I found the discussion about why men prefer blondes to be particularly interesting...
Blond hair is unique in that it changes dramatically with age. Typically, young girls with light blond hair become women with brown hair. Thus, men who prefer to mate with blond women are unconsciously attempting to mate with younger (and hence, on average, healthier and more fecund) women. It is no coincidence that blond hair evolved in Scandinavia and northern Europe, probably as an alternative means for women to advertise their youth, as their bodies were concealed under heavy clothing.
I have two daughters, both of whom were very blonde when they were younger and whose hair has gotten more brown as they have gotten older. However, they and their friends have the kinds of fabulous, highlighted hair that older women pay hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars to re-create.
Now I know why my wife is so obsessed with getting her hair highlighted, particularly as she has gotten older.
"All of these ratios and such are measuring the current cultural zeitgeist with regards to beauty, and those standards are largely culturally plastic."
Notice the implication that this is just cultural, which it simply is not.
First, if your idea is that easy to steal, then it's probably not that good. The best ideas have some secret sauce (e.g. a really elegant algorithm) behind them, and it's that secret sauce that makes them valuable. If your idea is just a concept, and isn't based on some secret sauce, then it probably isn't as good as you think.
For instance, I once helped build a CRM product called SalesLogix and our secret sauce was a database synchronization system. Telling you that the system relied on DB sync isn't telling you much of significance, because it just describes the concept and not the secret sauce. Even describing the secret sauce, which was based on field level logging, wasn't that big of a deal because it took a lot of trial and error to build the logging system and the sync system.
In a similar vein, there is a quote by Paul Hawken that I love that says basically the same thing. The gist is to not worry about people stealing your ideas because the best ideas are an integral part of you and your experience and the only way to steal them in their entirety is to steal your life.
No, largely because it's too close to spamming for my tastes. I am sticking with a conventional PR driven strategy (targeting the press and bloggers) combined with white hat SEO that I have done myself.
You are of course entitled to your opinion (but I'm not sure it's based on actually reading my book).
Here's an e-mail I just received from someone with a different opinion of my book...
HI, Chris--I would like to quote directly with attribution your nine C's about effective elevator pitches in an article for school librarians, published in Knowledge Quest, the journal of record for the American Association of School Librarians (AASL). May I have your permission?
You say your product is a spectrogram editor, but you don't use that term on your web site. If that is indeed the name of the product category or type of product, then that's your first mistake.
A while back I left a company in part because the head of the company was dead set on using his own name for the category (application fabric) rather than the more familiar category terms (application server, grid computing, cloud computing). He had a point, but I found it telling that when I would describe the company to people using his terms they would inevitably say, "Oh, so you're kind of like (an application server, grid computing, cloud computing). They have now embraced the "cloud computing" term with improved results.
I wouldn't lock something down until it STARTS getting stolen, because that is usually the mark of a product that is actually valuable (and not just a toy that can be discarded without concern).
FTP Voyager started out this way.
They got me hooked with free versions and once I got addicted they started charging (modestly) for it.
Don't give stuff away if you can't afford to (which is the beauty of selling software versus hardware).
Back in the day (which was pre-blog) I wouldn't give software to anyone who hadn't been published in a major trade publication. That kind of worked, and kept the guys looking for freebies in check to a degree, but you have to just accept that only a percentage of the people you contact will reply and only a percentage of the people who reply will actually write something. That's why it's a bit of a numbers game (lots of things in the funnel for a few things out).
For my book "Elevator Pitch Essentials" I have probably sent out 50 review copies and gotten 5 articles in return. That's kind of depressing, but it's the way it is.
I will say that the whole blog thing has changed the question of accreditation. I will send free copies (both PDF and hard copy) of my book to bloggers but I have had a very high success rate (80%) and it costs me nothing to send a PDF and only a few bucks to send a hard copy.
I always hated the phrase "You have to spend money to make money" when I was just starting out, but now I find myself telling it to people.
11 or so years ago I worked for an MPEG encoder company called Heuris. We made a software-based MPEG encoder. This was back before the DVD boom, and one thing I did was spend a lot of time on digital video discussion lists (this was in the days before discussion boards and the SPAM boom) answering questions about MPEG and DVD.
This helped build goodwill toward me and us, helped establish our credibility, and led to sales and multiple press and analyst inquiries (which then led to articles which led to sales). Many of these posts were informative enough that they are still around (Google "mpeg heuris leary") or go to...
This has worked for me in the past. At a minimum it's good for developing contacts.
The best place to look is at the workshops and symposia. That can be a good place to find press, analyst, and industry contacts. Just roaming the floor isn't the most productive use of one's time.
I would also suggest trying to find a more focused show. This one feels a bit too generic and Comdex-y to me. I never accomplished anything memorable at Comdex other than scoring tickets to a private party where I saw the B-52s from the front row.
Back in the day, I made great MPEG contacts at a small, focused Hollywood DVD conference, but accomplished nothing at big shows like NAB and SIGGRAPH.
Black projects are most likely inEFFICIENT (and even that's debatable, at least when Lockheed's Skunk Works is concerned), but it's not accurate to say that they are inEFFECTIVE. A number of very interesting projects came out of the black world, including the SR-71, U-2, and F-117.
Of course, a lot of money has also been just pissed away.
Again, sending press releases to sites won't get you anywhere. The same for technical forums. Maybe a 5 percent success rate if you're lucky.
You have to find out who the writers and analysts are who cover, and hopefully are interested in, the subject. That will yield a 25 to 30 percent success rate (which isn't great but is good enough to get the ball rolling).
In terms of technical forums, spamming them won't work. You have to establish yourself as an expert by answering questions about the subject and build up karma points with people.
Write press releases. This document [netpress.org] does a good job of outlining how to write on. The next step would be to get a list of contacts to relevant press and personally write them whenever you have something to talk about. (Examples: KVRAUDIO, Audio Magazines, Industry Websites, User blogs, Etc.) If they reply, write back.
I haven't found press releases to be that useful, but developing press and analyst contacts absolutely is.
An easy trick is to Google the term, or the nearest relevant term, and find out what writers have written articles about the subject. In many cases this will be their area of coverage (their beat), or at least an area of interest, and within reason they will actually want to know what's going on in the field.
I got a chapter in a Grid Computing book out of one such contact.
Finding out who the relevant writers and analysts are is much more effective than sending tons of press releases to random people at random publications.
Do you have a web site? Have you done any search engine marketing (SEM)? How does your product rank for the keyphrase "spectrogram editor" (assuming that really is the keyphrase)? You could do some basic, but effective SEM yourself and for very little money.
I just Googled the term and there are no relevant links, which means you could probably get a high ranking pretty easily and quickly if you put up some quality information like an FAQ.
It's kind of funny (or pathetic) but many advanced technologies (like stealth and hypersonics) start out this way. Some guy in some academic lad has a weird idea that actually works. The DOD then takes the concept black and tries to wipe out all traces of the idea's prior existence. They weren't very good at that back in the 70s and 80s and there's no way they are going to be able to do that today, given the power of the Web.
Slashdot Mirror
For those of you who moderated this as being troll-ish, here's a citation for you...
http://jbd.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/27/3/212
I found the discussion about why men prefer blondes to be particularly interesting...
Blond hair is unique in that it changes dramatically with age. Typically, young girls with light blond hair become women with brown hair. Thus, men who prefer to mate with blond women are unconsciously attempting to mate with younger (and hence, on average, healthier and more fecund) women. It is no coincidence that blond hair evolved in Scandinavia and northern Europe, probably as an alternative means for women to advertise their youth, as their bodies were concealed under heavy clothing.
I have two daughters, both of whom were very blonde when they were younger and whose hair has gotten more brown as they have gotten older. However, they and their friends have the kinds of fabulous, highlighted hair that older women pay hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars to re-create.
Now I know why my wife is so obsessed with getting her hair highlighted, particularly as she has gotten older.
The fact that you see the phenomenon in infants, who are pre-cultural, means that it is not the least bit cultural.
That is precisely why the study was done with infants; to remove cultural influences.
In other words, the word "largely" is an entirely inaccurate characterization of the findings of these studies.
What?
My comments are aimed directly at this quote...
"All of these ratios and such are measuring the current cultural zeitgeist with regards to beauty, and those standards are largely culturally plastic."
Notice the implication that this is just cultural, which it simply is not.
Great article. Thanks.
Infants will spend more time looking at pictures of symmetrical models than they will looking at pictures of less symmetrical models.
That is biology, not culture.
Life isn't fair, so deal with it.
Actually, there are objective ways to measure beauty. It has to do with things like the degree of symmetry and ratios like how far apart the eyes are.
So much so that it's no longer called AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Now it's MI (Machine Intelligence).
This feels like a desperate attempt at a re-branding effort to re-establish a field's relevance.
It's SO 20 years ago.
First, if your idea is that easy to steal, then it's probably not that good. The best ideas have some secret sauce (e.g. a really elegant algorithm) behind them, and it's that secret sauce that makes them valuable. If your idea is just a concept, and isn't based on some secret sauce, then it probably isn't as good as you think.
For instance, I once helped build a CRM product called SalesLogix and our secret sauce was a database synchronization system. Telling you that the system relied on DB sync isn't telling you much of significance, because it just describes the concept and not the secret sauce. Even describing the secret sauce, which was based on field level logging, wasn't that big of a deal because it took a lot of trial and error to build the logging system and the sync system.
In a similar vein, there is a quote by Paul Hawken that I love that says basically the same thing. The gist is to not worry about people stealing your ideas because the best ideas are an integral part of you and your experience and the only way to steal them in their entirety is to steal your life.
No, largely because it's too close to spamming for my tastes. I am sticking with a conventional PR driven strategy (targeting the press and bloggers) combined with white hat SEO that I have done myself.
You are of course entitled to your opinion (but I'm not sure it's based on actually reading my book).
Here's an e-mail I just received from someone with a different opinion of my book...
HI, Chris--I would like to quote directly with attribution your nine C's about effective elevator pitches in an article for school librarians, published in Knowledge Quest, the journal of record for the American Association of School Librarians (AASL). May I have your permission?
I'm not a fan of affiliate marketing because I'm not convinced it's effective.
You say your product is a spectrogram editor, but you don't use that term on your web site. If that is indeed the name of the product category or type of product, then that's your first mistake.
A while back I left a company in part because the head of the company was dead set on using his own name for the category (application fabric) rather than the more familiar category terms (application server, grid computing, cloud computing). He had a point, but I found it telling that when I would describe the company to people using his terms they would inevitably say, "Oh, so you're kind of like (an application server, grid computing, cloud computing). They have now embraced the "cloud computing" term with improved results.
I wouldn't lock something down until it STARTS getting stolen, because that is usually the mark of a product that is actually valuable (and not just a toy that can be discarded without concern).
FTP Voyager started out this way.
They got me hooked with free versions and once I got addicted they started charging (modestly) for it.
I guarantee you that the Chinese and Iranian military tech exploitation guys can get around the Great Firewall Of China.
What's the name of the product? I'll take a look at some stuff (for free) and see if you're making any newbie mistakes.
To a degree, that's the price of doing business.
Don't give stuff away if you can't afford to (which is the beauty of selling software versus hardware).
Back in the day (which was pre-blog) I wouldn't give software to anyone who hadn't been published in a major trade publication. That kind of worked, and kept the guys looking for freebies in check to a degree, but you have to just accept that only a percentage of the people you contact will reply and only a percentage of the people who reply will actually write something. That's why it's a bit of a numbers game (lots of things in the funnel for a few things out).
For my book "Elevator Pitch Essentials" I have probably sent out 50 review copies and gotten 5 articles in return. That's kind of depressing, but it's the way it is.
I will say that the whole blog thing has changed the question of accreditation. I will send free copies (both PDF and hard copy) of my book to bloggers but I have had a very high success rate (80%) and it costs me nothing to send a PDF and only a few bucks to send a hard copy.
I always hated the phrase "You have to spend money to make money" when I was just starting out, but now I find myself telling it to people.
11 or so years ago I worked for an MPEG encoder company called Heuris. We made a software-based MPEG encoder. This was back before the DVD boom, and one thing I did was spend a lot of time on digital video discussion lists (this was in the days before discussion boards and the SPAM boom) answering questions about MPEG and DVD.
This helped build goodwill toward me and us, helped establish our credibility, and led to sales and multiple press and analyst inquiries (which then led to articles which led to sales). Many of these posts were informative enough that they are still around (Google "mpeg heuris leary") or go to...
http://listproc.ucdavis.edu/archives/digvid-l/digvid-l.log9810/0190.html
You have to strike a balance between being commercial and being informative and knowing when it's OK to get a bit commercial.
This has worked for me in the past. At a minimum it's good for developing contacts.
The best place to look is at the workshops and symposia. That can be a good place to find press, analyst, and industry contacts. Just roaming the floor isn't the most productive use of one's time.
I would also suggest trying to find a more focused show. This one feels a bit too generic and Comdex-y to me. I never accomplished anything memorable at Comdex other than scoring tickets to a private party where I saw the B-52s from the front row.
Back in the day, I made great MPEG contacts at a small, focused Hollywood DVD conference, but accomplished nothing at big shows like NAB and SIGGRAPH.
Black projects are most likely inEFFICIENT (and even that's debatable, at least when Lockheed's Skunk Works is concerned), but it's not accurate to say that they are inEFFECTIVE. A number of very interesting projects came out of the black world, including the SR-71, U-2, and F-117.
Of course, a lot of money has also been just pissed away.
Again, sending press releases to sites won't get you anywhere. The same for technical forums. Maybe a 5 percent success rate if you're lucky.
You have to find out who the writers and analysts are who cover, and hopefully are interested in, the subject. That will yield a 25 to 30 percent success rate (which isn't great but is good enough to get the ball rolling).
In terms of technical forums, spamming them won't work. You have to establish yourself as an expert by answering questions about the subject and build up karma points with people.
Write press releases. This document [netpress.org] does a good job of outlining how to write on. The next step would be to get a list of contacts to relevant press and personally write them whenever you have something to talk about. (Examples: KVRAUDIO, Audio Magazines, Industry Websites, User blogs, Etc.) If they reply, write back.
I haven't found press releases to be that useful, but developing press and analyst contacts absolutely is.
An easy trick is to Google the term, or the nearest relevant term, and find out what writers have written articles about the subject. In many cases this will be their area of coverage (their beat), or at least an area of interest, and within reason they will actually want to know what's going on in the field.
I got a chapter in a Grid Computing book out of one such contact.
Finding out who the relevant writers and analysts are is much more effective than sending tons of press releases to random people at random publications.
Just make sure they are doing white hat SEO and not black hat SEO. Black hat SEO will get you banned from Google.
Do you have a web site? Have you done any search engine marketing (SEM)? How does your product rank for the keyphrase "spectrogram editor" (assuming that really is the keyphrase)? You could do some basic, but effective SEM yourself and for very little money.
I just Googled the term and there are no relevant links, which means you could probably get a high ranking pretty easily and quickly if you put up some quality information like an FAQ.
Yes, I'm replying to myself...
It's kind of funny (or pathetic) but many advanced technologies (like stealth and hypersonics) start out this way. Some guy in some academic lad has a weird idea that actually works. The DOD then takes the concept black and tries to wipe out all traces of the idea's prior existence. They weren't very good at that back in the 70s and 80s and there's no way they are going to be able to do that today, given the power of the Web.