As most geeks are, I am a fan of podcasts. I listen to them, I have done a few of my own, and I have co-hosted a few. Podcasting, especially video podcasting, is quickly becoming the next “TV”. [ Revision 3 ] has gone along way in making that a reality, and they go beyond the “newsy” type of podcast that you would find normally, and are actually creating some quality shows.
One of these is [ Scam School ], of which I am a HUGE fan. Scam School star [ Brian Brushwood ] who was recently interviewed on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Scam School teaches its viewers how they can do really cool bar tricks in an effort to get free beer, or break the ice with people you want to meet. Brian really makes the show, he is very lively, fun and just an all around kick ass guy.
A couple of weeks ago, March 28, 2009, we met up with [ Tom Merritt ] from another of our favorite podcasts [ "Buzz Out Loud" ]. Tom’s wife Eileen does the video editing for Scam School, and is probably the coolest lady you will ever meet online. While we were talking she asked us to come up and do a shoot with Brian. Well, as you can imagine, I about freaked out right then and there, but was able to keep my composure and say “Uh.. sure, that would be awesome”.
So the next Friday, we road tripped our way up to San Francisco and found ourselves at the [ SF Brewery ]. Aside from having one of the best micro brewed Porter’s I have had in awhile, the atmosphere was awesome. Eileen stopped by and told us to just chill out for awhile while they set up, and we got to meet to Brian which was WAY cool, and of course it was instantly on twitter, and much to my surprise about 5 minutes later this tweet came back from @shwood :
Well, of course, we’re geeks. We don’t put socks on in the morning without putting it on twitter. About an hour later, and 3 beers (to calm me down) we were sitting at a table with bright lights and cameras, and Brian with a deck of cards. I specifically requested no fire, but kind of regret that now, although they said that was never in the plan. It was a fantastic experience though and I can not stress enough, not only how cool Brian was, but all the Revision 3 people were so awesome. They knew we were fans, so they did more then just the normal shoot and we got to see a few super cool card tricks that Brian does.
Of course after wards I had to have my picture taken with Brian and Eileen :
I can’t thank Revision 3, Eileen and Brian enough, for giving this geek an experience that I will remember forever.
Our show will be released tomorrow… so make sure you download it www.revision3.com/scamschool/ , and let us know what you think in the comments.
Also , follow these people on Twitter :
Brian : twitter.com/shwood
Eileen: twitter.com/bigepaz
Tom : twitter.com/acedtect
Us
Stephen : twitter.com/darthweef
Allen : twitter.com/allen099
Aric : twitter.com/phatemokid
On July 1st, I started an experiment to see how beneficial Plurk could be as a viral marketing avenue. The results were pretty interesting. Before I go into detail about it, I want to set the stage on what the expectations were, since we didn’t do any massive numbers.
For the Love of Geeks is a relativally new blog that I started back in January. It was initially designed to be my personal blog, but it quickly developed enough of a following that I thought I should at least start posting useful (at least I like to think they are useful) bits of information on geeky stuff that I like.
This blog generally receives about 10,000 – 15,000 page views a month, and I can generally count on each of my posts to get 2 or 3 diggs, and each post generally gets about 100 individual page views, and comments are a rarity.
On Plurk, I am not a major player. I have about 125 “friends” and 25 “fans” (or people that follow my plurks). Compared to people like Leo Laporte who have 1767 friends, and 1592 Fans, or Tony Hall, who has a whopping 2040 friends, you can see that my reach is much much more limited.
Even though I have a smaller number of people on Plurk, I was looking at it from the standpoint of the MLM pyramid aspect. My 100 friends have 100 friends who have 100 friends, etc. Could I get them to pass the along the link to thier friends and then in turn keep it going.
Another aspect of the experiment that is very important is that there was no real content being passed. It wasn’t some fascinating article solving all the problems in the world, or some new peice of tech that was previously unknown. It was a simple request to digg, comment, and pass on, and I let them know it was an experiment. That would also have tainted the results, but the goal was to see how deep we could go.
So here is a breakdown of what happened.
Within the first hour, there was 25 comments, and about 10 diggs. At this point, most the people coming were two deep. (meaning that a friend of mine had sent them there.)
Within 2 hours we were up to 50 comments, and were now about 4 deep. (me > my friend > thier friend > commenter)
By the end of the day 1. We got up to 75 Comments and were at about 40 or so diggs. At this point the post had been viewed several thousand times. The view count is a little skewed, since the post got stumbled and was linked to by a few other blogs and websites. So, the traffic count became little less important in our experiment.
At the end of day 2, we had 107 comments, and I “estimate” that we had gotten about 6 levels deep, and the tally of comments so far is 112, and surprisingly almost a week later, I still see traffic coming in from people on Plurk.
In the end, I have to declare this a win. It was really cool too see the frenzy this idea caused and how excited everyone was to be a part of it. I did see some people who made comments like :
“I clicked the link, but don’t want to share” or
“I don’t want to see this”
Also, I found it interesting that a large part of the plurk population is not a part of digg, or at least they didn’t want to digg the post if they were. I have found that people who are a part of one social network are generally a part of several others as well, so this surprised me a little.
It is important to note, that plurk doesn’t favor spammers, and if you post nothing but to this link plurks, they will likely be ignored. Also, when I have posted specific blog postings I can get a decent amount of traffic from my friends, but it doesn’t get passed around automatically.
People like Tony Hall have very low karma because I think people have stopped following his plurks since they didn’t really carry a social aspect to them. They were more of a marketing thrust, trying to get his masses to do something.
On the other hand, people like Tom Merritt, or Leo Laporte have the ability to post a request and have that go viral almost instantly, since they carry a bit of “internet celebrity” status, and they have friends who have more of a “follower” mentality then a friend one.
Ultimately, I think that Plurk definitely has the potential of being a very very important marketing tool, and I can totally see targetted advertising going in this direction soon. Other services, that are more entrenched, such as FriendFeed, or Twitter have a much larger capacity to go viral since the user base is much larger.
In the end, this was fun, and when I have more time, I am going to run a similar test through twitter, so stay tuned for that. 
If you have come here, and don’t follow me on Plurk, feel free to add me .. [ darthweef ]
If you have no idea what Plurk is, and want to have a little fun online, sign up – here is in an [ invite ]
Also, give me your thoughts on people using plurk as a marketing tool in the comments below. 
So I got to thinking the other day .. I love blogging about the geekiness I find online, and after reviewing the traffic that I have gotten on the site over the last few months, it would seem that at least a few of you enjoy reading about the geekiness I find online.
Blog traffic is a very sought after commodity. It establishes credibility, let’s face it, no one at i09.com is really all that knowledgable about sciFi, and could they be anymore negative about everything they see? So why do we put faith in what they say??? becuase they get almost a million page views per month …
Same with any of the gawker media portals. Wired, Reuters and other sites have “genuine” journalists who make the real content that ends up disected onto other blogs, so they kind of come with their own credibilty.
This all got me thinking though … who has more credibilty then all of them … WE do…
That’s right, we have the real credibility, becuase we are the unknown masses who give these sites the traffic they need to gain thier credibility. We are the ones who have seen every Star Wars movie 400 times. We are the ones who can quote any episode of Star Trek. We are the ones who can tear down and rebuild a computer in less time then a Green Beret can field strip his m-16. We are the ones who make the geek news, so why shouldn’t we be the ones to report on it.
I want to form a coalition of Geeks. UNKNOWN geeks. Sorry Leo Laporte .. Sorry Tom Merritt .. Sorry Rafe Needleman… I respect you all, but your views are now tainted by the man. I want geeks who answer to no one, who will tell it like it is, and who want to be apart of what could become the largest online geek community with a voice..
If you’re a geek (computer, scifi, science, art, whatever … ) and you want to start contributing to a whole new type of online blog, let me know.
Individually we are nobody, but as a mob… we are force to be reckoned with …