UI -> User Interface… we still get the occassional email that says “I have NO idea what JibberJobber is/does! What is it?”
I’ve lived in this world for too long to be unbiased, so we take this feedback seriously and work on little tweaks to help people get it. Here’s the old home page (the stuff in the YELLOW is what we were changing – it wasn’t really YELLOW! Also, I think this is the 3rd or 4th version):
And here’s what we just changed it to (one minute ago):
What do you think?
I started blogging three years ago this month. It was a fantastic environment where you had your own “bully pulpit” … a place where you were in charge, you had the mic, and you could say whatever you wanted.
I soon learned that bloggers had quite the ego. They used their bully pulpit to talk about boring stuff (that we were supposed to be interested in) as well as though leadership or subject matter expert stuff. Bloggers had enough rope to hang themselves with – and some did. Others became fantastically popular (Seth, Guy, Michael, Chris Brogan), and even internet celebrities.
One of the most empowering, ego-feeding things for a blogger is the comments – or, NUMBER of comments. When someone leaves a comment on your blog it means (a) you have readers (aside from your momma), and (b) you touched someone intellectually to the point they wanted to weigh in.
Getting comments on a blog fed a blogger’s ego like Golden Coral feeds a hungry boy scout. There are even bragging rights associated with getting comments.
Read a blog that doesn’t get comments? You might just be the only reader of that blog. Obviously, a blog with a few comments (if there are consistently a few), or dozens, or hundreds, or even tens of thousands, really validated the blogger.
And fed their ego.
Fast forward a bit and we come to the evolution, or perhaps the problem (if your ego is tied to your comments): the introduction of other social platforms where discussion can happen.
For example, three years ago I might have written a thought-provoking post and gotten 15 comments on the blog post – my ego is fed, I’m validated, and everyone knows I’m a force to be reckoned with.
Today, however, it’s different. I write a blog post, and tweet a link to my Twitter followers. I get NO comments on the blog.
But my tweet gets RT’d 6 times.
And 4 people reply to my tweet with their thoughts.
And 7 people comment on my “status” on Facebook, since my Tweets become my Facebook Status.
There are two problems with this scenerio:
The first problem is artificial… it isn’t really a problem, although it crushes the blogger’s ego. If you get no comments on the blog, you start to look like a chump… right? What happened to all of those validating comments? Maybe you should QUIT BLOGGING?
You might have heard that blogs are dying (they aren’t!)… I think people who see the conversation go elsewhere wonder why they still blog and are somehow convincing themselves they should follow the discussion (as it travels through various platforms), as opposed to continue to initiate the discussion (on their blog). I think this is a shortsighted mistake.
The second problem is what really irks me. It is that someone who reads my blog post WILL NOT get the benefit of the wisdom of the crowd.
I try and write my blog posts from my perspective, and always wonder what other smarter folks would say – either agreeing or disagreeing – I don’t care their position, but I do want to get a well-rounded discussion.
It’s no one’s fault, but when people respond a little bit here (Twitter) and a little bit there (Facebook), and even in Facebook they respond on the Wall and/or the Notes section, the conversation is fragmented, and NO ONE can follow it, except me.
It makes me sad that the wisdom of the crowd gets lost amongst the platforms, and no one else can get the value of the conversation.
Are blogs dying? No. But there is an interesting evolution of where and how the conversation happens…. and this is an evolution that hasn’t been fun to watch 🙁
Almost a month ago I listed my DVD on Amazon… getting into a $39.95/month payment plan. Shortly thereafter I had to take the listing down because I hadn’t gotten my DVDs yet, and by policy I had to ship within 2 days of any order. Once I got the DVDs I immediately went back to Amazon and relisted the DVD… but there was one little, er, MAJOR problem: If you look at LinkedIn book, my DVD would not show up.
Why?
Because I had to list my DVD in the DVD section, where it was buried amongst movies… and totally not related to books at all. Even though they are the same (a) subject and (b) author, you wouldnt’ find my DVD on my book page. And what I really wanted you to see was my DVD on ANY LinkedIn book page.
Alas, wasn’t going to happen.
I spent hours poking through the help pages, the advertising pages, listening to the advertising webinar, emailing support, and even trying to talk with them on the phone. It was very frustrating trying to get an answer. Amazon has a cool sellers forum, where I found some awesome information, so I listed my problem there. I learned about more options, but didn’t get the answer I wanted.
Finally, I decided to try calling again, and finally got on with someone who had a suggestion that wasn’t going to work (he said to put the DVD as a book, and in there you can say what the binding is (I think that’s the section), and he said to say it was a CD ROM or Diskette). The problem with this first suggestion is that I didn’t want Amazon to come back and say I was doing something deceitful… I certainly didn’t want my amazon account to get taken down!
The second solution sounded a lot better, and he reiterated three times that this was totally acceptable and would not get me in any hot water… he said to “package” my book with the DVD, and then I could put it in the books section. That is what I did. So here is what I came up with (the wording was almost 100% from the Amazon rep, as we were brainstorming it):
and here’s the image (which is the front cover of the CD sleeve… luckily it already had the book cover on it!):
You can click here to see the posting.
So I got a response to most of my questions from Amazon… the didn’t answer the question about tying my DVD to my books… but they did say that I CAN NOT list something that I can’t ship within two days. So I “closed” my product there and will relist it around the 5th. Darn.
Also, apparently you can’t have a special price… you know, the one that has a strikethrough that shows there is a sale?
I guess those two things are only for really cool people, like this:
So now I’m going to hurry up and wait for my DVDs to get here. Meanwhile, I’ve asked a question on LinkedIn about being a Pro Merchant on Amazon and hope to get some good answers.
Last night I bit the $39.95/month bullet and listed my LinkedIn for Job Seekers DVD on Amazon as a “Pro Merchant.” I could “list a single item” on Amazon for free, ONLY IF they already have that item in their “catalog.” In other words, if there is a book or DVD you can already find in Amazon, you can list yours to sell there… but if you want to submit a NEW item (like LinkedIn for Job Seekers) you have to pay $39.95 a month and become a Pro Merchant.
There is lots of help information available for this, although I find it to be a rather complex thing so I ended up reading a lot to do research on it. Here are my initial thoughts:
So those are my first impressions. It really will be interesting to see how many are sold through Amazon, which will likely be people who have NO idea who Jason Alba is, vs. how many are sold through my own network/audience and affiliate channels.
Here’s an image from the Amazon listing page:
Once again I changed my email signature (here’s another post when I did it before)… here’s the old one:
I did indeed like this one, but I still felt it was too long. Also, I had the “check out the second edition… ” which I think served it’s purpose, but it’s time to move on. And I wanted to emphasize JUST two things – JibberJobber and the DVD… so here’s the new one (as of today):
I don’t think I’m getting any goodness out of saying I’m an author or speaker on my signature… you can eventually see that if you click on my LinkedIn blog… but really what I want you to know about is just the two things, so this is an effort to put the more important stuff in front and again clean out the noise.
I am changing this more than I ever thought I would… we’ll see how long this signature lasts 🙂 BTW, the links go to JibberJobber and my LinkedIn blog.
I spent some time with Carl Chapman, website and SEO expert, and he made some suggestions to me about this page, which he said confused him (no in-your-face call to action, etc.):
Here’s the new one that I reworked:
Here’s what I did differently … notice the underlines are not included in the changes listed below, but they are different than the old page:
What do you think? How else should this be improved?
BTW, if you are interested in the DVD, you can order here. OOPS! I mean, 
🙂
I need to update you on the video thing… last post I asked for some input on a video from my new video editor…and since then we have changed some stuff and started to put out new videos (which are now live, and in production).
You can see all of the videos we’ve put out for JibberJobber user tutorials here, on Vimeo. They are hi-def, which means crazy big files, but Vimeo handles it well, and the user doesn’t see slow download time (afaik). Also, if they make the video bigger the quality is good. Cool.
I’ve also been working on the first series that I’ll sell – because it is HD we can’t do downloads as it’s GBs of info – just barely enough to fit on one DVD. More on that soon!
Thanks to everyone who gave input on the video post from last time 🙂
I need some input/feedback on some changes I’m doing with my JibberJobber user tutorial videos. I’ve embedded our test video below, but you can see the wider version here. Notice that the visible quality is horrible – we’ve uploaded it on vimeo.com also, but it is still rendering apparently… so ignoring the visual (and my narration), I’m wondering about the editing and final product.
Here are my initial thoughts/questions (I hope this doesn’t influence your feedback):
Again, realize the quality of what you see (not the audio) will look much, much better on vimeo.
I love the song If I Had A Million Dollars by Barenaked Ladies. When I watched these very cool/funny/clever videos I got jealous of TheLadders marketing budget, and thought, indeed, if I had a million dollars this is what I would want to come up with:
And,