RedSwoosh. free your links

What is BR you ask?  BR is the informal, cooler, no-spin, no b/s alternative of PR (public relations): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations#The_industry_today  

With our latest launch we scrapped all plans for PR.  We want to be seen for what we are by people who understand what we do.  Fewer compromises in just being ourselves.  So why not leave it to the blogosphere? We’re trying to reach the web development community and what better way than to go to fellow bloggers and let them decide? Now this isn’t the traditional way of doing business and not traditional at all when it comes to launching a product, so why BR over PR?  There are many reasons.  Here are a few: 

Niche News:
How many geeked-out web developers turn to the marketplace section of the Wall Street Journal?  How many savvy web marketing gurus get their cutting edge web technology news from the LA Times?  Ummm. . . Bueler, . .. . Bueler. . . nobody raising their hand??  In fact, the online generation gets their news from niche, expert sources, brought together by massive aggregators. The web devs that matter don’t get the latest from Forbes, the wall street journal, or the Baltimore Sun.  They get their news from other webdevs who share their experiences and their insights with their peers. . .folks like http://emilychang.com/ , http://waxy.org  maybe with pointers from digg or del.icio.us.  The audiences in aggregate are far bigger than traditional media, and the news at each site far more relevant.
 

Linking Ecosystem:
Newspapers don’t link to stories outside of their “media amusement park”.  They want to bring you in and then keep you there and read all the other “amusements” they have in today’s edition.  Newspapers would rather you not even know what your alternative news sources are, let alone point to them.  Online versions of newspapers will rarely link to other sites, let alone other news stories on the same topic.  Not so in the blogging world.  It’s all about linking to others to give props to those you respect, and to be open about your detractors because on the net — unlike in paper — you can’t hide from them.  In practical terms, I heard from a number of bloggers “that’s pretty cool. . . I’ll point to ya’”  Don’t think for a second you would ever hear that from a mainstream journalist.  If it’s compelling, the blogosphere takes over from there.  That one “point to ya” turns into dozens of blogs with hundreds of links talking about the story and pointing to your site.  Story filters and aggregators like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and others were by far the biggest referrers to our new site during our launch.  The blogging ecosystem multiplied the effect of our news many times over and far outpaced any amount of traffic we would have gotten if we did the PR path.
 

Bloggers Get It:
Bloggers love what they do, have an expertise at what they write about (at least the good ones do), and they work for themselves.  In a meritocracy, good ideas float to the top and the bad sink to obscurity.  The blogosphere is built on this tenet.  Far too often journalists lack the passion or expertise that’s necessary to find the good stuff.  A good story speaks for itself, and I’m glad I didn’t have to explain what “Swooshing your links” is to USA Today (they wouldn’t point readers back to Red Swoosh anyways).
 

A few quick anecdotes from our experience of BR vs. PR:
- Bloggers are passionate about the Internet, Newspapers fear the Internet
- Journalists work for the Man, Bloggers work for themselves. - Newspapers follow the casino model (once you get in, it’s hard to get out), Bloggers build around the flea-market model (let the best content win).
- Bloggers see the world as an ecosystem, Big Media see it as a zero-sum game.
- Bloggers write about what they care about, journalists often just have to write on what they’re told
 

And to finish up, a little shout-out to some of the folks we found pointing to us, who themselves have quite interesting things going on: 

http://www.stumbleupon.com/ Must check this out.  A Firefox plug-in that shows people the latest cool stuff on the web.  I didn’t know about them, but they came out huge for Swoosh during the launch. 

www.techcrunch.com TechCrunch is the leading blog on web 2.0 period (whether you like the web 2.0 moniker or not).  Michael Arrington at Techcrunch cuts to the chase and is what I would call a “lead bull” in the blogosphere — people follow.    

http://del.icio.us/  We all know del.icio.us, mmm yummy. . .      

http://www.webcreme.com/  All the cool sites out on the net with the most-creamiest of designs.  When creating this site, I had to turn to my friends’ sites as guides for design, what works and what doesn’t. . .I’m going to use these guys for expert guidance the next time around

http://www.cssmania.com/  This is for all the CSS’ers in the house, with a special thanks to our Polish CSS masters at www.helldesign.pl for making it all look so shiny.