The Promoter

Often representing the interests of others, Promoters know how to convey an important message and creatively direct the target reader to the right place.

A Blog with a Promoter profile is often perceived as someone with the desire to communicate a message rather than facts. Charm and creativity have a central place in this blog. The blogger has no desire to explain something logically or philosophically, instead he would like us to know how he envisions a specific brand, subject or item and the way we should perceive it.

Promoters will use different techniques for this purpose. The blog has usually some form of a business-like approach; hence the visual quality of the blog plays an important role. It can be formal or fun, colourful or not, but Promoters will often arouse the reader’s senses. They probably uses a personal domain name and a paid or personalised template. The writing style and its layout might be well studied and a “PR”-like feeling could be experienced.

Promoters enjoy interactions, comments and feedbacks and will naturally seek to understand what people like and need in order to make the appropriate connections with his readers. They want to have one positioning voice in the middle of many interactions. Their blog often uses widely used features and becomes a small gathering place for lovers and fans of the Promoter's chosen blog subject.

Promoters like to share and believes in the need to use external links, videos, music and other media, provided it is in his interest. The Promoter’s Blogroll will expectedly have some famous names or brands.

Advertising and affiliations are important and adverts should have a connection with the blog’s subject and its design.

Since I am an avid blog reader and having had my share of experiences in understanding humans for what they are or seem to be (I’m a big fan of crime investigation TV series); I decided to share with you some of my insights. Most people wear various masks or are sometimes understood at different levels. Being a Lemur, I also have my share of personalities that I wish to relate with you. Those will be consequently used as explained underneath. As for the feminine character – I’ve got that covered too because I’ve asked my beloved Zaya to participate.

Let us start with 3 examples out of a total of 16 profiles.

With the exponential increase of e-commerce we also saw an overflow of recommendation oriented solutions. Most use ratings (usually 1 to 5 points) and verbatim messages.

Very few services have their ratings based on more than one criterion and therefore limit the value of the final grade by restricting the provided details. With our Zilhouette System we desire to go a step further by integrating perception and essentially show how brands and products, but also, journalists and bloggers are perceived by others.

Our first approach is to work with bloggers and provide them with a simple tool to see how they are perceived by their readers. It is not a rating tool, therefore there is no good or bad. The feedbacks received from blog readers will enable to depict a perceived blog profile, which will then be represented by one of the pictures above (and more to come).

This profile will help:

• the blogger understand how he is perceived by others based on his writings
• new visitors see what kind of blog they are looking at and be able to differentiate “bargain hunters” from “philosophers”
• ZackBrandit provide specific offers and services based on communities around bloggers
• additional information to support the study of online social trends.

Each of these traits will be clearly defined and with time will be refined based on your feedbacks.

In our next postings we will explain how the profiling system works and identify the 16 different existing profiles. Meanwhile, I have to dive back into my latest book How to be a Hero for Dummies

• Will it not provide the same advantages while limiting costs per impression (CPM) and click frauds?
• Wouldn’t it help companies and organizations with small marketing budgets?
• What if companies could invest part of their marketing budget into something more valuable?
• Will it not become an incentive to the way information is conveyed to consumers?
• What about publishers, shouldn’t bloggers find a better way to monetize their blog’s value?

Online “social” shopping is gradually enforcing change in the way individuals, groups and retailers interact. The trend is increasing in pace and progressively moving towards evolved affiliation techniques. In the same way Social Networks are fuelled by User Generated Content (UGC), manufacturers and retailers can benefit from social shopping platforms and their User Generated Recommendations (UGR).

Dion Hinchcliffe, founder and CTO of Hinchcliffe & Company and one of my favourite Web2.0 bloggers schematizes online communities in the following way:

He also expresses the need for companies to interact and presents best practices here.

But what if there is something more?

What if those three types could be entwined?

What if services and their promotion could be based on perception and abstraction rather than surfing behaviour?

	Let me explain, I like this picture a lot. It shows the way people connect and interact. It perfectly represents what we expect from a social network. But more than that, I love the individual reflections. They symbolize something.
On turning the picture upside-down, we realize the result is the same, but from a different perspective. Our perception provides us with a new image for the same thing, but the action we’ll take might ultimately differ. Reflection and original are transposed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our perception alters our behaviour. Hence, developing an algorithm profiling the perception we have instead of the resulting behaviour might become highly valuable. A question though, is it even feasible to create such an algorithm and does it make any sense in an environment shifting to Users Generated Content (UGC)?

Having had a vision, I decided to gather trustworthy people and start this community. Each one of its members wishes for change and substance. Why not join us in providing this added extra? If the Web is to provide value-added content and opportunities based upon interactions, then it is time to work on it together!