Cross-Post: STBD Grounded?

Kownacki and occasional STBD crew member Jeremy Brok are not pleased.
STBD creator Justin Kownacki is supposed to be speaking on Monday at Blogference, a social media conference in Israel. Instead, he's at home in Pittsburgh because a connecting flight from Delta was canceled due to rain.

Follow the timeline (to be updated when possible) here.

STBD Story Meeting and You

On Monday, several STBD regulars convened at a pair of tables in the Shadyside Crazy Mocha to float ideas for Season Five of STBD. We discussed goals and concepts for various characters, and for the series as a whole.

As with any brainstorming session, some ideas and insights were spot-on, and some weren't received quite so warmly. But exchanging these ideas is an integral part of creating the series WE want STBD to be.

What about you?

We'd love to open the story creation process to the audience as well, since you're the ones who keep coming back for more. Do you have specific ideas you'd like to pitch for Season Five? Would you like to try your hand at writing a scene? Let us know!

We're considering the merits of an STBD wiki. Would those of you inclined to provide ideas be interested in the wiki format?

Feel free to post comments here, or to email jkownacki somethingtobedesired com.

I'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again...

On second thought, maybe they DO get it...

After blogging yesterday that the Pittsburgh Film Office seemed quite clueless about STBD when they called to inquire about our status, I received a voicemail this morning:

"Hi, Justin, this is Jessica with the Pittsburgh Film Office. I just came across a blog posting about..."

So at least the PFO has the whole vanity blogging thing down.

Lessons learned:

#1: Never talk about anyone, anywhere... unless you want them to find you.

#2: The Pittsburgh Film Office does, indeed, know how to use the internet. At least part of the time.

#3: Clearly, I'll never work in this town again. Which is fine, since I wasn't working much in this town in the first place. I'd better fan the flames on those STBD spinoffs in other cities while the iron is hot.

(Moderately mixed metaphors are the new black.)

How Much Is That Website in the Window?

Seth Godin mentioned DNScoop on his blog yesterday. It's a self-contained site-worth appraisal service, which utilizes various criteria -- Alexa ranking, number of inbound links, Google pagerank, and even the age of a site -- to determine that's site's approximate worth.

A quick check of their methodology revealed some amusing facts:

Rocketboom and Ze Frank, two of the heaviest hitters in the new media marketplace, are each worth over $3 MILLION dollars, according to DNScoop.

Meanwhile, Something to Be Desired is worth a paltry $6,000. I have a feeling this has to do with our Alexa ranking bottom through the basement recently... which is interesting, considering our actual daily traffic has been growing over the past few months.

And "stbd.com," which is the URL I'd previously been interested in purchasing as the home for our web series, is worth less than $300 according to DNScoop... which is also interesting, since the gent who owns the URL flatly told me a year ago that he routinely charges in the mid-4 figures for a "standard 4-letter domain name... But since 'stbd' also stands for 'starboard'," as he reminded me, this would presumably push his price even higher.

With sites like DNScoop and Alexa in play, it's impossible for anyone to lie about their numbers anymore. Each of us can independently verify a site's claims about its traffic at the click of a mouse.

But is any of it accurate?

What the Numbers DON'T Tell Us

For the uninitiated AND the veterans, here are five things to consider when surveying web numbers:

1. Alexa only counts traffic generated while using the Alexa toolbar. As most people know, the Alexa toolbar tends to be native only to Internet Explorer, which means it's not accurately counting visits made by users using Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. By and large, that means MAC surfers aren't being counted at all.

2. Web hosts could game Alexa -- if they wanted to. One of our highest Alexa traffic spikes came not when we launched Season Three of STBD, but in the two weeks before it. That's because we were spending a huge amount of time on the site's back-end, using proprietary web tools to update each page of the site. ALL of that traffic counts as "visits." Were I shady or unwise, I could do the same thing every day to inprove our numbers... except I no longer work on a PC unless necessary, which means I can't influence Alexa.

3. Automated web appraisers don't process intangibles. If I emailed the guy who owns "stbd.com" again and mentioned that his site is really only worth a couple hundred dollars, he'd laugh me out of the room. Why? Because he knows the value of the URL is based upon two additional factors: level of interest and level of potential. DNScoop doesn't know that STBD stands for starboard OR something to be desired, nor does it care. It's only interested in measurables, and there's not much to measure about an unbuilt website.

4. Site awareness exceeds direct traffic. Our STBD videos are hosted via Blip.TV. If anyone goes to Blip and watches our video there, instead of through our homepage, we don't register those numbers. Blip still tells us the video was watched, but that viewer doesn't count as a visitor to our website. Ditto anyone who watches an episode on MySpace, or any other third-party site. Does that mean these people don't know Something to Be Desired exists? Of course not. But Alexa and DNScoop don't know that.

5. ALL web value is subjective. Just as the owner of "stbd.com" believes his site is worth more than $300, I'm sure neither Ze Frank nor Andrew Baron will be selling their sites for $3 million dollars anytime soon. Some people might consider $3 million for those sites insanely overpriced; I suspect both men would consider them undervalued. I'd say the same thing about our site at $6,000.

But then, we're all considering value from the insider's point of view. We "know" what things are worth because we understand their potential WITHIN OUR INDUSTRY. But, like baseball cards, comic books, cars and real estate, EVERYTHING is worth exactly what you can get for it -- and that will ALWAYS be subjective.

Who Is Your Audience?

Attentive listeners at PodCamp Pittsburgh. Photo by Kimberly Reed.

Chris Brogan asked this question on his blog the other day. While commenting upon it just now, I realized I had a completely different take on the issue:

Everyone is concerned about motivating their audience. Without an active, engaged audience, you're missing the community that powers the engine of whatever it is you're currently doing in your life.

But I think you need to make a key distinction: your (target) audience and your fans are not always the same thing.

Your audience is the people you BELIEVE are hearing your message, the ones you CREATE the message for.

Your fans are the people who RESPOND to your message, who TAKE ACTION based upon what you say or do.

We may think we're creating something that appeals to a certain group of people when, in fact, it appeals to a completely different group for completely different reasons that we never considered.

For example: you might be writing a blog that deals with all the minutae of being a better teacher. But if a lot of your suggestions are rooted in organization aand time management, rather than direct communication and educational theory, don't be surprised if you find your actual "fans" are people from all walks of life who are searching for better productivity tips. Or, conversely, if you do focus on better communication skills, you may find your teaching blog being bookmarked and cited by public speakers, managers and politicians.

Once you really understand who's responding to your message, you can better evaluate whether you're on target with your original goals. Or, if your actual audience differs from your anticipated audience, you can decide whether you need to change your message or embrace your unintended fanbase. Either way, you can't truly be sure you're succeeding in your original plan without being able to accurately assess your audience AND your intentions -- which is one reason we surveyed our audience last week.

As the pipe company who owned the "utube" URL proved when they were slammed with misguided YouTube traffic, it's not who you THINK you're talking to that matters; it's who's actually HEARING you.