So, essentially we've been social engineered :)
Congratulations!
Knowing that I might be a bit more reluctant to visit maxklein.posterous.com links in the future.
Congratulations!
Knowing that I might be a bit more reluctant to visit maxklein.posterous.com links in the future.
My further posts are no longer going to be manipulated in that manner -- well, till I think of something interesting to try out again.
The only difference between what I did and what lifehacker or any such site does is that I explained afterwards.
(Sorry about the weird apostrophe, I got a new macbook and it has a strange keyboard).
It was personalized for us? So you're saying: In the process of creating the post, you designed it in ways that would appeal to the sorts of individuals that frequent Hacker News?
That sounds... a little like... social... engineering.
Wikipedia:
Social engineering is the act of manipulating people into performing actions.
We can get pedantic, but Jacques accused you of doing exactly what you're doing.
Thanks to this one article, everything you attempt to write from now on will be hounded by people criticizing you and calling out manipulation. You're Max Klein the con man. If you're sincere about your goal that won't deter you, but don't kid yourself into thinking the locals here will be a fan.
I'm ambivalent, myself; what you purport to do is what a thousand marketers have written about before you. What do you have to say that has not been said and critiqued before? If you're really committed to writing something interesting, that's a question you need to answer. If your goal is just fameballing, then expect fame, but fame's not as fun as it looks.
I think that's a little strong.
That said, I remember how vicious Hacker News got back when Valleywag was allowed on this site. Hell, look at how they get about TechCrunch's style of journalism. People don't like being told they've been manipulated, and they hold grudges. When somebody goes out of their way to tell an entire community that they've been manipulated, that community isn't going to be happy with the person who pointed it out.
Hopefully, Max, you're not offended by my choice of language? I didn't mean to deride you with it. It was more a warning that to an angry group there's little difference between a would-be magician and a shyster.
That's not how I think personally.
I'm curious to see how this plays out myself.
That's your interpretation, mine is different. You've used your reputation to get me to visit your site, specifically not the text of those links. You've written interesting stuff in the past and I wondered what this was about. (edit: reputation+title = click, reputation alone or title alone would probably not have been a click, but that's after the fact).
> My further posts are no longer going to be manipulated in that manner
So you say.
> well, till I think of something interesting to try out again.
See, that's what I mean. You've abused your reputation in order to do your experiment, and you've succeeded in your goal. Now I'm going to be more wary, and will think twice before I click, no matter how enticing the title. In fact, the more enticing the title the less chance that I'll click because that will make it more likely that you are pulling another stunt.
> The only difference between what I did and what lifehacker or any such site does is that I explained afterwards.
A good magician never explains his tricks to the audience.
I know that that is a fine line here, but even though I'm sure you have good intentions and you are in a way making up for tricking people by explaining it I can't help the feelings that it creates.
Trust is a fragile thing, and in some sense you have broken that trust.
You've taken 'link bait' or 'title bait' one step further and created 'article bait'. That's an achievement in its own right, and I find it quite impressive that you managed to pull this off but at the same time you've shown yourself more than willing and capable of doing this with intent.
> I don´t write to gain twitter followers
No, but you write "My aim in both cases was to increase my name recognition. I wanted the right people to be aware of "Max Klein". "
If twitter followers are a measure of that then we can use that to gauge your success and effectively you were trying to gain a following.
That's what social engineering is all about. It's a hacker term for getting people to do what they otherwise would not do by outsmarting them. That's not limited to getting passwords over the phone by pretending to be the sysadmin.
But I choose not to. What I want to write is a meta blog. A blog where the things I write to pull people to my site are further explained and analysed. Like getting traffic by writing an article about how to get traffic and in that article analysing the traffic the article itself would get. That is the experiment I want to do.
Yes, unfortunately, you are my test subject, and it is your choice if you choose to participate or not, but I think it will be interesting.
So I am the magician explaining and analysing my tricks. Not everyone likes that - some just want to see the magic.
If you had a specific goal other than 'increasing the name recognition of Max Klein' then that would be cool with me.
Say you invent a gadget and you apply this technique and you sell a million of them and document it. That's the exact same thing but with one major difference, there is a concrete goal.
The audience itself is not the goal, and neither is simply increasing your name visibility. It's like a branded box with nothing in it. Other than your 'cleverness'.
By closing the loop and making the whole thing about how to attract visitors you are like a spammer that mails you a guide on how to get traffic, the guide tells you to spam people and send them guides.
There is no real goal here.
That's a harsh analogy, but that is the way it appears to me.
So, what do you really intend to do with the audience that you have got ?
Are you going to get to some kind of conversion goal or is it just a numbers game ?
Step 1: Write interesting articles where I deconstruct the art of gaining name recognition, and in the process gain a lot of name recognition. At some point, I will have a following of about 1000
Step 2: I am going to challenge one of the established software players that I am going to make software that is better and more loved than theirs
Step 3: I will program and release something very promising. My followers will spread the news. It will grow
That's my overall plan. There is software I am developing where I am going to stake my reputation on. But what's a reputation to stake if you have none, ey?
That method only makes sense if the people whose name recognition you are now coveting will be in some way very closely related (or will even be) the consumers of your eventual product.
Only then it makes sense, or you'll have to go through the whole rigmarole again by the time you are ready to approach your customers, which will have cost you time and effort.
So I would bet that that is the case because otherwise it would not make much sense to cultivate this particular audience.
Again, I'm very impressed with your ability to do this, if you can transport it easily to fields outside of the one you are currently active in (software development) then there probably is a metric ton of money to be made exploiting that talent.
Another problem I foresee with your approach is the timing. If you are right now busy creating a target audience for a product that doesn't exist then you are effectively opening a window of opportunity without the ability to fill it.
If you had used your talent to attract 60,000 prospects to your product you'd be laughing all the way to the bank now, whereas right now all you have is an impulse whose momentum will be long gone by the time you're ready to go to market.
It seems to me that your timing is off, but time will tell.
The problem here is how actually you create good software
Illusions, jaquesm.
Perhaps mine is a niche view here — certainly it is — but if your goal is simply to get eyes then writing blog posts is the wrong way to go about it. People react to programs, photographs, and music more than they do to writing.
I've seen my writing consistently hit the front of Hacker News. It provides exciting spikes, yes, but when you launch a single webapp you see a vastly greater traffic from the same sources.
So, which is the goal? Is it popularity, or is it craft? If you want popularity, blogging's the wrong game. If it's craft, posts like this are self-defeating and lose you face in the eyes of the people who might be interested.
Overexposure doesn't help either.
That is basically the problem I have with this whole approach. I make a good bit of money on a site that has on the order of 15,000 visitors per day. It's sticky as hell and we charge an arm and a leg. People stay for 6 months or longer. I spend 0 on marketing, it's all word of mouth.
If you get 60,000 people to visit your site with two articles (which is really a talent) then you should have a plan ready about what you're going to do with those people.
Just getting them is 1/100th of the job. The other 99% is keeping them, and getting them to really participate in something. Not to use them as guinea pigs.
Everybody can generate impulses, maybe not of this magnitude, but it's doable.
The trick in running a successful internet business is not to be able to generate impulses, even though that is a part of it, the trick is to have all your ducks in a row and to provide a pipeline of activities executed in parallel.
Each of those steps in the pipeline (I'm not going to enumerate them, but they're pretty obvious) lead to a single goal, which is to form a long term relationship with a customer or a user.
If that's not the end goal then you are executing before you are ready to do so, essentially you are using your powder before it's time.
* Build up a following of devoted disciples
* After a while start trying to sell them stuff