How To Split An Atom

Today I wanted to explore personal marketing through a case study. In this case, Robert Scoble who has manged to launch one of the finest “comeback tours” I have ever seen. To give you a bit of insight into this, here is some background.

Scoble’s Departure

Amidst a rain of detractors brow beating him, a rather substantial reduction in the amount of conversation on his blog, and a general cloud of contention surrounding his persona — Robert Scoble bowed out of the blogosphere a few weeks back. For those who don’t know, Robert is one of the leading evangelists for the podcasting network PodTech and the former “Microsoft Blogger”.

Well, one of the problems with leaving something in a huff and then wanting to return is that you usually lose a bit of face in the process. I can only assume that Robert realized this, and being the promoter than he is, he decided to orchestrate a fantastic “welcome back to blogging” party for himself in the form of one of the more outlandish claims I’ve heard in a while, “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years”

Needless to say, the tech blogosphere was up in arms. A laundry list of top tier authors spent the next two days tearing into Robert. Despite the fact that almost everyone disagreed with his claim, it didn’t really matter because the spike in his readership, increase in links and general improvement in relevance more than made up for a slightly bruised ego.

All Press Is Good Press

Robert had played exactly the card he wanted to, picking a headline that just screamed “link to me” and playing it off so well that even as people were bashing him, others were rising up to defend him against the lynch mob who had lined up to have him publicly hanged.

For weeks before this little play, Scoble averaged about 15 comments per post. For someone who prides himself on being a conversation starter, this must have been a bit frustrating. In his most recent posts since the debacle, this number has shot up — sometimes breaking the 100 comment mark.

The point? In the blogosphere, all press is good press. A lot of people think that Robert has ‘jumped the shark’ on this one, but a savvy marketer can see that this was a calculated play by a master of self-promotion. While people are busy arguing about how ridiculous his “Google Killer” tale was, he’s watching himself become orders of magnitude more relevant than he has been for weeks.

Web 2.0 Roundup

I suggest that everyone look at this story for what it is — not the misguided attempt of a tech pundit to predict the future of search but instead a brilliantly orchestrated marketing ploy by a master self-promoter.

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