Jonathan GrubbThis, my friends, is an Opportunity
February 21st, 2008Check out these charts.
I wanted to compare something unknown (Brad Pitt) to something known, so I picked your friend and mine TechCrunch. The result: Brad Pitt destroys TechCrunch when it comes to search queries, while TechCrunch kills Brad in terms of pageviews. The same holds true when any movie star is compared with any tech blog.
February 22nd, 2008 at 3:33 pm
I’m not sure what your premise is. It’s not clear what opportunity you’re seeing. Should Brad Pitt care about page views at bradpitt.com?
For Brad Pitt the product or brand, I’m not sure bradpitt.com needs to do much heavy lifting.
Take a random popular product like, say, Crocs (the hideous plastic footwear). If Crocs had a crappy website, would it affect the brand perception or sales of Crocs? Or, conversely,as it begins to dawn on people that Crocs are stupid, could an awesome Crocs website prevent sales from plummeting?
The search queries stat is much more valuable. If you’re Tom Cruise (or his PR team), it might be really nice to know as soon there’s a sudden spike in searches for “Tom Cruise.” It would be even better if you could know that “scientology video” is included in many of those searches. It would be nice to know, in general, which bloggers are your fans and which are your detractors.
I have a feeling that most celebs (and their people) are not very savvy when it comes to monitoring the web for this kind of information, or understanding its impact on their “brand” value.
Is that the opportunity you see?
February 23rd, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Good points Shawn. I’m not quite sure what the point is either, but it has something to do with the fact that Brad Pitt is a popular topic on this internet but he’s not doing much to directly benefit from that popularity. He’s doing plenty to indirectly benefit, but nothing direct. I see some opportunity there.
In this example it would be pretty easy to build a simple website for bradpitt.com that would benefit from all that search traffic. Or something.
I totally agree that stats are the most valuable thing right now, whether it’s search stats or the kind of stats/data that a company like, say, Scout Labs will provide.
Actors may not benefit much from a website (see Madonna example in previous post) but they would certainly benefit from *something* on the internet. My guess is that engagement with fans using social networks is the best way to start, but I could be way off. Setting up a system to measure impact is probably the first step — basically finding out where we are before heading in a specific direction.