All right I’m going to say it right off the bat this post seems like an incredibly bad idea right from the start, I mean really does Guy Kawasaki really need to take branding and marketing advice from me? So I’m either going to go down in a fiery ball of flames or hopefully learn something along the way.
In the beginning his blog was named something like “Guy Kawasaki’s blog a person writing for people with nothing to do” or something close to that. He was building the Guy Kawasaki brand and throwing a cute funny little tagline on the end. Recently I started to notice in my feed reader this blog that keeps showing up with the annoyingly ambiguous title of “how to change the world”. How to change the world doesn’t really tell me anything there’s no “mental velcro” or “impression after taste” of brand association, in short it floats untethered in the vast void blogosphere.
At first I thought maybe it was some unintended technical glitch similar to what happened to Danny Sullivan’s podcast feed
which he quite promptly fixed. However upon visiting the page (shown below) you can see there is no Guy Kawasaki text anywhere in header on the page. Some of you are wondering does branding exist in the blogosphere, you bet it does! Back when I was spoke about bidding on Matt Cutts as a keyword I wondered out loud whether my CTR was influenced because people knew “graywolf” and not “michael gray”. Well at pubcon this week I think I discovered the answer to that question. In a completely unscientific test I can tell you got completely different responses if I said “hi I wanted to introduce myself name is Michael Gray” compared to to “hi I wanted to introduce myself I’m graywolf”.
So back to the question does Guy Kawasaki need branding help? Well if I were trying to make it into the technorati top 10 I would absolutely use everything I could to get there, and making sure people knew it was the “Guy Kawasaki blog” and not the “How to change the world blog” would definitely be something I’d do. I’m sure there are some clever folks out there saying, all right Gray I’m onto you, isn’t this just some clever attempt at baiting Guy into linking to you? No lie I’d love a link, but I’d really like to hear from Guy what’s his thinking on this one. Why did you drop your name/brand from the title of your feed?
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{ 7 comments }
I don’t think Guy Kawasaki needs any branding help… but his blog might.
I agree. I changed the name of the feed as soon as I subscribed. (Worst name ever for a blog) Great blog though.
You should’ve been on the linkbait panel with Aaron and Rand.
I been subscribing to feed to Guy’s blog for a while now it used to be called ‘Signum sine tinnitus-by Guy Kawasaki’ which is even harder to memorize.
Think I’ve got any chance at building my brand of G-Man?
G-Man
Graywolf, I work with Guy on his blog and the “How to Change the World” is there for a reason. He is going to be releasing a book with that title, which is why it is important to brand that right now.
OK Neil but IMHO “Guy Kawasaki – How to Change the World” gets two birds with one stone
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