Mr. Gary Lee

After all the fun at the expo, the last thing we had to do was go and listen to Mark Cuban give the keynote speech. I have always been a big fan of Mark Cuban as he is living one of my dreams of being an owner of his favorite basketball team, the Dallas Mavericks (I’d like to own the Lakers just in case you’re wondering). I’ve also been lucky enough to hear him speak on numerous occasions and he has always been very approachable after his speeches. I’ve even emailed him before regarding my thoughts on how to improve the NBA Dunk Contest and he responded within a day to let me know his thoughts to my idea. Of course, I would follow his blog - www.blogmaverick.com - long before I started blogging myself, so if you want to know where I get some of my writing style, now you know.

On to the Keynote . . . Danielle, Prija, Darin and Nate were a little late to the keynote as we were gathering our things and helping tidy up the Unique Blog Designs booth before they take it down. We got our seats and began to listen to some of the stuff Mark was talking about. It was pretty general stuff that I’ve preached before, along with many other bloggers - honesty and openness to your readers. Although most of the keynote was a yawner as Darin will show you with pics of John napping, there were a couple of points in his keynote that made me raise my eyebrows.

Mark started talking about how mainstream media is now incorporating blogs into their websites and how journalist should just stay to journalism and not try to hide behind the purity of blogging. The main reasoning behind this is because of the influence Mark feels the advertisers have over the content of main stream media. It starts to get good when he starts down the path of accusing blogs that place advertisements on their site of becoming just like main-stream media by appeasing to their sponsors by catering their content to their products. I don’t know if this was the smartest thing to say to a room full of bloggers who are trying to learn the best ways of monetizing their blogs. Also, I would say it’s rather hypocritical to call himself a blogger when he uses his blog to promote and appease to his sponsors, whether it be his movies, his basketball team or himself on Dancing with the Stars. Even in the keynote, he was using it as a platform to promote his upcoming movie and tried to get away with it by always prefacing it with “excuse this shameless plug!”

This made me think about how out of touch Mark is with today’s blogosphere. I’m not sure he knows what it takes to become a successful blog by just being a regular person who doesn’t have a billion dollar marketing resource. He’s still in the school of thought that if you write it, they will come. I don’t think he understands how PR affects traffic levels or how link building improves your ranking in google. Actually, I know he doesn’t know because when asked the question about PR and link building during the Q&A section, he said he’d have to look into it more to answer that question.

I know Mark is a great speaker and that he has helped give blogging a level of credibility in mass media, but in this case, especially at the first ever Blog World Expo, times have passed him by for him to be regarded as a blogging authority anymore. To help him understand what I’m saying, I would say that it’s like asking Bob Cousy for training advice to compete in today’s NBA.

News Blogging, Link Building, Marketing, PR