One Degree Calling – Is Anybody Home?

“So did you ping back One Degree?” a client asked me this week. I had no clue what they were talking about.
Apparently, One Degree – Where Canadian Internet Marketers Gather, had a posting called, One Degree Calling, in which they were discussing if certain companies actually have or look at RSS feeds.
One Degree then went on to do a little experiment where they listed off a handful of shops based in Canada and would then post how long it took those companies to see the posting and place a comment on the site. It took Twist Image 21 hours and 45 minutes.
Here’s why One Degree is kind of off.
It actually took me no time at all. I get the One Degree RSS feed as soon as they are posted, I just don’t read all of it right away – specifically postings with titles that seem to have little immediate relevance to me or are ambiguous (like One Degree Calling).
If you’re into the Blogosphere (like I am), then you’ll have hundreds of feeds (like I do).
I have so many feeds, that I’ve had to add pages to My Yahoo! just so I can keep them all in check (I did not even know about this functionality until recently and have been deleting certain feeds for others because I was maxing out on my main page… arghhh!). I also rank them by the ones that provide me with immediate must-read news and others that I can simply “scan” on an ad hoc basis.
I’m certainly not dumping on One Degree. I think Ken Schafer has a solid site going with One Degree and he makes a valid point that most “shooters” in this space probably don’t even follow what’s going on (as of writing this Blog posting, only 4 out of the 10 have even responded to One Degree’s post). I just feel that the methodology is a little out of whack.
If anything, One Degree Calling was a better example of how fast word-of-mouth can spread online as I probably would not have even read a post with a title like that unless someone had specifically told me to.
Getting beyond the little One Degree “experiment,” what it made me realize is how much great content is out there, and how much care has to go into making every word count. Especially the call to action – which in this case was the title. If it does not resonate with me, no matter how much I like everything else that has come out of there, I am just ambivalent towards it (maybe One Degree could have done multiple postings for each company, so one could have been titled, “One Degree Calling Twist Image” – that I would have read fast).
Lesson from One Degree Calling: If you want to get a response, create a call to action that engages and is personal enough that it will catch the reader’s eye on a screen filled with great postings from great Blogs and other online forums.