In an Economy – And a World – Gone Haywire, Creativity and Flexibility Are the Keys to Entrepreneurial Success
August 1, 2009
An Interview with Dr. Ellen Brandt
Interviewer: Hi, Ellen. So what’s this I hear about your being a doctor, a lawyer, and an Indian chief?
Ellen Brandt: Vicious rumors! But I am a Ph.D. – from Penn, with a specialty in early American cultural history. Elder lawyers are among my colleagues in my current role as a senior services provider. And it was an interview with a 100-year-old Indian chief – and several other Centenarians – that first got me thinking about elder-oriented businesses and how important they’d be to the future of this economy.
Interviewer: Tell us more.
EB: I’ve been a heavy-volume magazine writer for several decades now. About 20 years ago, I did what was then probably the first major US magazine cover story on Centenarians, folks who’ve reached their 100th birthdays or more. Parade Magazine sent me all over the country to meet these amazing people.
Among them was the 102-year-old Chief of the Crow Tribe, Robert Yellowtail, whom I interviewed in a tribal nursing home in Wyoming. He remembered going to Washington in the early 1900s to cement a treaty with the US government and camping out in a tent and a sleeping bag right on the National Mall.
Chief Yellowtail died before the story was published, so Parade cut out the section about him. But I interviewed many other fascinating folks, like a tiny, very refined 107-year-old African-American lady from Cincinnati, Ella Miller, who strolled her neighborhood on a 3-mile “constitutional” rain or shine, and 101-year-old Philadelphian Julius Adler, a prominent civil engineer, who didn’t retire until age 95 and still dressed formally in suit, vest, and tie to regale guests over sherry in his impressive library.
After this story was published, in the crowd-frenzy of media then and now, I became an instant expert on the very aged and was asked to do dozens of follow-up stories for publications large and small. Centenarians who bowl. Centenarian RV enthusiasts. Centenarians of Boston and Albuquerque and Greater Los Angeles. Methodist Centenarians. Baptist Centenarians. Centenarians Who Skydive – OK, I made that last one up!
Interviewer: And it got you thinking about senior services?
EB: It did. Because I also talked to a lot of gerontologists – academics who study the aged – and geriatricians – doctors who specialize in their care. And every single one of them was concerned back then, 20 years ago, about a coming crisis in coping with our changing demographics, especially as the vast Baby Boom generation – to which we belong – starts to get seriously elderly.
That’s not for awhile yet. Despite misconceptions among some young people and even some members of the media, we Baby Boomers will only turn age 46 to age 63 in 2009.
But the absolute number of extreme elderly is already increasing rapidly among those in our parents’ generation, due to higher fitness levels, better treatment of various medical conditions, and unexpected factors, like increased immigration.
Interviewer: When did you move into the senior services sector yourself, and what are you doing now?
EB: About two years ago, I started a service called Lifestories Limited, videotaping the autobiographies of mostly people over 75, both very healthy seniors and those who are more frail. I’m sometimes hired by my subjects themselves, sometimes by their sons and daughters, and I’ll happily tape in nursing homes or assisted-living facilities.
I’ve tried to position myself as ultra mass-market in this niche. There are PR-people who market do-it-yourself “kits” – essentially scrapbooks plus lists of questions – at the very low end. But if you can tape your parents yourself, you don’t need a “kit.”
Then there are the wedding photographers, almost all without skills as either historians or journalists, who charge many thousands of dollars for videotaped chats with their subjects – extremely pretty but sorely lacking in substance.
I believe I charge an exceptionally reasonable price, which nearly anyone can afford, for a full videotaped autobiography, the end product being a one-hour DVD with 20 copies included in the package. I also tape married couples and groups of brothers and sisters.
Interviewer: Has the more traditional senior services community embraced your concept?
EB: They have. I’ve made many “friendly colleagues,” as it were, among social workers, nurses, assisted-living managers, nursing homes owners, physicians, and elder law attorneys. One of the most prominent elder lawyers in the country has just hired me to videotape his mid-80s Mom and Dad in Florida.
I’ve also established a periodic “history seminar” geared to folks over 80, which I’ll be presenting as a program for all kinds of senior residences, churches, and synagogues.
And I’m working on a program for mortuaries, sort of a “Lifestories After Death,” in which relatives and friends of deceased loved ones, with a clinical psychologist present, reminisce on videotape as part of the bereavement and healing process.
Interviewer: I hear you have dreams of a Senior Services Empire.
EB: Well, I was Imperatrix (Empress) of my high school Latin Club! If I can get some venture capital or big chain backing, I do have ambitions to move considerably beyond what I’m working on now.
I recently wrote a story called “Summer Camp for Seniors,” with perfectly true anecdotes about how dismal the average “enrichment” – i.e. activity – program roster is at even the most chichi nursing home or assisted-living site. Retired teachers and doctors and lawyers and small business owners – people certainly worthy of everyone’s respect – are essentially treated like kindergarteners, herded into endless games of Bingo or balloon volleyball or taken on exciting field trips to Red Lobster or Dollar Tree Stores.
The story, which I expect will get widely reprinted, has garnered uniformly favorable comments from professionals and residents’ children alike.
As for residents themselves – they’re not encouraged to use computers! In many cases, sites actually ban their residents from having even personal computers, as if any exposure to the Big Bad Outside World would somehow decrease the ridiculous amount of control some site managers wish to maintain over their aged clientele.
Interviewer: That’s absolutely incredible.
EB: It is. But to an entrepreneur, an unmet need means an unmet opportunity. I intend to try to get backing for a turnkey management company which will come in and handle all of a site’s activities, including computer and fitness activities – virtually everything except food service, nursing, and social work.
I think a competent, well-capitalized management firm could handle things better, more efficiently, and even cheaper than what is in place now.
Interviewer: How so?
EB: Just on the staffing front, there is now an extraordinary labor pool of very well-educated, sophisticated, and experienced academics and other top-flight professionals who are either recently retired, unemployed, or under-employed.
At the same time, assisted-living, independent-living, and other elder sites more or less always have extra – sometimes a lot of extra – space on hand.
Through my company, you could have – instead of the junior-college-trained “recreation” majors who typically handle activities now – former college professors or high-school principals or senior teachers taking over these slots.
To entice them, you would offer an on-site apartment and full board for them and their trailing spouses, plus maybe a company car, which would allow you to pay far lower salaries than you probably pay the unqualified recreation directors you have on-site now.
These sophisticated, superbly-educated women and men would be trained by us to take advantage of the latest research on the elderly intellect and how to stimulate it, on lifelong learning, and on physical fitness. We would work to establish close links for each site with nearby colleges and universities, medical centers, cultural institutions, fitness trainers – you name it! – the resources available in the greater community, whether you’re a rural site or located in a big city.
We’d do a Lifestory videotaped autobiography for every resident, offer frequent guest lecturers and seminar-like discussion classes, and provide computer banks and computer training.
In short, we would strive to turn every senior site we managed into nothing less than a University for Elders.
Interviewer: What an exciting and ambitious concept. But will you face resistance from current sites?
EB: Of course. There always is to new and innovative ideas. But I think there’s a direct parallel to – of all things – the handful of firms which now manage America’s prisons on a turnkey basis.
I clearly remember when the idea of a prison management firm was first being floated twenty or so years ago, when market penetration was essentially zero. Everyone knew that both the Federal government and the states were having problems running their prisons cheaply and efficiently. But there was extreme reluctance to turn them over to outside management.
Well, I now understand that something like 80 percent of all prisons are managed by outside firms on a turnkey basis. I think once the initial resistance is overcome, the concept of allowing outside professionals to manage one’s senior sites will meet with similar success.
Interviewer: You clearly like to plan a few steps ahead.
EB: In a time of rapid change in virtually every sector, I think the true keys to entrepreneurial success are creativity and flexibility.
Interviewer: I think you told us that your career as a journalist represents that.
EB: It certainly represents the strange twists Fate can hand you! My previous writing output had been essentially academic articles for academic journals. But when I moved to California in the 70s, it was the heady Feminist years when every day, another woman seemed to be the first-this-that-or-the-other.
So I conceived a women’s page column – those were the days when every newspaper had a women’s page – called California Woman, where I profiled people like the first woman to manage a National Forest, the first female prison warden in the state – I remember she wore a pink, fluffy sweater – and the first woman to pilot a traffic helicopter for the morning commute.
That was in Los Angeles, and her name was Pamela, a lovely blonde Englishwoman. She took me up with her one morning, and whenever she saw something interesting on the highway, she’d swoop down, happily commenting, “Look at that great accident!” Before this market crash, the scariest experience of my life.
So back to my serendipitous career progression: One of my columns profiled a hotel owner in the Sierra Nevada whose hotel had a resident ghost named George. I got a call from one of the leading supermarket tabloids, possibly the National Enquirer, possibly the Globe, asking if I would write a little story for them – just about the ghost!
I did. They loved it. And to make a long story short, for a couple of years, I became a very high-volume writer for all the tabloids. My specialty, which basically no one else had back then, was finding serious business-oriented articles and turning them into catchy material the tabloids could exploit.
For example, I reported on the very first talking supermarket scanner, at a Ralph’s Supermarket in suburban California. My favorite was “Teacher’s Life Sucked Away By Killer Weed,” which was about an unfortunate victim of an epidemic of water hyacinths crowding an Alabama river.
Serendipity struck when the Executive Editor – second in command – at one of my tabloid clients was named Editor-in-Chief – first in command – at a major women’s magazine. He needed someone to do a weekly consumer finance column, a weekly careers column, and anything else they cared to throw at you.
The magazine in question is the most tabloid-y of the women’s mags, in that it sells primarily at the supermarket counter and is geared to a broad, general audience. But you needed a solid finance and business background to produce the material.
So there I was: a volume tabloid writer, a women’s page newspaper columnist, an Ivy League Ph.D., and someone with corporate financial experience. To be frank, I didn’t have much competition!
Interviewer: Do you have any advice for your fellow Baby Boomers discouraged by the current economic outlook?
EB: Gosh, No! Other than banding together and taking over the Planet again.
Seriously, I think our generation will just lick its wounds, think things over, and start getting very creative again about rebuilding this economy – and our own savings accounts – in ways, shapes, and forms that are better than those that have gotten us into this mess.
I think everyone now acknowledges that an economy that depends too heavily on financial services at the expense of every other sector is not building on a truly solid foundation.
Now we’ll turn to all those other sectors that have been neglected for far too long. I’m concentrating on senior services. Others will help rebuild manufacturing and agriculture and energy and healthcare and education.
And I have no doubt whatsoever that we Baby Boomers are going to completely redefine and reshape what Aging in America is all about.
Interviewer: What about the “Millennials,” recent graduates and new employees, who are starting their careers in a time of economic malaise?
EB: It may actually be a fortunate turn of events. Instead of starting out on safe, pre-ordained career paths based on their college coursework and finding out ten years later they hate where they are, they’re more or less being forced to take longer, more circuitous career paths. That should enable them to explore, to try new things out, to fail and succeed in ways they may not have dreamed of yet.
As they say, You Learn From the Journey. Today’s beleaguered Millennials may be far luckier than they think they are.
About This Publication: This story, In an Economy – And a World – Gone Haywire, was printed at Baby Boomer Knowledge Center on May 9, 2009.
Since I retain all legal rights to the story, I’ve decided to “bring it home” to EllenInteractive.
Readers who enjoyed this story might want to read “Recession? What Recession? Not in the Senior Services Sector.” Please go to: http://wp.me/pycK6-p
Also see “Summer Camp for Seniors” at: http://wp.me/pycK6-t
And for Ellen’s new – and already controversial – series, Baby Boomers-The Angriest Generation, please go to: http://wp.me/pxD3J-3
Corpses, Mollusks, and Kinky Sex – How I Won the Blog-Off
November 27, 2009
by Ellen Brandt, Ph.D.
Many of those in my now-loyal audience first became acquainted with my work by supporting me in the Community Marketing site’s Great Blog-Off contest a few months ago. A number of people have asked me to write a little case study about my (overwhelming) win in that test, which illustrates some basic principles everyone who writes for the Internet should keep in mind: Hook ‘Em With Headlines. Keep ‘Em There With Links. And Remember You’re Only As Strong As Your Fan Base.
I’ve been a heavy-volume print journalist most of my working life. But after a several-year sabbatical from the field, I returned to find the world of magazines in disarray, Big Media under fire from Little Media, and the Internet emerging as the place where a busy and educated audience of professionals tended to go for both news and features.
I was also dismayed to find that the current dominance of a few major search engines tends to exclude from Internet visibility anything written prior to 18 months ago or so. Magazines are particularly poorly represented. So the more than 3,000 print magazine articles I’d published over a 30-year period were virtually inaccessible, in Internet terms. I was suddenly a journalistic ghost, while Buffy the Siamese Cat, with 14,000 Twitter “publications,” was now a media superstar.
What to do? Well, with the help of my cousin the Internet guru, I first scanned in a selection of about 50 of my magazine articles and placed them in a little virtual portfolio on the Web. Then I wrote a couple of articles for Internet “aggregators,” but soon decided they were pretty much pimps, and I was a lady, not a Lady of the Night.
So I decided to create a Web presence of my own by publishing and administering my own blogsites and developing an audience in the Brave New Blogosphere. While this idea was germinating, I heard about the Great Blog-Off contest at a website called Community Marketing.
Marketing is not my area of expertise, although I’ve done a few stories on it over the years. (I’ve probably done a few stories on everything over the years.) But this contest was not designed for marketing writers only. It welcomed all bloggers who professed to be “thought leaders” on any kind of subject matter. I had been contemplating starting my Baby Boomers-The Angriest Generation series, which most of you now know about. (See the latest Index at http://wp.me/pxD3J-2a )
I signed up for the contest, describing myself as a “thought leader” on the subject of Baby Boomers. The owner of the site asked contestants – there were a couple of dozen originally, although some turned out to be not very active – to come up with punchy little descriptions of themselves, a few words that would make us memorable. I offered the following:
Dr. Ellen Brandt – “Sophisticated Rabble-Rouser”
About my professional background: I’m an Ivy League-educated Ph.D. cultural historian and the author of over 3,000 magazine articles. I’m now a professional in the senior services industry – the fastest-growing sector of this economy for the next 100 years or so – while also resuming my career as a heavy-volume journalist.
When I’m not working: I’m a mezzo soprano trained at Juilliard Prep when it was at 123rd and Claremont. I like lighthouses, carousels, and botanical gardens. And my Dog-Nephew Garcia, named after Jerry Garcia, was – honestly! – the inspiration for the Obamas getting a Portuguese water dog.
My Pre-Blog-Off Blogsite
Said punchy blurb was accompanied by a photo and the notation that I would be the contestant representing Boomers among a field of mostly Gen-Xers and Millennials.
The punchy blurbs were posted about ten days before the contest proper was to begin, at which time I contemplated what kind of strategy might set me apart from the field, help win me a loyal audience, and address the essential differences between a static print environment and this dynamic sphere which calls itself the Internet.
I decided to establish a “pre-Blog-Off blog” at WordPress, where I now house the blogs I publish. The site was called “Preparing for the Blog-Off” with the subhead “Seeing What Works.”
It basically consisted of the same page repeated ten times with different headlines. More about the headlines in a second. The main purpose of the page was to introduce readers to the Blog-Off, with an easy link to the contest embedded in the text.
I also said a little bit about my background and stated that I would be the contestant representing Content and Experience, as befitted a Baby Boomer. On the blogsite’s About page, I offered further links to my Linked In profile, about 50 examples of my print magazine articles, and a wide-ranging interview about my career. (See Why This Blog at http://wp.me/sycK6-about )
This adds up to a whole lot of links! Which illustrates one of those three principles successful website owners should keep in mind: Don’t keep your Readers on one static page, in which case they might as well be sitting at their kitchen table reading a newspaper. Keep your audience moving swiftly from link to link, offering them choices of what to read about next. Make your site a textual Treasure Hunt, with riches galore opening before their eyes.
Now For Those Headlines . . .
All I needed now was an interesting topic for the site, broad enough to warrant several blog entries over the two-week period of the contest, and compelling enough to attract a brand-new audience previously unfamiliar with my work.
The Blog-Off winner would be the contestant who attracted both the most comments and the most clicks – or page views – on the Community Marketing site. So I conceived the idea of a series of stories about attracting both page views and comments via the strength of one’s article headlines.
The series would be called “Thank You For Clicking!” and would be based on the experience early in my career within the world of those Headline Hotshots, the tabloid newspapers. (See “In An Economy and World Gone Haywire” http://wp.me/pycK6-v )
No one does headlines better than the tabloids. Their titles may amuse you, intrigue you, infuriate you, or have you scratching your head – but they are superb at drawing you in and getting you to read the accompanying stories.
Looking at this exercise as informative, as well as fun, I decided to use ten Faux Tabloid Headlines representing different kinds of typical tabloid stories, which I categorized as The Big Story, Plausible-But-Off, Purely Ridiculous, and What-the-Heck-Is-That-About? You can read about these tabloid story categories – and I certainly hope you will – in the four-part series of blogs which made up my composite entry in the Blog-Off.
Here are the ten Faux Tabloid Headlines:
Corpse Found in Internet Guru’s Gym Locker
Kinky Sex, Chocolate Truffles, Adorable Puppies
Thailand Swallowed By Giant Clam
New Reality Show To Feature Laid-Off Bankers, Lawyers
Women Want Men Who Smell Like Fresh Peaches
7 Out of 10 Blog In the Nude
Swimming Pool Features Underwater Computer
Are You a Cheetah or a Crocodile?
Transvestite Running for Mayor
Pet Hamsters May Spread Swine Flu
Each of these headlines was placed on a separate page at the “Preparing For the Blog-Off” site at Word Press, with the exact same text accompanying each one. In other words, the only element that differed page-to-page was the headline itself. A reader’s clicking on any particular page instead of another would demonstrate that the headline on that page attracted that reader in some way. I also encouraged readers to comment on why they clicked on that particular headline.
Please click on this link to see what the “Preparing For the Blog-Off” page looked like: http://wp.me/pycK6-2h I have used “7 Out of 10 Blog in the Nude” as an example.
Finding Your Fan Base
At this point I needed an audience to read my Blog-Off entries. Several of the younger entrants in the contest publically stated they’d be concentrating on their Twitter networks as potential bases of fans. But I wasn’t on Twitter yet, nor was I active on Face Book.
So I decided to focus my efforts on my Linked In network – considerably smaller then than it is now – and my 50 Linked In Groups.
Starting about two weeks before the Blog-Off’s official commencement, I began to post each of the ten Faux Tabloid Headlines in turn, with a link to the appropriate “Preparing” site page, first in the News sections, then in the Discussion sections, of my various Linked In Groups. I made sure each of the ten Faux Headlines appeared in News and Discussion threads an equal number of times, meaning that an approximately equal number of site visitors would have the opportunity to click – or not click – on each distinctive headline.
Readers who did choose to click were encouraged to make comments about why they chose the headline they did. Many got into the spirit of this exercise and made comments which were sophisticated, insightful, and often quite funny.
It was also soon very clear who my own “fan base” tended to be: over-35; equally divided between female and male; well-educated; and with professional, managerial, or creative careers.
I’m quite happy with that audience. And, in fact, many of those who first “found” me and my work via the Blog-Off are now friends and members of my network.
A quick note about my Baby Boomers series: I intended to introduce the first of my Baby Boomers-The Angriest Generation articles towards the end of the Blog-Off contest. But I collected so much material from the Faux Tabloid Headlines exercise – most of which turned out to be genuinely interesting, as well as humorous – I decided to stick with that “mini-series,” consisting of four separate “Thank You For Clicking!” results stories, as my composite Blog-Off entry.
Here are links to the four stories in the series:
Thank You For Clicking! Part One: Corpse Found In Internet Guru’s Gym Locker http://wp.me/pycK6-2i
Thank You For Clicking! Part Two: Kinky Sex, Chocolate Truffles, Adorable Puppies http://wp.me/pycK6-2l
Thank You For Clicking! Part Three: Thailand Swallowed By Giant Clam http://wp.me/pycK6-2m
Thank You For Clicking! Part Four: New Reality Show To Feature Laid-Off Bankers, Lawyers http://wp.me/pycK6-2o
I urge you to read these stories in sequence, after looking at the Introductory page from the “Preparing For the Blog-Off” site, linked above.
This sequence of four Thank You For Clicking! results articles made up my Blog-Off entry. They were posted on the Community Marketing site at about three-day intervals over the two-week course of the contest. Other active competitors also posted about four stories on average, with three to five blogs being the typical range per contestant.
When the results were tallied, my articles garnered about twice as many page views on the Community Marketing site as my nearest competitor. But the number of page views on the “Preparing for the Blog-Off” site itself was over double that amount, meaning my total views overall, counting both sites, was between six and seven times as great as the next-nearest contestant.
Tell Me What You Think
The series of Thank You For Clicking! stories also did extremely well in terms of reader commentary, which I believe is one of the essential components of successful Internet-based publishing.
Internet gurus tell us that a comment-to-click ratio of 1-2 percent is the average among publishers across the Web. Adding together the approximately 200 comments the Thank You! series received at the Community Marketing site, my Linked In Groups, and the “Preparing For the Blog-Off” site, these articles had a comment-to-click ratio of almost 4 percent, considered an excellent showing.
The comment-to-page view ratio on the “Preparing” site alone, where I – and not other managers – had complete control of the blog and its content was similar, with close to 100 comments from readers, out of 2700 page views in a three-week period.
I am including a selection of original Reader comments from the Community Marketing site and the “Preparing” blogsite as an appendix to this case study. To see them, please click here: http://wp.me/pycK6-2q and http://wp.me/pycK6-2r
The superb reader response demonstrates how enthusiastic – and witty – an audience I was fortunate enough to make an acquaintance with during the course of the Blog-Off contest.
There were a few detractors. If you’ve read my serious humor piece about Malice on the Web, you’ll remember a small cadre of loonies at a couple of Linked In media groups – including a PR man! – who thought anything whatsoever to do with tabloids was just too undignified for Internet discourse. (See “Vultures and Stiletto Heels” http://wp.me/pycK6-5 )
But most readers loved the premise of the Faux Tabloid Headline experiment and understood that it was not only entertaining, but also told us some interesting things about which kinds of headlines readers respond to viscerally and why.
Even coming from a heavy-volume print background, it was essential for me – as it is for every writer and publisher – to discover just who my Internet “fan base” might be and how I could best appeal to them in future Web publications.
My gratifying win in the Blog-Off contest allowed me to do that.
Soon afterwards, I launched my Baby Boomers-The Angriest Generation series. (See http://wp.me/pxD3J-2V ) And “Tell Me What You Think,” a catch phrase I used throughout the Blog-Off, became the subtitle of my EllenInteractive site, a cornucopia of diverse stories designed to elicit above-average reader response. (For instance, see “The World is Divided,” a key question story which received well over 100 comments: http://wp.me/pycK6-n )
I’m now moving on to additional Internet publishing projects:
Media Revolution, a subseries of EllenInteractive, talks about how the entire media sector is undergoing a sea change of enormous proportions and how we must prepare for it. (See “Is Big Brother Here-And Is He An Algorithm?” http://wp.me/pycK6-1Y )
Romance After Fifty is a series on dating and relationships I’m developing with a Baby Boomer matchmaker. (See “A Chance for Romance” http://wp.me/pxD3J-R )
A Little Knowledge will look at Internet security and cloud computing from the perspective of an audience which is well-educated and has used computers for years, but which lacks information on some of the serious recent developments that are changing the Web as we speak.
And The Rest of US – pun intended – is a new blogsite I’m launching about and for political Centrists.
So there have been many interesting developments built upon the foundation of my Blog-Off win.
I invite my brilliant, sophisticated, and in-every-way-perfect audience to join with me in these new projects and others to come.
Any success I have is due to you!
Filed in Blog Off, Humor, Interactive, Internet, Media, Media Revolution
Tags: "7 Out of 10 Blog in the Nude", "A Chance For Romance", "A Little Knowledge", "Angriest Generation", "Are You a Cheetah or a Crocodile?", "Baby Boomers-The Angriest Generation", "Big Media", "Corpse Found in Internet Guru's Gym Locker", "Corpses Mollusks and Kinky Sex", "EllenInteractive", "How I Won the Blog-Off", "In An Economy and World Gone Haywire", "Is Big Brother Here-And Is He An Algorithm?", "Kinky Sex Chocolate Truffles Adorable Puppies", "Little Media", "New Reality Show to Feature Laid-Off Bankers Lawyers", "Pet Hamsters May Spread Swine Flu", "Preparing for the Blog-Off", "Reality Show to Feature Laid-Off Bankers Lawyers", "Romance After Fifty", "Sophisticated Rabble-Rouser", "Swimming Pool Features Underwater Computer", "Tell Me What You Think", "Thailand Swallowed By Giant Clam", "Thank You For Clicking!", "The Rest of US", "The World Is Divided", "Transvestite Running For Mayor", "Vultures and Stiletto Heels", "Women Want Men Who Smell Like Fresh Peaches", 7 Out of 10 Bloggers, Adorable Puppies, Aggregators as Pimps, article, Audience-building, Audiences, Baby Boomer Matchmaker, Baby Boomers, Blog in the Nude, Blog Off, bloggers, Blogging in the Nude, blogs, Boomers, Buffy the Siamese Cat, bullying, Case Study, Cheetah, Cheetah or Crocodile, Chocolate Truffles, Comment-to-Click Ratio, Comment-to-Page View Ratio, Community Marketing, Competition, Competitor, Contest, Contestant, Crocodile, Cyber-Gatekeepers, dr ellen brandt, Educated Audience, ellen brandt, Ellen Brandt Ph.D., Fan Base, Faux Headlines, Faux Tabloid Headlines, Feature Stories, Features, Flamers, Fresh Peaches, Gatekeepers, Gen-Xers, Giant Clam, Giant Mollusk, Great Blog-Off, Gym Locker, Hamsters, Headlines, Humor, Humor Blog, Interactive, interactivity, Internet Guru, Internet Guru's Gym Locker, Internet security, Ivy League, Ivy Leaguers, Jerry Garcia, Juilliard, Kappa Kappa Gamma, Kinky Sex, Laid-Off Bankers, Laid-Off Lawyers, Linked In, Links, Magazines, Malice on the Internet, Malice on the Web, Mayor, Media Revolution, Mezzo-Soprano, Millennials, Mollusks, Networking, Obama's Portuguese Water Dog, Peaches, Perfect Audience, Pet Hamsters, Portuguese Water Dog, Reality Show, Reality Show For Bankers, Reality Show For Lawyers, Satire, senior services, Serious Humor, Social Media, social networks, Swimming Pool, Swine Flu, Tabloid Headlines, Tabloids, Thought Leader, Transvestite, Transvestite Mayor, Twitter, Underwater Computer, University of Pennsylvania, Virtual Portfolio, WordPress, writers, writing