Paul Gillin has posted the results of New Influencers blogging survey on his website.

The numbers here aren't huge, with only 159 completed responses, but it's better than no data.

So, I just took the 2006 MarketingSherpa blog survey. What fun. It was great and humbling to see the company I was in. However, the survey was a pain in the ass, and here's why.

I've read nearly every english language blog in the survey at some point in their life, however, I might not have read them recently, and my memory is quite short.

Wouldn't it be great if for surveys like this, you could take the RSS feed from each of the blogs in question and on an AJAX survey page, click on a 'twistie' or dropdown to see the latest headlines from the blog to get some sort of refresher on their content and to better inform my decision on whether or not to vote.

That would be a great way to use RSS - powering surveys.

RSS could also be a trusted delivery mechanism for surveys for companies that run ongoing customer panels. For example, I just signed up to receive more information from Best Buy on doing their compensated customer surveys and panels. I would gladly subscribe to an RSS feed from them (lest the emails from them get caught in a spam filter) to ensure that I get all of the surveys they send my way. (I love Best Buy, by the way)

<ShamelessSelfPromotion>

Well, what do you know, I made the MarketingSherpa Best Marketing Blog nomination stage in the B-to-B blog category. In fact, this happened in spite of the fact that I missed the deadline and never even nominated myself.

Anyway, if you're reading this, why not click over here and register your vote!

</ShamelessSelfPromotion>

I think Seth Godin's policy on "no comments" on his blog is a brilliant one. Why?

Simple - it promotes other bloggers and get's them to tell the story on their own site. (He does have Trackbacks enabled)

Really, it forces lazy bastards like me, who would have lobbed off a half-baked comment to actually come back to my blog, trackback to his, and compose my thoughts a bit more clearly.

Not to mention that it's great not having to deal with all that comment spam. I really think that MovableType is in the crapper. No new updates now for several months and comment spam is raging out of control with no end in sight, in spite of their "junk comment" tools in 3.2, I don't see any curb in comment spam activity.

Technorati Tags: seth+godin

The Wisconsin blogging seminars just keep coming! This time, the Northeastern WI PRSA group is running the show.

The Program:

The Northeast Wisconsin Chapter of Public Relations Society of America features "Blogs, Podcasting, Wikis, O My!" at its next meeting, Tuesday, April 25, 2006 at Liberty Hall in Kimberly. All communications professionals are welcome to attend.

Our presenters:

Don’t miss your chance to listen to this group of techno-savvy speakers enlighten us on the latest in blogs, wikis and podcasts.

Erin Leffelman, host of Milwaukee's "Play in the City"� blog will inform us on what the blog has done to increase attendance at Milwaukee area events: and
Will Van Epern, interactive director at Infusion Inc. will share his expertise and creative insight on the future of Internet communication.

Date, Time & Place:

Tuesday, April 25, 2006
5:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. Registration & Networking
5:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. Dinner & Business
6:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Program
Liberty Hall
800 Eisenhower Drive, Kimberly
Directions...

Reservations:

You can e-mail your reservation by Thursday, April 20, 2006!

Meeting fees:

Are payable at the door by cash or check:

PRSA Members: $20
Students: $18
Non-members and Guests: $40

B.L said so in her press release:

"Now you need to hire us to bring your clients into the world of social media. That way you can stop wasting everyone's time and money on your education. Otherwise, by time you get with the current program, the next big thing will already be passing you by."

Am I just cynical about this? Maybe tomorrow I'll issue a press release about myself, for myself, quoting myself, telling folks to hire myself... Or, maybe the hell not.

Full disclosure, for what it's worth... B.L and I both write for BusinessBlogConsulting.com

Technorati Tags: blogging for business

Just a quick thank you to the Rotary Club of Green Bay for having me today as a speaker at their Monday meeting. The topic of the event was blogs and blogging...of course.

Download the program notes outline [pdf]
***
Download the blogging resources handout given at the meeting [pdf]

Technorati Tags: blogging for business, Green Bay, Rotary Club

Stowe Boyd on Advisory Capital
- Simply brilliant. Really. Read it.
***

Reminded of an SNL skit with Mike Meyers during a Scotland bit during the Olympics
"If it's not Scottish -- it's CRAP!"
***

Technorati Tags: advisory capital

Interesting report from the Onalytica blog, measuring who the top 25 most influential business bloggers are, with full disclosure on their methodology for defining 'influential.

Not sure I agree with their results, purely because they have a mix of blog networks (Corante), multi-author blogs (Businessblogconsulting) and famous single bloggers like Steve Rubel @ Micropersuasion.

Download the PDF of the report here.

The Results

Cross-posted to Businessblogconsulting.com.

Technorati Tags: blog research, blogosphere, business blogging, influence

Just got a nice, semi personal email from Jeff Veen at Adaptive Path stating that their newest project, Measure Map, had been acquired by Google.

So I said there was news, and here it is: I'm writing you to announce that Measure Map has been acquired by Google, effective today. For the near term, you will see no difference in its operations. In the not so distant future, you can expect great things from this acquisition. We couldn't be happier to find such an ideal home for Measure Map, and are thrilled at the possibilities.

Read more on the Google blog.

Technorati Tags: analytics, blogosphere

Download The Virtual Handshake for free
* The best business book I've read in 5 years is now available for free on the web. Good luck printing...
http://thevirtualhandshake.com/free-book-download.htm
***

Rich at Trade Show Marketing Report quits blogging. Apparently, his continued attempts to give a damn about the trade show marketplace have sputtered and stalled.
***

State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search
* Dave Sifry talks about the "magic middle" and the beta feature on Technorati allowing you to filter by "blog authority".
***
Building A Successful Corporate Blog Survey With Northeastern University
* Backbone Media, John Cass & Dr. Walter Carl are partnering on some spectacular research on business blogging. With these guys behind an initiative like this, watch out for some groundbreaking findings.
***
The Participant economy strikes at Amazon & BN.com according to this post on BlogRevolt.
* ..."consumer reviews on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com had a potent effect on sales of the products reviewed."
***
The Secret Cause of Flame Wars
***
Linkology - Top 50 sites by links
***

Technorati Tags: authority, blog research, blogosphere, flame wars, technorati, The Participant Economy, thought leaders, trade show marketing

Finally got around to creating a blogging resources handout for speaking engagements and other times where you just need a good leave behind. If you're new to blogging, this will likely be helpful. If you're an A-lister...pass this on by.

Download Blogging Resources PDF

Technorati Tags: blogosphere, business blogging, handout

Jonah Bloom of AdAge took notice of the WOMMA bloggers that were in Florida for the WOMBAT conference a couple of weeks ago. Truth be told, bloggers love a little recognition now and then!

Just outside the conference hall at last week’s Word of Mouth Marketing Association basic training conference was a blogging station -- a.k.a. a few computers on a table -- and a huddle of real, live bloggers blogging about such issues as how word-of-mouth marketers should pitch information, to, you guessed it, bloggers.

Why is this a big deal? Well, that depends on your perspective. At the end of the day, all forms of media were represented at the conference - bloggers included. From the 'conference coverage' perspective, bloggers have a unique ability to get the blow-by-blow coverage of each session, as we heard in some of the post-conference testimonials of people who read the blog, or decided not to take notes because the bloggers' coverage was so good!

By bringing bloggers into discussions of word-of-mouth marketing, highlighting their work on the WOMMA Web site and being generous with the association’s content (i.e., giving information away free to all, rather than only to paying members), Sernovitz and his team have built a culture of trust between bloggers and the word-of-mouth marketers who seek their attention.

Technorati Tags: blogging, conference blogging, wombat06, womma wombat

DIY Network recently launched a two-month internet-only marketing campaign designed to drive DIY Network tune-in via targeted impressions, and drive DIYNetwork.com clickthrough for relevant content.

They did everything online. Site-specific banners, ad networks, blog advertising, RSS advertising (no podcasting, though), contextual ads and paid search.

Not only did they do online marketing proud, they got results from their two-month effort to boot!

- 67.9 million impressions
- 580,000 clickthroughs
- 80 percent of site visitors were new to DIYnetwork.com
- Visitors viewed an average of seven pages
- Rich-media banners average interaction rate was around 10 percent
- CTR for paid search increased 183 percent during the campaign, reaching 4.25 percent

They were even so kind as to share a diagram of their success with iMediaConnection.

Source: DIY Networks via iMediaConnection

Technorati Tags: Advertising, DIY Network, Pheedo, RSS

Chris Hoyt, president, Hoyt & Company wrote a compelling article on the HUB magazine website about mining the blogosphere for comments and content on your company.

According to a November 2005 Reveries.com survey, over 60% of companies surveyed weren't monitoring the blogosphere.

On the heels of the WOMMA WOMBAT conference, the emergence of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, and the venture funding flowing into the word-of-mouth marketing space, its never been more apparent that monitoring the consumer media (blogosphere) is an essential function in every marketing department.

So, what might you listen for on the blogosphere?

1. General consumer understanding
   Find your evangelists & vigilantes
   Early warning signs on issues
   Consumer specifics - likes and dislikes
   Competitive intelligence
   Product/service improvement ideas
   Campaign tracking
   WOM tracking

What would your company listen for?

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogging survey, business blogging, womma+wombat

Well, now that was a conference!

First of all, thanks to the fellow WOMMA bloggers who helped me bring the conference coverage to everyone last week:

- Toby Bloomberg of Bloomberg Marketing and the Diva Marketing blog.
- Josh Hallet of hyku - another pro blogger and blog consultant
- Marianne Richmond of Resonance Partnership, LLC and the Resonance Partnership Blog

Thanks also to WOMMA for bringing us all to Orlando to be part of such as great thing. It was a pleasure working with such fine folks covering such a monumental event.

Technorati Tags: bloggers, feedback, Josh Hallett, Marianne Richmond, Toby Bloomberg, wombat06, womma wombat

In just a few days, Toby, Josh, Marianne and I will all converge on the WOMBAT conference to do some pretty heavy conference blogging. We've worked very closely with WOMMA do put a great blogger program together to make sure that we're setting a good example of how comp'ed conference blogging should be done, but at the end of the day, what do we know.

I'm more interested in what you all know. What are some of the "Best Blogged" conferences you've been to or read about? Have you conference-blogged yourself and have some good posts to show off?

I'd love your take on what you feel makes the best conference blog and conference blogging experience (and reader experience if you're consuming conference blog posts)

Thanks!

Technorati Tags: conference blogging, womma+wombat

Bill Flitter posted a great summary of the year in RSS activities over at his ReveNews blog. Full links to each of he events can be found in Bill's original post.

A few highlights:

1/10 – CNBC presents an introduction to RSS segment on Closing Bell. Welcome Wall Street!

1/12 – John Robb presents the idea of a Global RSS Subscription Repository to make subscribing to RSS a universal function that eliminates automatic subscription buttons from large vendors.

1/18 – Rok Hrastnik releases the most comprehensive electronic book on RSS.

2/23 – The Associated Press begins to deliver content via RSS feeds. Can you say mainstream?

4/3 – Feedburner gets second round VC funding.

4/28 – Dave Winer calls for RSS ads on a subscription basis.

6/24 – Microsoft announces that it will support RSS in Longhorn (now Vista) and Internet Explorer 7.

7/5 – The New York Times reports on the growth of RSS and the resulting RSS marketing opportunities.

9/27 – Forrester announces that 6% of consumers are using RSS, up from 2% in 2004.

10/2 – Feedburner announces partnership with Feedblitz to give publishers the capability to deliver content to readers via email.

10/7 – Google releases RSS aggregator: Google Reader.

10/10 – Yahoo releases whitepaper: RSS – Crossing Into the Mainstream. Key findings include:
• 12% of users are aware of RSS and 4% knowingly use it.
• 27% of internet users use RSS without knowing it.

12/4 – Target offers weekly ad via RSS.

12/12 – RSS Industry Night Roundtable, hosted by Rok Hrastnik, brings RSS industry leaders together to discuss the future of RSS.

12/14 – Pheedo releases second Pheed Read report.

12/15 – Microsoft announces use of orange RSS button in IE and Outlook.

Check out the rest of the RSS 2005 highlights here.

If we're in the era of 'web 2.0', then it stands ti reason that we're also in the era of 'conference 2.0', doesn't it? No, I'm not saying that we're going to go un-conference on everything, but I would like to see a bit more in the area of 'social & technological awareness' around conference communications.

I'd like to get your thoughts on what makes a good social media toolset for conferences.

I've come up with these tools so far, please add your thoughts in the comments:

1. A blog (of course)
2. A wiki
3. A Frappr map (like Loic's) of conference attendees, speakers and followers
4. A del.icio.us account tracking links about the conference
5. A flickr photstream with conference photos, tagged with the appropriate keywords
6. A technorati link to the conference keywords & tags
7. Buzznet Buzzwords

What else have you all used to bring social media to your conference?
What else would you try if you had the chance?

[UPDATE] LesBlogs did a great job using social media for conference coverage.

Technorati Tags: womma+wombat

I'll be posting this on the WOMBAT blog later, but I wanted to introduce y'all to the WOMBAT Bloggers who will be covering the WOMMA WOMBAT conference next week in Orlando. In true ethical WOM fashion, we'd like to fully disclose our involvement as quasi-compensated blogging pro's who happen to be just mad about WOMMA!

Seriously, our mission is to bring the conference out of the seminar rooms and into your living rooms (or offices, or basements, or wherever you happen to dwell in front of the screen).

And...the bloggers are:

- Toby Bloomberg of Bloomberg Marketing and the Diva Marketing blog.
- Josh Hallet of hyku - another pro blogger and blog consultant
- Marianne Richmond of Resonance Partnership, LLC and the Resonance Partnership Blog
- Me

If you're going to the conference, look us up! You're sure to be blogged!

Technorati Tags: wombat, womma

Toby is looking for some ideas on what folks are seeking from the blogosphere in 2006. What do we want to see 'more of' and what could we do with 'less of'. Here are my thoughts:

1. I'd like to see more people move beyond 'blogging' and reach deeper to the 'metaphors' that blogging represents like customer-to-corporatation (read: people-to-people) connection and the role blogging plays in the participant economy.

2. I'd like to see less uncivil blogging. People starting blogs just to trash companies or trash other people. If you can't say something to someone's face, you shouldn't see it on a blog.

3. Let's see more bloggers realize that they are part of changing the world as we know it, even if only in some small way in a little corner of the world. Online conversation is a beautiful thing.

What are your thoughts on what you'd like to see more of and less of in the 2006 blogosphere?

Contact Toby with your thoughts.

Todd referenced this story in the Marquette Warrior about a dental student who was suspened for some comments he made about a professor and the university on his blog.

Personally, I did not get to read the blog by the student, but based on the excerpts from the Marquette Warrior like this one, I'm inclined to think that the blogger/student was just ranting w/out thinking of the consequences. Not a wise idea on his part, but an EASY mistake to make when you forget, even for a moment, that other bloggers, and non-bloggers who read are HUMAN FUCKING BEINGS.

This VERY TOPIC was the point of much discussion yesterday at LesBlogs 2.0, largely due to Mena Trott's opening remarks on civility in blogging and Ben Metcalfe's staunch difference of opinion. I'm inclinded to side with Mena, but it's like saying 'can't we all get along'. Which, as evidenced by certain world events like war, is not always a strong enough argument. People are going to be nasty, and that's the way it is...or not. Really, in the aggregate, bloggers are a helpful lot. I couldn't help but notice the 'change the world through words' sentiment at the conference. I've drunk the kool-aid and believe it.

As this Marquette student learned, and as evidenced by Ben's rightfully standing up for his position, if you're going to blog about something, take responsibility for your words, your actions and the consequences, intended or unindented, that result from putting your thoughts onto the permenant web.

As a cyclist and former bike shop owner, I've longed for more marketing folks and cyling industry mavens to talk about the bike industry, something I've loved and followed now for 16 years.

Great to hear (via Johnnie Moore & Kevin Briody) Donna of Kryptonite is contributing to a group blog about the bicycle marketing industry at Shut up and drink the Kool-Aid where she is clear about her role at Kryptonite. Thanks, guys.

Amanda talks to random strangers about firefox vs. IE. Obviously, it's done in an urban location where there are enough folks to know the difference. Seriously, and nothing against Green Bay here, but if I did this at home, I'm betting that over half of anyone I acosted for an opinion would not have the slightest on what FireFox is. In fact, many are still using AOL.

Scoble gives a shout to the guys at Cognitive Daily who highlight a report on how mood affects your ability to remember and make word relationships. Bottom line on the study. If you're looking for creativity and ideas, check you mood!

I'm in Paris for LesBlogs 2.0 this week. Had a chance encounter with Mark Fletcher of Bloglines yesterday when we checked into the hotel at the same time. Went to the LesBlogs meetup last night and realized that I don't know too many European bloggers. (surprise...)
[Note to self: expand international blogging horizons]

Rok gives you 11 Reasons For Using RSS Marketing. As if you needed that many. I always think about RSS, but was thinking more after our presentation at SRI last week. Elaine O'Gorman of Silverpop hit home that RSS is a channel. When put in marketing terms - RSS is a marketing channel.

Scott Allen was at The Blogging Enterprise in Austin put on by Steve Rubel and others this past week. He has a great series of summary posts here, on the sessions that he attended. Most noticable is the panel on Character Blogs, which still gets blog purists' undies in a twist and Steve Rubel's keynote.

Also check out the Blogging Enterprise category at Technorati.

Toby tipped me off to the Blogging Family Tree. Apparently, I'm a blog daddy.

Thanks to Karen Post for this link to the latest "blogs will ruin your life" article on AdAge.com.

WHAT BLOGS COST AMERICAN BUSINESS
In 2005, Employees Will Waste 551,000 Work Years Reading Them

I say, so f--ing what. We've been screwing off for years with junk emails and funny videos and other crap like that. Blogs are just replacing that, and more.

Apparently, there's a lot of blogging going on during the workday that shouldn't be...

Some employers are more draconian than others in their blockage of blogs. I recall as early as January 2005 that my former employer had blocked all things blogs, and lots of other useful content on the web.

Edelman and Technorati have published the results of their recent survey.

If you’re interested in survey methodology and how the media are reporting on surveys, check out Constantin Basturea's analysis. He also provides a thorough list of links to related discussions on the Edelman/Technorati study.

[via Kevin Dugan]

I haven't personally tried this one yet, but it looks as if FeedShot has a 'blog search submission' service that gets your blog/feed URL into all of the 50+ blog related or specific search engines.

http://www.feedshot.com

Anyone have experience with this one yet?

[via PRWeb]

Hope you're all tuning in! Great stuff so far!

[via PRNewswire]

Google has finally launched it's official blog search engine. http://www.google.com/blogsearch Of course it's in Beta. Isn't everything in Beta over there?

I did some searching this morning and found a few of my favorite Movable Type blogs that would normallly turn up in Technorati to be absent from the Google results. According to Google, this will be remedied soon.

[via Charlene Li of Forrester]

As a former Internet marketing director, I was tied to a few key metrics each month, not the least of which was sales that the website generated. Running both a B2B lead generation site and a retail e-commerce site, I got to see both sides of the house from a 'sales metrics' perspective, and if Iearned one thing, it's that a website (or blog, for that matter) does nothing if it doesn't net you increased sales.

I'm a bit concerned about the conversation going on between Betsy Richter of OneByOneMedia, and John Cass of Backbonemedia.

Betsy says:

We argued the same thing about websites in 1997. In the end, we had to put up, or shut down. We'd never have gotten a damn thing funded if we couldn't show revenue from it. Is showing positive sales growth from all of your marketing and advertising endeavors too much to ask from such investments? Blogs are good for a lot of things, but if conversion, and whatever that entails for you, isn't at the top of the list then they're good for nothing. (OK, before you jump all over that one, I know that they're good for a lot of other things too, but IMHO sales have to increase or some costs have to decrease for them to be of any value at all. Period)

Come on John, you can't agree that we don't need to show sales

Had a nice mention yesterday, along with some great folks from Gourmet Station, Stone Creek, REI and the Diva Blogger, Toby, in Internet Retailer Magazine.

But if you really want to know how I feel about things...

Read Into the Blogosphere

Just a quick pointer to let you know that Rick Bruner's BusinessBlogConsulting.com has been re-energized by none other than Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing and a cadre of business & marketing focused bloggers intent on seeing the site become a directory for news and advice on business blogging. I'm delighted to be part of the team.

Got a quick plug in an article today on blogging called "Business blogs increase customer interactions" on the WTN website, along with my friends at Stone Creek Coffee.

Umbria, a Colorado company that's taken up intellegence gathering from weblogs published a simple chart and a statment on the good will expressed for McDonalds in the blogosphere. Interesting data - interesting tactic on their part, putting out this data as a show of what their system can do.

I've had some communications with Umbria and have mentioned them in my presenations on blogging as one of the services, along with Intelliseek and BuzzMetrics, that can give you more intelligence on the blogosphere than you can get yourself by doing your daily Technorati, Google and PubSub searches.

Glad to see that some firms are making some sense out of all the blather in the blogosphere.

The Green Bay Press Gazette is looking for teen bloggers. Who knew?

Pheedo is excited to partner with BlogHer to develop a support program where bloggers can run advertising on their blogs, which, in turn, will support the BlogHer network by giving the ad revenue that Pheedo would normally take, back to BlogHer for developing future events and assisting women bloggers who want to attend the event.

The program is pretty simple for bloggers and advertisers.

Bloggers: Simply use the dedicated BlogHer signup page (so we know to credit the ad revenues to BlogHer) to get your blog registered as an advertising property. And wait for the confirmation email from Pheedo. Once you have the email and have clicked through, you can fill in your information and set a price for your blog. We recommend that you do two important things here. 1) Put the word "BlogHer" and then a dash to identify to advertisers looking for BlogHer supporters [Blogher - Blog Name] and 2) Select the option to "Allow run of network advertising in this zone" to ensure maximum ad revenues back to BlogHer.

Advertisers: Sign up for an advertiser account with Pheedo and be sure to look for BlogHer bloggers and run ads on their site. Click throughs on those ads will help you, and BlogHer!

Thanks everyone for supporting BlogHer!

While I was addressing a group of marketing leaders from Nonprofits in Washington D.C. yesterday, the conversation about blogs was brewing at AD:TECH in Chicago. While I admit that there's little that these two events have in common, save for the general message that we're sending about blogs. Axe Deodorant's Senior Brand Development Manager David Rubin said something very similar to what I told my audience about handling the negative comments in the blogosphere. I urged them to 'turn comments to ON' and let the plusses and minuses work themselves out on the blog.

I know it's sometimes hard to accept that there is some altruism in the blogosphere and that things will even out for good organizations, but on the whole, it's really true. You will have your evangelists and your vigilantes and they'll balance.

We're so afraid of negativity that it becomes an unreasonable fear that impedes progress. Which brought me to the phrase I used for companies that aren't embracing blogging: "Years of tradition unhampered by progress." I hope that doesn't sum up your company. But if it does, there's hope.

The first go-round might be painful, but open discussions with your customers are certain to aid progress! You need to hear the good, and the bad from your customers.

Ad agencies have discovered that paying bloggers to promote companies' products and services is a cheap and personal way to reach the approximately 37 million Americans who read online journals.

[via] The Boston Globe (6/26)

I got a sneak peek at this stuff when we were in Boston and let me tell you, this is some really exciting information! As of 3:48pm the Backbone Media Corporate Blogging survey results are now live.

Download the free PDF of the report. 70 pages of pure goodness!

Check it out.

First of all, thanks to everyone who voted last year! You put this blog in the top spot in the "best b-to-b marketing-topic blog" category in the 2004 MarketingSherpa Readers' Choice Best Blog Awards

Well, it's now 2005 and MarketingSherpa's 2nd Annual Reader's Choice Blog Awards are just around the corner, and the voting starts today.

If you dig it, please Vote Here! http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=333931095143


After doing some quick analysis on last years' winners and this years' nominees, it's interesting to note that there are only 2 winners from last year that were not nominated this year. Canuckflack and re:invention, Kirsten Osolind's blog.

After looking over many of the entries, I see a lot of folks I know! Great stuff. Toby's in here. Brian Carroll is in, and Kirsten posted a fabulous comment - please have a read.

John Cass & Backbone Media, Inc., a Boston based Internet marketing company that specializes in integrated search engine optimization and website design services, announced a survey on business blogging (http://www.backbonemedia.com/blogsurvey/). The survey seeks to understand what results business bloggers have received from their blogs. Specifically the survey asks respondents what sales, PR and product development results they have seen from their blogging initiatives. Backbone Media, Inc. will develop a snapshot of what makes a successful blog, and then translate the industry snapshot into a working model for future company blogging initiatives.

Also, check out the blog associated with this initiative.

Please comment if you know. Thanks.

...or so says Steve at AdRants

I have a presentation draft that I'm finalizing for the AMA today that's geared toward that academic audience. If there are any academicians reading this, could you please give me some feedback, via comments, on what questions you'd like answered in a presentation geared toward your audience.

I have all the usual stuff on blogs - with the intent that you'll be able to turn around and 'teach' the material to your student body - but am looking for any specific questions that I might be able to address as I tighten up the material.

Thoughts?

For those that have not yet read the Business Week article on blogging, I urge you to print it out and put it on your "must read this week" pile.  And, when you're done with that, you have to read Henry Copeland's counter to the Business Week article here.  You be the judge.

To all of the marketing educators out there, I'll be doing an academic focused webcast on blogging for the American Marketing Association next month. I've put the details of the webcast and the link to sign up below. REMEMBER: This event is specifically for marketing educators.

What Is Blogging and Why Does It Matter to Marketing Educators?

Date and Time: Monday, May 23, 2005
10:00 am, Pacific Daylight Time

Panelist Info: Dana A. VanDen Heuvel, Founder – Chief Blogging Officer, BlogSavant.com; Andy Grieser, Moderator, American Marketing Association

Duration: 1 hour

Description: What is Blogging and Why Does it Matter to Marketing Educators? is an important one-hour presentation designed to give those teaching marketing a high-level understanding of what weblogs are and how they are reshaping the marketing and media landscape. You’ll leave with answers to the topics below and an understanding of weblogs and RSS.

The specific items that this one-hour presentation will cover:
* Definition of blogs, blogging, RSS, podcasting and consumer generated media
* The basic tenants of successful blogging
* Trends in blogging that you need to know about
* Marketing blog case studies
* Practical steps and advice on how best to write blogs
* How best to leverage other bloggers and harness consumer generated media
* Resources to help you and your students understand the power of blogging, RSS and consumer generated media

Who Should Attend: Marketing Educators

Here's the link to sign up for the event

So says business week in its May 2, 2005 cover story. Blogs Will Change Your Business

Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later

Blogging on the job? The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group devoted to "defending freedom in the digital world," has some advice on how to avoid being caught telling tales out of school. The EFF guide "How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)," is a how-to guide for bloggers worried about protecting their privacy and free speech.
[via CNET and the IAB SmartBrief]

The WSJ reported today that Starbucks is getting its feet wet on Capitol Hill[Sub Reqd], and the ride's been a bumpy one so far. In fact, several other companies, such as Red Hat Inc., a software company; Monster.com, a job-search Web company; and Google Inc., the search-engine giant, all hired their first lobbyists within the past few years.

Will bloggers ever have a lobbyist? Who would sponsor such a person or group? Or, do we already have one. I know that blogging has the attention of politicians, but to date we've been blowing in the winds and whatever direction they happen to be going that day.

Perhaps thinking that we'll actually put an advocate in the capital is a bit far fetched, but is it that unreasonable to think that someone like Google, who owns Blogger, or SixApart would put someone in washington, or at least tag along with a lobbying group on citizens media rights or something?

MKEonline.com is running a weekly blog poll with some of the best blogs from the Wisconsin area. I'm in the poll this week! Voting is until April 13, and the voting page (and more info) is at http://www.mkeonline.com/people/blogcontest.asp.

The blogs come from MKEonline's 1000 Voices blog directory, a collection of blogs written in, for, or about Wisconsin. Read them online and vote for your favorite by 11:59 p.m., April 13. The blog with the most votes will be announced April 14 on MKEonline.

A conversation with a customer last night prompted the question of "who's thinking about corporate governance of weblogs?" Meaning: When a company has weblogs that are written by its employees, how are they being monitored, what quality controls are in place, what are the 'managers of the blogging program' really accountable for, and so on...?

I know, blogs are supposed to be the unfiltered voice of the individual connecting with the customer. However, when we start to add blogging to job descriptions, things change a bit. Or, when we start to ask those "thought leaders" in the company that are already our most prized assets, we have to have a good answer for the WIIFM question when we ask them to start blogging on the behalf of the company.

More to the point, employees need to understand the power of their words in media, and employers need to understand, and deliver a crystal clear set of expectations on what they're seeking from the would-be blogger and what's not acceptable.

I don't have the answers to this yet, but as more companies think about what it means to have their internal associates, CEO, or anyone else from their company blogging, they need to pay attention to expectations and accountabilities.

As a blog consultant, I'm curious to know how we really determine that blogging, and namely consulting on blogging, is an industry that's growing. (it's part of a business plan I'm putting together, so I this is work that's beneficial I guess..)

It's an interesting question really. How do we know that any industry is a growth industry? Where are the industry figures on blogging, or do we take the growth in Internet marketing as an indicator, as evidenced by the explosive growth touted by this company?

If we look at the growth rate of the Ad agency industry, namely the marketing consultant segment, NAICS code 541613, maybe that will give us some indicator?

Sorry, but I'm not part of the solution on this one yet. Need to do some more research. Anyone have any ideas?

Or, maybe, just maybe, the notion that marketers will increase online ad spending by as much as 30% in 2005, according to a recent survey of media planners and buyers conducted by Deutsche Bank in conjunction with MediaPost, is enough to goad us on!

I love reporting on local blogs. Now I have the opp to talk about two of them!

Blue Door Consulting of Oshkosh, WI has a blog, as does an Oshkosh programmer/developer at McWilliams' World.

Great to see other WI bloggers. It sometimes seems that there are so few of us!

I've gone from a diet of 0% TV to being addicted to Crossing Jordan. Go figure.

Anyway, every week Nigel, one of the ME's on the show, is always talking about his blog, nigelblog.com. I thought that it was just part of the show, (well, actually it still is...read it, it's all medical examiner speak) but the fact that it really does exist and that they tout it on the show is pretty interesting.

It's one of the better faux blogs that I've seen. YES, there are comments. What's odd, is that it reads like a gaming blog or a mystery solving blog where the commenters are weighing in on the story - which is just a TV show.

Lastly, like most good blogs and websites these days, there's the proper link to the legal stuff.

I don't understand why most realtors don't have better websites. As we're looking for a duplex to buy, I'm appalled at the dismal presence that most realtors have on the web. You know, come to think of it, blogs are the perfect application for realtors. Here's why:

• Current and timely. Your most recent listings at the top, and you can fudge the dates if something is re-listed, to put it back at the top
  
• People can get to know you. To me, all realtors are interchangeable UNTIL YOU MEET THEM or get some idea of who they are. Imagine what a blog could do to put a 'personal touch' on your web presence and forge a relationship with potential home buyers
  
• Categories - this is a built in way to classify your houses by the areas you serve, and, if you use multiple categories, by the type of home of any other classification!
  
• RSS - Holy shit would I love to be able to subscribe to RSS feeds of all of the agents selling homes and duplexes in my areas of interest and price range. Wow, would that make searching easy or what. NO, it would be or what, because it wouldn't be searching anymore, now would it!
  
• Podcasting - realtors could leave a quick voice narrative about the home. Not only could I read them, but I could listen to them. Hell, I'd damn near know them by the time I got around to calling them for a showing!
  
• Search - especially if you were to tie your site in with some Google AdWords and some Verizon Superpages keywords to get the 'intensely local' search crowd
  
• Easy - take your photos, plug em in, post, done.
  
• Photo galleries made easy through blog plugins
  
• You don't need to know code to have 100% control over your site.
  
• Your blog could become a hub for home buyers - have a mortgage person or home inspector do some guest blogging with/for you. You've not just become the most popular agent in the county!
  

C:NET has a comprehensive FAQ for bloggers behind the corporate lines.

So, I've been paring back on the number of blogs that I had in my Movable Type installation to clean things out a bit. Deleting blogs is a pretty significant thing. What's interesting though is that the MT log is supposed to capture "notable events" that happen on the blog (searches, logins, etc.) but it does not capture blog deletions. That's odd, I'd have thought that deleting a blog would be a pretty damn notable thing, wouldn't you?

Seriously, besides the birth of a blog, it's death is probably the most significant other event.

Don't be too alarmed - these were only internal blogs that ran various sections of the site...nothing that will be noticable from the outside world.

Toby sums up some of the major questions & issues that would be corporate bloggers are confronting & that they posed to us during Friday's AMA HotTopic event in Chicago. Toby also announces a fourth AMA HotTopic Blog event in San Francisco!

I'll be doing a bit of posting in the future over at Rick Bruner's Business Blog Consulting blog. Now that I'm in the business of consulting on business weblogs, I'm going to spread my time between this site, BlogSavant, and BBC.

There are a number of other great bloggers over there too. Todd from A Penny For..., Steve Rubel, and B.L. Ochman are also onboard with Rick.

I responsed to a query on the AMA's B2B Marketing SIG on how to drive traffic to your blog and thought that I'd post here as well...maybe an idea or two that you can use, and a few good articles on blog promtion in the links...

There are a number of things that you can do to promote your weblog, which are not all that much different than promoting your website.

1. By default, your weblog should be pining technorati.com, blog.gs, and weblogs.com. If not, you may wish to engage the service at www.pingomatic.com to get your blog to ping other aggregator sites that can help you out.

2. Setup a technorati feed for keywords that are prevelant in you field or industry - get on those bloggers blogs via comments & trackbacks from your blogs. Blogging is all about the relationship and the community. You need to participate to get maximum results.

3. Use your keywords in your post titles, which ultimately show up in the URL - this will help with your search engine rankings & drive targeted traffic.

4. Have a look at IT Toolbox - you might try to work with them, get in touch with their bloggers, or guest blog for them for additional traffic.

5. Write stuff that people will actually read

6. Get off the blog to get people to your blog. When we were trying to generate interest in the AMA's HotTopic blog event, we did direct mail, email and, of course, blogged about it...but when you're driving traffic to a new blog, it pays to step off the blog to do it.

7. Check out this article on ways to generate newsletter signups - many of the same principles apply to blog traffic and RSS subscriptions http://www.danavan.net/29ways

8. Read Dave Pollard - http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/03/23.html#a674

9 Read Blogger's own promo tactics written by Biz Stone - they are a goldmine of ideas. - http://www.blogger.com/knowledge/2004/09/promoting-your-blog.pyra

10. Link like crazy to other bloggers and other sites in your sphere of interest and influence. Bloggers watch their trackbacks and their inbound links - some of my best connections with people have come because my blog showed up in their referrer links over and over.

Paul & Rok discuss affiliate links & being a transparent blogger. This is an issue close to me, as I contributed to Rok's book and would love to somehow recoup something for my time, but the transparency police jump down our throats when we try to make a buck. If we're honest, and you can look at a couple years worth of blog posts to figure that out, and we want to pimp a product, so be it!

For the record, I'm not collecting any revenues through an affiliate link because I'm promoting Rok's book on the AMA HotTopic tour as well. so I'm keeping some hard lines to ensure that I'm not called on the carpet, even though I believe that anyone in a corporation who wants to use RSS for anything should read Rok's book or hire someone who has read it and can guide you as your consultant.

Are you one of the transparency police officers?

Rok does a rock star's interview with Paul at the marketingstudies.net site today. Brilliant stuff - great to 'hear' these guys!!

During the audio interview, Paul addressed: The Pro Bloggers Association, Blogging Transparentcy, Becoming an A-list Blogger and RSS
* What is the Professional Bloggers Association? What are its goals? And most especially, how can they help (and plan to help) professional bloggers? How can you sign-up today?
* Who are professional bloggers anyway?
* What makes for an A-list blogger, and how can one become one of the top bloggers on the internet?
* What are the exact steps for getting readership and increasing your blog traffic? How to increase your RSS readership?
* Is there a witch-hunt on for bloggers who promote things with their blogs? Are the "transparentcy police" really here?

It's a pretty simple equation to grasp, as Paul indicates. Posting brings traffic. Too bad it's not tracking RSS too! I'm not sure how many feed readers I have, but I know from my own behavior that I almost never visit a weblog again once I've signed up for the feed, IF THEY HAVE FULL TEXT FEEDS. If they don't, I'll visit, but grudgingly!

What's interesting in these stats is the uptick on the 20th, largely due to my post telling people that they needed to produce full text RSS, which brought in links from others (though the trackbacks lie, the stats tell the truth!). The site always takes a dump on Fridays and the weekends, unless I post something outlandish.

Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger put together a nice concise list of business blogs that are tied nicely into the capitalist motives of the companies mentioned. Nice work. Thanks for the list Darren.

I've really been a slacker about this, but for those who haven't heard, there is a new association on the block for bloggers, and they have a website! (I know, everyone has a site, but we just started and a site is a good thing for us ;) I'm one of the founding members, and also a board member. The founding team is all talent, and are likely names that you'll all recognize.

What is the Pro Bloggers Association?

We are a nonprofit organization comprised of people dedicated to developing and promoting the profession of blogging (and related strategies, such as podcasting) as a legitimate business function. The PBA elected officers and a board of directors in January 2005, after much interaction and discussion between the founding members. Our members are experienced creative writers, web designers, talented business experts, technology experts, and experienced marketing professionals. All of them bring a proficiency in blogging to the group.

Members include blog copywriters, blog consultants and organizations that support the blogging industry such as blog designers, search engine firms, blog advertising companies, and even software companies. Here's the full list, with links to their blogs.

We’re new. We’re cutting edge — and just as blogging is global, we have an international membership. We encourage professional bloggers from all over the world to consider joining us.

I'm not going, but I imagine that I won't feel like I missed much. The conference will be full of bloggers who are blogging the event, so you'll get almost every angle on the event.

Todd at A Penny For... is going
Business Logs is going
Paul Chaney is going
Tom Peters is going

Hypothetically, what would happen if blogging went the way of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Sound Garden?

The whole 'blog thing' couldn't be much more in your face that it is. It's in business, politics, on the news, everyone everywhere is talking about blogs.

What happens when 'blogging is no longer cool'. I mean, think back (for those of you who listened to Pearl Jam, Nirvana, etc) to when your favorite grunge band 'sold out', at least in your perception. Your favorite, "I'm one of like only a few people that know about them so that makes me cool" bands went from under the carpet to uber celebrity. It was a shocker, it was painful, and now people were criticizing them in ways you didn't know possible, oh, and all of your 'un-cool' friends were now listening too. As all things are relative, your relative coolness shrank precipitously, and you started seeking another Nirvana. (Good, we need you folks out there seeking the next thing...)

While blogging is likely to have the staying power, and this theory is likely to be bunk. I have a certain uneasyness about relying on the world of consumer generated media to drive the next generation of my brand. Brand Hijack and Open Source Marketing included - customers are fickle beings whose interests change rapidly and are hard to keep up with (at least for most of us, Wal-Mart's predictive powers through data patterns would blow your mind). We're staking part of our strategy on "the individual", but what happens when that individual changes?

For me, this only underscores the need for the constant segment - target - position analytics that take place around your customers & potential customers. However, don't go 'down with the customer'. There must be measures & metrics in place to know when you've gone too far with a an individual customer, and jettison them from your target market to stay near & dear to your core competencies. You then need to keep an eye on who's moving into your sphere of conversation next and engage them.

Point being: when your CGM customers who are blogging like mad no longer find blogs cool and get blogger burnout, where will you go? This will not be Nirvana if/when it happens?

Todd at A Penny For has officially launched the BizLinkBlog. Todd, ever mindful of his readers' needs, has taken the time that he spends reading hundreds of feeds from blog and non-blog sources and linked to the best of the best.

I know, there's a lot of link blogs out there, but I personally find great value in what Todd is doing because to me, what he's doing is an affinity link blog, in that I like what he writes, read what he reads, and am more than delighted to get his uber agregation of what's going on in the world via one feed.

Check out the blog, or subscribe to the FULL TEXT feed here.

This is just cool. Should have linked to it earlier

Members of the Amazon Web Services Developer Relations Team have been blogging to the Amazon Web Services Blog for the last couple of months. Right now they have two blogs:

English: http://aws.typepad.com/
Japanese: http://aws.typepad.com/aws_jp/

The blogs contain information on new releases of AWS, products built with AWS, and links to articles that they believe will be of interest to the AWS developer community. Ah yes, again, using weblogs to keep a community together. I love this space!

Their posts are long winded, they are definately written by programmers and programmer managers, and they've got some unique views of the world. And, they've chosen to use TypePad and just get going on their blogging rather than 'Amazonizing' the design and attaching off the back end of the website. How very 'skunk-works' of them.

I particularly love this quote:

Learned Helplessness, when bad things happen to you that are out of your control, form of depression. Give people ways to exert control over their environment. Napkins to fold, windows to wash. Control over environment. This is what is attractive about being a programmer. Compiler does exactly what you say.

BL Ochman is one of those people that just makes me want to watch my grammar. However, thanks to her diligence in this recent post on how to write a proper blog post, I suspect that many of you will avert the grammar police w/out even knowing it.

Read. Digest. Practice. She's got some good advice here.

[Thanks Shel]

Todd and Commoncraft mentioned that Boeing VP of Marketing Randy Beseler has dipped his toe in the blogging waters. Well, sort of. Both of those guys already pointed out that the blog lacks the requisite trackbacks, comments, permalinks, and on top of all that, the design is lackluster.

Seriously folks. Be smarter. Don't do it half assed. Ever.

Then again, maybe it's not 'really a "blog"'??? I mean, it doesn't really look like a blog? Maybe it's something else. However, if you subscribe to the 'lowest-common-denominator-definition' of a weblog as being simply a reverse-chronologically ordered website, well, then we have a blog.

Todd at A Penny For... is going to the Business Blog Summit. Glad that there will be some representation from WI there!

Todd also has a short list of links on recent articles on biz blogging...

[Update] This article on Waterstone's in the UK firing Joe Gordon for his blog. Waterstone's provides a stellar example to tarnish your company's reputation in this age of consumer generated media. Nice work Bastardstone's.

This page contains a list of companies that are purported to have fired employees for blogging "fired, threatened, disciplined, fined or not hired people because of their blog."
[Thanks Scoble, Cory]

1.) Delta Air Lines
2.) Wells Fargo
3.) Ragen MacKenzie
4.) Starbucks
5.) Microsoft (some say yay, some say nay)
6.) Friendster
7.) the Houston Chronicle
8.) the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
9.) Nunavut Tourism (Canada)
10.) the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, Harvard University
11.) Maricopa County Superior Court of Arizona Self Help Center and Library
12.) Mike DeWine, US Senator (R-Ohio)
13.) the Durham Herald-Sun
14.) Kerr-McGee
15.) ESPN
16.) Apple (according to this blog entry AND this article)
17.) Statistical Assessment Service (DC nonprofit)
18.) Minnesota Public Radio
19.) The Hartford Courant
20.) the International Olympic Committee (barred athletes from blogging during the Olympics last summer)
21.) Health Sciences Centre, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (?)
22.) the National Basketball Association (NBA)

[full list @ Bloggers' Rights Blog]
[more original stuff on 'fired' bloggers here]

You must be joking. He's doing a video, and selling it? I feel like I've just been sold a lemon.

From Brian Bailey via Todd. Ten thoughts on building a better blog. Sound, insightful, just-do-them kinds of ideas.

1. Use Categories
Griff makes the case for this too...
2. Use Titles
3. Publish During High Traffic Times
4. Syndicate Your Entire Post
5. Click Your Own Links
6. Develop an Authentic Voice
7. Tell Us Who You Are and How to Contact You
8. Don't Be Afraid to Promote
9. Comment on Other Sites and Your Own
10. The More You Write, the More You'll Have to Write Write About

Great stuff going on over at the new GM blog written by Bob Lutz, the outspoken vice chairman of General Motors. Bob posted a Weblog on Thursday touting the ``new face'' of its Saturn brand.

The GM blog is at http://fastlane.gmblogs.com

Looks like Will found this one yesterday...
Jeremy Wright, now jobless, scooped this as well.

Shel dutifuly points us to a brilliant post which debunks a series of myths on copyright which bloggers should pay attention to.

As part of my commitment to doing more 'open source writing', this is a zygote of an article on the subject of the Fifth P and how weblogs are the quitisential manifestation of the Fifth P in marketing strategy.

By allowing their employees to have weblogs and forge relationships directly with customers in their brand community, organizations like General Motors, Microsoft, Stonyfield Farms, Nike, and Jupiter Research have been credited with acquiring something they've long lacked: an approachable human face.

By now, many of you have heard about weblogs, and may have even read a few of them. Weblogs are reverse-chronologically ordered, frequently updated websites which typically include commentary, news, ideas and Internet links from one person's point of view. In the context of marketing, weblogs have been both a boon to corporate-to-customer relationships, and a PR nightmare. Nevertheless, having a company weblog is only part of the equation. In truth, companies don't blog, only people do. The success of weblogs can be attributed, in part, to the rise of the "fifth P of marketing."

Traditionally, marketers have wrestled with just four basics. Price, promotion, place, and product. However, in 2001, Gallup published an article stating that there was a bona-fide fifth P of marketing: People. Their findings suggest that people, above all else, "not only represent the brand but, in the perceptions of customers, become the brand." People, namely employees, have the ability to add or subtract significant value from the brand by dint of their actual customer interactions. At this intersection of marketing, technology and people, we find that many companies, across industries, have capitalized on the power of weblogs and the fifth P.

TDavid is having some major issues with TypePad and commenting in that TP won't accept TD's url http://www.makeyougohmm.com.

I know that there are a few who've emailed me to say that they can't comment on my blog, so I just change the filters in MT Blacklist, and life gets better.

I know that not everyone's a tech-savvy geek, but I believe that this adds fuel to the case for why you should use Movable Type vs. TypePad. MT is largely under your control, including how you handle comments and who's comments are accepted, where as TP, being a hosted service, is out of your hands, for the most part.

I'm going to keep an eye on TD's blog thread. I'm really interested to see how this turns out.

Following up to something I said at the AMA blogging seminar in Seattle, where I posited that by having a corporate weblog, and partcipating in the conversation about your company going on in the blogosphere lets you 'contol how the conversation ends', at least to some degree. I'd like to thing that the rhetoric about counterblogging and the concept of blogging being only about talking 'at' someone, vs. with someone is a moot point here, as I'm looking at the whole 'market as conversation', where what you really want is a voice that's on parity with the determined detractors, like the one's profiled in this NYT article.

The determined detractor is the one from the 'dark side' of consumer generated media, or the rogue hacker in the world of open source marketing.

Left unchecked, "hear me" types can become "reputation terrorists" who have a personal interest in publicly criticizing a company, Mr. Rand said. "These are the folks we have to track and stay on top of," he said. "To not do so can cost money."

Three Reasons to Publish an E-Newsletter AND a Blog

Ben and I were batting around some superficial ideas for a better name than "Ghost Blogger" for those who write weblogs for others. Correspondent bloggers, freelance blogger, outsourced blogger all came to mind, but didn't seem to resonate.

What would you call this type of person? Please leave your comments, or send me an email.

This is a great weblog tools & supporting technologies overview, albeit a few months out of date, of the weblog tools market. Moreover, it features a weblog from Intuit, one of the companies at Seattle's AMA Blog Seminar. (The New York AMA Blog Seminar is next! - Check it out!)

I can't get this to work. NewsGator doesn't like the .xml file that Bloglines exports...???

On the heels of the AMA blog seminar, it's great to see some more case study material hit the scene. The Yahoo Search Blog is a "A look inside the world of search from the people of Yahoo!", as they say it..

In true blogging fashion, and keeping with the concepts of building the community for the benefit of the community, they have timely, relevant posts, have enabled trackbacks and comments, and even link to the Google blog from their site.

There were audience members today who asked us if the world of the traditional website was changing in the face of weblogs, because, as we (the speakers) said, if you truly want participitory journalism, and you want to grow a community around your brand/company/product/whatever, you need to work from an altruistic platform and include your evangelists, detractors, competitors, and garden variety fans-of-the-brand in the weblog conversation.

Other Yahoo departments considering new product launches are now consulting with her on how to use blogs to beta test and launch upcoming products.

This is one of the greatest strength of blogs: they provide companies a relatively low cost means of conducting market research and obtaining user information from those who are actually using the technology in question. All companies need to create a genuine dialogue between themselves and their customers, and blogs provide an elegant low cost solution to the age old problem of figuring out what the customer wants.

In the AMA Blog Seminar today, someone asked the question about whether or not there are, or will be weblog consultants. Yes.

In a moment of perfect serendipity, Rich Bruner kicks the topic off on BusinessBlogConsulting.com. The conversation is going on here.

Jay Lipe and I are talking over at his blog about participatory marketing with your customers (open source, if you will) in the ice cream parlor paradigm. Fun stuff.

Bob Bly gets it. If we're in a conversation with someone, and we care what they think (let's pretend that we do, even if we don't), what's the natural thing for us to do after we tell them what we think? Well, typically, we ask them what they think.

Take a look at your blog posts. How many overtly ask for 'what people think' as a call to action.

I looked at most of mine. No call to action.

So, how would you all handle this? What are some potential 'calls to action' for your blog posts? Is commenting enough, or should there be more?

I can't wait to get to Seattle! This is going to be a very exciting blog event with some of the most passionate folks in the weblog space.

I know that there's a lot of you who aren't going to be at Seattle, but there are still two events to come, and we're just getting started!
AMA - Hot Topic //Blogs// - Dates and Locations
Seattle - December 17
New York - January 21
Chicago - February 18

Speakers Include
Robert Scoble, Microsoft
Scott Rafer, Feedster
Ben McConnell, Church of the Customer
Dana VanDen Heuvel, BlogSavant
Dave Williams, 360i
Steve Rubel, CooperKatz & Company
Bill Flitter, Pheedo Inc.

Ben's also gathering everyone up for Dinner in Seattle. Join us!
How timely - I'm reading CMO magazine this morning and this month's issue calls Blogs "The New force in media." However, they warn, don't be foodled into thinking that blogs are an untainted medium offering a free form exchange of ideas and opinions. The bloggers have an agenda too!

I don't think that bloggers are necessarily pulling punches on their posts. They're getting better at what they do, regressing to the mean slightly, and writing for the audience that's made its voice heard on their site, IMHO.

Blogging means many things to many people. Some use it for expression, some for business, others for ranting, and dozens of other reasons. I believe that we're at a point where those that have been blogging for some years now are 'maturing' in the 'blogging lifecycle' and their writing is reflecting that. Do I have data to support that, not really, but it's a thought that I think holds some merit.

Personally, I know that my blogging has changed due in large part to one factor: Audience

If I have an audience that I'm trying to retain, I start to figure out what drives my numbers, and there are few among us that don't like looking at their stats and see the numbers going up when we write something that resonates.

Seems like I'm not the only one to suffer a bit of blogger's block recently. There's an article in Entrepreneur about it this month.

Seriously folks - there's been a lot of prep going into the AMA Hot Topic Series - Blogs: Marketing Beyond the Website. Look for good things to come out of that event.

Paul at SquareSpace talks about the hype that numbers provide. Whether or not your a hardcore business numbers addict. Numbers matter. Words matter. Combine the two for a great blog entry, and great news about your company.

CMO Magazine has a quick one-pager in this month's issue on the subject of blogging. Unlike Bob Bly's decidedly negative comments to the direct marketing community, Christopher Caggiano delivers a positive, albeit brief, review of blog technology and their potential merits.

Oddly enough, they also cover the topic of RSS in the same issue. James Robertson immediately highlights the marketing angle on RSS

If you haven't already signed up for your free issue of CMO, I highly recommend it. It's all meat and no crap. Really!

The sale of political ads on Web logs boomed during the election campaign, but how will the blog ad business fare now that the election is over? Henry Copeland, the head of BlogAds.com, a firm that sells ads for more than 500 blogs, acknowledges that the blog ad business will slump for a while, but he thinks it will surge early next year.

[via BusinessWeek (11/4)]

The future of knowledge management is embodied by the blog.

Full Story: http://www.destinationcrm.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=4495 &TopicID=9

Hey folks, this is great news!

I'll participating in a coast-to-coast roadshow with the American Marketing Association. They have assembled an a-list group of knowledge speakers on the subject of blogs and marketing. If you are a marketer looking to see how a blog can benefit your business, this is your opportunity.

Event Description
Blogs: Marketing Beyond the Website is an important one-day workshop designed to help marketers understand blogs and their marketing implications. Industry leaders will share their experiences with you on what makes a successful blog. You'll leave with a wealth of information and specific techniques that will help you cross the chasm in incorporating this innovative Internet-based strategy into your organization's marketing plan.

Speakers Include
Robert Scoble, Microsoft
Scott Rafer, Feedster
Ben McConnell, Church of the Customer
Dana VanDen Heuvel, BlogSavant
Dave Williams, 360i
Steve Rubel, CooperKatz & Company
Bill Flitter, Pheedo Inc.

Dates and Locations
Seattle - December 17
New York - January 21
Chicago - February 18

It is an honor to be among such great thought leaders in the blogging space! Hope to see you all there!

We got a tip that there’s a new blog out there devoted to the Chevy small block engine to commemorate the engine turning 50 years old. The site looks very nice and then we see it’s part of “GM Blogs.” What is GM Blogs you ask? I have no clue. If you go to GMblogs.com only a logo appears with no links, no nothing. One would think that this has to be a GM product or these folks would be sued faster than me saying yes to an order of Buffalo wings. Anyone know what this may be about? The site is registered to Detroit PR firm Hass MS&L. If GM is entering blogdom it would be huge news.

[via Autoblog]

I interviewed with and almost went to work for Vitalect back in 2000. They are an online learning delivery company that's made it through the dot com boom and bust, and recently caught the corporate blogging bug!

Not only are they blogging, but it's the CEO that's doing the posting!

It's great to see Mr. Kurup and his crew doing so well!

The Kitchen: How to Cook a Weblog is a two-week clinic on weblogging and related topics for webloggers and those who read webloggers and even those who don’t but still manage to use the web without stumbling all over us. The focus of the clinic is on community participation, contribution, and benefit.

The clinic will start on a Monday and continue until Friday, the following week. Each day we’ll feature a different topic (see Clinic:Schedule), which forms the basis of the essays contributed that day. Topics can range from CSS style guides, to scripting tutorials, to the ethics of flaming, as well as being a garden blogger.

[via public(MIND)]

Another blog firing (or, suspension w/out pay in this case) has given bloggers yet another company to get pissed off at.

Delta Airlines suspended Queen of the Sky, otherwise known as Ellen Simonetti, for her posting of seemingly inocuous photos of her, at her job, in a Delta uniform. Nothing suggestive at all, just garden variety pictures.

It's already very easy to hate the airlines. Here's yet another reason.

There are things that are off limits in blogging which, at times, seem exponentially apparent to those of us behind major corporate walls. Such things that might get you fired for blogging. It makes one, at times, afraid to blog.

Scoble and Gartenberg weigh in on this.

Evelyn has a post on meeting other kindred bloggers that underscores why many of us blogging, especially those of us in areas like Green Bay, WI where kindred spirts can be harder to find than they might be in a larger city with may like-minded folks.

If you don't blog, you might not know a secret incredible unstated benefit to blogging is that it becomes a clear steady beacon to all those that are kindred spirits.

I wanted to point out an interesting convergence that I noticed today on blogging and branding in a ‘pre-brand’ phase. (maybe everyone’s already seen this idea, so I could be behind the times here)

The authors of Squarespace published a blog entry on their experiences with a pre-launch blog and it’s value in establishing a company and their brand way in advance of an official launch (advertising, press releases, blah.) which I find to be right on target and illustrative of the quintessential audience-connecting essence of a weblog.

One needs to look no further than the weblog that Worthwhile magazine had running well in advance of the publication of their first hard copy issue. By design or by default, the weblog has been a success in many measures. Subscribers to their RSS feed in Bloglines are over 160 (not bad – considering it’s just Bloglines, but Scoble’s 3,407 subscribers puts that number into a different perspective.) leading me to believe that they’ve achieved a significant reach in a short period of time. A marketer’s dream is always to have a market waiting for their product – an eager and loyal brand community waiting on their toes, even before the ‘brand’ officially exists. (it does exist though, in the hearts and minds of the constituents, if you take the Lovemarks perspective on this)

This whole pre-brand blog concept has me rethinking my presentation strategy for a paper “GeoFree Brand Comms: Building Brand Communities Using Blogs.� The premise of the paper is that non-geographically bound brand communities could be developed and sustained through weblogs (I know, there are already brand communities supported by the web…) in addition to other media. Frankly, I was having a hard time in the beginning with the unique value proposition of weblogs in this context, but some recent articles, particularly this one from CFO magazine, have crystallized my thinking. The bottom line: People want to connect with people. Blogs, in many ways, and for a lot of reasons, have become just the next most logical way for many of us to connect with our customers, and for our customers to get to know us. It’s really not much more complicated than that.

On that note, I’m thinking that a pre-launch blog case study might be warranted for the upcoming AMA business blog conference. Should be fun!

Jim Borgman

As recently as a few years ago, few corporate executives were big fans of blogs. The personal Web pages gave a free and open voice to customers and ex-employees - too often, irate customers and disgruntled ex-employees. In some cases, corporations went to court to try to get business-bashing bloggers to cease and desist.

[Read more at CFO.com]

The TechWeb Network is running a Best Independent Tech Blog Readers Choice Award. Any blog that primarily covers technology and is not affiliated with a major tech publishing company is eligible. Ten finalists will be picked at the end of this month and will get six months of promotion on our sites. The winner will be picked from the ten finalists in mid-November and will also get a $500 Starbucks Coffee Card.

Here's the press release

Here's the nomination form

Paul at Radiant Marketing had a timely post today stressing the need for a business blogging conference that is business-centric and that would have a cross-cultural appeal to both corporate America and small business. While we already have BloggerCon, for some it's a bit too esoteric and rooted in the romance of blogging to be useful for business purposes.

For those of you in Paul's camp, I submit that the very blogging conference you've been seeking is here, and it's coming to a town near you. The details are still being worked out, but here's what we have so far:

The American Marketing Association is going to have a 3 stop tour on blogging and internet marketing starting in December in Seattle.
Hot Topic: Incorporating Blogs Into Your Strategic Marketing Plan

The lineup looks like this:

• Friday, December 17th Seattle
  
• Friday, January 21st New York
  
• Friday, February 18th Chicago

I won't go into detail here, so just read Dave Pollard's post on this

.

There's already been some buzz about community blog portals but this relatively new weblog/blogging category is about to get substantially bigger in the coming months as for-profit and non-profit organizations alike discover the value in BlogPortals that apply a distributed authorship model to connecting with constituents

21Publish, one of the key players in this space, is a premier tool for housing web-based groups such as alumni associations, Small and medium enterprises, universities, groups, boards and communities, along with commercial enterprises. The beauty of 21Publish's new "Collaborative Blogging" software is that it enables organizations to communicate and interact more effectively without the hassle of a complilcated enterprise conent management system or tedious IT involvement in your project. 21Publish is a spin-off of 20six (http://www.20six.co.uk/), a European provider of weblogs, with communities in Germany, Netherlands, France and the UK.

There has already been significant buzz from the supply side of this equation. So, needless to say, the future of enterprise blogging in general is pretty well mapped out, at least for the forseeable future. However, it's up to those of us in the blogosphere to drive the demand side of the equation. Some of which will happen with the continued credibility that bloggers are gaining and the attention now being paid to the medium, but at the end of the day, the rest of the work will be done by those providing solid business use cases for enterprise blogging, BlogPortals, and collabortive blogging.

Here's an interesting summary of the advantages and disadvantages of blogs from an organisational perspective, written by someone I trust, which starts by pointing out something that gets overlooked a great deal:

Isn’t it interesting that some of the most significant ‘revolutions’ of the last twenty years have all had to do with writing? How retro is that? First we had email, then webpages, then mobile phone texting, and now blogs. All this reflects a trend whereby the world is becoming more formal in how it communicates. Instead of body language and endless conversations, communication has shifted towards endless words on a screen.

There’s money in words; real value, real worth. I’m not a blogger but I do have this newsletter and I can tell you that these 500 or so words that I publish every week have seen a major return on investment for me...

...This is an age where you will build your professional reputation word by word.

A recent article by USA Today columnist and president of PlanningShop.com Rhonda Abrams gives some excellent insights as to why and how small businesses can use blogs. If you're thinking about it, you really should read this article.

Some of the ways a small business could use a blog:

• As a Web site. For a consultant, freelancer or very small business, a blog may be a free way to get a Web site fast.

• To create a stronger personal connection with customers.

• To share images with clients.

• To develop a following. If you are an expert in a specific field, it's possible your blog will develop a following of devoted readers.

[via Radiant Marketing Group]

From Corporate Blogging: 14 Steps To Your Business Blog

1. Start using RSS for news, jobs or press releases
2. Thoroughly study what a blog is
3. Be specific with purpose
4. Ask yourself, do you really need a blog?
5. Ask yourself, do we have the resources?
6. Co-ordinate with other communication channels
7. Who's the blogger?
8. Make a decision on all aspects, features of blogs
9. Choose which tool to use
10. Create a blogging policy
11. Make sure the blogger(s) know blogging
12. Launch quietly
13. Start doing subtle PR
14. Success or failure? Decide on the future of your blog

B.L. Ochman calls out some of the less glamorous aspects of being a weblog author in her recent article in MarketingProfs. Granted, she touches on the positive as well, but I found the flip side far more intriguing this time...

• Blogs are writing intensive.
  
• Maintaining a blog is hard work.
  
• Blog software is cheap and easily configured. However, you need to have a designer customize the appearance and navigation of your blog and set up templates to make using it easy for you.
  
• It takes time, effort and skillful promotion to build an audience for a blog. Just as with a newsletter, report, Web site or e-book, driving traffic to a blog requires marketing.
  
• You have to register your blog in blog search engines and use subtle PR to push traffic to your blog.
  
• A blog that isn't well-written and frequently updated will simply be ignored.
  
• A blog that is an obvious attempt at self-promotion may be mocked by other bloggers.

(If you want more words on this one, see what Gerry McGovern has said about the disadvantages of blogs.)

I didn't even know that RH was still in business?

Anyway, they got an interview out of Joyce on her recent shitcanning from Friendster.

Check it out.

[via Shel Holtz]

Thanks Toby for summing up Biz's article on weblog promotion. Great stuff!

Blog promotion, according to Biz, falls into three basic categories:
1. Settings
2. Techniques
3. Actual marketing tricks

Tactics to apply:
1.Set your blog to ping.
2. Make sure you are publishing every post as its very own web page. That makes your entries way more link-able and more attractive to search engines. Links to your blog means traffic to your blog.
3. Write quality content and do it well.
4. Publish regular updates..the more you blog the more traffic you attract.
5. Think of your audience...visualizing the people who might read your blog.
6. Keep search engines in mind. Use post titles and blog page title tags along with your post page archiving. This will automatically give each of your post pages an intelligent name based on the title of your post. Also, try to be descriptive when you blog. A well crafted post about something very specific can end up very near the top results of a search.
7. Keep your posts and paragraphs short. A longer piece every once in awhile is fine but according to Biz most people want to "pop in, read up, and click on."
8. Put your blog URL in your email signature - simple but often overlooked.
9. Submit your address to blog search sites and directories - Top 55 Dirctory and RSS Sites from Robin Good
10. Participate in meme games. A meme is an idea transmitted from person to person like a virus.
11. Advertise. - BlogSnob is a network of free, text-based blog advertisers
12. Link to other blogs.
13. Install a blogroll.
14. Be an active commenter. Try to leave comments on the blogs you read every day. This is in the same vein as linking. Leaving a comment on someone's post can make their day.
15. Pitch your posts via email to other bloggers.
16. Print your blog URL on cards, stickers, etc.

[via Diva Marketing]

For the 3 or 4 of you that regularly read this site, you might have noticed a slight shift in the posts, away from a strict Internet marketing focus, and more toward a broad business, sales, sales process, and marketing coverage of issues and ideas that are currently in the realm of what I'm working on. By no means has Internet marketing gone away, but due to my career path, I have now entered into the realm of sales process and sales operations which covers a great deal of other areas that I hope to learn from.

I'd like to hear anyone's feedback on this shift in focus. Positive, or negative. If you came here looking for Internet marketing info and were confronted with sales process postings, were you turned off, or tuned in? My feeling on that matter is that It's always beneficial to be able to broker knowledge from all areas of the organization at and use that to one's advantage. What are your thoughts?

I'll assume that no feedback means that everything is cool and to keep on trucking. For what it's worth, there are about 3500 visitors/month coming to the site, and that's been steadily climbing all year. Something must be going right.

Blogs are quickly becoming a highly effective tool for communication in the business world. Here are a few ideas on how you can incorporate a blog in you business or personal career search:

• An Expert Forum of Intelligence and Knowledge
  
• Communication Platforms for Information Sharing
  
• A New Breed of Customer Service
  
• Work Group and Project Management

I'm running a new version of MT on this site right now, version 3.1 Beta. Sorry for any issues that arise during testing. I think things are working pretty smoothly at the moment. There are a few key features that y'all might be interested in.

DYNAMIC PAGES
The most prominent new feature in Movable Type 3.1 is the dynamic page functionality. This completely eliminates the need to manually rebuild your files; when you update the design of your archive templates, for example, the design of your site will immediately be updated without requiring you to rebuild.

SUBCATEGORIES
The new category management interface in 3.1 gives you fine-grained control over the organization and display of your posts.

POST SCHEDULING
Using post scheduling, you can set a time and date for your posts to appear, permitting automatic updates to your weblog even when you're away. The bummer is that this requires some server side stuff that might be difficult to implement on your host...

A Globe and Mail article highlights the popularity of blogging but notes that the Canadians have not yet adopted the technology at the same rate as the US. Nevertheless, blogs are going to be big, they say.

Blogs are going big business. And according to advocates of the technology, it's about time. "Whatever it is you do by marketing, you can do by virtue of a blog," devotee Jim Carroll says.

Rick Bruner at Business Blog Consulting is looking for some folks to review blog software.

Before you spend your precious time doing this, please contact Rick. These badboys have to be 100% legit reviews.

Ben & Jackie highlight the following reasons, among the many dozens of reasons to get going on a weblog...

Among dozens of reasons, here are seven:

1. They fan the flames of customer evangelism. Their personal nature helps humanize you and your organization.

2. They function as an instant-feedback mechanism. Most blogs allow readers to respond to your posts or link to them on their own blogs. These features provide almost real-time feedback on ideas and issues that strike a chord, or highlight new or existing problems. A blog can help reveal a little problem before it becomes a big one.

3. They compel you to Napsterize more of your knowledge more often. A blog is about sharing what you know, think and believe; search engines index your ongoing knowledge-sharing, making it easier for customers and prospects to find you. Attraction is always easier than hunting.

4. They facilitate the spread of buzz. Honest, informative or thought-provoking posts about issues important to customers and prospects tend to be spread more often.

5. They allow you to have more simultaneous conversations. It's more than you could ever do in person.

6. Most blog service providers offer good-looking templates to use if your existing website design is embarrassing or non-existent.

7. They help position you as a knowledgeable expert in your industry.

An article on blogs that's well worth reading.

Since the blog was added as the featured part of an overall site redesign a year ago, the number of hits on Earth Share's site has more than tripled. While the site generated slightly more than 3,000 hits per month before adding the blog, it now gets as many as 12,000 a month.

[via Trevor Cook]

Todd's running a new series on blogging at A Penny For... To answer his first question on the frequency with which one should blog, and the acceptable minimum blogging thresholds, I have come up with the following...

- New Blogger (less than 3mos old): Blog at least once a day for 6 weeks, and then 4x per week after that. For those that have been blogging for a while (18mos +) we are wary of new bloggers until we see that you are committed to sharing, and becoming part of the community.

- Tenured Blogger (18mos +): At least 3x per week. Quality is usually high, and visitorship is regular if posts to this point have been insightful. Visitors are looking for quality and ideas now. They already know you exist. Also, you are in a position to weigh in on conversations in your domain of expertise, so blog & wait for the comments & trackbacks to unfold…

- Veteran Blogger/Superstar (since ½ hr before dirt): Blog once per week, or less, and you're fans will still follow (Seth Godin could blog once a month and people would still come…)

There are other variations on this theme. New Bloggers can quickly establish credibility and manage expectations by sticking very close to a theme, blogging accordingly, and spreading intelligent comments on other blogs of a feather. These bloggers may be able to bypass some of the initial workload.

Further, on the subject of new bloggers, one might want to ask when you should "launch" your blog. I would argue that in the current 'era of blogging' one should wait 4-6 weeks and have the corresponding number of posts under their belt before making a splash. This also helps to bypass some of the 'intro blogger' issues that plague bloggers who struggle for content after their first few brilliant posts.

Continue this conversation over at A Penny For...

Tim Slavin from ReachCustomersOnline.com has some good insight into understanding business blogging. He discusses:

1. What are weblogs?
2. Are they useful to business?
3. What weblog tools exists?
4. How do I install weblog tools?
5. What are good weblog resources?

Thanks Bill

Heather at Microsoft took a stab at listing some of the skill requirements for becoming a successful corporate blogger. Great list - great start!

1. Your blogging activity has to be in support of some kind of goal
2. Executive sponsorship
   
3. Established guidelines
   
4. A manager that trusts you not to say anything stupid
   
5. A blogger that is committed to not only post but also to be part of the blogging community
   
6. A blogger that has something interesting to say
   
7. Blogger with strong communications skills. Four categories came to mind here: writing, presenting, diplomacy and credibility.
   
8. A PR department that doesn't vet everything you put out there

   Check out Heather's post on the topic for more insights.

Why doesn't Car Talk have a blog? Seriously, I think that it would be really cool if they did. I'd love to hear more of their funnies on a daily basis, and the could answer some readers' email questions via the blog and we'd all benefit.

Peter Davidson referenced a post by Mark Ramsey at Radio Marketing Nexus on why radio talk show hosts should blog as an accompaniment to their regular shows.

Here's a list of five reasons for creating a radio show blog:

1. Because it's a way to open a dialogue with your listeners which drives them to your website and ricochets them back to the station.
   
2. Because blog posts are informative little advertisements for your morning show which listeners will subscribe to or email to each other.
   
3. Because it gives listeners - and the on-air folks - something to talk about, thus spreading word of mouth.
   
4. Because listeners can respond to posts and engage the talent in a way that's otherwise impractical or impossible.
   
5. And finally, because it's bound to help your ratings.

Q: What is your take on the advantages of instigating multidimensional feedback with a blog through outlets like comment functionality versus a more traditional publishing model? Is it a feature more common with paid, server side software?

Putting aside the issue of comment spam, which has forced many weblog authors to turn off their comment features for the time being, there are a few reasons why a weblog author would want to allow a multidimensional conversation through comments.

1. Comments, or multidimensional communications, are what form the foundation for a community around the weblog and it’s respective topics. Comments, especially on corporate weblogs, allow you to hear the voice of your customers, good or bad, in a direct medium. Shutting off comments, on the other hand, illustrates your unwillingness to listen through what is arguably one of the most effective ways to genuinely connect with customers.
   
2. Comments facilitate connections among ‘audience members’, allowing others to add fuel to a topic, in a similar fashion to how trackbacks facilitate connections among bloggers, allowing them to offer commentary on others’ posts in their own forum, namely, their own weblog. As an aside, trackbacks are becoming more important to the community as more people who may have only been ‘commenters’ before have become authors by starting their own weblogs. One only has to look at the flame war that ensued among bloggers and commenters when MovableType announced their new pricing and licensing model in May.
   
3. Comments grease the social networking wheels of blogging. They can be an integral part of a blogger building their community. By commenting on another’s weblog with intelligent or arousing dialog, a new blogger can garner visitors to his/her site through contributions to others’ conversations. In essence, comments are vital to building the blogging ecosystem.
   

Information Week asks the question that we all think we have the answer to. Well, what did they come up with?

Read on....

Heather at Microsoft posed the question today on what it will take for (corporate) blogging to become a job skill. Interesting, when you think about it. I think that it will follow suit with things like "Internet Marketing" and other new-age ventures. However, what is blogging, in the corporate sense. Does updating project weblogs count? Anyone can do that (is corporate e-mailing a skill?). Or, are we talking about projecting your company's voice into the world?

Heather has the following to say about the skills required:

How timely this is! Today, on Debbie Weil's '1 Minute Blogging Quiz', I put in, as my most important question "How do I make money from my blogging activities?"

Then, like clockwork, J. Veen pointed to this article from SFGate.com on "Bloggers finding ways to profit."

Here's how others are doing it...

Weblogs — or ‘blogs’ — are not just for Internet pundits. They’re valuable tools that IT managers can use to improve company communications internally and externally
....read the rest of Blogging for Fun and Profit on CIO Australia

[via re:invention - Kirsten was mentioned in the article!]

Peter writes:

The 1st, 10th, 25th, 50th and 100th person to link to this post will receive 5 dollars. You can only win once. I will determine who wins by looking at this technorati link. Link to this post, not to this blog.

MarketingSherpa had requested we keep this under wraps until after 4PM eastern today, but it seems that Todd, Steve, Andy Beal (who is simply "chuffed" at winning) and probably a few others have already picked up on it, so I might as well go ahead.

Dana's Blog was voted the "Best b-to-b marketing-topic Blog."

The honorable mention in that category went to Brian at the B2B Lead Generation Blog.

Check out the rest of the winners of the MarketingSherpa Readers' Choice Best Blog Awards 2004.

Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion is on an "all blog" media diet this week, as his newspapers pile up and traditional media driven emails go unread, keep tabs on what Steve gleans from snacking on only the blogosphere for an entire week.

With 141 RSS feed subscriptions in my Bloglines account, I'm already on an all-blog diet. In fact, I really only visit the Wall Street Journal site, to which I have a subscription, when Todd blogs something interesting from WSJ.

Next, I'd like to see a head-to-head shootout of a "blog fed" news junkie and a straight "web fed" news junkie - see who knows more about current events after a week's diet of one or the other.

I'm always ecstatic when I find out that there are others in Green Bay doing the "blog thing."

Carson Diltz, a recent St. Norbert grad, has started his own weblog and will be discussing some of the finer points of cars, motorcycles, programming & project management and living out his dream of becoming one of the cognitive elite and conquering the world.

Yeah, I figured this would be the case...

88 points is in the 81 through 100 precent You're definitely a blogaholic. You dedicate most of your time to weblogging that you forget to have a social life. There's still life outside Bloggerville, you know. Try to go out more, 'kay?

[Thanks Jeremy]

[Are YOU a Blogaholoic? Get Tested]

John Cass has started a great conversation on how to further engage visitors in *conversation* once they are at your weblog. Please chime in with your thoughts on this. How are your engaging visitors at your site, if you have one?

I submit that weblogs are not much different than other websites, and standard knowledge about sites apply, but who knows...
http://pr.typepad.com/pr_communications/2004/05/how_do_you_enga.html

Heather @ Microsoft has an interesting take that I've not yet seen - The "mentality" of a company that's OK with it's employees' weblogs and websites, and their quasi-direct affiliation with their employer.

Heather's take on Microsoft, which I extrapolate to mean "blog friendly companies in general," is as follows:

-Companies don't want unhappy employees to be visible.
-Companies that encourage blogging are not afraid to take risks.
-Companies that encourage blogging have respect for the individual. (This is BIG!)
-Companies that encourage blogging think their employees are smart.
-[me] The company is not afraid of its employees, or what they'll say in public.

Now, what are the downsides? Comments anyone?
- Maybe it makes people assume we have extra time on our hands?
- Maybe it has another "marketing agenda" that the blogs are feeding?

Seems appropriate that you all should be the first to know ... My good friend Toby Bloomberg launched the Diva Marketing Blog just seconds ago!
http://bloombergmarketing.blogs.com/bloomberg_marketing/

We're in the middle of developing some small business blogging guidelines here at Balance and epicsoft, now that three of us are blogging. Tom Murphy over at PR Opinions has a growing compendium of corporate blogging policies that we've been reviewing in an effort to make our policy a comprehensive one.

UPDATE: PR Opinions - More on corporate blogging guidelines..

Don't get me wrong here. I don't mind bit paying for MT and have donated $$ in the past, and even paid them to install it on my system for the first time.

However, the issue at stake here is the absolutely shitty communication strategy (or lack thereof) that 6A has in place.

Along with many others, I've now gone through the Alpha and Beta testing cycles over the past couple of months. Now, with all of the database changes that were made, if I were to want to go back to a clean, "free" install, that supports all of the blogs/content areas that I have, I would need to do a clean install of the finished product, which will require restructurin several months of work or pay a hefty license fee to do the *exact* same thing I was/am doing for free.

I have no problem paying for software, I do have a problem with the expectation that I should pay a fee for a version release that offers me little added value.

If Six Apart had bothered to mention the possibility of a new pricing structure (sharks in the waters ahead, so to speak) at the beginning of the beta cycle, then I'd have stayed my ass out of the ocean. I simply would not have upgraded. But they didn't, and I did. Now I have three choices:

a) destroy several months of work
b) pay them their money
c) stick with a potentially buggy beta version

What a pain in the ass, really, what a pain...

Moore finally started a weblog, it's about time! He discusses the ins/outs of Flash, .NET programming, and Artificial Intelligence.

Toby B. is thinking about it...look for her stuff soon!

Darren's about to get rolling with Animator's Anonymous too!

In case you haven't already checked them out, visit Anne's MarketingSherpa blog awards survey (or, if you're coming from there, thanks - there were 320 of you yesterday which was a record day on the site!

Anyway, because of my inherent dislike for doing things twice, I'm going to nominate my favorite blogs here publicly (I've already taken the survey)by way of Bloglines. Bloglines manages the blogroll on the left. In essence, what that means is the my current RSS/Blog reading list of 135+ is listed on the left. It's a great feature that allows me to do things only once :)

So anyway, I've recategorized my Sherpa nominated blogs under "Sherpa Blog Nominations." Have a look-see...

If you like what you see, why not continue the conversation by subscribing to this site's RSS Webfeed

[Thanks Decker for the great idea!]

Sun Microsystems' New Technology Director Tim Bray recently posted Sun's official blogging policy. Now Groove Networks and Sun Microsystems have weblog authoring policies. Glad to see that smart companies are recognizing that workers are going to do these things and putting guidelines in place.

I had proposed a weblog policy when I was at KI, but was shot down vehemently. I'm sure that there were good reasons. Nevertheless, it would have been nice to get the press on being the second official company, from the manufacturing sector no less, with an official weblog policy/guidelines.

[via PR meets the WWW] - Here are some of the basic tenants of the Sun policy.

Now that Movable Type 3.0 has moved out of the Alpha test phase, they are allowing us to post items in 3.0! There are a number of things that are improved with this version. Look for more information at the Movable Type site.

This is great to see! So now when you get to school you'll not only get your own email, but your own blog. They also have a lot of links to some great MovableType resources on how to start blogging and other beginner type stuff. They've obviously done their homework on this one!

UThink is available to the faculty, staff, and students of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and is intended to support teaching and learning, scholarly communication, and individual expression for the U of M community. All you need to login and start blogging is your U of M Internet ID and Password.

UThink: Blogs at the University Libraries
[via The Minnesota Daily]

I'm working on designing a weblog to use as a freelance client communication tool...yeah, I 'm too cheap for basecamp, and don't like the interface anyway. Anyway, Dudz pointed me to this site which has some really well designed blog ideas - love em all!

This is the first RSS ad that I 've seen - pretty cool! I found this on Lockergnome's web dev blog.

This is that the landing page looks like - I like how that ad is placed nicely in the RSS text. Could be a pretty simple PHP includes file or something. Sweet!

Rick Bruner has a new blog on business blogging.

Business Blog Consulting is a site devoted to demonstrating how effective weblogs can be for communicating with customers and marketing to new customer prospects. You will find here lots of examples of business blogs, as well as resources to help you learn more about the topic.

This site is maintained by Rick E. Bruner, a consultant with almost 10 years of expertise in Internet marketing, including publishing two books on the subject. If you are interested in developing a weblog strategy and setting up an easy-to-maintain weblog for your business, Rick is the man who can help.

[via PR meets the WWW]

MarketingSherpa is launching thier "MarketingSherpa's Reader's Choice Award for Best Blogs" on the subjects of marketing, advertising and PR. A blog must have been regularly updated for at least the past 90 days to be considered. Winners get a review and hotlink from our site, plus a MarketingSherpa Blog Star t-shirt.

To enter a Blog you author, or to nominate this blog, email Managing Editor Anne Holland by April 30th. They'll collect reader votes in May (hey it's a great way to get traffic to your Blog), and announce winners in June. *Please* put "Best Blog" in the subject line of your nomination email and send to anneh [at] marketingsherpa.com

Dave Pollard discusses some of the ways to increase your blog's readership.

THE TOP FIVE WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR BLOG...

Marketing is useless if you don't have a good 'product'. Here are five ways to ensure you do.

1. Provide something unique
2. Provide something valuable
3. Be first
4. Do your research
5. Learn to write very well

... AND THE TOP FIVE WAYS TO ATTRACT MORE ATTENTION TO IT

1. Use other media to pull people to your blog
2. Write, at least sometimes, about 'hot' topics
3. Make a great first impression
4. Learn by studying who's reading what, and what works
5. Get outside more

When I started my weblog about a year ago, I had the express purpose of blogging so that I could work on my writing, (anyone who wants to write needs to write at least every day), keeping a personal knowledge base, and communicating with peers. I've not wavered from that purpose, but many who have started blogging and dropped it, have wavered.

David at Ripples (via Jennifer Rice@BrandMantra) discusses the topic of staying in blogging for the long haul, and outlines some of his ideas for what you need to do personally if you're going to be around in a few years.

"Would you like to be writing your weblog a few years from now? Can you even stand the idea of blogging for that long? I don't have the answers for you, but it has made me think about my own future as a blogger."

1. Understand why you are writing. Have a mission statement, even if you don't publish it.
Revisit it occasionally if production drops.
2. Write about things that interest you
3. Write so you do not have to apologize for your choice of words.
4. Try to make your topic as interesting as possible, without bending the truth too much.
Parodies are excepted, of course.
5. When the words don't come, work on something else.
6. Keep track of what you have written so you will know when you are revisiting subjects.

Mark Cuban rocks! From his post today about telling the media that from now on they could reach him through his blog. He said, in no uncertain terms, that he would be "...posting whatever I had to say on my blog"

"The satisfaction of knowing that each will have to explain to their editors what a blog is — and argue for who knows how long about whether or not BlogMaverick.com is an attributable source — crept over me and that jaunt on the gauntlet flew by.

Editor & Publisher: When Journalists Blog, Editors Get Nervous

Personal employee blogs, it seems, are land mines for media employers. The nature of the Internet is why. A simple family blog written by a reporter might contain a reference to trouble at work, or discontent with a boss. It's so easy for such an item -- meant for a tiny group but accessible by the entire Web world -- to take on a life of its own and spread to a huge audience, embarrassing not only the employer but also the employee. The media operates in a Google-driven, Romenesko world now.

Marketing Wonker and Internet marketing consultant and all-around smart guy Olivier Travers has launched a new weblog at OlivierTravers.com. My understanding is this suplants his earlier Webvoice blog.

The study by the Perseus group on the sheer number of weblogs that have been abandoned is a bit disturbing, but it makes me wonder... How many of us have had free email accounts at one point or another which we've since abandoned? While these are slightly more private and not subject to be reported on like public blogs, I'd be willing to bet that the numbers would be a bit alarming.

What I propose is a "Weblog Expiration Policy", which would simply state, like Hotmail does, that if a blog has not been updated in some acceptable length of time (3 months?) that it would be deactivated. This will reduce clutter and get "tire kickers" to think before they march off into blog land.

John Porcaro mentioned a great new blog by brand and strategy consultant Jennifer Rice called Brand Mantra, covering Brand Strategy News and Views.

This came the form of an email from Toby Bloomberg. The author is Darren Brothers, a Registered Futures Specialist at Hills Capital Management in San Fran. It's too good not to post, because what you have here is a wakeup call to start blogging. I noticed almost no change in the rankings of my blog posts in Google on the keywords/terms that I searched on. Once again, as always, content is king.

Dan Cornish of Cosential and DesignArchitecture.com has started a blog on the DesignArchitecture site. Why do I care? Because, this is a "first" in our industry. There are very few players in the contract furniture/architecture & design industries who have any sense of blogging or how to apply it to business.

Kudos to Dan for getting on the ball with this!

Martina Z @ Adverblog recently posted her take on RSS and it's impact on marketing , and I have to say, I agree with her 100%. Further, her stance reinforces what everyone's been fighting me on since I published an article on RSS - It's just more crap that you have to install, and your average user is NOT going to install more shit, setup more profiles on more websites that they'll forget to visit, blah. You get the drill.

You can't tell me that you welcome yet more information sources to get more information... We do, we're geeks, the general public (your customers) do not want RSS, per se. I said this way back in July in a conversation w/ J. Angel (follow the entended entry link for the context of that discussion)

Some of you may have read the article RSS for the Real World in MarketingProfs or on Brand Advocate recently. As with anything we say in life, sometimes we wish we could change, or add to what we said, that being said, there are a few addendum and errata that I’d like to clear up with the article.

Stephen Cohen, Michael Fagan and John Botscharow have dutifully pointed out some of these things already.

- You can include images in RSS feeds (and most likely within Atom as well). However, the “stock” summary that comes out of Blogger or MT usually includes just text.

- You don’t “need” to download a news aggregator; you can use web-based aggregators like Bloglines and Feed-Me. That being said, if RSS is to truly be part of the desktop, like email, it will be most likely embedded into one of the tools that we already use to communicate, like our email client. Also, many corporations block websites that they deem to be inappropriate or a productivity drain. Couple that with the fact that many corporate desktops are “locked down” and people can’t install their own software (at least in our company), RSS/Atom will need to be more “integrated” into the pre-existing or pre-approved corporate standards.

- RSS can work for neophytes, but it’s admittedly more complicated than setting up your average web-based email client. These issues of usability and friendliness will shake out soon.

- You “can” track RSS, the same way we used to track banners and email, with a small embedded GIF/JPG which gets tracked in your web analytics software.

This is what I really love about the web and weblogs. We learn, we change, we post it!

Kirsten Osolind wrote me the other day to inform me that she hadn't yet written anything on RSS because she still couldnt' get RSS on her Blogspot version weblog. As many of you know, Blogger is in a state of flux right now where they are no longer offering the former "Blogger Pro" that I was using (but I did get a SWEET Blogger hoodie as comp for having already paid for the service) and they are putting all of their efforts into "something new"

According to one account from Blogger, they are moving forward with Atom, as opposed to straight RSS. Below are a couple of resources on Atom vs. RSS, and the reply from Google/Blogger.

C|Net: Dispute exposes bitter power struggle behind Web logs

Interwitingly.net: Motivation (for Atom, or anything but RSS)

-----Original Message-----
From: Blogger Support
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 12:25 PM
To: Kirsten Osolind (1668486,5566499)
Subject: Re: [#20471] RSS/Blogger.....Marketingprofs.com article says
so.

Thanks for your patience, and thanks for using Blogger!
-Eric,
Blogger Support

A couple of articles ran yesterday which may be of interest.

RSS for the Real World was published on MarketingProfs.com, which I've since seem some comments about - I'll share those in the comments section.

Also, Blogs: The next frontier of biz communication, from the Shoestring Marketing section of the main Biz Journals site mentioned the SFA blog.

Good stuff!

Consider running your entire site with Movable Type
http://a.wholelottanothing.org/features.blah/entry/007162

When people from work ask me "why do you blog and write all those articles?" I always give the answer "because, part of my job involves writing, and in order to be a OK writer, you have to keep writing!

Apparently, this line of thought is gaining momentum in academia. Professesors and students alike are starting to use the blog as a medium not only for communicating class notes and updates but also as an integral component of the cirriculum. Students are being encouraged to keep a blog, as they would a journal (remember those creative writing or communications classes where you were required to journal for a semester. How many of us that hated that stuff are now avid bloggers. ...as I raise my hand).

Blogs are also being kept up to facilitate group work amonst students. Imagine - all those group projects you were working on, what if you had a blog for that 5 person group that you all posted the latest reports, ideas, and updates to so that your group knew what was going on every step of the way (funny, wouldn't it be great to do this in corporate america too!) Not only that, but a blog offers a great way to maintain the history of your group's progress. While primitive (seems odd to say that in the context of blogging) this could be a student's first foray into formalizing the process of project management, and may even lead to better and more adept project managers in their furture work lives. Who among us does not manage projects at this point!

Related Links
The Exponent Online: Instructors increase Weblog use as aids
The Blog Herald

Funny how you think you're doing something good and people punish you for it. I was happily blogging along when I started to notice an increasing number of comments on my site, which I thought were good, but were really just a bunch of crap laden with links back to their worthless sites selling faux sex enhancers.

Wonderful.

I'm really fed up with comment spam. I've taken to deleting comments that are blatent spam (don't talk about Viagra in your comments) and have published my blacklist, made possible by Jay Allen and his MT-Blacklist tools. You are welcome to grab a copy of that file and use it as part of your own comment spam prevention system.

Related Topics
Wired News: Spammers Clog Up the Blogs
Jayallen.org: Wired misses the mark on blog spam
BBC News: How spammers are targeting blogs

Every week, it seems that yet another "mainstream" (i.e. something your ceo or marketing VP reads... :) sales and marketing publication takes on the subject of blogs.

Today, I got a bit of "blog advice" from SM&M's E-business Advisor newsletter. I find these particularly interesting because they sound like "hammer to the head" do's & dont's of blogs - all in just 3 points.

1. Pick the most colorful individual within the company to build a Weblog.
2. Weblogs must remain personal or they lose integrity.
3. Don't sell anything via Weblogs, and don't charge users to view them.

Good advice. Pass it on to your VP of marketing.

This is still a pretty *new* space for web apps and developed software, but if you're intent on keeping up with it, keep a watch on Heiko Hebig's RSS News Aggregator compendium.
http://www.hebig.org/blogs/archives/main/000877.php

Six Apart's Vice President of Business Development Anil Dash, says there are enterprise opportunities ahead for weblogs and weblog tools such as MovableType. In an interview with Executive News Editor Mark Jones, Dash outlined his vision for online publishing and his take on Weblog business models. - Read the InfoWorld Invterview

I only skimmed the article, but it's great to hear/see someone from the blog tools community expressing their vision. We need more people like this from Google and Blogger, speaking out and evangelizing the technology so that the world's IT departments get away from the mindset that this is some underground fad perpetuated by teenage girls with nothing better to do.

Barbara Payne, of ReallyGoodFreelanceWriter.com, just wrote a super article on blogging for Marketing Profs. Thanks to Tom at Lanex for pointing this out.

Blog for Business: Is It Right for Your Company?

It may sound radical to some companies, but there's no denying the power of authentic communication when it comes to building loyalty between people—and clearly your customers are people first.

So I've decided to test an "offline" blog editor, SharpMT. I really have only one pet-peeve with MT and that's the small window that you have to type text into. It's really cumbersome with larger posts and is beginning to drive me nuts.

So...here goes.

I've been trading emails with Toby @ Bloomberg Marketing about small business blogging, and have located a few resources to support getting your small business online via blogs. I'd love to write an article, but Dan Bricklin has already made the case for small business blogs, as have a few others. here are some useful links on the topic.

* Dan Bricklin (of Visicalc and Trellix fame) wrote an outstanding essay for his web site called Small Business Blogging that was published last August.

* Using Weblogs as a Promotional Tool by Peter Cooper.

* What a Blog Can Do For Your Small Business, posted by Darrell Zahorsky at About.com.

A couple of weeks ago, the American Marketing Assn. Internet Marketing SIG invited Biz Stone, the Genius blogger, to moderate our discussions on blogging for a week. Biz was a super resource, and outside of having an already great book on blogging, he left us these additional bullet points to ponder. Thanks again to Toby Bloomberg for putting this together.

Following is a recap of key points:

-Incorporating a blogging strategy as a component of a marketing plan can support relationship building by "breaking down barriers between business and customers."

-While blogs are still on the peripheral for most organizations, some companies understand that blogs can provide a valuable "window on what people (customers) are thinking and talking about."

-Business blogs are used to publicize new products, demonstrate product features and answer customer questions.

-Blogging is useful as a knowledge management tool.

-Blogs are a natural to support branding strategies. Great for consultancies to reinforce expertise in targeted areas/sectors.

-Consider using blogs in qualitative brand or product research where respondents maintain a blog on a proprietary intranet

- Determining ROI is still difficult. Biz suggests defining "success" in terms of quantity and quality of comments, measuring page views, trackbacks (what people say about your posts).

-A successful blog requires dedication to daily postings. Post must be of perceived value for the target audience.

A few more resources:

- An example of B2B blogs. Jupiter Research - company analysts each have a blog. Provides an opportunity to connect with their audiences on a regular basis. Interesting idea for companies that have a model that includes segmentation by sectors or areas of expertise. http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/

-Mircrodoc News. News blog about blogs.
http://microdoc-news.info/home/BloggerNews/2003/04/03.html

Business blog
http://blogs4business.com/

Not being a master of several languages (maybe a little Spanish), I was really stumped when I tried to read this TrackBack link from a .nl (Netherlands) website written in Dutch.

Here's a nifty little tool that I found. World Lingo has a website that will translate damn near anything. Yeah, I know Google does the same for some sites, but World Lingo does it way better.

Check out the online tranlator here.

marketingterms.com has a nifty little definition of what a blog is along with an arm's length compendium of links to articles on blogs back to 1999. Pretty cool for those of you nostalgic types who want to revisit the history of blogs.

My personal favorite was this article from The Guardian in the UK on how "liberating" blogging is.

John Porcaro pointed out some interesting posts by Laurie Sefton, tonight that underscore some tensions going on in the blog-meets-employer space which have yet to play out to their fullest.

Here I am, smack in the middle of said corporate dilemma. As the leader of the E-commerce/web group, I feel that the responsiblity is ours to take for crafting an intelligent yet easy to implement corporate policy, similar to what Ray Ozzie has done with Groove Networks, which outlines our official stance on employee weblogs and websites. However, when I've approached people about this topic the answer that I've received has been that our "code of ethics" policy covers all such instances. I don't think so, but who am I to say.

Nevertheless, I did draft some bullet points which could one day comprise a fairly comprehensive policy on employee weblogs and websites. I don't think we'll be using this information, so here it is. Maybe one of your companies needs it.

Christian Crumlish has been blogging Seybold, along with several others, at least according the Technorati. Sweet. Glad to see we're all on the same page here.

Also, props to Christian for his well above average presentation on blogs and RSS (XML, RDF, whatever...).