January 2005

Curious about the weather in Seattle, wondering what to wear to the summit? Check the Weather RSS feed from NOAA.

Brian Chin interviews Steve Broback for the Seattle PI’s Buzzworthy blog and asks him to amplify the Summit’s tagline, “show you how your business can leverage current real-world blogging techniques, tools and platforms to promote and enhance your ventures.” It’s a great Q/A on the state of the summit.

Update

CBS MarketWatch and Micro Persuasion pick up the BBS 05 Q/A story.

While the List o’ Links grows to a whopping 288 links, we’ve put our reFeed test on hold and just added MT Feeds to the sidebar in the Sessions sub blog. MT Feeds is a plugin, written by Timothy Appnel, for publishing syndication feed content into Movable Type templates. MT Feeds is displaying headlines from our Speaker’s blogs. For the sidebar, I set it to the last 5 and for the full display, it’s set to the last 25. It’s particularly useful because feeds are updated at differing frequencies and intervals. On that, from a quick glance, it appears that Scoble, outposts everyone.

Expanding on a previous post where I showed how the google/alexa stats of our 3 month old blog compared to the northwest’s largest PR firm, I decided to run a similar test on a larger scale.

This analysis contrasts A list blogger (and our conference keynoter) Robert Scoble to the top PR firms in the world. The result may serve to surprise those who write press releases for a living…

Robert is unaware that I performed this test, so I will be eager to hear his analysis of the results. I hope he doesn’t mind me using him as an example.

Test 1: Pages that specifically mention the organization/author:

I simply typed in the following names into google and noted the number of pages that were returned. List is sorted by most to fewest responses. In the case of complex names I used as few words as possible in order to benefit the PR organization.

• Robert Scoble: 199,000 mentions
• Burson-Marsteller : 108,000 mentions
• Porter Novelli : 83100 mentions
• Weber Shandwick Worldwide : 81,300 mentions
• Hill & Knowlton, Inc. : 71,600 mentions
• Fleishman-Hillard Inc. : 69,300 mentions
• Edelman Public Relations Worldwide : 25,400 mentions
• Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide : 23,500 mentions
• GCI Group/APCO Worldwide : 16,300 mentions
• Incepta (Citigate) : 15,300 mentions
• Ketchum, Inc. : 4,120 mentions
  

Test 2: Inbound links detected by Google:

• Robert Scoble: 13,900 inbound links
• Burson-Marsteller : 899 inbound links
• Edelman Public Relations Worldwide : 376 inbound links
• Hill & Knowlton, Inc. : 330 inbound links
• Ketchum, Inc. : 233 inbound links
• Fleishman-Hillard Inc. : 191 inbound links
• Weber Shandwick Worldwide : 145 inbound links
• Porter Novelli : 144 inbound links
• Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide : 123 inbound links
• GCI Group/APCO Worldwide : 63 inbound links
• Incepta (Citigate) : 55 inbound links
  

Test 3: Site traffic as ranked by Alexa:

• Robert Scoble: 7,136 alexa ranking

• Edelman Public Relations Worldwide : 107,735 alexa ranking
• Burson-Marsteller : 108,025 alexa ranking
• Fleishman-Hillard Inc. : 127,165 alexa ranking
• Weber Shandwick Worldwide : 134,584 alexa ranking
• Ketchum, Inc. : 144,341 alexa ranking
• Porter Novelli : 175,122 alexa ranking
• Hill & Knowlton, Inc. : 180,761 alexa ranking
• Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide : 217,375 alexa ranking
• Incepta (Citigate) : 545,695 alexa ranking
• GCI Group/APCO Worldwide : 566,286 alexa ranking
  

Notice that the only PR firm on the list with an RSS feed/blog is Edelman, and in site traffic they came in second place. More evidence that the “blog advantage” is real.

Again, the goal here is not to imply that the PR firms aren’t incredibly sharp at leveraging TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. These guys are consummate pros in those arenas. My goal is simply to nudge them into considering a shift in their Web strategies a bit more toward the blogosphere. (and of course try to get them to come to the Blog Business Summit.)
Disclaimer: This list may not depict the most recent top ten firms (based on revenues), as it was culled from a list that was a few years old. There may very well exist a PR firm that can beat Scoble at these tests. Please comment if you find one. Individual (versus a parent company conglomerate) firms are what I am after. I am offering a discounted $195.00 seat to the Blog Business Summit to the first person who can find a PR firm that can beat Scoble’s numbers.

Caffeinated and Unstrung is a wiki that lists Seattle’s free wireless coffee shops. BBS 05 is in the Waterfront/Belltown neighborhood and the guide lists 4 nearby shops.
For more on Seattle’s coffee shops and wifi, see Wi-Fi’s on the (coffee) house
from the Seattle PI. The Bell Harbor Conference Center and Marriott Waterfront Seattle also have WiFi.

Recalling the laptop controversy at SXSW, I tell Steve, at least once a week, to make sure WiFi is working well and that laptop owners can plug in.

There was the Fortune magazine article then Motley Fool, and then

• Bob Lutz, auto-industry legend, is blogging
• Bill G interviewed by Gizmodo
• Six Apart buys Live Journal
• USA Today blogs CES

Wow. What a week in business blogging. I remember a year ago, consulting at a large corporation, and evangelizing blogging. The culture was just getting it, but some we’re dismissive, they had lots of other priorities. I knew at that time blogging was going to be huge, bloggers were on the verge, and it was working for us at Clip-n-Seal. Now, reading all this press and a Bill G interview on a blog, I thought, “you can’t front on that. Man. You can’t front on that.”

Lenn Pryor and I had an instant message conversation about the potential backlash to business blogs, the potenial for a blog bubble, and all the recent blog press. The discussion started here, on this post about the Pew study, and I pinged Lenn for his opinion

-b- says: My comment is in there as to what happened with one of my clients. She’s read all the press and sees blogging as something only big companies do.

Lenn P says: I see

-b- says: And I was like, “what?”

Lenn P says: well I can see how people are having a hard time understanding how this matters to business; especially average and traditional marketers

-b- says: as my client is — what? I’m going to talk everyday?

Lenn P says: I understand. First thing they must do is read the Cluetrain

-b- says: (riding the cluetrain)

Lenn P says: then they can start to understand why you want to talk about it. Then have them read creating customer evangelists and they will start to see how the internet is changing the marketing landscape with certain demographics

-b- says: continue.

Lenn P says: in a meeting, have to continue later

-b- says: ok.

That was it for Lenn, but he was right on. He’ll be speaking at BBS 05 about podcasting and I’m sure we’ll discuss the blog bubble at the reception. Then again, we may just have a few beers and hang out.

According to Om Malik, Six Apart is buying Live Journal for an undisclosed amount. Malik claims that “Six Apart will become one of the largest weblog companies in the world”.

According to Elise Bauer’s calcs, this could put them firmly into the number one position in terms of users. Not sure how accurate her Google based index is, so please let me know if a more accurate assesment exists.

As many of us already know, it can be difficult at times to express the “blog advantage” to the uninitiated. Lately I have been leveraging a demo that where I compare my site (which is a series of blogs) visibility to other traditional sites (usually a site that the person getting the demo has been involved with). The result is usually a “light bulb” moment, and they get quite excited. Today I showed my demo to a local PR professional (we are getting quite a few PR people signing up) and had to pass on the results to our readers.

I asked my friend “what is the largest PR firm in Seattle?” She said “Waggener Edstrom is the biggest one in the Northwest, and one of the biggest in the U.S.”. So, I did some comparing of our two sites:

Google searches and resulting pages finding mentions of:
“Blog Business Summit”: 27,800
“Waggener Edstrom”: 21,600

Alexa traffic ranking (a lower number is better):
www.blogbusinesssummit.com: 365,568
www.wagged.com: 620,895

Google Pagerank (a higher number is better):
www.blogbusinesssummit.com: 7
www.wagged.com: 5

Keep in mind the following:

• Waggener Edstrom has had a Web site for probably ten years and has issued thousands of press releases. The Blog Business Site has been up since late October and has issued no press releases.

• Waggener Edstrom has full-time gurus who totally grok search engine optimization. We have a full-time wheaten terrier, and have done little to no SEO.

• Waggener Edstrom has offices in Oregon, Texas, and Washington, as well as Germany and the UK. The Blog Business summit has a single office in Kirkland WA, and a storage unit in Redmond.

• Waggener Edstrom has sales of around $70 million, comparatively BBS doesn’t even have enough revenue to count as a rounding error.

• Waggener Edstrom wins awards constantly for being a great place to work and for their innovative and successful campaigns. I personally received the “inspirational swimmer” award my senior year of high school.

Most Importantly:

• We have specifically pursued bloggers as marketing partners. I am not aware of any blogger outreach for Waggener Edstrom

• The Blog Business Summit site issues RSS feeds. The Waggener Edstrom site does not.

• The Blog Business Summit site communicates in a conversational, informal tone. The Waggener Edstrom has a professional, polished tone.

• According to Google, the BBS site mentions the word “blog” 104 times. Waggener Edstrom site, zero times.

• In the past 12 hours, the summit has been mentioned in 4 blogs (according to technorati). Waggener Edstrom in zero blogs.

Now don’t get me wrong. Waggener Edstrom is a terrfic company, and could crush us like a bug as far as any serious media competition goes. Everyone knows they are one of the most successful ventures in the world. No doubt they will continue undaunted long after the BBS (and I) have been put out to pasture. My point is that there is amazing leverage in 1) using a blog platform to host your site, and 2) working closely with bloggers. These guys have a great Web presence, I am only saying it would be better with some blog-enabled assistance.

BTW, If anyone from WE wants to come to the summit and learn more about blogging and bloggers, we’d love to see them there.

Alyce Lomax at the Motley Fool has some interesting data points in her Blogs Booming? piece today. The date is culled from the Pew Internet and Family Life Project. In a nutshell, Blog reading and authoring is a market on fire, with a lot of growth still to come.

• 62% of us don’t actually know what a blog is.
• Blog readership jumped 58% in November from February, with 27% of total Internet users saying they read blogs.

This article, (like so many others) still fails to “get” one of the main reasons the whole Blog thing is such a big deal. They don’t get (yet) it’s the architecture, not the content that has the greatest potential. True, blogs will become even more so “a serious source of information, concepts, or ideas.” Yes, they are “making discussions even more interesting.” and I have to agree that “there are plenty of silly blogs out there.”

Thats not the point. This is like articles in 1995 saying the Web is important because “it’s a great place to read physics papers”.

The fact is for a significant percentage of traditional Web sites (a majority?)—they should be served by a Blog engine instead. The entire site presenting this event looks like a traditional Web site to the untrained eye. It isn’t. The Blog Business Summit site is entirely a set of blogs, and after overseeing traditionally architected sites for many years, I will never go back to the old way. Visibility, collaboration, updating, and distribution are all light years ahead of the old method.

The article concludes:
“The blog phenomenon could remain a niche or stagnate at these levels. However, it seems to me that’s a slim chance. How this industry evolves will be of the utmost importance to traditional media — and Internet-based — companies, and the individuals who have invested in them.”

Will these newfangled Toyotas and the Interstate highway system remain a niche or stagnate compared to the tried-and-true Model T on gravel roads? Only time will tell…

As the enterprise asks the question “where is the money” in Blogging, many individuals have found that answer in Marqui, a company that has begun paying bloggers directly. Their ranks include several of the “A list” bloggers, including some of the speakers at this conference.

Marqui has expanded their support for the blogging community by becoming a contributing sponsor to the Blog Business Summit. They will be hosting the opening morning breakfast, and are doing their part to insure that this conference can become an ongoing community gathering.

Thanks much to Marqui for their generous assistance.

All the gurus say that a great (and free) way to enhance traffic is to make sure all the various rss search engines know about your site. The problem is finding a place where you can access all of them.

Ari Paparo has created a comprehensive source called the “Big List of Blog Search Engines.” Paparo has posted all the blog search engines, directories, and web-based RSS aggregators he could find.

I took this a step further and have created an AppleScript (sorry Windows users!) that will automatically open all 29 of them in Explorer for the Mac (I am having a heck of a time scripting Firefox and Safari…)

They’ll open in separate windows, and then one can use command ~ (tilde) to flip between the sites. I have tested this on only my own machine, and with just one submission set so far, so I make no guarantees. Please comment if it needs debugging.