August 2005

As I noted on my personal blog, I’ve been watching way more TV than normal, out sick this week, and I’ve been numbed by the coverage. I’d also wondered where the blogs were and then realized: no power, no blogs. Well, not for the Interdictor. He’s defending his position in his company’s data center and reporting on the Planet of the Apes chaos outside with a webcam.

While we had Eric Rice — the diddy of the blogosphere — in da house at the BBS 05 San Fran, we didn’t specifically cover video podcasting. Business Week explores the topic in an article about Rocketboom and making a business of out a video blog. Considering a business model, Eric put it this way

seriously
leverage the agility and low overhead of the medium

make content

it will spread

and ignore the punditry that will inevitably try and get in your way

Doing just that is Lean Back Vids with the virtual tour around Seattle using Google Earth, Eric’s Wawh wah wa waawh wa wa waaa wrahh, or Molly on FutureMedia declaring blogging, “an act of courage.”

Go Make Media Nobody Can Stop You

In the context of blogging, it’s all the same thing. It’s all podcasting, winecasting, pugcasting, video logging, or whatever. Eric continued in our discussion with more examples for business, including

• Release audio how-tos for your product
• Check Channel 9, as a corporate video blog
• Video podcast from the floor of trade show
• Make your own news clips

In my lectures, I talk about blogging enabling the creative, how blogging is a creative medium. That creativity can be your home movies, a product launch, a visit to the factory, or whatever you want to do.

Daring Fireball reviews all the recent news on Google and argues that they are an advertising platform. To that point, our speaker and cofounder Dave Taylor published the The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Growing Your Business with Google. We’ll also cover Google and your business in our upcoming Blogging 101 seminar.

I noticed our revision cycle in a word doc file name

BlogBook_outline_SB_EK_DLB_EK_DLB_EK.doc

That’s Steve to Erin to me, back to Erin, to me, then Erin. That starts all over again when it goes to PeachPit for editing and comes back to us.

I’ve just started to evaluate the sessions and speaker ratings from the SF Blog Business Summit, and am pleased to see that the Microsoft Keynote has rated as one of the top sessions. Keynoter Dean Hachamovitch rated higher more than three quarters of the professional business bloggers who came to present.

Based on my history hosting technology conferences, this is a somewhat unusual situation. Usually vendor-related keynotes do not rate so highly. The few exceptions to this rule occur when the presenter focuses on creating a session that delivers for the attendees, and not one that delivers a “message”. This was one of those exceptional cases.

The night before the keynote, Hachamovitch probed me for insights as to what specific topics the audience would find beneficial, and then spent several hours working to align his lecture to the attendees needs. At one point I offered some suggestions as to how Internet Explorer 7 (and particularly the interesting new syndication features) might fit into his presentation. I was pleasantly surprised when he said that he wasn’t there to promote product, and instead focused exclusively on how the world of blogs and RSS can benefit business.

All I can say is, Dean can keynote at one of my conferences anytime…

The Seattle PI reports on the Seattle Weblogger Meetup Group organized by Anita Rowland and Jack William Bell .

I’ve never made to a meetup, but hear they’re huge — 333 members and counting. Seattle’s bloggers make up a good portion of the blogosphere, including the Blog Business Summit. We’re blogging now from West Seattle, above Alki Beach, and will be at the Bell Harbor Conference Center for our Blogging 101 Seminar in October.

After Six Apart’s first public demo of Movable Type 3.2 at the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco, they launched “the most powerful blogging platform” today.

We’ll roll 3.2 on some blogs we have in beta, if all goes well, the update will go live on BBS 05.

Update

BBS 05 is now powered by Movable Type 3.2!

After upgrading our other blogs, including Pug Blog, as a test, I updated this morning and all is well.

KGO-TV, the San Francisco local ABC affiliate covers blogging and the Blog Business Summit, including video they shot and ran on the news during the event.

The Blog Advantage: What Blogs are and Why They are Taking Over

9:00am to 10:00am

There’s a reason Business Week magazine said “blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate” and it has nothing to do with personal diaries. In this session we’ll cover the basics of what makes a blog a blog and why blogging platform technologies provide significant advantages to businesses that leverage them.

• How to enhance your search engine presence
• Saving money through inexpensive database-driven Web pages
• Working with multiple site authors
• Driving readership through RSS and syndicated feeds
• Viral marketing benefits from community

RSS and Feeds: Monitoring the Blogosphere and the Buzz

10:15am to 11:15am

What tools and techniques are best for finding out what’s being said about you or your company? This session covers Web hosted services along with desktop applications that automate the gathering and analysis of blog, discussion group, and search engine content. See how to get the latest info without flipping through hundreds of sites or wading through too many feeds.

• The best RSS feedreaders
• Turning google searches into RSS feeds
• Scraping utilities that convert static sites to RSS

Smart Blogging: Essential Blog Design and Critical Features

11:30am to 12:30pm

Good content is a requirement, but there’s a lot more to a good blog than just the posts. There are critical features and technologies you’ll want to investigate. Standard designed templates are fine, but there are a myriad of reasons why you’ll want to customize and enhance with a unique layout. Proper blog design can insure your branding, position, and message are optimally projected. Beautiful, cross-device, navigable, and fast loading sites that search engines love are a must. This session will cover what top bloggers do to get the best of all possible worlds.

Lunch 12:30am to 2:00pm

Getting started: Choosing a Platform

2:00pm to 3:00pm

There’s more to a Blog engine than just price. Once you’ve made your choice, transitioning can be a challenge — so you’ll want to pick the optimal platform. If you have chosen, it’s not too late to move to a more robust environment. This session will cover all the major issues in selecting and migrating to the best system. Molly and Byron will cover:

• Insuring scalability
• Spam prevention
• Workgroup options
• Feature sets
• Pinging, publicity, and broadcast features
• Extendibility, plug-ins and upgrades
• Being “orphaned”, and how to prevent it.

Blog Promotion: Posting isn’t Enough

3:15pm to 4:15pm

You’ve got a fantastic blog. The design is beautiful, the content rich and relevant. But your stats are showing that only three people have visited since last July. What can you do? In this session, you’ll learn some of the best ways to build blog traffic quickly, increase interest in you and your product or service, and improve your bottom-line results.

• The pros and cons of comment systems
• How to use Trackback and Pingback to rapidly extend your blog’s reach
• How content aggregation technologies can quickly get your blog content to a wider audience
• How to improve blog ranking with both standard and blog-specific search engines
• Tips and tricks to keep your visitors coming back for more.

Blog Management: Strategies and Tactics

4:30pm to 5:30pm

Before you flip the switch and encourage employees or partners to blog about the business, it’s critical that you set the stage for responsible and effective posting. In this session, we’ll delve into the realities of workflow, policy, and content generation experiences to help those new to the game learn what works, what doesn’t, and what traps to avoid.

• Screening and editing posts
• Getting the team to contribute
• Choosing topics to write about
• Minimizing internal filters while maximizing “safe” dialog
• Resolving ownership issues
• Integrating blogs and confidentiality agreements
• SEC and “quiet period” restrictions
• Reconciling personal opinions against implied corporate representation
• Competitor linking and dialog — how open do you want to be?

In the afterglow of the Summit, we’re back to writing and working on chapters and finalizing the table of contents. The Summit was like a big case study for what people want to learn more about and they told us. There’s a mix between the tech, the practical, and the big picture. Our approach was also reassured by what we heard.

Content has always been King, we just ignored it during the dotcoms, dotcom crashes, and now it’s back on the throne with blogs and site redesigns. A perfect example is the new A List Apart (ALA), which rolled out today. I asked the designer, Jason Santa Maria (aka Virtual Stan) about content and design and he said

“Content is most certainly king on the new ALA, and the design was created to emphasize that. We included nice contrast in text as well as comfy white space and leading to help make reading a pleasure. I wanted ALA to feel like a book you sit down and spend time with. It’s not something you’re supposed to skim; it’s there for you to consider and digest.”

I followed up with Erin Kissane (also our blog book coauthor), ALA’s Managing Editor

“Design does matter, and any supposed opposition between design and content misses the point.”

Blog design has been a theme of my lectures since SXSW earlier this year and the debate came up again during the Summit. I argue again, as Erin does above, that there is no conflict between content and design. In fact, we need design even more with the explosion of blog content and RSS. Click around ALA to see why content is king.

The King is back. Long live the King.

A great post from Frank Janssen, a Dutch blogger, on the best slides from the Summit.

To demonstrate a meme in my lectures, I show Virtual Stan. A meme is an idea (joke, video, etc) that’s passed from one person to another and in context to business blogging, it’s a great way to drive traffic to a site (also part of the “blog with a soul” thing I talk about). Coudal’s making air and Abba videos are also great examples.

I dig Virtual Stan and he’s always a crowd favorite. Zorton, his sidekick robot, brings the house down and usually sets the roof on fire. Adding to the memeness in San Francisco, was the presence of Greg Hoy, who was representin’ Pixelworthy, a site where Virtual Stan’s creator, Rob Weychert, contributes. Greg videotaped Virtual Stan in action and used Stan as a conversation starter at the reception that night. As the comments on Greg’s post note

You know you’re living in the future when your creation has spoken at more conferences than you have

And

There really is nothing like a big giant head to really entertain an audience

There is some debate as to who’s more real and who’s the avatar. Is it Virtual Stan or Jason Santa Maria?

Highlights from the Blog Business Summit (in no particular order)

• InflightHQ announced
• MT 3.2 demo
• Wordpress.com demo
• Scoble meets Jobs
• Seminar Series announced

More of
BBS 05 in the news, on Technorati, and Flickr.

Media Co-Option

The Washington Post thinks bloggers are selling bottled air. Webpronews responds, as does Matt Mullenweg and there’s a lively debate started by Adrian Trenholm. The author of the post article obviously wasn’t at the summit, read the Silicon Valley article about Matt and quoted it out of context.

We’ll add that to the any press is good press (I guess) department and note how media is now telling bloggers how they should blog or what’s good or bad about blogging — without blogging themselves. I was talking with Jeremy Wagstaff about this topic a few weeks ago because I’d noticed that magazines were publishing top-ten blog lists. He said

Big media, like big corporations, are slow to get blogging. Not because blogging itself is complicated, or expensive, but because it involves embracing an expensive premise: that the gap between “consumer” and producer has suddenly got narrower. This is leading both groups to see blogging through a hostile lens — as snake-oil or something to be conquered and co-opted. I prefer to see it as the natural flattening that the Web promised us but failed to deliver a decade ago.

In other words, “All Your Blogs Are Belong To Us.”

And, finally (for now) Pam noted how she’d rather have a nifty notepad than a beta browser.

And with that I’m out for a few days. The Bog Business Summit was a success, a great event, with some tweaking to do. We need to find the right mix of sessions and we’re working on that. It’s a diverse audience we’re attracting and that means more demands on what they want to learn. Tell us what you want, fill out those eval forms, and comment directly on the session posts. Later we’ll podcast some audio and video.

We’ll be back at it October 29 in Seattle for the Blog Business Summit Seminar Series. If you want to learn more about building your business with blogs, we’ll cover it for $195.00.

Thanks again for attending. I met many of you and appreciate you being there.

Steve Broback, Lynann Bradbury, Laurie Mayers, Rick Murray

Lynann Bradbury

• What happens when the PR and blogging worlds collide?
• Think strategic before tactical
• Think about different ways you can reach out to the blogging community and what you can offer them.
• Use the Weblogging Index to find out where you fit and what you should consider.
• Prioritize bloggers and make connections with and for them
• Ask for referrals to other bloggers

Rick Murray

• PR is about messaging, control of the messaging has been lost
• 35,000 PR people worldwide, 5 billion dollar industry
• Old PR is stunts, attention getting
• Maybe 100 people inside Endleman that understand and are working with bloggers in a positive way
• Wants to get colleagues and clients into the pro-blog camp as soon as possible
• Blogger posted password for beta site of Microsoft Student 2006, torpedoed traditional PR plan
• Endleman CEO is a blogger,
• Get to know the new people,
• Don’t pitch, participate. He is trying to kill the word “pitch”.
• Lose the messaging, gain the tone and language of the blogger you want to get to know
• Add value to the conversation, don’t just talk about your own stuff

Laurie Mayers

• Careful corporate messaging not dead: SEC regulations on “material disclosures” needing to be announced simultaneously
• Press release isn’t dead because it meets SEC requirements, traditional media still used to them, can be localized for local markets
• That being said, corporate messaging is involving. GM announced management changes on their blog.
• Businesses will make their own rules about comments, post length, ghost writers, etc
• PR needs to learn better, faster writing

• You cannot control the message on the web, but you can choose to participate and vector it
• You cannot appear authentic, you either are or you’re not

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit, blogging, blogs, pr, publicrelations

After the success of our San Francisco pre-conference seminar, several of our Summit speakers will be hosting a one-day seminar on how to get your business up and running in the blogosphere.

Get the details here.

Molly Holzschlag and Darren Barefoot

• Edit your materials before you post, but don’t let your own editing censor your voice
• Blogs lend themselves to quick writing and shorter posts
• Resisting the temptation to push “Publish” too soon can be helpful
• Corrections are best handled with strikethrough text on the error. “Update:” at the end of the post works well too
• Editing too many times can irritate people because subscribers to your web feed see it as a new post each time you update
• Don’t name people on your blog unless they are already in the public space
• Don’t excerpt email discussions unless you have the person’s approval
• Understand the blogging environment by reading for a while before you write
• Companies don’t blog - people blog. Passionate ones make the best bloggers.
• Blogging is about telling a story, and extending that story into a conversation
• Having a voice and a personality is critical. Boring or bored people aren’t engaging.
• The last people in the organization you want to run the blog is the PR or marketing department. They have been trained to think and speak in a certain way that doesn’t work in a blogging environment.
• PR and marketing people can be great bloggers if the get on the Cluetrain
• The amount of time spent blogging is dependent on how fast of a writer you are and the size of the posts
• Controversial posts bring traffic, inbound links
• If you’re not a controversial person or in such an environment, this may not be the right approach for you
• Blogging is an act of courage, because you are putting things out in the public that never were before
• Blogs are changing the corporate culture of Microsoft, Adobe
• Define the audience, offer public feedback mechanisms and listen to them
• If you don’t give customers a place to talk about your products, they will make their own
• Discuss your competition frankly and honestly. You become a source for information on them.
• Cite other blogs, you can’t do this enough
• Bottom line: be transparent, be authentic, tell your story

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit, blogging, blogs

One of readers sent this in earlier . . .

comments: There was an explosion in an electrical vault at the intersection of Post and Kearny that may affect attendees’ ability to travel around the local area. The cause of the explosion has not yet been determined. PG&E, the FBI, and ATF are on the scene. The Ralph Lauren store at 90 Post Street was on fire, and portions of Sutter, Montgomery, Kearny, and Post streets have been closed while investigators proceed through the area.

Reports

• SFGate
• SFist

Hey, hey! I didn’t even know wordpress.com was being announced. Matt dropped it during his demo. It’s a hosted service powered by Wordpress.