August 2005

One of our attendees asked me last night about business to business blogs, specifically, vendors communciating directly to their business clients. I couldn’t think of any specific blogs, but I’m sure there is. Anyone have some links, examples?

More live posting at the Blog Business Summit from Business Blog Consulting and Qumana.

KGO television’s, Local ABC 7, cameras were here today and interviewed Steve Broback and Paul Rosenfeld. The story will run tonight between 6 and 7:00 pm.

Janet Johnson and Robert Scoble

• Marqui paid bloggers to talk about the company
• Received a lot of bad press, was called lots of nasty names
• Positive or negative feedback aside, it did raise the level of brand awareness
• Develop a thick skin, be absolutely honest, have a point of view, do your research, engage detractors, drive to closure on topics
• Pitching bloggers: build a relationship by sending information that’s not about your company, then pitch the blogger
• Some bloggers don’t want anything from PR people
• Never act like you’re entitled to a link
• Marqui now focuses more on blogging themselves instead of paying bloggers
• Steve Rubel gets his companies stories into the blog world by being a resource for information first, and inserting messages from the companies every 10 or 20 posts
• Microsoft product teams are changing the way they develop products based on the feedback they get from customers on the blogs they run
• Simply Hired used the blog as a way to make fun of the error messages they were sure to give users as they went into a beta product launch
• Silence at a problem causes people to think that the company has something to hide
• Scoble had a journalist libel him, he responded and made himself available to bloggers that linked to the story, ended up turning the tide against the journalist
• People are not fanatics, they are smart about what they read
• Bloggers are the kind of people who help shift public opinion
• Podcasting is powerful because the human voice feels more real
• The legitimacy gained by linking to someone that gets your story wrong is short term, credibility is long term
• Linking to people that disagree with you also shows credibility
• Businesses can also use their blogs to give the people that use their products advice on best use cases or tutorials the product and other parts of their jobs
• Great amplification effect for little time and money invested
• Blog search traffic is growing at about the same rate as blog writing - doubling every 5 months
• When you’re in a crisis - overcommunicate

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

John Cass, David Wharton and Buzz Bruggerman

David Wharton

• Works at Nintendo, develops online communities
• Sent copies of new game to target gamers
• Created a private online community for them
• Members posting pictures of their real dogs, Nintendogs, sharing stories and tips
• Metroid Prime 2 Echoes, big Christmas release and nobody was talking about it
• Developers didn’t want to say or share anything about the game
• Created character Samantha Manus and her blog at channel51.org
• Created site to talk about how women were better suited to space flight
• Created exclusive community to engage serious gamers, get real feedback, allow profanity
• These people are incredibly marketing sensitive, need to be engaged for advice

John Cass

• The web is being used by customers to compare products and companies
• Consumers using blogs to publish their own websites
• Customers have the opportunity to create lots of buzz marketing
• Search is where research begins. 64% use search engine, 19% use the manufacturer of the products site
• Still in the early stages of customers using blogs
• People are looking for the best products and ideas, not necessarily yours
• Case studies of Indium, Intuit, Macromedia, all benefitted from blogs
• Targeting influencers: target the right keywords, find your blogging customers, use blog search engines to find bloggers covering your products, comment on the other blog
• The goal is NOT to spam, but to have a conversation

Buzz Bruggerman

• Blogging world has leveled the online marketing playing field
• Steven Levy in Newsweek “Blogs and forums are the new crystal ball”
• Got over 400 requests from 28 countries from 1 podcast interview, he offered free copies of ActiveWords to anyone that had listened through to the 1 hour mark they were at
• Searching for product name + problem in any search engine will customers everything wrong with your product
• You better build a good product and be responsive or you won’t last in today’s market
• One determined detractor has more power than 100 happy customers. That number is going to grow.
• Boeing invited bloggers on to the Conenexion flight that had wifi during the flight
• Believing that mistakes will blow over and go unnoticed is wishful thinking
• Little companies can’t afford bad press, Buzz constantly watches mentions of himself, the company and the products, offers personal discussion with any dissatisfied/confused customer
• Getting bloggers to deliver the right message involves listening before approaching, asking them how they would make it better
• The magic is coming up with the product idea, building the relationship with real people

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit, blogging, blogs

Buzz Bruggerman and DL Byron

Buzz

• Markets are conversations, products are conversations
• Buzz had a little company, great product and no money to advertise
• Where ActiveWords downloads come from: David Allen, Robert Scoble, 43 Folders, Ernie the Attorney, Slacker Manager, Make Magazine - overall half of downloads come from blogs
• Don’t need to post all the time, just have to have something interesting to say
• Show there is a real person about the product
• Consumer product blogs suck as Treonauts are better written, provide more useful information than company marketing materials
• Buzz reads journalists that cover subjects related to his product to find out what blogs they read and get on those blogs
• ActiveWords has spent $600 on marketing and they have great brand recognition
• Comments allow Buzz to build a better product
• People inside large organizations reading blogs talking about ActiveWords
• If you want to know how to market your product with blogs, learn how to watch what others are doing?
• Found who he wants to publish his book about the “ActiveWords Odyssey” by reading The Average Joe: A Book Publisher Blog

DL Byron

• Clip n Seal blog has sold over 50k units, 1.5 million pageviews
• Great Google results for keywords like “bag clip seal“, this is because they are blogging
• New markets opened up: Antartica, Ireland, Caribbean, Space (NASA)
• Talked to bloggers, more and more people talked about and linked to Clip n Seal
• Amazon.com picked up the product on their site
• With a concerted campaign blogs can bring in real sales results
• The biggest benefit is search results, can’t be outspent on incoming links to create high search results
• Product demos in video, flash, etc can become memes that get spread around

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit, blogging, marketing

Robert Scoble and Dave Taylor

• Being the first to link to something is powerful, you can become “the source” for that information
• Tell friends if you find something first
• #joiito chatroom is a great place to seed stuff - full of A-list tech bloggers
• If you read a blogger, know what they’re interested about and write something that might be of interest to them - email them.
• Never act entitled to a link, because you’re not
• Long tail: millions of markets of dozens are just as important as the the head of A-List anything
• Staying on topic helps readers and other bloggers find you and make sense of what themes are your beat
• Recommended Wordtracker for picking keywords
• Being on the top of the first page for keyword results on Google is powerful (Google heatmap)
• Correct semantic markup helps for SEO, most blog tools output such code by default
• Good titles for posts helps you be searchable and findable
• Dave uses Google News to find fodder for his blog
• Design may make me subscribe in the first place, but once the user is getting the info via RSS it doesn’t matter anymore
• [pointless side conversation about partial vs. full RSS feeds. I'm with Scoble, go full feed or I lose interest]
• Attending geek dinners and other social events, meeting other bloggers and telling them what you do is a good way to get links from them
• I’d also add that submitting how-to kinds of posts to places like Lifehacker and posts about business to the Carnival of the Capitalists can be good traffic builders.

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit, blogging, blogs

If you can’t make it to the conference and want to keep up with what’s going on at the Blog Business Summit, here are some resources:

• BBS attendees can add their blogs, rss feeds and such at the BBS05 wiki.
• Technorati has a blogbusinesssummit tag and a bbs05 tag where they will be listing posts where people use the ‘blogbusinesssummit’ tag and ping them. (hint, hint attendees).
• del.icio.us has a blogbusinesssummit tag and a bbs05 tag where people will likely be posting links to resources related to the panels, etc.
• Flickr has a blogbusinesssummit tag and a bbs05 tag where you can see photos in near real-time.

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit

While walking to Office Depot to get some supplies, I found a small blue address book laying in a gutter. I’ve been periodically flipping through it. It tells a story, in brief passages, addresses, address changes, names and notes, including this one

Remember I worked at Nordstroms on call. In Hawaii.

for pecan pies:

www.mrssullivans.com

Let us know if you find any interesting objects. San Francisco is a fascinating town.

Blog notes from Dave Taylor’s 101 seminar

• Extensive notes
• Yeah, PR is dead for sure
• Blogtronix Launches
• Dave doesn’t get it

Ping us on your posts with this trackback. Trackbacks are open during the event. To read what others are posting, see

• PubSub
• Bloglines Citations
• Link Cosmos
• Technorati tag:BBS05
• Technorati tag:blogbusinesssummit
• On Flickr

Event Blogging will blog the sessions live tomorrow and Friday.

It’s standing room only in Dave Taylor’s Blogging 101 sessions. There’s a great turnout and really positive vibe. Tomorrow and Friday it’s all day sessions. Also remember there’s a geek meet tonight and Microsoft is sponsoring the reception tomorrow night from 5:30 to 7:00 pm.

If you just heard about the event, and want to come, no worries. You can still register for the sessions.

According to Blogger Product Manager Jason Shellen, there is a new “Blogger for Word” toolbar that allows you to post to your Blogger site directly from within Word. Shellen says:

“Use Blogger for Word as a way to back up your document drafts with the ‘Save as Draft’ button or work on posts while you are offline and post them later.”

Maybe Biz will demo this at the Summit…

… according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

ZDNet reports that:

“The top 50 blogging and blog-related sites grew 31% to 29.3 mln unique visitors during July 2005 as compared to the beginning of this year, comprising nearly 20% of active Internet users.”

Article and detailed chart here.

During this week, the next, and maybe a few more, Jeremy Wagstaff will guest post for the Blog Business Summit. Jeremy and I have been instant messaging for over a year about business blogging and I suggested that he add his voice to our “practical blogging” topics.

Jeremy is a technology columnist with the Asian and online Wall Street Journals, who doubles as a would-be author (non-fiction, a work in progress on Indonesia).

His Loose Wire column has run in Dow Jones publications for the past five years: Online at WSJ.com, in Asia in The Asian Wall Street Journal’s Friday section Personal Journal. It appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review until the magazine shifted to a monthly in October 2004.

Another topic I’ll discuss in all of my sessions with my cospeakers is Google love. Finishing the last chapter of their blog book, Naked Conversations, Shel Israel writes about how we’ve entered, “the Conversational Era.” In a passage, he quotes me

“You blog, other blogs link to your blog, you link back, and Google loves that”

I’m saying how simple it all is, just like Steve noted in his post about SEO over the weekend. For bloggers, we just blog, write passionately, and the Google love comes. An example, search for “localized blogging,” a topic I posted on a few weeks ago. As of this morning, it’s the number one hit.

In an interview with the BBC, Sir Tim Berners-Lee talks about how blogging is closer to his original idea for the web and says, “What happened with blogs and with wikis, these editable web spaces, was that they became much more simple.” He continues with, “When you write a blog, you don’t write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I’m very, very happy to see that now it’s gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium.”

In my design session, I’m going to talk about blogs as a creative medium, how design does matter, and why it’s effective. Where some bloggers may see blogs as a conversation, another vehicle for ads or marketing, more importantly blogs are for creativity. The creativity is being expressed with personal, business, and corporate blogs.

Here’s a tidbit to show the boss who is reluctant to start blogging, and is something I’ll be talking more about at next weeks summit.

Just ran across genuineblog, a site authored by Jim Turner (who is coming to the SF Summit) It’s a perfect example of how a two year head start, and ownership of a killer domain name can’t compete with a blog.

If you type the word “genuine” into Google, genuineblog holds the top two positions. Way down the list is a (very) static commercial site (a consulting firm) that owns “genuine.com”. Note that genuine.com also went live about two years before genuineblog.

Seems to me that frequent updating, interesting content, and a syndicated feed may be a better investment than an impressive domain name.

Want more proof? Check out how the traffic to “photography.com” (how much did that domain name cost??) compares to “photographyblog.com”.

Forget SEO people, just start blogging…

I’ve noticed some commenters aren’t putting their websites in the form or are using fake sites or strings and also using fake emails. What happens is that triggers the spam filter and your comment is denied and we don’t know you’ve been denied unless you tell us.

We don’t use your emails for anything other then to authenticate you as not being a penis spammer (and that doesn’t work so well, but it’s all we got).

We don’t use your URLs for anything other than to link to you from your comment. If you don’t have a website that use the # sign.

We’re nice people, running a blog and a conference, don’t worry.