November 2005

In the article Book Publishers Build Buzz Early, Hollywood Style (subscription required), WSJ Reporter Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg reports that the new book “The Number” by Lee Eisenberg is garnering pre-release buzz that could send “potential buyers to bookstores in droves”.

Viacom Inc.’s Free Press imprint is releasing the retirement guide on Jan 3, but has spent several months building interest by sending out manuscripts to reviewers and other “influential people” including 300 bloggers who focus on financial issues.

Naturally, the author has set up his own book site with a blog. Notice below how google ranks the blog as more relevant than any of the other 39 pages on the site (including the home page).

AudioBlog is Turning Japanese (iTunes). They recently secured the funding to take their critically acclaimed service into Japan’s tech-savvy, ultra-mobile society by partnering with TransCosmos, the investment arm of TCI Japan and one of Japan’s biggest streaming media/infrastructure providers.

Today, a month ahead of schedule, they launched Castella.

“The United States is a PC-based society, while Japan is much more mobile-phone oriented. They really fly on those phones over there,” said Rice, “We knew that being able to podcast instantly from anywhere would translate well.”

And with many Japanese phones capable of receiving podcasts and even videocasts, the phone-to-phone workflow means that computers are suddenly not a requirement to be up and running in the blogosphere.

As my Japanese is limited to a few choice phrases about the sexiness of Ichiro, I consulted AudioBlog’s English site to figure out how this all works. “On the go with a video-enabled cell phone?” their marketing copy asks. Not a problem, “you can record and email the video directly from your phone.”

So what’s to stop would-be pirates from simply using a cell phone to make bootleg recordings at a concert and podcasting right from the nosebleed section? Or videotaping Angelina Jolie’s sexy love scene with Brad Pitt from the first showing of Mr. and Mrs. Smith and podcasting it for all the world to see free of charge?

According to Eric, nothing but quality. “You know it’s funny,” he says. “You hear a lot of people criticizing the video iPod because the picture quality isn’t as good as a DVD when they hook it up to their state of the art plasma television. People want quality, and they’re not going to get it off a mobile phone. Maybe it will be a problem ten years from now, but at this point it’s a nonissue.”

But with pirates, any new technology is going to be exploited. And eventually they’re going to get very good at it. It’s possible that in the future, companies like Castella and AudioBlog will carefully filter what gets posted, or face the media industry wrath that has been leveled at such file sharing protocols as Napster and BitTorrent.

US Border Guards have apparently started using Google as one of their numerous tools for deciding whether to admit a person to the US. According to E-week, guards at the border crossing south of Toronto recently turned away Hossein Derakhshan - a Canadian citizen of Iranian origin - after they read about his recent trip to Iran and a sarcastic joke about the CIA and illegal money laundering on his blog.

Derakhshan was on his way to New York to speak at ConvergeSouth.

Byron forwarded me an e-mail today from Paul Chaney. Paul is one of our speakers and he wanted to let us know about a client of his. Patti Thompson is the owner of Way-fil Jewelry in Tupelo, Mississippi. She is also a small business blogger. Her blog was the first that Paul ever worked on.

Just a few days before the start of the holiday shopping season, Patti’s jewelry store was destroyed in an electrical fire. Thankfully, nobody was hurt - but losing her store right before the most critical season for jewelers was a huge blow. She’s managed to set up a temporary shop and she’s still doing business on eBay. But there are still some obvious issues with lost holiday revenue, so Paul asked each of his e-mail recipients to link to Patti’s blog. The hope is that the web attention will help her do better this holiday season despite having lost her storefront.

After I finished reading Patti’s blog and being appropriately astounded at her moxie and positive attitude, I started wondering about the monetary value of linking. Can a link be a charitable donation?

After all, the link is the single most powerful feature of the Internet. A simple html tag can change a word into a gateway. This is incredibly valuable - even critical to the success of a blog. But how do you assign a discreet monetary value to a link?

Boris Galitsky and Mark Levine published a paper trying to answer that question with a Web simulation that treated links as investments that could be bought and sold. In the end, their simulation operated like a Texas Hold’Em tournament, with one player getting all the links and power in the end. That’s an unlikely outcome on the Internet. So the Galisky and Levine model is useful, but only from a theoretical perspective.

On the real Web, Google’s PageRank is a good indicator of a link’s value. As Jill Walker explains in her paper on the topic:

Google indexes links between web sites and interprets a link from A to B as an endorsement of B by A. Links can have different values. If A has a lot of links to it, and C has very few, then a link from A to B is worth more than a link from C to B. The value determined in this way is called a page’s PageRank and determines its placement in search results. The PageRank is used in addition to conventional text indexing to generate highly accurate search results. Links can be analysed more accurately and usefully than traffic or pageviews, and have become both measure of success and dispensers of rank…[So] when I link to B, I give B a link. That link translates to a precise (though undisclosed) value in Google’s PageRank.

If PageRank were the only consideration, assigning a value to a link would be as easy as asking, “what is the bump in PageRank worth to this particular site?” But there are other, more unpredictable human factors at work. Why do people click on some links when they surf and not others? Does mood and personality effect what links people find interesting? Does a blogger’s relative enthusiasm or scorn encourage readers to go down the proverbial rabbit hole?

These are psychological questions, and they’re going to have to be answered if business bloggers want to understand exactly what they’re doing when they link to a client or a competitor. It’s probably not the most pressing consideration - but it is going to be important in quantifying the impact of the blogosphere.

But while we’re figuring it out, we encourage you to visit Patti’s blog and look through her eBay inventory. You might just find the perfect Christmas gift for someone you love.

The buzz over Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson’s new flick, King Kong has reached proportions equal in size to the gargantuan gorilla himself. This is due in no small part to Jackson’s production diary, on which he periodically leaks juicy details about the movie, a potential sequel, and other tabloid-worthy tidbits.

On this evening’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Adrian Brody talked about how the blog gives Jackson control over the direction the buzz takes. We all know that generating buzz around a big blockbuster film is nothing new, but using a blog to control the flow and keep it consistent with the director’s vision is a hot idea. Peter Jackson, you’ve earned our kudos!

On top of being hardworking and dedicated, we at the Blog Business Summit are also fanatical about blogging. Why? Because we’re bloggers ourselves. The Blog Business Summit has an ever-growing network of blogs, from the Boeing-sponsored inflightHQ to Byron’s widely read and outrageously cute Pug Blog. Here’s a roundup of what went down in our own mini-blogosphere this week:

inFlightHQ:

• The hunt for the perfect seat continues with a roundup of the best tips and tricks for the least sardine-like seats left in coach.
• My seven rules for staying healthy on a business trip.
• European airlines duking it out over business class travelers
• Pricegrabber now lets you check cancelation rates for various routes when deciding on an itinerary for your flight.
• Google airfare searches
• France’s philanthropic airfare tax
• Enforced check-in times.

TexturaDesign:

• Byron’s daughter sends her first e-mail.
• Byron spots a nuclear sub.
• Lamentations and adulations of the strange things floating around the blogosphere.
• Elation at our New York Times mention.
• How to give a Clip-n-Seal as a gift.
• Byron’s Christmas tree smells like pee.

PugBlog:

• Cappy’s Dinner PugCast
• 50 ways to leave your lover becomes 50 ways to make the pug happy
• Big Dog Dreams

If you like what we’ve done for Boeing with inFlightHQ, and think a sponsored blog may be right for your business, please contact us to discuss your needs.

Since Louise Story’s November 26th New York Times article that mentioned the Blog Business Summit, traffic on our site has spiked tremendously. We had thousands of hits on Sunday alone we’ve been getting major traffic ever since. Byron has had to increase our bandwidth limit. It’s been a bracing experience, and it’s a perfect illustration of why blogs have major advantages over static websites and press releases.

It’s likely that Ms. Story found our site through a Google search of “Business Blogging” or a similar search term. And since we’ve got interesting things to say, the blogosphere tends to link to us, which increases our Google page rank. That makes us more noticeable when a reporter like Louise Story starts working on an article about business blogging.

But page rank alone won’t get a reporter to stay at your site and read about you if she doesn’t like what she sees. You’ve got to have interesting content. Which is what separates blogs from traditional search engine optimization. There are no little tricks, you’ve simply got to earn your page rank through great posting, which attracts inbound links from other serious bloggers and ultimately gets you mentioned by the Times.

And once a major newspaper has mentioned you, the hit counters start dinging. It’s easy to see how you can kill two birds with one stone by using a blog. The same medium performs two very important functions as a communications tool. We’re not saying that blogs will replace traditional public relations efforts and well-designed websites altogether, but they will get you some additional media coverage. We didn’t have to do a thing beyond writing interesting posts to be mentioned in the Times. And in the immortal words of Bart Simpson, “that’s some GOOD SQUISHY!”

Stay tuned to The Blog Business Summit for information about our next event by subscribing to our RSS Feed. For information about what an RSS feed is an how to subscribe, click here.

In the article As Corporate Ad Money Flows Their Way, Bloggers Risk Their Rebel Reputation , New York Times Reporter Louise Story cites several recent business blog success stories.

According to Charlene Li at Forrester Research, businesses will spend $50 million to $100 million this year on blog advertising and marketing. FWIW, our own site inflighthq.com which is sponsored by Conexxion by Boeing fits into this profile.

Once again it’s stressed that corporate America is “courting blog writers with public relations efforts and inviting writers to come blog on one of their corporate sites.”

Corporations may be courting bloggers, but I would argue that PR firms are still way behind the curve as far as effectively working with bloggers is concerned. Truth be told, I would say most PR firms are largely crossing their fingers and praying the whole blog thing just goes away.

This is a good article for those who closely follow the blog business space. Refreshingly, Ms. Story brings us a piece that introduces us to a few new sources and companies. Without naming names, we escape hearing pithy quotes from all the “usual suspects” of blog punditry. A few of the tired old standard case studies and experts (like us) are dredged up or mentioned, but thankfully, there is more new here than old. One of the better mainstream press pieces coving our space.

Articles in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal today outline how Hasbro and Budget Rent a Car are moving into non-traditional media like blogs to deliver their messages.

Considering (as we reported last week) ad space in the major portals has become extremely expensive and to some degree unavailable, leveraging the less expensive yet highly influential audience that bloggers serve seems like a smart plan to me.

Budget’s agency Impax Marketing Group and consultant BL Ochman executed on a campaign that featured a scavenger hunt which was promoted largely through blog ads.

Scott Deaver, executive VP for marketing at Cendant (which oversees Budget and Avis) said “I can’t outspend Hertz, but I can outsmart them.” He continued “We’ll certainly be back in this space.”

What is most valuable about nontraditional media like blogs, Deaver said, is their ability to “actively engage the consumer,” compared with what he called passive TV spots and other traditional choices.

Bloggy gifts from Amazon.com include Clip-n-Seal, a blog success story and a great gift of freshness. I’m so going to blog this and Born to blog bumper stickers could be plastered all over a bloggers laptop and this lovely Blogger charm would surely warm even the snarkiest blogger’s heart.

Books from our Speakers and Founders are available as well

• Naked Conversations
• The Weblog Handbook
• We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture
• Zen of CSS
• Designing With Web Standards
• The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Growing Your Business with Google

and more design books

• Don’t Make Me Think!
• More Eric Meyer on CSS
• Defensive Design for the Web
• The Brand Gap

Our book won’t be available ’till the spring, so hold that gift for Valentine’s day.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Ever called your credit card company or a tech support line and felt like murdering someone by the time you got through to a live human being? Well not anymore, NPR reports that Web entrepreneur Paul English has posted an IVR (Interactive Voice Recognition) cheat sheet on his blog that tells you how to get to a real person on the phone in an average of 56 seconds.

The wondrous things you can find in the blogosphere!

Referring to the [CNN interview with Mena Trott](http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/08/10/mena.trott/), a [blogger](http://www.blogebrity.com/) said to me, “heh, except that cnn article asks the usual dull questions.” Maybe dull to the blogosphere, but not to the millions of people that are just getting blogging. When asked, “What do you think the Internet’s biggest impact has been?,” [Mena](http://flickr.com/photos/tags/menatrott/interesting/) said, ” that ability to communicate with anybody . . .”

And that ability to blog about anything with anybody give us blogs about business, hobbies, pets, and everything else. Recent examples include

* [Purls and Pugs](http://aswanson.typepad.com/knit/) — a knitting and pet blog all in one (add something about web 2.0 and that’d be over the top!)
* [Greener Building](http://www.greenerbuilding.org/) — a blog for better buildings
* [43People](http://danmccomb.43people.com/) — I’m one of the 43 people Dan has/will meet.

It’s also much of what we’re writing about in our [book](/book/), explaining blogging to a retiring executive, Betty in accounting, and a small business owner.

I was going through some site stats today with Byron when we came across something interesting: the number one post drawing traffic to our site is Byron’s post from a week ago - Porno for iPods.

I was telling Byron how much he rocks with the Google-friendly subject headers. But he interrupted me, explaining that he doesn’t construct them to any search engine optimization specs. Byron just BLOGS. And it’s not that Byron is a brilliant genius - although I think he is - it’s that he’s writing about what he loves. Which is, in this case, porn for iPods.

But I digress…

My writing professor in college used to say that we are at our best when we write the things we’ve been thinking about. You don’t necessarily have to write what you know. You just have to write what interests you.

That’s what really makes blogging such a big deal - it’s gives organizations an opportunity to show how authentically passionate they are about their work.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Cliff Freeman & Partners, a well-regarded but sometimes troubled creative advertising and marketing shop in New York has hired a new CEO. Of the chosen one, Jeff McClelland, the Times writes:

[His] experience in what is known as integrated marketing - that is, campaigns that include nontraditional elements as well as conventional outlets like TV and print - is of particular value as marketers strive to broaden their media selections beyond the usual choices.

My background has always been integrated accounts, but we called it ’survival,’ ” Mr. McClelland said in an interview last week, joined by Mr. Freeman.

“Now for an agency, integrated marketing is the price of entry to compete for clients,” Mr. McClelland said. “You can’t talk to them without the goods.”

Hmm….”nontraditional elements,” that sounds an awful lot like blogging to me. Since public relations has collectively dropped the ball on our little Web phenomenon - with a few notable exceptions - it’s entirely possible that blogging could belong to integrated marketing instead. It seems like the flexible spirit and big picture thinking of integrated marketing could be more in line with the sometimes unpredictable spirit of the blogosphere.

But Shel Israel disagrees. He says that:

Integrated marketing solutions are an attempt to take a series of messages and push them out to a company’s constituency. They are devised and polished by committees, then the work is divvied up by ad and PR vendors as well as internal folk. The key to it is to push the message out, and this is supposed to improve brand awareness.

Blogs are an example of from one-to-many communications. They fail when they push. They are downright assaulted by a great number of blogosphere denizens when they appear crammed with the marketing jargon of yore. Hugh McLeod finds such blogs and gives them Lame Awards, which is as damaging as a bad review of a Broadway play in the New York Times.

Obviously I agree that pushy, contrived blogs that are laden down with boring ol’ marketing content won’t survive in the blogosphere. That said, I think Israel overlooks the fact that in order to use the blogging technology, companies have to accept it first. I predict that the first sector of communications that will broadly accept blogging will be the integrated marketing teams. They’re just nontraditional enough to get it. Some of them will make the mistakes Israel prophecizes, but the good ones will quickly grok the content issues and learn to speak in a more authentic voice.

…when they say that publishers rather than ordinary users ought to be given the new power of the tag. Being a blogger, I’m all about power to the people - I’m just not in favor of power to the spammers.

Amazon may have to learn this one from experience.

We at the Blog Business Summit think that the much-discussed Forbes article “Attack of the Blogs” was rather over the top. But that doesn’t mean we don’t know the truth - the blogosphere has sharp teeth. Bloggers are an opinionated lot and we tend to pounce when our unique culture or sensibilities are offended.

Take the case of GourmetStation, which was recently covered by Inc.com. The online retailer of high-end food and wine products was besieged by the blogosphere last year after owner Donna Lynes-Miller decided to start a business blog written in the voice of GourmetStation’s fictional mascot, T. Alexander.

It’s my personal belief that using the voice of Alexander - a proverbial “hog from Epicurus’ herd,” whose knowledge of fine food and wine knows no bounds - was a clever move. I think he’s adorable. But the blogosphere as a whole disagrees with me. GourmetStation was criticized roundly for being inauthentic by bloggers from BlogThenticity to Gapingvoid.

GourmetStation’s response was straight out of Marqui’s rules for good marketing in the blogosphere. Miller and her marketing consultant, Toby Bloomberg engaged their detractors. They posted comments on the blogs of even their fiercest detractors, telling their side of the story in a calm, measured way. While the blogosphere didn’t ever fully come around to the idea of T. Alexander as a blogger, they did go off in search of greener pastures.

That’s part of the reason that every business blogger needs a consultant. Because traditional business and communications methodologies don’t always translate to the blogosphere. In this vast, mostly uncharted wilderness - you need a guide.

I was checking CNN for interviews with Ted Koppel, [who signs off tonight](http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/TV/11/21/apontv.ted.koppel.ap/index.html), and saw this [interview with Mena Trott](http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/08/10/mena.trott/). Mena talks about how blogs “serve pundits and knitters alike” and the biggest impact of blogging is that anybody can really, “communicate online.”

I [met Mena](http://blogbusinesssummit.com/2005/08/mena_posts_on_m.htm) at the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco earlier this year. What a nice surpirse to see her on CNN — well deserved and props to her.

Today’s Wall Street Journal article The Jig Is Up . . . So What’s Next? Is designed to introduce the concept of Web 2.0 to the business community. It reinforces much of what we’ve been saying for years, that there are some fundamental architectural changes that have come to the Web, and business had better start paying attention. The shape of a second-generation Internet is emerging says writer Don Tapscott — and blogs are a key part of it.

Tapscott writes that some “are now treating the latest buzz as mere hype” and I have seen this first hand. Personal experience has shown me that many (most?) businesses who could and should be blogging have key players who are fearful, apprehensive and are hoping the whole blog thing will just go away. As Tapscott says about the current Web naysayers “They’re making a profound mistake”.

According to the piece, collaboration is at the center of this shift to a more powerful Web: “From multi-user games, blogs and photo-sharing sites to new designs for innovating and manufacturing, people and firms are using the emerging capabilities of the Web to collaborate in new ways, and new businesses are springing up to help them.”

The enabling technologies are:
* Internet-connected mobile devices
* The proliferation of broadband connections
* The rise of collaborative software
* Increasing penetration of Internet-connected computer power into everyday objects

The result is:
* Users are no longer “manacled” to PCs.
* New combinations of software are being created by small nimble companies.
* It’s inevitable that software as a service will replace the shrink wrapped monolithic software model.

From my blog-centric view, it’s clear to me that inexpensive database-driven sites that broadcast RSS feeds will almost completely replace HTML web pages in the next few years, and high-end content management systems are threatened as well. Most CEOs and IT managers we’ve talked to are not eager to hear that their Web sites will soon be dead…

The next few years will certainly be interesting.

Posting about the [changes in journalism](http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2005/11/17/41-getting-sjsus-journalism-program-to-the-new-world/), Scoble wrote that Eric, “writes, does podcasts, and does video blogs. That’s the prototype of the new journalist.” And Eric does it all with unfettered passion, as he said it’s [real-time revolutionism](http://blog.ericrice.com/blog/_archives/2005/11/12/1382347.html).

Any doubt about how a revolt works in the blogosphere, check [Sony and the CD controversy](http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/248470_sonyfolo16.html?source=rss), including how the fix they offered made it worse!

Social network startup, Judy’s Book, raised [another 8 million](http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/100554.asp) and is building their business on “real-life, first-person content.” Judy’s Book is a word-of-mouth marketing service, where network members share their tips, asks for referrals, discuss businesses, and advertisings sponsor listings. I [found Judy's Book earlier in the year](http://blogbusinesssummit.com/2005/09/social_networks.htm) when looking for a dentist.

I understand the Judy’s Book business model, but wonder if [Craigslist](http://seattle.craigslist.org/) is more attractive. Users get the same thing, without ads and no log in. I put up with junk postings on Craigslist to not see the ads and didn’t sign into Judy’s Book because I didn’t want to come up with a username/pass, remember it, give them my demographics, and more. Same thing when a blogger [posts about a business](http://www.zagula.com/food_and_wine/2005/07/02/blue_ginger_korean_grill.html) and links to a Judy’s Book review that I have to sign in to view.

That’s not to say millions of people aren’t joing social networks, they’re certainly signing up for [Facebook](http://www.facebook.com/) and [Myspace](http://www.myspace.com/).

For more on Judy’s Book, see posts from the Ignition Partner’s Blogs

* [Judy's Book in the NY Times](http://www.theludwigs.com/2005/08/judys_book_in_the_ny_times.html)
* [Tip Monkies on Judy](http://www.theludwigs.com/2005/10/nice_mention_of_judysbook.html)
* [Google Maps and Judy's Book](http://www.tongfamily.com/internet/2005/09/02/a9_maps.html)