April 2006

Who should IM me this evening but Six Apart’s own Anil Dash (I feel so cool, Anil IM’s me on a Saturday night) to tell me that Southwest has started a blog. “Cool!” I thought.

After having looked over Southwest’s blog, I am considerably less enthused. The overwhelming feeling I get from this blog is that Southwest is blogging because they understand that it’s important, but they really don’t know what they’re supposed to be talking about. It looks like the blogosphere in general agrees with me.

But like Anil and I are always saying, there’s room for companies to get into the blogosphere, screw it up a little, and still have an overwhelmingly positive experience out here. I remember when Starwood Hotels first started The Lobby for travelers. It was great that they got out the door, but it wasn’t there yet.

Since its debut, The Lobby has retooled somewhat - and now I find myself typing, “Via The Lobby” at least a few times a month over at inFlightHQ our sponsored business travel blog for Connexion by Boeing.

So while the cute-if-cheesily-entitled Nuts About Southwest isn’t at 100% yet, we here at the BBS completely applaud their efforts. We know they’ll get that right mix of snark and sincerity eventually, and we look forward to the evolution of the blog.

Gutsy move, Southwest!

One of the things we talk about in our book is blogs that don’t look like blogs - which is to say, blogs that don’t follow the traditional three column (or two column) bloggy looking layout.

Rising from Ruin is a good example of a blog that doesn’t look like a blog.

Another amazing example is Byron’s Clip-N-Seal blog which is a fairly recent development. This beautiful site doesn’t look like what you picture when you picture a blog, but it was built with Movable Type and lots of brilliant design work.

So when you’re thinking about building a business blog, the sky is really the limit. Blogs can look, feel and behave in ways that aren’t necessarily “bloggy” while retaining all the power that makes them “Websites on steroids.”

American businesses that deliver content on the Web all have one very big question mark in common: China. The Chinese government is a big proponent of censorship, in the news and increasingly on the Web. Now it appears that Technorati has run afoul of the state-of-the-art censorship system known as the Great Firewall.

The furor over China has been going on for a while, but it really hit a boiling point in January of this year when Microsoft shut down the MSN Spaces account of a dissident blogger at the behest of the Chinese government. During a particularly contentious House Subcommittee meeting on the issue, California Represenative Tom Lantos told executives from Google, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Yahoo!, “I do not understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night.”

Good times.

So what does all this mean for Technorati? In a nutshell, it means that they’re going to have to do the same thing Google did if they want to become available to the Chinese population again: censor themselves. Either that or as Tom Raftery so aptly put it, all the search engines are going to need to band together to come up with a unified China policy and then stick to it.

I recently got an e-mail from a very nice chap by the name of Jim Kukral responding to my call for interesting blog stories. Jim told me all about how he got Mark Cuban to hate him, which is really the story of how easy it is to get the attention of the mainstream media by combining blogs with the power of PR Web - which is, incidentally, the official newswire of the Blog Business Summit.

I won’t rehash the whole story, but in a nutshell, Jim blogged about how much he would love for Mark Cuban - owner of the Dallas Mavericks and blogger extraordinaire - to call him. He then sent out a press release over PR Web about his little experiment to see if Mark Cuban would indeed call.

So far, Jim hasn’t heard from Mark Cuban, but he has heard from a reporter who did a story about the experiment.

What does this prove? In truth, nothing that hasn’t been proven before by the many successful business communications initiatives that have included blogs and RSS driven newswires. But it is a very compact and entertaining example of how powerful these tools can be when used effectively. To quote Jim:

Blogging & Promotion Experiment Gone Bad?

The reporter did ask me if I thought my experiment was failed because Mark didn’t and won’t ever call me. What did I say? Of course it’s not a failure! Let’s look at the facts and results.

Fact #1: I spent $10 on a domain name, $80 on a press release and about an hour of my time writing and setting up a blog.

Fact #2: Within a few days of my idea, and within 8-hours of my press release going out, I had my name put in front of Mark Cuban himself, and a reaction from him about me. Regardless if he got me confused with someone else, I was able to get his attention indirectly.

Fact #3: I had a reporter from a major newspaper interview me for a story which was syndicated across the globe.

Fact #4: I met with and the owner of the web’s most prolific promotion company (prweb.com) who in turn featured my experiment to a crowd of hundreds, including attendees like Robert Scoble and Matt Cutts. I also was able to get him to do a podcast with me about the story to be re-released across the PRweb network.

I think this story is a nice little nugget for anyone who is trying to make the case for a blog to the higher ups at their company.

When we talk about blogs and public relations, we often talk about the “command and control” mentality of traditional business communications and how blogs have thrown all that out the window because they allow the voices at the heart of the action to tell their stories more quickly. Blogs kill spin. Blah. Blah. Blah. I would be guilty of dead horse beating if I brought this same issue up again in those terms, but there’s another aspect to this idea of blogs delivering the truth, and it has to do with journalism.

The Blog Herald reports today about a woman who blogged her experience aboard a United flight that was forced to conduct an emergency landing under military fighter escort at Denver airport after a man now known to be Jose Pelayo-Ortega reportedly made a bomb threat. Many people have correctly observed that this firsthand account of the story is much more compelling than what we’re hearing on the news. But what many seem to have overlooked is that the blogger paints a much more accurate picture of the events aboard United Flight 735.

The mainstream media has been steadfastly reporting that the plane was landed after the man “claimed to have a bomb”, but the blogger involved in the incident gives us a few more details:

He was screaming, “I want to die, “I have a camera in my stomach”, “Kill Me “and also “We have to save the Country!”…It was believed that there might be a bomb threat since the guy was raving about needing his camera and the “camera in his stomach” comments” and permission was given to land in Denver under an emergency situation.

When you first hear that there’s been a bomb threat aboard an airplane, you automatically think of the person making the threat as a villain of some kind or another - either a prankster or a terrorist explicitly claiming to have a bomb. But when you hear that the person making all the ruckus was raving about having a camera in his stomach and trying to open the door of the plane to “save the country,” you begin to see that the culprit is most likely suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

That isn’t to say that the pilots and the powers that be didn’t do the right thing by landing the plane. This guy was clearly a security risk, and when it comes to potential bomb threats it’s much better to be safe than sorry. They did what they needed to do to ensure the safety of the passengers and the crew. But assuming that the woman who blogged her story was actually witness to the events aboard the aircraft, her story is the most detailed and accurate report out there, and the facts she relates paint a very different picture from that perpetuated by the mainstream media.

In this instance, a blogger bringing the truth to light hasn’t caused any scandals. If anything, it has at least partially exonerated Pelayo-Ortega in the eyes of the people who have read the true story. But business people can learn something from this example of a blogger giving the real story while the media is still reprinting and echoing the standard line. Blogs really do cut through the crap and get straight to heart of the matter - and it can happen in any situation. Factoring these sorts of eventualities into your overall communications policy will be a key to the future of successful corporate communication.

I often joke about all those sidebar icons bloggers use to show their affiliations. I call them little badges of courage. Now, bloggers are adding “do this” links at the bottom of posts, lots of them. They include Email this Article, Subscribe to this feed, Digg this, Add to del.icio.us, Add to Technorati Favorites, Add to Simpy, Mark in Ma.gnolia, Bookmark with OnlyWire, Slashdot This, Add to Yahoo, Furl This, Spurl This, Seed This.

So, dear readers please read my post, comment, and then do something else with it. Social bookmarking is good for the blogosphere, reblog topics, continuing the conversation elsewhere — I get that, but all those links make it a real bitch to track posts about you because every article with a “do this” can show up in Technorati and on Google. It’s also adding clutter to your posts and page and I wonder what the actual click through on those links is.

Is anyone actually doing something else with your post with those links?

We’re always on the lookout for interesting business blogs and business bloggers to talk about and learn from. Let us know if you have an interesting business blogging story to tell by leaving a comment or sending an e-mail to teresa at blogbusinesssummit dot com.

Tomorrow Steve and I will be at [Six Apart's Blogging for Business Seminar](http://www.sixapart.com/business/seminar-contact). We’ll be talking about practical business blogging, [our book](http://www.blogbusinessbook.com/), clients, and [consulting](http://blogbusinesssummit.com/consulting).

We hope to meet you, hang out, and talk blogs.

The Guardian’s online technology section ran an article today about some new research on blogging in Europe. The basic message was a familiar one, “businesspeople, the bloggers are powerful and they can ruin your business.”

It’s a pretty common theme in the blogosphere, and one that a number of business bloggers are starting to find rather tiresome. How many times can we really hear the Kryptonite bike lock story followed by the Raging Cow Blog story without starting to feel like we’ve had the same song stuck in our heads for a long, long time?

Yes we’ve talked about blogosphere horror stories and the mistakes that companies can make. And we’ll continue to talk about these stories because it’s important for our readers to hear them. But it’s crucial that we keep this stuff in the proper context, because the reality is that these stories scare people - and that fear isn’t getting them to blog, it’s making them bury their heads in the sand.

Here’s an even deeper reality for you: it’s really hard to screw up in the blogosphere. You have to work really, really hard to dig yourself the kind of hole that Dell and McDonald’s now find themselves in. What’s more, if any of the aforementioned companies made a concerted effort at having a relationship with the blogosphere, they would likely be able to dig themselves out relatively quickly.

Just look at what happened when Dave Taylor interviewed Donna Tocci of Kryptonite. The interview offered a very interesting counterpoint to the story that’s typically told throughout the blogosphere. According to Technorati there are 48 inboundlinks to Taylor’s post about Kryptonite, many of which take the rounded-out perspective that Tocci offers to heart. Kryptonite wasn’t clueless or caught unawares, they just cared about their customers more than they did about what the blogosphere was saying at that particular time. Yeah they may have been slow to respond, but they’re getting their story out there now.

And here’s another example. Remember GourmetStation, the site that started a character blog and was then excoriated by the blogosphere for it? GourmetStation did a great job of engaging their detractors head-on, and eventually those detractors found other blogs to criticize. And Kryptonite Locks is living proof that engaging detractors in the long-term can kill controversy and negative buzz.

With that in mind, I think we can safely say that the only thing businesses have to fear from the blogosphere is not getting involved with it in some capacity. If you make a mistake, you can admit it, drive to closure and move on. Where else in the business world will mistakes be so easily forgiven?

And as Janet Johnson told me in our podcast interview if we start telling those success stories more often, maybe more businesses will decide to become involved in the blogosphere.

In a shameless plug for our services, I’d like to remind our readers that the Blog Business Summit is uniquely poised to help you move into the blogosphere without fear or trouble. Get in touch with us and tell us about your business. We’d love to help you figure out how to make your own success story in the blogosphere.

The recent news that Robert Scoble has changed his comment policy has created a flurry of buzz throughout the blogosphere. Some accuse him of censorship, although the vast majority of posts I’ve come across express support for his decision.

Serendipitously, Anil Dash recently wrote, “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with creating a smart policy about what kind of feedback is appropriate, explaining what your expectations are for accountability in a conversation, and enforcing your company’s standards for dialogue in a public setting.”

We couldn’t agree more. But the last thing we want to do is just provide more fodder for the echo chamber without adding value to the conversation, and this is one discussion that has been talked about from a number of different angles - so it’s definitely hard to come up with anything entirely fresh.

I think the bottom line here is that company culture plays a serious role in this. The standard of decorum on Robert Scoble’s blog may be entirely different than that expected from commenters on a snowboarding or punk rock-oriented blog. As long as the guidelines are clear, everyone can be expected to respect them.

And in the end, even very strict comment policies don’t amount to censorship. Because even if…just for the sake of argument…Bob Lutz over at Fastlane Blog does decide to take down a comment or two, those commenters can always set up their own blogs and write whatever they want. The blogger enforcing the comment policy isn’t infringing on their right to free speech any more than the editor who selects which letters make it into to the Sunday New York Times is infringing on the rights of the thousands of people who will never have a letter published in that particular paper. The editor has the right to determine what letters appear in his or her publication just as the blogger has the right to determine what comments appear on his or her blog.

One of the blogs we talk about in [our book](http://www.blogbusinessbook.com/) is [TDF Blog](http://www.tdfblog.com/). When it launched, it was the only bike-racing site that offered RSS —and that’s why it beat out competitors in this niche and gained considerable traffic. The site’s publisher, Frank Steele, aggregates cycling news from around the web, adds his perspective, and offers an RSS feed.

This week Frank started another [blog for the Tour of Georgia](http://www.tdgblog.com/), America’s biggest stage race that attracts an international field. For those not familiar with bike racing, the TOG is like the World Baseball Classic, where players from all over the world play in the US and it’s on now.

Another topic in our book is [mashups](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid) (and proof that I can relate most anything to cycling and our book!), a term used to describe a web application that is created by combining and mashing up data from other applications. VeloNews has combined a sports ticker, current results, course profile, photos, ads, and [GoogleMaps](http://maps.google.com/) into the [TOG mashup](http://www.velonews.com/Admin/ticker/georgiaonmymap5.html).

For more on mashups see the [Wikipedia entry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid) and they are featured in the [April 3rd issue of InformationWeek](Mashups are featured in the April 3rd issue of InformationWeek).

Being a social networking junkie, I naturally spend a lot of time connecting with my old college pals on Facebook. And like every person who loves to play around on social networking sites, I often click on random links just to see what pops up. That’s how I came across the Microsoft Student Hub (Facebook Account Required). The basic group description as outlined on the group’s page is:

You’re a student and you’re passionate about technology. The Microsoft Student Hub is the place for you! What will you find here?

• We’ll update you on the latest ways to win cool prizes.
• We’ll post videos of REAL Microsoft employees who work on the latest and greatest in technology.
• We’ll let you know when there are Microsoft sponsored events coming to campus.
• We’ll post the latest in product news.

But this isn’t a one-way deal. If you’ve got comments or questions, POST THEM! We’ll answer–promise! :).

Hmm…wait…doesn’t that sound an awful lot like what blogs are supposed to do? Granted the Hub doesn’t offer an RSS feed, but still it’s a pretty cool way for Microsoft to connect with its young user (and potential employee) base.

I pinged Microsoft Geek Blogger Robert Scoble to see what he knew about the Hub. He told me that he would dig around and let me know what he found out about who’s responsible. I definitely want to interview them for a podcast.

A couple months ago, I posted that Facebook might be an excellent way for businesses to reach their young user bases. I guess the folks over at MS (and a number of other customers) are thinking the same way.

In our forthcoming book we also talk about how social networks will become increasingly relevant to businesses - just as blogs are growing in relevance now. Stay tuned, business leaders. It won’t be long before social networking becomes relevant for your business.

Apparently, Amazon.com has started a podcast, I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but I think it’s wonderful that they’ve started to create content in this growing arena. This is part of the reason that I think Forrester is wrong when they say that podcasting isn’t a worthwhile investment of time and effort for companies. Just like with blogging, it will take a critical mass of geeky early adopters before podcasting will catch on and become mainstream. And as the technology to create podcasts becomes cheaper and easier to use, we’ll see it catching on in a huge way.

Via TinyScreenfuls

I must admit that I have become utterly addicted to podcasting, as I admitted on last week’s Blog Business Summit Report. One of my favorites is This Week in Technology (TWiT) which is also available on iTunes in which Leo Laporte and his high tech friends like Dvorak and Scoble chat about what’s going on in the world of computers and other such geeky things.

So when I heard the folks on TWiT this week cracking jokes about how they should all hang up and stop doing this because podcasting is supposedly going nowhere, I had to find out what all the fuss was about.

Apparently, Charlene Li - who once claimed a 5000% ROI on her blog for Forrester now has a report that advises businesses to limit podcasting to content that already exists - such as quarterly calls and existing radio content. Anything else, she says, won’t reach a large enough audience to be a cost-effective way to reach out to your customers.

While it’s true that podcasts have yet to take the world by storm, I would argue that this report is incredibly shortsighted, although some think that it was announced solely for the hype.

On the TWiT show, the general consensus was that the report was the sort of thing that someone would have said about the Web 10 years ago, or blogging only 4 years ago. Give it some time to reach critical mass and go mainstream.

As fans of the BlogHer conference, we found this article intriguing. In the article, Women in the workforce: The importance of sex, the Economist reports on why in business, “it’s a women’s world.”

Consider the following:

“Girls get better grades at school than boys, and in most developed countries more women than men go to university. Women will thus be better equipped for the new jobs of the 21st century, in which brains count a lot more than brawn. In Britain far more women than men are now training to become doctors. And women are more likely to provide sound advice on investing their parents’ nest egg: surveys show that women consistently achieve higher financial returns than men do.”

AND:

“Furthermore, the increase in female employment in the rich world has been the main driving force of growth in the past couple of decades. Those women have contributed more to global GDP growth than have either new technology or the new giants, China and India.”

Luckily, we’ve seen women embrace blogging in a big way, and also they’ve been integral to the growth of blogging in business. It’s resources like BlogHer that are helping to move blogging into the mainstream.

As I blogged just a few days ago (and as we wrote in our forthcoming book), content on demand is a growing aspect of any good business strategy that involves the Web. And now the Emmys are getting on the bandwagon, offering an Award for Internet, Cell Phones AND iPods.

The latest tempest in a teapot regarding blogging in business is how Werner Vogels at Amazon grilled Shel and Scoble and was unable to get concrete answers as to why Amazon should be blogging.

Amazon really gets having a conversation with their markets. Always has. For years, they’ve had scores of editors writing daily about products and other items they think their audience is interested in. Amazon issues RSS feeds. Amazon has a system for gathering customer input and responding. They listen to the blogosphere, and participate when necessary (I assume largely by commenting.) Vogel is right, there is no compelling need to immediately add a superfluous layer of communication by having all their employees blogging.

In essence Amazon had the “blog” culture early, they just didn’t have the tools to do it, so they had to roll their own, and spend a gazillion dollars to do it. The problem is that now anyone with a laptop and a pulse can function as an online book reviewer and will have visibility equal to (and in many cases superior to) Amazon’s salaried editors.

I think this may explain why Scoble and Shel were largely “grilled” about blogging during their visit at Amazon. If I’d helped create a powerful, incredibly expensive system that gave my company a significant competitive advantage, I’d be a little defensive about some cheap, open, alternative that significantly replicated our efforts and promised to lessen our edge.

Nicholas Carr wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in 2003 that captures what’s going on here. In the piece IT Doesn’t Matter, he describes how key IT advantages rapidly become commodity items. He says that the cash you throw at having a technological lead could put you at a disadvantage when competitors buy the same stuff for cheap later.

The great example is teenagers and cars as described by Kevin Maney:

“To understand his argument, think of IT as cars and companies as teenagers. When I was in high school, hardly any boys had cars. So the ones who did own cars had a huge strategic girl-luring advantage over those who didn’t. Those boys were mobile. They could get to every party. They could make out in their cars. My friend Ed had a car that had gaping holes in the floor and belched smoke like an Iraqi oil well fire, and even that was a strategic advantage.

Today, in my neighborhood of the spoiled, every high school boy has a car. So having a car is no longer a strategic advantage. Having a Lexus might give you a bit of an edge over a classmate with a Hyundai, but it’s not even close to the gulf between a boy with a car and a boy with no car.

Bottom line: As a strategic advantage for teenage boys, cars no longer matter.”

So. Here is how the discussion might have gone 45 years ago:

Scoble: Werner, you should get one of these Volkswagen Bugs. We’re all getting them, they’re great, and SO cheap.

Vogels: Robert, why would I do that? I have an Oldsmobile! Worked like a dog for three summers and borrowed money from my Uncle to buy it. Been driving it for years! It’s way better than that crappy tin can…

Scoble: Well, I like parking at the drive in. You should consider the Bug because…

Vogels: I’ve been parking there for years! Tell me what the Bug can do that my Oldsmobile can’t do? My Olds has power windows for crissake!

Scoble: Er, ahh, I’ll get back to you. I guess you aren’t coming to the party tonight–all the Bug owners are getting together. It’s a big and growing community, we have a great time talking about road trips.

Vogels: I’ve been on tons of road trips. Tell me why I’d even consider a VW? They’re smaller, slower..

Scoble: I guess you might not need one.

Vogels: HA! SEE? I have to go to my night job now, have to pay off the loan on my Olds.

Scoble: I’m off to the party.

As a side note, Nicholas Carr has been following this debate, yet hasn’t mentioned the obvious linkage to his own HBR article…

Part of the genius of services like Flickr and Digg, and social networking sites like Facebook and Consumating is that they get most or all of their content from the user end.

Kodak has taken another approach to the user-generated content bandwagon by providing users with an online tool that allows them to insert their own personal photographs into a recent Kodak commercial.

This is particularly cool because it gives users another chance to engage with the Kodak product and brand in a way that means something unique to them. Kudos to Kodak for their creativity and user-focus.

Proving once again that the “Cluetrain has left the station,” Amazon’s CTO calls on Scoble and Shel to prove their [Kum By Yah](http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/) theories of business blogging. As I’ll talk about next week at the [Six Apart Blogging for Business Seminars](http://www.sixapart.com/business/seminar-contact), one of the problems with blog dogma is that the pundits don’t have budgets, employees, or resources to manage. I always advise businesses to blog their own way, however it works for them. I’ve been hearing the same thing that Amazon’s CTO said in meetings all year and we write about the practicalities of business blogging at length in [our book](http://www.blogbusinessbook.com/).

[Anil summarizes](http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/news/2006/04/violent_agreeme.html) the Amazon v. Scoble & Shel debate, expresses frustration, and notes that we should “spend less time being fodder for Slashdot and more time actually helping people take advantage of cool stuff like blogs.”

Like, for example, the true revolution of blogging is a simple content management system that works. There are real productivity gains to be made from blogging and not just from conversations that are [naked or fully clothed](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?path=ASIN/047174719X&link_code=as2&camp=1789&tag=texturadesign-20&creative=9325).

In addition to offering Desperate Housewives and Lost (both iTunes) on the iTunes Store, ABC has announced that it will offer the two popular shows for free on its website. The catch? Each show contains advertising that cannot be bypassed.

One thing that we talk about in our forthcoming book - Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business from Peach Pit Press - is how businesses need to learn how to give their core audience content on demand. Users are becoming used to getting content in whatever form best suits their needs. And while downloading each episode of a favorite television show for $1.99 is nice, it can add up over time. It’s a great alternative to let the advertisers pay for the content. I don’t mind watching the occasional ad if it cuts down on the money I spend each month.

I think this is a great move on ABC’s part to satisfy its ever-growing Web-savvy audience.