June 2006

In the article Companies Tap Podcast Buzz To Sell Contact Lenses, Appliances, reporter David Kesmodel writes about how companies like Johnson & Johnson, Nestle SA, General Motors, Sprint Nextel and Whirlpool Corp are leveraging Podcasts to boost awareness and create buzz.

As with all new marketing technologies, there are still plenty of laggards who are terrified of the unknown:

“Plenty of companies have been reluctant to jump on the bandwagon. Frank Salerno, president of River Communications, a marketing firm in Ridgewood, N.J., said he has been disappointed by clients who have balked at his suggestion that they launch a podcast. Some have said they want to keep their marketing efforts focused on tried-and-true strategies. Corporate podcasting, he said, is still ‘waiting for its champions.’”

Those of us who have been advising businesses to embrace blogging can certainly relate. We’ve seen how the notion of a visible two-way dialog with customers can cause certain marketing professionals to soil their undergarments in fear. Here’s a quote from the article that they should consider:

“Bill Betts, a (GM) company spokesman, said response from consumers has been ‘excellent.’ The number of listeners to the podcasts this year has ranged from 39,000 to 87,000 a month, he said. “We don’t have enough experience to draw conclusions yet” about the viability of the marketing device, Mr. Betts said. But the company, which also publishes several blogs, likes being able to communicate directly with its audience.”

The spammers are really going hog wild out there. I’m working to get everyone’s comments approved, but we have a huge backlog.

Your patience is greatly appreciated.

Biz Stone seems to think that it looks a little like a hurricane, but I think it looks a little more like an animated rendering of the AIDS virus.

Basically, this is a visual representation of the interrelationships between various blogs. I wish the blogs were color coded by topic instead of by hosting situation, or cross referenced with their Technorati rankings to determine if the nucleus of the blogosphere has enough significant overlap with their “most popular” list.

There are a lot of cool things you could do with a map like this if it actually told you where the bloggers that interested you were clustered.

Business Logs has an equally hilarious and informative piece about five practices to avoid to maintain your credibility in the “Web 2.0″ (shudder) community.

I have to say that I disagree (somewhat) with number 4. Comments are off on your blog.” Rundle says:

What’s the point of having a company weblog if comments are turned off? Blogs are great for two-way communication, so stop using them as press release regurgitators. If you want user feedback then be ready to accept it, for good or for bad.

Yeah, you have to be ready to accept user feedback - but sometimes comments are just too much for some companies to handle. A big part of the problem is comment spam - which needs to be made illegal, and quickly.

So if you see a blog whose comments are off, please don’t assume that it’s not a credible source of information. If comments are off AND they’re just using the blog as an RSS feed for their press releases, then I say they’re doing things wrong. But if they’re making thoughtful - bloggy posts that are relevant to their readers, then maybe the comment conversation is going on elsewhere. Check the inbound links to see who else is talking, and where.

But Mike, if you don’t want me to laugh at your post, I’d stop using the term “Web 2.0.” Like Eric Rice said, “16 Years of the Web and we’re only on version 2.0? You’d be so fired.”

In the Wall Street Journal article Social Networking for Bookworms, reporter Aaron Rutkoff cites how librarything.com (a site that aggregates and shares personal library information) has become a minor phenom thanks in part to blogger engagement.

“Mr. Spalding’s book community has grown almost exclusively by word of mouth. Referrals from book-oriented bloggers have helped, but LibraryThing has grown mostly gradually. Mr. Spalding downplays his user numbers, pointing out that fewer people make frequent use of the site than have registered. “The numbers are probably misleading,” he admits. “It is very, very easy to join.”

RSS is most often discussed as one of the features that separates a blog from a traditional Website. I’ve heard it said that if a site doesn’t syndicate, it’s going to become irrelevant.

But there are uses for RSS that have nothing to do with the Web at large, one of which David Berlind discussed today over at ZDNet.

Berlind sees the RSS - in conjunction with the use of wikis - as the new protocol that makes the corporate intranet function and facilitates true collaboration.

Before the invention of RSS, says Berlind, collaboration was stilted by the “Draconian technologies” that supposedly enabled it. To work as a team, you’d have to schedule a meeting, prepare an agenda and a presentation and any number of documents. Then you’d have to store and share those documents for further editing, and each version of the document would have to be re-circulated amongst the group for further collaboration.

Even worse than the collaboration was the notification process. Documents were:

Passed around on the proprietary email system using oft-forked threads of e-mail that resulted in out-of-synch document changes. To add insult to injury, the e-mail feedback loop which may or may not have involved revisions was completely out of context of the collaborative activities themselves and required tools that were overkill given the requirements. At the end of the day, collaborating involves a bunch of walled gardens of technology that all too often, are retrofitted to the art of collaboration and that end up being manually integrated. In other words, Sue in the Marketing Department finishes tweaking a new campaign proposal and has to remember to send it to Trevor over in Advertising for his thoughts, and so on.

By combining wikis with RSS, Berlind thinks we could get rid of that frustrating morass of e-mails and versions of documents - facilitating true collaboration:

With wikis, which can notify you when their content is changed via RSS, not only can the collaborators use 95% standard technology (there is no standard wiki markup language, yet), any and all virtual expression of the collaborative activities (new content, revisions to that content, annotations, comments, approvals, etc.) happen in the context of the collaborative environment. It’s all in the same one — one that involves almost no proprietary parts.There’s no jumping back and forth between systems or even integration of multiple systems. No word processor. No special content management system. No e-mail. No strapped-on transfer stations to get it all working together.

It looks as if software developers are catching on. Microsoft is reportedly adding wiki functionality to its SharePoint program, and the head honcho of IBM’s collaborative software division recently called the old system of collaboration “fundamentally flawed.”

But how fast will Corporate America embrace these new technologies for collaboration? Human beings are astonishingly resistant to change, even if that change is overwhelmingly positive. As Berlind admits, the use of wikis and RSS to facilitate internal corporate communication is a giant threat to the status quo.

A few weeks ago Steve posted about the entrepreneur who built a successful media empire out of Long Tail blogs.

It looks like there’s an epidemic of such blogging enterprises going around. Today, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece about blogs (subscription only) that are getting venture capital funding.

Says the article:

The financing, though small in comparison with most Web deals, is one of several in recent weeks that indicate optimism on the part of early-stage investors in the viability of blogs as an outlet for journalism.

So what’s bringing venture capitalists to the blogosphere? It’s the economics. Starting a magazine is a huge investment, and there’s no guarantee of success. Ventures in the blogosphere are more scalable - and catering to a very targeted sector of the reading public is a viable option for some kinds of ad campaigns.

To toot our own horns for a moment, I should remind our readership that we build sponsored blogs. Our inFlightHQ blog that we built and still maintain for our sponsor Connexion by Boeing has garnered attention from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

If you think a sponsored blog might be right for your business, you should get in touch with us.

Via TechMeme.

I’ve never seen an iTunes Music Store link turn up in Google before, but in a recent search for Christina Aguilera’s new song “Ain’t No Other Man,” the link to the iTunes store page where you can buy the song came up first.

I guess this means that more people are linking to the iTunes store, since Google pays attention to pages and gives them authority when people link to them. It’s little indicators like this that make me wonder whether any company is ever going to catch up to Apple when it comes to the online music/.mp3 player sphere.

Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot going on in the blogosphere. But Chris Pirillo was too busy to post yesterday, so we’re using it as our excuse to be too busy to post today. See, Chris…you’re a bad influence.

Here’s something interesting: in case you didn’t know yet, Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee is not very happy about this whole Net Neutrality under fire thing.

Ooh, and here’s something else that’s interesting. Jeremiah Owyang has a really nice follow up on the interview with Jakob Nielsen (subscription only) in the WSJ that we commented on a couple of days ago. Looks like Jeremiah wasn’t exactly in agreement with Nielsen either. Nice to know we’re not alone.

Ok, now back to the piles and mounds of other things I’ve been working on.

After reading the recent article about the business blogosphere in the Wall Street Journal (subscription only) today, I can’t help but feel like perhaps reporter William M. Bulkeley really don’t understand the blogosphere. The only thing he said that I really agree with is the necessity of a corporate blogging policy. Everything else just kind of rings hollow.

In his opening paragraph, Bulkeley writes:

Product marketers, software engineers and even a few top executives of major companies have started sharing their thoughts and advice in online journals known as blogs. But, as you’d expect, their offerings are far different from the political vitriol of the best-known bloggers or the stream-of-consciousness musings of teenage girls.

Maybe I’m nuts, but it seems to me like Bulkely doesn’t really read blogs. If he did, he would know that political vitriol and teenage girls’ musings are only two of the many topics that flow through the vibrant non-business blogosphere. And if he does have any understanding of the blogosphere beyond that stereotype, then he should have dispelled it from the get-go instead of using it as a crutch for the very cursory exploration of the corporate blogosphere that followed.

Yes, he pays lip service to Mark Cuban, Bob Lutz, and all the other usual suspects - but he doesn’t really talk about what blogs are doing for their companies. He doesn’t talk about the goodwill or the customer satisfaction. He pays more serious attention to the “corporate image specialists” who worry that a corporate blog might send out too many messages and muddy the waters.

The final four paragraphs of the article gave me a particularly bad case of stomach cramps:

Of course, allowing freedom of expression on workplace blogs can result in statements that may make managers cringe.

Birdie Jaworski, an Avon Products Inc. representative in rural Las Vegas, N.M., has developed one of the most popular blogs hosted at news Web site Salon.com. She has even heard from book publishers urging her to write a memoir. One reason for Ms. Jaworski’s popularity: her unvarnished reviews of Avon products, which she tries before peddling to customers.

Last fall, Ms. Jaworski wrote of an anti-aging cream: “I don’t know how I’m going to get through a two-week trial! This stuff is giving me whopper zits!!!!!” In February, she disclosed that she had stuck with the regimen and has found “my skin is softer and more even-toned than when I started,” although fine lines remain on her face.

Avon says it encourages its independent representatives to express themselves freely.

And…that’s it? No exploration of how Ms. Jaworski’s business as an Avon saleswoman might have benefitted from her honesty about the products she sells? No discussion of how Avon might be right to encourage its independent representatives to express their honest opinions about its products?

If this is what business people have to go on when it comes to making decisions about the blogosphere, it’s no wonder that so many of them are still baffled and frightened by the whole concept. Bulkeley is still listening to the PR “experts” who don’t really get the blogosphere either. What’s more, he has his head firmly stuck in the CEO box and there are a lot of people stuck in there with him.

Let’s unpack this a little bit. Companies: your CEO doesn’t have to blog. You don’t have to talk about what’s going on at headquarters every day. Most of your customers don’t even care about that stuff. There are much better ways of entering the blogosphere. Just look at what Wells Fargo is doing with its blog about preparing San Francisco for the next big earthquake. They’re engaging their customers while keeping the corporate messages perfectly clear.

I would be particularly surprised if Bulkeley even knew about the existence of blogs like that.

It’s already making the rounds of the blogosphere, showing up on both digg and BuzzMachine. But with all the negative press that Dell has been receiving in the blogosphere since Jeff Jarvis started talking about his sub-par experience with their customer service, you can hardly be surprised when everyone latches on to a story about a spontaneously combusting Dell laptop at a conference in Japan.

It may seem like an odd comparison, but these days, Dell is an awful lot like beleaguered pop star Britney Spears. It seems that whatever she does, the paparazzi and the press assume the worst and run with the story. Spears recently told NBC’s Matt Lauer that she wishes the paparazzi would leave her alone. But she continually offers them a gigantic target by refusing to listen to the image professionals that have helped her craft her career. Spears would do well to heed their advice.

Dell has the same problem. Yes the blogosphere pundits can be a pain in the tuchus at times, but when it comes to Dell they have a point. And by continually stonewalling the blogosphere’s criticisms, Dell has offered them the same kind of target that Spears has given to the paparazzi. So whenever something goes even slightly wrong for Dell - like an exploding laptop, or a bad quarter - the blogosphere latches onto the story and runs with it - drowning out anything good or redeeming that the company might say.

Just like Spears, Dell would do well to pay attention to the advice of some of the many smart people who understand the blogosphere. I think they should start by giving Jarvis a candid interview about what they’ve done wrong and what they’re starting to do right.

I was on the cardio machine at the gym, reading Newsweek when I noticed an ad that made me smile. Technorati has been running print ads right next to the blurbs and tidbits section in the back of the magazine. See the graphic at left. I do apologize for the strangeness of the way it looks. I took the pictures with my new camera phone and then pieced it together using PowerPoint (of all things).

This is so cool because it means that blogs are becoming more mainstream. The fact that a blogosphere-oriented search engine is advertising in a magazine so widely by the American public can be used as a metric of the public’s interest in the blogosphere. Technorati and their affiliated business geeks believe that most people are ready to start using blog search engines, so they start advertising to them. This is more reason than ever for businesses to start the process of figuring out what they want to do about the blogosphere. Even more reason to seek out our consulting services.

At the very least, it means that companies must start work on a blogging policy at once. If you own a business, chances are that your employees are blogging. And yes, they’re talking about work. If you don’t tell them what they can and can’t write about - then anything is fair game. And it’s much better to keep critical information from leaking into the blogosphere beforehand than having to fire a valued employee because of something they said after the deed is already done.

Lee Gomes did an interesting interview (subscription only) for his “Talking Tech” column in the Wall Street Journal today. According to the subject of his interview, Web designer Jakob Nielsen, business bloggers should make their blogs more like…e-newsletters.

I know the newsletter idea seems counterintuitive, but Nielsen has a point. He points out that the really great e-mail newsletters are full of timely, relevant and highly targeted information. They’re released on a schedule, with the users’ needs in mind. Blogs don’t tend to behave the same way. The content and timing are subject to the whims and attention of the blogger. In the absence of careful structure and clarity, Nielsen argues, the average reader will treat a blog as information overload. Blogs, he says, are targeted only at the fringe market of people who are truly passionate about the Web and the blogosphere.

Are blogs really only written for the techiest of the techies? Do I lack perspective on this issue because I’m a giant geek in my early 20’s? Does the rest of society even care yet?

Right now, blogs have a mostly indirect effect on people’s thinking. I remember a couple of months ago when I heard a friend of mine use the term “Dell Hell” without knowing that it originated on Jeff Jarvis’ blog. But despite their circuitous influence, the regular readership pool in the blogosphere is severely limited.

Maybe Nielsen is right. To take blogs to the next level, we may need to start simplifying and structuring. Would it really hurt us to start referring to our RSS feeds as “news feeds” to avoid confusing the uninitiated? And how bad would it be for us to put a little more thought and planning into the timing of the information we discuss on our business blogs? Do people respond better to the authentic human voice when it’s presented spontaneously or with a lot of structure?

Like most things in the blogosphere, I think it all depends on the audience. Companies really need to know their target demographic and what they expect out of the blog. A company that makes gardening tools might want to present information in a way that appeals to the 35+ year old female homeowner. And maybe that includes giving some structure and pre-planned timing to the way information is presented.

For my generation, the story changes. I’ve been exposed to an ever-growing overload of information my entire life. I’ve become very good at picking out what I need and ignoring the rest. People my age respond well to randomness, so a blog targeted at us can afford to be a little more stream-of-consciousness.

All of this boils back down a a very central blogosphere maxim: know your audience. If you know what they want, then you’ll know what to do with Jakob Nielsen’s advice.

For the uninitiated, Wikipedia defines a meme as, “a replicator of cultural information that one mind transmits (verbally or by demonstration) to another mind.” Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point (iTunes) deals with the moment when a meme goes from a popular idea to a cultural phenomenon.

Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to realize that I had been a critical transmitter in the mind-to-mind movement of a very small, potential meme. It got started when Maryam Scoble posted the contents of a humorous e-mail forward to her blog. The list of hilarious flight attendant quips struck me as the perfect comic relief for inFlightHQ. One of the quotes came from a pilot who, upon landing the plane at Reagan International, came on the loudspeaker and said, “Whoa, Big Fella! Whoa!”

Then yesterday, The Wall Street Journal profiled inFlightHQ in its daily “Blog Watch” column. At the end of the story, the writer paid special attention to the comic relief. “In between pragmatic posts, the blog occasionally takes a comedy break. ‘Hilarious Flight Attendant Quips’ lists a few of the more surprising comments to come over the in-flight intercom. For example, as a plane slowed to a stop at Reagan National Airport in Washington, ‘a lone voice came over the loudspeaker: �Whoa, big fella. WHOA!�”

This little meme probably got started long before it fell into Maryam’s hands. The story probably circulated verbally or by e-mail for a while before it even became a part of the chain of forwards that landed it in Maryam’s inbox. Before that, someone had to either hear a pilot say it or perhaps make it up to amuse friends.

And it could go anywhere from here. It’s possible that the WSJ is the last step for this little idea. But then again - maybe it will show up on an episode of some insanely popular television show in a couple of months. Or maybe another pilot will take inspiration from the first incident and make the same announcement the next time she lands a plane at Reagan. In 10 years, it could be a tradition.

But whatever happens to this meme, businesses with an eye on the Web can learn something from my chance experience. Memes can start anywhere, be about anything, and go anywhere. People who were in college in the last few years are bound to remember the badger badger badger video meme that made the rounds via instant messenger. Another video, the “All Your Base are Belong to Us!” meme that became an international phenomenon still provides countless hours of hilarity over here at the Blog Business Summit.

A few months back, GAP started a meme by creating a very amusing “choose your own adventure” flash video that allows people to create their own avatars, choose an outfit, and then watch their animated selves wriggle out of it in a hilariously choreographed striptease. The video spread virally, via instant messaging and the blogosphere. At least three people instant messaged it to me in January of 2006, and I must have passed it on to friends at least 5 or 6 times. I also posted about it on my blog.

I’ve got a call in to GAP to find out whether or not they saw any increased website traffic or maybe even an increase in sales as a result of the meme. As yet, they haven’t returned my call - but I’ll make sure to update you if and when they do.

But regardless of GAP’s profits on this, they did raise brand awareness. And that’s always a good thing when you’re trying to make a fashion statement.

We are very pleased to report that the Wall Street Journal found our travel blog which is sponsored by Connexion by Boeing to be so very interesting and compelling that they included it in their blog watch (subscription only) for today.

Here’s what they said about us:

This blog, published by the Connexion by Boeing service, a unit of Boeing Co., says its intent is to provide “tools, tips, and techniques for being productive at 30,000 feet.” But the blog covers just about anything flight-related. Recent posts discuss ways airlines claim to have improved boarding speed and service.

In between pragmatic posts, the blog occasionally takes a comedy break. “Hilarious Flight Attendant Quips” lists a few of the more surprising comments to come over the in-flight intercom. For example, as a plane slowed to a stop at Reagan National Airport in Washington, “a lone voice came over the loudspeaker: ‘Whoa, big fella. WHOA!’ “

How cool is that?

Late last week I posted over at inFlightHQ about the Gizmodo Idol competition.

The whole idea is that Gizmodo readers make videos of themselves singing a song and send it in. After a round of judges voting, and a round of readers weighing in, the winner will get three pairs of ultra-slick earbuds.

Now, it’s not like Gizmodo needs a lot of inbound links or Google juice. They’re already super hot, but they didn’t get as hot as they are by just writing good blog entries about interesting gadgets. They do these cool contests partly because they know that it will generate inbound links and buzz throughout the blogosphere. This tactic is something that established business bloggers can learn from. When and where appropriate, periodic games, contests or other interesting, meme-worthy topics like this can raise your profile, engender goodwill, and provide hours of amusement for you and your staff.

Also, please bear with me as I shamelessly plug my own entry which has made it to the final five. I think it might be because I’m a girl…

After having installed WordPress on a server all by myself for the first time, I can truly declare that it is one of the easiest possible things to work with. Not that I don’t love Movable Type, but I may just be a convert to this WordPress thing.

One of the things I especially liked about the install process was that they offered a lot of tips and advice about the different hosting services. They suggested FTP clients and text editors, and they made helpful general suggestions about how the MySQL databases on different hosts might be configured.

Another really cool thing about WordPress is that there’s no rebuilding. If you change something in the back end, it goes live immediately. I’m sure that can be both a blessing and a curse at times, but I like how fast and smooth it is to work with.

I’m sure that in time, I will find myself complaining about some facet of the software - but for the time being, I’m in the early throes of passionate infatuation.

Good lord, I’m a geek.

I applaud Chris Pirillo’s totally reasonable stance on press passes as reported by Scoble. Pirillo is telling all press to buy tickets to Gnomedex, just like everyone else. We get inundated with requests for free passes to the Blog Business Summits — and do give a few out, but most requests are denied. In a few rare cases we have been flamed when we didn’t give one out to everyone with a pulse and an RSS feed, so here is the rationale for our stingy position.

Three things not widely recognized by even the most enlightened digerati, but easily grasped by event planners is:

1) Every head in the room costs real money, especially at the venue where Gnomedex and the next BBS will be held.

The Bell Harbor Conference Center counts heads and charges the host of the event for every one. The venues that don’t do this charge five bucks for a cup of coffee, and don’t forget binders, badges, and managerial overhead. Receptions and lunches? Ouch, big bucks. People don’t understand that at real conferences, there is generally little to no charge for meeting rooms, it’s the incremental food and beverage that matters. Every “free” pass can cost hundreds of dollars in direct inescapable charges.

2) It’s Econ 101 people, there’s this thing called opportunity cost. This is the big one. If your event sells out, every free press pass displaces a paying (and upset!) attendee. That means you stand to lose a lot of money and your staff has to deal with angry potential customers being turned away. Gnomedex is being held at a small venue, and it’s pretty much sold out (still wondering why after last year’s success Chris chose such a tiny meeting space) so these free passes are incredibly expensive for Pirillo.

Back when I was producing the world’s (first and only) Photoshop Conference, folks from Adobe Systems wanted dozens of “free” passes to a conference that was sold out. Apparently they thought meeting space was like software and can be infinitely reproduced at almost zero cost. We were already turning away people with cash in hand, so we had to limit the freebees we could offer. Apparently, there are still managers at Adobe that think I was just being random and inconsiderate to them. Hope they read this and understand the rationale.

3) Even good press happens too late. Articles and coverage tends to occur during or after the event, which may help you a tiny bit with attendance next year, but don’t do a darn thing for you this year. Tell me how you want to cover the event before it happens and I’m intrigued, tell me about how you want to cover it when there, and I’m not particularly motivated.

At first, I didn’t think much of Washington’s new anti-online gambling law. Since the state said that it wouldn’t prosecute small-time gamblers, I thought it was a pretty innocuous piece of legislation designed to make folks on the religious right and irritated gambling widows sleep a little easier.

Then I read Danny Westneat’s Seattle Times column about Todd Boutte. Boutte is a blogger based in Bellingham. He was recently forced to shut down his site because of the new law. It turns out that in addition to a ban on Web-based gambling, the law also prohibits distributing gambling information using the Web. Since Boutte was using his blog to give readers tips about dishonest casinos and information about online gambling, he was committing a crime.

“1984 has finally arrived, I can’t believe this is happening in a liberal place like Washington,” Boute told the Times.

Boute’s blog was a small business for him. He hosted advertising and links to online poker sites, which provided a steady income for the former Wal-Mart employee. He is now trying to sell it out of state.

Sure, this law applies only to a small fraction of the current business bloggers out there. Most of us aren’t based in Washington, and most of us aren’t writing about online gaming. But if this law holds up in court - which I’m almost certain it won’t - it means that states could begin to ban online speech about all kinds of things. That’s an issue we’ve all got fair reason to be concerned about.

PR Squared says that the social media press release they debuted a couple of weeks back has been met with mostly positive feedback from the blogosphere.

I wasn’t too terribly thrilled with the newly formatted release when I first read about it. But since PR Squared has done such a nice job of responding to its detractors on this new press release format, I will relent a little and admit - as I’ve done before - that there is a time and a place for such releases.

My concern is that clueless PR people will grab this format of release, decide that it’s exactly what the doctor ordered, and then go on pitching bloggers in the same blogosphere-inappropriate ways that they always have. We all know just how well those random, inappropriate communiques go over in the blogosphere. It’s well established that if you’re going to contact bloggers, you’d better at least figure out how to do it right. I recommend reading Media Guerilla’s rules for blogger relations, or as we like to call it, blogger engagement.

I think at base, PR Squared and I are on the same page about this new press release. The content still has to be good, and you can’t just send them out willy nilly.