July 2006

In yesterday’s New York Times Randall Stross wondered why more C.E.O.’s don’t blog. Then he answered his own question: blogging is a risky proposition. As a rule, C.E.O.’s aren’t prone to risk-taking behavior, especially when the potential outcomes aren’t quantifiable. It takes that kind of cautious and calculated attitude to run a successful business.

That said, it’s unwise to state categorically that blogging is too big of a risk for the head honcho to take. Sun Microsystems’ Jonathan Schwartz has met with acclaim from the blogosphere and the mainstream media for his uncensored, if infrequent, posts about the company’s inner workings. Stross offers a spot-on analysis of the value that Schwartz adds by blogging:

Mr. Schwartz has posted his thoughts, very much on the fly, five times a month for two years. Over time he has earned credibility by his willingness to put in public view his unfiltered ruminations on a regular basis.

That credibility was needed last week, when he sought to put a positive spin on Sun’s quarterly earnings, his first as chief executive. One-time charges combined to produce another loss for the quarter — the company has reported losses for the past five fiscal years — but revenue was up significantly.

After the earnings release, Mr. Schwartz itemized on his blog the many positive developments that he sees in the company’s business. Viewed alone, it would be easy for unhappy investors to dismiss. But read as the latest installment of candid self-evaluations of the company’s strategic initiatives and performance, Mr. Schwartz’s optimism exerts a tonic effect.

But based on Schwartz’s success, Stross makes some unfounded generalizations about the entirety of the C.E.O.-sphere. He argues that even though Microsoft has more than 3,000 employees blogging, the lack of a blog written by Steven Ballmer or Bill Gates constitutes “an embarrassing silence at the top.”

“A large company is an outsize elephant,” he wrote. “Each employee works within a tiny wrinkle on the hide. Only the chief executive is in a position to sit astride the beast and share the widest perspective.” True as that may be, it does not necessarily follow that all C.E.O.’s would provide a benefit to their companies and shareholders if they were to broadcast that unique perspective in blogosphere format.

Companies and consultants need to pull their heads out of the C.E.O. box and look at all the options when making decisions about how businesses relate to the blogosphere. Instead of assuming an either-or solution, we need to give companies the chance to determine whether or not their C.E.O. is the right blogger for them. Sure, the C.E.O. can play an integral role in this brave new world of candor and transparency. But it’s not a requirement for him to be out there on his own.

Update: Of course, we’ll be discussing “the CEO box” and how businesses might determine other editorial angles at the next conference, coming up in October.

Some of the folks over at Know More Media want to schedule a meet-up and listen to some good blues (password required) between conference days.

It was funny how I got access to this post. It came in over my feedreader from a search on Feedster. It’s password protected, so I can’t see who wrote it. But whoever it was attended our conference last year. Here’s what he had to say:

The Blog Business Summit 2006 will be held October 25-27 in Seattle. While the 25th is aimed at newbie bloggers, the 26th and 27th will have the meat of blogging for business. I went in 2005 and it totally inspired me to start blogging. I met many of the big players: Mark Canter, Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, etc, and learned quite a bit.

Good to hear!

Charlene Li and Marnie Webb are talking right now about using tagging and microformats to organize and provide meta data about your blog.

Steve and Byron wrote about microformats in Publish and Prosper. And I’ve always found them very exciting - but Charlene and Marnie’s presentation is bringing me a new level of understanding of how to use them practically. I’m really looking forward to downloading the Movable Type plugin that makes using microformats super easy.

I know that microformats haven’t yet reached critical mass on the Web, but this presentation convinced me that I really want to be an early adopter of this exciting new technology.

Here’s the wiki from their presentation for your review.

Our new host experienced a power outage today that temporarily stopped us from being able to post. Before I knew about the outage, I tried to post and received continual error messages. Frustrated, I tried to post several times before checking with the host and discovering the outage.

It appears that after they restored our site, all the posts that were queued up went into the system and appeared on the site at once. I can imagine that the repetition felt like spam to you - especially given the topic of the post - and I do apologize. It was an unanticipated and unintended consequence of the outage.

The site should be back to normal functioning now. Your understanding is greatly appreciated.

Trojan’s Elexa brand condoms are purported to be constructed with a woman’s pleasure in mind, but when I first saw them I found the brand spinoff to be incredibly insincere. It made me think about that horrendous movie What Women Want. I felt like they were trying to leverage a market that they didn’t really “get.”

But that all started to change when I opened my bag at BlogHer and saw their condoms bundled up with a pretty pink ribbon and a nice tee shirt. “Maybe I’ll give them a second chance,” I thought.

So I looked them up on the Web, and the next thing I knew, I was reading their Sexy Smart blog. It features smart women reaching out to women about sex, love, relationships, STDs and orgasms. The change in my perception of their brand was firmly cemented by my experience with this awesome blog. It’s an awesome example of how blogging can turn skeptics into “brand ambassadors” simply by showing that you care about the same things they do.

I’m really rooting for Trojan/Elexa on this one. Nice job, guys & gals! We’ll be talking about how you can make brand ambassadors out of skeptics at the next Blog Business Summit conference in October.

I’m taking pictures at BlogHer and uploading them to Flickr today and tomorrow.

Here’s the link to my photostream. And here’s the general photostream with the tag BlogHer06.

The Blog Business Summit editorial team was able track down Spongebob Squarepants for an extremely brief interview focusing on the announcement that Microsoft was preparing an alternative to Apple’s galactically successful iPod. What does he say to Microsoft about this gutsy move? Listen to the mp3 here.

The registrations have started coming in, and the blogosphere is buzzing about our upcoming conference. Here’s a couple of links we found while hunting about today:

• Diane Ensey of A List Review says she’s coming to the BBS ‘06. Diane, we’re delighted to have you.
• Thanks to Mike ConverStations for the inbound link and the shout out about our special pre-launch pricing.

Remember that if you have a PageRank of 6 or higher, you can get some cool conference-related rewards just for linking in. For more information, check out the affiliate information in our sponsorship PDF.

Steve also found this cool link with a great review of his and Byron’s book Publish and Prosper. Business Blogger Day Tooley writes:

This is the book I wish I had a year ago when I first started the EasyStreet Business Blog.

DL Byron and Steve Broback are experienced bloggers and business blogging consultants who have condensed their practical advice into a friendly 180 page book.

It’s such a thrill to find positive things about your work being said in the blogosphere. I can’t explain it to you until you’ve experienced it for yourself. Attending our conference is the first step in making it happen for your business.

By the way, we’re at BlogHer hanging out with all the awesome FemBloggers. If you see us around, be sure to stop us and ask for the special BlogHer card that will get you a discount to the BBS ‘06. Just look for the Baby Got Blog tee shirts!

Steve and I are taking off this evening for BlogHer in San Jose. I’m particularly looking forward to Lisa Stone and Lynne Johnson’s presentation on ten types of Web writing. I’m also looking forward to hearing Charline Li and Marnie Webb talk about folksonomies–like our tag cloud–and taxonomies.

And of course, I’m really looking forward to hearing Maryam Scoble talk on a panel about staying naked even as your body of work changes. It reminds me a lot of the post that Anil wrote about making your blogging efforts meaningful. We’re delighted that Maryam is helping us to develop the speakers and sessions for our upcoming Blog Business Summit conference.

While at BlogHer, Maryam and I will be wearing these cool “Baby got Blog” tee-shirts. If you see us around, please feel free to chat us up about the conference and whatever else is on your mind. The design for the tees was created by WebComic It Girl Dylan Meconis.

We look forward to seeing you at BlogHer, at at our conference in October!

As I prepared to sign the contract for our next blogging conference, I decided to do a little analysis of blog-centric Wall Street Journal editorial coverage. My thinking was to see how many articles covered business blogging, and see what the trend was over time.

Based on previous searches, I knew searching for the word “blog” within articles was not going to be a solid indicator of editorial coverage, as so many pieces now include text like “check out his/her blog at…” etc.

I decided to search on the word “blogger” and found the headlines that resulted overwhelmingly contained relevant coverage of blogs and bloggers in a business setting. As the chart below shows, growth is significant, and the trend-line is not flattening.

The 2006 count of 222 was extrapolated from the actual count of 121 as of 7/19. Since 2006 is not over, I counted the number of articles so far this year, and then assumed the same rate of article appearance for the remaining months.

2005 saw 80% growth in mentions over 2004, and 2006 looks to beat 2005 by a whopping 150%. Encouraging!

No idea if this is any indicator of blogging acceptance, but it seems to me that it may at least relate to interest. Given these numbers and how they track with our previous numbers of conference attendees, this indicates to me that our comparatively intimate venue space may just get sold out. We’ll see…

It’s been said a million times that the bloggers who are passionate about your product are your best sales force. But when it comes right down to it, a lot of companies aren’t really sure how to leverage that particular power. That’s why I’m so impressed with Music Today, the company that handles Christina Aguilera’s fan club.

Today, an e-mail went out to all fan club members offering us a 5% discount to pre-order Christina’s forthcoming double album, Back to Basics. They also announced a contest in which each fan club member received her own personalized 5% discount code to share with “friends and family.” The Christina fan who pre-sells the most CD’s before Friday, August 11 at 3 PM ED wins an autographed iPod nano.

In the days before the blogosphere, these discount codes probably would have been sent out into the e-mail ether and they would probably garner only a few thousand sales at best. But with the blogosphere in full effect, Music Today and RCA records can expect larger sales by reaching out to Web-savvy Christina fans.

That’s not to say that Music Today couldn’t have made this offer better. They should have made a pre-release CD available on the iTunes store and given each fan club member a personalized 5% discount code that unlocks special features on the digital version of the CD.

We’ll be discussing these kinds of outreach efforts and how to maximize their impact at our upcoming conference in October.

And in case you’re interested in pre-ordering Christina’s new CD, you can go to the MusicToday store and use discount code TBLNCBBW for your 5% off. That’s right. I really want that iPod.

We’ve just signed the contract with Bell Harbor Conference Center, and are cranking now on editorial, sponsorships, and logistics. A basic overview of the event is here, and we’ll be fully fleshing out the details over the next few weeks. Some of the key elements that make this next conference different from previous Blog Business Summits are:

* Maryam Scoble will be working with me on the creation of our sessions, speaker recruitment, and all aspects of the editorial effort for the October show. Maryam, Robert and I used to work closely on developing conferences years ago, and it’s really great to be working with her again.

* More and more of our client companies are eager to get better at monitoring the blogosphere, and to engage with the bloggers relevant to their markets and products. We’re going to make sure we cover both subjects in-depth at the summit.

* We’ll spend more time covering the latest in working with audio and visual content (Podcasting and Vlogging.)

* Audience measurement and assessment has become a very hot topic, and we’ll make sure we demystify this subject.

* Several new speakers will be joining us onstage, and they’ll continue our tradition of bringing the best experts in the business to our attendees.

Hope to see you there!

Podcasting is made possible by a series of tubes. You shout down one end, and your audience hangs out at the other end and listens to you talk. The sound quality can be echoey, but if you’re strong of voice, you can shout over everyone else using the series of tubes and make yourself heard. It’s really neat.

But if you’re not Senator Stevens, you might not want to use a series of tubes to communicate with your audience. Instead, you can use the new BlogTalk Radio beta to podcast live over Windows Media Player.

So far, podcasting hasn’t really been the tool that many people imagined it would be. The business applications have been useful, but not dazzling or revolutionary. That’s why live podcasting in the right hands has the potential to be a big step in the evolution of business communications on the Web.

So far, businesses have used podcasts to record and distribute quarterly shareholder meetings or to hold interviews with their resident experts in a particular field. The entertainment industry sometimes uses podcasts to promote various shows, movies, or even new albums. Purina uses their podcasts to reach out to consumers with pet tips.

But for a business to have a meaningful conversation with core constituents, podcasting as it stands today is a sub-optimal medium. Like old-world communications, podcasts are a one-way street. The audience can’t respond to the company’s statement in the same medium in which the information was originally presented. That makes the conversation clunky and one-sided.

But let’s assume for a moment that live podcasting takes off to become the new standard. Companies would be able to have open, two-way, real-time conversations with their customers.

For example, let’s say that Dell wanted to address some of its service issues in a live forum. They could host a round-table discussion with some of their customer service gurus. Customers could call, e-mail, or instant message questions and suggestions during the discussion. Then, the entire conversation could be recorded and placed in a blog post as an ordinary 1.0 podcast after the fact.

Companies could use this sort of podcast to converse with core constituencies on specific issues or occasions–like when there’s a recall, a merger, or when a new CEO is hired. Some companies might decide to host an open forum each week–or even on a daily basis.

It’s possible that when combined with a blogging initiative, or even as a standalone outreach strategy, live podcasting could take companies to a whole new level of connectedness with the people that matter to them.

And no, podcasting is not a dump truck.

Via Gizmodo.

Update: The expansion of the two-way conversation made me think of this article that Fast Company posted yesterday about how Credit Suisse is listening to its customers.

Update: We’ll be covering podcasting as it applies to business at our upcoming conference.

Last week, I posted about blogger John Scalzi’s run-in with Guerilla Marketing and PR. A Guerilla staffer sent Scalzi a pitch e-mail full of condescending marketing jargon that made the firm look like they hadn’t a clue about the blogosphere.

On Friday, Guerilla President & CEO Michael Leifer left a comment for Scalzi apologizing and explaining the misstep:

Each of our outreach emails are crafted for a specific target audience and typically go through a quality control and approval process. As I’m sure you are well aware, mistakes occur within even the most strategic marketing campaigns and, unfortunately, you mistakenly received an email that was specifically developed for outreach to a database of comedic fansites (thus the affiliate-focused offer and tone).

Aside from containing messages that were not tailored specifically to you, the email you received was crafted by a Guerilla staffer who took it upon herself to make creative changes to the approved email copy, which resulted in language that was far more cutesy, “salesy”, immature, unprofessional and generic than any which Guerilla pr typically recommends using- with any audience. The copy in the email was not approved by anyone at Guerilla PR, nor by anyone at Napster.

The Guerilla staffer was fired for her decision to make unapproved changes to the copy.

As Scalzi notes, some of his readers are skeptical of Leifer’s sincerity:

Many of the commenters seriously doubt the sincerity of the letter above, and suggest Mr. Leifer’s explanation (and termination of his staffer) are largely the work of a marketeer trying to once again get a grip on his spin…This [accentuates] how suspicious folks in the online world are of bad marketing, and how quickly credibility erodes when one’s company does something dumb.

I couldn’t agree more with his conclusion. That’s why it’s critically important that businesses make understanding the blogosphere a high priority before something like this happens. The staffer in question should have been educated about working with bloggers before being given an assignment that put her into direct contact with the blogosphere.

Of course, Leifer did the right thing by apologizing. And his e-mail goes a long way toward damage control, but as of today, a Google search for the firm pulls up our previous post about the incident before Guerilla’s own site (see screenshot).

This was unintended on our part, but it does highlight what can happen to a company when the blogosphere starts to pay attention to a negative incident. Just look at the Warren Kremer Paino Advertising debacle this past May. At the height of the scandal, there were maybe nine or ten bloggers ahead of WKPA’s own website on Google (I wish I’d taken a screenshot).

I could wax poetic about the immense power of the blogosphere, search engine marketing and how businesses need to pay attention - but it’s all been said before. Obviously there are a lot of people out there who still don’t “get it.” But with Dell starting a blog, Leifer apologizing and Nestlé responding to criticisms, I think the tide just may be turning.

This post is only tangentially on topic! Beware of the Friday silliness.

A few days ago, a giant wasp flew into our apartment and scared the living daylights out of us. Andy (my fiancé) shooed the creature out the window and we thought nothing more - until it happened again, and again, and again. That’s when we figured out that a whole fleet of mud wasps had built its nest in the exterior wall of our apartment and were flying in through the open window.

I’m terrified of all flying, stinging insects - especially when the only thing between me and their nest is a bit of drywall that they’re bound to chew through at any moment. The exterminator is so booked up that he can’t make it out until Monday, and so you can imagine that this whole mess has given me considerable anxiety.

Then, last night, things went to a new level. I had this horrific dream in which the wasps had chewed through the interior wall and were all over the apartment. But they weren’t stinging. They were blogging. That’s right. Blogging wasps. And they were writing bad things about us.

I woke up at 4 a.m. drenched in sweat - swatting at the air and mumbling incoherently.

“What’s wrong?” Andy moaned, half asleep.

“The wasps,” I said, “they’re blogging.”

He paused for a moment, dumbfounded. Then he said, “you really need a vacation,” rolled over, and went back to sleep.

Image via here.

The fake Steve Jobs blog has one writer craving the real thing.

Yes, Apple has its student blog (which they essentially abandoned) and there’s Surfin’ Safari - but Janet Johnson was right a few months ago when she talked about aiming the magic wand at Apple and giving them a blogging initiative.

I want to see them open their gleaming platinum and white plastic kimono a little bit wider. What do they think of the newest Microsoft iPod killer rumor? What do they think of the Apple is dying meme? Any plans for an iPhone?

If Dell can do it, Apple certainly can.

Via Digg.

Yesterday I posted very briefly about the new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The study indicated that most bloggers target small niche audiences and focus on their own personal perspectives.

Obviously, this bears out the long tail model that we’re always blathering on about. But what else does it mean for businesses with an eye to the blogosphere?

Let’s delve a bit.

Some general facts about the study

• It was conducted using telephone interviews.
• The sample size was 233 people nationwide who identified themselves as bloggers during a larger survey. They were called back and asked in-depth questions for this inquiry.
• The respondents were mostly under the age of 30 and split evenly among men and women.
• They were less likely to identify as white than the general Internet population.

Personal Experiences, not Journalism

The Pew study bore out the prevailing theory that the largest group of bloggers identify themselves as diarists rather than journalists. This runs counter to the practice employed by some public relations professionals of relating to bloggers in the same way that they relate to reporters.

Of course, the best public relations is always conducted through human relationships based on shared interests and mutual benefit - but the fact that bloggers are more invested in their personal experience than in journalistic ethics means that the rules are slightly different. For example, a reporter would never publish the horrible pitch letter he received from a PR representative the way that John Scalzi did yesterday.

This means that businesses need to relate to bloggers as customers rather than reporters. Since bloggers are writing from their own personal experience rather than the dispassionate third-party perspective of a reporter, it is in a company’s best interest to make the customer’s experience as positive as possible.

If a blogger writes that they are dissatisfied with your product or service, it behooves you to contact them to ask what you can do to make the situation better - just as you would if a customer wrote a complaint letter to your corporate offices. The only difference is that in this case, the complaint letter is public - and addressed to your current and potential customer base, making it even more critical that you respond.

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Some blogs are run more like mainstream publications - with multiple writers and an eye for news on a particular topic. These bloggers straddle the line between diarist and journalist. If companies have a vested interest in working with bloggers of this stripe, the approach should showcase the mutual benefit of the proposal in a personalized, authentic way.

Bloggers Fact Check and Cite Original Sources…but not Always

Fifty-six percent of respondents in the survey said that they “sometimes” or “often” spent extra time verifying facts they wanted to include in their posts. This is good news, although those same numbers - if applied to journalists - would be scandalous.

It therefore behooves businesses who want to relate to bloggers to check facts themselves before interacting with a blogger. Sometimes all it takes to resolve a controversy is a calm, straightforward correction of the facts.

Blogs Gain Recognition on a Niche Level

The bloggers surveyed for this study said that their blogs were most often noticed by friends, family members, acquaintances and coworkers. They were also given some attention from fellow bloggers with overlapping interests. This bears out the “long tail” model.

This does not mean that businesses do not need to pay attention to “small-time” bloggers. Even with a small readership, bloggers are even more influential than the average customer. A blogger’s opinion about something lingers on the Web - and in search engines - forever. If a blogger posts today about a bad experience she had with your customer service, it could affect her ex-boyfriend’s sister’s decision to buy your product ten years from now.

Add up enough of those kinds of posts, and you have a problem that needs to be fixed.

Summation

Most of the time, companies should communicate with bloggers as customers who communicate very effectively with other customers in their wide social circle. Communications should always be conducted with an eye to personalized interaction and authenticity.

Thank you, Pew!

I would like to extend a thank you to the writers of the Pew study. Too often, academic writers use obfuscating language that makes research papers a chore to dissect. This study was a joy to read and showcased the findings nicely. Thank you for assigning your best writers to the task of preparing your work for presentation to the world!

I’ll be there (of course) and so will Steve. We’re really looking forward to seeing the ever fabulous Maryam speak. Of course, I’ll be blogging about the event for the Blog Business Summit.

Anyone freelancy out there who wants to go for free? Ping The Blog Herald and let them know.

• Wal-Mart made an abysmally ham-handed attempt at creating a social networking site. AdAge slammed them hardcore. Can they do anything right on the Web other than sell cheap stuff? I haven’t seen any indication.
• Jason Calacanis has been offering the most prolific users of social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious $12,000 a year to bookmark interesting information for Netscape instead. (Thanks to Janet Johnson at Marqui for the interesting link!)
• A recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project bore out the idea that most bloggers are interested in reaching only a very small niche audience, and are focusing primarily on personal perspective. Bring on the Long Tail model! Via TailRank.
• Google Guide offers a nice cheat sheet of Google operators to make your searches more efficient. Via Digg.
• India has released its blocks on some Web sites (subscription only) after the international community protested.
• European travel guru Rick Steves has launched a blog.

I started reading John Scalzi’s Whatever blog a few months ago when I came across it while researching a post I did about the anti-contraception movement. I put him in my RSS reader because I liked his attitude, and boy am I ever glad I did.

Today, he hit me with a killer example of how NOT to communicate with a blogger by comparing two pitches he received this week–one good, one bad.

The good pitch came from Tower Records that made him a nice offer where the value-add for both sides was clear:

I work for Tower.com and was wondering if you’d be interested in working with us to save your readers a couple bucks.

By contrast the pitch from Guerilla Marketing and PR, was condescending, sleazy and full of marketing jargon:

Napster is willing to pay you money, and all you have to do is keep your site lookin’ pretty…Give us a call or email and say, “my site wants a sugar daddy”, we’ll hook you up.

If you send something like that to a blogger, please don’t be surprised if it gets plastered all over the Web and makes your company look idiotic. It still amazes me when people think that they can put a “hip” spin on a tired old pitch and send it off into the blogosphere. Yeah, blogging is a hip new medium - but the people doing the blogging are still human beings. We want to be recognized as such.

Instead of worrying about looking hip, develop relationships with individual bloggers based on what you have in common. Make deals with them in a human, common sense, low-key way. Nine times out of ten, you’ll get a lot further.

So what’s Guerilla PR and Marketing to do now that they’ve been outed as ineffective in the blogosphere? I’ll give you folks a free bit of advice:

• Send Scalzi - and every other blogger that obvious form letter went out to - an apology.
• Admit that you don’t know what the heck you’re doing.
• Ask Scalzi to give you some pointers about how you might restructure your letter next time and ask him if he might be willing to post the conversation.
• Start sending out better pitch letters.

It’s not too late, Guerilla. You can still turn this around before it becomes a flustercluck of epic proportions. Stop doing things that make your clients look like “a coked-out middle-aged dotcom jackass with hair plugs, hanging out at a strip club and trying to convince the new meat on the stage to do the squishy with him in the back of his C-class Mercedes” and the blogosphere will forgive.

::Sigh:: I love John Scalzi….