August 2006

Obviously we were not happy to hear last week about a the end of Connexion by Boeing. We coordinated the Blogging the Stratosphere 1.0 event for them and they sponsor our inFlightHQ blog, and they’ve been a great client. We’ll miss them as people, as clients and as a source of revenue and bragging rights.

Our role as a consultant and partner with Connexion was to help them use the blogosphere to capture a robust market for their remarkable service. But as Boeing Chairman, President and CEO Jim McNerney said, that market did not materialize to the degree that they needed in order to get a return on their massive investment.

In his recently updated and re-release book The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman writes that it’s always best to be the “second buyer” of infrastructure and technology. That is, it’s best to be the company that comes in and takes advantage of the infrastructure and innovations that a first, unprofitable company left behind when they ceased operations. We saw it with the massive investment in fiber-optic cable by the telecoms during the first Web bubble and the subsequent direct benefit to globalization. We saw it with Napster, which started the revolution of obtaining music over the Web only to be relegated to relative obscurity by Apple’s better-structured use of their initial concept in its iTunes Store. 

It’s possible that Boeing’s executives looked at the landscape of in-flight WiFi and were concerned that newer technologies might put them at a disadvantage.

The tough reality is that no amount of blogger outreach was going to make the Connexion service any less expensive to run, or eliminate 1.5 billion dollars in development costs. With those sunk costs, I estimate Boeing would need to outfit well over 400 planes a year for ten years to achieve the required ROI. So far only 156 planes had been outfitted to date.

While we could get people interested in the service by creating award-winning buzz. We could provide great editorial that drew in Connexion’s target market. But we couldn’t fix the business model.

So where do we go from here?

We’re going to do our best to smooth the impact of Connexion’s shutdown on its customer base in the U.S. and abroad by using our inFlightHQ blog to keep Connexion customers informed about what the service shutdown means for them. We’ll find out more about what Lufthansa–which has Connexion enabled on 80% of its planes–intends to do with the existing infrastructure. And we’ll look at the future players in this exciting new market.

Long-term, we’ll work to keep Boeing’s initial investment of time, thought leadership and money relevant to the conversation about in-flight WiFi. The Connexion story will be a very important one when we look back on the history of making Internet access available in the sky. We hope that Boeing will look at Connexion’s investment in a blogging initiative as a good one, even if it couldn’t make the service profitable.

Cameron Olthuis at ProNet, Jeremiah Owyang at Hitachi and Joseph Jaffe at JaffeJuice have compiled a great list of relevant topics that your company should be monitoring on the Web.

I’d like to add that if you’ve got a Mac, there’s no better program to use for all this monitoring than NetNewsWire because you can so easily configure it to monitor for specific tags on Technorati, Flickr and more. You can even configure it to pay attention to search engines (not Google, unfortunately).

We’ll be covering more of these Web monitoring and response techniques at our next conference.

Update 8/24/06: The Bivings Report has some nice additions to the list, and a wiki has been set up to allow others to make contributions to the list. This is one to watch, folks.

We’re very excited to see that so many people have taken advantage of our special pre-launch pricing (until August 21) for the upcoming conference. And we’ve been enjoying the blogosphere buzz.

Here’s a post from Sabine at CT Biz Blogs. She says that last year’s BBS in San Francisco, “looks to have been very well-regarded.” She also links to Dave Taylor’s excellent post about the value of attending conferences.

Meanwhile, Maryam Scoble–who is helping us with our editorial development and speaker recruitment–has gotten herself into quite a heated conversation with Shelly Powers and her readers. She’s used the ensuing chatter (which spilled over onto the iDid blog) to get people on record about what they want from a business blogging conference.

Rest assured, guys, we’re listening to your suggestions. Please feel free to join us over here as well and let us know what you’d like to see.

If you haven’t made the jump from a traditional Website to a company blog, you’ll at least want to pay attention to one very important feature of the blogosphere: permalinks.

PRR is an excellent communications consultancy that I worked for one summer. They recently underwent a beautiful Website redesign/rebrand that has just one big problem. In the process of reformatting the site, they completely disrupted all their old links. Suddenly, the link that used to go to CEO Rita Brogan’s bio now gives searchers a 404 not found error. (Her new bio can be found here.)

This wouldn’t have been much of a problem back before the blogosphere got everyone hyper linking (pun intended) to one another all the time, but we’ve entered an era where even traditional website owners need to be aware of the permalink. From now on, anyone that finds a blog post that refers to Rita and clicks on the link to her bio will meet with a 404. This process is called link rot.

Fortunately for everyone, there’s an easy fix to this problem. Just copy the permalink to this post (it’s in the title) and send it to your Web designer. Ask him or her to make changes to the .htaccess file for your domain to point all the old links to the new ones. It’s a couple hours worth of work to make sure that all the necessary redirects are in place, but it optimizes your site both for bloggers who are linking in and for search engines that tend to keep old links around for quite a while.

And in case you want to make the change yourself, just download your .htaccess file (make sure your FTP client can “see” hidden files), open it in your favorite text editor and add the following code:

Redirect /directory/file http://yoursite.com/directory/file

There are many precautions, from preventing link rot to initiating a company blogging policy that non-blogging companies can do to co-exist more comfortably with the blogosphere. We’ll talk about more of these techniques at our upcoming conference.

Diane Ensey over at Do Real Time has a thoughtful response to my post from yesterday about putting information from social networking sites in its proper context during the hiring process:

I’d suggest anyone hiring read the article, but with one caveat. I’d ask the candidate why they have the photos and/or information posted about themselves. They won’t be expecting the question and the answer could be an insight into how they see the world.

I absolutely agree with this in principle but employers need to be aware of some entangled legal issues. An attorney friend of mine told me today via e-mail:

I think it would depend on why the “light” he/she was in was considered bad. If it related to religious beliefs or some other protected class (sexual orientation for example), then I would steer clear. But if it was something like being sprawled out on the ground with beer cans all over, being nude, lewd, etc., then I would ask away.

My dear friend Michelle–who is an ultra-responsible med student–also had an excellent contribution to the conversation. She pointed out that people generally put only the most extraordinary photos up on their MySpace pages. Employers need to keep in mind that a MySpace photo of a potential employee dancing on the banquette at Bungalow 8 might be representative of one of the most amazing–and uncharacteristically party-heavy–nights of her life. Asking about the photo might elucidate that further and give you some information about how she sees the world and the Web.

The Terra Cotta Inn & Spa has a great press release outlining the top 5 myths about small business blogging over at PR.com. My favorite is myth #5, “I’m too busy to blog.”

If a business needs a presence on the internet, then it needs a company blog. It is very easy to set one up. Go to blogger.com or wordpress.com (two of many blogging sites). In as little as 15 minutes, you can create a blog. Add at least 1 article every week. Tell your customers about your blog. They will be glad that you did and so will your bottom line!

I have to disagree with a couple of the finer points. One post a week isn’t frequent enough. We’d rather see our clients put up two or three short posts a week than one long dissertation. But companies need to do what’s right for them and then let their customers decide whether the blog is working.

Also, even though Blogger and Wordpress are awesome hosted solutions, we still recommend that serious business bloggers move their blogging initiatives onto their own websites sooner rather than later.

We’ll be talking more about what platforms are best for which types of business blogging at our upcoming conference.

You’ve just interviewed “Julie”–a recent college grad–for an entry-level job at your firm. In your interview, she came across as polished, intelligent and charming. She’s got a fantastic GPA from a good school, a great resumé and references that give you the impression that she’ll be running the world someday. You’re thrilled to have met her and are leaning strongly towards hiring her until you fire up your computer and take a look at her MySpace page.

There you find photographs of a different Julie from the one you just met. In one, she’s wearing a revealing skirt and making a kissy face at the camera. In another, she’s dancing on the bar at a local club.

You’re stunned. Why did Julie and her friends put up pictures like this? Do they have any judgment whatsoever? Can you honestly say that you’re prepared to hire someone who looks like such a party girl?

The prevalence of social media today has implications for companies and potential employees alike. The issue has raised questions in the mainstream media and the blogosphere. But what do employers really need to know in order to frame the question?

We’re living in an era where even the most responsible people under 30 are comfortable and feel justified in sharing some of our youthful shenanigans online. We grew up with the Web as a pervasive part of our daily lives, and we look at it as a tool for work and as space to play.

So, what should you do to decide if “Julie” is still worth hiring?

Step 1: Go back and look over her resumé, transcript and references again. Ask yourself, if she were really that much of a party girl, how did she get these amazing grades and manage to impress her professors so thoroughly?

Step 2: Go back over your first impression of her. Was she intelligent and polished during your interview? Did she ask good questions? Did she have good responses to yours? Has she since followed up with a thoughtful note, an e-mail, or a phone call?

Step 3: Think back to your past. When you were Julie’s age, did you ever go out for drinks or dance until the wee hours? Are there people you respect who did similar things when they were in their 20’s and 30’s? Was there ever a similar photo of you posted on the bulletin board in your frat house or residence hall in college?

This last question is the most important, because for people who grew up in the computer age, the social Web is our frat house bulletin board. It’s a pervasive part of our tech-savvy culture, and its not necessarily a bad thing.

So do Julie (and yourself) a favor and put the information you found in context. Remember that it’s possible for most people to separate work and play. Then take a deep breath and go with your gut.

We’ll be talking more about what companies and employees need to know about appropriate use of the social Web at our upcoming Blog Business Summit conference this October.

Update: Diane Ensey has a great response to this post at her Do Real Time blog.

Dell met with some criticism in the blogosphere yesterday for not using its blog to address the recall of 4.1 million lithium ion batteries due to the potential for explosion.

Since the announcement of the recall and the subsequent criticism, Dell has responded with a number of posts addressing the recall and answering customer questions.

Now, I agree with Shel Holtz that Dell should have made announcements on their blog before news of the recall hit the mainstream media. But all in all, they’re still doing a good job on the relevance and transparency end of the spectrum.

This is a good, practical learning experience for companies that are using any kind of blogging strategy. If you’ve got a major announcement, make sure that there’s something timely about it up on the blog. It’s not an egregious, hugely damaging mistake to make the kind of oversight that Dell did–but it does raise a few eyebrows.

We’ll be talking a lot more about fine-tuning your blogging strategy and dealing with big announcements at the upcoming Blog Business Summit conference.

It looks as though Apple’s new Leopard OS will incorporate many new social Web tools. Apple has already embraced blogging and podcasting for its users bigtime.

The coolest developments to my mind are the new Wiki server that will enable user friendly collaboration between teams on a company’s intranet. One of the other cool features will allow you to use CalDav to view and edit your coworkers’ calendars.

Bokardo points out quite aptly that almost all of the new features in Leopard are aimed at facilitating better communication between teams. We’re going to talk about a number of ways to do just that, using tools available on both Macintoshes and PCs at our Blog Business Summit conference in October. We’re looking forward to seeing you there.

When I first read that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had started a blog, I was so skeptical that I decided I’d wait a few hours before blogging about it, just to make sure that the blog wasn’t a fake. After all, Hot Air did raise some pretty valid questions about the blog’s authenticity.

But since then, Iran’s state-run TV has confirmed that Ahmadinejad is indeed blogging, and they would know.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of all this. If you’d told me a few days ago that the president of a country that cracks down on dissident bloggers would start blogging, I would have laughed in your face.

It’s likely that this blog is just a place for Ahmadinejad to release rants as the crisis in the Middle East continues to develop. I doubt that he’ll actually tolerate dissent, engage with his detractors, offer any kind of transparency, or do any of the other things that a blogger is supposed to do when representing an organization.

But you have to admit that it’s a brilliant publicity stunt.

Maybe he missed his calling in Public Relations.

Via TailRank.

Old media wisdom would suggest that teenage spinoffs of popular magazines do more than just capture a broader market to generate advertising dollars. They tie girls to a particular magazine from a young age.

But magazines targeted at teenage girls have been tanking left and right recently. According to Anastasia Goodwin at Fast Company this is because young teenage girls–who have always read magazines targeted at older teens–are now graduating to “grownup” magazines like Elle and Cosmo at a younger age than they used to. And with the boom of user generated content–mostly in the form of social networking–it seems like the magazines targeted at this demographic are all but irrelevant.

Of all the contenders, Goodwin predicts that only Teen Vogue will survive in its current form because its primary topic is helping girls make trendy, high fashion looks work on a teen’s budget. Unlike Seventeen or Cosmo Girl, Teen Vogue will survive because it serves one pressing need for a lucrative niche market. Other magazines will need to move toward that same “long tail” model or face extinction.

All of this lead me to one glaringly obvious conclusion. Teen magazines need to start blogging post haste. Not one of the current contenders has so much as an RSS feed on their Website. With such a Web-oriented audience, no wonder they’re all facing extinction.

I’m not suggesting that Seventeen close the pages of its print edition forever, but adding a couple of single-topic blogs to its Website couldn’t hurt its goal of getting teenage girls reengaged with the magazine. At the very least, it could generate some additional advertising dollars.

Am I off base, or do you guys think this could work?

The latest analysis from Hitwise indicates that traffic to the social bookmarking site Delicious has more than doubled since Yahoo! acquired it late last year.

At BlogHer this year, Marnie Webb and Charline Li presented about social bookmarking among other things. They really enlightened me to the value of using these types of sites for research when I’m working on an intricate post. It’s definitely become very useful for me, because not only can I save links I find interesting, I can find out who else liked those same links, and then see what other links they found interesting.

I can only imagine what would have happened if I’d been using Delicious this way while I was doing research for papers in college…

Retired Oregon Supreme Court Justice Edward Fadeley railed against the blogosphere today, calling it “a veritable Wild West of verbal ambushes and shootouts, with very little fear of legal recourse to keep character assassination, defamation and dirty business tricks in check.”

Fadeley went on to say that many legitimate businesses have been harmed by the irresponsibility or outright viciousness of bloggers, and he alleged that as many as 60% of the attacks on businesses by bloggers were sponsored by competitors.

Fadeley makes a valid point that running afoul of the blogosphere has done great harm to some businesses. But what he doesn’t understand is that these same businesses have the opportunity to emerge victorious from the maelstrom of criticism and backbiting by simply engaging with the bloggers that are attacking them.

That said, it’s no wonder that many corporations still perceive the blogosphere as a problem to be avoided instead of a powerful tool. If very bright people like Judge Fadeley hold this perception, it’s not hard to imagine that corporate executives and other powerful individuals would feel the same way.

At our upcoming conference, we’ll talk about how different businesses are using the blogosphere in unique ways that fit the culture, business model, and goals that they value. And we’ll help our corporate attendees on their way to determining the optimal strategy for working with the blogosphere to benefit themselves and their customers.

Via The Blog Herald.

Six Apart has launched new software for the Palm, Windows Mobile or Nokia Series 60 smartphones. The software makes it possible to post to TypePad blogs from anywhere you can get a cell signal.

While this software will probably make the most difference for personal bloggers who want to moblog, it has some applications for business as well - particularly for business travelers who are using TypePad blogs to communicate between team members.

Via TailRank.

A January 2006 study by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found that Fortune 500 companies who were early contributors to the business blogosphere adopted individualized strategies for balancing messaging control with the autonomy of individual bloggers.

Based on their data, they determined that there were five different types of corporate blogging strategies that can be characterized broadly as being either “top-down” or “bottom-up.”

A company with a “bottom-up” strategy allowed all employees to blog, on the company website, about any topic that suits their fancy. Sun Microsystems hosts just such an open blogging forum for their employees. Each individual’s blog serves its own unique purpose - from humanizing the company to providing complex technical support.

By contrast, “top-down” strategies range from companies that allow only one or two top executives to blog to those that allow a select group of employees to blog about a predetermined subject. The researchers identified four subtypes of “top-down” corporate blogs:

1. Top-Down I–in which a top executive of the company blogs to establish thought leadership or to communicate with core stakeholders.
2. Top Down II–in which a few select individuals from different groups blog about preselected topics in order to establish thought leadership.
3. Top Down III–in which a group of employees work on one blog together to discuss a niche topic of interest to one or more of a company’s core constituencies.
4. Top Down IV–in which a company speaks with a “lack of human voice” to promote the company’s products or services. The researchers cited the ill-fated Raging Cow blog launched by Dr. Pepper/Seven Up as an example of such a blog.

I have a bone to pick with the researchers’ characterization of subtype IV. While they obviously understand that “traditional marketing gimmicks found in press releases are not tolerated in the blogosphere,” they don’t grasp that it’s possible for promotional bloggers to speak with an authentic human voice.

Instead of trying to be gimmicky in a promotional blog, we recommend that companies ask an employee or group of employees that are genuinely enthusiastic about the value of their products or services to blog about what they find helpful and relevant. Companies should also ensure that the blogger(s) are free to engage in constructive criticism without negative consequences. This helps to establish credibility and engages customers in the process of making the company and its products better.

We’ll discuss how to walk this fine line between promotion and gimmick at our upcoming Blog Business Summit conference in Seattle, WA this October. Our special discount pricing is available only until August 21.

Ooh yeah, and lest I forget, the Blog Business Summit is mentioned on the first page of the study. Hooah!

I knew that the blogosphere was going to be buzzing from the second that I started reading Nicholas Lemann’s piece about the new media in The New Yorker this weekend. I wish that I could have posted sooner, but I’ve been without Internet access on Long Island for the past few days. I am currently blogging from a coffee shop on Columbus Circle in The City (is there any other?), so here goes…

The main problem with Lemann’s article is that he thinks he’s making a big point about an issue that has, in fact, already been settled. The blogosphere and the MSM are complimentary forms of media. They enhance one another and keep one another honest. But bloggers will never replace reporters, and I don’t think there’s very many of us who would even like to try.

Lemann cites the statistic from the recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that only 34% of bloggers consider what they do to be journalism. Yet he stubbornly presses on with his argument that bloggers will never replace the media as if this were a revelation.

But despite that glaring problem, I took the most issue with Lemann’s unfavorable comparison of bloggers to the early pamphleteers of later Stuart Britain and post-Revolutionary America:

They were the bloggers and citizen journalists of their day, and their influence was far greater (though their audiences were far smaller) than what anybody on the Internet has yet achieved.

The comparison shows just how off base Lemman’s understanding of the blogosphere really is. Has he not heard of The Long Tail, or is he just playing dumb?

Most bloggers have a very small, niche audience. That’s what blogs are good for. We’re not trying to be newspapers with wide circulation. We’re providing little nuggets of content that describes our individual experiences with a particular piece of the world at a particular time. When put together, and tagged (or microformatted) appropriately, those collected nuggets can paint a fuller picture of the quality of a product, the reliability of a service, the prescience of a book, or the seriousness of a political debacle.

The power of the new media is often described as a democratization of traditional media. Lemann has mistaken this to mean that bloggers believe we can be reporters. What it really means is that everyone has a method for broadcasting their voices that was previously reserved for a select few. It’s those collected voices that make us powerful and relevant to businesses, politicians, and yes, even to the press itself.

Way back when I was a kid, there was an urban legend floating around my elementary school about pop rocks and soda. If you consumed them together, the story went, your head would explode.

But now it appears that the playground myth of my childhood has morphed into a full-blown science experiment cum meme. It’s grabbed the attention of scientists, bloggers, the mainstream media, and now the corporate world.

It all started a few months ago when some kids decided to put some Mentos into a bottle of Coca-Cola and videotape the results. The ensuing geyser fast became one of the most popular videos on YouTube, spawned thousands of copycat experiments, and even made its way to coverage on NPR, where scientists made attempts to explain the phenomenon.

The slow buzz around this meme has been phenomenal, so it’s only natural that the products involved would attempt to hope on board. But while Coca-Cola has been trying to take control of the meme, Mentos has taken a more laid-back approach. By jumping on the bandwagon instead of having a command and control mentality, Mentos is the clear winner when it comes to this meme.

CNN’s new Exchange portal is a citizen journalist’s wet dream. Roving reporters can now send text, video and picture messages to CNN from their cell phones. Citizen op-ed producers can also sound off on issues of the day in 30 second clips - the best of which appear nightly on Prime News with Erica Hill.

I’m now a lot more likely to turn on CNN than I used to be. It’s a grand slam for them to find ways to integrate user generated content into their broadcasts. But it remains to be seen whether the folks in charge of filtering the content will post or broadcast opinions or stories that are critical of CNN, its advertisers, or its affiliates.

Via Micropersuasion.

When I read that Jeremiah got a call from Samuel L. Jackson about his forthcoming blogosphere-influenced thriller Snakes on a Plane, I wanted to find out how this happened and replicate it for all my friends and family.

So I went to the website where you can build a custom message from Samuel L. for someone you love (or hate). I spent several minutes building a message for my fiancé, entered his cell phone number, and waited for the hilarity to ensue.

His phone rang a few minutes later, but when he picked it up, there was nobody there. After about 20 seconds, a female voice came on the line to tell him, “there has been a problem, please call back later.”

Now, this is a cool idea. I have a feeling that there are already 100,000 geeks sending ridiculous messages to everyone they know. But the fact that Varitalk, the company responsible for this little promotional masterpiece, didn’t plan on enough capacity to handle all the incoming requests is sheer garbage.

If you’re going to offer any kind of service that will be popular with a geeky audience, you have to be prepared for the incessant demand for bandwidth, phone line capacity, or whatever other resources you’re using. And if you’re trying to start a meme, triple the amount of demand you anticipate.

Because the last thing you want is for your lousy execution to become a meme all its own.