September 2006

We’ve had a number of questions come in about the free book offer, so I’d like to make a few more clarifications.

• If you do not have a mailing address inside the United States, we cannot send you a book. There are no exceptions. We apologize for any inconvenience.
• If you are not associated with a legitimate business, we cannot send you a book. We ask that you prove your association with a legitimate business by e-mailing us at freebook [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com from an e-mail address associated with that business. E-mails from services such as Comcast, Earthlink or Hotmail will not be eligible to participate.
• If you are associated with a legitimate business, but do not have an e-mail address to prove it, e-mail me at teresa [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com. We evaluate these appeals on a case by case basis
• You must fill out a survey to get your book. A number of people have sent their mailing addresses to either the freebook address or another of our contact addresses expecting to get the book. If you do not fill out the survey, you don’t get the book. No exceptions.

Here is the step by step process to follow in order to get your book:

1. Send an e-mail to freebook [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com from your business e-mail address
2. Receive an e-mail back with a link to a survey.
3. Click on the link to fill out the survey.
4. Receive your free book in 2-4 weeks.

Also, in the interest of transparency, I should mention that we’ve been experiencing some problems with the filter we’ve been using to determine whether an e-mail address is associated with a business. Some people have received multiple responses. I can imagine that this experience would be very annoying and I’m sorry that the filter got screwed up. No person and no system is perfect and we sincerely apologize for the annoyance and inconvenience this malfunction caused.

Based on the first round of requests for Publish and Prosper through our free book offer, I’d say that our optimism about businesses blogging is well-founded. Requests have come in from real estate agents and CEOs, PR professionals and entrepreneurs. This preliminary information seems to support what we’ve been saying: the blogosphere is a permanent part of the future of business, and business people are waking up to that fact.

I’d like to issue a couple of reminders at this juncture:

1. There are only 500 books being offered at this time, and they’re going fast. If you’re interested in the book you should send an e-mail to freebook [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com from your business e-mail sooner rather than later.
2. You can’t get the free book without first proving that you’re from a business and then taking a short survey. Please don’t send e-mails to any of our contact addresses requesting the book. You won’t receive one, and you will only annoy me. The only address that you should e-mail in order to get a book is freebook [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com.

If you’ve got any questions, you’re welcome to e-mail me at teresa [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com.

Our very own Steve Broback will be speaking at the upcoming Venture All-Stars NW Fall Business Soiree.

The gathering is geared toward entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who want an opportunity to network and build new partnerships. Steve will speak on a panel with October Blog Business Summit speaker Andru Edwards and Venture All Stars’ Tim Reha about leveraging new media tools for businesses.

As a precursor to our Small Business Blogging session at our upcoming conference, we highly recommend the article How to Get Attention In a New-Media World by Gwendolyn Bounds. In some ways it contradicts what we know from a few successful blogs who have leveraged traditional PR to get their blogs noticed.

“Three years ago, fledgling New York shoe and dress designer Holly Dunlap hired a well-known public-relations firm to put her brand name — Hollywould — on the map. She paid roughly $6,500 a month as a retainer…Ms. Dunlap, in fact, was seeing results — just not so much from the PR firm. She had begun penning a diary on her Web site, www.ilovehollywould.com, chock-full of juicy details about her personal life, from late-night keg-party revelry in her downtown Manhattan boutique to boozy jet-setting jaunts through Europe…After five months, Ms. Dunlap cut loose her PR firm, betting the Web site could do more to build her company’s image. Today, she spends roughly $700 a month on Web maintenance and commands an average of 20,000 visitors a week, a figure that can triple when her site is mentioned on other Web-site trend leaders such as DailyCandy and Gawker.

Our best PR,” Ms. Dunlap says, “comes from people who are mentioned or featured on our site and forward the link to their friends.” Ms. Dunlap estimates sales of $6 million to $8 million for 2006 for Hollywould, and her wares are now sold in Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Harrods of London, among others.”

I’d say the right strategy is abandon the PR firm that doesn’t “get” blogging (few do at this point.) and get one that does. OR, hire a consulting firm that specializes in engaging with the blogosphere. The problem is that you’ll have a hard time finding a PR firm (good or bad) that isn’t touting a blog-centric strategy. The issue is discovering which ones are blowing smoke, and which ones have their act together.

Blog Business Summit conference speaker Robert Scoble has started an awesome new vlog where he chats with CEO’s of geek-oriented companies.

Yesterday, he posted his first interview with Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz who blogs from “astride the elephant” as one New York Times reporter said of CEO blogs.

Scoble’s final question for Schwartz was of particular interest to me. He asked about the ROI of the company’s blogging initiative, and of Schwartz’s blog in particular.

Schwartz responded that–aside from the “blog demon” on his shoulder telling him that he is obligated to blog–the initiative has “only been upside.”

Sun places a great deal of emphasis on transparency, which Schwartz described as a “useful tool” even when it “cuts both ways.” I truly admire the fact that they are unafraid to rely on other people’s blogs as a tool for future product improvements, even when negative feedback is made public.

One other comment caught my attention. Schwartz says that he would encourage other CEOs to jump into the blogosphere, but he doesn’t give a specific reason why a CEO should blog. Instead, he talks about all the wonderful things that the company blogging initiative has done.

Were I in Scoble’s shoes, I would have asked Schwartz if he would recommend CEO blogging over other kinds of company blogs. What unique contributions can a CEO (and only a CEO) offer to the conversation, and when are those contributions essential to a company’s presence on the Web?

Mr. Schwartz, if you’re reading right now, would you mind answering this follow-up to your wonderful interview with Robert?

If you’re a blogger, and you want to get $100 off any package to the upcoming Blog Business Summit, all you have to do is post and link in.

Here’s how it works:

1. Post about the event and link here.
2. E-mail Kim [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com with a link to your post.
3. Recieve a discount code worth $100 off the conference.
4. Click here to register and use your code.

Pretty simple, eh?

Update 10/12/06: Here are some banners and bugs to throw up on your site if you’d like to.

As you can see if you look at the navbar, we’ve added an attendees sub-blog where we list the attendees who have given us permission to do so. If you are already a Blog Business Summit attendee and you would like your name and bio to be listed on this blog, please send a bio and photo to teresa [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com.

If you’re not registered, but you’d like to be, click here.

If you look in the sessions section, you’ll see that schedules of the sessions have been posted. These are subject to change, but they’re a pretty good representation of how the conference will go.

In the next few days, we’ll be posting more speakers and clarifying more sessions.

You’ll also notice that the cost of the conference has gone to full price.

If you can’t come to the conference this October, you can still learn about business blogging from the folks that put on the Blog Business Summit. As part of our mission to get businesses blogging, we’re giving away 500 copies of our book Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business free of charge.

Obviously there are some provisions associated with this promotion, and you can read all about them here. Basically, you need to e-mail us at freebook [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com. Our e-mail filter will determine whether your e-mail address is associated with a verifiable business. If the filter determines that you are associated with a business, it will send a reply with a link to a short survey. Fill out the survey, get the book in 2-4 weeks.

So why are we doing this? There are a couple of reasons. First, we really care about business blogging.

But we are a business and businesses rarely do things for purely altruistic reasons. We are working to raise awareness of the conference this October, our partners Marqui, Six Apart and Attensa, the book, and our blog.easystreet.com)

“Indispensable…a practical guide to blogging for business.” -Mobil’Homme via (Amazon.com reviews)

“If you are a manager and have heard about blogs but don’t know what they are or how they can be used, then this book is right for you. The messages are clear, complete and will prove invaluable if you are considering or planning an entry into the blogosphere…Read this book before you start a business blog!” -Charles Ashbacher via (Amazon.com reviews)

So there you have it, if you’d like to get a $22 book for free, e-mail freebook [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com.

According to Rubel, over 200 US bloggers have Wikipedia bios. Looking up the bio for your target blogger might be a good place to start if your goal is to avoid doing ham-handed blogger “engagement”.

The overarching theme here is: get to know a blogger before you start pitching. Figure out how to best engage them with your product, even if that means thinking outside the box. Look for the value add on both sides of the fence, instead of going in with an old-school broadcast mentality.

According to MacWorld, Apple has been publishing tech support documents to deal with some of the many reported bugs in the new version of iTunes.

Tech support documents are all well and good, but a blog dealing with product bugs would be such a great way for Apple to give out the same information while learning of new issues faster.

Sigh…

…Or an example of another snarky blogger? Alas, I suspect the former.

All we can say to corporate America is once again, if you’re planning a blogger campaign, consider hiring a consultant (like us) to help you. Joel Spolsky has written a scathing essay about his experience with Sprint and their Power Vision Network. Ultimately, it appears that Sprint has some lessons to learn here (many of which we cover BTW at our conferences, seminars, and consulting sessions) about blogger engagement:

“Over the last six months, Sprint has been trying to get bloggers (like me) to write about their new Power Vision Network by sending us free phones and letting us download music and movies and use the phones for free.

That’s rather nice of them, but honestly, I have a really strong aversion to writing about things just because some PR person wanted me to. Basically, there’s no better way to make me not want to write about something than to ask me to write about it. I accepted the free phone because, gosh, well, it’s a free phone, but I decided that I simply wouldn’t write about it no matter how much I liked it.”

Conclusion? Have some finesse. Work on having an agenda that’s a little less transparent. Form a relationship, cultivate a bond of some kind. Sending out phones to targeted “influencers” is a one-way, old world, broadcast model notion. An engineer asking a blogger for their input because they’ve read a post of theirs about interface concerns forms a two-way relationship. Here’s a question to Joel — was the PR person a blogger themselves? Would it have made any difference? Our feeling is that to engage a blogger, it helps to BE a blogger.

“Where a Motorola RAZR has a solid case made out of almost sensual matte-black steel that just feels great, the LG Fusic is made out of the cheapest kind of gray plastic, the same material you find on a $3 toy. Where Motorola goes to great lengths to hide the screws, and minimize bumps and seams, the LG Fusic has dozens of ugly protuberances, gaps, holes, screws, seams, etc. Worst of all, the LG Fusic has no less than three of those evil, flimsy, rubbery plug-caps that are connected to the phone by the thinnest of filaments.”

“There’s no desktop integration, no ITunes integration, no feature for subscribing to Podcasts, nothing like that. When you plug the phone into your computer using the supplied USB cable, it thinks you want to use the phone as a modem. Yes, one day I might want to do that, that’s true, but for now I just wanted to get MP3s onto the thing…”

“…I have literally never seen such a useless MP3 player.”

Conclusion? Understand your audience. Don’t send a geek engineer a product that a geek engineer that won’t respect. Make sure you are providing something of real value. Beware that it’s real easy to post negatively too. If you aren’t sure, hire a blogger to help you.

“And now suddenly someone at Sprint read some book by Scoble and then they read Malcolm Gladwell’s theories of tipping points in the airport and Hey Presto! Maybe we can make this work by finding the tipping point people! You know, the bloggers! And all the bloggers get free cell phones, and Sprint gets tons of publicity, but frankly all the publicity in the world is not going to help them foist on us a product that is utterly pathetic.

Ouch. Conclusion? Ask/hire for input before pushing for a “review.” This was a classic example of how sending Spolsky a prototype phone a year ago could have saved Sprint from shipping a sub-par product, and could have given them a heads up that he’d pan the thing as is. As I suspected, other bloggers in the program also seem to want to be more than just co-marketers, and have influence over the product’s direction.

This is a question that we hear from potential clients all the time. If blogging/social media is as easy as writing an e-mail and costs practically nothing compared to an advertising or marketing campaign, why do we need to hire someone to help us do it?

Some companies truly don’t need to hire consultants, they may have the blogging talent and knowledge in-house. But the road to the blogosphere is paved with stories of companies that have made serious missteps in social media because they entered the arena with the best of intentions, but without really getting some crucial component of “it.”

Recent examples include:

• McDonald’s
• Facebook
• Starbucks

So what is that elusive “it” that consultants, like us, offer?

Knowing the blogosphere as we do, we’re better able to predict and prevent common pitfalls like the use of marketing jargon or gimmicks. We’ll ask questions about your plans for the blogosphere that people in your organization won’t think to ask. And we’ll bring real-world examples of successes and failures to the table.

Why do we know all this? Because we’re truly passionate. We’re unabashedly geeky and we really love the blogosphere and related technologies. We live out here. We spend all our time thinking about how this stuff works for businesses. Unlike major PR firms, we don’t provide any other services. There’s something to be said for true specialization when you’re hiring a paid expert.

This is the reason we’ve chosen to focus on the “how” instead of the “why” at our conferences. You can understand the “why” from reading any number of blogs and business blogging testimonials, but when it comes to the “how,” you’re probably going to need some help.

In 2005 the Blog Business Summit team conceived and planned a special blogger event where several of our top speakers flew to Walla Walla wine country on a private 737. This year, we are excited that conference sponsor Greenpoint Technologies has offered up their Lear jet to us for another getaway to Washington wine country.

The trip will take place on October 28, the day after the conference, and this time, we are opening the trip up to include 3 seats for the 3 top speaker/sponsor/qualified attendees who drive the most clicks and sales our way via our affiliate tracking system. We’ll have more details posted soon. To become a sponsor or qualified attendee affiliate, please e-mail kim [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com or download our sponsor flyer.

Greenpoint Technologies is a VIP jet completion firm based in Kirkland, WA, and we’re launching the newest in our list of sponsored blog properties–a blog about the rarified world of private jet ownership–in conjunction with them very soon.

While poking about the Web today, I discovered the existence of a very cool wiki designed to track the business blogging efforts of the Fortune 500.

According to the wiki, only 30 (6%) of the Fortune 500 companies have verifiable, active public blogs. Part of the goal with this conference that we’re plugging shamelessly is to do just that.

Via Gumption.

Strong: Steve made me aware that this is nothing new, but that doesn’t diminish it’s coolness

Yesterday I wrote about NBBC, NBC’s new spinoff responsible for online distribution of content produced by NBC and its affiliates. I saw a number of things wrong with the system, chiefly that it wouldn’t allow users to repost the content elsewhere. If your goal is widespread distribution, you should allow others to disseminate your content as they see fit. That’s just common sense.

Jeff Jarvis continued that theme yesterday, mentioning that the biggest problem with NBBC is that they would only distribute content from NBC’s producers and affiliates. User generated content would not be a part of the site. In short, they want complete control over their site, what gets posted, and where their content goes.

That’s a problem. Part of the massive popularity of YouTube is that users can easily respond to content produced by others. With no way to respond, interact, or upload content of their own, NBBC’s users won’t stay interested for long.

If NBC really wanted to get people interested, it would open up a user-generated portion of the site where independent filmmakers–like those responsible for the recent lonelygirl15 phenomenon–could submit their content. The most popular content would receive consideration for a show on NBC.

Yesterday, I wrote about the need for PR and IT professionals to collaborate and innovate on new uses of technology for the benefit of business communications.

If anyone lives that spirit, it’s the people at PR Squared. Their latest idea to pitch reporters by tagging their names on relevant blog posts is inspired.

Obviously, people who used this technique would need to institute some best practices. The people at PR Squared list several, but I would like to include that the practice would need to be explained to bystanders.

After all, if we started tagging New York Times columnist Chris Elliott–who has written about us before–in many of the posts over at our inFlightHQ business travel blog, many readers and searchers might be truly confused.

NBC and its affiliates have launched a new company, the National Broadband Company. The NBBC will be responsible for disseminating content from across the NBC network on the Web.

Already, the NBBC is facing criticism from some quarters, who say that its ban on reposting of content on weblogs and other sites will hinder its goal of widespread Web-based distribution.

I have to jump on that bandwagon on this one. More than half the point of distributing your content this way is so that people can experience and share that content in a way that works for them. If your goal is widespread distribution of your message, the last thing you want to do is restrict how people can spread it.

Since its launch in May, the LAPD’s blog has gotten its fair share of both criticism and praise. Earlier this year, LA Daily News Columnist Mariel Garza wrote that the blog, “just bogs down the net.”

But now, the LAPD is earning attention in the blogosphere for its use of the blog as a public clearinghouse for interdepartmental issues. On one particularly contentious post, Deputy Chief Michael Moore fired back back at the anonymous “Officer M,” whose contempt for the department is evident in everything he writes.

Of the exchange, the LA Voice writes:

This is definitely the most open and transparent thing ever posted on the department’s fledgling blog - and a particularly brave choice, at that.

The department’s media officers could have quietly issued a press release, hoping for the great likelihood that even if the Times or Daily News did bother tasking a writer to it, the final squib would have been buried somewhere around B-7 and never seen the light of day.

But now that they’ve posted it online, where (gasp!) anyone can see and comment it, they’re finding themselves engaged in a donnybrook with a vocal handful of officers, officer-candidates and civilians - and they find themselves perched on the same craggy peak where so many other bloggers cling today: compelled to publish fast, overtaxed on accuracy and benefit-of-the-doubt issues, driven to take a stand and beset by their audience.

The LAPD blog has, at last, arrived.

Yasher koa!

If New Line was truly disappointed with the performance of the much-touted Snakes on a Plane, they should consider making it available for download over the new iTunes store, which is equipped to handle full-length motion pictures.

The impulse buy/content on demand factor alone would probably bring in more money for them than the box office did.