October 2006

Just a note to let you know that C4Chaos from Zaadz is liveblogging the conference.

If you remember from my post about how we show our love for our speakers, you’ll know that we had a wonderful party planned last night.

And what a night it was. Ashton Limousine delivered us from the conference center to Maggiano’s Little Italy in Bellevue in their fantastic Mobile Boardroom. We drank some very special wines by DiStefano, which is one of my favorite wineries. We were also lucky enough to have Simon Ford, the brilliant brand ambassador from Plymouth Gin do a presentation about the history of gin.

I really want to get Simon blogging. He’s a treasure trove of knowledge about the subtleties and complexities of gin. He had us try three varieties and I instantly was able to tell which was the Plymouth. I’ve never even had gin before last night–I’m usually a tequila woman–but the Plymouth was so distinctively smooth. I would almost describe it as buttery. He also designed some remarkable cocktails for us. I’ll share those recipes as soon as I can pry them out of him.

The food and the wine were just as amazing. It was all such a whirlwind, but I have a memory of a wonderful chicken and mushroom pasta in a savory cream sauce and a very tasty chocolate cake with buttercream layers. DiStefano’s wines really don’t need any introduction, but they’ve always been a favorite of mine and last night was no exception.

As I’m sure you can imagine, we’re all a little bleary-eyed this morning, but we must thank our sponsors and their fabulous PR firm, Randall PR. There are a number of public relations people who don’t really get blogging, but Lori Randall and her team are not among them. It’s wonderful to see communications professionals so enthusiastic about these emerging tools.

Yeah, I know, I’m gushing about sponsors. They give us things and they want us to blog about them. But I don’t gush about things unless they are really and truly fabulous.

The following are my notes from the special breakfast session about the future of online communications with Jeremy Pepper of Weber Shandwick, John Starkweather of Microsoft and Jeanette Gibson of Cisco Systems.

• John: Cell phones are on track to become like wristwatches, you take them everywhere. Any phone with a browser will be able to read all kinds of social media. This will give companies powerful, portable ways of reaching people. If you’re writing a blog, be thinking about small screens and how your blog renders on people’s cell phones.
• Marketers can add functionality to traditional advertising to enhance relationships with customers. Someday, you’ll point your cell phone at a billboard and be able to purchase the product it advertises automatically. When you go to the ballpark, your cell phone will be able to tell you where you’re supposed to sit and which entrance to use.
• Q: How does blogging add value for a company? A: Qualitatively, it’s about reaching influencers and customers in a human way. Most executives want an older metric like traffic, PageRank and Alexa ranking.

The following are my notes from our legal panel of Phil Mann, Buzz Bruggeman and Kevin O’Keefe at Day One of the Blog Business Summit.

• What do you do when you get the letter from the lawyer? Phil says, not to contact the other side. Tf you call the other side or call the other lawyer, everything you say may be written down or taken out of context. The intention may be a letter to scare you, or they may be deadly serious. You don’t know which.
• It’s best never to send a cease and desist letter to a blogger if you’re not prepared to back it up with legal action, and especially if you don’t have a case. It could seriously backfire on you. Kevin used the Warren Kremer Paino case as an example of a time when threatened lawsuits backfire. The bloggers went crazy and the lawsuit couldn’t be dismissed fast enough. It’s always better to try to communicate. The bottom line is: the best thing is to try to communicate with the blogger rather than sending them a cease and desist letter as a first step.
• If you stick to facts, it’s hard for anyone to win a defamation action.
• The laywers link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s overview of legal liability issues for bloggers.
• What about getting fired for being a blogger? Buzz has looked through all the cases where people have been fired for blogging and never found a case where people were fired for simply blogging. He says they got fired for being stupid and disclosing inappropriate information about salary, proprietary information, etc. “You’re not smart enough to realize that you got fired for being stupid.” You get fired for being stupid, not for blogging.
• Smart business follow simple practices: hire smart people, give them good guidance, motivate them, give them good tools and get out of the way.
• Good corporate blogging policies help define protocols that help employees to avoid pitfalls of overlap between personal and professional life in the blogosphere.
• How are lawyers blogging vis a vis their business? There are a number of examples: Rethink (information about intellectual property), LegalMojo (employment opportunities for lawyers), This Week in Law
• One particularly great example of Web marketing is a bankruptcy attorney who found her audience where they live. She created a MySpace account because her primary audience was between 20-30 years old. She got lots of clients and her innovation got her radio interviews, and an article in Pittsburgh newspaper. Soon, her story was all over the blogosphere and she had more business than she knew what to do with.
• Buzz uses the s*** word from the podium…
• If you want to create controversy on your blog, great. But measure it and write about what you know.
• Phil says he has recieved more business as a result of his blog in the last two years than he did in 20 years of traditional marketing strategies.

This post was just brought up in our legal issues panel at the Blog Business Summit here, and I found the whole article and situation unbearably amusing.

Apparently, Larry Bodine wrote an article about how he had a tough time with his brand new Mac G5, and it wasn’t well received by the Mac-loving community. Apparently he got hate voice-mail and tons and tons of grief for being unable to figure out “what any five-year old child can do.”

He didn’t respond that well himself, but, you know:

These Mac owners are defensive beyond belief. They need to get a life. They must grow up and learn that their computer is just a machine, not their religion.

It’s a good example of how sensitive subjects can lead to flame wars that can turn into legal liabilities. And it’s amusing.

This latest session has been a bit more in depth than I would normally call “getting started,” but the side-effect of that is that it’s fantastically interesting. There’s been a lot of discussion about:

• Are you better off doing video or audio? Scoble says it depends on what your message is. If it’s told easily with pictures, you should look into video. But don’t underestimate the reach of good audio - you can listen to something while you are driving, hiking, or knitting.
• The process of making (recording) a podcast is getting simpler and simpler.
• Be careful of hosted upload services, like YouTube, because they can end up owning your content.
• Formats are an open issue still in many ways. If you’re doing audio, mp3 is the most solid choice, but there are all kinds of specific formats for specific devices, and you can tailer your podcast or your videoblog to the kind of device you’re aiming for.

Jeremy Pepper of Weber Shandwick will be conducting a special breakfast session tomorrow morning along with Jeanette Gibson of Cisco and John Starkweather of Microsoft at 8:00 a.m. in the Bay Auditorium.

They’ll be talking about what’s next in online communications.

I’m not one to give out compliments unless they’re true. Even when people are throwing money our way. PR Web is sponsoring the Blog Business Summit, but I would love their service even if they’d never given us a dime.

I had the opportunity to tell Andrew and Joe who are here at the Summit today, that PR Web has been life-changing for me. They were so happy to hear it that Joe posted about it.

This is a collection of notes from Steve’s presentation on what a blog is and why blogging is so important and cool. I’ve jotted a few other notes on other presentation on my own site.

• The number one search phrase with the word blog in it is: “What is a blog?” There’s a lot of mystery around what a blog is and why they’re such a big deal.
• The success of a blog can essentially be boiled down to visibility and practicality.
• Steve talks about how well the Blog Business Summit blog (this site) has done as not just “a blog,” but as the entire web presence for the BBS.
• Steve asks how many people remember building web pages by hand. What a painful process. A blog engine is entirely dynamic - the user interacts with a database, and the whole site is far more efficient from a back-end perspective - you don’t have to access, edit, re-upload each page if you make changes to the design.
• Something that gets glossed over a lot when talking about blogging advantages: it’s easy.
• Steve uses copytalk, sounds very cool. For a monthly fee, Steve calls a phone number, talks at it, and then he gets a typed transcript in his e-mail.
• All exotic technologies become boring commodities - many people say that blogging software is “toy” CMS (content management system) technology. Like Photoshop (created to convert file formats) vs. Quantel Paintbox (huge crazy system) - Photoshop started out as a “toy.” Now you probably can’t even buy Quantel Paintbox.
• Google (and co.) love blogs.
• The catch phrase “Nigritude ultramarine” - a contest among SEO geeks to see who could take a nonexistant phrase on Google and hit the top result. As you can see, it’s a blog. All he did was make a post and ask people to link in.
• Blogs are clean coded and content oriented. All this standards-based design and formatting is done automatically. Google likes that. Blogs are focused on frequent content. Google likes that.
• Every new post in a blog is actually a new page. This is great for Google because Google likes to have individual pages in it’s directory - and it keeps it in the same place. This is what permalinks are all about.
• A disadvantage to a tradition CMS is that these pages will only be created upon request, and so search engines were unable to index the (nonexistent) page.
• Permalinks make it really easy to link between blogs to specific posts instead of just a meaningless main page. Also, these regular linkings are seen favorably by gooooooogle.
• A question: if Google loves blogs, won’t spamblogs make Google like blogs less? Well, Steve says, that’s been a concern for ages, and Tris adds: Google’s methods for cutting out the spamblogs are getting better and better. Steve thinks that Google is going to rank based on what blog engine you’re using (something that’s free and easily run by a bot will be ranked lower).
• Comments are an advantage in many ways: it’s free content. If you don’t want to do comments, you don’t have to - but if you do, you can really get something out of it.
• RSS: don’t check back. The content will check with you. All blogs have this ability for you to subsribe to an RSS feed, and a newsreader will allow you to visit zillions of sites a day (or at least their content).

The following are my notes from Dave Taylor’s keynote speech on the future of findability. Our fabulous Tris Hussey is also liveblogging this conference over at the Tucows blog.

• Every business will need to be findable in order to survive. If your clients find your competitors before they find you, you’re out of business.
• Dave Taylor has the pink Motorola RAZR Phone a purple snap-on cover for his RAZR…phones will soon become as much of an interface for findability as the PC. You can ask your phone, “where’s the closest __________?” and if your business isn’t in that directory, it doesn’t matter how good your product is. You’re out of business.
• You must read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point because he talks about how people are always influenced by thought and opinion leaders. Every market segment has them, and the first thing you need to do is identify which ones are relevant to your business. You need to get your product in their hands, and you must accept that you don’t control the message.
• Homepages are obsolete
• Companies aren’t organizing themselves to create the best, most relevant and most findable content.
• Companies are holding press conferences, news bureaus and meetings in Second Life.
• You must be on social networks like MySpace.
• Put your URL on your schwag and bills to draw people in to your website. Have a sense of whimsy. Perhaps you could have your CEO sing a silly song and advertise that on your invoices…
• Find your next great employee or joint venture partner online, take a look at LinkedIn or Facebook (for up and coming hotshots)
• Find bloggers and get them involved in the beta testing of your product.
• Whether or not you are blogging, the blogosphere exists. You must be aware because bloggers are more likely to be the thought and opinion leaders. Even if your customers don’t read your blog, the journalists at the trade magazines they do read are reading the blogs.
• Your computer, telephone and television are going to be interchangeable. You must reinvent your business to fit into that space. Your competitors are. The companies that rise to the surface tomorrow will be the ones that are thinking and acting on these issues today.
• Your content must be fresh in order to stay relevant in the search engines. Google “dances” and changes its algorithms all the time.
• Transparency is a little bit of a red herring. How transparent do you need to be? It’s a wild and wooly world out there. You need to find what the thought and opinion leaders in your space are doing and find the people who are creating the best practices on transparency.
• “A blog is just a tool.” Subvert it to your will and the needs of your company. You don’t need to have comments. There are consequences for those choices, but you can make them.
• Blogs are really cool because they’re cheaper, more search engine friendly, easy to manage and fun to produce, establishing a dialogue with your customers (think “focus group”), you can schedule publication in the future of posts you have written in advance, and you can work with others to produce your content.
• Q: Is there a place for offline advertising and marketing, especially when you’re launching? A: Of course, but print ads are not enough anymore. You must have an online presence. “We will always have offline. We will always have Paris, but the world is moving online…I have the world’s biggest focus group and it doesn’t cost me a dime.”
• Write about what you know to become THE person to quote in your industry when the press come looking for a quote.
• If you can send an e-mail you can blog.
• Pinging search engines to let them know you have new content. Make sure all those pings are in your defaults. Letting them know they should index it.
• The reading list. The Tipping Point, Influence by Robert Cialdini. Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and Dave’s own Growing Your Business with Google.

Here are some links to people who are flickring the conference, check out their photostreams:

• C4 Chaos from Zaadz
• Tris Hussey

I’ll update as I find more photostreams.

Steve and I will be presenting during breakfast tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. in the Bay Auditorium. We’ll be talking about how we created Big Business Jet a sponsored blog for our client, Greenpoint Technologies.

I’m really excited, as this will be my first presentation. Steve will probably wind up doing most of the talking, but either way it’s going to rock because we open the kimono and give away all our sponsored blog building secrets. Don’t miss it or I’ll be sad.

Stephanie, who is one of our partners in crime over at Randall PR, sent me this e-mail just a few minutes ago:

Waterfront Seafood Grill heard about the blog summit (they are right next door to Bell Harbor) and they want show some love for your attendees, too! Anyone who comes in wearing a badge from the summit this week will get 15% off their bill. A spectacular restaurant with an unparalleled view of Elliott Bay. A great way to relax after a full day at the conference, and so conveniently located. Can you let people know with a post to your blog?

Why yes, Stephanie. I just did!

We’re hanging out at the Bell Harbor Conference Center getting set up for the first day of the 2006 Blog Business Summit. The air is thick with anticipation. In the picture at left, you see fearless leader Steve Broback preparing for our leadoff presentation before Dave Taylor’s keynote.

See y’all in the AM!

Blogosphere expert and BBS keynote speaker Dave Taylor says that the backlash against character blogs has been overblown. “I mean, c’mon folks,” he writes. “Once someone does a good, amusing character blog everyone will suddenly decide that it’s rather cool after all.”

Of late, a couple of companies have tried to do just that. Cosmopolitan–the favorite read for the bodice ripper set–has its own fictitious blogger: a TV news producer by the name of “K.” She wants to get married before her 30th birthday and nurses a “heavy-duty crush on her very sexy, very married boss.”

To be fair, the “Cosmo Bedroom Blog” is about as compelling as the rest of Cosmopolitan. The blog reads like “chick lit,” replete with “impossibly gorgeous” men and constant improbable excitement. If “Cosmo” has set out to reach their readership with this blog, they’ve likely succeeded. The blog does seem to be a value-add for people who identify with Cosmopolitan.

At least “Cosmo” is up-front about the fact that their blogger isn’t real. It seems to have inoculated them against any hardcore criticism from the blogosphere. Marketing firm Barkley and their client Sonic Drive-In may not be so lucky. Given the recent conflagration over Edelman’s Wal-Marting blog, you’d think that companies might be loathe to launch a questionable blog on behalf of a client. Still, that’s just what Barkley did with The Brian Blog.

If you’re a connoisseur of cable television, you’ve likely seen the commercial (which I love) starring Brian and his wife going through the drive through at Sonic. Brian says that he’s going to write about the yummy strawberry cheesecake shake he’s eating, while his wife teases that only his mother will read it.

The blog, which prominently features a photo of the very same actor from the Sonic commercial, was built and written for Sonic by Barkley. I know this because the link to the blog was e-mailed to me by a Barkley staffer after I called to compliment them on their hilarious commercial. I responded almost a week ago with an e-mail expressing my concerns about the character blog, but have not recieved any response.

Unlike the “Cosmo” blog, this blog doesn’t add value for those who care about the Sonic brand. At least the “Cosmo” blog gives readers what they’ve come to associate with the magazine: cotton-candy fun. But other than the picture of the actor, the Sonic blog gives no indication of who writes it, or why. It features posts about random things that didn’t actually happen. Even when “Brian” talks about Sonic, he doesn’t acknowledge that he’s associated with the company in any way.

Now, I’m the first to say that the blogosphere tends to overreact any time a business blog lacks authenticity and transparency. But the bottom line is that this blog doesn’t add any value for people who like Sonic and it doesn’t add any kind of value to the blogosphere this blog isn’t transparent. It’s not even that funny I don’t find it that funny. Unlike the ingenious “bring it on” campaign they initiated on YouTube, or their hilarious series of “two guys” commercials, Barkely has really dropped the ball with this blog.

UPDATE 12:33 p.m. I just recieved an e-mail from the aforementioned Barkley staffer. She says that these are valid concerns and that they have considered them. It’s good that they’ve considered the transparency/authenticity issue, but then why did they launch the blog as is? I’ve reiterated my recommendation that they post a disclaimer in the sidebar of the blog. We’ll see what happens.

UPDATE 1:09 p.m. Commenter Linda says that she was thrilled to find that there was actually a blog associated with the commercial. I suppose that’s a matter of taste. I don’t find the blog funny, but some people do and I’m happy for them.

Podcast/videoblog hub PodTech.net–whose CEO John Furrier and Vice President Robert Scoble are both speaking at our conference–recently interviewed our CEO and fearless leader Steve Broback. The podcast can be found here.

Marketing voices host Jennifer Jones is responsible for the killer interview.

Our speaker, Ben Edwards sat down with (BBS sponsor) PR Web’s Aaron Apple for a podcast interview about his keynote at our upcoming conference and how IBM is using corporate blogging.

I’d like to clarify one thing Ben said in his interview. He told Apple that the Blog Business Summit is, “really for people actively involved in blogging and thought leaders in blogging to come together and to share information and insights with us in corporate world.”

That’s almost the whole of it. But I’d like to add that the Blog Business Summit is also for newbie business bloggers. Our first full day of the conference is dedicated almost entirely to bringing newbies up to date on all the latest technology. Even if you come into day 1 asking, “what is a blog?” you’ll be ready for Day 2 and Day 3.

I’ve had at least one attendee ping me to mention that he sent in his bio and photo for the attendees page a while ago but didn’t see it up on the site. I knew this was going to happen sooner or later as I am buried under piles and mounds of e-mail.

If I’ve done this to you inadvertently, please just pester me. I’ll happily put your bio & photo up. Apologies!

Easton Ellsworth of Know More Media and I have been working on a cool project for the past few months. I’ve been slow on my end of things in terms of getting it launched because of the intensive preparations for the conference.

Basically, this project is designed to gather the most comprehensive hub of information about what Fortune 500 companies are doing about blogging. I know there are a number of other resources out there that try to accomplish the same thing, but we’re hoping that this project can add value in a few ways.

First of all, this project is by bloggers and for bloggers. All the research will be done by people who are interested in the exciting world of business blogging. All the content will belong to the individual bloggers who do the research.

Secondly, we hope to provide qualitative information about Fortune 500 companies and their blogging initiatives. How well are they working with the blogosphere? What are bloggers saying about the company? Are they blogging internally or participating in social media in innovative ways?

So how does this work? Simple:

1. A blogger signs up on the wiki.
2. The blogger begins researching a company and posts his or her findings on his or her own blog example posts can be found here and here.
3. The blogger then copies the first 50-75 words of his or her post into the wiki with a link to their complete post about the company.
4. More bloggers join in until all Fortune 500 companies have been researched.

In addition to this effort on the part of bloggers, my fantastic boss Steve Broback and our awesome sponsorships director Eric Anderson are sponsoring a phone bank based in Delhi, India. There, our talented data gatherers will speak to marketing executives from all of the Fortune 500 and catalogue what they’re doing with blogging. This information will be added to the wiki as it becomes available to us.

Now, some of you may be saying to yourselves,“ wait a minute! This wiki is hosted at blogbusinesssummit.com! That’s fishy! They’re trying to take ownership of the hard work of good bloggers and dominate the world!”

Let me explain. Yes, we wanted to host the wiki on our domain for self-serving reasons. We want the PageRank boost, pure and simple. We’ve also committed significant resources to making this the best resource for information about business blogging anywhere on the Web. We feel like this is fair.

In the interests of egalitarianism, we want to make it clear that we don’t own any of the content written by the participating bloggers. The bloggers own their own content. We just want to link to it and reference it, making the wiki the hub from which all the information can be easily accessed. We also want to make it clear that any participant in the wiki may place an ad on the wiki for a period of time. If someone has written a book, started a new company or developed a new piece of software, they’re welcome to share that with the community. Please ping me at teresa [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com for more specifics.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten to mention something here, so I’ll probably update this post, and post again about the wiki. For some more practical details, check out Easton’s post and check out the wiki itself.

Happy blogging!