December 2006

I saw a couple of great posts this morning while looking through my RSS reader about blogosphere best practices. Both posts that caught my eye were about openness in blogging.

Dave Taylor writes about the practice of routinely sharing editorially superfluous personal details on a professional blog. He argues that a great blog targets one specific bit of editorial and doesn’t deviate:

Imagine that you were a well-known business author and you had a blog with the intent purposes of promoting your new book, your speaking gigs, and your consulting business. Blogging about your book, about letters you receive, reviews in the media, and even your experience speaking at different events is all perfect content, continually reaffirming your expertise, credibility and status as an expert.

Now imagine that in the middle of this you pop in a note about how you were really disappointed in the latest Star Wars movie, or had a terrible experience at a local ethnic restaurant. Could be interesting reading, but unless you somehow related it to your book and area of expertise, it’s just noise, just content that’s fighting your other efforts and preventing you from reaching your goal of being widely recognized as a professional in the online world.

He also points out that sharing personal details about sexual orientation, open relationships, religion etc. in a business environment is inappropriate and unprofessional.

I tend to agree with both points. But I’d like to add that sometimes those personal details are relevant to the online conversation. Professionals who are considering entering the blogosphere should remember that a blog that is all work and no play can be pretty dull. The point of having a business blog is to put a human face on the carefully controlled corporate image. It’s possible to be both professional and amiable and I think that’s the key mix that creates a good blogging personality.

On the other end of the openness spectrum, Eric Rice writes about the Linden Labs blog where a well-known agitator has been flat-out banned from commenting. Linden Labs, which owns and moderates the popular online game/social network Second Life, has reserved the right to ban a commenter for any reason at any time. Similar bans have been enforced against other agitators in the past.

Now, Linden owns their blog and their game, and they have the right to exercise whatever arbitrary rules suit their fancy. But that’s not going to be too popular with the Second Life crowd. When your most prominent Second Lifer is Robert “Mr. Openness” Scoble, and you’re engaging in draconian moderation policies, you know that you’ve got impending problems.

One of the scariest parts of business blogging is dealing with comments. It’s scary to open the comment queue and find that someone has a really good point about something you’ve been doing badly or flat-out wrong. But would you rather find that out from a comment on your blog, or when your company suffers major losses because you’ve become out of touch with your customer base? I’d sure prefer the former.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t moderate comments. You have the right to do whatever works for you. That includes not offering comments. But the industry best practice is moderated openness, regardless of how hard dissenting opinions may be to hear

The world “evangelism” gets used so often in the blogosphere that sometimes, I think people forget where it originated. According to Answers.com, the definition of evangelism is, first and foremost, “zealous preaching and dissemination of the gospel, as through missionary work.”

Now, I don’t want to get into a religious debate on this blog. There are a lot of viewpoints when it comes to Evangelical Christians, especially given the Bush administration’s policies on faith-based initiatives and the like. But no matter where you stand on the political/religious spectrum, I’m sure we can all agree that Evangelical Christians have done a hecukva job marketing their cause, particularly in recent years.

This effort on their part is the subject of a recent book by secular, liberal, feminist journalist Lauren Sandler. In Righteous, she delivers a collection of informative if not entirely unbiased “dispatches from the evangelical youth movement.”

In her book, Sandler repeatedly portrays Evangelical youth as disaffected by American consumerist society. In chapter two of the book, pastor Mark Driscoll of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church tells her, “America has been marketed to so constantly and shamelessly that it has produced a generation of jaded cynics desperate for what feels real.”

This attitude is reflected later in the book in her interview with Ryan Dobson, scion of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson. In recent years, Dobson the younger has been podcasting to what Sandler calls the “Disciple Generation” in the same way that his father has reached out to their parents with his well-produced radio show.

Writes Sandler:

Ryan’s podcast is the Disciple Generation’s answer to his father’s airwaves. Podcasting feels more real, Ryan says, because of its low production values. He amps up those values on his show, answering his cell phone, having conversations off-mic. Its makeshift rec-room sound is what he says makes his message seem–and here’s the buzzword of this generation again–more “authentic” than his father’s programming.

It’s pretty clear that if you want to market to the under-30 crowd these days, you’re going to need more than a snappy jingle and a celebrity endorsement. You need that authenticity, that human connection to your audience. And one way to achieve that authenticity is to reach out through new media. The success of the Evangelical youth movement is another feather in the cap of passionate people using the Web to connect to a huge audience in a human way.

Keep that in mind the next time you start thinking about how to get the kids on board, no matter what your politics are.

Robert Scoble has posted his video from our bloggy junket, Grapes on a Plane to Eastern Washington’s Hedges Cellars on two private jets provided by Greenpoint Technologies.

Check out the video and enjoy a sneak peek into the billionaire lifestyle. We sure did!

During our conference this October, I was lucky enough to spend copious amounts of time with George Athannassov of Blogtronix. He walked me through all the features of his software, which I found incredibly cool. As a psych geek who spent a lot of time doing content analysis for my thesis, I was particularly excited about the sophisticated data mining tools that are built right into the system. I had a little geekgasm when I found out that I could do statistics.

Tomorrow, George assures me that we’ll be seeing some really interesting developments within Blogtronix–which integrates blogs, wikis, social networks and RSS into one badass bloggy confection. Apparently, they’ll be offering some new features that makes filtering and republishing from your RSS feeds a snap. Unfortunately, that sneak wouldn’t tell me any more. I guess I’ll just have to wait until tomorrow with the rest of you.

I got an e-mail today from Easton Ellsworth at Know More Media announcing that they had launched BizzBites, a site that operates similarly to Digg, but for business-related news.

I’ve already loaded it into my RSS reader.

Steve approached me last week with an assignment. He wanted me to read WordPress 2 by his friend Maria Langer and her co-author Miraz Jordan over the weekend and report back about how much it rocked or didn’t rock.

“Oh great,” I thought, “in addition to everything else I have to do, Steve wants me to read a book! And over the weekend, no less! But he’s the boss…”

But now, I feel a little silly for all of my internal bitching and moaning, since this book came in really handy during the redesign of my personal blog this past weekend. There are a lot of great PHP tricks listed in the Template Tags section of the WordPress codex, but I find about half of the explanations of the tags overly confusing. By contrast, the WordPress 2 book makes everything crystal clear and easy to follow. The book is worth buying for that reason alone.

We’ve been doing a lot of WordPress consulting of late, but to be perfectly honest, tech-savvy business folks can probably get most of the same value-add out of this book. It’s a very useful tool for anyone who doesn’t already know Wordpress inside and out, which is the vast majority of the population. I can also imagine that it would be a handy desk reference for even the most experienced guru.

In the interest of transparency, I should note that the publisher of the aforementioned tome is also the publisher of our recent Publish and Prosper: Blogging for your Business.

Just some good stuff I found in my RSS reader

• IM as social media by Jeremiah Owyang
• Scoble on Microsoft’s potentially colossal SEO influence
• The TailRank buzz about NewTeeVee
• Office for Mac users (like me) are SOL with the new office
• You’re either “LinkedIn or left out.”

Kevin Hillstrom at the MineThatData Blog has a cool formula for determining business blog ROI. I like his adaptation even better than Jason Stamper’s because it takes bonuses and bennies into account on the costs side and utilizes a better metric for web traffic.

Technorati Tags: Business blog ROI, Kevin Hillstrom, Jason Stamper

With all the fuss about CEO blogs, sometimes other “C-level” bloggers get short shrift. Another rarity in the blogging world, according to this fairly recent article from Information Age, is the Chief Information Officer, sometimes also called the Chief Technology Officer.

To quote (extensively) from the article:

While some CEOs and employees lower down the food chain have readily embraced the concept of blogging, the upper echelons of IT still remain, perhaps ironically, behind the blogging curve. “CIOs aren’t on the leading edge of culture and are often late adopters of technology,” argues Will Weider, CIO of US Ministry Health Care and Affinity Healthcare Systems and a frequent blogger. “It’s probably a bit of a stereotype, but that’s what I see.”

Conservatism when it comes to technology is one explanation. But the other is simpler: CIOs have so far failed to recognize how their involvement in blogging can deliver significant value to their organization. Moreover, many fear the practice will raise their profile higher than they might desire. According to professional business blogger Dennis Howlett, the situation reflects the cultural and political issues that surround the positions at the top of IT management as a whole.

“Too many CIOs see their jobs as ‘how do I avoid getting fired’. It’s only in the last couple of years that they’ve been able to return to the boardroom table with a degree of respect, for the simple reason there was so much overspending, plus a lot of over-promising.”

Overburdened with expectations and project backlogs, CIOs often claim they simply do not have the time to devote to an online journal, which could land them in trouble. Jeremy Wright, author of the book Blog Marketing, and former CIO, argues however that such perceived obstacles are more a matter of delusion than reality.

That last sentence pretty much sums up a lot of the blowback to blogging in the corporate world, at least in my personal opinion. But as a professional, I can understand the trepidation. As with any professional who blogs as part of her job, CIO’s need to exercise good judgment and go in with a game plan. With proper planning, they need not fear.

Thanks for the article go out to Pablo Molina, CIO of Georgetown University’s Law Center.

Technorati Tags: CIO Blog

In his book, The Looming Tower, Middle East expert Lawrence Wright lays out a number of the personal and technological barriers that prevented agents at the CIA and FBI from “connecting the dots” to prevent the 9/11 attacks. In both Tower and the 9/11 Commission’s report, intelligence community culture–which guards information like Google guards its precise algorithm for determining relevance–was faulted for keeping critical pieces of the 9/11 puzzle apart.

Yesterday, the New York Times magazine reported that this culture is reinforced in the computer systems used by the agencies:

The spy agencies were saddled with technology that might have seemed cutting-edge in 1995. When [former Defense Intelligence Agency agent Matthew Burton] went onto Intelink–the spy agencies’ secure internal computer network–the search engines were a pale shadow of Google, flooding him with thousands of useless results. If Burton wanted to find an expert to anwer a question, the personnel directories were of no help. Worse, instant messaging with colleagues, his favorite way to hack out a problem, was impossible: every three letter agency–from the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency to army commands–used different discussion groups and chat applications that couldn’t connect to one another. In a community of secret agents supposedly devoted to quickly amassing information, nobody had even a simple blog–that ubiquitous tool for broadly distributing your thoughts.

Offline, inter-agency information sharing is similarly impeded by a morass of bureaucracy. This wasn’t a problem when the USSR was the enemy. The communist government moved slowly and deliberately. By contrast, Al-Quaeda and its sister organizations move much more rapidly and covertly than the Soviet Union ever could.

One step in the process was an essay contest sponsored by the office of the Director of National Intelligence. Agents were invited to submit essays about how to improve information sharing. One of the winners was an essay by Calvin Andrus, the CTO of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A entitled, “The Wiki and the Blog; Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.”

From the Times article:

When a blogger finds and interesting tidbit of news, he posts a link to it along with a bit of commentary. Then other bloggers find that link and, if they agree, it’s an interesting news item, post their own links pointing to it. This produces a cascade effect. Whatever the first blogger pointed toward can quickly amass so many links pointing in its direction that it rockets to worldwide notoriety in a matter of hours.

Spies, Andrus theorized, could take advantage of these rapid, self-organizing effects. If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink–linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important–then mob intelligence would take over.

Who knew that the echo chamber could be used in such a powerful way for the defense of the United States?

Like with any organization, there are very real institutional obstacles to overcome in order to implement these technologies. But even within the intelligence community, some agents have begun experimenting with a wiki system they call Intellipedia. The system has even been used to generate a National Intelligence Estimate, which the Times describes as “an authoritative snapshot of what the intelligence community thinks about a particular state–and a guide for foreign and military policy.” Elsewhere, blogs are being used to collect and disseminate information about the state of the H5N1 Avian Flu virus threat.

This is as innovative a use of blogs and wikis as I’ve seen. It’s also great evidence for the potential of blogs and wikis. If the national intelligence community can use these tools to break down age-old institutional barriers and save American lives, companies can use them to improve efficiency and flexibility. Pretty exciting stuff.

Technorati Tags: FBI, CIA, intelligence community, 9/11, blogs, wikis, national security, new york times, open-source spying

As we posted before, we’ve been assisting CEA in their evaluation of bloggers applying as press to CES. In addition, many of our conference speakers, attendees and sponsors will be heading to Vegas this January.

Being the event-loving people that we are, we decided that there was no better way to reach out to the bloggers than to throw them a party. We’ll be hosting it on the evening of January 9th at the edgy new Atomic Testing Museum, which is just a block off the strip. The fun starts at 5:00 p.m.

If you’re an avid blogger who covers the consumer electronics space and you’re going to CES, let us know so we can get you an invite. Just send us an email and include a link to one/some of your posts. Just send mail to teresa [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com.

As always, we’re looking for sponsors for this little soirée. If you’re interested in getting your brand in front of the most influential and
interesting people in the consumer electronics space today, ping kim [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com.

Technorati Tags: CES, CES07, CEA, bloggers, press passes, Atomic Testing Museum

UPDATE 12/08/06: If you’re interested in buying a round of drinks for the assembled bloggers, here’s our sponsor PDF. Check it out!