January 2007

It’s been announced that business communications Goliath Ogilvy has partnered with Technorati to provide clients with, “engage in online conversations and build relationships with online communities relevant to their brands.”

Sounds like competition to me…
In all seriousness, it’s cool that Ogilvy is doing this. And I’m really curious as to how they’ll leverage Technorati’s ever-growing database of syndicated content to add value for their clients. I wonder how they’ll parse and make sense of it all. There’s a lot of data out there to assimilate and synthesize. And then managing the outreach is quite a feat.

We’re playing now with some new tools in that arena right now, so my brain is definitely in the monitoring/engaging space.

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Many thanks to Blog Business Summit speaker and all around kick ass guy Kevin O’Keefe.

We blogged recently about Starbucks’ run in with a number of Chinese bloggers who object to the presence of a Starbucks store inside the Forbidden City.

But the blogosphere can have the same impact on much smaller-scale businesses. Pagliacci, Seattle’s own gourmet pizza parlor recently ran afoul of some commenters on the West Seattle Blog. Apparently, Paggliacci has a particularly odd delivery area in West Seattle, about which one commenter wrote, “I have often suspected that the delivery area for Pagliacci was set up based on the perceived affluence of the neighborhood. They have never articulated a reason for their circumscribed delivery area.”

The controversy sparked a column by the Seattle P-I’s Robert Jamieson during an admittedly slow news week.

What I find very interesting is that unlike their competition (Garlic Jim’s) Pagliacci did not respond directly to the bloggers. Instead, they elected to speak through Jamieson. They explained that their odd circle of delivery in West Seattle adheres to a “seven minute rule.” If they can’t get from the store to your house in 7 minutes, they won’t do it. Anything more and their pizzas would arrive cold and soggy.

This was met with some serious skepticism from the West Seattle folks. I wish that Pagliacci had reached out to the bloggers directly rather than using the traditional press as a mouthpiece. Some intelligent outreach on their part might have resolved this issue before it became newspaper fodder.

Many thanks once again to Byronicus Maximus for pointing out this interesting kettle of fish.

Based on a survey of 20,000 people, a recent study concluded that only 8% of Americans read blogs. The vast majority are bloggers themselves.

Well, I guess that’s it. We should all pack up and go home. MRI Research and CBS chief research officer David Poltrack has once and for all proven that the blogosphere is utterly irrelevant to the future of anything.

Except that it isn’t. So what if only 8% of people read blogs on any kind of a regular basis? The important thing is that search engines read blogs. What’s more, search engines like blogs. They update a lot and they are remarkably free of stupid, confusing code. Dynamic sites have a huge leg up in the world of search and everyone knows it.

If your customers are looking for products that you make, or services that you provide, you want to be the first thing to show up in the search results. And if you want search engines to consider your site to be the most relevant result to your industry, blogging is the best way to accomplish it.

This whole Web 2.0 thing is a too complicated to be contained in a simple statistic like: “only 8% of people read blogs.” Yes, the blogosphere may be slightly over-hyped right now. But it’s a lot less hype and a lot more substance than this study would indicate.

Many thanks to DL Byron for IMing me the link to this study and its inane conclusions.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Steve Case’s Revolution Living LLC is taking their Lime cable network off of cable TV and will be now be primarily Web-based. According to Chief Executive C.J. Kettler, the audience has been “shifting” and that the Internet provides a “better opportunity” for them.

Toyota Motor Corp. and L’Oréal SA’s Garnier will advertise on the site which will “feature original video focused on nutrition, the environment and related issues.”

This relates to another article in the WSJ today, that describes recent Harris polling indicating that online videos have become mainstream.

I love that Matt Mullenweg and his crew over at WP opted to name the latest version of Wordpress after all-time awesome chanteuse Ella Fitzgerald. I’m also pretty damn happy with the way Ella is working on my personal blog. It seems a lot faster and more efficient. I’m particularly jazzed about the feature that allows you to “set any ‘page’ to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.

So if you’re interested in upgrading your blog to 2.1, but you’re nervous to take WP apart and put it back together all by yourself, ping me. We can upgrade you to 2.1 for (most sites) around $200.

According to an Economist magazine podcast, the “shifting power equation” theme of this year’s Davos-based World Economic Forum has them encouraging the attending CEO-type attendees to get into blogging.

So far as I understand things from this article on the subject, it appears that Microsoft is in trouble with the Wikipedia community over its hiring of a bloggr to make “corrections” to an article that the corporation felt was inappropriately slanted in favor of an open-source document standard that competed with one of its products.

Now, I suppose it would have been wise for Microsoft to be more transparent about the issue. But I’m pretty sure that they weren’t trying to be evil sneaks. According to the CNN article I read, they hired blogger Rick Jelliffe — who is also CTO of an Australia-based computing company — to review the article and make changes based on his independent and informed judgment. However, both parties had agreed that Jelliffe’s re-writes were not subject to review or revision by Microsoft. Also, Jelliffe was being paid for his time and his perspective, not the specific copy he was writing.

Prior to hiring Jelliffe, Microsoft made attempts through Wikipedia community-sanctioned channels to flag pieces of the article that they felt were slanted, but got nowhere.

Obviously, they should have handled the situation differently. Had I been Microsoft, I would have had someone in the group responsible for the document standard to blog about the situation. A public call to Wikipedia’s most prolific editors, asking them to give the article another look would probably have gone over a lot better than the course of action Microsoft ultimately chose. But a closer look at their specific actions does show that they were at least attempting to approach the matter ethically.

I’ve been an enthusiastic reader of the Wall Street Journal for 25 years and have felt that their editorial coverage of the blogosphere has been on the mark. They seemed to “get” blogging early, and cover the space quite well.

A promo on their current archive article search engine is offering a sneak peek at a coming search upgrade that will provide a “new look.” Naturally, I clicked through right away — and fully expected to find search feeds, but no luck!

C’mon guys, the only upgrade that really matters is the one that offers proactive search. The WSJ has shown enough savvy of late that I am thinking this was an intentional omission. I’d like to have been a fly on the wall during those internal discussions.

What do you think? Cluelessness or are they being opaque in order to drive more eyeballs? (I guess both may be argued as cluelessness…) I say purposeful opacity–OR hopefully a feature to be implemented at formal launch…

After 20 minutes of trying to join in on presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton’s interactive Webcast and running into technical problems, I’ve decided to throw in the towel. You can only hit your head against a brick wall so many times before it starts to get sore.

Senators Obama and Edwards are having a much better time with social media engagement because they’re not trying to take control of the time and location on the Web where the conversation takes place, thereby overloading their own servers and alienating people from their chat with America. They’re letting it flow back and forth naturally between their own websites, YouTube, and other existing online communities.

So far, I’d say Edwards gets two points. Obama gets one point, and Hillary gets 0 points…

I wanted to thank Simone at SNCDestinations’ blog for her nice post about our perspective on the Starbucks/Forbidden City situation. But her blog is in “Emergency Comment Blockage Mode.”

I Googled the term and found out that it allows you to disable commenting for your whole blog when under heavy spam attack.

Now, we have a lot of blogs here at Blog Business Summit. A lot of blogs means that we get a LOT of comment spam. But on the blogs that run WordPress we use Akismet, which is frankly the only spam blocking software I’ve ever been 100% happy with.

The Clinton campaign has announced that they will soon be kicking off their campaign blog, and they’ve asked supporters to submit the first post.

I think this is kind of a cool idea so far as buzz building and community involvement go, but I’d rather hear from Senator Clinton herself. She’s talking about how she wants to start a conversation with America, but so far all I’ve heard coming out of her mouth is politics speak. I want to hear some real, practical nitty gritty talk about candidate Clinton’s views on a particular issue.

I’m going to be participating in her live Webcast tonight at 4 p.m. PST. We’ll see how it goes. I hope she’s got enough bandwidth reserved.

I plan to ask her whether or not she’ll be using other social media applications like YouTube, Facebook, etc. and (to take a page from Scoble’s book) whether she intends to keep using them if she’s actually elected.

Two and a half years ago, when we launched this site, the idea of blogs being a serious business medium was hotly debated. Now, Gawker Media changes an editor and the Wall Street Journal covers it like a new Federal Reserve chairman had been appointed. 665 words dedicated to the piece Gawker Shuffles Its Editors, Again, Amid Increased Competition for Gossip.

Consider yesterday’s article: Hilton Hotels CEO Will Step Down At End of Year.

222 words.

I was interested to read in today’s Wall Street Journal about the Chinese blogosphere’s outcry over the presence of a Starbucks inside the imperial Forbidden City.

I remember that my impression of the Forbidden City as a mysterious and special place was diminished somewhat when I found out from a friend that there was a Starbucks there. It actually made me less interested in visiting the City, simply because it seemed much less authentic.

Apparently, I’m not in the minority. When Chinese news anchor cum blogger Rui Chenggang (in Chinese) wrote about his discomfort with the juxtaposition of this Western cultural icon with one of the most iconic pieces of China’s history, the post got more than half a million page views.

According to the Journal, Rui wrote, “it is really too inappropriate for the world’s impression of the Forbidden City. This isn’t globalization, this is the erosion of Chinese culture.”

Other bloggers have joined Rui’s call for the Starbucks to be removed, and the Forbidden City museum is paying attention. They are currently in the process of reassigning the shops inside the City as part of an overall facelift for the campus. Starbucks may or may not be a part of that plan.

Any company that does business in China has to be aware of the phenomena that underlie this outcry. First and foremost, China is grappling with serious issues of tradition and modernity. Chinese people as a whole are embracing progress, but they are working hard to hang on to its own unique identity as a nation. This nationalist sentiment can often be found in the blogosphere, where China’s 20 million bloggers are more or less free to talk about their reaction to foreign business investment in their country.

Paying attention to the blogosphere is a necessity even when a company and the culture it serves are from the same culture of origin. But it goes doubly true when a company decides to cross cultural lines into wired countries like China.

If I were Starbucks, I would bow out gracefully from the location and open another store just outside the city. Then I would find a culturally appropriate way to tip the company’s cap to China’s past and present. What do you guys think Starbucks should do?

Every month Fast Company’s Michael A. Prospero writes a column called “Best Blogs.” He looks around to find the three best blogs in any given category. This month, the category was “Blogging the Bloggers” and he picked us along with Greg Knoltenberg’s Bloggers Blog and Kyle Bunch’s Blogebrity as the winners.

Of our blog, Prospero wrote:

The Skinny: An expert guide for every company that has tried to promote itself online via word-of-mouth — but that ultimately can’t fathom this new-fangled blogging thing. The overriding theme: “Businesses are used to a level of control that is no longer possible, and that’s scary. The sooner you get over that paralyzing fear, the better.”

Obviously, we’re honored to be considered among the best blogs and being quoted in Fast Company is always a thrill. So I asked Prospero how he chooses the final three.

“As you might imagine, picking three blogs from the plethora of choices every month takes a little doing,” he wrote. “It’s a very rigorous, scientific process that involves a supercomputer, a massive database, recursive algorithms, and, most importantly, a hat to pick the names out of.”

Then he got serious. “I’ll pick a topic for the month, say social networking, and then scour the Internet for a bunch of blogs that examine that topic from a variety of angles, but all ideally with a business bent to them. After I’ve come up with a critical mass, I’ll choose the final three based on how well they fit together—we don’t want to feature three blogs approaching the same topic from the same place—to give our readers a well-rounded perspective.”

But regardless of how he picks them, we are thrilled that he chose us.

Prospero is always on the lookout for good blogs, so if you know of one, you can click here to reach him.

I like Jim Turner’s post about how some clients become discouraged when their blogs don’t offer insta-results. Jim compares blogs to having a child who “will not be running for President of the United States on her first day of school.”

But blogging — like having children — does offer some immediate return on investment. It forces you to think about things in a whole new way. When you think a great deal about something, you tend to be able to write more clearly about it. And when you write about something, sometimes it helps you to think more clearly about it.

Just as a journal of your personal feelings and innermost thoughts can help you clarify your next steps in life, keeping a journal of your business can help you to recognize patterns, learn more about the weaknesses of your business model and synthesize new information.

I think this is one of the most under emphasized aspects of blogging for business and it deserves more attention.

Steve Rubel points out that Bill Marriott — who just launched his blog — is in his seventies and, by his own admission, does not use a computer well.

Obviously, Bill Marriott is no dummy. He understands the spirit of blogging because he understands how important his customers and associates are. But he is an older guy who grew up in a world where the personal computer wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. You have to be a person of some vision and some humility to see the changing landscape, listen to people who are younger and less experienced than you are, and embrace it instead of treating it as a threat.

So, if Bill Marriott can find time in his busy life to blog and podcast, there’s no reason why you can’t make it happen. If blogging or podcasting or social media will work for your business, then you should use them. Don’t let your lack of technical skill or your desire to cling to the way things used to be deter you. Sometimes new tools are scary, but take inspiration from Bill Marriott and be not afraid.

Today, I got a boilerplate comment on my personal blog from a person who was trying to correct some “misinformation” about her company’s product that was being spread via the blogosphere. (To read the whole troubled tale of woe, check out my personal blog.)

The problem: my blog post was more about my reaction to a larger issue brought up by the product than it was about the product itself. She didn’t respond to any of my thoughts, she just did a boilerplate hit-and-run on my blog and left. She didn’t even bother to identify herself.

The whole thing got me thinking a bit about best practices for commenting on someone’s blog on behalf of an organization. This is what I would have recommended she do differently.

• Identify yourself. You don’t HAVE to leave your full name, but at the very least, leave your first name.
• Address the blogger by name. Even if most of your comment is a boilerplate statement, show some courtesy by attempting to discover the blogger’s name (or handle) and using it when addressing him or her.
• Respond to the specifics of the blog post. Even if you’re responding with talking points, tailor your response to issues raised in the specific blog post instead of just posting a general blob of information.
• Acknowledge feelings, opinions and concerns. If the blogger is pissed off about something (whether or not you think she has a right to be) try to acknowledge the validity of the opinion/emotion/concern. Even if you disagree, try empathizing. It helps to diffuse anger and promote a spirit of reconciliation.

I’m sure that these are pretty common knowledge to many of you, but they bear repeating as long as there are people out there who do social media outreach the wrong way.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet (where have you been?), LonelyGirl15 is the saga of a cute, vulnerable teenage girl by the name of Bree. Bree video blogs earnestly from her bedroom and belongs to a strange cult that wants her to go through some kind of creepy ritual. She posts her videos to YouTube and gains a huge following. Drama ensues.

Bree is played by actress Jessica Rose, of whom Wired says, “there’s something about [her] that the webcam loves. Her distractingly large eyebrows and small, round face are bent and stretched by the fish-eye lens into a morsel of beauty that fits perfectly in a pop-up window.”

The recent Wired article also details the attempts of Lonelygirl creators Miles Beckett, Mes Flinders and Greg Goodfried to engage with mainstream Hollywood:

Their first sit-down with a major broadcaster was, Goodfried says, an “exercise in futility.” Beckett tried to explain to the executive that the central theme of online entertainment was interactivity, as opposed to the passivity of television. He wanted to create shows in which the line between reality and fiction is blurred, where viewers can correspond with the characters and actually become involved in the story by posting their own videos. The exec responded by walking them through his fall lineup and pointing out that the network’s Web site had great supplemental video material for the season’s upcoming shows.

Beckett is clearly frustrated. “The Web isn’t just a support system for hit TV shows,” he says. “It’s a new medium. It requires new storytelling techniques. The way the networks look at the Internet now is like the early days of TV, when announcers would just read radio scripts on camera. It was boring in the same way all this supplemental material is boring.”

The LG15 crew has a different vision. They want to create entertainment that fans can touch through interactive role-playing and video blogs of their own.

When Business Week wrote, that blogs are “going to shake up just about every business — including yours,” this is what they were talking about. The question is, do you want to be remembered for doing your industry’s equivalent of reading radio scripts on camera while your competitors discover the TV drama?

Oh sure, he’s only formed an “exploratory committee”, but for all intents and purposes Barack Obama has thrown his hat in the ring for President.

Whether you support him or not, you have to admire his strategy. Rather than just coming out and running for President, he’s formed a very public exploratory group and posted videos of his musings about the future of our country on YouTube.

He’s betting that the blogosphere will be all abuzz by the time he announces his intention to run on February 10th. It’s a great strategy.

“This is not a suit against Apple’s innovation, their modern design, or their cool phone. It is not a suit about money or royalties. This is a suit about trademark infringement,” wrote a PR representative from Cisco on their blog.

Regardless of which way this case turns out, Cisco is better positioned to win in the court of public opinion. All Apple has is an abandoned anonymous blog.

Via JK on the Run.