April 2007

Today’s Wall Street Journal Report on Search Engine Optimization offers some great advice for businesses that want to boost their search engine rankings. Their approach combines traditional search engine optimization techniques with blog-based evangelism.

But while the article mentions blogs here and there, it never states explicitly that blogs cover most of what the experts they interviewed recommend without a lot of fuss. After the jump, I’ve broken the article down into its basic components and explained why blogs can help you do just about everything the Journal article suggests.
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If you want to understand the attitude that resists starting a business blog, you should watch Helen Mirren’s astonishing performance in The Queen (iTunes).

More about why on my personal blog.

We’re presenting to an in-office group today about blogging for business. We do this for companies. Right now, Steve is talking about subscribing to RSS feeds.

If you’re interested in having an in-office presentation about business blogging, drop us a line!

When you start seeing articles on “declaring e-mail bankruptcy”, you know that something has gone horribly wrong with e-mail as a business communication tool.

My colleague Jason Preston has been arguing that e-mail is a broken system for quite some time now. I’m starting to agree with him. I have a number of e-mails in my inbox that I never quite get around to replying to. That’s not to say that I’m not paying attention. I do try to stay on top of all the projects I’m involved with.

My personal e-mail? Don’t even go there. It’s mostly a repository of e-mails from my parents, reminders from wordpress@somedomain.com that I need to check the moderation queue, and the occasional spam.

The only time I use e-mail in my personal life is to organize communication among a large group of people. And even then, if they’re all on Facebook, I tend to use that instead.

But what’s the equivalent communication tool for business? If you want to be public, blogs and comments are a nice way to talk to one another. But what if you want to have a private conversation with your co-worker?

I’m a big fan of instant messaging because it’s — well — instant. It insists on getting your attention immediately and it won’t give up and go away like e-mail does. It also breaks information down into little easily read chunks.

The problem with instant messenger is that not everyone uses the same protocol. And even when they do, some people are more reliable about logging on than others. My boss, Steve tends to hate instant messaging. He says it’s the, “worst of e-mail combined with the worst of the phone.”

Obviously, an internal project blog is a great solution to keep teams in contact with one another. But there’s always going to be someone who doesn’t have access. E-mail — flawed as it is — is the widely accepted standard for communicating one-on-one in business. People are used to it. And in business, it’s hard to get people to do anything but what they’re used to.

I’m curious. What are your biggest peeves about e-mail. Have you discovered any unique, brilliant ways to circumvent them? Do you and your coworkers have some magical system for communicating with one another? Please to share.

I recently spoke with a friend who poked gentle fun at some companies who say they want to be, “Web 2.0 compliant.”

“As if it were a standard,” he chuckled.

The term “Web 2.0″ gets tossed around a lot. It’s even starting to become a business buzzword like ’synergy’ or ‘paradigm.’ But what does it really mean?

The Scoble writes:

Web 1.0 was about pages. URLs.
Web 2.0 was about users. Adding them onto corporate pages. Wikis. Blogs. Myspaces.
Web 3.0 is about getting rid of pages altogether. Being able to make the Web YOU want or need. Is Twitter a page? Or a post? Or an SMS? A graph? Or a map display?

I’d like to add a few things to that.

Web 1.0 was primarily about pages and URLs. It was also about sloppy HTML and flash entry pages. The focus was on look and experience in the browser rather than content.

Web 2.0 is about user participation. But it’s also about a shift in focus from wild colors animations and design to simple, clean code and well-organized, tagged, searchable content.

Web 3.0 — as Mr. Scoble calls it — is about discreet chunks of content presenting themselves in various ways. It’s about freeing up that content to be viewed on multiple devices and found in a variety of ways. It’s about developing a standard markup language for content that is easily understood by computers and by humans like microformats.

The future of content distribution means that your customers’ opinions about your products will not just show up when someone Googles your company name. They’ll also be geotagged to your storefront, so that when a potential customer walks by, he can see whether other people have good things to say about your company.

This means that even though services like Twitter aren’t particularly relevant to businesses now, they will be in the future as those discreet chunks of content are formatted, tagged, marked up, cross-referenced, and shared worldwide in real time with anyone who cares.

According to the Wall Street Journal today, smaller, more flexible blog networks offer advantages for advertisers. Reebok is one company who is putting more emphasis on blog ads:

And the ads didn’t show up just on Glam.com. Glam has assembled a network of roughly 300 similarly themed blogs, Web sites and magazines that it links to — broadening Glam’s reach. Glam’s female-oriented network drew 10 million unique U.S. visitors in March, making it the second-largest women’s online property after NBC Universal’s iVillage, according to comScore Media Metrix.

“You are not just hitting one portal; you have thousands of these other sites. By showing up incrementally on these other sites, you are getting more bang for your buck,” says Marc Fireman, head of digital marketing for Reebok.

Blogs also are more flexible with their coverage — but at the cost of editorial integrity?

Glam has also shown it is willing to blur the line between editorial and advertising by, for instance, getting its sponsors mentioned in its network of blogs. While bloggers have editorial control over their sites, they’re often receptive to anything that looks like news in the fashion, style and beauty areas. For example, Glam Media announced yesterday the launch of a handbag designer competition with Hearst Magazines’ Marie Claire. During the day, a number of blogs noted the news with links back to the contest’s site. In the Reebok campaign, the Glam-affiliated fashion blog “Couture in the City” recently posted an item about the Glam exclusive “Scarlett Hearts Rbk Giveaway.”

This morning’s Wall Street Journal has a cover feature detailing how Justen Deal, an employee rabble-rouser was able to create a public relations nightmare at Kaiser Permanente with one widely-broadcast internal email criticizing the company’s efforts to digitize sensitive patient information.

The e-mail was sent on a Friday after most employees had gone home for the weekend. Kaiser IT staff spent much of the weekend trying to purge it from the e-mail system, but they met with limited success. According to the Journal, “by Monday, the mass mailing had reached an estimated 120,000 computers at the company. It had also leaked into cyberspace.”

The highly critical epistle was picked up by the blogosphere and became a major issue for the company. Some even speculate that it could have affected Wall Street perceptions.

According to the Journal:

“Mr. Deal…quickly became a cause celebre in the blogosphere and beyond. HIStalk, a popular health-care IT site, featured ‘an exclusive interview,’ with Mr. Deal. One stock analyst says that Kaiser’s tribulations could alter the competitive landscape for IT vendors.”

We’ve said for years that a blog post is “an email to the world” and it’s obvious that when this mail jumped from someone’s in-box to a blog entry it took on a life of its own.

Justin Deal– the author of the email was not a blogger, so to send a large-scale message, he had to cobble together a mailing list via manual means:

“But it wasn’t as easy as pushing a button. He didn’t have access to a company-wide “send all” address, so he improvised. He says he bought a cheap software tool that helped him gradually build a list on his own computer.”

Consider this: if Kaiser had been using an enterprise blogging system (like Blogtronix, iUpload, Marqui, and others) instead of e-mail for internal workgroup communications, Deal’s embarrassing efforts would likely have been stymied because it would have gone out as a blog post with a central location rather than a mass mailing. Furthermore, this posting could have been held for management review before being made public. Posts peppered with terms (as this mail was) such as “conflict of interest,” “recklessly,” “losses,” “inefficient,” “exposed,” “internal resistance,” “ignored,” “problems,” etc. etc can automatically land in a “potential rants” folder for review by superiors before propagating.

This is one reason we work with corporate clients to set up blogging systems that accommodate several blogs, some public-facing, some internal. This platform allows management to exercise control over what is said and when. It also means that public-facing employee posts are driving link love and Google Juice to the corporate domain.

That said, it’s obvious to us that it’s not always in an employee’s long-term best interest to create a media property — especially in their spare time — that they can’t take with them if they make a career move. When Scoble left Microsoft, his blog went with him. If the blog had been a Microsoft property, his value to another firm would arguably have diminished significantly.

So. In many cases we encourage employers to have their staff populate blogs owned by the corporate entity, while at the same time we tell friends, relatives, and clients who are independent consultants to avoid investing a lot of personal time in any blogs that can’t migrate with them.

Yes, we are consistently inconsistent.

Scoble wrote today that he was rather surprised that he hasn’t yet been contacted by any companies marketing to new parents. After all, he’s announced his wife’s pregnancy to the entire world via his blog.

He also says that the advertising industry should pay attention to Twitterment. This service basically compares two terms based on the frequency with which they appear in Twitter entries. Here’s a chart comparing the frequency of mentions of Coke vs. Pepsi:

If a representative sample of consumers were using Twitter, this would be unbelievably useful. But the vast majority of people don’t even know what Twitter is, let alone pay attention to or use it. Like I mentioned before, individual tweets don’t get linked to, so they don’t have any real search engine presence.

That said, I do anticipate that one day a Twitter-like feature will be a common feature among social networks and fully integrated with people’s individual Web presences. When that happens, analyzing the data will be of immeasurable value to marketers the world over. But until then, the most relevant measures of the online conversation will continue to be analytics like the report we’re generating about CES.

Update: And speaking of Twitter as a feature rather than a service, it looks like Facebook just cloned it with RSS feeds and a dynamic page listing all friends’ status updates. I almost feel like this is more useful to me as a personal tool than Twitter is.

Bloggers aren’t highly regarded for our journalistic ethics. We’re often maligned for not checking facts, publishing half-truths, running with innuendoes, and becoming one big echo chamber. All of these criticisms are not without their merit.

But sometimes the shoe is on the other foot. We all remember the way that the blogosphere called Dan Rather out on his damaging mistake regarding phony documentation about president Bush’s service during the Vietnam war. This week has presented another such opportunity, one that the blogosphere has attacked with relish.

Eighteen year-old Emily Hilscher was the first victim in last week’s tragic killing spree at Virginia Tech. She was an aspiring veterinarian who loved animals. Pictures show a sprightly girl with sparkling blue-green eyes. She was often photographed riding horses or goofing around with a silly expression on her face. She was beautiful and very compelling.

The mainstream media spent a great deal of time fixating on Hilscher because she was the first person killed in the massacre, and because the circumstances of her death made it look initially as though she was targeted specifically. The college and the police originally believed that the murders of Hilscher and her neighbor Ryan “Stack” Clark were an isolated domestic incident and questioned Hilscher’s boyfriend, Karl Thornhill at length.

Meanwhile, speculation in the mainstream media went way off track. Some mainstream papers speculated that Hilscher’s murder was the unfortunate result of a lover’s quarrel. Others went so far as to insinuate that some infidelity or cruel rejection on her part was the catalyst that set off gunman Seung-hui Cho’s murderous rampage. Wired cited but did not link to unspecified “news reports” that claimed, “Cho had been dating one of his first victims, student Emily Hilscher, and that she broke up with Cho two weeks ago.”

Hilscher’s friends, family and her boyfriend were thunderstruck. How could the media get it so wrong? And how could they say such things about the person they loved so much just days after she was brutally murdered?

Some bloggers perpetuated the rumors, but a critical mass resisted. Questions arose, aided by a Facebook group that became a hub of information for those who were seeking to distribute the real facts about Hilscher’s life and death. Some mainstream press venues also picked up the call for truth. A week later, very little doubt exists that Emily Hilscher was not involved with Cho.

Last week, I wrote that the most compelling information about the Virginia Tech tragedy could be found on blogs and social networks, rather than in the mainstream press. Now it appears that the most factual and relevant information about this senseless tragedy is also available in the new media, rather than the old.

Our valued genius, Jason Preston turns a ripe old twenty-something today.

Happy birthday, buddy!

Sarah Ellison and Suzzane Vranica report today in The Wall Street Journal that for most newspapers, online advertising growth won’t be as strong as predicted. Blogs and other news sources such as myspace are partly to blame:

Media buyers also indicate marketers are beginning to look beyond traditional journalism sites, realizing many news junkies go elsewhere, too. “Advertisers are getting less scared of blogs and newsgroups and now are beginning to take money away from the traditional newspapers’ sites,” says Greg Smith, chief operating officer of Neo@Ogilvy, an interactive ad agency owned by WPP Group’s Ogilvy & Mather, New York.

Another significant drain profiled is the move toward search-focused ads, which of course is a key source of revenue for many bloggers. FYI that we’ll be hosting sessions contrasting ad networks for bloggers at our next event.

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Business Week online columnist Karen E. Klein interviewed me a short time ago asking for advice for one of her readers about starting a lifestyle blog.

It was a really interesting question and I enjoyed answering it. Many thanks to Karen for getting in touch and for fitting in a plug for our conference this September.

As competition from Web and satellite-based media continues to eat into the radio market, Clear Channel is working hard to find a new formula that will keep listeners tuned in.

Their newest idea involves eliminating commercials in favor of integrating sponsorship announcements more subtly into programming. They’re testing this model with their new Dallas-based Lone Star 92.5. For example, a host might say, “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking: you are not free to enjoy nonstop Lone Star music thanks to Southwest Airlines and Lone Star 92.5.”

This is similar to the way that many video and audio podcasts set up their sponsorships. Just look at how Seagate has integrated their brand with The Scoble Show.

Media buyers need to be particularly aware of this changing format. If this model bears out as well as I think it will for Clear Channel, you’ll soon be changing your entire media plan. You’ll no longer simply buy time in which you can insert a pre-produced ad. You’ll be working with individual radio stations to determine how your company’s message can best fit within the culture and musical genre of the radio station in question.

This is also a potential big change for advertising firms. If this model takes off, companies might wind up skipping the production phase of radio advertising entirely and working directly with the radio station to produce ad copy. Advertising firms that specialize primarily in radio content will need to develop new specialties and become even more familiar with the content, message and audience of specific radio stations in specific markets.

The gals over at Blog Squad have an interesting post about some of the biggest mistakes you can make in business blogging. One of them is not using proper metrics to measure how well your blog is meeting its goals.

Of late, we’ve become big fans of StatCounter. In our experience, it has been head and shoulders over all the other metrics programs we’ve tried in terms of accuracy and real time reporting.

The results are even downloadable.

People far smarter than I have declared that the future of social networking is in three places:

1. Social networks that cater to niches.
2. Social networks that act as a hub for people’s many disparate social networking accounts.
3. Mobile social networking.

The third category heated up yesterday when the patent for some key components of mobile social networking sold for $2.6 million.

I did a bit of research into some of the beta social networks out there and had a lot of fun with Socialight. Basically, it uses your phone’s GPS to find out where you are, then it tells you information about locations near you. I quickly joined and geotagged a number of my favorite restaurants, complete with my menu preferences for each.

If you’re a business owner with any kind of a storefront, sites like this matter tremendously to you. Just look at this listing for Huling Brothers auto dealership. Apparently, the store once scammed a mentally disabled man. If you’re a socialight user and your phone beeps with that information when you get in range of Huling Brothers, are you going to want to shop for a car there?

This is very similar to the wine bottle story that John Battelle told in his book The Search. In that instance, a person can find out what her friends thought about a particular vintage and where in the area she might be able to buy it for cheaper just by scanning the bottle’s bar code with her mobile phone.

The importance of these variants on mobile social networking and opinion sharing will only grow for your customers over the next five years. And unlike a number of online services that aim to do the same thing, they’re impossible to game. These networks enable people to listen only to their friends or other people whose opinions they have come to trust. If you post a recommendation for your own restaurant, not too many people are going to pay attention.

Denise and Patsi of The Blog Squad posted today about a client of theirs whose blog has brought him a great deal of new business.

“My blog…has been the single best action I have taken in the way of marketing for my company and myself,” wrote Mark Siegel, Managing Director of Golf Asian in an unsolicited testimonial. “I…have seen over $250,000 of new business come in just from people reading the blog and gaining confidence in dealing with my Thailand golf travel company.”

I always enjoy hearing these success stories, even when they involve our competition. For small business owners, this is a great indicator of just how helpful a business blog can be in getting the word out about what you have to offer.

Jeff Jarvis has a great post up this morning that explains why cable is a dying platform for content distribution. Because of the Web, content is becoming commodified. No company can have a monopoly on great content. The new platforms are those that enable people to share content freely. Like Google and YouTube.

Jarvis argues that the future of media is in enabling people to connect with the information they care about. But even if you’re not in that sector, this still matters to you. Because like John Battelle told us last year all businesses are publishers now if they want to stay competitive.

The questions you should be asking yourself: How can we use emerging platforms to enable our customers to do what they do better? How can we do that without trying to control the outcome of every conversation? How can we reach out to our customers organically by providing a value add that is compelling to them?

Blogging is one way of doing this. Chances are that someone within your organization knows a lot about what your customers care about. Find that person and encourage them to spend company time sharing that information in the spirit of reaching out to your customer base. If you enable them with some critical piece of information, chances are that they’ll stick around to see what else you can offer.

Self-promotionally, I should mention that our conference this September is going to cover this new organic outreach in a big way. I’m especially excited to discuss it with the newcomers at our “Social Media Bootcamp” on Day One of the conference.

Intelius Chief Technology Officer Kevin Marcus has a great post up about why Intelius uses technology built on the LAMP stack.

I just had a great chat with Matt Mullenweg about the amazing applications of open source technology to business. In the past, businesses have been wary of using anything developed in an open source environment because it doesn’t come with the same level of legal accountability and technical support that a proprietary piece of software does.

This can be a deal breaker for a lot of businesses, but for some, Matt and I both agree that the support/accountability issue is trumped by the dedication of passionate communities to problem solving and by the fact that companies can get open source software to jump through hoops that proprietary software will not.

And as Marcus writes:

Yes, commercialization can result in advantages including more robust support and compatibility, (consider the success of RedHat or MySQL), but in my mind, the real benefit to an open source model is overall software quality and flexibility.

Can you imagine the day that email sent from Outlook requires an Outlook browser to read it? If you can imagine the potential implications of a development like that (something like the different formats for different versions of Excel not always being backwards compatible), you might want to look more closely at the design motivation behind your infrastructure.

If the increase in interest in WordPress is any indication, open source blogging platforms appear to be one of the major themes of 2007. Surely their applications are not limited to non business bloggers. It’s something we definitely plan to discuss at our conference this September.

Many thanks to my colleague and friend Kim Larsen for pointing me in the direction of Marcus’ piece.

The recent tragedy at Virginia Tech has shocked the nation and provided the cable news stations with a 24/7 stream of graphic, tragic images. Viewers have been treated to round-the-clock coverage that repeats the sad facts of yesterday’s massacre — the death toll, the locations of the separate incidents, the statements by President Bush and Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger — ad nauseum.

But in this most recent national tragedy, the most compelling, hard-hitting and provocative sources of news have not been mainstream. The most important news has been broken by the students of Virginia Tech themselves as they share information and grieve together on the student-oriented social networking site Facebook.

Just as September 11th, 2001 cemented the blogosphere as an important source of news, so has the Virginia Tech incident cemented the importance of social networks in how people get their information.

Couple this striking fact with the recent study that concluded that viewers of Comedy Central’s Daily Show and Colbert Report were more informed about current events than viewers of FOX News or CNN and you start to see a pattern emerging: mainstream news is being rapidly eclipsed by other forms of media, both old and new.

As always, the most compelling and informative content will always draw the most eyeballs. People are moving away from mainstream and network television as more varied and compelling options present themselves. Needless to say, marketers will need to pay attention to this fact moving forward.

Author’s Note: The thoughts and prayers of the entire Blog Business Summit team are with the Hokie nation today as they recover from yesterday’s tragedy.