April 2007

The past few weeks in the blogosphere have been even more complicated than usual. In short, some hurtful things were posted about prominent female bloggers on a couple of group blogs that were owned or maintained by other prominent bloggers. In some cases, those hurtful postings crossed the line from poor taste to blatant misogyny and sexually loaded death threats. Leading blogger Robert Scoble even took the week off from blogging in solidarity with his female colleagues who had been attacked. The flurry of debate, recrimination and anger that followed these postings was so intense that it made a splash in the mainstream media, culminating in a feature on CNN.

The whole mess probably turned some businesses off from getting involved with the blogosphere. After all, who wants to engage with a community that periodically goes through firestorms like this? It’s all too hard to control! There’s too much risk! There’s too much immaturity out there for this to be a viable medium for business!

But cooler heads eventually prevailed, leading to these coordinated statements from Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke — the two major players in the uproar.

It’s this spirit of forgiveness, discourse and agreement to disagree that businesses should pay attention to. Sure, there will always be immaturity in the blogosphere. But that’s just as true of the business world. What’s interesting to note is that like all blogosphere firestorms, the whole imbroglio settled down fairly quickly once the two sides were able to engage with one another and find common ground.

That’s the takeaway for businesses. In the blogosphere, it’s best to engage quickly and maturely with all stakeholders in a debate. If you’re capable of having a mature discussion with people who don’t agree with you, then the blogosphere is for you. It might seem very scary sometimes, but there’s an overwhelming likelihood that you and your colleagues will be able to overcome any obstacles you encounter.

We all remember the great hullabaloo over Facebook’s unilateral introduction of its News Feed feature last year. Facebook’s users didn’t like the feature because it aggregated so much information about their friends in a “stalkerish” way.

From the blowup, I drew three conclusions that were relevant to businesses:

• Ask what your customers want and then listen to them. To paraphrase danah [boyd], you should configure your product to match your users, don’t try to configure your users to match your product.
• Admit when you screw up. Then communicate frequently and consistently about what measures you are taking to solve the problem.
• And finally, even after you’ve corrected the big issue, continue to respond to feedback from your audience.

It looks as though Facebook is making the most of that third idea with their Facebook Sneak Preview group. The group boasts over 100,000 members and gives users a chance to preview the upcoming changes to the site’s user interface. It also encourages broader discussion of what users want out of their social network.

This idea of using the Web to engage customers in product development is hardly new. In Facebook’s case, it had everything to gain and nothing to lose by opening the kimono. But there are some companies with trade secrets and intellectual property to lose.

What do you guys think? Should companies err on the side of caution when it comes to IP and other sensitive information? Has this world of transparent communication online left no room for opacity, or do we have some wiggle room? When we bring product development into the equation, do we change the rules?

Incidentally, and in the interests of self-promotion, this is one of the big issues we’ll be discussing at the next Blog Business Summit in September.

Many thanks to Easton Ellsworth of Business Blog Wire for posting one of our conference bugs on the sidebar of his blog.

And don’t worry buddy, I’m still working on the Fortune 500 wiki. I just get so overloaded…

The Wall Street Journal article Ogilvy’s New Digital Chief Discusses Challenges features an overview of WPP Group’s Ogilvy North America take on the new advertising landscape and how traditional agencies are struggling with the new world of Web, mobile, search, and social media.

Ogilvy’s move is the latest sign that big traditional ad agencies, under pressure from clients, are trying to make Web-based and mobile advertising a stronger part of their day-to-day operations. But as advertisers are shifting more of their ad budgets into digital media, many are wrestling with a shortage of digitally experienced creative staffers at their ad agencies. The issue was highlighted by Nike’s recent decision to move part of its business away from its longtime ad partner Wieden + Kennedy because of dissatisfaction with the shop’s digital abilities.

Based on last week’s activities, I think you can add Waggener Edstrom to that list of old-world corporate agencies that are struggling to be a part of today’s game.

We’ve got some beautiful sidebar bugs, and we’d just love it if you’d spread the word by placing one in the sidebar of your blog.

First person to post one and e-mail me with the link to your blog gets some link love and a big hug from me the next time I see you!

<a href="http://www.blogbusinesssummit.com/conferences" title="Blog Business<br /> Summit 2007"><img src="http://www.blogbusinesssummit.com/images/2007bugs/BBSChicagoGeneral.gif" alt="Blog Business Summit Chicago 2007" width="160" height="160" /></a><br />

<a href="http://www.blogbusinesssummit.com/conferences" title="I’m attending Blog Business Summit 2007"><img src="http://blogbusinesssummit.com/images/2007bugs/BBSChicagoAttendee.gif" alt="Blog Business Summit Chicago 2007" width="160" height="160" /></a><br />

<a href="http://www.blogbusinesssummit.com/conferences" title="I’m speaking at Blog Business Summit 2007"><img src="http://blogbusinesssummit.com/images/2007bugs/BBSChicagoSpeaker.gif" alt="Blog Business Summit Chicago 2007" width="160" height="160" /></a><br />

<a href="http://www.blogbusinesssummit.com/conferences" title="We’re sponsoring Blog Business Summit 2007"><img src="http://blogbusinesssummit.com/images/2007bugs/BBSChicagoSponsor.gif" alt="Blog Business Summit Chicago 2007" width="160" height="160" /></a><br />

Last week, I posted my conclusion that Justin.TV was more relevant to businesses than Twitter.

Reader Ryan Hupfer left a very intelligent comment about the ways that “lifecasting” — as Justin calls his experiment in 24/7 online visibility — could be applied to business interests:

imagine if Pepsi had a contest to send to ‘lifecasters’ down to SXSW, or Coke sponsors a ‘lifecaster’ for each Final Four team in order to give a true experience to an audience.

Mario Sundar of Marketing Nirvana followed up with the question, “Do you see any other applications for ‘lifecasting’?”

This got my wheels turning. If a client came to me and said, “we want to do something really cutting edge,” I’d definitely take lifecasting into account. I’d like to see a company like Toyota — which makes environmentally friendly hybrid vehicles — empower one of their most passionate environmentalist customers to lifecast about saving the planet. Even if that environmentalist demonstrated how to hack their hybrid to plug into a traditional wall outlet, and even though taking such action voids the manufacturer’s warranty.

I’d like to see a White House staffer close to the President lifecasting. Obviously this couldn’t be a person with high level security clearance or we’d be putting national security at risk. But it would be an amazing step toward creating political transparency.

And who knows, maybe a very special CEO out there might consider a lifecast. This would have to be someone who embraces transparency wholeheartedly but doesn’t have the time or inclination to blog on a daily basis.

Do you guys have any other good ideas for intersections between lifecasting and business?

Ooh, and let’s start discussing best practices. How does business lifecasting differ from what Justin is doing? Do we really need to hear a CEO use the bathroom?

The ever Web-savvy Dallas Mavericks — owner Mark Cuban has a blog — have launched Friends.Mavs.com, a social network for Mavericks fans. They’re calling it “the first professional sports social network and video hosting site.”

Evidently, they’ve never heard of NHL Connect, the social networking site the NHL launched last year to connect hockey fans.

So far, the site only appears to have just over 1,000 members. (I calculated this with a quick glance at the list members page. There were twenty members to a page and 52 pages. 20*52=1,040.) It’s built with Ning, which has some open source features but retains the right to feature its own advertising.

I think the Mavs are cool to be so low-key about this and go with an existing service rather than building a Wal-Mart style command and control social network. But I’m not sure the value add is really there for them. Ning doesn’t even allow those who build networks with their software to access their users’ e-mail addresses, although it does allow them to message all the users within the system.

As with any blogging or social networking platform, the user’s needs take precedence. Ning works very well for a company whose end goal is to facilitate community for community’s sake. But forget about analyzing the behavior of that community in any kind of detail.

On the upside, they seem extremely committed to helping social network builders develop an attractive product for the end user. I like their Ning tricks feature on the blog, which features tips and tricks for getting the most out of your social network. They allow backup and export of the network’s underlying data, so companies could conceivably move to a network of their own making at a later date. They also earn points for rapid scalability.

Only time will tell whether the Mavs were smart to choose Ning for their platform. But I think it’s wonderful that they’re getting into the game.

The current thinking in blog design is that your blog banner should be a link to the home page of your blog site. I overlooked this fact when building this blog. My ever-observant colleague Kim Larsen told me that she thought the banner should be a link, so I went back to the drawing board.

If our banner were just a straight image, it would be an easy process. You just wrap your img in an a tag and add a few style elements.

Unfortunately, our banner is actually a background image. I designed the site that way because I wanted to float the nav bar elements in front of the banner. Making a background image into a link is technically impossible, but I figured it out with the help of the Web at large and some clever reorganization of our stylesheet.

First, I had to change the way our stylesheet was making the banner. Before, it was merely an empty div in the header section with the following attributes:

.bannercontainer {
height:132px;
width:920px;
background-image: url(build/blogheaderimage.jpg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}


In the header section, I changed the empty div to an a href="http://blogbusinesssummit.com" with the following attributes:


#bannercontainer {
display: block;
height:132px;
width:920px;
background-image: url(build/blogheaderimage.jpg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}


Notice that in order to have an empty a, you need to make it a block-level element in the CSS.

This made the banner into a link back to the blog portion of the site, but it created a new problem. Every time I hovered my mouse over the banner image, it got an underline. No matter how many styles I added to the #bannercontainer element, nothing changed.

If you run into this problem, you might need to investigate what other divs your banner is sitting inside of. Maybe one of them is the culprit. In our case, the div responsible holding our site together needed some additional styling. I also needed to place it lower in the stylesheet to override some other styles.

So that’s how we made our background image banner into a link. Hooray for CSS. Now, I’m off to finish migrating the Fortune 500 project and do a dozen other things that need doing.