May 2007

I’ve been spending a lot of time playing with Facebook’s new “platform” feature. Basically, it allows developers to build neat little widgets that extend the social network in a number of ways. Users can now play games with their friends, share their favorite drink recipes, post songs to their profiles. And cool new applications keep showing up every day.

It’s not as though they’re the first social network to open the kimono to third party value-adds. When Friendster allowed seven developers to work on the network late last year, they experienced a 17.76% jump in unique visitors. It’s clear that users like the creativity that third-party developers bring to the table.

So what makes Facebook’s third-party offering compelling and relevant to businesses? The fact that advertising is no longer the only way to reach Facebook’s more than 16 million users. Companies and organizations can build applications that users find useful. This is a great new way to introduce folks to a new brand or reinforce loyalty to one that’s been around for a while.

For example, US Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was the first political candidacy to create an application for Facebook. The app serves all the most recent Obama video and news onto users’ profiles and enables them to identify and share Obama materials with friends who live in early primary states.

While I think it’s cool that Obama’s campaign has launched an application on Facebook, I think they could do a better job of adding value for users. Folks who already support Obama will be more than happy to use this application, but what about those who are still making up their minds? It would be really cool to see an application that lets users answer political questions to determine how closely their values and priorities align with those of Senator Obama. They key to creating an application that wins hearts and minds is how useful and interesting it is, not how well it serves the organization’s one-sided interests.

We talk a lot around here about using technology to really listen to customers. In fact, that’s really what we teach people how to do. So we figured it was time we started practicing what we preach.

The bottom line is that some of our favorite sessions have been suggested to us by members of the BBS community before, after or during conferences. We wanted to streamline that process by making it easy for people to join our community and propose sessions. That’s why we built a plugin that lets our community propose sessions and rate other people’s sessions once they are proposed.

So have at it! Go hog wild! Propose a session or nineteen. We’re all ears.

UPDATE: Ok, OK! I spoke too soon. We detected an error in the plugin that required we shut it down for the time being. It should be up and running early next week. Sorry for the inconvenience.

By proposing a session through the Blog Business Summit the person who proposed the session (henceforth referred to as the PROPOSER) agrees to the following terms and conditions:

1. The PROPOSER relinquishes any claim of ownership of the session idea.
2. The PROPOSER relinquishes any claim to compensation for the session idea from Blog Business Summit, its parents, subsidiaries and partners.
3. The PROPOSER acknowledges that Blog Business Summit has the right to modify the session’s description or speakers in whole or in part.
4. The PROPOSER acknowledges that Blog Business Summit may not post the session for peer review.
5. The PROPOSER acknowledges that Blog Business Summit may use the session idea or speaker suggestion(s) in whole or in part for an event other than the one for which it was originally proposed.
6. The PROPOSER understands that providing inaccurate contact information for any proposed speaker, including the contact information of a public relations or speaker firm representative, will result in automatic disqualification of the proposed session.

The Blog Business Summit reserves the right to change these terms and conditions at any time without notification.

The marketers present here at FiRe not only seem to embracing social media as a great way to drive sales, but in at least two cases, it’s been the only/main way they have promoted their wares.

From the podium this morning, Dave Winer was asked if there was a business model for podcasters. His response was that one might not get paid directly for podcasting, but there might be indirect revenues. As an example, he said that Scripting News was successful in generating sales revenues (I assume for Userland Software) and yet the business never took out ads. Winer indicated that his blog was the key traffic driver.

During lunch I was fortunate enough to sit next to Simon Hackett who is the founder and managing director of Internode Systems, and Agile Communications. Coincidentally, Internode also has not spent any money to speak of on traditional outreach and yet has been extremely successful. Simon told me that much of their success has been due to the positive word of mouth exposure gained from hundreds of hours he’s spent monitoring and contributing to the broadband community forum whirlpool.

I’m currently at the excellent Future in Review Conference (FiRe) in San Diego and have been polling the attendees regarding their blogging status. I’ve asked a half dozen corporate thought leader and marketing types from various organizations “are you blogging?” and five out of six have responded that they are.

Seems to me like we’ve rapidly transitioned from “fear of blogging” to “fear of not blogging” to “of course we’re blogging!”

Just like we predicted back in 2004…

We are in the midst of installing a massive plugin that will help us do some AMAZING things with conference editorial. Until everything is moved in, there may be some minor site glitches.

If you see anything serious, please drop me an e-mail. Any issues should be fixed by Friday.

Thanks!

As many of you know, one of the coolest features of Google’s Feed Reader is that it enables you to share the most interesting content items coming through your feed. Other people can subscribe to the list — which Robert Scoble calls a “link blog” — and see what you found interesting.

If your business sells stuff online — whether it’s songs, furniture or toys — you should enable users to share their favorite products in similar ways, whether through an RSS reader on an online social network like Facebook. For example, if the iTunes Store offered RSS feeds, I would be sharing Maroon 5’s awesome new collection of songs with the whole wide world. As it is, I can only share the URL with my friends on Facebook through their “share” feature and link to it on my blogs, both of which take longer than just hitting “shift + s” on my keyboard when I come to an item of interest in my RSS reader.

I think it was Scoble who originally said that anyone who launched a marketing site without an RSS feed should be fired. I’ll add “sales” to that list.

Selecting a platform for your blogging and social media efforts is a high-stakes process. Choose the right software and you’ll have a significant edge over your competitors and reap huge dividends from network effects. Choose wrong and you may find yourself in a technological dead end and be forced — at great expense — to start over.

The open architecture of the World Wide Web obliterated closed networks like Prodigy and Compuserve, while a diminished AOL was forced to migrate largely to a role of Internet access provider. Conversely, Windows remains supremely dominant on corporate desktops while Linux has been unable to expand much beyond it’s role as a server platform.

As companies large and small rush to embrace the world of social media, it’s critical that they understand the issues of control, lock-in, and extensibility that they will face long-term. In his keynote, WordPress founder and creator Matt Mullenweg will explain the evolution of open source, and show how participation in open source user and developer communities offers all businesses an upside that he feels far outweighs the risks.

Microsoft Popfly might be the newest kid on the block, but from what I can tell by poking around their website, it’s a very cool concept (it’s still in “Alpha” stages).

One of the things I’ve always thought could be improved in the blogosphere is the way that blogs (and therefore bloggers) interact with one another. I think that aside from linking to one another, widgets and memes are a great way of making sure blogs connect.

Popfly is essentially about creating widgets without bothering with all that pesky “code” stuff.

The coolest part, in my opinion, is that once you’ve mixed, mashed-up, or shedangled your own widget, anyone can grab it, play with it, and post it wherever, including the Vista sidebar. From their site:

Popfly lets your rate and Rip (copy) someone else’s project which creates a personal copy of the project for you. You can also embed your project on some of the most popular blogging services on the Web, including TypePad, Windows Live Spaces and others. You can even save your project as a Windows Sidebar Gadget that can run on the Windows Vista Sidebar.

In the article Tapping Into Customers’ Online Chatter, Wall Street Journal reporter Aaron O. Patrick details a topic we’re going to focus on at our next conference — using blogs as virtual focus groups.

Blogs and other messages posted on the Internet by individuals are becoming an increasingly popular way for people to share information about products, offering companies a trove of consumer feedback they previously could get only through expensive and slow surveys. About 1.4 million Internet messages were posted each day in March, up from 600,000 a day two years previously, according to Technorati, an Internet search engine for finding blogs.

That is driving agencies that mine Internet posts for customer information and enlist blogs in marketing campaigns to develop innovative new products.

“By listening to what people are saying online, we are getting an understanding of what people really think,” says Gard Gibson, a VML partner. “The moment you ask someone for their opinion I have created a bias because of the natural human instinct to please.”

Karen Klein (no relation to me) interviewed him for a business advice column about getting started with a business blog.

The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of how television studios are conducting blogger outreach was really interesting.

So was Jeff Jarvis’ response:

Bloggers are, truly, just viewers and fans: real people. So who’s going to pass up a chance to hobnob with a star and take home some TV schwag?

Personally, I think CBS did it 95% right. They reached out to people who are influential among their niche, gave them a cool experience and didn’t tell them to lie or offer them anything in exchange for positive coverage. It was a smart initiative and I don’t think they committed any major ethical violations.

If I had been advising them, I would have recommended that they track down bloggers who are already fans of the show. That would eliminate any question of whether the bloggers in question were saying nice things because they were given access because they were already fans long before the offer was made.

Reaching out to bloggers who can influence your niche is smart. Reaching out to bloggers who already like your product and have some reach within your niche is smarter. And reaching out to bloggers who have said negative things about you and trying to improve their experience with your company is the the cleverest move of all.

I’m in the midst of a huge editorial meeting with Kim and Steve right now getting more speakers and sessions brainstormed for the upcoming conference. In the meantime, here are some really interesting chunks of content from around the Web that I found this morning.

• The Wall Street Journal asks, are popularity aggregators like Digg too easy to game?
• Diva Marketing’s Toby Bloomberg has a great list of questions about business blogging. I’d love to hear what you guys think of #28: “Is a social media strategy right for all companies? When does it make sense?”

Will post something more in-depth later.

The Hyper Dog Blog has a great post about the top nine SEO mistakes designers make when building sites. The general gist: search bots don’t index Java or Flash very well, so your site should rely primarily on nice, clean HTML.

Blogging engines are GREAT for that.

CBS’s first attempt at providing its content online met with less than enthusiastic results. The reception has been so bad that CBS’s new internet strategist recently told the Wall Street Journal that the URL for its online media service should be called “CBS.com/nobodycomeshere.”

So CBS is changing gears. They’re making deals left and right to make their content available for free in at least ten different web-based venues. I was particularly excited to read that they’re in talks with Facebook to allow users to share CBS video on their profiles.

To succeed, media companies will need to get used to the idea that the natural habitat of content is no longer restricted to one format or one viewing platform. By opening their content up to a number of different channels, CBS is embracing this concept wholeheartedly.

There are takeaways here for businesses that are not traditional media companies. Remember what John Battelle said about all companies being publishers? It’s still true. And since all businesses are publishers, they need to make sure that their content is just as available to the people they want to reach as CBS does.

Here are some general things to think about:

1. How do(es) your company blog(s) look on mobile phone browsers?
2. Are your podcasts buried on your company website, or can people find them in podcast directories?
3. Is your content being repurposed anywhere? How can you add additional value for people who view your content in that format?
4. How many different ways are you enabling people to share your content? How does it display on Facebook’s shared links service? Do you have links that let them share it on Digg?
5. Are you getting click through from people’s Google Reader link blogs? Find out who is sharing your content and thank them.

A panel of judges has ruled that it’s acceptable for employers to base hiring decisions on Googling you. This means that whatever is out there about you online can legally impact your career prospects.

Since blogs are so beloved by search engines, why wouldn’t you want to use one to bury any incriminating photos of yourself under a layer of blog posts that round out the picture employers will see when they Google you? Write about your areas of passion and expertise. Show off your intellect. Post photos of your new puppy. In short, put your fabulous self out there.

You don’t have to be 100% wholesome 24/7. (If you did I’d be in real trouble.) But if the only thing that comes up when someone searches for you is a photo of you doing a keg stand during senior week, that’s the only thing employers will see.

The recent admission by Microsoft’s marketing group that the tremendous community reaction to their “Mad World” TV spot for the game Gears of War was not an intended side effect of the ad campaign got me thinking about what Jeremiah Owyang wrote a couple of months ago about community vs. viral marketing.

When it comes to creating viral videos, Jeremiah advises marketers to “stop trying to do something unattainable.” Because while we can dissect viral phenomena and learn from them, it’s almost impossible to create one outright. Viral content is defined in part by its spontaneity. And the conditions under which a carefully crafted marketing message can take off to become a viral scenario involve more luck than good planning.

Blogger Long Zheng seems to agree with this, writing in his post about the Microsoft admission, “the more you try the less it will happen again.”

I think this incident further reinforces the reality that online marketing must be driven by good old-fashioned blood sweat and tears. That is:

1. Build relationships.
2. Be transparent and honest and human.
3. Demonstrate that you care about what your customers care about.

Sure, think about stickiness and how people might do/make stuff with your advertising. But don’t expect that you can replicate the magic. And don’t promise your clients/boss that you can replicate the magic. In fact, don’t even try to replicate the magic. You’ll jinx yourself. Instead, focus on community-building. There’s way more ROI there.

As we all know, the Web is a growing competitor to traditional media when it comes to advertising. And as connections get faster, the kind of media that can be displayed in Web-based advertising has grown richer. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal has a great article about how content providers are working with these “rich media” ads, which can range from simple animations to embedded video.

The prevalence of such advertising can create something of a quandary for a business that is contemplating blogging. With a shortening national attention span, and so much jumping, flashing, and otherwise shiny stuff vying for the same eyeballs, how can simple words hope to draw the same amount of attention?

A couple of recommendations:

1. Short paragraphs. Blog posts with long paragraphs are visually exhausting. Make sure that you keep your paragraphs to three sentences, max.
2. Short posts. Occasionally, it’s ok to write a thesis. God knows I’m guilty of doing that very thing. But most blog posts should be short jots. If you’re writing about a complex topic, break it out into a series of posts.
3. Use lists. I’m a big fan of breaking content up visually by using lists. They make content more useful for people who are skimming for key points.
4. Embed media. Sometimes an image really is worth a thousand words. A video can be worth even more. Consider using a combination of media within your blog posts to get your message across.

Jeremiah Owyang did a really interesting interview with Intel Internet Strategist Bryan Rhoads. For the most part, I found it really informative, but I’m going to nitpick on one particular question that I feel wasn’t fully answered.

Owyang asked, “Do you have an Blog Policy? What’s the publishing process like for the Intel Blogs, and who’s involved? Who is allowed to blog and how are they selected?”

Rhoads replied:

We do have a policy for employees that is essentially an extension of our long standing communications policy. Its very much inline with former electronic communications policies, but updated to accommodate the medium and new technologies…

There is no “content workflow” through PR, Marketing or Legal… it’s the blogger communicating directly w/ his or her audience. Unfiltered and straight from the blogger’s keyboard to the live blog.

Given that there is no filter for content before it is published, it seems rather important that Intel choose bloggers who will represent the company well. I don’t mean to imply that Intel bloggers are required to drink the Kool Aid before they can speak, but I would like to know what criteria they use to determine who can blog.

Chris Pirillo has nine excellent points about how to do business on the Web. I’d like to expand on his first point.

Chris writes:

It’s not just about having an open mind; it’s about having an open strategy. You can’t control the Internet. Once you put something out there for the world to consume, assume that they will consume it but not just in the format you offered. It doesn’t matter if it’s audio, video, text, software, hardware or any other service—they’ll want to use it in ways that you can’t even imagine.

This is what Michael Raynor was talking about when he told PR Squared’s Todd Defren that social media injects additional uncertainty into business operations.

And it has more serious implications than the simple re-purposing of content. Businesses need to approach all aspects of social media with an open strategy. Unlike traditional marketing efforts, nobody can control the pace or subject matter of a conversation online. Each individual that participates can take any discussion or line of thought in myriad new ways.

So how does traditional goal-setting jibe with this lack of control? I think it works something like this:

1. Set a reasonable goal for your online interaction.
2. Listen to each individual and how the community responds to the individual.
3. Ask intelligent questions and listen to the responses.
4. Ask, “is my reasonable goal still reasonable?”
5. Either adjust goals to fit community response, or take another step toward your goal.
6. Repeat steps 2-5.

What do you guys think?