June 2007

The Mobile Internet is changing the dynamics of relationships — from how we interact with our colleagues, customers, and partners to how we find, collect, and use information. In essence technology is changing the traditional definition of the “human experience.” The world where your potential customers can use their mobile handsets to receive opinions from trusted sources and up-to-date price comparisons on products you carry whenever they pass by your retail outlet isn’t far off. Today moblogging is changing the dynamics of journalism by enabling all of us to become “journalists” by capturing news from our mobile devices and posting to major news blogs. This sharing of personal opinions has become the norm with the advent of video and services such as YouTube.

According to a study released late last year by comScore, 19% of Americans access the Internet through their mobile phones. In Europe as many as 34% of people access the Web from their phones(1). The numbers are even higher in Asia. In Japan, 69.2 million people use their phones to connect to the Internet, compared to 66 million PC users (2).

As Web-ready phones continue to proliferate in the US and abroad, and technologies like GPS become more prevalent, mobile access to blogs and social networks will influence consumer decision-making more than ever before. On the flip side, your employees’ access to social media on their mobile handsets can add tremendous value to your marketing and communications initiatives.

In her keynote, Motorola CTO Padmasree Warrior, will demonstrate how the mobile internet is transforming businesses, economies and societ ies around the world.

There’s a story in the NYT today about the Bear Stearns hedge fund hullabaloo, which isn’t unusual or noteworthy in an of itself—after all, we expect news from the New York Times.

However, Julie Creswell, the journalist who wrote it, clearly sat down and Googled the management involved before she wrote the article. I know this is what happened because

a) It’s exactly what I would do were I writing the article, and
b) it explains why she found Richard Marin’s blog:

In the midst of the turmoil, Richard Marin, the head of the Bear unit that ran the troubled funds, “stole away” from the “crisis-hedge-fund-salvation-workaholic weekend” to see the new Kevin Costner thriller “Mr. Brooks.”

His advice on the film?

Take a “pass,” Mr. Marin wrote in a review he posted that day on his blog, whimofiron.blogspot.com.

That’s in the first 100 words of the NYT article. This goes hand in hand with some of the social networking and personal presentation issues that Teresa has been musing about recently.

More importantly, employees are blogging—maybe not about your company or your product—but they are blogging, and the news media can find those blogs as easily as anyone else. Clearly this caught Bear Stearns by surprise:

A spokesman for the company said, “We have no comment on his personal blog.”

Having a corporate blogging policy is a great way to make sure that when the New York Times calls you up to ask about an employees blog, you aren’t caught flat-footed. We’re going to have an entire session on corporate blogging policies at our next conference.

Thomas Friedman has a suggestion (TimesSelect) for you business types who are trying to game the blogosphere just like you used to game the mainstream media: don’t.

The subject of Friedman’s column this morning is Dov Seidman’s new book How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything…in Business (and in Life).

The basic thesis of the book is that we live in a world where people are constantly observing and blogging about one another’s behavior. Therefore, our reputations are much harder to change or escape from than they used to be. Friedman writes:

Our generation got to screw up and none of those screw-ups appeared on our first job résumés, which we got to write. For this generation, much of what they say, do or write will be preserved online forever. Before employers even read their résumés, they’ll Google them.

That is, what you do isn’t important anymore. It’s how you do it that sets you apart as an individual. The same is true of business:

Companies that get their hows wrong won’t be able to just hire a P.R. firm to clean up the mess by a taking a couple of reporters to lunch — not when everyone is a reporter and can talk back and be heard globally.

But this also creates opportunities. Today “what” you make is quickly copied and sold by everyone. But “how” you engage your customers, “how” you keep your promises and “how” you collaborate with partners — that’s not so easy to copy, and that is where companies can now really differentiate themselves.

Seidman writes that this presents a unique opportunity to simply out-behave the competition by providing a better customer experience and connecting to your customers on a human level.

How can you outbehave your competition? In Michigan, Seidman writes, one hospital taught its doctors to apologize when they make mistakes, and dramatically cut their malpractice claims. In Texas, a large auto dealership allowed every mechanic to spend freely whatever company money was necessary to do the job right, and saw their costs actually decline while customer satisfaction improved. A New York street doughnut-seller trusted his customers to make their own change and found he could serve more people faster and build the loyalty that keeps them coming back.

In this changing world, the company that consistently adheres to an ethos of excellent customer service and human connection will succeed. A unique product simply isn’t enough anymore. And in the presence of all this need for transparency and human trust, the best thing a company can do is blog.

Because while being a fantastic company is more than half the battle, having a voice really matters. Even the best people and companies have issues and concerns that they want to discuss and explain. A company blog is the perfect place to shed light on exactly how you do things.

Many thanks to Robert S. Klein (a.k.a. my dear ol’ dad) of Short, Cressman & Burgess for the heads up about this interesting article.

There’s an article in the Wall Street Journal today (free, by some miracle) noting that many people now refer to blogs when deciding on what law school to attend:

The blogs “tell you more useful information…than the percent-employed-after-graduation numbers that schools report to U.S. News,” says William Rothwell, a third-year student at the University of Chicago Law School. Mr. Rothwell, who contributed figures made available by his school to the clerkship blog, says he trusts the law-firm blog because it has been accurate about summer associates at two offices where he has worked.

I decided years ago at Law Camp that becoming a Lawyer was not at the top of my list; it turns out I don’t look very good in a suit.

But the larger point here is that many people are relying largely on bloggers to decide where they go to law school. That’s a very big, important decision.

Blogs can be very powerful, trustworthy sources for people in an increasingly crowded internet. If you make a personal connection with the writer on the other end, their opinion is going to matter more to you, and this doesn’t apply only to law school.

I have frequently found myself buying books and CDs that have been recommended on the blogs that I read. What’s more, I usually enjoy them.

Having said all that, you should register for our next conference.

Everyone knows the adage, “a picture’s worth a thousand words.” But the changing face of customer outreach compels companies to find new ways to build affinity with wired and wireless consumers.

Taking a page from its past as “America’s Storyteller,” Eastman Kodak Company has embraced new media — including blogs and podcasts — to synch with consumers. Kodak’s blog isn’t a product showcase, or a feed of executive corporate-speak. Instead, everyday employees write and photograph the people, places, and things they’re passionate about.

In this session, Kodak’s manager of new media, Denise Stinardo will describe how the Kodak blog began, and how it continues to help Kodak build new relationships with customers in a digital era.

Posts come in all different shapes and sizes. Every blogger is unique in the way they compose and present their posts, which is one of the things that makes the blogosphere such an interesting place. The other interesting thing is all those crazy widgets.

There are people who write in a long, rambling, off-the-cuff style like Bob Lefsetz. There are people who tend to write essays like Tom Evslin. Still more people write somewhere in the middle, like Fred Wilson.

But regardless of your writing style, a good blog post usually happens when you take the time to put it together well. Think about how you want to structure your post. Do you want to jump right in, or are you writing about something that needs an introduction? Should your tone be lighthearted or serious? Does the title include the right keywords? Will your first sentence pique the reader’s curiosity? Will Scoble read your post?

A good blog post doesn’t necessarily escape the rules of good writing just because blogging is a relatively new medium. Don’t get me wrong—personality is important, but you can have a human voice without littering a post with errors. How does the saying go? “To err is human, to proof-read is unusual?” I think I made that one up.

It tends to take me between fifteen minutes to a half-hour to write a post I’m satisfied with, but that’s only after I’ve decided what I want to post about. I’m also including the time I take to re-read before I post.

Taking a little extra time to re-read an entry before you post it will often give you a stronger piece, and one good blog post is worth several poor ones, regardless of its shape or size.

If you want to see topics like this at our next conference, feel free to propose a session for the community to vote on.

We all know that Facebook is rocking socks. Even Robert Scoble says that he would choose it over Twitter if he had to be on only one service.

I’ve been playing with the site as a way to connect with college friends for years now, but it’s moved beyond a simple “keep in touch” mechanism.

So I built a Blog Business Summit group on Facebook. I even created a Blog Business Summit event on Facebook.

So if you like this blog, or you’re coming to the conference, or you’re just a geek and you love talking about the intersection of technology and business, you should come join our group. And while you’re at it friend me, and friend Steve, and friend Jason and friend Kim.

Online chatter often feels like a shouting match between traditional outlets, user-generated content, social networks and millions of blogs in the US alone — all competing for attention, shaping popular perception, and ultimately, impacting consumer purchasing decisions.

So how do you separate signal from noise? Is pinpointing influence as easy as pulling up a blogger’s authority ranking and audience size? Can influence ever truly be measured?

This panel will explore:

• Whether influence online can be scientifically proven
• The correlation between online influence and advertising performance - does an “influential” blog necessarily mean it’s a good ad target?
• Once deemed influential, what are the implications for those creating influential content, and the businesses seeking to reach their audiences?
• What are the best practices for engaging influential bloggers?
• What should corporate marketers and advertisers avoid?

When blogger Damien Mulley had a problem with Sky Handling Partners’ customer service, he did what any blogger would do: he blogged about it.

That’s when he started getting confirmation e-mails from gay dating sites. One of the e-mails revealed an IP address that Mulley was easily able to trace back to Sky Handling Partners.

After some less than fruitful conversations with the folks at Sky Handling Partners, Mulley posted again about his issues, only to receive an e-mail from a law firm telling him to take down the posts.

If Sky Handling Partners had simply responded to the first blog post by apologizing for the original customer service issue and trying to make it up to Mulley, they wouldn’t have two more critical blog posts on their hands. Now, by resorting to legal action, they only stand to make the situation more difficult for themselves.

When a blogger criticizes your company, the best thing you can do is try to smooth the situation over. Making it worse with underhanded, immature tactics and then resorting to shaky legal threats turns a little bush fire into a massive conflagration.

We’ll cover blogger engagement success stories, as well as some bad examples at the next Blog Business Summit.

Many thanks to Maryam Scoble for the heads up on this developing story.

Michael Arrington has independent confirmation of yesterday’s rumors that Yahoo! may be looking to buy the Jerry Yang has been named Yahoo’s new CEO. Yang, who founded the company while still in business school, was once thought to be too inexperienced to guide the company. Investors wanted a seasoned executive at the helm. So Yang served in the non-traditional role of “Chief Yahoo.”

The decision on MySpace will be a test of Yang’s strength as a CEO and of his savvy in the fast-changing world of social networks. Many signs point to MySpace’s day in the sun as largely over. The meteoric rise of Facebook, and its recent launch of an “insanely viral” platform for applications makes it unlikely that MySpace can continue to succeed in its current form.

Perhaps an acquisition by Yahoo! and a complete overhaul by longtime Web professionals with a new perspective will put MySpace on top of the social network heap once again. But if I were Yang, I would steer clear.

I spotted a quick note on paidContent yesterday morning about the Swedish newspaper Metro Nordic’s decision to start paying bloggers:

Metro Nordic, part of the Metro International commuter newspaper chain, will start putting bloggers on the company’s payroll but not in the usual way. Rather than hire the bloggers for its site, the company has set up an automatic system that will activate payments via MasterCard once a blog has attracted a pre-agreed number of monthly pageviews.

The press release offers a bit more information, but it manages to avoid telling you anything useful. I can’t tell if the company is just going to pick random news-related bloggers to start compensating, or if they’re going to seek out and “hire” bloggers than will only get paid if the reach a certain traffic quota.

Either way, it’s an interesting approach to paying bloggers. And the system seems horribly skewed, because as a blogger once you reach a certain traffic gateway point, they put your posts on the Metro homepage, which will boost your traffic, which will get you paid more…

I can’t decide if it’s a victory for the blogosphere for blogs to have paid inclusion on a major news web site, or if it’s just an opportunity for a major newspaper to supplement its normal content at an inexpensive rate.

Building online communities has become a key part of the new marketing equation for many businesses. While some companies have engaged with communities inside existing online social networks like Facebook and MySpace, others have opted to build their own using a wide variety of newly available tools.

In this session, we’ll discuss the best strategies for building online communities, both on your own and on third-party social networks, with a focus on:

• Granularity and ease use of in privacy settings
• Creating a positive user experience
• Exercising good marketing boundaries
• How much branding is too much branding?

If you’re a blogger and you have two minutes (seriously!) to take a survey about your information gathering habits, we’ll be eternally grateful. So grateful, in fact, that we’ll enter you in a drawing for a $200 discounted attendance to the Blog Business Summit this September.

Sound good? Click here to take the survey!

We’ve been spending a lot of time recently on developing the roster of sessions and speakers for our upcoming conference in Chicago. This happens to be one of my favorite parts of working with the Blog Business Summit because it gives me the opportunity to review experts, ideas and best practices from all over the emerging field of business blogging.

This year, we’re working to bring more corporate speakers than ever before to the podium. Big corporations have a great deal to gain by blogging, but they also have a long way to fall if their initiatives are not well-crafted. In order to give our corporate attendees the information they need, we are drawing speakers from the growing pool of corporations who are blogging and engaging with bloggers successfully.

And while successful business blogging remains the primary focus of our conference, the Blog Business Summit is about more than blogs. New media for online communication are emerging all the time, and we know that our attendees want to be on top of those trends as well. This year’s conference will take a look at emergence of online social networks as powerful media properties in their own right. Understanding how these networks function and how users respond to commercial engagement with their communities is just as important as understanding the rules of successful corporate blogging and blogger engagement.

Another new horizon in our editorial development process has been the launch of our session submission and review system. A lot of successful conferences in the technology space take on an “unconference” model. That is, the attendees shape the editorial and direct how the conference forms. We think this is an interesting idea, but we run a conference that is primarily targeted at the business community.

We started asking ourselves, “how do we adapt our business-oriented conference to a more democratic model without sacrificing hard-hitting business oriented editorial?” We decided to put our money where our mouths are. After all, we’re always talking about listening to community when it comes to product development.

So we worked with our team of geeks to develop a massive custom WordPress plugin that would allow us to make blog posts the fundamental unit of editorial. In short, one blog post = one conference session. The plugin allows us to provide additional meta-data to each post (time, location, editorial track, speakers, etc.).

The plugin also manages and reviews the ratings and proposal system. This allows anyone who is interested to submit a session for review, and to vote on proposed sessions. We think this hits the sweet spot between community participation and the top-down editorial model favored by most business conferences.

Stay tuned in the coming days for some very exciting session and speaker announcements. Sessions will appear right here on the blog (and in our RSS feed) as individual blog posts.

Not all business blogging is about attracting a bazillion visits every day. Blogs work great as internal tools, and function just as well for 50 people as they do for 50,000.

But I think those blogs are a minority. “How do I get more traffic?” has to be the number one question in mind for a lot of business bloggers. Blogging is a get-the-word-out type of tool, after all, and having more people read it means the word is getting out and around town.

I like to tell people that there are three secrets to getting lots of blog traffic. Two of them are hard. One of them is easy.

1. Create compelling content (hard)
2. Get people to link to you (hard)
3. Post more (easy)

As it so happens, number 1 begets number 2, and number 3 often begets number 1. I’ve done the research myself, and it’s almost always true (yes, yes, I know–there are always exceptions): more posts means more traffic.

Surprisingly, it’s nearly impossible to find a service that tracks a blog’s number of posts per week. Blogpulse has a beta service up, but the number of blogs in their database is incredibly small at this point. Regardless, we collected the data anyway, starting from a list of blogs we accumulated when monitoring posts about CES last January.

When you take a blog’s number of posts per week, and plot it on a graph against their Alexa rank (I know, I know, it’s flawed–but it’s the only consistent public stats tool we can use at the moment), you get a scatter plot that looks like this:

It may not be the clearest statistical correlation in the history of statistics, but it’s not hard to spot the upward wedge on this chart, or how every blog posting over 100 times per week is in the top tier of the Alexa ranks.

There’s a reason that Engadget averages around 25 posts every day. People only come back to the site when something new is up. And while I wouldn’t recommend posting 25 times a day to most business bloggers, two a day will get you more traffic than one.

And of course you have twice as many chances to write something compelling.

We’re happy to announce that after much tinkering and many adjustments to the massive plugin we’ve been talking about, we’re finally ready to call it a late beta.

Here’s what the plugin does:

• Allows community members to propose and vote on sessions and speakers for our conferences.
• Allows anyone to sign up to be a partner level sponsor of our conferences for free.
• Tracks clickthroughs and conference registrations to award additional sponsorship benefits to partner-level sponsors, or to allow sponsors who have written us checks to offset the cost of their sponsorships.

And yes, we did all this by working within WordPress.

So please do try the plugin out and either e-mail me or leave us a comment here with your feedback.

UPDATE: There seems to have been some confusion about the plugin’s availability. This is not something we developed to offer as a free download. It’s a behemoth custom conference management install with lots of site customization required. It’s for exclusive use here on BBS for the time being. Please give it a shot here on our site and let us know what you think.

For a long time I’ve wondered why Microsoft stopped making Internet Explorer for the Mac. It’s not that I like IE (it’s probably my least favorite browser), it’s that intentionally restricting the market for a something that taps into the one truly cross-everything platform (the web) is kind of a dumb idea.

Which is why I was also surprised that Safari, Apple’s native browser–which really is a pretty good browswer–wasn’t available for the PC. It seems to me that, just like iTunes, Safari was well suited to float effortlessly onto the desktops of millions of windows users.

Well now the Safari 3 beta is for Windows, too.

Interestingly enough, they have an XP background on their big screenshot instead of a Vista background. I assume, however, that the browser works on both.

Two years ago, this would have been brilliant. Now it’s only halfway brilliant. All the tech-minded people who would have grabbed Safari for the speed and the features are probably, like me, completely attached to Firefox because of the extensions.

And the average “dumb it down” user isn’t going to look much beyond IE7 because it comes with windows and it works. I know this because of how long people kept using IE6.

Still, it will be interesting to see how far it spreads.

[ ps. Probably not very fast as long as it is full of bugs. ]

I can’t remember the first place I saw (and filled in) a captcha. They’re so ubiquitous now that it’s almost impossible to leave a comment or sign up for something without trying to read squiggly little letters and numbers in an image box.

But they’re not going to solve the spam problem. The New York Times (again, I know) has an article about captchas in the Business section, on how captchas are being broken by computer subroutines (and those programs being sold to spammers for $1,000).

And long before now, creative spammers figured out they could re-route captcha images to free porn sites, requiring horny net surfers to fill in a captcha which could then be routed right back–all by computer–to the site that was meant to be for humans only.

Now the big boys like PayPal and MySpace are working on developing systems that ask for true image recognition (is this a vegetable?) - something that is still notoriously hard for computers. It won’t last forever, of course. In fact my favorite quote from the piece is fairly apt:

“No single defensive technology is forever. If they were, we would all be living in fortified castles with moats.”

So far, the best spam-catching experience I’ve had is with Akisment, which now comes standard with Wordpress installs, and it is indispensable to me.

Ideally, young upstart programmers would stop coding $1,000 programs that crack through anti-spam systems. But that’s not very likely, so I guess it’s time to grab my shovel and start digging a moat.

I’ve always been a fan of doing little things that somehow subconsciously make your blog prettier. It turns out that making yourself a custom FavIcon is one of those little things.

If you’re too lazy to click on the Wikipedia link, a FavIcon (short for “Favorites Icon”) is the little pixelated icon that shows up next to a link in your favorites menu, or on your tabs in Firefox.

To me, this little icon says “Hi! I’m professional.” It says that you, or someone you pay, (or theoretically it could be someone you blackmail), knows enough and cares enough to make a little visual button for people to easily spot your site in a list.

Many sites and web hosts provide default FavIcons, which is great, because it means you don’t end up with the little blank page that most browsers stick in there if nothing is found, but I think it’s worth the extra effort to put your own icon up.

There are a few web tools that help you convert the file you need to put one up, and I know that you don’t always need to have your own hosting to do it (TypePad lets you customize your FavIcon). If you’ve got a logo lying around, and you’re using a default FavIcon, go fix it!