July 2007

I have an addictive personality. I’m apparently 82% addicted to blogging. I’m probably addicted to video games. And I’m certainly addicted to Firefox.

Which is why I’m surprised to notice that I haven’t particularly missed it in the past two days while I’ve been using the new release of Flock. To be fair, Flock is built on the same foundation as Firfefox. The code is open source, and anyone is allowed to snag their own copy, develop it in their own particular way, and then release it back into the wild. And that’s exactly what Flock is doing.

As far as I can tell, the basic idea behind Flock, and what sets it apart, is the way it integrates a whole bunch of features that in other browsers are essentially extensions and plug-ins.

It boots up with a nifty “My World” homepage that is coupled to whatever actual home page you choose. MyWorld is a bit like custom Google or Netvibes in that it aggregates a couple different search engines, a favorite feeds widget (generated from the built in RSS reader), a favorite sites widget (which also appears to be automatically generated–cool!), and a favorite media widget.

When you go to sites like FlickR and YouTube, Flock recognizes the site, pops up a media bar, and prompts you to “enable advanced features”:

The RSS Reader is pretty solid. It’s integrated as a sidebar and the feed display gives you several important options (headlines, full feed, partial), and it lets you split into two columns if you want:

And then the blog editor is reasonably good. It was a quick two-step process to get it set up with my self-hosted WordPress install. I particularly like how it asks if you want to append your post with a credit to Flock, rather than simply inserting it like Performancing. I wish it would let you save drafts, though. In fact, I wish any editor would let you save drafts in MySQL so it could sync with your web back-end drafts. Someone please do that.

Overall, Flock is a good package. It’s different than Firefox, definitely, but it has the same core reliability, and while it doesn’t have as many extensions (it does have some), a lot of the desirable features are already built in.

If you’re tired of your current browser, or just looking to check out something new, grab yourself a copy of version 0.9.0.

I’m popping in from my vacation this week to draw your attention to an interesting article about Twitter from yesterday’s WSJ in case you missed it. Here it is!

mocoNews has some interesting analysis as well.

We’ve been picking through the videos of our last conference and pulling out some interesting tidbits to share online. We’re trying to give people a sense of the conference and what to expect at the next one this coming September.

Jason Calacanis gave a memorable keynote back at our last conference in October of 2006, leaving behind him a slough of announcements, nicknames, and of course, some amazing bits of wisdom.

Here it is, folks, how to become an A-list blogger in 30 days, presented in 30 seconds by Jason Calacanis:

Look interesting? Register now for Chicago.

Presence started out as the “Do Not Disturb” button on phones. Now it’s affecting VoIP, instant messaging, microblogging, geography applications, career and dating services, and social networks. Let’s deconstruct the emerging ideas and practices of presence and see how the new engines of presence close the gap between blogs and live conversation, making blogging more powerful and necessary.

In this session, Blogtronix and IBM/Lotus will present their enterprise social media offerings.

Each presenter will have 25 minutes to speak, intermediated by a 10 minute transition period.

In this session, Near-Time and Microsoft SharePoint will present their enterprise social media offerings.

Each presenter will have 25 minutes to speak, intermediated by a 10 minute transition period.

If I were responsible for giving the Sprit of the Blogosphere Award, I’d give it to Liz Strauss. Our speaker Andy Sernovitz put us in touch. I had a really lovely chat with her yesterday and came away with a renewed vigor for blogging. That’s usually how I know I’ve had a great conversation with someone.

One of the things that struck me during our chat was that “online community building” is becoming a buzz word, kind of like “synergy” or “paradigm.” She told me a story about a corporate marketer who told her that he was going to build a community on his company’s website. She asked him what he would do to get the people to come there and how he would work with them. He kept returning to the “community” angle, and she kept asking, “but what about the people?”

Liz has an astonishing number of comments — tens of thousands, in fact — on her blog. She’s very proud of this. She hosts open comment nights and spends inordinate amounts of time getting to know her readers. She explained to me that the secret to good blogging is understanding that your posts should be conversation starters rather than statements. The only way to really engage with people is to leave your posts unfinished.

About halfway through our conversation, I started feeling guilty. I realized that I didn’t spend nearly enough time engaging with the commenters on any of the blogs I write for. I asked her, “how do I make sure that my commenters understand that I do care about them when there just aren’t enough hours in the day?”

“You just did,” she replied. “You show up. You read what they’ve written and you make sure they know you were there.”

The moral of this story is that the business buzzword of “online community building” doesn’t really cover what needs to happen when a company sets out to build a community around their brand. Many corporate marketers seem to be approaching the issue with an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. But if you want to have a successful online community, you need to step out from behind your role as company spokesperson/spin-doctor and actually talk to people. Talk to them like you talk to your friends. Be yourself.

This mentality — which represents a real paradigm shift, not just a buzzword — will be a subject of renewed focus at the conference this September. We’ll be talking about technology and numbers and ROI to be sure, but we’ll also be talking about the real power of social media: the people that use it.

As many of our conference attendees know, I put a high priority on finding news and relevant content hidden away in traditional HTML so we can introduce it into the RSS ecosystem. Done right, it avoids contributing to the echo chamber and creates what economists call a “Pareto Efficient Allocation” — where everyone involved is made better off and no one is made worse off.

A classic example of this surrounds a post I made today on our bigbusinessjet site. Here’s the chronology:

1) My favorite Firefox Plugin Update Scanner noticed one of the better (yet archaic) HTML subject expert sites we monitor has a new article posted. Aviation gurus Conklin & de Decker have written a piece about aircraft leasing. See below, as Update Scan even highlights the new item on the page.

2) Click through to the article and read.

Notice: At this stage Google has not noticed that the article exists.

Nor has Google indexed anything (yet) with the same string I used for my post headline.

3) Write an overview post, link back, and encourage readers to click through.
We get a nice post, relevant to our readers, Conklin & de Decker gets an inbound link and the resulting traffic. We win, Conklin & de Decker wins, and (see below) readers that previously had no idea this content existed can now find it.

The good news: 5 minutes later Google has indexed my post.

The not-so-good news (which should self-correct in a few hours/days:) Google sees us, but not Conklin & de Decker yet for the article title search string.

We’ll follow this over the next few days and see what Google picks up on and when.

Spam is a giant, fourteen-headed version of Bette Midler - it just won’t go away.

Google and other search engines spend countless hours and resources hunting down and shutting down spam and black-hat SEO tricks. According to various links on the internet, most notably TechCrunch, Google most recently laid down the law with Squidoo:

The reports indicate that some Squidoo pages have seen a 75% drop in traffic, and in other cases have either been removed from high ranking positions on Google, or removed all together.

Squidoo itself isn’t a spam site. In fact, I think Squidoo is a fairly good idea—you might call it user-generated About.com, where each author (lensmaster) gets a little kickback on the Google ads served for their answer.

But Squidoo made the mistake of allowing their service to be too easily spammed, and if Google finds one of those fourteen heads sprouting out of your domain, they’re going to chop it off. And if they get a little bit of your shoulder…oh well.

To their credit, Squidoo is on top of things, blogging about it, and I’m sure they can recover.

The lesson here is that if you’re not careful with your SEO strategy, BAD THINGS can happen, even if you’re good people with good ideas. There is a far more effective and less risky way to raise your search engine ranking:

1. Get a blog
2. Write good stuff

Come learn about it at our conference in September!

Nick O’Neill of AllFacebook.com thinks that our Facebook application is cool. We’re pretty proud of BlogTips and we’re really glad that Nick thinks it will make a successful Facebook marketing effort.

We’ve got 55 users so far, and a number of excellent tips have been submitted. I’ll be posting some of them later on this week.

UPDATE: Steve has asked me to add to this post that we can conceive and develop Facebook applications for clients as well. If you’re interested, contact Kim Larsen at (425)-556-1941 or by e-mail.

I got into a debate with Robert Scoble on my personal blog a couple of weeks ago. I pointed out the vast difference in the ways that we were using the online social network, Facebook. I even called him silly.

The truth is, in the past few weeks I’ve started to use Facebook the same way Scoble does. I’ve friended (and been friended by) a number of professional contacts. I even removed a few photos that I wasn’t sure people would take the right way. Robert doesn’t think those photos would have been a problem, but Wall Street Journal columnist Jared Sandberg seems to think differently. So do a number of the people he interviewed for his most recent column.

But “coolest self” photos are only part of the problem. As UCI anthropology professor Tom Boellstorff told Sandberg, “All these social relationships — apples and oranges — are getting crammed into one category of friends.”

I’ve always maintained that Facebook should allow people to create different profiles to display to the different categories of people in their lives. Rather than having different social networks for different parts of my life, I’d rather connect with all of my contacts in one place, but with a different emphasis depending on the type of contact.

I’m curious, how are you all using your social networking profiles? Professionally? Personally? Something in the middle?

And how do you judge professional contacts who share their personal photos on their social network profiles?

We recently completed development of our very first application for Facebook. The application is called BlogTips and it enables users to share their tips for what makes a great blog with their friends and the wider blogging community on Facebook.

Last week I posted that we’re eating our own dog food by building this Facebook widget. Building applications that add value to existing communities is one of the best ways to get the word out about anything.

In fact, usefulness appears to be the new #1 rule of online marketing. If your blog doesn’t provide any useful information, nobody will read it. I guarantee that your audience isn’t interested in your corporate marketing talk or the latest press release. They want real, practical information that adds value to their daily lives. The same is true of applications for social networks. People don’t want to stick your advertising on their profiles. But if you provide something that they’ll find useful, they’ll be more interested in helping you get the word out.

We sincerely hope that our contribution to the growing library of Facebook applications is a useful one. Of course, if you’ve tried it out and you think it stinks, we want to know that, too. Leave us a comment, link to this post, or drop me an e-mail if you have feedback either way.

I found a tasty and interesting nugget of information in today’s WSJ article about the employees’ economy and the booming number of foreigners coming into the country to fill jobs that used to be taken by American high school and college students on summer vacation:

On a recent bright Saturday, Patricia Fajtova, a 21-year-old Slovak marketing student, explained how she came to be sitting guard at an apartment-house pool in Washington using a temporary cultural-exchange visa: “I typed ‘work in the USA’ into the Google,” and up popped the Sierra Pools Web site, she said.

The bottom line: There are only 33,000 of these visas available nationwide. The competition for seasonal workers is extremely high. If you’re in a business where hiring foreign workers on seasonal H-2B visas is pivotal, you can’t afford not to have high search visibility.

Your summer employees have many, many opportunities to work in the United States. They’ll take the opportunities that are easiest to find from places like Slovakia, Thailand and Kazakhstan, which means that they’re looking online.

And what’s the fastest way to rise to the top of online search results? Start a blog about how young folks from all over the world can get summer employment in the United States. And be sure to focus on navigating the H-2B visa process. At the very least, you should be taking out Google ads on the relevant keywords.

You’ve heard the talk, you’ve heard the hype — word of mouth marketing is the next big thing. What’s also become clear is that blogging and blogger engagement have been central to many successful word of mouth campaigns.

How exactly should you do to create a word of mouth marketing campaign that leverages weblogs and influential bloggers? How do you convert blog visitors to paying customers? How do you use your blog to build your brand — and reduce negative word of mouth?

Andy Sernovitz is the guru of Word of Mouth Marketing, author of the definitive book on the topic, founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association — and now teaches the first ever graduate course on the topic at Northwestern. And he’s a great blogger, too.

Learn the 5 steps to starting an impactful, effective, sales-driving campaign. We’re going to get specific here: Who to hire, where to start, and how to make it successful.

In this session, you’ll learn:

• Finding the right people to talk about you
• Giving them something to talk about
• Creating tools to make it easier for them to talk to each other
• Participating in the conversation
• Tracking and measuring results

I’ve had a couple of friends cite the recent incident at Google as a good reason why companies should stay out of the blogosphere. The fracas got started when a Google blogger shared her personal opinion of Michael Moore’s controversial new documentary on one of company’s blogs. The blogosphere assumed that her opinion represented that of the company and decided to tar and feather Google for being insensitive to the needs of America’s uninsured.

It’s true that if you give your employees a megaphone, sooner or later, one of them is going to use it to say something you’d rather they hadn’t. They’re human beings, human beings screw up, and screwups are a part of business. You learn and you move on.

Google is taking that approach to the incident. Today, a Google spokesperson told the San Francisco Chronicle, “we hope to get even better at it over time, but we’ll probably also make more mistakes.”

The beauty of blogs is that they help to put a human face on a monolithic company. But human faces have wrinkles, scars and imperfections. In many ways, the issue facing companies today is similar to the central dilemma of Stephen Frears’ masterpiece The Queen (iTunes).

In the film, Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) is bowled over by the public outpouring of grief in the wake of Princess Diana’s death. Diana’s foibles and flaws put a beautiful human face on the British monarchy, and the people loved her for it. But from the Queen’s perspective, Diana’s death is a private one. She sees no place for a royal presence in the mourning period for an ex-HRH.

The British people disagree. Diana was a beloved public figure and still a member of the royal family in their eyes. When the Queen neglects to properly share in their grief, she becomes a target. At the height of the public outcry, one in four Britons are of the opinion that the monarchy should be abolished outright.

As the Queen so eloquently puts it to her mother, “there’s been a fundamental shift in values.”

Corporations are a bit like the British crown. They struggle to be understood by ordinary people. So when an opportunity to humanize any monolithic organization comes along, it should not be ignored. Even at the risk of mistakes.

I don’t mean to say that every corporation should immediately start blogging and try to make mistakes. But they should be aware of, and accept that mistakes come with the territory. In the end, it’s better to screw up and apologize than never to take a risk at all.

Jeremiah Owyang pointed this video out on Twitter this morning. I’m passing it along to our readership because I think it explains a concept that some are still getting to know in very easy terms.

On this day in 1776, the wise people of the American Colonies declared themselves independent from the British Crown. By doing so, they set in motion a series of events that leads us to this grand moment in the evolution of human communication.

Now, it’s true that the Constitution as we know it wasn’t framed until 1789 and that the Bill of Rights wasn’t even included in the original document. But the Declaration of Independence foreshadows the Bill of Rights with its reference to “certain unalienable Rights” beyond the “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” originally mentioned.

When the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, the first of the ten amendments to the Constitution guaranteed that, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Two hundred and sixteen years later, this specific articulation of an idea only broadly referred to in the Declaration of Independence guarantees us the right to speak the truth on our blogs and in our lives. Without the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the blogosphere could not exist.

So amid your fireworks and barbecues and times of good cheer today, please do take a moment to think about all that our nation’s founders accomplished when they pledged to one another, “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

We at the Blog Business Summit say to you, “God Bless you and God Bless America.”

Happy Fourth of July!

I had the good fortune to sit down with Jeff Nick CTO of EMC at the excellent Future in Review conference a few weeks back and we discussed the EMC Enterprise 2.0 initiative he calls the “EMC Innovation Network.” A video of the interview is here, and my notes follow.

EMC is trying to achieve two objectives with the Innovation Network. One idea is that the network will create value earlier in the product development pipeline. Traditionally EMC has been very strong on development, but less focused on pure research. Nick is anticipating that the initiative will enhance this dimension of their R&D efforts. The second objective is on collaboration — to provide a means of getting cross-cutting capabilities and innovation across business units.

EMC has grown organically and also through a set of acquisitions. Within business units information flows fairly freely, but the challenge has been breaking through the independent silos so ideas can cross divisional boundaries. Nick feels the systems they’re implementing will provide a collaboration model that cuts across business units.

EMC is not alone in this challenge of propagating knowledge across divisions . Nick’s discussions at FiRe with Mark Bregman and Tom Malloy (the CTOs of Symantec and Adobe respectively), made it clear to him that other organizations are also also challenged with cross-divisional knowledge transfer.

Nick told me that initially he focused on providing a platform for process innovation. He identified a set of areas where crossing the seams between business units would be a priority. He began with the intersection of security and information management, and then where resource management and information management came together.

Content management and collaboration are key to the initiative. Nick feels these are arenas where Web 2.0 technologies excel. In the collaborative sphere, the requirements for EMC were:

• To get people to be able to find each other
• To communicate and socialize ideas
• To harvest those ideas
• To iterate across organizational boundaries
• Enable rapid sharing, and materialization of collateral

Nick and his team investigated the capabilities of current open source collaborative tools and also talked to companies providing proprietary technology. EMC finally settled on what Nick calls a “framework model” which allows for integration of a variety of different tools. They specifically did not want to be locked into any particular monolithic platform. Nick’s team also preferred tools that their user community was already familiar with, and liked to use.

EMC largely settled on open-source applications including WordPress. The only proprietary technology they’re using is Documentum which is designed to securely share content and documents, but not a great way to collaborate. These tools have been enhanced by EMC with code to provide enhanced security, and some WordPress plugins are in development.

Nick’s team now has blogging and Wiki capabilities, along with RSS feeds, and instant messaging.

The collaboration is not just internal — the collaboration includes many university partners and these outsiders are granted access to the full capabilities of the system.

We’re working to get someone from EMC to our upcoming event to discuss the specifics of the tools they’ve implemented.

 

 Interview with Jeff Nick: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

If you want to understand the radical shift taking place in online advertising, you need look no further than two recent Wall Street Journal articles. The first cites research showing that kids don’t like it when social network sites include advertising in their profiles without their permission. But 20% of them do post advertising and marketing material on their own profiles when it aligns with their needs or interests. The second discusses the fact that people across the age spectrum have developed selective blindness when it comes to banner ads.

We’ve been paying attention to these developments, and we’re factoring them into our marketing strategy for the upcoming conference. We realize that it’s much better to add value for people than to pander to them.

That’s why we’ve spent some time over the past few weeks developing an application for Facebook platform that we hope to roll out in beta form later this week. It’s our first attempt at an app, so it’s functions are limited. But the goal here is to build on the community of blogging experts currently using Facebook to spread the word about what makes a great blog and to hopefully drive some traffic to the conference.

So what’s our application called, and what does it do? It’s called BlogTips and it…

• …displays a user-submitted “blogging tip of the day” each day with a link to the tipster’s Facebook profile.
• …allows users to submit their blogging tips right from a friend’s Facebook profile.

Each day, we’ll go through all the submitted tips and select the next day’s tip. Then, on August 17th, we’ll have our speakers vote on the best tip. The top tipster gets a free pass to the three-day Blog Business Summit this September.

Yes, we’re shamelessly self-promoting. We spent the time and money to develop this widget to drive traffic to our conference. But we know that this application won’t take off unless people find it legitimately useful. And we think it’s a contribution to our community that goes beyond a marketing initiative.

Personally, I was thrilled to manage the development of this application because it gave me the opportunity to witness the new Facebook API in action. I have a million new ideas for applications that I would build if only we had unlimited time and resources. Some of them might even add value for our clients, both existing and potential.

So if you’re interested in engaging with Facebook’s users via an application, give us a buzz at (206)-229-9335 or an e-mail and we’ll chat.