August 2007

Our good buddy Liz Strauss is asking some very worthwhile questions about blogging for business. She’s working on a series of posts about what she calls “inside out thinking,” that we are very much looking forward to.

We encourage you all to go post your responses.
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We are incredibly adamant that business bloggers should host their content on their own servers. Nobody — not Six Apart, not our friends at WordPress, not Blogger — should have control over where or how your content is hosted.

Ultimately, Facebook presents the same problem. Servers crash, stuff happens and your content is locked away inside an extremely limited walled garden.

Facebook is a great tool for online community building, but the long-term future of online communities rests with the ability for bloggers and site owners to link their sites together via a “friend standard.” This is what I meant when I said that the Facebook killer may be the Web itself.

A business blog running on your own domain, on your own servers means that nobody controls your content but you. Facebook holds a lot of promise, but it can’t promise that.

So while we love Facebook and social networks and online community building tools, we’re also still completely gonzo about business blogs, and blogs in general. This is a medium with real staying power.
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Thankfully, blogging gurus such as Des Walsh have posted and emailed me about the mixed signals we’ve been sending about the status of the BBS conference. After reading the commentary, it’s obvious that our position needs to be better communicated.

A little background info may help. Since 1991, I’ve been hosting conferences on a myriad of publishing and Web topics. The last company I owned — Thunder Lizard Productions, hosted the following events in a single year: Photoshop Conference (2,) Dreamweaver Conference (1,) Web Advertising Conference (1,) Web Marketing Conference (1,) Macromedia Web World (1,) and probably two or three others that escape me. So, my being a host of multiple unique shows at one time is not unusual.

In the past I have relied on “disruptive” technology changes and the flocking of businesses to embrace them as central to the events we host. The idea was to find something that will likely transform how businesses operate and create an event that that teaches them how to get on top of this shift. This was the original model behind the BBS. Sometimes it works well (Web Advertising Conference 1996) sometimes it tanks (My “Push” conference in 1997.)

Like the Lambada, I don’t believe my original, 1990’s era event model is nearly as viable as it used to be, and certainly not so for the BBS. The BBS really never attracted the huge numbers of marketing and PR types that clearly *needed* to learn this stuff. I tried very hard with the Chicago event to attract that demographic and our efforts washed up on shore like a dead fish.

In addition, we emailed, snail mailed, and telephoned 250 CTOs and CIOs and invited them to come and learn how Wikis and blogs can enable internal knowledge sharing. They were terrified, and only 3 signed up. A couple even said they were “too busy” with their current efforts to reign in email overload to take the time to attend(!)

What we learned is that (at least in Chicago) most corporate types that don’t get it (or are scared) just aren’t going to come. The ones that were already blogging seemed mostly interested in speaking.

On the other hand our event has always been strong at bringing in the *community* of existing business bloggers. Much of that Chicago community IMHO was already served this summer by SOBcon and BlogHer. I believe this arena is where we have a real opportunity for the future. I believe the enthusiasm and desire to commune that existing business bloggers have is what’s important now. Sharing knowledge and socializing is the powerful force — not the “disruptive-ness.” The feedback I have received from previous attendees and partners lately confirms this.

So, yes — the Blog Business Summit as a change enabler for corporate slowpokes may indeed be dead. The BBS as a place where dedicated business bloggers can come together is the future. We are excited about reinventing this show and focusing on what the community wants, not on what we think corporations “need.”

To all our attendees, speakers, readers, and sponsors. Please keep the comments and criticisms coming, we’ll need them to create a blogger gathering that truly resonates.

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Since we’ve recently expanded our editorial gamut to a discussion of online community building tools, I want to know how you’ve used your business blogs to build community. Do you cross-promote with other platforms?

How do you encourage conversations?
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There’s been some speculation since we canceled the September Blog Business Summit that we’ve abandoned the blogging and blogging for business spaces outright. I understand why it would be easy to think that. We’ve made a pretty dramatic transition. In just a few days, we pulled the plug on our Chicago event, launched this new site, and announced our intention to put on a event in Seattle this December that is not strictly about business blogging.

It’s absolutely no wonder that people are getting the wrong idea.

But like Steve posted yesterday on the Blog Business Summit site, we do plan to do more Blog Business Summits. It’s true that we don’t have a specific date in mind, but blogging is as much a community building tool as any social network. If you doubt it, look no further than Liz Strauss’ blog where she hosts open comment nights and put together a whole conference based on getting those people together in the flesh-and-blood world.

If businesses overlook the power of blogging as a community building tool, they’re sunk. [Update: It has been pointed out to me that this last statement was overgeneralized and somewhat inaccurate. Businesses that overlook blogging are not, in fact "sunk." What I meant to say is that businesses who overextend themselves in the social media space without a place to call home -- a blog in most cases -- are at a distinct disadvantage. Everyone should have a hub.]

In fact, I’m just now getting ready to post a video - as soon as Revver approves it - about how to bring the RSS feeds from your multiple business and personal blogs into Facebook. That’s a community building move because sharing content starts conversations, and conversations are the building blocks of community.

Blogging, bloggers and this incredible space we’ve created out here on the Web are still at the forefront of our imaginations, our interest and our intellectual curiosity. The rapid-fire changes over the past few days are really just an expansion of our editorial gamut, not an abandonment of the space that got us started.

Cross-posted at Web Community Forum.
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We may have given the wrong impression yesterday that since Chicago didn’t work out this year, and we’re hosting a new Facebook event that we are done with business blogging. The fact is that while there isn’t a frenzy surrounding business blogging so much these days, people definitely want to get together to discuss best practices. We do anticipate producing more bbs conferences, if there is interest from the community.

More info here, and some “proof” that Facebook for business uses is a hotter topic than “Social Media”?

I’ll be appearing as a guest on One By One Media’s show The Mediasphere today at noon PST.

Please join us and call in with your questions at (646) 478-5023.

After much consideration we’ve decided not to host the Blog Business Summit in Chicago this year.

We are contacting all of our speakers, sponsors, and attendees to notify each and every one of them personally of this news.

Despite strong participation from sponsors and our long-time community members, we just weren’t seeing the registrations we hoped for from the local, Chicago-area bloggers and PR/marketing professionals that were required to support the event.

Our conferences have always relied heavily on local participation, and our feeling is that Chicago has been very well served this year by at least two excellent, and very reasonably priced blogger conferences: SOBcon and BlogHer. A third event close on the heels of these other shows is obviously a tough sell. In addition, it’s clear from discussions with local marketers that blogging has normalized and is not the disruptive force it was back in 2004 when we launched the BBS.

As our pal Robert Scoble said in 2006, blogging is rapidly being subsumed under the larger heading of social media and online community/conversation building. For those serious marketers that “get it”, blogging is just one tool in their arsenal that needs to be mastered.

This is why we as a company are expanding our editorial gamut. The BBS team has launched a new blog: the Web Community Forum

And as you’ll see when you visit the Web Community Forum site we’ve created a new event focusing on the best practices for commercial and political ventures who want to use Facebook as a community building tool. Our sense is that many of the same people who attended our first three blogging conferences are now shifting their attention to building and engaging with their communities there. We hope to see many of your faces once again.

On the Web Community Forum site, we’ll cover how people, businesses, and political campaigns are using technologies such as Facebook, Twitter and, of course, blogs to reach out to core constituencies and build communities. We’ll talk about best practices and great technologies - from WordPress plugins to Facebook applications - that enable community engagement.

We ask for your patience and understanding as we move forward with the logistics of canceling this Chicago event. We are committed to providing excellent customer service to our entire community as we move forward.

If you’re a Chicago BBS speaker, attendee, or sponsor and have not heard from us by noon PST Tuesday. Please feel free to contact us. Here are our phone numbers:

Steve Broback - (425)-503-2093
Kim Larsen - (425)-556-1941
Teresa Valdez Klein - (206)-229-9335
Jason Preston - (206)-235-8981

Every morning, I go to my RSS reader and pull out a few tasty chunks of content: usually about ten out of 500 or so items. I open each in a tab in my browser, then I go through the list and decide what to do with each of them.

This morning, three of my nine tasty content chunks were about Facebook. And I decided that I should post them here:

• Jeremiah Owyang comments on Wal-Mart’s sinking Facebook strategy and offers some sage recommendations for how to turn things around. Basically, he says they should rise to a new level of facilitated conversation.
• Wired’s Kendall Black has some tips from a Facebook native to share. Among her pearls of wisdom, “poke frequently.” I couldn’t agree more.
• Marketing Pilgrin’s Jordan McCollum has some great insights on using Facebook for B2B relationships and for being a Facebook entrepreneur.

Update: Whoops! I forgot to list Dave McClure’s insight: it’s the feed, stupid!

Jeremiah Owyang asked his Twitter network this late last night.

I’d like to be able to import RSS feeds and post items to a group’s page. Sharing content with people who share your interests is one of the best features of Facebook and it should be extended to interest groups.

What features do you think Facebook should add to groups?

When I was first getting into social networks, I noticed that a lot of people I knew had hundreds, even thousands of “friends.” I asked one girlfriend about how she knew all those people and she explained that a lot of them were just random strangers. This was especially true on MySpace.

Apparently, the number of people you count as cyber “friends” is a metric of your popularity. For many, it’s a manifestation of the same phenomenon that leads people to conduct smear campaigns before prom court is announced in high school.

Having never been terribly popular in school — hard to believe, I know, but true — I was pretty much oblivious to this phenomenon. Until recently, the only people I was friends with on Facebook were folks that I had met in real life. Since then, Robert Scoble has convinced me that it’s alright to friend — it’s a verb now — all comers. It’s a good way to reach out to your readers. Robert uses his Facebook as a hub to organize the copious content he produces all over the Web.

This raises a lot of questions about privacy and control over personal information. But those issues aside, it also brings us back to the hyper-friending phenomenon:

How many friends do you really need? Don’t the quality relationships matter more?
[click to continue...]

A few days ago (I know, I know, I’m late to the party again. I prefer to say “fashionably late”…) Jeremiah posted a link to a white paper (PDF) he co-authored, titled Tracking the Influence of Conversations. It covers a lot of important concepts about measurement online, and how metrics are going to change—how they must change—going forward.

It’s well worth a read, especially if you’re new to the scene.

Going through the list of “important attributes” the panel came up with for measurement, I was unsurprised to note how many of them were in many ways completely nebulous. How do you track relationships? or relevance?

One of my favorite ideas is Stowe Boyd’s “Conversation Index,” which is a concept that’s very familiar to me. I started blogging in 2001 on LiveJournal, and on LJ there were two ways to figure out how important someone was: the ratio of friends (so, how many people read you vs. how many people you read) and the ratio of comments (how many comments have you made, how many have you received).

[click to continue...]

Jim Turner of One By One Media — which is sponsoring the Blog Business Summit — wrote some really nice things about us today. I couldn’t resist linking in.

I’ll be appearing on One By One’s BlogTalkRadio show next week Tuesday at noon PST.

Today’s guest is Jeremiah Owyang, one of my favorite people and a great resource for everything you need to know about online community building. You should absolutely tune in to listen to today’s discussion at 12 noon PST.

They say that a good magician never reveals his secrets, but that cannot be said of entrepreneurial bloggers. In fact, our distinguished panel of high revenue bloggers are jazzed to share their latest tips, tools and tricks for maximizing the money they make from their blogs.

In this session, attendees will learn:

• The role of patience in successful entrepreneurial blogging
• How small changes can make huge differences in revenue
• What community interaction can bring to your blog, and your pocketbook

The Sydney Morning Herald proudly proclaims Facebook to be an office time-waster that costs Australian business $5bn annually:

Richard Cullen of SurfControl, an internet filtering company, estimates the site may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year. “Our analysis shows that Facebook is the new, and costly, time-waster,” he said.

The report calculates that if an employee spends an hour each day on Facebook, it costs the company more than $6200 a year. There are about 800,000 workplaces in Australia.

Needless to say, that’s playing fast and loose with the numbers. Of course the article goes on to quote Office Space-like employees who “averaged about 15 minutes of work per day,” (though, interestingly enough, this particular person doesn’t credit Facebook for her off-time).

Internet time-wasting is no doubt something that’s here, and should be kept in check, but this story smells a little bit like hyperbole to me.

Yes, there’s unproductive time spent on Facebook. Of all the social networks, it is the most college-oriented, and college is famous for nothing if not procrastination. But experiments have shown that a little bit of time spent engaging on Facebook can lead to some incredible ROI, or some great community and awareness building.

If you’re in the business of having customers (get it? that’s everyone), don’t be so quick to write Facebook off as the devil. If your team is on Facebook, chances are your customers are, too. Don’t throw that connection away if you don’t have to.

If you’ve ever spent some constructive time on Facebook, leave a story or a link in the comments (I know you’ve got at least one, Jeremiah).

Eric Goldman reported yesterday on American Airlines’ decision to sue Google (pdf link) over their keyword advertising practices:

This complaint pleads the usual claims for this type of action, including direct, contributory and vicarious trademark infringement (I don’t know why the vicarious claim was made; it’s deficiently pleaded); a false advertising claim that the “sponsored link” language communicates a false impression of actual sponsorship; dilution; various “soft” state claims (unfair competition; misappropriation and others); and tortious interference with contract because Google allegedly knew that American’s distributors weren’t supposed to buy American’s trademarks as keywords.

Eric’s got a lot more legal chops than I do, but it sounds to me like American Airlines thinks that they’re losing business because Google is allowing other airline services to advertise against the American Airlines trademark. In other words, Google is letting competitors trade on the AA name.

I’m not really sure what they’re trying to accomplish with this suit. The only thing I can think of is those TV commercials where they say “compared to other leading brands” instead of “compared to Coke.”

The idea, I think, is that you can’t use another product’s name in your ad. You can suggest it, but you can’t use it. Advertising on Google against AA is a little bit like using another product name in your ad. I wonder if it’s close enough.

One trend I see among business bloggers is to write blog posts by committee. That is, they ask others to read and edit blog posts before they publish them. This practice has its place in school papers, formal reports and books. But a blog post is none of these things.

As our speaker Liz Strauss is quick to point out, a blog post is about starting a conversation. How you write that blog post is as important as what you write.

Bloggers are very fond of citing a study in the Journal of Educational Psychology that supports this assertion.

Here in Kathy Sierra’s words:

So one of the theories on why speaking directly to the user is more effective than a more formal lecture tone is that the user’s brain thinks it’s in a conversation, and therefore has to pay more attention to hold up its end! Sure, your brain intellectually knows it isn’t having a face-to-face conversation, but at some level, your brain wakes up when its being talked with as opposed to talked at. And the word “you” can sometimes make all the difference.

The key to a blog post is to start a conversation, because conversation are the building blocks of community. And if you’re a marketer, you want to be building community the natural way.

Both Dave Winer and Fred Wilson are celebrating the first signs of an open Facebook: feeds that let you subscribe to Facebook content from “the outside.”

As people have wisely cautioned, however, a little access to feeds doesn’t mean that the platform is “open” yet, nor is it likely to be as open as some would like in the near future. But it is a sign that the people running Facebook are still trying to make something that people can use, instead of something that traps them into it.

On the internet, being able to use something means being able to pair it with as many of the hundreds of other services out there. Facebook status messages and Twitter. Facebook tags, Technorati Tags, FlickR search. The list goes on.

I’m interested to see what happens as Facebook grows more and more into a platform within the web (the web OS?), but in the meantime, I’m going to go subscribe to some feeds.

Just a few years ago, AIM, Friendster and Yahoo Groups were considered to be community platforms with almost unassailable momentum. Today, those destinations are mentioned far less frequently than Facebook, Twitter, Flikr, Jaiku and Pownce.

And what about MySpace? Are the reports of its death greatly exaggerated, or are we looking at the end of an era?

In a world where the next big thing can so quickly become yesterday’s news, how can we allocate and invest marketing dollars? We know where out target market’s attention is today, but where will it be six months or a year from now? Is there any social network that can stay relevant long enough to become THE platform?

And what about the the challenge to create an open social network? Will it happen? What’s a marketer to do if it does?

• How social networks become and stay relevant
• Do any of the social networks have what it takes to keep the early adopters around?
• What’s features and technologies can we anticipate in the next ten years?

We’re testing a new tool that is showing promise as an effective engine for measuring the tone of blog posts (but not comments–yet…) as they relate to a specific product or company. We’d love to include some of your data into the research, and would provide you the results free of charge. All we ask is that you take the time to cross-reference the results to your own analysis and tell us how the system performed.

The only data we need is: 1) A list of permalinks to posts that discuss a company or product, and 2) the name of the company or product.

We’ll send you back the list of links with an attached rating to each permalink: positive, negative, or neutral.

If you’re interested, just email me: steve AT blog business summit dot com (no spaces.)