Jason Preston, Marketing Coordinator, Blog Business Summit

For ages and ages “publishing” has meant going to a whole lot of expense to get something distributed to a large number of people.

If you look at things on a large enough scale, it goes like this:

First, if you wanted to share information with someone, you had to see them and talk to them.

Then, you could write it down and give it to them. They could write it again or simply pass the original document on.

Then someone figured out how to make identical copies of an original item without actually re-making the original.

Then we separated information from its physical form, and freed it from the laws of physics entirely. Suddenly getting information from point A to a place where every other person in the world can see it is easier than cooking dinner.

Often, this is called blogging. If you’re a company and you’re blogging, are you in the publishing business? Are you competing with your local newspapers and TV stations to get your customers valuable information in your space?

If you’re not, you’d better think about starting. Publishing is so cheap, there’s no reason not to be doing it.

It’s a really good idea for large companies to take advantage of social media technologies to remove some of the management overhead that just comes naturally with directing a large group the old fashioned way.

One of the most well known tools is a blog. Giving employees a blog they can use internally (or externally) is a good way to get your company out there.

But as we move forward, it’s more and more likely that you’re going to be hiring people who already have their own blog, either on their own hosting or with Wordpress.com or Typepad or one of a hundred other freely available services.

And you can’t make internal communities and blogging mandatory. Groudswell has a good explanation of why it’s a bad idea (with case studies to back it up!).

So the problem going forward is going to be: how do you integrate employees’ personal blogs into an internal network?

I think it would be interesting to see a plug-in for engines like WordPress that would let users specify, for example, a particular category of post to be fed only to a secure intranet area. This way an employee could keep their personal blog, but be able to participate in an internal blogging structure as well.

Blogging is just the tip of the social media iceberg, of course. Who wants to set up a brand new profile when they move to a new company?

I’m interested to see how businesses approach this problem.

I know I’ve said it before, but if you’re running your web site and you’re not paying attention to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, you’re ignoring a very good resource.

Just yesterday, Sven Naumann (who is on the search quality team) wrote a post dealing with concerns webmasters have about scraper sites that pull exact post content and republish it as their own.

So what does Google do? They use a couple of methods, which they don’t identify, to determine which bit of duplicate content is the original piece, and then point to those.

For people who see scraping sites placing higher in search results than their own, original content, they offer this advice:

Some webmasters have asked what could cause scraped content to rank higher than the original source. That should be a rare case, but if you do find yourself in this situation:

• Check if your content is still accessible to our crawlers. You might unintentionally have blocked access to parts of your content in your robots.txt file.
• You can look in your Sitemap file to see if you made changes for the particular content which has been scraped.
• Check if your site is in line with our webmaster guidelines.

Largely, the answer seems to be “don’t worry, we’ve got a handle on it.” But if you want more details on how to minimize duplicate content within your own domain, you can go check out the post.

What I think Google really needs to solve though, is the arrival of “old” content for the first time online. How do you figure out who the real owner of that content is?

Fred Wilson is absolutely right about web discussions: Information can be sucked out, but it needs to be pumped back in as well.

If I write a great blog post, and it gets sucked in to Facebook as a note, and the conversation happens there, inside Facebook - it doesn’t automatically get attached to my site. The problem stems from the fact that all these different web services get value from having the conversation happen on their servers.

Facebook gets value from having a complete social environment going on inside their walled garden, so they’re not dependent on search.

Disqus gets value because all the comments left in their system are regarded by Google as their original content.

FriendFeed gets value from having conversations happen ON friendfeed, which keeps people on their service.

Business bloggers get value from having comments on their site because Google sees it as original content and because smart commenters frequently add to the knowledge available in the post.

Google is the largest roadblock in this process. As long as it provides an incentive to web sites and services who collect comments and discussion on their server (first), then it’s only smart business to keep things segmented.

Over on the interactive marketing blog, you can find background information on the blog reader survey that Forrester gathered about four of their blogs: Web Strategist, the Interactive Marketing blog, Groundswell, and Being Peter Kim.

I thought some of the most interesting results are shown on slides 11 and 14. They tell you 1) how people are reading these blogs (overwhelmingly RSS) and 2) that these blogs are clear sources of authority in their space.

Here’s the slideshare of the results:

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It’s abundantly clear by now that the internet is a double-edged sword for business ventures: On on the one hand, the rapid dissemination of information and content can lead to mass market exposure with the lowest cost-benefit ratio in the history of mankind.

On the other hand, this very same process can often take a gigantic chunk of the “benefit” by effectively killing a business’s ability to monetize that same content.

I saw today on Chris Pirillo’s blog that Cory is releasing a new audiobook completely DRM free AND with a generous license to re-hash the content (up to 30 minutes can be redistributed wherever). This is from the e-mail Cory sent to Pirillo:

The audio book comes with the author’s sampling license: once you own it, you’re free to take up to 30 minutes’ worth of material from it and remix and then redistribute it as much as you like, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis, make sure that it’s clear that this is a remix and not the original, and make sure that you tell people where to find the original. This is in addition to all the fair use remixing that you’re allowed to do.

Anybody who embraces DRM-free internet distribution with a paid product is undoubtedly forfeiting a good chunk of potential revenue.

In the future I think that the “widgetization” of content will allow businesses to monetize their content via ads regardless of where it goes. But for now, when is the right time to let your product go? Should you risk the lost revenue for the possible gain in exposure?

I’d be really interested to see some data on this. Finding and downloading content of all kinds—music, movies, audiobooks, etc—is so easy already that the amount of revenue captured by DRM has got be relatively minor. For the most part, people who will steal the book will steal the book regardless of whether it is a DRM release.

Given that assumption, I’d say it’s almost always the right decision to release content without DRM. Enabling open sharing will help drive the technology to monetize it using some new model. What do you think?

I know a lot of people who are reluctant to start blogging because they feel like they’ll have a hard time coming up with stuff to blog about. And they’re right that coming up with the right stuff to blog about is one of the more daunting tasks you face if you’re aiming to blog regularly.

The first great solution, which I recommend, you can find at Copyblogger here.

Fortunately, there’s a loophole for this problem. You can write about the same stuff more than once.

It turns out that repetition is a great tool for teaching and persuasion. If you’re trying to get an idea through people’s heads, it’s actually a good strategy to approach the issue for four hundred different angles. I can’t count the number of times that we’ve blogged about how a blog should be your business homepage.

The point is this: repetition is a teaching strategy. As long as you’re not simply re-posting something you wrote before, re-hashing the same subject is fair game.

I know that blogging can often take more time than you expect. I sat down to write this post half an hour ago, and I’m just now starting to type. Who knows what time it will be when I’m actually done writing it.

Unfortunately, successful blogging often requires a commitment to consistency that can seem daunting. Fear not - there are strategies for rolling activities that you do on a daily basis into good, useful blog posts with a minimum of effort.

Del.icio.us

If you use del.cio.us to tag interesting posts or pages on the ‘net, you can also use it to automatically generate a digest post at the end of each day.

You can find instructions on how to set up your blog by plugging your username into the following URL:

https://secure.del.icio.us/settings/USERNAME/blogging/posting

As long as you bookmark at least one item with del.icio.us each day, you’re guaranteed to have a post on your blog. Even better, if you’re bookmarking interesting things (and why wouldn’t you be?), you’ll be giving your readers a great set of recommendations.

Twitter

If you’re not on Twitter, you should be. It’s the new Facebook.

Twitter’s API is awesome, flexible, and completely malleable. It also gave birth to Twitter Tools, which is an awesome plugin for anyone using WordPress (and why wouldn’t you be?) that lets you import a digest of the day’s tweets.

So unless you go a day without tweeting OR tagging anything in del.icio.us, that makes two posts a day without even opening your posting window.

A side effect of having a plethora of cool web services built by VC-backed entrepreneurs is that they all need to find an exit.

In recent times, that’s meant that companies get acquired as opposed to IPOs.

Check out Fred Wilson’s blog post today on finding new exit strategies.

I think it’s a good point that these services tend to languish under the ownership of large companies. It would be cool to find a new way to maintain high levels of innovation and still give investors and entrepreneurs the incentives to keep building them.

Seth Godin, as he so frequently does, has put his finger on a really important concept: the details make the difference.

The facts:
Too many choices.
Too little time.

The response:
Quick decisions based on the smallest scraps of data.

It’s amazing how the little things make such a big impact on our decisions. When a reader first lands on your site, they are going to see a lot of things that help them fit it into some kind of category.

For me, sites fall into one of these groupings:

1. Personal Blogs
2. Media Blogs
3. Company Blogs
4. News Sites
5. Forums
6. Services/Social Utilities
7. Not interested

And you’d be surprised at how quickly I decide which category a new site falls into its place.

Google ads at the top of the page? Media blog.

Forums are easy.

Custom banner image? Personal blog.

Content not obvious/above the fold? Not interested.

When you’re building your blog, pay attention to the grammar that you’re using. Make sure your site advertises itself as what it is. That will help you gather the right audience.

This big long post on Searchblog requires some chewing. I’m going to take my first bite in public.

If I were to take what Battelle is saying and massively simplify it, it would looks something like this:

Consumer brands love to advertise around media brands that generate a lot of enthusiasm and dedication from their readers. Combine this with the fact that the print advertising industry is extremely mature (there is a formula in place that more or less works), and you realize why magazines can charge a crapload for a full page spread.

And the online equivalent of those magazines are…drumroll please…blogs! Or, in many cases, media sites built on blogging technology and an ethos that more readily matches the blogger than the mainstream media outlet.

The trick to print advertising, it seems, is that it exists in a format that has a lot better chance of connecting with the reader than advertising online. And Battelle rightly reminds us that online media is still extremely young, and we’re likely to see plenty of permutations of business models in the next few years that we haven’t even thought of yet.

If Battelle is correct in predicting the rise of online media brands, and I think he probably is, then there are going to be a lot of opportunities in this space going forward. What I want to know is how much “old media” brands will catch on and run with it, and how much of the space is going to go to newer, different media outlets like BoingBoing.

Everyone knows what the holy grail of blogging is. You get 100,000 daily pageviews for writing three quick posts, and then you have your chauffeur drive you to the bank to deposit your ad revenue.

Everyone is also slowly realizing that this will only ever happen to Cory Doctorow.

The real question is this: for the average blogger, what are the revenue systems available, and how well do they work?

I recently had a chance to talk with Jeff Sable from Chitika, a blogger-centric ad network, and with Gail Bjork, owner of Digital Camera Help, which serves both Adsense and Chitika ads.

Here’s what they had to say about Chitika’s ad offerings, and how effective they were in comparison to other options.

With Jeff Sable from Chitika

BBS: According to your site, Chitika ads are “designed exclusively” for bloggers. How are they different from other CPC solutions?

Jeff: There are a couple of aspects of our ads that have allowed bloggers, as well as other types of publishers, to improve the content of their web sites while making great money. First, our ads feature targeted products. This means the blogger or publisher can focus on writing great and interesting content and Chitika’s technology will automatically serve a relevant product-centric ad to the end user who is reading the content. Second, our ads are designed to complement a web site and “fit” into the site without adversely affecting the relationship with the reader. Because of the combination of these particular attributes and other features of Chitika ads, bloggers in particular have found Chitika ads to excellent and Chitika to be a great partner as they build their businesses.


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One of the things about advertising on the internet is that it seems to blend more and more with marketing and with content.

Good, relevant advertising is content.

I was reading I forget what earlier today and I ran across an AmEx ad that was so awesome I took a screenshot of it, not that a screenshot will really convey the value:

What are you looking at? This is a screenshot of an interactive video display. If I clicked on any of the thumbnails I got about a minute and a half of video with Seth Godin moderating a discussion between Jimmy Wales and Sean Parker.

Awesome. I watched each video, and they were all interesting.

The point is this: AmEx might as well have written a blog post with some YouTube videos in it. I got the same value, and that was clearly an advertisement.

Good for AmEx, for using ad space well.

Good for you for blogging about your business, because blogging is a lot cheaper.

The team over at 24/7 Wall Street have come up with a list of the 25 most valuable blogs (although they don’t tack a number on all of them), and topping the list is Gawker Media, meaning the complete blog network.

How does the valuation break down? Here’s the blurb:

If the [Gawker] sites generate one-and a-half page views per unique visitor and the total CPM value of the multiple advertisers on each page is $20, Gawker is an $11 million business which is still growing quickly. The company does not appear to be staff-heavy, so it is imaginable that the margins on the business are 50%. Would the business be worth 15x revenue or 30x operating profits? Could be.

As far as the math goes, I’ve seen worse attempts at breaking it down. The list tails off at just under a million dollars for Talking Points Memo.

I’m sure they missed several big blogs, and I’m sure they’ve got many of them pegged pretty far from what price they’d actually fetch, but it does underline the fact that blogs are still working as media properties, even if they’re out of the spotlight at the moment. They’re drawing revenue, and if they were for sale, they’d probably be fetching good prices.

Many of you probably spotted this post on Gawker last week about the hypocritical “pay-me” blogosphere. A survey recently conducted by APCO on the “state of blog relations,” apparently suggested that bloggers are asking for a little palm grease from the PR industry.

I wonder if that was intentional.

This survey was distributed to bloggers and PR people in order to compare the responses from each group. Let’s look at the question that evokes that response. According to Gawker:

And the biggest disconnect of all didn’t really make the bloggers look like the righteous bunch. 96% of flacks disagreed with this statement: “It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients, but it is not up to me to tell them to disclose the payment.”

But almost half of bloggers agreed. They want to get paid, yo!

That suggests to me that the question on the survey looked something like this:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement:

It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients, but it is not up to me to tell them to disclose the payment.

I smell confounding variables. That is a two-part statement, and I could choose to agree or disagree to either part, neither part, both parts, who knows. A better survey would have broken them out:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statments:

1. It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients

2. It is not up to me to tell bloggers to disclose the payment

I suspect that most PR people thought to themselves “well, I’m OK with paying bloggers, I guess, but if I pay them I’d better tell them to disclose the payment.” So they marked disagree.

Similarly, most bloggers probably thought to themselves “I don’t mind getting paid every now and then, but damnit it’s on my terms, it’s my blog, and I’ll decide when, where, and how to make a full disclosure.” So they marked agree.

Are there some bloggers who are out there to make some cash by being dishonest? Of course. Does this survey prove that “some bloggers” is 50% of the blogosphere? Hardly.

As Mark Twain once said, “facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.”

1. Your tagline is “just another wordpress weblog”

2. You’re on Blogspot

3. Your About page says “This is an example page”

4. You’re using the default template

5. You’re using a theme with the word “AdSense” in its name

6. Your permalinks end in numbers, like “?p=847″

7. Your posts end with “[souce: Engadget ]” or “Read original article”

8. Your readers get Carpal Tunnel from trying to scroll past the ads

9. Your posts are authored by “x9872ldy7d0-3″

10. You’re using a domain that ends with .info

Feel free to add yours in the comments…

Last week our friend Buzz Bruggeman pointed us to the New York Times article about being a “blogging star,” including a run-down of advice from popular bloggers like Mark Cuban and Xeni Jardin.

It reminds me of Calacanis‘ training video on how to become an A-list blogger in 30 days.

The Times articles is well worth a read even if blogging stardom isn’t what you’re after. There’s good, solid advice for everyone:

The hurdle that stops many would-be bloggers is fear of clicking the “Publish” button. Xeni Jardin, who juggles blogging at the quirky alternative-news site BoingBoing.net with a career as a freelance journalist for NPR, Wired magazine and others, resists the urge to polish her blog prose the way she would a radio script.

If you glanced at Techmeme this afternoon, you’ve probably noticed that fully half of the screen is devoted to Arrington’s rant about the VC money pouring into the blogosphere.

Most of the discussion is about who would make the dream team?, or, is Arrington just trying to rattle the boat?, or even making a bid for inclusion.

But what does this mean for business bloggers?

Money pouring into the blogosphere

This is going to sound similar to my answer to the next part, but here goes: 90% of all business bloggers will not be significantly affected. VC money is for media companies who aim to make their money by producing blog content.

You are blogging to create a connection with your customers, and to build a relationship that leads to trust, friendship, and hopefully, patronage.

The number of venture-backed, advertising-based media properties on the internet is not going to make much of a difference in your blogging. The same was that, if you’ll buy the analogy, a few new newspapers wouldn’t affect the way you go about conducting a monthly luncheon.

Should you network multiple blogs?

Again, wrong field. Don’t let Arrington’s call for uber-networkness tempt you to explore dividing your blogs.

Mike’s concept is interesting in itself: do blogs really offer the same product that the standard news media offers? I think the answer is a resounding no. I’ll let Paid Content speak to issues of factual accuracy.

The media-producing blogs will probably roll up in some way or another. Blog networks invariably seem to do better as a business than single blogs do. But again: don’t be tempted to follow that model if you’re blogging for a business.

Why would your customers want to see multiple blogs? The advantages of a network apply to companies trying to develop a media property: larger footprint, more ad inventory, diverse but niche topicality.

For the typical business blogger, these do not fall high on the list.

As always, Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has great advice for people who struggle with regularly finding interesting things to blog about.

All too often, a potential blogger will raise the very valid concern: “I’m worried that I’ll run out of things to blog about,” and some new media maven who has a literal hardline between their frontal lobe and the Comcast pipes running to their house will casually dismiss it: “There’s always something to write about. You’ll see.”

That’s not necessarily the case. It can be very helpful to schedule your editorial, and if you’re a blogger (or a potential blogger) who is worried about being regularly inspired, Darren’s post is well worth a read:

The first step in a journalistic system for blogging is having a plan for each month. Set up a spreadsheet, a table in a word processor, or a calendar on your desk - it doesn’t matter how you do this, but you need a monthly plan. On that plan you need to mark out the days you will definitely blog. This might be every day, just the weekdays, the weekends, every Wednesday - whatever works for you and your audience. Now you have a visual plan of what’s needed you can start filling in the blanks.

Essentially, he advocates mapping out, by month, the days you will blog and the topics that you will blog about.

If that sounds like too much work for you (it sounds like a lot of work to me, and as a blogger I am both inherently lazy and constantly wearing a bathrobe), you might try a more “intermediate” system like the one I like to use. It works especially well if you have a blog that covers a particular beat or topic:

1. Create a folder on your hard drive.
2. Whenever you run across a link that fits your topic, ask one question: do you need to blog about it immediately for it to be relevant?
3. If the answer is yes, blog about it.
4. If the answer is no, add it to the folder.
5. If you think of an idea not tied to a link, create a text file, put in the headline, and save it to the folder.
6. Whenever you do not know what to blog about, refer to your folder.

If you live in Seattle, you ought to check out the Seattle PI’s big kahuna: The Big Blog.

Mónica Guzmán (who writes for The Big Blog) and I were having a discussion a couple weeks ago about whether or not what she does should really be called “blogging.”

There’s a whole list of things that she has to do that have nothing to do with the way that I post. What she does is absolutely, unequivocally, journalistically superior.

She checks her sources. I make up words. She clears posts with an editor. I am source, writer, and publisher. She writes about things that are verifiable. I operate on wild speculation.

Why in the world should what I do be given the same name as what she does?

No matter how many times we tell people that a blog is just the system you use to publish, the fact is that people have not separated the platform from the content in their minds.

It’d be nice if you could say “I’m a blogger,” and get the follow up question, “what kind?” — the way that if you said “I’m a writer,” people might ask, “for what? TV? Magazines? Newspapers?” — but you can’t. And ignoring that won’t fix it.

She does “blogging PLUS,” and I think that giving it a linguistic distinction is probably a good idea. Mark Cuban explains why pretty well in his post:

I’m sure the NY Times, like all major media outlets hopes that because it is branded a NY Times blog, that readers will have the perception and expectation that it will be of a higher quality than say, Blogmaverick.com.

That when readers actually read the blog, they will see that its of a higher quality than say, Blogmaverick.com. It may well be that some do. The marketing reality however is that there is a significant risk that they will not. That rather than assigning the brand equity of the NY Times to the blogs hosted, they will take the alternative path of assigning their perception of what a blog is to the NY Times, there by having a negative impact on the brand equity of the NY Times. That’s an enormous risk for any mainstream brand to take.

I don’t think it has to be “Real Time Reporting” (kinda lame sounding), but it shouldn’t just be straight “blogging.”

There are satsumas and there are oranges. I feel like right now we’re calling everything oranges.

OK, you can all tell me why I’m wrong now.