Steve Broback, CEO, Parnassus Ventures

Our client Jott launched their Jott the Vote initiative Oct 17, and I’ve been comparing the blog buzz surrounding it and other launches that occurred that day. Lumenos Health was one of the companies that also announced a new product on the 17th. I plugged their name into Google Blog Search and was surprised by the results. 69 entries found, and almost all of it spam or “pollution” as Jason Calacanis called it at Gnomedex.

I’ve seen a gradual degradation of the quality of results since the service appeared, but this seemed over the top to me. I entered the result set into excel and categorized the results. Then I set it up for filtering and made pivot tables and charts. The file is
here.

The result set included a significant number of blogspot blogs (44) and almost all were splogs (43.) Sadly, all the wordpress.com hosted results (6) were worthless(!) Hopefully, Matt and the gang aren’t being overwhelmed and will be able to delete these offensive sites quickly.

One result was not a blog but a bulletin board entry whose link led to a generic entry page on the site. I gave that one partial credit.

Why can’t algorithms be built to solve this? Spamsieve is terrific at filtering the crap out of my mail algorithmically. Is human-filtered search the answer?

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.

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”?

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

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.)

Participation means engaging with the company’s community. By participating, a company attracts customers from the community. When a company is involved in this area, the customers tell the company what they need or want, and the ensuing dialogue fosters a true relationship. Community members value the two-way relationship they have with the company, and have more loyalty to the brand, rather than simply receiving a service and being satisfied.

Discussion:

1) Design applications and content that users find valuable

2) Enable people to take the concept further and innovate

3) Encourage dialogue and contribution: Don’t control, just give

For any blogger who has ever struggled with the right topics to write about, this lightning fast session will offer many ideas you can use. Take a tour through the 25 essential styles of blogging, from “ambition blogging” where you write about something you want in order to try and get it, to “list blogging” where you publish a useful list and use it as linkbait. The techniques in each style will be discussed, and you will see examples of each in use, including how often you should use them and how much discussion you might expect from each. You’ll also leave the session with a handy presentation to refer to as you go back and apply the styles to your own blogging.

I recently posted about how the Firefox plug in Update Scan can help bloggers discover great non-syndicated content that Google hasn’t picked up on yet.

Here is another approach that’s even better at putting content in your hands that not only isn’t syndicated, but also may NEVER get indexed by Google unless you put it there.

Check out this recent post I made about taxes on private jets.

It’s based on an article contained in a magazine that is one of hundreds that still don’t get the Web. You know the ones — their philosophy is “hey, we work like dogs to research and write all this stuff for our subscribers, there’s no way we’re going to put it up on the Web for free!”

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Lots of big news today from iUpload. They’ve been a central player in the enterprise blogging game for years (and sponsored the very first BBS conference back in 2005.) They’re one of several players surging forward into the emerging enterprise social media market. They have a new release of the software which contains more “participation options.” We’ll get a demo and report back.

Since we launched our BlogTips Facebook application twelve days ago, several trackable conference registrations have been the direct result. I calculate a 43.75% net ROI in approximately 1/30 of a year. If you multiply that out, that’s an annualized 1,300% rate of return on the investment. Not too shabby.

By some metrics, it’s the single most effective marketing campaign I’ve ever been involved in — especially when we’ve only launched a 1.0 widget with limited functionality. Admittedly, we haven’t scaled to a volume where it’s a main driver of revenue (yet,) but it’s clear to us that this is an arena that shows great promise. It’s also a heck of a lot easier than fighting over AdWords terms.
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The Wall Street Journal has written today about how (and why) the Democrats are leading the Republicans in presidential findraising by some $100 million dollars. They specifically cite how the Democrats are embracing the blogosphere while the Republicans struggle more with Web 2.0 tools.

Democrats have also benefited because of their comparative strength with Internet activists. While Republican voters tend to gravitate toward traditional media like talk radio, Democratic voters with strong opinions are more likely to go online to read blogs. That, in turn, has led to an explosion in online giving to Democrats, who are building lists of thousands of small-dollar donors for a fraction of the cost of traditional direct mail.

In a memo sent to Republican campaigns earlier this year advising them how to engage bloggers, the NRSC said: “In comparison to the left, the center-right has an underutilized online fundraising apparatus.” An NRSC spokeswoman confirmed the authenticity of the memo, which is posted on Politico, a political Web site.

I’ve noticed a similar trend in some local races I’m following. The promotional/fundraising sites built by established, older, business types are frequently static HTML with no feeds — resulting in lousy PageRank and Alexa numbers. Meanwhile, the lefty activists are often using WordPress and are big-time into RSS.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just like we predicted back in 2004…

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

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

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

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

The article Pitfalls Ahead for Social Networks? quotes Mark Jung, former chief operating officer at Fox Interactive (emphasis mine:)

At Fox, Jung was responsible for several Internet properties, including what became the wildly successful MySpace. For all the growth in user generated pages, Jung isn’t sure they’ll be sufficiently monetized. He said publishers haven’t quite figured out how to capitalize on the passion of bloggers and other user-generated content sites. “There’s an assumption that the user publisher “thinks like a large publisher and is after profit,” said Jung. “In general, they don’t. It’s not always about money, but ego, personal fame and having an individual voice, not cash flow.”

Align that with today’s Wall Street Journal article World According to Buffett where reporter Karen Richardson discusses how the Sage from Omaha feels about newspapers as a business (emphasis mine:)

Mr. Buffett blamed the decline of sales and circulation in the newspaper industry on technological and cultural changes, and not on the dual-class shareholder structure of some major media companies. “The truth is, the world has changed in a significant way,” Mr. Buffett told shareholders at the annual meeting. “I think Rupert [Murdoch] would even acknowledge that some part of his interest in The Wall Street Journal is noneconomic,” said Mr. Buffett. He said Dow Jones has a high noneconomic value, “second only to the New York Times,” which includes prestige and notoriety, for example, and he suggested other bidders could emerge for the company. “The last chapter is not necessarily written on that,” he said.

True most bloggers are posting for noneconomic reasons, but many have discovered that they can earn a living from their efforts. At our next event, we’ll have sessions focusing on advertising, affiliate programs, and other revenue-generating options for bloggers.

Just did a Google News search and discovered that the long-time issue of duplicate items appearing in the results (sometimes dozens of times…) has apparently been resolved. See below — the ability to “sort by date with duplicates included” is now optional! My few tests show an average reduction of 50% in results sets. Google Reader users like Scoble can now peruse more results with less tapping of the keyboard.