2005 San Francisco Conference

John Cass, David Wharton and Buzz Bruggerman

David Wharton

• Works at Nintendo, develops online communities
• Sent copies of new game to target gamers
• Created a private online community for them
• Members posting pictures of their real dogs, Nintendogs, sharing stories and tips
• Metroid Prime 2 Echoes, big Christmas release and nobody was talking about it
• Developers didn’t want to say or share anything about the game
• Created character Samantha Manus and her blog at channel51.org
• Created site to talk about how women were better suited to space flight
• Created exclusive community to engage serious gamers, get real feedback, allow profanity
• These people are incredibly marketing sensitive, need to be engaged for advice

John Cass

• The web is being used by customers to compare products and companies
• Consumers using blogs to publish their own websites
• Customers have the opportunity to create lots of buzz marketing
• Search is where research begins. 64% use search engine, 19% use the manufacturer of the products site
• Still in the early stages of customers using blogs
• People are looking for the best products and ideas, not necessarily yours
• Case studies of Indium, Intuit, Macromedia, all benefitted from blogs
• Targeting influencers: target the right keywords, find your blogging customers, use blog search engines to find bloggers covering your products, comment on the other blog
• The goal is NOT to spam, but to have a conversation

Buzz Bruggerman

• Blogging world has leveled the online marketing playing field
• Steven Levy in Newsweek “Blogs and forums are the new crystal ball”
• Got over 400 requests from 28 countries from 1 podcast interview, he offered free copies of ActiveWords to anyone that had listened through to the 1 hour mark they were at
• Searching for product name + problem in any search engine will customers everything wrong with your product
• You better build a good product and be responsive or you won’t last in today’s market
• One determined detractor has more power than 100 happy customers. That number is going to grow.
• Boeing invited bloggers on to the Conenexion flight that had wifi during the flight
• Believing that mistakes will blow over and go unnoticed is wishful thinking
• Little companies can’t afford bad press, Buzz constantly watches mentions of himself, the company and the products, offers personal discussion with any dissatisfied/confused customer
• Getting bloggers to deliver the right message involves listening before approaching, asking them how they would make it better
• The magic is coming up with the product idea, building the relationship with real people

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit, blogging, blogs

Robert Scoble and Dave Taylor

• Being the first to link to something is powerful, you can become “the source” for that information
• Tell friends if you find something first
• #joiito chatroom is a great place to seed stuff - full of A-list tech bloggers
• If you read a blogger, know what they’re interested about and write something that might be of interest to them - email them.
• Never act entitled to a link, because you’re not
• Long tail: millions of markets of dozens are just as important as the the head of A-List anything
• Staying on topic helps readers and other bloggers find you and make sense of what themes are your beat
• Recommended Wordtracker for picking keywords
• Being on the top of the first page for keyword results on Google is powerful (Google heatmap)
• Correct semantic markup helps for SEO, most blog tools output such code by default
• Good titles for posts helps you be searchable and findable
• Dave uses Google News to find fodder for his blog
• Design may make me subscribe in the first place, but once the user is getting the info via RSS it doesn’t matter anymore
• [pointless side conversation about partial vs. full RSS feeds. I'm with Scoble, go full feed or I lose interest]
• Attending geek dinners and other social events, meeting other bloggers and telling them what you do is a good way to get links from them
• I’d also add that submitting how-to kinds of posts to places like Lifehacker and posts about business to the Carnival of the Capitalists can be good traffic builders.

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit, blogging, blogs

If you can’t make it to the conference and want to keep up with what’s going on at the Blog Business Summit, here are some resources:

• BBS attendees can add their blogs, rss feeds and such at the BBS05 wiki.
• Technorati has a blogbusinesssummit tag and a bbs05 tag where they will be listing posts where people use the ‘blogbusinesssummit’ tag and ping them. (hint, hint attendees).
• del.icio.us has a blogbusinesssummit tag and a bbs05 tag where people will likely be posting links to resources related to the panels, etc.
• Flickr has a blogbusinesssummit tag and a bbs05 tag where you can see photos in near real-time.

Technorati Tags: bbs05, blogbusinesssummit

While walking to Office Depot to get some supplies, I found a small blue address book laying in a gutter. I’ve been periodically flipping through it. It tells a story, in brief passages, addresses, address changes, names and notes, including this one

Remember I worked at Nordstroms on call. In Hawaii.

for pecan pies:

www.mrssullivans.com

Let us know if you find any interesting objects. San Francisco is a fascinating town.

Blog notes from Dave Taylor’s 101 seminar

• Extensive notes
• Yeah, PR is dead for sure
• Blogtronix Launches
• Dave doesn’t get it

Ping us on your posts with this trackback. Trackbacks are open during the event. To read what others are posting, see

• PubSub
• Bloglines Citations
• Link Cosmos
• Technorati tag:BBS05
• Technorati tag:blogbusinesssummit
• On Flickr

Event Blogging will blog the sessions live tomorrow and Friday.

It’s standing room only in Dave Taylor’s Blogging 101 sessions. There’s a great turnout and really positive vibe. Tomorrow and Friday it’s all day sessions. Also remember there’s a geek meet tonight and Microsoft is sponsoring the reception tomorrow night from 5:30 to 7:00 pm.

If you just heard about the event, and want to come, no worries. You can still register for the sessions.

During this week, the next, and maybe a few more, Jeremy Wagstaff will guest post for the Blog Business Summit. Jeremy and I have been instant messaging for over a year about business blogging and I suggested that he add his voice to our “practical blogging” topics.

Jeremy is a technology columnist with the Asian and online Wall Street Journals, who doubles as a would-be author (non-fiction, a work in progress on Indonesia).

His Loose Wire column has run in Dow Jones publications for the past five years: Online at WSJ.com, in Asia in The Asian Wall Street Journal’s Friday section Personal Journal. It appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review until the magazine shifted to a monthly in October 2004.

In an interview with the BBC, Sir Tim Berners-Lee talks about how blogging is closer to his original idea for the web and says, “What happened with blogs and with wikis, these editable web spaces, was that they became much more simple.” He continues with, “When you write a blog, you don’t write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I’m very, very happy to see that now it’s gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium.”

In my design session, I’m going to talk about blogs as a creative medium, how design does matter, and why it’s effective. Where some bloggers may see blogs as a conversation, another vehicle for ads or marketing, more importantly blogs are for creativity. The creativity is being expressed with personal, business, and corporate blogs.

I’ve noticed some commenters aren’t putting their websites in the form or are using fake sites or strings and also using fake emails. What happens is that triggers the spam filter and your comment is denied and we don’t know you’ve been denied unless you tell us.

We don’t use your emails for anything other then to authenticate you as not being a penis spammer (and that doesn’t work so well, but it’s all we got).

We don’t use your URLs for anything other than to link to you from your comment. If you don’t have a website that use the # sign.

We’re nice people, running a blog and a conference, don’t worry.

The BBS05 team is working hard on the event, wrangling slides, updating the site, and blogging. Here’s a few bullets for today from the blog week that was:

• Scoble records a back-porch conversation with Steve Broback and Buzz Bruggeman. (I wasn’t there, but the Three Amigos comes to mind: ‘Jefe, would you say I have a plethora of pinatas?’). The 40 minute-long recording includes Broback recalling his memories of The Palace, Adobe including RSS in Photoshop, and the very positive vibe going into the Summit. Buzz discusses the Stratoblog and compares the real-time blogging with the latency of media. Scoble discusses accuracy and trusting bloggers.
• I slipped the term Bennifer into a passage of the blog book and I’m watching it to see if it makes it past editing. I also realized that starting the book during the Summit was not the best planning.
• Google’s News RSS continues to amaze. It’s the accuracy. I’m seeing articles I hadn’t seen before and it’s updated almost immediately.
• The Chief Program Pilot for the Boeing 777 reports on how they flew low over the crowd at Seafair.

6 years of Anil

Anil posts on 6 years of blogging. Clip-n-Seal’s blogging started on Anil’s blog. He was the first blogger that posted on what we were doing. It was June 10 2003.

And finally

Part of the fun of getting a new Powerbook, is tracking it on FedEx.

Just like last time, in Seattle, there’ll be a parrallel conference in the halls, dinners, breaks, coffee and drinks. So far Niall Kennedy is planning a Geek Meet. Please let us know what you got planned and we’ll post on it.

For me, I’ll roll all free-form with the flow. There’s much to do leading up to the event. I’ll also have my bike with me and will ride around San Fran, when I can get away. Join me for a bike ride, that’d be cool, as I have no idea where to ride in that town.

To lighten up the pre-conference tension and a quick break from all the business, a short verse was submitted by Erin:

I have flamed
the entry
that was on
your weblog

in which
you were probably
going
for “wiseass”

Forgive me
you were so snippy
so brief
and so wrong

• Blog networks are being discussed at 9rules, includes comments from Calcanis, Scrivens, Nick, and me
• Business Logs is promising to go on a meet-and-greet networking binge
• Will Pate and Kris Krug will blog the Summit live for us
• Steve’s link experiment is getting linked

Also . . .

Irish bloggers discuss getting paid to post, I lost more than 45 minutes of book-writing time clicking links on Rebecca’s pocket, sipped from my coffee cup while reading the Year of Coffee blog, and expect to see more GhostCycles on my ride later today.

I’m publishing two podcasts, one for the blog book and another for Pug Blog. IBM announced that it’s podcasting, so did PepsiCo, GM, and Apple offers an enormous podcast directory in iTunes, which includes the pugcast. Clients ask me about podcasts, what to do with them, and how. Part of the reason podcasting has been adopted so quickly, is that it’s easy to do. It’s just an mp3 file announced by an RSS feed. Here’s how I produce a low-tech podcast:

[click to continue...]

Any good economist will tell you that in a competitive market, the price of a good is equal to its marginal cost (the cost to produce an additional unit).

In the case of an information good like wifi network access, (high cost to create first unit, but all additional units very cheap or free) price should equal average cost.

That’s why I’ve chafed for years having to pay people like T-Mobile monopoly prices for wifi access. My thinking is: Starbucks doesn’t charge to use the toilets, yet it’s many, many times more expensive to install and run bulky plumbing and fixtures than it is to toss a tiny $50.00 LinkSys router in a closet. Why isn’t an ad on a free splash screen more than fair to compensate them?
[click to continue...]

The event hotel room rates of $199.00 have been extended until August 10th. Be sure to mention BBS 05 if you call and the room rate is applied when you use the online booking tool. For PayPal, if you’re using a corporate credit card, click the “If you do not currently have a PayPal account” option. Register using name on company credit card, with the correct billing address and phone. We will then contact you via email to get the attendee details.
If you enter wrong information by accident, wait several hours (preferably 24 hours) before attempting the transaction again. If you have difficulty, call Kim at 425-556-1941.

We determined that the problems are related to personal accounts v. corporate and once you make a PayPal error, it will kick you out and then escalate into not allowing you in at all.

If not a big group hug, expect a round of drinks with Web Standards Project members and the Internet Explorer team at the Blog Business Summit. As CNET reports, there’s, “Peace on the standards front.” The reporting is well-researched, includes quotes from Zeldman, and many of the people behind the scenes will be at the Summit, including me, Molly, Scoble, and Dean Hachamovitch. Besides the hell freezeth over fact that we can all get along, there may also be a few more surprises.

Portalsmag.com reports on Why Executive Should Blog and cites Randy’s Journal and Fastlane as examples. The people that built those blogs will be “in da house” in San Fran talking about how they did it in their sessions and during the event. As the article notes, “It’s about interaction and information.”

As a test of blogger influence, we’ve set up this post to determine inbound linking and how it affects seach engine placement. We’ll be discussing this Palace Hotel event “case study” and the conclusions at the conference in a two weeks. We’ll also post about what we discover.

What we’re asking for is bloggers (only bloggers please) to link back to this post.