2007 Chicago Conference

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

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?

In this session, Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress will present their enterprise social media offerings. He will speak for 25 minutes.

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.

Recruiting and retaining top talent is critical to the success of any business venture. Unfortunately, this essential effort is often one of the more under-resourced components of a business. With limited budget and an imperative to locate, recruit and hire the best talent, blogs become a valuable tool for human resources professionals.

In this session, our panel of business bloggers will talk about the ways — foreseen and unforeseen — that their blogging efforts have impacted the quality and diversity of job seekers that come their way. We’ll also discuss how surfing the blogosphere may point you in the direction of your next great hire.

• How major corporations like GE and Microsoft do recruitment blogging
• Who should write the recruitment blog at your company?
• How frequently do you really have to post to have an effective recruitment blog?

The rapid rise of popular web tools that facilitate conversation and interaction online by allowing millions of people to easily share ideas, insights, experiences, perspectives and media has left enterprises everywhere scrambling to come up with new strategies to leverage or limit the newly unleashed power of these new social media.

No longer do teams need to be harnessed to stuffed email in-boxes filled with irrelevant cc’s and FYIs. Critical institutional knowledge that formerly was archived into invisibility can now be accessed via enterprise search.

Inexpensive or free social media tools like blogs, forums, podcasts, wikis and social communities have given workgroups the potential to communicate essential information targeted to those who need it most.

Social media are having a profound effect on businesses everywhere. In this session, we’ll look at the current social media landscape and examine:

• The promise and potential pitfalls of unleashing blogs, wikis and social networking in business organizations
• What the first adopters have learned about how to make social media work to their advantage
• How to create a failure-proof social media strategy

All great blogs — no matter the goal of their existence — have one thing in common: a passionate blogger. In fact, that’s the most common tip that top bloggers give when asked for their suggestions for a successful blog.

But beyond passion, what do great bloggers bring to the table? What tools do they use? What do they do when they can’t think of anything to post about? How do they avoid the echo chamber?

In this session, our panel of top bloggers will share tips and tricks for:

• What to do when the creativity well runs dry.
• How to keep your readers engaged.
• What are the great tools for finding information Google doesn’t even know about?

Most organizations would like to engage with a robust, thriving and receptive online community. Many have launched blogs, wikis or social networks to in an effort to build community around their brand.

Successful online community builders know that these initiatives take time, patience, an open mind and a willingness to listen and grow as an organization. They also understand that the most important interactions are often initiated outside their carefully crafted networks, on other people’s blogs.

These initiatives can be tricky even when everyone speaks the same language and comes from the same basic culture. But international cultural concerns make global execution trickier still. In this session, you’ll hear firsthand how major corporations with a lot to lose have won praise as effective community builders.

You’ll learn:

• How Unilever’s willingness to listen and respond to the blogosphere at large has reinforced and improved brand loyalty
• How Intel launched a successful domestic and international social media campaign
• What all companies with successful community building initiatives have in common

In the world of blogging for dollars, not all forms of content are created equally. And while your text-based content is searchable, you can’t overlook the power of video to sell advertising.

In this session, successful gadget blogger Andru Edwards will explain how adding video content to your commercial blog property will increase your advertising revenue and create better ROI for your advertisers and affiliates.

• Optimal video length
• How should your video blog’s editorial relate to that of your text-based blog?
• How much should you invest in equipment and editing software?
• How to engage with advertisers and get your video content sponsored

Advertising isn’t the only way to make money as a blogger. Many bloggers draw considerable income from the wide range of affiliate programs offered by online retailers. But just as with advertising, the sheer number of different affiliate programs can be dizzying. Each has its own upsides and downsides.

And while the beauty of affiliate programs is that they allow bloggers to blog about products they truly believe in while still earning money, readers may be put off by too many affiliate posts and too much selling.

In this session, our panel of experts will share their tips and techniques for maximizing revenue from affiliate programs while maintaining a strong relationship with the core reader base.

• At what point does trying to drive affiliate revenue cloud your editorial and drive away readers?
• Which affiliate programs offer the best deals for bloggers?
• How to work with multiple affiliate programs without running afoul of restrictions.

There are a number of options for bloggers who want to host ads. Some blogs belong to advertising networks like BlogAds and Federated Media, while others host contextual ads driven by Google.

With the myriad options, it’s challenging to know whether you are truly meeting your blog’s revenue potential. In this session, our panel of experienced pro-bloggers will explain how they chose their advertising partners and demonstrate how they meet their revenue goals each month.

• What advertising network is best for your blog?
• How to place ads prominently without overwhelming your audience
• The optimal blog layouts and designs for optimizing reader attention to your advertising

You’ve got a successful blog. Your PageRank is high. You get lots of comments and your readers keep coming back for more. Advertising revenues are strong. You’re on a roll.

Then someone offers you money to post about their products. And you’re tempted.

There’s been much back-and-forth in the blogosphere about whether it’s really right to get paid for posting. But your choice as a blogger depends a great deal on what you know about your audience. If you accept the money, will your readers stop trusting you?

In this session, our panel of experts will discuss their perspectives on so-called “blogola” and will provide guidelines for entrepreneurial bloggers seeking an answer to this thorniest of questions.

• The different kinds of deals offered to bloggers
• How to explain payblogging to your readers
• The potential consequences of accepting money to post
• The potential consequences of not accepting money to post

Contrary to what some might think, there are social networks beyond Facebook and MySpace. They take every conceivable shape and form — from microblogging apps like Twitter to community-building widgets like MyBlogLog to private chat applications like AIM.

Each one of these services has a unique value-add that you cannot afford to overlook when building a social media initiative.

• How to make the most of MyBlogLog in building a community around your blog
• How Flickr and Zoomr can help you find and work with your customers
• Why Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce are more than just facilitated diarrhea of the keyboard
• How chat can help your employees to be more productive
• Why Kyte, Revver and YouTube are about more than just viral videos

“Conversation” has become the buzzword of the social media generation, but what does it really mean?

In short, conversation is the natural thing that happens every day between your customers online, offline, on their cell phones, chat programs and in their browsers. You can’t possibly monitor all of the conversation. But you can put yourself in a position to overhear and respond to a great deal of it.

In this session, our panel will explain how any organization can put together a basic conversation monitoring initiative. Attendees will learn:

• The best tools for paying attention
• The mindset of listening and understanding
• When a response is warranted
• How to jump into the conversation without being intrusive

Software for social network building has proliferated in recent years as organizations the world over envision building their own MySpaces. But online community building isn’t just a matter of installing the right technology and providing the right features.

In this session, our panel of online community experts will address the features, culture and style of interaction that characterize successful online communities

• The questions you should ask before launching your own branded social network
• When it’s better to reach out to pre-existing online communities rather than trying to command & control your own
• How major organizations made the decision to launch their own social networks

Most discussions about social networking today begin with one of two sites: MySpace or Facebook. MySpace — which was acquired by NewsCorp in 2005 for $580 million — boasts 100 million users and is one of the most visited sites on the net.

Facebook began as a site for high school and college students, but quickly ballooned to 30 million active users after opening to the general public and launching a platform for developers to build applications within the site in 2007.

Marketers are absolutely salivating over the passionate users and fixated attention in these two networks. But is advertising the best way to reach the people that use these sites to connect with friends and loved ones?

In this session, social networking experts xxx and xxx will explain the user interfaces, features and cultures within these two powerful communities. Attendees will learn:

• How people use social networks to disseminate information to people they care about
• The most common mistakes that marketers make when attempting to engage with social network users
• How social network users respond to and interact with advertising
• The “coolest self” phenomenon and what it means for business

The rise of social media comes as no surprise to those who understand the inherent human need to be seen, heard, and understood. At its core, social media simply enables people — your customers, clients and employees — to do these things more quickly and easily than they have ever done so before. In short, social media facilitates relationships.

Companies that make an effort to understand and relate to this new world of human relationships facilitated by sophisticated and rapidly-changing technology stand to make tremendous gains in public relations, customer loyalty and satisfaction, and internal productivity.

In this opening session of the Social Media Bootcamp day, our panel of social media experts will provide attendees with a road map for the rest of the day, and for the rest of the conference.

• The major types of social tools and the needs that they fill
• The mode of thinking that characterizes all successful social media initiatives
• Some of the major players and tools shaping the space today

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.