2007 Chicago Conference

If I were responsible for giving the Sprit of the Blogosphere Award, I’d give it to Liz Strauss. Our speaker Andy Sernovitz put us in touch. I had a really lovely chat with her yesterday and came away with a renewed vigor for blogging. That’s usually how I know I’ve had a great conversation with someone.

One of the things that struck me during our chat was that “online community building” is becoming a buzz word, kind of like “synergy” or “paradigm.” She told me a story about a corporate marketer who told her that he was going to build a community on his company’s website. She asked him what he would do to get the people to come there and how he would work with them. He kept returning to the “community” angle, and she kept asking, “but what about the people?”

Liz has an astonishing number of comments — tens of thousands, in fact — on her blog. She’s very proud of this. She hosts open comment nights and spends inordinate amounts of time getting to know her readers. She explained to me that the secret to good blogging is understanding that your posts should be conversation starters rather than statements. The only way to really engage with people is to leave your posts unfinished.

About halfway through our conversation, I started feeling guilty. I realized that I didn’t spend nearly enough time engaging with the commenters on any of the blogs I write for. I asked her, “how do I make sure that my commenters understand that I do care about them when there just aren’t enough hours in the day?”

“You just did,” she replied. “You show up. You read what they’ve written and you make sure they know you were there.”

The moral of this story is that the business buzzword of “online community building” doesn’t really cover what needs to happen when a company sets out to build a community around their brand. Many corporate marketers seem to be approaching the issue with an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. But if you want to have a successful online community, you need to step out from behind your role as company spokesperson/spin-doctor and actually talk to people. Talk to them like you talk to your friends. Be yourself.

This mentality — which represents a real paradigm shift, not just a buzzword — will be a subject of renewed focus at the conference this September. We’ll be talking about technology and numbers and ROI to be sure, but we’ll also be talking about the real power of social media: the people that use it.

You’ve heard the talk, you’ve heard the hype — word of mouth marketing is the next big thing. What’s also become clear is that blogging and blogger engagement have been central to many successful word of mouth campaigns.

How exactly should you do to create a word of mouth marketing campaign that leverages weblogs and influential bloggers? How do you convert blog visitors to paying customers? How do you use your blog to build your brand — and reduce negative word of mouth?

Andy Sernovitz is the guru of Word of Mouth Marketing, author of the definitive book on the topic, founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association — and now teaches the first ever graduate course on the topic at Northwestern. And he’s a great blogger, too.

Learn the 5 steps to starting an impactful, effective, sales-driving campaign. We’re going to get specific here: Who to hire, where to start, and how to make it successful.

In this session, you’ll learn:

• Finding the right people to talk about you
• Giving them something to talk about
• Creating tools to make it easier for them to talk to each other
• Participating in the conversation
• Tracking and measuring results

If you want to understand the radical shift taking place in online advertising, you need look no further than two recent Wall Street Journal articles. The first cites research showing that kids don’t like it when social network sites include advertising in their profiles without their permission. But 20% of them do post advertising and marketing material on their own profiles when it aligns with their needs or interests. The second discusses the fact that people across the age spectrum have developed selective blindness when it comes to banner ads.

We’ve been paying attention to these developments, and we’re factoring them into our marketing strategy for the upcoming conference. We realize that it’s much better to add value for people than to pander to them.

That’s why we’ve spent some time over the past few weeks developing an application for Facebook platform that we hope to roll out in beta form later this week. It’s our first attempt at an app, so it’s functions are limited. But the goal here is to build on the community of blogging experts currently using Facebook to spread the word about what makes a great blog and to hopefully drive some traffic to the conference.

So what’s our application called, and what does it do? It’s called BlogTips and it…

• …displays a user-submitted “blogging tip of the day” each day with a link to the tipster’s Facebook profile.
• …allows users to submit their blogging tips right from a friend’s Facebook profile.

Each day, we’ll go through all the submitted tips and select the next day’s tip. Then, on August 17th, we’ll have our speakers vote on the best tip. The top tipster gets a free pass to the three-day Blog Business Summit this September.

Yes, we’re shamelessly self-promoting. We spent the time and money to develop this widget to drive traffic to our conference. But we know that this application won’t take off unless people find it legitimately useful. And we think it’s a contribution to our community that goes beyond a marketing initiative.

Personally, I was thrilled to manage the development of this application because it gave me the opportunity to witness the new Facebook API in action. I have a million new ideas for applications that I would build if only we had unlimited time and resources. Some of them might even add value for our clients, both existing and potential.

So if you’re interested in engaging with Facebook’s users via an application, give us a buzz at (206)-229-9335 or an e-mail and we’ll chat.

The Mobile Internet is changing the dynamics of relationships — from how we interact with our colleagues, customers, and partners to how we find, collect, and use information. In essence technology is changing the traditional definition of the “human experience.” The world where your potential customers can use their mobile handsets to receive opinions from trusted sources and up-to-date price comparisons on products you carry whenever they pass by your retail outlet isn’t far off. Today moblogging is changing the dynamics of journalism by enabling all of us to become “journalists” by capturing news from our mobile devices and posting to major news blogs. This sharing of personal opinions has become the norm with the advent of video and services such as YouTube.

According to a study released late last year by comScore, 19% of Americans access the Internet through their mobile phones. In Europe as many as 34% of people access the Web from their phones(1). The numbers are even higher in Asia. In Japan, 69.2 million people use their phones to connect to the Internet, compared to 66 million PC users (2).

As Web-ready phones continue to proliferate in the US and abroad, and technologies like GPS become more prevalent, mobile access to blogs and social networks will influence consumer decision-making more than ever before. On the flip side, your employees’ access to social media on their mobile handsets can add tremendous value to your marketing and communications initiatives.

In her keynote, Motorola CTO Padmasree Warrior, will demonstrate how the mobile internet is transforming businesses, economies and societ ies around the world.

Everyone knows the adage, “a picture’s worth a thousand words.” But the changing face of customer outreach compels companies to find new ways to build affinity with wired and wireless consumers.

Taking a page from its past as “America’s Storyteller,” Eastman Kodak Company has embraced new media — including blogs and podcasts — to synch with consumers. Kodak’s blog isn’t a product showcase, or a feed of executive corporate-speak. Instead, everyday employees write and photograph the people, places, and things they’re passionate about.

In this session, Kodak’s manager of new media, Denise Stinardo will describe how the Kodak blog began, and how it continues to help Kodak build new relationships with customers in a digital era.

Online chatter often feels like a shouting match between traditional outlets, user-generated content, social networks and millions of blogs in the US alone — all competing for attention, shaping popular perception, and ultimately, impacting consumer purchasing decisions.

So how do you separate signal from noise? Is pinpointing influence as easy as pulling up a blogger’s authority ranking and audience size? Can influence ever truly be measured?

This panel will explore:

• Whether influence online can be scientifically proven
• The correlation between online influence and advertising performance - does an “influential” blog necessarily mean it’s a good ad target?
• Once deemed influential, what are the implications for those creating influential content, and the businesses seeking to reach their audiences?
• What are the best practices for engaging influential bloggers?
• What should corporate marketers and advertisers avoid?

Building online communities has become a key part of the new marketing equation for many businesses. While some companies have engaged with communities inside existing online social networks like Facebook and MySpace, others have opted to build their own using a wide variety of newly available tools.

In this session, we’ll discuss the best strategies for building online communities, both on your own and on third-party social networks, with a focus on:

• Granularity and ease use of in privacy settings
• Creating a positive user experience
• Exercising good marketing boundaries
• How much branding is too much branding?

We’ve been spending a lot of time recently on developing the roster of sessions and speakers for our upcoming conference in Chicago. This happens to be one of my favorite parts of working with the Blog Business Summit because it gives me the opportunity to review experts, ideas and best practices from all over the emerging field of business blogging.

This year, we’re working to bring more corporate speakers than ever before to the podium. Big corporations have a great deal to gain by blogging, but they also have a long way to fall if their initiatives are not well-crafted. In order to give our corporate attendees the information they need, we are drawing speakers from the growing pool of corporations who are blogging and engaging with bloggers successfully.

And while successful business blogging remains the primary focus of our conference, the Blog Business Summit is about more than blogs. New media for online communication are emerging all the time, and we know that our attendees want to be on top of those trends as well. This year’s conference will take a look at emergence of online social networks as powerful media properties in their own right. Understanding how these networks function and how users respond to commercial engagement with their communities is just as important as understanding the rules of successful corporate blogging and blogger engagement.

Another new horizon in our editorial development process has been the launch of our session submission and review system. A lot of successful conferences in the technology space take on an “unconference” model. That is, the attendees shape the editorial and direct how the conference forms. We think this is an interesting idea, but we run a conference that is primarily targeted at the business community.

We started asking ourselves, “how do we adapt our business-oriented conference to a more democratic model without sacrificing hard-hitting business oriented editorial?” We decided to put our money where our mouths are. After all, we’re always talking about listening to community when it comes to product development.

So we worked with our team of geeks to develop a massive custom WordPress plugin that would allow us to make blog posts the fundamental unit of editorial. In short, one blog post = one conference session. The plugin allows us to provide additional meta-data to each post (time, location, editorial track, speakers, etc.).

The plugin also manages and reviews the ratings and proposal system. This allows anyone who is interested to submit a session for review, and to vote on proposed sessions. We think this hits the sweet spot between community participation and the top-down editorial model favored by most business conferences.

Stay tuned in the coming days for some very exciting session and speaker announcements. Sessions will appear right here on the blog (and in our RSS feed) as individual blog posts.

It’s clear that in the era of social media, traditional customer outreach is no longer a viable strategy. Ben Edwards, publisher of Economist.com and former new media guru at IBM has spent years staying on top of the trends and technologies driving conversational marketing. In this session, Edwards will deliver a personal narrative about where the customer participation model is taking businesses and how smart organizations can leverage this new paradigm for competitive advantage.

• Engaging with your audience
• Gathering input and sentiment
• “Gradualism” and being guided by your customers
• Optimizing for the medium while staying true to your brand.

Online social networking aficionados have always known that the future of the medium would include third-party developers. For example, when Friendster opened up their network to a few select developers late last year, their month-over-month unique visitors increased 17.76%. Allowing users to make additions to a social networking site’s functionality adds value and gives the community more say in how the site works for them. With Facebook’s launch of the new “platform” functionality, the proverbial chickens have come home to roost.

These open APIs create numerous opportunities for businesses and organizations by enabling them to reach millions of passionate users without buying advertising by simply creating a useful application that adds value to a user’s experience of their favorite social network.

In this session, you will learn:

• How the big online social networks work, who their users are, and which ones have APIs for you to use.
• What other organizations have done and what the results have been.
• Finding the right developer to work with the API
• Adding real value rather than just peddling your product or service

Need to understand your target market better? Want to develop products that resonate with customers? Experienced bloggers know that their readers can provide them with a treasure trove of valuable information to assist in product development efforts.

In this session we’ll focus on the practical strategies and tactics that bloggers use to leverage reader comments and cross-postings to affect how messaging, features, and packaging of products can be optimized.

• “Comment farming”: Writing posts that drive reader participation
• How provocative posting works
• Determining what “acid test” questions to ask
• Getting your organization behind weblog-based research

We talk a lot around here about using technology to really listen to customers. In fact, that’s really what we teach people how to do. So we figured it was time we started practicing what we preach.

The bottom line is that some of our favorite sessions have been suggested to us by members of the BBS community before, after or during conferences. We wanted to streamline that process by making it easy for people to join our community and propose sessions. That’s why we built a plugin that lets our community propose sessions and rate other people’s sessions once they are proposed.

So have at it! Go hog wild! Propose a session or nineteen. We’re all ears.

UPDATE: Ok, OK! I spoke too soon. We detected an error in the plugin that required we shut it down for the time being. It should be up and running early next week. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Selecting a platform for your blogging and social media efforts is a high-stakes process. Choose the right software and you’ll have a significant edge over your competitors and reap huge dividends from network effects. Choose wrong and you may find yourself in a technological dead end and be forced — at great expense — to start over.

The open architecture of the World Wide Web obliterated closed networks like Prodigy and Compuserve, while a diminished AOL was forced to migrate largely to a role of Internet access provider. Conversely, Windows remains supremely dominant on corporate desktops while Linux has been unable to expand much beyond it’s role as a server platform.

As companies large and small rush to embrace the world of social media, it’s critical that they understand the issues of control, lock-in, and extensibility that they will face long-term. In his keynote, WordPress founder and creator Matt Mullenweg will explain the evolution of open source, and show how participation in open source user and developer communities offers all businesses an upside that he feels far outweighs the risks.

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.

The Blog Herald has a giant mega post about all things WordPress.

In all honesty, I haven’t had time to digest it all, but hooray for great open source software.

Incidentally, open-source software is going to be a topic at our conference this September. I’m working on editorial development right now, so if anyone has ideas for what you’d like to see covered. Here’s the place to comment.

One of the most important aspects of any business venture is measuring how well your efforts are meeting your goals. Blogging is no different. With syndicated feeds, the standard methods of reading visitors and impressions goes out the window–how can you determine your actual audience size? In this session you’ll learn:

• Buzz measurement tools
• Do “hits” matter anymore?
• Measuring inbound links
• Using statistics programs made especially for blogging
• Using feedburner stats
• Blogroll links, Pagerank, and combination measurement systems
• Emerging measurement services

Before you flip the switch and encourage employees to blog about the business, it’s critical that you set the stage for responsible posting. Your employees need to be aware of potential “land mine” issues that you don’t want them to write about. It’s also critical that you resolve any issues about ownership of the content your employees generate on company time. Finally, your blog readers need to know where you stand on profanity in the comments, commercial postings, and other issues.

This panel of experts will cover the most critical internal and external policy areas, and how to deal with them:

• Integrating blogs and confidentiality agreements
• Accuracy mandates
• Do disclaimers help?
• Reconciling personal opinions against implied corporate representation
• Competitor linking and dialog—how open do you want to be?
• Screening and editing posts.
• Developing a respectful and transparent comment policy

Of all the professionals impacted by the emergence of social media, business communicators have seen the most changes. Information embargoes and top-down, command and control messaging aren’t as useful as they used to be. How can business communicators embrace transparency and customer participation while supporting the needs of companies?

In this session, you’ll learn:

• How to work with bloggers to make your message heard
• Prioritizing which bloggers to work with
• Responding to customer’s concerns in the blogosphere
• The power of linking to your critics
• Letting go of spin
• What the legal department doesn’t know about saying “sorry!”

We’ve taken our Sessions page live, and we’re working to populate it with conference sessions.

We’re in the process of developing a plugin that will place the sessions in the schedule grid, but for now, you can see them as blog posts. And because they’re blog posts, they have comments. So please, please give us lots of feedback.

And if you’re interested in being updated when we add sessions, you can subscribe to our sessions RSS feed.