by Teresa Valdez Klein on May 1, 2007
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
by Teresa Valdez Klein on May 1, 2007
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
by Teresa Valdez Klein on May 1, 2007
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!”
by Teresa Valdez Klein on May 1, 2007
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. 
by Teresa Valdez Klein on May 1, 2007
A recent Wall Street Journal Report covered how much blogs bring to the table when it comes to search engine optimization. In fact, you can accomplish most of what they recommend with a well put-together business blog.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- Why blogs beat regular Web sites
- Which blog platforms have an edge
- How to craft post titles with keywords in mind
- Why your URLs, permalink structure and post slugs matter
- Categorization and tagging techniques
- Plugins that add value to SEO efforts
- Tools for researching what people are searching for
- Optimal layout and feature considerations
by Teresa Valdez Klein on April 18, 2007
Jeff Jarvis has a great post up this morning that explains why cable is a dying platform for content distribution. Because of the Web, content is becoming commodified. No company can have a monopoly on great content. The new platforms are those that enable people to share content freely. Like Google and YouTube.
Jarvis argues that the future of media is in enabling people to connect with the information they care about. But even if you’re not in that sector, this still matters to you. Because like John Battelle told us last year all businesses are publishers now if they want to stay competitive.
The questions you should be asking yourself: How can we use emerging platforms to enable our customers to do what they do better? How can we do that without trying to control the outcome of every conversation? How can we reach out to our customers organically by providing a value add that is compelling to them?
Blogging is one way of doing this. Chances are that someone within your organization knows a lot about what your customers care about. Find that person and encourage them to spend company time sharing that information in the spirit of reaching out to your customer base. If you enable them with some critical piece of information, chances are that they’ll stick around to see what else you can offer.
Self-promotionally, I should mention that our conference this September is going to cover this new organic outreach in a big way. I’m especially excited to discuss it with the newcomers at our “Social Media Bootcamp” on Day One of the conference.
by Teresa Valdez Klein on April 13, 2007
by Steve Broback on April 10, 2007
As a follow-up to our work with CEA in evaluating bloggers for the 2007 CES show, and in preparation for our 2008 CES blogger bash, we’ve launched an in-depth analysis of blog activity related to the January event.
Using a combination of several Web intelligence engines and human review of over 3,000 individual blog posts, we’ve captured the majority of blog posts made by those in attendance at CES. We’re starting to see clear patterns emerge.
One of the largest data sets we have on hand is extracted post subject lines. We’ve broken those subjects into individual words and have analyzed them for frequency. Below is a chart depicting the top 150 or so words in use–after assignment to companies best aligned with them. The iPod was the single most frequently mentioned product term. Vista, iPhone, and Xbox also were hot topics.
Note that PodTech’s Bloghaus sponsored by Seagate was in the top ten. Heads up that thanks to the data being munched and the services being tapped into, we’ll soon have a comprehensive set of interpreted CES blog-related info. We have a list of the hundreds of individual bloggers who attended CES, and are ranking them now based on influence. We’ve also begun the process to glean product and company mentions (and sentiment) within blog posts.
FYI that Monster Cable is just one of the client companies who have commissioned us to deliver to them the final report we’re preparing. If you are interested in receiving the report based on this data, contact Kim Larsen.
by Teresa Valdez Klein on April 10, 2007
Blog Business Summit ‘07 speaker Kevin O’Keefe has a fantastic quote this morning: “you don’t make money from a blog anymore than you make money from your cell phone.” That’s pretty much true for legal bloggers, who blog in order to establish themselves as thoughtful professionals who can help their clients.
Kevin is responding to a post by ProBlogger’s Chris Garrett this morning. Chris argues that in addition to direct methods like advertising, professional bloggers can monetize their content indirectly. My favorite is his profile of David Krug:
As well as being a means to earn money, blogs also have value as assets which can be sold. I think the best known person who makes money by buying and selling blogs has to be David. You can earn money by building up your own blog and selling it, or you can buy up under-valued blogs and selling them after giving them a little TLC.
He’s got a great list of other ways that professionals have indirectly monetized their blogs.
by Teresa Valdez Klein on April 3, 2007
Many thanks to Easton Ellsworth of Business Blog Wire for posting one of our conference bugs on the sidebar of his blog.
And don’t worry buddy, I’m still working on the Fortune 500 wiki. I just get so overloaded…
by Teresa Valdez Klein on April 3, 2007
We’ve got some beautiful sidebar bugs, and we’d just love it if you’d spread the word by placing one in the sidebar of your blog.
First person to post one and e-mail me with the link to your blog gets some link love and a big hug from me the next time I see you!
by Teresa Valdez Klein on March 30, 2007
As you can see from the sidebar of our blog, and from our confirmed speakers page, Motorola’s Executive Vice President and CTO Padmasree Warrior will be speaking at the Blog Business Summit this September.
I must confess that since I came across Padmasree’s blog earlier this year, she’s become one of my heroes. Under her direction, Motorola won the 2004 National Medal of Technology.
She’s also been a passionate advocate for federal research and development funding to keep the United States competitive in the world economy. She recently wrote:
For example as outlined in a report on competitiveness from AeA, consider how federally funded R&D accelerated innovations like fiber optics and the Internet. Federal funding of solid-state physics and ceramics/glass engineering in the late 1960s created the knowledge base for widespread use of fiber optic cable in the 1990s. Department of Defense began experimenting with the design of a decentralized file and data-sharing network in 1969, leading to the explosive diffusion of the Internet 25 years later. The fact is that government R&D investments play an indispensable role in building the foundation of a knowledge-economy by investing in concepts years before they are commercially viable.
To top it all off, Padmasree is an advocate for women in an industry that, as Robert Scoble so aptly put it, has a “culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop.”
For all of these reasons and more, I think Padmasree Warrior is the bees knees and I’m jumping for joy that she’ll be joining us this September.
by Teresa Valdez Klein on March 28, 2007
What a week it’s been! I thought we were going to be live with this blog by Friday, but a number of unanticipated issues cropped up. We’re now fully propagated and live again.
I’ll be spending a lot of today re-building the tag cloud and tying up loose ends with the site migration. Right now, I’m sitting here with Steve and Kim working on yet another (!) proposal and discussing the editorial for our upcoming conference.
The big new kid on the scene while we’ve been out of commission is Justin.TV. Justin Kan — who happens to be a childhood friend of mine — walks around with a camera on his head. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. He says he’s going to do it, “until it stops being fun.” I would have reached that point about five days ago, but it’s been nine days and Justin’s still going strong.
The pace of social media has really picked up of late. I posted about this on my personal blog. Basically, between Twitter and Justin’s project, the streams of content are coming at us faster than ever before.
I’ll be spending a lot of the remaining week delving into the relevance of these emerging online phenomena to our business audience.
by Teresa Valdez Klein on March 19, 2007
by Teresa Valdez Klein on March 15, 2007
Blog Business Summit has secured a special reduced rate for conference attendees at the Chicago City Centre Hotel & Sports Club.
To make a reservation, click here and use the following booking code: BS1
You may also call 312-787-6100 to secure a reservation using the same booking code.
There are a limited number of rooms available at the special reduced rate so plan to book early.
by Teresa Valdez Klein on December 7, 2006
Robert Scoble has posted his video from our bloggy junket, Grapes on a Plane to Eastern Washington’s Hedges Cellars on two private jets provided by Greenpoint Technologies.
Check out the video and enjoy a sneak peek into the billionaire lifestyle. We sure did!
by Teresa Valdez Klein on November 29, 2006
by Teresa Valdez Klein on November 7, 2006
Here’s another constructively critical post from one of our attendees, Terrell Meek.
Terrell raises a point that I’ve heard quite a few times already: our speakers were so clued in to the blogosphere that they didn’t really connect very well with our less bloggy attendees. I think that’s something we’re going to need to pay closer attention to next year.
Please keep that feedback rolling in, we really appreciate it. And if you attended, you got an e-mail from Kim Larsen with a link to the attendee survey. Please remember to fill it out.
by Teresa Valdez Klein on November 3, 2006
And now for a bit of lighthearted silliness and jocularity…
During our “Grapes on a Plane” event last week, we made a post-conference foray to Hedges Family Estate in Richland, WA on a couple of private jets courtesy of Greenpoint Technologies. Just about everyone had a few glasses of wine. This made us all rather silly.
The next thing you know, Robert Scoble is performing “The Butter Knife Scratch,” a new and innovative musical sound that can only be produced by scratching melted vinyl records with a butter knife.
I’m proud to say that I’m a part of the “Butter Knife Scratch.” That mellifluous female voice at the end of the recording belongs to me! 
I am also the proud owner of the piece of melted vinyl upon which Robert played his opus for the assembled throng. It is pictured at left encasing a bottle of Hedges Family Estate Red Mountain fortified port.
Christophe Hedges, if you want it back, you’re gonna have to come and get it!
We now return to our regularly scheduled seriousness…
by Teresa Valdez Klein on November 1, 2006
I hope I’ve done at least a halfway comprehensive job of finding posts about the Blog Business Summit. In case I missed anything, here’s the Google Blog Search. As always, feel free to bring posts to my attention if they’re not on the list:
Whew! Did I miss anything?
