Events

As many of you know, our speakers and their spouses were treated to dinner, wine, and gin tasting courtesy of DiStefano, Plymouth Gin and Maggiano’s Little Italy. Jason Calacanis might not have liked it because it was a blogger junket, but I know I enjoyed it.

Here are some of the things our speakers had to say:

• Maryam Scoble found British gin expert Simon Ford very entertaining, although she’s not sure whether it was his fascinating talk about the history of gin or just his sexy british accent. Oh boy, watch out Robert!
• Chris Pirillo has kindly posted the recipes for the drinks that Simon concocted for us.
• BlogHer’s Elisa Camahort wrote about her experience of the dinner as a vegan who is allergic to alcohol. I’m glad that Maggiano’s was able to accommodate her dietary requirements, but I wish I’d known about her alcohol allergy in advance because I’m sure Plymouth’s master mixologist could have come up with some virgin and vegan concoctions for the occasion.

I’ll post more links to the dinner buzz as things get going.

Can be found on her blog. Mary gave a talk on live web search.

Here are the slides from Scott Niesen’s presentation on putting web feeds to work.

Here are the slides from John Battelle’s keynote presentation on blogs, search and media.

Here are the slides (PDF) from Elizabeth Lawley for the session on blogging tools and trends.

Here are the slides (PDF) from Ben Edwards’ keynote presentation.

Here are the slides from Robert and Maryam Scoble’s presentation about how to blog well. This was one of my favorite presentations of the conference.

Here are the slides from the presentation Steve and I did about the creation of a sponsored blog.

Here are Tara Hunt’s slides (PDF) from the Building Community Online session, which many have called the best session at the conference. More session wrap ups are forthcoming…

This year’s conference–my first with the BBS crew–was a whirlwind of bloggy goodness. I can’t believe it’s over. Of course, too much longer and I would have collapsed from sheer exhaustion.

I’m happy to say that about 95% of the feedback we got from our attendees was positive. I’ve had a couple people tell me it was the most valuable conference they’ve attended in years. That felt really good. I was also gratified to learn that one of our attendees decided to skip watching his beloved Cardinals win the World Series in order to attend.

I’ve already posted some of the constructive criticism we recieved. Here are a few more points that came up:

• Some of our speakers needed to focus more on giving basic information and less on the 30,000 foot view. Anecdotes are useful, but only when they illustrate a larger point.
• The best sessions were those that focused on heart and passion while delivering great content. The conference wasn’t as heart-based as some of the other gatherings in this space.
• We need to serve less food next year. There was some concern that we were being wasteful and not keeping an eye toward sustainability.

We always appreciate feedback like this, so please keep it coming. As long as it’s constructive and delivered within tolerable snarkiness parameters, we’ll take your thoughts into account for next year’s conference.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my teammates, Steve Broback, Kim Larsen, Eric Anderson and Jason Preston for a great conference. I feel like we’re all old war buddies now.

In the coming days, I’ll be posting presentations from speakers, bits of video and audio, and linking to more conference coverage. If you’re a speaker and you have your presentation handy, please e-mail it to me. My e-mail is teresa [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com. Otherwise, I will hound you until you send it in!

Also, if you think I’ve missed linking to your post, or anyone else’s post about the BBS, please leave a link in the comments or e-mail me. We want to be as comprehensive as possible.

Thanks again, everyone! And now on to Blog Business Summit 2007. Stay tuned for details!

The following are my notes from John Battelle’s keynote speech.

• The Internet economy is the third wave of tech and culture. 1970’s, the back office was being digitized. People used a command line interface to interact with the information. Then the front office was digitized in the 1980’s with the advent of the PC. Now the customers are digitized, and that’s Web 2.0.
• Command line is how we navigated the 1970’s. The Find command is how we navigated the 1980’s. Now search is the way that we navigate Web 2.0. The command line is natural language. “We are starting to use computers the way we talk to other people.”
• If search is an interface, then it’s our navigational device. It’s our steering wheel.
• Customers make the business better and build the business for them. “If you can figure out how to get your customers to help you build your business, you’re in.”
• Search is the driver of Web 2.0 businesses. It’s our cultures entire point of inquiry.
• Search has an average of $8.5 per customer acquisition. Audience declares intent, then content finds an audience. “Every business is a content creator now, if you’re not, you don’t exist.” Intent drives your content, what do your customers want? If you want to create content, you must understand the intent of the end user.
• Conversations are links. Link love drives search. The audience’s attention matters. You have to get into bed with the search engines.
• How can you employ your customers in the conversation around your products? How do you take advantage of those moments when your product is criticized. Invite users’ input. Your end user tells you what your brand is.
• Target your advertising to the readers of the sites you’re advertising on. Microsoft advertising on Glenn Fleishman’s blog about the WiFi features in Windows. Dice advertising on sites for IT professionals: “Does your Tech Job suck?”
• He’s excited about Vox from Six Apart because of its approach to integrating social networks, blogging and more. He’s also thinking there should be an application that allows developers to mashup RSS with structured search.
• What I see in great blogs is a great publications with a great audience and a passionate editor.

By the way, I’d like to thank John for putting our logo at the top of all his slides. That was very thoughtful of him :-).

I was running around doing logistical stuff during Robert and Maryam’s talk, but I loved what I did get to see.

ConversationRater has a great rundown of their 15 points for a killer blog.

We love constructive comments. Yeah, it makes us all feel warm and fuzzy when people come up to the Reg desk and tell us how much they love the conference. But we grow and learn even more from people who are willing to tell us what they feel could be better about the gathering
.

Here’s what we’ve been hearing so far, both from the blogosphere and in the 3D world:

1. There are really two conferences here: the gathering of the bloggerati clan and the business folks.
2. We need more speakers who are from less tech-savvy companies and have some experience with the institutional resistance that is currently a major obstacle to getting the vast majority of businesses into the blogosphere.
3. Businesses need to stop being so obsessed with the “A-list.” Jeremy Pepper thinks we need to pay more attention to other bloggers in specific niches instead of always looking to the Scobles and Jason Calacanises of the world.
4. Some of the panels never really got around to their main topic, particularly in the monetizing your blog session. There are some really good tips from Jason Weisberger’s post (link below).
5. Jason Calacanis’ announcement that most bloggers suck, especially those who are not highly ranked using traditional metrics was just plain wrong.

Also, we’d like to remind all the attendees to please silence their cell phones and computers during sessions.

Here is a list of folks who are writing thoughtful, constructive things about the conference, both positive and negative:

• Jason Weisberger
• John Koetsier
• James Omdahl
• Pat McCarthy
• ValleyWag Link in, you guys!
• Dave Taylor
• Zoe Goldring

Scoble just showed us all the $4,000 HD-DV camera he bought for doing a video show, and the panel is explaining to us how if you’re going to be doing videoblogging and you want to get noticed, you have to meet a minimum standard in editing quality and video quality. They seem to think that if you’re going to do it, you ought to do it in HD.

I disagree. I think their reasoning breaks down as follows:

• HD broadcasters are looking for scarce content. If you have good HD content, they might buy it off you.
• Video is going to be trending upwards in quality, and eventually everyone will use HD, so you might as well do HD now.

Well, my take is different:

• It’s all about the aesthetic. Hand-held non-HD is OK, in fact it’s great, for basic videoblogging, because videoblogging is, like blogging, a personal medium. The “real” aesthetic that you get — like you did in The Blair Witch Project — will work with you, not against you.
• Serving HD content, if you’re doing it yourself, is a pain in the–
• For most business videoblogging, you’re not aiming for the TV producer audience.
• On a computer screen, 640×480 is plenty big for a web-streaming video. HD doesn’t make a lick of difference until you go bigger than that.

They’re right that everything will eventually move to HD, but for now the infrastructure isn’t there to support it, and I’m not convinced it will be practical for at least five years. Making a much smaller investment in a regular camera and spending a bit more time on “post-production” (which is simpler than it sounds, and getting simpler) will be more than enough to get your business noticed in the videoblogging space.

Finally, and more importantly, I’m always convinced it’s more about the content than the quality. That’s why we like Beatles recordings better than, say, over-engineered O-Town, the Beatles made great songs.

Corporate branding in the age of YouTube, the Keynote today by Ben Edwards. My usual stream of consciousness was running through my fingers onto the keyboard. Be sure to check out the video:

• Ben spent ages (14 years) working as a print journalist, and moved to “digital publishing” at IBM when he had a small epiphany about the future of print media - it’s on a downward trend.
• What is New Media Communications? Ben tells us: ignore the corporate “gobbledy-goop” up on the screen, I use this slideshow for boring audiences. The slide says “Establish social media skills among IBM Communcations teams around the world. Develop enterprise applications for these seocial media capabilities across all communications disciplines…”
• There is a huge potential, Ben thinks, to destroy costs by adopting social media.
• Ben throws up a number of statistics on the screen - social media adoption is going nuts - BlogCentral has a zillion recorded users, YouTube has 200,000 uploaded videos per day (YoutTube number is real).
• He hates to say it at a blogging conference, but the fastest growing new tool is the Wiki - he shows a chart of Wikicentral registered users that shows just over 0 in December 05 and just about 60,000 by this August.
• Social media are not about the technology. It’s how you use it.
• I like this one: Socil media should not be thought of as new “channels” for distributing existing content and messages. They’re fundamentally different because they have different economics and different audience expectations.
• A new slide: The New Communications Paradigm - it divvies up the Mass Media and Social Media attributes of Marketing, Communications, etc. The basic concept: the fundamental paradigm has changed - we’ve gone to low-cost, active-engagement, individual publishing.
• You need to attract your audience with the value of your content - *ding* he’s right.
• Ben played us a hilarious video. Here’s the YouTube link.

So, on to branding:

• Brands began as symbols of product quality and consistency. Then they began to be symbols of consumer identity.
• Now brands are more about symbols of social aspirations (BP just re-branded to be “beyond petroleum”).
• The prevailing orthodoxy: companies no longer have “control” over the brand. Ben thinks that companies lost control of the brands ages ago, when they became symbols of social aspirations - after all, he says, who controls those aspirations?
• Where is Kodak on FlickR? Good question - get with it boys.
• Users have increased influence on creating and sharing the brand in social media because they are themselves publishers. It used to be a simple relationship between the corporation and the customer’s wallet, with a little bit of mass media thrown in. No longer.
• How are brands doing on YouTube? Cool question. Turns out that people are re-publishing in about four ways:
  • Celebrating the brand
  • Mocking the brand
  • Mashing up the brand with other brands
  • Making a brand perform strange and unnatural acts
• Mass Media didn’t offer a lot of opportunity to listen - just focus groups basically - but new media lets employees, shareholders, customers, suppliers, and partners all publishing about the brand.
• Ben thinks we have a shot at making our brands more secure and healthy - we need to make brands available to everyone, don’t try to segment your audience. Because everyone can publish, you, as a corporation, are “naked” - so the brand has to become something that everyone can relate to and feel comfortable with.
• Listening is probably the big point in making brands stronger. Listen to what employees are saying about the brand. Listen to customers and shareholders and everyone else.
• Question: how do you bring these ideas and these technologies into the fold in a large organization. Answer: It’s certainly difficult - people tend to get angry about social media because they perceive it as a threat. The way to approach it is to be humble - don’t rub it in people’s faces, don’t be arrogant about it, just present it in very practical ways. Bring up Instant Messaging, how it flowered up outside the corporate area but ended up being useful there.
• Question: How does IBM re-spend their ad dollars to put their new brand out in new ways? Answer: Well, there is an increasing awareness that IBM’s ad budget is mis-allocated. They don’t have the resources to create really experimental stuff. Ben really wants to liberate great stories at IBM, and so they need great storytellers, and people that really understand and appreciate business. That combination is rare and difficult to find, so there’s a real “supply bottleneck.” A lot of companies don’t know where to spend their new money.

Scott Niesen is giving an awesome presentation this morning on putting Web feeds to work. You should absolutely not miss it.

Scott Niesen, of Attensa, starts off the day with a presentation on the practical business applications of RSS, and RSS enterprise solutions. I’ve dropped my usual bullet-list of running thoughts below:

• The holy grail of marketing is getting the right information to the right people at the right time.
• The feed tools at Attensa, says Scott, are designed to use RSS feeds to get the right information to the right people instantaneously, without overloading them.
• There are stages of RSS in Business:
  1. Blog posts and news headlines come in.
  2. They start using them for business intelligence alerts.
  3. Then they get circulated around with internal blogs and wikis.
• Then businesses get RSS-enabled enterprise systems to really harness RSS as a business tool.
• RSS readers allow you to access what is essentially an indispensable research tool, for example, monitoring RSS feeds from the blogosphere lets you do pretty intense brand monitoring, just by running a constant keyword search.
• Persistence and Subscription: RSS is an indispensable collaboration tool in its ability, in an internal blo for example, to make new developments available instantaneously of changes or updates. In short, a great way to track team projects.
• CEO blogging is a great way to build a shared vision - Attensa CEO keeps a private and a public blog, both of which help keep the company headed in the same direction.
• RSS connects to a ton of different data types that go beyond traditional blogs and wikis - they use RSS to deliver podcasts within the company.
• Sales force leads can be delivered to blackberries very conveniently with feeds. Good idea.
• RSS is a double-edged sword - old methods of getting information are not going away - so RSS is convenient, but it’s also another possible way to get to information overload.
• The difficulty is creating a system whereby you get the news you want (or need) without getting overloaded with millions of feeds (anyone who uses an RSS reader knows how difficult this is).
• This is kind of cool: in the new Attensa reader, the feeds you look at most automatically rise to the top of your list. Kind of like the “most played” list in iTunes.
• When you’re looking at enterprise RSS options, Scott has a list of 7 things to check, some of them:
  1. Is it easy to install and deploy?
  2. Access it anywhere? Offline, web and mobile?
  3. Synchronization - critical!
  4. LDAP integration and Exchange support (I don’t know what that means…let me see if Wikipedia does…I’m guessing this one)
• Question: What’s the smallest size company that this enterprise type solution is practical for? Scott says: well, a company of one can download the Attensa reader and get a lot of benefit about it. But for the more complex systems, they recommend you start around 100 employees.

Our friend and longtime speaker Janet Johnson has been live blogging the conference at her new blog.

These are some quick (OK, so they’re somewhat long) notes from today’s session on RSS and feeds: Monitoring the Blogosphere and the Buzz. It’s being given by Dave Taylor and Halley Suitt at the moment, because the third speaker is stuck in a cab. Ok there she is: Mary Hodder.

• Blogging and RSS are not necessarily the same thing - there are RSS feeds that aren’t created by blogs or blog software
• There are tons of tools to browse through the blogosphere. Technorati is Dave’s favorite tool. He just searched for “photographer” in the blog directory, and it found 387 blogs self-categorized as being in the “photography” area.
• In Technorati, you can decide whether to sort by freshness or authority. Authority is essentially based on the number of inbound links a blog has. Now you can see which blogs are linked to (seen as authoritative) frequently.
• Using a Technorati search in blog posts will let you filter your search by authority and from what blogs (Technorati is having problems now - the live demo is…problematic). So you can search for the word “camera” in “all blogs” with “some authority.”
• Google Blogsearch does a better job of cutting out splogs because they don’t admit blogs that have zero inbound links.
• You can subscribe to RSS feeds of Technorati searches (to see if anyone is talking about “bubble gum”) and keep a constant eye on what’s being said.
• Dave says that Newsgator can be used to arrange a bunch of feeds so that you can have what’s been promised for almost a decade - a personalized newspaper. If you’re not using a news aggregator, then you’re not keeping up on your industry, and you have a “huge problem.”

Mary takes the podium (figuratively) to talk about live web search.

• Why do you get different search results from different search services?
• Google was created for the static web; pagerank is a measure of people’s interest in a certain site, and Google leveraged pagerank (links, essentially) to make keyword search work. It went and found the “most relevant” site based on pagerank.
• So new search (blogsearch) brings in key word matches, but in reverse chronological order. The new search, Link Search, yields everything that has linked to a url.
• The different types of searches are good for different types of content: static search (the first one) is best for a static-type page (a bank’s home site), live search is better for rapidly changing content like that on blogs.
• Bloglines keeps all links from all the time they’ve existed, but Technorati only keeps incoming links for 6 months. (Which, to me, makes sense - you don’t want to give an unhealthy weight to blogs that have been around forever or blogs that are no longer active).
• Alexa provides a flawed metric because it counts visits to a site based on a toolbar that is voluntarily installed on Internet Explorer browsers only.
• For a complete picture, you should look for the number of inbound links, the number of comments, the frequency of blogging a topic, RSS subscribers, and tagged URLs - like in del.icio.us
• Mary says that to monitor the blogosphere, you should look for posts and comments that follow conversations within a sphere of blogging, in addition to individual, unconnected posts.

Now Halley is taking a turn to speak:

• How do you go about finding RSS feeds on sites that you aren’t sure have feeds. CNN, for example: One way to do it is to look for the little orange chicklet that says XML, RSS, or something like that. It’s often crazy difficult to find
• There is a question about IE7: is IE support of RSS bring RSS closer to adoption. Dave Taylor says he thinks it’s an irrelevant blip. Unless they promote that as a main feature (say when you come to a site with an RSS feed, IE pops up and say “would you like to subscribe?”), then it would be significant.
• Question: What’s the deal with reposting/reblogging feeds? Answer: Use a short feed for commercial use - in other words, don’t allow people to grab the whole article via RSS, people have to go to your site to get the full thing.
• Monitor your company name use on FlickR
• Question: how do you get a feed from a site, rich with content, not offering a feed? Answer: Well, Mary thinks you should respect their choice not to have a feed. But you could also hack the robots.txt and create an RSS feed for the site, although that’s somewhat technical. You could also use Google Alerts (searches google for a phrase, grabs the top 500 results, and then brings the new items to you in an RSS feed).