Archive for January, 2006

I received the following press release today. It looks like an event that is definitely worth attending. Would be perfect for the blogging newbie.

New Communications Forum to Take Place March 1-3, 2006 in Palo Alto, Calif.
Tuesday January 31, 11:30 am ET

PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 31 /PRNewswire/ --

Who:    Six keynote presenters, including:
* Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook
* Shel Israel and Robert Scoble, co-authors, Naked Conversations
* Charlene Li, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
* Jeremy Wright, author, Blog Marketing
* Jory Des Jardins, blogger, Pause and co-author, More Space

... and the world's most illustrious experts, including well-known
and respected journalists, media and communications experts,
bloggers and research fellows of the Society for New
Communications Research

What:   New Communications Forum (http://www.newcommforum.com )
An intensive conference designed to bring journalists and media,
marketing, PR and advertising professionals together to learn how
to use new media tools such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and
podcasting to enhance media communications, corporate branding,
marketing communications, public relations and employee
communications initiatives.

When:   March 1-3, 2006
3/1 -- Pre-conference Boot Camps:
Blogging 101, Podcasting 101, Videocasting 101, Wikis 101

3/2 & 3/3 - Full conference sessions
Tracks include:
* New Advertising Strategies
* New Approaches to Corporate Communications (sponsored by Ragan
Communications)
* The New Media & the New Face of Journalism
* The New World of Marketing

Where:  Sheraton Palo Alto
625 El Camino Real
Palo Alto, Calif.

For more information or to register, visit:
http://www.newcommforum.com or call +1 650-331-0083

About New Communications Forum:

New Communications Forum is one of the world’s leading conferences focusing on blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, videocasts and other emerging media and communications platforms. New Communications Forum is a focused conference specifically designed to teach PR, marketing, advertising and media professionals how to harness the power of new media tools for corporate branding and internal and external communications initiatives. The forum provides an in-depth, hands-on exploration of the future of communications. Presenters and instructors are senior professionals from around the world and journalists from leading media outlets, all of whom have pioneered the use of these new tools and technologies. They will share their in-the-trenches experiences as early adopters of these new tools. More information can be found at http://www.newcommforum.com.

New Communications Forum 2006 is sponsored by Eastwick Communications, Kontiki Lawrence Ragan Communications, ProfNet/PR Newswire, Qtags, Socialtext, Tekrati, Stormhoek Wine, Voce Communications and the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR).

ITConversations.com has a fantastic podcast on corporate blogging that provides great suplimental material to my ?ÄúGetting started?Äù post Here is a description of the show.

While customers today are exposed to almost constant marketing messages, many businesses struggle with keeping control of the corporate image. The current climate of the internet, the proliferation of content creators, and the ease with which a company’s customers can communicate with each other and with potential new customers have begun to limit the amount of control a company can exercise over the information the public can access about the company and its brands. In this climate some companies are taking steps to make sure that they are participants in this new level of discussion, and not just the subjects of it.

The speakers in this panel represent companies from small and non-technical to large and computer-related, from non-profit to for-profit, and they discuss aspects of business blogging from the corporate culture required to make business blogging successful to the various reasons that drive companies to blog successfully and the sorts of tools that can help make a business’s blog more successful. Along the way they cover issues of blog promotion, customer blogging, tracking blog subscription rates, and determining the value blogs and bloggers offer to a company.

Forbes recently ran an interesting article, Tapping Into The Blogosphere, that was basically a tutorial on how businesses can leverage the power of blogging to help realize their business objectives. There are definitely some golden nuggets to be found in the article. This is a must read for those of you that are new to corporate blogging and are looking for ideas to help develop your blogging strategy.

Tapping Into The Blogosphere
Tom Taulli, 01.25.06, 6:00 AM ET

Without bloggers, Indeed.com may not have survived.

To increase visibility for the beta version of his jobs-search engine, Paul Forster decided to contact influential bloggers, including John Battelle, the blogger behind Searchblog and author of The Search. Battelle wrote a post on the new company, which was then read by a venture capitalist.

“It greatly influenced our future,” said Forster. “Union Square Ventures, the venture capital firm that ultimately invested in Indeed, discovered us because of John’s blog.”

Since then, blog outreach has been a critical part of Indeed.com’s marketing strategy. The company has leveraged blogs to soft-launch new tools and services. Techcrunch, another technology blog, was one of the first to post about the company’s “Jobs by Instant Message,” and Micropersuasion, a popular public-relations blog, published examples of the “Job Trends tool.”

According to Dan Burstein, the author of BLOG! and a venture capitalist at Millennium Technology Ventures, there are more than 50 million blogs worldwide. “Blogs are a concrete new form of media and communications, as well as a new business opportunity,” said Burstein. “Over the next few years, businesses will figure out how to use blogs to develop whole new relationships between businesses and their customers and partners.”

Here’s how your company can tap into the blogosphere.

More

Have you ever noticed that regardless of what you order at a Mexican restaurant it?Äôs all made from the same ingredients – meat, cheese, beans, rice, lettuce, tomatoes and tortillas? What a marketing job the early Mexican restaurant owners went through. Faced with the realization that they didn?Äôt have much of a business if all they could come up with was one item on the menu whose ingredients were meat, cheese, beans, rice, lettuce, tomatoes and tortillas, they developed a full menu of dishes with names like burritos, tacos, enchiladas, chimichangas, and fajitas ?Äì all with the exact same ingredients ?Äì and successfully sold it to the American consumer. Their marketing was so good that in Mexican restaurants all over America you can actually hear people say things like, ?ÄúI prefer the fajitas over the burritos,?Äù which just isn?Äôt logical given that they are the exact same thing just with a different name.

Web technology is kind of like Mexican food ?Äì its all basically the same thing (http, html, with a side of scripting), but the technologists and consultants have come up with different names for various applications for purely self-aggrandizement purposes. Take blogging for example. Why not call a spade a spade and call it keeping an online journal. When businesses blog its called ?ÄúCorporate Blogging?Äù rather than ?Äútalking to clients?Äù. I guess corporate blogging sounds more important.

The point of this post is not to demean the value of blogging, but rather to keep things in perspective. I read a great article last week that is a great complimentary piece to this post. Enjoy!

A BLOGGER IS JUST A WRITER WITH A COOLER NAME

Why Blogging vs. Traditional Media Has Been Oversold

January 16, 2006

QwikFIND ID: AAR31G

By Simon Dumenco

I?Äôve been thinking of what I am — about what any media person in the digital age is — since having coffee last week with a 30-something newspaper editor who bemoaned the fact that newspapers keep on setting up blogs as these separate, exotic add-ons to their Web sites, instead of integrating blogging into their usual newsgathering operations. There?Äôs simply no good reason to segregate the functions, he insisted.

And it occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing — writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology. Even though I tend to first use Microsoft Word on the way to being published, I am not, say, a Worder or Wordder. (more…)