Archive for February, 2006

This comes from WebProNews. I thought this was all solid information, most of which I have already discussed in Corporate Blogging 101, but it never hurts to hear it again.

1. You don’t know how to use your blogging software, yet you expect to look like an expert and build credibility. How could you know? Blogs haven’t been around that long, and the blogging software is continually being upgraded. You need to learn how to use your blog features that increase your findability on the Internet and readership. For example, you need to regularly use trackback, pinging, and permalinks features.

2. You are writing in a vacuum, without knowing what questions your clients want answered. You haven’t done any keyword research, or asked your current clients what they’d like to read. Even worse, you under the impression that a blog should be like an online diary. You are writing about your personal life and details, detracting from the on-target, focused purpose of your blog as a business building tool.

3. You haven’t researched other blogs in your field, or spent any time on them, leaving comments. You need to get out there and raise your hand in the blogosphere, so people will know you’re there. You also need to know what’s going on in your field.

4. You haven’t put a subscription form on your blog, and you don’t understand the whole RSS feed thingy. Your readers can’t find you or know when you have updated your blog.

5. You haven’t put any images on your blog and your blog doesn’t look as neat and tidy as your business is. It doesn’t reflect your business image or brand.

6. You haven’t put any content-appropriate ads on your blog, that don’t distract from your own products. Your blog has a non-professional, non-business look and feel to it.

7. You haven’t used categories for your blog posts and your readers are confused about wide-ranging subjects you write about. What is your core message? What is the focus of your blog? And important question you must answer for your readers: What’s in your blog for them?

8. You haven’t written anything for a month. When you’ve got a blog that has lack-luster traffic, your enthusiasm for writing begins to wane. Why bother posting, if no one is reading your words of wisdom? Then your blog slips even further, and begins to look like a ghost town. Worse, it’s still up on the Web, and people will find you and decide you maybe don’t care, went out of business, or changed your mind.

Here are some solutions:

1. Study the professional business blogs in the blogosphere and model their strategies.

2. Buy an ebook on how to set up and optimize a professional business blog

3. Take an advanced course in blogging (not one that just tells you how to get a free account and set it up, but one to explain how to optimize for business.)

4. Hire a team of professional blog experts to coach you in using your blog for your business.

5. Hire a business blog consultant team to help you tweak your blog, or do an extreme makeover

6. Delete your blog and start all over again

This is from Hendry¬?Lee at Spero News.

Mozilla Firefox¬? – the only browser I use for browsing. One useful feature of this browser is the tab feature, which allows user to open multiple browser window on a single window.

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wbloggar¬? – a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) blog editor software that allows me to post to many different blog platforms and save drafts for later editing and posting.

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FeedDemon¬? – a desktop based news aggregator. I subscribe to hundreds of RSS and Atom feeds as the news source for blogging. It also supports podcasting. This software helps me keep up with the amount of information I need to consume on a daily basis. It tells me when new content is available without having me to check the site manually.

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SnagIt¬? – great program for capturing text, images on your desktop. This saves a lot of time as you can grab only a section of the window, so you don?Äôt need to crop it manually using an image editing software. SnagIt can produce the torn paper effect on images in a snap, a feature that I use frequently on my blogs.

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Adobe Photoshop¬? – the only image editing software I rely on. SnagIt can do basic editing but since I sometimes design some logo and perform other image processing tasks, I need this software. I find it particularly useful to optimize images for web. I try to limit the size of every image I post to under 20KB, often times less than 10 KB.

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Mindjet MindManager¬? – the indispensable mind-mapping software for project planning, article brainstorming, and others. I even use it to get a draft outline of my article series. Mind-mapping happens to be my favorite way to brainstorm.

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The Journal¬? – My desktop based journaling software for notes, ideas, URLs, todo list, frequently asked questions, resources, journals and scratch pad. I implement my to-do list using this software successfully, except the calendaring system.

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Gmail¬? – My favorite e-mail program that I use to check emails twice a day. Having forwarding, POP3 and excellent filtering features make it great. Recently, Google has integrated Google Talk with this e-mail service. This means you can keep in touch with your colleagues more easily. It even captures the conversation, which consists of ideas and other important things into its own folder.

PRWeb, an online news and press release distribution service just came out with a service that allows bloggers to reference online press releases via a trackback.¬? Though I haven?Äôt had a chance to try this service out yet, but Im sure I will, it looks to be a great new feature that benefits both the company that issued the press release as well as the bloggers talking about the press release.

In the past, a blogger could always reference a particular online press release in his/her blog, which was fine except that it was virtually impossible for the company to track who was “talking” about its press release and the blogger didn?Äôt get any quantitative benefit from the mention.¬? Adding a trackback to the online press release changes all of that.¬? Now, the company that issued the press release can see (as well as anyone else reading the online press release), via the trackbacks, who is talking about the press release and the blogger gets a bit of publicity via the trackback link as well. A win-win situation for everyone.¬? Any functionality that precipitates conversation in the market is good for business.

The only drawback that I can see is managing the trackback approval.¬? In typical blog software the blog owner can approve/disapprove all comments and trackbacks to avoid spam.¬? How this works on PRWeb’s service is still unknown.

I?Äôve submitted a trackback in this post to the original PR piece so we?Äôll see if it is really working or not. ¬?¬?

Unfortunately many corporate blogs written today are simply PR pieces touting the supposed expertise of the company or the latest ?Äòrevolutionary?Äô service that has just been launched.¬? The effectiveness of these blogs is minimal.¬? As I’ve said before, corporate blogs are all about starting conversations within the market you participate.¬? Corporate blogging is best when the blogger, usually a principal of the company, is passionate about the subject.¬? A classic example of a passionate corporate blogger is Ron DeCorte, a master watch maker.¬? I learned of Ron?Äôs blog from BoingBoing, one of my favourite blogs.¬? Here is what they had to say about Ron?Äôs blog:

Ron DeCorte is a master watch maker who creates his own timepieces, restores complex mechanisms, and has a deep interest in automatons. The articles he writes are fascinating and his photos of dissected complications are stunning. From his study of a Vacheron Constantin minute repeater wristwatch movement:

Unlike a lot of other watch complications, the repeater is a bit mysterious, having most of its mechanism hidden under the dial. And so I thought it would be interesting to present an article on the subject of repeaters, particularly the minute repeater…

Striking watches, repeaters, were developed prior to electricity when checking the time during the night wasn?Äôt as easy as turning on a light bulb or looking at the illuminated electric clock. And during some of those long Sunday church services many a man was known to reach into his pocket, cradle his repeater in his hand, and count the hours and minutes until he was free to go fishing, drinking with his buddies at the pub, or visit his mistress!

(Seen here, a) Vacheron Constantin minute repeater wristwatch movement, topless. The minute repeater strikes the hours, quarter hours, and minutes, on two gongs, each with a different pitch. Yes, there are exceptions to this two-gong rule, but they are very rare.

Daniel Gross from Slate came out with a story last week called ?ÄúTwilight of the Blogs – Are they over as a business??Äù which got my ire up.¬? To bolster his claim that Blogs, as a business, were already yesterday?Äôs news, Daniel references an article in New York-?ÄúClive Thompson concludes that the blog industry has already tri-furcated into an ?ÄòA-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs?Äîthen hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work.?Äô In other words, a few people will make money?Äîjournalist money, not Wall Street money?Äîand the hordes of late joiners will make nothing.?Äù

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I guess neither one of these guys read David Sifry?Äôs (CEO of Technorati) ?ÄúState of the Blogosphere?Äù post in which he cites data collected from Technorati that shows that latecomers do have a chance at gaining widespread popularity.¬? I tend to think David Sifry has more insight into the business of blogging than either Daniel or Clive have, but let?Äôs just assume that blogging as a business is over, which is to say that the chance to create a profitable business around blogging is over. Does that mean that businesses shouldn?Äôt be blogging?¬? Absolutely not!¬? Businesses using blogs as a way to interact with their markets is far from a dead activity.¬? Furthermore, businesses that have a corporate blog in their marketing communications quiver will be much better off than those businesses that don?Äôt have a corporate blog.

Edgeio has been getting a lot of buzz recently and rightly so. Tom Raftery was lucky enough to be able to give it a test drive yesterday and had this to say about it on his blog.

I received an invite to take a sneak peek at Edgeio this morning – Edgeio is Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame?Äôs latest start-up. The tagline for Edgeio is ?ÄúListings from the edge?Äù so the name comes from the word ?Äúedge?Äù and ?Äúio?Äù (input/output?).

The idea behind Edgeio is that people can advertise items for sale from their website or blog and if they include the ?ÄúListing?Äù tag with the post, the Edgeio site will automatically find the post and List it on Edgeio. Edgeio will therefore become a free version of eBay (you won?Äôt have to pay to be listed on Edgeio, you simply post on your site including the ?Äúlisting?Äù tag in your post) where you maintain ownership of the data!

This definitely sounds like a very nice, well thought out application, but I don?Äôt think it can compete with the likes of eBay as the guys at razorshine seem to think. The reason Edgeio, as it is now, doesn?Äôt stand up well with eBay is that there is a critical piece of the puzzle that is missing and that is a reputation engine. Reputation is what makes eBay a trusted market place. ¬?There is, however, a market for Edgeio ?Äì the same marketplace now dominated by Craig’s List and Google’s adsense.

I am really anxious to check out Edgeio for myself.

Microsoft’s uber blogger, Robert Scoble, has six tips on how to properly get your blog on.¬? They are:
Tip #1: What’s in a name? Search engine results.
Tip #2: Read a bunch of blogs before you start.
Tip #3: Keep it simple. Keep it focused.
Tip #4: Demonstrate passion.
Tip #5: Show your authority.
Tip #6: Add comments.

Of course Scoble’s post fills in all of the details.¬? Good stuff and definitely worth a read.

David Sifry from Technorati came out with his “State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search” post yesterday and it was as informative as Part 1, which dealt with growth in the blogosphere. While the entire post was chock full of great information, I was really excited by his announcement that Technorati was beta testing its filter by authority feature. This is a huge step in the right direction for all types of searches.

Filter By Authority: Giving YOU the power to tune your searches

There’s one more big feature that I wanted to write about tonight, our new Filter By Authority feature. You can see this on all keyword search results pages, looking like this:

Clicking on the green slider allows you to easily refine your search results to show greater or fewer matching blog posts. For some searches, you might want to pick and choose only posts from blogs that have been around a while and are highly influential – so pick “a lot of authority” as shown above. I’ve found this great for searches on highly trafficked topics, like “George Bush” or Olympics, or on topics that are known to get a lot of spam, like mortgage or refinance. I find that it often helps me to also answer the question, “Who is the most influential blogger talking about XXX this week, and what did she say?”

Clicking lower on the slider gives you the ability to see how different levels of filtering affect your search results. For my ego feeds, I always want to see every single mention, so I turn off filtering for those feeds. I also love looking at the charts on the left-hand side of each search result to see what changes when I change the filter, too.

As we implemented this feature, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to name it. We frequently use the term authority on our site when we talk about inbound links, as in “a link is a vote of authority.” So to maintain consistency we called this new feature, ” sort by authority.” But in no way should this imply a value judgment. More authority doesn’t necessarily mean more good or more interesting. In many instances, less authority yields more interesting results: a greater diversity of opinion, less mainstream thinking, more individual voices. The authority filter is a tool to fine tune results, and its a great way to zoom in on the voices that are commanding the most attention, and then zoom back out and listen to the whole diverse medium that is the blogosphere. With so many voices we’re happy to add a new tuning control!

The first thing that came to mind after reading his post was a vision of Scoble shouting, “You will respect my authority!”

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. – Cluetrain Manifesto

Q. What do you get when you cross blogging and chat?

A. 3bubbles

As Stowe Boyd posted on his blog, “The model is to support the integration of chat into blogs: a chat room for your blog, even one for every post. Imagine that next to your post’s “comments (2) | trackbacks (1)” there was an additional “chat (5)” indicating that 5 people were discussing that post, right now.

In theory it sounds pretty good as anything to facilitate conversation is always welcome, but in reality I don?Äôt see this making a big impact on blogging and here’s why. In order for a chat room to have any impact on blogging there has to be a critical mass of people at any particular post for there to be anybody actually chatting.¬? I don?Äôt know what that magic number is, but I don?Äôt think that there are many blogs that get the kind of traffic that would precipitate a vibrant chat discussion.¬? Making the chat discussions persistent so that people could see what has already been discussed might help, but I doubt it.

Let’s say you have a really wonderful new software application that you have been working on for the past year and a half and is now ready to launch. As luck would have it you don?Äôt have the necessary money to get the service launched properly- you can?Äôt hire a big PR firm to sing the praises of your revolutionary new service or do any online advertising. What do you do? Well, you can do what I did and work 24/7 doing guerrilla marketing and send your business plan out to as many angel investors and VCs that you can find and hope that its enough. But the sad reality is that it probably isn?Äôt enough. After two years of developing software that would truly revolutionize a high value niche industry and doing everything that I possibly could to get the word out, I found myself absolutely broke with personal debt that is frightening.

The takeaway – it doesn?Äôt matter how good your idea/product/service is, if you don?Äôt have connections, you don?Äôt have shit.

So what does this have to do with blogging? A lot actually, as blogging has further eroded the traditional barriers to entry, but even with the best blogging practices, you still can’t guarantee that you will get your idea/product/service in front of the right people. It seems as though the key to success these days is to get a thought leader/uber blogger/gatekeeper of the 21st century on board pumping your story. In fact, the Wall Street Journal had a nice article on this topic in which the author questioned the ethics of having these uber bloggers creating buzz for companies in which they sit on the boards of directors, are business advisors and/or have a monetary stake in the success of these companies. Is there a conflict of interest? There could be, but these guys are no different than the gatekeepers of the past. The bottom line is that if you are in a position that can increase the likelihood of success for a start up then you should be compensated for your work. Just be upfront and honest¬? about it.

Interestingly enough, just one day after this article was published Stowe Boyd, one of the new gatekeepers, was blogging about a new service called 3bubbles. What is important here was that Stowe was upfront from the get go about his relationship with 3bubbles.

The technology is neat (full disclosure, again: I am consulting to the company, and as a member of the advisory board, I have a financial interest. Be warned: I am not unbiased! This is not an independent assessment! Floss daily!) which is what first attracted me to the company, along with the story of the founders. One, Drew Golkar, dropped out of college to pursue his 3bubbles dream, and another is Jeremie Miller, who is well known to me and others as the inventor of the Jabber protocol. Good DNA and cool juju.

By taking this route Stowe never puts his integrity into question. Model behavior indeed.