Jeff Jarvis says:

The subtitle is “direct conversations with Dell” but this is as much a conversation as yelling at a brick wall. There is not one link there. It’s filled with promotions for Dell’s wonderfulness.

But seriously, folks, the first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them. The conversation is already happening out there without you. Join in that conversation. Dell continues to believe that it can control the conversation. That horse is out of the barn, over the horizon, dead, and buried.

Steve Rubel says:

More importantly, Dell really failed to get the blog going the way that they could have. This was a golden opportunity for the company. They could use the blog to engage the community in a genuine conversation on the critical issues that have dogged them for years now as well as the good things they are doing. (Recent pictures of a Dell computer blowing up at a conference in Japan were recently the rage in the blogosphere and now the media.) However, they chose not to.

Scoble says:

By the way, I agree with Andy Lark that we should be nicer to new companies that try the bloggy Web. At least give them a couple of weeks to get settled into their new homes before we start lobbing rocks through their front windows. Of course, I doubt anyone will listen to me because these companies came into the bloggy Web so late that the mob isn’t gonna automatically be nice the way they were to me three years ago.

I agree with Scoble – give them a few weeks to get things straightened out. However, had they done their homework at the outset, they probably wouldn’t have received the lambasting that they did. Rest assured that with all of the eyes on Dell’s blog, it will either shape up nicely or be pulled within the month. My guess is that they will be forced into doing it right. Their post today shows that they are starting to get it.

Good luck Dell.

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• 35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate Weblogs this year. Combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006.
• Only 32 percent of marketing executives said they use corporate Weblogs to generate WoM around their company’s products or services.
• 64 percent of executives spend less than $500,000 to deploy and manage corporate Weblogs.

Like most people you’re probably thinking that 70% is awfully high. Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing thought there was something not quite right with the study, so she sent them a note asking them if they could clarify how they had got that number. This was the response:

Information about JupiterResearch reports are available to accredited members of the press for free and clients.After looking at your blog link, JupiterResearch has decided not to fulfill your request for more information since the blog is closely tied with your company that serves as a consultancy. I?Äôm sorry I didn?Äôt tell you this earlier, I didn?Äôt realize that your company and blog were so closely affiliated.

If you?Äôd like more information about becoming a client or purchasing a report, please let me know.

A weak reply if you ask me. Fard Johnmar also thought it was lame as well and plunked down $750 to purchased the report. He’s provided a professional and objective review of the JupiterResearch study on Healthcare Vox. Interestingly, even after reading the report Fard has unanswered questions about the methodology.

“I feel it is important for me to share my observations about the report because it is far from adequate. I have two pieces of advice for readers: Don?Äôt buy this report. Don?Äôt accept the results of this survey.”

I suggest you read Fard’s full post.

My conclusion is that JupiterResearch was a bit optimistic. I do think that many businesses will embrace blogging as an effective corporate communications tool, but 70% by year end is unlikely.

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To Advertisers:

PayPerPost is an automated system that allows you to promote your Web site, product, service or company through the PayPerPost network of bloggers. Advertise on blogs to create buzz, build traffic, gain link backs for search engine ranking, syndicate content and much more. You provide the topic, our network of bloggers create the stories and post them on their individual blogs.

To Bloggers:

Get Paid to Blog. You’ve been writing about Web sites, products, services and companies you love for years and you have yet to benefit from all the sales and traffic you have helped generate. That’s about to change. With PayPerPost advertisers are willing to pay you to post on topics. Search through a list of topics, make a blog posting, get your content approved, and get paid. It’s that simple.

As you can imagine, there are plenty of opinions being bandied about. Jason Calacanis sums it up best – The currency of blogging is authenticity and trust… you pay folks to blog about a product and you compromise that. I would almost care about this, but it’s so obvious to everyone that this is either a joke or an idiot that there is nothing more to say.

Of course, Scoble hits it on the head as well - After all, I read blogs and forums to try to learn the TRUTH about products, companies, movements, and ideas. Advertising rarely brings truth.
I guess this sort of thing was inevitable especially when you consider how far Hugh MacLeod hit one out of the park with Stormhoek. I suspect that this pay to blog tactic will not gain much traction as the bloggers that would participate in such a scheme dont have the kind of currency to deliver a decent ROI to the advertisers.

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Q: What is one of the primary benefits of business blogging?

A: Increase online exposure through improved search engine rankings.

B: Create new business relationships and nurture long time partnerships.

C: Improve internal and external communications.

D: Get Smarter (Improve industry knowledge).

E: All of the above

If you answered “E” – all of the above, you’re right. While most people focus on benefits A-C, one should not overlook the fact that following blogs in your industry will make you more knowledgeable. There are literally hundreds of quality blogs for each business industry/discipline. In my RSS news reader, I have about 10 blogs that are focused on Business Blogging and about 20 more blogs focused on Marketing. I am positive that if there is breaking news or something profound being said about either of these topics, that I will find out about it in one of the blogs that I follow.

Case in point. For the past few weeks, I have been trying to find a site that provides ongoing case studies that discus how small to medium sized businesses have integrated blogging into their marketing mix and the benefits that they have received. Well, today I opened up Bloglines and found what I was looking for.

Want to convince your company that a blog can help them?

Naked Conversations has a great heads-up on The Pajama Market. The Pajama Market focuses on a different small-business every day, and how they have integrated blogs into their marketing mix. Everything from pubs, to resorts, to knitting companies are covered. TPM covers how each business is utilizing the blog, their favorite posts, and how effective they feel the blog is in helping the business grow.

If you’re like me, catchphrases like ‘markets are conversations’ are good up to a point, then you need to see real-world examples of ideas being put into action. TPM gives us that, and shows what can happen when a business actually tries to COMMUNICATE with their community, instead of just advertising whatever stale one-way message you want them to hear. The Pajama Market definitely goes in the ‘I wish I’d thought of that’ file.

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I read about an interesting new service this morning from an RSS feed of one of my favorite tech blogs. The service is called WhoLinked. The idea behind WhoLinked is straight forward; it’s a service that publishes a list of sites that link to your site on your site. Installing WhoLinked is EXTREMELY easy – I had it installed in under 5 minutes.

WhoLinked adds value to your blog because it provides your readers a roadmap to conversations that revolve around the same topics found in your blog. Being able to show a list of sites that link to you also adds a bit of credibility to your blog. It doesn’t replace your blog roll, but it does compliment it.

More from the Technology Evangelist

Real World Experience

I installed WhoLinked on Technology Evangelist around two weeks ago. What have I learned so far? I haven’t determined what effect it has on credibility, although our RSS subscriber base seems to be growing a bit faster than usual. More importantly, it has generated a measurable bump in traffic from sites you link to who have WhoLinked.com installed on their site, including WhoLinked.com, where we’re currently displayed in their #1 WhoLinked position after linking to them back on April 20th:

What’s the Catch?

Clicking on the “WHAT’S THIS?” link at the bottom of the report reveals an ad served by WhoLinked. Currently, it looks like their serving a link to Ebay, but that could change at any time. It’s unobtrusive, so not a major negative. You do share some web stats with WhoLinked since they could track how many times their script is served on your site. If you’re protective of that sort of this, this script probably isn’t for you.

Marketing Application

Should you seek out sites publishing their WhoLinked stats, then link to them to gain a backlink? Why not, right? Keep in mind that appearing in a WhoLinked report won’t improve your PageRank or search engine rankings since it uses JavaScript. But click throughs are nothing to shake a stick at.

He even comes up with a great promotional campaign centered on the WhoLinked app.

Let’s Have Some Fun

I published our current WhoLinked stats above. If you can bump any of the current sites off the list in the next 30 days, I’ll send you $50* (or $50 to the charity of you choice). Wait! Let’s make it easier. I’ve increased our wholinked.com report from 5 to 10 sites, so there is as much as $500 on the line (yeah, it’s not a ton of cash, but really, could it be any easier to win?):

If you manage to move into the top-10 by June 10th, you’re in the money. Sites currently on the list are not eligible. I have to have some rules, right? 

How to enter: Link to www.technologyevangelist.com It’s that easy. How to win? According to WhoLinked.com’s FAQ, here is how they determine rankings:
We show the highest-quality links first, as determined by the search engines. This includes Google PageRank. If you have more links than there is room for, they won’t show up.

So link away. Give it your best shot. Link from as many sites as you can. It doesn’t hurt to try, and it’s easy money if you win. By the way, your site doesn’t have to be a blog to be eligible. Any old website will do.

Bonus: I’m interested in finding out if WhoLinked.com’s system can be gamed by a creative marketer. If you can somehow sweep our WhoLinked.com top-10, there’s $1000 in this for you. Good luck!

*We don’t want to break any laws so we’ll figure out how to do legal awards at the end of the contest. Post questions to the comments, or send me an email to the address listed on my profile page.

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There is a new service called Zookoda that just launched. I read about Zookoda today on Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch.

If you are a blogger looking for a solution, either of Zookoda or Feedburner will work. I like Feedburner because, frankly, I don?Äôt want to spend a lot of time formatting templates and going through detailed reports: Feedburner?Äôs one-size-fits-all approach is perfect for TechCrunch, and I like the fact that all of my RSS and email subscription statistics are managed in one dashboard. For bloggers looking for a more robust, customizable solution, or who want more detailed reporting, Zookoda is a very user friendly product that will work extremely well.

That was enough for me to give Zookoda a try. After 15 minutes of unsuccessfully trying to get it to work, I went back to Feedburner. Hey Michael, Zookoda is not user friendly.

Message to Zookoda: Make your service intuitive to set up. You should have a step by step set of instructions for each service offering. Make it simple. I had such an unpleasant experience that I will never try your service again, especially when Feedburner is so easy.

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…only minorities of top executives surveyed are convinced to “a great extent” that corporate blogging is growing in credibility either as a communications medium (5%), brand-building technique (3%), or a sales or lead generation tool (less than 1%). In contrast, most executives are somewhat or not at all convinced of blogs’ growing credibility in these areas, (62%, 74%, and 70% respectively).

Among other highlights of the survey:

• Even though 12% of senior executives say their companies have taken legal or other action in response to a blog, only 20% report having a formal process in place for monitoring blogs written about the company.

This is frightening. The blogosphere is the place where conversations are taking place. Its the place where your customers are talking about you. Its the place where your competitors are talking about you. Joining in these conversations should be priority #1 for businesses – and you dont need a blog to do that.

• A minority (15%) say that someone in their organization is currently writing a blog related to the company or its activities.
• Only one in five (21%) report reading business-related blogs once a week or more frequently.
• Only 30% of senior executives report that they have a thorough understanding of the term “Internet blog.”
• Forty percent believe that their companies should have corporate policies to address the writing of blogs unrelated to the company or its activities. This compares with the 77% who believe their companies should have such policies concerning the authoring of blogs sanctioned by the company.

Absolutely! Before you unleash your corporate blog(s) you must have blogging policies in place. You can find out more about developing corporate blogging policies here.

• Further, 8% report organizing a team of dedicated people to write sanctioned blogs about the company and its activities.

I wonder what percentage of these companies have employees that are writing unsanctioned blogs? I guess if they are not monitoring the blogosphere then they will never find out. Ignorance is bliss.

• Three percent said their company changed its product, service, or policies because of publicity generated by a blog written about it.

Andy Beal summed it up best on his blog – Could it be we need to come up with a better way of explaining what a “blog” is? I bet if they conducted a similar survey and asked “Are you interested in hearing what your customers think of your business?”, we’d get a different response.

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This debate, as well as the Slate article proclaiming the death of blogs, is really short sighted in my opinion. The value of blogging does not come from Adsense revenue, but rather in the intangible benefits that blogging provides – improving your career opportunities, relationship marketing and improved online visibility just to name a few. Obviously it’s much easier to quantify the ROI when your only metric is Adsense, but to assume that is the only ROI metric for blogs is making a huge mistake.

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Can you imagine working for a company that is so short-sighted that it blocks its employees from reading RSS feeds? Do they not realize that RSS feeds + RSS Aggregators = huge time savings? Hear a few reasons I think these companies are shooting themselves in the foot.

They can not easily hear what the market is saying about them and participate in the conversation.

They can not easily collect business intelligence by keeping tabs on what their competitors are doing.

They do not encourage their employees to improve their skills and knowledge by subscribing to e-learning RSS feeds such as those found at MarketingProfs.com

The company is basically saying to its employees that it doesn’t trust any of them. Do you want to work at a company that doesnt trust its employees?

The ironic thing about this is that RSS functionality will be built in to Windows IE 7 and Vista. These companies are fighting a losing battle.

As always, if you are new to blogging or not getting the results you would like from your blog, please feel free to contact me.

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David Sifry’s been keeping up with blog growth for quite a while, and he’s become the resident expert on the topic, garnering much attention when he releases his latest ‘state of the blogosphere‘. Here is a summary of his findings:

• Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

With all of these new blogs being started how is it possible for a new entrant to even have their voice heard? Does it still make sense for a small to medium sized enterprise to even start a blog? I believe the answer is yes because search/filter (Technorati) and aggregation services (Newsgator, Bloglines) will continue to improve thus continuing to increase the signal vs noise ratio. Here are a few tips to ensure your voice will be heard.

1. Develop strategy and set goals before you begin blogging.
2. Be persistent. In most cases, you will not see significant results for at least 6 months.
3. Be an active blogger. You must blog at least once a week.
4. Blog with passion and focus. Make sure your topics are focused on the categories that you developed in the strategy phase. To ensure higher search engine placement you should also include the key words you identified in the strategy phase.
5. Network with bloggers that are focused on similar topics. Exchange links and post meaningful comments in their blogs.

If you are new to blogging or not getting the results you would like from your blog, please feel free to contact me.

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