Archive for the 'News from the blogosphere' Category

I have decided that once a week I will highlight a small business blog that does an exemplary job of blogging. This week’s site is the Artsy Asylum run by Susan Reynolds. Susan is clearly passionate about art and weaves some really fun and interesting stories around all topics art. Susan is clearly a seasoned blogger and has done a great job of setting up her blog. The one criticism I have is that she has a lot going on in her side bars, which gives it a cluttered look. Check it out and see what you think.

One of the biggest benefits of blogging is the contacts you make. It starts with you exchanging comments in one another’s blogs and then you begin to exchange emails, connect on LinkedIn and really start to exchange ideas. One such contact I have made is Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah runs a blog about how web tools enable companies to delight customers. Jeremiah knows his technology. More importantly however, he is probably the most passionate, genuine blogger I know. If you’re looking for a great example of how to run a blog, you need look no further than Jeremiah’s blog.

Miss Rogue has quite an idea brewing over at her blog. It ties in nicely with the idea I have been mulling over recently – developing a formal agile marketing methodology. Check out her blog and her wiki and let me know if you think her idea has merit.

These are my thoughts on Pinko Marketing:

I truly believe that this is an important message that needs to be heard. Unfortunately, I believe the majority of people will tune out the message because of the negative connotations most people have to the word “pinko”. What a shame that would be!

More importantly, all that she has done thus far is provided a very glossed over utopian view of how the masses will control the marketing message. Don?Äôt get me wrong, this is a good start, but unless she backs it up with methodology, practical applications and real world examples I don?Äôt think her idea will gain much traction. When I read the Pinko manifesto I recently thought of two recent blog posts I had read on “agile marketing” – here and here. IMHO I think the ideal scenario would be to develop an agile marketing methodology designed to engage and empower the market.

Nick Carr recently posted seven rules for corporate blogging on his blog in response to Scoble having cracked (his opinion, not mine).¬? I think some of his rules certainly have merit, while others are just too over the top.¬? The following are his seven rules with my comments interspersed.

1) Don’t do it. If you have no compelling business reason to get involved in the blogosphere, then don’t. While there’s no evidence, beyond a few anecdotes, that corporate blogging leads to better business results, there are clearly risks. If you give bloggers too much freedom, they may “go native” and tarnish your reputation by writing something stupid. If you try to rein them in, you’ll be attacked for being a dinosaur. That’s a lose-lose situation – the kind companies should avoid if at all possible. And don’t buy that nonsense about needing to have “conversations” with the marketplace. That’s an ideology, not a strategy.

I agree wholeheartedly with Nick’s statement -¬? If you have no compelling business reason to get involved in the blogosphere, then don’t.¬?¬? I think that this also ties into another one of my beliefs on corporate blogging which is that not all businesses need to have a blog. The important thing to remember is that you should clearly define your blogging objectives and strategy before you start writing.

¬?I somewhat agree with Nick’s statement – If you give bloggers too much freedom, they may “go native” and tarnish your reputation by writing something stupid. This is easily preventable by setting corporate blogging guidelines at the outset. Hill and Knowlton, a PR/Advertising company, has some of the best guidelines that I have come across.

I completely disagree with Nick’s statement – And don’t buy that nonsense about needing to have “conversations” with the marketplace. That’s an ideology, not a strategy. I’m sorry Nick, but Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to satisfy customers and the only way you can effectively do this is by talking to people in your market(s) and a corporate blog is one of the corporate communications tools that facilitates conversations.

2) Use blogs to advance your business interests. OK, you’ve decided to ignore my first rule. Fine. But don’t get carried away. For companies, blogging should be treated as another channel for corporate communications, with its own strengths and weaknesses. You should use that channel to get your message out, not to give employees a sand pile for self-expression. Yes, corporate bloggers should write with honesty and personality, but they should never forget – nor let their readers forget – that they’re speaking on behalf of their employer. If a corporate blogger is embarrassed to be promoting his company’s interests in public, he shouldn’t be a corporate blogger.

I think rule 2 is rather sensible.¬? It also reinforces the need for well defined corporate blogging guidelines.

3) Stick to your goals. Maybe the goal of your blogging program is to help customers use your products more effectively. Maybe it’s to make your company more attractive to potential recruits. Maybe it’s to influence the public or lawmakers. The important thing is to be clear about your objectives, to stick to them and, as with any corporate program, to routinely evaluate how well you’re meeting them. If blogging isn’t working, then change what you’re doing (or who’s doing it). If it still isn’t working, then stop it.

I agree 100%.¬? This goes back to having clearly defined objectives and strategy before starting your blog.¬?

4) Choose your bloggers wisely. Blogging is a hot medium. The people who blog for your company should be ones who can keep their cool – and who aren’t likely to fall in love with their own words. Often, the people who most want to be allowed to blog are precisely the ones who shouldn’t be allowed to blog.

I also agree with this.¬? Blogging, as you will find out once you get rolling, requires thick skin and a level head.¬? As Scoble has shown, even the best of them lose it on occasion. A blogger on tilt can quickly negate all hard won goodwill that your blog may have garnered.

5) Assign blogging buddies. You need to trust your bloggers, not censor them. On the other hand, blogging makes publishing so simple that having some kind of circuit breaker can make a lot of sense. Think about requiring each of your corporate bloggers to have a blogging buddy – a colleague who reads each post before it’s published. All boggers have had the experience of hitting the “publish” button too soon – and then regretting it. A second set of eyes will solve most problems before they even happen. And your bloggers will thank you for that (after, perhaps, some initial whining).

I really like this suggestion!¬? We have all pushed the send button and then instantly regretted it.¬? Pushing the “publish” button on a blog can actually be worse as the number of subscribers can be significantly larger than the recipient list in your email.

6) Be wary of allowing comments. Most people who comment on other people’s blogs are smart and insightful. But “most” isn’t “all.” In addition to being a spam-magnet, blog comments can be nasty, obscene, and offensive. This can lead to another lose-lose situation: If you don’t censor comments, you’ll end up with stuff that can embarrass your company. If you do censor them, you’ll be accused of, well, censorship. In most cases, it’s best just to turn off the comment feature from the get-go. That may annoy the true believers, but they’re a tiny minority anyway.

I completely disagree with this rule. Blogging only becomes a two way communication medium when the comments and trackback features are turned on.¬? If you don?Äôt have them turned on then you are essentially giving your the people in your market(s) the middle finger – your voice is not important to me.¬? The whole point of blogging is to engage in conversations and you can?Äôt do that effectively with the comments and trackback features turned off. Lastly, if it is spam you are worried about then make sure your blog software supports the Akismet plug-in.

7) Call in the lawyers. I hate to say it, but if you’re allowing your employees to blog on your dime, you’re liable for what they write. Better safe than sued.

I disagree with this 100%.¬? As one person commented on Nick’s blog, “‘Calling in the lawyers’ would kill any chance of a blog getting off the ground. Set good blogging guidelines and leave the lawyers out of it.

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.

Its been said here before that with blogs, its all about the conversations. The way conversations happen in the blogosphere is via comments and to a lesser extent, trackbacks. The problem is that when you start conversing in the blogosphere, keeping track of what you said and where you said it becomes cumbersome. That was until came along.

How do you know how well your blog is doing? One of the things you can do is to monitor the number of page views your blog is receiving with the idea that the number of page views should increase over time for successful blogs. There are two problems with that approach. The first being that the total number of page views and growth there of does not accurately correlate with the ?Äúsuccess?Äù of a blog. It is possible to have a very successful niche specific blog with a small target audience with not much growth over time. The second problem with this measurement is that it doesn?Äôt quantify the most important variable in blogging ?Äì conversations. If you don?Äôt have conversation in your blog then you don?Äôt have much. So what we need is a formula for measuring a blogs conversation coefficient.

That is precisely what Stowe Boyd did the other day in his blog. You can read the original post here with the follow up post here. The crux of his theory is that successful blogs — ones that were currently viable and vibrant, and those that were on a growth trajectory from their start — shared a common characteristic: The ratio between posts and comments+trackbacks. Thus the Conversational Index (CI)= (Comments+Trackbacks)/Posts. This means the CI gets larger as the conversation gets richer.

While this may not be a perfect algorithm to measure a blog?Äôs true success, I do think it does provide a good picture of a blog?Äôs general health.

This is just brilliant….

BLOGUE, by Owen Thomas (apologies to Madonna)

By Xeni Jardin

Xeni Jardin:

Owen “Ditherati” Thomas shares the following original monstrosity masterpiece of pop music parody with BoingBoing. “If you film the music video,” says Owen, “I’d gladly pay $1.99 on iTunes for it.”

“BLOGUE”Strike a post
Strike a post
Blogue, blogue, blogue
Blogue, blogue, blogue

Surf around, every page you load is tragic
Tripe everywhere that you go [surf around]
You try everything you can to escape
The mainstream media you know [media you know]

When all else fails and you long to read
Something better than your feeds today
I know a place where you can have your say
It’s called the blogosphere, and here’s what it’s for, so

Chorus:

Come on, blogue
Let your fingers move to the music [move to the music]
Hey, hey, hey
Come on, blogue
Let your fingers go with the flow [go with the flow]
You know you can do it

You don’t have to do real reporting
Link to it, that’s what it’s for [that's what it's for]
Stay inside, for your finest inspiration
No need to open the door [open up the door]

It makes no difference if you’re black or white
If you’re a boy or a girl
If the server’s pumping it will give you new life
You’re a microstar, yes, that’s what you are, you know it

(chorus, substituting “groove” for “move”)

Traffic’s where you find it
Not just where the AdWords mine it
Hits are in the trivial
That’s where I feel so pivotal
Whimsical, like Justin Hall
So get up on the blogosphere

(chorus)
Blogue, [Blogue]
PageRank’s where you find it [move to the music]
Blogue, [Blogue]
PageRank’s where you find it [go with the flow]

Mark Cuban, Malik, Om,
Nick Denton, Doctorow
Calacanis, Weblogs Inc.
Written up in Wired magazine

Daily Kos, Wonkette, Kaus
Fierce with a computer mouse
Metafilter, Dave Winer
Peter Rojas, gadget finder

They had style, they had grace
Kottke had the interface
Arianna, Ana too
Robert Scoble, Bill loves you

Ladies with an attitude
Fellows that were IMterviewed
Don’t just stand there, let’s get to it
Strike a post, there’s nothing to it

Blogue, blogue

Oooh, you’ve got to
Let your fingers move to the music
Oooh, you’ve got to just
Let your fingers go with the flow
Oooh, you’ve got to
Blogue

(c) 2006 Owen Thomas with apologies to Madonna