BLOGthenticity

BlogWrite for CEOs: New corporate blogging survey grossly inflates percentage of companies that are blogging
Sorry, I can’t let this one pass. As much as I’d like to believe the reported results of the iUpload and Guidewire Group Corporate Blogging Survey released this week, I can’t. The survey reports that 89% of companies are blogging. And that corporate adoption of blogging is entering the hyper growth phase.

Filed under: Business Blogging, Charlie, General | Comments Off

The Doc Searls Weblog : Friday, October 21, 2005
Tom Hespos writes about what a hypothetical ‘converstion department’ at a corporation might look like:
I think we can agree that comparatively few companies have made any sort of investment in opening and continuing meaningful dialogue with their customers online. We’ve got the broadcast model to thank for that. As you know, when you¹re holding a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. When folks are out there praising or panning a product or brand, corporations tend to look at the problem as a mass marketing problem. In reality, most of the panning can be dealt with effectively by empowering somebody to join the conversation, actually listen, and take the feedback to the company for incorporation. Most of the praise can be greatly amplified in the same way.

Filed under: Charlie, General | Comments Off

The latest in really stupidly bad corporate blogs.

VentureBlog: Don’t Let Your Advertising Agency Write Your Blog
Wrigley’s gum has started the Juicy Fruit Blog. The advertising geniuses at Juicy Fruit devised an add campaign the essence of which is 2 people simultaneously grab hold of the last pack of Juicy Fruit and both refuse to let go of said pack of gum; as a result, the two people must do everything together including shaving, singing in the choir, wrestling, etc. In keeping with this campaign, the Juicy Fruit blog chronicles the comings and goings of the two attached Juicy Fruit fanatics.

Filed under: Business Blogging, Charlie, General | Comments Off

BlogWrite for CEOs: Best new downloadable white papers on corporate blogging
Get ‘em here:

The Content Factor’s To Blog Or Not To Blog (download page)

Edelman/Intelliseek’s The Rise of Employee Bloggers (download page)

Filed under: Business Blogging, Charlie | Comments Off

The Diva Marketing Blog
Chrysler Media Group joins the growing list of Fortune 100s to launch a blog … calling it Firehouse.biz. You have to register … which I did but couldn’t access the blog. Perhaps you’ll have better luck.

By the way, here’s another set of guidelines for your files.

Filed under: Business Blogging, Charlie | Comments Off

Interested in finding out what others are doing in corporate blogging? Here’s a round up by Stephen Baker from Business Week. Paul’s Tinbasher is mentioned (Paul is a contributor to Blogthenticity).

Thanks for all the responses to my call for small business blogs. I went through the comments and put together these links, in no particular order, so it will be easier to check them out.

Filed under: Business Blogging, Charlie, General | Comments Off

The results of the corporate blogging survey from Backbone Media have been published. I was one of the participants through The Security Awareness Blog.

“With all of the buzz around corporate blogging, we wanted to understand the real value of it for companies. Why would a company want to start blogging, who should blog, what makes a blog successful, and how can a company use this type of website to make a positive impact on business?”

Here are the survey results and here is a PDF Link.

Filed under: BLOGthenticity, Business Blogging, General, Greg, Why Blog? | Comments Off

I am currently researching the possibility of adding podcasts to enhance our business blogging efforts. We certainly have the messages to deliver and our audience has grown exponentially this summer. It seems like the next transition.

But, is it me or is podcasting growing faster than the technology can handle it? I don’t want our audio messages to come across as desktop/garage style pirate radio. For the last several months, I’ve been thinking about how businesses can truly benefit from podcasts as much as blogs have in the last year. I’m contacting the right people, researching the right tools and testing as much as possible before we go public. It took a good six months last year for our blog to catch a groove with content, style and audience. How long will the podcast experiment take?

Can anyone share some wisdom on this topic?

Filed under: BLOGthenticity, Business Blogging, General, Greg | Comments Off

It’s been a good day for useful info!

Here is an entertaining article, via BW’s Blogspotting, that tries to frame the question - what is the difference between a blog and a message board, and why one over the other?

Read the comments, too!

Common Craft - Social Design for the Web: DeathMatch: Bad, Bad Leroy Blog vs. Mean Mr. Message Board
Here we are at the Web 2.0 Virtual Games and next up we have a fight to the death between the veteran collaboration tool, Mean Mr. Message Board and the upstart Bad Bad, Leroy Blog. This will be one for the record books folks…

Filed under: Charlie, How to Blog | Comments Off

One of the reaction I get when I tell companies that blogging is a conversation is - how the heck can I read them all and keep up with them.

Forget the standard answers about RSS readers and such, read this article for some interesting solutions.

How marketers can monitor what 10 million bloggers are up to
Mining blogs for marketing intelligence is all the rage. But how to do it?

Filed under: Charlie, How to Blog | Comments Off

Authenticity in blogging is still very strong. It’s a major impediment to true story-telling in the PR sense.

Strategic Public Relations: P&G’s Blogging Secret

PR Machine noted recently that P&G is now marketing via blogs. According to AdRants, it’s via a full-fledged character blog for Sparkle Body Spray “Where the Secret Girls get real.”

Secret_1

Hmm, blog characters get real? Nah, I’m not going there. Since skewering McDonald’s Lincoln Fry blog, I have helped over analyze this discussion, including my latest thoughts on the topic. I’m moving on.

But then again, is the old fictitious story still useful? Can’t we find real people who can tell a real story? Or, can we find a real person to tell a real story and still be credible?

This is something we all need to grapple with.

Filed under: Charlie, How to Blog | Comments Off

One year ago I created the Security Awareness Blog as a tips and tricks site and to serve as the central publishing house for Winn Schwartau, our company president. He writes columns for half a dozen Info Security trade magazines and uses the blog mainly for his outrageous rants.

Man, can he rant. This is one guy you don’t want to get on the bad side of, ever. Recently, he got fed up with the problems associated with his personal and work computers. His frustration led to a high profile switch from PCs to Mac.

As soon as the Apple/Mac community heard about his switch in a Network World column and a blog post, the blog traffic and comments section exploded. We went from a humble 4,000 visitors a month to 65,000 in three days. In fact, our corporate sites showed a spike in traffic and sales leads followed briskly.

My point is…if it wasn’t for the infrastructure established in the blog, we would not have been able to capture the audience the way we did: hundreds of new links from Mac news sites and forums; thousands of newsletter subscribers; new members to our Information Security forum; sales leads from the company contact page; and media interviews with Winn.

Is your blog ready for the big hit?

Filed under: BLOGthenticity, Business Blogging, Greg, Why Blog? | Comments Off

Here is a good and thoughtful commentary that mentions observations similar to mine: there is a ton of confusion as to the what, when, how of corporate blogging.

Guidewire Group - A Social Media Enterprise: What do corporations want?
Interestingly, there was little discussion about corporations and the blogosphere at these events. Based on conversations I had over the course of the three days, it’s clear that there is very little mutual understanding between the entrepreneurs, geeks and enthusiasts on one side and the mainstream corporate marketing and communications professionals on the other. Which makes me feel like a U.N. interpreter.

Filed under: Charlie, Why Blog? | 1 Comment »

I measured the effectiveness of our marketing blogs in a few ways:
- I used Google to check our ranking and who’s linking
- I used Technorati to measure our impact in the blog space and to see who’s talking about us.
- I review the number and quality of the comments left, since it’s a good gauge of the readership
- Of course, I also use standard web techniques of traffic and visitors and analysis of the referring links.

The previous in this series: ‘Blogs are about being involved in the conversation about your company‘

Filed under: Charlie, General, How to Blog, Why Blog? | Comments Off

There are a few ways you can participate in the blogosphere:
- do it yourself
- interact with other blogs
- find someone already doing it and support them

The great thing about the way blogs are with their comments and permalinks, is that it sometimes doesn’t matter where the conversation takes place, so long as it does. That means that at a minimum, you need to participate in relevant conversation that talk about your company. If you don’t participate, you lose out on the benefits of blogs in general. If you don’t participate, then someone else is driving the conversation.

Here’s a good shot across the bow by Business Week.

Here’s the previous post in this series - Strategy to feed a blog

Filed under: Charlie, General, How to Blog, Why Blog? | Comments Off

Borrowing a term from journalism, to keep a blog alive, you need to ‘feed the monster’. You also need to show honesty, transparency, and passion. You need to keep the conversation going regularly and intelligently to keep the readership interested – not much different than any publication. And, of course, you need to keep on top of the comments, participating in the conversation on your blog and on other blogs as well (especially if they comment on your posts).

When you do blog, keep your posts short and to the point. Participate (post or comment) regularly and actively. And, make it easy for the blogger (if you leave a comment) or a reader (if you have your own blog) to contact you.

Here are ‘Top 7 tips to write an effective blog’ from ‘BlogWrite for CEOs’.

The previous post in this series - What makes a blog?

Filed under: Charlie, General, How to Blog, Why Blog? | Comments Off

Here is how I characterize a blog:

The main unit is the post, with a title, body text, and maybe some categories for organization. The post sometimes has a bunch of links to help support the topic of the post. Interestingly, posts are best when short (I fail there sometimes) and to the point. Post are then organized in reverse chronological order, newest at the top.

OK, so that’s not much different than a regular web page. Press release pages invariably have this structure, but so do many other types of pages (indeed, I ran a whole website like this that I now know was a proto-blog).

But, two key characteristics, I think, define the blog. One is the permalink, a permanent link to the post that allows the whole world to stably link to it without fear of losing the information (absolutely not a feature of the current Web).

The other key characteristic is the ability to leave comments. Comments allow the blogger to have a conversation. Whereas forums are sort of conversations, they are usually many to many. A blog is usually a conversation of one (the one who posts) to many, with the many participating in an almost guided conversation (that’s different than a forum, for the most part).

Here’s a great encyclopedia entry about blogs from Wikipedia.

My previous post from this string of posts - Blogging is not mainstream.

Filed under: Charlie, General, How to Blog, Why Blog? | 1 Comment »

I’ve been on the road all month and picked up some interesting observations. I have a string of things I want to share with you, in response to the various questions I’ve had. This is the first.

Try this: A useful exercise for any person who believes blogging is the greatest thing to come this way in a long time should walk out of their office to the nearest diner and ask everyone there what they know of blogs. My bet is that they will get, out of every 100 people, a few hands of people who have heard of blogs, two to three hands of folks who read blogs, and if very very lucky, one person who actually has a blog.

Yes, the reality is that really, statistically speaking, no one really blogs (of course, I exaggerate, but it’s not just for effect).

I still find the majority of folks I talk to really don’t know what a blog is, let alone what it takes to run one or why. The first thing many ask me is ‘what is a blog?’. Next, comes in the confusion of how they are different from forums. Once we waffle through those two questions, they then ask what types of companies are expected to have a blog and what expectations of performance do blogs set.

Oy, oy.

Being a marketing type, I speak with many about the usefulness of blogs in marketing, direct marketing, PR, CRM, and general business to business communication. The folks I speak to do, indeed, see how a blog can help, but really need to be able to see a clear measurable value. Also, considering all the stuff they already are responsible for, they worry about resourcing, processes, control, and ownership of the blog. And, what throws me for a loop, there are serious and understandable software and hardware issue, too.

Wow. Heavy.

I’ll post some snippets of my answers to some of these questions in subsequent posts. I’m not saying anything new or revealing. Also, I didn’t come up with this all myself, but have learned it from reading other bloggers. If you have some good links that explain these issues better, then by all means, post it in the comments. I should have more links here, but really can’t find any succinct posts that illustrate what I am trying to say.

Filed under: Charlie, General, How to Blog, Why Blog? | 1 Comment »