Global Neighbourhoods

I'm restoring @#$#&%$ CAPTCHA Feature

A while back Jeremiah Owyang became about the 10th person to tell me he hated the CAPTCHA feature I had activated on this Typepad account. This is the thigamajig that asks you to identify a string of characters when leaving a comment.  He said it discouraged him from leaving as many comments as he might.

Like most bloggers, I want as many comments as my readers will give me. Blogging is not about publishing as much as it is about conversations. Even when my friend Jim Forbes is leaving a comment telling me I'm dead wrong on my contempt for fake Steve Jobs, I want comments.

So, following Jeremiah's I turned off Captcha and allowed unmodified posting of comments. On the first day I received 17 spam Comments, on the second day 34.  On the third day, the number was over 60 when I decided to install Comment Modification.

Comment modification meant that I had to read comments before they would get posted. This has slowed the conversation down. Unless I have time to read them as they come in, some Comments have been delayed for 24 hours before i got to them.  Plus, I still have to pour through the spam crap every day, which has become both tedious and depressing.

So, I have restored CAPTCHA because I have no other options.  I have to say that this is one area where Tyepad seems to me to be doing a worse job than other sites where the character strings are more legible to the human eye.  other sites have simple math problems to solve.

Besides, Jeremiah hasn't left me a single comment in the entire time that CAPTCHA was turned off.

I hope you will all keep those cards and letters coming

Voice of a future employee: 'Let me blog.'

Kyle has some nice things to say about Scoble and Naked Conversations, but that is not why I am pointing to it. I am pointing to it because he is in college and about to graduate, and he wants to start his career with a company that will let him blog.

He writes: " "Of course businesses should listen to what their customers are
saying," I think to myself. And "Why wouldn't a company want to be
transparent and open to the world." (OK, I am not that naive, I know
there are good reasons not to, but let me go on.)

I think there are more and more future star employees like Kyle and employers need to pay attention now, if they want to attract the best and brightest members of the next generation.

Josh Hallett Says Blogging Hot in the Enterprise

[Josh Hallett. Photo by Shel]

I always learn something interesting or useful when I listen to Josh Hallett of Hyku, Inc. speak. His recent appearance with Alex Kim from SolutionSet at Third Thursday, the marketing/communications networking event, hosted at VOCE Communications in Palo Alto was no exception.

As a web consultant, Josh's clients are overwhelmingly large and global.  As a social media company consultant my clients are small as mine are small but still global, thanks to the internet.

One of Josh's main points, confirmed as well by Alex Kim, is that the social media tool of choice in the enterprise these days is the blog.  This is in striking contrast to what I'm seeing from the corner of the field where I sit. From where I sit attention has moved on to online video and particularly online social networks.
A few attendees were disappointed in Josh's other comments, particularly those that made IT sound like a barrier.  Yet almost all the feedback I get says this is true. But I have always found that Josh's enterprise insights are accurate and if he says blogs are hot and online video is not, then I tend to assume he is accurate.

This confirms the argument that blogs are normalizing. I sit on the edge of technology, where early adopters are,well, adopting early. Enterprise is slower to adopt and slower to adapt and as they begin to immerse themselves in the blogosphere, the geeks in Silicon Valley are getting excited about new technologies.

What is most interesting to me is that the timeline has gotten so much shorter.It took about a dozen years for the enterprise to accept the PC.  It took about six years for them to see the value in wired networks.  It took about three years for IT to accept that notebooks were less of a threat to corporate security than was originally feared.

Now, less than 18 months after my world was euphoric with the excitement of blogging, they are being ingested into large corporate bellies. The world is moving faster and faster or so it seems to me.

Shel Holtz weighs in on Ghost Blogging

In the heat of most blogging arguments, Shel "It depends" Holtz is Mr. neutral.  He prides himself in seeing the merits of both sides of an argument. Although I am very different than that, I have usually admired it. Sometimes it has frustrated me, because I knew that Shel believed as I believed during some controversies, but chose to speak with greater ambivalence.

That is why it gave me so much pleasure to read his post this morning on ghost blogging. He's against it, because:

"... blogs were created and popularized by people who were fed up with traditional business communication channels. They had had enough of fabricated quotes in press releases and speeches read by executives but written by professional speech writers. These people wanted authentic conversations with real human beings. A ghost-written executive blog is the opposite of what blogs were created for; it is counterintuitive to the 10th tenet of Christopher Carfi’s Social Customer Manifesto: 'I want to do business with companies that act in a transparent and ethical manner.' "

Shel, thanks for taking a side on this one. I know it was probably difficult for you, but once you get used to it, maybe you'll do it more often.

Blogging is not all about well turned phrases.  It's about letting people see there are real human beings inside that corporate entity, real people doing real jobs; real people who have grammatical flaws and typos as well as human frailties.

That does not come through if you use a mouthpiece, no matter how accurate that mouthpiece is. Holtz revisited the argument that a good ghost writer is like someone who signs for a deaf person, who simply and accurately translates what is being said.  This is a subject I know a small amount about and no signer ever gets the exact translation.  There are arguments that interpreters have caused wars by losing subtleties in the translation.

I have been a ghost writer for both executives and politicians. I was very good at capturing the style of the people contracting me. But there is no single piece I ever wrote where just a tiny bit of me has not shined through.

Good call, Shel.

Microsoft now has 4500 bloggers

UK Microsoftie Darren Strange reports that Microsoft now has 4500 bloggers among its 71,000 employees.  Both numbers show significant growth.  As irecall, when Robert and I were writing our first chapter of naked Conversations there were 2500 bloggers among 56,000 employees.  By the time we finished the book in October 2005, the bloggers were topping the 3,000 mark. This would mean that the number of Microsoft bloggers has grown by over 50 percent in about a year and a half.

By percentage, I'm not sure whether Sun Microsystems or Microsoft has more bloggers, but both companies continue to grow and continue to extol the virtues of doing it.

One interesting aspect in Darren's report is that there is no longer any controversy about it. When Joshua Allen, became Microsoft's first blogger, the first call to fire him for blogging came just a few hours later, as we reported in Naked Conversations.

Now it is seems to me, blogging is normalizing at Microsoft and that is what should happen.


Technorati Tags: darrenstrange, joshallen

Adam & Amanda, you've been 86'd

This blog has long had a Living Room Policy, which states that I have the right to take down your comments, if you are an anonymous blogger. I also can evict you for being generally an asshole. Amanda, unless you return under your real name of Brian Connelly of Chicago, I will no longer post your comments here.  Adam Zand, you are hereby banned for being an insufferable asshole.

Early Rise to NewComm Forum

I'm heading to Las Vegas at some ungodly hour tomorrow morning to be one of more than 400 people attending New Communications Forum. This promises to be a really superior gathering of corporate communications and marketing people with a virtual who's who on the corporate blogging consulting side.

I am on a panel, moderated by VOCE exec Mike Manuel, who has done a great job of prepping panelists, something which is not done by moderators often enough. Mostly I am there to meet up with old friends and meet new ones.

I had hoped to be done with my Global Conversations Overview before leaving, but that is not possible. I'm pretty sure I will be able to squeeze off the next significant section before going to be early for a 4:30 am wake up.

Waiting for the Tsunami

I've talked to a good number of people in the last few weeks, many of them living and working in a space that is far away from what we call the blogging community. This is as it should be.  I try to speak to audiences who are not insiders, who are rying to figure out just what is happening with this blogging and social media stuff and how they can adjust whtever it is they do to what is happening.

I recently have come across some steadfast doubters, a mainstream media executive who believes that the reduced classified ad revenue is just a down cycle, that will come back up; a recent commenter who still believes that blogging is just a fad, a resident of one of North America's most sophisticated cities, who believes that blogging may be fine for Silicon  Valley, but will have no impact on the global enterprise where she runs marketing.

And I heard a lot about how blogging is just kid's stuff.  This is a subject upon which I could write a book.  In fact, it is a subject on which I am writing a book.

I have lots of time for people who do not yet understand blogging, who are struggling with how they can adapt to it, who are trying to fathom, just what it is their kids are doing on their cell phones, who are trying to figure out why the integrated marketing campaigns that have worked so well for so long are not working so well anymore.

But at this point in time, after what has occurred, after what has been written, I'm just not going to argue with people who are Hell bent on becoming socially and technically and culturally obsolete. As my Church of the Customer friend Ben McConnell advised when I interviewed them for Naked Conversations,, "don't bother trying to convert the atheists. Work on the agnostics."

My favorite atheist comment came a while ago after I gave a talk to marketing and communications executives. After my talk, the owner of a mid-sized PR agency in New Jersey came up to me and very directly said: "Let me tell you why you are wrong. Record profits.  That's why.  We had record profits last quarter and we are going to have them again this quarter.  And we completely ignore blogging."

I have an image of this New Jersey atheist walking along the beach, enjoy the sunshine and tropical breeze completely unaware of a tsunami gathering height and velocity and heading toward his beech at a speed too rapid for him to avoid.

Apple, Google, Blogging, Microsoft and Sun Micro

I was impressed by the hospitality and professionalism Infopresse showed me as my Montreal hosts. The more I know about an audience, the more comfortable I feel that I can give them what I have that they may value most. Arnaud Granata did a great job of telling me about the attendees.During lunch, before my presentation I spoke with Marie (I never caught her last name or title) who asked my if blogging was so great, why is it hat Google and Apple, two companies who seem to disdain open blogging are doing so well, while Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, the two bloggingest of major companies, are not doing nearly so well.

I admitted to Marie, that this was the question that I dread the most when I make presentations.  So she elected to ask it from the audience at the second I completed my talk. On the same topic, when I got home and started catching up on my reading, I came across this article by my friend Arik Hesseldahl of Businessweek who tells us why Steve Jobs should blog in two parts.

I wish Arik had been on the dais with me because his description about Steve's candor and his willingness to take an ethical stand that could cost Apple revenue make Jobs sound like the stuff that blog heroes are made of.

But I was not equipped to address that from the Infopresse dais. Here, generally speaking is how I did answer the question.

Before you get to blogging, any company needs to focus on great product and in that light, most people feel Apple and Google have given people great products for the most part.  This is less so for Microsoft and Sun.  Blogs are just a tool.

Blogs, however, have worked miracles for Sun and Microsoft, in turning around negative perceptions that hurt the company. Blogs have shown both companies have thousands of employees who are passionate about what they do and who care a great deal about customer relationships.

I think over time Apple and Google will suffer from their less than open blog policies, particularly when a crisis occurs. I think they will suffer more over time because companies that do not trust their employees to blog will fail to attract the best and the brightest young talent possible.

Currently Google and Apple are generally recognized as cool places to work. But when a new generation comes of age--those who are currently teenagers and young adults--when they come into the workplace this may all change.

I may not have said this as well at Infopresse yesterday, but this is how I would have expressed it, if I had been able to submit my response in writing as I am doing now.

BTW, as a sidenote--I have not been Steve Jobs greatest fan over the years, but his comments on Digital Rights Management, followed now by his candid assault on teachers unions caring more about tenure than teaching are brave and commendable stances. Jobs obviously feels he can be heard without blogging and he is obviously right. But the times are really changing (I'm on a Dylan kick today) and sometimes they move fast enough to surprise even the wisest and most agile marketing mavens.

 

JetBlue may not blog, but it is transparent

First off, I'm extremely happy that my horrendous travel schedule did not deliver me to the Northeast last week. Second, I'm a JetBlue fan, even if most routes I'm taking condemn me to United and American Air most of the time.

JetBlue is a young company, who just revealed the first blemish on the face of its seven-year history, and it was a pretty ugly one that left people locked on unventilated planes on the JFK tarmac for up to 10 hours. My wife is claustrophobic.  Had we been on that flight it would have been extremely hardon her.

Still, I had to wince when through Personal Bee, I was directed to Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed, where Paul says that the airline company's lack of information to the public could easily have been a case study for Naked Conversation's. If the book were being written now, I'm sure we would be all over this case. Paul might see it going into "Blogging in a Crisis," or perhaps "Doing it Wrong," but he would be surprised to see us put this one into "Doing it Right."

Paul, you may have missed the startling Page One interview in the New York Times with David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue, who described himself as "humiliated and mortified," with how JetBlue customers were treated and how his organization melted down.He admitted that part of the problem, was the low-cost model upon which JetBlue is built and he publicly aired additional problems, such as flight attendants being unable to reach the company to find out if a flight was on or off.

This is transparency and it is a case study for how a CEO can use it. Using a blog would have been a better communications tool, but I think it's important to remember that like a hammer, a blog is just a tool.

JetBlue has sinned, it has suffered and it has repented.  The guy at the top probably ignored a whole bevy of lawyers telling him not to admit any kind of culpability. He says they'll do better and next time the suffering passengers will be compensated.

Naked Conversations began with the statement that we live in a time when most people don't trust corporations.  Personally, I trust this one because of Neeleman's comments.  I will be surprised if they do not do better next time.

And, by the way, when the communications officer at JetBlue, reads ths post, they should pay heed that a blog woiuld be a most efficient commnications tool when your next crisis takes place.




Technorati Tags: jetblue, nakedconversations, infectiousgreed, paulkedrosky

Montreal Blogger Dinner Feb 21

Marc Snyder is hosting a Montreal Blogger Dinner one week from tonight, with my being in town the excuse for bloggers and their friends getting together.  If you are in the area, please join us and let us know by signing up on Marc's site.  I look forward to meeting you.  I have not been to Montreal in a very long time and I remember it as a very beautiful city.

5 More Corporate Blogging Tips

I am on a panel at the upcoming New Communications Forum in Las Vegas March 7-9. The event is looking strong, and if you want to understand about social media and business, I would suggest you sign up before it sells out. My panel is headed by VOCE Communications' Mike Manuel, who we profiled in Naked Conversations as one of the "publicists who get it."

Mike has asked each of the panelists to list their favorite best practices in company blogging. I'm not sure a tactic becomes a best practice until it becomes tried and true over the years, and we have not yet had that many years.  But some tips for business blogging have proved pretty trustworthy already and other tactics, such as character blogs have been pretty well established as lame.

Over the years, I've probably written more than 100 blogging tips, including (with Scoble) an entire chapter in Naked Conversations called "Doing it Right." Many of them have become blatantly obvious. So, in preparation for the conference I tried to forge a few new ones.  Please let me know what you think of them:

1. Humanize.  Remember that one fundamental reason for blogging is the humanization of the corporation.  Be a real person when you blog. Reveal the passion you feel for your job.  Let readers see and feel your personal fallibility and, above all, do not fall into the abyss of mediocrity, where so many corporate blogs have fallen.

2. Serve your reader more than your employer. This is a fundamental success strategy. The more generous you are to your readers, the more influential you will be. Send people away from your site through links to competitors whenever it will benefit them. You may lose a sale, but you will likely gain a trusting customer.

3. Join conversations before you start new ones. People are already talking about the issues they care the most about. Read what they have to say, then add value to the existing conversation by saying something new whenever you can. When you start your own new conversation, you will have established your own credibility. Too many enterprise bloggers are too me-centric.  They start a conversation and want to know where their readers are. If people do not know who you are and where you are coming from, it's very much like starting to talk make a speech wile riding with strangers on a subway car. Even if what you say is valuable and interesting, people will do their best to ignore you.  They are also likely to mistrust you.

4. Keep each blog to one topic. There is power in simply focusing.

5. Your blog is about your personal brand. The more company representatives who have strong personal brand, the more powerful the corporate brand becomes.

Back in the saddle again

I'm really very flattered.

I have received a few emails and even a phone call from people concerned that I have not been blogging for all of six days. They were worried about me. They said they missed my posts. 

In fact, I have been really very busy for a really long time, too long a time.  I've been traveling a lot, schmoozing a lot, helping clients, dealing with family matters and otherwise wearing myself out. The thing about getting older is that I'm not as young as I used to be and 18-hour daily schedules start wearing me down in the third or fourth consecutive week of them.

I consistently counsel anyone who will listen to not blog when they are tired, feeling rushed, in a bad mood or any combination of the three. Being tired makes one cranky. For me it is time to rest.

I left WeMedia in Miami a day earlier to get home.  I slept yesterday for more than 12 hours.  I am skipping Noah Kagan's very promising Community Next conference at Stanford University today just because I need to recharge my battery. Sorry Noah, it looks like a winner and I hope a local reader rushes over there to take my place in the audience.

I am going to spend the weekend getting caught up on the basics of life, get my energy back and most important immerse myself in two loves--blogging and Global Neighbourhoods, which has been pretty much my abandoned child over the past month. It is a child who has my love and is calling to me and I must confess I would rather write a book than post a blog.

But over then next few days I expect to blog a good deal. For me, it is a way to get back in shape as a writer and joining the conversation online is often energizing and gets me in better shape for the business of book writing.

How should we blog? Let us count the ways.

Brian Oberkirch has a great executive summary of the different approaches companies take to blogging. Most remain attempts to put words out, rather than to open conversations with customers. They need to be reminded of Debbie Weil's key message in The Corporate Blog Book.  Companies don't blog.  People blog. A key advantage to corporate blogging is the humanization of former monolith's.  Reformatting company press releases and restating PowerPoint presentations hav many shortcomings, not the least of which is that they are boring.



Technorati Tags: brianoberkirch, debweil, likeitmatters, thecorporatebloggingbook

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Blogging Blackmailers & Death wishers

This is a week in which I saw and heard many dark moments in the blogosphere, some of them much darker than what the press release of the future may or may not look like. Several incidents seem to me to reveal bloggers starting to abuse the very real power that we are acquiring. 

Let me give you four examples of what I'm talking about.  I am going to withhold the names of the people involved.  I will say that my sources are in each case, people I know and trust.  In no case did I ask the other side for their perspective on what occured.

• One of the people I respect the most in the tech industry called me.  This person has a 20 year history of being credible with me.  It seems a blogger very much wanted something that my colleague had previously said he might do, then decided not to.  The blogger threatened to publish old email showing that my friend had reneged on a deal.  The key message was "Either you do what I tell you, or I'm going to use my blog to make you look bad." This smacks of extortion to me.
• A blogger I hold in pretty high esteem got into a pretty nasty dispute with a vendor and posted about it. That's fair game.  But then it accelerated into a campaign of asking bloggers who are no involved to join in.  Multiple posts seemed design to hurt the vendor, but added no additional news to the situation. This is not extortion in my view, but it moves from writing to warn others of shoddy products and services into the area of personal vendetta.
• A friend of mine owns a company whose businesses involves appropriate use of confidential and discreet information. On Friday, his firm extended an offer to a bright young woman to join as an administrative assistant.  She said she needed the weekend to think it over. She was chosen from several candidates and the firm held off on talking to other finalists until the top choice decided one way or the other. On Saturday, she posted on her personal blog, naming the company and publicly anguishing that she and her husband were planning to move out of the state and she didn't know whether she should take this new job that paid better than her current one.  My friend wanted to know whether this blog would justify  them withdrawing the offer for its clear indiscretion. In my view, this applicant has a death wish that should be granted. My answer: Of course they should.  Blogging should give employees, and potential employees a voice.  But there is nothing about the social media that allows employees to embarrass their employers.

I'm a big believer in social media giving people a voice. It has become increasingly clear that blogger voices are being heard.  Any blogger.  Back in Naked Conversations we talked about EA Housewife who made the world aware of abusive rules in her husband's workplace.  Jeff Jarvis coined to phrase Dell Hell and it resonated because so many of us were already unhappy Dell customers.

How are these two examples so very different from the four situations I learned about this week? In these two cases, bloggers took action o right a wrong.  In both cases they got some level of results. In three of these new cases, my perception is that bloggers were trying to use their voice to intimidate other parties. In the fourth case, a potential employer was afraid that not hiring the blogger would give her cause to further embarrass the company by future postings. I'm sad to say their is legitimacy in the concern.

I guess this sort of stuff was bound to happen.  It makes me sad, that four cases in one week would imply that they are happening with great frequency. It seems to me important that bloggers understand they have a great emergent power and they need to use it wisely.

If not, we collectively, lose that power as our credibility swirls around then gets sucked down the drain.

Michael Hyatt to post his publishing book in a blog

Michael Hyatt, president and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, the world leader in Christian publishing s writing a book called "The Thomas Nelson Way." He has announced that he will write it chiefly in a blog and that Scoble and I inspired him to do this through the Naked Conversations experience.

This reiterates what Robert and I already knew. Michael Hyatt is a real gentleman. He personally got involved in Thomas Nelson's bidding to become our publisher.  He almost did.  Nelson and Wiley competed for rights to our book and in the end Wiley made the higher bid in terms of an advance.

I'll be watching his project closely, even as I continue along with my second book being written his way. If you are an author, understanding publishers is really vital.  You may start with a dream and a need to tell your story. But, this authoring stuff is indeed a business, and what Michael is doing is generous and valuable to anyone even contemplating authoring a book.
Technorati Tags: thomasnelson, michaelhyatt

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Gartner says blogging to peak in 2007. I bet they're wrong.

According to the BBC, crystal ballers at Gartner Group predict blogging will reach its apex in 2007 at 100 million, because just about everyone who wants to blog will have tried it.  The respected research group also estimates that some 200 million blogs have been abandoned.

My guess is that they are wrong, but I can see why they are saying it. I think there will be tens of millions of blogs and that many people who wish to blog do not yet have computers or if they do--internet access. I think their are millions of people living in countries where it is dangerous to blog, whose children will be able to do so.  I think there are thousands upon thousands of company employees whose bosses will not allow them to blog.  Those bosses, over time will be replaced by a new generation of executives who will encourage employees to blog because it will have evolved into a more efficient way to communicate with customers and prospects.

In education, i think in 2007, we will see increased numbers of teachers using social media, including blogs, to teach and communicate with students. In politics, I believe 2007 will see a fire hose of elective aspirants chasing voters through blogs. Nonprofits, likewise, are just now stepping into the blogosphere because they are learning they can interact with far more people than through the physical rigors of grassroots campaigns.


What I do think will happen next year is that blogging will normalize, that a blog will be just another tool that employees are entrusted to use in the course of their job, and counting who blogs will be about as relevant as counting who uses email or the telephone.

Of course, if I am right and Gartner is wrong, they'll just pubish and market a new thick expensive report on how unpredictable this social media market really is.

Technorati Tags: gartnergroup

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Is Typepad about to improve? I hope so.

A few weeks back, I commented that I was becoming increasingly frustrated with Typepad.  A few hours later, Six Apart's Mike Sippey who is in charge of the Typepad product,  pinged me and invited me to lunch. We got together yesterday, chatting for over two hours. 

After spending some time discussing, industry and personal niceties, I let loose with a 20-minute barrage of why I was considering a divorce fromTypepad. Fueled by excessive coffee and a frustrating morning, I was pretty aggressive.

Mike did what I think any company representative should do when confronting an upset customer: He listened. He really listened. He jotted notes, asked drill down questions, that got into specific details.

Mike told me that new human resources had been added to the Typepad team and in January users will start seeing a steady flow of extensive improvements just about everywhere in the product and its deteriorating support service. I agreed not to post specifics.

I believed what I heard. if it happens as he says, then I will likely find myself once again a happy customer. If I don't, then it's nice to know there are other options open to us end users.

Stay tuned.

Why so many blogs are just boring.

Long term readers of this blog already know that I don't much care for what Nick Carr has to say. The interesting part is that I don't like it loyally every day. On days when I don't have time to exercise, I use him to get my blood circulating faster.

Nick is a very good blogger.  First, he's a talented writer, second he's a good story teller and third, he's not afraid to take a stand--usually on the opposite side of the one I would take, forcing me to really think about the opposing view.

I prefer to read Nick to some people I know, like and with whom I almost alway agree.  These guys write nice things, but they add little new to the conversation. They try hard not to offend anyone. They don't scour online and off, for new data points to add to ongoing conversations and rarely discuss new topics worth discussing. Some days they feel obliged to write because they have been advised to write often, so they tell you about their messy desks.

There are now millions and millions of posts going up every day, most of which will bore most everyone. Some of this is topical. None of us are interest in all possible topics.  I for one, ignore most posts on sports, hummingbirds and butterflies, macramé and its quilting cousin, cars, cute puppies and inexpensive fashionable accessories.

That does not mean they are not good blogs.  It means they are not relevant to me.  This is the same for most of us when we browse bookstores, TV and movie listings, iTune store offerings or the Most Popular section on YouTube. Maybe you like animated penguins with Happy Feet, but I'll pass, thank you very much. But thanks for the search tools that let you find these topics and me to simultaneously avoid them.

But, there are a great many topics that interest me, business, international, social media, technology, political, travel, photos, sailing and so on. Nearly every day I wander through posts on blogs I have not previously looked at and, so very often, feel an instant cure for insomnia.

It seems to me that as blogs wend their way from neat little creeks into the roaring mainstream there is just too much content that is just plain boring. I find many, on topics I follow, that are about as engaging for me as reading a Russian language phone directory.  In the blogging mainstream, we seem to be building mountainous islands of pap and crap.

I don't think this trend is stoppable. It always happens. TV once overflowed with innovation. So did rock music.  But then, each got institutionalized. The pioneers got replaced by marketing people who replaced creativity with the brainless determination  to make the next one very much like the last profitable one.

I cannot stop the mundane from mucking up mainstream, neither can you, but I can offer you some cheap, free advice on how to keep your content off the islets of pap and crap. This advice is in the category of dreadfully obvious, but the evidence abounds that it bears mention:

1. It is better to be interesting than boring..

A couple of  days ago, I was asked why Scoble is so damned popular.  He's had to post more retractions than just about anyone. That's because Scoble is usually interesting.  He joins conversations that have already captured attention and he adds new thoughts and information to it. He takes risks by swinging the bat and he's prepared--sometimes eager--to admit when he screws up. That's why Scoble is usually interesting. That's why he gets more comments than the average radio talk show host.

2. It is better to be useful than boring.

Most bloggers are less provocative as Nick.  Nor so they wish to take as many risks as Scoble does. You don't have to.  Most readers are more concerned with finding useful information than anything else. Yesterday, someone asked me why Pat Phelan has such a successful blog.  "He's like Switzerland.  He never takes a stand.  He rarely throws a punch," I was told. Pat is one of the most successful bloggers I have coached. In less than six months he has moved from about a three millionth ranking to just about 30,000. Pat is frequently the first to report on matters related to the new telephony services and this is igniting into a very hot topic. He also salts his postings with personal experiences and interesting--or funny-- miscellaneous stuff. He's not likely to burn a bridge simply because that's not his style. He's also not afraid to be very personal.  When he wrote about a drunken Mel Gibson's brush with antisemitism and the law, he slipped in that he is a recovering alcoholic--very brave for a CEO. People like and trust Pat.  But his  blog is becoming popular because it is above all--useful.

3.Sparsity is better than boring. It is better to write less frequently and then surprise your readers by having something to say. Yes, I know, I know. You score better on search engines when you blog often, but that does you very little good if people realize you are mostly contributing to the mountains of pap and crap. When he was still CEO of Groove Networks, Ray Ozzie now Microsoft heir-designate used to go months between blogging bursts. His new blog seems to have been abandoned, but one never knows. But when he wrote, a great many of us soaked in his every word.  It's what he wrote then, that leaves me with some glimmer of hope that Microsoft will pull itself out of the abyss it seems to be hovering over. In short, if you say it once well, you don't need to say it a thousand times.

4. Provocative beats boring. Nick Carr sometimes makes my blood boil. Strumpette stirs it another way.  I really hope when her identity is revealed, she really turns out to look like the picture. Like Nick, she's made herself a contrarian and she keeps coming up with some compelling cases that make the traditional PR industry uncomfortable.  I just love it. I think every PR and marketing blogger should take note and try to write with the level of passion and persuasiveness she serves up.

Pne last thought to Nick Carr.  Nick, have yourself a very merry Christmas and enjoy your eggnog break. I look forward to having you piss me off again next year and long into the future.

Juggling my three hats

My old friend Don Thorson, who's now VP marketing at Jajah, a new telephony company, expressed some frustration with putting me into the right box.  In an e:note he wrote:

I don't know how to treat you these days - as a consultant or a blogger. So here's the question. We have some cool "phone industry news" going out on Monday. It relates to your Dec 2nd / "The importance of Cheap Talk" post and the recent Skype announcement about raising prices.

I understand Don's frustration.  We live in an era when many of us wear multiple hats.  Jajah is in a new telephony category, which I am writing about with increasing frequency.  I also have a client that is in this category. This is the same for my friend Andy Abramson, who has a very respected VOIP blog and a few clients in the same category.

Last week I sat down with Carnet Williams, who had been given old data points on me. He sat down to hear what I could do for him as a PR guy.  I sat down, primarily to cover the fund raising technology he was launching.  I couldn't figure out why he was giving me his product and financial plans.  He got pretty confused when I hauled out my camera, and asked him if everything he had to say was on the record.

Gawd, I feel like I have multiple personalities. Transparency gets tedious. But it is so important. And if I am confusing friends like Don, then I am confusing lots of other people as  well, so let's see if I can give you an executive summary of who I am and what I do.

Actually, I have three roles and they are all pretty much interdependent of each other:

• Book--The book is my core project and the subject of the most passion. I am starting to wake up at 5 in the morning to work on it. Wherever I go, whatever I do, I am looking for data points and anecdotes that will fit the pieces of the puzzle that will become Global Neighborhoods. i expect the book will be published in Q1 2008, which believe it or not, doesn't give me much time.
• Consult. As I have done since about the time the wheel was developed and launched, I consult companies on issues related to communications strategies. While most companies I have worked with are tech startups I've been increasingly invited to companies of all sizes and in all categories on issues related to social media.
• Blog.  I write on subjects that I hope will interest business people. Lately, I have been expanding the topics in all sorts of experimental ways. I am looking at how technology and culture interact.  I am looking at the future impact on business caused by youth who communicate through social media.  I am dabbling a bit into politics. I am trying to get Americans and people elsewhere in the world to understand each other better. If people want to pitch me, I enjoy getting email because it helps me to get better informed on what is happening.  But I am much more interested in issues than new product launches.  I care more about markets than companies and my loyalty in writing about my clients or their competitors is to my readers--not to my clients.

Toward the goal of all three of these endeavors, I prefer a face-to-face meeting in which  we have a simple, interactive conversation.  I hate PowerPoint and monologues. I hate the implication that I should listen up and write this down. i think this makes me a great deal more like my readers.

It is sometimes hard for me to keep things straight. I know a great deal of confidential information that I will not write about until it is made public. I sometimes have competitive information on a client's competitor and I keep it to myself, because it was given to me as a writer and my credibility is my fundamental religion in all the things I do.

I hope this helps, Don.

Lunch with Agency Citizens

[Agency Citizens (from left) Chris Messina, Tara Hunt & Ben Metcalfe. Photo by Shel Israel]

I took Chris Messina, Tara Hunt and Ben Metcalfe, the three partners of Citizen Agency out to lunch today as a thank you for a bunch of nice things they have done for me. We had a ball. Not only that, the selected upscale restaurant was overflowing so we strolled down to a Thai restaurant letting me save a bundle in my treat.

For those of you who don't know them through their outstanding blogs, Citizen Agency is a hot little consultancy doing something entirely new. Instead of traditional marketing or PR, they are teaching companies how to be good citizens in the communities where customers can be found.

That last sentence is a bit awkward, because I try to avoid the term "building communities." If a company builds a community, that community is a factory town and the company owns everything, including all the real estate, schools, goods and services. I wince over at Dell's site when they use the term, because they are really talking about feeding a blog to a user group.  In a real community, citizens have real choices.  They are empowered by competitive efforts of different companies trying to give them the best choices.

But those are all my words, not there's.  We talked very little business, dwelling mostly on insider gossip.  I like these three players as individuals, and see the power of them as a team. They are each bright, collaborative and passionate.

In coming years I think Citizen Agency will face mre than a few competitors and imitators. I think the end result is that Citizen Agency is destined to become leaders of a very large pack.

Weinberger reports on Le Blog Politico

Cluetrain author David Weinberger reports on what the conservative candidate for French president had to say at Le Web 3.  To be honest, I would have enjoyed this on-topic talk if I had been there. It is also the first time that I've read that there was simultaneous translation.

Hugh & Scoble: Time to kill blog conferences

In related blogs, Hugh MacLeod says it's probably time to stop having blog conferences and Robert Scoble agrees, adding that there is nothing new to learn from them. Scoble may have attended more of them than any three other living beings, so he may know. This on the heels of Steve Rubel's.

Wow. These are among the people who most shaped my thinking on blogging. They are truly leaders of whatever it is that just happened. My inclination is to say that if they say it , it must be true, and I believe it probably true for them.

The passion they had on their first dates with blogging must have been much greater than what they feel now after so many eons of living and working and talking in the blogosphere. Those three have been such great seducers of so many of us who followed.

Now they are saying it's over?  I think it may be for them. Scoble, Rubel & MacLeod (sounds sort of like a law firm, doesn't it?) have little more to learn from blog conferences.  They have also said pretty much what they needed to say to ignite sparks in the rest of us.

But blogging isn't over.  Neither are blog conferences. Geek conferences on blogging may be over. But millions of people, ordinary people, in regular jobs, in traditional PR agencies, in journalism, in developing countries, in countries where it is still dangerous to blog--they are just starting to come to the party.  Their conferences would probably be boring and old hat to these three blogging myths.  Hell, it would be boring to me, unless I was having the pleasure of spreading the word to the attendees as a speaker.

People who live in the front of the comet are always looking for a brighter light. I'm among them.  But when we start getting restless, when we start looking for a new place to hang out, where we can see some new cool stuff that is not blog-related, let's not discount the partiers who will get to the scene after we have left.

Rubel thinks blogging and Naked may have peaked

"The Flack" Peter Himler posts an interview with my friend Steve Rubel who comments that books such as Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversations may be old hat and that blogging itself may have peaked in terms of numbers.

Maybe so. Maybe so, but I think not.

In fact, Naked has surprised everyone by the steadiness of it's sales.  The book is just short of its first birthday and sales, we strut to say, are still pretty solid. I ave noticed that sales have moved geographically away from American urban centers while taking off in English speaking communities of Asia, Europe and Canada. This trend seems to overlap with many historic technology adoption routes.

Steve and I tend to hang out in the front of a comet that has a Long Tail to it and he just might have been blinded by the light in his comments to Peter.

In our neighborhood world he's absolutely right. Blogging is an over-discussed topic. If you talk about Kryptonite bike locks in our neighborhood, people will roll their eyes heavenward or point to their throats and make gagging noises. But ours is a small neighborhood and this is a very big world despite current levels of connectedness.

I will be better persuaded that it has peaked when my wife's employer tells her a blog would be useful in her marketing efforts to attract more foster parents in Santa Clara County, California, or when shoppers at Edelman's most famous client stores know about great or shoddy deals because of what they read on a customers blog or YouTube clip.

What I do see and have written previously about is the normalization of blogging. Like movies, telephones, recorded music, television, PCs, trains and so on the real impoact comes after the mania, when everyday people start adopt technology to do everyday things.  Blogging will pass its peak only after it becomes an everyday tool worldwide and  we have some road to travel before that happens.

Braiding Humanity into your Business Blog

Over the past two years a significant portion of my life has gone into counseling business people on blog-related matters. It is increasingly clear that one of the most difficult components of a successful business blog remains how to move from the dreadful marketing language of Corpspeak into the more human first-person present narrative.

Of the scores of people I've talked with and coached on this subject, my two most successful former pupils are Riya's Munjal Shah and Roam4Free's Pat Phelan. Munjal started a photo recognition company at a time when many parents were still fearful of posting their children's pictures online and in public. So, Munjal named his site "Recognizing Deven," after his then 18-month-old son. Munjal's brilliance has been the ability to be absolutely candid, while knowing wisely what should and should not be shared with readers. Shortly after the launch of the blog in a company also named for a partner's daughter, the issue, for the most part, disappeared from debate. Munjal has since used his blog to successfully change his company's position.

Pat Phelan has been blogging for six months, even though he has had no product to offer to customers. That will happen before year end, and like Munjal's Riya launch it will occur without the time and expense of traditional marketing efforts. Why?  Because Pat has built street creds with an entire community of people interested in the new low-cost telephony services now coming to market. Most analysts, executives and company insiders know Pat through his blog and they trust him as a credible source of insight, information and candor.  As a streetwise, Irishman, he would never call himself a "thought leader," but that is what he has become. If his Roam4Free product  really reduced the cost of international phone calling by over 90% as it is supposed to do, and it isn't too complicated to use, then I would wager it will do quite well in the marketplace and other companies will want to leverage both his credibility and market position by allying themselves with him.

Trust me that Munjal and Pat are very different dudes.  Munjal is polished and Standford educated. He is a sequential entrepreneur and knows how to work the venture community.  Pat is a former Thai chef, who writes about his struggle as a recovering alcoholic. He has never created a PowerPoint presentation.

But when it comes to blogging, the two have a great deal in common.  Here's what they both know and practice:

1. Tell a story. Don't make a blog a marketing document. 

Both these guys are good spinners of non-fiction yarns.  They are comfortable to using their own words to tell stories. Their narratives often are about people other than themselves and they simply become narrators, or occasionally, reporters.

2. Blogs yield to products.

Despite the loyalty built through their blogs, but know they cannot transcend the blemish of crappy products. Munjal has written of the agony of the product not performing as planned, of the marketplace positioning the product differently than we marketing consultants had advised. The humility he showed feels real. Both Pat and Munjal know that people are loyal to people, but they spend money on products and services.  If the ones your company have to offer, suck, or do not live up to company claims, your blog could be the best on earth, but your company will still be doomed.

3. Give to your readers.

Robert Scoble is the grandmaster of this. Back when he was at Microsoft, he gained a great deal of credibility lamenting over his Mac envy or by blurting out once that the CEO's actions made him ashamed to be a Microsoft employee. The real important part was that Microsoft simultaneously gained credibility by allowing him to do this. Back when Scoble was a sales clerk in a camera store, he sometimes sent customers to the competition.  The payback was that he'd lose the sale, but gain customer's trust.

I recently started consulting a client who was surprised that in our first meeting, I cited Debbie Weil,  who wrote The Corporate Blogging Book, which many people feel most directly competes with Naked Conversations. Debbie says, "corporations don't blog.  People blog." I envy her wisdom and wish I had authored the line. By telling clients and now, you readers what she said, I may be helping Debby, but more important, I helped my client and you readers. I would be lying if I said I would prefer you buy her book over ours, but that needs to be your choice, not mine. More than that, Iwish to be perceived as a though leader in the area of social media and I cannot do that by just talking about my product. Such selfishness can and should hurt my standing as a community leader because generosity is required to lead.

4.Braid yourself into your business.

In face-to-face meetings, at conferences and over lunches, we salt our business conversations with personal information and anecdotes. 

For readers of this blog, there's posts about a new grandson, a trip to the Italian Coast and the horror of leaving computers at airline security. But overall it is about business blogging, and more recently about global communities and social networking.

I need to braid anecdotes into my blog to show there is a real person over here and that some of my experiences just might be like some of your experiences. But essentially, people come here to read about blogging, social networking, online communities and hopefully, my next product--a book called Global Neighborhoods.

This braiding of personal and business is often the most difficult part of what I teach new business bloggers, but it seems to me essential that readers understand there is a real human in there or your blog will just be an other mediocre example of corpspeak.

This involves a delicate balance. It takes a while to master, but once you do, it's like riding a bicycle.

Suppose you are a CEO who enjoys music.  In a post, you might mention that during a a recent business meeting, you missed a point because you were tripping out on a jazz riff you had heard that morning on your MP3 player.  That makes you human. Something like that has happened to a great many of us. That would make a good quick blog because it shows a real person doing one of those little things that makes us human.

5. Get back to business.

If the same CEO kept talking about music in post after post, then I would lose interest  In braiding into your blog, do not forget your central strand.

Cory's Advice: Just Give It Away

Through the illustrative Hugh MacLeod, I was pointed to this Forbes Magazine article by Cory Doctorow who says that he's been giving away his books for years and that act has made him tons of money. His point is that the rewards to his efforts, like blogging, are indirect.

Oh never mind.  Just go read the article and you'll know why the adjective most often put in front of Cory's name is brilliant

Living Room Comment Policy

Right there along with ROI is the negative and nasty comments issue.  People just hate the spammers and drive-by commenters that feel like they have put they use comments the same way graffiti writers use spray can. Kami has just posted 5 useful tips worth considering.

At this site, I use what I call the Living Room Policy. I've written about this before, but I think it is worth repeating.  It goes like this:

1. If I am throwing a dinner party in my home and you show up at my doorstep and I don't know who you are, I won't let you in. In short, with few exceptions, I don't allow anonymous comments.

2. If you do come in and you become rude to me or my guests, I will ask you to be nicer--once.  If you continue to be rude, you will be thrown out and you will not be allowed back in.

I started imposing this rule well over a year ago. In fact, I am convinced that it has reduced the number of hateful and inappropriate people trying to deface this blog.  I think it is a policy that would work for a great number of corporate bloggers.

Charlene Li and the Holy Grail

[Charlene Li (l) and Shirley Owyang. Holy Grail not included.]

Charlene Li, my favorite social media analyst, continues her pursuit of blogging's Holy Grail--a simple solution to measuring ROI. There is no social media consultant who does not get hammered on this question when talking to corporate audiences. Yet not one of us has a solid, quantifiable way to answer.

The truth is that to date the question cannot be answered. Social media as a category is still in its formative stage, experiencing enormous dynamics.  Measurement historically only get accurate after things settle down, after markets become more stable.

While corporate adoption of social media continues to grow, it has not done so at the pace Robert and I thought it would when we wrote Naked Conversations. My guess is that no way to quantify or measure the results of social media campaigns is among the top two reasons for this, the other being a top down love for the illusion of message control.

Charlene has worked harder and gone further than anyone else or so it seems to me. Her recent blog is a progress report on the framework she is building as well as a closer look of how to institute different measures for different corporate strategies. It seems to me, the process she's undertaking will become more complex before it gets simpler--and it will need to be stop-dead-simple, before the massive adoption many of us envision will occur.

Make no mistake.  I still believe that corporate adoption of blogging and social media is hurtling forward at a rapid rate.  I also believe that companies that do not dip their toes into the blogosphere soon will be hesitating at their own peril.

But until we have a way to measure and quantify results, the progress will be made based on Guy Kawasaki's observation of many years ago. "Some things must be believed to be seen."

Biz 2.0, blogging and Singing Sows

Through my Wiley publisher Joe Wikert, I was pointed to this report that Business 2.0 magazine is forcing it's journalists to blog.  Joe is dead right that this sort of thing just won't work.

There's an old Kentucky homily, I've always enjoyed: Never try to teach a pig to sing.  First off, you will fail, and second, you'll have to deal with one very pissed off pig." I'm not likening journalists to pigs, but I think forcing anyone to blog has a high likelihood of failure.  Even if it succeeds you will produce the most mediocre of blog product.  You will also create a bad feeling likely to spill over into the hardcopy content.

Burning Batteries & Sony's Silence

Dell Computer, in my opinion is doing a good job of turning around public perceptions essentially by turning around its own behavior with real actions, rather than multi-million dollar ad campaigns. I think their blog http://www.direct2dell.com/default.aspx   is an essential component of it. But the commitment to repair their oxymoronic support with a $100 million commitment and their recent handling of the battery crisis are also parts.

But where the Hell is Sony (no link available)?

The behemoth consumer electronics company has yet to step forward and say that they are sorry the batteries they sell to other computer companies occasionally and abruptly became consumed in flames.

Why have they not stepped up to say they regret that one of their products when used as directed can result in the death or partially singed appendages?  They have not publicly owned up to the fact that their business partners have suffered a costly embarrassment because of their trusted relationship.

Since they have been very close to mute on this subject, I can only speculate, which is precisely what I’ll do here.  Please keep in mind that the following scenario is solely a product of my imagination. It could be almost as wrong as when I wrote in my former other blog that George Bush had zero chance to be reelected.

Sony, like a great many in the computer industry got surprised a couple of years back when sales of notebook computers began to exceed expectations.  Like most global manufacturers, they produce product based on projections. They suddenly were blessed with the problem of having to ramp up fast.

We’ve all been there.  There’s a business opportunity.  You weren’t ready, but you shake it out and you get ready.  In the case of mass production that means you cut corners.  Frequently the easiest corner to round out just a tad is quality control.  It was not oversight.  It was a calculation done by a risk analyst who looked at the situation and determined that so many hours could be saved and so much more product could be delivered and so much revenue could be realized if we just allowed the probability of a battery exploding to rise b maybe 2-3 percentage points.

Some executive decision maker at Sony weighed the pros and cons and went with the pros.  This was not evil or terribly callous.  It was calculated and the decision put people at risk.

My guess is that the decision maker in one way or another has realized a downturn in his career path.  In fact if Sony announced that the guy has decided to leave the company to dedicate more time to gardening, I would think more highly of the company. I imagine other employees in this classically top-down enterprise would get a message that lowering the cost of goods sold by raising the threat to human safety is just not the Sony way.

But since I have not heard Sony speak on this subject, then I have to wonder if maybe it is indeed the Sony way.

Anyone who has ever dabbled in the communications industry knows the scenario.  Something awful happens, a drunken sea captain ground an oil tanker that should have had a double hull and causes an environmental disaster.  Some nutcase puts poison into a Tylenol bottle.  An organic farmer grows spinach that is somehow infected with sometimes deadly Ecolli bacteria.

The lawyers sit on one side of the table the marketing folk on the other.  At the head of the table is the CEO and at the foot the CFO. The communications folk say you have to apologize. You have to tell people you’re sorry they almost got killed or in some cases actually did.  You have to send the entire executive team up to Alaska to have the CEO video-taped in rubber boots helping to clean off the oil soaked birds amid the dying fish

The lawyers stare at the marketing people as if they were addressing a toddler with a learning disability.  If you say you’re sorry, you are implying culpability. To do so would increase the possibility of lawsuits.

The discussion goes on for a while.  Tempers flare.  The conversation starts getting circular.  At some point, all eyes turn to the CEO, who is looking at the CFO.

What happens next can go either way.  The decision will paint or taint the brand for years to come. I buy Tylenol.  I don’t buy Exxon gas, even though the company seems to do just fine without my support. I never eat at Jack in the Box, which isn’t a big deal because I rarely ever have.

But I imagine there are lots of people like me and I would guess that blog conversations may increase this sort of buyer decision making.

I think I know which side of the table the Sony decision maker listened to. Maybe the marketing folk never even got a hearing.  I wouldn’t know.  Sony is a very private company.

The funny thing for me is that our next big household expense will probably be an HDTV, once I figure out the LCD v Plasma issues. There is a very nice Sony store in the Stanford Mall where I sometimes shop. I jus spent an hour getting educated by a very nice Sony sales guy.

But all things considered, I think I’ll go with another brand.

Is Blogging the Jazz of Writing?

Chip Quips on blogging as the jazz of writing.  It is a metaphor that works for me. I play the keyboard.  Sometimes, I like to think I've made some real music.  Other times I hit an offbeat chord.  Some bloggers remind me of a saxaphone at dawn while others a drummer who went off somewhere and doesn't know how to get back. Collectively you could say the blogosphere is just filled with all that jazz.

The Return of ToughSledding

A week ago, I was proud to have discovered ToughSledding, a blog by Kent State instructor Bill Sledzick.  I was downright effervescent when I came across his first post just hours after it went up.  I encouraged everyone to run over to his post and welcome him to the blogosphere.

Unfortunately, Bill had already taken it down, and the people I sent circled back to me with email that ToughSledding had set a new record for the shortest life of a blog. It turned out that Bill, unhappy with the blog host he had selected and opting to move over to the more popular Wordpress where he has reemerged.

He is a self-described newbie who starts off asking the ROI question, which leaves me a bit short on the enthusiasm with which I embraced him a week ago. But he also admits that he really needs a good deal of help.

For example, he does not yet know how to link.  He also stated that he moved to Wordpress in part, because posting photos was easier, but then did not post a photo.

I'll give the first tip. Bill, it is unwise to take down a blog until you have set up your new one and you can point people to it. Here's what I propose: I still think everybody should go over to ToughSledding and give Bill one tip about blogging.

But let's not address the ROI issue.  Either Bill will figure that out or he won't.

PR & Social Media Part 3: Kami Huyse

Kami Watson Huyse
Originally uploaded by kamichat.

It was just a few months ago, when I first discovered Kami Wilson Huyse. She started dropping comments onto my blog when I wrote on marketing and PR-related subjects. Sometimes she agreed with me and other times not. But each time, she added something of value to the conversation.

Now and then, she took the conversation over to her own blog where she took it in new directions. That started me reading her other posts and I was impressed. When I thought she had something useful or interesting, I started pointing my readers to it as a service to them.

Kami  seems to me to be a glowing example of how a latecomer gains topical prominence in a short time in the blogosphere. She may never rival Scoble in mass audience headcounts, but if you read blogs and care about PR chances are more likely than not that you will find Kami and continue to read her.

That's why she's the third of five interviews I'm conducting as I revisit the issue of PR and blogging in preparation for my Ottawa speaking tour. Here is what she has to say:

1. Can you tell me something about your background and career before you got active in social media?

I spent most of my 12-plus year career on the client-side of public relations, working for America’s Charities and then the Manufactured Housing Institute. Both are large national organizations, where I served in many functions, from media spokesperson, to running major national public relations campaigns and performing issues management. I opened My PR Pro in 2002 to serve both local and national clients, including the Red Cross pro bono, MHI, SeaWorld San Antonio and Time Warner Cable.

2. How and when did you get into social media and blogging?

I started Communication Overtones in early November last year as a sandbox to build on my skill in social media and to transfer this knowledge to my clients. In music, an overtone is higher acoustical frequency than the fundamental note. I felt social media was becoming the overtone to communication and felt that I needed become proficient in using the tools and in understanding the culture around it.

3. Your blog seems to have very rapidly risen to prominence. What did you do to make this happen?

"Prominence" is a big word. My goal is just to share the things I learn as I go along, and to record them for myself as well. I am glad that it resonates with a few people out there and that people come to read and comment. My goal was to build relationships with other PR professionals around the world, and I have found the blog an ideal place to do this.

4. What has this blog done for your business?

It has had an immediate impact. My business has already expanded by 30 percent this year alone as a direct result of the blog, and I have contracts in hand that show at least a 50 percent increase next year. I have also been able to sufficiently grow my network to implement the virtual agency concept that I envisioned when I launched My PR Pro. I am now working with a number of talented independent practitioners and agencies across the U.S. and the world. The Internet and social media tools have made possible a distributed workgroup of specialists that stretches across geographic boundaries.

5. What advice do you have for PR practitioners?

I have three thoughts about what make someone great at public relations:

(1)  a willingness to learn;

(2)  the heart of a public advocate; and

(3) trusted and perceptive counselor to top management.

6. What is you vision for the future of PR?

I see the role of the PR practitioner as a facilitator, making sure that access is granted to those who need it and that the public gets what it wants from the organization. My vision is that public relations will live up to its definition as a two-way exchange of information between a company and its stakeholders. Arthur Page was the first VP of public relations for AT&T, and I see PR through his lens. Somewhere in the 1930s, he wrote, "So we, like all other companies, live by public approval and roughly speaking, the more approval you have the better you live. This is the fundamental reason for seeking public approval. The fundamental way of getting it is to deserve it.” Amen to that!

7. How has blogging changed your perspective on business? On life in general?

I feel like I have been in an aggressive graduate-level study program for the last year, I have learned so much. One of the biggest challenges I faced was the notion that I would have to be up-front and center about my opinions. Being able to learn how to do that effectively has helped me to have more confidence.

8. Do you have some useful do’s and don’t for getting started on a business blog?

Yes, I have a three-step social media process that I advocate to my clients: Active Listening, Outreach, and Engage. In the first phase, I recommend they spend a lot of time monitoring, listening, reading and learning. Then they formulate a strategy to reach out to other bloggers in the segment in which they hope to build a presence. Last, they can engage by launching their own blog.

9. Do you feel social media is an extension of a corporate PR program or something entirely new?

I want to emphasize that I think social media strategies aren’t for every company. However, I do think that an active listening program is essential, so I guess I fall in the “extension of PR” crowd with one important caveat. At least for now, social media is the way that some influential consumers have chosen to voice their opinions. It pays to keep your eye on what is being said about you and your company. If we subscribe to the two-way version of communication, we have to listen. You can ask a number of companies and individuals that have been involved in what I have dubbed a “firememe” if social media is a force to be reckoned with: Kryptonite, Dan Rather, Dell, McDonalds, the New York Times and the list goes on. Like it or not, social media and its effects have become a part of our job
.

10. What sage advice you can add to what you’ve said above?

Get some sleep. Don’t let this stuff keep you up at night. Social media is time consuming and the immediate feedback aspect can be addictive, make sure to keep it in perspective and set limits. Your comments will wait until tomorrow.

It should be noted that Kami's written responses to my questions came in at 10:45, her time, once again indicating that none of us always follow our own advice.

PR & Social Media Part 2: Brian Oberkirch

When I first met Brian Oberkirch, I had no idea how much we shared in common.  He was sitting on a panel between executives from the Washingtonpost.com and the Austin Statesman and he just took the show away from them as he discussed his experience as a citizen-journalist with his Slidell Hurricane Damage blog.  I've since come to know him well and respect both his vision and professionalism.

He's the second of at least four people I'll interview on the issue the changing role of PR in the social media age. I am working this issue in part, because in Naked Conversations, our chapter on PR depicted the profession in a change or die situation, which was perhaps just a bit harsh I'm preparing for a series of talks at the end of this month in Ottawa and Toronto where I'll be speaking to PR, marketing and government communications officers.  I'm using that talk as a chance to revisit the issue, asking people who I think have changed and are flourishing as they figure out how to stitch new businesses with their traditional training.

So, in that light and toward those goals, heeere's Brian:

1. Brian, for the benefit of our studio audience can you give us a little professional background on yourself.

Sure. I've done a number of things that revolve around my main passions: coming up with ideas & writing.

Brian
Originally uploaded by jeremiah_owyang.

I've been a reporter and radio news guy, literature professor, ad agency strategist and creative, PR guy and marketing consultant. I've worked for international brands like Pergo, Nokia and Samsung, sexy tech startups and staid, successful mid-sized companies. I started an agency devoted to social media last year, and now consult companies on marketing, social media and web application development.

2. You have described yourself to me as a fellow “recovering publicist.” What made you decide to get out?

I never had a 'Road to Damascus' moment, nor was I ever really a publicist, per se. I started incorporating blogs and other forms of social media into my marketing program recommendations in late 2000 (spurred on by the success 37 Signals was having with their company blog, Signal v. Noise). By 2003 or so, people were actually saying yes to such projects and, gradually, I started to de-emphasize traditional forms of PR. Stepping back, I think as PR pros, we've put way too much emphasis on media relations. I understand the economics of that practice, but with the new tools available I wonder how long the old models will be attractive for either client or agency.

3. Can you describe your current business?

I work in three areas:

(1) Unmarketing--growing a tribe of passionate users by making remarkable things that speak to real user issues

(2) Social media programs--using blogs, wikis, podcasting, feeds and other tools to have better conversations with those who matter to your business, and

(3) Consulting on the development of Web applications (user needs, features, marketing, etc.)

4. Can you tell me how and when you got into social media?

I've been on the Web since there was a Web. (Remember how cool Gopher was at the time?) As far as getting into blogs, like most people, I started reading a ton of them. Camworld and Signal v. Noise were probably the first that I read routinely. I started blogging in 2003, got serious about using a feed reader to track things, and started podcasting and video casting just this year. To my surprise, podcasting has much more impact than I would have thought. Seems like I hear more back from people about pod casts than blog posts.

5. What’s your take on the future of traditional PR?

Well, I have a skewed view of traditional PR (since I spent most of my time at bigger agencies like Public is), but I would say that we'll see diminishing returns. Just as traditional advertising packs less wallop, it makes sense that mass media relations will start to be less central. At the same time, I expect the PR function to increase in importance as analysis, interpretation and timely response to the market will be more needed. I think PR people have a golden opportunity to take a more central role if they don't cling to old-fashioned publicity/gate keeping/messaging models.

6. If you ran a traditional PR agency, what would you do to adjust course because of the social media?

I think the best agencies have always been open to incorporating new stuff and cross-pollinating their work with great ideas from other disciplines. One thing I'd do is have my team become much more net Native to use Fred Wilson's term. Having an Internet Guy (and they are usually guys) is all well & good, but is the whole shop reading relevant blogs? Are they watching feeds for their clients? Are they up on how wikis are becoming a real alternative for internal communication? Take it beyond the brown bag lunch stage and make sure everyone is getting cozy with these new tools.

7. How should PR people deal with bloggers and blogging?

By soaking in it. When I say 'don't pitch bloggers,' what I mean is don't pull 100 blogger emails from your Bacon's list, spam them and think you're doing outreach to those folks. Of course they want relevant information. But they don't want to feel like you're selling them. And don't waste their time. The nice thing is, it's a corrective medium. Your bad pitches will be posted and mocked immediately, so you'll learn quickly. If you spend anytime in the medium, you'll get the ground rules. Be open. Add value to the conversation. Give it away. Talk back when people comment and ask you something. Link. Link. Link. I think PR people mess up most when they just pop in to a blog neighborhood to see what they can get out of it, with no sense of setting up shop and sticking around. People don't blog in their spare time to give your client more coverage.

8. Do you see a future for traditional PR and marketing folk who continue to practice PR as they always have?

I know we talk a lot about dinosaurs and how everything is changing, etc., but I think it will be gradual. If you don't eat well, keep smoking, never exercise, eventually that will catch up to you. Same thing will apply. You'll be able to get away with it for a while, but there will be a tremendous opportunity cost.

9. How does traditional marketing move from monologue to dialog?

Simple: listen.

Then incorporate cues into your product development and your marketing communications that show you're listening. If your products are worth talking about, people will tell you most of what you need to know. In a way, I don't think any of this is new. But now, word of mouth is much more visible, to marketers and to other people who might want your products or services. Your community is much smarter about what they want than you are. Humble yourself enough to pay attention and respond.

10. Say something else that is pithy, witty or brilliant, that would look good on a powerpoint slide.

Social media is about connection, not content.
Social media is about them, not you.
Social media may be cheaper initially, but it takes far more homework.
Get small fast. (Niche is nice. Think smaller feature sets, more targeted audiences, less chatter from you, and so on.)

Interview: David Parmet on PR & Social Media

As I've mentioned, I am going to be doing a series of talks to PR and marketing executives as well as government communications officers in Ottawa and Toronto at the end of this month as the guest of Joe Thornley.

I'm going to ask PR people who seem to me to have made the transition from strictly traditional to social media, to give some advice that my audiences may find useful.  David Parmet was among the first who came to mind.

If you think you have something to add to this conversation, please join in--or email me here.

Originally uploaded by Kara C.

1. David, for the benefit of our studio audience can you give us a little professional background on yourself.

After casting about for a career I discovered a talent for media relations while working on NY Mayor David Dinkins's re-election campaign in 1993. Since then I've worked in the public and private sector - mainly in agencies and mainly for technology clients.

Completely apart from this - I've been on the Internet since the days of BBSs and dial up with 300 baud modems. My wife and I were members of Mindvox - one of the first ISPs and Internet communities in New York in the early 1990s. I've had an email address since 1993 and been blogging since about the turn of the century. But it wasn't until a few years ago that the convergence between social media and marketing became apparent to me.

2. Who do you currently represent?

A handful of small start-ups with a focus on social media. Currently, I'm working with Coco Myles, BackBeat Media and BlogTalkRadio. I'm also doing some work with a firm involved in book and author promotions to bring them into the social media world. I also consult with agencies on specific projects and provide general advice on developing social media programs for their clients.

3. How do you get new business?

A combination of word-of-mouth, my blog and aggressive networking.

4. Your blog got you the legendary EnglishCut account. Can you briefly tell the story of what happened and what you did for them?

Hugh MacLeod and I know each other through our respective blogs. Hugh was working with Thomas Mahon, a bespoke tailor who began blogging about the culture and history of Savile Row in early 2005. Hugh suggested I could take advantage of Thomas's blog and see if any of the NY area fashion and style press would be interested in speaking with him.

We got hits for the blog in Boing Boing and Fast Company as well as an interview on the BusinessWeek blog. What was even more interesting was coverage in places like the NY Times Style Magazine and Men's Health that had nothing at all to do with the blog - but the fact that a Savile Row tailor was so open and willing to talk about his business made Thomas a natural source for these publications. The Men's Health article was very interesting - the writer was doing a piece on 'how to spot a cheap suit and since Thomas was unavailable at the time to talk, quotes were pulled out of the blog and run in the final piece.

5. Exactly what happened to make you give up on traditional agencies?

I faced a combination of not being able to work with the kind of clients I wanted to and not being able to develop and execute social media plans for any clients. Unfortunately, these sort of clients and programs can't work in agencies since they don't pay very well - the companies are too small and the programs too ill-defined (at least in ways traditional PR would define and invoice them).

When I jumped, in February 2005 I had a fairly well-read blog about my family life and I was very interested in blogging about PR and ways PR and social media could work together. However I was working with an agency that viewed blogging as no more than a fad. So after a heart to heart with my wife, a gut check and a long argument with my boss - I took the plunge. I've never looked back.

In retrospect, leaving agency life was the best thing for my career.

6. If you ran a traditional PR agency, what would you do to adjust
course because of blogging and social media?

I would encourage everyone in the agency to blog, podcast, whatever..
about anything at all that occurred to them. By immersing everyone in the agency into social media it will become a natural way of doing business, not something they add on at the end of the program.

I would also make sure that social media is integrated into every plan - and not viewed as a separate practice. I would also reward employees for social media hits as they would be rewarded for mainstream hits.

7. What should traditional marketers do to adjust course?

Understand that social media is not something some strange tribe of kids or hipsters is doing but that it's now something so common to so many people that it's no longer 'new' or different. Many people go to Google before going to the Yellow Pages. In a few years that will be most people.

Traditional marketing is not going to just go away, but it's now part of a larger field. There are more options open to marketers than ever before, so look at this as an opportunity and not a threat.

8. Do you see a future for traditional PR and marketing folk who continue to practice PR as they always have?

Yes. There will always be a market for traditional big-brand PR as practiced by the big agencies. Fortune 500 companies with big ad and PR budgets aren't going away.

I would however see a great deal of money coming from those Fortune 500 companies now spent on social media campaigns in addition to traditional marketing. If the big agencies are smart, they will see this as an opportunity and develop plans to incorporate social media into what they do - otherwise folks like you and I are going to get very rich.

9. What's your perception of how blogging impacts media relations?

As I mentioned, I will be Joe Thornley's guest at the end of this month in a series of presentations to PR, marketing and government communications officers. I'm asking a few of the PR practitioners I think have done a superior job of integrating social media with PR.

David Parmet was among the very first to come to mind and I will use some of what he has to say in my talks. If you think you can add to this conversation, please email me at shel@itseemstome.net.

They are now so intertwined that to see them as separate or different is missing the point entirely. If you are in tech PR how would you define Mike Arrington, Charlene Li or Om Malik? If you are pitching celebrity news, would you put Gawker or Jossip on the 'b' list because they are just blogs? (FYI, I know agency folks who do exactly this.. but I digress)

For smart PR people, this just means many more targets to pitch our clients. For the rest it means a lot of missed opportunities to get their clients some ink.

Wells Fargo Student Loan Site Goes Live

Wells Fargo, who I briefly consulted has gone live with one of the ideas they were working on, a student loan site.  They haven't actually launched it yet and there are only a couple of posts up, but on my first look, I think its very promising and smart.

First off, a young customer is a longterm customer. If you develop a relationship with students, and you can maintain it to that student's satisfaction, you have that chance to be their bank of choice through life.

Second, I can remember back to my student loans and the lack of understanding and choice I had when I took them out.  Students need this information.  So do their parents.

Third, by doing this, Wells Fargo will make itself smarter as to what on the minds and in the hearts of students.

Okay, I say all this, while they are in prelaunch and while there are a paltry two posts up. The bank with the stage coach could always have one of their horses go lame.  I don't think so.  The improvements at Guided by History, their disaster preparedness site have been slow and steady ever since it was launched earlier this year.

Hugh, Scoble, B5,Web 2.0 & Chasms

Between Hugh and Scoble, we are being treated to some great cartoons and thoughts on whether Web 2.0 is a bubble, just froth or maybe an echo chamber. While Robert used a great many words, Hugh managed to crack me up in about five seconds.

Robert also mentioned fellow blog book author Jeremy Wright, whose B5 Media Network seems to me a classic success story of bringing blogging outside the insular Web 2.0 community where many of us loiter.

So much bubble and froth talk. It's seems to me the issue is not the bubble but the chasm.

To me blogging is growing up and to understand what we face, people should circle back and read or reread Geoffrey Moore's brilliant Crossing the Chasm. The blog marketplace is acting a bit like a bubble.  But the real relevance, seems to me to be that we have saturated the early adopters in three markets--geeks, politico's and American youth.  Word of mouth has generated all that, and now there's probably 100 million people in the world enthusing or complaining about blogs.

The question is can blogging and the social media, leap the chasm from these significant but niche communities and land into the big oceanic repository created by the mainstream. I see lots of evidence that that is the case. Read through the more than a dozen niches that Jeremy's B5 serves and note that B5's growth these days is probably faster than any techcentric network, including Podtech and Techcrunch.

[Jeremy Wright]

My point is this: The blog issue du jour is not bubble but chasm. The next step, as I've written before, is that blogging needs to be less newsworthy and more normal. Blogging is not about a ratings war.  It's about a tool that is important because it scales people's abilities to have conversations. It's a tool like the telephone or email.

And it fulfills its potential when everyday people, everywhere use it for everyday purposes.

Why I don't dig Digg

There is little doubt in my mind that Digg's significant contribution to making social media more conversational is questionable   think the company has a great future. I've had a subscription to it since just after they first came out.

But over time, I found myself using it yes and yes.  I just opened my Digg folder and realized I had not even looked inside for over a month. Here's what's wrong with it for me:

Personal relevance is more important to me than mass popularity.  I like the idea of people voting.  The concept has done wonders online for eBay. In fact, the concept of voting thumbs up or down on people, products and politicians has proved to be a pretty good thing in the real world.

But when it comes to choosing what I read and what is relevant to me, I'm only interested in opinions from people i know and trust.  I may be in one demographic.  you may be in another.  I may like opera and you may like Hip Hop or BeBop.

Digg's top vote getting content frequently does not interest me. That which does I find without using Digg. In fact, in the old fashioned days when i read lots of magazines and newspapers, I rarely read the most popular publication.  I respected the New York Times much more than I did the National Enquirer, which at the time had a larger circulation.

Several companies have tried to make it easier to find user defined relevance in news searching.  Personal Bee is one that looks good to me, but despite it's name it does not seem to have generated the buzz it needs to become a powerhouse.

I think it is very, very hard to let people find what is relevant to them and for a company to do that for masses of people. I look forward to using any tools that can help me find stuff that I personally consider either interesting or useful.

Help Me Give some Advice

Joseph Thornley, CEO of Thornley-Fallis PR is bringing me up to Ottawa and Toronto in the last week of September for no less than six talks in three days. Yes, he gets a volume discount.  I know he'd like me to list each one, but I have a hunch most of my readers would prefer I didn't.

But I need some help in what I say in a couple of areas:

1. Public Relations--In Naked Conversations, we said this was a "change or die area" and I think the 18 months since we wrote those words have strengthened the argument, which at the time was called overstated.

I'd like two things: (1) Case studies of PR practitioners who have gained by incorporating social media for themselves or their clients, and (2) horror stories of bad practice caused by PR people who did not understand the power and opportunity of blogging and social media.

I will of course give full credit to any of you who give me cases I can use and your additional thoughts on this subject are welcome.

2. Government and blogging--thanks to Joseph, I am addressing a group of Ontario government communications officers. These are professionals in government who are weighing the pro and cons of blogs.  There are two parts to this:

(1) People influencing government through blogging and social media and (2) government people who are getting interactive with constituencies by blogging.

I am looking for case studies on this one as well. I am particularly interested in these cases, because this is an area that I plan to cover in Global Neighborhoods as well. If you know of any cases in this area, please post them here.

If you wish, you can email me your thoughts or cases as well.

Make that 81 Random Thoughts

Keith Newsome down in Texas as 9 thoughts on my random thoughts. I really like the piece and wanted to leave a comment, but that function seems to have a problem at the moment.  I could click on the word, but it did not jump to a comment input section.

Keith, you said you'll be in the Bay Area and would like to meet some of us bloggers.  I think that as good reason as any for us to have a blogger dinner with you as the guest of honor. Give us the dates and we'll see if we can assemble a blogger or two in a tavern where the beer is cheap and the food hardly edible.

9 Random thoughts about Blogging

These are just a few random thoughts that popped into my mond on a flight home tonight.  Each has something to do with posts I've read recently from people who apparently see the blogosphere differently than I do:

1. Law of Diminishing Share.

No blogger can grow at the speed that the blogosphere is expanding.  The world’s most popular blogger reaches a smaller percentage of the total blogosphere every day.

2. The buck’s not there.

There are few bloggers making a living, or even rent money, by blogging.  Many more improve  their livings because of blogging.  The same, of course, can be said of people using telephones.

3. Size isn’t relevance. A blog may give you a huge audience but a smaller audience may be more relevant to you and your business. For example,you could have a political blog with only three readers.  If they happen to be the heads of the US, China and Russia, you could have great influence on the world. Yet Technorati would rate you as chopped liver.

4. Give to Get.

Blogging is very much like a savings account. The more you contribute, the more you get in return. Like a savings account, it takes a while before you can see measurable returns.

5. It’s the conversation.

The blog is just the latest tool. You can have more conversations with more people in more places with blogs.  None of them beat a face to face encounter.

6. Blogging is multi-sensory.

Touch and voice are useful, but eyes and ears are equally valuable.

7. Blogging is like an elephant.

Depending on how and where you touch it you get a different impression of what it's like.

8. ROI is priceless.

Few blogs can be measured by financial returns.  The ROI can be measured the same way that you measure the ROI if a press release or the value of earning a reputation for great customer support.

9. Any blogger can be heard.

It happens all the time.  Some unknown blogger posts about a spouse being abused in the workplace, or a hole popping out of a plane or a bomb in a London tube and the voice is heard worldwide very quickly.  This does not mean every blogger who posts a picture about their cat will be heard.  Nor does it mean they should be.

My Visit to Scrapblog

I haven't blogged for the past few days, mostly because I've been in the affluent Miami suburb of Coral Gables, a tropical-smelling, Caribbean-influenced place. I was there to work with a company and team I really enjoyed at Scrapblog, who is preparing to launch at DEMO about a month from now.

If you don't know the rules of Chris Shipley's DEMO, where 60-70 companies launch new products and technology twice annually, then you may not realize that the nondisclosure rules are tight prior to the event.  Each company get precisely six minutes to present in front of 500-700 product enthusiasts. So I can't tell you much about the new version, but the name "Scrapblog" kind of gives it away. You can see a more primitive version of it here.

The new version is going to be a lot better. But more than that I like the team and the feel. Carlos Garcia, CEO and founder, is co-founder of Nobox, a successful Puerto Rican interactive advertising agency. At a time when ad dollars are moving to insertion in dead trees to placements on sites, he's in fat city economically, or at least I surmise from our dinner conversations.

At precisely the moment in life when most people are settling in, Carlos is getting out.  He's dipped into his own pockets, as well as those of his partners and is starting a Web 2.0 social media company. He is not doing this because he sees a market opportunity, so much as he just feels this is something he has to do.

Well, for the same reason, I've been hearing since Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolscheim told me they had developed workstations, when Sun Microsystems was my first startup--because they couldn't find the tools they wanted to work with so they developed their own and now they want to share them with friends.

In all my years of working with startups, this has been the best reason I've heard and nearly all the success stories I've touched upon over the years have had that component.

In this case, Carlos and his wife Margarita wanted to make scrapbooks of their first-born Lorenzo, now 2, and they wanted to share them online with friends and family. So did the friends and family.

I can't tell you exactly what happened there, without stepping on the NDA, but what I love is the way, Omar Ramos, his soft-spoken lead developer told me they had improved the photo framing feature. "My wife (Lydia) was in the other room shouting because it didn't work right.  So I had to fix it to make her happy." It seems the caption balloons got improved in the same way after Margarita expressed the same frustrations with resizing them.

It was just a small project, but this company is playing in so many of the yards where I feel passion: photo-sharing, blogging, social media and startups. Geography prevents that I work with them day-to-day as I like to work with DEMO companies I coach, but I am certainly hoping these guys to well at the conference.

[Note--Photo added after I found it in the wrong folder.]

Scars from the Carr fracas

Well, I've never been quite pummeled the way I have been for my broadside against Nick Carr's rant last week. Shelley Powers said the obvious about six times, but her using her blog like a graffiti board doesn't much bother me.

What does bother me is that so many people thought that I was over the top in what I wrote, that my post exuded bullshit and that I had revealed an arrogant and hypocritical streak by discouraging Nick to contribute to the blogosphere he holds in such contempt or so it seems to me.

As I noted in my earlier post, Nick rubs me the wrong way.  This precedes blogging.  It was developed when I read his book and it strengthened after I watched him on stage a few times. e rubs me the wrong way and its personal and when I responded to him, I did it with too much anger and too little logic.

I like blogging because it gives me license to insert subjectivity into my writing, and to show the passion which is very much part of me. But like TS Eliot wrote, "Only those who risk going to far, can really know how far one can go."

I went to far. In so doing, I damaged my credibility and lessened the strength of the argument I was trying to make.

Here is what I essentially object to: The blogosphere is not run by a small, elite group of bloggers with high rankings.  They do not sit in a private room inside a castle set on top of the hill where it casts shadows on hungry peasant hordes.  There is no moat and there is no gate. To claim it is so, seems to me to be the real fraud.

Does that mean, as several bloggers asserted, that I am claiming the blogosphere is flat? No.  It does mean that I think there is more equal opportunity here in the blogosphere than in any other communications channel that exists or has ever existed.. As this photo shows, castles do crumble and there's me on the outside of it.

One blogger commented that it was easy for me to say, because I had the help of Scoble to become an A-Lister.  Well, Scoble himself certainly helped me on my path as did a great number of other people who had higher rankings than me, encouraged me and sent me link love when they thought I merited it. But it was I who took the initiative to approach Scoble through mutual friends.  I flew to Seattle at my own expense, to persuade Scoble to write a book with me.  The collaboration worked and a great number of people seem to think its a pretty good book.

Higher blog rankings was not what I was after, but they did result. In any case, the point is that I took initiative.   I worked my ass off and for that reason, and for a limited time, I have the numerical rankings according to one pulse taker, whose accuracy I question, that says I am now an A-Lister. two years ago I was not n the top million and two years from now I may not be again.

One or more of you will replace me and the other hit tunes of this day.  I assure you this will happen. One day Arrington and Scoble and the rest of us will wake up and discover that we are soooo yesterday, and that will be just fine with me. I will have had my run.

The blogosphere is not a flat world.  It is an equal opportunity channel. The peasants at the gate can get in. They can push incumbents off the playing field. But if it were easy to do this, t would not be valued and coveted by so many people.

But that brings me to my second point.  Bloggers should really, carefully think about whether or not they want to actually be so-called A-Listers. This may be a case of Groucho Marx Syndrome.  "I want no part of any club that will let the likes of me into it."

There is great value in long and middle tail blog positions. What bloggers should want, or so it seems to me, is to be respected by audiences that are relevant to them. The entire blogosphere studio audience is not relevant to everyone.

This blog focuses on business people who want to learn about blogs. Those people are relevant because I want them to buy my book.  I want them to contract me to speak or consult. Right now, that's a good place to be.

If I'm right however, that becomes less and less relevant and this blog will become as valuable and interesting as someone who posts about all the neat ways a business user can use a telephone.

I apologize for having gone over the top.  I regret letting my temper overshadow the points I wanted to make.  I hope this clarifies it somewhat.

Confessions of a Gatekeeper: or "Call me Rosie"

At last, my story can be told.

Since I confessed to the Carr Commission, I've been put into the the Blogger Protection Program.  You would not recognize me now. My new name is Rosie O'Grady. I have flowing red hair, and I must say, the reconstructionists have made me rather buxom.  My new job is as a tavern keeper's waitress at an old pub in Western Ireland.

My new boss says I'm a great conversationalist and that's why I get so many tips.  However, he's had to warn me not to tell any customers to sit down and shut up.

This whole amazing transition started back when I was an A-List enforcer for the Costa Blogga organization. I was not among the blogggers of bloggers who sat in the counsel room.  I was a mere lieutenant, employed to enforce their will by carrying out their orders.  I did not get to decide who shall blog and who shall be made silent.

Don't ask me how we silenced those who needed to be cut off.  It usually happened at night. We drove up to the guy's house either in a Ford Town Car or a multibus. We scrambled their WEP encoding so they couldn't get online.  Then we arranged for AOL to send them a back bill for 999 months. Finally, I made so that when they logged on a, shall we say, "fatal error" would occur.

This of course led to their ruin.  It was nothing personal, you understand. It was just business. The A-Listers need to protect themselves  They were on one side of the gate, and most of the time, I made sure everyone else was on the other.

It was boring work, really.  Sort of like a bouncer at a club.  I checked the A- List.  If you was on it you was in--if you wasn't you just wasn't.  I slammed the gate shut on you.  If part of your body got slammed at the same time, that was your problem, not mine. It was just business.

The came Carr and his commission. At first they were just making noise.  They called us innocent, which we was not and they called us liars, which we were--and I'm tellin' you the truth when I say that.

But the Carr guys kept at it.  And soon the writing was on the wall.  That those guys were going to tumble don my guys and I was going to end up face down in the moat. I didn't want them.

So I did what the Carr Commission wanted me to do. I became rat. I spilled megabeans. I handed over the list of all the links scheduled to be linked from one A-Lister to the other--as well as the list of those two be forever kept out of the gate--no matter what they wrote. The Carr Commission turned it over to the IRS, who under special authorization of the Attorney General had made social collateral taxable.

So now I'm Rosie O'Grady, tavern keeper's wench. But not for long. My agent tells me that we just sold the movie rights to my story. Jack Nicholson is playing me--before I became Rosie.

It's coming out next fall.  It's called "Snakes in the Castle."

The Dell Swan Song

Through Pat Phelan, comes this ingenious YouTube animation called "My PC is on Fire."

You might play it in background if you read today's NY Times Business Page.  The lead story is "Profit Falls by Half at Dell."

Maybe the song title should be, "The Dell swan Song."

Jane Genova Thinks I'm Getting Boring

Jane Genova, who has previously said some very kind things about this blog, thinks I've gone off on the wrong track lately.  She's not interested in my laments about canceled trips and declarations that I am available for consulting.

She wants me to stick to matters that are useful or interesting to her and likens me to the bloggers of yore who wrote about how many cups of coffee they had today. Says Jane:

As a businessperson trying to figure out ecommerce competitive advantages for myself and clients, I get annoyed by Israel's chronicle of personal feelings about such events as a canceled tour and not-enough-assignments.  What I need is for Israel and other bloggers to go to the next level: Here are approaches for solving X and Y.

Jane, I'm sorry you feel that way, I really am. I suggest that you might just skip the posting that you don't care for, which is what I do on a great many blogs. As for me, that trip was the beginning of my next book. That post was also the fastest way to tell over 100 people that we had hoped to see, that plans were canceled.

As for my occasional self-promotion, I have found it to be an easy way to stir up new business.  It may bore you, but it does feed me. How does your tagline about being a speechwriter-ghost writer work for you?

An Open Letter to Nick Carr

Dear Nick,

It's really nothing personal, but I just find myself disagreeing with so much of what you have to say.  My eyeglasses do not see the world the way you do and my experiences in the universe draw me to very different conclusions than you draw.

Yesterday, was no small example. I did not see your latest anti-blogosphere blog. The funny twist was that I would have missed your post entirely, had it not been for one Sterling "Chip" Camden who wrote a great reply to you.  I went on to comment without reading your post at that time, because reading you, well it generally pisses me off. Then I write something nasty about you and then you shoot back and you may enjoy this kind of stuff, but it may surprise you to learn I don't. So I just don't read your blog unless you start a conversation, such as this one, that I just can't let myself avoid.

But let's go back to your recent broadside that claims A-listers, like you and me, like Doc and Michael are the equivalent to feudal gate keepers was very well written.  I admire your ability to articulate so well, even if what you articulate is a fraud , innocent or otherwise.

What is so ironic to me is that according to Technorati, Chip is a mere 55,154th in ranking. While you are a formidable #610. Yet, he sent me to you.  You got my hit, and now you are getting my link and I suppose that will get you more traffic, just like Michael Arrington's link to you might help drive a nice blip in your traffic.

So who's keeping whose gate?  And for that matter is it an open or closed gate?

Let me take it from another point. Some of my best friends are A Plus Listers, Scoble, Doc and Arrington are people I know and like. But these days, I'm reading a lot more of Chip, Kami Huyse, David Parmet, Brian Oberkirch, Jeremiah Owyang,Tom Raftery and Josh Hallett, Chip and Brian Brown's Pajama Market, more than the latter trio. If these links send them traffic, I feel good.  Retaining the traffic is entirely up to them.

Who I read could--and probably will-- change tomorrow. Like all other blog readers, I have the right to choose and the right to be fickle. I have the right to link or not and so do you and so does everybody else. A committee does not get to decide from high within the castle.

So whose hand is on the gate? You have higher ranking than I do?  Would you say then, that you have a greater weight on this gate than I do? Why the Hell do I want to go into the castle anyway.  The weather is great out here. As one of those blog evangelists, you so disdain, why would I want to be inside the castle, where all the converted hang out anyway?

You raise the issue of Seth Finkelstein, whose blog I had not read until you pointed it out to me. Thanks for referring him to me and I will subscribe for a while.  Maybe he will keep my interest and maybe he won't.  Like the rest of us, if Seth wants to be an A-lister, he needs to not just do the right mechanical things, he needs to interest enough people enough of the time. He needs to have readers enthusiastic enough about what he has to say that they link to him and talk about him and catch his passion and get valuable information and insights on things they care about.  In short, he needs to be relevant.

At no point and in no space is there some Committee of the Anointed A-List sitting in a topdown boardroom deciding who should link and who should be linked to. This may be hard for you to understand, Nick, since you are such a lover of all things traditionally corporate.  You just cannot get your mind around anything that is organized from the bottom up.

The link I gave Seth might send a few people his way. He's picked up more than a few links, thanks to you. Now it's up to him to retain them. I raise this because I did a quick check, because I was not certain.  In the past month or so, it appears that over 70% of my outbound links went to people who are not considered A-Lister's Scoble's s over 50 and so is Doc Searls.  Of course this is true of Arrington, but let's disqualify him because he covers "little companies with funny names" as you so belligerently put it.

Nick, I read a few minutes ago that you are about to take a vacation.  I hope you enjoy your space away from the blogosphere. Don't worry about your rankings while you are away.  I'm sure when you come back, you will manage to offend enough lovers of this new conversational media, that your A-List ranking will remain secure.

The other thought is that maybe you should reflect on just quitting your blog. You don't like the blogosphere.  You certainly don't seem to like those of us who are dedicating lives and energy to its promotion, and--don't be offended by this Nick--we really won't miss you a whole lot if you just sit down and shut up.

Sincerely,

Shel Israel                                                                                                     Blog Evangelist

Revolting Rankings

In his recent post, Revolting Peasant Metaphor, Sterling Camden at Chip's Quips hits a significant nail on the head of an issue I've written about a few times--over-ranking blog rankings.  Beside that, I like his ambiguous use of the word "revolting."

Is he making it a verb or an adjective?

If 50 million bloggers all want to be top-rated, then the blogosphere becomes nothing more than a humongous shouting match.  That seems to me, would be a pretty revolting development because it takes attention to the kind of rankings that are used by TV networks, and loses the power of the backyard fence conversation. In the former case, a bunch of slick people in nice suits uses every trick they can cook up to capture your eyeballs.  In the latter, two folks build trust, credibility and an enduring relationship through simple, candid conversations.

If you want to be an A-Lister, there's lots you can do.  First, enrich me by buying the book.  It's filled with rank-boosting tactics: Post often.  Be controversial.  Link to Scoble, Arrington and someone at BoingBoing.  Join every conversation at the top of the Technorati daily list. and at TechMeme.

Scoble and Arrington are the two most popular bloggers I know.  I don't really know there numbers, but I'd guess both get more than 25,000 visitors a day. They achieve this by contributing a great deal of incite and information relevant to a very large number of people.

This sounds pretty phenomenal until you realize all the people, all the people, all over the world who DON'T read either blog.  In fact, every day and Arrington probably reach increasingly smaller percentages of the total blogosphere.

But I have a hunch that's not what most people want from their blogs.  I think people just want to be heard and to start a few simple conversations like two guys chatting over their backyard fence who share  a few similar interests. For example, if Patti in Petaluma is passionate about hummingbirds and she blogs about it, she's delighted when she gets an enthusiastic comment from Bruce in Boise or Lilly in London. Maybe there's only three of them at first, but they all blog and over time there's may 30 hummingbird lovers, sharing their passion and some picture and 1st-person experiences.  They fly very low on the Technorati barometer, but who cares? These hummingbird lovers are relevant to each other. They learn and grow from each other. The blogs have allowed a very small global community to form.

If they wanted rankings, one could claim he or she had sex with a rock star or politician, maybe even toss up a video. Then they would gain rankings at about the same rate that they lose relevance to their chosen community.

This argument extends to me to business bloggers. Very few companies cater to all economic, demographic, geographic, sociographic categories of humanity. Most business cater to very small audiences and they can reach them--and be reached by them--more efficiently, more effectively and more economically through blogs than through any other choice.

Sterling's point is quite quote good.  Ratings are over-rated, or so it seems to me.

Josh Hallett: As Simple as 4 + 4

I really enjoy Josh Hallet's Hyku blog. He writes about many things that interest me so I find myself leaving more than a few comments on his site.  I really love that his spam filter requires me to answer the same question: the sum of 4 + 4.  (Okay, I used a calculator to be sure, but now it's memorized.) If this lets Josh filter out the automated spammers, why does Typepad require me to match six letters and numbers that are often hard to read because of the lines going through it?  I really hate having to pass spam tests on my own site as well as others.

I just think the simplest solution is almost always the best.

Biz 360 starts a Stats Blog

Biz 360, the self-proclaimed "market intelligence company" has started a blog. MarketIQ Brian Glover promises to provide, "data-driven examples of the changes taking place," which seems like a good idea to me.

I have never actually consulted this company, although I almost did.  I've met Brian and I am hopeful he will deliver what he promises to do in this opening post. It seems to me that the lack good statistical information has been one of the sea anchors slowing corporate blog adoption.

We shall see how this one evolves.

Doug Karr's Blogging Tips

Doug Karr has Ten Tips to successful blogging, which are a good summary for people too busy to read Naked Conversations.

Menlo Park Blogger Dinner Tonight

There is a blogger dinner tonight upstairs at the British bankers Club on El Camino in Menlo Park, CA. It will be my last social engagement before taking off Friday to investigate Global Neighborhoods on my micro world tour with Rick Segal on Friday, so I'm really looking forward to seeing old friends and meetiung new ones in my own neighborhood.

If I can expect to see you there tonight at 6 or thereafter, please leave a comment here.

Sifry Reports on State of Blogosphere

David Sifry reports today on the state of the blogosphere, which continues to be extremely healthy. It has grown one hundredfold in the last three years with more than 50 million bloggers today, with 175,000 more bloggers daily. It's rate of doubling has only slightly slowed since Technorati began tracking in October 2006, from once every four months to once every 6.5 months today.

Spammers continue to be the rapidly emerging communications channel's biggest threat. Sifry reports that 70 percent of the pings Technorati receives are from spammers and up to 8 percent of them get past the company's filters.

To me, this trend reconfirms my belief that blogging itself is normalizing.  There was a time when having a telephone or a TV or internet mail was news.  Now it is not because it is so commonplace. I think this is what already has started happening to blogging and it should.

My vision is that blogging becomes a nonissue.  People will start new jobs and get their desks, computers, telephone, email and blog accounts and they will be trusted and expected to use these tools to do their jobs.

The revolution is not in the blog, it is in two-way conversations that empower communities of users more and monolithic organizations less.

Do Comments Help?

Now that I have had my comments restored on this blog, I've had some very interesting back channel discussion. One corporate friend asked me if I could give any examples of comments making much of a difference for companies enterprises under assault my unhappy blog denizens.

He emphasized that the issue is comments, not links or posts.  Without it being said, my assumption is that corporation is not certain they are worth the trouble of the spam and scorn they might endure.

My answer is resoundingly yes. I cited three examples from Naked Conversations.  My retrospect is that my favorite example did not apply.

1. Guided by History.  When the Wells Fargo blog launched, the first reaction was to call it lame. A Wells Fargo spokesperson placed comments on just about every posting that came out.  He showed they were listening.  People got more polite.  Guided by history got better and has now evolved into a disaster preparedness cause blog. If the comments had not been used, Guided might not have had the chance to evolve.
2. Kryptonite.  When the story of the BIC-pickable lock first emerged, Kryptonite chose to ignore the blogosphere, thus becoming the first poster child for the foibles of ignoring the newly emerged force. Nine months later, when Robert and I wrote about Kryptonite in that manner, Donna Tocci, the company's PR person, jumped onto our4 postingf with a series of comments that passionately argued Kryptonite's case.  This resulted in a dialog that persuaded us to write a more balanced version of the incident and more important changed considerable number of minds about the little lock maker's sensitivity to customers.

These are but three examples. I'd like to hear more and so would my friend. Do you know of an example of how comments were used to help a corporation improve their position in a difficult time?

Please post them here. With a little luck Typepad will allow them to go through.

Give Free Advice. Win $600 Phone

My client Pat Phelan has an offer you can't refuse over at his Free Roaming blog.  Tell him what you think of his new Web page.  Give him the best advice and you'll win a $600 Nokia super duper cell phone. Personally, I think the page can use some help.

Jeremiah Gets me Flickring

Two posts ago, was the first time that I displayed photos that came out in a way that did not embarrass me. I am now using using the HTML code that Flickr offers you in a certain one if its many photo views.  I would not have figured out how to do this on my own very easily except for the patient and persistent help of a blogging buddy, Jeremiah Owyang.

I needed to get photos going. Without them, audio and video clips, my posts are starting to look so yesterday, but that's not the point. The point is that I could not easily figure this out by using Flickr and not asking someone to advise me. Maybe, I'm becoming an old dog, but I don't think so. If Flickr wants to realize the huge potential so many of us see in it, then it needs to make some of its most valuable functionality a LOT easier.

Is it it me or is it them?  You guys tell me.

Another Caution on Group Blogs

I find companies of all sizes struggling with the issue of individual vs. team blogs, an issue I wrote about fairly recently. I keep hearing about this one and getting asked what organizations should do.

While, I have preference and see evidence that individual blogs are more popular, I need to emphasize that this should not be a go/no go issue.  Companies should move forward with what makes them comfortable, then adjust accordingly when they get the hang of it.

I do have one additional caution: The magic of blogs is in their humanity. Readers will glom onto the people they like wherever they find them, rarely the corporate team. There are exceptions and I can see additional exceptions.  If the Car Guys started a blog it would be popular as a team, although i don't see how they could replicate their program or their Boston accents.

(1) This is not a go/no go issue and too m

What's in a Name?

We wrote about the importance of discoverability your blog name creates in Naked Conversations and Douglas Karr writes that he took it to heart. He changed his blog to On Influence and Automation because that's what he writes about. He's posted a little chart that dramatically depicts how the name change caused his traffic to soar.

Dell Flack Attacks Jarvis

Just when I thought Dell was beginning to understand blogging, an anonymous representative of Dell's Marketing agency, CGI, hurls this incredibly tasteless and inaccurate pile of shabby homework into Jeff's Comments and makes Dell look really awful, just when it seemed to me, to be moving in the right direction. Now, whatever direction Dell tries to go, it will be moving with each foot in a bucket.

Richard Edelman, whose agency competes with CGI, rightfully called it a "serious case of malpractice," which is pretty much on-spot, if you ask me.

As far as the anonymous comment poster, his footprints go directly back to CGI. Dude, if CGI has half a brain, you should look forward soon to a career in the restaurant service industry.

Guided By History Puts Feet on the Street

When Wells Fargo started it's Guided by History blog several months back, I was ambivalent. I had the feeling they were trying to show that their roots in San Francisco went back a long way. Since then, the blog has had evolved a good deal and most recently, it seems to me, it has gotten very, very interesting.

The blog is now focused on disaster preparedness and that makes sense for a huge company that holds mountains of paper in mortgages and business loans. They are enmeshed into most local communities in North America and then all the components are networked into the Wells fargo infrastructure.

I learned a little more this week during a couple of consulting sessions with a few of their people, this week, but it is their current coverage of the currently raging Southern California high desert fire that has grabbed my attention because it is new and different from anything else I have seen.

The bank is using its local staff to provide feet-on-the-ground coverage of a complex catastrophe as it unfolds. In one recent post, the Wells Fargo interviews a customer who's hands get scorched as she opens a barn in a desperate attempt to save her livestock.  She succeeds in letting the animals make a run for it, but loses the barn.

We know about traditional media coverage, which does a good job of providing spectacular photos and recording what official spokespeople have to say. Everyone is also familiar with the coincidental and collective power of citizen journalists, who just happen to be present when a bomb goes off in a London tube or when a hole gets bunched out of an Alaska Airlines plane in flight.

But Guided by History is different.  This is a Fortune 500 company with a network in communities all over the place.  They are using staff as correspondents or stringers with access and knowledge of their local communities.  Trad media does not have the human and data resources that they have.  Citizen Journalists, by their very nature, cannot be organized in so many communities the way Wells Fargo is.

This seems to me to be both interesting and important. I have no idea just where it is going, but I think it has very significant implications and is well worth watching.

Jupiter Yields to Diva Bloomberg

Well it seems to be a good week for blog evangelism. First Dell awkwardly inserts toe into the blogosphere, now JupiterKagan president David Schatsky posts under the headline of "Bashed by the Blogosphere writes, "obviously we didn't handle communications with interested parties as smoothly as we might have," regarding the brouhaha Toby Bloomberg stirred up when she wanted to know how Jupiter could possibly make a corporate blog projection orders of magnitude higher than previous projections or those of us on the front lines are sensing.

This is no reason to gloat, although Toby is to be commended by her persistent, level headed journalistic approach, and Schatsky is to be commended for a timely response and a reversal of position.

What is to be commended, is that a concerned public is gaining resonance in its voice and large and powerful companies are learning the importance of listening and responding.  People respond so much better if they think you are listening.

Dell & the Bloggers

Well, Dell has started one2one, a corporate blog, and response from the blogosphere has gone along predictable lines. Jarvis trashed it, Scoble told them how to improve it, Holtz was a voice of moderation and Nick Carr made his usual large sucking sounds in the presence of a corporate consulting prospect.

Personally, I think its a very good thing that Dell is blogging.  The fact that so far, it is pretty sucky, is almost irrelevant. And it isn't that we need another corporate blog, which is not true of the bar is set for mediocrity.

It's that Dell has taken a significant baby step in the direction of listening and respond.

Dell's problems are not that Jarvis and the rest of us have posted unkindly about them.  It's that, in order to win a price war, they sacrificed product reliability, then disassembled a once adequate support system to the point of shoddiness.

The anger so many of us felt toward Dell, was not the disintegration of the products we had purchased, it was that the company wasn't listening, was dismissing legitimate complaints and otherwise displaying a disdain for the problems of their customers.

I am not so concerned with what the authors of one2one have to say. That will inevitably get better over time.  I am more interested in what they hear and acknowledge.  People stop shouting when they think someone is listening.

Dell, I'm unlikely to ever go back to you.  I left you after being a customer for 15 years.  I found Lenovo where service and support continue to be superb. But I'm happy to see you at least try to listen and my advice is--really listen to what people are saying.

Then do something about it.

Welcome to the blogosphere. Seriously.

Free Roaming from Ireland

I met Pat Phelan at the Cork Bloggers Dinner.  The next day, he presented me with a Crimson "People's Republic of Cork" T-Shirt, which drew more than a few stares this morning wen I jogged through a fairly conservative neighborhood. He also presented me with a cell phone to use, when I go on the global tour.  It will allow me to to receive calls from anywhere for free in most of the places I'll be visiting.

Pat has since contracted Tom Raftery to set him up with a blog and to educate him on using blog tools. Now, he's contracted me to work with him on a blog strategy, which very quietly started last week.  It was intentionally quiet for a couple of reasons. First, he wanted to get comfortable with blogging and to be sure he had the time to post nearly every day and second, the product, called Roam4Free won't be ready for a few months yet and he doesn't want to talk to much about it just yet. However, I have to admit the name kind of gives it away.

I advised Pat to use the next three months to let people get to know him, to decide whether or not they should trust him, to understand where he's coming from and what parts of his story ht his passion points.

And it turns that he has a Hell of a story to tell. He's up to Part 6 and I suggest you go back to Part One and read up. A few years ago, Pat was a chef in a Cork-based Thai restaurant.  He had a chance encounter at a Thai airport with a recruiter who was tapped into Bangladeshis who were willing to leave home for honest work. In Ireland, a sustained economic boom was making it hard to find Irish kitchen help, so Pat started importing Bangladeshis for the kitchen and came to respect and empathize with them.

Their biggest problem was they missed their families and the cost of calling was too expensive... .

Aw Hell.  just go read his six parts.  He tells it so much better than I do.

Dr. Buyster's Book Blog

You may have never heard of Dr. J. Robert Buyster, or SAIC the company he founded. I hadn't until I stumbled across this article in the San Diego Union tribune. A former nuclear scientist, he quietly built an $8 billion dollar defense contracting firm, which beame

Brian Oberkirch--Like he Matters

My pal Brian Oberkirch has resuscitated his personal blog, Like It Matters, with a new address and it's looking pretty good. I think Brian shows a sassier attitude here than he does on his better-known Weblogs Work, a team blog that he dominates. I hope he keeps going with the new effort.

Nearly Half of Dallas IABC Say They Should Ignore Nasty Bloggers.

Bulldog Reporter is a PR industry rag that hasn't much changed since I took my vow of PR celibacy back in 2001. You have to scroll down to the second story on the page to read the article. Despite warnings by an expert that we bloggers have become a "legitimate media target" for PR practitioners, a poll shows that IABC Dallas members think:

46 percent of respondents believe bloggers should be ignored, or managed by customer relations departments

42 percent say bloggers should be handled by media relations representatives

6 percent say neither of these departments should handle angry bloggers

6 percent say they don't know

I see a great future in the restaurant service industry a large percentage of those who were polled.

They have a nifty report on a poll about who should handle us nasty bloggers and who should handle us, quoting an expert who says we have become a "legitimate media outlet," because we seem to be able to spread messages quickly. You have to scroll down to the second story from the link, because they are using old technology.

There is something happening.  They don't know what it is and it really is a shame.

A Neighborhood Lunch with Martin Green

I had lunch yesterday with Martin Green, the CNET Communities general manager who is my former client and new-found friend. In was through conversations with Martin that I got the idea and terminology for "Global Neighborhoods."

Martin's concept is that each of us dwells in multiple neighborhoods that are local, regional and global. For example, I'm a member of the San Carlos Brittan Park neighborhood where I share common concerns with the people around me about deer-eating roses, traffic and the trash pickup contractors. I feel safe in this neighborhood, and I have love for my home--but I feel little passion for the municipal issues. I also belong to a global neighborhood of bloggers. I am passionate about the neighborhood, it's preservation, it's expansion, attempts to blight it up. I find soul mates in this neighborhood, people who share my dreams. Unlike my San Carlos, Brittan park neighbors, I will never actually see all the people in this global neighborhood.

This concept is at the soul of my next book.

But yesterday, Martin took the concept further.  He divided bloggers into the few like Scoble, Arrington and Congdon who have become media properties.  They have voices that resonate across the blogosphere.  Many have a future, like Scoble, in social media networks that are now forming and have, I think, the potential to do in the next generation what ABC, CBS and NBC did in the middle of the last century.

But these new media stars are few in numbers and bloggers and blog participants are now massive in numbers, with the growth continuing at a relentless pace. Martin started a personal blog a while ago and he has only 20 links.  Can he really be heard like Scoble whose personal blog has over 12,000 links?

Of course not.

As Martin and I dined on sushi from Styrofoam boxes in the tables outside of CNET's 2nd Street offices, Martin argued that is where the sort of online communities  like Webshots and Chowhound are coming in. They are sort of amplified voices for the rest of us  as Martin sees it.

To illustrate, Martin took me in to look at Chowhound, a site that has gone through enormous improvement since I last looked at it in early May. Chowhound is a community for people who are passionate about restaurants. It is organized by physical neighborhoods, so you can search for restaurants in San Francisco's SOMA district or Boston's back Bay or anywhere else that people choose to open up.  Ad hoc "boards" of the most passionate dining people review comments to make certain contributors are on the side of the audience and not pals of the restaurant.  They are comprised of the most passionate community members.

After about a five-minute tour, Martin leaned back and reminded me of his mere 20 links on his blog. "If I write about this restaurant and post it on my blog, probably no one from my local neighborhood will see it. But if I post it on Chowhound, then the people most passionate about food and restaurants will see it.  They are the most influential people for this neighborhood and Chowhound amplifies their influence." This is a shining example of an online neighborhood.  Chowhound is well on its way to being a global community but it serves people via neighborhoods where they live and visit.

He's right, of course.  Alone, he's hollering in a hurricane of over 45 million voices and being heard is becoming increasingly a challenge. By putting his voice on Chowhound he has a neighborhood boom box playing his tune.

But Chowhound a blog,I wondered.  Martin thinks not.  In his view, it is not.  Chowhound is a walled garden, owned, managed and operated for eventual profit by CNET.  Still, I'm linking here to Chowhound, so if it is a walled garden it is a connected garden with open access. I can get recommendations without actually joining or contributing to the community. It looks like a blog and it behaves one.

In the end, it is not really important whether or not it is a blog. The community and the neighborhood is what is so important.

It's About Ethics, Stupid.

I am much more an optimist than a pessimist.  I am happiest when I am championing something, not attacking it. I have passionate hot buttons that make me go over the top, as someone I admire recently wrote and I have more than once recently ignored Scoble's advice to not blog when I am in a bad mood.

The result is that this blog is getting cranky and I'm not happy about it.  Naked Conversations was started to champion something, and to demonstrate the benefits of collaborating on the blogosphere.  It has succeeded wildly toward those goals. Personal fears that our intellectual property would get stolen proved not to be the case.

In all this blog has reinvigorated my faith in people and the wisdom of crowds. I began this project as a reporter.  Scoble was the visionary.  And what has happened here exceeds his vision. Blogging is bigger than what even Robert thought.  Social media is bigger than just blogging.

So why do I find myself railing these days at two categories of people. newcomers with clever ideas of how to corrupt blogging into something deceitful and companies who continue to ignore not only blogging, but the needs of their customers. To me, these two issues tie together under the umbrella of a single word:

Ethics.

I usually avoid discussion of ethics. Such talk often gets sanctimonious and also infers a smugness that mine are better than yours. My ethics have to do with what I do when no one is looking; whether I leave that juicy apple on the cart when the vendor is distracted. It's also about decisions made in backrooms about competitive pricing that requires shoddy goods where the customers cannot see them and about making the term "customer support" into an oxymoron. It's about earning trust, slowly, steadily over time.

Ethics is also not a term most people incorporate into their perceptions of marketing, PR and advertising. When I was studying Marketing 101 four score and seven years ago, we were taught that marketing is about relationships. This of course ties neatly into the concept that markets are conversations. If you can't see what those thoughts have to do with ethics, I doubt that anything I can say will help you see it.

There have been lots of questions lately from people asking  "what wrong with..." questions on ethical issues." The truth is there is nothing for me to say in response.  You either know the answer already or you don't.  If you know the difference between what's ethical and what is not, then I hope you will change your strategies.  If you do not, then I sincerely hope--for the sake of the rest of us--you will fail.

Newsgator Road Map

I'm a NewsGator user and a company fan.  This is in part because Jonathan McDougal, a support guy has twice solved some complex problems I was having, courteously, quickly and on the first try. The only other time I contacted their support, my email was answered by some guy name Greg, who turned out to be Greg Reinacker, who is the company founder and CTO. Greg is the other reason for my loyalty.  He was already a blog community star when I first started edging into the back of the room at blog-related events.  He was always gracious and encouraging to me.

I'm also a fan of the company because I believe RSS is even more important than blogging. The idea of being fed the information you want to your desktop creates an unprecedented efficiency as well as a new level of secure user autonomy.  Companies like FedEx and the New York Times have already taken RSS beyond blogs and it will go much further than it already has, making static websites more "live" and current.

Greg was recently at Gnomedex, sharing the NewsGator road map with attendees and garnering coverage from my two favorite blog news sources, TechCrunch and FacetoFace. These two sources will also get you to Greg's own blog as well as audio and video clips about what it's all about.

My summary is that Newsgator is going to make feeds simpler, and less visible as feeds themselves. They are going to give users greater choice.  They are going to make them easier and then easier still.

To me this is important. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) so far is not really that simple for non-technical people. I needed Scoble and Greg to do a great deal of explaining before I got how it works and why it matters.When I talk to folks new to blogging, it takes great effort to explain both RSS and its significance. In fact the blogosphere will be a kinder, gentler place,  when no one has to explain RSS, they can just enjoy its benefits. Most people drive cars without knowing or caring about the principals of torque or internal combustion. 

The same should be true for bloggers and RSS.

Jonathon McDougal

The Diva Challenges JupiterMedia Numbers

It's a number I'd like to believe. Seventy percent of Fortune 500 companies will have corporate blogs by the end of 2006.  That's what the press release put out by JupiterMedia's PR firm had to say. The release also said some 34 percent of large companies already have blogs.

This would be great news.  Except that a wiki by the highly credible Ross Mayfield and Chris Anderson puts the corporate blog number at a mere 5.8 percent, which feels about right to those who spend a piece of their time evangelizing corporate blogging. One of them is Toby Bloomberg who called Peter Arnold Associates, JupiterMedia's PR Agency. She was told nicely that someone would check with the client and get back to her. Here's her first post on the story, citing the apparent discrepancy.

That's also where the story took a hairpin curve. On the callback, Toby was told they wouldn't give her anything else because her blog was a marketing blog closely associated her marketing consulting business. Other bloggers jumped into the fray including Fard Johnmar from Healthcare Vox who was told that if he wanted to know more he would have to buy the report. He coughed up $750 and got a four-page executive summary.  However, to get it, he had to sign an NDA. So he can't publish the details.  However, from his post, it is clear that he thinks the full report is thin porridge indeed.

I find this all pretty regrettable. Analysts had their reputations pretty badly tainted when the last bubble imploded and may have spent some years rebuilding their reputations. JupiterMedia has put its foot into a bucket on this one. Even if they can defend their questionable numbers, that still leaves them with having orchestrated some pretty questionable behavior.

Congrats to Toby, Fard and other bloggers who have dug into this story with hard-noses and level heads.

Blogging's Biggest Lie

Ann Hadley has been blogging for three months now and she thinks she's found blogging biggest lie--that building up traffic is easy.  I could write a book on what it takes to make a new blog popular.  I hope some of you visit Ann and give her some encouragement.  It's not all just plug and play as she has learned, but it can be done if you hang in there.

PayperPost--Please Crash & Burn

I have not met Ted Murphy, but he is co-hosting a blog dinner for Jeremiah and me in Boston on July 12. This morning he sent me an email pointing with pride to this BusinessWeek article accusing him of Polluting the Blogosphere, which I think is pretty accurate of Ted's new service PayperPost. Jeremiah, my co-guest at this event posts that Ted is actually a very nice guy, which he apparently also told to Marshall Kirkpatrick of at TechCrunch.

I don't care if Ted comes across as a bloody saint. I hope this nasty, cynical, ugly idea crashes and burns swiftly. Jeremiah may recall that last night over dinner we talked about the meanest people, the ones who have committed the nastiest, least honorable actions.  They always come across as being really nice. They are accomplished at getting other people to like them,despite their slight tendency to be sociopathic in business.

I'm not saying that Ted is one of these.  But I'm feeling a mite suspicious that he is. His email to me said he just was curious to know what I thought of the idea. He had to know I wasn't going to like it.  He just figures that among my many wonderful readers are a few slimeballs who might take him up on his call to prostitution. So maybe he's enjoying any fuel I'm putting on the fire because it could be helping him.

That is not my intention.

When I was a kid, back when the wheel was being developed, there was a school play that nearly every school produced, called "The Devil and Daniel Webster." In it, Webster has a solo in which he says something to the effect of, "The devil won't show you horns and pitchfork when he comes down. He will be a well-dressed and well-mannered man.  He will smile and shake your hand and call you friend."

I didn't much care for the play and I am sure I am badly misquoting it. But the pith of it has resonance for me today.

Why Support Matters

One of my faults is that I often stray from the subject at hand. I was talking to Deb Eastman, Biz 360's CMO who has recently contracted me to run a blogging presentation workshop.  She was supposed to be giving me input for my talk.  But she couldn't get a word in edgewise because I was off on yet another tirade about poor corporate support.

Yesterday and today I was dealing with the labyrinthine separations between United Airlines and United Vacations, which you will find on UA's website but is in fact not part of UA. This leads to customers being treated like a Ping Pong ball when they need information or have a problem.  I might add that the UA side of this pincer of torture is a good deal more callous than the UV side.

Deb pointed out that she recently blogged about her problems with Mercedes and it was a good 10 minutes later that she managed to coral us back to the subject at hand.

I think the heart of this matter is that Deb and I are both marketing people who have come to understand the incredible flexpoint of how companies deal with customers and prospects when they have problems or just need information. Deb and I are both passionate on the subject.  We both believe it is a marketing issue, as does David Churbuck over at Lenovo as I recently reported.

I go so far as to believe support should be a part of an enterprise marketing organization.  It should not be treated as an ROI-depleting expense, but an opportunity to generate word-of-mouth marketing champions.  For me this is an issue of emerging passion.  In a world where companies and customers are having fewer and fewer face-to-face or voice-to-voice encounters, the imprint of the support line conversation is eclipsing the 30-second spot, the full-page ad and the ten city media tour in terms of perceptions and brand.

The good news is that more and more companies seem to be getting it.  Th bad news is that most companies still don't or they do see it, and feel paralyzed for reasons that are sounding lamer every day.

Why am I dwelling on support n a blog about business blogging? Because blogging gives us a voice. There is much greater power in blogging about company support winners and sinners than there is in shouting at your TV sets.

A Complete List of Blog Tools

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has posted the most comprehensive list of blogging tools that I've ever seen.  i did not realize how many there were and how many I've never heard of. Darren just lists them.  It still up to you to choose the best ones for your use.

I'll wager that over time, the tools will get better at about the same rate this list gets shorter. Thanks Darren, this list will be useful to a great many people.

Personal v. Team Blogs

I wrote a couple of days ago about issues of boosting your personal blog traffic in a world of increasing noise list and issue which I think is more complex than it seems. I've also been recently asked with great frequency about employee personal blogs vs, company team blogs, an issue which I think is simpler than it may seem.

The basic issue is that team blogs give enterprise executives more comfort because the company brand remains over any personal brands. On the other hand, most of the most popular blogs are the work of individuals who write mostly about their work.

The issue seems to have been escalated by Scoble's recent announcement that he was leaving Microsoft, leaving Channel 9, which is company property, but taking Scobleizer with him. Actually, this will be the third job Scoble has left with his personal blog moving along with him.

I say this issue is not so complex, because ultimately companies will become more comfortable with blogs and when they do, they will opt for a blog strategy that will be the most effective for customer relationships. If decision makers are more comfortable with team blogs, then they should start with them and see how the thing evolves over time.

Personally, I think they would do better by simply setting up appropriate blog guidelines to allow any f their employees to blog if they choose to. The first fundamental change to a company caused by blogging is internal.  The culture changes when employees discover they have an enlightened management who trusts its employees to do and say the right thing on their blogs. The evidence is overwhelming, that employee rarely betray that kind of faith. There's also the MySpace factor. Kids are growing up using blogs and they aren't going to be much interested in working somewhere that tries to suppress or control the personal brand that comes out of it.

But personal brand brings us back to Scoble.  Executives point out that his personal brand has become a significant chunk of the kinder, softer corporate brand that has been evolving over at Microsoft. Scoble says he's leaving and it's mentioned in nearly two hundred traditional media outlets as well as thousands of blogs. Employers are immediately uncomfortable with that sort of power and impact being caused by a mid-level employee and I can certainly see the reasons for it and first glance.

But let's take a closer look. Scoble's departure does not seem to have undone the good he did during his paid tenure. Microsoft still has a more human face. Is their a vacuum in Microsoft's brand caused by his departure? Of course there is, but it will be short-lived.  Microsoft has over 3000 bloggers, about five percent of its global workforce. One or more of them, currently writing in the giant shadow will emerge. They will have a different style and texture, than Scoble had, but we all move on.  Someone else will pick up the Channel 9 handheld camera. He or she will change it a bit from the way Scoble did it, but the show--watched by 3.5 million people a month--will go on. When a TV network loses its anchorperson, someone else always walks into the spotlight. The Mercury News has its problems, but few people think Dan Gillmor's departure had much to do with it. Nobody I know was reading Biz 2.0 when Om Malik was there, so his departure has little impact on the struggling publication.

Let's go back to Scoble for a moment. What if his blogging had been part of some Microsoft evangelical team blog.  Would he have been asked to be less prolific, to stop dominating the team?  Would he have been directed not to say he had Mac envy or wished Microsoft would support gay rights and acquire more cool startups? It's a good question. It was easier for Scoble's managers to do or say nothing when it was on his personal blog, written at home. If someone was managing this blog, would he have not tried to cover his own butt by filtering what Scoble wrote?

The killer question is which way ultimately benefited Microsoft more? I think the evidence is pretty compelling that the personal blog, which has never been Microsoft's property, gave Microsoft the greater--and longer lasting--gain.

The thing about Team blogs is that they are generally mediocre.  The participants tend to talk to each other, they link too often to other portions of their own organization and too rarely to competitors.  They feel self-serving, rather than community serving. Its a reason that Corante, which was originally Hell-bent on providing the most group blogs has been moving away from the position.

There are several that do work. I've previously mentioned TechDirt as one that I like at has high rankings.  But I don't like it for being a team blog.  I happen to like what each of the contributors has to say. Of course if they blogged separately, they could link to each other a lot and say why they agree or disagree with the other team members.

Team blogs are safe and it is better to be safe than abstain. But if you want your company bloggers to really move the needle, I think the wiser course is to let them blog as individuals.  Many voices have turned out to be more powerful and credible than one voice.

(Note--I cleaned up a couple of typos on this post. More signicantly, I inserted the 5th paragraph above, beginning with: 'Let's go back...')

Madam Butterfly & Blogging

It's a taste I've acquired late in life, but I've grown fond of the opera in recent years.  I have this fantasy of walking down Market Street in San Francisco with a boom box on my shoulder playing Carmen or La Boheme and 5 million decibels and blowing all the nasty hip hoppers of the sidewalk.

Last night, Paula took me to see Puccini's Madame Butterfly at the San Francisco Opera House for the first time. It was a wonderful experience. Today is a mostly administrative day, and I have beautiful arias resonating in my mind. It's funny how predictable opera is.  The virtuous soprano is happy in the first act and you know she will be dead sometime after intermission.  She will either be the victim of the baritone or he will take the fall along with her.

So, if they are all so predictable, what's so special about them? The passion is what. The storyline may be redundant but the heart that is expressed in the voice is what makes them so special and memorable.

Just like blogs.

Scoble, Arrington & Blog Traffic

I keep getting asked by new bloggers how to get more traffic, links and comments. The book is filled with tips on these very subjects I say. But the world is changing fast, I am told.

Robert and I were early to the blog party, we are told, and that helped us gain prominence.

Maybe.  Maybe not.

Being early always helps. Scoble was about the 250th blogger and over two years later I was about 6.3 millionth.  It would be nice if I could argue that is why his traffic, comments and links run 5-10 times higher than mine.  It would be nice to use that to discount the possibility that more people are interested in the topics he covers and the way he expresses himself than they do me. But then, how do I account for Michael Arrington, who started blogging nearly two years after me and is now ranked higher than Scoble. How do I account for Jeremiah Owyang, Kami Huse, and KD Paine who all started long after me and are now on trajectory to pass me by?

I blog mostly on business and blogging and more recently Web 2.0 companies and communities.  There are many people who are interested in these topics, so this helps my rankings.  I post between 10-25 times a week, so this helps my rankings.  go out of the way to find new business blogs that will interest my readers and I link to them. Yep, that helps too. Every few days,  I check Technorati and find the conversations relevant to me and the readers who matter to me, and this of course helps as well.  I link a lot. That helps.  I leave comments on other people's blogs, which of course is a plus.  I often resist my temptations to cover multiple subjects in a blog.  I toss in enough personal stuff so that readers see my humanity, but I get back to my core topics as often as I can. I let people know that I want to speak and consult for money, but I don't belabor that, because it's not why people come here.

Michael Arrington does a masterful job of analyzing Web 2.0 companies making him invaluable to any company or person either in the space or simply reviewing the space.  Investors want to know what he has to say. Traditional press covering the topic cannot live without him. He's more relevant to more people than I am. Robert is the poster child for the humanization of businesses. A huge number of people care about that.

I won't speak for myself, but I will say that Michael and Robert write with passion and knowledge.  They are occasionally wrong--sometimes dead wrong, but that just makes them more human and more like the rest of us. Jeremiah is a new guy on the block with a consistently positive view and a passion for building communities. KD addresses one of the great chasms in the new marketing--how do you measure all that stuff.  Kami is a new voice in PR.  She never loses focus.

All of us use multiple tools to monitor other conversations and bloggers and we keep vigilant on what is being said about ourselves and the topics we care about. We are all generous, sending or visitors to other places to see things that would be valuable to them. When we make factual errors, we own up to them and apologize of we feel the situation merits. Some of us get sucked into responding to smarmy comments that should be ignored, but we also have gained the wisdom of listening closely to critical voices and thinking about what is being said.

Robert and I have the same tips for people getting started: Join other conversations. Don't just jump onto someone's blog and say, "I think this is great" or "I think this sucks." Add some new fact or insight to the conversation. Other bloggers will come to your blog and see what you have to say.  They will write about you if they think you are contributing something to the conversation.

There is one think about ratings. They are sometimes overrated. You could have a political blog and have only three readers.  If they happen to be the heads of state of China, the United States and Russia, you would be a very influential blogger with awful technorati rankings.

You need to be very clear in your mind why you are blogging, who you hope to reach and what you would like to achieve. You need to know your community and you need to understand that in the new worlds currently forming the people who are most generous to their communities will emerge to be the most influential.

Blogger Dinner in Boston July 12

Jeremiah and I will be in Quincy, Ma to speak on a panel at a Frost and Sullivan event on July 13. Our moderator is 360I's David Berkowitz, who's a nice guy, even though he's a NY Mets fan. He and Ted Murphy are hosting a blogger dinner at Fire & Ice on Berkeley Street at 7 pm July 12 in our honor.

Boston is sort of my home town.  I went to Northeastern and Boston Universities, did most of my reporting at the Quincy Patriot Ledger in its heyday.  I worked for a while in state government and my brother lives around the corner on Commonwealth Ave. It's always nice to be back in a land where most decent folk love the Red Sox and disdain the Mets as irrelevant.

If you blog, or just think bloggers are cool, or even just like to hang out with loud noisy ill-mannered folk in a Mongolian Barbecue place please join us there. Jeremiah has posted the event at Upcoming. You can sign up there, or just leave a comment here.  We do need a headcount for this event.

KD, I'd love it if you could make the drive.  Leave your sailboat on the Lake and c'mon down.

Charlene Li says her Blog ROI is $1 million

Like most of us consultants, Charlene Li gets asked a lot about the ROI in blogging.  Like the rest of us, Charlene sees quantifying the real value as pretty tricky.  Still she can see $1 million dollars in added revenues to Forrester's coffers, thanks to her blog.

Me For Hire

I have had a series of consulting work postponements since I got back hometown days ago, making my schedule pretty much clear through mid-July. If anyone has any work for me, this would be an excellent time to make yourself known to me.

I provide several services.  The are all related:

• Workshops.  Essentially, there are two parts: (1) a general session in which I give an overview of the strategic issues of blogging and the social media, and (2) hands-on coaching for any employees who are blogging r are considering starting.
• Ongoing blog consulting.  I basically help a company form a blog strategy and implement it.
• Presentation training.  I help people get ready for public presentations. I have been doing this for a long time.  At the last DEMO conference, I coached three companies.  Each earned one of the nine DEMOgod awards.
• Other.  If you think you may have something suitable, please let me know and we can discuss it.

If not, would you please drop a few coins into the hat when you see me on the roadside with a sign saying "will consult to support blogging habit."

Thinkpad Service--I'm a Regular.

The bad news is that I have needed tech support from the Thinkpad folk three times in two months, all three with critical problems. When I got home from Ireland after about 14 hours of flying and connecting, I booted up my computer and it froze on the Thinkpad boot up screen.  After staring for a good 15 minutes and with perspiring hand, I force quit.

As Scoble would say: "Crap!" When I rebooted, I read found myself watching a DOS screen with increasing trepidation as it culminated on the words : "Cannot find OS."

"Crap. crap. crap." (What would Hugh say?).

I rebooted again.  This time my darling little X40 came alive for a mere two seconds.  I tried again and again.  Same results two more times.

Hard Disk crash, I figure.  Crap. Well I can get to the Internet on my wife's computer, so I'm sort of covered.

In the morning, I go to their site and call the tech support number.  I get a human in less than one minute.  He asks me all the annoying questions and makes certain that I understand that my brief warranty on my refurbished computer had expired.

I figure this is going to cost a bundle, but my life is trapped inside this little dead box.  Please Do NOT ask me about backing up.  Just forget about that question.

The guy listens to my story and tells me he's never heard of a computer doing what mine is doing.  Not ever. "Crap," I think. Maybe I should just get a blindfold and a cigarette and get it over with.

The guy tells me to take the battery out, count 30 seconds and reinsert it. Then he tells me to quickly press F1 precisely 10 times, then on an 11th time hold it for 30 seconds.

Hocus Pocus, I think as I follow his direction.  Magically on the 11th press-and-hold, the thing ignites.  He walks me through a few BIOS configuration subroutines and the thing ignites and I'm back in business.

Turns out my probablem was excessive static electricity. This sometimes happens when you are on airplanes a lot or in rooms where you walk barefoot on carpets. I would have been able to invent a spaceship faster than I would have figured this out.

Jeez.  Those guys are good. It's a shame I have first-hand expertise on the subject.

There's just one catch.  I cannot get Internet through my WiFi connection.  I have all sorts of workarounds, but my WiFi connection is primary. I am getting my email.

I'd hate to call them back tomorrow.  Does anyone have any ideas?

SF Blogger Dinner Hotel Utah Volunteer Needed

Thanks mostly to Jeremiah's Upcoming vigilance, we should have more than 40 people at tomorrow night's blogger dinner honoring Adriana and Jackie at the Hotel Utah.  I have reserved the upstairs room from 7 pm on.  When you get there, just walk up the stairs in the rear and you will find us.

They would like someone to come at 6:30 and make sure that the space remains reserved for just the bloggers.  It will be difficult for me to make it until 7. Is there anyone in SF, who could get over there by 6:30 and serve as blogger watchdog?

Boeing 777 & Community Building

Paula and I got to fly to London on a Boeing 777.  It was pour first experience this elegant, sculptured spacious new airship. Even though we were relegated to coach for a flight that lasted more than 10 hours, we suffered no fatigue.  The plane was almost silent and we had seats roomy enough to let us sleep well and not lose a day once we landed. If I were a slick ad guy, I would say we were in 777th heaven.

I would advise anyone shopping for a long flight to shop for a 777, particularly if you have to fly coach.

I had no idea that the plane would be a key point at Content 2.0, where I debated Alan Moore, author of the book Communities Dominate Brands. Alan and I, it would turn out, agreed on almost all issues regarding social media--except one. He believes that Companies can build communities of passionate customers.  I don't.

I'm of the opinion that people build communities and these communities are excerpting the power that companies and other large organizations have traditionally held.  I believe that all traditional marketing tactics are rapidly becoming impotent in their efforts to build, exploit and sell through communities.

As an example, I recounted my experience on the Boeing 777. I shared it with the 150 conference attendees.  How much more would my personal endorsement mean than an endorsement from an official company spokesperson, a sports official, an ad, or a PR campaign.

I am a member of the very large community of people who fly cramped and uncomfortable in the back end of commercial planes.  Fellow travelers trust each other much more than we do any ad.  Did I just help Boeing or the commercial lines who use these planes?  I don't care. Did I just help you on your next long flight?

I hope so,

Crashes, Catch-Ups & Typepad Problems

Just back from Europe to the glory my first ever hard disk crash and the new that my book partner Robert Scoble has made the wise decision to leave Microsoft and join John Furrier's Podtech as a vice president. Now, I'm working on wife Paula's Macintosh and using Internet email. Can any of you Macaholics out there tell me why I cannot see my Typepad editing tools menu, so I can neither link, nor spell check? Both Robert and John really need those links.

I have had incredible experiences in London and Ireland, met new people, learned new things and had so much real life experience, I was almost relieved in Europe when broiadband connection was often too expensive to use or unavailable. The disk crash is another story. It is the third time in three months that my Thinkpad X40 is down and appears to be destined for another voyage to the Thinkpad Hospital.

I have over 100 unanswered emails and can think of 20 posts I'd like to write.

They will be forthcoming in drips and drabs. I'll try to catch up on Europe in the order things happened. They may not be as timely as I would like, but I can think of no other way of doing it. Without the Google Toolbar and access to my own feeds, linking will take more time than I like and I apologize in advance for not being as generous with them as I usually am.

Free At Last!

Arrived a few hours ago in Cork, Ireland where Tom Raftery, his beautiful wife Pilar and his enchanting 18-day-old son Enriquez greeted Paula and me at the airport.  We bonded over a late lunch and now I'm enjoying my first European blog since arriving in Europe.

That's because the Clarion, where the good folk at IT@Cork are putting me up, has free broadband.  This in itself would not be such a big deal, except that we have been at the Melia White House in London since Sunday.

There, we were offered the most expensive broadband connection I have ever seen: Ten Pounds Sterling for one hour.  That's about $23an hour, enough for me to abstain from my well-known blogging habit.

Instead Paula an I played tourist for every minute that we could.  Adriana Cronin, who talked the good folk at Content 2.0 into letting me speak there gave us a guided tour of Oxford, where she spent "the happiest days" of her life she told us. We also enjoyed a barge ride down the Thames River to Greenwich where timeon Earth begins and ends. Next week, she will be a dinner guest at our house in California and the guest of honor at a blogging dinner Tuesday night at the Utah Hotel in San Francisco. She's in town for the BlogHer Conference. Please join us if you can.

A great deal happened in London and Content 2.0 was well attended by passionate thoughtful people.  I had spent some great time with Hugh and we discussed the incredible Stormhoek story which just keeps getting better.

I'll write more next week when I get home.  There's a blogger's dinner tonight. Tomorrow I speak about Web 2.blah at the IT@Cork conference. Then Paula and I will tool over to the Ring of Kerry before coming home from a hectic, whirlwind one week tour.

It's nice have spent face time with so many old blogging friends and having made so many new acquaintances. It will be nice to have connection all the time back home.

(NOTE: I changed this post to read TEN pounds, not one, which is the correct figure)

Creating Passionate Blogs

Kathy Sierra posts that Creating Passionate Users has joined the Technorati 100 Club and asks just what it is that makes her blog so popular.  I think it begins with the name of it, which is the best statement I know for what business blogs are about.

Then there's the fact that Kathy writes with simplicity and elegance, with depth and though fullness.  Kathy usually avoids "flock topics," conversations that go from one blog to another and another.  Instead she starts conversations on topics that matter to a large number of people.

Creating Passionate Blogs is one of my favorite blogs.  I'm happy to see it reaching such a milestone of success.

Bloggers Can Shield Sources, Court Rules

The California Appeals Court yesterday ruled that bloggers have the same rights as traditional journalists have the right to shield confidential sources. SF Chronicle Staff Writer Ellen Lee called it is a "decision that could set the tone for journalism in the Digital Age," and I agree.

The decision stems from a law suit by Apple Computer against a blogger who published information on a music product that had been discussed only under NDA restrictions. The blogger had not signed an NDA, but got the accurate information and published it, citing confidential sources--presumably inside the Cupertino-based company.

The California Appeals Court essentially ruled that bloggers are protected by the same First Amendment Rights as journalists. This is an essential component of a free press.  If journalists cannot protect their sources, than the only source becomes the official company or government spokesperson.

I have long argued that some bloggers are journalists and deserve to be treated as such.  I would also argue that some traditional newspaper writers are anything but journalists and abuse their privileges all over the place. The medium is not the key to defining the message-writer.  The quality of reporting is.

It seems to me this decision is a good day for bloggers.  It is a great day for free speech.

Jim Estill Starts from Zero

Blogging CEO Jim Estill, who I enjoyed meeting in Toronto a few months back, has moved his blog and is starting from zero on links. He now has more than one. I use Jim as an example of a disciplined CEO who finds 20 minutes for blogging every day.

In his current posting Jim, talks about people who find his blog through on-topic "appropriate searches," that send him traffic. If Jim wants to see examples of inappropriate searches, he should try putting the word "Naked" in his blog title. You'd be amazed and embarrassed to see some of the Google entries that lead smut searchers to the here business book site.  There's a reason why we had to take down AdWords.  The keyword traffic just wasn't our crowd.

Guided by Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo, like any financial institution clearly feels the angst of the social media explosion.  On one hand, they are in a category of business that carries the burden of almost insufferable regulatory controls.  On the other, is the customer fear that their financial stuff will be shared with God only knows who.

Then there are people like me, who are quick to point out that there have been no major breaches of confidentiality yet, despite the fact there are nearly 40 million blogs and bloggers are posting new content faster than once per second.

Of course, if I were Ed Terpening at Wells Fargo, who manages a companywide team addressing blogging/RSS issues, I just might take a more cautious approach, which is indeed what happened. The result was Guided by History, a group blog by Wells Fargo associates, braided into the centennial observance of the

San Francisco

earthquake in the banks hometown.

I was consistently ambivalent about this blog.  I found it interesting and well-written.  It was devoid of “corpspeak.” It used no false characters, nor did it make any lame attempts to sell.  By following it, I learned more about an historic event of interest to me. And now the blog is continuing to cover disasters elsewhere as they occur. All for the good.

But still, I wish that Wells, or some other bank, would take the chance t have a blog that used real employees talking about the finer points of getting loan approvals, soft tips on interest calculations, what happens to them if the till desn’t balance at the end of the day.  I want to see real people doing real jobs who I can ewatch and trust and that will build my loyalty to Wells over B of A or some other non-blogging bank.

Will this happen in my lifetime?   The following interview gives me reason to be encouraged.  Ed makes clear that Guided is but a first cautious step for the bank into the deep blue Blogosphere. What follows, except for a few insignificant condensations and grammar polishes are his answers to my questions.

1.  What does Wells Fargo expect to accomplish with blogging?

Blogging is an extension of our web site, in that it gives us another touch point--a way to listen and communicate.  We recognize the growth of emerging online social networks (of which blogging is just one part) as one that provides us unfiltered sentiment from consumers and from which consumers can collaborate to achieve goals.  Social Networks, like 43Things, http://www.43things.com are a great example of where consumers collaborate to achieve financial goals.  We want to use these new media as another way to understand consumer needs and opinions. 

2.  How does Well Fargo wish to be perceived by customers and prospects? How does blogging impact that, from your perspective?

First, we want to see our customers succeed financially.

We wish to be perceived as a bank that is guided by customer needs, socially responsible, and innovative in both product development and use of technology to make people's lives easier.  Blogging helps us achieve many of these objectives. 

While our current blog does not have a finance focus, we're listening to what consumers are saying, and have begun responding with comments, identifying and addressing common customer service questions and are considering possible future blogs that may be related to our businesses and the products we offer to our customers.  I believe that joining the conversation and using the power of blogs lets us find more ways to help our customers be financially successful, which is ultimately our most important objective. I've already seen evidence of how "being in the room" brings a higher level of constructive conversation, and that's beneficial to all involved.

3.  How did the concept of Guided by History come about?  What did Wells Fargo hope to accomplish with it?  How would you evaluate the results in the brief retrospect that you now have?

The concept came about when we recognized a unique intersection of events and needs: First, we were searching for a way to enter the blogosphere that was somewhat safe (i.e., a short term commitment, non-controversial, etc) to get experience.  At the same time, our Historical Services Dept. was preparing exhibitions in our museums related to the '06 quake anniversary.  When I looked at what they were doing--especially the first-hand accounts of 1906 employees of the time--I recognized it could make a great blog. 

The stories are written as you'd write a blog: first person, authentic, often passionate.  The challenge was: how do we go beyond history, and make the event relevant today?  It t urns out the same manager responsible for the museums was on a company-wide committee working with The American Red Cross and the City of San Francisco on preparedness events and awareness.  So, "Remember & Prepare" naturally married our unique historical perspective.  Our history is an important aspect of our company and culture and seizing an opportunity to make history relevant today made perfect sense.

We've evaluated the success of the blog using many data points, including comments (both quantity and sentiment); feedback emails; by reading what more than 100 bloggers wrote about it; and standard web metrics like unique users, hits, etc.  Overall, the metrics were extremely encouraging. 

4.  Guided by History is a highly localized blog.  Yet Wells Fargo does business in a much larger geographic area.  Why did Wells pick such a localized subject?

Of course the Internet is global, and we're getting worldwide visitors to this blog that care about preparedness, but you're right the topic is somewhat local.  There are a couple of reasons for this:

1) we wanted the experience. The idea of blogging is still new to financial services companies, and we wanted a benign topic that allowed us to dip our toe in the blogosphere - the earthquake anniversary made sense and is local to our company's headquarters;

2) we felt the topic had global significance, especially in light of such recent disasters where preparedness was top of mind (e.g. Katrina, Tsunamis, etc.);

3) Wells Fargo focuses on consumers at the local level, so a regionalized blog was not unnatural for us, and speaking directly to communities is something we want to continue to do.

5. You have been criticized by several bloggers including me for not making this blog more about banking services and less about banking, or a banker's life at Wells Fargo.  What is your response to these comments?

I accept that as valid criticism. As an industry, we're regulated (and with good cause), and so therefore we're going to approach things differently.  I'd like to say we're as "Gung Ho" as some tech companies are in this medium, but the reality is that, as a large financial institution we are careful and conservative given the sensitive nature of what we deal with - people's money and people's trust. As I've commented on Naked Conversations, we've dipped our toe into the blogosphere. The water is fine, so we look forward to providing our customers with more information geared toward their financial interests.

6. You personally responded, as I understand it, to just about every blogger who wrote about the Wells Fargo blog. You used email.  Why did you not post a response on a Wells Fargo blog and link back to other bloggers? Why did you not at least leave comments on our posts?

I did leave comments on blog posts (more than 30).  I personally responded to just about every blog post about the blog not via email, but rather on the blog that posted the content, as my own comment (disclosing my name, title, etc), and followed up separately via email only when requested by the blogger. 

I felt a blog post on Guided by History responding to some of the comments were out of context for a number of reasons: 1) the audience that generally wrote criticisms about GBH were largely industry watchers, not the general public; 2) It seemed off topic; we're blogging about history and preparedness, not _about_ blogging; and 3) I wanted to ensure that the blogger got a direct response to their own post, hence my comment on their own blog.  My focus was on our core audience and their needs.  I'm open to feedback about GBH - we did this as a learning experience - otherwise I would not have taken the time to find and respond to bloggers who wrote about us.  I just felt a direct response via the commenting mechanism was the most direct, respectful, and most in context.

7. What will you do differently next time?

I would have liked to have had more guest bloggers.  We're not the experts on disaster preparedness.  Had we had more time, I would have signed up more guests and let them run with it.  I'd also like to see more community building features added, like polling and other features that surface reader opinions.

We launched this blog in a very short time frame, and I think we rushed through some decisions that I'd like to revisit, such as collection of email addresses, URLs, etc.  As a bank, we generally face more restrictive rules limiting the collection of personal information, so we have to be especially careful.

8.  What blogs can we anticipate from Wells Fargo in the future?

We'd like to blog about topics related to financial services, to continue to use this platform to reach out to the community (what Steve Rubel calls "Higher Holy Calling", among other approaches), for us to think local-as well as global-and for us to listen and respond.  We also expect to follow the broader Social Networking phenomenon for which blogging is a part.

Several groups in the company also use blogging internally to communicate (as well as Wikis, etc).  There are at least a couple dozen internal blogs that I track. I hope that trend continues as it will further educate all parts of the business on blogging and social networking.

9.  How, in your opinion, will blogging change Wells Fargo in the long run?

We want to be where our customers are, when they are there, which increasingly is the blogosphere and online.  Blogging is another channel-- an increasingly influential one at that - to reach a consumer audience; it does not (at this point) replace other forms of communication, including traditional marketing, media relations, etc.

I believe consumer tools that support brand analysis by mining social network data and surface broad consumer sentiment (eg, "Intelliseek for the consumer", like Yelp) will gain acceptance.  This will re-enforce the company's commitment to customer service-every customer touch point is increasingly important, as the voice of the "average consumer"

increases in visibility.

I also believe regional blogs will bring us closer to customers and have a very positive marketing impact.

10.  How do blogging and the social media impact banking? How will it change relationships between the financial services companies and customers?

Social media and the "connected society" are making the world smaller very quickly.  The practical impact is something I spend a lot of time thinking about and observing.  I can foresee possible futures, but like the start of the web, what actually happens depends on many factors, including cultural, technological, and even legislative. 

The ability of like-minded groups to instantly share broad sentiment on brands and products is extremely empowering. The bottom line is companies like Wells Fargo are very customer focused, react to customer-segment needs more quickly, and address local segments - blogging can take these efforts to the next level. I believe it will also have a segmentation effect on products/services.  As companies better understand the needs of segmented social networks online (eg, whether by age group, or other attribute that creates a "group"), we can respond with specialized products.  Perhaps a WellsFargo.com tailored for seniors or another for teens.

Martin Green Starts a Blog

Every now and then you start a consulting gig and you end up with a friend. I'm just winding up a couple of months of helping CNET Communities with a few things regarding message and blog.  I'm only scheduled to be over there one more time.

My primary contact over there has been Martin Green, general manager of the Communities Group which will have a lot of things to talk about in the next few months. Martin is surprisingly shy for someone on the GM level, that is until he starts talking about his Communities division.  Then he has the tenacity of a dog with a bone.

It was during a conversation with Martin that I thought up the title, Global Neighborhoods for the book. When he starts going public with what they are doing, you'll hear a good deal about neighborhoods, an idea he developed before I lifted it.

I think Martin is a prince of a guy. I hope we remain friends.

But that's not why I'm writing this.  I'm writing because Martin has finally started a personal blog. I have pushed, prodded, pleaded and cajoled him to start his own blog. Now that I am quacking and limping my way out the door, he starts one. 

I feel like it's a going away present.  For me, it's the next best thing to a bonus check.

LAPD Starts a Blog

Through Theresa Valdez Klein at Blog Business Summit points to a fascinating blog by the Los Angeles Police Department, an organization rarely cited for outstanding community relations or innovation.  This one, I think scores them a significant point in the right direction. As much as I'm enjoying the recent publicity I've been receiving, I'll be grateful if I never get to see my photo on this particular site.

3rd Thursday's Corporate Blogging Panel

Jeremy Pepper and Mike Manuel co-hosted that spotlighted a panel of three charming corporate communications specialists from Cisco, NetAppliances and Ingres. I did not take notes.  Nor did I catch all three of their names, so I have to give a vague report based on my recollection of what was said after I had consumed a beer and was really focused on not freezing to death in the Palo Alto Fanny & Alexander Patio where the heat lamps were not turned on as the temperature plummeted.

Each of the companies are taking different views of corporate blogging. Ingres, a recent spinoff, is acting with the freedom and speed of a startup because it is still a private company. NetApps has only one official blogger and he is on the C-level.  Several employees blog on their own time and identify themselves as NetApp employees. Cisco seemed to me to have the most open blog policy, sounding very much like any employee can start a blog and is trusted to say what they want. One official blog, faces off on one of the most controversial of all issues, Cisco's involvement in China where internet freedom of speech is under the thumb of a government command and control policy.

The two public companies moved at a glacial pace to implement blogging.  Ingres moved with speed.

I got a special kick out of the fact that two of them said they used Naked Conversations to persuade their company decision-makers to facilitate blogging.  Jeremy pointed out t me and identified me as co-author.  I felt like I was in a remake of the Marshall MacLuhan moment in Annie Hall.

In fact, this is precisely what Robert and I hope will happen with Naked Conversations.  It is a book written with Corporate evangelism in mind.

Each see them increasing

Blogger Dinner for Adriana Cronin-Lucas

This is a case of hands-across-the sea reciprocity. 

Along with Jackie Danicki, Adriana Cronin-Lucas is co-hosting a blogger party in my honor in a private home in London's Chelsea District on June 5.  It's the night before I speak at Content 2.0 where she was instrumental in getting me as a speaker.

It turns out that she will be in San Francisco the following week, arriving here one day after I get back. I would like to return the honor and throw a blogger dinner in her honor on Tuesday, June 13. I'm thinking of making it the Hotel Utah and arranging to get their upstairs room. If anyone can suggest a better venue, I'd be very interested in hearing about it.

I met Adriana at Les Blogs and we immediately liked each other.  She has a very popular blog.  I don't think I can tell you much about the blog consulting work she is doing, but when it is completed, it will make history or so it seems to me.

Please come and meet her. If you want to be counted in please let me know in the comment section below. If you have an idea for a better venue, please leave it in comments below as well.

See you there.

Blogging Inside Washington Group International

I had never even heard of Washington Group International (WGI) until I started chatting with Jim McKeeth at the Boise Bloggers Dinner on Monday night.  Jim, it quickly became clear, is WGI's internal blog evangelist and he asked me to drop by  to talk about blogging with his boss Andy Snodgrass yesterday afternoon.

It turns out the WGI is among the world's leading engineering, construction and large, complex project management firms. I does business in 30 countries and 40 states. It is a conglomeration of large chunks of Westinghouse, Raytheon and Morrison Knudsen divisions and as the legacy of the people who built the Hoover Dam, TransAlaska Pipeline,the Mars Land Rover, chemial weapons destruction facilities, light railways and a good deal more.

The company's interest at this point is only for internal blogging, at least for now and they have two enormously suitable project for internal blogging and perhaps wikis:

(1) Passing generational wisdom--WGI is bracing itself for the retrement of a significant ercentage of its existing workforce. These guys are the "Old Joe's" who have been there, done that and have the wisdom and sagacity aggregated over a lifetime of trials, errors and successes.  Andy talked to me about using an internal blog, to let this generaion tell their stories of what they saw and what they did along with how they did it. The blogs, and perhaps podcasts, would serve as a digital history for the company and for the next and future generatios of new employees.  This is a wonderful idea.  I have not previously thought of using a blog this way but it is so clearly an idea that is easier to implement than most of the complex engineering projects that is the company's core competency. Social media is simply a superior way to deliver storytelling and it lasts forever.

(2) Interdepartmental collaboration--Andy told me a story about the company having stored a pair of massive turbines for a particular project.  When it came time to deploy them, the team discovered they had been corrupted by some sort of pitting.  They called in a pair of outside "experts" who solved the project for a tidy fee. Several months later the company's CEO would discover that these experts had learned their trade from a book written by GI employees in another division. It is an enormous challenge for global companies to know what it's collective staff knows and we discussed how blogs and wikis could help the company effectively share knowledge.

Both of these projects involve the use of social media to prevent the need to continuously reinvent the wheel, a problem for a great many companies.  I left impressed with their interest and enthusiasm.

For me, there was an additional lesson. I ave to admit that part of me is a start-up snob  A key reason is that I just hate being bogged down by process. I said good night to Jim a about 10:30 Mnday night. By 10:30 yesterday morning, he had been able to set up a meeting with a corporate VP. This morning I asked Jim for permission to post this at 7:20 a.m.  Andy gave me his blessing at 7:42. Now thats the kind of focus and execution that takes my breath away.

NOTE: This post has been reedited with a typo being removed and some irrelevent financial mentions being deleted.

London Blogger Party June 5

Jackie Danicki and Adriana Cronin-Lukas are two new-found friends, thanks to blogging and the face-to-face gatherings so many of us attend.  I'll be seeing both of them at Content 2.0 in London on June 6.

Now, the two of them honor me further by hosting a blogger party where I will be the excuse to attend in the home of Adriana's Big Blog Company partner Perry de Havilland, a blogger who has a reputation for throwing great parties on June 5.

If you are in London that night, I'd love to meet you.  Space is limited so please click on Jackie's link to find out details.

Boise Blogger Dinner

I've only been to Boise once and I found it a pleasant enough place.  But on a personal level, I did not get a sense of connection. Now, I'm headed back, not as the PR consultant I was back in 1995, but because I'm an author and the Boise PRSA wants me to talk about blogging to a roomful of PR consultants.  I love these touches of irony in my life.

But, I'm heading up there Monday, May 15 feeling certain that there are people like me there. Steve Nipper, an Intellectual Property attorney-blogger has done a phenomenal job of setting up a blogger dinner that about 20 people ranging from student age to ancient like me have said they're coming.  We are holding it in the Flying Pie Pizzeria, whose employee,  Lesley Juel  posts on the pizzeria's Flora the Foil Ball Blog.

We will be a diverse group in lots of ways, but we will share one or two common passions--blogging for sure and pizza is a strong likelihood. In fact, it's becoming clear yo can go to most places in the connected world and find a colony of bloggers willing to bend and elboiw and share a story together. Steve Nipper will beme yet another old friend who I'll be meeting for the first time.

I'm looking forward to both events.  And if you happen to be in Boise with nothing to do on Monday night, please join in. You can come if you don't have a blog yet, but think sometime soon you might like to start one.

Avenues of Blog Influence

A couple of days ago, I was invited in to visit some folk at Biz 360, the market intelligence company.  They've been around a while and I can remember back in the late 90s when I was running a PR firm wishing that I could afford their stuff.

Times change. Now there's blogging, which is highly decentralized, dynamic and topically skewed. If you are interested in corporate blogging, you may find this blog useful and consider some of what I post, influential some of the time  If your passion is hummingbirds, then despite the numerical rankings that blog search engines say I have absolutely zero influence.

Even on my own topic, on a given, someone you and I have never heard of may post something on a subject I write regularly about, and that may have the most influence in the world on a given day. Likewise, having big numbers, as most A-Listers will confide, does not necessarily show influence. It depends on who those readers are.  If you are a business blogger, a tech editor at the New York Times is worth to my influence, more than six godzillian MySpacers.

This is interesting to me.  It's a nightmare to an analytics company, trying to sell market intelligence to Fortune 1000 companies. Our session began with them showing me a sample comparison chart of blogger numbers v traditional media coverage of a theoretical company.

I kind of wrecked the presentation,by asking why it mattered whether the original source of information comes from a blogger or an editor.  We all monitor each other all the time.  We influence each other. They abandoned the presentation and we just talked.

Okay, I mostly did the talking. I guess they impressed me because they listened closely and because half the group who were in the room came from development, rather than marketing.  The engineers mostly just listened for two hours.

Somewhere, near the end I asked if they had thought of visual mapping of how blogging flows. I said that if you wanted to understand influence, a visual map would allow companies to see the avenues of influence where information flows. For example, I mentioned Gautam Ghosh, a Bangalore-based blogger whom I followed. Gautum is a known and respected blogger, but few people would call him an A-Lister.

But I read him.  Scoble reads me, and just about everyone including national business editors read Scoble. Perhaps Gautam reads someone who has just 4-5 links. That someone has a direct avenue of influence that can easily get what he or she has to say onto the front page of the New York Times within one day if the topic and content were rel event to everyone on this avenue. Of course, each stop on this avenue actually intersects with other avenues.

Such a visual map would be enormously complex.  But Manuel Lima, from VisualComplexity has already begun creating visual maps containing extremely complex information. Nothing he has done, so far, would be as complex as a global map that depicts a company's avenues of influence. But it is getting increasingly clear that any blogger can leave the blogosphere at any time, and the influence would get redistributed along the avenue he abandoned.

But this is what it will take to allow a major company to get the important answer.  The question is not really, what 10 bloggers have the most influence, but rather what avenues does information travel along that generate the most influence.  it is nearly irrelevant at what intersection that information enters the avenue, or so it seems to me.

I don't know if I was any help at all to the folks at 360.  But I am on the side of better analytics. Until some company like them or Umbria or some unknown Web 2.0 startup gives the folks in the world's largest marketing departments some rel event analytics, corporate adoption will continue to meander at a pace that I feel is short of fast track speeds.

Lawyers Drop Lance Dutson Suit

Lawyers for the ad agency suing Maine blogger Lance Dutson have just withdrawn the suit. Way to go Lance.  Go away lawyers! Ever now and then the good guys win one.  Yea!

The Connected Generation

I hear it at least once weekly. A corporate skeptic hears me rattle off Technorati numbers as his face forms a frown. "Yeah, but isn't it mostly kids? Isn't it just the MySpace and LiveJournal kids?  What good are they to MyCo?"

First off, it's not just the kids.  Blogging is growing in just about every way you can measure. But it is true, and extremely important, that blogging's greatest growth is among people under age 25. Forrester's Charlene Li told me that 25 percent of American youth read blogs and that is where the greatest growth is happening.

I maintain that the adoption of young people who use blogs is essential to the future of just about any enterprise, even global business-to-business organizations. Ignore what is happening in online youth communities and blogs and your company can expect a future in the company of dinosaurs.

These kids will graduate in a few fiscal quarters and they will become your customers, your employees and those troublesome entrepreneurs who will challenge staid and aging incumbent cultures. Blogging and online sharing is a big part of their culture, their way of making choices and their approach to buying goods and services. You can find the best and brightest of the emerging generation among others in MySpace and LiveJournal.

Blogging is part of their lifestyle and their habits. The habits we form in our college age days tend to stick with us through life. Large chunks of the social networks we build when we are between the ages of 18 and 25 stick with us through life.  The internet has made these social networks larger and more powerful than back when I started college in 1962.

But habits and social networks have only changed in the mechanics of the formation. On my first day of college I picked and read the first New York Times I had ever read.  I was grateful that it was free to students.  By the time I graduated, the New York Times is part of my habit. I read my first copy 43 years ago while drinking a cup of coffee.  I did the same thing a couple of hours ago. I have been paying to support this habit for the last 39 years, so the Times has had a good ROI on their investment in me.

My granddaughter is only seven, but I doubt traditional newspapers will be much part of her life. But I bet that by the time she graduates college her habits will include blogging, online sharing and things I have not yet imagined that are now arts of the great misnomer we call Web 2.0.

Hers will be the connected generation

She will go online to find people who share her tastes and values.  They will influence each other about where to dine, travel and buy; on what to drive, where to live and work.  She will only want to see advertising in areas where she states her intentions online. She ill be recruited for her first professional job online. On her first day at this new job, she will be given a desk, a computer, a telephone, an email account and a blog account. She will use these tools for different purposes based on her job and her habits.

The blog and connection will just be part of a normal day in a modern workplace.

Companies that do not start altering course to accommodate this day will go the way of the Cadillac division. They kept marketing to the customers they had as those customers aged. They ignored emerging generations who saw better luxury and value in competing luxury cars.  They allowed an image to be embedded that theirs was the car for cigar-smoking, environment damaging, aging white men. The problem was that the image to a great degree was accurate.  Over time, the aging white guys died off and their were too few customers to replace them. Cadillac has had to start all over and continues to struggle, even as their cars get steadily improved reviews and they recalibrate to market to young adults.

Companies that do not understand that every four fiscal quarters, a new generation of potential employees, customers and competitive threats is coming into the workplace may find their customers and employees have all driven their Cadillacs into Jurassic Park.

Southwest Smooths Its Flight Pattern

After chopping through turbulence with its maiden voyage into the blogosphere, Southwest Airlines seems to have found some smooth air.  It's flights into the new territory have become more frequent, and like so many of it's tangible flights, it is learning that brevity is appreciated.

Yesterday,Angela Vargo, who has been busy emailing many of us, asking us to be patent, started joining the conversation with links back to Brian Oberkirch and some guy named Robert Scoble. She also revealed that she is getting help from the very competent PR -blogging maestro Andy Lark.

Angela, it turns out, is a public relations specialist for Southwest. Many have argued that corporate PR people should not blog.  I'm not so certain that this is the case, if they are transparent. After all, the emerging new role for PR people is to get closer with the customer in my view,and this seems to be a good way to do it. I wish all the Southwest people would show their titles. I found out about Angela by Googling her.

It's just a week later and Southwest has soared up in my opinion to a rating of not bad. This is how I've been picturing it happening for large customer-focused companies.  An awkward toe dip, an adjustment of course and then--dare I say this about an airline company--taking the full plunge into the blogosphere.

Angela, I expect I'll be meeting you or someone else from Southwest when you start showing up at industry conferences telling your story.

Dennis Howlett Demoes R&D on Steroids

Dennis Howlett over  at Accman Pro had a fascinating interchange yesterday, after reviewing a new WebEx competitor named vyew. A few minutes after publishing, Steve Checkley posts a complaint that the new Web 2.0 company does not let users share a live desktop.

Someone else complains that it doesn't support PowerPoint sharing either.

At 6 pm, a vyew spokesperson, Tim H. chimes in saying in fact that PowerPoint is supported then a little after midnight, Tim H. responds to say the company listened to Checkley in the morning and will support live desktop sharing THIS Week.

Talk about listening to your customers. This has to set a new record for responsiveness for user-requested refinements. My congratulations to vyew. My advice for next steps: start your own blog, vyew, so that you can have more direct exchanges with customers.

Hey Southwest! Listen to Oberkirch. Seriously

Brian Oberkirch has started a brilliant series of fabulous sample blogs showing what he could do if he were Southwest Airlines. Not only are the four samples, here, here, here and here.  He says there are five of them, but I only found four. I think they're really stupendous, capturing the spirit of why so many of us really like the airline.  I can perceive of no way any one of them could cause a legal or SEC exposure problem.

I can think of every reason posts like these would make people more loyal to PSA.

I've already offered Southwest a half day of my services for free. Angela sent me a nice note but it doesn't feel like they take me seriously. But Hell, Brian is a home boy for Southwest. They are both located in Dallas and he has some fabulous ideas.

Angela, from Southwest: I know you're reading this stuff.  Don't send another polite email.  Contact Brian.  If you need his phone and email, ping me.

Individual vs. Team Blogs

I have a couple of half-day workshops on blog strategy coming up, one at Hitachi Data Systems and the other at CNET.  In preparing for them, both companies have asked me about the issue of team vs. individual blogs.  This also has emerged as an issue over at Sharpcast where I am consulting. It dawns on me that this issue is cause for angst in many companies.

Should employees who are going to blog about their jobs be organized by product group, department or workgroup?  Should the URL have the company name in it? Does it matter if it is hosted on Wordpress, Typepad, Movable Type or a company server?

When I first started hearing this question, I used to say it really doesn't matter.  Now, I would adjust that to say it matter less than many companies realize, but there are pluses and minuses for a group blog vs individual blogs.

Pluses:

• I requires less time of each blogger.
• Each blogger can give a different perspective to the same project, product or service.
• Group blogs fit into a neat tidy ball with the existing web site.

Minuses:

• Your most passionate readers rarely go to your actual blog.  They subscribe to feeds and read what you have to say in plain text. All that look and feel work you might do on a company blog, is like dressing up to entertain an occasional house guest. For your real friends, you probably appear more casually.
• Most reader follow bloggers, not blogs. In short, if five people share a blogspace, each of them will develop their own followers who often skip entries by co-bloggers at the same site. I scanned my feeds this morning and was surprised at how few group blogs have reach prominence.  With the exception of TechDirt, my short list of daily "must reads" has no group blogs. When I have time there are a few others I enjoy over at the Corante stable.
• In fact, I think Mike Arrington has selected a wiser course.  He started with TechCrunch, then branched into CrunchNotes, MobileCrunch and CrunchTalk.  Each blog s written by a different person.

In short, my advice to companies is to spawn a culture that encourages people to blog about their work. Let everyone start their own blog wherever they wish. Maybe use a company site to point to list their individual URLs.  Encourage synergy between blogging employees.  Let them link to each other when there's relevancy.  That linking will help their rankings of course.

My disclaimer, is that this advice may be obsolete in time. Companies seem more comfortable with group blogs than individual blogs. There is no reason why, with tweaking, some passionate, informative group blogs will become wildly popular.

Lance Dutson Getting Sued

Lance Dutson, who has been blogging up a storm of allegations of sweetheart deals in the State of Maine has received an official response. He's being sued. On one side we have this small, independent online design guy.  On the other, we have a bevy of lawyers and politicians. I'm not in a position to say who's right, but I do know who I'm rooting for.

Good luck, Lance.

What Blog Analytics Do You Like?

When I'm talking with marketing groups and executives I get asked a lot about blog analytics.  I think I can say that I am personally ambivalent with just about every measurement I'm using.  There are some I don't use that I don't believe and others I just don't quite grasp there meaning.

So let me ask you folks out there in our studio audience: "What analytics do you like? Which do you believe? Which do you use? Why?  What kinds of analytics do you hope someone offers up tomorrow?

If you leave a comment concerning a company in which you are in any way involved, please disclose it in your answer.

Southwest Blogs. I've been Scobleized

I was just about to post something about my disappointment in the newly started Southwest Airlines blog when Scoble, made more agile by his recent brief retirement, had this to say on the very same subject. He pretty much wraps up my thoughts on the subject.

I guess strange minds think alike.

Like, Scoble Southwest is my primary regional airline.  I could tell them all sorts of reasons why I love them, but this blog by their VP Marketing and Sales does not motivate me to join their conversation.

God, I'd much rather hear from a pilot or flight attendant or one of their really nice gate personnel. But to tell me that SWA is for business travelers when I have been using it for business travel more than once a month for about a year now, is kind of insulting.  To complain that they are not just a leisure travel airline has certain irony.

Every time I go to my favorite vacation spots, I have to use a different carrier because Southwest doesn't fly to Mexico, Hawaii, Italy or any of the other places where Paula and I can play when we have the money.

WaggEd's Corporate Blogging Index

I was on a conference call earlier today with Waggener Edstrom's Lynann Bradbury who is always interesting and heavily focused on the pragmatic implications of corporate blogging strategies.

Lynann made reference to the Waggener Edstrom Blogging Index, which she first shared publicly back at the Blog Business Summit last August. While she made it into a scorable index, I think they could be written as ten questions every company should ask themselves about blogging.

Naked Conversations Most Frequent Words

Amazon.com has this feature that I had neither heard about nor noticed until just a few minutes ago.  It's calledConcordance and it tells you the 100 most frequently used in a book.  It lists them alphabetically and sizes them like words in a Tag cloud.

Here's the ones for Naked Conversations:

2005  ad  another  best  better  blog  bloggers  blogging  blogosphere  book  business  change  com  comments  communications  company  conversations  corporate  culture  customers  day  employees  even  example  executive  fact  few  find  first  get  good  google  great  help  ideas  information  ing  internet  issues  know  let  link  market  marketing  may  media  microsoft  might  million  need  new  now  number  often  own  part  people  perhaps  point  post  posting  pr  press  product  public  read  real  rss  say  scoble  search  see  services  should  site  something  start  started  still  story  take  team  technology  things  think  thought  time  told  tool  two  use  used  users  want  web  word  work  world  write  years 

There are no surprises here, but I do find it fascinating.

Controlling Influencers? Not any More

I was just finishing up a draft f the second half of my interview report on Charlene Li, my favorite analyst, when James Governor published this thoughtful piece about where analyst and influencer relationships belong in a modern organization. He links to an article whose headline asks who should run these areas.

I had to stop for a second. Charlene's key point, when I publish in a day or two is that control is moving from institutions to communities and the power in communities belong to the people who reside in them. Because of blogging, we are all influencers.  The stories of unknown bloggers posting something that gets world notice in a few days or even moments are occurring so often that it is less newsworthy than it was just a few months ago.

A company who tries to run relationships will fail very likely in a painful way. It would find more success in shoveling water than in running relationships with all the new influencers.

If you are a company and you see me as an influencer or analyst, do not try to control your relationship with me.  Do not sit in committee and decide how and when you will inform me of something. Just start a conversation.  Do it on a blog. Let me subscribe to your feed.  Let me decide what you have that I like or do not like. Let me decide when or if I'll use my influence or analytical abilities to discuss you.

Control the relationship? Don't. Inform people.  Let them decide what they will do with whatever influence they have.

Guilty of Web Surfing

Shel Holtz, my namesake and friend, has an interesting report on the imminent light sentencing of an employee found guilty of web surfing on company time. I share the dim view he holds of those who make workplace surfing sound like the crime of the century.

But what really caught my eye was Shel's quote from Administrative Law Judge John Spooner:

It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work.

I think it's one of those self-evident comments, that would be too obvious to mention if it wasn't from a judge who was about to impose punishment. A decade ago, workplace internet access was a big deal and the cause of controversy, warnings from lawyers, cover stories and so on. Now workplace internet access is more common than the Yellow Pages.

This is the same route that I see for blogging. A decade from now, it will be that ubiquitous and commonplace.  This is what I meant when I wrote about the normalization of blogging.

A decade from today, I see all new employees getting their telephone,desk and chair; their connected computer and email account and yes, their blog account. Some will use the telephone for primary communications.  Others will prefer email. But a very significant number will blog about their work from their desktops.

Then some jerk will sue someone for it.

Russell Beattie Closes His Notebook

Popular veteran blogger Russell Beattie  just announced that he will be terminating his Russell Beattie's Notebook, which began as a wiki back in 2000. I have been following him since 2003 and I will miss him.

Russ is the second prominent blogger to announce his retirement. Dave Winer said he'd stop blogging for at least a year, even though he's been going like gangbusters ever since he made the declaration. Scoble has taken his overdue two-week cure and sounds like the old Scoble that everybody loved, when we talked recently. I recently returned from a less-publicized brief blogging break.

Someday, I will run ut of things to say on blogs.  Someday we all will.  It's no big thing.  I hope I'm around long enough to see where the next generation of bloggers will take all this.

This is as it should be.  Great bloggers like Winer and Beattie should leave when they want and return if they want. We will miss them the way we miss favorite TV programs when they end.  We remember them but our interests go to those talented bloggers who will come along to fill the vacated space. For those of us who cannot live without them, we can watch Winer and Beattie reruns on the Internet for free for pretty close to forever.

Scott McNeally Steps Down at Sun; Jonathan Schwartz Steps Up

News hit the wires about a half hour ago that Scott McNealy has stepped down as CEO of Sun Microsystems.  He is replaced by President and COO Jonathan Schwartz a popular executive blogger. The announcement came shortly after Sun announced an improved, but still unprofitable quarter and quoted McNealy as stating the next step is profitability.

In after hours trading, the stock is up 41 cents.  Part of this is because it was an improved quarter.  No doubt an additional portion an be attributed to the departure of the last of Sun's four founding fathers.  McNealy's steely style was credited with building Sun's meteoric rise against incumbents in the engineering workstation market in the early and middle 1980s. More recently, that same steely personality was blamed on Sun's massive capacity for pissing off its customers.

In recent years, McNealy has retreated steadily from the public eye as Schwartz has presented a kinder, gentler and increasingly prominent face. I have thrice watched him speak from the dais and he has been downright inspirational, even at a time when the company seemed to be permanently adrift. Now, there seems to be some evolutionary focus and direction of where Sun is going or at least trying to go.

Disclosure: I interviewed Schwartz for Naked Conversations and was so impressed with him that a purchased a small quantity of stock in the company, speculating that Schwartz felt likely to take the reigns and steer the company with a steadier hand. When Sun and Google announced an alliance, I double up my purchase and have done quite well.

Alec Saunders: Tips on Making Your Blog Popular

My ex-client Alec Saunders has a blog that seems to be moving from oblivion to Broadway.  The iotum co-founder & CEO shares his tips on how to get a blog to be more popular. It's good advice.

Interview: Charlene Li On Web 2.0 (Part 1)

My next book will be about Web 2.0, a term which means different things to different people and no one much likes anyhow. To get my arms around the subject,  I’ve decided to interview a bunch of smart people who can give me a good overview.

Charlene Li, Forrester Research’s celebrity analyst was my first choice. Covering online media, marketing, social computing and search, Charlene has become one of the most respected observers of these topics.

She’s been immersed in online interactive communities about as long as anyone. She has five years hands on experience in content publishing and online community building,  first with Knight Ridder and then with Community Newspaper Company where she started a series of online town sites. In many ways these modern versions of the old-fashioned New England town meeting were prototypes for today’s online civic journalism.

Working now from her new Northern California home, she is a frequent speaker at social networking conferences.  I’ve caught her twice in recent months and both times walked away armed with valuable new statistics and insights. 

We spoke for a couple of hours at a local coffee shop, competing with after-school teens and piped in music. We rambled through all sorts of issues.  Charlene had a great deal to say, more than I could cram into a single post. This is Part One. Part Two will appear in a day or two.

Defining Web 2.0

I asked Charlene how she defines this thing called “Web 2.0.”  She uses what I consider a Biblical definition. In the beginning, Web 2.0 referred to the technology and framework.  Ajax and wikis would be Web 2.0. This is how Charlene still defines it. The people-to-people companies the rest of us  throw into the Web 2.o bucket—such as Riya, Flock and Edgeio, Charlene calls Social Computing companies. She positions this latter group at the heart of the current transformational phenomenon.

While many bathe in KoolAid, Charlene maintains a more sober, even-handed view. Her customer is the enterprise thinker. Forrester is among the most respected keepers of business numbers and spotters of business trends and what it says has considerable influence on both business and the media.

And while blogging and Social Computing numbers can sound huge, when compared with what they were a few years ago, she emphasized they remain a very small slice of a very big  demographic pie. According to Forrester, only ten percent of adults in the US are reading blogs regularly. Less than one percent listen to podcasts regularly. Corporate adoption is happening but at a slower rate than many of us would expect.

Except in one very significant area—youth. One-fourth of America’s adolescents are tuned into blogs, explaining perhaps why LiveJournal appears to be so much more successful than MovableType and why MySpace feels like THE space to its community members. Blog adoption is also growing at an astounding pace, doubling about once each year.

This is extremely relevant to the direction of business. Young people, obviously, are going to be around buying goods and services longer than old people. They are going to be disposing of discretionary income for a great many years. The freedoms they take today as self evident will remain that way long after their rebelliousness grays away.

Blogging in their DNA

“Blogging is in their DNA.  They clutch to their self expression and will be unwilling to give it back” as they move forward through life, Charlene observed.  What does this mean to business?  A great deal. It forebodes a future where companies that do not allow employee blogging will lose some recruits.  It means that as this generation emerges, there will be a trust gap in companies whose employees do not blog.  Companies may be doing very well today without blogging, but over time, as their customer base ages and starts dying off, they will have difficulties attracting younger replacements.

Charlene also noted that blogging tools have begun to evolve into more expansive applications. “They are a content management system, an online publishing toolset,” she told me, noting that she is seeing static websites being built with blog tools because they are faster, easier to build and, equally important--easier to update and revise. A year ago, Six Apart’s Loic LeMeur  reported the same thing was going on in Europe, where webmasters were buying MovableType and using it to avoid HTML on static sites.

I wondered about the slowness of corporate acceptance. I asked her what Forrester was telling corporate customers.

“We are telling them that the corporation has a huge opportunity [with blogging].  This is a way to get back control by giving up control.  We advise companies to give up more control,” she said with some passion. Are they fearful of receiving negative comments? “We get companies to say they can’t do it because of the usual negatives, because of law suits, bad comments, etc.  We tell them they need to develop thicker skin.”

I recounted the difficulties Robert and I recently had in discussing the ROI question at Amazon.com and asked her how she addresses ROI in talking with large companies.

“It’s really difficult to answer. It’s going to differ for every company, yet there usually is a cause-result that comes out. Look at GM. Have they sold more cars because of the blog? Probably not yet. Is the stock performing better? No, they’re losing too much money (NOTE—this interview was held prior to GM’s announcement of smaller losses in the last quarter). Are they getting better press?  Maybe a little, but not much--except in the blogosphere.

“So where’s the ROI?  Lots of customers are talking about GM all of a sudden. People like you and me who would never consider a GM car are taking a second look. [GM Vice Chairman Bob] Lutz blogged a lot about the Pontiac Solstice and the car is an apparent success.  What’s the ROI?  That’s for GM to determine but it’s obvious that they see one.  They are expanding there blogging activity.”

From her perspective, the key issue is the possibility that arises when you put publishing capabilities into the hands of a product manager—any product manager.

“Maybe it works and maybe it doesn’t. But to not consider the issue is foolhardy. Each company needs to make a rational decision. They need to ask: is blogging a rational place where customers may want to hear from you.”

Charlene thought that Robert and I had “slightly overstated the case” in the book where we declared nearly every company should blog.  But then she noted the potential for blogging as a recruiting tool.

“Every company should have a recruitment blog. Blogging recruiters will put a human voice on the company.”

Changes Big & Small

So where is all this next generation stuff going?  Charlene had thoughts about changes both big and small. 

• First, RSS is bigger than blogging itself and has already begun to spill over to the way other online media deliver news and information, the New York Times and Yahoo being but two examples. Charlene sees RSS-delivered earning releases and podcasts of post-earning conference calls so that time travelers can hear what was said.

• More traditional marketers are also modernizing with RSS. For example,Silverpop an email marketing company is using RSS to feed email newsletters to subscribers.

• She believes that Doc Searls is spot-on with his belief that  the Intention Economy is going to emerge as very significant. The way it works is simple: I tell you what my intentions are: buying a car or a home, traveling to a foreign country. You get to send me ads and announcements that you think will be relevant to me. I choose what I want and after that you all go away.

While significant to business, this is of course all incremental.  Where Charlene sees the greatest change is in the point solutions—the one-stop, one-service, places, such as a beauty supplies service that blogs and uses online interactive approaches to finding, retaining and fulfilling customers. These  vendors can be highly profitable and reach global markets from the comfort of a single server based business.

NEXT: What happens when the power moves from companies or even governments into the hands of communities? Charlene shares her vision for the future.

Apple v. Bloggers. v. NDA v.revealing sources

I've been wanting to write on the controversial trial going on regarding Apple Computer and bloggers with the related issues listed in my headline.  While traditional media has given this issue prominent play this week, bloggers have not--at least from the slim search results I found this morning at Technorati.

Here's a quick scenario of what has occurred over the past several months. Two consultants to Apple blog information about unannounced products.  Apple goes bonkers and sues. A court finds the consultants guilty of breaching NDA and declares that bloggers are not protected by the same disclosure laws as authentic reporters. Claiming that First Amendment laws apply to everyone, not just reporters, the consultants appeal to a higher court where it was heard this week.

The number of issues here are huge and complex. I am not a judge and I do not wish to second guess issues that need to be decided in court. But I thought I'd toss in my own thoughts on several of the questions being tossed around.

1. Should journalists be exempted from revealing sources when criminal or tort charges are connected?

If you think it through, you cannot have a free press unless they can protect the confidentiality of the press. The ability to report on business and government from sources other than official part lines is essential to how journalism works. The concept of confidential sources is under huge assault on multiple fronts right now, and failure to defend it seems to me to be a threat on a free society.

2. Should bloggers be treated as journalists?

My answer: When they behave as journalists, they most certainly should. In the cases of people like Om Malik and Dan Farber, these bloggers are indisputably journalists, not because they get paid as such to blog--but because they conduct themselves as journalists in every sense of the word. Other bloggers are simply opining and they are not journalists. Then there's this group of which I am included.  members of this group sometimes report on what they've seen.  They interview other people and write about it. They do Saturday morning opinion pieces that might have been suitable for the op ed page of yore.

My thought is that whether or not you are a journalist, is not about the delivery mechanism of paper vs. Internet; nor is it about paychecks. It is more about what you write about and how you conduct yourself as a writer. When we behave like journalists, we should be treated like journalists.  Likewise, when journalists or bloggers behave as idiots, they should be treated as such.

3. Is it fair game for a blogger, behaving as a company consultant, to break NDA agreements that they signed?

Of course not.  It is bad business and bad ethics.  Likewise, reporters should honor them as well.

4. Should Apple have pursued this this far?

My sense is that Apple has had much more to lose than it has had to gain here.  The conception of them as anti-blogger is widespread. Their behavior has to feel intimidating to their own employees.  It is presenting an image that will not attract very many new employees.  It has gained nothing through this experience that will help it sell more goods, nor will this behavior bolster its stock position. Apple believes it was betrayed and is pushing a point.  It may win this second round in court, but I do not see how this will score any points on their behalf in the court of public opinion.

How generous is our culture?

Kami Huyse at Communications Overtones has been writing some good stuff about blogging's "Culture of Generosity. She's picked up on a Doc Searls theme, but you can track all the history from her post.

I agree with just about everything Kami has to say, just like earlier I had agreed with most of Tara's Pinko Marketing Manifesto.  But to me words and titles are important. Tara's allusion to Communism turns off a great number of people on two fronts: (1) Those who were raised during the Cold War still consider the word "pinko" to be offensive and I am among them, and (2) Communism was and is the ultimate top down command and control organizational form.  The idea of sharing under Communism is among its cruelest lies.

Kami's term "Culture of Generosity," does not come close to Pinko Marketing as an affront to traditional business thinking. But the idea of a Culture of Generosity is going to sound a little more touchy and feelie than some will feel comfortable embracing.

I guess I mince words more than most--but that's because I consider words so fundamentally important. Recently, you may recall, Robert and I were challenged to define the ROI in blogging and we did not do a first rate job of using the right words.

So my question becomes, "Will traditional business folk understand there is an ROI to the Culture of Generosity. That the generosity you put in delivers rewards. It's not quid pro quo.  It's more like investing in a longterm savings program. You give a little here and a little there and in the long run you get a great deal back.

One example is this blog. Robert and I tried to find and share content that was valuable.  We tried to speak with companies that were interesting. We linked hundreds, perhaps thousands of times to other sites, some of which were written by people who disagreed with us, sometimes passionately.

We were generous, but we hoped for something in return.  We wanted readers to advise us in ways that helped us improve the book and we wanted readers, once the book became available to serve as word-of-mouth champions.

Both have paid off for us big time.  We got what we said we wanted and we got it by using links to send thousands of people to other sites.

In short, we invested generosity and we got back recognition and books sales. Not such a bad deal.  Had not gotten the return would we have been disappointed. You bet we would have.

My point is this: The culture is indeed one of generosity.  But there is ROI to that culture.  And if blogging is going to continue its adoption rate, then the value of generosity must be emphasized in the words we use to corporate cultures.

Will Someone Please Hire Tom Raftery?

The Boston Globe has written an article that says blogging is good for getting yourself a job and Tom Raftery over in Cork, Ireland feels left out.  No one has offered him a job, although just about everyone who knows him respects him and everyone who reads him or listens to him admires his style and content.

Here's what he has to say about his skillsets:

"Well, I’m not too bad at blogging and podcasting

• I know shedloads about social software and how to use it to raise the online profile of a company, product or service as well as how it can be used to improve a company’s internal and external communications.
• I know a considerable amount about search engine optimisation (hence the following, for example)
• I have an impressive and growing network of contacts
• I am a very good communicator - well used to speaking in front of large audiences
• I have led teams of coders in the development of large web applications
• I am a very experienced sysadmin - and I know my way around Win2k and Win2003 Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, and ISA Server ens to his podcast likes what he has to say.

I'll add a personal recommendation: "Tom is smart, witty, honest, hard-working and very well-respected. He understands and sympathizes both with traditional IT issues while he grasps and embraces the tumult of change going on at the leading edge."

You organization will be a better place if Tom is in it. Trust me on this.

Blogs and Recruiting

I keep hearing about HR recruiters who are using blogs to recruit talented people. Microsoft, for example, has two recruiting blogs including this one. I've posted blogs for a couple of startups that generated qualified leads, including this Rogue hire for Riya.

I am becoming convinced that recruiting may be one of blogging's "killer apps."  A recruiting blog is superior from a Help Wanted ad in so many ways. 

• More personal--The recruiting blog puts a human face on a company's recruiting arm. Heather at Microsoft is a real person, and an interested applicant can actually use the blog to get to know her.  Compare that with the website'sCareers@Microsoft.com email address.
• Word of Mouth--We seldom read the Help Wanted listings when we are not looking for jobs. But an interesting blog gets readers who will tell friends about new jobs as they occur.
• Demystification--While everyone knows we want to do our best when applying for work,we often forget that the hiring company wants to see your best shot. A recruiting log let's a company show a potential ire what the company and people would look like.  You can use a recruiting blog to show, workspace, co-workers, the building, the neighborhood etc.

There are more reasons, but I'll stand on those three.  What I'm really looking for is some reader input on recruiting blogs.  Who has them?  What are some f the great success stories?  Do you know cases of people being hired who would not otherwise have been found and encouraged to join?

Please send in your comments.  If there appears to be a bigger story, I may contact you for a follow up story.

Alan Discovers Hugh

Alan Weinkrantz has a new favorite blog.  He has discovered Hugh McLeod's Gaping Void. Alan, you need to take a ticket at the door and have a seat.  Hugh is just about everybody's favorite blogger. The challenge is to pick one of his cartoons for your business card that won't freak out traditional corporate people.

Will Blogging Get you Promoted?

Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal has a thoughtful post in response regarding the To Be or Not to Be issue of CEO blogging.  He reiterated my previous point that no one should be forced to blog, not even a CEO. Forced blogging may contain the necessary but it will invariably lack the passion.

Phil raised a coupe of good new points.  He noted that as a blogger, he began in relative obscurity and had the luxury of making mistakes that went relatively unnoticed. That was my experience as well. CEO's may not have this luxury.

But what I found most interesting about Phil's blog is the question of blogging as a career catalyst.

Shel, is it your guess that bloggers will be promoted [in a company] more than non-bloggers? Can you see a blogging track record being the difference between getting the nod for a Fortune 3000 CEO job, or getting passed over?

Phil I hadn't thought about this. I think the answer is yes.  People who represent their companies well in general, rise faster. Blogging affords a new way to represent your company well and to be rewarded for it--provided your company sees the wisdom of open culture. I know of no case to prove this point--yet. But I'm optimistic that one will evolve. Perhaps Microsoft will promote Scoble to a VP. Based on what he's done to put a human face on Microsoft, I think he deserves it.

Blogs also allow each of us to establish a personal brand, which may help your career, even if it requires a change of business address. Steve Rubel is a case in point.

Another Idea for Amazon

Jozef Imrich who wrote a wonderful, gripping true story of his escape from Communist held Czechoslovakia called Cold River just left a Comment on my recent why Amazon Should Blog post made mention of the pain that bad reviews on Amazon cause. That gave me an idea.

Amazon could allow authors to respond to reviews. That would create a person dialog and be fascinating to follow. It also might do something Amazon's Connect, it's author blog does not yet do--it could join the overall conversation of the blogosphere.

Sorry, I can't tell you how that would impact ROI, but I bet it would be more positive than negative.