Whatever your political persuasion — right, left, or center — the blogosphere is a great place for bloggers to share their political views and make plenty of friends and enemies. We try to follow the conservative, liberal, and everything in between of politics and political blogs/blogging — but only when it intersects with business blogging.
Have a read below of our latest entries on politics and political blogging…
Red Hat, vendors of commercial Linux services, staged a worldwide customer outreach tour in early 2004, and supported it with this blog about the behind-the-scenes activities of the tour. During the tour, the blog was averaging more than 3,500 visits a day. MarketingSherpa has a great case study about this event and blog.
A great case study from MarketingSherpa (what else would you expect from those gals?) on how Red Hat, the commercial Linux experts, combined the power of a blog, a worldwide customer tour and MeetUp to achieve fantastic outreach for “1/5th the price of a trade show.” An excerpt:
A big part of Red Hat’s brand is that it’s an open source company. [Chris] Grams [Senior Manager, Marketing Communications, at Red Hat] took that to mean that communications should be as open, honest, and even human as possible, rather than “corporate-sounding.”
“I want to give people the sense that Red Hat is made up of real people. You’re not talking to a building, you’re talking to an individual, and some pretty darn smart individuals at that. We’re proud of that.
“I really believe if you talk in a real person’s voice, you reach people in such a deeper way. We try not to make the message so watered down and so enterprise antiseptic that it appeals to no one. We may make at least a couple of people mad, but I’m hoping an enormous number of people feel a deeper connection.”
The blog averaged 3,000-5,000 readers per day during the tour. A link to Red Hat’s blog here.
MarketingSherpa: How to Use a Back-stage Blog & Virtual Community Networking to Maximize Your Road Show’s Impact
This site uses blogs as a marketing vehicle with a clever twist on the sweepstakes model. The basic idea is that marketers offer up some of their products as a prize for a sweepstake, which Blogstakes encourages blogs to promote. The hook, however, is that both a random visitor from one of the blogs and the referring blogger both with the prize. That is, Blogstakes tracks where the click-throughs to its site come from, and they give a prize also to the blogger from whose site the randomly drawn winner clicked. Because bloggers have some skin in the game, the site has been popular with bloggers who link to it.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I was the winning blogger of one of the first contests, for Clip-n-Seal. I had written on MarketingVox about the launch of Blogstakes, and based on that post, I referred the winning entrant to the contest. I also received a sample package of Clip-n-Seal’s product, a clever device to seal open bags with, and I have to say, it is a terrific project. I think this marks the second time in my life that I won any such contest (once, when I was around 25, I won a CD in a radio call-in drawing, the first CD in my collection!).
Clip-n-Seal is an innovative consumer product, a plastic rod and clamp device, in various sizes, that seals bags securely. The company behind it has embraced blogs whole-heartedly. Not only do they maintain their own blog, under the News section of the site, which is a mix of customer news, marketing initiatives, PR coverage and other miscellaneous customer information, but they also have embraced blogs as a marketing outlet. Notably, they were one of the first advertisers for Blogstakes, a sweepstake program that drafts other bloggers in its promotions, which, they attest, was very successful for them in raising their awareness around the Net and lifting their Google rank.
In a recent post, founder D.L. Byron describes what it’s like to get BoingBoinged (we can only imagine).
I live in NYC and listen slavishly to our local NPR affiliate station, WNYC. From 10am to noon, Brian Lehrer hosts one of the most erudite shows on talk radio. I’m delighted to see he’s just started a blog. Of course, I proposed he should do this a year and a half ago. Now he’s just got to pave the way for his colleague Leonard Lopate, the other most eruidte talk show host on the radio.
Alan Meckler, CEO of Internet research and publishing firm Jupiter Media, has embraced blogs in a big way. Not only has he encouraged many of his firm’s analysts to maintain their own blogs, but he also blogs himself about general trends in the Internet and high-tech industry.
ClickZ’s editor Rebecca Lieb reports on the recent news that the popular humor and tech blog Boing Boing is too popular for its own good. Boing Boing’s found Mark Frauenfelder, a former editor at Wired, recently appealed to readers for ideas on how Boing Boing can generate revenue, at least enough to cover its ballooning hosting costs, as the blog’s ever-growing popularity is driving the site towards $2,000 a month in bandwidth fees.
Hundreds of readers have shared their ideas. I contributed mine, too, which I posted to my ExecutiveSummary.com site, namely a combination of micropayments, recommended donations and BlogAds.
Lieb notes that Boing Boing has recruited John Battelle to help manage the situation, the former founding editor of Wired and publisher of the late, great Industry Standard magazine. Battelle describes his role with Boing Boing’s four writers, “I’m Reuben, they’re the Partridge Family.”
The ClickZ article also notes that Battelle, if he takes the mantle of publisher, will be following in the lead of Jason Calacanis, Nick Denton and Tony Perkins when it comes to commercial blog entrepreurism.
ClickZ: Boing Boing Plus Battelle Equals Blogs as Big Business?
Wired was a bit slow to join the blogging trend, but it shows signs of rolling out several, with a landing page for all wired blogs (link above). The first two blogs list are:
Scott Neal, “your friendly City Manager for the City of Eden Prairie, MN,” explains:
I use this weblog to keep Council members, staff, and interested citizens informally updated on a variety of community-related stuff that’s crossing my desk and my mind.
Kennesaw State University’s Public Journalism Network. From the organization’s charter statement:
The Public Journalism Network is a global professional association of journalists and educators interested in exploring and strengthening the relationship between journalism and democracy.
We believe journalism and democracy work best when news, information and ideas flow freely; when news fairly portrays the full range and variety of life and culture of all communities; when public deliberation is encouraged and amplified; and when news helps people function as political actors and not just as political consumers.
Blog by the president of Citizens League, which a public policy advocacy and lobbying group in Minnesota:
The Citizens League promotes the public interest in Minnesota by involving citizens in identifying and framing critical public policy choices, forging recommendations and advocating their adoption.
You can’t get a lot more CPG than milk. Well going hog wild, as it were, this environmentally conscious organic dairy has no less than five “Blog ‘Cow’munities!” (their pathetic joke, not mine):
UPDATE: On June 7, the company put out this press release, calling attention to their blog initiative, quoting yours truly as an expert in the space.
Good travel industry blog from a business that focuses on frequent flyer mileage services:
Founded in 1986, Frequent Flyer Services has created a unique niche for itself within the travel industry as a company that conceives, develops and markets products and services exclusively for the frequent traveler. Its focus and distinctive competency lie in the area of frequent traveler programs.
First the “Majority Report,” hosted by Janeane Garofalo, had its own blog, now the “O’Franken Factor,” hosted by comedian Al Franken, is the lasted radio show of the new liberal talk radio network Air America to have a blog.
There’s something about talk radio and blogs that is a marriage made in heaven, for the zeolot who has just too much ranting to be contained in a three-hour talk show format. Interesting that Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limblaugh on the right don’t have blogs of their own. (Could RushLimblog.com be a better name for such a site?)
Utterly brilliant example of a business blog from a somewhat surprising source: Microsoft. Brilliant in terms of philosophy (well thought out) and execution. Here is a post that lays out the The Channel 9 Doctrine, and here is the "What the…" schpiel in the left-column of every page:
Channel 9 started as a personal story from one of us about fear of flying. Lenn realized after years of dealing with it, that it was actually a fear of the unknown. The fear was conquered through learning. The more transparency into what it took to fly a plane, the more the fear went away. Lenn got to know pilots who flew planes everyday, and every time he flew he turned on Channel 9 on the in-flight audio system to listen in to the cockpit.
We think developers need their own Channel 9, a way to listen in to the cockpit at Microsoft, an opportunity to learn how we fly, a chance to get to know our pilots. Five of us in Redmond are crazy enough to think we just might learn something from getting to know each other. Were we wrong? Time will tell.
Join in, and have a look inside our cockpit and help us fly the plane.
Welcome to Channel 9.
One of the most innovative features of the blog is the use of video clips of developers interviewing each other. You know it’s the real deal when these not-exactly telegenic gentleman (I haven’t seen any women yet) cite a Star Trek movie as informing their programming considerations. Serious geeks, in addition to the video blog posts, the site comes complete with a moblog and a wiki.
Blog supporting consulting work of Lee LeFever, who helps companies manage online communities and other “social software resources.”
As all non-fiction book authors should be doing, Howard Rheingold is blogging to support his book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. In fact, Rheingold isn’t even doing the blogging: he’s enlisted the help of a team of devotees of the book to do the blogging for him. Smart mob, indeed.
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Business Blog Consulting is a site devoted to demonstrating how effective weblogs can be for communicating with customers and marketing to new customer prospects. You will find here lots of examples of business and corporate blogs, as well as resources to help you learn more about the topic.
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Other stuff? Email us.
Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing
Andy Bourland of Bourland.com
Rich Brooks of Flyte
Paul Chaney of Blogging Systems Group
Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus
Josh Hallett of Hyku
Tris Hussey of Larix Consulting
Lee Odden of TopRank
Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts
Dave Taylor of Intuitive Life for Business
Jim Turner of One by One Media
Dana VanDen Heuvel of BlogSavant
Des Walsh of Thinking Home Business
Debbie Weil of WordBiz and BlogWrite
Jeremy Wright of Ensight
Rick E. Bruner is co-author and principal analyst on this report
Our own contributor Jeremy Wright is the author of this book
"The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right" with a foreword by GM's Bob Lutz..and the rest by Debbie Weil.
Produced by contributor to this site Debbie Weil. Rick E. Bruner is one of the featured experts in this report
This report is written by contributor to this site BL Ochman
I guess this was inevitable
