Over at ClickZ Kate Kaye presents the findings of a recent survey conducted by the Blogads Network that distinguishes blog audiences into four categories: political, gossip, mom and music.

CEO Henry Copeland points out that some political and entertainment advertisers grasp the idea of targeting specific types of blogs based on the unique audiences they reach, many advertisers “don’t get the degree to which these are self-contained universes…This is not a basket of eyeballs; these are very interwoven communities.”

The study also showed that hardly anyone from the four groups listens to podcasts:

“62 percent of music blog readers, 75 percent of political blog readers, 77 percent of mom blog readers and 80 percent of gossip blog readers said they never listen to podcasts.”

Along the lines of advertising, eMarketer reports a study by PQ Media that Blog, Podcast and RSS advertising rose by nearly 200% in 2005 and is expected to grow another 145% in 2006 to reach nearly $50 million.

“Blog, podcast and RSS advertising are being driven by some of the same factors boosting the growth of the overall alternative media sector: continued audience fragmentation, the perceived ineffectiveness of traditional advertising, and the elusive but coveted 18-to-34-year-old demographic,” said Patrick Quinn, president of PQ Media. “[They] have demonstrated an ability to reach younger demographics as well as influentials.”

And then there was this interesting quote about podcasting:

Looking ahead, PQ Media estimates that podcast advertising will be a larger market than blog advertising by 2010, when the blog segment will comprise only 39.7%, or $300.4 million, of overall expenditures. Podcasting, projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 154.4%, is predicted to reach a total of $327.0 million in 2010. These numbers are closely in line with eMarketer’s own projections, which recently put total spending on podcast advertising at a total of $300 million by 2010.

Perhaps Blogads CEO Henry Copeland and PQ Media President Patrick Quinn should get together and compare notes?

A couple days back I posted “Net Neutrality and Small Business on the Web” at flyte’s blog, alerting small business owners and entrepreneurs about some legislation that might affect their online business.

I stood up for net neutrality, the idea that all information should be treated equally on the net, and that ISP’s like Verizon and AT&T shouldn’t be able to give preferential treatment to their partners and other large corporations willing to pay a premium for such a benefit. In my mind, changing the current method (which Verizon and AT&T are lobbying hard for) hurts small business.

Within hours there were five comments at my blog (which is a lot for me): four against and one for. (And I wrote that one!)

Commentors questioned why the government should be interfering with yet another aspect of our lives (point well taken) and felt the market should sort it out. Some felt we should leave well enough alone. However, it seems to me that big ISP’s are lobbying for a change to the current system.

Just a few moments ago I got an email from Andy Wibbels — a smart guy if ever there was one — asking for support of net neutrality. Andy asks us to “imagine if the eletric company made your refrigerator run slower if it wasn’t a Whirlpool brand.”

Alternatively, imagine if the passing lane on a highway could only be used by giant corporation’s trucks, and all other traffic needed to take side streets.

What if your competition was a Verizon partner and their blog came up faster in a browser at the expense of your own? GM’s FastLane Blog might benefit from this change, but probably not your blog.

Well, now you’ve heard those in favor of net neutrality. What do the rest of you think?

UPDATE: The answer appears to be yes! Several hours after I wrote the entry below, Jonathan posted When I First Met Scott… A nice story about meeting retiring CEO Scott McNealy for the first time in 1992 or ’93. Followed by a riff on Sun’s mantra, “The network is the computer.” Go Jonathan! Hope you can keep it up.

…

Darn, it doesn’t look like it so far. Following yesterday’s news that Sun’s founding CEO, Scott McNealy, is stepping down – to be replaced by COO Jonathan Schwartz – I skipped over to Jonathan’s blog at blogs.sun.com/jonathan.

As of this morning, the latest entry is a week old, dated April 18, 2006, and talks about meeting Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva – and how cool that is.

I fact, Jonathan links back to a blog post he made on June 16, 2005 where he notes that “it’s cool to sit with a head of state, or a head of a corporation, or a CIO with an IT department bigger than Sun’s entire employee base.”

I quote that entry in The Corporate Blogging Book. It struck me as guilelessly transparent and a reason we love to read senior exec blogs – to find out what they’re really thinking.

So Jonathan… are you going to give up blogging? Do tell!

UPDATE: I emailed Noel Hartzell, Jonathan’s chief communications guy, to ask what was up with Jonathan’s blog. He just emailed back, writing:

stay tuned… 😉

So maybe Jonathan’s will be the first blog by a Fortune 500 CEO?

This is the first I have ever heard of a blog being suspended.  Last week, the editors at the L.A. Times suspended Michael Hiltzik’s Golden State Blog for essentially putting comments on his on blog under a false name, in this instance "Mikekoshi".  Hiltzik was in essence adding to the blog conversations under a different identity seemingly backing up Hiltzik’s opinions and mocking other commenters.  The story was broken by a blogger at Patterico’s Pontifications.

This does not surprise me in the least that someone would comment under a pseudonym, in fact, my own personal blog identity is named "Genuine", and I frequently comment on personal blogs with that name.  In all my other blogs, I use my full name as I do here. 

How does this practice effect blogging and business?  Many of the corporate blogs we talk about here are written by CEO’s, company employees and C level officers within each of the companies.  What would happen if these bloggers also added to the comment sections of their blogs, bolstering their own opinions and seemingly inflating the traffic and comments on their sites, or berating other commenters to their own benefit?  I for one would think that if it was uncovered that a CEO entertained this practice that person would be tarred and feathered and would lose any credibility the blog might be producing. The conversations produced by blogs must remain an open forum, and they must have credibility in order to withstand the onslaught of criticism a company might endure.  This practice could make it very difficult for a PR person to repair something that has been done behind closed doors in the company.

The L.A. Times in the case of Mr. Hiltzik must have thought the same.  They have not reinstated his Golden State Blog, yet he has not been suspended himself.   The outcome of this case will help guide our future commenting practices in business blogs .  Is this going on in today’s business blogging?  I for one certainly hope not, but it could be argued that comments on business blogs that cheer on the company or back up its product or message could be just someone within the company.  Good PR for the company right up and until it is uncovered.  Then suddenly you have a PR nightmare.

Tags: L.A. Times, Golden State Blog, Michael Hiltzik, Patterico’s Pontifications

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At the University of Delaware, Alex Brown is challenging the next generation of business leaders to think new world/web 2.0 marketing. Prof Brown is teaching a class called Infotech Applications in Marketing. Not only does a blog support the course but students are expected to blog and comment.

Do the kids get it? I’ll say they do. Here’s a snip from a post by Mark Muller – Have We Wasted 4 Years Here?

The problem i have with this is not that fact that Mr. Cherkoff said it, it is the fact that i realized today that i have been learning “old” marketing techniques at this “old” school. The University obviously needs to do something about its curriculum and innovate.

[Note: James Cherkoff was a guest speaker.]

Business is changing. Maketing is changing. Hope there are a few college deans who are listening in and taking Mark’s advice to heart to innovate their curriculum.

How will marketing studies be structured in the future? Will there be classes on buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, blogging, building communities? Will blogs projects be on a class blog or wiki? Will Marketing 101 include how to integrate podcasts, vlogs and “clouds” into campaigns?
And .. true to the blogosphere, you never know who might be listening in. Gary Spangler, global ebusiness manager for DuPoint, commented on Mark’s post about blog ethics. Perhaps Mark can include it in his CV when he applies for a job. CMP Media, The Thompson Corporation and Mansueto Ventures (Fast Company) all have positions that require blogging experience.

It is easier to build a relationship with your reader and engage with them if your blog is sticky. A sticky web site compels visitors to come back again and again, and to stay longer too. My blog is reasonably sticky because the author is so good and has such insightful things to say. 😉

But in all seriousness though, there are things you can do to engage your readers more effectively. For instance, you can form a community where they all talk to each other. Most blogs, unfortunately, are abysmal at that. Even my blog really doesn’t do a very good job of bringing readers together and involving them in a group discussion. It’s entirely too easy to be up on one’s soapbox, to start a conversation and also finish it.

Here are some practical suggestions for making your blog sticky, courtesy of Performancing:

1. Design for repeat visits
2. Keep advertising minimal for repeats
3. Provide a recent posts list
4. Answer your comments
5. Use the right language
6. Post frequently
7. Have a private message system
8. Allow member posts
9. Include members in decisions
10. Don’t neglect the distributed community

The first mistake I mention in “The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make” is not getting your own domain name for your blog, and using something.typepad.com or something similar.

However, you need to be careful if you use the registrars to research a blog domain name. (Or any domain name, for that matter.) Wired’s Monkey Bites blog reports here and here on a situation where someone put a desired domain name into a shopping cart at GoDaddy but didn’t check out right then. (Happens all the time.)

When they returned the next day to purchase the domain name it was gone, purchased by someone else and for sale for an inflated price.

The same thing happened to someone I know when she put her titular domain name in a shopping cart at GoDaddy but didn’t check out. The next day — poof! — it was gone.

Slimy? Yes. Illegal? Probably not.

In short: if you researching a domain name at the registrars, be ready to buy it right then!

This week in Boston the Pubcon conference kicked off with the Boston Marathon and a keynote from Malcolm Gladwell. The conference covered a lot of ground including a session on blogs, podcasting and RSS.

On Tuesday, the “Blogging, Pod Casting and RSS Feeds” session included Dr. Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit, Daron Babin of New Gen Media, Brian Prince of BOTW as well as Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo and Matt Cutts of Google for the Q and A.

The mechanics of blogging and marketing blogs included alternative uses for RSS, blog and feed optimization, plugins, promotion and blog metrics. Babin discussed the pros and cons of podcasting with practical insight based his experience with the explosive growth of WebmasterRadio.FM.

The Q and A brought up the blurring line between what is a blog and what is a web site with the search engine reps defending their performance at indexing blogs. There was also a good question about whether to convert a whole site to a blog platform or to just add a blog to the existing site. Jeremey Zawodny’s response was to pick the right tool for the job based on your needs whether it’s forum software or blog or a content management system.

Here’s more detailed coverage of the Blogs, RSS and Podcasts session.

The “hot news” on the Blogosphere this morning is the interview between Alan Meckler and Jason Calacanis in the Wall Street Journal.  The discussion is geared more towards the individual blogger with the experience Jason has as the CEO of a major blog network.

The discussion (according to tech.memeorandum) is pretty diverse.  A lot of people are focusing in on the “if you hit this traffic level you make good money …” aspect of the article, however I think this is only part of the story.  Jason touches on it with this short comment:

The fact is that the “long tail” of sites is largely unmonetized. Over the next five to 10 years, Google AdSense, Weblogs Inc., Yahoo Publisher Network, AOL’s white-labeled version of AdSense, and Microsoft’s “AdSense killer” will enable the monetization of a lot of those smaller sites.

For businesses blogging, there might not be much, if any, interest in putting ads on their blogs.  However, if you are a small business or a solo pro … earning a little extra cash is a nice bonus.

Looking at the larger picture, though, most of the major ad networks recognize that there are a lot of untapped (un-added?) blogs out there.  Leveraging that potential real estate is going to be the challenge of 2006.

Tags: blog advertising, long tail

 

Preparing a workshop on blogging for people in the meetings and events industry, I went googling for hotel blogs. I found plenty of blog posts about hotel experiences, but not hotel corporate blogs, with one exception, the new blog launched by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, TheLobby.com, which is claimed to be the first blog launched by a major hotel company.

Graphically attractive in a fairly understated way, the blog is apparently aimed at ‘Starwood Preferred Guests’ (SPGs), although there is no sign of any section reserved exclusively for that group (not that that would need to be evident to a casual visitor).

Several posts are not much more than chatty plugs for one or other hotel in the Starwood group, which I’m sure could be helpful if, for instance, you were planning a trip to Tirana, the capital of Albania and needed to know which of the two international hotels to stay at if you want wireless internet (it’s the Sheraton) – see post of April 18, and see below why this is not hyperlinked.

The blog is evidently written by a group of travel writers – Marc S., Mark (Editor), Thomas C., Nick L. and Philip S. It seems odd, and frankly I found it irritating, that we are provided with no more identification than first names and some last name initials, especially the lastname initial bit – is there a ‘guess the travel writer’ test here for the designated SPG readership?

Although the April 13 item from which I picked up this story in iMedia Connection  (acknowledging the Wall Street Journal) says there is no provision for commenting, there is in fact a comments function and some posts already have comments. A scan of the disclaimer/warning that sits above the commenting screen suggests that the lawyers have been busy. It’s the most daunting piece of work I’ve seen on a blog comments page to date.

I could not find a permalink function. In what presents as a more traditional website fashion, you can search for archived posts on categories of brand, category (type of hotel), city, or country.

There is a pretty unobtrusive feedback link in the dark gray background area on the right side of the screen. When clicked, this produces a pop-up with a detailed questionnaire that I suspect only dedicated survey-takers will want to stay and complete.

From where I’m viewing it, TheLobby.com is basically a pr blog or even an adverblog, designed to cater to the already converted guests of this group of hotels – and it’s not suggested the publishers are offering anything else, although if the writers were given some more latitude it could no doubt turn into a travel blog with a potentially wider appeal. Calling it a ‘corporate blog’ as iMedia Connection has done, in spite of the fact that the blog doesn’t really speak for the Starwood group as a corporation, raises the question of just what constitutes, or should be recognized as, a corporate blog.

This question will be looked at by the California Court Appeals this week, after bloggers leaked a story about an Apple Computer product called "Asteroid", reports Wendy Davis at MediaPost. 

Companies are constantly asking what blogs mean legally to their company, and as Court cases begin to address this new media we in the blogging business are looking closely at these cases and the rulings following arguments for an against the use of blogs.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation  a nonprofit company follows cases involving blogging and other online issues.  It is a good source for you to review for issues related to blogging and the current legal cases.  If you are doing research into what cases are being argued and how it might affect your business blogging I suggest this site is a good place to start.

Tags: Electronic Frontier Foundation, Law and Blogs, Apple Computer, O’Grady v. Superior Court, Apple v. Does

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This just in… we’ve learned about a free teleconference tomorrow, hosted by WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association). Here are the details:

Wednesday April 19, 2006 at noon ET
Dial into a free teleconference on WOM Ethics (“A Practical Guide to Doing it Right”). Call 512-225-3050 and enter passcode 772541#.

WOMMA’s teleconferences are usually paid events so this sounds kinda interesting. It coincides with WOMMA’s announcement that DuPont has adopted WOMMA’s code of ethics for word-of-mouth marketing.

And the significance is that there’s been a good bit of discussion on the ethics of word-of-mouth marketing campaigns where the sneezers (to use Seth Godin’s expression) are offered some kind of incentive for spreading the word. It’s an interesting debate — there’s often a gray area — and I’ll be interested to hear how the WOMMA folks frame it up.

Recently SixApart began offering Widgets (add-on modules) to increase the functionality of TypePad blogs.

TypePad bloggers can view the gallery of widgets and choose from such categories as:

• commerce
• content
• games
• job search
• music
• photos and video
• publishing tools and
• search

Some of these widgets are painfully beta, while others will appeal to a very small audience segment. However, if you’ve been looking to add search to your TypePad blog or promote your eBay auctions, be sure to check out the new TypePad Widgets.

Sadly, Google has no sense of humor. Thus, some advise in search engine optimization from an unlikely source: the NY Times. Of course, for the best advice on optimizing your blog for Google, check out the posts of our own Stephan Spencer.

I devote a whole chapter to confronting fear of blogging in The Corporate Blogging Book. Anil Dash makes quick work of the topic with several salient points:

• Blogs are an established technology
• Blogs work with other technology, including email and your website
• A blog can be used anywhere that tools like email and IM are: Inside or outside the company, in one location or around the world.
• There [are] no set rules about how to have a blog. You can start small, with a lot of control over content and community, and expand over time — don’t jump in with both feet if you’re not ready.

His comments are directed at what he calls “normal business people.” Which is an important distinction. Those who read this blog and others that cover the topic of “corporate blogging” may already be convinced that blogs are a new must-use communications channel. But there are lots of folks just beginning to think about this.

Coinciding with Ad:Tech San Francisco April 26-28, the RSS Industry Night Roundtable II aims to assemble a group of the top thought leaders in the RSS industry to discuss key topics that challenge all of us in RSS Advertising. This group will span the disciplines of RSS advertising, RSS manufacture, RSS aggregators and readers, and RSS purveyors and luminaries.

The event is free and seating is limited to 40 people. The event is sponsored by iUpload, PRWeb and Pheedo.

The first RSS Roundtable dinner, brought together some of the pioneers in RSS marketing and services including, Yahoo!, Microsoft, eBay, NewsGator, Simplefeed, Pubsub, Feedburner, Pheedo and Forrester.

The intent of this meeting is to discuss a number of key issues facing our industry and it’s chances for continued success. This meeting will also serve as a vehicle for our key industry partners to discuss mutual challenges and viable solutions, as well as come to a mutual understanding of goals and objectives that we all have for the RSS advertising space. Lastly, we will have an opportunity to collaborate, as leaders in the industry, on how we can increase the rate of RSS adoption among information consumers. Case studies on RSS advertising success will also be presented. Attendees will also be encouraged to share their stories.

Where: San Francisco, 10-15 minute walk from Moscone (location of Ad:Tech). Event location details will be sent to interested parties.
Time: 6:30PM – 9:30PM
Date: April 27 (second day of Ad:Tech)
Cost: Free dinner sponsored by iUpload, PRWeb, Pheedo, cash bar
RSVP:: Send an email to bill AT Pheedo.com with your name, email, telephone and company name/address

Topics:
There are so many topics that we can collectively address as an industry, however, it’s critical that we focus on the important few that address issues of RSS growth and adoption.

We will focus on key industry issues that are preventing business adoption of RSS. Below are the high-level issues that we’ll cover. At the end of the document are additional topics that can be discussed if there is additional time.

–> Lack of standardized RSS metrics
–> Lack of presentable case studies and best practices
–> IRSS mass syndication
–> Actual RSS penetration
–> Rich-media advertising

Attendees:
Ideally, the event will attract around 40 high level leaders from within the RSS and Advertising industries including the following disciplines.

RSS Manufacturer
RSS Advertising
RSS Readers
RSS Services
RSS Convergence
RSS Research

If you are interested in attending, please send an email to bill AT Pheedo.com with your name, email, telephone and company name/address.

So Andy whimped out and asked me to post for him about the official release of his book “BlogWild!“. Geez Andy, it’s a great book! Why wouldn’t you want to write about it? Now I’ve already done a review of both Andy’s and Des’ books, but this is Andy’s day. The book is real, it’s done, it’s even hard cover!

And I really did enjoy it (I still have to try the recipes). Here’s my thing about business books. First they need to be readable. Good prose is key. Humour is important. Next, they need to cut to the chase. Brevity scores major points in my book. Took me less than an hour to go cover to cover (yeah, okay I skimmed the Typepad sections … but I know when I’m fixing Toby’s site I’ll be referring to it). So if you car pool to work or take transit, you might be able to be done and have action steps before you even get to work!

That brings me to my next (and next to last) point … action items. End the chapters with nice easy action items. Something short and tangible that could even be done while you’re on hold or something. Intense action items just don’t work. KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid.

Finally, the anti-hype factor. Yes, blogs are hot. Yes, people are clamoring about them. But there are real business reasons for using the a blog to get your message out. How about saving money! There’s a good one (and it’s in Andy’s book). Andy leverages the hype about blogs to get your attention, but then puts all the advice into anti-hype tone. This is so important. People might get sick of talking about “blogs” per se, but they aren’t going to get sick of being able to write about their business, communicate with customers, and get a good search engine ranking for like $15/mo.

So … Andy’s book is for real. Congrats Andy!. And boy with all the authors on this site I’m getting to feel like the odd man out! Oh well. Who wants to read a book written by a geek anyway.

Tags: BlogWild, Andy Wibbels

I’ve been pretty absent from the Blogosphere lately and if you’ve been wondering why (or maybe you haven’t 😉 ) this is why. For the past month + I’ve been orchestrating the launch of a deal with Lycos to use and promote Qumana’s offline blog editor and our RSS reader QReader (formerly Lektora).

Lycos press release, Qumana release, my blog post

This has been a huge and exciting project for us and, to the best of my knowledge, is the first time a blog platform has chosen to promote a single blog tool for their users. Believe me this is just the first of these kinds of deals we’re working on.

Beyond what this means for Qumana, I think this is the first step towards a great thing for blogs and blogging. Make it easy for “regular people” to publish rich posts, publish to nearly any blog platform, tag their posts, and insert a key-word driven via Q Ads (formerly Adgenta) and I think we are enabling people to write more content, better and leverage it across lots of places.

So, thank you to the whole Qumana and Lycos team. The fun is just starting now!

Tags: Qumana, Lycos

I did PR for a year, so I mean it in the nicest possible way when I say that, yes, at a certain level it’s a profession of whores. (Really…the nicest possible way. I mean, I’m now in advertising for crying out loud, so I’m certainly not judging!)

To that end, you have to love the literalism of Rellatio: a PR firm founded by ex-porn stars. Naturally, they have a (brand new) blog.

UPDATE:
The more I think about it, the more I’m thinking this is probably a hoax, yet another faux blog. What made me think initially it wasn’t is that the first blog post is dated today, not April 1. But still, it just seems too good to be true. Please let me know if it turns out to be a send-up.

With our recent posts on RSS, I figured I’d weigh in with a quick opinion of my own. I know its heretical for a blogger to say so, but I think RSS is vastly over-hyped. To that end, I’m happy to point out Dave Taylor’s recent post where he points out an obvious truth: most RSS readers suck.

Here’s a brave admission: I don’t use any RSS reader. I haven’t for a couple of years. I tried various ones here and there, but ultimately I come back to the fact that I just don’t have time to keep up with all that information, and I’m an information junkie, blogger and researcher. I don’t know how the rest of you do it. I have simply don’t have an extra hour every day to scan the posts of the 200 blogs I love. I barely have time to read the industry sites that cover my sector (Internet advertising). Basically, I try to scan MarketingVOX daily, and then spend 2-3 hours with email and then, if I have any time left, I try to actually do some work. I’d love to read more blogs, but where do you fit it in? I’m sleeping only six hours a night as it is. I’m a drop-by blog reader; I cycle through my favorites here and there where I have time andbrowse their archives.
But it’s one thing for a blogger to admit this (and those who follow my blogging know that I’m also a catch-as-catch-can blogger, not a daily machine like some people). But what the hell does an ordinary person need with RSS? A blogger, a trend watcher, a journalist, or just info junkies, I can see the point of why they use RSS. But that accounts for the 5% of the population that already uses RSS. Why on earth would my mom need an RSS reader?

Here’s what baffles me most about RSS and the blogosphere: for all the excitement about about RSS as a reader subscription feature, it’s been virtually ignored by blog software tools as a true syndication mechanism. Why isn’t it a standard feature of every blog publishing tool that you can customize the resyndication of your other favorite blogs? E.g., I’d like flexible controls to put in the margin of my blogs up-to-the-minute headlines (or short posts, or long posts) from my favorite five (or 10, or 20) blogs. I tried to do this two years ago and all I found was some university hack. I suspect there are (but don’t actually know of) some more mature widgets out there that let you do this now, as I’ve seen it here and there on other blogs, but it’s certainly not widespread. It would be like blogrolling on crack. Seems like a no-brainer. Is there a WordPress plug-in for that?

(Of course, what blog publishing tools really need is the ability to aggregate posts and publishing them as an email newsletter, but, as Molly Shannon memorably said, don’t even get me started…)