Is the term “social media” moot? Steve Rubel thinks so, but a majority of his commenters, including some names you’d recognize, beg to differ. I’d love to hear your opinion. Are the lines blurred to the point there should no longer be a distinction? Fellow BBC bloggers (and others as well), what do you have to say?

If you’ve been following the exciting world of search engines (only said slightly in jest) you know that Google keeps increasing its market share, and that the only way that wanna-be MSN Live is even getting any traction is by forcing everyone to upgrade Internet Explorer to IE7, which conveniently resets everyone’s default search engine to the Microsoft solution. Hmmm… okay.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales, the founder and creator of Wikipedia and the commerical Wikia, has come out with news that he’s building a human-powered search engine called Wikiasari (I have no idea what the name means, sorry) with funding from Amazon.com. Amazon, you might recall, have a failed search engine of their own called A9, and even with the offer of special discounts on Amazon.com purchased for A9 users, they still can’t get anyone to use it. No wonder they’re interested.

But should we be interested in Wikiasari?

I don’t think so.

The problem isn’t that the search engine might not be interesting or useful, the problem is that to even compete in the world of search engines you have to fight the incredibly strong powers of momentum, of people just not wanting to bother with something different. Regardless of how wonderful Wikiasari might be (and I’m skeptical it’ll work at all because of spammers and other cons) (recall that they killed DMOZ, for example), the only way people will try it is if Google really starts failing as a search engine.

The weird thing is that the media is writing about it with the sort of hype usually reserved for Google itself, talking about how Wikiasari might be a “Google killer” and a “serious threat to Google’s marketshare”. I just don’t see it.

What’s your take? Would you switch search engines “just because”, or do you find that your favorite search engine is hard-wired into your fingers at this point in the evolution of the Internet?

I have a longer article on this subject available on my Business Blog too: Wikiasari threatens Google? I don’t think so. if you’d like to engage in a discussion on this topic too.

For many of you this may seem basic, but there’s a first time for everything….

Have you ever wondered how us “blogging experts” keep up on dozens or even hundreds of blogs a day? Do we visit dozens or hundreds of Web sites a day hoping that each one has posted new, worthwhile post(s)? Don’t we have lives? Don’t we have businesses to run?!?

The answer is that we subscribe to the feed from these blogs and collect them in one central location. I prefer NetNewsWire (Mac only!) while others prefer the browser-based Bloglines.

Unfortunately, subscribing to a blog feed is counter-intuitive. The very action we’ve been trained to do with Pavlovian perfection–clicking on a link–instead presents us with a page of XML mumbo-jumbo.

To that end, I’ve put together this little movie (at 10.2 MB it’s actually not that little) that walks you through the subscription process. Soon you’ll be able to subscribe to blogs with the best of ’em, keeping up on important industry information and staying ahead of your competition.

How to Subscribe to a Blog Feed: The Movie!

I was going to let this one go, but Paul Chaney suggested I write this up as a post on how not to and how to pitch bloggers to write up stories for their blogs.

This morning I got an e-mail pitch from a PR company to write about a pretty cool use of blogs and real estate.  This isn’t too unusual for me, not as common as say Scoble, who just gave me an obscene number of e-mails to look for blog fodder for the PodTech blog, but it happens.  The story, like I said, was interesting, but immediately I saw a problem.  The company that did the blog was Paul’s company Blogging Systems, which would be fine except that Jim Turner and I work together in a competing company One By One Media.  So I couldn’t really give Paul and co. props without twisting it to also highlight the work that Jim and I do with OBO.

I replied with a polite e-mail back the the PR person, copying Paul, asking how Paul might want to handle this.  Then the PR guy calls me to talk about it.  Well, I explain, Paul and I are friends, but we’re also competitors.  Oh.  Wait, it gets better.  The PR company in question is Lee Odden’s company!  So we have four bloggers involved in this, who all know each other, and all contribute here too!  Yeah I told you it got better.  This is why this makes a great case study.  This is no fault of Lee’s or Paul’s, don’t worry guys.

So first thing about pitching bloggers is you have to do your research.  Not just, oh he/she blogs about business, you have to dig deeper you have to look into who that blogger is connected to on the blogosphere.  Who does he/she work for (and there could be several alliances there)?  Where does he/she contribute?

Bloggers are a very social and interconnected bunch.  We often wear many hats and have several gigs going at the same time. We also tend to know everyone in our niche, friends will help friends but we have to draw the line at competitors (even if they are friends).  Researching the blogger will help with this little problem.

Next you need to contact the blogger before the first pitch to find out if they are interested in being pitched.  Some bloggers don’t want to be pitched.  Others, like me, don’t mind, but I do like to be asked first (I’ve even blogged about this).

I don’t think the person pitching me really knew who I was.  If he had asked Paul or Lee they would have told him … yeah great blogger, bad choice for this pitch.  Let me sum up my recommendations for PR folks pitching bloggers:

• Do your research first
• Don’t e-mail out of the blue with a pitch
• Don’t call on the phone right away to push your pitch
• Do tell the blogger why they were picked.
• Don’t just say “I think this would be interesting for your blog” , unless you’ve already established a relationship with the blogger
• Don’t be offended if they pass
• Do thank them if they post
• Do track mention of the pitch topic, you might be getting slammed or miss a great post

Like I said, this the best part of this story is the whole interconnectedness of the whole thing.  Paul, Lee, Jim, and I all know each other and contribute here.  Again, this is no fault of Paul or Lee.  I’m sure they will get a chuckle out of it.

Tags: PR, pitching bloggers, PR case study

In speaking last week with friend and colleague Alan Rimm-Kaufman, he told me of his company’s plans to switch their company’s site to WordPress. Very timely that he would mention that to me given my recent post about WordPress for non-blogs. I asked Alan to write these points up, they were so good. He agreed, and blogged it. In summary, Alan says WordPress provides company site owners with:

• editing without needing to know HTML
• easy handling of “rolling events” like speaking engagements
• post-dating of articles so they can automatically “go live” on the scheduled date (as is required with embargoed articles until their print publication date)
• reader participation through comments
• organization of the content using tags
• seamless handling of pre-existing URLs
• easy addition of new functionality (because it is “open source”)
• free support by the very responsive developer and user communities

I’ll just piggy-back on Alan’s points a bit:

• Because WordPress is such a popular blogging platform, it’s easy to find developers to work on it. It also certainly doesn’t hurt that WordPress is written in PHP — the most popular programming language on the planet!
• WordPress is easily extensible through the use of plugins. Many hundreds of plugins exist already. It’s also pretty easy (if you’re a developer) to write your own plugins. That’s a lot more elegant that directly hacking the WordPress code base.
• Maintaining inlinks to former URLs can often be accomplished just by making the “post slugs” (filenames) consistent with the old site then adding a rewrite rule to the .htaccess file that maps to the new URL structure. If that’s not possible, you can always create a comprehensive list of 301 (permanent-style) redirects to add to your .htaccess file.

So I made my case for running WordPress on non-blogs, based primarily on the positive impact on SEO that you’ll get out of doing so. This rounds out the reasons for switching to include compelling reasons beyond just search rankings.

Actually, I’ll add one more. WordPress allows you to add cool sidebar widgets, such as the Swicki buzzcloud, with the greatest of ease. I love widgets! (A swicki, by the way, is a custom search engine, like this one, and a buzzcloud is a tagcloud type thing but of popular searches rather than tags, like the one in the right column on my daughter’s Neopets Cheats site.)

I’ve only recently started to get to know Jeremiah Owyang and his blog, something to do with the fact that he works at PodTech and I’ve just started blogging there.  Regardless Jeremiah has posted 10 (and I’d say killer) strategies for social media for the Fortune 1000 set.

1) Social Media is about people.
2) Communities are the goal, conversations are the verb.
3) Let go to gain more.
4) Measurement will be important.
5) Organize internally.
6) Risk of the unknown.
7) Social Media goes deep in the organization.
8) Social Media goes wide in the organization.
9) Social Media spans time.
10) Social Media is not magic nor voodoo.

These are basic, simple and, I think, pragmatic.  Paul has a good series of e-mails going on this (B .L.  Ochman and Toby Bloomberg … and dern I owe him an e-mail) on this very topic.

I expect to see a lot more of this in 2007.

Tags: social media, social media strategies, social media consulting

 

The analysts at Gartner have made their predictions for 2007 and they say that blogging will peak next year and all the hype will fizzle out.

One of their top 10 predictions for 2007 is that the number of bloggers will level off in the first half of next year at roughly 100 million worldwide. The reason: most people who would ever dabble with web journals already have. Those who love it are committed to keeping it up, while others have got bored and moved on, said Daryl Plummer, chief Gartner fellow.

“A lot of people have been in and out of this thing,” Plummer said. “Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they’re put on stage and asked to say it.”

Well, that certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons!

It got a flood of media coverage and many bloggers weighed in too.  Does this mean blogging will suddenly die and go away.  No, the Gartner gurus say it will level off and the rapid growth we’ve seen with the blogosphere doubling every 6 months will go away.

There may well be 200 million ex-bloggers, but dedicated bloggers with a real voice and an audience will continue to keep the conversation alive.  And many of them are business bloggers.  C level execs are only just getting comfortable with blogs and blogging. They’ve seen the success of business bloggers like Jonathan Schwartz of Sun.

“The trend is, I think, irreversible at this point,” said Shel Holtz in the USAToday article. “You’re having businesses that are showing some substantive results with well-thought-out, strategically planned corporate blogs.”

And that’s what businesses are after – substantive results.

 

 

 

Watching the excellent online seminar series by Apple, “The Podcast Recipe“, really inspired me to get serious about podcasting and make produce something really professional. If you want to start podcasting, or if you want to do it better, then this online seminar is essential viewing!

From that seminar, I also got inspired to reach out to one of the presenters, Joe Cipriano, for an interview. Joe is one of the most recognizable voices on TV and film. He does voiceovers for NBC, Fox, CBS, Food Network, and several motion picture studios. As you can imagine, this keeps him very busy. Yet he also manages to blog (his blog can be found here) and to even create video podcasts that give an inside view of his craft. I found his video from the voice over booth at the 58th Primetime Emmy Awards (he was the announcer) particularly fascinating.

For someone who is so highly sought after by the television and motion picture industries, Joe probably doesn’t need to do any marketing. So why does Joe blog? What does he get out of it? I was curious to hear his motivations for blogging and podcasting and any lessons learned along the way. Here’s what Joe had to say…

In what ways has the blog has been helpful to your business?

It’s given me a chance to meet and interact with some of my peers all over the world and and also young talent who are just beginning their voice over careers.

Any lessons learned by doing the blog?

When you start a blog…you’re going to get a LOT of spam 🙂 I spend the most amount of time deleting spam messages that come in to the blog.

Why did you start blogging?

My web designer suggested it about a year ago and I thought it would be a great way to interact with clients and others with an interest in voice overs.

What’s been the time commitment required to blog? Do you plan on increasing it?

I should spend more time with it, but I do like to come up with different ideas to present on the blog. Most of my blogging deals with entries from voice over hopefuls who have questions about studio equipment, moving their career along and tips on getting started in the business. I started a new entry recently that had nothing to do with the business of voice over with the title, “What’s Your Perfect Weekend.” It has nothing to do with voice overs and I encourage readers to submit their “perfect weekend.”

Where does podcasting fit in for you? And where will it in the future?

I have a couple of video podcasts up on the blog. I’ve gotten the most response to these. People are fascinated to actually see what a voice over session is like. To produce the video podcast, I use my MacBookPro and built in iSight in the bezel of the screen, recording directly into iMovie for these little video tidbits. I take the audio from the studio itself rather than the microphone in the MacBookPro. It gives the effect of the “real” full fidelity sound of the session.

What’s the pay-off been for you of doing podcasts versus regular blog posts?

I guess it’s the difference between reading a magazine and watching a video. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.

So there you have it. Joe’s blogging is a way for him to give something back, to help voice over hopefuls break into the industry and hone their skills. Very cool! Good on ya, Joe!

In these troubled times of flogs (faux blogs) and disingenuity orchestrated by PR firms on behalf of their fat cat clients, bloggers like Joe are a breath of fresh air! They are the reason why I am still so enthusiastic about blogging.

Business Blog Consulting’s founder, Rick Bruner, hasn’t been seen or heard from lately, at least not here. I was beginning to wonder if he still existed. Lo and behold, I found he does. His name is attached to a new report released this month by DoubleClick, where he serves as Director of Research.

The report, titled Influencing the Influencers: How Online Advertising and Media Impact Word of Mouth (PDF), talks about how marketers can make use of word-of-mouth marketing by “influencing the influencers,” those whose buying decisions tend to have greater impact on friends, family, and associates than others.

When I opened Bloglines the other day to check my feeds I saw a notice about an opening for a director position to oversee future development of the app.

As you probably know, Bloglines was acquired back in February by Ask.com. Bloglines creator Mark Fletcher assumed the director position, but left the company in June to pursue other interests.

I’ve written an op/ed on my Allbusiness.com blog, Strategic Business Blogging, so let me invite you to read that post as well.

Is there no end to the faux pas that corporate communications folk and interactive marketing and PR agencies make in the blogosphere?

Hot on the heels of the Wal-Mart Edelman flog fiasco comes the  admission that alliwantforxmasisapsp.com is a fake blog put up by sony and their agency Zipatonia. It’s no wonder that corporate executives in the US and the UK polled for the Bulldog Reporter/Peppercom business blog survey said blogs are not a credible source of information – with corporate shenanigans like this the public will soon feel that way too.

They have obviously not read all the data that clearly shows consumers want openess, honesty, transparency and authenticity.   It builds brand and engenders customer loyalty.

A commenter on the blog claiming to be a Zipatoni executive replied to criticism in the fake blog’s comments. “Please know that we approached the client initially with this scenario and they said ‘who cares if people find out? As long as it is funny, we do this stuff all of the time,”

And you guys thought that would be all right then?  If the substance hits the fan, we’ll duck and point fingers at the client.

It’s the job of an agency to advise the client on how to operate in the new social media environment.   Not to take their money and run when the project goes south.

Social media is a new playing field with new rules.  Ignore them at your peril.

“The blog world is a very open, self-policing and pretty unforgiving world when you try to trick them with things like this,” commented Cymfony’s Jim Naill. “I don’t understand why marketers, after all the different examples of this, don’t get the message that you can’t get away with faking these kinds of blogs.”

 

Yesterday, I posted Toby Bloomberg’s explanation of what a social media consultant is and does. I also asked PR-blogger B. L. Ochman for her take, and here’s what she had to say… (more…)

The Washington Post is reporting the Federal Trade Commission may regulate word-of-mouth marketing and require full-disclosure.

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday said that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.

In a staff opinion issued yesterday, the consumer protection agency weighed in for the first time on the practice. Though no accurate figures exist on how much money advertisers spend on such marketing, it is quickly becoming a preferred method for reaching consumers who are skeptical of other forms of advertising.

I’ve ranted about the PayPerPost, need for full-disclosure debacle a couple of times and have one more such rant in me, which I’m considering posting here later this week. However, if the FTC steps in, it may make my harangue moot. More to follow on this I’m sure.

Via TechCrunch and CopyBlogger

I’ve made the case for WordPress as a CMS (content management system) for corporate sites, using the website of my company, Netconcepts, as the guinea pig. We switched from a home-grown content CMS to WordPress in August and the commensurate traffic increase over the few months since launch was significant. I shared some traffic graphs to illustrate, in a recently published case study. The funny thing is, I doubt many visitors ever guess Netconcepts.com is powered by WordPress just by looking at it.

Now that I’m convinced of the benefits of a search engine optimized, WordPress-powered corporate site, we decided to give WordPress a go on a microsite, one that we just finished for our client, Countrywide. The microsite is Credit Demystified. We’ve equipped the site with all the SEO goodies that I’ve blogged about before, like a tag cloud, tag pages, my SEO Title Tag plugin, Technorati tags, etc. One breakthrough we made with the site was adapting the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to handle static pages, and not just posts. More on that here.

I think using WordPress for a CMS on sites other than blogs has a lot of merit, in terms of the SEO benefit. Know of any non-blogs powered by WordPress, particularly ones that are having some success with their search engine rankings? I’d love to hear of them!

I’m sure most of the readers of this blog know technology consultant and business advisor Dave Taylor. He is a fellow blogger here at BBC as well.

One of Dave’s blogs, AskDaveTaylor.com, has been nominated for a very prestigious award as the Best Technology Blog in the 2006 Weblog Awards. If he wins, Dave will beat out the likes of tech blog notables as Gizmodo, Slashdot, and TechCrunch.

While those other blogs are certainly award worthy, I look at it this way. Dave Taylor has contributed more intellectual capital to the storehouse of business blogging knowledge than just about anyone I know. He is a master teacher who can explain technically complicated matters in a way that make sense to even the most nascent. Conversely, he is never belittling toward those of us who ask the simplest of questions. That is the mark of a true statesman and gentleman. Dave is both.

At the recent Blog Business Summit in Seattle, I had the privilege of attending a session where Dave was a panelist. I was amazed at the ease and fluidity with which he presented his ideas. Dave spoke as one having a deep knowledge and understanding of his subject. It was a privilege to sit under his tutelage.

Real masters of their craft are few and far between. Dave Taylor is one such artisan. For that reason, I urge you to cast your vote for AskDaveTaylor.com. And, if you’re so inclined, because the award hosts allow you to cast votes every 25 hours, do so repeatedly.

Toby Bloomberg used to be business blog consultant. Now, she refers to herself as a social media consultant.

Just for fun, I asked Toby what that was and here’s her reply. (more…)

Debbie Weil, author of the The Corporate Blogging Book, is interviewing Des Walsh, editor of the new Business and Blogging blog, part of the b5media network, today on her internet radio show, The Corporate Blogging Show.

The program airs today at 12 noon pacific and is being streamed live. You can download it later if you don’t catch it live.

Des says it won’t be tech-talk or “how to make money from blogging,” but about how he and others have used blogs to build their business (Which would be just about everyone who contributes to this site.).

In an article that’s sure to take the joy out of any blogging enterprise, Internet Business Law Services has posted Internet Law: Employee Blogs Pose Potential Problems for Businesses.

While I’m sure that a number of large businesses have experienced problems with employees’ blogs (the article references a few cases), maybe the first step a company should take when employees complain in their blog is to take their complaints seriously! (Of course, I run a small business; what do I know about keeping peons in their place?)

This article talks specifically about personal blogs that employees work on after hours (or perhaps when the boss isn’t looking.) They look at what happens when the employees blog about work, disparage co-workers, or share company secrets.
If you do run a large business, or you’ve given your employees good reason to despise you, the article does have some helpful hints on new entries for the employee handbook, like making sure employees who blog about work state that these are their own opinions and not that of the company, and not to reveal any trade secrets.

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t give any advice on keeping your employees happy, engaged, or giving them reasons to blog positive.

 Richard Nacht, president of Blogging Systems which specializes in blog strategies for the lending and real estate industries, has the following Top Ten strategic benefits of blogging,

1. Search Engine Marketing
2. Direct Communications
3.  Brand Building
4. Competitive Differentiation
5. Relational Marketing
6. Exploit the Niches
7.  Media & Public Relations
8. Position You as an Expert
9. Reputation Management
10.  Low Cost

Read more at the Daily ‘Dog

Over at SNCR, some of our fellow blog evangelists and experts are predicting what to expect in the coming year.  Our own Debbie Weil and Sally Falkow are quoted:

From Debbie Weil:

We’re unhooking from our computers and will be getting much more online info via our cell phones, PDAs, etc. Beware the marketer who doesn’t remember this and doesn’t format blog posts, etc. to be read
on a cell phone or Treo!

The corporate blogosphere has gone multi-media. If you’re not including podcasts, embedded video and cool images with your blog, then you’re soooo 2005.

From Sally Falkow:

This has been the year when RSS came into its own. The release of IE 7 with the reader built into the browser has finally made it really simple. Jupiter Research found that 30% of large companies are deploying RSS due to customer demand.

2007 will see an explosion of web content syndication with RSS and the sharing of content on social media sites. Already one in twenty web visits is to one of the top social media sites according to HitWise. And, these sites are driving traffic to search engines and verticals like travel and telecom.

Corporate communications professionals and PR agencies will have to wrap their wits around online PR and social media.

I would be curious what the rest of the group here thinks will be the outcome of 2007?  What are some of your predictions for the Blogging Future?

Tags: Debbie Weil, Sally Falkow, SCNR, Blogging, 2007

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