Do you really need a process for starting a blog? Well, not if you’re a small, one-person business and you’re the only person to answer to. However, if yours is a multi-million (or billion) dollar enterprise that needs multiple layers of approval, then the following first in a three-part series on the process of setting up a corporate blog will benefit you.

This comes from a post at MarketingProfs, so here are the highlights. For the full post and original material, read on over here.

There are three phases to the corporate blog process. 1) Investigate, 2) Create, 3) Activate. This post deals only with the investgate phase, which follows these steps:
1. Determine Goals for Your Corporate Blog
You need to to determine why you’re doing this, get baseline measurements in place and create a vision for success. See the mindmap below for more detail.

2. Assess Your Market for Blog Viability
Not every company should blog. You need to understand what kind of conversation is taking place in your market and if you can easily enter the conversation with your blog strategy. You also need to look internally to make sure that this fits with your corporate culture.

3. Map to Overall Marketing/Communications Strategy
This is critical. The blog should not be an appendage or bolt-on to your marketing. If you’re going to do it right, it needs to be integrated into the rest of your messaging and conversation.

4. Risk Profile Assessment
Ask yourself a few questions to determine how ready you are to engage in the market conversation. You’ll have sooner or later, but here are a few things to look out for before you leap.
– Have you ever personally used social media and what’s your comfort level?
– What is your company’s tolerance for risk (e.g., initiating new or untested marketing tactics, launching bold corporate initiatives, etc.)?
– How does your company normally react to negative commentary from the media?

For more, read the MarketingProfs post: What’s the Process for Starting a Corporate Blog? How Long Does It Take? [Part 1 of 3].

The web works quickly, as so noted by Wendy Davis in her column today “Just An Online Minute… Facebook’s About-Face“. No sooner did Facebook put up their “News Feed” and “Mini-Feed” to keep users alerted about changes in their friends’ profiles through the magic of RSS than they were feeling the wrath of over 500,000 social netizens breathing down their neck to stop the privacy invasion. All this great publicity (and a 6%+ response rate – 500K of 9M, not bad numbers! Enough to make any direct marketer blush) thanks, in part, to the folks at Students Against Facebook News Feed.

The group has, however, issued a statement basically telling people to ‘back off’, as Facebook has impelmented satisfactory changes to it’s privacy policy.

The group’s initial impression is that Facebook has implimented most of the privacy changes that we asked for. We never believed Mark Zuckerberg was out to hurt people and that his corporation had nothing but good intentions when they launched news feed and mini-feed.

My take on this whole thing, which is obviously one-sided, is that this whole situation was a bit overblown and really shows the power of the social media zeitgeist when it’s way, way out of control.

Think about this. Plaxo has been doing this for years. I get emails all the time from them telling me that someone’s updated their content (though, it usually comes from my computer with the Plaxo toolbar installed). I also see this every time I log in to LinkedIn. In fact, just today, I can tell you who, of my connections, added friend and connections (and who they were!), updated their profiled, added their blog URL and other various administrative tasks. Tell me, what seperates these from the Facebook ordeal?

I say, there’s not much difference here, just a difference of perception. For some reason, that I’ve not the time to dive deep into here, the current generation of Facebook users (cursory view – there’s only one other person from my graduating university class on facebook..most everyone else is ’05 – ’10) have a warped perception that there’s privacy online. Really, since when? Google has your life in a box (and a well organized one at that). So what if your friends see that you added a new picture, seriously, with the volume of stuff (my experience with LinkedIn and Plaxo) coming though, it’s not like anyone will care anyway.

In the wise words of one Sun MicroSystems CEO, Scott McNealy “Privacy is dead, deal with it.â€? While I wouldn’t go so far as to say “dead”, there is a movement going on in the “identity” space, privacy certainly is not something you expect in an online social network (at least, not in this day and age, and not from Gen X)
The lesson that I take away, and the reason that we’re so in love with RSS (or News Feeds, Mini-Feeds, whatever…) is that it’s all about CONSUMER CONTROL and OPT-IN. Think about that the next time you lauch a great feature. (especially to a rabid community of 9 million). It’s that simple. Facebook made a quick about face, and was able to save face (sorry, couldn’t resist) here by implementing some very swift policy changes. Kudos to them for listening and reacting!

RSS is a great tool, just like every other great tool on the Internet, but it’s the best kind of tool when the user has the controls. If Facebook gives the controls to the users (and they know how to use them), we’ll see News Feeds come back in style on Facebook.

More info: WSJ (free article) New Facebook Features
Have Members in an Uproar

It was only a matter of time. Just as employers have clauses in their HR documentation about drug and alcohol use, it appears that blogs may soon join the ranks of contraband in the halls of some corporations.

According to an article in ABC NewsOnline, Australia, the authors of a new book “Uses of Blogs” have a detailed chapter on blogging and the law which highlight the wishes of some employers to ban blogging in the workplace. This is common sense -don’t blog on personal time. However, the lines could, and will, quickly blur as to how far this extends into the personal lives of employees.

“Employers are now considering including specific blogging provisions in employment contracts,” the authors write in Uses of Blogs, a book to be published later this year.

While I’m not an attorney, I’m projecting that the real enforceability of a no-blogging clause in an employment will be vetted in court after someone’s fired for a breach of contract.

Would anyone say, “sorry, I have to decline your offer as working for your company would keep me from blogging.” We’ll see…

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.

Dave Winer, the founding father of RSS, has a lucid essay on putting valuation on the current state of RSS investment in the world. Given the VC investment, the number of companies doing RSS and podcasting that have invested in RSS, and even the companies like Pheedo and FeedBurner that have hired and entire staff devoted to RSS, there’s a pretty substantial chunk of capital that’s decked against this technology.

I analogize it to CRM (Customer Relationship Management). I’m not sure who is the ‘arguable’ father of CRM – perhaps Tom Siebel plays a role. CRM is essentially the ‘plumbing’ of customer data & customer interactions inside most major companies. As of 2003, the CRM market was around $8.8 billion. It’s only grown from there. But if only 19% of user licenses of software like SAP are deployed, then I guess they’ve got issues greater then market size to contend with.
Back to RSS. The investment, however large, is real, and it’s alive. RSS is not a technology that sits on the shelf. RSS, once implemented, lives, breaths and connects content to customers, just by the nature of its very being.
In some ways, RSS is changing the ‘plumbing’ of the Internet and its effects are profound. The RSS investment trend illustrates just how powerful blogging and social media are in this web 2.0 world. Something CRM didn’t have in it’s favor.

To that end, Dave puts it this way.

Here’s one way to visualize it. Let’s assume the average home price in the U.S. is $400K. So $8.2 billion is about 21,000 houses. Now imagine you wanted to change the way the plumbing worked in all of those homes. You get the idea. There’s no way 4 or 5 random people on a Yahoo mail list, people of ordinary means, can move that much capital without having a pretty compelling argument and making it an incredibly compelling way.

Dave has a great point there. However, his next point is even more important.

Viewed another way, given that Scripting News, for years, was the central if not primary means of distributing information about RSS, it gives you a sense of how powerful blogging is. It can’t move that much capital overnight, but given enough time, and persistence, and a high-quality idea, you can create quite an economic effect.

That’s the mantra on RSS. Focus on the vision, persist in “changing out the plumbing”, and pushing for the constant incremental economic effects for and from RSS advancement.

Shamelessly cross-posted at the Pheedo blog.

Interesting report from the Onalytica blog, measuring who the top 25 most influential business bloggers are, with full disclosure on their methodology for defining ‘influential.

Not sure I agree with their results, purely because they have a mix of blog networks (Corante), multi-author blogs (Businessblogconsulting) and famous single bloggers like Steve Rubel @ Micropersuasion.

Download the PDF of the report here.

The Results

Technorati Tags: blog research, blogosphere, business blogging, influence

Just got a nice, semi-personal email from Jeff Veen at Adaptive Path stating that their newest project, Measure Map, the great blog analytics tool, has been acquired by Google.

So I said there was news, and here it is: I’m writing you to announce that Measure Map has been acquired by Google, effective today. For the near term, you will see no difference in its operations. In the not so distant future, you can expect great things from this acquisition. We couldn’t be happier to find such an ideal home for Measure Map, and are thrilled at the possibilities.

Read more on the Google blog.

Marqui, the blogging and communications company, in conjuction with FreeRange Communications, the mobile RSS company, have released a great whitepaper on RSS entitled “RSS Rx: How Marketers Can Make the Most of RSS Technology.” The document is a quick read, at only 15 pages, but gives a really great overview of RSS for marketers in a conversational tone that is very much a Marqui thing. (I mean, really, look at their website and you’ll see what I mean)
The document cites nearly every RSS study done to date, and highlights some of the prominent RSS purveyors throughout the document. (Full disclosure: Pheedo is mentioned in the document)
There is also a fair bit of prescriptive content on ‘what do do next’ with your new-found RSS knowledge, such as the following:

Marketers interested in incorporating RSS into their activities should first take a hard look at their Web site. What content does it have that can – and should be – distributed? For example, does your site have blogs, forums, press releases, product information, support information, email newsletters, audio presentations or whitepapers? If not, can any of these items be added?

Even companies relying on third-parties to manage some of these items might be surprised to find that adding an RSS feed is an option. For instance, companies using a newsletter service to manage their newsletters should ask if the service comes with RSS feeds since more and more services are adding this capability.

Marqui has made the whitepaper available for download on their site in the downloads section.

Technorati Tags: Freerange communications, Marqui, RSS, whitepaper

OK, so I don’t have 101 uses for RSS YET…I’m working up to it, and I need your help.

Rich Ziade over at basement.org listed about a dozen uses for RSS, including:

• Tracking packages
• Following the comics
• Transferring contacts between computers

There are, I’m sure, dozens of ways to use RSS, outside of the normal news gathering, competitive intelligence.

Other RSS uses lists:

RSS Specifications – Uses for RSS

public virtual blog – Cool Uses of RSS

What’s your innovative use for RSS?

At the end of the month, I’ll compile a list of all the great ways to use RSS here. Let’s shoot for 101!

Chris Hoyt, president, Hoyt & Company wrote a compelling article on the HUB magazine website about mining the blogosphere for comments and content on your company.

According to a November 2005 Reveries.com survey, over 60% of companies surveyed weren’t monitoring the blogosphere.

On the heels of the WOMMA WOMBAT conference, the emergence of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, and the venture funding flowing into the word-of-mouth marketing space, its never been more apparent that monitoring the consumer media (blogosphere) is an essential function in every marketing department.

So, what might you listen for on the blogosphere?

1. General consumer understanding
2. Find your evangelists & vigilantes
3. Early warning signs on issues
4. Consumer specifics – likes and dislikes
5. Competitive intelligence
6. Product/service improvement ideas
7. Campaign tracking
8. WOM tracking

What would your company listen for?

If you’re coming to the Syndicate conference this December 12-14 in San Francisco and you work in the "RSS industry", we’d like to invite you to drop in for some lively discussion on the future of our industry. 

In conjunction with the event, Pheedo is informally hosting an off-conference RSS Industry Night (full disclosure: I work for Pheedo) Roundtable, Rok Hrastnik will be moderating the evening as a neutral party. Essentially, we are aiming to focus the event on our industry and not on any company in particular.

Event Summary:
Coinciding with the RSS industry conference, Syndicate, the RSS Industry Night Roundtable aims to assemble a group of the top thought leaders in the RSS industry to discuss key topics that challenge all of us in this space. This group will span the disciplines of RSS advertising, RSS manufacture, RSS aggregators and readers, and RSS purveyors and luminaries.

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 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.

When:

Time: 6:30PM

Date: December 12th

Timing: In conjunction with the first day of Syndicate Conference on December 12th, 2005 in San Francisco.

Moderator:
Rok Hrastnik, a noted RSS authority and author of the book Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS has agreed to moderate the event as a neutral party.

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 on the 12th. 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 20 high level leaders from within the RSS industry from the following disciplines.

RSS Manufacture
RSS Advertising
RSS Readers
RSS Services
RSS Convergence
RSS Research

Participation:
If you wish to participate, please contact Rok Hrastnik as soon as possible for additional event information. The audience will be targeted to RSS service providers.

It appears that the world was just waiting for Scott Adams to start a dilbert-esque blog. Well, in fact, he did just that with the Dilbert Blog.  The number of comments that he’s attracted for each post in just two short months of blogging is just mad – a recent post on "why [Scott Adams] is stupid" has almost 200 comments alone, and it was posted on the 22nd of November.

A few days ago I invited the readers of my blog to tell me why I’m stupid. The results are in.  If you are new to the Internet, allow me to explain how to debate in this
medium. When one person makes any kind of statement, all you need to do
is apply one of these methods to make it sound stupid. Then go on the
offensive.

Who says that no one reads blogs?  It looks like those folks that are reading blogs are the same ones  who’ve long since left the fairytale world where corporations are good and ethical and our bosses are right and reasonable.  (mine is, don’t know much about yours…)  I guess that puts the blog numbers
‘way up there’ considering that just about every disengaged worker in America is at least a passive Dilbert fan (there, take that generality and turn it into and absolute).

According to the Wall St. Journal and Paid Content, Gawker’s Nick Denton has signed a partnering arrangement to distribute content to Yahoo that will be featured on their news site.

I’m of the mind that partnering is smarter than acquisition at this point in the blogosphere.  Let’s see how this one plays out.

The end of an era where we can’t meausure podcast listenership is almost over, so says Audible.com. I’m betting that this was ‘all the rage’ at the Portable Media Expo near Los Angeles today.

According to an article in today’s Wall St. Journal (sub. req.), Audible will be releasing technology, already deployed in it’s audio book products, for the podcast market which will help track and measure the listenership of any given podcast that’s run though its proprietary system.

Audible is making its tracking service available to outside podcasters.
The company will charge three cents per downloaded podcast to report
whether a downloader listened, and for how long. Audible will also
offer tools that will stop the podcast from being emailed to others. It
will charge five cents per download to track listening and attach the
access restrictions. For half a cent per download, Audible will insert
an ad relevant to the podcast.

Let’s all line up, nice and orderly now, to get in partnership with Audible to better track ads in podcasts.   The technology will be made available some time next quarter.

Tim Manners, publisher of Reveries ‘Cool News’, has released a blogging survey in the face of some of the negative blog related data coming out of AdAge and Forbes.  The objective is to get the marketers’ and agencies’ takes on the real skinny of what’s going on with blogs and gauge the sentiments of the marketers who have to defend ‘the brands and the lives that blogs allegedly destroy’, according to the Forbes article.

In an email to Cool News Today subscribers, Tim put it this way.

In view of the rapidly growing impact of blogs, we have developed a survey to
get underneath the hype and find out how marketers (both brand and agency)
actually view blogs — as a potential useful tool or lurking danger — and to
what extent, in fact, our readers currently monitor blogs as the Forbes
article recommends:

Take the survey here:
http://response.surveyincite.com/survey/18667.jsp

The results of this survey will be available to all participants to
judge for themselves whether they are ahead or behind on the blogging curve.

There have been a number of blog surveys this year but none has really given us the ‘complete truth’ or the whole picture.  However, I think that the more of these we do and the higher the response rates, the closer we get to having a real understanding of what the blogosphere means to the advertising and marketing community.

In his Fast Forward column in September’s issue of Media magazine, editor-in-chief Joe Mandese highlights a scene from Back to School where Rodney Dangerfield is shopping for textbooks when someone recommends that he buy used ones because the key passages are already highlighted from previous owners.  In reply, Dangerfield responds, "But what if they were morons?".

I’m not about to call everyone who’s not bought into the metaphor of customer community, citizen contributed media and dialogue that blogging stands for a moron.  That wouldn’t be nice.  However, I would argue that the path we’ve traveled to marketing riches before has been written over by a new generation of marketer.  Your customer.

A friend of mine, who’s trying very hard to shift the mentality of an old-world company through the power of blogging has this to say about her struggles, which typifies the argument that many are having inside the walls of corporations around the world.

This group is afraid of blogs. They don’t see anything but the danger in blogging.  They are afraid of the conversations and afraid to "lose control" of our message.

You want fear?  Understand this.  In talking with some of the folks at I/PRO recently, they cite a well known fact that the major panel based web ratings firms like ComScore and Nielsen have a pretty good idea of what’s happening on the top 100 sites on the web.  They know little about what’s really going on in the long tail, which is where I/PRO’s ‘sweet spot’ lies, based on their methodology of auditing sites well beyond the top 100.  Media planners around the country are waking up to old media, and even the top 100 sites, becoming less relevant to the greater population than the millions of blogs that make up the long tail.

I think that the tagline for the citizen contributed media world should be "The Long Tail Wagging The Old Media Dog."  Because that’s what old media, and an old media command and control mindset really is.  Just an old dog.  How ironic that ‘cynicism’ is the Greek word for ‘a dog’.  (taken literally, the ‘piss on ideas’)

For those who fear the new media, blogging infiltrated world, the only real safe path is in partnership with your customer.  A change of attitude is what’s required here.  An attitude that the conversation, community, citizen participation and the Internet as one great big wonderful media lab is what’s required here. 

The point here is that marketers need to always be asking the question "but, what if they were wrong?" (let’s not call anyone morons here).  What if what I know about marketing, my customers, and what I think about blogging is wrong, or at best, misguided.

Yeah, what if…

It seems that the higher your profile in the blogosphere, the more prone you are to attracting nasty, raw and outright rude comments, as evidenced by Robert Scoble’s recent back-and-forth with ‘Arnold’.  The profile of this has received a number of links, but angry, rude
communication is not the way to win your case (doubly so in the blogosphere). In fact, for the most
part, people will turn away and won’t even hear what you’re saying. Not something you’re shooting for on your first foray as a corporate blogger.

I think that there’s a lesson here that political candidates have already learned about bloggers and their ability to launch nasty screeds from the launchpads of their keyboards. What they’ve found in some recent face-to-face interactions with bloggers is that they’re not so mean once they come out from behind the keyboard.  In fact, they can be downright docile, and even helpful, once you’ve got them in a room together.  A once raging blogger can become an advocate and a cheeky writer can become an inquisitive, thoughtful interpreter of your message.

As ever more companies launch their own blogs into the market, the determined digital detractors and on-screen vigilantes will grow in proportion to your popularity, as evidenced by the history of high-profile blogs.  If a customer complaint is a mere gift, as purported by some, then a raging blogger vigilante could be a virtual endowment of opportunity to engage ‘the other side’ and see what your company has been missing.

Henry Copeland of Blogads has a pretty compelling contrarian review of the recent Business Week article Blogs Will Change Your Business.  In short, BW is "often jumps on the bandwagon just as it goes off the cliff", or so says Henry.  I tend to agree, and do have some issues with the short shrift techno babble cursory manner in which they dealt with blogs.  They usually do this on any number of topics, so no real surprises here.

At the end of the day, I guess I’m thankful that they’re raising the level of blog awareness among the BW audience.  (mid to upper level managers in almost every company in the US)  On the other hand, I’m already being asked by my corporate friends about some of the facts, figures and examples that were handily glossed over in their cutesy blog-like format of the article.  More work on my part, but at least were having the conversation on blogs.

I tried to introduce a ‘blog policy’ at the company that I was at two years ago.  They wanted nothing to do with it – said anything done on the blog would be covered in their employee code of conduct. 

As I think back on that, a thought that was prompted by this article from BizReport, I think they were right.

Most bloggers aren’t being fired for blogging.  Bloggers are being fired for doing something stupid on their blogs that violates some policy of some description within their respective employers.  I’m going to get called on the carpet for this, but employers do have a point.  Send dirty emails, get reprimanded, make lots of personal calls, get fired.  Blogs are just another way for employees to get themselves in hot water by not heeding corporate policy.

Memo to bloggers:  Check your corporate ethics, conduct, and media relations policies and just ‘keep it between the lines.’

Scott Kessler of BusinessWeek has picked his five favorite companies to watch in ’05 and I’m sure you’re surprised to read that there’s a blogging company included. 

Weblogs, Inc., co-founded by Brian Alvey and Jason Calacanis, is the company behind well regarded blogs like the Autoblog.

According to Scott:

I believe blogs will grow increasingly prominent, because they offer interesting and unique content, are easy to search and organize, and have the potential to generate notable revenues and profits through the use of online advertising (primarily keyword search) and affiliate marketing. Gawker Media is another major network of blogs.