A just published Fortune article makes the point (quoting IBM CEO Sam Palmisano) that the 3-D virtual world of Second Life is not just “eye candy” and may represent the “next phase of the Internet’s evolution.”

But as Alex Manchester puts it on the Melcrum blog: “… the waters are definitely still very, very muddy and I still think few senior execs that aren’t in the tech industry would go for it [Second Life].” Alex, I agree.

Although… I’m increasingly convinced that something is very real about this place (I’ve explored Second Life briefly). For example, the equivalent of US $1 million exchanged hands inside 2L in the past 24 hours. And the World Economic Forum, in Davos this week IRL (in real life), is doing interviews at Reuters’ Second Life bureau. Go figure…

Useful Link

Second Life: It’s Not a Game by Fortune senior writer David Kirkpatrick (Jan. 23, 2007)

Dave Balter, author of Grapevine and founder of BzzAgent, is up to something intriguing. He launched a new company blog today called The Bento Box (my favorite thing to have for lunch at a Japanese restaurant).

Take a look. It’s kind of a blog as performance art. (Be sure to click on the image above to listen to the audio segments.) BzzAgent has hired two high profile contributors to create the blog: John Butman, a professional writer and author; and artist Seth Minkin.

What really goes on inside BzzAgent?

For the next 168 days (24 weeks), the writer/artist tag team will “reveal” what really goes on inside Balter’s word-of-mouth-marketing agency. The point, presumably, is to counter criticism that the firm hasn’t been totally transparent about its method of recruiting volunteer BzzAgents to spread the word about a new product or service.

As the blog explains:

“Part Blog, part art show, part essay, part media experience, The Bento Box will allow you to nibble on what’s happening inside an operating company in real time, with the goal of thinking differently about your own business, non-profit or community.”

And the Transparency Guidelines as stated on the blog:

• Employees must approve any usage of their names or likenesses
• Clients must approve usage of their names for all information that is not already public
• We will not disclose
  • the personal information of any BzzAgents
  • BzzAgent financial information
  • Confidential employee information
• We are learning as we go. These rules may change as people get more comfortable with how this turns out, with the ultimate goal of limiting as many rules as possible.

Thanks to a writer for Entrepreneur Magazine for alerting me to The Bento Box.

I’m moderating a discussion this week about CEO Blogging over on the IAOC blog. I’d love to hear your two cents on the numerous questions surrounding this topic du jour.

First question: Is it OK to ghostwrite a CEO blog? Waddya think? Click here to jump into the discussion.

Fortune 500 CEO blogger Jonathan Schwartz was quoted over the weekend in an AP story by Rachel Konrad titled Sun CEO Among the Few Chiefs Who Blog:

“The blog has become for me the single most effective vehicle to communicate to all of our constituencies – developers, media, analysts and shareholders,” Schwartz said in an interview in his Silicon Valley office. “When I go out and have dinner with a key analyst on Wall Street or a key investor from Europe and ask them if they’ve read my blog, they almost universally say yes.”

Check out my backstory on Rachel’s article, which ran in dozens of newspapers, as well as links to a list of CEO bloggers, etc. Dave Taylor and I were both quoted in the AP story.

Strumpy (aka Amanda Chapel / anonymous PR blogger / tall, athletic, Pantene shoulder-length black hair, perfect perky boobs – ed. note: you’ve got to be kidding) is all fired up today with his/her new meme: The Death of Corporate Blogging.

God, (s)he’s clever the way she/he/it writes.

But (s)he’s wrong: corporate blogging – or at least the widespread use of blogging as a business communications tool is NOT dead. And I’m not just saying that because my new book, The Corporate Blogging Book (Penguin Portfolio August 2006), is coming out next week.

Well OK that’s one reason I’m saying it.

Corporate blogging is just getting started

The real reason is oh so simple. Far from being dead, corporate blogging – the use of a blog either internally or externally as part of a company’s online communications and marketing toolkit – is just getting started.

As Ken Yarmosh, who live-blogged my Washington DC book launch yesterday, put it:

“Despite the echoes we often hear in the halls of geek-dom, the blogosphere is not saturated yet. There are many, many more voices to come, blogging on everything from finance to real estate, to yes, even air conditioners. And I know, because I’ve met them this afternoon.” – Ken Y.

Look, I’m sifting through the stack of business cards I got yesterday and here are the kinds of corporate blogging wannabes who attended (I won’t use specific names out of respect for their privacy): commercial real estate, attorney-at-law, non-profit foundation, custom publishing group, government affairs office, board of trade, three or four national associations and so on.

Strumpy, read my book

Strumpy, read my book for god’s sake and maybe you’ll get it. I make a lot of points. Three of the key ones are this:

It’s not about being cool

Corporate blogging is not about being cool. It’s about following your customers where they’re going… and that’s online. You gotta be there to interact with your customers. It’s that simple. Blogging enables an instant (or almost) conversation with them. And that’s what people want. They want to be heard. They want to be acknowledged. Then they’re more apt to do business with you and your organization.

A blog is just a publishing platform
A blog is just a platform, a powerful, simple, inexpensive Web publishing system. Why in heck wouldn’t most companies adopt this platform? Call it Web 2.0. Call it common sense. Call it budget cutting. Who needs a whole IT department that takes months to update a page on a corporate site, when a non-techie manager can do it in minutes with blogging software?

Customers are driving this – not consultants
The new world that PR practitioners, marketing strategists and other consultants are touting is here. We haven’t concocted it as a way to line our pockets with gold. Marketing has become a two-way conversation between customer and corporation. The big guys at the top have lost control or at least complete control. A lot of the best creative stuff (new ideas, great writing) is bubbling up from below.

With 40,000 or 60,000 or whatever new videos being posted everyday to YouTube, with trackbacks and tagging and RSS and digging and Technorati and del.ici.ous and all that cool stuff innovating, fine tuning and becoming easier for the non-techie to use every day… well I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that corporate blogging is here to stay.

Remember, those ordinary people are customers. They’re driving this thing. Not the corporate blogging consultants.

Sorry Strumpy, stuff it.

Update: See here.
Technorati: the corporate blogging book , corporate blogging , debbie weil

Because it’s bogus.

What I mean is that, as amusing or clever as anonymous blogging can be (of course sometimes it’s nasty), it’s still slippery. Only half credible. And therefore ultimately an artifice. It’s not real. It’s not *authentic.* It doesn’t carry the weight of legitimate commentary.

The obvious, of course, is that an anonymous blogger is cloaked by er, anonymity, and can toss grenades at anyone or any company without fear of being personally attacked in return.

By contrast, the essence of effective business or corporate blogging is that it *reveals* something about the individual blogger… his or her smarts about a particular issue or discipline. We are usually as interested in the “who” of a good corporate blog, as in the “what.”

And the connection with Strumpette is…

Update

Ooooh too cool… here’s my back and forth with Amanda Chapel (aka Strumpette) that clarifies what I’m trying to say about anonymity as it relates to corporate blogging.

Way to go, Brian! It’s exciting when a fellow author hits publication day and can announce the official release of his book: Lead Generation for the Complex Sale (McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0071458972, $24.95).

2.0: the new way to publicize your book release

• press release
• podcast
• blog
• Amazon blog (or is it a “plog”?)
• email blast to colleagues

Just got an email from Brian with a link to today’s press release about the launch. (He uses PRWeb which I’ve also used and recommend highly. Inexpensive and reliable; your release gets picked up by Google and other news sources.)

Cleverly, he’s also released a matching podcast through PRWeb Podcast. [Note: Brian’s PRWeb podcast is 7:41 mins and links directly to an MP3 file that is 7.1 MB. Wish there were an interim download page for this.]

Notice that Brian also has a big-name publisher, McGraw-Hill. These days, that isn’t enough. You’ve got to market your book as imaginatively and aggressively as if you were self-published. In fact, proving that you can do that is one key piece in getting a book deal.

About the book

Brian sent me a preview copy. It’s a handsome hardcover that packs in everything you could possibly want to know about creating and sustaining a lead generation program. If you’re in big-time sales with long lead times — or managing anyone who is — you gotta have Brian’s book on your desk. Order on Amazon.

More about the book and other ways to order.

Here’s a truism about corporate blogging: generally, nobody cares about your widgets. What people do care about is stuff related to your widgets – cool things you can do with them, related lifestyles, corresponding industry issues, etc. This is where it gets a bit trickier. Should you be deadly serious? Can you have a bit of fun??

The cleverest tack I’ve seen lately is one taken by the Ethics Crisis blog. It’s the marketing companion to a business called SRF Global Translations. (The blog appears to be the company’s Web site, as well.)

SRF is a family-run business established in 1976 that provides “mindful, nuanced, professional multilanguage translations” of unglamorous materials like corporate codes of ethics and compliance documents.

Not the kind of widgets that make you say “cool” but certainly a very useful service.

So what’s the blog about? Well, there are sections for serious discussions of global ethics. But the fun part is an Ethics Confession page where you can type in — anonymously — the most unethical thing you’ve ever done at work (“we’re not talking about taking home the office pencils,” the blog advises).

After you’ve submitted your 250-word anecdote, readers vote on how egregious your actions were… More

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 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.

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.

It was bound to happen. An A-list blogger or two decides to throw in the towel. Enough blogging is, er, enough. But why? Read on…

Two well-respected bloggers have announced their retirement recently. One is the irascible Dave Winer, creator of the RSS format and a blogger for almost a decade:

On March 13th he wrote in Scripting News:

I can do it, folks, I have already, in some sense, stopped one of my rivers, and soon, probably before the end of 2006, I will put this site in mothballs, in archive mode, and go on to other things, Murphy-willing of course…

Note his “I can do it” assertion, as if he’s already hearing the “No, you can’t!” chorus that did, in fact, spring up from the bloggerati upon his announcement.

Another is David Allen, best-selling author of Getting Things Done. On March 15th he wrote: I’m halting my personal blog for now…

‘Twas a noble experiment, 270 Entries and 1,529 Comments later, and it was great for me to experience this medium from the inside out, in my limited way. I’d probably continue it in some form, if I didn’t have a multitude of other things to do that are taking priority…

Get the inside story of how and why these two A-listers decided to retire from the blogosphere. They cite the time factor and re-ordering priorities as the main reasons. And one talks about wanting more “privacy.

More…

Wells Fargo is offering a sneak preview of the blog it launches tomorrow as part of the bank’s commemoration of San Francisco’s Great Fire & Earthquake of 1906. Guided By History, as the blog is called, is a group blog. It’s a great idea for an event-specific (and time-limited) blog. And yes, Wells Fargo appears to be the first Fortune 500 financial services company to launch a public blog.

I counted 10 contributors on the About page, including Wells Fargo’s new president and COO, John Stumpf. He’s made one of the first entries, titled A Ride Through History. It’s a bit too polished to qualify as “bloggy” in style but it’s pretty interesting. The 1906 earthquake and fire left half of San Francisco’s residents homeless and destroyed 490 city blocks, including Wells Fargo’s headquarters…

More

If you haven’t checked in lately with GM’s top blogger Bob Lutz (he’s GM’s global vice president for product development), head on over to FastLane right now. His most recent entry – Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before – is a cogent rant on GM’s “image” problem. He comes about as close as he can to acknowledging the elephant in the room (GM’s financial woes). He writes:

This issue, this question of how do we increase awareness, improve our image, and enhance public opinion of our cars and trucks, is weighing on everyone’s mind in this company, from the plant floors to the boardroom. We are all weary of hearing that “GM doesn’t have any vehicles that people want� or that GM “doesn’t excite anyone� or doesn’t have any products that are “relevant.�

And then further on, after citing a bunch of recent awards for GM cars (the Solstice, the Corvette, the Hummer):

And yet, the coverage of our financial state [I bolded this] continues to point out our alleged lack of cars and trucks that people want. All the while more than a quarter of the vehicles sold in America are ours.

And finally:

We need to step up our non-traditional communications and word of mouth, and get our message directly to the people on a grass roots level. This blog is one example — but we need more avenues, and bigger ideas. What do you think?

I don’t know about you but that sounds pretty transparent to me for a Fortune 500 blog. Translation: we’ve got a problem. Can you help? So far, 178 readers have left comments on this entry. Fascinating to read: lots of specifics, on warranties, 1-day take-home test drives, tips on how to deal with MSM’s approach to the GM death spiral story, etc.

I’m quoted in today’s San Jose Mercury News in an article about the new Google China blog: “Google launches China blog a day before China hearing.” The reporter, Elise Ackerman, has just been assigned full-time to “Google” as a beat which she was really excited about. She phoned me late yesterday for an interview. Could hear her madly typing as we spoke, as she was on deadline. The story got a “weird edit” at the last minute, Elise said in an email this morning.

As in a, um, run-on sentence:

“Debbie Weil, author of the forthcoming “The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right,” said the idea [of the blog] was sound, but did not bring up the questions Google faced about its dealings with China overshadowed what would otherwise be a chirpy corporate branding effort.

[Update: the run-on has been fixed.]

The point of the article is the rather odd timing of the launch of Google’s chirpy China blog one day before the contentious hearings in the House this week.

BTW, I agreed with Joe Nocera’s provocative column in yesterday’s New York Times about the hearings: Enough Shame to Go Around on China. His point…

Continue reading

Yes and no. Many blog entries just don’t elicit a response, even if it’s a popular or well-read blog. But sometimes a blog entry hits a nerve and it’s like uncorking a geyser.

That’s what’s happening today over on Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion blog where he’s announced that he’s moving to Edelman as a Senior VP. 42 comments and counting (“hey, congrats!” and “you da man!”) as of 2:48 PM Eastern. Hey, Steve, what’s the most comments you’ve ever gotten on one of your blog posts? We’d love to hear.

Micro Persuasion is #72 on Technorati’s Top 100 blog list.

Google has launched a Google China Blog. Yes, it’s in Chinese so I can’t read it. But clearly it’s an attempt to answer critics of the company’s decision to cooperate with the Chinese government in censoring search results. Here’s the story in ChinaTechNews. And a less charitable spin on it here at P2Pnet.

Included are a few links in English in the right-hand column including John Battelle’s Searchblog. Kinda cool. That’s what you might call “getting exposure.” What’s the population of China? I forget… but probably growing exponentially along with the blogosphere.

Oh, and what’s my stance on the doing-business-with-a-repressive-government thing? It’s complicated. I lean towards the view that Google’s being available to Chinese Internet users – even in a limited way – is better than not being available at all to them as a resource. And your take on it is… ? Click that Comments link above!

UPDATE

But this reaction may be rather simple-minded of me. Read NYTimes write-up of yesterday’s House Subcommittee hearing on human rights with testimony from top execs at Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. And another thoughtful account of the heated debate from BlogBusinessSummit.

And finally, details from Rebecca MacKinnon on the proposed Global Online Freedom Act of 2006.

This is the newest wrinkle in corporate blogging. It’s brilliant and it’s simple. Coke has found six smart university students (from China, the U.S., Austria, Germany, Canada and Italy) to blog the Torino Winter Olympic Games for them. Torino Conversations features the photos – and corresponding country flags – of the students along with snippets of their most recent entries. Click the one for Du Wei from China and you’ll see her latest entry. It includes a link to a podcast. She writes:

“Finally, we are getting started. Katie and I spent 2 hours walking around within the sponsor village and into the streets of Torino, grasping people to talk to and pose for photos. It was also good to have opportunity to walk around and look at Torino from a non-Olympic angle.

The Chairman of Coca-Cola, Neville Isdell came to award the first Coca-Cola Live Olympic Award to the very first employee of TOROC, Giovanna Locci, and we got a chance to talk to the chairman before the ceremony. Check it out here [link to podcast] and we will come up with more interviews with PIN TRADERS and perhaps the Opening Ceremony tomorrow.”

According to MarketingVox the students have agreed to keep their blog entries positive and upbeat. Travel and accommodations are being paid for by Coke. How cool is that…

I’d be interested in knowing more about how Coca-Cola identified the students and vetted their blogging skills and common sense quotient. (Gotta be some good parties in Torino… )

Oh and just noticed this. Scroll down on Torino Conversations and you’ll see photos they’ve uploaded along with comments from (no doubt envious) friends. This fits right in with Pew Internet’s recent survey that said 57% of teens create content for the Web. It’s as natural as talking on a cell phone for them.

Useful Link

Light the Torch is another twist on Olympics blogging. It was just launched by blogging network b5media and is inviting guest contributors. All proceeds from Google AdSense revenues on the blog will go to athletic organizations supporting athletes (not sure what those are exactly, but sounds good).

Fred Wilson nails it. The reason? Because RSS still isn’t “brain dead simple.” For non-geeks it’s still too confusing to set up an RSS newsreader, to find – or aggregate – all the feeds you’re interested in, to subscribe, etc.

The RSS vs. email debate has erupted once again in response to the announcement several days ago that Yahoo and AOL will start charging senders 1/4 of a cent to a penny per message delivered. The idea is that the email or e-newsletter marketers who pay this premium will be guaranteed that their messages will reach intended recipients.

Read Tris Hussey and Steve Rubel on the topic of the end of cost-effective email marketing. Read Dave Winer on why RSS is hard to use and Stowe Boyd on Reads, Not Feeds.

Oh, and don’t misunderstand. RSS is in many ways a better solution for dispensing and receiving information online. But despite the proposed postage for email marketers, email isn’t dead yet.

Lots of buzz. Lots of folks.

Word-of-mouth-marketing (WOMM), Florida warmth & sun and a bunch of online experts… including our very own Toby Bloomberg, Josh Hallett and Dana VanDen Heuvel who are live blogging the Word of Mouth Marketing Association‘s conference in Orlando. (Dana is one of the lead bloggers.) What more could you ask for?

Check out the WOMBAT (Word of Mouth Basic Training) conference blog. Day 1 here. Day 2 here. They’ve got a full crowd of international attendees and speakers. 400 people according to conference organizer and WOMMA ceo Andy Sernovitz. Wish I were there…

Note: there are lots of posts on the WOMBAT blog. You’ll have to poke around. A sampling: Women and WOMM; B2B and WOMM; WOMM and ethics; WOM and blogging.

Also see Technorati.

Bottom line: WOMM has come into its own as a separate and defined marketing niche. The notion that this form of marketing can be codified and measured is fascinating. Stay tuned…

David Kline, co-author of one of the handful of books published thus far on blogging (Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business and Culture) emailed me this week to ask for a quote for the article he’s working on about what’s holding the F500 back from blogging and what it will take for blogging to go mainstream. He referenced the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki’s stat that only 3% of F500s are blogging. I responded with the following mini rant:

Fear & blogging on the blogosphere Long Tail
(with apologies to Hunter S. Thompson)

Fear is the single most important thing holding corporate America back from embracing blogging. Fear of being open, fear of a two-way conversation, fear of not being able to control the message, fear of the time commitment. Just makes sense. If you put blogging in the basket of corporate communications it runs absolutely antithetical to so-called current best practices.

So what will make this change? Again, fear. Fear of not embracing the new media technologies which so many consumers are now adopting, whether it’s a video iPod or a blog. Fear of not being where your customers are. Which, increasingly, is online.

Well, that’s my thought for the day. Now back to cleaning up the mess on my desk… Oh, and don’t misunderstand. I’m not being critical of the F500s efforts thus far to launch blogs. Just realistic.