GM’s Smallblock Engine blog shuts down tomorrow today after exactly one year, perhaps the first highly-publicized Fortune 500 blog to bite the dust. This sounds like a natural death. It was an event-driven blog, created for the 50th anniversary of the Corvette’s small-block engine. And the party is over. Makes sense. (Dave Hill, chief engineer of the Corvette, is also retiring which kind of wraps it up nicely.)

You could say it created a category for corporate blogs: event-specific and time-limited. It never got a huge number of comments from readers. But that’s OK too. Remember, a blog is just a tool. Use it anyway you want as long as you make it a good read, you’re honest and a bit of passion shows through.

Addendum: in April 2005, halfway through the year, the GM folks blogged about whether or not to turn the smallblock engine blog into a powertrain blog. A number of commenters said "oh, yes please do!" But one guy left an astute remark:

"Keep to one topic… don’t try to take on too much in one blog."

Here’s Rick Bruner’s Nov. 2004 post crowing about the launch of the Smallblock Engine blog:

"This is big: the biggest car company in the world now has a blog… "

Update (2 days later): SixApart’s CEO Barak Berkowitz provides more details. He posted his Message from the CEO to the TypePad blog and also sent it in an HTML email to customers:

Dear Debbie,  

As you might know, some of our users have been experiencing slow performance with the TypePad service over the past few weeks…

Pretty nice. To back up a minute… we (meaning a bunch of contributors to this blog) are taking partial credit for these blogged
responses from SixApart. We started complaining vociferously on
Wednesday Oct. 26th (first me and then Tris Hussey, Rich Brooks, Toby Bloomberg and Paul Chaney) about the recent slowness and outages with TypePad, SixApart’s popular hosted blogging service.

The result? SixApart co-founders Mena and Ben Trott posted a reponse,
the first real explanation we’ve gotten from the company after several
weeks of problems with TypePad. The number of TypePad blogs and the
activity on them (the good news) has outstripped their server capacity
(the bad news), they tell us. They’re working to move TypePad to a new
data center (which hasn’t been going smoothly).

Moral of the story? The blogosphere works. You kvetch enough. You get everybody’s attention. (Addendum: we’re quite pleased with the effect of our buzz campaign.) Now let’s  hope they can fix the problems…

Backstory
I sent Anil Dash
(a SixApart VP) several emails yesterday begging him to "listen up" and
to make lemonade out of lemons, so to speak. Anil is a friend and
colleague. I suggested he get the top dogs at 6A to acknowledge the
recent problems and address them more transparently than the cryptic
messages we get on 6A’s Status Weblog about "temporary service degradation."

He listened.

Another
takeaway… there are many channels of communication. You need to use a
combination of public and private ones. The blogosphere is a very very
public place. It’s not right for everything.

Update: SixApart’s Anil Dash responds.

As I wrote here and here a few weeks ago, I’m one of thousands running a business blog on TypePad. The service has been excruciatingly slow of late. (Just now I thought I’d tear my hair out while waiting for this post to Save.) Sometimes it’s down altogether.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a “trash 6A” blog entry. It’s a please please please listen to your customers before it’s too late message. The buzz is building. There’s talk of moving some high-profile blogs (including this one) to WordPress or another platform.

My advice? Post fast. Post fresh. Be transparent. The blogosphere is gonna bite if you don’t. And get something up on your Status Blog (which, BTW, doesn’t have an archive so it’s conspicuously not quite a blog) or on Mena’s Corner that acknowledges the problem.

C’mon guys. We love you! Don’t disappoint.

Sorry, I can’t let this one pass. As much as I’d like to believe the reported results of the iUpload and Guidewire Group Corporate Blogging Survey released this week, I can’t. The survey reports that 89% of companies are blogging. And that corporate adoption of blogging is entering the hyper growth phase.

Here’s the rub. The conclusions are based on 140 respondents. That’s far too small a number from which to draw such a sweeping conclusion. In addition, the way the survey was conducted taints the results. DoubleClick research director Rick Bruner (yes, Rick is the brains behind this blog!) spoke with Mike Sigal of Guidewire Group to find out more. Rick emailed me the following:

"I think the sample size is less of an issue than the sample recruitment methodology…

Oh, and not so coincidentally, perhaps, iUpload sells an enterprise blogging platform. Download the  iUpload and Guidewire Group Corporate Blogging Survey here.

…He [Mike] said they sent out invitations from some
mailing list that should have been representative of the Fortune 500…
But they also put the word out to lots of [bloggers], who posted about
the survey on their blogs. Meaning that a significant number of
respondents were self-selected. Hence, it’s likely that companies who
are particularly tuned into business blogs were more likely to respond."

Makes
sense, doesn’t it? I know I was one of the respondents who took the
survey and I suspect every blogging "consultant" or expert also took it
just to see what questions were being asked. Add up the number of non-corporate respondents to the survey and I wager you’re well under 100 statistically valid responses.

In comparison, I got over 700 responses [PDF of results] to a survey I ran last summer on business blogging. The clearest result from that survey: Time is the top Fear Factor when it comes to corporate blogging.
Other results: 55% of respondents said blogging will become a
"must-have" corporate marketing tool. But it’s not quite here yet. My
survey was publicized to the 15,000-plus subscribers to my
e-newsletter, WordBiz Report.

Download the survey
You can download the iUpload and Guidewire Group Corporate Blogging Survey here. Read with a grain of salt. Then do leave a comment below. Would love to hear your thoughts.

You gotta love it. Seth Godin and the smart crew he’s assembled have
torn a page directly out of Seth’s books to soft-launch his new online
company, Squidoo. No traditional PR, no advertising,
just viral blogging via his new e-book, Everyone Is An Expert [31-page PDF]. The e-book explains (sort of) what the service does. I was lucky enough to get a copy from his Editor-in-Chief Megan Casey, when she emailed it out last week.

In the e-book Seth talks about creating “meaning” out of the mess of information you get when you search for something on the Web. Squidoo is all about finding what you’re really looking for. Because an expert has compiled information for you in a way that makes sense and is immediately useful.

And who are these experts? Well, as the e-book explains, anybody can be an expert. Squidoo’s Web 2.0 platform enables anyone to create a “lens” – a special kind of Web page that points to links and information about your expertise. (A Squidoo lens page also enables you to make money.) But it’s not just links. That doesn’t  describe it properly. It’s RSS feeds and other stuff…

that automatically update your lens page for you.

(And it’s Web 2.0… as I understand it, because Seth & co. are building it from other apps or services or databases already out there.)

Here’s the clearest explanation thus far, from the Squidoo blog, of how a lens works:

It’s a guide (like about.com) and a reference (like wikipedia.com).
It’s a place for personal expression (like typepad.com) and an open
platform for real people (like del.ico.us).

Tantalizingly, the e-book closes with a list of URLs that link to sample lenses. But they don’t go live until Oct. 18th!

Here are two of them:

http://www.squidoo.com/samples/royalties

http://www.squidoo.com/samples/sethgodin

SixApart is one of the companies largely responsible for the migration of blogging from personal musings to the small business and corporate world. Their hosted TypePad service has been wildly popular amongst professionals. IBM legend Irving Wladawsky-Berger uses TypePad (instead of IBM’s blogging platform); Seth Godin uses it. Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing, uses it. Intuit’s QuickBooks uses it here and here. The Air Conditioning Contractors of America uses it. This blog uses it. And lots more.

So when the TypePad service goes down, as it did earlier this week, it’s a pretty big deal. Lots of business blogs disappeared for hours. And if you’re the publisher of one of them, as I am, it strikes fear in your heart. Has the damn thing been swallowed up? All those thousands of words gone forever?

I was in a panic to put it politely. For me, and thousands of other customers, this was a crisis. Frustratingly, there was scant information at the time on SixApart’s supposedly real-time status blog.

Well, I’m delighted to report that 6A now gets this crisis blogging thing (see above). They’re talking to us. They’re telling us, candidly, what happened:

Both Monday’s and Tuesday’s outages were the result of hardware failures…

That’s really all customers want. We care more about being kept in the loop than about how bad the news is.

It’s just that we want the information in real-time, during the crisis. Tell us something, anything immediately. Acknowledge that there’s a problem (even a big problem) and that you’re working on it. But do it in plain English. Get the CEO to jump on the "status blog," if necessary. Don’t for heaven’s sake leave it up to your techies to pen one sentence about a "temporary service degradation." That’s jargon. It’s not communication.

Hard to do in a crisis, I know. But it’s the whole point of having a blog as a channel for real-time communication. To turn your customers, who are momentarily in a panic, into your evangelists. And who better than SixApart to model how this should be done. Thanks guys, for being responsive to my comments.

Note: turns out you can back up the contents of a TypePad blog into a file and download it to your computer. I just did it here. Now that would be a good tip to give TypePad customers, wouldn’t it? Doesn’t reflect badly on 6A and is a gentle reminder that these are just machines after all.

Someone asked me yesterday where to go for a "blogging 101" and I was momentarily stumped.
There’s so much information out there it’s hard to know where to
begin. I decided to be literal and look for resources labelled Blogging
101… or close to it.  Here are a few 101 links to get you started. I include RSS and podcasting because they fall under
the umbrella of corporate blogging.

Blogging 101

Blogging 101 by Rebecca Blood (on MSN Spaces)

Blogging 101 by Kari Chisholm

Blogging 101 v. 1 on BlogWriteForCEOs

Blogs 101 by Rich Meislin in New York Times’ Technology section

Blogging 101 by Technorati

Business Blogging 101 on the NEWPRWiki

Global Voices’ Intro to Blogs

Weblog Basics on About.com

Wikibooks’ Blogging 101

Wikipedia definition of Weblog

Click "Continue reading" for Podcasting 101 and RSS 101 resources…

Podcasting 101

Podcasting 101 on MacZealots.com

Podcasting 101 on TechWeb

Podcasting 101 by Merle Stinnett

How to Record a Podcast by Glenn Fleishman

RSS 101

RSS 101: "Really Simple" 5-Step Guide to Get Started

RSS 101 Screencast by Alex Barnett

RSS 101 for Marketers (Forrester report, July 2005)

RSS Marketing

These are by no means the only 101 resources for blogging,
podcasting and RSS. If you know of others  titled "101," leave a note in
the Comments below and I’ll add them.

The disaster of Hurricane Katrina is mind-boggling. My heart goes out
to all those affected. Like so many folks, I have a special feeling for
the city of New Orleans. Inconceivable to think of 80 percent of the
city being underwater.

I’m writing a
chapter in my book that considers the crossover of blogging from the
realm of the personal to that of small business and corporate
America.

One reason is human behaviour. In a crisis, people increasingly are turning to blogs to get an account of what’s really happening. They
expect a blog to tell them in an in-the-moment, ragged, authentic voice, typos and all. They
expect to see photos and video, however raw and unedited. It seems more real than the packaged report of a reporter in a wind-whipped anorak.

That’s what mainstream adoption of a new technology or phenomenon
means. It’s based on reflexive behaviour, not on a carefully planned
marketing strategy.

The connection to business is obvious, don’t you think? Just as we turn
to Google and an online search to answer almost any question these days
( …when was the last time you trekked down to the public library?), so
blogs and blogging are becoming a habit.

Useful Links for Hurricane Katrina disaster relief & information

KatrinaHelp wiki

Blog for Relief (see Paul Chaney’s post)

NoLa.com blog (dozens of stories submitted by survivors)

List of disaster relief agencies

If it wasn’t enough trouble to come up with the right string of words to describe your brand, now you gotta worry about what your brand sounds like. That’s right. You need an audio logo for your podcast. What’s your cue music, your sign off… and those little bits in between, like NPR radio uses between segments? MarketingSherpa writes here and here about what’s involved in developing their theme song for podcasting.

Check out Podcastinglogos.com to hear snippets of music used by the New England Journal of Medicine, the Baseball Network and other organizations for their podcasts. The site was just launched by independent film score composer Michael Whalen.

Whalen helpfully poses 10 key questions you should consider before commissioning an audio logo. Here are the first five:

1. How is your company perceived in the marketplace? (big, small, cool, traditional, fun, forward thinking, etc.)
2. How do YOU perceive your company? Is it the same as your answer to #1?
3. Do you think your audio ID should support or work against this impression(s)?
4. Who is your ‘typical’ audience member or customer? (demographically, sense of their tastes, etc.)
5. Should the audio ID appeal to your audience’s taste or should it only support your company’s image? (see question #1)

Follow this link and click on Pricing and Suggestions in the left-hand column to get the rest. (This site is designed in frames… bad idea as I can’t give you a direct link!)

Gartner released yesterday its 2005 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. The research firm has pegged Corporate Blogging and RSS as being two years away from mainstream adoption. For now, both are tumbling into Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment (along with wikis and desktop search) as a result of too much media buzz. If you believe Gartner, Corporate Blogging is already sooo… last year (2004).

They’ve got a point. The media rumble about Corporate Blogging is almost deafening by now. It’s not a “new” story anymore. Which is not to say that blogging isn’t still a “new” thing to many companies.

At any rate, the five stages of hype make a lot of sense. It works something like this: new technologies get overhyped in the beginning; then they go out of favor; eventually they mature and are adopted by the mainstream but by that time they’re no longer news.

The five stages are: Technology Trigger, Peak of Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment and Plateau of Productivity. Oh, and podcasting is on the upswing, according to Gartner. It’s sliding up the Peak of Expectations. That sounds about right, doesn’t it?

The way I understand it, the hype cycle is measuring the buzz as well as the adoption rate. It
doesn’t necessarily correspond to the long-term utility – or success –
of a phenomenon like Corporate Blogging. Only time will tell.

Read more about Corporate Blogging’s downward slide into the Trough of Disillusionment…

One of the great things about participating in a three-day conference like Blog Business Summit is meeting in the flesh people you’ve been interacting with online. (I ran a session featuring dueling corporate blogs: GM’s Fastlane blog vs. Intuit’s QuickBooks Online blog.)

Dave Tayor, who ran the BBS’s popular Blogging 101 pre-conference session, has penned a thoughtful article on this topic: The Critical Business Value of Attending Conferences. BTW, it’s been hugely fun for me to meet Dave in person for the first time after several years of email correspondence.

In addition, I’ve had the chance to meet a handful of whip-smart A-list women bloggers. In no order, a tip of the hat to Mary Hodder, Sally Falkow, Laurie Mayers, Rebecca Blood, Molly Holzschlag and Evelyn Rodriguez – all of whom presented at BBS. It’s been a thrill…

Clever article by Susan Kuchinskas for InternetNews.com, Entering the Corposphere, gives a good overview of today’s sessions at the Blog Business Summit. Some excerpts:

“… corporate communications pros and public relations account execs gathered to grok the rules of engagement with the blogosphere.”

and

“Blogger relations can be more critical than public relations, according to Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s chief blogger.”

and

“(DL Byron) turns off comments on his (Clip-n-Seal) blog and advises clients to do likewise,
to avoid having yucky stuff like porn spam showing up under the brand.”

End of the afternoon and, surprisingly, the audience at the Blog Business Summit is beginning to perk up and ask more questions.Someone asks Robert Scoble: “So how much time does blogging take?” He laughs. His one-word answer: “Starbucks.” Expanded: “I spend almost every waking hour doing something related to blogging.”

The “time” question is key and of huge concern to prospective corporate bloggers.

Great tidbit just now from Boeing Web designer Chris Brownrigg on why Boeing’s much talked about blog is called Randy’s Journal: “Because they (management) were uncomfortable with the term blog.” Chris wisely got around that decision by giving the blog the following page title: “Boeing Blog: Randy’s Journal.” Better for search results when you type in “Boeing blog.” Take a look when you click through.

The (dreaded… or anticipated) blogging phone call

Chris was given 48 hours to design and launch the blog for Boeing VP Randy Baseler after getting “the blogging phone call.” Audience members nodded at this. Seems both managers and techies are getting “the call” from top management to “get into this blog thing.” Uninitiated into the ways of the blogosphere, he dove into the project by looking at the code behind lots of other blogs. He settled on Movable Type as the software platform. Posted a mock-up of the proposed blog here. Comments and other blog features were subsequently added after readers protested.

I love this inside glimpse of how a corporate blog gets launched… shows how it’s very much a joint effort between management and the Web techies.

Bob Wyman, CTO of PubSub, is trying to explain to the audience what the point is of blog search tools like PubSub, BlogPulse and Technorati. I like the way he puts it: “For the first time you have an open, trackable conversation.” In other words the babble of the blogosphere can be analyzed. If you (a company) listen carefully, you will learn what people are talking about, what they’re interested in and what they want to hear about. And then YOU will know what to write about, rather than issuing a press release once a month because you think you should.

Interesting… but I fear there’s too much inside baseball talk this morning. If I were an attendee just getting on the blogging boat, I’d be a bit lost already. Hope the panels coming up are more mindful of those who don’t consume Jeff Jarvis with their morning coffee.

Good article in Inc.com last week runs down the "Top Ten" things you should know before starting a small business blog. Author Carole Matthews did her homework. I had a great conversation with her and she also quotes Paul Chaney (now contributing to this blog) and Anita Campbell. She lists the usual cautions:

– Understand that a blog is a two-way conversation
– Know what topics are off limits
– Use keywords in your titles and posts so your blog will get found by the search engines

She also mentions a pet peeve of mine: "Yes, you do need to be able to write." That’s not to say you need to be a published author before starting a blog. Far from it. But you do need to write coherently, succinctly, interestingly. And that’s a skill you can learn by blogging, er writing, a lot. Your thoughts?? Leave us a comment below.

P.S. I learned from Carole that Inc.com has maintained a blog, Fresh Inc., since August 2003. Funny… I had never run across it.