I’m behind the times on these two articles from Fortune on marketing and blog trends, but they’re both so good I’m still happy to link to them:

• Want Truth in Advertising? Try a Blog
• Why There’s No Escaping the Blog

The first story above is only a few days old and is mainly based on insightfly quotes from Steve Hayden, vice chairman of New York-based Ogilvy & Mather about how advertisers should understand blogs. The second link is actually shameful on my part that I post it so late, as it’s three weeks old (I was on vacation when it was published) and it is simply the most thoughtful analysis of the business blog trend I’ve read to date.

Rok Hrastnik has just produced a huge study on RSS and its power for both marketing and publishing. Price: $39.95. He sent me a preview copy, but I confess to having been too busy lately to have given it proper attention, so I’m just going to rip off what my pal Tig over at MarketingVox said about it:

European e-marketer Rok Hrastnik spent the last year or two researching
an exhaustive review of syndication technology on the web, finally
releasing to Marketingstudies.net
a 550-page definitive ebook on RSS and the marketing uses of
syndication. The advance copy sent to MarketingVOX is written in a
detached, rational tone, in some contrast to the sales pages’ hard sell
copy. Of particular interest will be the technical background
information and the near comprehensive set of interviews of industry
figures, which serves as an indication as to where RSS is heading and
what significance it has to marketers and publishers.

MarketingStudies: Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS

Filed under "This Site Needs a Blog," USA Today reports today Wal-Mart is trying to address its critics more directly with a new public openness. So far, that has taken the form of an open letter from CEO H. Lee Scott in 100 newspapers and planned TV and radio show interviews, as well as a new web site WalmartFacts.com. Notably, however, the site does not feature a blog.

The American Marketing Association has just launched this blog to support its seminar series Blogs: Marketing Beyond the Website. (BTW, the NY event on January 21st, in which I will be participating, is filling up nicely, I’m pleased to say.) Dana VanDen Heuvel, who set up the blog, describes its mission this way in an email to the group of authors:

The AMA blog can be characterized as a vehicle for promoting the event, a clearinghouse for marketing weblog related topics, an overall ‘drive-to’ engine for the seminars, and a repository for "blogging from the seminar’ type content.  All while being geared toward MARKETERS.  What this blog is not is another blog about blogging for the sake of blogging. I know, that’s pretty narrow in focus, but that’s why we originally created the weblog.  Further, it stands to reason that a seminar, on the topic of weblogs, by the de facto organization of record for marketing, should have its own blog.

UPDATE:
For anyone in the NY area interested, a group of us will be getting together for dinner after the event. Details on Church of the Customer.

Link

Appropriate that Fortune just announced its Best Companies to Work For list, as Dana VanDen Heuvel and the Bloggers’ Rights Blog have both just published black lists of companies that are especially unsympathetic to bloggers (usually in the form of firing them for blogging).

Big geek, little geek:
Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson with
Bill ‘G-money’ Gates

Another sign of the times and validation for how seriously some businesses take blogs. Major score for Gawker Media’s Gizmodo: Microsoft approached them about an interview with G-Money himself, Bill Gates.  Much of the conversation in this first-installment of the serialized interview is about blogs and RSS. Big congrats to my man Joel Johnson, Gizmodo’s editor. (I bet Pete Rojas is just sick over this!)

Gizmodo: Bill Gates Interview

Six Apart, maker of the popular blog softwares Movable Type, TypePad and most recently Live Journal (via an acquisition just announced) has taken a true blog “industry” leadership position in battling the vexing problem of comment spam. Their latest line of defense is this detailed document describing how spammers attack and how bloggers (using various blog publishing systems) can best respond. I haven’t read all the way through this yet, but it looks like such a useful resource, I thought I’d post it immediately.

Six Apart: Guide to Comment Spam

Yet another story about whether blogs are going to turn media and advertising on its head. I have to say, I am disappointed by this piece. The writer was trying to interview me, but we never connected. It just seems poorly edited, with some obvious factual errors (such as calling Henry Copeland the CEO of DailyKos, when he is the CEO of BlogAds), starting paragraph with “Nor” where it doesn’t make sense semantically or grammatically, and stating as a fact that “blogs offer…soaring incomes,” among other dubious points. But I’ll spare the nit-picking. Nothing much of interest to regular followers of this trend, and nothing about blogs as a customer-communications or marketing vehicle, just blogs as a publishing/advertising medium.

FT: Niche Appeal of the Blogging Business

Ka-boom! This is a biggie in the world of business blogs. Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman of General Motors, is the blogger. Whoa. Props to Steve Hall of Adrants, where I first saw the link. He wrote something more thoughtful: read that.

This on the heels of GM’s Smallblock Engine blog.

Link

Blog consulting has apparently gone big-time. ClickZ reports:

Interpublic-owned PR firm MWW Group today launched a Web log marketing practice. Blog 360 will advise clients on strategies to create, participate in, monitor, and advertise in blogs.

"We’ve formed a specialty practice area around blogs, but we really believe they are an important part of any communications plan," said Alissa Blate, MWW Group’s EVP and director of consumer marketing.

Blog 360 will be a component of MWW’s Marketing-360 approach, which supports brands through multiple audience contact points. Depending on a client’s needs, MWW’s plan might include creating a CEO blog for reputation and branding benefits, or a tech blog for information, Blate said. Blog monitoring will likely be a part of any plan, she added.

Ironically, I can’t find anything about it on MWW’s own site, which like so many agency sites is all in Flash and hence very hard to navigate. I can’t even find anything about their "Marketing-360 approach" referred to in the story. Dare I suggest, their site could use a <cough> blog </cough>?

ClickZ: MWW Debuts Blog Marketing Practice

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report on the blogosphere:

By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

You can see the complete PDF here.

Pew Internet: The State of Blogging

BURST Media

has introduced an ad network for blogs. Current properties include Gawker Media blogs, BlueLemur, 2 Walls Webzine, and CelebCourthouse, with others on the way soon.

Meanwhile, CrispAds is another player in the blog ad network space. I’m getting briefed more on their play shortly and will update with details then.

1

ClickZ: BURST! Media Launches Blog Ad Channel

A t-shirt blog, my new favorite commerce blog since MightyGoods.

Link

Big congrats to my buddy Steve Hall for his Adrants blog being named the #1 "Websites You Should Bookmark" in Ad Age’s (print-only) 2004 Book of Tens issue. (Just in case you thought sex had stopped selling…)

Adrants: Adrants Named Number-One Site to Bookmark

Officer Dubina, aka Jan

Oxygen Network’s show Women & The Badge, about female law enforcement officers, features this blog by one of the real-life police officers featured in the show.

Link

Anil Dash, VP of Six Apart (makers of Movable Type and TypePad blog publishing software), and Jim Coudal, of Coudal Partners (designers and entrepreneurial upstarts), recently gave a free online seminar about the benefits of blogging for business. Anil links to where you can listen to the audio for free. I’m not entirely clear who organized it exactly, but I listened to most of it, and it was interesting and informed. Anil plugged it in advance thusly:

Topics we expect to cover include marketing content vs. editorial content, how weblogs compare to other CMS systems, chat rooms, and discussion boards, the personal/professional balance, and syndication. If you’re already familiar with blogs, but want to get your co-workers, clients, or peers up to date on the medium, this might be a good place to start.

Link

This is great. Saw it first on MarketingVox, which linked to the original note on Micro Persuasion, where Steve Rubel noted that IntelliSeek is targeting ads on Google to keyword searches of Steve Rubel. Some additional quick research shows the same goes for Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis, though sadly no one seems interested in my name or, surprisingly, Robert Scoble.

I suspect this is rapidly going to become the next litmus test for cool in the blogosphere (in which case we’d soon see sad examles of people bidding on their own names through dummy sites, no doubt), the way it has been for a while to have a first-name rank on Google (e.g., despite the fact that he personally rarely blogs anymore, I see that Denton retains his enviable rank on "Nick").

In light of my recent case study on Stonyfield Farm’s blogging efforts, I decided to look at their rank on Alexa. Then I thought of something that proved quite interesting: check out StonyfieldFarm.com’s traffic (according to the admittedly dubious Alexa ranking system) compared to Dannon.com.

UPDATE:
Ironically, I just learned that Groupe Danone owns 85% of Stonyfield Farm.

I think we can safely let this pass without comment.

Link

When I first started this site, my main interest was really just to catalog examples of business weblogs and generally to comment on the trend. I threw the word “consulting” in the domain name mainly because basic permutations of BusinessBlog.com were already registered. I was making my living at that time as a web marketing consultant, so I though what the heck, maybe I’d pick up a bit of consulting work out of it as a perk, which sounded fun. In fact, aside from a few minor engagements, mostly which were pass-through to a weblog designer friend, I didn’t have much consulting out of it. (I did write a business blog for a travel agent friend for a while, and he did pay me for it, so there was also that.) Now I have a full-time job as a market researcher, so I’m really not interested in persuing the consulting part of business blogs, though I do still enjoy tracking the trend.

I’ve watched with interest, however, as various other folks have set up blog consulting businesses. I don’t have much insight into what success they’ve achieved in that, but I figured I’d round up some links. If you know of others, feel free to advise. (Note: I check comments more often than the dedicated Gmail address for this site.)

• 646 Industries
• Albrycht McClure & Partners
• Appnel Internet Solutions
• Big Blog Company
• BloggingWorks
• BlogKits
• BlogLogic
• BlogSavant
• BlogSite
• B-Spirit
• BusinessLogs
• Ciao! My Bella!
• CooperKatz & Co.
• Dryden Marketing
• Easy Bake Weblogs
• ExpansionPlus
• Gekko Blogs
• Hyku
• Inside Blogging
• Intuitive Systems
• LexBlog
• John Lawlor
• Mark Carey
• Moxie Design Studio
• MWW Group
• One By One Media
• Radiant Marketing Group
• Sonnet Media
• Strategic Communications Group
• Textura Design
• Wigley & Associates
• WordBiz and BlogWrite and BlogWriteForCEOs (sister services)
• Worker Bees

If you do want to recommend others (like your own), please try to have actual clients for this and not just hype your intensions as a blogging freelancer.