This is year 3 that my friend Alex Brown will be teaching an innovative undergrad class at the University of Delaware. Infotech Applications in Marketing and is probably one of the few of its kind that is required for marketing majors. In addition to presenting the lastest interactive strategies, including social media/blogs and search, students are required to blog their assignments.

Last year Alex used Shel Israel’s and Robert Scoble’s Naked Conversations along with John Battelle’s The Search: How Google And Its Rivals Rewrote The Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. Alex asked me if these books were still “appropriate” or if he should look at something different. Amazon lists 57 books for the search business blogging and 4734 for the search blog. So many books .. so little time!

What are your thoughts? If you were teaching an undgrad class on innovative internet marketing what books would you use? Keep in mind that the blog/social media aspect is a significant component of the course.

FYI – Alex is no stranger to online marketing, in addition to putting on the prof jacket, Alex is behind the highly successful Barbero blog, which last week pulled over 70k visits; and the Wharton Admissions Blog, the first blog that was developed as a value-add portal.

One aspect that gives social media its power punch is the ease in which we can share and link information. Tools are being developed as fast as the growing blogosphere. Just when you finally figured out how to spell del.icio.us up pops a toy box of new fun – from a tool that sounds like a disco dance linkaGo Go to something that you’d find on a dessert bar Raw Sugar.
How to keep track was a nightmare for most people. Offering more than a couple of options to your readers was even more frustrating. Lee Odden, Online Marketing Blog, has developed a couple of nifty social media tools that make all that a snap. In true blogger kindness, has provided them gratis. Of course, what would you expect from one of the Business Blog Consultant site contrbutor bloggers.
The first tool allows you to add a social bookmark menu after each post or on a static web page. The jazzy thing about this tool is the social bookmark links are presented in a drop down menu to save screen space.

The second tool is an RSS Button Maker. By placing your cursor over the orange RSS icon a list of the top RSS readers folds out so you can subscribe using your favorite reader.

Sweet!

One of the benefits of contributing to Business Blog Consulting is the opportunity to tap into the expertise of some of the best and brightest bloggers. The lively discussions that occur “off-blog”, on the contributing bloggers’ Yahoo list, are often as valuable as the BBC blog posts. With the permission of Rick, Dana, Jeremy and Dave here is a recap of a recent thread on monitzing blogs.
The Question

What kind of revenue return can one expect from a blog that gets an average of 12k unique visitors a day and whose readers are engaged to the extent that some posts pull over 600 comments? The blog focuses on the champion racing horse Barbaro. (Backstory is on Diva Marketing)

As you might expect there were a range of opinions and projections along with specific tactical advice.
Business Blog Consultants’ Responses

Rick Bruner
My $0.02: it’s going to be hard for a consumer blog site to command much over $1 CPM on average (maybe $3, as Dave states, but as I say, not much over). A few reasons: little perceived premium for those audiences. Even if they are focused, they’re not big, so they’re a pain in the ass to buy.

Also, BlogAds creates extra work for advertisers in making them recreate a different type of creative units for a small audience, compared to the leaderboards and skyscrapers and boxes their agency already created for the mass online ad audience, which BlogAds doesn’t support.

The biggest reason, however, most bloggers can’t make decent money from ads is this: they don’t sell. They expect the mountain to come to Muhammad. Their logic seems to be, “Hey, I spend a lot of hours on this thing, I get a few thousand people, advertisers should do the work to find me and give me money.” That ignores the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. A few thousand visitors a day is small change compared to the big sites dominating the online ad space.

That’s where Tig and Rafat have stood apart. First, they’ve aggregated an audience (B2B) that commands a high CPM ($30+). Second and more importantly, they both personally broke their asses for hours a day actively selling ads, calling agencies, making a real business out of their sites. Now, they’ve both hired ad sales teams.

Dave Taylor
It can be all over the map. Let’s look at AdSense since it’s easy. AdSense effective CPM can range from under $1 to over $10, depending on placement, subject and the click thru rate. If this blog uses a typical placement they’ll see approx 2% CTR (ballpark). Racing will draw some good ads, but much of the gambling is prohibited by AdSense, so let’s just guess that these will be okay value ads and the overall effective CPM with that CTR will be about $3.

Now we can do the math: 12,000 visitors/day = 20,000 page views/day. At a 2% CTR that means that this 20,000 page views account for 400 clicks. If we stick with our resultant effective CPM based on this, that’s really $3 per thousand views, or 20,000/1000 * 3 = $60/day. That’s $0.15/click, not bad for AdSense. Multiply that out and we might be talking about approx $20k/year.

These are all out of thin air, of course. The ads could be more valuable, the CTR could be higher (or quite a bit lower), producing an effective CPM far different than my guess of $3. There are also lots of other advertising alternatives, including BlogAds, etc etc, and
they could just sell their own adverts so they could delve into gambling ads directly, which I imagine would be far more profitable for the site.

Jeremy Wright
Hard to say, BlogAds is its own little economy. We (b5media) have a few similar sites that get 100$/week for a BlogAds ad spot. They’re in the Entertainment space, though.

I’d probably get the blog included in one of the BlogAd Networks, price a unit at 100$/week and then raise it as it starts to fill up. Personally I think a unit’s worth about 250$/week on that site, but it’s always hard to tell with BA’s buyers.

Dana VanDen Heuvel
That would depend a lot on the advertiser and the category…horse racing…not sure what’s out there on that, in terms of advertisers… It’s not like B2B tech where they’re getting $50CPM…at least, not that I know of.

You’d have to find the right category advertisers to make a go at it…or do
Google AdSense.

BBC Readers
What advice would you give?

Recently JupiterResearch dropped a media release that has the social media scene buzzing. And well it should for the prestigious JupiterResearch’s study revealed that “… 35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate Weblogs this year. Combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006.”

That’s significant. Actually, I found that to be a little too signifcant.

According the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki (written by Chris Andersen of Wired and Ross Mayfield of Socialtext) Wiki to as of April 18, 2006 29 (5.8%) of Fortune 500 companies had a blog. If JupiterResearch’s analysis is correct and “nearly 70% of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006” a lot of Fortune 500s (not to mention other large companies) are are going to be pretty busy building blogs during the next six month.

Even though I admit to a drink of that kool-aid every now and again, this sounded strange. I shot an email off to Peter Arnold Associates (PR agency) explaining that I was working in the social media space, was a blogger and wanted to post their client’s findings. I explained I found the analysis odd and asked for clarification on the methodolgy, how JupiterResearch defined “corporations” and “large companies” and how they came to their conclusions.

I received two lovely responses. The first: “Let me check in with someone on the research team at JupiterResearch to find answers to your questions. I’ll be back in touch as soon as I hear.”

The second: “Information about JupiterResearch reports are available to accredited members of the press for free and clients.

After looking at your blog link JupiterResearch has decided not to fulfill your request for more information since the blog* is closely tied with your company that serves as a consultancy. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this earlier, I didn’t realize that your company and blog were so closely affiliated.

If you’d like more information about becoming a client or purchasing a report, please let me know.”

Bloggers have gotten called on the carpet for jumping the gun and posting without fact checking. While we’re not journalists, the majority of business bloggers do feel an obligation to their readers to present accurate information.

BBC readers, I tried to find out the story behind the numbers for you before I posted that I thought these findings were .. shall we say out of the ball park optimistic. Based on the information presented in their media release, I caution you to look at JupiterResearch’s conclusions with with a few grains of salt.

If anyone has read the report and can explain how “nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006” please drop a comment. I sure would like to know.

TypePad must really like the blogger line-up at Business Blog Consulting. We hit the jackpot this week. Rich Brook’s Flyte is the featured blog today.

Congrats! Rich. By the way, if you miss the write-up on the home page (6/8), catch it on the archives.

At the University of Delaware, Alex Brown is challenging the next generation of business leaders to think new world/web 2.0 marketing. Prof Brown is teaching a class called Infotech Applications in Marketing. Not only does a blog support the course but students are expected to blog and comment.

Do the kids get it? I’ll say they do. Here’s a snip from a post by Mark Muller – Have We Wasted 4 Years Here?

The problem i have with this is not that fact that Mr. Cherkoff said it, it is the fact that i realized today that i have been learning “old” marketing techniques at this “old” school. The University obviously needs to do something about its curriculum and innovate.

[Note: James Cherkoff was a guest speaker.]

Business is changing. Maketing is changing. Hope there are a few college deans who are listening in and taking Mark’s advice to heart to innovate their curriculum.

How will marketing studies be structured in the future? Will there be classes on buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, blogging, building communities? Will blogs projects be on a class blog or wiki? Will Marketing 101 include how to integrate podcasts, vlogs and “clouds” into campaigns?
And .. true to the blogosphere, you never know who might be listening in. Gary Spangler, global ebusiness manager for DuPoint, commented on Mark’s post about blog ethics. Perhaps Mark can include it in his CV when he applies for a job. CMP Media, The Thompson Corporation and Mansueto Ventures (Fast Company) all have positions that require blogging experience.

I am not a techie, affectionately know to many as a geek. I don’t know how to code. I can barely get Technorati tags to work. I am simply a marketer who loves this new media 2.0 technology because of what it can do: increase awareness, further reach, build relationships, tell the story my way. In other words for the end results.

One of the techniques that I believe will impact new media word of mouth buzz is RSS – Real Simple Syndication. However, I often find it’s not so simple to explain. If you can’t help people get it .. they’re obviously not going to use it.
Deb Franke, e-Marketing Manager at Emerson Process Management faced the same challenge when she wanted to bring blogs and RSS to the company’s emarketing efforts. Deb knew that the RSS adoption rates were low and needed a to find a way to increase those numbers. She told me that her team created an RSS Starter Kit as a way to help customers with the learning curve. By the way count EPM as the newest F100 blog.

“We hope to help the entire process manufacturing community see the value that we see with RSS and be able to immediately work smarter and faster because we believe RSS can short-cut the learning process. We hope one of the ways they use RSS is to more easily fnd the experts around Emerson who can help address some of the challenges they face on a daily basis.”

EPM is making their RSS Starter Kit available to all. The kit includes a how-to subscribe-to an RSS reader video along with all the who-what-whys of RSS. You may have a different favorite reader but the video does show the process of how easy it is to get started and provides clear answers to the basic who-what-why questions.
If you really want to jazz up a news aggregator and use it as a marketing tool – BuzzHop will create a branded reader with the elements of your logo.

Diva Markeing has examples of companies using RSS as a website strategy.

Call this post “an observation” about comments & trackbacks. – Guy Kawaski recently posted about The Art of Creating A Community. A lot of people must have thought it was interesting. There were 36 comments and trackbacks.

Not a surprise, in true social networking / blog style, the post also received buzz that wasn’t in comments or trackbacks. One of the bloggers who picked up on the topic was “A*List” blogger Robert Scoble. Robert added his take on the topic and posted on his blog. A lot of people must have thought it was interesting. There were 31 comments and trackbacks.

Comments on the Bona Tempura Volvant blog and the Scobleizer blog took slightly different directions. Feedback on Guy’s blog focused exclusively on the topic. However, many of the Scobleizer comments took point with Robert as an “A*List” blogger – moving the conversation off topic. Guess that’s one of the perils of being an “A*List” blogger.

It seems that every virtual corner I turn there’s talk about tracking the buzz from 2.0 social media tools e.g., blogs, boards, Flickr, etc. The marketing research profession is entering an exciting (although some may find it uncomfortable) phase in the development of data collection and analysis techniques. The field (literally!) has gone from asking questions via door-to-door interviewing to listening to virtual conversations.

Granted, the use of consumer generated media (CGM) as a credible research tool, is in its infancy (historically researchers seem to move cautiously…look how long it took for firms to embrace online research); however, consumer generated media is too rich to overlook. Some companies are beginning to explore CGM as a supplement to traditional research for information about:

• Brand buzz -who.what.where
• Competitive intelligence
• Product development and improvement
• Pre launch buzz
• Early warning crisis management
• Advertising effectiveness
• Voice of the customer

I understand that Chrysler is using CGM to track trends. They’ve gone from mining data at a high level – sensibilities about specific models to a more granular level of information about features and attributes. The next step is better understanding the influencers and how the information flows.

Just yesterday I heard from a reliable source that a popular Atlanta beverage company is reviewing research firms that monitor digital conversations.
However, for CMG to become accepted as a mainstream, credible technique marketing research professionals will be challenged to:

• Incorporate CGM information into the findings from traditional methodologies
• Develop a standard of credibility that is acceptable by practitioners and academics
• Determine what is white noise and what is significant information without sanitizing the data

Here’s one to ponder …

Information is any difference that makes a difference. – Gregory Batson

Technorati Tags: Marketing_Research, CGM, Consumer_Generated_Media, Blogs

Buzz is that  2006 is the year marketing blogs will gain acceptance within the business community. Seems the publishing world is betting that people will want to read about how to use blogs as a marketing tool. For your reading pleasure the contributors of Business Blog Consulting have put together a list of published, and soon to be published, biz blog books.

Business Blogging Books
–We Blog, Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey, Meg Hourihan
–The Weblog Handbook, Rebecca Blood
–Buzz Marketing with Blogs For Dummies, Susannah Garden
–Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS, Rok Hrastnik
–Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World, Hugh Hewett
–Blog, David Kline & Dan Burstein
–Blog On Building Online Communities With Web Logs, Todd Stauffer
–Blogging: Genius Strategies For Instant Web Content, Biz Stone
–Blog Marketing, Jeremy Wright
–The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Growing Your Business With Google, Dave Taylor

Coming Attractions Business Blogging Books
–Naked Conversations, Robert Scobel & Shel Israel
–The Everything Blogging Book, Aliza Sherman Risdahl
–The Corporate Blogging Book, Debbie Weil
–The Rough Guide to Blogging, Jonathan Yang
– Blog Wild! A Blog for Small Business Blogging, Andy Wibbles

Find more books about blogging at Blog Revolt
Heard it from: Debbie Weil, The Corporate Blogging Book

If you come across any new business blog books drop a comment. Let’s keep track of the new releases.

The  #1 concern I’m hearing from organizations interested in exploring blogs to support marketing strategies is, “But what about the negative comments? How do we control people posting bad things about our brand or our company?

Marketing has changed. The world has changed. It changed while you were not looking. It changed when the internet, email and cell phones made it easy and cheap to communicate.

Bottom-line with over 50 million people chatting it up on blogs if you turn comments off you loose the home court advantage. People will talk about your company, your products, your customer service and even your blog. Why would you not want that discussion to take place where you can easily monitor it and respond?

To turn comments on. To turn comments off. This has be come a tired debate in the blogosphere. One of the benefits of a marketing blog is the opportunity to dialogue with customers, prospects and stakeholders.  Sorry, no comments does not make a conversation. It’s called a monologue. One person takes center stage with no opportunity for direct feedback. For my money, a blog without comments and trackbacks is an on-line newsletter. And that’s not a negative comment.

Great example of a highly focused brand kibitz on a non “corporate blog” is McChronicles. This blog about McDonalds recently welcomed it’s 18,000 visitor. A Google search for McChronicles pulls 15,800 results. And with this post the count is now 15,8001. That’s a lot of Big Macs! U.S. News and World Report highlighted McCs in an article about customers creating buzz.

Citizen or conversational journalism. McDonald owners get it. Some are asking McChronicles to review their restaurants. Corporate McD people have been known to drop by to listen (tracked by referral stats). However, the folks at corporate McD’s must be busy chowing down on their burgers since a sanctioned McD blog has not yet surfaced.

If you’re still not convenienced that comments on are a smart business decison, here are …

5 Strategies To Combat Negative Blog Comments
5. Turn off comments
4. Monitor comments
3. Develop a comment policy
Include on your navigation bar and above the comment section
2. Delete comments that do not meet your guidelines

The Number One Way To Combat Negative Blog Comments …
1. Show ’em what you are made of!
Use negative comments (those that express legit concerns) as a way to demonstrate how you handle customer concerns.

Our customers’ sphere of influence is not limited to their around the corner neighborhood or the company water cooler but anywhere there is an internet connection or cell phone access. With the understanding – that companies no longer control the message (influence yes. control no.) – and that customers have more power than ever before in “helping sell your product”, you gain a huge advantage over your competition – those that are trying to swim upstream against the current. It’s an exciting, new world. Don’t be afraid to become apart of it. 

Like it or not … corporate guidelines for blogging are becoming SOP (standard operating procedures). Next up podcasting guidelines?  Yup and IBM is the first company, I know of, to draft guidelines for podcasts. Can vlogging guidelines be far behind?

IBM’s blogging guidelines
were used as a basis and then a few extra podcast/medium specific
guidelines were added.  Most are common sense and reflect a standard of
professionalism that should not be a big deal within a business
environment.

IBM’s Podcasting Guidelines

–Do not podcast IBM Confidential material.
Currently there
is no way to protect/encrypt audio files in a manner that meets IBM’s
security guidelines. Files can be easily shared outside of IBM. Don’t
disclose anything you wouldn’t disclose outside the company.

–Be mindful not only of what you say, but how you say it.
Sometimes
the way you say something — the tone of your voice, such as a hint of
sarcasm — can be as revealing as what you say.

–Protect your privacy and the privacy of others.
Make sure
you don’t record any person without his or her consent and awareness.
Surrepitiously recording and distributing conversations is a breach of
other’s privacy and can have severe consequences for you. Start each
audio recording by identifying all the individuals participating.

–Set the bar as high as you can for audio production and content quality.
External
podcasts that present topics or points of view relevant to IBM’s
business or broader corporate interests inevitably reflect on the
company’s brand. To put it bluntly, if it does not sound good, even the
greatest ideas may not be enough to hold a listener’s attention.
 
–There may be some invitations to participate in non-IBM podcasts that warrant IBM Communication’s involvement.
You
should treat these the same way you would treat an interview request
from a reporter. If you’re in doubt, be sure to talk to your local
Communications people to discuss the opportunity before agreeing to
participate.

 –Identify your podcast as the voice of an individual or small group within the company, not the “official” voice of the company.
This
is similar to the standard disclaimer in IBM blogging guidelines — but
in the case of a podcast, it’s necessary to make such a declaration
verbally.

 –Before you initiate a podcast, ask yourself if it is the most appropriate method to communicate with your audience.
Before
creating a podcast, listen to some. Experience what podcasting is like
from the audience’s perspective. Go out and listen to some podcasts.
What do you think works well? What do you dislike? What is it that you
have to say — and is this the right medium in which to say it?

IBM also reminds its folks that MP3 files (like blog posts) can remain accessible for a very long time. Aint that the truth!

Read More: Corporate Blogging Guidelines

Heard it from: Christopher Hannegan’s Blog Employee Engagement

Ed Garsten, editorial director of DaimlerChrysler’s media-only blog – TheFirehouse.biz provided an interview to me as part of Diva Marketing’s Biz Blog Profile Series.
Ed explained the strategy and gave his views about blogging and the
impact of the internet. Our interview is one of only two that Ed has
given about Firehouse.biz. The other was with Debbie Weil.

For those who might have missed the the story, recently TheFirehouse.biz blog created some buzz in the blogosphere when word got out that it was open only to the media. Industry analysts have since been invited.

What did this Fortune 100 company do?  They took it in stride and
never proactively participated in the conversation. It seemed odd to me
that they didn’t tell their own story. However, from their research,
they knew the blog was being embraced by their target readers who were "grateful for the opportunity to communicate in a closed environment." As Ed said, "Does Ski Magazine care about what non skiers think about it?"

"Blogging is still an evolving medium that different constituencies
will begin to use in ways that make sense to them. We’re not about
exclusivity or secrecy. We’re about communicating with a certain subset
of people and aiming our content toward them with ‘Firehouse.’ " Ed Garsten

So the what if the some pundits of the blogopshere are tied up in
knots about a closed community blog. Althought barely a month old, it
was launched September 12th, the company views TheFirehouse.biz as a
success. It has become an important media relationship strategy.
According to Ed, DaimlerChrysler considers the blog  "…another means
of
spreading our message
while affording reporters an opportunity to post their feedback on
issues, events, products, etc."

One thing for sure Ed gets it when he says, "We’re involved in the most explosive form of communication to
come along in at least a decade and there’s no reason its growth and
potential should be reined in by artificial limits. It’s called
progress."

Yeah, the Chrysler Media Group made a few blunders in the launch;
however, for the most part, their strategy was well thought out and
researched. They understood what their target audience wanted and
delivered it. Sure there are growing pains, but it’s a new medium and
we’re all still learning. Heck…we can’t even agree on how to define a business blog!

Here’s the back-story about the Chrysler Group Media Blog, The Firehouse.biz, direct from "mysource" at Chrysler who has asked to remain anonymous.

Chrysler’s business strategy was to create a blog to support their on-line "press only" site. As mysource pointed out, "press only" sites are common practice within the automotive industry. I must admit, I had no clue about that one and it seemed odd to me.

However, I did a few Google searches and found some "press only" sites from a few of the big guns in the auto biz. The language says loud and clear KEEP OUT. And we wonder why so many
dealerships stink at customer service. Must be a culture thing.

Toyota: You have entered a section of The Pressroom that requires a user name
and password. Some sections of this site are reserved for use by
members of the print, broadcast or electronic media.

Ford:
(Supporting information is required to obtain media access)

Honda:

If you are not a journalist, your application will not be approved.
Please do not fill out this form unless you are a journalist. All
applications will be verified prior to approval.

When I asked "mysource" why Chrysler didn’t jump in on the
blogosphere conversation and explain their position he assured me that
someone who had access to their blog was sure to do that. I didn’t get
this one either. Why would you want to depend
on the kindness of reporters when you have the opportunity to speak for
yourself?

"Mysource" was right. BlogWorks and Adrants
and picked up the post written by Jason Vines, vp of communications at
Chrysler and added their own spin. Be it good..bad..or indifferent.
That the point is Chrysler missed a chance to participate in the
discussion – to tell their story in their way.

Now I don’t have a real problem, as some might, with closed blogs.
What frustrated me was completing an application, in good faith, to
gain access to the blog and then being told I wasn’t part of the
in-crowd.

From my point, the entrance page doesn’t tell you that the blog is for the media
only. I assumed that the name the  "Chrysler Group Media Blog" referred
to a multi author blog written by the media group. [Cool, thought I.
Some PR folks who are getting it.]

"Mysource" agreed that might
be a valid point and would take it up the food chain. Seems to me all
this could have been avoided if Chrysler had simply put access to the
blog within their "press only" site. But then again…they wouldn’t
have the buzzzz.

Lessons Learned: If you have a closed blog keep don’t make the entrance page public.

Chrysler welcome to the blogosphere!

Chrysler has launched a blog for the working press. Can’t help but wonder what are behind those firewalls that can’t be let out to Chryslers’ customers. If any bonafide ‘working press’ people register would love your take on the new blog.

Thanks for your interest in TheFirehouse.biz, the Chrysler Group’s
media-only blog.  We will issue media registration rights to members of
the working press only.  A member of the working press is one who is
paid as an employee,freelancer who regularly contributes, or
representative of a known and established media organization
(newspaper, magazine, television, radio, etc.) If you would like to
resubmit your registration, we would be happy to reconsider it.

[itv] is combing new ‘old media’ – eMail – with new ‘new media’ – podcasts. Podcasts are integrated into  an email. Of course, you can also download the ‘old-fashioned’ way via the [itv] website/blog.

Great way to add more value to your email newsletters and
differentiate from the clutter…at least for now. If you want a forward of the newsletter (you can subscribe for free) drop a comment and I’ll email it to you.

Tony Williams, the esteemed mayor of Washington DC, has joined the blogosphere. On the 15th of August Mayor Williams launched Mayor’s Blog. He  posted a couple of paragraphs and told his constituents to "stay  tuned." Expectations were set that the new blog would connect the Mayor with the citizens of DC.

The people chatted; they welcomed Mayor Williams to the blogosphere,
expressed their concerns and even offered the Mayor blog advice: need
an RSS feed, filtering comments is not transparent, read other DC
blogs and don’t forget to remind people it’s really you.

And then they waited. And waited. And waited. The people were getting
annoyed. Where was their leader? Where was the connection?  "When
are you going to say something interesting, helpful, provocative or
something? So far it’s a snooze with a long time between snores."

Mayor Williams came back a week later with Star Wars humor. Yoda would say, "a weekly paragraph will not an exciting blog make." Then he really got serious and set expectations for himself….

Generally speaking, I will try to be cogent and consistent. By this I mean: first, providing you observations you can’t find elsewhere in over 100,000 pages of the website; and second, stating the same, take your pick – distinctive or disgusting comments regardless of the audience and the circumstances.You should know my position on an issue, whether you agree with it or not. Blase press releases will not a …YODA!

And expectations for the readers … the blog is not a service line but righteous indignation or comforting, supportive comments are welcomed.

Mayor Williams, I think you’re getting this blog stuff….go forth unto the blogosphere and prosper.

A lesson for all bloggers – "a weekly paragraph will not an exciting blog make."

Article in the Washington Post (free subscription required).

First, thanks to Rick and to Paul for their vision in giving us a playground to talk, debate and exchange ideas regarding issues that impact our emerging new industry. And thanks for the invite to join in on the conversation.

Recently there’s been a buzz about Techorati and their search
algorithms. Just for fun I played around with a post I did yesterday on ValueClick and FastClick. Nope never made it on to their page. Noticed that my pal Dana at Pheedo, who wrote about the same topic, was listed.

Just for more fun I ran a couple of quick searches:

IceRocket picked up both Pheedo and Diva Marketing’s posts. In fact, Diva Marketing was noted before Pheedo altho Dana posted earlier.

Yahoo (beta) linked to Diva Marketing on page 1 but 5 pages in couldn’t find Pheedo.

Feedster didn’t want to play with either Pheedo or Diva Marketing.

BlogPulse didn’t link to either post.

Lesson Learned: Technorati is loosing credibility by the second while IceRocket is gaining in the search blog space.