The August 15, 2005 issue of BusinessWeek has an article on podcasts going mainstream and the impact Apple’s iTunes is having on indie shows and media giants in Podcast: David vs. Goliath.

As podcasts become a more common tool in small businesses’ Web
marketing toolbox, (as business blogs already have,) how will they
compete against media giants who can just reuse or re-purpose existing
content?

The article suggests a few things such as joining more informal networks (away from iTunes) such as Techpodcasts, the Association of Music Podcasting or Podcastoutlaws.

Small businesses may need to focus on their niche rather than a broad audience to begin. If Seth Godin is right in All Marketers Are Liars, finding an untapped niche that shares your world view might lead to something bigger…like a top 100 ranking on iTunes.

In the most recent issue of Fast Company (August, 2005) Jory Des Jardins interviews Elizabeth Albrycht and Andy Lark in a small piece called Business Blogging for Beginners.

The conceit is that creating a business blog is like hosting a cocktail party. Based on the amount of navel gazing that goes on in the blogosphere, the metaphor is helpful.

The advice isn’t about what platform to use, or pinging, or marketing your blog, but rather good, basic advice on how to improve your blog, all couched in the cocktail party metaphor: "a good hosts connects guests…be authentic…dress business casual…."

I also liked Lark’s term "blinking": posts of snippets of commentary with links. Hadn’t heard that one before.

When noted offline direct mail copywriter and author Bob Bly launched his blog about 6 months ago, I felt that business blogging had indeed tipped (A nod to Malcolm Gladwell’s popular book, the Tipping Point).

Now, even the most cynical holdouts have more proof that blogs mean business. Forbes.com recently released the annual "Best of the Web" issue and the feature story was titled "Blogs That Matter."

From the Forbes article: In this Summer 2005 edition of Forbes.com Best of The Web, our editors have trained their sights on the rapidly expanding world of blogs, collectively known as the "blogosphere."

Editors from Forbes spanned the blogosphere and unearthed 6-10 favorite picks in 20 categories ranging from Art and Literary Blogs, to Small Business, Marketing, Shopping and Music Blogs. Each blog was given a brief review and a quick what’s best and worst about the blog blurb. The collective list, totaling 100 blogs, is a virtual road map of the established blogging landscape. Without a doubt, there are omissions of deserving blogs in every category but, as a tool to advance the spread of business blogging, they have done the blog world a good deed.

Blogging longevity and previous blog notoriety seemed to score high marks in the selection process as a scan of the winners turned up many very established blogs. But, every category also seemed to possess one or two little-known titles. (At least little-known to me)

A scan of winners in the technology category, for instance, gives us a list that likely already appears in many a blogger’s RSS reader, mixed with one or two new finds.

• Slashdot
• BoingBoing
• Engadget   
• Gizmodo   
• Kuro5hin       
• Lifehacker       
• O’Reilly Network       
• Think Secret

       
The Forbes name carries with it some major credibility for the world of blogging and I, for one, can attest to the fact that this type of mainstream media exposure for business blogs is advancing the form and function of blogging at an increasingly rapid pace.

Everyone likes to wax poetic about the million reasons why a business should get into blogging, and why a weblog is the cornerstone of a smart Web site. Heck, even I’m not immune, I’ve been writing – and lecturing – about this for years now.

But sometimes, truth be told, there are businesses that shouldn’t be blogging, and there are people in businesses who shouldn’t be writing entries for the company weblog, and even specific topics that just are not appropriate for a corporate weblog. Let’s have a look, shall we?

First off, let’s agree that the goal of a good business blog is to raise your visibility in your customer community or market segment, to increase your credibility as an expert and to humanize your company and present yourself in the best possible light. Reasonable?

Are you a gardener? You could blog about taking care of gardens, flowers, plants, fertilization, smart techniques for mowing lawns, winterization, etc. A funeral director? Oh, that’s an industry rife with con artists and shady businesses, so talking about funerals and how to ensure that you have the death ceremony you want would be a terrific weblog subject. Maybe you’re the gal who drives the ice cream truck around the neighborhood? Write about children, play, and the changes in our society you can see as you get a unique glimpse into children, parents, and guardians (not to mention children’s manners!)

So, seemingly, there’s not a business you could be in where a blog wouldn’t help you gain visibility and credibility. But there is an assumption in what I’m saying here: that there’s a story and that you can figure out how to tell it online.

Imagine two opticians. One says “I take care of eyes. There’s lots of medical info on eyes out there, so my Web site will be a digital brochure, and that’s good enough for me” while the other says “I get the same questions from every patient, and there’s so much confusing information online, I’m going to try and shed some light on eye care and eye health by writing about it. But not with a newsletter, how 90s!, but with a blog.”

Now, a slight aside: I believe that the future of business is findability, and if your business doesn’t appear when your potential customer looks for you online, you’ll eventually wither and die. Given that, you can guess which optician I think is going to be more successful in 24 months.

Let’s be frank, though. The first optician above should not blog. They aren’t going to be engaged, interesting, or informative, and they’ll find that the exercise of setting up a weblog and having a blank “input box” staring at them each morning will be more than they can handle, and they won’t stick to it and work on their blog for at least six months before they ask “am I getting results?” Better for them not to start at all.

I actually encounter a lot of businesses that have this philosophy, what I call the “let the customer come to me” approach to business. They’ll pay for an 800 number, they’ll print up a newsletter, but the level of their engagement with their market is fairly minimal. Many of them are also hourly professionals — think psychologists, acupuncturists and massage therapists, for example — and their response is “I’m already booked, why would i want more customers?”

If their goal is to fill up their appointment calendar, then they’re right, and they certainly shouldn’t blog or, perhaps, even have a Web site at all.

But what if they could be selling their expertise rather than their hours? What if they could be blogging about their profession and upselling high quality, professional ebooks that cost them time + $500 to produce, and net them $25k annually? That’s a smarter way to look at these professions, isn’t it?

Being completely honest, there are also people who lack coherent writing skills. They may be delightful in person, but put them in front of a computer (or a podcasting mic) and they freeze up, become dreadfully boring, or simply have nothing interesting to say. That’s a real problem, and is one of the rarely mentioned downsides of the entire blogosphere. Put frankly, most bloggers stink as writers. If your company has these sort of communicators, keep ’em far away from your blog! After all, it’s more trouble, more cost and certainly more ineffective to have a boring, dull, tedious blog than to just have a regular old “brochureware” Web site.

Finally, there are specific topics that I believe you shouldn’t blog about, even if you’re the most zealous and enthused of business bloggers. Personnel issues? Customers suing you? Spouse just ran off with someone else? Kids thrown in jail? Have a strong partisan reaction to political news? All of these are topics that should stay far, far away from any sort of business blog. (this isn’t to say that you shouldn’t blog about them, but please, keep it separate. I blog about parenting at The Attachment Parenting Blog, but it’s kept quite separate from my business weblogs The Intuitive Life Business Blog and Ask Dave Taylor, for example)

Some blog experts believe that you should follow the digital version of “let it all hang out”, writing about any and everything that strikes your fancy, but I think they’re wrong. But then again, maybe they aren’t, and maybe I’m wrong!

What do you think?

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.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, BusinessWeek came out with a great story last week aptly titled Blogs Will Change Your Business. Here’s a taste:

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours.

I also refers to Steve Rubel as "an all-knowing Thumper in a forest of clueless Bambis," which is probably one of the weirder things they guy has ever been called. Anyway, required reading for followers of this trend.

BusinessWeek: Blogs Will Change Your Business

Decent article about blogvertising. I was interviewed at length but didn’t get quoted. Oh well. Features the usual cast of characters: Denton, Calacanis, Copeland.

Just had a call with Todd S. (are last names important?), and he was aggrieved by the last paragraph of this piece:

For now, many big companies are sitting on the
sidelines. "We’re in a wait-and-see mode," says Stuart Bogaty, senior
partner and managing director of mOne Worldwide, a digital ad agency
that is part of WPP
Group. He thinks that companies will remain skittish until agencies can
better monitor and control what individual bloggers are saying about
them. On the other hand, that might undercut their renegade appeal. "If
we were able to convince a blogger to do that," he notes, "it would
reduce the value of his blog in general."

The link above allows free access to the story for a week, so read it while the reading is good.

WSJ: Many Advertisers Find Blogging Frontier Is Still Too Wild

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.

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

Christine Halvorson has a job title many would enjoy: company blogger. The company in question is Stonyfield Farm, which actually maintains four different blogs. I’ve written about their blogs before and have frequently cited the blogs as an example of a consumer company doing something interesting with blogs. To wit, I wrote Christine the following note a few days ago:

I was on a panel a few weeks ago talking about blogs at AdTech, a conference about online marketing and advertising, and one of my fellow panelists, Nick Denton, publisher of the blog media "empire" Gawker Media, said cynically that he didn’t see the business case for business blogs, particularly for a CPG like a yogurt company (I had cited Stonyfield Farm as an example moments earlier). He asked whether I knew what your traffic was and what benefit you’d seen from it, but of course I had no idea. But I thought they were questions worth following up.

So, with the blessing of her PR director and CEO, Christine graciously answered the following questions in an email interview:

1) What kind of traffic are you getting to your blogs (individually and/or collectively)?

Since we began the five blogs on April 1, 2004, we’ve had a total of 160,000 visitors. (That number combines all five blogs. We actually didn’t begin measuring until June 6.) We have discontinued one of the blogs, so now there are four.  Of those remaining four, the most recent per month visits are:

Strong Women Daily News: 15,603
The Daily Scoop:  4,049
Creating Healthy Kids: 9,659
The Bovine Bugle: 28,237

These have been growing steadily each month.

I like also to measure our [email] subscribers. Even though "subscribing" is not really "blog culture", I like to offer our readers that option. Subscriber numbers to date are:

Strong Women Daily News: 1,701
The Daily Scoop: 129
Creating Healthy Kids: 318
The Bovine Bugle: 276

These, too, have been growing slowly and steadily, with the exception of Strong Women, which has grown dramatically and quickly!

We do have an RSS feed on each blog.

2) What was the thinking behind launching the blogs in the first  place?

Our company has experienced phenomenal growth, and we have a certain "personality" in the world–we care about the environment; about healthy food; about supporting family farms.  With growth, we fear losing touch with what is a very loyal and committed customer base, and so our CEO, Gary Hirshberg, saw the blogs as a way to continue to personalize our relationship with our customers.  He wants to "be real" and saw the blogs as a way to do that–inspired in part by the success of blogs within the Howard Dean presidential bid of early 2004.

3) What is the business rationale? What are you trying to accomplish from a marketing perspective (or otherwise)?

See the above.  Again, we want to maintain a close relationship with our customers. As organics grows to be mainstream, we want to show how our brand is in fact different, and invite our readers/customers in to help us do that and participate with us in our struggles and triumphs, to the extent possible.  Our blogs "continue the conversation" we’ve had with our readers/customers since the beginning in 1987, when we had 7 cows and a great yogurt recipe. Today we produce 18 million cups of yogurt a month!

4) Are you measuring the benefit? If so, how? If not, why not and may you later? When?

We are measuring things like page views, visitors and subscribers.  Much like any public relations effort (and we are part of the public relations department), the "benefit" is somewhat intangible, but we have faith that there is one.  Somewhere out there, we have created a positive response to our brand by virtue of someone reading something that tickles them, or interests them, or inspires them in one of our four blogs. If we gave them a bit of information they wouldn’t otherwise have, or inspired them to an environmental action, or asked them for an opinion–we assume they remember us when they stand in front of the many yogurts in the dairy case at the local grocery store. We assume that relationship, that contact, causes them to reach for our product, not the competitors’, when given a choice.

5) What kind of feedback do you get from readers? I see you have comments open and that you don’t get a lot of comments but you do get some. Is there a consistent tone or refrain from the comments? Do you get feedback about the blogs in other forms? Via email, the phone, in person comments? What do investors, staff, executives, board members think?

We get a lot of comments in the blogs when we raise controversial issues (and we’re trying to do more of that).  We asked once who should be the first female president–that inspired a lot of comments! And we asked what was important to them in the 2004 presidential election. We asked, "Is God male or female" and that was REALLY popular! In The Bovine Bugle, we get a lot of nostalgic comments.  The Bovine Bugle is written by one of the organic dairy farmers who supply us with milk.  He just writes about his daily life, and the challenges and differences with running an organic farm, versus conventional farming.  Many readers will comment about their memories of a childhood on a farm and how they miss it, and how The Bovine Bugle brings back their memories. They also seem to enjoy this glimpse into where their food comes from.  In Creating Healthy Kids, we seem to have inspired a lot of professionals in the nutrition/school food/public policy arena, which is exactly what we wanted, and they have strong opinions on junk food in schools, which is why we started that particular topic of blog.

I often get direct comments to me about how much readers enjoy the blogs.  I don’t think we’ve had a lot of comments to our consumer relations lines about them.  The "blogging community" seems to like what we’re doing also.

6) Is blogging helping sell more yogurt?

See #4 above.  It probably affects someone’s buying decision. The good will generated by the blogs is hard to measure, but we assume it will have a positive impact on our bottom line.

Also, we have a huge website and sometimes our blogs are a great way to highlight some of the web content that might otherwise get lost.  In this way too, we assume we’re steering some blog readers to buy our product, and some to become subscribers to one of our four e-newsletters.   

7) Anything else you’d like to comment about the experience so far?

It’s been a challenge keeping up with 5 (and then 4) blogs, as a one-person operation, but it’s been incredibly fun and I hope more and more readers and consumers find us and participate. We also plan to add another blog after the turn of the year (topic area still confidential).

8) Do you have a sense of repeat readership to the blogs?

It’s hard to measure, except perhaps by the subscriber numbers above. I get folks writing directly to me saying, "I love your blogs. Keep it up." That sort of thing.  I actually had one woman say she was housebound with cancer and looked forward every day to her blog entry coming into her computer!

[See update here]

Nothing-special review of the viability of ad models for blogs. Nothing really on using blogs as a marketing tool. Usual suspects featured ‚Äî Copeland, Denton, Calacanis ‚Äî as well as MayItPleaseTheCourt.net‘s J. Craig Williams. Also, a spokesman from Audi comments on its sponsorship of Denton’s Jalopnik.com.

BusinessWeek: The Business Of Blogging

Michael Gartenberg, VP and research director at Jupiter Research, writes this piece with three key pieces of advice:

1. Know what’s being said about your company on other people’s weblogs
2. Go slowly when creating official corporate blogs
3. Establish guidelines for workers who identify themselves as company employees while doing personal blogging

Computerworld: Business Weblogs Are Double-Edged

I know I should just let it go, but I can’t.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a screed here in reaction to an opinion piece in DMNews about how useless blogs supposedly are for marketing by direct marketing copy writer Robert Bly. Then, DMNews’s editor, Tad Clarke, followed that up with another commentary about the stink bloggers raised in response to Bly’s column, in which Clarke said Bly found "not one iota of proof" that blogs were "the next big thing in marketing."

Well, I’m not sure who suggested blogs were the "next big thing," but the idea that Bly had since found "not one iota of proof" that they were a good marketing tactic, after I’d given at least one iota if not several to that effect, got me all miffed again. So, I wrote Clarke a letter to the editor with further a piece of my mind. Not only has he not yet published it, but he didn’t even acknowledge receipt of it. So, rather than let a good rant go to waste, I offer it to you, below:

I know that Mr. Bly read my blog post in response to his article (because he emailed one of my friends about it, with his panties all in a twist).

Granted, I was juvenilely sarcastic, but such is the prerogative of bloggers. Nonetheless, I cited more than a dozen examples of companies and individuals making money off of blogs or at least credibly citing their marketing power, from Bill Gates and Jonathan Schwartz (president of Sun Microsystems) down to several one-man brands. What would convince him, I wonder? This is his idea of being open minded? Who exactly has he interviewed on the subject who is credibly an expert?

Bill Gates, founder and chairman of Microsoft; Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun Microsystems; Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman PR; Stephen Jurvetson, managing director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (leading Silicon Valley VC firm); Mary Meeker, senior analysist, Morgan Stanley; Alan Meckler, CEO of Jupitermedia; Charlene Li, principal analyst with Forrester Research; George Soros, billionaire financier and philanthropist; Mark Cuban, billionaire entrepreneur; Seth Godin, best-selling author, marketing guru and former VP of direct marketing at Yahoo!; Jerry Michalski, president of Sociate and former managing editor of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0: all bloggers and/or blog evangelists. All of these folks know less about marketing and the value of a dollar than Robert Bly?

No, blogs are not going to steal huge share of marketing dollars from traditional marketing tactics, but they don’t really need to in order to be effective, as they’re redonkulously cheap to operate. And granted, their best application may not direct marketing (despite a few examples I cite where they are being used effectively for that). I’m not aware that blog evangelists are claiming that’s what they’re best at. But they are good for many purposes in a marketing context, including brand evangelism/thought leadership (akin to Mr. Bly decision to advance himself as an "expert" by writing a column in your publication; "dead tree medium" was a joke he apparently didn’t appreciate), customer support, dynamic content for otherwise static site, Google fodder, and an opportunity to join in a genuine conversation with customers and prospects outside of the intolerable din of marketing garbage we’re all bombarded with every day (dare I say by the likes of Mr. Bly’s customers), which we’ve all been conditioned to ignore or at least treat with great skepticism.

Mr. Bly is presumably one of those died-in-the-wool DMers who sees the world in black and white: direct response good, all other marketing a waste of time. I don’t disparage direct response, but I believe that the way customers buy is a bit more subtle than that. I believe that trust in the integrity of a company is going to becomes ever more important to the bottom line in our media- and marketing-saturated world, which is exactly where blogs can be effective. He may want to stick his head in the sand and ignore the validation that companies like Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Nike, General Motors, Audi and countless other companies large and small have provided for the effectiveness of blogs because he feels personally threatened by them or whatever, but you’re doing a disservice to your readers to let him advance his evidence-free opinions on the subject without taking seriously the proponents of this burgeoning medium.

Direct marketing copywriter Robert Bly argues that blogs are a big waste of time:

Should marketers add blogging to their arsenal of tactics? Will it help sell more products and services? Or is it, as I suspect, a complete waste of time ‚Äî a pure vanity publication that won’t pay you back even one thin dime for your effort?

How quaint. Apparently quite the online marketing expert (his own brochureware site uses frames; hoot!), Bly writes:

I have yet to find a single marketer who says that a business blog has gotten him a positive return on investment. I know plenty of online marketers who make millions of dollars a year from their Web sites and e-zines, for instance. But I’ve not seen a blog whose creator says that the time and effort spent on it has directly put money into his pocket.

Blog ROI. He cracks me up. For starters, this is like arguing religion or politics to try to talk to an die-hard direct marketer about anything one click-through removed from a sale. Why not talk ROI about public relations or public speaking or customer service or brand advertising, for that matter. (No, it isn’t branding that sells Nike (a company that has seen the wisdom to invest in blogs, incidentally), it’s all that great telemarketing, direct mail and email newsletters, I’m sure.)

But I’ll take the bait.

Let’s be pedantic: ROI of course stands for “return on investment.” So, what is the investment in setting up a blog? Hmmm. Using Blogger.com software and Blogspot hosting, the cash investment is a big fat zero, of course, like many other blog softwares, but let’s assume you go all in and buy a multi-seat licence for Movable Type 3.x and you pay for hosting above and beyond your existing web site, plus an over-priced web developer, you’re talking an investment to get set up of $2,000 to maybe $10,000 if you’re a complete idiot and hire the most expensive blog designer on the planet. More likely, if you’re a largish company, you’ll get someone in IT to set it up for nothing in a few hours. Beyond that, the only other “investment” is 10 minutes here, an hour there, as you’re inspired to write. Or, maybe you hire someone, but most bloggers don’t know the value of a dollar and can be had cheap. (I know of what I speak: I run a web site call “Business Blog Consulting.”) Point is, it’s an extremely low-cost medium. Makes running an email newsletter look like an expensive proposition, not to mention a royal pain in the ass.

So, can blogging earn back the “investment” ranging from nothing to a few thousand bucks? Bob writes it “won’t pay you back even one thin dime” and he hasn’t “seen a blog whose creator says that the time and effort spent on it has directly put money into his pocket.” Sounds like his research was exhaustive.

Just to clear the palate, let’s give at least a nod to ad-supported blogs: I know that Rafat Ali, Tig Tillinghast and Steve Hall are making more or less full-time livings off of their business blogs, not to mention Nick Denton, Jason Calacanis and Henry Copeland who are betting on much bigger commerical ad-supported blog plays, so far with every sign of success.

But Bly is talking about marketing, so let’s stick to marketing. How about BizNetTravel, a travel agency (and former client of mine), who credits its blog (more than a year old) with driving a significant amount of business (I was paid regularly for more than a year for my blogging services; I can’t see this small business regularly flushing money down the toilet without seeing a return on that investment). Denton recently bought the rights to a film with an affinity to one of his blogs, as noted in a story in the New Yorker, and his director of business development (yes, he has a director of business development) told me the other day it’s selling like hotcakes. MightyGoods is taking an affiliate marketing spin on a blog; I don’t know details of how her business is doing, but I think it’s a great idea. T-shirtKing.com says its blog is the best direct marketing program it has in its arsenal, out-performing its email newsletter, which was burning out. Keiko Groves is making enough money selling her original clothing through her blog to put herself through college.

But these are all small businesses. Earlier today I noted that Jupiter Research claims that it has tracked several business leads to its blogs. I know something of Jupiter’s prices: one contract would be more than enough to justify all the development costs and hours of its analysts’ time. Or, if that’s not compelling enough, what about Sun Microsystems, whose president and COO, Jonathan Schwartz, writes a blog and told Business Week he “first suspected that his blog was a success when his salespeople began reporting that customers were reading his posts and sealing deals faster.” Not convinced? How about Bill Gates, a man who knows the value of a dollar, raving about how great blogs are. Oh, and let’s not forget Howard Dean who raised millions of dollars though his campaign’s blog and basically revolutionized politics forever in the process.

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. In fact, that’s exactly why I started this blog: to catalog all the evidence of this trend. I have to agree with Steve Hall’s reaction to Bly’s column: he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. One gets the sense he’s only read about blogs in magazines. What else explains why he’s still writing in that archaic dead-tree medium? (Yeah, blogs are a waste of time with no provable ROI, but writing a one-time opinion piece is a magazine, whose web page doesn’t even hyperlink to Bly’s crappy site, is ROI-riffic.)

Oh, and how did I discover Bly’s article in the first place? Through DMNews.com’s email newsletter? Har! Like I need to subscribe to another email newsletter (or that I’d trust my email address to a company with “direct marketing” in their name). No, through a blog — duh.

DMNews: Can Blogging Help Market Your Product?

If you can get past the corny lead without puking, the story suggests that Jupiter Research’s blogs are actually driving real business leads:

The at-times offbeat journals are stirring sales leads from clients who otherwise might not have contacted Jupiter, says David Schatsky, chief of research at JupiterMedia’s Jupiter Research unit.
“One example is tech vendors whose marketers are checking to see if Jupiter mentions their products and what we say about them,” Schatsky said.
The company can’t say just how much business the blogs have generated. But Schatsky says scores of potential clients have contacted Jupiter because of the blogs.

Investor’s Business Daily: Blogs Bring A Boost To Jupiter Research

When it comes to making money off a blog, Columnist Lou Dolinar says it perfectly:

The odds of making a living by writing a blog are a lot like the odds of a garage band turning out a hit album: It can happen, but you better enjoy the music and hang on to your day job in the meantime.

Much attention to Blogads, which he calls a “brilliant idea,” which may be a bit hypish, but I’m all for my buddy Henry’s service.

NY Newsday: Bloggers Adopt a Revenue Stream More Lucrative Than Panhandling

Piece about ad agencies using weblogs (not as ad vehicles but as customer communication tools). Generally skeptical in tone. Includes examples of blogs by Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners’ Influx Consulting, A Fine Kettle of Fish by Bob Cargill of Yellowfin Direct (which is a weak example of a business blog in my book, as the blog doesn’t link to the business site or vice-versa, as far as I can see), Urban Intelligence by Urban Advertising and Richard Edelman’s blog. The story also quotes our own Steve Rubel.

Aside from its stand-offish tone about blogs, I have a few nits, such as "weblog" is one word, damnit, the company’s name is Gawker Media, not Denton Media and why the hell put a story about blogs on your web site without hyperlinks to them? But, whatever.

I’m amused to see Steve Rubel had a link to the story yesterday, though it appeared in the print edition only today. That tells you something about blogs, no?

UPDATE:
Oh yeah, buddy Steve Hall is quoted, too. In fact, he has a little rant about the article on his site.

NYT: Madison Avenue Ponders the Potential of Web Logs

Questions and answers with Gawker Media’s Nick Denton, whom the WSJ calls a blog “impresario,” discussing specifically the advertising opportunities for weblogs. He discusses why Audi’s interested in being the sole sponsor of Gawker’s car new blog Jalopnik, as well as the mistakes Dr. Pepper made with the infamous Raging Cow blog, among other things.

The link to this article is set to expire in seven days (WSJ.com is a paid subscription site, in case you’re new to this planet), so get it while you can.

WSJ: Questions for…Nick Denton

Passes the Bruner sniff test: it must be a good article, because it quotes me.

General examination of some fake blogging efforts by various marketing agencies, with mixed results. One thing it neglects to note about the central blog in the article, Beta-7: this stunt is more than a year old. Also notes the blatant gaffe by Warner Bros. in having someone from PR litter a blog’s comments section with praise for a new MP3 preview of a band Warner Bros. was backing (d’oh!).

It also quotes Jason McCabe Calacanis with his favorite peeve, that a blog isn’t really a blog if it doesn’t have comments turned on (which is just a transparent attempt to differentiate his Weblogs, Inc. publishing empire from his rival Gawker Media, which doesn’t turn on comments on their blog; my response to which is, so InstaPundit and Boing Boing aren’t really blogs?)

Chicago Trib: Fake Blogs, True Buzz