Nice article about business blogging, not least of which because it features a quote for me. Basically it’s business blogging 101, but it has a few decent insights, including close attention to one of my favorite business blogs, Stonyfield Farm’s, as well as this great comment from Sun Microsystems’ director of web technologies, Tim Bray: “[We’ve] become better at hearing what the market is saying” thanks to blogs.

CFO: Blogging for Dollars

More of the usual evangelizism for everyone’s favorite “new” trend.

Globe & Mail: Blogs go big business

The basic 411 on biz blogs. Trying to be cute, the writer uses subheads like blog date entries. She gets the reverse chronology right, but that doesn’t really make sense, because the flow of the story is top to bottom, but were the paragraphs at the bottom of the story really written earlier than the top paragraphs with later dates, the story wouldn’t make any sense. Just a gimmick, I realize, but kinda silly.

Entrepreneur.com: The Bottom Line on Business Blogs

A decent general overview piece about blogging (when is this kind of “What’s a blog?” story going to run it’s course, do you suppose?) that includes several examples of business blogs along with political and other types of blogs. Starts with a short profile of the Air Conditioning Contractors of America’s blog:

“Our members may not be your typical bloggers, but this works for us,” said Kevin W. Holland, the trade group’s vice president of communications and membership.

Deb Weil, who is featured in the article, provides behind-the-scenes elaboration on the story.

Washington Times: What’s all the blog about?

Kind of a ridiculous, over-the-top piece of hype article — the likes of which ultimately doesn’t do a lot of favors for business blogging being taken seriously — that suggests blogs are going to make marketing departments obsolete, confusingly conflates RSS, blogs and social networks and otherwise paints a rather muddled picture of things. For examples:

The question by some is, “Do companies need a full-blown marketing or PR department when the employees themselves and the conversations they have on these blogs are getting the corporate info out more effectively?”

Who exactly is asking that? Crazy McLiealot?

InternetNews: Blogs: The Marketing Killer

If we’re going to go for prescriptive descriptions of what makes a blog a (good) blog, I prefer this one (link in headline) to this one.

Asterisk: A successful blog (or blogger) isÖ

Keiko Groves

Another example of a commerce blog. 19-year-old student Keiko Groves is selling her original clothing line through her LiveJournal weblog where she mixes updates of her funky modified thrift-shop clothing with pictures of her boyfriend and puppy. According to this Orlando Sentinel piece, She makes just about enough to pay for her college tuition and cell-phone bills and the blog has brought her to the attention of more established designers. Steve Rubel calls her the future of marketing, which may be a slight overstatement, but if she’s what the future of marketing looks like, it is a welcome sight (the fact that she serves as her own model for her clothing probably doesn’t hurt, in her case).

Link

Intelliseek, an online market intelligence firm that includes a blog analysis service, is hosting a free webinar on August 25 (times given without time zone context, so call first).

Intelliseek: Marketers Must Understand Blog Behavior

I have no idea what the headline of this story is supposed to mean, but it’s a decent piece on the PR power of blogs.

Guardian: The Blog Busters

Another good example of a non-profit blog, Earth Share of Washington is an information hub for 65 member environmental education and charitable organizations in Washington State.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has a profile of the organization’s blog and how it has helped it drive a lot more traffic and attention to the web site’s other resources.

Link

Must they? No, not necessarily. But it’s porbably not a bad idea.

Email Universe: Must Email List Publishers Blog?

The story is slightly confused about things, but it quotes me (albeit briefly), so I’ll be nice and just note it and move on.

San Antonio Express-News: Companies get on blog bandwagon

The article starts out well, focusing on the blog of Jonathan Schwartz, president of Sun Microsystems:

Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer of server maker Sun Microsystems (SUNW ), first suspected that his blog was a success when his salespeople began reporting that customers were reading his posts and sealing deals faster. Then, the blog started getting a surge of traffic from users with e-mail addresses ending in “ibm.com” and “dell.com” — folks who work for Sun’s rivals….
Some six weeks later, he’s a firm believer that a blog — which generally consists of diary-like entries that are posted to the Web — is a must-have tool for every executive. “It’ll be no more mandatory that they have blogs than that they have a phone and an e-mail account,” Schwartz says. “If they don’t, they’re going to look foolish.”

Then, this:

In fact, these blogs, which now account for a handful of the estimated 20,000 blogs on the Web, could eventually grab a lion’s share of the Internet audience, says Chris Charron, an analyst with tech consultancy Forrester Research in Boston.

Forrester thinks there are only 20,000 blogs? Uh…Technorati monitors more than three million of them, hello? (Top left corner of the site.) Whatever. It’s otherwise quite a good article on the subject.

Business Week: Blogging for Business

As Olivier put it, “Yawner from Reuters.” That about sums it up.

Reuters: Blogging and Business Moving Mainstream

More optimism about blog advertising. My concern with this angle, which I’ve expressed to BlogAds CEO Henry Copeland before (who’s quoted in the story) is the current over-reliance among blogs on political advertising at the moment. Sure, pick the low-hanging fruit while you can, I suppose, but let’s not create the impression among advertisers that political ads are all blogs are good for. Otherwise, come November, and that’s it for another four years.

Mediapost: Convention Coverage Could Boost Blog Traffic, Ad Rates, and Awareness

Various coverage about BlogOn conference, mostly highlighting the experiences of everyone’s favorite blogging business, Microsoft.

• CNET News: Blog’s the Word in Big Business
• Wired: The Empire Blogs Back
• Various blog posts via Daypop

VAR Business points out in this piece that blogs have done something quite remarkable for Microsoft: made it cool.

VAR Business: The Ogre’s New Voice: Can Blogs Save Microsoft’s Image?

Slowly but surely, the PR industry is starting to take blogs seriously. This long article, published originally in The Holmes Report, a newsletter for the PR industry, is reproduced on Steve Rubel’s site (a guy who does get it), Micro Persuasion. While the points made in the article are generally the right ones about how blogs really are something important for businesses to pay attention to, I can’t help but observing that The Holmes Report’s own “weblog” hasn’t been updated for almost two years.

Link

An anonymous blogger (as far as I can tell) at SciFiHiFi.com, who is apparently an Apple employee, makes a case against business blogging. His (? her?) jumping off point is a recent post by PR specialist and blog evangelist Steve Rubel titled “Why Apple Employees Will Blog in Revolt”. While Rubel suggests Apple should be blogging, as I also did recently, SciFiHiFi guy disagrees, suggesting that not blogging is part of Apple’s “Think Different” mystique.

Obviosly, I don’t agree, but the post is worth reading, if just for the contrarian argument. One point he/she makes is “I personally think that every official corporate weblog I‚Äôve ever seen (from Microsoft‚Äôs Channel 9 to the Google Blog) has come across as rather contrived and trendy.” True, that’s a danger of some blogs (though I happen to like Channel 9, even if I don’t often read it; Google Blog, on the other hand, is certainly a disappointment), but he/she conveniently overlooks some much better business blogs, most notably in the context of Microsoft being Robert Scoble’s, which is widely read and respected.

Anyway, SciFiHiFi’s implication is that there is a danger for a company like Apple, the success of which relies in large part these days on underpromising and over-delivering (according to its fan base, anyway), is that a blog would reveal too much. I never get this argument against business blogs. You trust employees to grant interviews to the NY Times and the WSJ and not to reveal too much in the face of touch questions from seasoned jouranlists, don’t you? Why then should some trusted employee not be able to keep their mouth shut about company secrets on a weblog? The blog could be about any number of things other than company secrets and new feature previews, such as a showcase of “Made on a Mac” projects around the web, or whatever.

Also, SciFiHiFi makes the case that corporations are not people and they shouldn’t try to sound like people, hence business blogs sound artifcial. But the whole point of a good company blog, like Scoble’s, is it’s clearly written by a person with an individual point of view, thereby humanizing the company, as we all know that companies are made up of individuals. Given that Apple all but invented the job title of “evangelist,” I think it’s conspicuous that they don’t have a blog. “Think Different” is fine when it makes strategic sense, but don’t go against the flow just for brand consistency even when it’s not the right thing to do.

(But don’t get me started on Apple; I’m a former Apple die hard who was eventually dragged onto the PC by an old job, and no amount of trend ads will ever get me to switch back to Mac. But that’s another story.)

Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Redmond Blogs, Cupertino Codes

The question keeps getting asked. Nothing in this answer strikes me as particularly insightful, but I’m glad to see the issue is getting fleshed out more in the popular and industry press. This article is part of IW’s SmartAdvice series from consulting firm The Advisory Council, which, I can’t help but to observe, does not appear to have a blog of its own.

Thanks to Olivier Travers for the link.

InformationWeek: Are Blogs The Next Internet Marketing Phenomenon?