Over at ClickZ Kate Kaye presents the findings of a recent survey conducted by the Blogads Network that distinguishes blog audiences into four categories: political, gossip, mom and music.

CEO Henry Copeland points out that some political and entertainment advertisers grasp the idea of targeting specific types of blogs based on the unique audiences they reach, many advertisers “don’t get the degree to which these are self-contained universes…This is not a basket of eyeballs; these are very interwoven communities.”

The study also showed that hardly anyone from the four groups listens to podcasts:

“62 percent of music blog readers, 75 percent of political blog readers, 77 percent of mom blog readers and 80 percent of gossip blog readers said they never listen to podcasts.”

Along the lines of advertising, eMarketer reports a study by PQ Media that Blog, Podcast and RSS advertising rose by nearly 200% in 2005 and is expected to grow another 145% in 2006 to reach nearly $50 million.

“Blog, podcast and RSS advertising are being driven by some of the same factors boosting the growth of the overall alternative media sector: continued audience fragmentation, the perceived ineffectiveness of traditional advertising, and the elusive but coveted 18-to-34-year-old demographic,” said Patrick Quinn, president of PQ Media. “[They] have demonstrated an ability to reach younger demographics as well as influentials.”

And then there was this interesting quote about podcasting:

Looking ahead, PQ Media estimates that podcast advertising will be a larger market than blog advertising by 2010, when the blog segment will comprise only 39.7%, or $300.4 million, of overall expenditures. Podcasting, projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 154.4%, is predicted to reach a total of $327.0 million in 2010. These numbers are closely in line with eMarketer’s own projections, which recently put total spending on podcast advertising at a total of $300 million by 2010.

Perhaps Blogads CEO Henry Copeland and PQ Media President Patrick Quinn should get together and compare notes?

UPDATE: The answer appears to be yes! Several hours after I wrote the entry below, Jonathan posted When I First Met Scott… A nice story about meeting retiring CEO Scott McNealy for the first time in 1992 or ’93. Followed by a riff on Sun’s mantra, “The network is the computer.” Go Jonathan! Hope you can keep it up.

…

Darn, it doesn’t look like it so far. Following yesterday’s news that Sun’s founding CEO, Scott McNealy, is stepping down – to be replaced by COO Jonathan Schwartz – I skipped over to Jonathan’s blog at blogs.sun.com/jonathan.

As of this morning, the latest entry is a week old, dated April 18, 2006, and talks about meeting Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva – and how cool that is.

I fact, Jonathan links back to a blog post he made on June 16, 2005 where he notes that “it’s cool to sit with a head of state, or a head of a corporation, or a CIO with an IT department bigger than Sun’s entire employee base.”

I quote that entry in The Corporate Blogging Book. It struck me as guilelessly transparent and a reason we love to read senior exec blogs – to find out what they’re really thinking.

So Jonathan… are you going to give up blogging? Do tell!

UPDATE: I emailed Noel Hartzell, Jonathan’s chief communications guy, to ask what was up with Jonathan’s blog. He just emailed back, writing:

stay tuned… 😉

So maybe Jonathan’s will be the first blog by a Fortune 500 CEO?

This is the first I have ever heard of a blog being suspended.  Last week, the editors at the L.A. Times suspended Michael Hiltzik’s Golden State Blog for essentially putting comments on his on blog under a false name, in this instance "Mikekoshi".  Hiltzik was in essence adding to the blog conversations under a different identity seemingly backing up Hiltzik’s opinions and mocking other commenters.  The story was broken by a blogger at Patterico’s Pontifications.

This does not surprise me in the least that someone would comment under a pseudonym, in fact, my own personal blog identity is named "Genuine", and I frequently comment on personal blogs with that name.  In all my other blogs, I use my full name as I do here. 

How does this practice effect blogging and business?  Many of the corporate blogs we talk about here are written by CEO’s, company employees and C level officers within each of the companies.  What would happen if these bloggers also added to the comment sections of their blogs, bolstering their own opinions and seemingly inflating the traffic and comments on their sites, or berating other commenters to their own benefit?  I for one would think that if it was uncovered that a CEO entertained this practice that person would be tarred and feathered and would lose any credibility the blog might be producing. The conversations produced by blogs must remain an open forum, and they must have credibility in order to withstand the onslaught of criticism a company might endure.  This practice could make it very difficult for a PR person to repair something that has been done behind closed doors in the company.

The L.A. Times in the case of Mr. Hiltzik must have thought the same.  They have not reinstated his Golden State Blog, yet he has not been suspended himself.   The outcome of this case will help guide our future commenting practices in business blogs .  Is this going on in today’s business blogging?  I for one certainly hope not, but it could be argued that comments on business blogs that cheer on the company or back up its product or message could be just someone within the company.  Good PR for the company right up and until it is uncovered.  Then suddenly you have a PR nightmare.

Tags: L.A. Times, Golden State Blog, Michael Hiltzik, Patterico’s Pontifications

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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.

It is easier to build a relationship with your reader and engage with them if your blog is sticky. A sticky web site compels visitors to come back again and again, and to stay longer too. My blog is reasonably sticky because the author is so good and has such insightful things to say. 😉

But in all seriousness though, there are things you can do to engage your readers more effectively. For instance, you can form a community where they all talk to each other. Most blogs, unfortunately, are abysmal at that. Even my blog really doesn’t do a very good job of bringing readers together and involving them in a group discussion. It’s entirely too easy to be up on one’s soapbox, to start a conversation and also finish it.

Here are some practical suggestions for making your blog sticky, courtesy of Performancing:

1. Design for repeat visits
2. Keep advertising minimal for repeats
3. Provide a recent posts list
4. Answer your comments
5. Use the right language
6. Post frequently
7. Have a private message system
8. Allow member posts
9. Include members in decisions
10. Don’t neglect the distributed community

This week in Boston the Pubcon conference kicked off with the Boston Marathon and a keynote from Malcolm Gladwell. The conference covered a lot of ground including a session on blogs, podcasting and RSS.

On Tuesday, the “Blogging, Pod Casting and RSS Feeds” session included Dr. Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit, Daron Babin of New Gen Media, Brian Prince of BOTW as well as Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo and Matt Cutts of Google for the Q and A.

The mechanics of blogging and marketing blogs included alternative uses for RSS, blog and feed optimization, plugins, promotion and blog metrics. Babin discussed the pros and cons of podcasting with practical insight based his experience with the explosive growth of WebmasterRadio.FM.

The Q and A brought up the blurring line between what is a blog and what is a web site with the search engine reps defending their performance at indexing blogs. There was also a good question about whether to convert a whole site to a blog platform or to just add a blog to the existing site. Jeremey Zawodny’s response was to pick the right tool for the job based on your needs whether it’s forum software or blog or a content management system.

Here’s more detailed coverage of the Blogs, RSS and Podcasts session.

This question will be looked at by the California Court Appeals this week, after bloggers leaked a story about an Apple Computer product called "Asteroid", reports Wendy Davis at MediaPost. 

Companies are constantly asking what blogs mean legally to their company, and as Court cases begin to address this new media we in the blogging business are looking closely at these cases and the rulings following arguments for an against the use of blogs.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation  a nonprofit company follows cases involving blogging and other online issues.  It is a good source for you to review for issues related to blogging and the current legal cases.  If you are doing research into what cases are being argued and how it might affect your business blogging I suggest this site is a good place to start.

Tags: Electronic Frontier Foundation, Law and Blogs, Apple Computer, O’Grady v. Superior Court, Apple v. Does

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This just in… we’ve learned about a free teleconference tomorrow, hosted by WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association). Here are the details:

Wednesday April 19, 2006 at noon ET
Dial into a free teleconference on WOM Ethics (“A Practical Guide to Doing it Right”). Call 512-225-3050 and enter passcode 772541#.

WOMMA’s teleconferences are usually paid events so this sounds kinda interesting. It coincides with WOMMA’s announcement that DuPont has adopted WOMMA’s code of ethics for word-of-mouth marketing.

And the significance is that there’s been a good bit of discussion on the ethics of word-of-mouth marketing campaigns where the sneezers (to use Seth Godin’s expression) are offered some kind of incentive for spreading the word. It’s an interesting debate — there’s often a gray area — and I’ll be interested to hear how the WOMMA folks frame it up.

I devote a whole chapter to confronting fear of blogging in The Corporate Blogging Book. Anil Dash makes quick work of the topic with several salient points:

• Blogs are an established technology
• Blogs work with other technology, including email and your website
• A blog can be used anywhere that tools like email and IM are: Inside or outside the company, in one location or around the world.
• There [are] no set rules about how to have a blog. You can start small, with a lot of control over content and community, and expand over time — don’t jump in with both feet if you’re not ready.

His comments are directed at what he calls “normal business people.” Which is an important distinction. Those who read this blog and others that cover the topic of “corporate blogging” may already be convinced that blogs are a new must-use communications channel. But there are lots of folks just beginning to think about this.

Over at TechCrunch there’s a good review on several of the major online feed readers written up by Frank Gruber of Somewhat Frank. The post covers: Attensa Online, Bloglines, FeedLounge, Google Reader, Gritwire, News Alloy, NewsGator Online, Pluck Web Edition, Rojo. My Yahoo, Live.com, Google IG and Netvibes were omitted as “virtual desktop applications” and not “heavy duty” RSS readers.

When checking Feedburner stats for one of my own blogs, I was interested to see that the top feed readers in the past 24 hours were: Bloglines, NewsGator Online, Rojo, Firefox Live Bookmarks, BlogBridge, Pluck, RssReader, Google Desktop, Opera RSS Reader and NetNewsWire. There were 50 overall, although I don’t know how many Feedburner will display at any one time.

The RSS reader reviews at TechCrunch were based on criteria in each of the following categories: user interface, feed set-up and discovery, support, mobile access and performance. What are the results? Here’s Frank’s summary:

If you are looking purely for performance, Google Reader and FeedLounge are the fastest in our tests. Bloglines and Rojo are the best choice if you are looking for a feature rich application (and Rojo blows Bloglines away on “web 2.0″ type features).

None, however, yet approach the speed and agility of the best desktop based readers like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

What I think was missing was the Sage plugin for Firefox. I’ve been using Sage for over a year now and it is by far my favorite way to track 200 plus search marketing feed subscriptions. Granted, it does not have all the features of the some of the desktop RSS readers, but that part of why I like it. What’s your favorite RSS Reader?
Update: Shortly after posting this, I received an email from Dave Taylor of Intuitive Life on his dissatisfaction with RSS and in particular, RSS readers. He makes some very good points.  For another view on RSS readers, check out Dave’s RSS reader rant.

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.

For those watching the world of blog publishing ventures, the latest one to watch launched this week, DealBreaker.com. This is first in what promises to be a series of blog sites, a la Gawker Media. And speaking of Gawker, what’s most exciting about DealBreaker, an invective gossip blog about Wall St. and high finance, is that it heralds the return to the blogosphere (in a real way) of the first true It Girl of blogging, Elizabeth Spiers, Gawker.com’s original editor.

The new blog’s introductory post promises:

[H]ere’s what you will find: posts about the precise size of the guitar collection on Paul Allen’s yacht spaceship, posts about the disparity between what Aswath Damodaran thinks is the dark side of valuation and what we think is the dark side of valuation (hint: high-quality cocaine), banker body counts (thank you, John Mack), interviews with people about how much money they make and whether they sometimes buy things just so they can throw them away, sightings of Eliot Spitzer, pitchbook origami, fun with league tables, and so on. And occasionally we’ll break news or do something that’s otherwise useful. Which will be entirely an accident. We apologize in advance.

Just out of beta, the site already appears to have legit ads from the likes of Universal Studios, CFO.com and others.

During her run as editor of Gawker, it would be fair to say that Spiers was overexposed as a media darling postergirl for blog hype. But it was all well deserved, as her genius for short-form snark remains virtually unmatched in the blogosphere before or since. (Full disclosure: she and I are good friends, and I’m secretly in love with her. Oops, too much disclosure…)

After Gawker, she went on to join the staff of New York Magazine, writing for the print magazine and its short-lived blog The Kicker. From there, she ran the editorial department of the journalism resources site MediaBisto for a year or so, including launching a suite of media-watching blogs there. Both jobs honed her journalism and management chops, I’m sure, but they didn’t showcase her preternatural blogging talents to their fullest. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that DealBreaker matches the brilliance of her original (and my favorite) blog, Capital Influx, which, like DealBreaker, obsessed a lot on Wall Street misdeeds (as well as Christopher Hitches, Jonathan Franzen and some other pet interests). Or at least I hope it gives Gawker a run for its money in the industry-niche gossip rags sector.

Investment partners with Spiers in the new ventures (which has a yet-to-be-announced publishing company name) are Justin Smith, president of The Week Magazine, and Carter Burden, CEO of web hosting company Logicworks. Spiers is also at work on a novel And They All Die in the End, a satire about the world of Wall Street, to be published by Riverhead (Penguin) in 2007.

When I started riding motor bikes some years ago, for commuting and occasional touring, I was made aware by other riders that Ducati owners were a special breed of enthusiasts. And the machines themselves were clearly serious racing bikes, which I usually saw disappearing very quickly out in front of wherever I was.

I don’t know how many Ducati owners are blogging just now, but my hunch is that the number is about to rise with the news that Federico Minoli, the corporate turnaround man who took the reins at the Italian company some nine years ago, is one of the newest CEO bloggers on the block. Two weeks ago, Minoli and his company launched Desmoblog. The company announced at the time that the blog would tell what is happening at Ducati and in the world of its fans, as well as decisions about new products, Ducati events, business strategies, ‘behind the scenes’ news from the race track and more.

In his welcome to the blog, Minoli says:

This new space online gives me a new way to communicate with colleagues, fans and bikers about my life, my experience with Ducati, the company, the motorcycles and of course Ducati Corse (link added).

The blog and the company website design are seamlessly integrated, and the Desmoblog is bi-lingual, in English as well as Italian.

The announcement of the blog on the Ducati website presents the blog as providing for a dialogue directly between blogger and readers and offers the opportunity of sharing ‘the fever for Ducati’, receiving frank comments from fans and replying directly.

Podcasts are also foreshadowed.

The many comments on the Desmoblog site in just two weeks, some in English, some in Italian, suggest that the ‘Ducatisti’ tribe has taken up the challenge with gusto, as for example in the comments on Minoli’s After the race March 11 post from Daytona. 

Summary: WordPress.com offers free, instant blogging but lacks the full features of the WordPress platform.

A lot of clients are asking me about WordPress and how it stacks up to other blogging platforms like Blogger or Typepad. Only problem is: There are two types of WordPress: WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

If you go to WordPress.org you’ll see the site for the WordPress blogging platform. WordPress is an open source software project. Open source software is developed by a global community of programmers – anyone can contribute to an open source software project.  Further, open source software is free to download, free to install and free to tweak as you see fit (there’s a lot more to open source than that, though). WordPress.org is for information about software – the blogging platform called WordPress.

WordPress.com is a hosted version of the WordPress platform. WordPress.com, like Blogger, offers anybody not just the software to manage their blog, but also the server space to host it. WordPress.com uses a slightly scaled down version of the WordPress platform – a version called WordPress MU, intended for multi-user sites with up to thousands of blogs. WordPress.com is intended to give interested bloggers a place to get started, the software to blog, the space to host and a flavor for the full-scale WordPress software that they could install on their own servers if they so choose.

WordPress.com is an instant solution much like Blogger. There’s no installation and no fees to pay – you simply sign up and start blogging. But WordPress.com lacks the full features of a blogging platform that you’ve had installed on your own server for full control over the functionality and look and feel of your blog. Plus, WordPress.com does not offer domain mapping yet so your WordPress.com blog’s URL is always going to look like something.wordpress.com.

WordPress.org is where you go to download the full-scale WordPress blogging platform that you install on your own web server for full control and functionality. To complicate things further, many webhosts offer 1-Click Install of WordPress so you don’t have to go through too much geeky rigamarole.

In retrospect perhaps they should have called WordPress.com WordPress Lite to help differentiate it. It can be a bit confusing. Usually folks call WordPress.org simply WordPress and then differentiate when they are referring to WordPress.com.

Using blogs for public relations is new territory for most traditional PR practitioners. I recently engaged in a Q/A about blogs and RSS with a PR agency specialist that I thought would be interesting to post here. If you’ve been in the business of blogging for any length of time, you’ll see how telling the questions are as to the perception of RSS/blogs and how much room there is for clarification and education.

What are the most popular news feeds to subscribe to?

The beauty of RSS is that there are so many niche, quality sources. However, the most popular feeds overall may not be the best for any one individual. In other words, it depends on the interests of the user. In terms of overall popularity, here are several lists of popular blogs/feeds:

• http://top500.feedster.com/
• http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs/
• http://bloglines.com/toplinks
  

You can also find feeds using one of the many blog search engines such as: Technorati, Google Blog Search, Feedster or Gada.be.

If a journalist is using an aggregator, which news feeds does it draw from?

Most feed aggregators offer pre-selected feeds to general news sources, but you can add feeds directly from blogs of interest. When you visit a blog, there are often subscription buttons for the various feed readers and aggregators. Clicking on one will subscribe you to that feed. You can also subscribe to feeds from other sources such as search results from Yahoo News, MSN search results or social bookmark sites like del.icio.us.

How can a PR firm submit news to RSS feeds?

When an entry is made to a blog, it automatically places that information to a web page and also as a post to a corresponding RSS feed. It’s possible to create a feed manually using software if a blog is not desired.

Other opportunities to get your news out via RSS include making sure your blog software is configured so that each time a post is made, a “ping� is sent out the the major blog and RSS search engines to notify them you’ve made an update.

If a blogger picks up your release then it will be included in the RSS feed of that blog and all of it’s subscribers. You can also promote a blog through the major blog directories.

Wire services such as PRWeb will automatically offer a form of your press release as part of an RSS feed which can be pinged to RSS search engines.

If your press releases are archived and managed with a blog, then readers (including journalists) can subscribe to the corresponding RSS feed. Increasingly, journalists are prone to pulling news ideas and sources in, rather than relying on the deluge of press releases being pushed to them via email. Making sure the press release RSS feed is added to the main company site in an auto discovery tag enables visitors using a RSS-friendly browser to subscribe without having to navigate to that part of the site with their browser.

Is there any way to find out which news feeds journalists are using (without asking them)?

Sort of. You can gain some insight by visiting journalists blogs and seeing who is listed in their blogroll – which is a list of links to other blogs that they like.

Also, you can see if they have a del.icio.us account. If you could see the sites a journalist has bookmarked it may gain some insight into what’s interesting to them. That’s what viewing their del.icio.us account could do,- if they have one. Here is a screencast by prominent tech journalist, Jon Udell explaining how he uses del.icio.us to track memes and find information for stories. Very insightful for blogger PR.

Tools such as similicious, Alexa and TouchGraph Google Browser are useful for finding similar or related blogs and may prove useful for discovering journalist blogs that focus on particular industries or related topics.

Another useful feature of RSS is to monitor search results as a feed based on a keyword query. If you want to monitor a certain Journalist, publication or topic, you can perform the corresponding keyword query at a Yahoo, Yahoo News, Google News, Google Blog Search, BlogPulse and others and subscribe to the search results in your Feed Reader/Aggregator – sort of like Google Alerts on steriods.

BlogPulse and PubSub offer excellent blog tracking tools and Aaron Wall has an excellent blog post listing trending and tracking tools for the blogosphere and newsosphere.

There’s a lot more to blogger PR than these few questions and answers. But they do provide some insight into what PR firms are thinking and hopefully a few useful tools.

Have you ever had problems explaining an abstract concept to someone in your business or personal life?

Perhaps you were attempting to sell an intangible product or explaining a technique for achieving a personal goal. To your dismay, the person receiving the information was just not getting the point somehow. The explanation you provided made no sense to them.

Enter the analogy.

You have heard of analogies, right? They are a way of comparing an unfamiliar abstract idea with an already known mental image. It’s like painting a picture in the listener’s mind. That’s of course an analogy too, as you may have guessed. I happen to like making analogies; and for more reasons than just explanations.

Analogies are very important in sales and marketing situations. The item or service being offered to the prospect may not fit into their existing knowledge base. The product or service might be entirely new to them. As such, the prospect needs a familiar frame of reference, from which to make the final buying decision.

Let’s take a real life situation.

This morning, I was discussing SEO with a client who was somewhat new to search engines and search engine optimization. Instead of discussing abstract and completely unfamiliar terms such as title tags, keyword phrases, and alt attributes, to name only a few, I used an analogy.

I described SEO as moving furniture into an empty house. The vacant home represented the website as it exists now. Unloaded into the house is the moving van full of furniture and other household items. As with moving house, the heavy lifting has to be completed before you can do anything else. Once the furniture is in the new premises, then curtains, fancy bedspreads, and fine china and silverware can be added. The initial placement is good, but you think that you can make the home even nicer with some changes.

Of course, after examining the results, it’s decided that the sofa would be better suited to another wall, and the kitchen table would be best on the other side of the room. After a number of changes in layout and additions, the final result is much better than before. So too with SEO. As with setting up your home in the best possible manner, SEO takes some experimentation and testing as well.

Sales and marketing aren’t the only way that analogies can be used to aid your business success. Making connections, between seemingly unrelated things, helps to find creative solutions to everyday and long term business problems as well.

What the utilization of analogies and comparisons does is to change the frame of reference and to force thinking in new and interesting ways. If a person is only thinking of the problem in its own terms, the number of possible solutions is very limited. By making analogies, and forced comparisons, the opportunities for new and creative solutions is multiplied many times over.

Use some analogies in your business and everyday life. Not only will your potential and current customers and clients understand your products and services better, so will you. By making comparisons and connections between your business and another known framework, the possibilities for creative thought and ideas increase exponentially.

Let an analogy go to work for you and your business today.

Analysis firm Cymphony and PR agency Porter Novelli have partnered to conduct research into how companies are executing their corporate blog strategy with a research survey called Corporate Blog – Best Practice. If you’re involved with business or corporate blogging, this survey is for you.

Jim Nail of Cymphony emailed me the details:

“The survey is delving into some of the unglamorous but important questions around corporate blogging: who actually manages the blog? Who actually writes the posts? How often? What tools do they use to monitor blogs? How often? There’s lots of talk about the reasons why companies should have blogs and what types of information they should include, but I haven’t seen anything about these practical day-to-day implementation issues that companies need to work out to effectively manage this channel.”

After you take the survey, you have the option of providing contact information to receive a executive summary of the findings and an invitation to a webinar where the full report will be provided.

After getting Jim’s email, I recalled the Blogger Survey conducted by Technorati and Edelman last year that provided some interesting insights focusing on how bloggers interact with companies and PR firms. The Corporate Blog – Best Practice survey focuses more on how businesses use blogs and it will be interesting to compare the results with previous research.

If the name Jim Nail is familiar, I mentioned him in an earlier post on blog buzz from a panel at the New York Search Engine Strategies conference. Jim was at Forrester for 8 years prior to joining Cymphony.

With the growing number of businesses launching blogs, there’s a huge opportunity in the blog metrics and analytics space. Many blogs use free programs with limited functionality and some use the same stats programs as for a regular web site such as Google Analytics.

There is a distinction to be made though, since the measurable outcomes for a content publisher, particularly a blog, are different than for an ecommerce site. Therefore Google Analytics and many other stats programs are not the best fit for blog metrics.

What options for blog focused analytics are out there?

blogbeat is a fairly new hosted blog stats program that caters specifically to the needs of blog content publishers. It plays well with FeedBurner and offers tabs of information separated by: Posts, Visitors, Referrers, Searches and Links. There’s a free trial period and then a small monthly fee.

Google recently purchased Measure Map which also pays more attention to blog-centric information, but they are not adding any new accounts at the moment. I have not been able to try it myself, however Solution Watch offers a rundown and screen shots of Measure Map.

Performancing Metrics stands out as a measurement tool meant for blogs. To get an idea of the features offered, see the post by Ahmed Bilal who reviews Performancing Metrics or the breakdown by Darren Rowse who also includes screen shots.

Performancing Metrics offers ad tracking, real-time blog stats, the ability to track mutiple blogs with one user account, RSS 2.0 feeds of your stats (how cool is that) as well as many other features.

I did a short interview yesterday with the Nick Wilson, co-founder of Performancing where he clarifies the Performancing mission as well as where their blog metrics offering fits within the services being developed for pro bloggers.

Performancing Metrics public beta launched today and is now taking on free accounts.

With some of the recent attention towards blog relations, there’s no question that buzz marketing through blogs and similar consumer generated media is on the rise. Blogs are many things including marketing tools for business and also voices to be heard – consumer voices that provide insight into a marketplace. Availability and ease of communications along with creative tools make consumer generated media (CGM) a force to be reckoned with.

Recently Al Gore’s Current TV announced that they are looking for consumers to create commercials for its commercial sponsors (AdJab). I think you’ll see more of that as marketers and consumers embrace the medium.

At the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York last week, Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ moderated a session including Dave Balter from BzzAgent, Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen BuzzMetrics (Intelliseek) and Jim Nail of Cymfony who presented on creating and measuring buzz using blogs and word of mouth (WOM).

Some interesting stats and insights from the session:

• According to a study by McKinsey, two thirds of the U.S. economy is influenced by word of mouth.
• 50% of negative WOM happens because of a feeling of injustice on behalf on the value of the brand.
• Blogs are indexed at a faster rate and will enter search results more quickly. Brands have an oppotunity to leverage this to acquire more “shelf space” in the search results.
• Just because journalists are not writing about an issue or event, doesn’t mean it’s not being talked about.

Overall it was an excellent session. Here are notes on the entire session on CGM and Blog Buzz.

The New York Times reports on efforts by Wal-Mart and its PR firm, Edelman to influence public opinion by providing information to bloggers. Nothing wrong with that, but apparently a number of the bloggers picking up on the information are posting it word for word and not citing the source.

Pitching blogs is picking up steam as a public relations activity by companies big and small. Wal-Mart’s Mona Williams is quoted on MediaBuyerPlanner.com: “As more and more Americans go to the internet to get information from varied, credible, trusted sources, Wal-Mart is committed to participating in that online conversation.”

While the issue getting attention stems from the way in which bloggers are posting the news and information, it’s Wal-Mart and Edelman that are left to deal with all the less-than-desired blog buzz that will result.

This is just another lesson for corporate PR on the right and wrong way to implement blog public relations and WOM marketing.