After my well-received Business Blogging 101 workshop at the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco last week, my strong exhortation to the audience that PR is Dead was the buzz of the Summit. Even publications like the San Jose Mercury News and InfoWorld were talking about it, even though I’m certainly not the first to propose that the traditional job of public relations has been supplanted by the blogosphere.

The most interesting discussion I had on the topic, however, was with Doug Free, Group PR Manager for Microsoft and Lynann Bradbury, Senior VP of Microsoft’s PR agency Waggener Edstrom. To set the scene, Lynann greeted me with “Hi. I’m not dead yet!”

But as we talked about the impact of blogging and, more generally, findability and the online world on traditional public relations, something became very, very clear…

What we agreed upon is that there are two types of public relations firms and that any informed public debate about the impact of the blogosphere and Internet on the profession of public relations must take these into account.

Large companies like Waggener Edstrom offer companies counsel on how to present themselves and their message to the public and their market segment. They are truly focused on, quite literally, public relations. But they’re in the minority.

I contend that there are in fact a significant number of so-called PR Agencies who believe – and their clients believe too – that PR stands for…

Bob Wyman, CTO of PubSub, is trying to explain to the audience what the point is of blog search tools like PubSub, BlogPulse and Technorati. I like the way he puts it: “For the first time you have an open, trackable conversation.” In other words the babble of the blogosphere can be analyzed. If you (a company) listen carefully, you will learn what people are talking about, what they’re interested in and what they want to hear about. And then YOU will know what to write about, rather than issuing a press release once a month because you think you should.

Interesting… but I fear there’s too much inside baseball talk this morning. If I were an attendee just getting on the blogging boat, I’d be a bit lost already. Hope the panels coming up are more mindful of those who don’t consume Jeff Jarvis with their morning coffee.

Bob Parsons, CEO of bargain domain registrar GoDaddy, has been blogging for a few months. In this post, he tells his company’s side of the story for why the NFL and Fox chickened out at the last minute from airing the second of its racy ads during the Super Bowl.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

ClickZ: MWW Debuts Blog Marketing Practice

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

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

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?

SiliconValley.com’s star blogger Dan Gillmor has an interesting post here on an email he got from a PR “professional” promoting a service to “Manage and Monitor Digital Influencers.” Dan points out, rightly, that one doesn’t “manage” bloggers, one engages with them. A commenter calling himself “Flackboy Kevin” defends the PR guy and goes on to further slag bloggers. A long debate in the comments ensues. Via Adrants, where Steve Hall also comments on the subject.

UDPATE:
Åsk Wappling at Adland and Tig Tillinghast at MarketingVox also weigh in.

Dan Gillmor: Fear of Bloggers in Business and Journalism

Engadget’s Phillip Torrone Hacks
the Evolution 2000 in seconds

This is so incredible. You had better believe that Kryptonite, makers of the most popular bicycle locks in the United States, will know what blogs are from this week forward. I believe the story was actually broken last weekend on a web-based discussion board, BikeForums.com, where a user observed that using a 10-cent Bic ballpoint pen you could easily pick a $100 Kryptonite lock. A variety of Kryptonite products seem vulnerable to this. The above link (see headline) is to a video of how to do it, in case you had any doubts. (Other videos here and here.) I just heard the story also on National Public Radio, and it also ran today in the NY Times, and it’s basically breaking out all over the place.

NYT photo

Incredibly, Kryptonite’s site (which is loading veeerrrry slooooowly today) still has nothing about this issue, a week after the story broke, despite the homepage ironically proclaiming “This is the place to get the most information about our products, our dealer locations, our company and more.” The most recent news on the homepage is about their having moved office locations in June 2002. (I see that they did provide a response to Engadget, and it’s less than encouraging that they’re on top of the crisis, or unclear that they even view it as a crisis.)

This is simply going to devistate Kryptonite. Too bad, I’ve always been a fan. Of course, this isn’t principally a communication problem; it’s a product problem. The only thing I could think that might save their business at this point would be a massive recall/refund for every customer with a U-lock. But this is also a communication problem. As a customer (I have four of their locks), I would really like to know whether this problem affect their other products, or whether it is limited to that Evolution 2000. But their communication on this sucks. The story broke online, yet there is nothing about it on their web site. They could really, really use a blog to try to contain the damage ASAP. But looking at their actions so far, I am not optimistic. For myself, I will probably go out and buy another brand this weekend, as I’m not going to risk losing my bike while they try to get their PR act together. (I’m certainly not going to bother trying to call them and wait on hold for 2 days with the volume of calls they must be getting now.)

As Phillip Torrone writes in his Engadget follow-up post:

We’ve spent over $100 on these types of locks for our bicycles, and hearing “the world just got tougher and so did our locks,” kinda got us a little miffed. The world didnít get tougher, it got Bic pens, blogs and your locks got opened.

Sad.

Engadget: Kryptonite Evolution 2000 U- Lock hacked by a Bic Pen

A week after her blogosphere-bombshell “Shitcanned” post where TroutGirl (aka Joyce Park) wrote of getting fired from Friendster for blogging, she tells her side of the story to Red Herring. I still haven’t heard Friendster’s side of the story. Have they told it somewhere that I’ve overlooked?

Thanks to Olivier for the link.

Red Herring: No Friendster of Mine

Very interesting interview on last night’s Marketplace radio program from American Public Media, an interview with futurist Andrew Zolli of Z + Partners. Zolli talks about the impact of blogs, social networks, peer-to-peer behavior and other online trends as creating a “numerical social cartography” that is having a big impact on marketing by letting (smart) companies track buying trends in explicit detail. He knows of what he speaks (Z + Partners even have a (somewhat neglected) blog of their own), with references to David Sifry’s Technorait and The Virtual Book Tour. Here are some roughly transcribed excerpts:

Retailers and marketers of all kinds are looking around social networks to try to create new forms of economic value. A great example of that is something arranged by an author in California called The Virtual Book Tour…. This one little blog [on the virtual tour] may have 100 readers. Well, that’s just as good as going to Minetonka and doing a reading and doing a reading at the local Borders.
…
The file sharing we generate on the Web…. There’s an oportunity to see people doing that in real time and building maps and networks of their social relationships. So this person who is a friend of this person introduced this song to this social network and it spread this quickly. That’s of unbelievable value. That’s the equivalent of going into that person’s bedroom and saying “I was there when this person made that person a mix tape.”
…
Commercial anthropology is here to stay. It is going to lead to shift in how we think about global marketing. We can get very effective at reaching exactly the right five people. That’s the kind of effect this kind of social cartography has on the wolrd of marketing.

Now that’s what I’m talking about!

Marketplace.org: Internet Trends

Oh, this is rich. The latest example of someone getting fired for blogging comes from an employee of no less savvy socially networked company than Friendster (which, so far as I am aware, has no official blog of its own to address the controversy on; too bad, that). According to the blogger in question, Joyce Park, aka TroutGirl, the offending posts were both quite short and, to my outsider interpretation, fairly innocuous. I predict this is going to have a bad PR fallout for Friendster in the blogosphere.

UPDATE:
Ted Pibil notes in my comments thread on this post that Jon Udell has an excellent wrap up on this: Why we owe Troutgirl our thanks. Lots of good links there to add context and further the analysis of the implications of this. Thought it was worth highlighting here in the main post. Thanks Ted.

TroutGirl: Shitcanned

The guy behind this new service Blabble has been exchanging emails with me about this for more than a week, but so far I haven’t gotten beta access to it, so I can’t really determine how interesting it might be. He says it will target PR and marketing folks to help track trends as they emerge in the blogosphere. Obviously, it could be interesting in theory but it all depends on the execution.

Internet Retailer: Mining Blogs for Buzz, Blabble Automates the Search of Blog Content

PaidContent points out this story about the Miami Dolphins team inviting publishers of 14 fan web sites to a schmooze fest the hope will become an annual event known as Dolphins Web Weekend. Mentioned in the story are blog-like sites FinHeaven and Phinatics. Now that’s smart blog relations!

The Olympic organizers shoud take note of this (though something tells me that if the Chinese have anything to say about it in Beijing, we shouldn’t look for a much greater blog-friendly policy in four years).

Mercury News: Web Site Operators Get Royal Treatment From Dolphins

Business 2.0’s senior writer Om Malik reports that Technorati, the popular blog search engine and tracking service, has taken $6.5 million in VC funding lead by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Steve Rubel and Matthew Podboy mull over what it means for PR professionals and media companies when bloggers, particularly those who are also professional journalists, use their blogs to scoop exclusives, ignoring traditional PR practices such as embargoing news.

Om Malik: Technorati Gets Fed VC Dollars

This sounds a bit dubious. The site’s funkily formatted homepage explains:

Blogversations are a new way to market. Here’s how it works: Advertisers sponsor bloggers to dicuss a topic or question. Bloggers earn $$. Advertisers engage turned-out audiences.

It continues on from there, but you get the basic idea. The homepage notes “advertorials not encouraged.” Not encouraged? How about not allowed? I’m not going to say this is necessarily evil; I’ll leave that to plenty of the rest of you, I’m sure. Certainly bears watching.

Link

Hoot! Short of a “Kick Me” sign on your back, nothing quite says “I know nothing about the Internet” and assures that you will be soundly mocked online like an anti-deep linking policy. Apparently the folks behind Athens 2004, the offical site for the current Olympics, still use AOL or have only read about the Internet in airline magazines.

This is so 1996. These kinds of policies are laughably uninforcable — there has never been any legal precedent set in this regard — and they miss the critical point of the a web site: you want people to visit it, and other web sites that call attention to specific valuable content on your site (e.g., bloggers) are doing you a favor.

Just for giggles, here are some of their ridonkulous requirements for linking to pages of their site:

• “Use the term ATHENS 2004 only, and no other term as the text referent” (emphasis theirs; presumably that excludes terms such as fart or bring back the days of olive-oil slathered naked Oympic athletes!)
• “[You should] not associate the link with any image, esp. the ATHENS 2004 Emblem” (as shown above left; don’t do that)
• “Send a request letter to the Internet Department…” (How about you send a letter to my butt instead?)

If you want to tap blogs to help drive more traffic to you site, read this policy statement and then do the opposite. (Oh, and don’t use frames. Frames suck for bloggers trying to link to you. In fact, frames just suck, and have done so for many years.)

Link