Whatever your political persuasion — right, left, or center — the blogosphere is a great place for bloggers to share their political views and make plenty of friends and enemies. We try to follow the conservative, liberal, and everything in between of politics and political blogs/blogging — but only when it intersects with business blogging.
Have a read below of our latest entries on politics and political blogging…
Jerry Michalski is one smart cookie. For five years, he edited Esther Dyson’s reknowned tech industry newsletter Release 1.0. Since 1998, he has been operating as an independent consultant to leading Silicon Valley companies, and others. Sadly, he blogs infrequently. I’d be interested to read his insights a lot more often than he doles them out.
I’ve known Nick for years from our time together on the Internet marketing speaker circuit. Not only a great speaker and consultant, but Nick is also the author of the popular book NetWords about online copywriting. He’s also been running a newsletter on the topic for a while, and, online wordster such that he is, a blog was only a logical extension, which he’s been doing since last August.
If I may be so bold, Nick, as to offer a bit of advice for the blog: 1) link to it prominently from your main consulting page, rather than making folks dig into your About Me page to find the link, and 2) fix your archives, so that you can navigate all the way back to the start more easily from the main site navigation.
Esther Dyson is truly a thought leader in the Internet and technology space. A consultant and venture capitalist through her firm EdVenture Holdings, her newsletter Release 1.0 has been an important read for technology executives for more than a decade. Release 2.0 is the title of her book, and Release 3.0 is the name of her fortnightly column for the New York Times Syndicate. So, it’s only logical that when she started a blog last year, it became Release 4.0. Dyson is also the host of the prestigious technology conference PC Forum.
Rich Ottum runs the eStrategyOne consulting firm, focused on Internet marketing. He has been observing industry news and trends on this blog for nearly a year (as of this posting).
He recently wrote an article “10 Steps To Marketing With Business Weblogs” on WebProNews and on his site he also he also offers this (Word doc) white paper, “Marketing with Business Weblogs Primer.”
I already noted Judith Meskill’s personal blog earlier and referenced this Social Software Weblog property there. But now that I’ve been following this blog more closely in recent days, I think it’s good enough to call separate attention to. If you follow this trend of social networks much, it seems to be the go-to resource.
I am also looking forward to posting the results of her The ‘Perfect’ Corporate Weblogging ‘Elevator Pitch’ Competition, which I missed when the competition was still accepting entries. Judges are currently (as of this post) evaluating the results. Stay tuned.
Cheskin, a marketing and market research consulting firm, does a great job with their blog. Their essays are thoughtful and frequent. Most impressive, however, is how effectively the blog reflects a true team spirit. I’ve seen other companies try to rally a group of managers to participate, and it’s hard to do. Normally, one person dominates the blog and others drag along occasionally at best. The Cheskin team, however, seems to have challenged one another to all stay involved, and a quick browse of the archive shows a healthy rotation of names and personal posting styles.
“Commentary on startups, small business, business planning and growth strategy” from the folks at Bplans.com, a business plan resource tool, and Palo Alto Software, a business plan software tool.
Consultant Debbie Weil has been publishing an email newsletter called WordBiz about business copywriting online for more than two years (as of this writing). She makes money by running seminars, consulting and selling reports, as well as ads in her newsletter and on her blog. Her blog features the same kind of breezy writing and straight-forward advice that has made her newsletter so popular among small and large businesses.
Her blog also includes a category on Blogging for Business, which I’ll be sure to scrape for all interesting entries to plug into this directory in the coming weeks.
Debbie Weil’s WordBiz organized a teleseminar on the topic of Business Blogs a few months ago, in which I partook as one of the “experts.” She’s done a nice job packaging the audio of that seminar with a companion PDF report. Some of the points she promises you’ll learn from the report:
Price: $59.
WordBiz: Blogging for Business
Hugh MacLeod is best known around the blogosphere as “the guy who draws cartoons on the back of business cards.” Something about his cartooning style has really struck a nerve with bloggers. His own blog features a lot of his original drawings. His background is in advertising creative, and I think he still does some of that on a freelance basis, as well.
Adam Kalsey’s firm specializes in web site development and online marketing. He is also the moderator of Marketing Vox’s Publishing forum.
I had the pleasure of sharing a car ride with Judith from Boston to NY after BloggerCon II and got to hear a lot about her remarkable professional background: an impressive mix of executive experience at marketing, operations, technology and more (she programs in something like 8 or more languages, after having been sent to programming classes by the IT department of a F500 company when she worked as a marketer constantly pushing the IT department to outdo themselves with special programming requests).
These days, she’s a high-priced (I’d assume) consultant focused on knowlege and social networking, and other corporate collaboration issues. She also blogs at socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com.
Amy Gahran is a writer, editor, trainer and speaker. One of her recent posts (as of this writing) is “More Corporate Blogging Resources,” each of which I’ll be sure to scrape as individual entries in this blog as soon as I have time.
A new blog (as of this posting) by British consultants Wayne Robinson and Tim Duckett. The About Us reads:
We run a marketing and technology consulting business that helps smaller companies in the UK. A lot of our work is now centring on using technology to reduce information problems. So this blog is designed to share our knowledge and first hand experience.
A criticism I have of this blog, other than its somewhat clunky layout (e.g., the page is too wide for my laptop screen and I hate blue link borders around images, but whatever [UPDATE: they’ve since fixed that, but the CSS is still acting a bit funky for me]), is that the above About Us statement claims “we run a marketing and technology consulting business,” but there’s no information about that company anywhere on the site that I can see. The consultants link to short profiles of themselves, and I gather that is the “business,” but it’s not even clear what the business is called (the URL is Infosential.com, but the blog seems to be titled “Cutting Through”), but I’m nitpicking. The content seems worthwhile (particularly since they already linked to my blog).
A wacky look at the world of taxes from Kerry M. Kerstetter, CPA, who uses his rather irrevent blog (dispelling once and for all the stereotype of uptight, humorless tax consultants) to “help capitalists, investors & small business owners win the tax game.”
David Weinberger writes this blog, about technology, media, marketing and other topics, to wide aclaim. Weinberger is an author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. A former philosophy professor and comedy writer for Woody Allen, he makes his living primarily as a public speaker, for what I can gather, and, having had the pleasure of seeing him speak, I can attest he’s hilarious and very insightful.
Jeff Jarvis has set up this wiki (definition) to support his “Blogging as Business” session at the BloggerCon conference.
Because this site is a wiki, it means any reader can contribute to and edit the content (click the “edit” link in the left-hand menu of the site).
Olivier is one smart guy. A friend and colleague, he’s one of the smarter bloggers out there commenting on technology and e-business issues. This is a relatively new URL for him. Previously, he had been blogging at WebVoice.Blogspot.com, which he recently gave up in favor of this new domain, and I see the old one is already some piano blog (I’d add it to this site’s index, but it’s not clear what business, if any, it supports).
Olivier makes his living as a strategic consultant. He also blogs in almost as many places as I do. He is a the main blogger behind TheEndofFree.com, about the trend towards user-paid content online, as well as a co-founder, along with myself among others, of MarketingWonk. In addition, he blogs at Lockergnome’s RSS site, and elsewhere, no doubt.
I’m delighted to see MarketingSherpa is reselling this report. I am its co-author and primary analyst, written originally for MarketingWonk, which did not do the greatest job of promoting the report. Leave it to MarketingSherpa, though, to market it right, as they are experts at report sales.
MarketingSherpa’s sales copy includes this:
Business Blogs sidesteps gee whiz hype to focus on practical realities. You’ll learn:
- How 45 companies in a wide array of industries (including both B-to-B and B-to-C) are using Blogs today for marketing, customer relationship building, PR, and corporate communications.
- Specific tactics to get readers for your Blog (with more than one million blogs out there, getting attention is your biggest challenge.) Includes 17-best online resources, and quick tips on syndication.
- How and where to advertise on third party Blogs if you want to take advantage of the Blog phenomenon without building your own. (Note: Response rates are currently more than double the average online ad click rate.)
- Basics on creating a Blog – including writing-style, best updating frequency, recommended technology, and legal advice. (Who owns copyright on comments visitors post to your Blog? Find out.)
The report costs $99 and is worth every penny, if I do say so myself!
MarketingSherpa: Business Blogs: How Successful Companies Get Real Results With Weblogs
Red Hat, vendors of commercial Linux services, staged a worldwide customer outreach tour in early 2004, and supported it with this blog about the behind-the-scenes activities of the tour. During the tour, the blog was averaging more than 3,500 visits a day. MarketingSherpa has a great case study about this event and blog.
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Business Blog Consulting is a site devoted to demonstrating how effective weblogs can be for communicating with customers and marketing to new customer prospects. You will find here lots of examples of business and corporate blogs, as well as resources to help you learn more about the topic.
Looking for a company that offers consulting on corporate and business blogging, including design, development and strategy? Consider Netconcepts.
Other stuff? Email us.
Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing
Andy Bourland of Bourland.com
Rich Brooks of Flyte
Paul Chaney of Blogging Systems Group
Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus
Josh Hallett of Hyku
Tris Hussey of Larix Consulting
Lee Odden of TopRank
Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts
Dave Taylor of Intuitive Life for Business
Jim Turner of One by One Media
Dana VanDen Heuvel of BlogSavant
Des Walsh of Thinking Home Business
Debbie Weil of WordBiz and BlogWrite
Jeremy Wright of Ensight
Rick E. Bruner is co-author and principal analyst on this report
Our own contributor Jeremy Wright is the author of this book
"The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right" with a foreword by GM's Bob Lutz..and the rest by Debbie Weil.
Produced by contributor to this site Debbie Weil. Rick E. Bruner is one of the featured experts in this report
This report is written by contributor to this site BL Ochman
I guess this was inevitable
