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You want me to write about your stupid company, Greg? Okay, here you go. (Let this be a lesson to the rest of you!)

From: gregs@[mystupidcompany].com
To: Rick Bruner
Date: 30 Mar 2006 15:02:28 -0500
Subject: [mystupidcompany].COM = Restaurant Finder

Well here is my question………I need to get my name out there…I read your Blog it is about websites which is what [mystupidcompany].COM is. I need people that are internet savy to look at my site.

Do your readers eat out? If the answer is yes then why not right a small blurb about [mystupidcompany].com

Let me know how to aproach guys like you in the future…….so that I can better prepare myself.

Thank you for the guidence, also let me know what to put in the title.

Have a great day

Greg

—–Original Message—–
From: Rick Bruner
Sent: Thu, 30 March 2006 19:12:01
To: gregs@[mystupidcompany].com
Subject: Re: *****PLEASE READ****

Not that I want to get into a big thing over this, but you don’t know me, your business has nothing to do with anything I write about, and your subject line is obnoxious. I realize you’re not harvesting addresses and sending out a million emails in a batch, but anyway it’s not what I would call best-practice PR.

On 30 Mar 2006 12:26:57 -0500, gregs@[mystupidcompany].com wrote:
>
> I was not spaming I was asking………….thank you for your time.
>
> Have a great day
>
> Greg S********
>
> By the way I thought it was cool how you give people your email
>
> Rickbruner at gmail dot com
>
> Genious if it is okay with you I will strat doing thesame thing.
>
> Again sory to bother you have a great day
>
> greg
>
> —–Original Message—–
> From: Rick Bruner
> Sent: Thu, 30 March 2006 16:48:01
> To: gregs@[mystupidcompany].com
> Subject: Re: *****PLEASE READ****
>
> No, I won’t, as this has nothing to do with anything I write about,
> and you should have more creative ways of getting PR than spam.
>
> On 30 Mar 2006 11:43:35 -0500, gregs@[mystupidcompany].com wrote:
>
> > Hello Rick my name is Greg S******** was wondering if you would be able to write about [MYSTUPIDCOMPANY].COM
> >
> > http://www.[redacted-url].com/subscribe/
> > http://www.[another-redacted-url].com/article.php?id_articol=134
> >
> > We are going through first round of funding starting June 15.
> >
> > Thank you so much
> > Have a great day
> >
> > Greg S*****
> > 847 – ### – ####
> >
>

You have a great day, too! And do me a favor and lose my email address.

UPDATE:
I just couldn’t leave well enough alone and had to check my email trash folder (I had set up a filter on Greg’s email to auto delete any further emails, but something told me he was going to write again…)

See that the problem with guys like you………you spend time writing something what you wrote……….if you would of wrote something nice I would of given you 100,000 shares of my company.

But you waste your time………doing what you did………………

Have a great day

Greg

—–Original Message—–
From: Rick Bruner
Sent: Thu, 30 March 2006 20:11:21
To: gregs@[mystupidcompany].com
Subject: Re: [MYSTUPIDCOMPANY].COM = Restaurant Finder

http://www.businessblogconsulting.com/2006/03/pr-case-study-how-not-to-email-a-blogger.html

I’ll be blocking your email address now, so please just move on with your life.

All the best,

Rick

I swear I’m not making this shit up!

PS: If anyone wants to take Greg up on his offer for 100,000 shares of his stupid company for a blog post, paypal me $1 at rickbruner at gmail dot com and I’ll send you the name of his firm.

PPS: I think I accidentally saved this post to draft form last night (still getting the hang of WordPress), so sorry it disappeared for 10 hours.

Today, less than 48 hours away from doing a presentation about business blogging at an Australian Marketing Institute seminar in Sydney, I am rather pleased to see that the lead story in the national newspaper The Australian’s IT Business segment, is ‘Blogging the Brand’, by Chris Jenkins. Neat: I can expect that a reasonable number of my marketing industry audience tomorrow night will have read or at least skimmed this piece on corporate blogging and will be ready with some good, challenging questions. It helps too, that the article comes close on the heels of a page 3 story last weekend in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Online buying frenzy as big business swoops on sites’, by highly respected journalist Tom Burton, about people making money from the web: about half of the article focuses on people making money from blogging.

Back to the article in The Australian. I found it quite informative, not so much for me in terms of  theories and broad observations about corporate blogging, but more because of comments from the trenches. I was particularly interested in the comments from Paul Crisp, ‘new media project leader’, responsible for the blogging operation at our major telco, one of Australia’s biggest corporations, Telstra, through its Now We Are Talking site, which has blogs by staff members as a feature.

Crisp acknowledges that Telstra had no Australian corporate blogging models to draw on, so had to adapt what it could learn from studying what US-based corporations were doing, such as Boeing, Microsoft and General Motors. He observes that Telstra does not need blogs to ‘push out’ information’, but sees blogs as giving the corporation a way to plug into public feedback (interesting, given that probably every Australian over the age of 15 has a Telstra story and they are not all positive!). He also sees blogs as allowing Telstra to put a different face to its message.

‘If you want to hear from the rank and file of the company, to try and put a face to the people that make this big company work and get their perspective and the challenges they face and what turns them on, here’s an opportunity to get it directly from the horse’s mouth.’

I took some time out to check out the blogs at Now We Are Talking. I had honestly expected them to be rather bland. They aren’t, and I’m impressed. I’m especially impressed because employees are writing about potentially contentious issues and there are comments on the blogs from the general public (I am so not a conspiracy theorist that I do believe they are from the general public!).  

The article also quotes Aussie Microsoft blogger, Frank Arrigo, author of the excellent Frankarr blog. On the subject of risk, which is invariably given prominence in the occasional Australian media story about corporate blogging, Frank observes succinctly: 

“There is always a risk, but it’s no different to me being at the pub and bitching about my job and there is a journo next to me,’ he says.

And with eminent good sense, it seems to me, Frank goes on to say that if he doesn’t want to see something appear on the front page of one of the national dailies, he doesn’t blog it.

(Note that the link above to the story in The Australian is a weblink but not a permalink and regrettably there is no link available for the Sydney Morning Herald piece.)

If there’s one vital rule for business blogging, it’s don’t do something so dumb — so alien to the true spirit of blogging — that it’s just going to get you pilloried in the blogosphere. Of course, making fun of bad corporate blogging is so much like shooting fish in a barrel I rarely bother anymore, but I can’t resist with the new GuinessBlog.

Allow me to digress for a moment. At my workplace, a group of us have started a photo club. We meet once a week and discuss techniques and critique each others’ work. A few club members are real experts, including one guy I’ll call Vince (since that’s his name). Vince is a great photographer and a font of knowledge on the subject. He also is not inclined to sugar coat his feedback. He’s become famous for offering the following advice when someone asks how they could have made a picture better: “Don’t take that picture.” What he means is, the photographer took the landscape shot at midday, when the light was invariably going to be unflattering (much better to take all outdoor shots in early morning or late afternoon light, I’ve learned), or the photographer’s lens just wasn’t appropriate for the effect they were going for, or there was no good way to get an angle that wouldn’t include the light pole blocking the cathedral or whatever. The point is, sometimes when you are striving for quality, you just have to recognize that you can’t achieve what you want due to circumstances beyond your control.

So, back to Guiness’s crappy blog. Actually, Hugh, where I first learned of the blog, assures us it’s a good blog. Maybe so, but I’ll never know. That’s because Hugh lives in London and I live in NYC, and due to some legal mumbojumbo, Guiness has decided to put a screener page that blocks users from geographies outside of Great Britain. WTF?? Sure, I could go back to the form and fill it out again and lie about where I’m located (though I suspect it would remember me from my cookies, as I checked yes to “remember me”; and of course I’m clever enough to know how to delete that cookie selectively), but I really can’t be bothered. Like I care that much about Guiness’s blog. (A large number of commenters on Hugh’s post agree with me.)

Oh, I’m sure it has something valid to do with liquor export regulations that has their lawyers’ panties all in a twist, and possibly for some good reason. But in that case, I’d counsel, “don’t take that picture.” If you can’t do a blog right, better not to blog at all. Otherwise you risk a bunch of nasty blog posts calling you a clueless git, like this one.

Call this post “an observation” about comments & trackbacks. – Guy Kawaski recently posted about The Art of Creating A Community. A lot of people must have thought it was interesting. There were 36 comments and trackbacks.

Not a surprise, in true social networking / blog style, the post also received buzz that wasn’t in comments or trackbacks. One of the bloggers who picked up on the topic was “A*List” blogger Robert Scoble. Robert added his take on the topic and posted on his blog. A lot of people must have thought it was interesting. There were 31 comments and trackbacks.

Comments on the Bona Tempura Volvant blog and the Scobleizer blog took slightly different directions. Feedback on Guy’s blog focused exclusively on the topic. However, many of the Scobleizer comments took point with Robert as an “A*List” blogger – moving the conversation off topic. Guess that’s one of the perils of being an “A*List” blogger.

The Economist published an article this week on the threats and opportunities of blogs and bloggers, “Corporate reputations – The blog in the corporate machine“.

The Threat:

“The spread of “social mediaâ€? across the internet—such as online discussion groups, e-mailing lists and blogs—has brought forth a new breed of brand assassin, who can materialise from nowhere and savage a firm’s reputation.”

The Opportunity:

“Many big companies have been looking eagerly for ways to tailor their advertising to specific groups of consumers. They have found that web logs and internet discussion groups, which bring together people of similar interests, can help them turn hot links into cold cash. But besides trying to get out their message, companies are also learning that blogs can provide early warning signs of potential problems.”

Steve Rubel was also quoted in the article giving tips on how to use a blog for crisis communications, suggesting the creation of a “lockbox blog”.

Despite the attempt at describing pros and cons of consumer generated media and blogs in particular, the article doesn’t do justice to the many positive marketing, PR and branding benefits. Reputation management is not the only reason companies should pay attention to the blogosphere. Regardless, the article does draw more attention to blogging with an influential audience and that’s a good thing.

David Kline of BlogRevolt has an article today about “What is holding back corporate blogging?”

David brings up a critical point and one that is heard often in the corporate world.  We on the front lines get to hear many of the corporate types run on about the problems with blogging–Time, money, legalities and many other reasons are given why a blog is just not in the PR budget.  As in all things, this too shall change, but for now, David has put together a thoughtful piece, with quotes from our very own Debbie Weil and Jeremy Wright.

David Kline, co-author of one of the handful of books published thus far on blogging (Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business and Culture) emailed me this week to ask for a quote for the article he’s working on about what’s holding the F500 back from blogging and what it will take for blogging to go mainstream. He referenced the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki’s stat that only 3% of F500s are blogging. I responded with the following mini rant:

Fear & blogging on the blogosphere Long Tail
(with apologies to Hunter S. Thompson)

Fear is the single most important thing holding corporate America back from embracing blogging. Fear of being open, fear of a two-way conversation, fear of not being able to control the message, fear of the time commitment. Just makes sense. If you put blogging in the basket of corporate communications it runs absolutely antithetical to so-called current best practices.

So what will make this change? Again, fear. Fear of not embracing the new media technologies which so many consumers are now adopting, whether it’s a video iPod or a blog. Fear of not being where your customers are. Which, increasingly, is online.

Well, that’s my thought for the day. Now back to cleaning up the mess on my desk… Oh, and don’t misunderstand. I’m not being critical of the F500s efforts thus far to launch blogs. Just realistic.

The  #1 concern I’m hearing from organizations interested in exploring blogs to support marketing strategies is, “But what about the negative comments? How do we control people posting bad things about our brand or our company?

Marketing has changed. The world has changed. It changed while you were not looking. It changed when the internet, email and cell phones made it easy and cheap to communicate.

Bottom-line with over 50 million people chatting it up on blogs if you turn comments off you loose the home court advantage. People will talk about your company, your products, your customer service and even your blog. Why would you not want that discussion to take place where you can easily monitor it and respond?

To turn comments on. To turn comments off. This has be come a tired debate in the blogosphere. One of the benefits of a marketing blog is the opportunity to dialogue with customers, prospects and stakeholders.  Sorry, no comments does not make a conversation. It’s called a monologue. One person takes center stage with no opportunity for direct feedback. For my money, a blog without comments and trackbacks is an on-line newsletter. And that’s not a negative comment.

Great example of a highly focused brand kibitz on a non “corporate blog” is McChronicles. This blog about McDonalds recently welcomed it’s 18,000 visitor. A Google search for McChronicles pulls 15,800 results. And with this post the count is now 15,8001. That’s a lot of Big Macs! U.S. News and World Report highlighted McCs in an article about customers creating buzz.

Citizen or conversational journalism. McDonald owners get it. Some are asking McChronicles to review their restaurants. Corporate McD people have been known to drop by to listen (tracked by referral stats). However, the folks at corporate McD’s must be busy chowing down on their burgers since a sanctioned McD blog has not yet surfaced.

If you’re still not convenienced that comments on are a smart business decison, here are …

5 Strategies To Combat Negative Blog Comments
5. Turn off comments
4. Monitor comments
3. Develop a comment policy
Include on your navigation bar and above the comment section
2. Delete comments that do not meet your guidelines

The Number One Way To Combat Negative Blog Comments …
1. Show ’em what you are made of!
Use negative comments (those that express legit concerns) as a way to demonstrate how you handle customer concerns.

Our customers’ sphere of influence is not limited to their around the corner neighborhood or the company water cooler but anywhere there is an internet connection or cell phone access. With the understanding – that companies no longer control the message (influence yes. control no.) – and that customers have more power than ever before in “helping sell your product”, you gain a huge advantage over your competition – those that are trying to swim upstream against the current. It’s an exciting, new world. Don’t be afraid to become apart of it. 

Would you believe that in 2005, employees reading blogs will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs unrelated to their work, on their bosses’ time? No? Well, what about 2.3 million work years (calculated on the basis of a typical nearly 40-hour work week)?

These startling figures are in the October 24 AdAge story What Blogs Cost American Business (free subscription required to read the story).

Sprinkled through the story there are clues that the stated figures need to be taken with a grain of salt. For example, half way through, well after the shock of the headline, and under the sub-head ‘Wasted time’, we get "Hard and detailed data on blogging time is limited, so Ad Age’s analysis is a best-guess extrapolation …" Oh, really? Does that mean what it sounds like, i.e. "we have a fair idea but we can’t really prove it"?

And "strong evidence" of "workday blogging" (posting? reading?) is based on figures for spikes in business hours traffic for Blogads and Feedburner traffic. So what would “weak evidence� look like? What the taxi drivers are saying?

Yet whatever the weaknesses in the argument or the caveats on the statistics cited, business blog consultants surely need to recognize that business owners who are employers may be encouraged by articles like this (there will no doubt be more) to be super cautious about getting aboard the blogging train. They might wonder, for example, whether by being enthusiastic about blogging, CEOs were in effect encouraging their staff to spend a lot of time on activity which did not evidently contribute to productivity.

There are some significant human resources management issues here for businesses which make a commitment to blogging and even for businesses with the “not interested� sign out – for one thing, their staff may be very interested and some will be reading blogs and some of those will also be blogging, if not now, real soon.

Having a code of conduct on blogging could help.

Recently, to assist a client of mine, I did some research online to find such a code of conduct, a clear, unequivocal set of rules or principles which business owners could apply to cover blogging at work and in relation to work. I found a lot of opinion and a few attempts at a code, but not a clear-cut set of principles that business owners generally could be expected to adopt. And let’s face it, there’s probably a generational issue lying in wait here, except maybe for companies with CEOs under 35.

I was intrigued by one particular comment in the article, an observation attributed to Jonathan Gibs, senior research manager at Nielsen/NetRatings, that at-work blog time is "probably" done in addition to regular surfing. In other words, the people who have been doing non work-related internet browsing are now also blogging or reading non work-related blogs at work. If true, that would mean that more of the "boss’s time" is being wasted by the same people already doing unproductive internet surfing, rather than their simply substituting blogging and reading blogs for more traditional internet surfing. What does that say about, for example, marketing to readers of blogs?

As many active bloggers out there know, TypePad has been paaaaaaaainfully slow lately. If you have a TypePad account, posting has been somewhere between difficult and impossible.

Here at Business Blog Consulting
(the other BBC), behind the locked doors of our Yahoo Group, there’s
been a lot of chatter about leaving TypePad for greener pastures. 

Debbie Weil, over at BlogWrite for CEO’s and a fellow BBC blogger, takes TypePad to task with her post Listen Up SixApart: some of your TypePad customers may switch. Because Debbie’s, well Debbie Weil, Anil Dash from Six Apart actually responded on her blog.

I know that other BBC contributors plan on posting their own
thoughts both to BBC and to their own blogs in the next 24 hours, and
as I get a list of those posts I’ll update this post.

For me, this reminds me of the mid-90’s when AOL’s email went down for about two days.
People lost it. Businesses claimed they were being ruined. Congress
held hearings on what could be done. And Steve Case said something to
the effect that it showed how important AOL was to American Business.
(At least that’s how I remember it.)

I believe the lesson business owners learned from that is that
whatever your communication medium is, it needs to be rock-solid.
Piggy-backing your communications on a consumer product like AOL is no
way to run a real business.

Until recently I recommended TypePad as a platform for business bloggers…especially compared to Blogger,
which doesn’t have half the bells and whistles TypePad offers. However,
as more businesses turn to blogging as a legitimate marketing tool they
are going to expect enterprise-level solutions…not “waiting on
TypePad.com” messages.

The recent problems with TypePad and slowdowns at Technorati
show that blogging is growing at a mind-boggling rate; businesses will
continue to flock to it, and so will dollars. Whether TypePad is going
to be part of the solution for business bloggers or an also-ran will be
determined by how they respond to their current problems.

In an article entitled What Blogs Cost American Business, AdAge.com contends that in 2005 alone, employees will waste 551,000 years reading blogs at work.

Some interesting factoids:

• 35 millions workers (25%) visit blogs and spend on average 3.5 hours a week at them.
• Time spent in the office on non-office work blogs is equivalent to 2.3 million jobs.
• U.S. workers will wast 2.3 million business work years this year alone.

What the the article doesn’t mention is if these lost hours are coming out of actual productivity, or the time we spent looking for good travel deals or checking last night’s sports scores, and will Expedia and ESPN suffer because of this.

It also doesn’t talk about the fact that most American workers work longer hours, work through lunch and take our laptops and Blackberries home with us. Don’t we deserve some time to blog off?

This story found via Blogcritics.org.

Not soon after I posted It’s the End of the Blogosphere As We Know It (And I Feel Fine), I read this article at Wired called Can Bloggers Strike it Rich?

Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, claims his writers make $200 – $3,000 each month. "Think a scuba diver or video-game player making $500 to $1,500 a month writing about scuba diving or video games."

Hmmm…maybe he should read Dr. Del’s article on video game networks.

In any case, read both sides of the story and make up your own mind.

Dr. Del Dhanoa posted an interesting article called The Implosion of the Blogosphere.

In it, he’s not predicting the end of blogging, or really even the blogosphere, but rather the way some bloggers make a living.

He uses the history of the video game networks, i.e., Gamespy, as a way of extrapolating what may happen to blogging networks such as WeblogsInc.com, Gawker Media and the like.

In short, he’s concerned that like video game networks, blogging
networks will accelerate the boom/bust cycle, paying bloggers more and
more money to jump ship, driving up ad rates, until the bottom drops
out. Basically, he’s warning against speculation.

It’s an interesting idea, and the article is well written. I’m currently reading "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister,"
which is told from the perspective of Cinderella’s sister, and takes
place during the tulip bust that destroyed many fortunes in Holland and
beyond. I think it’s safe to say that whatever the market is,
speculation is a risky business that ends in a zero sum game, or worse.

For me, personally, and for most of the business bloggers out there,
we’re blogging for our business, not for a network. Whether blogging
networks succeed or fail in the long run, the blogosphere and blogging
should continue as long as businesses are interested in connecting with
their prospects and clients.

SEO Book’s Aaron Wall was sued today by Traffic-Power.com for alleged inaccuracies and lies appearing in comments other people have left on his blog. If this case goes to trial, it’ll set an important precedent in the blogging community and the Internet at large, answering a critical question, particularly for business blogs: are the comments others leave on your blog a legal liability?

Some background: Aaron Wall runs SEO Book.com, a site focused on search engine optimization strategies and on selling his smart ebook of the same name. In a discussion venue of that nature, it’s no surprise that community members talk about different SEO firms, positively and negatively, and one company that’s been the frequent recipient of negative comments on Aaron’s blog is Traffic Power.com.

Today Aaron was surprised by a certified letter from a Nevada Attorney’s office notifying him that the parent company of Traffic-Power.com was suing him for the content of his weblog.]

With Aaron’s permission, I reproduce some relevant sections of the notification in question:

“Plaintiff undertakes rigorous and extensive measures to safeguard information about its business. Internet placement optimization is a highly competitive business, and if Plaintiff’s trade secrets are revealed competitors can gain a prejudicially unfair advantage over Plaintiff. Accordingly, Plaintiff’s trade secrets are provided to a limited number of people, only on a need-to-know basis and subject to strict confidentiality agreements.

“An unidentified individual, acting alone or in concert with others, has recently misappropriated and disseminated through web sites Plaintiff’s confidential information. This information could have been obtained only through…

The anti-blogging blogs (or the reality-check blogs–take your pick) continue. This one is from Jim Logan and his post The Temptation and Reality of Business Blogs.

Jim rightly points out that blogs are probably not the tool a small business and solopreneurs should use to immediately grow your revenue. He also gives a list of some marketing endeavors that might have a more immediate impact on your company.

However, I would argue that business blogging should fall into Stephen Covey’s second quadrant: important but not urgent.

I don’t think many people would argue that a business blog alone is
enough marketing for any company…even a business blog consultant.
However, it can be a great, long-term investment for companies and
businesses looking to have a conversation with their prospects and
clients.

Where do you rank business blogs in importance when it comes to your company’s marketing?

Wow. I just read business and blog consultant Jeremy Wright’s harrowing account of being turned away at Canada’s border to the U.S. after a two-hour interogation basically because the border guard didn’t grok  blogs. Solidarity, brother.

Tim Bray thinks the media obsession with bloggers getting fired for blogging is a crock. Rather, he makes a compelling argument that blogging is actually good for one’s career. He’s a posterboy for the idea himself; after being a prominent blogger for years stemming from his experience as an experienced technologist and entrepreneur, he was appointed Technology Director of Sun Microsystems last year, a company that now has several senior managers blogging.

Another case in point: Microsoft just announced its acquisition of Groove Networks, makers of a peer-to-peer-style employee knowledgement management system, whose founder CEO, Ray Ozzie, has now been appointed chief technology officer at Microsoft. Granted, Ozzie is well known in some circles for having founded Lotus Notes once upon a time, but he is also a revered blogger, although curiously he hasn’t posted to his once-popular blog in a year.

I tried to introduce a ‘blog policy’ at the company that I was at two years ago.  They wanted nothing to do with it – said anything done on the blog would be covered in their employee code of conduct. 

As I think back on that, a thought that was prompted by this article from BizReport, I think they were right.

Most bloggers aren’t being fired for blogging.  Bloggers are being fired for doing something stupid on their blogs that violates some policy of some description within their respective employers.  I’m going to get called on the carpet for this, but employers do have a point.  Send dirty emails, get reprimanded, make lots of personal calls, get fired.  Blogs are just another way for employees to get themselves in hot water by not heeding corporate policy.

Memo to bloggers:  Check your corporate ethics, conduct, and media relations policies and just ‘keep it between the lines.’