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.

This is the newest wrinkle in corporate blogging. It’s brilliant and it’s simple. Coke has found six smart university students (from China, the U.S., Austria, Germany, Canada and Italy) to blog the Torino Winter Olympic Games for them. Torino Conversations features the photos – and corresponding country flags – of the students along with snippets of their most recent entries. Click the one for Du Wei from China and you’ll see her latest entry. It includes a link to a podcast. She writes:

“Finally, we are getting started. Katie and I spent 2 hours walking around within the sponsor village and into the streets of Torino, grasping people to talk to and pose for photos. It was also good to have opportunity to walk around and look at Torino from a non-Olympic angle.

The Chairman of Coca-Cola, Neville Isdell came to award the first Coca-Cola Live Olympic Award to the very first employee of TOROC, Giovanna Locci, and we got a chance to talk to the chairman before the ceremony. Check it out here [link to podcast] and we will come up with more interviews with PIN TRADERS and perhaps the Opening Ceremony tomorrow.”

According to MarketingVox the students have agreed to keep their blog entries positive and upbeat. Travel and accommodations are being paid for by Coke. How cool is that…

I’d be interested in knowing more about how Coca-Cola identified the students and vetted their blogging skills and common sense quotient. (Gotta be some good parties in Torino… )

Oh and just noticed this. Scroll down on Torino Conversations and you’ll see photos they’ve uploaded along with comments from (no doubt envious) friends. This fits right in with Pew Internet’s recent survey that said 57% of teens create content for the Web. It’s as natural as talking on a cell phone for them.

Useful Link

Light the Torch is another twist on Olympics blogging. It was just launched by blogging network b5media and is inviting guest contributors. All proceeds from Google AdSense revenues on the blog will go to athletic organizations supporting athletes (not sure what those are exactly, but sounds good).

Although I’m not much of a yachtsman myself, living on the coast of Maine I have a lot of friends who own boats, and I’ve learned a lot through osmosis.

One thing I’ve learned is that they can’t get enough of pictures of boats; they refer to it as “boat porn.” It takes an especially tight hold of them when they’re ready to buy their next boat.

Which is why I think it’s such a great idea that Sabre Yachts, (a client of mine,) is telling the story of the construction of a yacht in the Sabre Yachts Blog.

Bentley Collins, their resident blogger, has been taking photos from the factory floor and telling the story of one Sabreline 34 Hard Top Express. (Unlike humans, boat builders usually know the type of boat beforehand.) It’s only two posts in, but Bentley says he’ll blog this until the boat leaves the factory. (Maybe we can then track the boat to its eventual owner and convince him/her to continue blogging!)
Having taken a factory tour, I have to say it’s quite a cool adventure.

OK, I know I’m stretching here, as this is a blog about business blogs, but hear me out.

Vernon Evans, Jr. is sentenced to die on Monday, February 6th. He’s certainly not the only person in America on death row, but he’s the only one I know who has a blog…a blog called Meet Vernon.

Vernon doesn’t have Internet access, so people email questions to him and he responds through an intermediary who then posts to his blog.

Whatever your personal feelings on the death penalty, this is an interesting approach to “personalizing” a death row inmate…something that has been done time and again through more traditional means in the past.

Is this what Marshall McLuhan meant when he said “The medium is the message?” Maybe. Or maybe it’s just the way in which many people may mis-interpret this famous line.

In any case, I first heard about this blog through the Wall St. Journal, although I’m sure it’s been picked up by other news media as well. What makes this story different than many others is the medium through which the story is being told.

Sometimes a message is important because of the way it’s delivered; as Vernon’s supporters have shown us, the blogging platform itself alters, enhances, and promotes the message.

While I’m sure (at least I hope) your blog serves a different purpose than Vernon’s, be aware of the unique attributes of blogging: its sense of community involvement, its immediacy, and its ability to be “news worthy” just because it’s a new medium.

Its newness and particularities make it a powerful method to disseminate your message.

Lots of buzz. Lots of folks.

Word-of-mouth-marketing (WOMM), Florida warmth & sun and a bunch of online experts… including our very own Toby Bloomberg, Josh Hallett and Dana VanDen Heuvel who are live blogging the Word of Mouth Marketing Association‘s conference in Orlando. (Dana is one of the lead bloggers.) What more could you ask for?

Check out the WOMBAT (Word of Mouth Basic Training) conference blog. Day 1 here. Day 2 here. They’ve got a full crowd of international attendees and speakers. 400 people according to conference organizer and WOMMA ceo Andy Sernovitz. Wish I were there…

Note: there are lots of posts on the WOMBAT blog. You’ll have to poke around. A sampling: Women and WOMM; B2B and WOMM; WOMM and ethics; WOM and blogging.

Also see Technorati.

Bottom line: WOMM has come into its own as a separate and defined marketing niche. The notion that this form of marketing can be codified and measured is fascinating. Stay tuned…

Frontier Airlines recently launched a new ad campaign using a blog.  The blog is at FlipToMexico.com and it seems to be gathering steam with traffic and comments.  The premise is to sign a petition to allow Flip the Frontier Airlines dolphin to get a flight to Mexico, and they have gathered a number of signatures.

This campaign seems to coincide with the Super Bowl, so I would not be surprised to see it come to a final end there.  This is a great example of viral campaigns using blogs.  This blog by Flip, a character blog, is sporadic in its postings, but nonetheless I will be following the feed to see the final ending.  I wonder if this means Frontier is about to join in on the corporate blogging bandwagon?

I have a close friend and fellow business blogger who lost her jewelry store to a fire on November 1st, just at the start of the holiday selling season. Her name is Patti Thompson.

Here’s the cool thing, Patti has blogged the entire incident, along with the story of her rebuilding process, on her blog at DiamondDivaOnline.

There are a number of remarks I could make about her willingness to do this, not the least of which is that it represents a vital way blogs can be used to communicate with customers and others — blogging during times of crisis, chronicling the entire process on a blog for all the world to see. She’s done it with genuine openness and transparency too, which in my estimation represents the highest ideals to which we bloggers aspire.

Let me make a simple request. If you’re a business blogger, why not write a post retelling Patti’s story. It is indeed one worth telling. Oh, and don’t pity her. She’s a real trooper, both stalwart and optimistic, determined to "rise from the ashes" and rebuild her business better than before. Knowing her, I have no doubt she’ll do just that. You’ll know too, because she will blog it all.

GM’s Smallblock Engine blog shuts down tomorrow today after exactly one year, perhaps the first highly-publicized Fortune 500 blog to bite the dust. This sounds like a natural death. It was an event-driven blog, created for the 50th anniversary of the Corvette’s small-block engine. And the party is over. Makes sense. (Dave Hill, chief engineer of the Corvette, is also retiring which kind of wraps it up nicely.)

You could say it created a category for corporate blogs: event-specific and time-limited. It never got a huge number of comments from readers. But that’s OK too. Remember, a blog is just a tool. Use it anyway you want as long as you make it a good read, you’re honest and a bit of passion shows through.

Addendum: in April 2005, halfway through the year, the GM folks blogged about whether or not to turn the smallblock engine blog into a powertrain blog. A number of commenters said "oh, yes please do!" But one guy left an astute remark:

"Keep to one topic… don’t try to take on too much in one blog."

Here’s Rick Bruner’s Nov. 2004 post crowing about the launch of the Smallblock Engine blog:

"This is big: the biggest car company in the world now has a blog… "

Denise Wakeman turned me on to this earlier today. Tom Evslin, the guy who invented VOIP technology (I think), is writing a novel and posting each chapter as it’s written to a blog. It’s called blooks – online books distributed on blogs.

This takes the Naked Conversations approach one step further and, so far as I’m aware, he’s the first to actually upload chapters as they’re being written. You can download them at no cost too.

Denise tells me that doing this actually increases sales of the book once it’s printed. She indicates people see the book as a "souvenir." After all, who’s going to download the entire book? (Other than me that is.)

Yet another innovative use of blogs.

You gotta love it. Seth Godin and the smart crew he’s assembled have
torn a page directly out of Seth’s books to soft-launch his new online
company, Squidoo. No traditional PR, no advertising,
just viral blogging via his new e-book, Everyone Is An Expert [31-page PDF]. The e-book explains (sort of) what the service does. I was lucky enough to get a copy from his Editor-in-Chief Megan Casey, when she emailed it out last week.

In the e-book Seth talks about creating “meaning” out of the mess of information you get when you search for something on the Web. Squidoo is all about finding what you’re really looking for. Because an expert has compiled information for you in a way that makes sense and is immediately useful.

And who are these experts? Well, as the e-book explains, anybody can be an expert. Squidoo’s Web 2.0 platform enables anyone to create a “lens” – a special kind of Web page that points to links and information about your expertise. (A Squidoo lens page also enables you to make money.) But it’s not just links. That doesn’t  describe it properly. It’s RSS feeds and other stuff…

that automatically update your lens page for you.

(And it’s Web 2.0… as I understand it, because Seth & co. are building it from other apps or services or databases already out there.)

Here’s the clearest explanation thus far, from the Squidoo blog, of how a lens works:

It’s a guide (like about.com) and a reference (like wikipedia.com).
It’s a place for personal expression (like typepad.com) and an open
platform for real people (like del.ico.us).

Tantalizingly, the e-book closes with a list of URLs that link to sample lenses. But they don’t go live until Oct. 18th!

Here are two of them:

http://www.squidoo.com/samples/royalties

http://www.squidoo.com/samples/sethgodin

SixApart is one of the companies largely responsible for the migration of blogging from personal musings to the small business and corporate world. Their hosted TypePad service has been wildly popular amongst professionals. IBM legend Irving Wladawsky-Berger uses TypePad (instead of IBM’s blogging platform); Seth Godin uses it. Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing, uses it. Intuit’s QuickBooks uses it here and here. The Air Conditioning Contractors of America uses it. This blog uses it. And lots more.

So when the TypePad service goes down, as it did earlier this week, it’s a pretty big deal. Lots of business blogs disappeared for hours. And if you’re the publisher of one of them, as I am, it strikes fear in your heart. Has the damn thing been swallowed up? All those thousands of words gone forever?

I was in a panic to put it politely. For me, and thousands of other customers, this was a crisis. Frustratingly, there was scant information at the time on SixApart’s supposedly real-time status blog.

Well, I’m delighted to report that 6A now gets this crisis blogging thing (see above). They’re talking to us. They’re telling us, candidly, what happened:

Both Monday’s and Tuesday’s outages were the result of hardware failures…

That’s really all customers want. We care more about being kept in the loop than about how bad the news is.

It’s just that we want the information in real-time, during the crisis. Tell us something, anything immediately. Acknowledge that there’s a problem (even a big problem) and that you’re working on it. But do it in plain English. Get the CEO to jump on the "status blog," if necessary. Don’t for heaven’s sake leave it up to your techies to pen one sentence about a "temporary service degradation." That’s jargon. It’s not communication.

Hard to do in a crisis, I know. But it’s the whole point of having a blog as a channel for real-time communication. To turn your customers, who are momentarily in a panic, into your evangelists. And who better than SixApart to model how this should be done. Thanks guys, for being responsive to my comments.

Note: turns out you can back up the contents of a TypePad blog into a file and download it to your computer. I just did it here. Now that would be a good tip to give TypePad customers, wouldn’t it? Doesn’t reflect badly on 6A and is a gentle reminder that these are just machines after all.

Can you save a cartoon character?

One ex-employee of Ask Jeeves intends to find out. He’s launched the Save Jeeves blog to rally support for the titular butler.

Since Barry Diller’s IAC acquired Ask Jeeves there has been a lot of talk about dropping the butler as part of rebranding the search engine as Ask.com. Our blogger wants none of it, and is taking his fight online.

Is this a legitimate beef or some sort of crazy marketing scheme–think "New Coke"–to rally Jeeves’ users and draw more attention to Ask.com? (The ex-employee is so far anonymous.)

Whatever the answer, expect more blogs from current and ex-employees looking to use the medium as a bullhorn to get their voices heard in the boardroom.

Fast Company blogs about an interesting blogging experiment that does a twist on reality TV shows like The Restaurant.

With the help of the firm Transformist and a team of experts, Alane Ebner sets out to develop an architecture business in 10 weeks. Best of all, she and her team blog about their progress at Alane By Day.

While most of us who start a business don’t have the benefit of having
a team of experts mentoring us gratis, there’s still a lot to learn
from the day-to-day activities chronicled at Alane By Day.

Things like 13 strategies to start your own firm, how to develop an identity, or finding your customers
can be beneficial to any one who’s just beginning a business…or
anyone who’s running an established business, for that matter.

With
80% of new businesses failing in the first year, this blog makes for
interesting reading. Although other blogs have chronicled the start-up
phase, often there wasn’t a team of experts working to make the company
a success. Anyone who learns business lessons from The Apprentice might
be interested in picking up the thread in Alane By Day.

As of this writing, the blog is already at day 13 of 82, so there’s a number of posts to catch up on.

When is a blog not a blog?

When it’s a faux blog. Recently, two (or more) marketing hacks from Hollywood decided to cash in on the buzz on blogs to manufacture blogs around new releases. Perhaps they created these blogs to add "authenticity" to the campaign.

In other words, if you can’t be sincere, perhaps you can fake it.

Exhibit A: A History of Violence Blog by David Cronenberg
As my friend Josh Hallett describes it, this is more of a journal than a blog. There’s no comments, no RSS, no trackback, no posting dates.

And
even though it purports to be from the mind of Cronenberg, the writing
is in the third person. Only the video clips are "from his mind." (And
he comes across as surprising mundane for someone who has directed The Fly, Scanners, and Crash. But I digress.)

Is it interesting? If you find David Cronenberg interesting, perhaps. If you like watching videos of him getting into a Porsche, perhaps. But I don’t think it’s a real blog.

The communication here is all one-way; there’s no interactivity, no way for a community to grow around this "blog." This is not a blog, but rather a photo of a blog. It also seems to me to be a missed opportunity.

Exhibit B: Miles’ Blog (Surface)
This
is a "blog" for a new show on NBC called "Surface" that I have to admit
I haven’t seen. It’s written from the perspective of Miles, apparently
a pre-pubescent character who–from what I can tell–is documenting the
care and feeding of Nim, a sea creature he’s raising.

I’m torn
on this. On one hand I see an interesting way to market a show by
having material about the show available outside the confines of a TV
set or a program schedule. It would be great to see updates during the
week that document things that haven’t been on the show, but affect or
are referenced by later events within the show. It would make this blog
(and marketing campaign) truly viral.

On the other hand, this
"blog" is completely lacking in authenticity. (No comments, trackbacks,
or RSS, either.) The writing comes across as a Harvard grad trying to
write like a over-educated 15-year old, not like the character from the
picture. (Again, having not watched the show, perhaps this character
has graduated from Harvard with classmate Doogie Howser, M.D.)

If you are going to do a character blog, why not allow at least moderated comments and trackbacks?
Maybe you could include comments from fans who are also "in character."
It would give an opportunity for a community to build around this
fledgling show, and to develop a passionate, core audience.

Ultimately, the question becomes "what is a blog?"
Is it posts that include trackbacks, comments, and RSS? Does it include
linking to other blogs? Can it be written by a character, or does it
have to be written by a real person, by that person?

Hollywood
appears to be searching for ways to leverage the popularity of blogs
into their marketing campaign. As a "business blogger" myself, I can’t
fault them for that. However, can the people who bring you sound
stages, CGI and canned laughter create an authentic blogging experience?

You may already be familiar with the concept of character blogging, where the blog is actually a fictitious charcter, such as a cartoon character from a cereal box, or a doll perhaps.

I think an interesting twist to this concept would be to have an historical character blogging from the past, as if it were the present day. I think American Girl, with their dolls from various historical periods would make for excellent character bloggers.

As a step in that direction, American Girl has recently launched a Felicity Blog. Felicity is a doll set in the time of the American Revolution. I think it would be a great idea for Felicity and the other dolls to be speaking to girls from the past.

American Girl is done a little bit differently though than a character blog. One of their editors poses questions Felicity faces, and also deals with themes/issues that are relevant to girls today, and asks girls to say what they think Felicity should do.

This Felicity blog doesn’t really give the impression of a character blog, but it is certainly very successful in soliciting comments from readers, with over 250 comments for their first blog post. That is really impressive!

Maybe there are some lessons here to be learned for business bloggers in how to engage with their community of consumers as successfully as American Girl seems to do.

The disaster of Hurricane Katrina is mind-boggling. My heart goes out
to all those affected. Like so many folks, I have a special feeling for
the city of New Orleans. Inconceivable to think of 80 percent of the
city being underwater.

I’m writing a
chapter in my book that considers the crossover of blogging from the
realm of the personal to that of small business and corporate
America.

One reason is human behaviour. In a crisis, people increasingly are turning to blogs to get an account of what’s really happening. They
expect a blog to tell them in an in-the-moment, ragged, authentic voice, typos and all. They
expect to see photos and video, however raw and unedited. It seems more real than the packaged report of a reporter in a wind-whipped anorak.

That’s what mainstream adoption of a new technology or phenomenon
means. It’s based on reflexive behaviour, not on a carefully planned
marketing strategy.

The connection to business is obvious, don’t you think? Just as we turn
to Google and an online search to answer almost any question these days
( …when was the last time you trekked down to the public library?), so
blogs and blogging are becoming a habit.

Useful Links for Hurricane Katrina disaster relief & information

KatrinaHelp wiki

Blog for Relief (see Paul Chaney’s post)

NoLa.com blog (dozens of stories submitted by survivors)

List of disaster relief agencies

If it wasn’t enough trouble to come up with the right string of words to describe your brand, now you gotta worry about what your brand sounds like. That’s right. You need an audio logo for your podcast. What’s your cue music, your sign off… and those little bits in between, like NPR radio uses between segments? MarketingSherpa writes here and here about what’s involved in developing their theme song for podcasting.

Check out Podcastinglogos.com to hear snippets of music used by the New England Journal of Medicine, the Baseball Network and other organizations for their podcasts. The site was just launched by independent film score composer Michael Whalen.

Whalen helpfully poses 10 key questions you should consider before commissioning an audio logo. Here are the first five:

1. How is your company perceived in the marketplace? (big, small, cool, traditional, fun, forward thinking, etc.)
2. How do YOU perceive your company? Is it the same as your answer to #1?
3. Do you think your audio ID should support or work against this impression(s)?
4. Who is your ‘typical’ audience member or customer? (demographically, sense of their tastes, etc.)
5. Should the audio ID appeal to your audience’s taste or should it only support your company’s image? (see question #1)

Follow this link and click on Pricing and Suggestions in the left-hand column to get the rest. (This site is designed in frames… bad idea as I can’t give you a direct link!)