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…
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.
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.
CEO Henry Copeland launched this do-it-yourself ad network for blogs nearly two years ago, and at that time there was a fair bit of skepticism that the business would ever pan out. Well, it has. The service now has more than 200 blogs using the system, each of which has at least 3,000 ad impressions each week. Some, such as InstaPundit and DailyKos, have millions of readers per month. The service has proven particularly popular with political advertisers — more than two dozen candidates in the presidental and other races have used it to reach political junkies through blogs. But many smaller and medium-sized companies are also find blogs a great way to advertise niche products. Blogs are ideal “for products that have a sensibility, not commodities, those looking to find audiences with a particular mindset,” Copeland said. Some of the biggest bloggers using the system are now earning thousands of dollars a month in advertising.
I have counseled BlogAds about its overall business strategy.
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.
Ross Mayfield is CEO of Socialtext, what I would call knowledge management software, but he’s told me should be called “enterprise social software.” Anyway, Ross is a leading thinker in the space of social software and people-powered publishing (such as wikis, business blogging, social networks). In addition to his personal blog (linked in the headline of this entry), which itself tends to be more about business than his personal life, he also blogs on Social Text’s site as well as part of a great group blog about social software called Many2Many on Corante.
Ray Ozzie is a well-respected commentator in the tech space on his blog, while his day job is running Groove Networks, “virtual office software that allows teams of people to work together securely over a network as if they were in the same physical location.”
Microsoft is certainly a bastion of innovation, but over the years it has demonstrated an inclination towards secrecy bordering on paranoia. It is therefore somewhat surprising that Microsoft has been so welcoming of the whole blog phenomenon. Certainly hundreds, if not thousands, of Microsoft employees maintain blogs, among the most high-profile of which are Robert Scoble’s and Channel 9. In addition, however, Microsoft links to more than 100 blogs (see link in the headline above) by employees about products and programming topics.
Macromedia, the software firm that makes a range of web and multimedia authoring tools, has been a pioneer in letting its knowledgable inner circle of product architects communicate directly with customers through a series of weblogs. These blogs, many of which both note that they represent the private opinions of their authors and carry the Macromedia company logo (go figure), touch of a range of topics, including the authors comments on general technology trends, as well as comments specific to Macromedia products. The company’s blogs include these:
Dan Bricklin is currently president of Software Garden, a small software applications developer. Bricklin is best known for codeveloping VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet application. Until early 2004, Mr. Bricklin served as CTO of Interland, Inc., after it acquired his previous company, Trellix Corporation, maker of enterprise publishing software. As a blogger, Bricklin has distinguished himself as one of the leading strategic thinkers in the technology sector.
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 is the tireless writer of this blog, with multiple posts daily on a range of topics, but with a concentration on media, blog-related news and politics. Technically, this is a personal blog, not a business blog, but Jarvis distinguishes himself as being such an influential blogger while simultaneously holding down the job as president & creative director of Advance.net, the Internet arm of Advance Publications and Condé Nast Magazines. While his blog clearly reflects his personal opinions and not those of his employer (as the standard disclaimer goes), he has acknowledged that Advance has given his blogging its nod of approval. “I type really fast,” he once told me.
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.
Alan Meckler, CEO of Internet research and publishing firm Jupiter Media, has embraced blogs in a big way. Not only has he encouraged many of his firm’s analysts to maintain their own blogs, but he also blogs himself about general trends in the Internet and high-tech industry.
First the “Majority Report,” hosted by Janeane Garofalo, had its own blog, now the “O’Franken Factor,” hosted by comedian Al Franken, is the lasted radio show of the new liberal talk radio network Air America to have a blog.
There’s something about talk radio and blogs that is a marriage made in heaven, for the zeolot who has just too much ranting to be contained in a three-hour talk show format. Interesting that Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limblaugh on the right don’t have blogs of their own. (Could RushLimblog.com be a better name for such a site?)
Utterly brilliant example of a business blog from a somewhat surprising source: Microsoft. Brilliant in terms of philosophy (well thought out) and execution. Here is a post that lays out the The Channel 9 Doctrine, and here is the "What the…" schpiel in the left-column of every page:
Channel 9 started as a personal story from one of us about fear of flying. Lenn realized after years of dealing with it, that it was actually a fear of the unknown. The fear was conquered through learning. The more transparency into what it took to fly a plane, the more the fear went away. Lenn got to know pilots who flew planes everyday, and every time he flew he turned on Channel 9 on the in-flight audio system to listen in to the cockpit.
We think developers need their own Channel 9, a way to listen in to the cockpit at Microsoft, an opportunity to learn how we fly, a chance to get to know our pilots. Five of us in Redmond are crazy enough to think we just might learn something from getting to know each other. Were we wrong? Time will tell.
Join in, and have a look inside our cockpit and help us fly the plane.
Welcome to Channel 9.
One of the most innovative features of the blog is the use of video clips of developers interviewing each other. You know it’s the real deal when these not-exactly telegenic gentleman (I haven’t seen any women yet) cite a Star Trek movie as informing their programming considerations. Serious geeks, in addition to the video blog posts, the site comes complete with a moblog and a wiki.
Blog supporting consulting work of Lee LeFever, who helps companies manage online communities and other “social software resources.”
As all non-fiction book authors should be doing, Howard Rheingold is blogging to support his book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. In fact, Rheingold isn’t even doing the blogging: he’s enlisted the help of a team of devotees of the book to do the blogging for him. Smart mob, indeed.
A communications strategy firm:
CRA is a consulting firm devoted to bringing leading research in organizational and interpersonal communication to bear on real-world problems. We are not a PR, media relations, or media production firm–we are a team of consultants educated in Communication Science and devoted to advice that works, responsive service, and lasting client relationships. Our team of fifty–over forty of whom hold their Doctorates–provides applied solutions across three practices:
- Internal Communication Strategy
- Leadership Development
- Organizational Research
« Previous Page — Next Page »
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
