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 stumbled upon this post about 5 Steps to Jumpstart Your Website [or blog] over at College Startup.
It leans heavily on Web 2.0 sites like Reddit and Digg and some upstart called Netscape. However, if you’re looking to reach a new audience this post has the links you’ll need to try out.
I took the author’s advice and posted Top-Level Domain Survey (or what to do when your .com is taken) to his number one recommendation and got about 30 hits in 30 minutes from the source. Not bad for 2 minutes of work. (Not including the hour or so I put into creating the survey and blogging about it.)
YMMV depending on your audience, post and title.
Blidget is a new tool/service/offering from Widgetbox that allows you to create a widget out of your blog. (What is it about Web 2.0 that requires every new tool to have a celebrity couple name?)
By turning your blog into a widget you can make it easier for people to syndicate your content while still maintaining some of your branding. Creating a Blidget only takes a few minutes, and depending on your blog software, installing it may be a one-click affair.
If you’d like to add BBC’s widget to your own blog, click below:
In case we don’t have enough to worry about as bloggers, it appears that the European Union is passing a new directive that makes it illegal for businesses to falsely masquerade as a consumer. Not just with fake blogs (also known as “sock puppet blogs”) but with comments on blogs too, reviews on Amazon.com and other review sites, and more.
It all sounds good in theory, but in reality I fear that this will prove to be a nightmare for bloggers if we are going to be held liable for verifying the identity of everyone who adds comments to our weblogs. I mean, let’s be straight here: identity is impossible to verify anyway, and even if you could, the nuances of identity are such that the system is trivially defeated anyway. For example, if my sister works at a company and I write a blog comment on someone else’s weblog that defends her firm, do I need to disclose that relationship?
It’s a curious law and I surmise that the EU won’t be able to enforce this new directive. But that’s just me. What’s your opinion of the new law that’s just starting to surface in the online world?
Tip: More details on this article can be found on my own blog, in a considerably longer article entitled: EU makes fake blogs and comments illegal: are all bloggers liable?
When I saw the following “motivational” poster for Blogging, I would have sworn it was yet another brilliant creation of the folks at Despair.com. But no, it wasn’t. It’s part of a home-made series by Ishkur. Classic!
Hat tip to Ilker.
Daniel over at Daily Blog Tips–a blog that focuses on providing daily tips to bloggers to keep those creative juices flowing–has listed 30 results from his reader survey on tips to increase traffic to one’s blog.
They vary from the obvious–create valuable content and comment on related blogs–to ideas on social networking and building community on sites like del.icio.us, Digg and Squidoo.
Chances are you’ll find at least one gem in this list of proven traffic-building techniques.
Jim and I have been working with Ben Yoskovitz (who also blogs with Des, Jeremy, and I at b5). Ben is a sharp guy and has skills that keep Jim and I in line (read guys with lots of great ideas … sometimes harebrained ideas though). Ben told us that he was writing up a Top 10 list of why proposals fail. Now given that he’s been reading the proposals I’ve been writing for OBO lately, I’m kinda worried.
Anyway, Ben’s list rocks. Basic stuff. Simple stuff. And how about this for a closer to the post:
Your business rocks. You work hard. You deserve more business.
Don’t let proposals get in the way. Do them right and you’ll win a lot more business.
Source: Top 10 Reasons Why Proposals Fail : Instigator Blog
Ben has been “lucky” enough to have this make the front page of Digg. I put that in quotes because his server has crashed at least twice today. Ah the peril of fame.
Okay, while this post isn’t about blogging it is about consulting which is what this blog is also about. I think Ben’s post is one of those that should be printed, laminated, and tacked to your wall. Maybe even given to all new hires. I dunno, but these are points to keep in mind.
One of the best set of point involves not being too technical and getting to the benefits. Jim and I had a section in our proposals about TechCrunch. Ben pointed out that to most of our potential clients (folks who don’t have blogs yet) TechCrunch might as well be Crunch ‘n’ Munch to them. They just don’t care—it has no inherent meaning to them.
Okay folks, everybody dust off some recent proposals and see if you make the top 10 list. Man, I’ve got some work to do.
This is year 3 that my friend Alex Brown will be teaching an innovative undergrad class at the University of Delaware. Infotech Applications in Marketing and is probably one of the few of its kind that is required for marketing majors. In addition to presenting the lastest interactive strategies, including social media/blogs and search, students are required to blog their assignments.
Last year Alex used Shel Israel’s and Robert Scoble’s Naked Conversations along with John Battelle’s The Search: How Google And Its Rivals Rewrote The Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. Alex asked me if these books were still “appropriate” or if he should look at something different. Amazon lists 57 books for the search business blogging and 4734 for the search blog. So many books .. so little time!
What are your thoughts? If you were teaching an undgrad class on innovative internet marketing what books would you use? Keep in mind that the blog/social media aspect is a significant component of the course.
FYI – Alex is no stranger to online marketing, in addition to putting on the prof jacket, Alex is behind the highly successful Barbero blog, which last week pulled over 70k visits; and the Wharton Admissions Blog, the first blog that was developed as a value-add portal.
I almost have to wonder if the National Pork Board is practicing brilliant, subversive marketing.
If you haven’t heard, the NPB is suing a blogger. (Seems like the best stories always start out that way.) Jennifer Laycock, the blogger behind The Lactivist Breastfeeding Blog, has been threatened with a lawsuit for her t-shirt promoting breastfeeding that reads “The Other White Milk.”
The t-shirt was one of many available at her lactating store at CaféPress including others that read:
[Snicker.]
I mean, when you go after a blogger, you’re begging for attention. According to her blog, Laycock has only made $8 off the shirt. I can’t imagine that this is a thread to the NPB or their tired advertising campaign.
If there are any global conglomerates out there looking for a little publicity in-and-out of the blogosphere please contact me. I’d be happy to riff on your advertising for a little mutual profiteering.
To promote the fact I’ll be speaking at the next Maine Innkeeper’s Conference, the group asked me to write an article on blogging for their newsletter. (PDF, 1.3MB)
There’s also an article in there on podcasting as well.
What site has atrocious design, usability issues, a frustratingly restrictive web page creation platform, and countless junk/spam/abandoned profiles, yet the highest number of pageviews out of any other site? Why, MySpace of course!
MySpace.com is a slice of humanity – a very big slice. With tens of millions of users (and most of them NOT teenagers), MySpace apparently drives more traffic to online retailers than MSN Search, according to some recent Hitwise data.
MySpace is a site that should concern retailers and business bloggers alike. It’s where our audiences hang out.
The MySpace ecosystem is host not just to teenagers, but also concerned parents trying to keep tabs on their kids, college students, obsessed sports fans, realtors, and every one else in between. And companies too, from bars to bands, brands to quirky dotcoms.
Before you go off half-cocked with your MySpace marketing initiatives, you need to understand it. Just like with the blogosphere, the MySpace community can turn on you the moment you make your first misstep. So rule #1 is ‘keep it real’.
Another one of the critical factors is having ‘Friends’ in your network. For instance, Apple’s iPod Nano registered 1,500 friends on October 15; by October 27 that had risen to 37,070 friends. Nice marketing job Apple!
“Weird Al” Yankovic breathed new life into his musical parody career, thanks in no small part to MySpace and YouTube. On MySpace, Weird Al has accumulated 420,000 MySpace friends since he joined the site in July last year (I chronicled this a bit more here).
I interviewed Michael Boldin at Pugster.com, who has been using MySpace to generate traffic, sales, and a very respectable 8,000 friends. He shared several great tips for cultivating friends on MySpace, among them:
This morning I wrote a post on my blog called “Bush No Longer a Miserable Failure, Claims Google.” It was in reaction to Google’s new algorithm that defuses “Google Bombs.”
At the bottom I linked to the post on Google’s blog that goes into more detail about what they did and why. (Whoops! I did it again!)
At the bottom of the post they have a section called “Links to this post” which has…wait for it…links to that post.
About a third of my traffic so far this morning is from that Google post, obviously from the blog’s readers.
Caveats:
This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten this reaction from linking to Google’s blog. To make the most out of it, you probably want to get your link in their early, while there’s still a lot of people coming to that post.
Alternatively, you could link to it late, and hope few people link after you, pushing you down the list.
Like any other technique, this is easily abused. Use it only for good, my young padawan.
Sean Kelly, who writes the Franchise Pick blog for b5media (where I am also and author and channel editor), has a pretty disturbing, if true, post about the coffee franchise Cuppy’s (formerly Java Jo’z).
The gist is that few months ago Scoble wrote about his brother Ben’s problems with the franchise. A tempest ensued over allegations of bad business practices from Cuppy’s. Fair enough, standard fare for the Blogosphere. The odd thing is that suddenly Scoble’s post disappeared. So did posts on both of his brothers’ blogs. Then other negative posts started disappearing and blogs critical to Cuppy’s started to have problems. To make it more interesting, comments on the LJ and Xanaga sites for Cuppy’s turned effusively glowing. There are now questions regarding the company threatening or even (maybe) bribing bloggers to delete posts or change their tune.
Sean has heard from Ben Scoble and he can’t talk about the issue, which means that some legal maneuvering has been taking place. So the question remains, what’s going on here? Is a company trying to silence critics? While there might not be any thing wrong going on here, it certainly doesn’t look good.
Tags: Cuppy’s, Java Jo’z, franchises
A just published Fortune article makes the point (quoting IBM CEO Sam Palmisano) that the 3-D virtual world of Second Life is not just “eye candy” and may represent the “next phase of the Internet’s evolution.”
But as Alex Manchester puts it on the Melcrum blog: “… the waters are definitely still very, very muddy and I still think few senior execs that aren’t in the tech industry would go for it [Second Life].” Alex, I agree.
Although… I’m increasingly convinced that something is very real about this place (I’ve explored Second Life briefly). For example, the equivalent of US $1 million exchanged hands inside 2L in the past 24 hours. And the World Economic Forum, in Davos this week IRL (in real life), is doing interviews at Reuters’ Second Life bureau. Go figure…
Useful Link
Second Life: It’s Not a Game by Fortune senior writer David Kirkpatrick (Jan. 23, 2007)
One of the big questions us business blogging consultants have to answer is “So, what’s the ROI here?”. Sure, we all have good answers. As a group we’ve all bantered this around, especially when we get together and we’re bantering over a round … of drinks, and we’re pretty much all on the same page here. One thing that has been lacking is that all-important uber-consultant seal of approval. I know it’s silly, but hey it’s the truth. Big companies like to see Gartner or Forrester reports that back what you’re saying.
Today Forrester released their blogging ROI whitepaper and real-world application of the model to GM (hat tips to Steve and Charlene). Finally! Now if I could just get my hands on a copy of that report …
If you’d like to read a little more in-depth analysis of the report, check out my post on the OBO blog.
Tags: Forrester, blog ROI, Charlene Li
Good article over at eWeek called “RSS Offers Relief from Enterprise E-Mail Overload.”
It talks about how email has fallen out of favor as a way of distributing information to large groups of people, and how certain businesses are starting to use RSS.
The article also covers some negatives of RSS, including:
This definitely isn’t one of those “email is dead” articles, but instead shows how forward thinking companies are looking to RSS as a new distribution channel.
Can blogs be optimized for search marketing? Absolutely! Blogs are basically content management systems with additional functionality such as comments, trackbacks and RSS. In many ways, blogs are no different than web sites.
If a document can be optimized and that document gets indexed, categorized and ranked by any kind of search engine, it’s an opportunity for search marketing. As such, marketers should be aware of how document optimization within various channels can be used within the overall online marketing mix. Blogs are one of many platforms that benefit from optimization.
At a minimum, using blog software to manage certain kinds of content on a web site such as an online media room, to archive newsletters, post frequently asked questions and to provide product updates can make a site that is otherwise very search engine un-friendly, become a viable source of great rankings. This applies to both regular search engines as well as blog search engines. These are applications for a blog besides the common use as a platform to increase credibility and communicate a more personalized voice for a company.
Blogs are no silver bullet though and require working hard and smart – especially smart. However the payoff can be significant. To prove the point that blogs are effective tools for improving search engine visibility, I can offer that my own blog (Online Marketing Blog) receives the majority of it’s traffic from search engines.
Here are a few Google ranking examples of the top referring search phrases in the past month for Online Marketing Blog:
Even more niche phrases bring in quality search traffic such as:
which are all services our search marketing agency provides. Of course the rules can change slightly over time, but here are a set of benefits I often find myself explaining to people wondering about the search engine optimization benefits of having a blog.
Felllow BBC’er Stephan Spencer has also written extensively about optimizing blogs and using blogs as SEO tools.
So there you go. A basic list of practical reasons a blog can be beneficial as a site optimization tool and for improved web site traffic along with practical examples. What SEO benefits have you found from having and promoted a blog?
Tris Hussey today posted about a debate that has gone through the blogosphere like wildfire. I too have been following this furor about the social press release and can see that it is clearly at a crossroad in its evolution. I hear screams of kill the press release and others saying that the press release is not dead and each side has its own strong beliefs. So as business blogging advocates where do we see the social media press release and what is its future? I’m sure we could have numerous opinions within the small ranks here.
It seems that everyone has a different idea of how they want information to be presented. The mainstream media has long had the press release in it’s bag of tricks, but with blogging becoming more and more of an information portal, their appears to be new players in the game that bring with them their own rules. Bloggers want the information quickly and in such a way as to relay that information in a format that can be easily posted. I, like Tris, can see that a new animal will be launched soon with a new meaning and with different rules. Until that time the debate continues and I will be sitting back to see the lines drawn in the sand. What side of the line do you stand on and where do you see the social media press release finishing?
Tags: Tris Hussey, Social Media, Press Release, PR Blogs
Yesterday’s New York Times article “Some Bling for Your Blog” got me thinking about widgets and plugins and how most of them are serve no real purpose to the average blog reader and simply frustrate them by slowing the page downloading. The article showed screen grabs of a few cool-looking widgets: the trivia game Blufr, the Streampad music player, and the fund-raising widget ChipIn. But do those widgets really add value — enough value to counterbalance the extra download time?
What I would have liked to have seen in the article is a list of the best of the bling. Well, since they didn’t, I will take a stab at it myself. And please jump in with your suggestions too, via the comments. Here are my personal favorites:
and these which are not really widgets, but plugins (for WordPress):
Plenty more widgets at Widgetoko
Another CEO has thrown his hat into the blogosphere, and decided that a blog is the best way to communicate with the customer. Bill Marriott, CEO and Chairman of Marriott International had his initial blog post on January 16, 2007. He realizes the importance of blogs by telling us up front:
I’ve checked out Jonathan Schwartz’s blog at Sun Microsystems and "Randy’s Journal" at Boeing. I’ve listened to Senator Barack Obama’s blog podcasts. I know blogs will be a hot communications tool in the 2008 Presidential campaign.
He finishes this thought after what I consider to be a rather long post, with:
Bottom line, I believe in communicating with the customer, and the Internet gives me a whole new way of doing that on a global scale. I’d rather engage directly in dialogue with you because that’s how we learn and grow as a company.
At the time of this publication, he had already received 49 comments. It seems that he has already made a big splash on his first day. This is a blog that should be added to your feed reader to see if he actually posts regularly and how he does with the communication tool. Welcome to the blogosphere Mr. Marriott. I wonder if all of the Marriott’s will provide free hi-speed wifi to every blogger now?
Tags: CEO Blogs, Marriott International, Bill Marriott, Jonathan Schwartz, Randy’d Journal, Boeing, Barack Obama, Wifi
Chris Richardson at WebProNews has a good article outlining some of the complaints against Google’s Blog Search.
Seems a lot of blogs are scraping content to either redirect visitors to another page or to sell Google Ads on their own blog. Who makes money on Google Ads? Well, Google of course! What’s especially frustrating is that many if not most of the offending blogs are on Blogger, owned by, of course, Google.
By running a Google Alert on “flyte” I’m finding about one blog a day that’s scraping my content to drive traffic to their sites to sell more Google Ads. However, since not all of my posts include the word “flyte” I’m only catching a fraction. (I share a name with a college football coach, so the Google Alert on “Rich Brooks” was not helpful.)
Is it even possible for me to write a paragraph about the Web that doesn’t include the word Google or a product owned by Google? Only time will tell….
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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
