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…
Rok Hrastnik has just produced a huge study on RSS and its power for both marketing and publishing. Price: $39.95. He sent me a preview copy, but I confess to having been too busy lately to have given it proper attention, so I’m just going to rip off what my pal Tig over at MarketingVox said about it:
European e-marketer Rok Hrastnik spent the last year or two researching
an exhaustive review of syndication technology on the web, finally
releasing to Marketingstudies.net
a 550-page definitive ebook on RSS and the marketing uses of
syndication. The advance copy sent to MarketingVOX is written in a
detached, rational tone, in some contrast to the sales pages’ hard sell
copy. Of particular interest will be the technical background
information and the near comprehensive set of interviews of industry
figures, which serves as an indication as to where RSS is heading and
what significance it has to marketers and publishers.
MarketingStudies: Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS
Filed under "This Site Needs a Blog," USA Today reports today Wal-Mart is trying to address its critics more directly with a new public openness. So far, that has taken the form of an open letter from CEO H. Lee Scott in 100 newspapers and planned TV and radio show interviews, as well as a new web site WalmartFacts.com. Notably, however, the site does not feature a blog.
The American Marketing Association has just launched this blog to support its seminar series Blogs: Marketing Beyond the Website. (BTW, the NY event on January 21st, in which I will be participating, is filling up nicely, I’m pleased to say.) Dana VanDen Heuvel, who set up the blog, describes its mission this way in an email to the group of authors:
The AMA blog can be characterized as a vehicle for promoting the event, a clearinghouse for marketing weblog related topics, an overall ‘drive-to’ engine for the seminars, and a repository for "blogging from the seminar’ type content. All while being geared toward MARKETERS. What this blog is not is another blog about blogging for the sake of blogging. I know, that’s pretty narrow in focus, but that’s why we originally created the weblog. Further, it stands to reason that a seminar, on the topic of weblogs, by the de facto organization of record for marketing, should have its own blog.
UPDATE:
For anyone in the NY area interested, a group of us will be getting together for dinner after the event. Details on Church of the Customer.
Appropriate that Fortune just announced its Best Companies to Work For list, as Dana VanDen Heuvel and the Bloggers’ Rights Blog have both just published black lists of companies that are especially unsympathetic to bloggers (usually in the form of firing them for blogging).
Another sign of the times and validation for how seriously some businesses take blogs. Major score for Gawker Media’s Gizmodo: Microsoft approached them about an interview with G-Money himself, Bill Gates. Much of the conversation in this first-installment of the serialized interview is about blogs and RSS. Big congrats to my man Joel Johnson, Gizmodo’s editor. (I bet Pete Rojas is just sick over this!)
Gizmodo: Bill Gates Interview
Six Apart, maker of the popular blog softwares Movable Type, TypePad and most recently Live Journal (via an acquisition just announced) has taken a true blog “industry” leadership position in battling the vexing problem of comment spam. Their latest line of defense is this detailed document describing how spammers attack and how bloggers (using various blog publishing systems) can best respond. I haven’t read all the way through this yet, but it looks like such a useful resource, I thought I’d post it immediately.
Six Apart: Guide to Comment Spam
Yet another story about whether blogs are going to turn media and advertising on its head. I have to say, I am disappointed by this piece. The writer was trying to interview me, but we never connected. It just seems poorly edited, with some obvious factual errors (such as calling Henry Copeland the CEO of DailyKos, when he is the CEO of BlogAds), starting paragraph with “Nor” where it doesn’t make sense semantically or grammatically, and stating as a fact that “blogs offer…soaring incomes,” among other dubious points. But I’ll spare the nit-picking. Nothing much of interest to regular followers of this trend, and nothing about blogs as a customer-communications or marketing vehicle, just blogs as a publishing/advertising medium.
Ka-boom! This is a biggie in the world of business blogs. Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman of General Motors, is the blogger. Whoa. Props to Steve Hall of Adrants, where I first saw the link. He wrote something more thoughtful: read that.
This on the heels of GM’s Smallblock Engine blog.
Blog consulting has apparently gone big-time. ClickZ reports:
Interpublic-owned PR firm MWW Group today launched a Web log marketing practice. Blog 360 will advise clients on strategies to create, participate in, monitor, and advertise in blogs.
"We’ve formed a specialty practice area around blogs, but we really believe they are an important part of any communications plan," said Alissa Blate, MWW Group’s EVP and director of consumer marketing.
Blog 360 will be a component of MWW’s Marketing-360 approach, which supports brands through multiple audience contact points. Depending on a client’s needs, MWW’s plan might include creating a CEO blog for reputation and branding benefits, or a tech blog for information, Blate said. Blog monitoring will likely be a part of any plan, she added.
Ironically, I can’t find anything about it on MWW’s own site, which like so many agency sites is all in Flash and hence very hard to navigate. I can’t even find anything about their "Marketing-360 approach" referred to in the story. Dare I suggest, their site could use a <cough> blog </cough>?
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report on the blogosphere:
By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.
You can see the complete PDF here.
Pew Internet: The State of Blogging
has introduced an ad network for blogs. Current properties include Gawker Media blogs, BlueLemur, 2 Walls Webzine, and CelebCourthouse, with others on the way soon.
Meanwhile, CrispAds is another player in the blog ad network space. I’m getting briefed more on their play shortly and will update with details then.
1
A t-shirt blog, my new favorite commerce blog since MightyGoods.
Big congrats to my buddy Steve Hall for his Adrants blog being named the #1 "Websites You Should Bookmark" in Ad Age’s (print-only) 2004 Book of Tens issue. (Just in case you thought sex had stopped selling…)
Oxygen Network’s show Women & The Badge, about female law enforcement officers, features this blog by one of the real-life police officers featured in the show.
Anil Dash, VP of Six Apart (makers of Movable Type and TypePad blog publishing software), and Jim Coudal, of Coudal Partners (designers and entrepreneurial upstarts), recently gave a free online seminar about the benefits of blogging for business. Anil links to where you can listen to the audio for free. I’m not entirely clear who organized it exactly, but I listened to most of it, and it was interesting and informed. Anil plugged it in advance thusly:
Topics we expect to cover include marketing content vs. editorial content, how weblogs compare to other CMS systems, chat rooms, and discussion boards, the personal/professional balance, and syndication. If you’re already familiar with blogs, but want to get your co-workers, clients, or peers up to date on the medium, this might be a good place to start.
This is great. Saw it first on MarketingVox, which linked to the original note on Micro Persuasion, where Steve Rubel noted that IntelliSeek is targeting ads on Google to keyword searches of Steve Rubel. Some additional quick research shows the same goes for Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis, though sadly no one seems interested in my name or, surprisingly, Robert Scoble.
I suspect this is rapidly going to become the next litmus test for cool in the blogosphere (in which case we’d soon see sad examles of people bidding on their own names through dummy sites, no doubt), the way it has been for a while to have a first-name rank on Google (e.g., despite the fact that he personally rarely blogs anymore, I see that Denton retains his enviable rank on "Nick").
In light of my recent case study on Stonyfield Farm’s blogging efforts, I decided to look at their rank on Alexa. Then I thought of something that proved quite interesting: check out StonyfieldFarm.com’s traffic (according to the admittedly dubious Alexa ranking system) compared to Dannon.com.
UPDATE:
Ironically, I just learned that Groupe Danone owns 85% of Stonyfield Farm.
When I first started this site, my main interest was really just to catalog examples of business weblogs and generally to comment on the trend. I threw the word “consulting” in the domain name mainly because basic permutations of BusinessBlog.com were already registered. I was making my living at that time as a web marketing consultant, so I though what the heck, maybe I’d pick up a bit of consulting work out of it as a perk, which sounded fun. In fact, aside from a few minor engagements, mostly which were pass-through to a weblog designer friend, I didn’t have much consulting out of it. (I did write a business blog for a travel agent friend for a while, and he did pay me for it, so there was also that.) Now I have a full-time job as a market researcher, so I’m really not interested in persuing the consulting part of business blogs, though I do still enjoy tracking the trend.
I’ve watched with interest, however, as various other folks have set up blog consulting businesses. I don’t have much insight into what success they’ve achieved in that, but I figured I’d round up some links. If you know of others, feel free to advise. (Note: I check comments more often than the dedicated Gmail address for this site.)
If you do want to recommend others (like your own), please try to have actual clients for this and not just hype your intensions as a blogging freelancer.
Christine Halvorson has a job title many would enjoy: company blogger. The company in question is Stonyfield Farm, which actually maintains four different blogs. I’ve written about their blogs before and have frequently cited the blogs as an example of a consumer company doing something interesting with blogs. To wit, I wrote Christine the following note a few days ago:
I was on a panel a few weeks ago talking about blogs at AdTech, a conference about online marketing and advertising, and one of my fellow panelists, Nick Denton, publisher of the blog media "empire" Gawker Media, said cynically that he didn’t see the business case for business blogs, particularly for a CPG like a yogurt company (I had cited Stonyfield Farm as an example moments earlier). He asked whether I knew what your traffic was and what benefit you’d seen from it, but of course I had no idea. But I thought they were questions worth following up.
So, with the blessing of her PR director and CEO, Christine graciously answered the following questions in an email interview:
1) What kind of traffic are you getting to your blogs (individually and/or collectively)?
Since we began the five blogs on April 1, 2004, we’ve had a total of 160,000 visitors. (That number combines all five blogs. We actually didn’t begin measuring until June 6.) We have discontinued one of the blogs, so now there are four. Of those remaining four, the most recent per month visits are:
Strong Women Daily News: 15,603
The Daily Scoop: 4,049
Creating Healthy Kids: 9,659
The Bovine Bugle: 28,237
These have been growing steadily each month.
I like also to measure our [email] subscribers. Even though "subscribing" is not really "blog culture", I like to offer our readers that option. Subscriber numbers to date are:
Strong Women Daily News: 1,701
The Daily Scoop: 129
Creating Healthy Kids: 318
The Bovine Bugle: 276
These, too, have been growing slowly and steadily, with the exception of Strong Women, which has grown dramatically and quickly!
We do have an RSS feed on each blog.
2) What was the thinking behind launching the blogs in the first place?
Our company has experienced phenomenal growth, and we have a certain "personality" in the world–we care about the environment; about healthy food; about supporting family farms. With growth, we fear losing touch with what is a very loyal and committed customer base, and so our CEO, Gary Hirshberg, saw the blogs as a way to continue to personalize our relationship with our customers. He wants to "be real" and saw the blogs as a way to do that–inspired in part by the success of blogs within the Howard Dean presidential bid of early 2004.
3) What is the business rationale? What are you trying to accomplish from a marketing perspective (or otherwise)?
See the above. Again, we want to maintain a close relationship with our customers. As organics grows to be mainstream, we want to show how our brand is in fact different, and invite our readers/customers in to help us do that and participate with us in our struggles and triumphs, to the extent possible. Our blogs "continue the conversation" we’ve had with our readers/customers since the beginning in 1987, when we had 7 cows and a great yogurt recipe. Today we produce 18 million cups of yogurt a month!
4) Are you measuring the benefit? If so, how? If not, why not and may you later? When?
We are measuring things like page views, visitors and subscribers. Much like any public relations effort (and we are part of the public relations department), the "benefit" is somewhat intangible, but we have faith that there is one. Somewhere out there, we have created a positive response to our brand by virtue of someone reading something that tickles them, or interests them, or inspires them in one of our four blogs. If we gave them a bit of information they wouldn’t otherwise have, or inspired them to an environmental action, or asked them for an opinion–we assume they remember us when they stand in front of the many yogurts in the dairy case at the local grocery store. We assume that relationship, that contact, causes them to reach for our product, not the competitors’, when given a choice.
5) What kind of feedback do you get from readers? I see you have comments open and that you don’t get a lot of comments but you do get some. Is there a consistent tone or refrain from the comments? Do you get feedback about the blogs in other forms? Via email, the phone, in person comments? What do investors, staff, executives, board members think?
We get a lot of comments in the blogs when we raise controversial issues (and we’re trying to do more of that). We asked once who should be the first female president–that inspired a lot of comments! And we asked what was important to them in the 2004 presidential election. We asked, "Is God male or female" and that was REALLY popular! In The Bovine Bugle, we get a lot of nostalgic comments. The Bovine Bugle is written by one of the organic dairy farmers who supply us with milk. He just writes about his daily life, and the challenges and differences with running an organic farm, versus conventional farming. Many readers will comment about their memories of a childhood on a farm and how they miss it, and how The Bovine Bugle brings back their memories. They also seem to enjoy this glimpse into where their food comes from. In Creating Healthy Kids, we seem to have inspired a lot of professionals in the nutrition/school food/public policy arena, which is exactly what we wanted, and they have strong opinions on junk food in schools, which is why we started that particular topic of blog.
I often get direct comments to me about how much readers enjoy the blogs. I don’t think we’ve had a lot of comments to our consumer relations lines about them. The "blogging community" seems to like what we’re doing also.
6) Is blogging helping sell more yogurt?
See #4 above. It probably affects someone’s buying decision. The good will generated by the blogs is hard to measure, but we assume it will have a positive impact on our bottom line.
Also, we have a huge website and sometimes our blogs are a great way to highlight some of the web content that might otherwise get lost. In this way too, we assume we’re steering some blog readers to buy our product, and some to become subscribers to one of our four e-newsletters.
7) Anything else you’d like to comment about the experience so far?
It’s been a challenge keeping up with 5 (and then 4) blogs, as a one-person operation, but it’s been incredibly fun and I hope more and more readers and consumers find us and participate. We also plan to add another blog after the turn of the year (topic area still confidential).
8) Do you have a sense of repeat readership to the blogs?
It’s hard to measure, except perhaps by the subscriber numbers above. I get folks writing directly to me saying, "I love your blogs. Keep it up." That sort of thing. I actually had one woman say she was housebound with cancer and looked forward every day to her blog entry coming into her computer!
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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
