Marketing Roadmaps

Archives for June 2006

BlogHer Unpanel on Business Blogging

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This July at BlogHer, Toby Bloomberg, Yvonne DiVita and I are doing a Business Blogging "Unpanel" on Saturday July 29th.

Here’s the scoop on the session:

This panel isn’t about us. It’s about all of us. Call it an “unpanel.” Call it a “rap session.” What we call it doesn’t matter. What we do, does. And what we are going to do is share our business blogging stories and then build a set of business blogging “best practices” based on our experiences. Everyone is part of the panel, and we’ll just do the best we can to keep up with the brilliance in the room.

Here’s the format. The first half of the session is devoted to case studies. Our goal is eight – we have three committed, so we need  BlogHers who plan to attend the session to step up and volunteer to share yours. How do you do that? Respond to this message (Please respond on the BlogHer site at this link) and tell us “I’m in” and let us know about the blog URL you plan to discuss in July.

During the session you’ll have 5 minutes to tell us the objectives of the blog, what worked, and what didn’t. Giving us the URL in advance lets us all check out the blog so you have to spend less time in exposition. And please, participants, do at least take a look at the blogs volunteered for the session. It will help us all get to the meat, which is creating our best practices deliverable.

Because what’s an unpanel without a collective product [You can see, Susan (who wrote this) really is a socialist at heart.]

The second half of our session is devoted to a group discussion. And we aren’t there just to chat. We want to leave the room with at least the shell of a best practices document –things that work become our best practices, things that didn’t are warning signs. This is the critical piece of this session. Without the deliverable, we’ve had a nice chat. When we create this document, we’ve helped ourselves and others be better business bloggers. Cool, huh.

So, please, if business blogging is your bag, and you are planning to attend this session, consider sharing your story. Yvonne, Toby and Susan can fill the time, but we don’t want to. We want to hear from and talk with you. Way more fun 🙂

Here are the case studies already on deck. Add yours in the comments. First come, first served. Five spots left, and we will do the session in the order received on the BlogHer site.

Masi Guy at http://masiguy.blogspot.com/
Know Your Bones at www.knowyourbones.com
Our Fathers Who Art in Heaven at http://murak.blogs.com/
Research from Stephanie Hendrik, a doctoral student from the University of Sweden: Stephanie will present research about when companies do inauthentic things with blogs. Things like fake blogs and fake commenters. Due to ethical considerations, she is keeping the the blogs in the study anonymous, but she is preparing a brief abstract for us which we’ll post here.

Two questions we know we’ll get:
Q. Can I talk about more than one blog?
A. Yes, but you still only have 5 minutes. Use them wisely.

Q. Will you stop taking volunteers after the 5 spots are filled?
A. Nope, keep signing up. People may decide to go to another session, or that they don’t really want to speak. Some people may take less than 5 minutes so we’ll have extra time. Who knows what will happen. Until it happens! So please sign up. We’ll go in order received until the time allotted for case studies runs out.

If you are planning to attend BlogHer, please consider joining us and sharing your blog case studies. Please sign up on the post at the BlogHer site –it is a whole lot easier if all the sign-ups are in one place. Thanks.

(cross posted to Marketing Roadmaps and MarCom Blog)

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No more 2.0

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After 20 years in high tech, most of them in the software industry, I have definitely internalized the concept of versioning. It’s one of the reasons I dislike the term Web 2.0. In a software release, a major release – signified by a number to the LEFT of the decimal – means new/enhanced features. While I suppose that’s true of the tools and services that are being lumped into the Web 2.0 label, it also means something finished. And that isn’t true of the Web.

I’m going to start using the terminology Doc Searls used in the presentation I saw at Syndicate — Static Web and Live Web. In Doc’s construct the Static Web, we consumed information from Web sites. Yes, the Web was connected, but most of us were passive users of sites developed by others for  information, enjoyment and commerce. In the Live Web, we are all producers — of blogs, podcasts, vlogs. Even Web sites. And the connections are alive, influenced by the audience as well as the original creator. There is no "audience" per se — we all are simultaneously audience and creator. How are we building this Live Web? With social media tools like blogs and tags and wikis and photo sharing tools and podcasts and so on. But these are all just tools that facilitate the connection. The secret sauce? It’s people talking to and learning from one another.

So, Hell no, no more Web 2.0 for me. I’m going with Live Web and social media.

And before I forget, the term "PR 2.0" must go too. For similar reasons. The fundamental practice of PR is still the same as it ever was — it’s all about connections and information and relationships. The tools are just how we accomplish the work. They are NOT the work.

And please don’t get me wrong — I LOVE these new tools. But I don’t think they are the be-all and end-all. They are just tools. Learn how to use them, they’ll make your life and work easier. Better even. But we have to get the fundamentals right first. Otherwise, it’s like putting lipstick on a pig. You know — it’s still a pig. Crappy press releases will still be crappy, even if they have del.icio.us pages. Poor pitches aren’t better because they use tags. Blasting a press release to a big list without bothering to verify the list or the interest of the recipients is still borderline spam.

All of this focus on tools reminds me somewhat of a phenomenon from the distant, pre-Internet past. Most of my career, I have been responsible for lead generation at the companies I worked at. One of the hardest jobs is lead tracking — knowing where the leads came from so we can allocate marketing dollars appropriately.Why so hard? Because we rarely have the tools to capture the information we need. Way back when, the top lead source reported by reps nearly everywhere I worked was "Phone." Apparently, it was too damn hard to find out the actual impetus for the inbound call. My response? "Tell them to try and find out or we’ll just spend the marketing budget on new phones and be done with it. No ads. No direct mail. No trade shows. "

Now, the new top lead source tends to be "Internet." Yup, same basic problem. Confusing the tool with the motivation.

We do the same thing when we focus on the social media tools we use in communications and forget about the fundamentals. I’ve had some back and forth with Todd Defren from SHIFT about his social media press release, both here and on his blog PR-Squared. I don’t dislike the format, but I do think it, like the focus on the term PR 2.0, may have unintended, unfortunate consequences.

 In our recent exchanges on his blog and in email, we’ve agreed to try and pull together some sort of panel or workshop or something (wine dinner? Parmet?)  to pull together all these threads and hopefully move the conversation forward. 

But it won’t be called 2.0 anything. Trust me 🙂

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Bloggers aren’t journalists

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Robert Scoble posted late yesterday that "Great journalists call" in reference to the fact that some reporters actually called to confirm the rumour that he was leaving Microsoft while other bloggers simply went with the story as it unfurled its way through the blogosphere, without calling.

Journalists can be bloggers. Dan Gillmor. The folks at BusinessWeek. There’s no shortage of examples. And some bloggers are journalists, subscribing to  a code of ethics that demands balanced reporting, objectivity or at least fairness, verification of the facts, and, dare I say it,  Truth. I’ll leave you all to find your own examples here — anything I do will leave someone’s favorite out, and then everyone will focus on that rather than my point.

Just having a blog does not make someone a journalist. Even if they happen to break the news. 

And before the citizen journalist advocates get up in arms,  I *do* think citizens can be journalists. But not simply because they want to be or say they are. A citizen journalist has to do the same job we expect from a reporter from the daily paper. Fair and balanced reporting. Check the facts. Check your spelling or get a copy editor to do it for you.

Break the news right, you can call yourself a journalist. Spread a rumour? That’s gossip. Nothing wrong with doing that on your blog if you want to. It is your blog.

But reporting a rumour is not telling the story. Let’s not confuse the two.

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It’s all in the name…

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Brangelina really should have consulted somebody on the name for their newborn daughter. Bad enough that they used the masculine form Nouvel, versus the feminine Nouvelle, but the blogosphere has coined a nickname for poor Shiloh-Nouvel Jolie-Pitt —  Shovel.

It would be awful if it weren’t so funny, n’est-ce pas?

(from CityRag, via Fashiontribes)

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