If you don’t know Corante, you probably have not been online much over the last couple of years. Their blogs have some of the best articles and experts covering a variety of topics that anyone who lives around DC will enjoy reading. Francois Gossieaux has an excellent Blog of his own, Emergence Marketing. You should definitely add it to your feed reader. (’feed reader’ is another term for an RSS Subscription manager - a tool for reading all your favorite news in one location)

Francois Gossieaux, President
Corante
Blog: Emergence Marketing

Q1 - What are the 5 Blogs you can’t live without?

(I am obviously biased about the first two)

http://marketing.corante.com/
http://innovation.corante.com/
http://www.hyperorg.com/logger/
http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/
http://www.freakonomics.com/blog [editors note: ditto on this, these guys are spot on]

I like blogs that are really well written, funny and also informative. Quality of the writing is my #1 criterion, but that’s just me.

Q2 - Tell us a little more about you and your company.

I am the President of Corante - the first blog-based media company. Corante is a trusted, unbiased source on technology, business, law, science, and culture that !s authored by leading commentators and thinkers in their respective fields. Corante also produces premium conferences and publications that help decision-makers better understand their industries and the world around them.

On a personal level I have a passion for marketing, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Q3 - What does Beyond Blogging mean to you? What does it look like?

Beyond blogging means two things to me. First, that quality content and opinions from the blogosphere find a way to penetrate other and more traditional distribution channels to reach people who don’t normally read blogs. Second, Beyond Blogging means extending the social networks that develop through blogs to face-to-face environments.

Q4 - Do you have any sage advice for a communications professional trying to work with a client that wants to Blog? What are the 3 most important things they need to look out for?

1. Don’t feel like you have to blog unless you have something really interesting to say. If you want to participate in the conversations about your company, your technologies or your markets and don’t have anything important to say, look at leveraging some existing employee bloggers to help you participate in the conversations you want to participate in.
2. Make sure that as an organization you understand the intricacies of the blogging culture and that you have the right corporate culture to start blogging. If you do not have employee bloggers, encourage some of them to become individual bloggers or hire new ones and put them either in charge of your corporate blog initiative or at least in an advisory position.
3. Develop a blogging landscape that includes the influential and connector blogs that participate in your conversations as well as adjacent conversations. Participate with them by commenting on and linking to their blogs.

Q5 - What’s the one trend in communications that isn’t being picked up on, or understood, by mainstream communicators?

I have two. The first one is that companies can truly no longer “control their message” - the only thing they can do is “attempt to influence” the conversation…

The second one is that most companies overlook one of their primary sources of customer/ brand communications - the customer service center

Q6 - What are some of your past Blog posts you would like to highlight for our audience? Why?

(Some of the more popular posts from my blog)

• Can word of mouth marketing be considered a “new” media “channel”?
• What do you do when your brand becomes the target of xenophobic rumors?
• Who needs a CMO anyway?
• Hyper-specialization is not always the right thing to do…

Q7 - Discuss briefly what you’ll be sharing with our audience at the Beyond Blogging event.

The challenges and opportunities related to establishing authoritative group voices in the blogosphere. The challenges and opportunities of extending the blogospehere’s virtual social networks to the physical face-to-face world. [Editor’s note: It’s good to see that more and more people are working to get out from behind their screens and spend more time with real people]

Categories: Blogging, Speakers