As an unconference enthusiast, I was delighted when my friend and BrainJams Patron Chris Pirillo announced he was going to embody many of the principles of the Unconference as part of his Gnomdex 6 event later this month.  I was more delighted when they sold out the other day (I bought my ticket back in February) and I was rolling on the floor laughing when I read Dave McClure’s post on the Braintrust mailing list about

“creating a startup to securitize the market for trading in Gnomedex tickets, futures, and related derivative products. i’m currently raising a $10M series A round to fund the venture, and interested high-net worth individuals should email me off list.”

But seeing Chris’ post about Senator Edwards speaking to the social media world of communicators, creators, developers and contributors (highly amplified influentials) really blew me away.  According to Chris,

“Sentator Edwards will quickly turn his time over to the Gnomedex audience, fielding questions and fostering discussion over how technology could and should play a role in our world.”

This is fantastic news.  Congratulations to my friend Chris Pirillo who has been doing amazing things with social media since long before we ever called it social.

Categories: Blogging, politics, Unconference
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I hope we will have some good news for everyone soon about what is going on here. I have been working behind the scenes on some very exciting plans, but can not talk about them just yet.

A couple of other important news items to share with you briefly:

1. In case you were not on planet earth earlier this week, Microsoft’s face to the Blogosphere, Robert Scoble has left Microsoft to join a Silicon Valley podcast network called Podtech. I heard the news at Vloggercon before the story broke - but out of respect for Rober’ts wishes to hold off on the story until Tuesday, said nothing about it.
2. Just over a week ago Tom Foremski announced plans to work on establishing some standards around a new press release format. My conversations with him around this seemingly played a role in this new development as we have talked about it several times since our podcast. Last night I agreed to help manage this process with him while at the Society for New Communications Research dinner.
3. In the company news front, Google has announced that it will begin to sell Adwords by Dayparts. MediaWeek has some basic coverage and Search Engine Watch had a few more details. Personally, I thought this should have been happening several years ago, but am very happy since it should create higher efficiency in marketing campaigns, but it will also drive the per click prices up for any product/service that gets sold into the working world. If it also drives down the number of wasted clicks, everyone should come out ahead.
4. Bloggercon is sold out, but people are still adding their names, so if you can make it to San Francisco next week, it would be great to see you there.

Well, there is lots more to talk about, but that is all for now. Have a great weekend - it looks like most of the US should be pretty nice outside. While you all are enjoying your Saturday, I will be participating in Rails Day 2006…

Categories: Blogging, New Media, PR Community
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Last night I wrote a post on my blog about FeedBurner. I’d finally gotten around to setting it up and I think it’s a great tool for anyone who publishes a feed. For those unfamiliar, FeedBurner is a service which takes your existing RSS feed and allows you to add enhancements to it. One of the most popular features is the ability to gather analytical data such as how many people are subscribing to your feed and what articles they’re clicking to. It also makes your feed look nicer in a browser, and makes it easier for users to subscribe. For a real world example, see the Beyond Blogging 2006 feed on this page.

The basic FeedBurner services are free and easy to setup. If you’re a TypePad user, things just got even easier since they recently added a new feature to seamlessly integrate the two:

Connect your TypePad feed to FeedBurner

Since they’re both owned by Six Apart, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar integration into MovableType type down the road. Regardless of what platform you use, if you’re a blogger who publishes a feed, FeedBurner is a free and easy way to make it better.

Categories: Blogging
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After a bit more delay than we had hoped, the webcast is now live and available for you to view and share with colleagues.  Some background on the Webcast is available on our Blog here, or you can go and enter your basic contact information to access the Webcast. Thanks to our partner Vodium for putting this online with us.

Categories: Uncategorized, Blogging, From Event
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Funny that Steve Rubel’s post “I Like Companies that say ‘We Suck’” came out when it did - guess the universal consciousness is bubbling up a big world-shifting idea once again. I have been working on a post all week about a similar topic, but I think Steve’s focus on companies admitting their faults does not go far enough. Yes, the tech companies have had a bit of experience with Mea Culpa’s over the years, and this is a requirement for the establishment of trust for an organization’s voice, but the real change that is needed is for companies to embrace all of the truth and their intentions in order to develop real trust within the Commons and amongst its customers. The sort of FUD that Microsoft used to masterfully deploy (and is now being put forth by Google) has no place in the world any longer.

While owning up to corporate short comings is a necessary component of trust, I see it more as philosophical shift towards more openess and being ‘real’ than simply admitting that a company sucks at something. No, I am not talking about giving away your client’s upcoming product plans three months before launch so a competitor can do it instead - that would be harmful rather than helpful. I am talking about letting employees and representatives behave like the real humans they are, rather than simply delivering the corporate spin and enforcing the seemingly hard and fast rules that ‘the system’ dictates.

Part of the problem is much bigger than any one company, it is an undercurrent that is sweeping away the industry. I spoke with Ed Keller about this briefly via email before the Beyond Blogging 2006 event last week. In his press release announcing TalkTrack, he referred to “Marketers”. Summarizing my conversation with him, I inquired whether he meant just marketing people or marketing and communications people. From his perspective the use of the term “marketer” was all inclusive of PR, Advertising, Research, Marketing, etc… Merriam Webster agrees with his definition, calling it “an aggregate of functions involved in moving goods from producer to consumer” but I see a need to redefine this understanding - to rebrand the marketing profession with not a makeover, but a “MakeReal”.

From my experience, and from the nature of a conversation I joined on Burning Bird with Shelley Powers in April, I have come to see that many people believe that marketing is evil and as such “Marketers” have a bad reputation. I won’t get into all the why’s here, but the main point was that the non-marketer general public sees the smarmy SALES tactics of some companies as marketing and this rubs off on all other aspects of the discipline. In certain parts of Silicon Valley, particularly the Open Source world and among many engineers, this is one of the leading causes of anti-consumerism. But like most anti-establishment rebellion, it is often more about an assertion of personal power and freedom in a world that seeks to impose power hierarchies and use fear of scarcity to control people who are left feeling helpless within a system that favors the rich corporations over the rights of the individual.

Tara Hunt picked up on this conversation with her post entitled “Marketing = Eeeeeeevil!” which contains some other great insights on this subject. While I agree with much of what she says in this regards, I disagree with her push for what she calls “Pinko Marketing“. To me, what she calls Pinko is really just a retelling of the original Cluetrain Manifesto - which she duly credits for much of the inspiration for her idea. The Cluetrain heavily influenced me and was a huge part of my original inspiration for pursuing the development of conversational intelligence software back in 1999 (before everyone but perhaps Intelliseek). While the principles are strong, the use of the term Pinko feels wrong, as does its association with communism.

I believe what we need to be talking about here is “Real Marketing“. As in keeping it real, being real and telling people what is really going on.

It may seem like merely a semantic difference, but there is a more fundamental shift of intention and focus at play here. Real Marketing is about matching products and services with the people who can truly benefit from those products and services. It is not about getting more people to buy something and maximizing market share. It is about getting the right people to purchase a product and helping them to get the most use out of it. It’s not about increasing sales for the purpose of making the numbers, it’s about getting more loyal customers who are obtaining real value from the product. It is about creating maximum efficiency in operations across the board - and that is only achieved by open and honest conversations.

As almost every panelist said at the event last week, we as “Marketers” can’t control the conversation any more - we can, however, participate in the conversation and facilitate certain portions of it. This reminds me of numerous meetings with almost every big client I have had around the issue of enabling open conversations through message boards or open comment systems. They were all ‘afraid’ of what people might say. Afraid that some truth might be exposed in regards to a product short coming, or a design defect, or a bad customer service experience. As I pleaded then, and still plead today - “THEY ARE ALREADY HAVING THESE CONVERSATIONS, AND YOUR VOICE IS NOT BEING HEARD BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T INVITE YOU TO JOIN THEM - THEY DON’T TRUST YOU!”

I have been working on a model of the stages of engagement in a customer relationship since my days of being Chief, eBusiness for the US Mint. While there are many deep things at play here in this model, the most fundamental premise here is that communicating the knowledge a customer needs to move through each stage of the relationship is the key - not advertising and not sales in the traditional sense. In this regards, I do agree with Edelman’s assertions on the potential for Communications Professionals to lead the way in the Social Media future we are just beginning to live today. Communications is conversation, so that is simple enough. I differ with them in that I see important roles for all practicioneers within the “Marketing and Communications Industry”. Advertising still has its place, as does research and an understanding of market segmentation.  What is needed is a more holistic approach that is centered on people.
Real Marketing means the end of empty hyperbole and hype. It is beyond the sales of Word of Mouth Units, the practical equivalent of increasing the volume of the sizzle - it is about increasing the nutritional value of the steak - about getting to the heart of what really matters. It still calls for the proper seasoning to make it tasty to the person consuming it, and we need to listen to whether the person wants that steak pink in the center or well done, but it is not so much about how many people hear that sizzling plate of Fajitas as it travels from the kitchen to the table. It has everything to do with people being able to get near real time information on what is in that dish, how it was prepared and what the people who have tasted it have to say about it. It is about the reputation of the restaurant, the description on the menu, the conversation with the server and the conversation over the shoulder with the person sitting next to you. It is about informed choices - it is about the market of conversation - it is about the market as conversation.

So what to do with this understanding? Blogging is a good place to start because it enables the sort of two-way dialogue that is essential for making Real Marketing work, but we definitely need to go ‘Beyond Blogging’ to make it Real. To really get the most from this however requires a fundamental shift in perspective - perhaps Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements might be a good place to start. Or better still, let’s start a conversation right here and try to get to the bottom of this together…

Categories: Blogging, Conversation, Authenticity, Word of Mouth, PR Community, Real Marketing
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Prior to the start of the Beyond Blogging 2006 event in Washington DC on May 19, I sat down with Greg Gershman of BlogDigger to talk about what Beyond Blogging means to him and what he was looking to get out of the event. We spoke briefly about the remix culture and Creative Commons licensing - they have a Creative Commons search feature which is now in beta . Finally we spoke for a few minuntes about BlogDigger, his Baltimore based Blog search engine and the maturation of Blogging.

One of the great things about the technology market today is that there can be many companies offering somewhat similar services to different types of niches. The defintion of success is no longer IPO (particularly with Sarbanes Oxley). Companies are developing their own niche markets and learning to operate efficiently, perhaps even proftiably! They can build a solid business that provides for a nice life without all the haslles of being big and going public by working the Long Tail to the fullest of its potential.

I don’t know how big BlogDigger will ultimately become, but I can tell you that Greg Gershman is uber smart and has the potential for greatness with whatever he does. So don’t count him or any of the other competitors out in this nascent market.

Note: The interview is 8:28 in length.

Download as MP3 File (4MB)

Listen right now:

Categories: Blogging, Podcasts, From Event
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After the first panel session at the Beyond Blogging 2006 Thought Leaders Breakfast, I took advantage of the short break to sit down with Mitch Arnowitz of Tuvel Communications. Mitch and I spoke about the current state of the communications business and some of the high points of the morning sessions. Mitch is really doing a great job down in the trenches and has a real understanding of what Blogging and Community mean to his clients. The work he did with Netpreneur was instrumental in the development of many great companies and an exponentially greater number of careers (like mine).

Notes: The interview is 7:46 in length due to time constraints, we literally finished just as they were starting the second panel. My apologies to Mitch and all of you for not getting this posted earlier. I am finally back at my desk in San Francisco and working frantically to catch up on many open items - thankfully my data on the dead laptop was ok, but the laptop needs some work. Photos and more Blog posts to come shortly…

Download as MP3 File (3.4MB)

Listen right now:

Categories: Blogging, Podcasts
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In a major tip of the hat to the growing adoption of broadband around the world, Google has finally released “click to pay video ads” for its AdWords product. I previously saw this via Chris Pirrillo who was an early beta tester. I have been waiting for this for many years now, having first seen short video ads at Michael Tchong’s infamous Web Attack back in 1999 (unfortunately the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine did not have the original site). I imagine Amanda and the good folks over at RocketBoom are going to be swamped with even more inquiries than they can handle once again.

The original post on the announcement is over at the official Inside AdWords Blog, with links to the loudly buzzing Blogosphere that are worth checking out, though I first caught wind of the announcement from my favorite Blog Filter, Tech Memeorandum which has recently been renamed TechMeme. If you are wondering what tech Bloggers are paying attention to each day, TechMeme is one of the better places where you can easily grab a quick insiders look at the current topics of conversation.

Categories: Blogging, Advertising, Online Marketing
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So what does Beyond Blogging actually mean? I have asked a lot of people that and received some very interesting answers. But I think to really get Beyond Blogging is a matter for the framing question. I.e., is the question really about what is Beyond Blogging, as in what does the future hold? Or Is it about going beyond blogging today, to imply that there is much more to this whole phenomenon. From my perspective, Beyond Blogging is about creating a deeper understanding of the best practices that work today while setting a path towards what we need from technology to do a better job for our clients in the future.

As Howard Rheingold says, “What it is -> is up to us”, so let’s get involved in the conversation and start trying things out, seeing what works and sharing what we learn with one another. It’s a about letting go of what you know and how things have been done in the past and looking for better ways to serve our clients - to create the most impact for their organizations, to tell their stories in ways that reach their intended audience. Now more than ever, the people who build these Web tools are open to the process of co-creation - my friends at BuzzLogic have been working very closely with a few key communications firms ever since they began development on their soon to be released software and will likely continue to do so forever. [Disclousure: I am an advisory board member for BuzzLogic]

So why now? What’s really different? Everything - and nothing. As Joe Kraus says, “It is easier than ever to launch a company, but just as hard as ever to build a business.” For me, what is really different is that we are finally in the throws of the Knowledge Economy and on our way to the next evolution, the Wisdom Economy.

In the knowledge economy, the value is no longer based on what you know, it is created from the unique way in which you apply what you know. It is found in the unique value of your relationships, the richness of your experience and your ability to adapt the insights you have gleaned from past failures and success in new ways for new situations. While we learn much from the patterns and protocols that have worked for us in the past, we need to think like Edwards Demming and Tony Robbins - we need to strive for Constant and Never Ending Improvement - finding better ways to accomplish our client’s goals as Tom Foremski suggests in The New Media Release.

Beyond Blogging is also an understanding that this new era of “social media” and Web 2.0 is about more than a technological revolution - it is about a fundamentally different way of viewing the world. It is a Chaordic world, not one in which the old world “Command and Control” hierarchies will work much longer. It is not a world of lies and cover ups - it is a world of authenticity and impeccable honesty. It is about filling the funnel instead of cllimbing the ladder - it is about helping one another by sharing what we know and being LoveCats. As I have written with The Noble Pursuit, it is also a time when fear and power are losing their grip on much of the modern world, but runs rampant in the unintegrated gap. It is whole brain thinking. It is about love winning out over fear. It is about the abundant capital of knowledge driving the economy forward instead of the scarcity of resources. It is about respecting the “Z-list” Bloggers as much as the A-List ones.

It is about people first and technology second. It is about you and me, in conversation with one another, asking the big questions or the silly one’s - at a conference table, in the hallway or over beer - enjoying the world around us and doing our bit to help make things right in our own unique way, using our own special gifts.

Yep - I know - all that idealism is fine and dandy, but what is Beyond Blogging for the communications industry specifically? What should we be concerned with as professionals? First you must understand how to work with consumer generated media to further your goals. Word of Mouth is a great practice area, but it can not be bought and sold for its full value. Monetizing it in units is just simply wrong from my perspctive - though it may be what the media buyers of the world want to do, it does not make it right. Its real value comes from the hearts of raving fans and the real troubles come from those that are really pissed off.

The trend I have been watching most closely over the past few years since getting into conversational intelligence and word of mouth has been the use of knowledge to further the goals of marketing. As consumers have access to more and more information, they rely on being able to find out what they need to know - they strive to make meaning out of the noise. So why not help make the meaning for them by replacing some of the advertising and communications mix with messages that teach people the important bits instead of always tugging on the emotional heart strings. While it probably won’t work for Coca-Cola, it might for Diet Coke - in a real sense, a nutrional label is a form of knowledge marketing in itself.

What does knowledge marketing mean? What does it look like? AdSense is one example - simple short text blurbs that must avoid hyperbole. It is Campbell’s Soup offering a series of alternative recipes for using its soup in other dishes. It is AdSense sending an email newsletter that helps advertisers better optimize their campaigns, helping them get the most from the service offering. It is American Express offering small business expertise as part of their Open program. It is a hundred other uses of producing media and applications that help people move from being a potential customer to being a loyal one who is selling your products for you and teaching their peers all the tips and tricks that they learned along the way. This approach creates natural word of mouth amongst your most highly valued customers and may take the form of an advertisement, a web site, a brochure, an email newsletter, a non-profit tie-in or any other form.

In short, it is about a fundamental shift in the framework and focus of the traditional communications agency from handling the public relations, Web site content and crisis communications to one that helps companies in all aspects of their outbound communications. It is about helping clients organize their knowledge assetts and figuring out how to best communicate them to the appropriate audiences in the most appropriate manner. It is about working to ensure the congruency of communications across all customer touchpoints - from press relations, to blogger relations, to internal communications, to sales scripts, to advertisements, to customer service centers and everything in between. Most importantly, it is about really listening to your customers and your markets, being engaged in the conversation and just keeping it real.

If you want to know more about this, come talk to me at the event tomorrow morning over at the Mayflower hotel - would be glad to hear your feedback and see what we might figure out together…

Categories: Blogging, Conversation, New Media, User Generated Content, Media Relations, Blogger Relations, Word of Mouth
2 Comments »

Since I previously wrote about the research report that Todd’s firm BoldMouth released and did a Podcast with him, I won’t bore you with any other background here - let’s get right to the reponses he gave us to his email interview…

Todd Tweedy, CEO
BoldMouth.com
Blog: Word Spreads Quickly

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

Actually, I spend more time tracking what’s happening in terms of how blog content is distributed by other bloggers as well as how traditional search engines indexed, score, and rank blog content.

Here are a few blogs I follow:

• Channel 9 – great example of how to establish a corporate blogging movement across an enterprise that’s not full of corporate-speak.
• The Working Model – Back in February 2000, Ford Motor Company wanted to give their global workforce of 350,000 employees an Internet-connected computer. That didn’t go as planned for Ford. Today, imagine 60,000 product managers at Microsoft deepening customer relationship and dialoging with customers via blogs. Very interesting discussions on community and the tools that help create it.
• BrainJams – — I attended the January 30, 2006 event in DC and am hooked. The unconference series is all about co-creation and participation. It’s a great example for enterprises to mirror as they build out corporate communication plans using blogs. How an enterprise humanizes content and facilitate contributions from individuals in a community is often overlooked when creating a blog strategy. [editor’s note: no bribes were paid for the plug of my non-profit, but I will buy him a beer for the kind words at the Geek Dinner tonight]
• The Business Soul – This blog hasn’t officially launched but Black Star, the photojournalism, corporate photography and stock photo company, is going to publish a new blog with a focus on “humanity in corporate communications.” I’m definitely going to blog roll this one.
• Naked Conversations - This is Shel Israel’s blog. Shel is the co-author of Naked Conversations — How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. This is a very interactive book so buy two copies if you don’t have one already cause you’ll want to have at least one copy that isn’t filled with scribbles and underlined sections.

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

I got my start in marketing via a stint in politics when I was only 5. My Mom would take me out canvassing neighborhoods to get-out-the-vote with my older brother. I caught the political bug and ended up working in the Legislative and Executive branches of government before spending a number of years doing public affairs marketing and grassroots mobilization – before we labeled it word-of-mouth - on the ad agency side of the isle.

My company, BoldMouth, is all about implementing word-of-mouth marketing campaigns that focus on community participation and co-creation in the development and distribution of product and service recommendations. We implement. We provide enterprises with innovative solutions to initiate, facilitate, and measure the impact of campaigns. We work with VP’s and Director’s of Sales and Marketing as well as Product Managers to integrate web presence strategies, search engine optimization, and community frameworks to support new product and service launches. We just finished a campaign for a publisher that resulted in a diet book making the #5 spot on the New York Times Best Seller List.

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

Blogging is relatively simple. Blogging is just publishing – text, audio, video. A “blog” is just another type of website. And, when we “blog” we are simply publishing content that interests us in some personal or professional way. When we start connecting with other individuals that are publishing content that is interesting to us the possibilities are endless. I believe we’re already starting to see the first wave of what is likely to be “Beyond Blogging” as blog tool providers shift their offerings to include content management and community tool offerings. This shift is very important. I believe we’ll see a community portal model emerge in online communications as tool providers try new methods to address the challenges of scaling. The blog provider that can maintain ‘strong ties” between members across an audience, that was at one time a community, will win BIG.

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?

I generally get asked three questions when we start working on a blog project:

1. How do we start the conversations?
2. How do we keep the conversations going?
3. How do they measure it?

I propose you start by identifying the “excellence in business strategy” success the enterprise has had whether operations, products/services or customer support. This becomes the message platform. Then build from there based on recognized interests of your audience. Be sure to get “Brand Ambassadors” engaged and, active early on too.

Here are a few more tips:

1. Make it easy to publish and, post comments.
2. Pick relevant category descriptions for structuring your content posts and use stemmed tags that map back to Top Tags on Technorati.com. Don’t forget to claim your blog.
3. Use pingbacks as a content distribution tactic and be sure use the direct URL’s for getting your content crawled quickly.
4. Incorporate permanent backlinks (permalinks) in your blog so that your content has a chance of sustained indexing over time.
5. Use RSS feeds to expand distribution.

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

I’m surprised that blogs aren’t viewed as a “viral marketing” mechanisms to support content distribution. I believe blogs are the ultimate “Tell-a-Friend” form. The secret to encouraging “pass-along” behavior is to focus on interest, not acquaintance, to drive distribution of content.

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

I actually blogged a business trip to Argentina in April 2002 and I wish I saved the content somewhere other than just on the service providers system. That ASP, of course, went out of business. Archiving blog content with a reliable third-party is likely to spawn interest in a whole new industry of service providers or perhaps expand the business models of local firms like @BackUp as well as Citrix’s GotoMyPC.com. I wish I secured the domain backupmyblog.com a long time ago! You can still get in on beta test and have your blogged backup for free. Oh, the domain IWishIDidThat.com is still available. Bottom-line, communications professionals need to have their clients archive not only the posts they publish on a blog but also the comments and link pool to the blog.

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

My company just published a study last week on Practices, Perceptions and Ethics in Word-of-Mouth Marketing with Osterman Research that has already been download more than 7,000 times. I’m sure I’ll touch on some of the key findings from the study as well as tips and techniques on how to integrate blogs into corporate communications.

Categories: Blogging, Word of Mouth, Speakers
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