Archive for the 'Blogging' category
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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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)
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
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Just one day away from the big event and I just got into the offices here at Fleishman Hillard on L Street. Unfortunately, I have been offline for the past 21 hours due to some WiFi issues and the five hours I spent with JetBlue. I have another long post to share with you shortly, but in the meantime, I have just received another reply to our Beyond Email Interview from Debbie Weil who is fresh off a trip to Toronto for Mesh where she spoke on a panel with my friend Tara Hunt of Riya.
 Debbie is the author of the forthcoming “The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right” to be published on Aug. 3rd, 2006 by Penguin Portfolio. You can download a free chapter from the book’s blog.
Debbie Weil
Author ~ Consultant ~ Blogger
New meta site! http://www.debbieweil.com
Book: http://www.TheCorporateBloggingBook.com
Blog: http://www.BlogWriteForCEOs.com
Newsletter: http://www.WordBiz.com/signup.php
Q1 - What are the 5 Blogs you can’t live without?
Steve Rubel’s www.MicroPersuasion.com
BusinessWeek’s www.BlogSpotting.net
Halley Suitt: http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/
Dilbert Blog: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/
Hugh MacLeod’s Gaping Void: http://www.gapingvoid.com/
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’m a corporate blogging consultant and a new author. My favorite gigs are in-house training for big companies like Edward Jones and Wells Fargo. It was gratifying to see Wells Fargo take one of my recommendations — to launch a blog related to history — and run with it. Their blog commemorating the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake & Fire is here.
Q3 - What does Beyond Blogging mean to you? What does it look like?
Beyond Blogging means getting beyond “cool.”
It’s a way of saying that social media is going to seep into our lives on a daily, practical level. We’ll have a computer built into the door of the fridge and we’ll scan our RSS feeds telling us which local store has the best price today on fresh shrimp. Or where to nab a cheap ticket for a quick trip to the Caribbean.
We’ll search blogs and podcasts and wikis before making any big purchase decision. It’ll just be second nature. I guess that’s what Web 2.0 really means. We’re still in the early adopter phase. It will take a few years. We have to get beyond “cool.”
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. Does the client have a genuine desire to maintain a quality blog with interesting writing and useful information. In other words, can they convince the client that this is another way of marketing - not a publicity stunt or a new publishing channel for press releases.
2. The client wants someone else to “do it for them.” Long-term you’ve gotta write your own blog. If it’s not a senior exec who can be a thought leader, the client may have a really smart, connected employee who can do it.
3. This doesn’t require a nine-month project plan to get started. Just do it.
Q5 - What’s the one trend in communications that isn’t being picked up on, or understood, by mainstream communicators?
Not sure what you mean by mainstream communicators. MSM? The biggest trend I see is that great content, commentary, ideas, creativity, etc. are bubbling up from below. I.e. from nonpaid professionals. Some of them are 17-year-olds publishing clever videos to YouTube. One example is the bowiechick video demonstrating the cool things she can do with her Logitech webcam:
This bottom-up explosion of creativity is threatening both mainstream media’s control of news delivery as well as our traditional model of packaged, controlled advertising. The line between editorial, advertising and entertainment is getting blurred. And it sure is more fun and interesting.
Q6 - What are some of your past Blog posts you would like to highlight for our audience? Why?
Bill Gates hires me for CEO blog coaching and to ghostwrite his blog! (My best April Fool’s joke ever)
Time still the top Fear Factor when it comes to corporate blogging (Based on a survey I did of the 17,500 subscribers to my e-newsletter)
What REALLY happened behind Kryptonite’s blogging fiasco and what it means for corporate blogging (My interview with Kryptonite’s PR manager debunking the notion that Kryptonite ignored the buzz in the blogosphere and gotten bitten badly because of it)
Q7 - Discuss briefly what you’ll be sharing with our audience at the Beyond Blogging event.
- That the term “corporate blogging” is not an oxymoron.
- That blogs are really just next-generation Web sites
- That corporate blogs have lots of practical applications. Google uses its official corporate blog at as a complement to traditional PR, for example.
Categories: Blogging, Speakers, Corporate Blogging
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 For those of you who know me, you have probably heard me talk about how blessed I am to get such great gigs as this one, writing for this terriffic event. I knew that writing here would be a great opportunity for me, but I could not have imagined how much I would learn from the great people who are involved with Beyond Blogging 2006. Learning of Yvonne DiVita’s work is another one of the great benefits I have received as a result of supporting this event - in her responses to this email interview, you will find out why. She is another one of those cool people who just ‘get it’.
Yvonne DiVita
President and Founder
WME Books
Blog: http://www.lipsticking.com
Blog: http://www.ahablog.com
Blog: http://www.wmeblogs.com
Blog: http://blog.thirdage.com
Q1 - What are the 5 Blogs you can’t live without?
How can I pick only 5? Okay, TODAY, these are my 5. Tomorrow, it could be different.
- Diva Marketing - Toby Bloomberg keeps me on my toes. She covers the right stuff at the right time.
- Crossroads Dispatches - Where Evelyn Rodriquez offers insightful thoughts on women, men, world peace and the emerging creative class centers of the world.
- Talking Story - Rosa Say manages to gather the great minds in marketing and business all in one place - here’s where I go for my daily dose of innovation.
- Hispanic Trending - Where Juan Guillermo keeps me up to snuff on the Latino community. Since Hispanics are a strong, growing business community, and they have such a rich culture, I find this blog not only informative, but enjoyable as a nice read. I don’t get to read it nearly enough, however.
- Ageless Marketing - David Wolfe has some interesting work on his blog - relevant to the baby boomer community and why businesses shouldn’t ignore us. [Editor Note: I used to love talking to David when I lived in DC - he was one of the sharpest knives in the local Company of Friends drawer]
Q2 - Tell us a little more about you and your company.
What’s to say about me? I wrote Dick*less Marketing to get some attention for the women’s market online, and it succeeded fairly well. It almost seems as if the world is more interested in ME, though. How could I give my book such an outrageous title? is a favorite question. To which I answer: I didn’t. A man did - and convinced me to keep it. The book begat the blog, and the rest is history. I write several blogs, and contribute to others, because I think the voice of the blogger is what’s important. It’s the chatty nature of getting together around a virtual table in a virtual café, sharing stories. It’s about bringing people together - to learn more about each other. To that end, WME Blogs (part of Windsor Media Enterprises, LLC), works with the people to teach them HOW to blog, so their blog will be as effective as they hope. There’s so much more to it than just throwing up a header and typing in a few paragraphs. And yes, blogs are search engine magnets…or, they can be, done right.
Q3 - What does Beyond Blogging mean to you? What does it look like?
What is Beyond Blogging about? It’s about women. I am confident enough of that to predict that over the next 5 years, more and more women all over the world will embrace blogging (in all of its shapes and forms - which is a topic for another discussion) to join hands, stand shoulder to shoulder, and share stories of their lives. These stories will bring our collective voices to the forefront - women will dominate blogging because it’s a social media, because women are social creatures. Because women are the ones in charge of hearth and home, husband and child, the collective voices of our stories will ultimately change the social contructs of the world around us.
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?
Here are the 3 things communications professionals need to look out for, when working with clients who want to blog:
- Thinking a blog is the be-all and end-all of marketing communications. A blog is a conversation - not a dialogue. A blog is a connection to real people - not a place to pontificate. A blog is a piece of the whole. I think most of the roundtable members are saying the same thing, in different words. Because, of course, it’s true.
- A quick, excited beginning that gradually drifts off into - nothingness. Blogs are a lot of work. Too many people lose interest when they don’t get immediate feedback (comments and trackbacks). You have to give yourself at least 6 months to build a community of interested readers.
- An inability to be flexible. During that six months I mentioned in #2, you need to be flexible enough to change focus, design, categories, even goals. You need to keep an open mind, allow the blog readers to lead you where they want to go. ROI is not always measured in $$ - sometimes it’s measured in the voices of your readers. Keep that in mind.
Q5 - What’s the one trend in communications that isn’t being picked up on, or understood, by mainstream communicators?
What’s being missed? The connective/collective power of women bloggers. But, don’t worry. We’re quietly in the background taking care of that.
Q6 - What are some of your past Blog posts you would like to highlight for our audience? Why?
First: Yvonne Discovers the Power of We - because of the words — power and we.
Next: Where in the World are the Women?- because women are the architects of society (so said Harriet Beecher Stowe)
And: I can’t choose any others…there are a lot of posts about other bloggers, cause that’s what women do - we support our friends, so, I leave the choice of which posts are worthwhile to the readers.
Q7 - Discuss briefly what you’ll be sharing with our audience at the Beyond Blogging event.
What am I going to talk about at Beyond Blogging? I’m going to go beyond blogging to show everyone that the talkers of the world, women, are also the bloggers of the world. I’m going to give folks reasons to start paying more attention. Stay tuned…
Categories: Blogging, Speakers
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 Starting today we are going to begin to move the conversation into focus for next week. We begin with an email interview with our moderator for the event, Shel Holtz (who I am really looking forward to meeting after hearing such great things about him). I think you will find this very informative. If you don’t already read his top five Blogs, you should rectify that problem today.
Shel Holtz, ABC
Accredited Business Communicator
Holtz Communication + Technology
Concord, California, USA
Website | Blog | Podcast
Q1 - What are the 5 Blogs you can’t live without?
- MicroPersuasion
- Media Guerrilla
- Scobleizer
- Church of the Customer
- John Battelle’s Searchblog
Q2 - Tell us a little more about you and your company.
I’m a sole practitioner working with companies to help them communicate effectively online. My background is in corporate communications — internal and external. I’ve been online since 1985 and on the Net since 1990, and I make it my business to stay on top of the trends that will have an effect on business. I help companies strategize ways to use these new tools as well as how to address the “dark side” of the online world. I’ve been independent since 1996, when I left a communications practice leader job at a global consulting firm.
Q3 - What does Beyond Blogging mean to you? What does it look like?
First of all, blogging is just a tool. In addition to the blogs that get all the attention, there are blogs about knitting, cats, books, cartography, you name it. Blogs are also being used to build non-blog websites because they have inherently powerful content management capabilities. What blogs represent, though, is the power of individuals to wield influence that was previously inaccessible to them…and to form communities that have even more power. Blogs were merely the first social computing tool to resonate with an audience because of their ease of use and low barriers to entry. What they’ll look like in two years is anybody’s guess, but they’ll certainly have merged with other technologies that achieve the same result. Look at blogs that now incorporate the ability to tag each article or let users bookmark the article in del.icio.us. Look at how tools that tap into the wisdom of crowds (like Digg and Memeorandum) are pointing to blog entries as much as content produced by mainstream media. This is really about citizen-generated content, not a single tool. As these become more pervasive and easier to use, we’ll see a tectonic shifting of power from institutions to communities, and institutions will have to figure out how to thrive in this environment. They’ll have to give up any hope they had of controlling their messages and opt instead to participate in the conversation.
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?
My sage advice is to read a lot of blogs, comment on blogs, and start blogging. It doesn’t have to be a corporate blog at first; try one from home that focuses on a hobby instead of the job. But the worst examples of business blogs are usually those launched by companies that figure they need a blog but have made no effort to understand the culture of the blogosphere. They should also align the focus of the blog with their business issues. To start a business blog without a strategy is no different than the horrible outcomes we saw 10 years ago from companies who said, “We need a website” without any idea why they needed one and what it should communicate. As for three things to look out for…
- Anybody who suggests a blog should or could be ghost-authored. Blogging is personal. If you’re not going to write it, don’t blog.
- Anybody who suggests a blog should be written in a corporate style. Write conversationally. Write with passion. Write with authority.
- Anybody who suggests you moderate comments in order to remove any negative contributions. Nobody is stupid enough to believe everybody reading your blog will agree with everything you say. Your credibility suffers if you don’t let the negative comments appear. Your credibility soars if you do.
Q5 - What’s the one trend in communications that isn’t being picked up on, or understood, by mainstream communicators?
Citizen-generated content.
Q6 - What are some of your past Blog posts you would like to highlight for our audience? Why?
Smart Corporate Blogging
“I’m Sorry” Getting Easier to Say
– Institutions resist admitting they are fallible. People have no such problem.
Companies Blocking Employees from Reading RSS Feeds
– Companies need to let employees access information without restriction.
Q7 - Discuss briefly what you’ll be sharing with our audience at the Beyond Blogging event.
Nothing, really. I’m the emcee and panel moderator! I hope to be able to ask some salient and pointed questions, but only if the audience questions start off slowly.
Categories: Blogging, User Generated Content, Speakers
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I have been thinking about how to share these stories with you for some time now. My friend David Wickenden over at Fleishman Hillard sent this to our attention shortly after this series of articles was published in The Economist on April 20th, 2006.
It is quite simply one of the best pieces of reporting I have found on the bigger picture we are referencing with Beyond Blogging. I still don’t know how to boil it down for you, so let me first say that I highly recommend you find the time to sit down and read each of them all the way through. I could probably write 2,000 words on each of the articles, so it is best if I let them mostly speak for themselves. The articles provide an excellent, non-alarmist perspective as to what all this stuff means and an understanding of how it affects your profession.
I would really like to sit and spend some time with the authors of this piece to dig even deeper. The inclusion of the broader historical perspective adds a tremendous level of understanding the current media ‘revolution’ in context. For instance, I have been watching as the old guard of Mainstream Media has responded to the Blogging phenomenon with scorn and disdain, portraying Bloggers as not only unskilled amateurs, but as hacks with a score to settle against others.
My experience has been completely the opposite - most Bloggers I know are more concerned with conveying the truth and are quick to correct themselves when shown to be wrong. Personally, I am not much of a researcher, but I know not to quote someone improperly as has happened to Todd Tweedy recently in his dealings with Tom Wasserman from Brandweek. In the end, professional ethics come down to the individual’s interpretation - so my point is that both amateurs and professionals are human, we all make mistakes.
Some of the more important elements of the lead article tie in directly with some of my previous posts for this Blog:
“Instead of a few large capital-rich media giants competing with one another for these audiences, it will be small firms and individuals competing or, more often, collaborating. Some will be making money from the content they create; others will not and will not mind, because they have other motives.”
“As with the media revolution of 1448, the wider implications for society will become visible gradually over a period of decades.”
“David Weinberger says that Mainstream Media ‘don’t get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations’. That is because institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume equality and eagerly concede fallibility.”
“[Barry] Diller is confident that participation can never be a proper basis for the media industry. ‘Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting,’ he says. ‘Talent is the new limited resource.’ […] ‘What an ignoramus!’ says Jerry Michalski.”
What is lost on Barry is how much of a training ground this is for the next Spielberg, the next Jennings, the next Crichton. What you don’t get in the ranks of most media organizations is the chance to really practice the craft and experiment with media - there is little tolerance for risk or failure. This is exactly what the Blogging revolution is providing - free training for the media stars of tomorrow as well as a new distribution channel for the stars of today.
Quality of production is a discriminating factor for many consumers, but the quality of the content can come from a poorly delivered. The fact that the story is being told somewhere rather than not being toldd at all is what really matters. With the proper tools for creation and discovery, every story that matters will find its audience, no matter how small that audience might be.
This is the real power of going Beyond Blogging.
What is new is that young people today, and most people in future, will be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and what is not. They will have plenty of help. Sometimes they will rely on human editors of their choosing; at other times they will rely on collective intelligence in the form of new filtering and collaboration technologies that are now being developed.
Categories: Blogging, Conversation, New Media
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As you may know, I have been down in New Orleans for the last few days for an event we held last Thursday and also to attend this year’s New Orleans JazzFest which just wrapped up yesterday. While on the festival fairgrounds on Saturday, I took the opportunity to seek out the “Media Relations Tent” to perhaps see what was going on there and which of my old friends I might meet again. Instead, I came away with a simple story, some lessons, and some practical advice I would like to share with you.
I was fortunate enough to have a few minutes to speak with Matthew Goldman, the Press & Advertising Director for New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and ask him what, if anything they were doing to deal with Bloggers as citizen journalists. I was very clear that I was not asking this because I was hoping to get some special privileges, but because I wanted to get an understanding of their view on “how to handle bloggers“. His simple answer, “Nothing. We already have to turn down too many photojournalists and others who want access as it is.”
I understand his perspective. Which of the attendees would not want special access privileges to one of the biggest music festivals in the country. I can imagine there would be lots of people trying to take advantage of their ability to publish to their Blog in order to get ‘on the inside’. This is seemingly a constant battle for media relations people. It is certainly a known problem with traditional events such as shareholders meetings and conferences. There is always too much to be done and too little time so we must choose where to spend our scarce resources. With everything going on post-Katrina, it was hard enough to deal with all of the ‘real’ influentials out there with platforms like the Times and the Post - Bloggers are simply not the highest priority when you need to worry about where your favorite volunteers are now living.
Mr. Goldman said they had received hundreds of requests from Bloggers who wanted to get special access. Since he was busy taking care of his responsibilities for the day, I did not get a response as to what they did with those inquiries our of respect for his time. I did, however, ask him if they had even considered doing something special for Bloggers to make them feel more welcome or to improve their experience at JazzFest. His answer was simply “No.” While he was very cordial and responsive and respectful to me given how busy he was, you could tell that Bloggers did not really matter to him. It seemed he did not give Bloggers a second thought, except perhaps to be annoyed by how often they kept contacting him.
Still, it is my perspective that this was a golden opportunity lost on their part, and a lesson for all communications professionals who handle events on behalf of your clients.
The fact that hundreds of Bloggers contact you about an event is a big clue that you should do something about it - to come up with a publicly stated policy on the matter other than a traditional press policy. Any time an organization gets more than a handful of requests for conversation about a given topic, it is worthy of attention. When the requesters have a platform to speak to others about you and your handling of that request, even more so - regardless of their potentially limited impact. From my perspective, it is simply a matter of respect. How much you respect that person can vastly influence the amount of respect and tolerance they give you, your event and your organization.
I suggested to Mr. Goldman that they could have perhaps just done something a little extra, to make the Bloggers feel like they belonged, that they had some value and deserved that respect. While he was well within his rights to be dismissive given the situation, I think this is something that needs to be corrected in the future. Blogger Relations should be as much of a required communications channel as a press release or press conference. Either invite the Bloggers into the tent to hold the conversations alongside traditional journalists and really dig deep into the story or handle them differently using separate but equal methods.
Jazzfest could have had a BloggerFest each weekend. This town knows how to party - I am sure it would not have been that hard to setup. As we know from personal experience, all it takes is a location and an invitation - the Bloggers would have ended up practically organizing themselves from there. The feeling of inclusion and value that would be derived from belonging to a special community would be invaluable for the Bloggers and for the event coordinators in terms of the positive experiences that would be had and the petty little problems that would be solved by access to information. This could also have been accomplished with a simple extension of what they were already offering traditional journalists in terms of power outlets, desks and Internet access. They could have even gotten a few donated/sponsored terminals so that Bloggers could do some live blogging from the event and upload photos for their friends to be remote voyeurs on the event via Flickr. It is all about word of mouth and they could have gotten numerous additional positive mentions, which would bring in even more people next year and ensure that many others would come back again.
You don’t need to give them full access to backstage areas and all those other reporter perks. But to give them a special badge that would allow them to bring their high end digital cameras legitimately into the festival would be a huge step in the right direction. As part of the Blogger pass, they could have required each registered photographer and/or Blogger to use a Creative Commons license and/or allow the JazzFest Foundation to repurpose their photographs and articles for promoting next year’s festival. This alone would be one reason to embrace Bloggers - the extra content they create and the permission to reuse it by forming a relationship with them.
I can personally assure you that this sense of ‘inclusion in something special’ makes a huge impact on the quality of the experience. My friends and I were fortunate enough to have passes to the W Hotels hospitality tent and on more then one occasion someone remarked to me how being able to stop into the tent to sit down, grab a FREE beer and use clean restrooms made the day so much better. So much so that he lead off our recent phone call this afternoon by thanking me for getting everyone passes (we stayed at the W French Quarter this trip).
People are already saying good things and bad things about you - the fact that they are doing it in the Blogosphere may not matter to you at all since you are too busy to manage what you already must do, but that does not diminish the need to do something. The point is that this is an opportunity that could potentially become a problem when it need not be. I have not had time to go through all the JazzFest posts as they keep pouring in, but I suspect they will be pretty positive all around - who wants to talk badly about New Orleans these days anyway? So given the situation, I understand Mr. Goldman’s decision to ignore the Bloggers - I just wish he could have seized upon the opportunity to turn some of the happy Bloggers/Customers into RAVING FANS by doing a little something extra for them.
To the question of “How to handle Bloggers?” I respond simply “With respect.” They may not have the reach of a Washington Post reporter, but they do have the potential to make an impact on someone who does. So next time you are planning an event or a project, take a few moments and come up with a strategy for handling Bloggers in a way that respects them as people who publish - regardless of their reach. You need not give away the farm to them, but at least figure out a way to embrace them as someone who cares enough about what you do to invest time into telling others about it.
Queue out to Aretha Franklin “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me…”
We gathered quite a few stories and several personal experiences that have provided some real insights into what is going on down there and what may be needed to rebuild not just the houses, but the community.
Categories: Blogging, User Generated Content, Events, Media Relations, Blogger Relations
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 On Thursday May 4, 2006 I sat down with Earthlink Blogger Dave Coustan to talk about his experiences as a corporate Blogger. This follows up on the Blog post entitled “Reflections on Blogging for Someone Else.” There are some really interesting insights from his experience working at Earthlink as well as some more simple details on certain aspects of the work. You can reach Dave through his Earthling Blog.
Categories: Blogging, Podcasts
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So it has been a little more than a week now since I have been blogging here and I still don’t know quite what to make of it. I do have some thoughts I want to share though, since it may be very helpful for those of you who are getting ready to step up and become a Blogger for your agency and/or on behalf of a client.
For starters, it is a lot harder blogging for someone else than it is for yourself. It is particularly hard to try to come up with new material every day and even harder to do so without the aid of an editor. It is not really hard because of the demands being put on me by others - quite the contrary actually - it is really hard because of the imagined demands I put on myself. Because of the questions I ask myself about the appropriateness of what I have to say and whether it will fit the needs of the people organizing this excellent event. Because of a concern that my friends at Fleishman Hillard deserve the best and because I want to give them even more. Because of the censoring I do on my own voice from a fear that what I want to share with you may not be well received. Because I want to help you learn about this great future for the communications industry that I see and which you will help to develop.
Of course, there are many other personal and professional reasons why it feels so hard, but most of all, it is hard Blogging for someone else because I still feel alone when I am writing. Blogging is supposed to really be a conversation, but in the beginning of any blog, it is a monologue with very few people participating in the discussion.
I was speaking with my friend Greg Narain of Live Journal’s publicized statistics show this to be true. Out of 10.1 million accounts on their service, only 1.2 million have updated their blogs in the past 30 days. About 12% in the past month, 7.4% in the last week and only 2.6% in the last 24 hours.
It would seem that most people are like me and are often too busy with work work to find the time to blog.
In all honesty, I did not ask the question why too deeply - I was more concerned with how some people out there could be promoting 30 million blogs when most of them are inactive. But Greg was very clear - “how much do you enjoy talking to yourself?” Without some sense of a connection with the people who may be reading what we write - without a feedback loop on whether or not what we have to say holds any value for anyone other than ourself, it is very hard to find the motivation to continue writing. The feedback could come from comments left on the blog, or from meeting the real people who read it and speaking with them directly. It could even happen by noticing in the statistics that more live humans actually visited the site than Web Spiders.
Personally, I kept blogging for the last year because I have been trying to become known for what I know - I am striving to establish my reputation, which is why I don’t wear a mask and choose to show my real self. I have been trying to build the brand called Chris actively for the first time in my life and I know that Blogs are one path to that end. It is an unfiltered connection between me and you - my words are not masked or edited by someone else. It is a slow and rough haul, but in the end it is worth it - I have made so many friends from my Blogging it is nearly impossible to count. And now, finally, with this blog, I am actually making money at it instead of just writing for myself and in support of my ideas for how to make the world a better place.
My Blog statistics show a very light readership overall - around 30 Feedburner subscribers and around 20 views for each post within the first 24 hours or so (before I shifted my blogging to here and to the BrainJams site). But, some of my older articles, like this one on “The Rise of Amateur Conferences” which was cited by Wikipedia, continues to get page views (15 last month). it has staying power, and for this reason, it motivates me to stay and continue my pontifications, even if no one is commenting, or no one, not even the people I am working with, have anything to say about what I am writing today.
It would be quite different if I were the Chief Blogging Officer for a large corporation with lots of customers, or if I were already a published celebrity writer, but going from relative unknown to a basic level of awareness is quite a hard path on one’s own. So when my friend and BrainJams PR volunteer Jerry Cashman told me that the editors and writers he is speaking to know of our non-profit’s work, and know of me through my blog, I was somewhat taken aback. I have no idea how they could know me and I had no idea that I had even generated some basic awareness at this point, despite my efforts to do so. I have not really talked to them and I certainly don’t know them (except for a few I call friends).
So my biggest insight on Blogging for someone else is a reinforcement of a core value I hold, and a follow-on to my post yesterday on Authenticity and Transparency. Keep it real, do it for the right reasons and all will be ok in the end - even if it sometimes feels like you are just talking to myself - because you never know who might be reading…
Categories: Blogging, Conversation, Authenticity, Statistics
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One of the most important aspects of Blogging is the development of trust between the writer and the reader. While blogging styles are quite diverse from person to person, ranging from strict adherence to editorial style guides down 2 txt msg abbrev, there is one absolute in my opinion - the need for authenticity. In my opinion, it is the deeper and more important premise behind Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s book Naked Conversations (note: the stated meaning of Naked is that it is an ‘unfiltered’ blog).
I start with this on Monday morning because I want you to understand why I write what I do and why I write how I do (awkward phrasing and all). While I am not naked at the moment (even writing alone late at night - 230am PST - I wear my plaid flannel PJ’s and a t-shirt), my soul, my thoughts and my personality are out there for you to see, warts, grammatical errors and all - love me or hate me, you are getting me, as I really am, as I really think.
For me this is the most important bit of going “Beyond Blogging” - about transforming the world of communications by laying bear the truth, by conversing directly with stakeholders, by being authentic and by embracing transparency. Not everyone is going to like me or agree with me (especially on these points), but by knowing who I am and what I stand for, I am hopeful that you can at least respect me and listen to me as I will listen to you. At the edge of the horizon for the communications industry is a new set of standards for the professional communicator - authentic, transparent and, as The Four Agreements says, being “Impeccable with your word”.
The other day a friend said to me that working in PR has to be one of the most trying and difficult jobs there is. Only two other major professions in his opinion have to ’spin’ reality more frequently despite knowing the unspun truth - sales people and lawyers. Interestingly, all three professions are ones in which people are hired to have conversations as a proxy on behalf of another person or organization. Don’t get me wrong here, I understand that the majority of communications professionals have high moral standards and would not compromise them - but we all know a few bad apples out there and more than a few instances where a given client’s statements were not fully transparent. This is often done for seemingly good reasons but has resulted in a world where many people are skeptical about the validity of press releases.
With Blogging, you represent yourself and bring your own unique perspective to the conversation on behalf of an organization - this is the big value add. I think this is the reason why my friends at Fleishman Hillard brought me on for this job. Because I am not afraid to be me and because I bring a non-traditional perspective to the conversation.
So in order to go Beyond Blogging, we first must start with an understanding of what it means to be authentic and transparent participants in the broader conversation. Once you possess this understanding within the very core of your being, you will be prepared for the future and the ever expanding opportunities that it will bring.
Reputations are built over a lifetime, but can be destroyed with just a breath…
Categories: Blogging, Authenticity
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I was in the middle of writing a blog post on Living with Uncertainty when I came across this poem from Tom Atlee called Let’s Nail It Down, Before It Gets Away!. This is the third time in as many days when the emotional learning brought on by a poem has been great and swift - when the creative use of words has helped me understand something more deeply. A timely reminder of the power inherent in true wisdom, spoken from the heart. The ability to help people understand expansive concepts in simple terms through the power of words is something that every human shares.
It is the power of conversation. It is at the heart of all media.
In every form I have examined, media is about some one, or some organization communicating with you - having a conversation, or at least wanting to have one. The Broadcast models is often referred to as one-to-many and is unidirectional. The Internet is about one-to-one conversations, which is bi-directional. Now social media has truly enhanced the Web with many to many conversations, held within some broader context, but always a personal conversation. Some examples to consider:
- Blogger
- Nightly News Anchor
- Rock Band
- Print Ad
- Television Commercial
- Play
- Movie
- Radio Talk Shows
- Poem
- Press Release
Are they not all examples of people holding conversations? While you may consider the Rock Band to be giving a performance (as do I), on the most fundamental level they are communicating with you, telling you a story - even the instrumentals do so. It is all about the connections between people, their ideas, their emotions and their actions - and how we communicate those via mediated conversations with one another.I am not quite sure where this is going yet, but I think it is a key insight that will be at the core of another big idea in the near future. I spoke a little more about the idea of media as conversations (ok, perhaps I rambled on about it) with Eddie Codel in this NetSquared Vlog entry. I had not yet worked out the idea of media as conversation fully, but the original question was how do you use Blogs for your non-profit community. My answer was simple, the blog is my site, it is my primary media, it is my way for communicating with everyone - it is where I have conversations with the people who care about what matters to us.
At the same time, it is just one of the many ways in which I have conversations with people and with groups of people.
The lesson though is that we should perhaps think about Media as we think about having a conversation with someone. That blogging is just a conversation between me and you. Perhaps you have something you want to say, so you can comment on this. Or perhaps you have something so important to share that you want to more closely associate it with your online identity, so you write about it on your blog and (hopefully) you link back to me. But the blog is adaptive - it is both a broadcast communication, from me to everyone out there who reads it and a potential one-to-one conversation. Most importantly, it is as easy to do as it is to type and click a button.
This is what makes blogging so powerful from my perspective, and why my answer about how we use blogs was so simple. Once you make the conceptual shift to this understanding and enter the flow with a genuine vooice, the world will change ‘write’ before your eyes.
Categories: Blogging, Conversation
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