Shel Israel expands focus of Naked Conversation to Web 2.0

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Shel Israel has returned from the New Communications Forum believing that blogging is entering a new phase, normalization.

According to Shel,

Blogging started as one of Seth Godin’s Purple Cows. I would still like to write about unique or valuable blogs–blogs that will help others find their way into the blogosphere. I hear about dozens of new blogs every week, but few, if any meet that criteria. I see blogs that are high quality, blogs that are good for the businesses and business topics they are designed to address but very few that are of Purple Cow uniqueness.

In fact, this is a good thing, if you are a blogging evangelist. The blog is starting to become part of the business normal, just as email and the Internet did. Both of these early disruptive innovations are now boring because they are so much of the usual business routine. It was not all that long ago that having a website, or allowing employees to email on company time were highly controversial with legal departments fretting the repercussions just as they do today over blogging.

The blog, it seems to me, is becoming just another brown cow. This again, is a good thing. First comes the excitement, then comes the prolongs inevitable change. This is what is supposed to happen. New things need to normalize if they are to endure if they are to really and truly change corporate communications as our book argues it will.

So, Shel is expanding the focus of Naked Conversations beyond business and blogging to include Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is topically a natural extension of blogging. These companies are forming a “people’s web” where the blog allows an efficient conduit for two-way communications. What’s important here is not the conduit per se, but that it allows the customer to take his or her rightful place at the center of the corporation. As Charlene Li said in her conference keynote, the new technology puts the power at people’s fingertips, instead of into the hands of the corporation.

I got into blogging because of its disruptive promise. Web 2.0 is a natural path that follows the lines of disruption and I’m going to follow down those line.

I’m sure that Shel’s readership and community are eager to follow this path, learning and expanding our own horizons in step with him.

IABC Communications Commons: Is there an appetite for a "Consulting Principles" forum?

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Shel Holtz tells us that the IABC Communications Commons has been launched. The Commons is billed as a “Blog Community for Business Communicators.”

In his initial posting on the Commons home page, Shel says

IABC’s goal for the Commons is to provide a gathering place for communicators to focus on their own areas of specialization and learn about others. … This is the place for communicators to gather to exchange ideas about their craft, guided by experts in the various, diverse specialties that make up our profession.

IABC membership is not required to read or participate in the Commons. In the spirit of the blogosphere, the Commons is an effort provide open access to some of the thought leaders from within IABC’s ranks. These Commons bloggers will share their wisdom, report on goings-on in their field, and — most important — engage in comments-driven converations.

To get things rolling, we’re starting with three corners of the organizational communications world: branding and marketing, employee communications, and communication measurement. More will be added as we iron out the wrinkles of this network of communication blogs. First on the list for inclusion down the road are media relations and communications creative.

Each of the Commons blogs are group blogs. That is, more than one author will contribute posts. This will add diversity of opinion as well as a broad range of experience and expertise within each subject matter area.

Kudos to Shel, Natasha Spring, Chris Hall and all the folks at the IABC who are behind the Commons. It is a great initiative.

And now a suggestion. One of the best things about PRSA/CPRS membership is the Counselors Academy. The Counselors Academy runs a great program of seminars and conferences on topics of interest to senior communicators and agency principals. I think the IABC Commons could provide a similar service to its members by adding a “Consulting Principles” section that would enable principals and senior practitioners to talk about the principles and practices that the leading public relations consultancies have adopted or are moving toward.

What do you think? If IABC hosted it? Would you be prepared to contribute to this type of forum?

Local businesses can project personality through blogs

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Ted Demopoulos makes some good points in Blogging for Business regarding the value of blogs to local businesses.

Search engines love blogs, and can quickly help catapult a local website in the rankings, sending them more potential customers. They can also help turn “dull” into “dynamic” (or at least less dull!) and encourage repeat visitors.

Many local businesses are relationship based, even more so than Internet and 1-800 businesses, and the personal nature of blogs can help increase the feeling of knowing Joe Blow @ Seacoast Tub and Tile, even if we’ve never met him. This increases the likelihood that people will stop by and make a purchase.

Some local business people are likely to wonder what they could write about. In approaching the content of their blog, they should remember that they are the “experts” in their business area. If they mix this expertise with a passion for their business, they can write about things that will be of interest to the consumer such as new products, specials, examples of good customer service and ways in which the local business tries to make itself special.

Technorati Explore: a promising new search tool

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Technorati has introduced a new tool that should prove indispensable to public relations professionals and others interested in identifying the opinion leading conversations within a specific professional community.

In State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search , David Sifry introduces us to the concept of the “Magic Middle” of the attention curve. Technorati currently counts about 155,000 people among the Magic Middle, which Sifry defines as bloggers who have 20-1000 other people linking to them. Sifry says that the Magic Middle contains “some of the most interesting and influential bloggers and publishers that are often writing about topics that are topical or niche … – these are blogs that are interesting, topical, and influential, and in some cases are radically changing the economics of trade publishing.”

Technorati’s new Explore tool uses these Magic Middle bloggers to point to the leading edge of the online conversations among communities of interest.

Given that there’s a lot of interesting topical posts by influential or authoritative bloggers in those topic areas, we formulated an idea: Why not use these authoritative bloggers as a new kind of editorial board? Watch what they do, what they post about, and what they link to as input to a new kind of display – a piece of media that showed you the most interesting posts and conversations that related to a topic area, like food, or technology, or politics, or PR. The idea is to use the bloggers that know the most about an area or topic to help spot the interesting trends that may never hit the “A-list”. We call this new section Explore…

These middle tier blogs also define communities of interest in the blogosphere. Its easy to think of the blogosphere as a cacophony of voices spread out over a big long tail distribution. But Blog Finder and Explore help resolve these thousands of blogs into topical, relevant communities of interest that interlink, refer to one another and often wrestle with ideas, discuss them and move them along. People often ask, “what blogs should I read?” And often times a good answer is, “you should read the posts from the leading blogs in topics that of interest you. Blog Finder and Explore make this possible for the first time on a wide variety of topics…

My test search of the top 20 posts in the Explore: pr category yielded a list that included posts by Steve Rubel, Scott Baradell, Phil Gomes, Lee Odden, Josh Hallett and Jeff Jarvis.

Technorati Explore strikes me as a very useful tool that will enable PR professionals to focus in on the discussion in our community.