Blogs, search and the Changing Media Landscape

October 27, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

John Battelle delivered the Friday afternoon keynote address on Blogs, Search and the Changing Media Landscape.

“Why am I standing in front of you? I went to Berkeley ;-)” The story: Wired. Hotwired. Industry Standard. The Standard. The 4th. quarter of 2000 – out of a job. Back to Berkeley. The Search. Searchblog. Web 2.0 Conference. Federated Media Publishing.

The Internaet Economy is the third wave of tech and culture.

First wave: Digitize the Back Office. The C:_ command prompt. Only a few people touched the technology.
Second Wave: Digitize the front office. The PC. A lot more people touched technology and a lot more money came into it.
Third Wave: Digitize Customers. Google. Touches everyone.

Search is still in its infancy. We use the command prompt/search bar. But the big difference is that we can enter plain language. And that’s a big thing.

Web 2.0 principles:

The web is a platform
The architecture of participation: Companies understand that it is smart to let their customers help them make their business better. The web can be a platform to make that happen.
Lightweight business models: Many companies were developing new things, but they weren’t trying to do it all by themselves. For example, up until recently, Google News had only 17 employees.
The Long Tail: These companies were harvesting new value that was being created by the Web.

Search rules.

Search drives Web 2.0 businesses.
Our culture’s point of inquiry, the spade with which we turn the web’s soil, artifact of a new culture. Our search histories can be saved and mined and handed down.
A new reality for all forms of tradition business. Paid search is the first true leveraging of the database of intentions.

When it comes to marketing, search has provided an entirely new catchment point for marketing. We declare our intent in the search box. Then search organizes the data and presents it to us. In the old media days, we would buy commercial space on programs/media drawing a demographic. Now, with search we can buy keywords – expressions of intent. Intent drives content.

Search drives content to social media sites … where consumers expect all participatns to understand the mores of those environments. And they expect businesses to know what they want.

Marketing becomes a dialogue, not a dictation of one to another.

Traditional media and marketing is ruled by distribution: if you get that, you get attention. Now, attention is not controlled by distributors, it’s controlled by the consumer. There are now new centers of attention: search and social media platforms.

Content is once again king, and the landing page is queen. All businesses must join the Point-to Economy (links = votes = attention).

The promise of the web is the ability to know who you customers are and what they want and then draw them into converation. This requires business to think differently about retrn on investment. Marketing is about more than satisfying demand. It’s also about creating it. And how do you measure that?

New advertising campaigns must recognize all of these factors and break out of the old mindset (no more dinosaurs, Microsoft!)

BBS: Maryam Scoble and that guy she brought with her…

October 27, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

Maryam Scoble and some guy she brought with her presented Ten Ways to a Killer Blog. And they should know.

Maryam: Don’t start blogging when people tell you to do it. Do it only when you feel like it.

Robert: How do you start a blog? Start by reading other blogs. By doing this, you’ll be able to identify styles of writing that you like. And you’ll also figure out whether you will be a good blogger. Because if you read blogs for a few weeks and find that you are not constantly commenting on other blogs, blogging may not be right for you. Blogging is about conversation and if you don’t comment regularly, you’ll probably write a “press release” style blog – and they’re really boring.

Maryam: When you start to blog, you’ll develop friends and online relationships. You’ll learn and you’ll develop a network that will be valuable.

Robert: If you’re trying to build a business audience, become an authority on it. And be generous by sharing your knowledge. And link to others. This will draw people to you.

Maryam: There are two kinds of bloggers: Bloggers who want to make things, shake things and change the world. There are other bloggers who just want to talk to their friends, post their baby pictures, talk about books, and share with friends. But regardless of which type of blogger you are, there are some things you must know to make your blog popular.

Robert: It’s a google world. The first thing most people do when they are using the internet is to go to the search bar. The search bar has become the primary entry point for using the computer.

People who focus their blogs on a single niche seem to do better than people who write generalist blogs. If you understand this, you must pick a niche you can specialize in and develop a unique perspective. This will allow people to find you and to return to you.

Can people still do this or have all the niches been occupied by early bloggers? Mike Arrington and TechCrunch is an example of a late entrant who developed a distinct voice by picking a narrow niche and going even deeper.

Link to other blogs.

When Robert began to blog at Microsoft, he began to link out. And as he did, people noticed and began to interact with him. As they did this, their comments moderated in tone.

Maryam: Even A listers maintain searches for their name. If you write about them, don’t be surprised if they comment on your blog.

Robert: Anyone can become an A lister with great content. For example, by having an interview with Steve Jobs.

He was challenged on this by voices from the audience. But Maryam came to the rescue.

Maryam: “I think it’s about coming up with consistent stuff. By covering interesting things and saying interesting things on a regular basis. It takes time.”

Robert: “There’s not just one A list. There’s 100,000 A lists. There’s one for every topic.”

Maryam: “There’s no one right way. I write about many different topics. My way is different from Robert’s.”

Admit your mistakes.

Maryam: “This is one of the reasons I didn’t want to blog. I read Robert’s blog and many of the comments were very harsh personal attacks. Because of Robert’s response, he gained credibility.”

Robert: “This is something I’ve learned. Richard Nixon didn’t admit that he’d made a mistake and people just kept piling on. When I make a mistake I try to admit that I’ve done it.”

Write good headlines.

Robert: In a google world, keywords and good headings count. In a world with much greater volume, you have to scan more rather than read deep. So, write good, descriptive headlines. They will stick out of the list. And they’ll be found more easily.

Robert showed the homepage of techmeme to illustrate that someone who writes good headlines will get noticed.

Use other media.

Robert: TechCrunch is a good example of this. When Michael Arrington started, every post had a graphic. This raised the bar. And today, you need to use a variety of other media – pictures and videos in particular.

Even if you are a text blogger, you can use a visual to stand out. This is why many text bloggers use lists. By breaking a text blog into a list, you can grab attention.

Robert pointed to crayon as an example of a company that is using Second Life to stand out. And GM uses flickr pictures.

Have a voice.

Maryam: Let people see you behind the posts. It will make people want to connect to you.

Get outside the blogosphere.

Maryam: By going to conferences, meeting other people, you will develop stronger relationships. And this still counts with blogging.

Robert: This is where the PR people miss out. They don’t realize that they need to go to conferences and meet people.

Market yourself.

Maryam: Recently, my blog was featured on the Best of MSN. I got 4,000 hits per day as a result of this.

Robert: Put your URL on your business card. It will help people to find you. Also, be creative with your business card. It’s those little touches that will help you.

Search google for Scoble business card tips.

Write well.

Maryam: Before you publish your post, do a spellcheck. Reread to be sure you said what you wanted to say. “Check your state of mind and state of heart” to avoid saying things you will regret.

Robert: Write short paragraphs. Put the most interesting information up top (the journalistic inverted pyramid.)

Expose yourself.

Robert: A lot of corporate types are very reserved about their writing. Every blogger has a knob that reads “safe” on one side and “interesting” on the other side. Don’t stay on the safe side. Spice up your blogs by showing something about yourself. Tell stories. Move the needle to the interesting side and you’ll get a more engaged side.

Help other people blog.

Maryam: Share what you’ve learned and help other people get into the community. That will build the network globally and for yourself as well.

Engage with commenters.

Robert: A lot of corporate ty
pes are skittish about going to other blogs and participating in the conversation. Simply having your own blog is not enough. You need to go to other blogs and comment to become known and to attract new readers to your own blog.

Keep your integrity.

Robert: “Dave Winer would keep telling me this.” You are what you appear to be. Don’t try to fool people or misrepresent yourself.

Thanks to Maryam Scoble and Robert Scoble for an enjoyable, engaging session by two people who really project happiness.

BBS: Ben Edwards

October 27, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

The session topic: Branding in the Age of YouTube. The speaker, Ben Edwards, Director of New Media Communications at IBM’s headquarters in Armonk, New York and one of the key players in developing IBM’s social media strategy.

Ben Edwards began his presentation by announcing that he is an imposter – a print journalist (14 years in print journalism, nine years at the Economist). Both he and IBM are relatively new to publishing.

What is IBM New Media Communications?

It’s really all about skills, developing enterprise applications for social media from internal communications to media relations and marketing. Ben is focused on the enterprise. This is different from the set of challenges and questions encountered when deploying social media outside of the enterprise. There are IT requirements that make it more complicated. But on the other hand, once these are satisfied, deployment is much simpler as the software is known, trusted and standardized.

Ben believes that there is tremendous opportunity for enterprises to “destroy costs” by adopting social media. And innovation can be encouraged in this process.

Finally, Ben hopes to estabish IBM as a trusted resource for corporations adopting social media.

Blogging is being rapadly embraced inside of IBM. At this time, they have about 3,400 active blogs. Of course, it’s very time intensive. And there is also a bit of an echo chamber with bloggers talking about other bloggers. Ben hopes to counteract the echo chamber by bringing even more bloggers online.

They have a podcasting pilot that has grown to 180,000 monthly downloads in less than 12 months in existence.

Since the beginning of the year, Wiki use has skyrocketed. There are now more than 70,000 users of Wikis within IBM. Ben himself uses four different Wikis.

The rise of social media heralds the advent of a new commuications paradigm. Social media represents a new way of communicating that will become the dominant way of communicating.

Social media are not about the technology.

Social media should not be thought of as new “channels” for distributing existing content and messages. That’s a very impoverished way of thinking about these technologies. They are fundamentally different with different economics, different expectations and different conventions.

The new communications paradigm:

Publisher: In mass media, we had professional publishing. In social media, we have self-publishing.
Economics: For mass media, costs were high. Social media costs are low.
Audience: Mass media pursued a mass audiecne. Social media appeals to niche audiences.
Engagement: Mass media was passive. Social media calls for active involvement of readers.
Voice: Mass media gave voice to institutions. Social media gives voice to the individual.
Communications: Traditional mass media institutionalized publishers as power centres. Social media enables everyone to publish.
Marketing: Mass media relied upon advertising. Social media attracts readers on the value of the publishing – the quality of the ideas.

Now, about branding….

Brands began life in consumer products as a symbol of quality (think Campbell Soup). By the 1960s and 1970s, brands began morphing into symbols of consumer identity (think VW Beatle, Marlborough Man). By the late 1960s, many brands were marketed on emotional attributes.

More recently, brands have become symbols of our social aspirations (BP – beyond petroleum; GE – ecomagination; IBM – innovation that matters.)

The prevailing orthodoxy of social media is that they will transfer control of the brand from the corporation to the consumer (Steve Rubel.)

Ben Edwards argues that corporations lost control of their brands the moment they became symbols of emotions and aspirations. There is a lot of volatility in brands. We punish them mervilessly. We fall quickly into and out of love with brands. When they no longer do things for us, wear the clothes we want, project the image we want, we punish them.

Since 2000, brand disasters include Gap, Sony, Kodak and Ford, each losing between 30% (Gap) and 70% (Ford) of their brand value.

As brands engage with social issues, brand insecurity may be worsening. Look at Merck or bp. Each is seeing their brand value destroyed by controversies around business practices and ethics – things that do not related directly to the quality of the product.

What has changed between us and them?

They can create and share the brand themselves.

In the mass media world, the brand image was shaped through mass media and advertising. In the social media world, audiences of all kinds discover communities of interest and publish the brand to each other.

Look at brands on YouTube. People mash them up. They mock them. They celebrate them. They make the brands perform strange and unnatural acts (Coke and Mentos.)

And it’s not just happening on YouTube. It’s happening all over the Web. Technorati. myspace. orkut. flickr. circuitcity (customer reviews on its site).

We can listen better.

With mass media, corporations would push out their messages and feedback would be throttled through mass media gatekeepers. With social media, there are an unlimited number of consumer feedback points.

We can create and share the brand with them.

With mass media, corporations attempted to dictate brand image through massive advertising. With social media, corporations may influence brand by inviting the audience to create and share the brand with them. Ford’s bold moves campaign is an attempt to do this.

Brands are at their strongest and healthiest when they speak about us and the people behind us. Social media allow us to open ourselves to the world.

Finally, Ben laid our an agenda for change:

Don’t try to segment your audience. Nurture a brand which employees, customers and all constituencies can relate to, emotionally and intellectually.
Provide emploees with the measn to tell their own stories about the brand and in their own words. (Look at the difference between Southwest Airline and JetBlue.)
Listen. Listen to what employees are saying about the brand. Listen to what customers, partners, suppliers and shareholders are saying about the brand.
See the first bullet.
Where there is potential for a positive outcome, engage to influence.

BBS: Scott Niesen

October 27, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

Day two started with Scott Niesen talking about Putting Web Feeds to Work.

The program suggested that I’d learn “how RSS and ATOM web feeds can be used to effectively monitor your company’s reputation, automatically track competitors and industry trends impacting your business, and make project team communication more efficient.”

Unfortunately (in my view), Scott’s presentation sounded way too much as a sale pitch for Attensa. I’m sure it’s a good tool. But at a conference like this that I paid thousands of dollars to travel to and attend, I don’t really appreciate blatant sales pitches masquerading as a presentation.

Having said that, Scott did provide a good overview of uses of RSS feeds in a corporate environment.

Scott started looking at the needs of different audiences:

IT: needs to get the right information to the right place at the right time
Consumers: need to get the right information while managing information overload

Webfeeds are the perfect tools for both of those needs.

Webfeeds have entered the workplace largely through the back door – through the efforts of employee bloggers. Now, like other tools that started in the consumer space, RSS feeds are beginning to find their way into the corporate environment.

Stages of RSS entry into the business environment:

blog posts, news headlines to monitor the world
business intelligence alerts for more specific information relating to the company
internal blogs and wikis enable collaboration
RSS-enabled enterprise apps to connect legacy IT information systems

The number one benefit of putting webfeeds to work is their use as an indispensable research tool. They can provide competitive intelligence. Scott’s company, Attensa, has been purpose built as a corporate tool for this purpose – tapping into 18 information sources, including google and the other search tools.

Feeds can also be used to monitor reputation, track buzz relating to markets, trends and people. Because bloggers tend to post frequently and quickly, they can also act as an early warning system, as news may break in the blogosphere long before it shows up on mainstream media.

Feeds can also support collaboration. The persistence of the information ensures that institutional memory is maintained in a searchable form. Subscriptions ease and speed information distribution. The delivery of information directly to interested users to be used when they are ready for it helps all team members stay abreast of developments. And the broad distribution of feeds behind the firewall can be used to build shared vision. Finally, all of this information taken together should provide the data for new insights.

Feeds can also be viewed as an indispensable delivery tool for training material, including podcasts, audio and video. Information can be delivered to a dispersed work force regarding sales leads, forecasts and opportunities.

RSS Feeds can also be used to support searching for information through indexing and tagging.

BBS: Betsy Aoki, Lawrence Liu and Josh Ledgard

October 26, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

The final session of the day. (Fingers, don’t fail me now!) And the crowd is thinning out. Only about half as many people as there were in the room this morning.

Microsoft and Social Media: Lessons Learned from MSDN Community Blogs and Channel 9. OK. Like most of the rest of the world, I use Microsoft software every day. (I’ve even drafted this introduction using Microsoft Live Writer at 30,000 feet on the flight from Toronto to Seattle.) They are everywhere.

And I just couldn’t resist a session in which Microsoft’s social media types – Betsy Aoki, Lawrence Liu and Josh Ledgard – talked about how they started their blogging initiatives at Msft and the lessons they learned from their experience.

Josh Ledgard said that the doors have been opened to enable customers to file bugs on Visual Studio. This has led to a better relationship with the community and to product improvements as the bugs have been dealt with.

Lawrence Liu said that a community has been established for SharePoint, maintaing contact with customers after the marketing campaign has concluded. For example, the Microsoft team drew on input from the community to produce enhanced documentation with screen shots, something which Microsoft doesn’t normally include in their documentation.

Lawrence Liu reflected on the difference between buzz and engagement. It’s possible to generate a lot of buzz, but more difficult to translate that into genuine engagement.

Betsy Aoki pointed out that the amount of blogging around Microsoft products by people who find bugs and suggest fixes and work arounds enables the company to focus their attention to other issues not fixed by the community.

Lawrence Liu indicated that he is hoping to poll community input on topics that should be covered in screencasts for SharePoint.

The panelists offered much more information that I haven’t captured. Sorry, guys, it’s been a long day and my batteries just ran down. Not it’s back to the hotel to recharge and prepare for day two.

See you tomorrow!

BBS: Ben Edwards, Nicki Dugan and Betsy Aoki

October 26, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

A session on Corporate Blogging Policy with Ben Edwards, Nicki Dugan and Betsy Aoki.

Given that the Thornley Fallis blogging policy is a stripped down, “Blog smart and Don’t cause harm to any person,” I figured I could pick up some useful advice about what I have been missing.

Nicki Dugan is responsible for Yahoo’s corporate blog. Similar to other companies, employees were blogging on their own for quite some time. They developed a set of guidelines to provide some indicators of acceptable behaviour for employees. Some of the main signposts:

If you mess up, it’s your neck
Remember your confidentiality agreement
Be respectful of your colleagues
Get your facts straight
Provide context to your arguement
Engage in private feedback
Remember that whatever you write will follow you everywhere

The publication of the guidelines provided a sense of security to the employee bloggers. They understood the parameters of acceptable blogging and they could blog without fear.

Ben Edwards of IBM runs the IBM blogging program through the department of new media communications.

The IBM guidelines encourage employees to blog. It’s in your interest to get involved and to understand what is going on in this area. And it’s in the corporation’s interest.

The guidelines were developed using a wiki with input from the company’s established bloggers. The guidelines are posted on IBM’s site.

IBM also publishes a list of its outward facing bloggers on its Web site. The bloggers listed here are writing about things related to the company’s business. Personal or hobby sites are not listed in the directory.

Ben believes that blogging is very much a minority activity within the company. A lot of people find it to be too time consuming. He views it as a very useful information sharing tool. And it provides an archive of information.

Betsy Aoki joined Microsoft in 2003. At that time, there were a number of employees already blogging. At the professiona developers conference of 2003, there were a large number of employees who wanted to blog and continued to blog after that.

Microsoft still does not have a formal blogging policy beyond “blog smart.” This was a huge leap forward in executive thinking. The company could not tell you ahead of time what the right answer was ahead of time. The company was empowering employees to think for themselves and determine what the right thing to do and say would be. This allowed the company to evolve and to be flexible. Robert Scoble was able to use this approach as a means to speak freely in his blog. This approach has had positive impact both on the company’s image and on employee morale.

Ben Edwards pointed out that “a set of guidelines won’t get you very far. It’s much more a cultural question. You are empowering employees. … The key is cultural. And that means involvement from the top.”

Betsy Aoki added that “the main reason you should be blogging is for your customers. If you want a completely scalable way to talk with your customers. …. If you can engage with your customers. Interact more with your customers. Increase the loyalty of your customers, then you should do it. … So, the real question is, do your customers want you to blog. If the answer is yes, then you should do it.”

Question: Have the internal blogs changed the relationship between senior management and the employees? Ben Edward spoke of the large number of IBM pensioners who were upset about the handling of a pension issue. A senior IBM executive wrote a post about this which received a number of angry comments. This was healthy as it showed a willingness to open discussion.

BBS: Mary Hodder, Dave Taylor and Halley Suitt

October 26, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

RSS and Feeds: Monitoring the Blogosphere and the Buzz with Dave Taylor, Mary Hodder and Halley Suitt.

Dave Taylor led off. He posed the question, “How do you find bloggers who are writing about your space?” You have a choice of tools, including: google blogsearch and technorati.

Technorati ranks bloggers by authority – the greater number of inbound links from other blogs that they receive, the higher their authority.

With Technorati, it is possible to “subscribe” to a search. This will deliver new entries relating to the search term directly to your browser as they are posted.

An RSS aggregator such as newsgator online, bloglines or google reader is an absolutely essential tool to keep up with your RSS feeds.

Mary Hodder spoke about the difference between how Google searches and show results and the way that a blog-specific search enigne like technorati searches and displays results.

Google is best at measuring the “static web;” technorati is best for the “live web.”

Google is best for static web pages – pages that do not change regularly. Bloggers change their content frequently and a search engine is required that specializes in current information which may not show up immediately on the google search engine.

It is also possible to track images uploaded on flickr by tags.

Other possible metrics include the number of comments (some bloggers may not have many inbound links, but may have many comments. ) If you only take inbound links without looking at comments, you may fail to see the real depth of the conversation at the site.

Frequency of blogging on a topic is another dimension to consider. A blogger who writes frequently on a particular topic may not have the same authority on another subject that they blog on only once or twice.

Mary sees a difference between influence and real authority. Authority happens on a person by person basis. Each of us assigns authority. However, technorati will rank people high in “authority” – which really means they are high in popularity.

Halley Suitt showed several examples of Web sites that display RSS feeds differently. Some display them with XML chiclets. Some use the new RSS standard icon. Others have text links to the RSS feeds. For RSS to become mainstream, RSS must be displayed in a more standardized and prominent way.

BBS: Tris Hussey and Andru Edwards

October 26, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

Tris Hussey andAndru Edwards:tackled the topic: Audience Measurement: Quantifying and Qualifying. The program promised that I’d learn:

Buzz measurement tools
Do “hits” matter anymore?
Measuring inbound links
Using feedburner stats
Blogroll links, Pagerank, and combination measurement systems
Coming measurement services

Do numbers matter or is it how many people are reading your blog? Of course numbers matter. But they are not the whole measure of success.

A lot of people mistakenly look at the number of hits they get.

There is still not a perfect tool to know just how many people are actually subscribed to your blog. As recently as one month ago, WordPress.com changed their metrics as they realized they had been double counting some readers.

Why is it difficult to measure? For example, some metrics will measure several people visiting a site using bloglines as only one person – bloglines.

There is not one tool to rule them all.

Clearly, writing frequently will draw more traffic. And of course, better writing will draw more repeat visitors.

Do blogrolls matter anymore? Tris Hussey feels not. “It’s still a nice way to show your friends you love them. But they do not generate traffic any longer.” Andru feels that blogrolls can be helpful if you have multiple blog properties. It’s a great way to interconnect things.

Scoble pointed out that his Shared items in google reader feed is driving more traffic to blogs he links to than does his blogroll on scobleizer proper.

Tris suggests that, given the imprecision of existing stats, it is important to look at the trends, not just the specific one time numbers. Look at the rise and fall. What is the pattern?

Tris and Andrew recommend AWStats and Urchin.

Tris also recommends Performancing as a Java script tool tailored specifically for blogs. He also uses google analytics, which provides user friendly graphs and reports.

However, because no single tool is perfect, Tris and Andrew suggest that you use two or more simultaneously to get a good picture of what’s really going on.