Strategies And Tips For Business Blogging Success

Panel information.

John Lawlor: about 23% of the people I talk to these days actually know what a blog is. I look at blogging as an opportunity, an intersection between a technological development and an amazing consumer acceptance of online communications. The expectation of what the Internet can do is coming in line with what we need it to do, it's very much a part of our days. Most organizations still don't know what a blog is, and more importantly, don't care. They care what it might be able to do for them. Blogging=Opportunity. Answering certain questions will give a busineess interested in this a strategy. Who should blog? Who is the target reader? What are you blogging about? What are the benefits we expect? What is important to my business? What needs to be restricted? Where will the blog appear? (Internal or external; makes a good personal filing cabinet, need not be public.) When are you going to have the time? It is a commitment. When will you see results? Why are we doing this, why do we need it?

Major Chris Chambers: discusses the America's Army site, a gaming blog done by the Army. (I missed most of this, sounds fascinating.)

Greg Lloyd: A weblog can be a conversation with a particular group, or with one individual and the rest of the world. The audience can be internal, or there are conversations with a company that are explicitly public. A weblog could be the shared space for everyone in public support, and individual customers can view that unified set. Middle ground is a company blogging about developmental projects.

Halley Suitt: blames David Weinberger for starting her down this path. David told her she had to stop emailing him her stuff, it was good so she had to put it on a blog. Someone here described her blog as sexy and spicy, which is ironic given at the time she started she was dealing with deep, heavy dark issues about her Dad's illness and death. I wrote a piece about that. Other things started to play out in my blog. The Alpha Male series. I also started working at Harvard Business School publishing, had a working life different from what was going on on my weblog. For work, I was asked to write a fictional piece that will come out in September about an employee-blogger who may have disclosed too much information. Four experts commented on the range of appropriate responses to the scenario (firing to promotion). Now with Yaga.com, working on electronic content management strategies.

Don White: Independent marketing consultant. Talks about brand managers, how they think. Fixed price better than low price, tend to look at risk from this point of view. One thing we're doingn is attempting to answer the needs of a real estate brokerage business with a blog tool. They needed to stand out in a business and a region with tons of competition in their area. Blogging tools enabled them to create a useful real estate site. The small real estate firm became The firm with expertise in fourteen different communities, and it was all done for less money than most people would have spent for one Web site. And, it can be operated by one to two people.

John Lawlor brings up the balance between the minimal management and control necessary for effective blogging, and the need to have certain information not go out into the public. Major Chambers: one way to manage the content is to make sure your bloggers are trusted agents (in our case, of the military), and let them self-edit. The army is a pretty risk-averse organization. The general principle is that if an agent has bought into the principles of an organization, it probably will be ok. We went in with a strategy that this was another tool for communication with our players. I was cognizant of this strategy and kept it in mind.

Halley: jumps in that the America's Army blog, against all odds, does just what a weblog should do in the way of voice. It was really interesting to see that given the constraints.

John Lawlor: the Afghanistan blog had a natural end, why didn't you blog the next war? Chambers: we wanted to continue it but had some problems. In an early stage operation, everyone is pretty busy. We couldn't really find someone with the time. In Afghanistan, we came in a little later, there was infrastructure in place. What we have done is continue on the developer side of our game product (kids love to talk to developers).

Greg Lloyd: the primary thing you're relying on is the integrity and trust of the people you've hired. Set guidelines, and give people more than one place to express themselves. Engineers might be more candid and forthright talking to other engineers than a wider audience, for example. People can know and recognize that comments posted to different spaces have different connotations. You can make people more comfortable, as well as avoid mishaps.

John Lawlor: one of the reasons business is interested in this is that blogs do well in search engines. Mentions the dispelled rumor that Google might remove blogs. There is room, I'm sure, for undermining the system. Panel?

Halley: I don't have favorites anymore, I simply use Google to find things. The search engines are used in a different way now. Of bloggers, search results and the other Halley: "He's not blogging enough" Audience comment: anywhere from 75-85% of search engine results come from Google, and weblogs have a significant impact on those results.

Audience question: do purist bloggers have an issue linking to a commercial blog? Jeff Jarvis: you heard it earlier, it depends on what you have to say. John Lawlor: if it has a human slant, that's all that's needed to interest people with a similar slant. Another question, referencing Major Chambers, about security. John Lawlor mentions that new tools or tool improvements are coming online to better address these concerns. ... "Anyone who's in marketing who's in this room is five years ahead of their colleagues. ... The people in this room are so far ahead regarding where this is going, it's phenomenal." (I'm sitting next to my firm's head of Web marketing, she gets a big pat on the back.) Question about the effectiveness of shipping the game related to the America's Army blog. Major Chambers: since this was a PR initiative, we saw qualitative indicators that it was being received positively in our forums and elsewhere. We saw we were resonating with our target audience: tends to be young males who like military things and guns. Our download peaks mostly were related to new realeases of the game. We did notice increases in referrals from our site to the Go Army recruiting site. The site had this scratch, unprofessional feel, mainly because it was me doing it over there, it had that kind of personal touch. Sort of by design, sort of because that's all I could do with the digital camera, etc. I had. ... Greg Lloyd: gives an example of blogs being used by law enforcement as a 24-hour operations log, and to keep people informed.

Don White, on where blogging will be in a few years' time: technologies usually first are used by the technologies, then the information professionals (lawyers, librarians, journalists). It's starting in the broader business community but there aren't many examples right now. Until we can address the risk aversion of those brand managers, we're going to have a tough road. We're a long way from having most businesses endorse a truly personal voice: "The manufacturers of Cheerios have no interest in having someone on the production line blogging the quality of oats coming in."

David Weinberger: Why Weblogs Matter

Blames Doc Searls for his always being referred to as "Doctor" David Weinberger. Why blogging matters? It really, really does matter. You can see it in the excitement level. Causes excitement at a level not seen since the beginning of the Internet. I'm not sure exactly why it's really important, but that's not going to stop me from talking about it.

The Bubble was never what the Internet was about. The Web is not primarily a commercial space, not even primarily an information space. The interest is not there because 800 million people woke up and suddenly decided they wanted to be research librarians. The bubble went away, but the Web absolutely didn't. The Web remains interesting and important. Nobody would have said a few years ago we'd have 20 billion pages on the Web. It's not just markets that are conversations, it's businesses themselves.

I am going to address the question, what is a weblog. They tend to be daily, tend to be a few paragraphs, often (almost always) reverse chronological, almost always very linked. Message is I want you to go away. Here's something I'm interested in, go take a look. These little acts of selflessness are what make many weblogs very interesting. They also have a voice. The paradigmatic blogs are full of voice. If it turned out that Dave and Doc hand coded their pages and uploaded them with FTP, they'd still be blogs. The technology enables the other stuff. The technical stuff does not help explain why blogs are interesting. If it's not the technology, what is it? Partially rhetoric, and as rhetoric it's important that it be written—badly. The reader knows then this is closer to the writer's actual self. Weblog readers also tend to be forgiving and helpful for this reason: prone to forgive bad spelling and gramar, write in about broken links or inaccuracies. Beyond rhetoric, their social. I hate this conversation: it's just like Usenet, only a little different. It's not like Usenet. It's a permanent, persistent place where indirectly and inadvertently, you are creating a proxy of yourself.

Are bloggers authentic? The normal view of self is an m-&-m view: an outer shell and an inner, private self. This doesn't work very well on the Web, because all you have on the Web is this persistent place in which you talk. There is non inner self, so what does this mean about authenticity. It's written, we're writing ourselves into existence on the Web, and with that comes all the virtues and flaws that go along with being an author. What does this mean? It favors good writers. It seems to push for self-exposure (mentions his nephew's blog). The recession also was timed perfectly for weblogging, because it favors the unemployed.

So, I want to talk about journalism in terms of this. Or really, blogging and truth, which is underneath the journalism question. Objectivity and subjectivity. Journalism strives for objectivity, and this has some strengths: multiple stories, expert sifting, providing a community baseline. The problem with this is journalism can't be fully objective. Objectivity admits of degrees, can be more or less. Same goes for subjectivity, and it's claim to be able to show us our world as it really is. The strengths are it acknowledges the observer and the situation, and captures more of the experience. On the other hand, it tends to be more scattershot, raw and individualistic. So why bore you with this? Blogs allow multi-subjectivity. What Dave said this morning. He wants multiple perspectives, likes reading the different reports. We have this now. For the first time, there aren't just little subjective islands scattered around. Now we can read myriad perspectives, from myriad locations, cultures, disciplines. Tis is part of why so many of us are so thrilled about weblogs. It's amazing that we can do this, we've never been able to do it before. So, what's not to like about this>

This is actually quite upsetting to many people. "This is an assault on knowledge, young man and young woman!" Particuarly true of businesses that mistake themselves as forts. They see knowledge as a weapon. Weblogs, as we heard in two panels today, are a way of providing insight, punching holes in the wall, letting in light. You can allow it to happen, but even if you don't, it's going to happen anyway. Another group of people not thrilled about this assault on knowledge are those traditionally who have been the gatekeepers of knowledge. There are notable exceptions: Dan Gillmor, there is not a person who more deeply understands, and is synthetic sympathetic! (sorry! the man himself pointed out this rather funny miscue) to what has happened. Over the course of thousands of years, the quest to discover what was worth listening to turned into a quest for certainty, and maybe I'm gerneralizing just a little bit, but we wound up with Descartes. Knowledge became so anorexic as to be uninteresting. Knowledge grew out of the body, and turned into an anorexic, purely rational thing that has no connection with the human body any more.

So let's talk about what constitutes knowledge on the Web. Time to market: increase the unit, then double it. Brings up Sears Web site. By the way, throw out the Cluetrain thesis about advertising not working. It's very effective for tricking people. We still know who the Shell Answerman is. Back to Sears. Nothing here tells you immediately whether the washing machine you want to buy will fit into the hole you just cut in your counter. If you search Google for Kenmore+Maytag+Discussion (or sub in Complaint for the last), you get a discussion forum that tells you exactly what you need, and more. "Jim," whether or not he works for Kenmore, is believable (and if he is a plant, he won't be able to hide it, will be found out in a matter of days). The Sears store or the Kenmore site will not tell you if there are issues with the annoying buzzer. They're trying to pitch and sell you. But Jim will, and a whole conversation thread may emerge from how best to deal with the buzzer issues. And someone named Rinso—a physicist of lint!—has even more to add. Another example: over the weekend, my blog went down, and then TiVo broke. (Audience groans). I know, you don't want to be next to me on an airplane right now. This was a really bad weekend. The Movable Type community (and any other weblog community) is amazingly supportive and solved the blog problem. Could the information have been wrong? Sure. In this case, the forum happened to be moderated by God (as Anil pointed out), but I didn't know that. This is what knowledge looks like on the Web.

So, why is the world turning upside down for this? Why are people so dedicated and excited. It makes sense in the context of a deeply alienated world. The Matrix, the AI Singularity: the fact we can even believe in this for an instant shows we live in an insane, alienated world. It's an insane, alienated reality to think we can go into work each day and talk like someone other than ourselves. Brings up AKMA's blogthread on forgiveness. You could maybe at this point read more about forgiveness by reading that thread than you could from any "objective" source. Weblogs exist in a new place, the Web. They allow us to have persistence in this space. With WiFi, the correspondence between this personal and public space will be mindblowing. (With that, someone IMs David's computer with a "Hi Dave!" Classic.) Any other questions?? We've never had anything like this before. And now we do.

Questions ("Or do you want to just take IMs?"): audience member asks about the fortress and knocking holes in the wall. How do you actually do it? David: Every time you link to someone you knock a hole in the wall. "Sticky eyeballs" concept, the most degrading possible way to think about a customer. Every time you put in a link, "you are Stickin' it To The Man." Question about Usenet, there's a computer group that has been runing for years on Usenet. It constitutes a kind of community blog among folks with a high level of knowledge about computers. You look at blogs, and you could go nuts trying to filter the computer information. Why are blogs an improvement on the Usenet group? David: they're not. Groups, mailing lists are really, really valuable. It's not a question of who's better. Weblogs are different. Question about another cultural phenomenon that has taken off—Yeah, American Idol, I know where you're going—no really, reality TV. Voyeurism, are blogs also connected to that. Not unlike watching someone suffer through a reality TV program. Phil Windley says his is like that, it's a lie. Dave Winer says this is ridiculous, blogs are not like that. It's like a telephone, the conversation is whatever you want it to be. If you want a blog like American Idol, you can write one that way. One can have a view of the world of blogs that substantiates either view. Brings up example of the Trent Lott story. The blogging world is so big, that Dave Winer, an "expert" on the blog world, didn't hear about Trent Lott on a blog, but on TV. Depends what's on your radar. Halley chimes in that sometimes what's for breakfast conveys a sense of the person: Doc, blogging about watching the stars with his son. The important part of most blogs is you get a sense of the person, that's what keeps people coming back.

Managing A Business Blog

Panel information.

Jimmy Guterman: mentions the personal connection you feel with someone when you follow their blog, but may not have seen them for awhile or perhaps even met them. ... (later) "Before I go on, I just got an IM that said, 'Introduce yourself, Moron.'" And he does.

Jason Butler: BostonWorks is the jobs classified section of the Boston Globe. They're running a collaborative HR blog with three people, finding information useful to their clients.

Adina Levin: differences between blogs and wikis. Wikis are a bit more conducive to communicating a group consensus. We don't see them in conflict.

Biz Stone, on developing a blog voice: starting out with one thing generally morphs into talking about whatever you're really interested in. Finding your voice is a little like jogging, something you do every day. Jimmy Guterman wonders if you have that same flexibility as a business. Adina Levin thinks perhaps yes; like diverging from a meeting agenda if that seems appropriate. We already have social constructs for this. If people are having conversations with co-workers or customers, it's bound to have business relevance.

Jason Butler has discovered an interesting side channel: some of their salespeople use stuff on the blog as an entree to go out and talk to the customers. Knowing the customers, they can point out items of interest.

Jeff Jarvis asks Jason Butler about the HR blog, raises fascinating management issues. How do you manage people who are paying you money? Jason: think about putting together a conference. You lay down ground rules about the speaker's role of providing information rather than shilling for a company or product. Follow up: do you have employees that spend too much time on the blog? Jason: "Only me."

Audience question about what happens to competition when you're linking, and/or seeing (through referrals) that your competitors are checking you out (perhaps on their intranet)? Adina Levin: good questions, haven't dealt with them as a problem yet, but sometimes on her personal site the referrers admittedly can make her nervous. Biz mentions referral blocking services. (Firewalls work too.) Audience member comments that it's valuable to know what your competition is thinking.

Biz Stone tells story about a co-worker where they started a blog "in her name." Not long before she was hooked and wanted to start posting herself. It's contagious. Adina Levin comments that peer pressure works well. And, identifying the projects and conversations that already exist and adding the blogging process.

About the tools, Jason Butler mentioned they went with BloggerPro because it was cheap, easy, and accomplished everything they needed. Adina Levin mentions that the personal blogger tools are really good if you only have a few people blogger. They (Socialtext) are trying to focus on serving the needs of teams, where there are concerns about administration and security. Biz Stone mentions that the information that some of the measurement tools provide (Technorati, etc.) is some of the coolest information involved in the process. Adina Levin: "Ev In A Box" is something that you probably never will see. The cumulative human intelligence is what's compelling.

Are Weblogs A Threat Or Opportunity For Enterprises?

This panel of fine folks is up. I'm a bit late to the party because coffee called. (My fingers are a bit tired, but since the whole room is blogging this, you should be ok!)

Beth Goza: "The only blogging strategy a marketing department should have is no blogging strategy." Absolutely blogging should be encouraged. Blogs are great at removing layers between the company and its customers. But people who work, for example, for Microsoft, are passionate about what they do, have positive things to say. If that's indirect marketing, that's great. ... Doesn't like the term guerrilla marketing, does like Gonzo Marketing. ... Mentions Microsoft VP Eric Rudder's blog as an example of transparency working on a corporate blog. Talks about bringing Gizmodo folks to Redmond. Interestingly, ZDNet wrote a really nasty article about them inappropriately trying to sway Palm users. Full disclosure is important.

Michael O'Connor Clarke: "If you don't have a personality, you don't, by definition, have a blog."

Jason Shellen (on the negative connotations of the term "pitch"): "I don't want someone to educate me, I want to learn." Jeff Jarvis: points out though that you want the same exposure, if you're Gizmodo, as those who traditionally have "pitched" big media to get it.

Rick Bruner: "There's just a need in a lot of organizations to more efficiently publish information."

Dave Winer: What Are Weblogs?

Remembering back to the start of the PC market, progression of adoption that eventually included business. While the Web was growing, this Weblog thing was happening slowly and quietly. Dave first started blogging in connection with a project he was working on at Wired called 24 Hours of Democracy. Wanted to show that the Web could be used for something very positive. Invited anyone who wanted to to write an article explaining why having the Web be an open, free, first amendment protected environment was a good thing. Put up a Web site for this, kind of internal but not password protected. Started linking to the new things that were coming online in reverse chronological order. "How many people are blogging this by the way?" 70% of the room. "Wow!"

Think of it this way: is there someone in your work group who is constantly sending around links and articles? That's your blogger. (Says hi to some of the many bloggers around the room. Hi Dave!) Talks about blogging versus journalism. Talks about posting your cheesecake recipe: it may reveal some truth about you that may wind up revolutionizing your life. If I were starting a business today, I would make it a weblog. This is why I wanted Doc and David to be bloggers when I read Cluetrain. The idea is to be yourself. Go ahead and put your cheesecake recipe out there, because your customers can see through your b.s. They want your real voice. Integrity: they want to know what your biases are up front, want to know where you're coming from. Comes back to Cluetrain again. Blogs are what a personal Web site is in 2003, will be even more sophisticated in 2007. Users are getting more sophisticated, while technologists are better learning how to make these things easy to use. I went from being a CEO to a university fellow because I felt that now we understand sort of how the software should work, have a backlog of features that haven't yet made it out to the users, and the question is how are they going to be used in various situations?

We had an experience at Harvard, I think it was in April this year. The RIAA had a new tactic of going after individual college students, five on five different campuses. Wrote to the Dean of Harvard College: do something about these downloads under the DMCA. Dean took some actions including denying the student Internet access, and we covered this on the Harvard weblog. Then, one of the fellows at Berkman, Wendy Seltzer, wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times, but thought it probably wouldn't get published. Had a revelation: why not post this (very respectful) letter taking issue with the Dean's actions on a weblog? Dave found this very interesting: we have expertise on this, let's run the story. They ran it, and the Dean's office said absolutely nothing.

Question: how do the words blogger and journalist relate? Blogging isn't journalism, but it's not not journalism. Journalism=disclose your interests and never say something you know is not true. Can you do that on a blog? Yes. Follow-up: is editing a necessary quality of journalism? Dave doesn't think so. Sometimes, copyediting winds up breaking rule 2. You can end up saying things that aren't true with your name on it. Doc: editing is necessary, it's just a question of where you get it. Professionally I get it from an editor, on my blog I get it from my readers. Dave observes there always are parallels like this between the business and blogging worlds. Question about journalism always having to be the sophisticated big stuff? Dave says no, importance of triangulation, getting news on an event from many sources. Halley: comments about objectivity/subjectivity. Jeff Jarvis: only difference with bloggers is that they're commentators, often. Journalism is more about gathering facts, but bloggers can do this well too. Dave: what's going on over time is the costs of running a professional news organization are outstripping demand, so they're getting smaller. Let's say you're going to Chicago tomorrow. In 1991, you wouldn't have gotten real time information. Today, you'd expect to get real time information on anything, and the professional news organizations will be able to provide some but not all of it. Audience member comments about journalism/blogging convergence from BBC regarding peace demonstrated. Another audience member comments that on the ground reports from individuals can be more objective than a professional journalist's account. Dave: so many of the press reports about blogs cast it as us v. them, and by the end of the article conclude journalists won't be replaced by bloggers. But bloggers don't wake up in the morning wondering how they're going to replace a professional reporter. They wake up thinking they love this new medium. New York Times as cautionary tale: if Times had been blogging, Jayson Blair would not have been able to go as far as it did. Dave met with Martin Nisenholtz a week ago today, mentioned they need an internal blogging process. Another audience member cites the Blair incident as an example of a breakdown of the professional editing function. (Dave's playing referree with the audience, exchanges going back and forth: This is a Keynote, folks...) Dave: I've never read an article in the New York Times in an area where I have expertise where I felt like they had really gotten the story right. I love the New York Times, but sometimes they just can't have all the information.

So, employees with weblogs. (Great segue!) Dave says he has sort of a balls-out reputation on these things, but actually not. However, at UserLand everybody was required to have a weblog, it's a weblogs tools company. Philosophy was if you don't like them, don't work here. Not the most natural thing for programmers. One person kept posting things that were not, generously speaking, team-spirited. Weblogs are prosaic things. Don't think of weblogging as a calling. It's a utility, another way of communicating. But the same basic issues of trust apply, you have to be able to trust that a particular person is not going to disclose a company secret in public. Halley: getting at the big T Truth, how much truth does any business want to tell. Dave: I think you have to be really transparent, at least in certain areas. A company's PR function should have a weblog. I'd also like to see customers being able to tolerate the truth, i.e., I know things are screwed up at any company, at least this one's honest. Jeff Jarvis: companies need credibility, but we know their goal is to put their message out. It's understood. Question about whether UserLand worked out its rogue blogger issue. Yes, we came up with ground rules. If someone's aware of the rules, but not trying to work with you, what are you going to do? Have to fire them. It's not any different than what you might not want people to do with the photocopy machine. Audience comment: you're going to find the people who are team players more quickly, you're going to see their cheesecake recipe. Dave agrees. Back to the Natural Born Blogger (NBB, birth of an acronym?), this becomes even more powerful when you put it together with an aggregator. There's a communication revolution waiting. Sure there are risks (and that's also where the fun comes from). Audience member (Update: Ah, that's Beth Goza, I met her earlier) asks about working at a company (Microsoft) where employees constantly are asked to get a clue, then penalized for getting one. Her site is flashgoirl.blogspot.com, she was in the Register. Issue was she made no secret about working for Microsoft, talked about various Microsoft things (using the XBox, her Tablet). She admitted to cheating on the XBox, and got in trouble. Dave: I think people like you who don't make a secret of their corporate associations are to be applauded. (And she gets a round of applause.) But flames happen. Another question about pre-screening posts: do you think that works? No. If an employer is reviewing every blog post, you miss Michael's permission-no-forgiveness point. There's a humiliation factor, you're a professional. Absolutely though, an employer has the right to tell you a particular post is inappropriate and should be taken down. "I didn't like the way I was being edited, and I quit." Can they, will they, should they: all distinct questions. Audience member comments on ranges of behavior that become known or are made explicit within organizations. Dave: what I have been willing to tolerate has been a moving target over time. If you look at things from the 1996 perspective, the world has gone nuts, particularly in areas like copyright. Dave got reamed for posting a picture of Elian Gonzalez. It's illegal, but its happening a hundred thousand times a day. Things become more or less controversial over time. (Back to blogging:) Nobody's gone to jail yet over this stuff. Idealism: don't knock it if you haven't tried it.