Six years ago, yesterday to be exact, I posted the first item on this blog, May 3, 2003. As I said in 2007, there were some lean times at the beginning (and recently). Mike Manuel and I have a close blog-birthday, his is May 1st. I'll spare any resolutions or promises, but of course I hope to be able to publish here more, work permitting.

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There is a nice feature story on Matt Mullenweg/WordPress in today's USAToday. We've been using WordPress for quite a bit on projects for a while now and are proud to work with one of the best WordPress development firms in the world, cnp_studio.

Speaking of that, I need to convert this blog from MovableType to WP.

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New year, and so new resolutions....how cliche...but appropriate. Mike tweeted about this earlier, and it's been on my mind as well. How will I use (or more appropriately, re-use) the social media tools at my disposal.

This blog has been somewhat stale with the last post coming a over two months ago. And up till then, much of the posting had been about photography and travel. Two things that took up much of my time in 2008.

Like many other folks, I found the true dialogue going on over at Twitter.

Moving forward I plan to spend some more time here, mostly to share what I've seen and learned over the past year. Working at Voce, specifically developing and executing social media strategies for some large brands has been an amazing opportunity.

Mostly it's to rise above the chatter, too much of that going on. People talking and talking, but not really doing anything client-wise (and going into a company for a one-day seminar on 'what is social media' doesn't count in my book).

Everybody is a social media consultant these days :-)

Time to take it up a notch folks.

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This week's edition of PRWeek features a story about the Sony PlayStation program that I am proud to be a part of. Mike has posted some thoughts over at VoceNation.

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So PR Week is having this little competition........so go vote for Voce!

Hyku isn't nominated since I stopped PR blogging a while back :-)

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With the launch of the eBay Ink blog we (meaning Voce and cnp_studio) had a nice hat trick on the WordPress.org site. The screenshot below shows the 'Powered by WP' in the lower right. I'm proud to say that they're all ours :-)

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The full title should probably be, "In our own minds, we all think what we blog is relevant to other people." That's one of the major appeals of blogging, it's self publishing. We get to say what we want and then other people read and respond (hopefully). There is a scary truth though and that is the 'importance' of what we say may not be that important.

As an experiment, a few months ago I unsubscribed from a number of 'influential' blogs....some might call them the dreaded A-list term, or in today's political climate 'agents of change'. Would I miss their commentary, would I miss out on the latest trends or topics?

Well a funny thing happened. Many of the folks I unsubscribed from were not missed at all. In fact I also never heard their names mentioned on other related blogs, or were directed there via links. Maybe this is a function of the blogging they're doing, less conversation, more talking at. Perhaps the real conversation has moved to Twitter?

The people I did miss though were what I would call friends or colleagues. I found myself missing their blogs not because of what they wrote about, I just missed them.

I'm still chewing through what this means in the evolution of social interactions online, but it does point back to the relationship aspect of things.

How many of the blogs you follow religiously are from 'industry leaders' and how many are from friends? In my experience my top folder in NetNewsWire is my friends folder.

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Jake has some good points and there of course is interesting discussion going on in the commentary in his post about 'expertise'. There are those that talk and those that do.

I think some of it has to do with the work/blogging balance that many professionals have to face. When you're not busy with 'work' you have plenty of time to blog and participate in conversations. When work gets busy, the extra stuff tends to drop off. But then again that's not following our own advice, we always tell clients to make time for blogging, so we should as well :-)

I think it was last year that Tom Biro said something to like, "the reason I'm not blogging is because I"m busy doing actual client work." I chuckled at that statement and now with the full-time gig I understand what he means.

Should people follow the example one leads on a blog, or the example they provide via the work they do with their clients?

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There has been quite a bit of discussion about the Blog Council, some positive, some moderate. David's initial thoughts were that it might not be a good idea and Geoff took issue with the 'closed door' approach. Here are some follow-up thoughts:

1. Like I said in the previous post, some groups like to meet among their peers and talk shop without outside influence/distractions. That can sometimes be good, or perhaps bad. One similar organization I have worked with is the Insurers Public Relations Council. It's a gathering of the top PR pros at the top insurance firms in the US. The meetings they have are part business, part fun. But ultimately they can get down to business fast since they all work in the same industry, all face the same issues, and all speak the same language. They still seek outside council though....but they're very clear, if you're speaking you're there to educate, not pitch.

2. Following-up on that last thought.....if you remember my rant from a few weeks ago about the standard presentation-as-pitch issue. If I could join a comms/professional group that promised to deliver good quality content that was pitch-free...sign me up.

3. Give them time. Hell the group was just announced. Ultimately the members will be able to see if there is any value in the organization. If it's good it will survive, it not it will die a slow death :-)

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What is ANTB? That stands for Andy's Next Big Thing. Who is Andy? Andy Sernovitz, he used to run the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and now he's launched the Blog Council.

Back in early October, Andy shared his plans for me, and it's great to see this finally launch (and stay true to the original vision he set out):

The Blog Council exists as a forum for executives to meet one another in a private, vendor-free environment and share tactics, offer advice based on past experience, and develop standards-based best practices as a model for other corporate blogs.

Representing thought leaders from corporate departments as diverse as corporate communications, global communities, marketing and customer service, the Blog Council's advocacy role functions as a collective voice in support of responsible, ethics-based corporate blogs. Other issues the Council will address include:

- How do global brands manage blogs in more than one language?
- What do you do when 2000 employees have personal blogs?
- What is the role of the corporate brand in a media landscape increasingly geared toward consumer-generated media?
- What is the correct way to engage and respond to bloggers who write about your company?

It's true that major brands have issues unique to them. They also like to interact/share with their peers, in confidence.

I was fortunate enough to present to the group earlier this week along with John Bell on the topic of blogger relations.

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If you are my age, then you know where the last part of that title comes from (inconceivable!). If not, ask around :-)

What does the word conversation mean to you and to your company?

We say the word conversation quite a bit in the social media world. But like some words, when you say it over and over, it sometimes loses all meaning.....sort of like social media. When I started my breakout session at the PRSA International Conference last week I joked with the audience was probably sick and tired of the term 'social media'. They had to be, they had been in sessions for three days hearing it over and over again.

Back to the word conversation though. I think when I say it and hopefully when some of the organizations I work with say it, they mean they want a two way dialogue. Both sides learn something from each other. There is a give and take.

Unfortunately conversation is also becoming a strategy, a marketing plan.

Politicians also use the word conversation. They say, "We need to sit down and have a conversation about that issue." I don't know about you, but when I hear that from a politician I usually think, "I am going to speak with you to give you the appearance that I actually care what you have to say, but in reality I am just going to use this opportunity to force my ideas upon you." Not my idea of conversation.

Are politicians and corporations giving conversation a bad name?

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Today at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum I moderated a panel on B2B blogging. When you get a room full of marketers the conversation will sometimes turn to SEO and of course ROI. Mix the two and you have a lively conversation.

Yes we all know that Google loves blogs, but if your only reason for blogging is SEO, then you're going to fail. Back in early 2006 I posted about a newspaper that wanted to start community blogging. I told them if the reasons were revenue or page views that things would fail. The primary purpose has to be conversation and community. If you do those two things right (and have your blog properly configured) then SEO and all the other benefits should follow.

During the panel today the analogy I used was this:

If your fiance asks you why you love him/her and want to spend the rest of your life with them you shouldn't say:

A. I'm looking for increased ROI thru shared living expenses.
B. You have a great network of (hot) friends, and partnering with you allows me to position myself favorably with them.

It should first and foremost be about love and compassion (with your fiance).

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This post wraps-up to my series on the individuals involved with corporate social media programs. In the first part I looked at the downsides of an organization becoming too reliant upon an individual with a social media/community initiatives. The second post looked at the same issue from the standpoint of the individual who may become overshadowed by the brand they serve. I wish this third post could come under better circumstances, but in business things don't always turn out the way you want them to. What happens when you layoff the staff that runs your corporate blog?

Earthlink corporation has been undergoing some tough times recently that culminated with a number of staff being laid off last month. One of those was their official corporate blogger, Dave Coustan. Dave was hired in 2005, to be the first 'blogmaster' for Earthlink. Longtime readers of this blog may remember that Toby Bloomberg first spotted Earthlnk's ad for this position back in 2005.

If you have a corporate blog and you take away the blogger, well you guessed it, the blog probably goes away too. Dave talked recently about the changes going on at Earthlink and what it will mean for Earthling, the corporate blog.

While many corporate blogs are indeed that, a 'corporate' blog, the people reading them often follow the personalities that write them. This is very similar to how people follow columnists in the print media. While I read SI.com, I usually seek out the work of Peter King. If Peter ever left SI, I'd probably visit SI.com less frequently.

One of Dave's major responsibilities was writing the blog, in his absence what can/will Earthlink do? I don't think turning the blog over to a group of people that can't give it their full attention would be wise. Also, Earthlink says one of their goals is to concentrate on doing a better job for their existing customers. It's a bit ironic then that they'd take away a communication vehicle between company and customer.

Tying back to my first two posts on this subject: 1. What could/should happen to the blog and 2. What should Dave, the individual, or in this case the Earthling do?

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I've recently started to blog over at MarketingProfs DailyFix. This is the first post and is cross-posted. I am going to try to avoid cross-posting in the future though.

Seth Godin recently talked about a SEO firm that promises to move negative reviews down the page on Google. Rather than spending money to fix the original problem, firms will spend money on making the criticism go away. (sarcasm) Smart (/sarcasm)

Earlier this year I asked, are you willing to take from your pr/marketing budget to fix a problem in another department? A great case in point was the recent Spirit Airlines dust-up. For a quick refresher:

- Alex has customer service issue with Spirit Airlines
- Alex blogs about it
- Other people comment, sharing their customer service horror stories
- Google ranks post #3 for "Spirit Airlines" search
- Even more people comment, sharing more horror stories
- Aviation Week blogs about it
- Traditional media picks up the story
- Rinse & repeat

If you read through the blogs posts, Alex's issue revolves around the customer support line. From his experience it just doesn't work. Many of the people who commented on his post shared the same view.

When I was interviewed by the media for the story about Spirit Airlines I was asked, "What would be your counsel? How can they make peace with the bloggers?" My response:

Well there is what I would tell them they should do, and then there is what they will do, which are two entirely different things.

What they should do.....It seems that the majority of their issues are related to their customer support line, they should fix that problem first. Fix the customer support lines and then go back to the bloggers and say, 'We're sorry for the issues you encountered. It seems that we had some problems with our customer support lines and we heard that from you and the other commenters. We've fixed those issues by increasing our staff at our major call centers. We'd love to have you fly with us again and if you ever need to call our customer service line again the level of service will be much better.'

Of course they won't do that. Each time something like this comes up again their communications depart will apologize. But we all know that it's a hollow apology since they really don't plan on fixing the problem.

I know budgets are really tight at a low-cost airlines, but at what point does the time and effort spent dealing with PR issues related to this (not to mention the lost sales) outweigh the cost to fix it?

I often hear old-school PR practitioners complaining that all this 'blog stuff' is negative. It depends on where you're sitting of course. Social media is great for shining a light on the broken parts of your business. You can take the exposure of faults as a negative, or as an opportunity to fix things and make your products/services better. Which will you do?

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In the previous post I talked about how corporations that are creating social media programs inherently need to rely upon the individuals involved with those initiatives. But what about the individuals? Quoting from the previous post:

On the flip side, what about an individual that becomes associated with a brand. In some cases they're not an individual, they're the company's blogger. I've seen it happen at conferences, "Oh hey, John....you're X's blogger?" They're always introduced as John, X's Blogger, never just John. It's like without that qualifier at the end they wouldn't be anybody.

What happens when they want to move on but the corporate brand overshadows their own?

It's a double-edged sword. The major brand is what has put them in a position to possibly move on to other opportunities, but that brand can also obscure them.

Sometimes you also get lost in the crowd at large corporations. Would you want to hire the PR person that 'oversaw' the blog or the person that actually wrote the blog? Executives taking too much credit for their staff's work is nothing new.

What do you do if you're the company blogger and want to establish your own identity? In smaller circles this is easy since the majority of the people you interact with via the blog will hopefully know you. It's a natural effect of the blog and the interaction between individuals. In many cases that might be all you need. If you're looking to move on, often it's the folks in the small circle that are your best resources.

Recently Jeremiah talked about his career blog, or a blog that moved with him from job to job. It's part personal, it's part professional. Striking the balance is the challenge though.

In my case, I'm fortunate because my name and brand, Hyku, are somewhat synonymous. But then again I work for myself :-)

A number of 'corporate blogging' friends I know also have personal blogs. Some are open about this, as in it's easy to find them and the connection. A few others like to keep thing separate and on the DL. It's only their friends that know the address. However, we all know that keeping something hidden in plain sight doesn't always work.

One little issue is the simple Google search of their name. Many times the corporate blog will be the first result. The only way to gain control of that is to get out there and start blogging/linking, etc. Taking on too much of a personal presence could cause tension at work though.

Facebook might be the solution. A number of corporate bloggers I know are my friends on Facebook, it's a great way to network.

Getting back to the question, what should/can a corporate blogger do to establish their identity?

First off, own your name, create a basic site/blog that is your personal brand. What you do there is open for debate, but it's important that friends know how to locate/interact with you outside the corporation you work for.

What else should one do? Comments?

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One of the elements crucial to corporate social media initiatives are the individuals who blog for organizations. Often these individuals become somewhat official spokespersons for the organization, but that's what they're supposed to be correct? It's the humanization thing. What are the downsides though?

Recently I was on a teleconference panel with a few organizations. One of the panelists talked about all the major social media initiatives that were handled by a member of their staff, let's call them John. John had become their spokesperson. Previously they never had one. The relationships that John built within communities online (and offline) were invaluable to the organization. During the Q&A, the questions mostly focussed on technology issues and we ran out of time before I could ask, "What happens when John leaves?" From the earlier discussion it would seem that if they left their entire community outreach efforts would vanish and so would a portion of sales.

Another issue related to business blogging is ego and internal politics. In some cases a junior staffer suddenly becomes an invaluable asset, sometimes that goes to your head. However, most of the corporate bloggers I know firmly have their egos in check, but it could be an issue. When Robert Scoble worked at Microsoft one of the questions that often came up was what do others in the company think of his profile? Here was a person that recently joined the company and suddenly is mentioned in the same breath as Gates and Ballmer. There were probably quite a few folks that said to themselves, who is this guy? I've been here a decade....etc.

Then of course Robert left Redmond and some folks foolishly asked, "What will Microsoft do?" I think Microsoft is doing just fine. Along the same lines, does anybody remember Cooper/Katz? (if you do, you somewhat date yourself in the PR blogging world.)

In Scoble's case, PodTech knew one of the things they were getting with Robert was his celebrity/followers. There is attention/publicity that comes with that, and to some degree that can be of value. You could compare this to pro sports before free agency. Often the star player would remain with one team for their entire careers, today that's a rarity. In the gadget blogging world the editors/writers seem to change teams quite a bit.

It will be interesting to see how situations like this play out in the coming years. Could you imagine a Ford press release: "Ford hires former GM Chairman Bob Lutz to launch new F-150 Fanatics blog!"

But let's go back to my initial example, if/when that person at a small operation leaves there would be huge consequences. That person is a communication channel and that suddenly disappears. It is possible to move on, but since much of the community is built upon relationships with an individual, you can't easily swap people out. That's been standard operating procedure for companies though. If it's a faceless corporation, then you can swap out the 'faces' as much as you want :-)

On the flip side, what about an individual that becomes associated with a brand. In some cases they're not an individual, they're the company's blogger. I've seen it happen at conferences, "Oh hey, John....you're X's blogger?" They're always introduced as John, X's Blogger, never just John. It's like without that qualifier at the end they wouldn't be anybody.

What happens when they want to move on but the corporate brand overshadows their own? Part two coming soon.

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This is a neat milestone. Marcomblog is a collaborative blog written by 'industry' folks for students at Auburn University. Yesterday one of the former students has joined the contributor list. Auburn professor Robert French introduces a post from Mary Metcalf, a recent Auburn grad who now works for Edelman in Chicago:

The first post in Marcomblog happened on Saturday, November 13, 2004. We’ll celebrate our third anniversary in just a few months. That’s a long time ago. Many students have passed through my classes and participated in our social media activities. So, I had this funny idea. Hundreds of those students have graduated and gone on to careers in public relations and marketing communications. Why not hear from one of them? I asked Mary Kneeland (MK) if she would write a post reflecting on the transition from student to practitioner. Here it is.

Yes it's been a bit too long since I posted something to Marcomblog, need to get back in that habit.

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We've heard this story before....blogger has bad experience with company, blogs about it, then Google works its magic. In this case it's Alex Rudloff who had a problem with Spirit Airlines.

Alex's post is now #2 on Google for 'Spirit Airlines'. It's even ranked higher than Wikipedia. That has attracted a number of comments and e-mail from folks with the same experiences with Spirit. It's sort of a mini Dell-Hell.

The latest twist in the story involves Spirit CEO, Ben Baldanza who had a slight e-mail snafu. Fun stuff.

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My blogging-partner-in-crime Chris Gent has a wrap-up post for our conference blogging at the 2007 Florida Public Relations Association Annual Conference. We posted a total of 84 entries, 7 podcasts and almost 700 photos.

Like many conference blogging experiences, it was fun, but exhausting. We had a team of bloggers and we tried to closely follow the conference blogging guidelines I set out last year.

Chris and I handled most of the photography. You can find the FPRA Flickr stream here.

One of the highlights for me was Cynthia Gordon's session on how Universal has been using digital and social media. Many of her examples revolved around the recent announcement that Universal Studios Theme Park would be home to Harry Potter.

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Savannah's Creative Coast Initiative have relaunched their blog. The Savannah area is an amazing place. I've been able to make a number of trips to the area for work and pleasure in the past few years. If I was single and wasn't tied to Florida I would seriously consider Savannah as a place to live.

Here is a bit about the Creative Coast Initiative:

The Creative Coast Initiative (TCCi) is a non-profit organization that attracts, nurtures, and promotes brain-based business in Savannah. Our job is to make it easy for you to get in, get setup, get connected and be successful in this cool coastal city. We’re all about relationships. We’re a public/private partnership created by city, county and technology leaders in 2003. We are chartered by the Savannah Economic Development Authority (SEDA), the City of Savannah, the Chatham County Commission and closely allied with a whole host of other organizations.

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Related to my previous post on the Boeing 787 rollout....when I need 787 news I turn to Flightblogger. It's one of the best resources for news on the new Boeing plane.

Earlier this week Jon Ostrower posted that he had been granted media credentials to the rollout by Boeing. One problem though, getting there, as in cost. He needed to raise $900 in less than a day. Jon posted a donation link and asked his readers to help out.

As it turns out the readers of his blog did it. They raised the funds. As Jon writes:

I am sitting here with my jaw on the floor.

I owe you all a debt of gratitude. From those who gave a dollar or some who cleverly gave $7.87 and to those who gave larger contributions, I am eternally grateful for your support. I am awed at your generosity and your words of encouragement.

I have raised the money to be present with Boeing this weekend in Seattle to cover the roll out of the Boeing 787.

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On June 11th, Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) launched the official PlayStation.Blog. I'm proud to say we had a little bit of a hand in the development of this new corporate blog.

The blog is based upon the WordPress platform and features a number of modifications. I handled the design and some of the project management while the team (Nick, Pete, Sean and Mike) from cnp_studio handled CSS, WordPress customization and other tweaks.

Response to the blog was been somewhat amazing with over 500 comments coming in the first 24 hours. Technorati rank went from non-existent to 8,364 in less than two weeks. Not bad.

As with any project of this nature, it's only the beginning. Look for more to come.

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I'm still working on part two of my CVB post, but for now here is a tidbit I've been sharing with CVBs and other travel and tourism folks. In fact I talked about it on Monday to a group of airport communicators. Benet Wilson from Aviation Week also blogged about it.

Every day is a FAM Tour

For some background, many convention and visitors bureaus (CVBs), attractions, airports, etc. rely upon familiarization tours or FAM tours to promote their locations. FAM tours are designed for journalists. CVBs bring in travel journalists/writers and then wine and dine them while showing off the best that their location has to offer. Their hope of course is that the journalists will then write positive stories about their destinations.

There is one problem with that.

Today every visitor can be a journalist in some way. People are constantly blogging about their travel experiences. The good and the bad. Those posts might only be read by a few friends and relatives at first, but eventually they begin to appear in the all-important Google results. That's when the fun begins. Benet talks about a recent example:

In the past, complaints like this were either never seen, or if they were, they were tossed aside, with the thought that one person's opinion didn't make much of a difference. But TravelGolf.com specifically targets this community, and I suspect it's a large one.

Golf is an important tourism tool for the Miami region. And if Tim McDonald says MIA is "hell," some of his readers may read that and decide to move their golf outing to somewhere like Tucson, which also happens to have an airport that's easier to navigate.

The question then is: Why don't you treat every visitor like you treat a journalist on a FAM tour?

The long-term impact of a positive/negative blog post is probably greater than a one-time column in a local paper talking about a 'Weekend Trip to X'.

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Last week I was conducting a training session for a group of journalists from across the U.S. During the course of the session we talked about how blogs allow journalists to create their own brand and build loyalty among their readership.

One of the blogs we looked at as an example was Pop Candy by Whitney Matheson from USAToday. Whitney's blog is a great mixture of her personality and reporting.

I threw the question out there to the audience, "Do you think that Whitney needs USAToday anymore?" Most of the journalists in the audience didn't think so.

What do you think?

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Via John Moore, I learn that Andy Sernovitz, former CEO of WOMMA, now has a blog: Damn, I Wish I'd Though of That!

Subscribed.

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Shel Holtz furthers the discussion on ghost-blogging, or the act of writing blog posts for somebody else. I agree with Shel that for the most part it's not a good idea.

My problem is simple: Blogs aren’t just another business communication channel. In fact, blogs were created and popularized by people who were fed up with traditional business communication channels. They had had enough of fabricated quotes in press releases and speeches read by executives but written by professional speech writers. These people wanted authentic conversations with real human beings.

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"This is a cool way to do the news"

That's what Billy Townsend, a reporter with the Tampa Tribune told me a few weeks ago on a Friday afternoon. We were in the middle of piecing together an interesting local story that would lead to bigger things. The news story would eventually unfold on the newspaper's web site and a number of local blogs. It was also an interesting exercise in how news is transforming, specifically the relationship between newspapers and local bloggers.

Here's the backstory.

CSX, a major rail/transport company is considering building a intermodal facility in Winter Haven, Florida. CSX and the City of Winter Haven are promoting the project as an economic boom for the area that will create jobs and increased tax revenue. With any development of this nature there are concerns over: growth, traffic, environment, etc. For the record, I believe the project will be a benefit to the area, but the proper steps need to be taken.

From CSX's standpoint the project/permitting process was moving along nicely. The surrounding communities in Polk County paid little attention to the project, it was perceived as being a 'Winter Haven' thing. At first, the local newspapers did very little reporting, mostly discussing some of the economic benefits.

I run a hyperlocal blog in our community called Empirical Polk. The first post about the CSX project appeared on EP on February 1, 2006. For the most part, with EP I can only comment on issues or share insights I've found from other news sources. In the case of CSX project, my blog along with other local blogs have all contributed to the ongoing story.

The first newspaper to do any sort of digging into the story was not really a local paper. The Tampa Tribune does not distribute their paper in the area and just recently hired Billy Townsend to cover the region. While Billy does file stories about Polk County for the print edition, his primary publishing tool is the Polk County News Blog. Billy is a reporter that has truly embraced blogging. He posts often, links to the competition and interacts with bloggers in the community.

On his blog, Billy began to look into the CSX numbers and how the development would impact the rest of the county. One of the issues was the increase in rail traffic. In Florida, CSX operates two main freight lines, a North/South and East/West. As part of the Central Florida commuter rail deal CSX will be shifting much of their traffic off of the E/W line to the N/S line. This can also be combined with a general increase in freight traffic related to the intermodal. How much of an increase is still up for debate. Freight traffic on the N/S line will mostly likely double, and might even triple.

On March 28th Billy blogged about Polk County's central location within the CSX freight system. The N/S and E/W lines cross in Polk County. The question was where? At first CSX didn't even know where. For any geek/blogger, of course Google Maps can help with a question like that. The problem was that we were looking for a natural crossing, as in X marks the spot.

On a Friday afternoon, I think I had figured it out. The lines didn't cross in a perfect X, instead they joined and ran along the same corridor for a few miles. In other words, all the N/S traffic would run on the E/W line for a short stretch. The problem though, was that the short, joint stretch runs through downtown Lakeland, FL. Like many towns in the south, the main rail line bisects the downtown Lakeland region. This causes traffic and noises issues downtown. With this discovery, it seems that those problems will double or triple as a result of the increased freight traffic from the Winter Haven intermodal facility.

Billy and I exchanged e-mails discussing my find and we eventually met up at a local coffee shop in Lakeland to go over things. The evolving story was spelled out on Empirical Polk and the Polk County News Blog. Being the reporter that he is, Billy followed-up with CSX to confirm the crossing and then he began talking to Lakeland civic leaders. While they had heard about the CSX project, the increase in rail traffic in downtown Lakeland was news to them.

Suddenly, the 'Winter Haven' project was having a major impact on Lakeland. Lakeland community/business leaders requested a meeting with CSX and the local media finally woke up. Lakeland-specific blogger Chuck Welch began following the story at LakelandLocal.com and has even created a content archive of all things CSX.

To this point the CSX project had avoided a DRI or Development of Regional Impact classification. A DRI brings with it a process to study and approve any development. That process takes time and money. With the increased media attention, the county and surrounding cities began requesting DRI status for the project.

What will happen next remains to be seen.

It was during our coffee break on that Friday afternoon that Billy said, "This is a cool way to do the news." I imagine it was like any group of reporters working on a story, except that I wasn't on the paid staff of the paper.

I have said before that what I do on my hyperlocal blog is in some sense lazy journalism. I don't have the resources to investigate or the contacts to get the interviews I want, but Billy (and the traditional media) does. I can pose a question on my blog and a reporter can follow-up on it. One local news-pro once joked that Empirical Polk was a great tip-sheet for their newspaper staff. The funny thing is that he was only joking halfway.

What can be learned from this?

Obviously we know that the business and reporting of news is changing, and fast. The tracking and reaction to news is just as fast, if not faster. From a PR standpoint the traditionalists might not like this, but there is a some benefit. All of this is happening out in the open. As more reporters blog (and blog more frequently), and hyperlocal blogs become more prevalent, the stories are now out in the open for all to see.

Reporters and bloggers are asking questions first on their blogs and the writing the stories later. Savvy PR practitioners can answer those questions if they're following along. Imagine knowing the question before the reporter calls, of better yet calling them first. Can't get to the reporter? Contact the local blogger, or leave a blog comment. The good local reporters are reading the local blogs.

The media and blog coverage of the CSX project will only increase and leave a detailed digital-paper trail for anybody to read.

So what is a PR person to do? Later this week in Part 2 I'll talk about what CSX and the Winter Haven Chamber of Commerce have been doing with blogs.

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Kevin Dugan posted some thoughts about the unusual design of the Urban Outfitters blog and asked David Armano and I what we thought. What's unusual about it? It features a horizontal scroll.

Well I have a bit of a soft spot in my heart for horizontal scrolls. After all, my photography blog uses a horizontal scroll. That said though, you need to consider the audience, the type of content and how you want people to interact with the content.

One of the issues with a horizontal scroll is that you want to keep the content height short, so you don't introduce a vertical scroll as well. Now you're limiting the content you can display based upon a design limitation. The beauty of a vertical scrolling blog is that each post can have a different height. Sometimes you might post a single sentence, other times a long article.

With a horizontal scroll, every post needs to fit in an imaginary box. With my photography blog that's not an issue since all I show are photos with a brief caption. With Urban Outfitters it's similar. They have a photo and then some brief text, but they can't expand upon this.

However, most blog and web site readers are used to a vertical scroll format. While a horizontal is a unique design twist, will it annoy people in the long term? I don't know of any sites that I visit frequently that use this format. My thoughts are that the initial 'hey look at that' functionality of the Urban Outfitters blog will give way to usability issues.

But you might say, why diss that format if you use it? Well I do use it, but my photo blog is not meant to be something you look at often and it isn't a major content piece. It's more of a gallery format. I would venture to say that Urban Outfitters intent is to constantly engage the readers with new content.

Of course if the majority of your blog readers are RSS subscribers, then your design is a moot point :-)

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We launched a new site/blog today for SeaWorld San Antonio and the Journey to Atlantis thrill ride. The site is half traditional content / half-blog built on WordPress and incorporates a number of social media elements. The videos are from Veoh and YouTube while the photos are from Flickr.

We're encouraging folks to 'Share their Stuff' and upload photos and videos from their ride experiences once the ride launches on May 12, 2007. Fan content will be highlighted on the blog in the coming weeks.

Kami Huyse is the lead on the project and has been working with the SeaWorld San Antonio gang on strategy and content. Kami is also building a blogger relations program to reach out to the numerous coaster/thrill ride blogs.

Kami contacted me a few weeks ago to help build the site. Total development time from start to finish was a little over two weeks.

The design was done by Jeremy Lazanowski from LazCreative and the gang from cnp_studio (Pete, Nick & Mike) assisted with some of the WordPress modifications.

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Being behind on feed reading I see Todd Defren's Twitter about Mike Manuel's blog birthday for Media Guerrilla. Mike has been blogging for three years. Congrats.

I start to think about a new business developing blog birthday cards, cakes and other 'celebratory/party' items for your favorite blogger. It turns out that Apple has a great birthday iCard to fit the bill. Here is the one I sent to Mike. The headline says, "Seriously, Go Outside."

Being in the birthday mood, I think, when is the blog birthday for Hyku, I really don't know? I do a quick look and it turns out to be today, that's kinda freaky. Yep, the first post went up on May 3, 2003. To be fair though the posting was rather sporadic at first and I did take some long breaks in there.

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Coming out of New Comm Forum there was a roaring debate over live-blogging. Since I do quite a bit of live-blogging for conferences, I figured I'd put in my two-cents (Another great live-blogger is Joe Thornley). For the background you can read the following posts:

- Steve Crescenzo's original post
- Shel Holtz responds to Steve
- Shel Israel responds to the response

From my perspective, Steve didn't like what Shel Israel wrote so he questions the validity of live-blogging. Is this one of those shoot the messenger not the message situations, or perhaps in Steve's case shoot the message, the messenger and the medium?

One way to get called out on the blogosphere is to make a broad generalization like 'live-blogging is useless' or 'all women who blog are mommy-bloggers'. Do you agree with either of those statements? Didn't think so.

Much of the debate seems to hinge on the word live-blogging, or as I define it, writing real-time notes of an event and posting them during the event. It's an interesting phenomena. Last year at Mplanet, Ann Handley commented on this real-time process:

Josh -- I think I'm having a meta experience. I'm in the back of the room while you are live-blogging this...seeing these guys on the stage at the same time I'm seeing the photo here. Cool...and only a little scary....

If you're questioning why somebody is doing something than the Cluetrain hasn't taught you anything. Bloggers and individuals do things for a number of reasons. Questioning their reasoning or saying it's not worth their time is very short-sighted and selfish. It's my time and energy, I'll do with it what I want thank you.

I recently spent quite a bit of time live-blogging the WOMBAT event and Forrester's Marketing Forum, was that useless and a waste of time or was the quality of the coverage lacking because I live-blogged it? I don't think so.

There are new wrinkles to the discussion. Jeremiah talks about people using his concepts/content in sessions and not crediting him. Chip Griffin also talks about live-blogging and about video blogging and conferences.

One of the benefits I see about conference blogging is that it's forcing organizers to get good speakers. If you have lousy speakers or people that use the time to pitch their own products/services the word gets out rather quickly and kills the vibe about your conference. The long term relevance of blog content via Google is becoming key to conferences. Google the name of a conference, the first result should be the official conference web site. More and more though the other results are blog posts from attendees.

I choose to attend conferences not based upon marketing materials I receive but the comments and feedback I get from friends that have attended the conference or blog posts from attendees. In other words, conference blogging is becoming an important part of the 'marketing' of conferences.

There are now organizations like WOMMA, FPRA and PRSA that actively seek out and support conference bloggers. This is a smart move since they have a hand in the blog coverage of their events. This is where thing can sometimes get sticky though.

I am often asked and compensated to live-blog a conference. This usually includes free conference registration and sometimes partial (or full) travel costs and in some rare cases I am paid for the service. In this role I disclose what I have been given. I am also there to document the sessions and not necessarily critique them. If you read through my live-blogs of events you will see they are more of a play-by-play than an analysis.

Yes there have been cases where I am sitting in a session saying to myself, "Boy this person is useless, or this is a pure sales-pitch." While I might not come out and say this directly, I usually find myself writing less about that session than others. On the flip side if I am at a conference on my own dime I might call out a speaker, but I usually don't.

Looping back to the recent New Comm Forum which started this whole debate, I can say that there were a few sessions I would probably call out, but I didn't blog much from NewComm....why? Sometimes it's good to step away from the laptop and enjoy the sessions rather than covering them. Plus I'm having more fun with photography at conferences anyway :-)

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Over at Marketing Profs, Lewis Green talks about the benefits of chamber memberships for business development. I agree with many of the points Lewis puts forth, with the caveat that your business fits a local model to some degree.

While I am a member of my local chamber, I know that I won't be getting many clients from my local market. It's just the nature of my current business. My major clients are based in: Florida, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Seattle and Silicon Valley. I joined my chamber to support the local business environment and community.

However, many years ago (1996-2002) when I owned a locally-focussed web design firm, the local chambers were indeed a huge part of my marketing mix.

So how does this relate to social media? When I talk to pr/marcom folks I often use the analogy of a chamber with social media. Here are a few highlights:

- Starting a blog, like joining a chamber is the first step, but it's only an entry. You need to put something in to your blog/membership to get something out. Bob Gernert of the Winter Haven Chamber says membership is like a health club. Joining is easy, but you need to actually go and exercise to see any benefit.

- Build relationships first before pitching/advertising. Imagine if you joined a chamber, went to the first social function and grabbed the microphone and shouted, "Hey my name is Stan and I sell car insurance, everybody needs to talk to me now!" I think the majority of the membership would look at you and say, "Who is that jerk?" That initial faux-pas will be hard to overcome, everybody will always remember you as being that jerk who sells insurance.

- At chamber social events introduce yourself to other folks, make the purpose of the conversation to learn about others, not to pitch your product. At some point in the conversation the other person will say, "What do you do?" Use that opportunity to say a little about yourself. If they're interested in your product/service they'll ask a bit more. Now you'll know who they are, what they do and how your product/service could benefit them.

- Learning about who you are talking to will avoid a number of embarrassing situations. Back when I had my web firm I can remember a few instances when a new over-zealous web firm would appear in the local market. At a chamber event one of their salespeople would come up and start talking to me, they wouldn't ask what I did, they just wanted to tell me about what they did and how my business could benefit from a new web site. I would let them talk for a few minutes before mentioning that I actually had a web site and was pretty sure it was built by somebody that knew what they were doing.

- It's conversation and relationships not advertising. When you think back to a recent event you attended what do you remember, the sponsor of the event or the conversations you had? For me it's mostly the conversations. At too many 'sponsored' events there is usually that awkward moment when the sponsor gets up on stage and gives a hurried, in-effective pitch to people who just had their conversation/lunch/dinner interrupted. That's not really the impression you want to leave with people.

- It's a long-term play. Sure there will be times you'll walk away from a chamber event with a solid lead, but it's the long-term relationships that pay off. I can't tell you how many times I would meet somebody and they would say, "Yeah we just had our web site built by X." No problem, in 2-3 years they'll need an update and guess who they always turned to? :-)

In the end, when I look at my years of chamber memberships I don't think about the business value, but more the relationships built and friends I have gained.

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Want to learn about how to use blogs for buzz? Chances are Anil Dash from SixApart and David Jacobs from Apperceptive can help.

Anil kicked things off with a question, "What can you do with a book?" For the most part people think of books as things you can consume/read. You never think about writing a book, at first. Today with the web there is an entire generation of kids growing up that know they can write, they can take part in the process.

Persistence and awareness are two major things associated with blogs.

Content does not need to be thrown away, persistence can be important, and is increasingly so. Google can find you. Almost half the visits to many blogs are from content that is over a month old. Now think about your e-mail newsletters, can I find the content from last month's e-mail newsletter?

Does the home page matter? So many people are finding content from search results, links from friends.

By putting our names and dates on content, we are creating a social contract. There is a promise of "I will stay in touch." But a promise is more than words, it takes work. It's about relationships, with friends, customers, etc.

It's about making the tools on the web as meaningful as other mediums. It doesn't have to be disposable.

Awareness is another key issue. So much of the e-mail traffic that Anil receives is not relevant at the time he receives it.

The devices you want to use are the one that give you control. Think Tivo or the iPod. Each of these devices gives you control over the experience. RSS is similar, it gives you control. RSS delivers awareness without interruption.

Awareness keeps the lines of communication open without the rudeness. Blogs are about maintaining a relationship with the people you care about. Blogs allow you to scale a conversation beyond the traditional one-on-one you have in person.

Next up, David Jacobs reviewed some examples of how blogs are used in the real world. The first example was Serious Eats. The conversation about food now takes place online. The other thing is the site opens up the conversation to the community. There are experts, but isn't everybody and expert in something? The site features profiles. Users can tell a bit about themselves, web sites, their favorite foods, etc.

How is this different than a forum where the person with the most free time wins? There is control from a post/editorial standpoint.

The user profiles builds a history of the users contribution to the site. It's their reputation. You respect those that contribute to the site. If you have a community like this for your customers it lets you learn who the real influencers are.

Once you begin to host the conversation, it's like having a dinner party at your house. You learn a lot in a civil environment.

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I think I've said this before :-) When you launch a corporate blog make sure you own your domain and the long-term control of your content.

Shel points out that Kryptonite is blogging. Great, but they're using Blogger and a URL they don't control: http://unbreakable-bonds.blogspot.com/

Spend a little bit of time and money to use/configure a service that allows you to have your own domain name. How about blog.kryptonitelocks.com? Or if you want to stick with the 'unbreakable' theme the domain unbreakablebonds.com is available (as of this post).

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The topic of sending bad pitches to bloggers is not new. There is a blog about it and even and handy-dandy button for it. However, Steven Noble brings up something I never thought of. If you're 'working' the blogs then you are probably monitoring and pitching them. This might cause an interesting situation:

That's right. You're own bad pitch will appear in the social media monitoring report that you will have to prepare for and deliver to your client. And then you have to explain it. Ouch.

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If you need to be reminded, April Fools Day is this Sunday. Last year I created the short-lived merger of Steve Rubel and Jeremy Pepper via PepperRubel PR. The pressure was on for this year though...what could I do as a follow-up?

Well I have had a number of ideas and was beaten to the punch on another....but ultimately I don't have the time to get something done by Sunday. With that said, here are some of the ideas I've been mulling over. Most of them are based upon available domains.

TNN: Twitter News Network (twitternewsnetwork.com)
Create a news site that gets all its news from Twitter. I don't mean real news though....the standard banal stuff that Twitter is famous for. We would also create a video news show with a real anchor reading Twitter headlines, i.e. "We're receiving breaking news out of San Francisco......Chris Messina is back from 45 minutes at the gym......Shocking news out of New York, Steve Rubel is considering not blogging for a day....emergency crews are responding now." The crawl at the bottom of the news show would be a continuous Twitter feed.

Caveman PR (cavemanpr.com)
Mashing up the Geico Cavemen and Un-Frozen Caveman Lawyer from SNL, we would create a PR firm by cavemen, for cavemen. If Phil Hartman were still alive I could see him saying, "You're attempts at controlling the message frighten me. Then these strange blogs and RSS....how do these messages arrive on my computer? Do tiny demons carry them?"

NoLifePR (nolifepr.com)
Forget Second Life and their few million residents, how about the after-life. Name a bigger target audience than the dead? They are also a somewhat captive audience :-) Better yet, every major city in the U.S. has a Bacon's for the dead, they're called obituaries. Seeing the opportunity, we'll create a PR/marketing firm for reaching that huge audience. I see product placements at graves as a huge opportunity.

PayPerMule (paypermule.com)
Building upon the controversy around PayPerPost, I am going to create PayPerMule. Need somebody to transport your drugs across the country or the world? Pay one of our mules as little as $5 and they'll transport it for you. Disclosure is not required and is not suggested.

PayPerPoop (payperpoop.com)
Extending the PPP theme once again. Medical research firms want to know what you're eating and what it's doing to your body, with PayPerPoop you get paid to do what you do every day...poop!

Yesterday afternoon in Orlando Alex Rudloff, Ryan Price and I brainstormed a few other ideas around the PayPer-X format. PayPerDate (aka prostitution), PayPerTweet (paying folks to Twitter), PayPerFriend (I think that exists already). You get the point.

Oh well, I think I have staked my claim to a few ideas. If you want to take any of these and run with them, feel free.

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The latest issue of Wired has a cover story by Clive Thompson about the See-Through CEO, or how blogs are transforming how CEOs and businesses work. The one pull-quote that speaks volumes is this one:

Google is not a search engine. It's a reputation management system. By enhancing transparency, companies can manage their images as never before.

While a newspaper story or crisis might make a slight blip on the radar, it's the long-term search results that will always stay.

Recently a friend had some bad news written about his company in the newspaper. I suggested that they blog about the situation, provide their version of the story. Why? Because a few months or years from now somebody will say, "Hey you remember when X did Y back in Z?"

A quick Google search will help refresh everyone's memory. What will turn up? The original newspaper article? With many newspapers putting content behind pay walls it will probably be a blog talking about the story. If the company blogs the story, what will most likely show up first a few months/years from now will be their post.

In many ways you're writing your own history. Yes this can be abused, but the blogosphere has a great system of checks and balances. They're called comments and links. If you try to BS or 'cover' a story you'll be outed. Stick with the truth.

In the end, who is telling your story? Is it the media or a blogger. Why not tell it yourself?

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Lee Hopkins asks if it's too lake to join the conversation. Never, but it also depends on your objectives. If you are just wanting to write a personal blog for friends and family it's never too late. If you're looking to use a blog for marketing purposes in a saturated market, it might be a long road ahead. I think this is what Lee is referring to.

When people say, "I'm too late" or "How can I build an audience..." I always point to Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah's been blogging a short time (relatively speaking) and has made quite a name for himself.

It seems like every week there is a new blogger that I add to my RSS list. Recently I've been getting some great nuggets from Dan Blank. It's not only the content a blogger creates, it's what they find. In the case of Dan, he recently pointed to a list of journalistic uses for blogs. Good stuff.

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In the past few weeks I've had some interesting experiences with corporations talking about social media. Many realize that they need to be 'there'. There being defined as where people (and their customers) are. They say they want to 'join' the conversation.

However, their definition of conversation is not a two-way street. They want all the benefits of blogging but none of the negatives. Sorry folks, it's part of the process. If you want to benefit from social media you need to be willing to take the good and the bad.

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Shel Israel has slowly been working on his next book (and follow-up to Naked Conversations). Today he posted an overview of Global Neighbourhoods. Go check it out.

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One question that always comes up is, "How long should my blog posts be?" One consistent answer is, don't make them too long. However, like any 'rule' there are exceptions.

In my case, one of the most linked-to and read posts happens to be my longest post ever: How to Blog a Conference

I think in that case, if you create good valuable content that is researched and well written it can be a a great resource. So, sure keep those blog posts kinda short, but don't be afraid to write that novel every once and a while.

Update: Kevin O'Keefe also talks about post length.

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I'm a bit late to this discussion, but here are my two cents.

Dee Rambeau ended his blogging adventure with a well thought-out and well written missive about the cons of the blogging world. I won't debate Dee on this issue, Allan Jenkins has already done a great job of this.

One of Dee's comments on Allan's post says:

I think if you read some of the students' comments, you'll find that they were aching for a contrary opinion. The koolaid was getting a little too sweet!

If you want to find a true debate about the issue (or any issue) for that matter you need to talk with both sides. In the blogosphere though, it's usually one side doing most of the talking.

I agree with some of Dee's points and always whole-hearted say, blogging is not for everyone, and dealing with many corporate clients tells me it's not right for many corporations. Would it be a benefit, perhaps, but going back to a post a wrote before, it's more of a culture shift than a communication tool.

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As part of a quick e-mail interview with somebody today they said, "I figured your NASCAR post would generate quite a few comments." Alas, as of now, there are no comments.

Predicting what will be a big conversation starter and what won't is, I think, an imperfect science. While NASCAR may be in full hype mode in the traditional media, I suspect that many of my readers aren't fans (or don't care). Some of this goes back to knowing what your readers want and providing it to them. Of course this is a personal/professional blog so I mix a bunch of subjects. It's what I've always done and probably what I'll always do. I try not to be a single-topic blog.

Back to conversation though. Sometimes you write a post looking for conversation (or links). You ask questions, you stir up controversy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The beauty of the medium is that you can fail fast and cheap.

Last year at the FPRA Annual Conference one of the posts that received the most traffic and quite a few comments had nothing to do with PR, it was about an animated character. Was that post written specifically to boost traffic or generate conversation? Nope, it was just a fun little item we ran across...sometimes those are the most interesting items though.

The spirit of the medium though is that your readers know more than you and can help generate comments, questions and new post ideas. I wish I knew how many ideas for posts started with a reader comment.

What I can look at though are the stats. As of today, I've generated 1378 posts on this blog, the readers have generated 2566 comments. That's almost double.

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Alister Cameron posted a brief he had crafted for a client about the differences between traditional web content and relational web content:

One of the things I spend quite a bit of my time doing is helping clients and prospects understand the difference between a “regular” website and a social network. I spend a lot of my time arguing in favour of “social media”, in the belief that a social media approach is at the heart of what we call “Web 2.0″ and is closer to how humans naturally function in “real life”.

I wrote a version of what follows for a prospective client today, and I have reshaped it a little for my blog. Whether or not you’re considering building the next MySpace, YouTube or Flickr, I encourage you to “immerse” yourself for a few moments in what I describe below, so you can perhaps come to a deeper understanding of how the web’s move towards a more deeply immersive “social” experience is a reflection of our innate relationality, and therefore in keeping with how we naturally function, and therefore a good thing.

One of the underlying points Alister makes is that organizations should go out a learn first before embarking on a program of their own. Learn about the community and 'your' community. This is along the same lines as a post I wrote last year.

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In a great post, Mike Manuel provides the chronology of the 90-second news cycle we now live in:

+1 second to hit publish

+2 seconds for a blog to refresh

+3 seconds for feed readers to update

+4 seconds to email, link, tag, rank, or rate a blog post

+5 seconds for readers to form an opinion and/or leave a comment

+1 minute for Technorati to register a server ping, crawl and index a blog post

+8 seconds for alerts, watchlists and saved searches to propagate

+4 seconds for a blog post to plateau, amplify or disappear

+2 seconds for this cycle to repeat from the beginning

+1 second to realize the world's changing...

In a 24-hour news cycle there are total of 960 unique, 90-second news cycles.

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Often bloggers will think of themselves as an independent voice, and alternative to traditional media. Sometimes they'll make bold claims such as, 'TV is dead' or 'there is no more mass media.....we're all media', etc. Yet here we all are blogging and twittering away about the most mass media of media events, the Super Bowl.

Like the tragedies that all-to-often hit us, the Super Bowl unites many of us for a short period of time. We gather online to talk about the game and ponder whether Peyton will win the big one. Mostly though we talk about the commercials.

Wait, I'm a blogger, I'm supposed to be anti-commercial. After all, TV's dead :-)

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The St. Augustine Lighthouse in where else...St. Augustine, FL is now blogging. I've worked with them in laying the groundwork for this project. They're taking the first steps and have some interesting plans for the coming months. The blog allows them to cover a number of topics, from the historical to the ghostly to all things Fresnel.

The lighthouse gang is fortunate since they have an attraction that is frequently photographed and shared via Flickr. To join the party, they'll also be using Flickr.

One of the driving forces within the organization has been Rick Cain. If you're a lighthouse nut be sure to follow his blog and all the others.

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From Jeff Jarvis:

The newspaper industry is spending $75 million to argue that it’s not screwed. How much better it would be to spend $75 million on innovation so, indeed, it won’t be screwed.

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Where have we heard this story before.....run 'hip' new ad during the Super Bowl then let people 'discover' (then call-out) your fake blog that goes along with it. Remember the Lincoln Fry blog from McDonalds?

In this case the commercial hasn't even run yet, but AdPulp's David Burn has discovered a possible fake blog from GM for their Robot 2407. Below is the GOTO ROBOT blog written by ROBOT 2407. (Susan's comment below is correct....it was very late last night when I wrote this...so perhaps character blog would be a better description)

Comments are not enabled on the blog, and it seems funny that the 'ROBOT' posts at exactly 6:00 PM each day.

ROBOT 2407 even has a YouTube account. Looking at his profile you see he likes Kraftwerk.

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Toby Bloomberg wonders if social media is tipping in Atlanta? There are a number of events coming up in the next few weeks that deal with all things social. Is it tipping/growing? Toby, the majority of my time outside of Florida is spent in Atlanta :-)

Is it the mecca? Not sure. I think the folks from ConvergeSouth and Greensboro, NC might argue that. Or perhaps Rex Hammock and all the bloggers in Nashville.

One of the comments on Toby's post points out that Atlanta is 2-3 years late as usual. This isn't always a bad thing. It all depends on your audience. If I am a tech firm in Atlanta trying to reach a broader market then yes I might be late to the game, however for local audiences much of this is new. Should it surprise anybody that the biggest blogger in the area is the local media? At last count the Atlanta Journal Constitution has 59 blogs.

Still, social media has existed for some time in the area. I remember coming up for a Atlanta Media Bloggers meeting back in the summer of 2005. Who was the first blogger I knew from Atlanta? Toby, followed closely by Jeneane.

It has been interesting to watch the growth though.

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A number of the people attending the BlogSavannah event this past Friday were exploring whether or not they should create a blog. The gang from Paragon were one those wondering...should we or shouldn't we? They didn't wonder long.

I just discovered their new blog, The Paragon Muse. The first post (and comment) talks a bit about their decision to start a blog:

After the conference, we were all way to excited so we designed and setup the blog Saturday night and edited the video Sunday. Thanks for presenting at the conference!

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I drove from BlogSavannah to Atlanta to attend the kick-off meeting of Social Media Club Atlanta this evening (event details here). Looking over the RSVP list there are plenty of old friends and a few new ones.

Social Media Club was founded by Chris Heuer, Howard Greenstein and Kristie Wells:

...for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media. This is the beginning of a global conversation about building an organization and a community where the many diverse groups of people who care about social media can come together to discover, connect, share, and learn.

The kick-off is being held in conjunction with the Social Media 2007 conference in Atlanta. I debated about registering, but decided against it. I think I get more out free events like BlogSavannah and Social Media Club than a paid event like SM2007. With that said though....read the next post.

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I think the first edition of BlogSavannah Un-Conference 07 was a great success. Congrats to Drew and the rest of the crew that put on the event. (Photos here)

The big issue with any un-conference is always managing the expectations of the attendees...many of whom have never been to an un-con. It was great to hear a number of folks say, "now that I've experienced this type of event, I really don't want to go back to the normal conference format."

Here are a few random notes:

- If you've been to a few local un-conferences you will see the discussions tend to repeat themselves, however you need to keep in mind that the majority of people in the audience are first-timers and all this is new to them.

- Just like BlogOrlando, some of the really good discussions were in the smaller room. Perhaps it's the confinement, or the smaller groups? What do you think?

- With a large percentage of users in the room you get a different perspective on topics.

- It's aggravating when the discussion turns into a debate about what a blog is and how to do it. It's especially frustrating when the people doing the preaching are not bloggers. It's like somebody telling you how to raise your children....and they don't have any of their own.

- A number of other bloggers have mentioned an individual that hijacked a number of the discussions. This is one of the issues with the format. Some of us tried to turn the discussion to other issues, but when you have discussion leaders that haven't facilitated sessions before it can be tough for them.

- Lisa has a great write-up from an un-conference first-timer. Go read it. The comments are good.

- Shawn thinks things were a bit too corporate...and I have to agree with her.

- The wifi was great!

- Chris Miller from the Creative Coast Initiative had a great session and really got the spirit of an un-con.

- Savannah is a unique and eclectic town. I spent most of the morning on Saturday walking around taking photos. However, move just a bit outside the historic downtown and there is poverty and decay.

- I met a bunch of new people. Chris, David, Lisa, Shawn, Betsy, Marjorie, Amber and her husband Rusty, the whole gang at Paragon (now blogging), Scott from Savannah Now, Angel and Alexandria to name just a few.

- I'll be back in Savannah on May 24/25/26th March 1st to do a seminar for Marjorie's clients so we'll need to organize a dinner/happy hour.

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I just led a quick impromptu session on blog basics for some of the BlogSavannah attendees. Drew, the event organizer quickly got feedback that some of the attendees were here to start their blog learning and wanted a basic overview, i.e. definition of terms, the culture, etc.

It was a great, quick session. With many questions. I always get amped by a group wanting to learn.

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Over at the Big in Japan blog Jake posts about a recent legal issue surrounding comments in an old blog post. You can read the post, but the gist is a firm didn't like the fact that there were negative comments about them on a blog post. They requested that Alex (one of the guys behind Big in Japan) remove the post and reveal the identities of the people that left the comments.

Alex contacted the company and their lawyers and suggested that he was willing to remove the post and the comments, but he wasn’t willing to provide the identities unless ordered to by a court. The company demanded that he backup the database and retain it in the event that the company can secure a court order for the release of the identities.

Do you think Alex is doing the right thing? Should he remove the post? What obligation does he have to stand up to companies who receive a few negative comments?

Back in 2005 I got involved in a situation where a person that commented somewhat anonymously (i.e. they left a handle and fake e-mail address) posted some possibly libelous statements on a blog I contribute to. Obviously the firm in question was interested in knowing who this employee was.

At first I wasn't planning on revealing anything. However, when we removed one of the potentially libelous comments from this person they began to lash out at Robert French and myself. The individual claimed that he intended to remain anonymous and challenged us to figure out who he was. This was conveyed via some interesting e-mail conversations (the person was always using a generic e-mail accounts, i.e. Hotmail, etc.).

Robert and I pointed out that we had his IP address and it was the same for each comment. The response? It would take court order for the ISP to reveal the identity, and a few other choice words.

The big problem for our anonymous tormentor was that we didn't need a court order. The company in question ran Exchange server and allowed staff to check e-mail via the web. All that we needed to do was cross reference the IP address of our 'friend' with the server logs of the mail server. Want to guess what happened?

The lesson to be learned is if you're trying to remain anonymous with your comments, don't piss off the owner of the blog since they hold some key information that can sniff you out.

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Here are a few links of interest from some smart people:

- Brian Oberkirch gives the 411 to agencies about blogs.

- Nathan Gilliatt talks about employer brand and how blogs are causing a convergence of PR and HR.

- Shel Israel clues us in on the new way to pick talent.

- 37 Signals on the 'suit'.

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Link Love, it's a term you hear quite a bit in the blogging world. Your friend sends you an e-mail, "Hey man, give me some link love'. For the most part link love is a positive experience, after all you're giving somebody a link and that's a good thing right? But are there others kinds of links?

Andrea Weckerle and I have come up with some other variations:

Link-Let's-Just-Be-Friends - Somebody you know asks you for a link, you read the post and realize it's not that great so you don't link it.

Link-It's-Over - When you write a critical piece about another person then link their name back to their blog, guaranteeing that they'll find the post you wrote. This also involves dropping that person from your blogroll and RSS reader. Also known as a Link-Dear-John.

Link-Flirtation - When you link to another blogger in hopes that they'll link back to you. So, you blog here often?

Unrequited-Link - When the Link-Flirtation doesn't work and you're left all alone.

Link-Stalker - When you link a whole series of unique words in a sentence to a variety of different posts by the same author. Kind of like this. Serious Link-Stalkers will also link to other media, i.e. Flickr photos, videos, etc.

Link-I'm-Serious-It's-Over - When somebody feebly responds to your Link-It's-Over post you construct a detailed post with numerous links showing off how stupid they are. Also known as Fisking.

Link-Twitter - Rather than linking via your blog, you link in a twitter message, hitting a smaller, but perhaps more targeted audience.

Link-One-Night-Stand - When you get a bizarre link from a blog that doesn't really pertain to your blog, but it generates quite a bit of traffic for you. You often wake the next morning, check your Technorati links and stats and say, ''whoa, what the hell happened last night?"

Link-You-Don't-Call-Anymore - When you link to somebody that you haven't received any link-love from in a while. Sometimes you'll get a link/e-mail back saying, "Hey, I was just thinking about you."

Cheap-Link - When you link to somebody but don't really mean it and don't mention their name.

Dead-Link - Yes, this is a known term, but it still should be included on this list. It's when the item you link to is removed from the web and the link dies.

Link-Whore/Link-Stud - Somebody that constantly develops blog lists and daily link-blogs to generate traffic. Much like life there is a double-standard. Some people that do it are called 'whores' and are chastised while others are 'studs' and get rewarded.

Link-Prostitution - Getting paid to write blog posts with links in them.

Feel free to add your ideas in the comments

Updates:

Link-It's-Not-You-It's-Me - You finally get around to linking to something for a friend and apologize for 'not getting to this'.

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At the WOMMA DC Summit a number of the big analytical firms were there showing/talking about their social media tracking tools. Among the big corporations, the dashboard seems be de rigeur. A number of marketing honchos talked about the power of looking at their dashboard and knowing immediately how their product/service/brand is tracking on 'the blogs'.

While dashboards and other metrics for social media can be great tools, you're taking away the core focus of social media, people and their conversations. Knowing that X% of blog posts are negative about a product/service only scratches the surface.

Now when an executive says, "I monitor blogs." I respond, "Great, what's that last one you read? Who wrote it?"

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Yes blogs are great at doing certain things, but adding a blog to your communication's mix isn't a panacea, sometimes a blog can easily expose your lack of communication and customer relations skills.

Blogs and other social media tools need to be part of a culture shift within an organization. Perhaps to restate this in the form of a question, are you adding a blog to become more open in your communication, or because you are open in your communication?

Often with corporate blogs (or corporate associated blogs) it's one person making a difference. Yes it's great that a 'company' is 'listening' and 'joining the conversation' but it's not really the company it's a few people (if that). We all applaud when Dell or Southwest starts to blog, but how has that changed the other 99% of touch points we have with the company?

Shel Holtz really captures this with his recent post about Dominos Pizza.

Are companies that start to blog, but don't change their entire philosophy just setting themselves up for failure?

Hear me out on this. Company A (think cell phone company) has a really great, personable blogger that really connects with customers online. However Company A also has about 1000 call center reps and 20,000 associates in the field. The majority of them have the traditional corporate attitude, i.e. "Not my department" - "I can't help you, call customer support" etc...

Dealing with this great blogger has set my expectations high, dealing with anybody else in the corporation is just a nightmare. Inevitably the majority of the comments and issues the corporate blogger deals with are negative customer service experiences. Wow, sounds like a fund job...oh wait, that's not their department :-)

I can't tell you how many times I've had initial client meetings and told them there is now way they're ready to blog. Sometimes it's legal issues, but the majority of the time it's because they just don't have the right corporate culture.

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A big congratulations to Scott, Eric, Todd and the rest of the MyBlogLog gang on their Yahoo! deal. MyBlogLog is an Orlando-based firm, so hurrah for the home team! (MyBlogLog that has ties to Cloudspace)

I met Todd last month at the Orlando Blogger dinner we had at HUE, great guy. It's always good to see hard work and determination pay off.

At dinner I asked Todd about any plans they had to integrate their service with something like Twitter, well it looks like Yahoo!'s MIXD might fit the bill, however most of the people I know use Twitter. With MyBlogLog, Yahoo! has an interesting collection of social network tools available, now the key is to better integrate all of them. Sort of like Yahoo Vox.

Did I mention they are an Orlando firm?

Update: Here is the Yahoo! post on Yodel about the deal.

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Do you like the Disney commercial with the dreaming snowman that visits the park and then gets sad when he loses his Mickey ears? Well he has his own character blog, of more specifically a 'Snowblog' at DreamingSnowman.com.

It's a cute micro-site that shows some other travels the snowman has taken. There are also a number of e-greeting cards you can send. When I was in DC a Disney employee handed me a package of mints with the URL on it.

Since it's the holiday season we'll leave the character-blog debate out of this.

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Back in August of this year FLAUSA launched a Florida-resident specific web site at floridians.flausa.com. When the site went live I posted a review. One of the concerns I had was how the site would handle negative comments (if they received any). Back in November I e-mailed some questions (you can read my original e-mail at the bottom of this post) to Vanessa Welter, Director Public Relations. I never received a response and followed-up with her this morning. Below is her response:

With all due respect, we address these issues and matters with our industry board and committees and the very trusted vendors we work with whom have been vetted by our industry. Our evolving web site development is in very capable and educated hands and is guided by our industry's philosophy at the current time. If you did not see negative comments on the site, it is because we either did not get any, or they are not being posted. The reasons why should be obvious.

Here is my original e-mail/questions:

Vanessa:

When Visit Florida first launched the local resident themed site in August I posted a quick review online:

http://hyku.com/blog/archives/001231.html

One of the things I wondered about was the percentage of non-positive reviews and comments that might be generated by users and how Visit Florida would handle these. Looking over the site today it seems that almost all of the user submissions are positive. In my social media experience with consumer product companies and traditional media I know that there is always a percentage of negativity associated with any consumer-generated content. In the current state the site looks a bit sanitized since all the reviews are positive.

Has the site (and by extension the destinations/getaways listed) received any negative comments? If so what has been the policy in dealing with these comments?

I understand that the mission of Visit Florida is to promote the state and allowing negative comments might not be the most PC thing, but in CGM you need to take the good with the bad in order to have a trusted and valued resource.

Thanks in advance.

More thoughts on this later...but what do you think?

Update: Deleting or not posting comments that are negative has proven to be a very bad strategy for traditional corporations. Obviously corporations have the right to post what they want, but unless a comment contains profanity or libel you need to let it stand. When you open up things for user comment, attempting to jump on the user-generated-content bandwagon you need to take the good with the bad.

FLAUSA presents itself as a trusted source of tourism content about Florida, but if the commentary is sanitized the general reader will see thru this and turn to other sources like TripAdvisor or Tripmates to get the 'truth'.

Update 2: The Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp has a blog: UWISHUNU that allows residents to post/comment about their favorite hang-outs/restaurants, etc. They don't delete negative comments...they only moderate if it contains profanity or libel.

Update 3: One friend IMs to say, "I guess they haven't heard the buzzword of 2006....transparency."

Update 4: Plenty of traffic to this post from Electronet.net the ISP in Tallahassee (home of FLA-USA/Visit Florida). Any response? Nope.

Update 5: I e-mailed Dale Brill from Visit Florida this morning about this issue and he has posted a great follow-up comment.

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You, me, us...we're all Time's Person of the Year. Well, technically speaking not all of us (more on that in a bit). Time has selected, 'You' as Person of the Year because of the revolution in user-generated-content that is increasingly influencing society.

The December 25th issue features a number of articles surrounding the selection. There is of course the cover story, as well as:

- The YouTube Gurus
- Essay: Andy Was Right
- Enough About You
- It's All About Us
- The Beast With a Billion Eyes
- Web Boom 2.0
- Making Mischief on the Web
- My So-Called Second Life

The question is, what about the people not taking part in creating/using any of this user-generated-content? Are they part of the 'You'? Perhaps they should have a different cover of Time that says, 'Them'.

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Pinny Gniwisch, Founder/EVP Marketing, Ice.com and Anil Dash, VP, Moveable Type Professional Network, Six Apart, led a breakout session to a packed room on how to create/use blogs for WOM. Lots of interest in this topic.

Pinny started the session with a humorous look back at the Internet past, from the early adopters to boo.com to the rise of blogs. Pinny highlighted the November Forbes article - Attach of the Blogs. Immediately after that article he created a blog. Of course there is a blog overload, but if you post consistently and honestly you will build an audience.

Flog: Pinny provided a quick review of the fake Wal-Mart blog scandal. You need to be honest with your audience.

At Diamond.com they created a blog called Sparkle Like the Stars. The blog discusses what jewelry the stars are wearing and shows comparable products they offer. Traffic has been great, around 6-7K uniques per day. Another blog they've created is JustAskLeslie.com which answers questions about jewelry.

You need to keep your blog fresh, post at least three times per week. Many of our fans follow us via RSS. The blog has also generated a number of press.

Next up was Anil, he decided to skip the slides and just spoke from the podium. Anil did a brief overview of how SixApart used blogs to build their business. Anil started his blog back in 1999, and thought he was late to the game, but then these other 50 million people show up and you realize you're ahead of the curve.

Until a year ago they had never purchased an advertisement. They built business by using the tools they create. They experimented on a number of different things, and screwed up a lot.

The power of self-expression is a powerful thing. There is sense of empowerment with self-publishing tools.

Anybody that says bloggers are (insert adjective), i.e. evil, have no life, etc...don't know what they're talking about. There are so many people blogging that it's impossible to segment or classify them.

More and more people are creating public blogs and personal blogs. Ultimately it's just a tool. There are a number of business cases that blogs can apply to. There are people building journalistic blogs and of course you might want to reach out to them, but the majority of blogs are personal. How do you reach out to them?

Working with General Motors it was amazing to see how a big company could work so quickly. Yes they are a large company and they have lots of red tape, so if you think you have problems launching a blog, it's not that hard. If the US Government can do it, so can you.

All that content you send out via e-mail newsletters disappears....it's gone once it's sent. Why not take that same content and put in on a blog? You now have the opportunity to build relationships and commentary around that content.

Think about a blog as a content repository. Often you have people creating content in your office now, why not publish it via a blog.

There are so many times that Anil will be writing an e-mail or some other content and he'll think, "Why not publish this to the blog?"

In Boeing's case, why create a blog for a plane? There is nobody reading this blog that will ever buy this plane. But what they found was the content that normally would be buried in press kits was now available online. Aviation enthusiasts and travelers visited the blog and saw the new interior of the Boeing 787 - Dreamliner. Carriers actually saw demand from passengers who wanted to fly in the plane. Carriers began to increase orders.

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I'm planning a simple blogger dinner in Orlando next Tuesday, December 19th at 7pm. We'll be meeting at HUE in the Thornton Park area. Here are some location/directions.

I have e-mailed a number of folks directly, but anybody is free to come...just leave a comment or e-mail me.

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A hyperlocal blog I run, Empirical Polk, is celebrating its first birthday today. It's been an interesting experience writing for a smaller/targeted audience and dare I say, reporting, on local issues.

I'm looking forward the the second year.

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My blog reading habits, my blogging and my blog readers are primarily a mix of a social media & public relations slant, so it was fun to cross the aisle so-to-speak into the marketing world at Mplanet 2006.

Overall the Mplanet speaker line-up was impressive. When you have the marketing leaders from Sony, Nintendo and Nokia sitting on a panel together you're in for a treat. End the day by hearing from IBM CEO Sam Palmisano and it doesn't get much better. Seeing Chris Anderson share the Long Tail vibe with the marketing audience was also something special. It's really hard to pick a favorite session.

Social media is what I do, and with many of the sessions focusing on the new medium it was a bit of, "seen it/heard it". However, it was seeing the attendee's reaction to the speakers which really intrigued me. The audience was a mix of corporate and agency, many of which are still trying to come to grips with a loss of control.

If anything, social media, like WOM is a common ground for advertising and public relations. There are aspects of relationships, trust, influence, viral and marketing all wrapped up in one. A refreshing trend is to see that things can't be faked anymore. Over and over a CMO would say that if they ever tried to force something it just wouldn't work.

As with any conference experience I was able to meet a great bunch of folks face-to-face like, Ann, Garrett, Rob, Peter, Eric and many more. I've added a number of new people to the 'Friends' folder in my RSS reader.

Next week I'll be back in some familiar/middle ground at the WOMMA Summit 2006.

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Last week I was called by a Florida Times-Union reporter about a 'Sucks' web site story. It's something we're used to seeing by now, person feels slighted, creates web site, generates negative publicity for organization. The article was published over the weekend.

Reading over the article you'll find that the target of one man's ire is the Shands Healthcare system. What does Shands have to say?

A Shands vice president, Steven Blumberg, declined to comment for the story.

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I just signed up for a webinar on blogging. When I saw this line in the 'promo' I just had to listen in:

What DRASTIC consequences could befall your business if you don't blog.

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I am pleased to announce that I am a new member of the Research Fellows & Advistory Board for the Society of New Communications Research. SNCR is a distinguished group of folks, many of which are my friends and colleagues, so it will be a great experience.

The big event for SNCR in 2007 will be New Communications Forum in Las Vegas on March 7-9th. I'll be there, will you?

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Previous meeting engagements are forcing me to leave Mplanet early, so I'll be missing the final two sessions of the day. It's been a busy two days of blogging (15 posts and 163 photos) and I'm looking forward to a break :-)

Conference blogging is a great experience and I try to work hard at it, so it's nice to get props from somebody like Ann Handley. A while back I posted my guide to conference blogging, and of course I used this for my blogging at Mplanet. The next conference stop for me is the WOMMA Summit 2006 in Washington D.C.

Big thanks to the AMA and the Fleishman-Hillard crew for inviting me and providing support/information when I needed it.

The experience at Mplanet has been great, however we did have one issue last night...but I'll let Ann talk about that one.

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In his talk at Mplanet today Peter Kim from Forrester talked about the role of social computing in today's marketing world. He suggested adding a Fifth P to the famous Four P's of marketing.

The 5th P - Participation

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Jeremiah Owyang talks a bit about traditional corporations and media needing leadership in web strategy and social media. This is an interesting knowledge gap that I have seen as well. There are those that are savvy at social media and can counsel clients and then there are those that can build businesses/divisions around social media. However, there seem to be fewer of the latter.

I have been contacted by a few headhunters looking to fill some social media jobs at some large corporations. In each case they needed a person with a blend of social media know-how and corporate smarts. Specifically, they wanted people that could build an entire division or team and thus handle all the standard business stuff, i.e. budgets, personnel, etc.

In almost all the cases the headhunters said they were having a difficult time finding the right person. They were easily able to identify some strong players in the social media space, but none of them were interested (or qualified) in the corporate side of things. This really didn't surprise me. I told the headhunters that many of my peers are independents like myself, and we didn't really want to work full-time for a corporation. We enjoy our freedom too much.

It seems then that there might be a job market for a strong corporate types that understand social media. Perhaps I should build a job board, ala CrunchBoard :-)

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During my Hyku College Tour I had breakfast with Dan Rua in Gainesville, FL. For those of you that do not know, Dan is one of the VC's behind PayPerPost. I've been critical of PPP, so I wasn't sure what direction our talk was going to take. As always it's good to be able to meet with people in person, it adds a different level to the conversation.

Dan and I talked about a number of issues, but one topic that interested me was DisclosurePolicy.org. The site was created in response to the complaints that PPP was not forcing users to disclose any payments from advertisers for blog posts written. DisclosurePolicyl.org allows a user to create a policy based upon a few variables. The system is similar to Creative Commons in this way. Like PPP, there was quite a bit of discussion about the validity of DisclosurePolicy.org and perhaps a hidden agenda when it was launched.

Having talked in person with Dan I think I can say there is no hidden agenda, he just wanted to put a tool/service out there for people to use. Yes, the launch was somewhat of a band-aid for PPP's transparency issues, but the basics of the service should be evaluated independent of that. Dan's big question was, "If anybody but PayPerPost had released it, do you think it would have been accepted differently?"

I think there would not have as much skepticism surrounding DisclosurePolicy.org if PPP were not involved. That's for sure. Dan said he attempted to reach out to WOMMA, but WOMMA wasn't reaching back. This was most likely because of two things:

1. Obviously PayPerPost's involvement with the project caused WOMMA to back away. The last thing an organization like WOMMA wants to do is associate themselves with an organization that has become a big target for disclosure.

2. WOMMA was just about to launch their blogger relations initiative and follow that up with the Dell announcement so they probably weren't interested in diluting their efforts.

All this leads back to Dan's question. What if somebody else led the charge?

Of course we might end up with a number of solutions. Today blogs have numerous chicklets on their sidebar's promoting a variety of RSS feed options, i.e. Add to Blogline, Add to NewsGator, Add to MyYahoo!, etc.... Will we soon see blogs with buttons listing all their disclosure policies and ethical guidelines? How about a disclosure policy MicroFormat?

What are your thoughts on DisclosurePolicy.org and along the same lines the new WOMMA guidelines?

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Over the holidays I would briefly look at feeds and mostly 'save that one for later'. Here are a few of them:

- I always wondered what Thomas carried in his bag. Now I know.

- Using one of the sponsored post services to boost your Google rank? Did you think Google wouldn't figure this out?

- I guess I take good sign pr0n.

- Jeremiah thinks out loud about information architecture. I used to spend quite a bit of my time focused on IA work, but it was, how shall we say....boring. Like Jeremiah I also like to see more user-driven organization of content, but there is still a role for IA.

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After attending BlogOrlando in September of this year, Andrew Odom said, "I want to do something like this in Savannah!" Well, he went back home and began planning an event, which was just announced: Un-Conference '07. This free event will be held in Savannah, GA from January 25-27th with the main event on Friday, January 26th.

Inspired by events such as BlogOrlando and other conferences around the country, blogsavannah in conjunction with SavannahNOW and TCCi is please to offer the Un-Conference ‘07. At this 1.5 day event we will provide a very friendly, laid back atmosphere in which to learn about, talk about, and disect the blogosphere both in the Low Country and the world around us. With each session being led by a noted blogger and the sessions being relevant to the blogger cause, we are hoping to start an annual tradition of technology and friendship! The cost is FREE and all you have to do is register and show up!

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That little equation is becoming rather powerful. If you don't get it, here is the explanation:

( Unhappy Customer + Blog ) x Google = Bad News for Company

Actually it was number three on Google within two days of my initial post, but it's stabilized at one for the past day or two.

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Shel, I feel your pain. Shel Holtz posts about hearing an 'expert' speak, but realizing the person was no expert. Stuart Bruce shares his experiences as well. I've been in a few similar situations recently. I mostly keep my mouth shut since I know the truth will come out in the long run (I hope). However it seems to be getting worse lately.

Like Shel, I don't want to sound too snarky, but there are plenty of people jumping into the world of consulting with little understanding of the medium. A while ago I had one 'consultant' tell me:

"This consulting is great, I just have to stay a week ahead of my client on the learning curve and I can keep billing them."

There is a learning curve, but I think being a week ahead is a bit short :-) Jeremy Pepper once said that nobody is an expert in social media, they're just a year ahead of everybody else on the learning curve.

Illustration by Hugh MacLeod.

While this is not a definitive list, here are a few things to look for when somebody says they are an expert in the 'blog' thing.

1. What's the address of their blog? If they don't have one, run. As my friend Toby likes to say, this is something you can't fake. You need to have hands-on experience.

2. What's the quality of their blog? I know this can be a bit subjective, but are they demonstrating any thought leadership on the issue or are they just running in place?

3. How long have they been blogging? Similar to the previous question, it can go either way. I dealt with a corporate VP that received a call from a 'consultant' inquiring about their social media strategy. While on the phone the VP looked up the blog of the 'consultant'. It was a few weeks old with nothing substantial and according to Technorati had no links. The VP quickly formed an opinion based upon their research :-)

4. Do they suggest a course of action the violates some basic blogging guidelines like WOMMA's or my simple rules? Run. You should be smarter than this, but unfortunately as we've seen recently, this isn't always the case.

5. Did you check references? Or in other words do they have a proven track record. Granted it might not be years of experience since the field is relatively new, but do they have some examples of programs they have implemented for clients?

Anybody have any other suggestions?

Like I have said before the great thing about social media is the that the truth always comes out in the end. However, in this situation the people being duped aren't part of the blogosphere so there will always be this issue.

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We often talk about how blogs can humanize communication online. Case in point....Go read this post from Eric Eggerston.

Congrats Eric, even if you did get your math wrong at first.

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The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is releasing a series of guidelines for interacting with bloggers. The guidelines are not 'official rules' by any stretch; they are merely meant to provide guidance for firms just learning about social media.

Of course firms are free to ignore them (and some will) but hopefully many will follow the guidelines since WOMMA reminds us: Consumers come first, honesty isn't optional, and deception is always exposed. The guidelines are listed below:

1. I will always be truthful and will never knowingly relay false information. I will never ask someone else to deceive bloggers for me.
2. I will fully disclose who I am and who I work for (my identity and affiliations) from the very first encounter when communicating with bloggers or commenting on blogs.
3. I will never take action contrary to the boundaries set by bloggers. I will respect all community guidelines regarding posting messages and comments.
4. I will never ask bloggers to lie for me.
5. I will use extreme care when communicating with minors or blogs intended to be read by minors.
6. I will not manipulate advertising or affiliate programs to impact blogger income.
7. I will not use automated systems for posting comments or distributing information.
8. I understand that compensating bloggers may give the appearance of a conflict of interest, and I will therefore fully disclose any and all compensation or incentives.
9. I understand that if I send bloggers products for review, they are not obligated to comment on them. Bloggers can return products at their own discretion.
10. If bloggers write about products I send them, I will proactively ask them to disclose the products’ source.

I like what I see so far. You can read all the details on the initiative at: http://www.womma.org/blogger/

While some argue that the markets and community will decide what is successful, i.e. PayPerPost, there are ethical issues at hand for PR professionals. Many of the colleagues that I work with are members of either FPRA, PRSA or IABC. Each of those associations strive to represent an industry which often is dragged down by less than ethical or professional behavior. It's that type of behavior that the professional associations are trying to stop.

When you join a professional association such as FPRA you pledge to adhere to a set of ethical guidelines. Those same guidelines apply to the blogosphere. As we've seen recently, if you don't follow the guidelines, chances are you'll be caught....rather quickly.

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Bob points out this great example of how not-to launch a blog. A Florida candidate for Attorney General 'launched' his blog with a 'Coming Soon' post on July 20th. As of today, it's still 'coming soon'.

If you can't launch a blog with at least one substantial post, then don't even bother to turn it on. Following that basic advice will help you avoid embarrassing snafu's like Skip's non-blog.

I typically advise clients to have at least 1-2 weeks worth of posts in the system before you go live. When you do launch, you can post a 'We're here....' post and then talk about the subjects you'll be covering on the blog with links to previous entries that represent those subjects. This way the initial readers will get a good overview of the purpose of the blog with relevant examples of content.

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A college student sent me a series of questions for a project they're working on. I decided to post my answers online.

When a company comes to you with the idea of setting up a blog, what steps do you go through with them to get it set up?

First off I like to assess the level of knowledge within the organization. When they say they, 'want to blog' I want to know what they think that means. In a few cases I have had potential clients approach blogging from the wrong direction. They're thoughts were usually purely marketing driven, which isn't the best thing. I also need to know who will be the primary blogger(s). The best-case-scenarios are when an individual or small team within a company really wants to start blogging and they contact me to help out. In that situation there is an internal passion and drive to make the project succeed. This is a big contrast to a communications manager that calls and says, "Yeah, we need to get one of those blog things going." Real enthusiastic!

This also goes back to the overall mood of the company. Are we dealing with an organization that has an open live of communication with the outside world (customers, vendors, etc) or are they somewhat secretive. Obviously a blog is a natural extension for organizations with open communication channels.

The next step is defining the purpose and content. Often an initial idea for a corporate blog will be very narrow in scope. While the narrow scope helps define the content it often can't support itself beyond a few months. I usually advise them to take things up one level. Once we establish the based needs/purpose for the blog we then look at the technical issues.

There are a number of other steps that can get quite detailed depending on the project. A while back I posted some other tips and questions as well. Most of them are research oriented.

Continue reading "Answers for a College Project" »

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I had the pleasure to work on the development and launch of the new Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog over at ysmblog.com. The 'official' launch happened yesterday afternoon.

There is only one post up now, but there is more to come. Ultimately it's about opening channel of communications, Aaron Pratt talks a bit about this:

Yahoo has launched the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog which is interesting to me. Would Google launch something called the Google Search Marketing Blog? I bet not, so why is Yahoo! getting into the Internet Marketing mix? Simple, Yahoo! has always been one to adapt to social change and understands the value of actively marketing their brand.

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I am in Orlando for a social media conference and just about everybody else is in Seattle for Blog Business Summit. PR pro Joseph Thornley is in Seattle and I hope he will be doing some blog coverage.

You can watch the FPRAblog for posts from the Orlando event.

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Yes that title is a bit over the top, since I am not an official 'rule' maker, I'm just one person offering my opinion.

Much has been written about the role of PR in blogs in the wake of the Edel-Wal story. Recenty, Robert posted his notes and Shel says enough (with some great comments). The entire affair has brought forth a discussion on ethics, disclosure, transparency (the new buzzword) and if PR can truly co-exist with blogs.

When working with a client here are some basic rules for developing a blog that PR wants to be involved in. If you can't adhere to all of these, then you shouldn't even start. It will sound a bit like a cliche, but remember blogs are about conversation and building relationships. Just like any relationship, whether it be with a significant other, friends, family or customers there needs to be openness and honesty.

1. Don't Lie. The truth always comes out. And when the truth does come out, you've got some explaining to do. You don't lie to your friends or your family, so why do it with blog readers.

2. Don't Hide Important Facts. Similar to number one, but some people say that there is a difference between a lie and hiding the truth. If you want to get technical, yes there is a difference, but in the end, the result will be the same. You will have broken the fundamental trust with the other person, and that's hard to get back.

3. Don't Pretend to be Something or Somebody You're Not. This also goes back to the first one, the truth will always come out. Just think about anytime you told a potential girlfriend/boyfriend a small fib to impress them. How did that turn out when they discovered you didn't really know Brad Pitt, or had never really run the New York Marathon?

4. Be Yourself. Perhaps another way of saying number three, but it's worth repeating. As with relationships in real life, you want people to like and respect you for who you are, not what you 'appear' to be. By putting on a front, you might achieve a short period of happiness/success but ultimately you'll be unhappy and you'll strain the relationship. Write in a style and tone that you're comfortable with...that will help with burnout as well.

5. Improve Yourself. Improve the product not the pitch. Many times people don't follow the previous four rules because they are ashamed of something, or trying to hide something. So rather than fixing their own problem they'll lie, hide it, etc. The original problem is still there and will continue to cause issues. If you're blogging and have to lie or pretend to be somebody else, what does that say about you and your position?

To use that other standard cliche, treat your blog readers the same way you would like to be treated. Think about it, if you had a friend which didn't follow the rules above, they wouldn't be your friend for long. With a blog, if you're not following the rules above, you won't have readers for long, and if the transgression are serious enough, you'll impact your reputation in a big way.

I have had corporations approach me to assist with blog projects, and for some reason or another they couldn't follow the rules above, so I don't take on the project. As an independent consultant I have that luxury. Things are different when you're working for a large agency or internally for a corporation. That's the billion dollar question with the Edel-Wal issue. Was is really some account group working on their own and not realizing they were breaking the rules? Or did Edelman say, 'We can't do this' and the client saying, 'Yes you will, otherwise we'll take our huge account somewhere else'?

People often say that blogs can be used to 'humanize' a corporation, and this is true to some degree. The corporation isn't really humanized, but a blog exposes the actual 'humans' within the corporation. This exposure allows two humans to actually have a conversation, which if done right can be a rewarding experience and build an actual relationship between the company (via the blogger) and the customer. However, if you don't follow the rules you're ultimately setting yourself (and your company) up for failure.

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All around smart-guy-pr-blogger Joseph Thornley wisely notes that with the release of Internet Explorer 7 the majority of web users will now start to see that little RSS icon.

With tonight’s release of Internet Explorer 7 the other 85% of the world is about to see that orange icon appear on their browser toolbar. And when they see it change from grey to orange, the clicking will start. And no one will care what RSS means. They’ll just be subscribing.

However, it will be interesting to watch/compare RSS subscription rates with the adoption curve of IE7. FeedBurner, did you get that?

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Over at Sticks of Fire, Tommy talks about David Banghart moving from one neighborhood to another within Tampa and how he's leaving one blog for another. David ran the popular and informative Seminole Heights blog, but now he'll be posting at the Word from Lutz.

Somehow I missed the St. Pete Times article that profiled David and the Seminole Heights blog. Tommy quotes a bit of it, but I just want to highlight this part:

Before his blog, residents of Old Seminole Heights, South Seminole Heights and Southeast Seminole Heights communicated through e-mail and phone chains mostly within their neighborhoods. Now, attendance is higher at events because everyone in the area sees the same fliers posted on the blog. “You post it on the blog, you’re going to get a turnout,” said Old Seminole Heights Neighborhood Association president Randy Baron. “I think it’s an excellent place for people to find out about things. It’s a one-stop shop.” And readers aren’t just residents. The media and city officials regularly check blogs for neighborhood news.

Shannon Edge, the city’s director of neighborhood and community relations, is a regular blog visitor. It’s a great gauge for what residents care about and alerts her to neighborhood issues, she said. She often verifies information posted anonymously on the blog with association presidents in order to pass it along to city officials.

But those professionals will need to know where to turn to fill in their own knowledge gaps as well. That's because the citizenry, the ones who live in the communities or who have a niche interest, are going to be powerful within that niche. Mainstream media outlets simply don't have the resources to get as minutely specific as blogging allows for. So not only is Josh smart for knowing what he doesn't know and reaching out for input, so to should reporters learn to know what they don't know and search for those who do....

....But niche bloggers have the time and the passion to cover topics or angles that big news organizations just can't because the return on investment is too low or even non-existent.

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A local reporter called me and tipped me off to a blog from Bealls Florida Department Store. The blog, called FLA etc. (flaetc.blogspot.com) is interesting to say the least. From the description:

A blog dedicated to the Florida Lifestyle with updates on fashion, celebrity, gossip, advice, and Florida living. In conjunction with Bealls, we aim to stare into the fiery ball of light known as the Florida Lifestyle with daily postings and a continuing dialogue.

It's very informal and bloggy while at the same time being very commercial and trendy. I think the strangest thing for me is that this isn't really an image that I associate with Beall's

First off, can a blog attract and retain an audience that doesn't normally identify with a brand? Ultimately that question is answered by the quality and type of content posted. The gossip-style content on the Bealls blog is similar to you standard Us/People/Insert-Name-of-Fashion-Mag Here that many teens might read so it might work for them. There are very few comments on the blog, so there is not much interaction coming from the readership.

All the posts on the blog are from 'Preston' but we have no idea who Preston is. The heart of any blog should be a true conversation between the blogger(s) and readers. It's hard to have a conversation with somebody you know nothing about. The closest we get to learning about Beallls is a post about a soccer team they sponsor. However the Bealls blog is less about a conversation and more about reporting gossip and fashion news.

The second issue with segmentation is will this type of content alienate their core audience? Chances are the average customer is not going to become a regular blog reader so they're safe for now. But if the blog content gets too edgy will it become a bigger issue?

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Some companies get social media, others do not. The title of this post is a question I receive often while talking with corporations:

Do people actually get paid to monitor this stuff?

or on a similar thread

This is actually somebody's job to monitor this stuff?

There are two important things with that question that speak to corporations' thoughts on social media.

First is that fact that they're even asking it. Too often organizations see the world of social media as something that isn't worth their time. Or in this case paid time. Why would they pay somebody to do this? This speaks back to my 'Who are these people, and why should I care?' post. If they do have an interest in social media it's a viral thing. It's the, 'let's put out a crazy video and let the kids share it' thing that rarely works.

The second thing is a bit more subtle. It's the word 'monitor'. Using 'monitor' rather than 'participate' speaks volumes about their perception of the situation. It's hands-off. They recognize the fact that they have fans (or detractors) that are discussing their company, but they wouldn't dare talk to them (See: Corporations Visiting Blogs, but Not Commenting = Prank Calling?).

When I give corporations examples of other firms that are actually paying (GASP!) people to work as evangelists or community builders many still can't believe it. Perhaps it's the region of the country I work in, around here Community Relations is purely and offline thing.

One thing that Jackie Huba and other folks that deal with loyal customers will tell you is that a big fan can quickly become a big pain if they feel they aren't getting the attention they feel they deserve from the company. In many cases all they want is some basic acknowledgment for their loyalty. A simple e-mail or blog comment would work wonders in any situation.

Why aren't more companies climbing aboard the community express? Perhaps it's because many organizations neuter the social skills of the their employees via policies and legal barriers..."Don't ever talk to anybody about anything!"

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No need to go into too much detail on the recent Wal-Mart blog fiasco since Constantin does a great job recapping everything and giving advice. With Richard Edelman's recent apology post the issue will probably linger for a few more days. Of course what we'd all love to read is the backstory. How did it happen? Didn't somebody at some point internally say, "excuse me, I think we need to...." Perhaps one day that will come out.

For me the story was an interesting situation since I have a client that is considering a similar type of travel blog. From the start though we've always planned to disclose the relationship/sponsorship of the blog. In fact it's an integral part of the project. It would be hard to somebody to read the blog and not realize the relationship.

The question now is what would the blogosphere's reaction be in light of the recent Wal-Mart travel blog implosion? The other issue we might deal with post-Wal-Mart-blog-story is internal push-back.

From an external standpoint I think it all comes down to content and execution. An example I always point to is Vespaway. It's a blog that is sponsored by Vepsa, but the bloggers do a good job of not 'pitching' Vespa. Any corporate blog is going to be looked at very closely (and suspiciously) by the blogosphere, but if the content is good (and honest) it will work.

Internally it's about education. Showing and reassuring the client that this particular project will not be another 'Wal-Mart'.

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This morning Kevin O'Keefe of LexBlog and I were talking about legal blogs and the blog development world. (LexBlog is one of the leaders in legal blog development) During our conversation Kevin said something worth repeating:

In the past it used to be the large law firms with the biggest PR budgets that would get the work. Now with blogs, it's the smart folks who really know their stuff getting all the attention.

Of course this doesn't just apply to legal blogs. Just about any knowledge-based industry is seeing the same power shifts. If you're an expert, where is your blog?

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My How to Blog a Conference post generated quite a bit of interest and links. Many people that contacted me or blogged about the post said they would be using the tips in their next conference blogging endeavor.

I'm glad that the post received the response it did, but now I have a favor to ask. If you applied any of the ideas to a recent conference blog, send me some links. I would like to see some applied results.

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Stowe Boyd is doing what I figured would happen eventually with PayPerPost. He signed up for an account and has outed an advertiser and a blogger. You can read Stowe's whole post, but in a nutshell he quickly found a blogger that wrote about a service for payment and never disclosed the relationship.

How long before the entire list of advertisers is out? I'd give it a few weeks. Figuring out who is blogging for payment is very easy as Stowe discovered. Just Google the suggested copy and bingo. Or as a colleague pointed out, just visit the PPP blog and look at the comments. The majority of the people commenting are PPP users. Just visit their blogs and read away.

Like Scoble, I think the primary impetus for advertisers doing this is not wholly product mentions. It's Google juice. Advertisers are paying for links. Get 100+ bloggers to link to your site with a specific word and watch your Google position sky-rocket.

I've written some opinions before about PayPerPost which you can read, but the basic issue I have always had has been the disclosure thing. If bloggers were required to disclose the compensation for a post then I'd be all for it. As of now it's up to the blogger to decide if they want to disclose the payment/sponsorship. Some are doing it, others are not. That will always be the catch, and cause many people to deride the service.

Would making disclosure mandatory really hurt their business though? Probably not in the long run. Both parties involved would still benefit. Bloggers receive compensation and advertisers get links (and mentions).

Brian weighs in with his opinion about the funding of the venture, but I am closer to the issue here in Florida. I recently met Dan Rua who is one of the VCs involved with the deal. Dan's a nice guy and is doing good work funding start-ups in the Florida market (Lord knows we need that). Dan like many VCs sees an opportunity. Yes there are some issues with PPP, but if they would just handle that disclosure thing I think many people would drop many of their complaints.

Update: Jason Calacanis has some strong words.

Update 2: Here is a blogger that was rejected by PPP because they used 'rel=nofollow' in their links. In other words Google won't follow the link. So what matters more to advertisers on PPP, the blogger mentioning their product or the link?

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Evoca has launched a new service called EvocaMic in a limited test mode. The little Flash module below (must be on my web site and not using RSS) allows anybody to record a message via their browser and built-in microphone. It's voicemail for a blog.

Try it out and leave me a message.

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The Orlando Sentinel posted an item on their political blog about the Katherine Harris comment spamming I received. At this point Talking Points Memo and TPMCafe have picked up the story. Perhaps we'll finally get to the bottom of this mystery.

Comment from a friend:

Outsourced sock puppet maybe my favorite new phrase.

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CVB's or convention and visitors bureaus are getting into social media in a big way. A few weeks ago I took part in a PRSA teleseminar for CVBs that was very well attended. There is a great deal on interest in the topic, specifically because so many people turn to each other (or total strangers) online for travel tips.

As a CVB you could teach yourself all this new stuff or just hire somebody. That's what the City of Philadelphia has done. They just snagged Annie Heckenberger.

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For the next few days I'll be tied up with BlogOrlando. I might get a post or two up here, but I doubt it. You can follow the BlogOrlando action by visiting BlogOrlando.com of course, or using Technorati and Flickr to track BlogOrlando stuff.

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Dan Greenfield has a thought provoking post talking about bloggers as journalists. The opening sentences set the stage:

We have all experienced it – a news story runs about your company, but the reporter never contacted your company for a comment. Makes us mad and clients mad. Journalists should know better we say.

But how about when bloggers post a comment about your company or pull comments from a company blog without contacting the PR department? Are we still as angry? My guess is probably not.

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The Orlando Sentinel ran an article today about Facebook's new feature that allows members to list their preferred candidates in political races.

The popular online meeting place for college students recently unveiled a new feature that allows users to list the political candidates they support alongside their pet peeves, favorite quotes and goofy or inappropriate pictures of themselves and their friends. The site then takes users' political preferences, totals them and displays them in a poll that shows the support candidates are getting among Facebook users.

The new feature is the latest sign that everyone -- from corporations to universities to political candidates -- is tapping into social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. And though it might not be popular enough yet to have a major impact on this election, one expert predicts it could become a crucial tool in future campaigns.

In Florida you can review who supports Jim Davis (D) or his opponent Charlie Crist (R) in the Governor's race

On Tuesday afternoon, Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist had 54 percent of the Facebook vote, while his Democratic opponent Davis had 46 percent of the vote. A little more than 3,000 Facebook users have listed their preference in the governor's race.

Now, who should do this? Well they shouldn't be over 30 to start with. The campaign outreach programs via social networks should be led by people in the same peer group as the users. Like any blogger relations program, the goal is to build a relationship and not to pitch news or events.

This new feature and story really highlight the research/listening power of social networks. Previously, to identify people interested in a particular topic you needed them to come to you, or spend some serious $'s on research. Now with a few minutes on Technorati you can find a few dozen or a few hundred people that share a common interest. Now all you have to do is connect with them.

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I'll be in Atlanta the first part of next week for some meetings and an IABC event on Tuesday the 26th. That night we're be organizing a blogger dinner. We'll most likely be meeting somewhere ITP around Buckhead. More details to come. If you're interested in joining use drop me an e-mail of leave a comment.

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I received an e-mail from somebody that was unfamiliar with the unconference format, they wondered if there was a 'catch' to this free event called BlogOrlando?

Thinking about it more, it does make sense. Many times financial planners or timeshare reps will hold a 'free' seminar to 'pitch' their services to the attendees. Well there are no pitches or hidden agendas, everything is out in the open.

The next question was how could I make money on this event? Simple answer, I'm not.

One of the great things about an event like this is that the costs are relatively low. I am very fortunate that the Rollins College PR department is helping cover half the cost of the facility rental which is $300. So there I am out of pocket $150. The wifi comes free with the facility, so no cost there. I need to buy some extension cords and power strips for the venue, but that's around $50. There is no breakfast planned since we start at 9 am, and lunch is on your own in the Winter Park area. There will be some basic printing/copying costs for the handouts and badges, but nothing huge.

In reality it's mostly my time that I have invested in the event. I am also fortunate to have two great helpers in Chris Scott from BlogZerk and Jeremy Harriington from Crawl Space Media. The two of them have provided hours of volunteer support and design services.

The only other real costs are the small deposits I had to put down on for the two dinners. When you tell a restaurant you're bringing 40/70 people they want some sort of guarantee.

To be honest, the restaurant reservations were the biggest issue I had. Since the event is free we could get a number of people that register and then don't show up, after all it's not costing them any money. I did have an idea to handle this though. I considered charging a basic registration fee, say $50, that would be returned to you when you showed up. With that process, the event would still be free, but it would make sure that those that registered showed up. It might be a good solution for other free events. What are your thoughts?

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My post earlier this week about the Katherine Harris comment spam from India has drawn quite a bit of traffic and media interest. One of the big questions was if anybody else had received similar comments from India. Turns out there are two other examples.

First up, Idyllopus left a comment on my original post. All the the comments they received never made it through their Wordpress spam filter, but they were all left by an IP from India. Idyllopus has a post about their experience with the Katherine Harris comment spammer.

Some dude dropped by last week and left 3 comments on an old Katherine Harris post. I mentioned it then and how there were 3 different email addies but from the same IP. I nuked the comments.

Same person dropped by last night and left 2 more comments.

Stats Info:

Domain Name touchtelindia.net ? (Network)
IP Address 59.144.165.# (BTNL-DL-DSL)
ISP Bharti Infotel Ltd.
Location
Continent : Asia
Country : India (Facts)
State/Region : Maharashtra
City : Pande

Next up is the Last Chance for Democracy Cafe. Greg posted about his experience.

We’ve been getting some really odd spam in the Cafe comments. Most have been caught by the spam filter, but some made their way to the comments holding bin (which were then deleted with glee). They all have different email addresses, but the same IP (click the IP to see the whois info):

Name: Raymond | E-mail: raymraymond@gmail.com | IP: 59.144.165.232 | Date: September 7, 2006

What in the world is going on here?

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Over the past few months I have been at a few events where a speaker will say something and then quickly throw out a, "Is there anybody from the media here?" In other words, they just said something incredibly stupid and want to make sure it doesn't leave the room. In most cases there isn't a member of the media present, but as a blogger should I raise my hand?

For the most part I have no interest in exposing some local official's slight slip-up, but there are exceptions.

What officials and speakers need to realize is that we are all media. We might not all blog, but if something stupid/scandelous is said, it's going to get out.

This issue came up earlier this year when Sean Hannity spoke at a local university. The media was not allowed to attend the speech. My question back then was who is going to stop a student from blogging/writing about the speech on their MySpace page or Facebook account?

This isn't a 'blogger threat' it's just a reality. The ability for people to get away with (and say) stupid things is going away, which is a good thing.

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When I speak, I often show the University of Florida newsroom as a great example of how to use blog software for non-blog-specific uses. The site, located at: news.ufl.edu, uses Wordpress for content management of a traditional media relations site.

In the past week UF has added videoblogs to the mix of content available online. So far there are two video segments available for download. One on Reading Readiness and the other on a Pesticide Breast Impact study.

The site is truly a one-stop shop. In addition to the new video segments it also offers: podcasts, photographs, press releases, e-mail distribution, rss and an events calendar. If you're looking for a great example of how to develop an online newsroom, check out UF.

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On Tuesday, September 26th I'll be moderating a panel at a joint meeting of Atlanta chapters of IABC and STC. The luncheon event will be held at Maggiano's in Buckhead from 11:30 am till 1:00 pm. It will be a discussion between corporate blogging pros from the Atlanta area.

On the panel are:

Toby Bloomberg - Bloomberg Marketing & Diva Marketing Blog
Dave Coustan - Earthlink's corporate blogger - blogs.earthlink.com
Mark Chernesky - Web Development Director for Turner Broadcasting

Click here for details or to register.

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Update: The old post has received two more comments from India. Bizarre.

Update 2: Two other blogs have seen similar comments from India.

This is one of those things that can only happen in the blogosphere. In March of last year I wrote a post that was critical of Katherine Harris' official Congressional blog (it's not a blog). Currently, Katherine is in a heated campaign for U.S. Senate in Florida against Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson.

Anyway, that post about Katherine's blog has been out there for a year and does receive some traffic, but nothing worth noting. This morning however, that post received a comment, and then another, and then a third all within a few minutes of each other. All of the comments were positive towards Katherine. For example:

Katherine Harris is tested by fire. She is strong and determined and will not back down in the face of adversity.

Receiving three comments on a row on a post that is over a year old does draw some suspicion. (Click on the image to view full size)

Looking into things some more, I saw that all three of the comments originated from the same IP address, 59.144.165.232. Even though three different names and e-mail addresses were submitted with each comment, they all came from the same place within a few minutes of each other. So where was the IP from? I was half expecting to see house.gov, but it turns out to be something a bit more interesting. Looking at my stats I see this:

The IP address is registered to an ISP in India. So the question is, who in India is such a huge Katherine Harris supporter that they want to comment spam a post? Or can you outsource political blog commenting to India?

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Update: If you've applied these tips to a conference blog, send me a link!

Having blogged a few conferences both on my own and with a team, I offer this quick 'how-to' for other groups looking to do the same. Feel free to use this to develop your conference blogging plan. Or you could just invite me to your conference :-)

At the most recent FPRA Annual Conference we had a team of four people blogging the event. Listed first are the tools we used. Following that, I'll talk some strategy.

The Tools

This is broken down into two major sections, hardware and software. As with everything, check to make sure all your tools are working ahead of time and that you know how to use them.

Hardware: Here is a list of the gear you'll need to lug around :-)

Laptop/PC/Mac - Obviously you'll need a way to post things online, laptops tend to work best at conferences :-) At this most recent event we had my PowerBook, two Dells and a ThinkPad.

Connectivity - You'll want some way to get online, either via wifi or a cellular technology such as Verizon EVDO. At the Ritz Carlton where the FPRA conference was held, there was not publicly available wifi in the conference rooms, but we had secured accounts in advance. As a back-up, one of the team had a Verizon EVDO card in his laptop.

Camera - Digital, point-and-shoot cameras work, but investing in a good DSLR will make a big difference. At FPRA I had a Nikon D70 and Chris had his Nikon D50. Make sure you have a way to easily transfer photos from the camera to your laptop.

Portable Audio Recorder - Some sort of device to record audio in digital format, MP3 is the best of course. I always carry an iRiver MP3 recorder. It features a built-in mic and a line-in jack to connect to external devices. A basic USB cable allows me to transfer the audio files.

Blog - Blogging a conference usually requires some sort of blog software :-) In some cases you can pick your platform, other times you'll need to work with the platform the conference is providing. For the FPRABlog we used MovableType.

Offline Blog Editor - Having an offline blog editor such as Ecto or Qumana can make a huge difference. Being able to compose your posts and then upload them in the proper format saves time. You might say, "I can use Word and then upload." Well sometimes that copy/paste from Word to the blog software can cause some formatting problems. An offline editor also helps when you have limited connectivity. At WOMMA this year we could not connect in the session rooms, but we could in the hallway. We would write our posts in Ecto, then step into the hallway to quickly post.

Flickr - If you're planning on taking more than a few pictures you'll want to use Flickr. The ability to upload, organize and include photos on your blog can't be beat.

Flickr Upload Tool - A dedicated Flickr upload tool can help speed things along. On the Mac I use the Flickr plugin for iPhoto from Connected Flow. I also have the standalone Flickr Uploadr tool installed. At the FPRA conference, our team installed the upload tool on their PCs as well.

Technorati - You'll want to use Technorati or some other blog search tool to track any conversation surrounding the conference.

Audio Editing Software - If you plan on doing any audio work you might need some tools to edit your audio files. In recent cases I have just posted the audio interviews as is without any editing. You learn to structure/format your interview in such a way that you can minimize or eliminate the need to edit your files.

FTP Software - Many blog tools have upload capabilities, but if you need to upload a large audio or video files FTP will work best. Like the Flickr Upload tools you can start a process and then move on to something else. Of course you'll need to have the proper username/password for FTP.

The Team:
Not every organization has the luxury of having a large blogging staff (whether paid or volunteers). You might be all on your own, but having some helpers makes a big difference. If you plan to cover everything, your lowest common denominator is the maximum number of breakout sessions. For example if at some point there are four concurrent breakout sessions you'll need at least four bloggers to get the job done. For a standard 2-3 day conference here is my dream team of 3-4 folks:

Blog/Tech Guru - This person is ultimately responsible for everything that gets posted. They also provide tech support to the other bloggers. In addition they can take photos/upload them and do audio interviews as needed. In a pinch they will also write-up sessions.

Bloggers (2-3) - These are folks that can write good reviews of sessions as well as recaps of other events. It's a bonus if they can do some outreach and find other blogs or references that pertain to the conference/topic.

Photographer (Optional) - If you can swing it I would suggest having a dedicated person to handle photography. Their job is to take photos and more photos then upload them. If only we could clone Scott Beale.

Continue reading "How to Blog a Conference" »

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Planning for BlogOrlando is coming along smoothly. In the past few days we've finalized the session schedule, dinner arrangements and theme park days.

As a quick refresher, BlogOrlando is an unconference I am organizing in Orlando (of course). The main event is Friday, September 22nd at Rollins College. The rest of the weekend will be spent at the Disney theme parks.

So far we have a great mix of local Florida bloggers and friends from around the country. Some of the folks flying in are:

Dave Coustan
Chris Heuer
Brian Oberkirch
David Parmet
Andrea Weckerle

Check out BlogOrlando.com for all the details or to register if you haven't done so already.

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Tampa-based blogger SarahInTampa recently posted about a business blog she has helped create for a local furniture store. As she states in her post, inspired DECOR is not a standard cookie-cutter furniture store so they decided not to go with the traditional web site. Instead they created a blog.

Blogs and web sites are obviously a great way to reach a national or global audience, but some business aren't capable of providing services outside their local area. In this case, how can a local business blog generate traffic in a local market, or convert traffic from across the globe to local sales?

As I commented on Sarah's blog, Tampa has a very strong local blogging community. I frequently mention Sticks of Fire, but just head over to TampaBLAB to see a list of other Tampa bloggers. In the case of inspired DECOR they have a large local blogging community that they can tap into. But what if you're in a town like Orlando that lacks a large, local blogging community?

Traditional advertising can be used to drive local residents to a web site or blog, but that can be quite costly and is a shotgun approach. Pay-per-click advertising on Yahoo or Google is another solution and can help jump-start traffic at a lower cost. Hopefully you can rely upon compelling content to keep first-time users coming back.

The long term play though is the natural SEO benefits that a blog can provide. By continually posting good content that is somewhat keyword and geography sensitive (and getting those precious links) the results should come. You always need to consider the market you're in though. Keywords such as real estate, mortgages are always a saturated market. In Florida there is obviously a great deal of tourism related SEO as well.

We're also still at a point where there is still some 'buzz' surrounding blogs, so local reporters are always contacting me for stories about blogs. The reporters always want a list of local blogs, both business and personal. The personal blogs are easy to come up with, providing them a list of local business blogs is somewhat more difficult. My friends at Websolvers and RedRocket have both received local press since they had 'local business blogs'.

Does anybody have some good case examples of successful local blogs that aren't in a community with an active blogging community (i.e. not San Fran, Atlanta, NYC, etc)?

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The Society for News Design is holding their annual conference in Orlando over the next few days. Luckily, Ernesto is not making much of an impact here in Central Florida and the designers should be able to enjoy a few days of sunshine.

The reason I mention the conference is because the SND has a pretty good conference blog going over at: www.snd.org/orlandoblog/. With our recent conference blogging efforts for FPRA I've been paying particular attention to these types of blogs.

How did I find out about this event? One of the blogs I read is NewsDesigner and they're running their own conference blog at: snd.newsdesigner.com.

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Rob Safuto picked up on my post yesterday about corporations visiting blogs but not commenting. He disagreed with some of my points, which I addressed in his comments, but I wanted to play-off his final statement:

I do think that smart companies will monitor and get involved in blogs where their brand or products are mentioned. But I don’t think that those companies have a responsibility to respond to a channel created and maintained by someone else.

If offered the choice of dealing with a company that limits/restricts communication options to only those that they control or dealing with a company that is willing to communicate with you on your terms which one would you choose?

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A year ago today, in the wake of Katrina, I posted the following item: PIOs - Add Bloggers to Your Media Distribution List for Disasters & Emergencies

The same thing applies today. Why anybody would not want to use any and every available source to distribute their information in time of a crisis is a mystery to me.

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Over at the Earthling blog Dave asks just how much a corporation should blog. Specifically Dave was talking about employees blogging on behalf of the company. There are some great thoughts in the comments, but I wanted to expand on things a bit more.

Earthlink's issue is how they should roll out blogging to the staff. We're not talking form a technical standpoint (that's another post). What we're talking about is from a strategic perspective. The desired result is to have a number of employees blogging in their areas of expertise, ultimately joining the conversation that's going on out there and dare we say humanizing the company.

One issue is that some of the employees already have active blogs elsewhere and you can't really say to them, "Hey why don't you move your blog to our new corporate blog network". Think about Scoble, he had Scobeizer before, during and after his Microsoft tenure. It's his brand. Compare that to the Microsoft employees that blog under the MSDN Blogs domain. Also, when you write for a number of similar blogs you're constantly battling with, 'which blog should I post this on?'

Getting back to the main question though, how much blogging? What's a good mix? Fifteen percent of the workforce? Five percent? Who decides which employees get to blog? Can anybody sign up or do you have to present a business case? How much time is allowed for blogging? Do we use Google's 20% rule?

Within a traditional corporation you could easily have bloggers writing about subjects such as:

Public Relations/Marketing
Human Resources
Logistics
Finance
Technology/IT
Community Involvement
Customer Relations

If a corporation the size of Earthlink had say 25 bloggers all blogging in specific content areas I think they could easily represent the company on the blogosphere. Could they have more? Sure, but what happens when you get crossover? I think it would be a waste of resources for a corporation to have say 10 people all blogging about public relations.

We might be talking about a whole other level of corporate politics. "Sorry Steve, we just don't need another blog about gadgets, why don't you blog about parenting?"

Talking with Dave Coustan of Earthlink he says one of their goals would be to allow employees to have a number of blogs if that's what they want. One corporate, under the Earthlink banner, and any other personal blogs they might also write. This allows a degree of separation, between work and personal life. However I think that the separation is a bit of a fallacy. This is nothing against Earthlink, but I think that it's hard for somebody to say, 'That's my work blog and this is my personal blog and they don't cross over'. If all the blog posts are public, any blogger or journalist is able to connect the dots if they want.

There is no absolute number/answer for the question, "How much corporate blogging?" I think the answer is unique to each situation. Perhaps the percentage rule is a good baseline, but ultimately it needs to relate back to your corporate culture. Have you always been a company that 'talks' to outsiders? if so, then go for it. If you're not the talking type take it slow to start with.

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If you've ever written about a corporation and then watched your blog stats you'll know what I am talking about. You write a question or a comment about a company, we'll call it ACME Co., and then watch as during the day users from ACME visit your blog and check things out, never leaving a comment. (See Finding Hidden Gems in your Stats)

A friend relayed a similar story to me last week. They had asked a specific question about a service and then saw close to 30 unique visitors from the company read their blog. Any official contact from the company? Nope.

In some ways it's the equivalent of calling somebody and then hanging up. Hello....we have CallerID (they're called stats), we know it was you...how come you didn't want to talk?

It's a conundrum for many corporations, they'll look but won't touch. From my experience they just don't know what to do. Who is authorized to comment on behalf of the company? We're not allowed to visit blogs at work....Aren't all bloggers out for corporate destruction? etc.....

That poses the question. What's worse:

1. A company not tracking blogs that mention them
2. Repeatedly visiting a blog but never contacting the blogger

The quick answer is #1 since just listening to customers is a major step for many organizations. However, if a company keeps up the practice of visiting but not commenting it might cause the blogger to call them out. Last year the McDonald's fan blog McChonicles welcomed visitors from Burger King and McDonald's corporate. Basically he said, "We see you out there...."

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Visit Florida, the Florida tourism agency, recently launched a new tourism web site aimed at Florida residents: http://floridians.visitflorida.com/. It's your standard destination marketing site with one exception. The site allows users to submit their destination/getaway ideas and comment on other user submissions.

Currently the content submission system is tied to a contest, and is limited to a 300 word write-up and two photos. The terms/rules for the submissions are:

GETAWAY SUBMISSIONS: 1. All submissions are the property of VISIT FLORIDA. 2. All submissions are subject to editorial review to correct grammar and spelling, delete expletives and eliminate content not related to travel in Florida. 3. Submissions that are known to be untrue or that are promotional in nature will not be posted. If a questionable submission is made, the site editor will contact the user to provide an opportunity to clarify the submission. 4. The site editor may provide additional commentary to a user’s submission for clarification purposes.

It's a great move by the state, especially since more and more travelers are looking to each other for suggestions. The true test will be if they allow negative comments to be posted. With this I am not talking about some biased rant, but a legitimate customer service related issue.

I plan to post some comments about my current trip.

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I'll be blogging from the Florida Public Relations Association's 68th Annual Conference for the next few days. Stop on by the FPRA Blog to follow-along.

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Jeremy Zawodny posts that Yahoo! has launched a corporate blog at yodel.yahoo.com. There is only one post up as of now but it does feature a cool video tour of Yahoo.

Congrats to Paul Stamatiou and the rest of the blog development gang.

The blog does feature one of those rotating-picture-header things :-)

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Steve Rubel talks about USAToday's blog fetish and a little bit about the use of blogs in newspapers. I've been following the USAToday blogs since the first launched in November of last year. They are all run off of TypePad and even they face problems when TypePad goes down (see error message below).

Previous USAToday related posts:
- Defining Blogs - A Misconception - 5.10.06
- USAToday Launches Yet Another Blog - 01.17.06
- Travel Blogs Article in the New York Times & USAToday's New Travel Blog - 01.17.06
- USAToday Rolling Our More Blogs - 11.29.05

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Next week I'll be traveling to Amelia Island, FL to attend/blog the Florida Public Relation Associations' annual conference. The conference takes place from Sunday, August 6th till Wednesday, August 9th. I'll be joined by a few other folks in covering the event over at the FPRABlog.

You may remember that we launched the FPRABlog with FPRA Blog Week back in March of this year. For the past few months it has mostly been used to cover FPRA events around the state. In the next few days I'll be posting some lead-up items in advance of the conference. We invite the PR blogging community to follow along and provide commentary.

From a technical standpoint, we ask that you tag any posts: FPRA.

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Elisa Camahort at BlogHer:

Blogging is the gateway drug to technology.

Dave agrees.

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Andrea Scher on one of the principles of her blog:

I try to provide people something of substance even if they're not interested in buying my jewelry.

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One of the cool people I have been able to meet at BlogHer is Amanda Lenhart from Pew Internet & American Life Project. Amanda is a Senior Research Specialist and was behind the most recent report on Bloggers: A potrait of the internet's new storytellers. Back in 2005 she also worked on a report about Teen Content Creators and Consumers.

I told her, "I cite your stuff all the time in presentations."

Amanda is coming off a whirlwind media tour with the recent release of the Bloggers report. Perhaps you read about it in the news or on the blogs :-)

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One of my hopes for blogging and social media as a whole is to change things that we've always put up with for no good reason. For example, waiting at the doctor's office. It happens to everybody. You have a 10:00 AM appointment, so you get there are 9:45 AM. 10:00 AM rolls by and pretty soon it's 10:30 or 10:45. Why do we all put up with it?

The opening session of Day 2 of BlogHer is titled: How are your blogs changing your world?

It will be interesting to hear how simple blog posts become something bigger.

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What is influence? That's the question I am asking myself after Onalytica recently ranked this blog as being the second most influential source for 'blog marketing'. I'm behind the New York Times and ahead of such names as Seth Godin and Steve Rubel. Scratching your head? So am I.

Rather than looking at pure popularity, Onalytica attempted to determine influence by a few different measures:

The difference between influence and popularity can be highlighted by looking at the parameters taken into account when measuring the two.

When you want to measure the popularity of a stakeholder, you count the number of other stakeholders who refer to the first stakeholder in the context being analysed. So the only variable taken into account is “number of referrals”.

Analogous this can be used to measure the link-popularity of a particular website by counting the number of inbound linkers.

However, when measuring influence we take one more variable into account: The influence of the endorser (linker).

So how do I use my influence? Simon says touch your toes.

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Andrea Weckerle tagged me as part of a new meme. Clicking on the link I also discovered that her blog has a new look.

Andrea asks what are the top five social media tools/sites that I use. These are in no particular order:

Flickr - photo sharing that is dead-easy to use. The majority of images I post to my blog are hosted via Flickr.

MySpace - A way to connect/interact with friends that don't blog.

YouTube - Like David, it allows me to get my fix for Joy Division and Ninjas

Technorati - I use it daily, almost hourly for searches, plus the watchlists make up a large portion of my RSS feeds.

Quimble - simple online polls that you can cut/paste into your blog.

This is the part where I am supposed to tag some other folks: David vs. Brian - blogger deathmatch.

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A long time ago I asked why FeedBurner didn't buy/merge with a traditional stats firm so I could get my RSS and blog stats in the same place. Well our prayers have been answered. FeedBurner just bought out Blogbeat. You can read the FAQ over at Blogbeat's site.

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According to Josh Bancroft, Intel has launched a series of blogs that are hosted @ intel.com.

Got word from a friend at work today that Intel Software Network has launched the first blogs (that I’m aware of) on the intel.com domain!

You can check them out at http://www.intel.com/software/blogs. I think they’re still having some issues moving these to the production web environment, so you’ll see some redirects to some weird Intel URLs with “cps” in them, that will likely change once it’s fully live. Just make sure to hit the link above to always be redirected to the right place, once all the dust settles

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How many times have you heard the phrase 'Just Act Natural'? Usually the phrase is associated with you entering a situation that you:

a) aren't prepared for
b) aren't supposed to be in.

Now think about how this term applies to corporations and blogs. Many times, those of us in the social media space just say to a corporation; have a conversation with your customers, open up, or "just act natural". Easier said than done though.

The majority of social media gurus are independent and usually don't deal with the structure (read: restrictions) of the corporate world. We attempt to understand what it's like inside the crystal palaces but sometimes it's difficult. The thought of openly talking to their customers is as foreign to them as working 40 hours per week at a 9-to-5 job in an office is to me.

Some corporations have an established relationship with their loyal customers, take Southwest Airlines for example. Southwest blogging makes sense. Halliburton blogging does not.

I've had the opportunity to speak to a number of corporations recently and they're struggling with this topic. Can they act natural? Some just can't. The alternative is faking it, which never works out well in the blogosphere.

Where is this going? We'll see, I'm going to use a series of post to further flesh out this topic....

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Blog consultants are always in an interesting bind. One of the ways you get leads/business is by blogging. If you get too busy then you can’t blog as much and your primary vehicle for leads slows down.

Things have been busy and blogging has been sporadic. I am fortunate that I am able to travel and speak quite a bit. Those engagements generate business, however with more work comes less time to speak.

A delicate balance must be struck.

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Neville posts a round-up of notes about PubSub.

Perhaps one indicator, here at Gnomedex Bob Wyman has scratched out PubSub.com from his name badge and has written in wyman.us.

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Update: Here is the Tampa Bay Business Journal article, and Tommy's thoughts as well as Eric's.

Speaking of bad ideas....

A reporter called me a few weeks ago to ask about a new blog that he received a press release about, TampaNewsBlog. It's a product of the BlogSpotNetwork. According to their release:

“Most online news sites are a collection of only national and world news stories designed to appeal to the masses, leaving a great opportunity for the emergence of a local online news source. We have ceased this opportunity and are proud to be the first to provide local web news in the very popular blog format. Most people have an opinion about many news stories, and our news blogs will uniquely allow them to easily have their say for all to see”, said Bert L. Bill, C.O.O. Our mission is to produce the best possible web news blog, which comes from listening to our readers and subscribers, and then providing what it is they want”, he added.

Looking at their site today there is no news. However, when I first looked at their site all they were doing is scraping content from traditional publishers, i.e. local newspapers and web sites such as the Tampa Bay Business Journal and the Tampa Bay Times and posting excerpts. Around each of these excerpts they provided a comment function and Google ads.

So in other words they take other people's content and sell advertising around it. I know that traditional publishers won't be too happy about that. Maybe that's why there is no news on the site now.

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Jeremiah posted first on this, then TechCrunch put it on a larger stage, pay-per-post. The first major organized foray into this trend comes from Orlando-based MindComet. It's called PayPerPost.

We've seen this before though.

MindComet tried something like this almost a year ago with the BlogStarNetwork. Visiting that domain you see that it's now called the new service. Back then I had some questions about the service which never got answered. I am not sure why the rebrand, perhaps the original idea never took off.

In the TechCrunch comment's Ted Murphy the CEO of MindComet is responding. Ted's position is that things like this happen all the time in traditional media. His point is valid, but just because it happens there doesn't make it right on the blogosphere. The 'traditional' media is inherently one-way. We listened to those ads because we didn't have a choice. Now we do.

What's refreshing about blogs is that you can read open (and in most cases) honest discussions about topics. The big question is who will be reading this pay-per-post content? Yes I might stumble upon a blog that is written by a paid-blogger but once that bias is exposed (after being hidden) I probably won't read them anymore or use the product. Case in point this quote from the BusinessWeek article about PPP:

But media today is so cynical that you have to come out and say that shilling without disclosure is a bad idea. Like Murphy, one BlogStar client shrugs off such concerns. "With a large enough network, you get a good representation of [bloggers] who disclose, who disclose partially, and others who go another way," says Mike Friedman, director of interactive marketing services for Darden Restaurants, who worked with BlogStar this spring for the 32-location chain Bahama Breeze. Friedman says BlogStar built Web traffic, and stats from blog tracker Technorati show that mentions of Bahama Breeze spiked during the promotion.

The question back in July of 2005 and still remains today is does Ted and MindComent 'get' the blogosphere, or is it just another market to them? I've never met Ted but he and I traded e-mails last year. I offered to talk/help them with their blog initiatives but he wasn't overly interested.

Marshall Kirkpatrick brings another aspect to the discussion with this comment on his TechCrunch post:

If you visit the Mindcomet.com website you’ll see that they do advertising for some very high profile clients. I can imagine many of them wouldn’t want to be associated with a project like this at all. Like EarthLink. They have a major campaign underway to improve advertising by paying people to make authentic promotional materials for them. How ironic.

Interesting point. Dave, what are Earthlink's thoughts?

Update: Postbubble has some more thoughts.

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Announcing BlogOrlando, an un-conference to be held in Orlando, Florida on Friday, September 22nd through Sunday, September 24th, 2006. What started off as an informal gathering of friends might just turn into something bigger.

Hyku, in partnership with Rollins College will host this FREE event that is open to bloggers and non-bloggers alike from Florida and anywhere else (so far we have one international attendee). We hope to bring together a good cross-section of folks to discuss blogging, podcasting, public relations, social media, citizen's journalism and other related topics. In addition to the Friday event we are planning some outings at the local theme parks over the weekend. This event is as much a social/family gathering as it is a 'work' gathering, so bring the family (kids included).

Shown below is a tentative schedule for the weekend:

Thursday (9/21): Travel day for most, perhaps an informal dinner that night
Friday - day (9/22): BlogOrlando un-conference at Rollins College
Friday - evening (9/22): Full-on geek dinner somewhere in Orlando
Saturday (9/23): Blogger day at one of the Disney parks
Sunday (9/24): Travel day, or stay an extra day at the Disney parks

As you can see the weekend will feature time at the Disney theme parks. We'll finalize what park we're going to do on which day. If we have a large contingent of families/kids coming in we can look to organize a Friday activity for those folks.

The original concept/title for this event was: Josh is Tired of Traveling Outside of Orlando so Everybody Come Here Con or JTTOOECH-Con. I wanted to get some friends to the area to meet, but more importantly spend some down-time at the theme parks with their families. Thinking about it more I also wanted to bring together some folks from the growing blog community in Florida that normally couldn't afford to travel out of state (and pay) for other events. I hope to achieve the best of both with this event. Of course having a draw like the Disney parks isn't a bad thing :-)

What will it cost? Nothing, well almost nothing. The un-coference will be free, but of course you need to get here and cover your hotel and theme park tickets. If you're from the area and only plan to attend on Friday, then all you're paying is gas and your lunch.

If you want to get a hotel reservation you can contact the EO Inn or the Embassy Suites in Downtown Orlando. Since this is an un-conference we don't have room blocks or special rates.

As more details become available I will post them here and over at BlogOrlando.com. I'll also have a registration form up shortly. For now if you intend on coming leave a comment below. Online registration is now available.

Update: upcoming.org link.

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Some of my clients are traditional media, i.e. newspapers and other publications. Within those industries there is a growing interest in citizen's journalism. What is it, how will it impact their business, how do they work with it, who are these people, why are they doing it, etc. Other major markets (California, New York, etc) have been discussing these issues for quite some time, often hearing from the true masters like Dan Gillmor and J.D. Lasica. Florida, however, is a bit behind the curve sometimes :-)

I often deal with traditional media that is just learning about the world of social media/CGM/citzen's journalism. When I discuss citizen's journalism I break it down into two segments: Active and Passive.

Active:
This segment is made up of individuals that are running hyperlocal blogs, contribute to local blogs or are participating in community publishing experiments such as BackFence or YourHub. The bloggers are actively seeking information and writing about a topic. They are also actively seeking readers that are interested in their topic.

Local Florida blogs such as Sticks of Fire and Urban Jackonville are constantly reporting/posting about news and issues within small markets. Are they actually reporting? That's up for debate, but the active participants have a true passion for local content. Many of the local blogs are updated on a daily basis providing stories and commentary on items that might never make the traditional media. As with most blogs, the comments of the visitors helps drive the conversation and spurs interest in stories.

Why do they do it? Mostly it's an interest in their local community. While some local blogs generate a small amount of revenue via advertising or Google AdSense, it's usually just enough to cover the bills. Some bloggers don't/won't even accept advertising.

What does traditional media do? Sometimes they try to court these bloggers to help provide content for community publishing systems they have implemented. However many of the local bloggers a fiercely independent and are not interested in working with the MSM. In some cases the local reporters will watch the local blogs for story ideas. Perhaps they'll credit the local blog with the tip, perhaps not :-)

Passive:
This segment is made up of the overwhelming population of regular bloggers. By regular I mean they just blog about their lives or a particular topic they are interested in. They might be on MySpace, Blogger or LiveJournal. They don't attempt to report or research and they aren't seeking local readers, they just blog.

So how do they become citizen's journalists? Well they don't don a 50's-era fedora and grab a notebook, they stumble into their role as a citizen's journalist. Or to be more accurate somebody else stumbles upon them.

Every once and a while your average blogger might write about an experience or event they witnessed. Perhaps a post about their recent vacation to Disney, seeing somebody famous, or a car shopping experience. These types of posts are then found by media or general readers via Technorati or Google. Something they wrote a few months or years ago suddenly becomes relevant.

Reporters are slowly becoming more savvy when it comes to using blog searches to find topics and leads. Searching blogs can open up an entire network of viewpoints and witnesses to a particular situation. So don't be surprised if one day you get a call or an e-mail from a reporter and they say, "I was reading your blog and....."

More Reporters:
Whether you want to call them reporters or not there is the reality that there are more eyes & ears on the ground. Yes there is some loss of privacy, but there is also a renewed interest in acting more responsibly because you never know who is watching (and blogging).

Take this recent example: The Future of Satellite Radio - According to Greg Wyatt.

I was at an event where Greg Wyatt proclaimed to an audience of PR folks that satellite radio was doomed and went on to discuss the future of radio. I thought Greg was a bit full of it so I blogged his quote. Somebody in the audience then told me I shouldn't quote Greg, my response, "maybe Greg shouldn't make statements like that in public." The blog post has pulled in a few interesting comments and is now on the front page of a Google search for Greg Wyatt.

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Rex discovers, as I have, that when you have a long flight home after a blog conference you usually end up writing a very long post. Down-time during travel has always been a great time to blog.

Rex's post is long, but worth the read.

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Just about every blogger at some point talks about the bizarre incoming searches they see appearing in their blog stats. Part of the long tail is when something you wrote a few months or years ago suddenly becomes of interest to somebody. Those interested folks generally find you via a very specific search on Google or Yahoo.

A while back I saw an incoming search for "nude photos of X". I won't embarrass the X person, but the searcher was looking for a specific person and I just happened to blog about them, thus my blog came up in the results.

While my example might sound somewhat bizarre, I think that Joe over at Exploding Unicorn takes the cake. Go read his post about what people a searching for on the internet and how his blog is a 'top source'.

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Congrats to Joey Marchy of nGenworks and Urban Jacksonville. The local paper in Jacksonville did a write-up on local bloggers and Joey was featured quite a bit.

In true blogger form, Joey has some comments/clarifications about the article on his blog.

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Just trying to access PubSub.com this morning and getting nothing. So are they gone for good?

Update: I've IM'd a few friends, some can get to it, others can't?

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I'm at the Florida Public Relations Association - Treasure Coast Chapter Media Breakfast today. I'll be blogging over at FPRAblog.

Up first is a session about the new Shuttle Launch Experience at the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex.

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When Karen Russell from UGA saw this article in the AJC this week she immediately thought of the post I wrote about the use of blogs in 'writing' history years from now. The AJC article talks about the problems we're currently having the accessing old digital content:

"We need to preserve digital information in such a way that it will be intelligible in 100 years," says Abby Smith, a consultant with the Library of Congress' digital preservation program. But she and others say that when it comes to preserving digital records, a solution has yet to be found....

...At the National Archives, staffers are already experiencing such problems. The government began storing key military records, such as flight details, on computers as early as the Vietnam War era, says Kenneth Thibodeau, director of its Electronic Records Archives program. Today, those records of every flight in Vietnam "are sitting in obsolete tapes in an obsolete format," says Thibodeau.

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This is not going to be a comprehensive list by any means, but it is something that I tell people all the time (including this morning) and something that Fred Wilson blogged about today.

When thinking about starting a blog for you or your organization:

1. Get your own domain name. What are we talking $8.95 with GoDaddy? When you own your domain name you own your destiny. I have dealt with a few clients that have built their entire following (and links, and google juice) at name.blogspot.com or name.typepad.com. When they hit a feature wall or become dissatisfied with the service they are stuck.

Services like TypePad will allow you to map a domain name and that will do the trick, the trouble is convincing people to spend a few extra bucks at first to do so. Do not think that buying a domain name and then 'forwarding' it to Blogger will work. Sure you have a domain name to direct visitors to, but all your permalinks and archives are still at name.blogspot.com. Another common problem is domain forwarding that uses frames.

If you already have a domain name for a company think about creating a subdomain, i.e. blog.domain.com or integrate your blog within your existing web site, i.e. domain.com/blog/. Ultimately you have complete control over where you blog content can be. If you're not happy with a service or web provider you can move.

2. Use FeedBurner. By default many blog tools will create a number of different RSS feeds for you and you end up with subscribers across all of them and very little ability to track metrics. If you use TypePad then your prayers have been answered by the TypePad and FeedBurner partnership that was announced this week. As Fred wrote he had subscribers to his FeedBurner feed and his Atom feed.

Creating the feed within FeedBurner is only half of the equation though. You need to promote/link to that feed alone. One problem is the meta-data that blog services put in the header of the blog posts. General users never think about this and need to edit their templates to get this changed, so it's not an easy fix.

3. Have Fun :-)

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Tim Elliott from Winecast.net and I are grabbing a quick bite to eat at the Pellston Regional Airport in Michigan. Our waiter is stressing since we both have laptops on the table and are working away. What do you expect when you have two bloggers that haven't had time alone with their feeds/e-mail in a few hours :-)

This morning we took part in a panel on new media for the Society of America Travel Writers at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. I covered blogs and Tim did podcasts. We were joined by Janna Graber of GoWorldTravel.com who spoke about online publishing.

The group was comprised mostly of freelance travel writers, CVB folks and public relations firms associated with travel. Many of them rely upon traditional media to purchase/publish their content. The shifting media landscape is of course impacting them. However they may be well-suited to transition to a web/blog-based world. Many of the writers are extremely knowledgeable about their topic and can write, both pluses for blogs. Much of the apprehension is with the technology, but as any blogger will tell you the tools are simple to use.

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I'm still writing Part III of my series of posts comparing corporate media and personal media (Part I, Part II). In the interim let's look back at something I posted in November of 2004: Feedback: Bloggers vs. Reporters. I looked specifically at the feedback mechanisms available to traditional reporters and bloggers.

With most of the major blogging software any blogger can receive feedback in a number of ways:

Stats
Traditional web server stats, via your server or a service such as SiteMeter, allow a blogger to know basic information about how many readers they may have (i.e. readership/circulation). Stats will let you know page views, session lengths, referrals, search phrases, etc.

Comments
One of the more powerful tools of the blog. Anybody (in most cases) can provide a comment about what you have written. A conversation begins. In some cases a comment may provide a correction, or more information on the subject.

TrackBacks/Links
TrackBacks allow the blogger to know who is linking to their blog. In a sense a blogger can begin to see what type of influence they have on the blogosphere. A-List bloggers often have up to a hundred or more trackbacks for a single post. That's influence.

Read the entire post...

Bloggers have always benefited from these feedback tools. Journalists that are starting to blog might also receive the same benefit.

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Some further thoughts on the relationship/battle between corporate media and personal media. The playing field is not level so it is difficult to accurately compare the two forms. Corporate media has research, staff, resources, etc, while a blogger may only have themselves, their readers and their passion for a subject. Each side attempts to hold the other to their own set of standards, which just doesn't work.

More and more media outlets are creating blogs. But going back to my post on blog misconceptions, are they adopting the tool or the style? Many are adopting the tool, i.e. the quick publishing of content with the ability to receive feedback from readers. But is the news still a lecture? Sure they have a blog, but if they're not linking, commenting and interacting with the readers then its not a conversation, it's a lecture.

The big question of course is will they be successful? Remember that in many cases their measure of success is revenue and page views. So we ask again, will they be successful? Looking at individual blogs there is a good chance they they might not. A blog does offer a beat reporter the ability to connect directly with those interested in their topic, but in many cases we're not talking about thousands of readers.

Taken in whole though, a blog network comprised of niche subjects and broader news and opinion based blogs can have a significant readership. This mirrors what is always been the case with the traditional newspaper, i.e. niche subject areas and the reporters that cover them are in a sense subsidized by the more popular content. That has always been the mission (or burden) of newspapers. If they just printed the popular news we'd have tabloids everywhere.

The newspapers that are learning (and doing it right) realize like many of us that blogs are a low cost way to publish. Suddenly content that could never find room in the print edition can be published online. At the Orlando Sentinel one of the popular blogs is Attention Must Be Paid by Elizabeth Maupin. Elizabeth blogs about theater in Central Florida and around the country. With her blog she has unlimited ink and paper to review and discuss the theatrical arts. But perhaps more importantly, Elizabeth can interact with readers that share her passion and interest. Is it a successful blog? In a passion/interaction sense it is, from a page view/revenue sense we'll have to wait and see.

In the next installment I will talk some more about the downfalls. What happens when they aren't successful? Will we see the traditional media say, 'Blogs don't work?' Those within the industry that never jumped on the blog bandwagon will say, 'told you so' while traditional bloggers will say, 'they weren't doing it right'. In my mind they'll both be right.

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Over at CrunchNotes, Michael Arrington talks about objectivity and to some degree transparency within blogging/journalism. I agree with much of what Mike says. I know that the media strive to be objective but true objectivity will never exist. I'm talking about little things that sometime get overlooked. Not because of personal agendas, but because a reporter just can't research and write about every possible aspect of a story. Mike nails it with this quote:

Or here’s the real mind bender - what if I don’t write about a competitor to a company that I like? Doesn’t inaction count as much as action when we’re talking about conflicts? Am I not writing about them because of the company I like, or not writing about them because I just don’t like the service? Should I write about them simply because they are a competitor to a company I wrote something positive about? Some people say yes, absolutely. Well, if I were to do that the blog would get pretty boring pretty quickly.

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Jeremy Harrington and I collaborated on a new blog template design for Jeremy Pepper's POP-PR Jots!. Jeremy (Pepper that is) has been on Blogger since day one, in fact almost three years.

He and I have had 'discussions' about Blogger as a platform, but in the end it does what he needs it to do. The one think lacking though was a unique design, there are only so many Blogger templates to go around :-)

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Almost two weeks ago I posted: The Social Media Revolution v 0.8. Shortly afterward I attended Syndicate and a few other conferences which I blogged from, pushing the SMR post off the radar perhaps. That's why I am posting this little reminder.

I'll be taking a blog break over the weekend to catch-up on work, but if you have a chance re-read the post and comment if you like.

Have a great holiday weekend.