everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2005

  • Thomas Nelson Corporate Blogging Policy

    One of the best corporate blogging policy guidelines I’ve seen. Written in plain English with just the right tone; not too corporate, not too casual – it’s just the right. I guess that’s to be expected coming from a publishing company. Their goals are simple:

    • To raise the visibility of our company,
    • To make a contribution to our industry, and
    • To give the public a look at what goes on within a real live publishing company.

    They also have established a Blog Oversight Committee, “a group of fellow-employee bloggers who are committed to promoting
    blogging within our company and making sure that the Company’s
    interests are served.” The BOC is there to evaluate new blogs to make sure they set the right tone and be there to provide direction if there is any doubt on what one can or cannot post on their blog. Their carrot and stick is inclusion into the corporate blog aggregator page which is equivalent to an endorsement.

    If you would like to have us link to your blog, you must submit it to the BOC. Before doing so, you should design your blog and write at least one entry. Once you have done this, send an e-mail to Gave Wicks with a link to your blog. The BOC will then review your blog and notify you whether or not it meets the criteria.

    The idea that one should dive in, set up the design and make their first post before submitting their blog for evaluation is a great idea too. Only those that are serious about blogging will get to this stage and by the time they have, they will have thought about their message and tone.

    It is also interesting to note that Thomas Nelson views each blog as the employee’s creation and therefore does not endorse a specific blogging package nor do they allow employee’s to expense costs for the blog (they also allow employees to run advertising on their blogs to offset expenses). This gets back to something Andy Lark explained to me. Whether they blog about their company or not, make sure to own their blog and it’s content. Your thoughts and relationships in a blog develop outside the context of your corporate affiliation and his view is that your blog, being the embodiment of all this, should be portable and follow you from company to company. This is why Andy established a blog on TypePad even while he was an employee at Sun which makes their own blogging product.

  • Boeing Blog takes off with Movable Type

    After a false start with “another blogging software package,” we’re pleased to see that Boeing has come around and launched their blog on Movable Type. After criticisms for not having an RSS feed, permalinks, archives, nor search they’ve come around and included all of these features in Randy’s Journal 2.0.

    They were also hammered for their style and what they wrote about:

    A number of articles have been written in print and on the Web,
    implying that Boeing’s blog and others like it just aren’t “real”
    blogs. Why not? Because we don’t rip on the company in the blog.
    Because we don’t trade in gossip. That’s funny. I happen to like the
    fact that I work for Boeing and talk about aerospace.

    I think that’s just fine. Define your passions and create your place to talk about them. That’s a true blog. You are a gardener of your space on the web and if it gets weedy and clouds out what you’re trying to say, it’s your job as an editor to keep things tidy for future readers. I do think it’s useful to have this direction stated up front which is why About pages are so important, they set direction and tone for your readers and future commenters.

  • Real Estate as an API

    This is a great case when two APIs get hooked up to make something greater than what each service could offer on its own. Paul Rademach, a tech lead for animation tools at Dreamworks, has connected Google Maps to Craigslist to present a visual UI for real estate listings. You can set your location and price parameters and get a map that you can zoom in on and scroll with pinmarks for every “hit.”

    A yellow pin indicates that photos are associated with the listing and clicking on the pin will bring up the information from Craigslist as shown in the image on the left.

    I dreamed something like this would be possible with other layers being added in as needed like those old Mylar overlays you would see in atlases or anatomy textbooks. I can already think of two overlays that I’d like to see if I were a homebuyer. Comparables and School Districts. Once geo-locater enabled web services are exposed for this data, it would be fairly trivial. I think much harder is getting this data.

  • Bite PR on Doc’s “snowballs”

    Bite’s Trevor Jonas posts about the marketer’s perspective of Doc Searl’s snowball metaphor – "frightening."

    I think it’s all about giving into the loss of control. It’s no longer about having a message to control and more about participating in a conversation as a participant and not a leader. This gets to what is still a new concept in marketing circles. Brands are owned by their customers, not the company. This leads to a whole new style of marketing that empowers the external champions of a brand. in this new world it’s all about working through the customers to drive a point, not leading them.

    Blogging is a platform that amplifies a message. If your story is told in a way that resonates with your customers, it will be picked up. If it’s well written, it will be picked up with all the contextual detail that will tell the story with less distortion and greater impact.

  • Bite PR Blogging Seminar – Mark Jen

    Mark Jen was fired from Google. He broke a few cardinal rules such as not being sensitive to Google’s culture which didn’t support blurting things out. He also broke a cardinal rule of blogging by deleting posts. This is a huge red flag that will only draw attention to the post which can be retrieved from RSS feeds and browser caches. He also mentioned sensitive information right before 4th Quarter earnings were released.

    Mark now works for Plaxo.

    Plaxo has a blog but they’ve made a decision to segment the comments over onto the forums.

  • Bite PR Blogging Seminar – Tom Foremski

    Tom previously was the Silicon Valley correspondent for the Financial Times and later founded the Silicon Valley Watcher.

    Tom joined to FT to take advantage of the brand and the infrastructure to get his word out. When blogging came along, this new publishing and distribution system came to the masses.

    Are bloggers journalists? Not a relevant question – it’s all about reach. It’s about a trusted relationship, a brand that gets built up reader-by-reader over time.

    Richard Koman on blogging ethics – most of the people that were paid to blog for Marqui ended up just blogging about being paid to blog about Marqui and didn’t write much about the actual CMS product.

    On SEO – don’t waste money on search engine optimization, companies should put their money back into “their knitting”. Why waste money on boosting your ranking if you can’t deliver on what you promise via your links.

    On sources – people can’t help telling you stuff. It’s important to let people know that “off the record” is default.

    No one has ever been fired for blogging, only for “inappropriate conversations.”

  • Bite PR Blogging Seminar – How to Pitch Bloggers

    Presented by Jill Ratkevic of Bite.

    Tivo – select play, select 30, select. Not something that Tivo could officially endorse or promote but blogging has gotten the word out there for them.

    On blogging and journalism – blogging is open source journalism. Whatever you write will be corrected by your readers. If you readers have a bad experience that you don’t cover, they will contribute this information as comments. It’s based on dialog, not monologue.

    On harnessing the conversation – relationships take time, talk about the issues first, not your product.

    Pitching bloggers – need to build cred with the influencers by tipping them off with fresh information in real-time for feedback which can then be incorporated into your pitch to the mainstream media.

    Traditional PR is about the number of clips. It’s a different world now. It’s no longer about mentions, it’s about results. Jill talks about their client become.com which generated much better ROI from their 10,000 beta testers that seeded the conversation around their product than from traditional press releases and media tours.

  • Bite PR Blogging Seminar – Q&A

    Rod Boothby (E&Y) asks – what about the blogging in companies? Are conversations of benefit to companies?

    Absolutely. Companies have souls, they have a “nature.” The value system comes from its founders. Some companies are born to blog. There’s an inverse relationship between branding and blogging. Companies that have a strong brand have difficulty with blogging. Companies can’t talk, people do.

    Question – How are PR departments handling blogging?

    It’s important for companies to have as many people blogging as possible. Need to trust your people to have good judgment. There’s something about blogging that acknowledges the incompleteness of what we know. This is anti-thetical to messaging which is about driving home a point.

  • Bite PR Blogging Seminar – Doc Searls

    I’m attending the Bite blogging seminar at the W in San Francisco. Swish venue with not only lemons and lime in the drinking water but strawberries.

    Great line up of speakers, about 50 – 60 people seated. They’ve got wireless so I’ll pass on some of the highlights.

    Doc Searls – talks about his writing of Cluetrain Manefesto

    On Blogging – email that I would write with “cc:world”

    On time it takes to blog – if you look at your email, the volume you put out in email probably exceeds what’s up on my blog.

    On marketing – it’s about conversations and not messages. Branding was a concept that P&G brought from the cattle industry. Branding is about putting out 8 boxes of soap and “singing about the difference.”

    On writing as content – John Perry Barlow once said that he never heard about content until the container business felt threatened. Once you start talking about “content” you’re already off base.

    On the Net – it’s a place, not a medium. The nodes of the net are not separated by time or space, a blog post is immediate. Once you You don’t send a message using “content.” You’re having a conversation in a place. You are “on the net,” you use real estate metaphors to describe the net.

    Update: I left off the best line of the conference. As a parting thought, Doc described (and I’m paraphrasing” his life before blogging as one of, “pushing many big rocks a short way uphill” and his life now as a blogger as, “rolling many snowballs down a hill with the compelling ideas gaining mass as they roll downhill.”