Woot

No longer confuzzled after a ginormous number of submissions, Merriam Webster WOOTs 

Top Ten favorite words not found in the dictionary

1. ginormous (adj): bigger than gigantic and bigger than enormous
2. confuzzled (adj): confused and puzzled at the same time
3. woot (interj): an exclamation of joy or excitement
4. chillax (v): chill out/relax, hang out with friends
5. cognitive displaysia (n): the feeling you have before you even leave the house that you are going to forget something and not remember it until you're on the highway
6. gription (n): the purchase gained by friction: "My car needs new tires because the old ones have lost their gription."
7. phonecrastinate (v): to put off answering the phone until caller ID displays the incoming name and number
8. slickery (adj): having a surface that is wet and icy
9. snirt (n): snow that is dirty, often seen by the side of roads and parking lots that have been plowed
10. lingweenie (n): a person incapable of producing neologisms

Everyone Loves Flowers

Have flowers evolved because we love them?

Have they exploited an emotional niche in the Darwinian struggle and so survived beautifully? 

Are they the pets of the plant world?

Rutgers geneticist  Terry McGuire seems to thinks so and he's got a trio of studies to support him.

Human Affection altered evolution of flowers

For those of you who are skeptical, consider that we are creating Designer Ecosystems in our cities.

On Borrowed Time

It was a fictional weblog that got me interested in avian flu.

Its imaginative putting me in the place where a pandemic is happening, telling me a story in other words, made me begin to grasp the seriousness and the likelihood of a global flu pandemic in the next few years.

Like most other people, I'm the victim of my own experience. Never having suffered a public pandemic, it's hard to imagine one. Never having experienced public panic or a breakdown of essential services, it's hard to imagine them. Somehow, I expect that all the wonders of our modern age from medicines to the Internet to an abundant supply of food, will continue without interruption forever into the future. I fancy myself a student of history, so you would think I'd know better.

Didn't the 9/11 Commission point to a "failure of imagination" as a principal reason that kept US officials from understanding the al Qaeda threat?

I think we are at a similar point now.

Have you heard anyone in the Centers for Disease Control talk about this? Maybe they are ashamed about their obesity fiasco. You remember that or do you? In 1999, the CDC director said obesity was epidemic in the United States, accounting for more than 300,000 deaths a year. Last year in a widely publicized study , the CDC upped obesity-related deaths to 400,000 until the figures were exploded as the whoppers they were. A embarrassing comedown for the CDC who had to admit only 25, 815 obesity deaths. Nevermind

It took a magazine, not a government agency, to alert me. And they did it with a story and a weblog.

Nature magazine is devoting its current issue to highlight progress and "incoherence in the world's response to a potential human pandemic."

From its editorial

Millions of people killed in highly developed countries within months. Tens of millions worldwide. The global economy in tatters. A Hollywood fantasy? No — it's now a plausible scenario. The first act, the spread of avian flu to, and probably between, humans, has already started across Asia. Unless the international community now moves decisively to mitigate this pandemic threat, we will in all probability pay heavily within a few years. Then, hard questions will be asked as to why we were not prepared.

Sceptics abound, convinced that talk of a pandemic must be scare-mongering, or scientists crying wolf. Surely with support care, drugs and vaccines, at least the rich world can easily stand up to a flu virus? After all, this is 2005, not 1918, when a flu pandemic killed up to 50 million people worldwide. But while the science and medicine of flu have advanced substantially, our ability to mount an effective public-health response has made remarkably little progress over the decades, and the potential for panic is, if anything, greater given the impact of television and the Internet.
...........................
The time for diplomacy and denial is over. It is time for advocacy and action.

The avian viruses in Asia are evolving: they've jumped the species barrier to infect pigs in Indonesia and human-to-human transmission may well have occurred. According to World Health Organization earlier this month, the H5N1 viruses "are continuing to evolve and present a continuing and potentially growing pandemic threat."

I'm in no way qualified to assess this threat, so I went to Effect Measure whose editors are senior public health scientists and practitioners who write anonymously and link to all the blogs writing on avian flu. They call the conclusion of the WHO report "chilling"

Evolution of a pandemic strain of virus may be preceded by numerous small steps, none of which is sufficient to signal clearly that a pandemic is about to start. This poses a difficult public health dilemma. If public health authorities move too soon, then unnecessary and costly actions may be taken. However, if action is delayed until there is unmistakable evidence that the virus has become sufficiently transmissible among people to allow a pandemic to develop, then it most likely will be too late to implement effective . . . responses."

WHO is openly admitting that everyone is unprepared.

"We are working on pandemic preparedness on borrowed time," the WHO's top influenza official, Klaus Stohr, told the meeting, reiterating that conservative estimates indicated that up to 7.4 million people might die.

"The objective of pandemic preparedness can only be damage control. There will be death and destruction."

"National pandemic response plans are the key," he said.

If millions of lives could be lost, if state and local governments don't know what to do, why in God's name has the CDC been more concerned about obesity and even getting that wrong. Not until this week did the CDC Director Julie Gerberding say

Even a "medium level pandemic" in the United States could result in 89,000-207,000 deaths and up to 734,000 people people being hospitalised...... According to Gerberding, between 15 percent and 35 percent of the US population would be affected by a flu pandemic and the cost to the US economy would be between 71 billion and 166 billion dollars.

The US has only a draft pandemic response plan, and has ordered only 2.3 million doses of Tamiflu, the only antiviral medication that seems to work.

It's Decisive Inaction.

The US pandemic influenza plan, in the works for five years and in only in draft form since last August will be completed in final form "by the end of the summer."
Marcia Cross, the [the Government Accountability Office's] director for health care, told lawmakers that federal officials have yet to determine what role the federal government will take in purchasing supplies of vaccine against bird flu and other flu strains. The government has also not cemented which population groups would be priorities for emergency vaccination in the event of an outbreak or finalized plans for possible quarantines or travel restrictions.

The delay has left state health departments unable to properly plan for flu emergencies, she says. (Via WebMD).

If there is a pandemic, it will be everywhere.
The scene of the disaster will be everywhere.
Everywhere is local. All the battles will be fought on the local level.

So, if the government is not prepared, what can ordinary people and businesses do to prepare? What will happen when 25% of the workforce gets sick

Effect Measure has begun a Pandemic "To-Do" list which I hope they make it a public wiki.

1. Rationing. Who gets what first? Who gets what at all? Who secures scarce supplies?

2. Care-giving. There are simply not enough hospital beds. There are not enough nurses. There are not enough caskets.
Time NOW to offer minimal nursing training for volunteers and a way to keep track of them. One commenter said many died needlessly in 1918-1920 from lack of hydration and nourishment.

3. Emergency equipment
and I'll add

4. Emergency plans to carry on essential services like water, electricity, fuel, banking and food supply. It's time for businesses to review their emergency contingency plans as well as their business continuity plans NOW. Time NOW to establish policies for people working at home and the means for them to do so. Time NOW to introduce Wikis to capture the knowledge necessary to keep businesses going. Time NOW to prepare crisis management blogs. Time NOW for people to assess their own personal and family preparedness.

If you need more to break out of your complacency, read Canada Sue's imaginings of what would happen in her hometown of 100,000.

World wide blog count

Now over 60 million according to Duncan Riley at The Blog Herald.

Online ID theft

According to a recent survey, some 17% of people have stopped banking online and 13% have stopped shopping online because of concerns about identity theft.

Holistic Money & Life Advice Franchise

You've probably never heard of SEI Investments even though it administers $291 billion in assets with offices in 12 countries and more than 2000 employees.

CEO Alfred West Jr wants SEI to become as much of a household name as American Express and he plans to do it with storefront franchises offering financial advice to the 50+ market.

West said the program was launched because he believes that baby boomers are not having their accumulated wealth managed well enough by the myriad stock brokers, insurance agents and estate planners that sell specialty services but do not consider an individual's total needs or goals.

"The baby boomer does have different needs than the previous generation, and the financial service industry is not set up well to cater to this individual," West said.

Under what SEI calls a "holistic" approach, the SEI Wealth Network franchises provide not only financial, estate and risk management but also advice with aging family care, life and career redirection, business transition and philanthropy. Instead of being charged a fee based on a percentage of assets, clients are charged an annual fee based on the complexity of their financial and "life" situation.
...
SEI has already opened two franchises and an additional four or five have signed on to become franchises. Locations include Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, San Diego and Little Rock, Ark. SEI also runs company-owned wealth management offices in Boston and Philadelphia. SEI uses the offices to help develop services for the franchises.
.....SEI would like to have 200 franchises within four or five years.

Well, they've got the market pegged right.  Most of the money is with the boomers.  Holistic approach works too.  I'm going to watch this one.

What hath God wrought

Way back before bloggers, before Edison even, people were connected via vast network of telegraph relay stations who all spoke in a secret language called Morse Code.

Below is a picture of the paper tape recording the first message ever sent by telegraph by one Samuel Morse on May 24, 1844, saying, What hath God wrought.


Nine years later, the telegraph network had spread to all states east of the Mississippi (except Florida) and parts of Canada. 

Not until 1861 did telegraph lines connect the entire continent east to west, a technological union in the midst of the Civil War.

Morse had the best middle names I've ever heard "Finley Breese".  He was trained as an artist and was quite a good one too.

All at the splendid American Memory project from the Library of Congress.

"Half forensic lab, half tavern"

The blogosphere is half forensic lab and half tavern, says George Washington University Professor Michael Cornfield  in a commentary to the latest Pew study on the impact of blogs on the 2004 election campaign.  Good metaphor, works for me.

The magic of the Internet is you can be looking at evidence, at direct documentation, while you're talking," Mr. Cornfield said, referring to the fake memos that turned blogs into influential buzzmakers. "It would be as if the Nixon tapes were available in MP3 format during Watergate."

Says Tigerhawk
Bloggers as a group combine two attributes -- the ability to assemble expertise on almost any topic at extreme speed, and the propensity to write at very high velocity. This combination of expertise and velocity comes at the cost, perhaps, of sobriety (there's the tavern metaphor) and deliberation. However, the competing tendency of bloggers to edit each other, also at high velocity, limits the potential damage of errors of fact.

Big businesses worry about the velocity, but they should take heart.  If they respond early and truthfully, they can limit damage about themselves and their products.  Of course, that implies they are paying attention in the first place.

via Instapundit

Crime Stats, Google Maps

Except in the aggregate, I don't pay much attention to crime statistics.  They are just not very useful.

Chicagocrime.org. using a combination of public data and google maps, has changed all that.   

Now, there's a freely browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago and boy can you learn a lot.

Here's a map of "aggravated assault: hands, feet, fists".

You can see where the crimes occurred and where the most common locations for any type of crime are.  Aggravated assault, for example, happens most often at public school buildings (240 crimes) while the distant second place is a bus (11 crimes).

There's even RSS feeds for every police beat and city block in the city.  Amazing.  Sure beats listening to the police scanner. 

Using Blogs to Get Clients

B.L Ochman has a great interview up with Alice Marshall on how to use a blog to get clients.

Democratizing Innovation

Fortune has a wonderful article, The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy.  Call them citizen engineers.

a number of factors are coming together to empower amateurs in a way never before possible, blurring the lines between those who make and those who take. .....they’re simply finding a way—in this mass-produced, Wal-Mart world—to take power back, prove that they can make the products that they want to consume, have fun doing so, and, just maybe, make a few dollars.
---
Bloggers, those do-it-yourself journalists, showed big media that the barriers to entry (like owning a printing press, say) didn’t much matter. Podcasters took radio into their own hands, creating audio shows and putting them online. Amateur music producers, using software that was once the province only of major labels, invented mash-ups: combining songs into totally new ones, then giving them away or selling them. And with the advent of services like Google AdSense, which let people easily put advertising on their sites, these tinkerers could—while not vaulting themselves into Bill Gates territory—at least break even.

Blogs are serving as an R&D center & focus group as well as identifying potential customers.

HT Instapundit.

How much is Inside?

Call him cockeyed, but one American pioneer is determined to find out how much is inside.   

I like knowing just how many peanuts are inside and I'm glad he does too.

IBM's Blogging Guidelines

Now this is interesting.  Just as posted earlier,  IBM's announcement on its intranet to encouraging all employees to blog, we also learn that IBM built and deployed its own internal blogging service, some 3057 blogs have already begun strictly through word-of-mouth promotion.

Also their Corporate Blogging Guidelines were written by IBM bloggers over a period of ten days using an internal wiki.

Here's what IBM says it's in its interest

To learn: As an innovation-based company, we believe in the importance of open exchange and learning -- between IBM and its clients, and among the many constituents of our emerging business and societal ecosystem. The rapidly growing phenomenon of blogging and online dialogue are emerging important arenas for that kind of engagement and learning.

To contribute: IBM -- as a business, as an innovator and as a corporate citizen -- makes important contributions to the world, to the future of business and technology, and to public dialogue on a broad range of societal issues. As our business activities increasingly focus on the provision of transformational insight and high-value innovation -- whether to business clients or those in the public, educational or health sectors -- it becomes increasingly important for IBM and IBMers to share with the world the exciting things we’re doing learning and doing, and to learn from others.

In 1997, IBM recommended that its employees get out onto the Net -- at a time when many companies were seeking to restrict their employees' Internet access. We continue to advocate IBMers' responsible involvement today in this new, rapidly growing space of relationship, learning and collaboration.

From James Snell at IBM  via Robert Scobel

Business Blog Survey Results

Very valuable - because it's one of the firsts - survey of business blog readers in Germany.

1 91% of the blog readers expect a fast and appropriate reaction to questions and comments in enterprise blogs.

2 90% think it's important to make a clear difference between commercial and non-commercial content.

3 Of the blog readers, 54% form their opinions about products/companies on the basis of blogs.

4 51% of the blog readers visit product and/or corporate sites as a results of reading blogs.

5 58% of the blog readers, read them to find news and information they can't find otherwise.

6 57% of them are interested in the personal opinions of the authors, but only 43% are interested in the discussions.

HT.  The Marketing Diva

Massive blog initiative by IBM

Next week, IBM will introduce the largest ever corporate blogging initiative, inviting any of its 130,000 staff to blog reports Tom Foremski for the Silicon Valley Reporter.

Employees will taught what blogging is, and they will be guided on what is appropriate blogging content. IBM has also set up a wiki, a simple technology that allows groups to collaborate on projects and share knowledge.  

Foremski reminds us that IBM was an early advocate for Linux, cultivating relationships with the open-source developer community which became a significant competitive advantage.

With this massive blog initiative, IBM hopes to extend its influence with online discussions with their tech gurus or evangelism through blogging with the goal of improving IBM's competitive position in key IT markets.

HT Kevin at Lexblog

The Digerati

Remember 15 years ago when you first heard the term "Digital Divide."
Then it referred those who had access to computers and those that didn't. 

Seth Godin has a terrific post on the New Digital Divide, one based not on circumstance but on choice, a post that comes with a chart so you can quickly see where you stand.  Worth reading.

I can dream, can't I?

From Huzzah! UK banks move toward two-factor authentication by Scott Pinzon

And I say, now that they're heading in the right direction, I hope they hurry. Maybe it'll goad the U.S. into following suit.

ZDnet UK  reported last week that British banks are close to agreeing upon a standard for using a physical device that each banking customer will carry. It generates a one-time-use password each time the customer needs to authenticate their identity (that is, prove who they are). The devices could be in everyone's hands in as little as nine months to a year.

Quick review: identity can be proven by
▪ Something you know
▪ Something you have
▪ Something you are

Most of the systems we encounter each day make us prove our identity by "something we know" -- a password or a PIN. Requiring any two of the three points above is called two-factor authentication and can provide much stronger security than passwords alone, which are notoriously weak authenticators.

The U.K. move looks particularly enlightened when juxtaposed against recent U.S. security developments. Consumer database giants LexisNexis and ChoicePoint both revealed to a Senate committee that their systems have been breached many times, yet both companies withheld that fact from the affected customers. The personal records of 310,000 customers were compromised. ChoicePoint's President admitted there have been "45 or 50 breaches." A LexisNexis executive admitted that of breaches there, "All but 4 or 5 ... were due to compromised passwords."

Until further legislation compels U.S. businesses to be honest about their sloppy security practices, it's every consumer for himself.

Can you see why I think two-factor authentication is a good move? Even the lamest consumer can't compromise a one-time password he or she doesn't know. I'd rather have banks dealing with the fact that people might lose their authentication devices, than dealing with the fallout of blabbermouth employees or customers revealing passwords that jeopardize the private accounts of us all. Godspeed, U.K. banks! Wise up, America! -

Every banking customer with an RSA SecurID is my dream.  It opens up an immense market for our ESOL online. 
It's simply the best protection available against identity theft, phishing and internal corporate thieves.

A Hard Lesson

Ingersoll-Rand learned a hard lesson when it failed to respond to a digital assault by a blogger.  It cost them $10 million.  Now they have a person monitoring blogs. 

How long before other companies realize that monitoring blogs is essential for a company's health? 

They might want to read how bloggers can lay waste to a product by Joshua Jaffee in today's C/NET

Today, most corporations still do little, if anything, with blogs, wikis and social networks, but that will change quickly over the next few years as more companies integrate these technologies into their daily routines. And if early signs are any indication, the evolution will lead to blogs replacing blast e-mails, wikis strengthening collaboration software and social networks taking conversations around the water cooler to a meta-level never envisioned by the most enthusiastic evangelist of the Internet boom.

Monster Blogging

So why is Monster.com blogging?  It isn't as if they needed to attract visitors.  It's about bringing greater value to their customers with personal stories.  Monster's blog  does it right.

The interview at Diva Marketing tells all. 

It's the Blogs, Stupid

"Blogging is forcing firms like ours to shut up and listen." says Mike Manuel in the latest interview posted over Naked Conversations, formerly the Red Couch.    If you don't listen, you WILL LOSE.

Like it or not, we are living in the next generation of marketing characterized by networks, connectivity, decentralization, easily available content and knowledge management tools, swarm attacks, memes and guerillas.  Companies would do well to learn from the lessons of the  Pentagon.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon began to adjust its thinking and infrastructure.  A decade of terrorist attacks culminating in the unbelievable horror of watching the World Trade Center's two towers collapse before our eyes, exposed our vulnerability to small cells of fanatical Islamofascists or other terrorists using easily available weapons.  The lesson the Pentagon learned at a terrible cost was expensive, high tech surveillance can not beat "humint" - human intelligence from people on the ground and in the secret cells.

The power of a networked meme shared by ordinary people changed governments in the past year.  In Georgia, the students said "Kmara" -Enough and the Rose Revolution began and resulted in honest elections in March.  In the Ukraine, it was "Pora" - It's Time and the Orange Revolution began with free elections last December.  In Lebanon, the Cedar Revolution with its "Independence 05"  banners mostly ended Syria's occupation.  Free elections in Iraq and Afghanistan were unthinkable a few years ago.  Everywhere people are speaking freely, many for the first time.  Free Iraqi blogs with a banner, "I was not living before the 9th of April and now I am, so let me speak".    What we thought was not what people in their heart of hearts hoped for and wanted.  The Arab Street is quite different from anything we had been led to believe and is now a vanquished cliche

Enough networked people speaking their minds and the result is whole countries have changed and are becoming real democracies.  It's called freedom.  And it's happening here too.  In the US, we have a political and economic democracy, but until recently, the mass media was a dictatorship of culture.  Oh, there was competition but it was ABC vs. NBC, Universal vs. MGM, the New York Times vs the Washington Post, Time vs Newsweek, Coke vs Pepsi.    Today, an attack can come from anywhere, by a single nobody on a blog, connecting to other nobodies with more information and expertise, creating together a body of facts that can topple a network news anchor like Dan Rather or a cable news producer like Eason Jordan. 

Today,  John Podhoretz writes about the democratization of the media causing a mass-media melt-down,  Hollywood, newspapers, television, talk radio and the music industry are all suffering rapidly declining audiences.  The market now speaks in a million different voices to say in countless ways they don't like what they are getting. 

Or as Hugh McLeod in the Gaping Void writes, the external conversations of the market are talking back to companies that used to talk only to themselves in self-referential internal conversations.    This is not bad news for companies, this is GOOD and IMPORTANT news.

Just as the Pentagon had to discard its MAD theory of Mutually Assured Destruction, companies are having to discard their MAD theory of Mass Audience Demographics.  There are hundreds of thousands of niches to be listened to and served and it can be done with a healthy profit.

How can a company possibly keep track of and listen to thousands of niches? 

To rework a cliche that won a Presidency - IT'S THE BLOGS, STUPID. 

If you use Technorati to follow blogs,  employ search feeds and allow corporate blogging, you've got your human intelligence.  When you comment on other blogs, you're playing court to and building relationships with other bloggers, each of whom is the tribal chieftan of its own audience.  You also have the tools to deal with blog swarms or a corporate attack.  While you have to get used to a lack of control, you get a much better grip on reality and what's happening on the ground. 

There has been an astonishing collapse of trust by Americans in traditional sources of authority.  People are placing more trust in people like themselves according to Dick Edelman and are creating their own Personal Web of Trust.  The only way to get into anyone's personal web of trust is to listen, to be real and honest, sometimes fallable, and always learning.  Most importantly, it's being on their side, not just your side.  It's being their advocates, putting their interests above yours.  It's doing well by doing good.

So get out in the countryside, listen and serve to win over the hearts and minds of the people.  They are not just wallets.  They want to be known and dealt with as the complex people they are, not just as consumers who buy products.  The reward is much bigger.  When you align with your customers, understanding where they are and what they need, and then giving them solutions to problems they have, making their lives easier, you've created customer evangelists who will do your marketing for you, just by word of mouth. 

This new generation of networked marketing is collaborative, It's Blog or Die.

Great Hidden Tech Boom

Are blogs the Great hidden tech boom? 

Michael Malone, once called "the Boswell of Silicon Valley" and most recently editor at large of Forbes ASAP thinks so.

Unmet Needs or Making Women Smile

Some people are just naturals when it comes to understanding and marketing to women.  Take this guy Bill, a natural.  And you can tell by his 28 ways to make a girl smile.

So is Jory des Jardins at Pause.  She writes about the recent Marketing to Women conference

Those whose livelihoods depend on marketing to women are fairly screwed; imagine resting your career on an ever-shifting market. The opening presentation, given by Frank About Women, asserted that demo targeting is a no-no when marketing to women. Afterall, who is, say, the typical mother of a small child? Today, she's in her teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or older if she's the primary caretaker of a grandchild. She's got a husband, or no husband, or maybe a wife. She spends her husband's money, or she spends her money on her husband. She floats between monikers of stay-at-home Mom, career woman, desperate housewife, DIY home renovator. Whoever she is, she prefers that you provide her with a solution, not a lifestyle option--she's already made her choices there, thank you.

I was comforted to know that Superwoman has been killed off; products will do well that don't promise to help women do it all. Good marketing must acknowledge the parts of her life that CAN be salvaged. Calgon sort of did that eons ago, but today there's less of a Sylvia Plath-like response to the competing pressures of career and domestic responsibility. Nor do women relate to themselves by job title. Over lunch I met the CEO of a multi-million-dollar company. She introduced herself as an entrepreneur.

I know, understanding women is a tall order, but I want to help. I'll start by telling you what I want, or what I think I want, as the sad story for women like me is we often know more about what we don't want. Here are some of my "touchpoints," mundane opportunities that marketers can exploit to make me a customer for life. Do with them what you will:

To read her touchpoints, go here. 

Don't miss her takedown of the Bank of America and their terrible practice of charging small businesses to deposit checks via ATM in Banks: a notoriously inhospitable industry.  Now Jory is a prominent woman blogger who writes engagingly on "working without a net" which is what she calls self-employment. 

She also is one of the organizers of the Blogher conference for woman bloggers on July 30.  Her story has and will travel widely in the blogosphere, among people who connect to each other to share stories and help each other live better lives.  How many people won't set up accounts at Bank of America because of Jory's story and the discussion in her comments.  If banks will pay $300-$500 for a new account, how much have they lost because of Jory's post.

Does anyone at Bank of America keep track of what bloggers are saying about them on the world wide web? If they did, they would be making changes more quickly then they are.    When the richest source of new accounts is new businesses by middle-aged men and women, why do banks make it so hard for the self-employed?  Why aren't they reaching out to the self-employed, figuring out what they need, and creating local support networks to attract new customers?

Shoshanna Zuboff writes in "The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism" (Shoshana Zuboff, James Maxmin) that economic value is distributed in the unmet needs of individuals. She also writes that history teaches us that those enterprises that move decisively to reconnect with an alienated population get rich first. 

What about it Bank of America? Why don't you make your self-employed women smile?

Blogging Furniture

If you have an online furniture store, what better way to market it than through a blog.    And that's just what Beverly and Michael Landfair have done with theirs.

I think what they've done can be summarized as the 10 steps to creating a successful business blog.

1. You draw traffic to your website about your "brick and mortar" store  Landfair Furniture and Design Gallery.
2. You publicize your online store selling accessories. Landfair Furniture Annex
3. Since most of your business comes from designers, you select your own Top Designers as resource links, generating referrals and making them  happy and incidentally bringing you more business.
4. You interview each of your top designers, making them your friends and bringing them publicity and referrals which makes them even happier.
5. You can explain in clear language why hire an interior designer. This generates more business for the network of designer customers you've created and consequently for you.
6. You offer other useful how to tips and a newsletter.
7. You share the wealth and publicize other home interior decorating blogs
8. You get to be interviewed as a Smart Couple Online by Lipsticking's Yvonne DiVita
9. Your web and blog presence is noted and so you are interviewed by the Portland Business Journal
10.  If you are the supportive spouse, you set up a separate blog to write about economics, politics and anything else that strikes your fancy that has nothing to do with furniture. Mover Mike

Blogging Scooters

So what does it look like when blogs are part of a business's  overall communications strategy?

Steve Rubel who writes the influential micropersuasion blog has won a new client - Cooper Katz. - for his firm PR firm Cooper Katz according to the Wall St Journal.

Rubel will develop two blogs to be written by US owners of those cute Italian motor scooters.

Imagine Biking Bis or Divester with an Italian accent.  I'll be very interested to see what Steve comes up with.

Blogs are the demand side supplying itself

Here are some takeaways from Doc Searls closing keynote at Les Blogs in April in Paris.

Authority is earned, and granted.  It is not delivered.  The blogosphere is a vast and growing meritocracy.  Not just a democracy, though it may be that too.

Blogs are the demand side supplying itself.  No big brand company invented blogging,  Just as none invented Wikipedia. Or Flickr, or Six Apart. Or the Net.  Or the Web.

Blogs don’t have to be sticky.  Leaving is more important than staying.  What’s sticky are ideas not bounded by any blog, any domain, any owner.

Blogging is about rolling snowballs downhill, not pushing rocks uphill

Bloggers on Corporate Management

For those of you who are new to blogging and don't know,  the "godfather" of the blogosphere is Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who writes the influential Instapundit blog as well as a weekly feature called "Reynolds' Wrap" at Tech Central Station. This week it's called The Unbearable Rightness of Nick Denton.

Even as a columnist, he writes like a blogger, liberally quoting what Nick Denton wrote two years ago.

... Modern communications, and the growth of weblogs and web bulletin boards in particular, have also given power to bitter employees.... Asymmetric warfare has come to the workplace: managers may sometimes have the power to hire and fire, but the peasants have the internet now.

Then relating it to an earlier story in the New York Times about how the  U.S. government is  having fits over the employee bloggers at the Los Alamos National Lab and from which he quotes.

A blog rebellion among scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, the federal government's premier nuclear weapons laboratory, is threatening to end the tenure of its director, G. Peter Nanos.

Four months of jeers, denunciations and defenses of Dr. Nanos's management recently culminated in dozens of signed and anonymous messages concluding that his days were numbered. The postings to a public Web log conveyed a mood of self-congratulation tempered with sober discussion of what comes next.

And tying it together with his own thoughts.

Things will be different, and already are. Even in the military, email and chatrooms are flattening hierarchies and changing power dynamics....-- employees don't necessarily resent managers who run a taut ship, so long as they feel that merit is being rewarded over sucking up....

The smarter managers will read blogs, looking for real problems that need to be fixed, and they'll respond (perhaps on their own blogs?) to the critics; the smartest ones will even realize that employees know the difference between the chronic bellyachers and the people who have serious complaints, and will respond accordingly.

Reynolds concludes.

How many managers are this smart? I guess, thanks to the Internet, we'll find out.

Managers not only have to worry about what their customers are saying about their products and services, they have to worry about what their employees will say about them.  Out Loud and on the Internet.    The transparency of the Internet now reaches behind the firewalls. 

UPDATE:  Better managers make for better companies and happier employees.

In a study by Sirota Consulting, the firm examined the stock prices of 28 companies that had tracked their employee morale during the past four years. The results: The 14 companies with "high morale" saw their stocks increase more than 5 times those of the half-dozen companies with "low morale" (16% vs 3%).

Via Kevin Salwen at the Worthwhile Blog

Online advertising set to explode

From Frank Barnako's Internet Daily, a summary of Forrester's latest survey.

A survey of 99 leading marketers finds almost half of them plan to cut their ad spending on traditional media and spend more on online advertising. Total U.S. e-marketing spending will reach $14.7 billion this year, a 23% increase from last year, according to Forrester Research (FORR). Principal analyst Charlene Li added that almost two out of three advertisers want to spend money on blogs. New advertising channels will draw "interest and spending from marketers," with 64 percent of the surveyed advertisers saying they are interested in spending on Web logs, and 57 percent through RSS, she said in a statement. This is a very bullish time for online advertising overall, she added. "Online consumers spend more than one-third of their time online, roughly the amount of time they spend watching TV. Yet marketers spend only 4% of ad budgets online versus 25% on TV."

Charlotte Li even has her own blog at Forrester

More Lawyers Blogging

Some interesting new legal blogs by lawyers and law firms.  It amazes that more lawyers aren't taking advantage of this essentially free marketing.

Mediation blog  - alternative dispute resolution by Diane Levin
New Hampshire Law Blog  by Burke & Eisner
BenefitsBlog - tax, benefits and ERISA by B. Janell Grenier
Arbitrary and Capricious - criminal law  by Skelly Wright
Blond Justice - an anonymous, young, female criminal defense attorney in a big city
DUI Blog - drunk driving laws by Lawrence Taylor
Corporate and Technology Law by Stephen Meltzer in Concord, MA
Antitrust Law Blog by Robert Doyle from Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP
Commercial Law, From Bricks to Clicks by Jay Hollander in New York City
Deal Attorney - Contracts, M&A by Anthony Cerminaro in Pittsburgh, PA
Financial Institution Law Blog by Sheppard Mullin
Brain Injury Blog by Michael Kaplan,  of De Caro & Kaplen New York City
Electronic Discovery Blog from Preston, Gates and Ellis LLP
How Appealing appellate litigation by Howard Bashman, Pennsylvania
Insurance Defense Blog by Dave Stratton in Washington, D.C.
Safety Lex -torts, rights and accountability by John Philo in Detroit, MI
Illinois Trial Practice
Notes from the (Legal) Underground
Illinois Personal Injury Blog all three by Evan Schaeffer at Schaeffer & Lamere in Illinois
Environmental Legal Blog - developments in environmental law by Stephen Holzer from Parker,Milliken et al in LA
Death and Taxes - estate planning, administration and real estate by Joel Schoenmeyer in Chicago.

Many at Blawg which THE source for law and legal related weblogs

Wealth Managers Do Better

What makes a successful independent broker-dealer? 

Well you have to do a lot more than manage investments which appears to be turning into a commodity business.  You have to do more, offer more, give better value to your clients.    Those that do offer additional wealth management services do significantly better according to a recent article in Financial Advisor magazine. 

A survey of 1028 broker-dealers in January by AssetMark found that wealth managers by offering more services do much better than pure investment managers.

What kind of services - estate planning (20% offered), life insurance (19% offered), income tax planning (16% offered), charitable planned giving (16% offered),  and asset protection planning (8% offered). 

Interesting too is the source of referrals.  Among  investment generalists almost 70% relied on accountants while wealth managers depended more heavily on attorney referrals (58%).