Fifty is the Turning Point

Jean Paul Treguer, CEO of Senioragency International with headquarters in Paris is the 1st and only international marketing and advertising network dedicated to 50+ and senior consumers.

He has a blog in English from which the following

there is a succession of important events that occur around the age of 50 and which plainly change people’s lives. At 49, on average, women become grandmothers for the first time. Three years later, in general, they’re in the throes of the menopause and are telling their husbands it’s high time to stop smoking and to watch their diet. At fifty, the main mortgage is paid off, and at 52 their youngest children leave the nest. A few years later, their own parents will die. This sad news will often result in a sizeable inheritance (at 57, on average).  Over and above the strange terms used in marketing, then, everything clearly leads us to see 50 as a turning point – one that it is convenient to take as a starting point for a so-called ’seniors marketing’ strategy.
---
Segmenting by Age in Marketing to Seniors

- the ‘Happy Boomers’ group (50 to 59-year olds)

- the ‘Liberation’ group (60 to 74-year olds)

- the ‘Peaceful’ group (75 to 84-year olds)

- the ‘Very Elderly’ group (85-year olds and over)

Nellie's Shopping Trends 2006

Nellie Lide has another terrific shopping trends list for 2006, better than last years and full of examples and links.

1. Shopping for a Better World - Shopping as societal force.
2. Men come into their own as shoppers.
3. Celebrity Wannabe Shopping
4. Social Shopping
5. Shopping for Temporary Ownership

She's done all the research, gathered all the links, so take advantage and read the whole thing at the New Persuasion blog.

The rules change so quickly, we need all the help we can get.

Favorite Mistakes

The Model A copier, the Edsel, the Hula Burger, Betamax, Lisa, Sildenafil and Breakfast Mates from Businessweek's cover story How Failure Breads Mistakes.

Insperiences

The trend watcher Springwise calls it Insperience, new businesses formed to bring top level experiences to consumers in their homes.

This week they point to Magnolia, a division of Best Buy, that's turning the complex difficulty of setting up and wiring home theaters and making everything work together into a branded, nation-wide business.

Magnolia tells consumers what to buy and then comes to their houses to hook everything up.

Trendwatching is a blog-like website that categorizes trends and all their newsletter articles that relate to trends like Mass Class, Garage Influentials, Infolust, Online Oxygen, No-Frills Chic and my personal favorite Life-Caching.

SpotScout

Coming soon to Boston and New York is Spotscout, "parking the mobile generation"

Using your computer or your cellphone, Spotscout will help you find parking wherever you go. Whether in a garage or in a private parking space, the service lets you negotiate your parking ahead of time.

Spotscout has its own blog,

From the Wall St Journal in "Your Space is Waiting"

Taking a cue from Web-based reservation systems used by restaurants, airlines and movie theaters, more companies and cities are offering services that let people reserve parking spaces online or by cellphone.

Studies apparently show that 30% f traffic comes from drivers circling around, looking for curbside parking.

Job description for corporate blogger

Stephen Spencer has nailed the job description for a corporate blogger

• identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary

• take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources

• ruminate on this information, analyzing and making a judgment call on its value and relevance to his/her constituents

• cull, aggregate, categorize, prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more relevant, timely, useful, and actionable

• republish it in a format that can be easily disseminated and further analyzed / commented on by others of his/her kind in disparate parts of the world

Digital Painting in Italy

Have you ever wanted to be a painter? I certainly have. It is one of the things I can do where I get completely lost in the flow of the work and the color. Sadly, I've not done it for years. Whatever visual art I do has been on powerpoint presentations. Pathetic, isn't it.

That's why I'm so intrigued with digital painting. Chava Hudson, artist and web designer, after hearing me speak about blogs, began her Digital Painting Blog.

Not only does she have wonderful images, she is going to lead a tour this summer in Tuscany at Monticatini.

If you love Italy, are familiar with computers and digital cameras, this would be a great vacation where you can learn to be a digital painter and create something as wonderful as this example from her blog.

Useful Blog Tools

Lee Odden has a very useful compendium of blog marketing tools over at Business Blog Consulting including an RSS Button Maker which I am definitely going to use as plans are afoot for an upgrading of all my blogs.

47 Hacks

I like Steve Rubel's pointer to the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging.

1. Using Free Blog Hosting Services
2. Ignoring the Basic Principles of Good Web Site Design and Usability
3. Being the Jack Of All Trades
4. Not Posting Regularly
5. Publishing Badly Written Posts
6. Spamming and Stealing
7. Failing to Establish a Personality

Steve has also posted

Ten wikipedia hacks

Ten RSS hacks
Ten Technorati hacks
Ten Blogging hacks

Why is we love numbered lists of things?

Turnkey blogging systems for verticals

Kevin O'Keefe has done a fine job providing lawyers and law firms with at urnkey blogging system at LexBlog.

Now Paul Chaney, at Radiant Marketing is introducing something very similar for another vertical, the real estate and mortgage industries, at Realtors Conference & Expo.

It's called Blogging Systems and you can read what Paul has to say about it here.

Congratulations, mazeltov, best of luck with this new venture to a vertical that sorely needs it.

Blogs as Extension of Marketing Strategy

Toby Bloomberg at Diva Marketing has some fine metrics on how blogs can increase sales and some good tips to jump-start your blog strategy.

A Brilliant Idea, Independent of Government

The most innovative idea for Katrina recovery from Hugh Hewitt reminds me of what  Shoshanna Zuboff envisioned in The Support Economy.

Hewitt's article entitled Rebuilding the Gulf Coast, One Group at a Time at the Weekly Standard says the only way to rebuild the societies battered by Katrina is getting specialized groups find each other using the internet.

With this disaster, America confronts for the first time the daunting reconstruction of complex social and political organizations.
It is a task which may be beyond the ability of the local, state, and federal governments to manage. How, for example, does a government--at any level--presume to assist a shattered church in the reconstruction of its walls and its Sunday School programs, an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter in the care of its members, a community theater in the reconstruction of its playhouse, or scores and scores of high school athletes in the completion -of their senior year schedules so that colleges and universities can offer talented kids a chance at a free education?
---------------
The only way such a multitude of specialized needs can be met is for the vast, vast numbers of their counterparts across the United States to act--independently of government--to come to their aid in a reconstruction effort.

THIS SORT OF SYSTEM is common in small-scale disasters where neighbors know what needs to be done and simply do it. Using the internet, that same generous impulse can be channeled on a large scale.

He expands on the idea at his blog.

Example: A family fo five with no job to return to and an apartment that's been gutted. They have family in Atlanta. They are willing to make a go of it there. The colonel tells the soldier "Relocate these people to Atlanta, to a two bedroom apartment at a reasonable rent. Pay first and last and for the four months in between. Pay for some furniture and some clothes. And try and find a local church to "adopt" the family."


This is the boat people model, on fiscal steroids. It requires judgment, not rules. And it takes cash money and credit cards.


Just do it. The prospect of American refugee camps and the costs/miseries/dysfunctions of such places cannot be allowed to just evolve for want of a plan. If there are 100,000 displaced folks flat o their backs, that's about 25,000 individual relief plans and relocation efforts. Not easy, but much less costly to move quickly to relocate in this fashion than for an ad hoc relief agency to assemble and slowly --ever so slowly-- come up with blueprints and rules, plans and codes of conduct. Mistakes will be made and money wasted. But it is a far, far better approach than the drift that led to the Superdome and Convention Center crises.

This makes so much sense.  It's faster, cheaper and more efficient.  And it  gets people making new personal connections across the country, working together to create a better future, knitting new bonds and uniting the country one person at a time.

After Hugh's first idea to set aside a Blogburst for Katrina day, N.Z Bear  took the challenge and organized the sign up of blogs from 20 countries, (blog burst now extended through the weekend), is going to kick-start Hugh's idea as he explains in his blog relief update.

Zuboff and Maxim argue that corporations are not meeting the deep needs of their clients and those who can figure out how to do so using technology in what The Support Economy calls "federated networks." will succeed and be part of the next great episode of wealth creation.

Government is failing in the same way corporations are.  They can't meet the needs of individuals aside from providing tools  - money, grants and other resources.    Hewitt's idea of specialized groups finding each other using the internet has a touch of grace about it.

The Internet is a marketplace connecting people.  The marketplace is conversations.  It's people finding just what they need from other people who share the same interests.  People joining other people in groups to reach a common goal.  The Internet is only the means.  Blogs and other social networking tools are only the tools.    In the end it's all about people.  It's people who are the agents of grace.  They want with their whole hearts to do something good and important.  People who have lost everything need so much.  But they still can give purpose and meaning to those who have so much.

Here's the link to  "The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and The Next Episode of Capitalism" (Shoshana  Zuboff, James  Maxmin)-----

I'm blogging at Business of Life for the Blogburst for Katrina .  My preferred charity is the American Red Cross where you can donate and volunteer. 

UPDATE:  It's beginning.

Technorati Tags: flood aid, Hurricane Katrina

A Brilliant Idea, Independent of Government

The most innovative idea for Katrina recovery from Hugh Hewitt reminds me of what  Shoshanna Zuboff envisioned in The Support Economy.

Hewitt's article entitled Rebuilding the Gulf Coast, One Group at a Time at the Weekly Standard says the only way to rebuild the societies battered by Katrina is getting specialized groups find each other using the internet.

With this disaster, America confronts for the first time the daunting reconstruction of complex social and political organizations.
It is a task which may be beyond the ability of the local, state, and federal governments to manage. How, for example, does a government--at any level--presume to assist a shattered church in the reconstruction of its walls and its Sunday School programs, an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter in the care of its members, a community theater in the reconstruction of its playhouse, or scores and scores of high school athletes in the completion -of their senior year schedules so that colleges and universities can offer talented kids a chance at a free education?
---------------
The only way such a multitude of specialized needs can be met is for the vast, vast numbers of their counterparts across the United States to act--independently of government--to come to their aid in a reconstruction effort.

THIS SORT OF SYSTEM is common in small-scale disasters where neighbors know what needs to be done and simply do it. Using the internet, that same generous impulse can be channeled on a large scale.

He expands on the idea at his blog.

Example: A family fo five with no job to return to and an apartment that's been gutted. They have family in Atlanta. They are willing to make a go of it there. The colonel tells the soldier "Relocate these people to Atlanta, to a two bedroom apartment at a reasonable rent. Pay first and last and for the four months in between. Pay for some furniture and some clothes. And try and find a local church to "adopt" the family."


This is the boat people model, on fiscal steroids. It requires judgment, not rules. And it takes cash money and credit cards.


Just do it. The prospect of American refugee camps and the costs/miseries/dysfunctions of such places cannot be allowed to just evolve for want of a plan. If there are 100,000 displaced folks flat o their backs, that's about 25,000 individual relief plans and relocation efforts. Not easy, but much less costly to move quickly to relocate in this fashion than for an ad hoc relief agency to assemble and slowly --ever so slowly-- come up with blueprints and rules, plans and codes of conduct. Mistakes will be made and money wasted. But it is a far, far better approach than the drift that led to the Superdome and Convention Center crises.

This makes so much sense.  It's faster, cheaper and more efficient.  And it  gets people making new personal connections across the country, working together to create a better future, knitting new bonds and uniting the country one person at a time.

After Hugh's first idea to set aside a Blogburst for Katrina day, N.Z Bear  took the challenge and organized the sign up of blogs from 20 countries, (blog burst now extended through the weekend), is going to kick-start Hugh's idea as he explains in his blog relief update.

Zuboff and Maxim argue that corporations are not meeting the deep needs of their clients and those who can figure out how to do so using technology in what The Support Economy calls "federated networks." will succeed and be part of the next great episode of wealth creation.

Government is failing in the same way corporations are.  They can't meet the needs of individuals aside from providing tools  - money, grants and other resources.    Hewitt's idea of specialized groups finding each other using the internet has a touch of grace about it.

The Internet is a marketplace connecting people.  The marketplace is conversations.  It's people finding just what they need from other people who share the same interests.  People joining other people in groups to reach a common goal.  The Internet is only the means.  Blogs and other social networking tools are only the tools.    In the end it's all about people.  It's people who are the agents of grace.  They want with their whole hearts to do something good and important.  People who have lost everything need so much.  But they still can give purpose and meaning to those who have so much.

Here's the link to  "The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and The Next Episode of Capitalism" (Shoshana  Zuboff, James  Maxmin)-----

I'm blogging at Business of Life for the Blogburst for Katrina .  My preferred charity is the American Red Cross where you can donate and volunteer. 

Technorati Tags: flood aid, Hurricane Katrina

BlogHer Session: $$$ and Sense

Moderator: Elisa Camhort
Panelists:

• Toby Bloomberg
• Carolyn Elefant
• Susannah Gardner

Elisa, one of the co-mothers of Blogher is also the Queen Bee at Worker Bees, a company she founded in 2003.  She blogs on no less than 7 blogs including Health Concerns.com, a blog sponsored by eHealth Insurance, to speak about the layperson's perspective on health care and coverage.

Toby is a marketer consultant, a blog evangelist who blogs at  diva marketing.

Carolyn, a lawyer whose blog MyShingle.com brings her clients and also inspiration to other lawyers with solo or small practices. 

Susannah is co founder of Hop Studios Internet Consultant and the author of Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies.  At one point, she was a senior editor of the Online Journalism Review and was one of the editors responsible for the launch of the Los Angeles Times website.

Elisa
Where do you draw the line when you start thinking about money.
Are you trading credibility when you put ads on your blog?

Susannah. 
Each person has to decide whether it's worthwhile to earn coffee money.    I started my blog to publicize my book, Buzz Marketing with Bogs for Dummies and that was my primary goal.

Darrell at Problogging is making about $10,000/mo but he writes a number of blogs

Carolyn
Tip jars for lawyers make me wonder if they can run a business or whether they'll 'nickle and dime' me.

Susannah
I'd draw the line at too many ads that overwhelm the content.  Also  Businesses with tip jars are questionable unless they're non-profits.

Question to Audience
Do you consider your  personal blog your brand.  Most of them.

Elisa
I have a sponsored blog that pays me a monthly retainer.  My sponsor eHealth originally brought me in to learn about blogs.  They quickly realized they were too heavily

Evelyn Rodriguez.
My personal blog is ad free, but I'm planning a commercial blog focused on tea and all the countries where tea comes from and plan to get sponsors or ads

Audience member.  Just so it's transparent.

Question to audience
How many would take a sponsor for their ads. 
A. About half.

Toby
Her experience of creating a blog for Gourmet Station, an online company that sells  beautifully packaged food.

T. Alexander is their icon character on the website and introduces newsletters.  The blog strategy was to use the character T. Alexander as the blogger who would bring value to their customers with good information.

I blogged the experience on my blog, Diva Marketing.  It launched in April and shortly was picked up as 'faux blog' by a marketing professor.

Soon a firestorm of flames by some bloggers  who were incensed that their vision of blogosphere, of real people that talked to real people, was threatened.    Some of it was ugly and personal.  Others supported the character blog and Toby.  Even as all the traditional rules of transparency were followed including the character revealing himself in the first post.

Hugh of Gaping Void was one of the those bloggers that reacted badly but was mollified when the company responded in his comments.

The net effect on the business is unclear.  The character blog continues.  The writer of the blog still offers value-added content and engages in conversations with customers.

Q from audience. How to price it.
Sponsorships and ads are being broken up.  Sponsors depend more on time the blog writes about the sponsor.  Ads usually depend on click throughs.

Elisa.  I went to blog ads as a customer and looked at the traffic of their biggest blogs and prices from there

Susannah. Ask for as much as you could possibly get and go down from there.

Carolyn.  I use my blog to leverage new clients.  Now, I'm thinking about  tools I can sell to solo practitioners.  I offer a link to any solo practitioner and sometimes will write a post about them. 

Elisa.  This generosity of bloggers is the 'light' side of the blogosphere. 

Audience member.  I've blogged about the science experiments I created for a first grade class and put on Google ads.  I made $200/year which I'm donating to the school.  A lot easier than a bake sale.

Technorati Tags: BlogHer, Bloghercon

It's Public Relationships

Terrific post by Dave Weinberger on Joho saying it's not public relations, it's public relationships.

PR needs to get out of the intermediation business. It means that more voices have to be allowed to speak from within the corporation, since relationships based on a committee-produced controlled voice will fail. It explains why blogs are such a useful tool: They are public relationships. It assumes there's persistence to the relationship, not merely press releases thrown in our faces whenever the company has some new crap to flog. It assumes mutuality. It relies on the relationships being based on frankness and transparency.
Building public relationships seems to me to be a useful rubric for all that PR agencies do, including the traditional services they will continue to provide.
------
For example, PR agencies are going to continue to scan editorial calendars looking for opportunities to get coverage for their clients, and they'll continue to monitor and measure what's being said. But if they do that within the context of building public relationships, perhaps they can help their clients get past their obsession with column inches. It's not about that and it never was. It's about building long-term, continuing, honest, mutual public relationships

This is a Blog

Blog readership is far larger than you imagine. 

Almost two-thirds of blog readers don't realize they are reading a blog!

Jonathan Carson has the staggering report at BuzzMetrics

He also asks whether "blog" will be a B2B term that consumers will never embrace.

Fatwah on Blogger

Seems as if the first  Fatwah has been issued against the  blogger  Anarchangel and his family.   

A Fatwah has been issued against me by a known terror group. Corresponding groups have responded indicating that I will be eliminated shortly.

They have my name, address, telephone numbers, and the names and addresses of my friends and loved ones.

The FBI has been unable to tell me of any actionable threat, however they beleive that the threat is real. They have warned me to take the standard anti-terrorist precautions, suitable for Bogota or South Africa not Phoenix.

They are also contacting the people on the list that was distributed, including my mother, my stepfather and step siblings, and the people who worked on Team Infidel with me.

Now I don't know how many other bloggers are going to post pictures like Team Infidel shooting a Koran, but it's a disturbing development to learn that some are threatening the lives of bloggers for what they post.

Google payment, Google video

Is Google bent on dominating everything?  And I don't mean its $304 stock price.

Bambi Francisco says that Google will launch a payment system that would compete with eBay's Pay Pal. 

Charlene Li at Forrester thinks it's most likely a micro-payment system, a Google Wallet, that would give you a subscription pass to access premium content on multiple sites.

Back to Bambi who says Google would be better off with local classifieds, a fine companion to its local service listings.
When I look at the market, I think Bambi might be right. 

Online classifieds were $1.7 billion in 2004
Newspaper classifieds were $16.6 billion.  Most of them local.

Charlene Li explores some business model options for Google video which began accepting uploads in April.  John Battelle confirms that Google will be launching an online video playback feature based on the open source VLC media player.  Most likely the video player will be integrated with their payment program for those videos that are not free.    Soon, independent video producers will have an "alternate universe" for video distribution and playback.

Online Anthropology

"We look at the blogosphere as a focus group with 15 million people going on 24/7 that you can tap into without going behind a one-way mirror," says Rick Murray, executive vice president of Edelman, a Chicago public-relations firm

Marketers Scan Blogs for Brand Insights in today's Wall Street Journal.

New technology like Intelliseek's Blogpulse, free online services like Technorati and Yahoo's Buzz together with improved methodology and more expensive technologies such as "natural language processing" help marketers decode what's happening among different demographic groups.

Blog-monitoring services charge big companies $30,000-$100,000/year

Empowering the Bottom

What blogging and other social media look like to the world of main street media.  Chaos at the Door by Terry Heaton
So, let's take a moment to examine what's happening at street level, where the personal media revolution is taking place. Web and politics pioneer, Joe Trippi, made an important observation about it last year:

If information is power, then the Internet, which distributes information democratically to anyone who has access to it, is no longer distributing just information — it's distributing power.

And in a top-down society, it's empowering the bottom. Put more simply—in America, it's empowering the American people.

And the paradox of power is that discontent increases with opportunities for acting on it. The more the bottom is given the tools to make and distribute their own media, the greater their power; the greater their power, the greater their discontent and, along with it, the opportunity for acting on that discontent. This bubbling caldron of energy is profoundly anti-elitist and anti-institution, because the more the bottom surveys the landscape these days, the more they realize that our culture has failed them, and this energy is palpable in the halls of power.

Demographer Hazel Reinhardt presented the Ball State group with evidence of what she calls a "Perfect Storm" of demographic and technological changes impacting the culture. Four demographic shifts will have a profound influence on the media.

• The aging of the population
• Growing racial and ethnic diversity
• The continuing and growing gap between the rich and poor
• Metropolitanization/Regionalization

Consumer Power

Steve Rubel  quotes Scott Rafer on how blogs are giving consumers unprecedented power

Blogging itself is the leading indicator of what customer interaction will be like in an always-on internet world, where customers must be listened to because they are easily able to listen to each other. It is easier to find out what individual shippers think of UPS compared to FedEx than it is for me to find the official UPS position on the topic. Treating the broadband-connected customer as a consumer of information, viewer of keywords and clicker of links will be a market-share losing strategy in two or three years.

If you are not thinking about how to make your customer relationships collaborative ones, you're going to miss the boat, the train and the plane.

Over at Tom Peters, Steve Yastrow asks 

How many of your customers would regularly talk about themselves and you as "We," as opposed to "Us" and "Them?"

If you're blogging for your company or small business, I bet you'd get far more "we's" than your competitors.  It's time to get on the same side as your customers.

Naked Conversation and Interview

Transparency is one of the things I love most about blogs.  You learn about the writer, what he or she cares about, whether they correct mistakes, how they respond to feedback, those little things which are everything when it comes to building trust.

Shel Israel  is one of those people I've come to trust without ever having met him, simply through his blog and emails.  Since I'm going to the  the Blogher conference at the end of July, I'm looking forward to meeting both him and Scobel, who will be attending and easy to spot in a room full of  women.

I first came across the Red Couch, now named Naked Conversations, when he and Robert Scobel posted chapter one, Blog or Die, in their new book, now title Naked Conversations, how blogs are changing the way businesses talk to customers.    The book itself is being posted chapter by chapter online for feedback in a remarkably transparent, real time experiment in publishing with each chapter only whetting my appetite for the whole thing.  Feedback, conversation and promotion all at the same time.  There you go, another reason for blogs.

I was pleased, honored and delighted to take part in an interview for the book when Shel contacted me.  I'm even more honored  and pleased that he's posted the interview even though it's not going to fit in the planned structure of the book. 

You will learn a lot more about me and what I'm doing and what I think about blogs, if you read the  Interview: Jill Fallon.    If you get the sense that I'd rather talk about other people than myself, you're right, so that's why you should read the interview.

cross-posted at Legacy Matters, Business of Life and Estate Legacy Vaults.

Rubel's 10 Commandments

Steve Rubel, he of micropersuasion fame, lists his 10 commandments for PR professionals in what he calls the Golden Era of Participation.

1) Thou shall listen – Utilize every avenue available to you to listen actively to what your publics have to say and feed it back to the right parties.
2) Remember that all creatures great and small are holy – It doesn't matter if it's the New York Times calling on you or an individual blogger, both have power. Take them all seriously.
3) Honor thy customer – Create programs that celebrate customers and they will celebrate you.
4) Thou shall not be fake – Keep it real; don't hide behind characters and phony IDs.
5) Covet thy customers – Don’t sue your fans. You will alienate them.
6) Thou shall be open and engaging – Involve your customers in the PR process. Invite them to help you develop winning ideas and become your spokespeople.
7) Thou shall embrace blogging – It’s not a fad, it’s here to stay. Be part of it.
8) Thou shall banish corporate speak – People want to hear from you in a human voice. Don’t hind behind corporate speak. It will soon sound like ye olde English.
9) Thou shall tell the truth – If you don’t tell the truth, it will come out anyway.
10) Thou shall thinketh in 360 degrees – Ask not what you can do for your customer, but also what your customer can do for you.

Good rules for every blogger no matter what your persuasion.

Blogging rules

Via the Big Blog Company comes this comes this handy summary of the common patterns in publicly available corporate blogging policies.

Fredrik Wacka, a Swedish blogger, did the work and has a deeper analysis at his Corporate Blogging Blog.

The Core; all companies

• You’re personally responsible
• Abide by existing rules
• Keep secrets
• Be nice

The Common; approximately half of them

• Add value
• Respect copyright
• Follow the law
• Cite and link
• Discuss with your manager

The Unusual; only one or two companies mention

• You can write on company time
• Our goal
• You may disagree with the boss
• Stop blogging if we say so
• Contact PR

Legal Guide for Bloggers

In what promises to be a great resource for bloggers, a "basic roadmap" to the legal issues we may confront, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has published an online Legal Guide for Bloggers that you will want to bookmark.

HT  Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine who says "Bravo"...."Long-needed."

Microsoft bans "democracy" in China

Microsoft has agreed to ban the words "democracy" and "freedom" in its new Chinese internet portal, a joint venture  with Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology.

That portal of course offers free blogging tools with MSN spaces. 

Shameful.  This is worse than censorship. 

HT Roger Simon

I'm betting Mark Steyn is right

The 21st century will be an Anglosphere century, with America, India and Australia leading the way.

India's the place, not China.

"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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Boeing Blogs

Randy Baseler, VP of Marketing is Boeing's blogger at Randy's Journal

Defense Industry blog

Blogs are replacing trade journals.  It's easy to see why more updates, more news, more resources and less cost appeals to trade associations. 

Take a look at  Defense Industry Daily.  60,000 page views a month with no promotion.

Procurement officers from all military branches and top defense industry players are already reading it, he notes, including "all the big guys like Boeing, Raytheon, etc." A project manager for a multi-billion company "actually emailed me about the details of a story. I was amazed he was reading it."

Industry bigs are finding the Defense Industry Daily posts in search engines because "we're writing about a topic that people are spending hundreds of billions on and yet nobody is writing anything about it online. So we are often top 10 in Goggle because there is a vacuum in free public information on the industry."

And who had the scoop?  A female blogger.  BL Ochman

Yahoo blogs!

I'm late in reporting this but you may have missed it too.  Yahoo is now offering a free business web site to every small business in the U.S, through Yahoo local.  They announced it on their blog -  ysearchblog.com - They call it a look inside the world of search from the people of Yahoo.

Looks as if search is escaping the box and flowing into different and powerful new interfaces with a renewed forcus on the user experience and social media.  Or as they say software meets wetware (that's us users) in new ways, according to reports of the BayChi event on innovations in search.

New to me too is the Yahoo anti-spy community, now global and a step ahead of spyware and adware alerts, where you can find people sharing tips from their own experience.

BusinessWeek: Blogs Are a Business Prerequisite

Businessweek's cover story this week is Blogs Will change your Business.  Their advice: Catch up...or catch you later.  And it's written like a blog, and they've started their own blog, blogspotting to follow up.

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business -- including yours. It doesn't matter whether you're shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)
......
Still, blogs could end up providing the perfect response to mass media's core concern: the splintering of its audience. Advertisers desperate to reach us need to tap niches (because we get together only once a year to watch the Super Bowl). By piggybacking on blogs, they can start working that vast blogocafé, table by table. Smart ones will get feedback, links to individuals -- and their friends. That's every marketer's dream.
.....
Yes, we, too, are under the gun. MSM, the bloggers call us. Mainstream media. And many of them delight in uncovering our errors, knocking us off that big pedestal we've occupied since the the first broadsheets started circulating.

We have to master the world of blogs, too. This isn't because they're taking away ad revenue, at least not yet, but because they represent millions of eyewitnesses armed with computers spread around the world. They are potential competitors -- or editorial resources.

Bill Ives on Blog Excitement

Following the Jarvis post, I want to point to Bill Ives, who continues to write superior posts on the trends in blogs with a reach that extends to RSS and knowledge management.  It's always a pleasure to read this experienced, thoughtful and erudite writer.  His week end restaurant and music reviews aren't bad either.  He thinks and he links. 

Using content to create connections among people - Sales support people are using them to great success both internally for product issues and competitive intelligence and externally for customer support.

Adding syndicated content to your blog - New features all the time at the speed of light.

A great disclaimer and blog policy statement  An excerpt - "Don't come crying to me if you lose your job following my advice."

What's unique about blogs -bullet points.

And best of all - his seven part series on Why all the Excitement about Blogs in Business.

Part One - Offering a partial antidote to ever exploding content.  Blogs bring a filter, they aggregate content and bring context and personal meaning.  A simple means to provide users with new levels of control.

Part Two -Reducing the Clogging of the Communication Channels.  Bypassing email, spam, and groups to offer news and updates the reader chooses in a form that's easily archived and searchable.

Part Three - Providing the Needed Outlet for the Personal Voice.  Empowering individual employees through blogs has already been proven to motivate employees and enhance the quality of the content generated.

Part Four - Aligning with the Rise of Distributed Markets.  By turning over a measure of control to customers,  businesses build trust and commitment with their buyers, eBay a prime example.  Blogs provide an easy access point to the on-line marketplace of ideas and influence both inside and outside the corporate firewall

Part Five - Better Enabling the Decentralization of Business. Bypassing managers and allowing employees and teams to communicate with each other directly and at the same time serving as a valuable resource for future teams facing the same issues.

Part Six  - Meeting the Desire for More Individual Connections.  There's a pent-up demand for a personal connection.  Consumers would rather listen to the informal and unedited thoughts of an individual than the collective wisdom of the marketing department

Part Seven - Driving Better Understanding Through Dialog. Nothing beats face to face communication for effective dialog, but blogs, with their conversational tone and the ability to exchange comments is second.  It's marketing through conversations.

Intuit's blog

Toby Bloomberg, Marketing Diva, has a terrific post up with an interview with Paul Rosenberg, general manager of Quickbooks Online.  He  knows how to think big, act quickly, and be strategic. 

Why Intuit is Blogging via QuickBooks Online
Because QuickBooks Online Edition is a service that you pay $20/month and access over the internet, we have found prospective customers want to feel confident in placing their sensitive data online. One way to achieve this trust and confidence is to share information about who we are, what we're working on to help customers and improve the business, and be honest about our "warts" when we have them.

How Blogs Fit Into Intuit's Marketing Strategy
Our key marketing strategy is placing our customers at the center of all our marketing. We do this because we have a service that revolutionizes our customers' lives via anytime/anywhere access and their testimonials speak far better to prospects than reading sterile marketing copy.

The Quickbooks blog

Blogs in Real Estate

Paul Chaney writes about using blogs in verticals.

Lexblog.was the first blog development company focused on the legal services industry.  Now
BuildingBlogz is doing the same thing, targeting the residential and commercial real estate industry, 

Just look at their example of BlogzManor Apartments to see how useful it could be for apartment buildings and condo associations.

Blogs for word of mouth

Four reasons why companies should be using blogs to support word-of-mouth marketing, according to Todd Satterson at a Penny for Your Thoughts

1. Blogging is personal.  Usually written by one individual  who likes to talk and to tell other people things.
2. Linking.  Links are recommendations and "googlejuice"
3. Permanence. The conversations that take place are permanent.
4. RSS. To make your biggest fans evangelists,

Microsoft's voice in Siberia

Experts at Wharton say Blogging will be around for a long time.  For those of you who want to read more than my excerpts below, you'll find it at  Weblogs are here to stay, but where are they headed?

Wharton legal studies professor Dan Hunter puts blogging right up there with the printing press when it comes to sharing ideas and disseminating information. "This is not a fad," says Hunter. "It's the rise of amateur content, which is replacing the centralized, controlled content done by professionals."
-----
"At its most basic level, it's a technology that is lowering the cost of publishing" and turning out to be "the next extension of the web," says Wharton legal studies professor Kevin Werbach. "Blogging is still in its early days. It's analogous to where the web was in 1995 and 1996. It's not clear how it will turn out." 
-----
What is clear is that opportunities for blogging abound. Companies can use bloggers to put a more human face on interactions with employees and customers; marketers can create buzz through blogs; and bloggers can act as fact checkers for the mainstream media. There are dozens of applications for blogs, Werbach notes, and many that haven't even been conceived yet.
----
"Blogging is really driven by interest and desires, not commercial activity," says Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader. "It's rare to see something take off like this when commercial prospects are so minimal. People just want to share ideas."

One of the big pitfalls that corporations may encounter is not understanding the culture of blogging and produce content that's so carefully vetted that no human voice can be discerned. Microsoft didn't make that mistake. 

Robert Scoble, a Microsoft employee who operates Scobleizer, a blog about Microsoft products and developments, maintains one of the more interesting blogs around. Scoble, whose official title is "technical evangelist," sounds like many employees at large companies. He has his share of gripes, but will also defend his employer. The key is that he is balanced, says Brown. "This Microsoft employee has to maintain credibility by remaining transparent. By being negative once in a while, it's more credible when he's positive."

Scoble is so credible as a Microsoft blogger that he is viewed as the voice of the company across the globe. When Ted Demopoulos, principal of Demopoulos Associates, an information technology consulting company, was traveling in Russia recently, he stopped in Surgut, Siberia, where he was surprised to find Scoble fans. "I'm out in the middle of nowhere and they ask me about Scoble," says Demopoulos. "To them, Scoble is the voice of Microsoft."

Scoble represents the power of a blogger who is trusted by his readers to be candid and say what he really thinks.  Even as they are downloading their thousandth patch for Microsoft's Explorer, people have a personal relationship with the Company because of Scoble.  Microsoft couldn't buy that.

Don't Get in Their Way

There's a lot we can learn about leadership from the military.  James Cartwright, General of the USMC, Commander, USStratcom has a Command and Control blog (not accessible) and he wants the right answer from whoever has it.  From The Daily Brief by Sgt Stryker-  A lesson on how blogs can be used in business.

The metric is what the person has to contribute, not the person’s rank, age, or level of experience. If they have the answer, I want the answer. When I post a question on my blog, I expect the person with the answer to post back. I do not expect the person with the answer to run it through you, your OIC, the branch chief, the exec, the Division Chief and then get the garbled answer back before he or she posts it for me. The Napoleonic Code and Netcentric Collaboration cannot exist in the same space and time. It’s YOUR job to make sure I get my answers and then if they get it wrong or they could have got it righter, then you guide them toward a better way…but do not get in their way.

Here Come Podcasts

Some of you are just learning about blogs and RSS feeds, so you may not know about podcasting.
Podcasting refers to the technology used to pull digital audio files from websites down to computers and portable devices like the Apple iPod hence the name.

Everything you need to know to get up to speed on what podcasting is all about can be found at Move Over Blogs: Here Come Podcasts. by Stephan Spencer.

HT to Toby Bloomberg at Diva Marketing.

Blogs Next Tipping Point?

Frank Baranko over at CBS Marketwatch says 8 million bloggers can't be wrong. 

Some selected quotes from his article and the interview with Chuck Richard, vice president and lead analyst for Outsell, a California-based technology market research firm.

[T]hey have "a horrible name and are virtually unknown, but they are going to be big."

Behind the sizzle stirs the essential ingredients of the next tipping point in the information industry.

"Clearly, there is a huge element of vanity press, but that's not important. What is important is the business-to-business applications,"

Richard urges companies to "quickly embrace" the opportunity to engage customer's interests and attention. "The long-term odds are heavy to the upside," he wrote. "You're betting with house money and (companies ) can only lose by not playing." 

"The result is a living, always-on example of the potential wisdom of crowds,"

Blogs offer "full transparency and instant dialogue on authenticity and accuracy." 

Blogs already are being mined for early intelligence warnings. At least four firms track the online conversations as market research for clients: Intelliseek BlogPulse, Techdirt, Factiva Insight, and Bacon's Information. Paid subscription Web logs are not far away.

Job Blog

Would you believe that the Boston Globe has a job blog?  Well it does and it's pretty good.  Part of Bostonworks - "jobs, events and information from the Boston Globe, the job blog pulls together good information from around the Globe - inside too - all in all, a welcome respite for those seeking jobs on its online listings.

It's a very good example of how a mainline media company can use blogs to its advantage, providing information to the HR people who list the jobs.  Information I haven't found anywhere else includes:

A new group plan that offers 'free agent' workers affordable health benefits.  The National Health Access plan also covers part-time, temporary, seasonal and contract workers and is the brainchild of 60 Fortune 500 companies that joined forces to attract insurers.   

Come Again? The AARP has launched an online job bank designed to link workers 50 and older with a group of pre-selected employers.

Work spouses.  a new phenomenon that makes a lot of sense.

But in our own casual, platonic way, we became a couple: I didn’t have to love, honor, or obey—I merely vowed to hang out with her at ?re drills. We ate lunch together, mocked coworkers together, and shared the few genuine feelings that didn’t get soaked with cynicism and sink to the bottom of our souls forever. She kept me from sending hotheaded e-mails I might later regret. “Step away from the keyboard!” she would tell me. I kept her entertained. For ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, Amy was my work wife. I was her day husband.

Fortune 500's who blog

Jeremy Enright has compiled a list of the Fortune 500 companies who are blogging -externally, internally or in management.  While he can't confirm it, he suspects that between 10-20% are using blogs in some way.

• GM
• Sun Microsystems
• Microsoft
• Google
• Yahoo!
• Boeing
• CitiGroup
• IBM
• HP
• Time Warner
• Dell, Inc.
• Lockheed
• Wells Fargo
• Intel
• Delphi
• Merril Lynch
• Disney (hugely, internally)
• Motorola
• FedEx
• Mitsubishi
• Cisco
• Raytheon
• Haliburton
• Kimberly-Clark
• UAL
• Delta
• Winn-Dixie
• MBNA
• Toys R Us
• Nike
• Pepsi
• Texas Instruments
• Oracle
• Avon
• Apple Computer
• Shell
• McGraw-Hill
• Radio Shack
• Starbucks
• New York Times

Blog or Die

Robert Scobel is one of the most famous bloggers in the country, bringing a human face to Microsoft and becoming arguably the second most famous Microsoft employee after Bill Gates.

He and Shel Israel are collaborating on a business blogging book called The Red Couch, though I like the title of the first chapter he has put up on the net for review far better, Blog or Die.  If only I could write as well or as compellingly.  Here are some excerpts.

Blogging is one of those “somethings.” It is vital and strategic to the future of business. Some who ignore this fact will face the same fate as the village blacksmith of the last century.

How can this communications mechanism be so damned important? Five years ago, it was dismissed as the purview of lonely diarists, the politically obsessed or the technologically zealous. Today, blogging has become the most rapidly adopted technology in history. Today, in February 2005, 40,000 new blogs will start. By the time you read this book, that number is likely to be much higher. More than 10 percent of all Americans read blogs, an increase of 60 percent in 12 months, according to Pew Research.
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[B]logging is necessary. It is necessary because it gives companies and constituencies direct interaction between each other. It is necessary because the other communications tools—press releases, ads, banners, websites, brochures, PowerPoint presentations are all irreparably broken. People neither believe nor trust the slickness of corporate materials and spokespeople.
----
The result is blogging has become the best way for your company to get attention, promote product adoption, get press coverage and build loyal customer bases. Businesses are made smarter by receiving the kind of direct, candid feedback that focus groups and market research surveys rarely succeed in providing. Blogging is the best way to listen to what the market is saying about you. Letting employees blogs is a superior way to show you trust them.
-----
To not blog today can find you facing the same fate as the village blacksmith of the last century. Ask a leading bike lock manufacturer who ignored posting on how his product could be picked, or a Silicon Valley computer games maker who didn’t pay attention to posted complaints of employee abuse or Dan Rather who stuck to his guns not realizing they were pointed at him.
---
Blogs have come to prominence just when so much else has failed. Today, they are the best way to
make your company more profitable, grow faster, or get your product more rapidly adopted. They are a kinder, gentler, more polite and therefore more effective way to reach people who matter to your company.

Legal blogbot reads WSJ

This is cool - the first blog avatar I've seen.    Andy Havens at legalmarketing reprises the Wall Street Journal article saying the blog as business tool has arrived.  He asks in his post and via his little friend he calls the Blogbot  - Will law firm marketing departments listen? 
It's about the best summary of why lawyers should use blogs that I've seen.

• Name recognition at a greatly reduced price
• RSS feeds don't get blocked by spam-guard like some email newsletters
• Search result increases can yield many more visitors in a span of months
• Content establishes reputation
• Comments allow for interactivity, which is a key "stickiness" factor for repeat viewers
• Authentic voice is more attractive than "PR-Speak" to many customers

Legal services are a perfect match for blogs -- the law is content-heavy. It's not like you're selling leg-warmers here, people. You've got lots to say, and your public wants to hear it.  Don't hide your light under a bushel basket. Publish it on a blog.It's the Wall Street Journal, people. How much more mainstream do we need to get before you'll wake up and smell the bacon?

I'd like to see Yvonne at Lipsticking use one.  After all, she already has the caricature, I'm sure she'll be diving into podcasts soon.  Why not try Oddcast.

Hat tip The Common Scold

UPDATE:  The blogbot has retired to the Bahamas.  You couldn't turn off and too many people found it annoying.  Hey, I thought it was fun, but I guess it's sort of like those animated toys that sing.  By third time you've heard 'raindrops keep falling on my head', you're ready to scream at the next person who walks by

More evidence of the blog advantage

Steven Broback over at the Blog Business Summit has created a terrific graph to show the blog advantage over traditional websites.