Toby over at Diva Marketing has a great post on Blogger Relations / Blogger Relations Programs.

She goes over bloggers vs journalists, bloggers as influencers, and the different expectations of bloggers when being approached by journalists or companies.

Bloggers are not set against partnerships or sponsorships or anything of the sort, for the most part. We just have different expectations in the way in which we are pitched.

Toby then outlines the essential elements to a Blogger Relations Program, as follows:

• Build on the values of social media
• Establish credibility and trust by creating relationships
• On-going informal conversations - comments, email, phone, face-to-face
• Position (you/company) as resource that can provide value added information
• Develop long-range programs that engage and develop the relationships
• Provide "special blogger only something" - TBD by strategy and needs
• Bring bloggers together to discuss related issues
• Include bloggers in customer feedback circles
• Respect bloggers’ time
• Courtesy and appreciation - thank the blogger for her participation and help

Hop on over to Diva Marketing to participate in the discussion.

Tags: blogger relations, blogger relations program, blogging, pr, blogs, marketing to bloggers

McDonald’s has thus far made some missteps in the blogosphere. First for it’s "fake blog", and now for it’s tentative "corporate" take on blogging.

Shel Israel has taken a firm stance against what McDonald’s is now doing, seeing it as a way to exploit this new "blogging thing", rather than as a way to build relationships or trust.

I do agree. Many companies come to blogging to see what they can get out of it, now what they can give to it. They want to suck out the most money from their blogging efforts as possible. Get that maximum ROI. It’s not focused on the people, the dialogue, the long term relationships or loyalty.

Shel has taken a step further an has offered McDonald’s some tips to blog more effectively:

1. Start a conversation with your customers. [and be honest]
2. Talk about a typical day in the life of a franchise owner
3. Ask your customers what they want of you. [and listen]
4. Drop the language of corpspeak.
5. Read other people’s blogs. Join their conversations.

The blogosphere can forgive and embrace. But it will remain suspicious of motives when it comes to large corporations and previous missteps. We’ll have to wait and see if McDonald’s will reap the benefits of dialogue - benefits that could revolutionize their business concepts and ideas - or if they are publicly denounced for their "PR" approach to blogging.

Tags: business blogging, mcdonalds, pr

It’s hard to grow as a blogger without falling under some criticism. Luckily in the year I’ve been blogging, most of it professionally, the criticism and angry commentary has been rare. But it’s been there.

Bloggers get some flack. And sometimes it’s some major stuff. Sometimes it’s for what you stand for. Somtimes for who you cite or your research bias. Sometimes it’s for your opinion. And sometimes, unfortunately, it’s personal. People just hate you, and they are ok saying so.

An example. I’ve been openly criticized for my opinion on a cafe on my Vancouver Coffee blog. It was a hard one for me. The criticism was major - public - and rude. We thankfully migrated the ‘fight’ offline, so to speak, and moderated even, but it got me down. Once I moved past it I realized that the online fight looked far worse for the instigator than for me, and left it there as a reminder - and as a bit of a permanent payback as well, perhaps. ;)

Nonetheless, as a blogger you’re likely to hit these down moments when you just want to stop sharing and turn off your comments. Darren over at ProBlogger talks about some ways to deal with criticism:

1. Thicken your skin
2. Establish boundaries
3. Remember the Humanness of the Other (vital)
4. Step away from the computer
5. Listen
6. Accept responsibility
7. Don’t get personal
8. Take it private
9. Keep perspective
10. Look for Opportunities (this is something we do a lot when we meet negative Qumana reviews. And it works)
11. Anger = Threat
12. Dialogue
13. Consider a Mediator
14. Control the Rhythm and Tone of your Blog
15. Move on

Read the details of each point from Darren. [italics are my own comments]. Some very valuable insight on how to deal with the flack - and how to avoid it in the future.

Tags: blogging, criticism, fights

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The Bloggies are open for their 6th year of awards for the Best Blogs, and you determine who the winners will be by nominating your favorite blogs.

Nominations fall into the following categories, and, yes, you can nominate a blog for more than one category!

• Best Web Application for Weblogs
• Best Australian or New Zealand Weblog
• Best Asian Weblog
• Best African or Middle Eastern Weblog
• Best European Weblog
• Best British or Irish Weblog
• Best Latin American Weblog
• Best Canadian Weblog
• Best American Weblog
• Best Tagline of a Weblog
• Best Podcast of a Weblog
• Best Photography of a Weblog
• Best Craft Weblog
• Best Food Weblog
• Best Entertainment Weblog
• Best Weblog About Politics
• Best Web Development Weblog
• Best Computers or Technology Weblog
• Best Topical Weblog
• Best GLBT Weblog
• Best Teen Weblog
• Most Humorous Weblog
• Best Writing of a Weblog
• Best Group Weblog
• Best Community Weblog
• Best-Designed Weblog
• Best-Kept-Secret Weblog
• Best New Weblog
• Weblog of the Year

To be consideed for the final vote, a blog must be one of the top 10 nominated blogs. So, get nominating. I would be very honored if you nominated us! Thanks!

Tags: bloggies, weblog awards

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Paul Kedrosky put out a survey to address domain ownership. The results were interesting, although quite expected.

Out of 110 respondents, 80% own at least one domain name. The data is, of course, skewed towards techies and business savvy individuals, so we’d expect this market to be domain owners. We just like to have them.

Of course, there are many reasons to own your own domain. To have your own brand. Your own control. To establish a continued web presence. To resell later. Sometimes buying up misspells of their own URL even.

One thing I would like to see from the survey, as it relates to blogging, is whether or not businesses formed a “site” and a “blog” on the same, or different, URLs. From my experience working with businesses, and in talking about blogs, this is a common thread. When it comes to a blog, the debate arises about whether it should be a new domain or the same as /blog or blog.site.com… how does it affect branding? SEO? Customer attraction & retention? Confusion?

So, I’d personally be more interested in this data - in how blogs fit into the ownership of domains and the choices made in where a blog should go. Input?

Tomorrow and Wednesday I will be doing a presentation/workship for the International Internet Marketing Association (IIMA) with Tris Hussey on Blogging.

The first night we’re focusing on Blogging 101 - what is blogging, why should businesses participate, and the basics of getting a blog up and running.

The second night we go into more of a Q & A period on Advanced Blogging, for people who know what a blog is and may already have one. This includes some of the more advanced uses of blogging, and how you can tap them for more. We have some demos planned, like understanding metrics and getting custom feeds. More or less we expect to get a lot of business application questions, and that’s great.

Both nights are really hands on. We have a computer lab, some slides, and are ready to dive into some great demos. Should be very interesting. Not enough events of this type are put on.

I’m looking forward to presenting everything and meeting some new people. The second event is sold out, and the first one almost booked up, which is great news! It’s a cool turnaround from last year, when I first presented with Tris, and Roland of Bryght, on blogging for business, and really started to break into blogging.

At that time I was still in the corporate world doing marketing, and a blog, and not long after that I broke off into what I do now. So, it’s cool to turn around a whole year and see what I’ve accomplished, what’s happened in the blogging world, and where my confidence and understanding now are.

So, we’ll probably be posting our slides online after the event. I think some Vancouver guys might be event blogging it too, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Jakob Nielsen has listed the top 10 design mistakes for blogs:

1. No Author Biographies - it’s all about trust & credentials

2. No Author Photo - good for press, credibility, recall factor

3. Nondescript Posting Titles - you likely have less than a second in scan time to grab attention

4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go - tell people where they are going, what to expect, and don’t use nicknames.

5. Classic Hits are Buried - make best articles direct navigation links, and link in other articles (good one!)

6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation - categories are key!

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency

8. Mixing Topics

“The more focused your content, the more focused your readers. That, again, makes you more influential within your niche. Specialized sites rule the Web, so aim tightly.”

9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss

10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Letting somebody else own your name means that they own your destiny on the Internet. They can degrade the service quality as much as they want. They can increase the price as much as they want. They can add atop your content as many pop-ups, blinking banners, or other user-repelling advertising techniques as they want. They can promote your competitor’s offers on your pages. Yes, you can walk, but at the cost of your loyal readers, links you’ve attracted from other sites, and your search engine ranking.

A very well rounded tip base. I think #5 is far too often overlooked - and makes me want to add more navigation tips to my own blogs. #8 hits home - simply start more blogs! and

#10 - ah, a pet peeve of mine. Just imaging what you would put on your business card and how much better it would look if you could match your email to your domain - oh, but if you don’t own that domain, you’re outta luck. There’s just too many restrictions associated with that route - and, for a simple $15 a year for a URL, free services like WordPress, and easy hosting solutions, why would you even consider a site whose domain you don’t own?

BTW - for those of you pro writers out there who follow this domain route, let it be know that people like myself often think twice before subscribing after wondering why you don’t own your URL, why you would bother with some annoying platform, and how seriously you take your future blogging efforts. :)

Via Boing Boing

Hill & Knowlton have a new blog policy set to embrace employee blogging in the right way.

The new employee blogs will be embraced under the name of “Collective Conversation: Hill & Knowlton’s professional blogging community,” with this preface.

Like many other companies, we believe that blogs have the potential to become powerful communications tools. We have created this community to give our consultants the opportunity to participate in the blogosphere, to listen to and learn from our audiences, and to contribute their own vast insight and experience on topics related to our industry.

Whilst the blogs within this community are written “professionally”, the views expressed by the authors remain their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the company.

All of the blogs are linked to centrally with a description. If you follow the links, you’ll see interesting tabular representations of the blogs, the number of posts, number of comments, team vs. individual, and the overall pride the company is taking in highlighting and supporting their bloggers.

Here is the aforementioned policy:

* I will acknowledge and correct mistakes promptly
* I will preserve the original post, using notations to show where I have made changes
* I will never delete a post
* I will not delete comments unless they are spam or off-topic
* I will disclose conflicts of interest (including client relationships) where I am able to do so
* I will not publish anything that breaches my existing employment contract
* I will distinguish between factual information/commentary and advertising
* I will never publish information I know to be inaccurate
* I will disagree with other opinions respectfully
* I will link to online references and original source materials directly
* I will strive for high quality with every post - including basic spellchecking
* I will write deliberately and with accuracy
* I will reply to emails and comments when appropriate, and do so promptly
* I will restrict my posting to professional topics
* I will write on a regular basis, at least once each week

Why is this good? It’s open. It’s brief. It’s clear. And it’s easy to follow.

Take this. Modify it. Make it your own.

Via Buzz Marketing with Blogs

Technorati Tags: hill & knowlton, blogging, business, professional blogging, blog policy, revolution

Chris Pirillo has a funny post on how not to get fired for blogging. Pretty sure some would be good strategies. No pub sub is going to pull up the misspelled company name, after all. Granted, that provides someone else in the company has to know about blogs and care about the company’s place in the blogosphere.

Here are my favourite tips:

10. Cats. Write about cats. A lot.

9. Always mispell your company’s name, just in case someone else is savvy enough to use (a) a search engine or (b) a keyboard.

8. When you talk about your co-workers, pretend you’re writing about a magical far away land of gnomes. Give them names such as “Whitey the Clumsy” or “Snitchbug.”

4. Learn to love garlic, as it will repel pesky co-workers (as well as the ocassional vampire).

Technorati Tags: pirillo, blogging, business, fired, cats

BlogHer Session: Blogging for Business

Speakers: Lisa Meyers Brown, Susan Getgood, Christine Halvorson, Mary Smaragdis

Flickr pictures

How to be successful:

1. Define your topic

2. Hit an emotional chord, not just intellectual ones

3. Use banners to your advantage to grow your traffic

4. PR works

5. Maybe ignore the ROI and focus instead on changing attitudes not sales

6. Corporate culture must foster trust and internal dialogue

7. Have a policy

8. If you don’t want it to be in a press release, don’t put it on a blog

9. Be risk tolerant - goes with trust

10. High level executive support

11. Be open to the value of community

12. Be willing to let go of some editorial control

13. Show you are committed to it

14. Keep the motivation high, and this can include helping with topics

15. Write about what you know (topic and opinion)

16. If you allow employees to blog, allow them to do it whenever with the caveat that the rest of what they do needs to be done

17. Speak to your niche community of readers, if you know who they are. Otherwise be more broad.

18. What is your mission? Stay true to it

19. Is it a product blog? An ‘on the scene’ blog?

20. Find the great writers in your company, no matter what they do

21. Do not be afraid of having opinions.

22. Express honest opinions on competitors, but don’t push it

Who should do it? You, your employees or (ack) your customers? Strategy comes into play here, of course. You can also do all three.

If you have evangelist customers, ask them to be a part of a customer blog. They must be customers present online, of course, and this is especially true if fan sites build up. You also must make it fun and easy for your bloggers to write. After teaching them how to do it, perhaps, you can also provide inside scoops and help interaction build through comments. You can also engage with fan sites, rather than starting up all new customer blogs. It need not be controlled within to filter your news.

Stonyfield Farms blogging came about after the CEO worked on the Howard Dean campaign and saw the benefits of blogging.

BlogHer Live tracking page

Technorati Tags: blogher, bloghercon

Lee Odden gives some excellent suggestions for ways to mine your own content to improve your ranking. This advice is for business blogs who think, incorrectly, that they have nothing to write about.

Here are the suggestions:

* Archive your newsletters

* Archive and syndicate your own press releases and media coverage

* Add syndicated news

* Add press releases content syndicated from other sources

* Use articles open for re-use from article directories

* Use Yahoo Creative Commons search to find available content

* Publish a glossary

* Publish client testimonials

* Publish product/service demos

* Publish a Q & A and/or FAQ

All great suggestions. Once you get in the flow of it, you’d be amazed how much more you have to say than you think you did. As Lee so correctly mentions, creating a content strategy is more than just a short term SEO approach. It is an approach that optimizes you for the long-term.

Technorati Tags: blogging, seo, business, writing, content

Good advice from Steve Rubel

Run a Conference, Then Invite Bloggers

If you run any kind of industry event, be sure to put bloggers on your invite list. It’s a no-brainer.

I’d go a step further: invite bloggers to help you advertise the conference. Right from the get go, months in advance.

Why?

Simple - increased exposure, varied audience background, increased interest in your topic, hype, sharing of knowledge and information, and dialogue between speakers and attendees. Need I say more? Get that event hyped, and get that internal, live dialogue that makes the conference just that much more valuable for those there.

Great value - probably the easiest and most inexpensive aspect of conference marketing.

Conference/event blogging is a great way to get known in your industry, and if you don’t do it, you may find your conference getting a bit stale. Or maybe it already is, but you haven’t noticed it.

Well, my advice: start up your blog and get bloggers in to work on it.

Technorati Tags: professional blogging, conferences, bloggers

Sharon Housely at FeedForAll makes a good argument that RSS make the biggest splash for enterprise users.

The most simple explanation: it’s a pull medium. People, in this case consumers, can select which content they want to receive. This pull for content will keep the case for good quality high and the hard sell low - after all, you can just as easily hit unsubscribe.

Although I seriously do not agree with some of Sharon’s assumptions (that without monetizing blogs, bloggers will abandon them and the blogosphere as we know it will die), I will pull out those tidbits which are significant. That companies are increasingly finding value in the medium of RSS and that this trend will continue (although not, as Sharon thinks, to the detriment of personal blogging).

As businesses adopt RSS and consumers experiment with feeds, the popularity of RSS will grow. Ultimately, consumers are the driving force behind technology. The convenience of RSS and increased popularity will set a precedent for consumer expectations. Businesses using RSS as a communication vehicle are able to create keyword-rich, themed content, establishing trust, reputation, and ongoing communication with current and prospective customers…

Consumer expectation will drive businesses that are slow to adopt. Ultimately, RSS will be a standard, like email addresses and websites are now a “must” for businesses. RSS feeds will join their ranks.

Blogs and RSS propose a challenge to companies to drop the old way of thinking and to adopt a different approach to communications. An open sharing of information, insight and perspective. It is an inexpensive tool in the communications toolbox that for now provides significant business benefits but that will, in time, be less of an option and more of a requirement for business success.

via Sally Falkow

Technorati Tags: blogging, monetization, communications, rss

The Wall Street Journal has an article today asking if newspapers should sponsor reporters’ blogs. So, let’s address what was said.

WSJ takes example of Matt Marshall, whose blog SiliconBeat, is sponsored by the Mercury News, where he is a reporter. Matt used his blog to raise questions about rumours of the Microsoft acquisition of Claria, a topic he was also covering as part of his regular beat. The only difference was that Matt could say just about anything he wanted on his blog, without an official review from an editor. He could raise points and facts that could not be brought to light in traditional press.

“I could definitely see how in journalism circles people could look at what we do and be a little bit nervous,” Mr. Bazeley says. But “when we sit down to write news stories, we put on a totally different hat.”

SiliconBeat (www.siliconbeat.com) and other blogs like it represent a departure from the just-the-facts tradition of mainstream news reporting… To date, it is relatively rare for newspapers to sponsor reporter-written blogs.

Why is it rare? For a newspaper to sponsor a blog of this sort, it would have to be o.k. with bias, opinions, and a whole range of commentary. A newspaper is traditionally thought of as non-partisan press - unbiased reporting. Although the owners of the press, the reporters themselves and other factors influence the selection and coverage of news in subtle ways making them partisan to some degree, it is rare for the opinions to be overt or controversial.

Read the rest of my article on the Qumana blog…

Technorati Tags: wsj, blogging, journalism

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So, I just confirmed my trip down to Blogher. Quite excited to be going. Blogher has been buzzing around just as much as Gnomedex. I’m interested to see how the event goes off, what the vibe is, and all of that.

Will be event blogging the whole thing, of course. I think that has to be the most exciting aspect of blogging for me - being in the vibe, catching it. I think it’s a great opportunity to share not just the outline of what’s going on, but to really catch its value for others.

If you are going to Blogher and want to meet up, leave me a comment. I’m coming over on the 29th and arrive fairly decently at dinner time. Will be staying over till the afternoon of the 1st of August to mingle and enjoy the sunny weather.

Hope to see you there!

Thanks to Qumana for helping me go down. I’ll be promoting both Qumana and Lektora while I’m down there, and am looking forward to sharing some of the new features to come. Trust me, it’s exciting stuff.

Technorati Tags: blogher

Technorati Tags: http://www.technorati.com/tags/blogher