Marketing expert Max Blumberg conversed with Bob Bly, saying:

[…] Blogging is more likely to raise brand awareness, but that the impact on direct sales will be more difficult to assess. Blogging is akin to, and probably forms part of public relations whose direct impact on revenue is difficult to measure, but definitely exists.

Absolutely spot on. It seems like this and other conversations Bob has had about his previous dismissal of blogging have gone some way towards persuading him that blogs require at the very least some investigation. Indeed Bob has now started his own blog. In the first post, he says:

In this blog, I want to provide the blogosphere with a view from my side of the fence as a member of another “sphere” – old-fashioned direct marketers who still believe the main purpose of marketing is to get the cash register ringing and not just have “conversations.”

This is great. I applaud Bob’s willingness to experiment and explore a medium with which he is not familiar, but I hope that he tries to dig a bit deeper than many marketeers currently do to see the genuine usefulness of blogs, not just as a way to communicate with (and, in some unfortunate cases, broadcast to) a market, but also in other contexts. After all, which business tool is flexible enough to be employed as a CRM tool, for knowledge sharing, or as a lightweight CMS?

I’ll give you a hint. It ends in ‘-og’.

Bob Bly is meeting rather a lot of resistance at the moment for his piece Can Blogging Help Your Product? in which he fairly firmly decides that blogs have no value as a marketing tool. Unfortunately the article is rather flawed, illustrating more Bly’s lack of knowledge and understanding than potential problems with using blogs in marketing.

Bly’s initital error, and the one I want to address here, is an assumption I have come across repeatedly over the last couple of weeks. He quotes Debbie Weil:

“A blog is an online journal,” blogging expert Deb Weil explains in her Business Blogging Starter Kit (www.wordbiz.com). “It’s called a journal because every entry is time and date stamped and always presented in reverse chronological order.

In Weil’s response to Bly’s piece, she says that her quote was taken out of context, yet Bly’s use of it reinforces the mistaken characterisation of blogs as nothing more than personal diaries. This then blinds non-bloggers to the potential uses for blogging software because they write it off before fully exploring the possibilities.

Just recently I had a long conversation with a friend of mine who, despite working in IT, confessed that he didn’t ‘get’ blogs. He also sees only the personal diary aspect of blogs and because he sees no use for personal diaries in business he doesn’t see the relevance of blogs to his work.

At the root of this problem is the confusion between the blog tool and the blog content. A blog is no more a diary than an empty notebook is a diary. Blogs become a diary when people use them to publish diary entries in the same way that a notebook becomes a diary when you write a diary entry in it.

But an empty notebook can also be a sketch book, a novel, an exercise book, a dictionary, or an infinite variety of other things, depending entirely on content. Equally, a blog can also be a tool for disseminating important news, or a project log, or a team building tool, or a marketing tool, or whatever its user chooses to make it.

In fact, blogs are a lightweight content management system which are easy to use, have strong archiving, cross referencing and search facilities, and are cost effective and flexible. That is what they are. A diary is what some people make them.

This leads me on to another conversation with another friend who brought up familiar concerns about even using the words ‘blog’ or ‘weblog’ with clients. He finds it counter-productive because frequently they neither understand the terms nor do they wish to expend the effort to get to grips with what they consider to be new and unusual (therefore potentially threatening) concepts. In other cases, he suffers the same blog=diary misconception.

Instead, he advocates using any other words or phrases which is appropriate to the client’s existing paradigm, whether that is ‘e-newsletter’, ‘event logging tool’, or CMS, it doesn’t really matter. What’s important is to get the client using the blog software and seeing the value in it. Later on you can explain that what they’ve been doing is blogging, but by then they’re so familiar with the process that the label is irrelevant – it’s water off a duck’s back.

Of course, none of this is really news. Anyone who’s tried to explain blogging to a non-blogger has probably come up against it. But it does cause a problem for those of us who work with blogs in business – how does one explain what one does if one can’t use the word ‘blog’?

One thing’s for sure. I shan’t be saying ‘Oh, well, it’s like a diary…’.

Richard Giles takes a look at the history of the internet and why he thinks businesses should keep public-facing blogs. Possibly a bit too detailed, but an interesting take anyway.

I’m glad to say that my good friend and fellow blogger, Michael O’Connor Clarke, has finally been sucked into the Corante vortex with his new PR/marketing blog, Flackster.

I can say from experience that Michael knows his onions like no other flack I’ve ever met. He even knows a bit about PR and marketing too. Without doubt, Flackster is one for the aggregator – I can say with confidence that if you like my style here at Strange Attractor, you’ll love Michael’s writing.

So welcome aboard, Michael. Good to have another mad Brit around the place.

Back in August (see how behind I’ve been with my blog reading?!) Danny O’Brien chewed on a question that is very close to being a question that’s very close to my heart. Danny’s questions is ‘How famous do you want to be?‘.

The fame question appeared in 1997. We were futzing around doing an NTK Live in Soho, and Stew Lee turned up to watch. He was very impressed with all the cabling and the recording equipment and the laptops we were using, and asked how many people were listening to the show online. Standing next to the streaming server, I could answer him instantly: maybe twenty or so (there were probably about seventy people watching the show at the venue). He looked very disappointed, and probably a bit defensively, I found myself asking him The First Question. How many people do you need to be famous for?

In a more recent update (thank god Danny doesn’t blog daily, otherwise I’d be way too far behind), Danny says:

The fame piece got a big reaction, and has been looking increasingly fascinating topic for me. Like Life Hacks, I’ve got this strong sense that this is rich new topic that may be too big for me to explore on my own. I’m doing my best.

I’m not surprised it got a big reaction. There are a lot of people kicking about who would like to be either famous or, in the very least, middling-to-famous. As one of those people, (and yes, I know you’re not supposed to admit it in public, but I have always made a crap fan, and would rather have them than be one), I am obviously very interested in Danny’s conclusions, as and when he draws them.

However, once Danny has answered his question, my question will remain. Once we can say ‘X is how many people you need to be famous for’, we will still need to answer ‘But how do I know how many people I am famous for?’.

In the blogosphere one could argue that such metrics are easily gathered by server stats, but that’s really not true. These days I get most of my referrals to Chocolate and Vodka from Google, so the chances are that most people who swing past there are on their way somewhere else. In particular the guys (and I assume that they *are* guys) looking for ‘hot messy chocolate fuck’ (yes, they’re being more selective in their search terms now) are not actually going to CnV because they know who I am, but because they think they’re gonna get to see some pr0n.

How terribly disappointing for them.

But my point is, visitor numbers can only give you a hint as to for how many people you are famous. It’s sort of a null hypothesis thing – if you have no visitors then you are likely not to be famous, but having lots of visitors doesn’t necessarily mean that they are visiting because they know who you are. It might just mean that Google throws up your blog for lots of different search terms.

So what are the markers of the 1500+ fans microfame?

YASN popularity? Ok, so the size of your Orkut friends pool is not going to give you any true indication of your microfame status because mostly people aren’t friends with their fans. Besides, some unscrupulous people have engaged in Orksluttery, befriending anyone who asked them, at least until the novelty wore off and the ‘no donut for you naughty server’ 404 messages ceased to be amusing and started to crawl up one’s nose like an earwig with a taste for mucous.

Having your own IRC channel? Ooh, laughable. Doesn’t take much to set one up, doesn’t mean you’re famous. Just that you have an ego the size of, er, well, mine.

Your own wiki? Cf. above.

Technorati rank? You might say that the people in Technorati Top 100 are pretty much guaranteed to be famous to some extent, but it doesn’t help the rest of us. One’s blog ranking might be interpreted to indicate relative fame, because one could argue that people are linking to you purposefully, but it doesn’t give you any absolute data about number of fans, just number of people linking to you.

PageRank doesn’t help – it says nothing about relative levels of fame, just how well you do in Google’s PageRank algorithm.

Although the above only refers to the blogosphere, the same issues are prevalent in other areas of our lives too.

Here’s an anecdote. I used to be really active amongst Welsh learners, trying very hard to improve the resources available online and to encourage people to not just take up the language but to persevere with their studies. When I went to the Eisteddfod (a big Welsh language festival), people would sometimes come up to me, knowing who I was because of what I’d done with Clwb Malu Cachu. Now, I may well have been microfamous then, but I really had no way of telling.

In a sense, it was not knowing where I stood, not knowing whether my efforts were being appreciated by anyone at all, that resulted in a feeling of isolation from the rest of the learning community. That feeling of isolation was exacerbated by geography and by the fact that I was a learner-turned-teacher who wasn’t completely fluent and couldn’t take part in monolingual Welsh discussions. Thus I was isolated by physical location and by language – rather ironic for one concerned with teaching languages online.

Ultimately, that feeling of isolation, and the failure to find out what my position within the Welsh community was, lead to my almost complete withdrawal from it.

I am starting, by this point in this post, to write myself into some understanding of why I am interested – concerned, even – in knowing what my level of microfame is, and why it’s important in terms of blogging. Status within the community always has been important to us human beings, and it doesn’t matter whether that community is online or offline, we want to know where we stand.

Whilst I was at BlogTalk 2 earlier this year, Stefan Glänzer presented a paper called Does Blogging Suck? Some of the reasons he gave for blogging sucking were:

– no readers
– no comments
– no trackbacks
– no attention

Blogs have a notoriously high churn rate, with people bailing out when they suffer from the above symptoms. According to Glänzer only 18% of new blogs survive their first month. Before giving up, many bloggers write epitaphs:

– Is anybody reading?
– test test test
– I think I need a break … I will be back …

These are all essentially pleas for feedback and for confirmation that one is not writing in isolation. The blogger is trying to find out what their status is in the community, and when they fail, they abandon the blog on the assumption (correct or otherwise) that they in fact are not a part of any community. In essence, they are attempting to climb onto the ladder which may at some point lead them to a pre-fame status, and thence onwards and upwards to microfame and beyond.

If we can understand how people feel about factors such as microfame, maybe we can better understand what drives people to both start and abandon blogging. Maybe then we can understand how to protect business blogging against the sort of churn rate that personal blogging suffers.

Technorati’s Dave Sifry takes a brief look at the state of the corporate blogosphere, which he defines as ‘people who blog in an official or semi-official capacity at a company, or are so affiliated with the company where they work that even though they are not officially spokespeople for the company, they are clearly affiliated’.

That’s a pretty broad definition of ‘corporate’ but one I’ll accept for now if only because to narrow down the definition might result in a single figure blog count. As it is, Technorati only identifies around 5000 blogs, which is only 0.1 of a percent of the blogs that the site tracks.

Although Sifry explains his criteria for judging what is or isn’t a corporate blog, he doesn’t say how he identified which blogs are corporate and which are not. It must be tricky for a spider to differentiate between a corporate blog and any other sort of blog, so I’d be interested to know how he performed the count.

Unsurprisingly, the main companies using blogs externally are tech companies like Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Macromedia. Sifry also groups together ‘media sites’ and ‘blogging companies’ which, between them, account for a sizeable slice of the pie.

Again, I’d love to see more detail on this. How many of these blogs are official? How many unofficial? How do the media sites and blogging companies slices break down? How many official blogs are marketing a specific product or service? How many are simply about improving presence?

As it is, Sifry’s report barely scratches the surface in terms of providing meaningful information about the use of blogs in business. The obvious point to make is that it only discusses external blogs. All the dark blogs – the internal blogs that are hidden away on intranets – remain uncounted and unmeasured, yet these blogs are the ones that are the most important for most blog-using companies. They are the ones that are currently providing the value.

Despite this, Sifry’s conclusion is right – blogs are slowly being accepted as being a useful business tool, and we are very much at the beginning of this process. We do, however, need to find better information than this in order to be able to convert new clients to the Way of the Blog.

A couple of years ago I remember coming across the Traffic street teams site and thinking that if I had more time, it’d be a cool thing to do. In short, Traffic puts together teams of people who are fans of bands willing to help promote that band in return for ‘swag’ – gig tickets, merchandise and other desirable stuff. It’s a cheap, easy and appears to be effective.

As it happened, I didn’t have time and the swag on offer was not sufficiently valuable to me that I wanted to spend hours doing the tasks required to earn it. That’s no great surprise – street teams are set up appeal to students and rabid fans, not businesswomen with a new internet start-up to look after.

A few days ago, I was feeding my rabid obsession with Shaun of the Dead when I came across Shaun Squad, a street team site for fans to promote the film in America, where is has just got a limited theatrical release.

Having a look round Shaun Squad, I was somewhat surprised that a site as new as this hasn’t taken any notice of the lessons learnt by social networking sites, which is a shame because it means that the site is nowhere near as effective as it could be.

Compare and contrast
Before I start pointing out what Shaun Squad could have been, I think it’s worth looking at how it works, and how it differs from Traffic.

On Shaun Squad, you have to register before you get full access to the site. You can then do certain tasks which earn you ‘pints’ that you can swap for goodies. The various tasks include inviting a friend to the site, IMing your friends, posting a link on a relevant messageboard or website, creating banners and icons, and various offline tasks such as taking photos of yourself in front of a theatre showing Shaun of the Dead. The site also collects feedback on ads, trailers and other official promotional activity.

If you earn enough pints, you can swap them for goodies such as a signed copy of the script, signed posters, t-shirts and the soundtrack CD. Pretty good incentives, but when a signed script costs you 18,000 pints and the tasks start at 50 pints for the online stuff, going up to 700 pints for an opening weekend photo, that’s a lot of effort to go to.

(Actually, if these prizes were available for UK residents I might be tempted into it by the thought of getting hold of a script, signed or not, but it’s only for Americans, sadly.)

On Traffic, teams are expected to do work offline – they are supplied with “materials (which could include stickers, leaflets, posters, CDs, promotional items, vouchers, tickets, competition prizes, etc.)”, and then have to complete simple tasks and submit an online report form prior to a deadline.

Traffic describe their perks thusly:

In addition to the satisfaction that you will get from promoting your favourite bands, you will receive all kinds of perks depending on what the bands, record companies/other clients provide us with on your behalf. You will receive things like pre-release copies of new records, free merchandise, gig tickets and promo items for completing your assigned tasks. There will, on occasion, be competitions and opportunities to meet the bands. There are also potential rewards and job possibilities for the most committed team members.

The key difference is that Traffic deals with ongoing promotions – a band will have single releases, album releases, tours, festival appearances, in-shop appearances and all sort of other stuff going on almost year round. Traffic creates teams of individuals to work a given band or project, and once a team is full it accepts no further members. They have time to build a team, and for that team to create a presence for the band.

Shaun Squad deals with one event – the release of a film in the States. And it’s a limited release at that, showing in only 607 theatres. They don’t have time to waste, they need a quick hit now. Shaun Squad doesn’t create teams, instead encouraging individuals to compete for prizes.

With Traffic, the social side of their activities is limited online to forums. Considering the slow burn nature of their activities, I guess this is just about adequate. More social interaction would create stronger teams, but without actually being able to take part in a team it’s hard to see precisely how well it works as is.

Shaun Squad uses forums and chat to promote social interactivity amongst members, but you must be registered before you can do that, or access most of the rest of the site. Whilst I can see why forum/chat moderators prefer users to register, it is beyond me why you would hide the majority of a promotional site behind registration.

Getting more bang for your buck
The whole point of Shaun Squad is to promote Shaun of the Dead. It has no other purpose. Once Shaun of the Dead is no longer showing in cinemas in the States, it has no function. Shaun Squad has a limited lifespan so they really want to be getting as much bang for their buck as possible, and they’re not: Currently the site has only 5300 members, a number I find to be surprisingly small.

Let’s do some maths. According to IMDb, Shaun of the Dead took $3,330,781 in its first weekend. At an average cost of $9.50 per ticket, that works out to be around 350,000 people. Even if every single member of Shaun Squad went to the movies once, that would only be an extra $50,000 (and this is not taking into account the fact that many of the members of Shaun Squad are in fact in the UK).

So, if its remit is to promote Shaun of the Dead and get more bums on seats, then Shaun Squad isn’t really doing so well. The question has to be why?

Social Shaun
I know that the company behind Shaun Squad, FanPimp, has heard of at least one social tool, because they have a news blog which includes posts by Edgar Wright, the director. Sadly, they are totally underusing this tool – it lacks standard blog furniture, is hard to navigate and is hidden behind registration. What does this mean? I means you can’t start a meme with it.

The Shaun Squad site of itself is not a meme, and never could be a meme, because it is inherently unlinkable. An open, public official Shaun of the Dead blog could, however, produce a meme which could spread through the film blogosphere rapidly – precisely the behaviour that’s required for the promotion of a cult film.

Posts by Wright, Pegg or Frost would create enough interest in the fans that they would post about it, and these posts would reach pre-fans (people who aren’t yet fans, but might turn into one given the chance). And it’s the pre-fans you want to get because these are the people who are going to go to the cinema and cough up their 9 bucks and thence (hopefully) turn into fans who will continue the word-of-mouth promotion of the film.

Ultimately, you can’t force a meme – they just happen. But you can create conditions suitable for meme growth: by posting strong material you can increase the chances that meme-spawning will occur. Hide your blog and you ensure memelessness.

Human traffic
Far worse than stifling memes, hiding the blog very effectively prevents healthy traffic. Look at Zach Braff’s Garden State blog and you start to get a feel for how popular film blogs can be. Zach has left comments open on his blog and he gets anywhere from 1500 to 3000 on each post. Compare this to the 40 to 50 comments per entry on the Shaun Squad blog.

Now, some more maths, although maths that is admittedly based on a terrible assumption. Think of it more as a thought experiment than actual maths.

I get around 40,000 unique visitors a month on Chocolate and Vodka. I get around 80 comments a month, so for every comment I get 500 visitors. By that reckoning, Zach Braf must be getting around 1.5 million visitors to each post. OK, my logic may well be faulty here, but either which way you cut it, this blog’s popular and it’s doing its job – it’s promoting Garden State.

Hiding the Shaun Squad blog is possibly the stupidest thing that FanPimp could have done. It achieves absolutely nothing. If anything it is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted – you need to be a committed fan in order to be bothered enough to register for the access to the site which will then allow you to read the blog.

The site should, however, be trying to convert pre-fans into fans and to do that you need to do two things: 1) reach your pre-fans and 2) persuade your pre-fans to go see the film. A blog can potentially do both of these things, something that FanPimp seem not to have realised.

In an ideal world
Any site that relies on word of mouth and networking to raise its profile needs to be thinking much harder about which social tools they can use, and how best to use them. Unfortunately, most aren’t. Whilst the fans are doing a pretty good job of promoting Shaun of the Dead themselves, it would be so much more effective if there had been a central hub which pulled all of that effort together.

If you couldn’t code a dedicated Shaun of the Dead Aggregator to pull in blog posts and spew them out again as a single RSS feed, then an official PubSub feed and/or TopicExchange channel would allow fans to find content more easily. A wiki would allow fans to collate trivia, a task currently performed by my very unofficial OpenZombie. And an open, official blog would be the perfect way for fans to find these resources.

But instead, and as usual, Shaun Squad tries to own the conversation, as well as the means of conversation. In pinning it all down, they kill it and the whole thing fails to achieve its potential.

I’ve no doubt that Shaun of the Dead will become a cult classic – it’s got the depth, the style, the laughs to succeed with or without Shaun Squad. But it would have been so nice to see it utilising social software to facilitate proper online support too.

Matthew Oliphant from BusinessLogs talks about companies who specify blogging as a core skill when hiring, in particularly The Robot Co-Op who have posted job vacancies on their blog.

I don’t think this is really that surprising a development. Blogs are a great window onto someone’s life and thought processes and it’s inevitable that they’ll increasingly be used as a tool for both people looking for jobs and companies seeking new employees. Blogs are, after all, just logical extensions of the traditional website jobs page and the online portfolio/CV.

Oliphant also points to Heather Leigh who asks, What is it going to take for (corporate) blogging to become a job skill? Heather outlines a number of key skills which she thinks contribute towards success as a blogger:

– An ability to gauge relevance
– Strong written communications skills
– An ability to filter for appropriateness
– Original opinions or an ability to contribute original thoughts to existing discussions
– Diplomacy skills

I agree with all of these points, but I think there are other barriers that need to be overcome before corporates accept blogging as a desirable skill, and they have little to do with what it takes to be a good blogger.

Getting buy-in
Good blogging, the sort of blogging that gives your company a good reputation, takes time. Anyone who is experienced in writing original posts understands this, but new bloggers may not and managers who haven’t ever blogged almost certainly will not. The blogger and manager need to be committed to the blog – the blogger in order to actually blog, the manager in order to provide the support required to blog.

The Invisible Work Problem
Much of our modern work ethic is based around the visibility of our tasks. We have open plan offices, public calendars, meetings, milestones, expectations. There is a need to be seen to be Doing Stuff. That’s why slacking off at work is easy if you’re pretending to actually work, but work that makes you look like you’re not working can create difficulties if managers and colleagues immediately assume the worst.

Blogging takes a lot of reading and thinking. These are non-visible activities, but they are essential to a good blog. If you can’t spent two hours just reading without raising suspicions, then your blog is going to suffer. Much of this is down to trust – you need your manager and your colleagues to trust that you’re getting on with stuff even if you look like you’re not. Surfing the net and reading RSS feeds are seen by many as skiving activities, but they are meat and drink to the blogger.

Clarifying the lines
What can and can’t you blog? This question needs to be answered very, very clearly in the blogger’s head. Mostly, one would hope that employees understand what they can and can’t talk about publicly, but that doesn’t stop people being fired for blogging. (Ostensibly, at least – we usually only get half the story when bloggers are fired, and that half is possibly the least rational of the two.) Clarity on this issue is essential – it’s not about trying to neuter the blog with a list of dos and don’ts, but of attempting to ensure that PR snafus never arise.

Prioritisation
How important is the blog to the company? Where does it sit within the blogger’s other responsibilities? Should they be blogging regularly or only when they have a light work load? How much of their time should they spend blogging?

Again, this comes back to issues of management buy-in, trust and time. Tacking a blog on to someone’s existing responsibilities without considering the impact of the additional work is only going to make life difficult for the blogger and will result in a poor blog. Expectations need to be set and managed. Again, clarity is important.

There are other issues to the acceptance of blogging as a core skill in business, but management and blogger alike must take into account these sorts of practical considerations in order for the bloggers to have the opportunity to blog well. It goes without saying that there is still a lot of suspicion about blogging in the business world, so attending to the practical and proving that you’ve thought these things through can go a long way towards helping overcome those barriers of unfamiliarity.

Phew!

At Corante, to the degree that we can be said to direct our various contributors at all, we certainly aren’t going to exhort them to produce more entries in the name of more entries alone — even if that technique naturally dupes the gullible. We are searching for a different path to influence the communities and markets we are involved in: true expertise and deep insight. And we may get talky at times too, but it won’t be for its own sake, or to pull the wool over people’s eyes.

Horst Prillinger explains trackbacks, and discusses when you should and should not trackback. This is something I’ve been thinking about lately too.

Horst’s first point is that you should not ping if your post does not have anything to do with the post you’re pinging, which is good common sense. He also advocates that you don’t trackback if you do nothing more than link to a post without adding to the conversation somehow.

My response to that second point is that some software automatically pings – i.e. if I link to you in a linklog style post, the software will ping you anyway. The software doesn’t differentiate between post styles, it just sees a link, derives a trackback uri and pings. I may be able to tell it not to, but I’ll probably forget.

I can see why Horst feels that a trackback from that sort of post is not worthwhile, as linklogs aren’t really adding to the conversation per se. But you do get some useful information from that sort of ping – it brings to your attention bloggers who are reading you and with whom you may have something in common.

That may seem like a very author-centric reason for accepting this sort of ping, but readers may also derive value from being able to follow the link trail to other blogs which, even though they don’t pass comment may also point to related posts that do.

There’s another circumstance where the value of trackbacks are debatable, and that’s when someone pings even though they are not quoting a post directly, but just talking about the same subject.

I had a trackback like that a while ago and initially I was rather miffed. I’d followed the link back to the referring blog, but there was no link to my blog there at all. In retrospect, I think my annoyance was down to my ego – here was someone implying they had mentioned me and they hadn’t.

On balance, this sort of trackback is no less useful than any other sort. It is, after all, extending the conversation and that is what trackbacks and comments are all about.