Blog Business Summit: Seattle, WA 2006…

Business Blogging Case Study: The Creation of a Sponsored Weblog
Steve Broback and Teresa Valdez KleinTo start a blog, this is recommended

Consider a banner

Tereasa likes Word Press best. But Word Press and Moveable Type are great because you put it on your server.

Steve says a sponsored blog is the easiest way to start buzz.

A sponsored blog is just that. Your company sponsors it and other people write it. It’s great for establishing juice.

Keynote: The Future of Findability
Dave Taylor

Dave dislikes free blog hosting services. If possible, use a paid service like TypePad – you get more bang for your buck.All information is perishable.

How do you measure findability? – Whether or not a customer finds you.

There is no best practice for blogging – it all depends on who you are and what you offer.

Home Pages are obsolete. Based on my experience with PPC, this is an accurate statement. Every page counts.

YOU MUST HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT.

What’s a Google dance? Remember, the algorithm is always changing.

Dave’s argument is that seo is competition and that’s OK but you’re always playing catch up. Blogging is the here and now, and the search engines are always adapting to this. I agree, it’s like walking into a casino in Vegas and trying to beat the house – you might have a good system and you might win a few, but will you really beat the house consistently?

A blog is just a tool. Dave feels it is a content management tool. Use a blog for your thoughts, use it to communicate.

The Blog Advantage: What Blogs are and Why They are Taking Over
Steve Broback

Steve likes blogs for visibility and practicality

His argument is that they are the new websites. It is a content management system.

Search engines love blogs. Why?:

-Clean architecture / clean code
-Focused on content
-Frequently updated
-Makes lots of pages
-Link love
-Comments

Working your Blog: Posting and Beyond
Dave TaylorBlogging Pitfalls:

-Coping with Cranky bloggers – make rules first and stick with them
-Expectations to update frequently – It’s OK to remove your time stamp, that way you don’t -have to get stressed out by having to post all the time
-Saying too much – too many people rant and rave. I’m one of them.
-Spammers – As always, they’re screwing everything up.
-Being suckered into digital polluters

Strategies for Comments:

-Find good, established blogs – use technorati and RSS feeds
-Add to the CONVERSATION. Dave Taylor alludes to being at a cocktail party. You don’t just walk up to a conversation about Middle East politics and start talking about your pet cat.
-When appropriate, point to yourself.
-Be polite and professional
-Better yet, be helpful

Business blogging – It’s not what you want to say. It’s what do what do my clients want to read about.

Special Breakfast Session: What’s Next in Online Communications?
Jeremy Pepper, Jeanette Gibson and John Starkweather

Look at Phones. Start looking at smaller screen format. It is the future.How do you measure BUZZ? You have to look at things differently and normal metrics do not necessarily apply. Pay attention to the influencers in your niche.

Today’s marketing needs to abandon traditional methods and reflective the language that defines the genuine and open nature of blogs. This comment rings true from the message of the last WOMMA summit.

Engaging with Bloggers: Working the Blogosphrere
Halley Suitt, Janet Johnson and Buzz Brugeman If you target influencers, MAKE SURE you read and understand their beliefs first.
Be honest with them on what you want.

DO YOUR HOMEWORK

Comments are much more important than the original post. This is the cocktail argument. The post brings up the subject (think Larry King) and the comments branch off and discuss the topic further.

Building Communities Online
Elisa Camahort, Tara Hunt and Betsy Aoki

To start an online community, try launching a blog and discuss your plans. The most important thing is to get feedback from your customers to find out what they want. Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about what your readers want.The argument was made that online communities are circular. If you take a traditional method that this it as either a one way street (you project a message) or a two way street (you project a message and you allow comments), you lose. For an online community to be successful, you must interact with your clients.

Kevin O’keefe brought up an interesting question. If you already have blogs and/or comments on multiple blogs that relate to a specific blog, don’t you already belong to an online community. The panel said yes and no – it all depends on the content and the message.

Important rule with Online Communities – you must establish (informal and/or formal) guidelines and stick with them.

RSS and Feeds: Monitoring the Blogosphere and the Buzz
Mary Hodder, Dave Taylor and Halley SummitHalley feels RSS is still in its infancy.

Technorati only searches blogs with RSS feeds and you can filter it down either by authority or freshness. The question then came up – how do you define the measurement of authority? Most blog search engines use the number of links “to” a blog to measure authority. Given the overall nature of blogging, one could easily argue that this type of measurement could be more “popularity” rather than “authority”.

You can subscribe to a blog “post search”

Possible metrics for Blogs:

-Incoming links to post URL
-Incoming links to blog URL
-Number of comments
-Frequency of posts
-Number of subscribers
-Incoming traffic link
-Outbound blogroll

Special Breakfast Session: Putting Web Feeds to Work
Scott NiesenSpeaker represents Attensa (check it out). It’s an RSS feeder / aggregate. It uses MicroSoft Outlook to project feeds.

The service is free for individual downloads, but if you want to be able to share your feeds, they offer an integrated system at a negotiated cost depending on existing systems.

Stages of RSS Feeds for business:

-Monitor external blog posts – news, headlines, etc.
-Business intelligence
-Monitor internal blogs and Wikis – vision communication, project management, etc.
-RSS enabled enterprise applications

If your going to consider RSS feeds in your business, consider the following:

-Easy to install and deploy?
-Access anywhere? – offline, web, mobile, etc.
-Sync, sync, sync
-LDAP integration and exchange support?
-Strategy for connecting legacy applications?
-RSS analytics and metrics?
-Bonus for attention metrics?

Ten Ways to a Killer Blog
Robert Scoble and Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble-Blog because you want to
-Read other blogs
-Pick a niche you own – be different
-Link to other blogs
-Admit mistakes
-Write good headlines
-Use other media
-Have a voice
-Get outside the blogosphere
-Market yourself
-Write well
-Expose yourself
-Help other people blog
-Engage with commenters
-Keep your integrity

Podcasting and Video Blogging Best Practices
John Furrier, Robert Scoble, Ben Edwards and Mary Hodder

For either medium, sound quality is most important

Since vlogging is still in it’s infancy, video can still be done with almost any vehicle (cell phone, digital camera, video camera, etc.)

Also, the web community is very forgiving because no one expects perfection. Again, it’s sound quality that’s most important.

I get it! => Consumer generated media allows people to be fun and expressive – regardless if they use the product or not.

Blogging and SEO Strategies
John Battle and Dave Taylorgoogle.com/webmaster – identifies best practices for SEO

Keyword research pays dividends – consider wordtracker, overture and/or adwords

The secret for SEO and blogs is inbound links. How do you get them, give outbound links,

Best Practices

-Good titles
-Good headlines
-Reasonable keyword integrity
-Occasionally emphasize a keyword with bold or italics (as appropriate)
-Good Category names

If you Google site:domain name it gives you who links to you
If you Google linked:domain name it gives you who links to you

Hittail.com – is a free service that allows you to breakdown visitor stats for your blog.

The Future of Blogging: Tools and Trends
Matt Mullenweg, Steve Broback and Liz Lawley
Sites like VOX were the User can create a blog with almost every type of media.
Mobile input is the next big thing. It’s not hypothetical, this technology exists today. How is this going to affect consumer buying?

Selective Sharing. These are blog settings that allow different levels of privacy (public, friends, privacy). Right now, LiveJournal is the only one that currently offers this.

Socially Filtered Search. Rather than rely on what other engines consider “authority”, this allows you to designate the “influencers” and what they feel are important. This is still in it’s infancy.

Stuff I’m unfamiliar with and need to research

-CSS
-How do you ping your postings?
-Nigritude Ultramarine
-Wordtracker
-PodTech
-Audiocity
-Hipcast
-Weblogs, Inc.
-Netvibes
-Threadlist
-QnA
-Blogher
-Delicious
-SFGate
-Orkut
-Techcrunch
-Global voices online
-Mefeedia
-Bliptv
-Dabble
-Bix.com
-Freevlog.org
-A movie called Homepage
-Microformats
-ShozuResearch these people

-Dave Winer
-Tony Pierce
-Mitch Radcliffe
-Glenn FleischmannBooks to Read

-The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
-Influence – Robert Gialdini
-The Long Tail – Chris Anderson
-The Search – John Battelle
-Growing Your Business with Google – Dave Taylor