The Honda blog, which launched yesterday, encourages Honda enthusiasts to register and share the blog. It’s hosted by 2TalkAbout, which is “a new, independent blog network that lets consumers talk about their favourite topics, products and brands. Honda is the first brand that has decided to join the 2TalkAbout network from the start.” Those adding comments can also give each post a star rating. It’s a novel approach to developing the use of blogs and it will be interesting to watch its success. For myself, I’m not sure I’ll be wanting to read about Honda owners asking other Honda owners whether anyone knows anything about the engine specs for the Type R.

The Guinness blog looks as sumptuous as the product it represents. Posts are made by a variety of members of the Guinness team and range (so far) from how the last Guinness ad was made to musings on St Patrick’s Day. The blog states its purpose as an attempt by the business to let the Guinness team and Guinness drinkers communicate more closely. There are a couple of minor glitches (the home button takes you back to the registration page and the permalinks look a bit scary), but overall I’m guessing Guinness fans will love it, and it ticks the right boxes for what this kind of blog should be: open, transparent, honest, relevant, oh – and interesting.

Tom Reynolds is an Emergency Medical Technician. His Random Acts of Reality (Trying to kill as few people as possible…) tells us about life as part of an ambulance crew in London’s busy east end. NeeNaw is written by Mark Myers, who’s an Emergency Medical Dispatcher (the person on the other end of the phone when you dial 999).

Their thoughts give an astonishingly fresh view on the world in which most of us are consumers, and about which many of us have complaints, preconceptions and opinions. Who makes the decisions about how long we wait for an ambulance? How could it be done better? What’s it like to be on the receiving end of the public at its worst – ill, frightened, angry, unfamiliar with the system.

Both the blogs recently won awards in the 2005 Medical Weblogs Awards, Best Medical Blog going to Random Acts of Reality and Nee Naw emerging as Best New Medical Blog.
Just in case you were still wondering if they really make a good read, Reynolds’ now has a publishing contract through The Friday Project. OK, maybe getting published isn’t perfect proof of being worthwhile reading, but in this particular case, it seems a good validation for this very readable work.

Maybe I’ll even be a little less quick to criticise and more willing to ask what I can do to make things work better as and when I’m next brought face to face with the seemingly impenetrable policies of the NHS.

Levi’s, Nokia, Audi and Budget Car Rentals all ran campaigns on blogs last year, of which Budget’s was probably the most fun, rejuvenating the slightly tired format of the online treasure hunt by posting daily video clues on a blog, linked to stickers placed around US cities (nudged on by a tempting prize of $160,000). Budget sensibly hired BL Ochman to create the campaign, which was run exclusively through bloggers and blogs.

Blogvertising looks like it can offer significant value to brands – if they get it right. Budget’s low-cost campaign drove 20,000 unique visitors an hour to their blog, with several thousand registering to play. The campaign was also in the upper quartile in terms of click-throughs. Audi used just 0.5% of its advertising budget on blog ads, which drove 29% of traffic to its site.

With advertising on bulletin boards and chat rooms generally spurned, it may be hard for marketers and advertisers to get their heads around just how different blogs can be. Every decent branding book worth its salt is clearly tells businesses to stop pushing their messages out and to start pulling their consumers in. Blogging is going to play a huge role in this. As ever, the trick will be getting it right – a challenge for the innovators, but tough in an industry that’s long had the monopoly of owning the message.

Drop a Jeans Size – a smart name for what was the Special K diet – advocates a simple two-week diet where two meals a day are replaced with a bowl of Special K (in any of its varieties).

To support the campaign, the site uses online message boards and blogging groups to drive mutual support among dieters – and powerful word of mouth for the Special K diet.

Kellogg’s clearly understands its audience.

There are now nearly 1,000 postings in the public message boards alone, fuelled by a mostly female audience from around the country. The tone is familiar from message boards on sites such as handbag.com and ivillage; open, supportive and interactive, (though it’s a shame Kellogg’s have set up their boards in a way that doesn’t allow threads to be followed or commented on).

Perhaps the most innovative element is the fact that Kellogg’s appear to be using blogging to allow dieters to form small support groups, inviting friends to join them. A great idea for engaging the audience, offering a helpful support tool – oh, and it also spreads the word about the diet and the Kellogg’s site.

The risk is that precisely because there is so much potential in blogging (not even thinking about how google-friendly blogs can be), that this can be seen as a simple marketing tool – and used as such.

Blogs don’t work like that. We don’t watch TV to see the ads, we won’t read a blog to get a pure marketing message.

To be successful, blogs have to be personal, interesting – and truthful!

It’s just plain offensive to presume that we’ll be duped by phoney characters pretending to blog. The Cillit Bang spam on Tom Coate’s blog is perhaps the most extreme example, but others have failed too, for example L’Oreal failed (and learned) with their phony “Claire” blog in France. To quote Shel Israel on the story ‘in the blogosphere you should use only true stories unless you have masochistic tendencies.’

Success depends on transparency, a strong advocate, a clear statement of intent – and some interesting stories to tell. Whether that comes from one person or a team, you need to know who’s talking to you and why.

Bob Lutz shows the way with his Fastlane blog. As Vice Chairman of General Motors, his blog makes use of podcasts, video and of course regular blogging, to tell you what’s driving Bob and his team this week. While I’d have to doubt that Bob writes all his own posts, I certainly believe that the enthusiasm and voice are his. And Bob’s fanclub is now out and cheering for GM alongside him.

For instance, someone who wanted to build a podcasting search engine could use Alexa’s tools and computers to request specialized audio files that were newly available on the Web.

Alexa is owned by Amazon.com, and the tool will be offered as part of the Amazon web services. The platform launched in beta yesterday and has been greeted with a guarded enthusiasm by John Battelle in his Searchblog.

While Alexa is still small in terms of Google or Yahoo, I’d hope that this should help bring us user-friendly and focused products to help us get what we want when we go online. I’ll be interested to see what happens, and how the major search engine comanies might respond.

Highlights for me included the panel on Citizen Journalism and mainstream media. I particularly enjoyed hearing about Marcel Reichart’s experience at Hubert Burda Media. The visionary Burda apparently sees building and interacting with audiences as key to the future. The company uses blogs to support the online version of Focus, the popular German news magazine, which now has now has nearly a dozen blogs with daily and weekly contributions from staff and external contributors. Celebrity blogs also seemed a perfect match for entertainment mag Bunte.

Elizabeth Albrycht led a panel discussing RSS, and, it turns out, the panel’s anticipation of the imminent demise of RSS as an entity in itself, as it becomes accepted as mainstream and integral to the web.

The panel on which I sat, Tracking/Listening to the Online World, was a lively session. Guillaume du Gardier’s introduction referred to Market Sentinel’s new white paper, which for the first time sets out to prove the influence of blogging on corporations, using Jeff Jarvis’s Buzz Machine “Dell Hell” and Dell as a case study. While Jeff Jarvis’s status as a journalist would probably have assured that his poor experience would have given rise to some print exposure of Dell’s failings in this instance, the fact that he blogged it – and his cause was taken up by other bloggers with similar experiences – can now be shown to have a strong influence over Dell’s reputation for customer service.

Technorati’s David Sifry gave a powerful account of his vision for a ‘conversation stream’, up-ending the conventional analogy of the web as a ‘library’ with page ranks and indexes, and seeing hyperlinks not so much a link between documents, but as a form of social gesture. Yahoo! Europe’s Yan Motte also shared information about some of the innovative tools coming our way, including Yahoo! Mindset, a search tool which will allow us to determine the degree to which our search returns focus on transactional or research-based sites.

Ben Hammersley gave a fantastic talk about his ‘Eight ideas that will really revolutionise the 21st century’. Glad to have been there.

There are now around 3,500 photos tagged Les Blogs on Flickr. I’m told I’m the one looking poised and intellectual – see if you can spot me!

The impressive list of speakers includes such notable bloggers as Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, Elizabeth Albrycht and Neville Hobson, covering topics from How blogging is challenging the corporate world, to Podcasting, Photo and Video blogging. I will be speaking on a panel discussing Tracking and Monitoring the online world, chaired by Guillaume de Gardier, who’s recently joined Edelman as Director of Online Communications for Europe.

Mark can’t come – he’s staying at home awaiting the imminent birth of his and Chloe’s new baby.

I’m looking forward to learning a lot, and meeting some great people.

‘In the early days of blogging, it was all about an individual voice – using the Web to publish your journal. As the number of blogs has risen, their function has changed, becoming less about micro-publishing and more about being part of a network. As well as generating unique content, bloggers are increasingly directing their readers to stuff they find interesting elsewhere on the Web or in other media. Add to this the effect that name bloggers have in attracting information from other people, not necessarily bloggers themselves, and what emerges is an incredibly powerful filtering and reference tool.’

Taking music as an example, Nutley goes on to cite the power of the blog in introducing new audiences to unknown bands (taking Arctic Monkeys as a case in point), comparing this revolution with its peer-to-peer downloads predecessor.

Echoing the past, it appears that the traditional marketers in the music industry are not willing to engage with this powerful new influence. However, there can be little doubt that in a broadband world, bloggers will be wielding increasing influence which PR and marketing should not ignore.

The paper lists the benefits of streamlining email communications through a group blog, recording and sharing experiences, and customer feedback among the advantages of employee blogging. The paper also stresses the value of introducing a Blogging Policy to protect companies and employees from potential problems caused by unthinking – or calculated – threats to brand.