Yesterday we attended the Blogging4business conference in London. It was very ably put together by Matthew Yeomans and Bernhard Warner of Custom Communications - two journalists who have put together training packages and strategies for communications professionals moving into blogging.

With this in mind, we designed a one pager Your 3-step guide to the blogosphere, (PDF download 70k) which we distributed at the conference. The HTML version follows …

1. Get started:

- Go to Technorati, the biggest of the blog search engines.
- Enter the topic you are interested in.
- When you find a blog that appeals to you, you can use Google desktop (a quick download) to automatically notify you when there is new content.
- Or save your search as a Watchlist, and get relevant information from a variety of sources.

Blogs to explore:

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things A lively commentary on events, the world’s most popular blog has 66,000 links from 22,000 sites.
Engadget Well-written technology reviews.
Dooce Personal blog by Heather Armstrong, who got sacked for blogging about her work colleagues
Public Relations Onlinefor discussing how businesses can best understand and use consumer generated content
British businesses using blogs:

The Guinness blog - bought to you by the Guinness branding team
The Cadbury’s Creme Egg podcast - with Kate Thornton
The Honda blog launched 28th February 2006, already has 107 links according to Yahoo

2. Join in

- Go to Blogger to create a blog for yourself. It takes about three minutes and is as simple as setting up a Hotmail account. Your blog will have the format http://yourname.blogspot.com.
- If you want to set something up with your own domain name for business, talk to a blog creation specialist like Market Sentinel.
- If you would like to comment on someone else’s blog posting, click on comment and complete the form. Sometimes (in Blogger and Moveable Type) you have to register in order to comment – this is to protect bloggers against spam comments from advertisers.
- You can comment on a blog posting on your own blog and put the address (http:// …) of the original comment into the “trackback” section of your blogging software. This will mean that your blog post is automatically linked to the blog you are commenting on. This facility has been abused by spammers, so most bloggers check trackbacks to prevent spam.

3. Get your blog noticed

- Optimise your blog for the subject matter. If your blog is about skincare, then put the word “skincare” into the name of the blog, and into the url: www.skincare.co.uk
- Update your blog regularly, at least once a week and ideally two or three times. Search engines visit sites according to how often they find new content.
- Tag your content. When you make a post, use the “category” or “tagging” facility to tell everyone what it is about. Someone on Technorati will be searching on the tag “dry skin”.
- Use Technorati or Google blog search to find out who else is writing about your subject matter. When you make an interesting new post, politely email them with the url and suggest that they might be interested in reading what you have written. You will make some new friends, and you might benefit from some links!
- If you are hosting your site, make you “ping” all the right ping servers when it is updated.

Market Sentinel works with top brands like Yahoo! Europe monitoring blogs and advising on marketing response.

For more information on how to integrate blog communications intoyour marketing strategy, call +44 (0) 20 7793 1575 or mail simon DOT rogers AT new DOT com

In Palo Alto for the NewComm Forum. The event is being organised by the Society for New Communications Research and in particular by Elizabeth Albrycht and the NewComm blogzine’s Jen McClure. The idea of the conference is to promote best practice and provide a forum for research on new communications technologies. There are speakers from a number of the key blogging and communications companies and a lot of new thinking is promised. This is going to be a much blogged event, so here are some highlights from the show so far (lunchtime on day one).

Rebecca Blood (from the keynote):

“People come to blogging and bring their own perspectives and they see what they want to see. Knowledge management experts see it as a knowledge management tool and refer to it as “Small KM” … PR and marketing people talk about it as the “new communications”, journalists see bloggers as would-be journalists. I prefer to talk about “participatory media” …

“Blogging has blurred the lines between professionals and amateurs. On the web, consumers become contributors …

“I remember my grandmother owned a mandolin. It was no longer played, because after the era of radio, people stopped making their own music. We stopped doing it ourselves and became consumers. Now we are getting back to the era of doing it ourselves …

“I have heard it called ‘mass amateurisation’. The ‘writeable web’. A massive multi-player online focus group which is online 24/7.”

To Paris yesterday to hear the great David Weinberger, by the special invitation of Guillaume du Gardier, now with Edelman.

David Weinberger was one of the editors of the Cluetrain Manifesto and thus has a legitimate claim to be at the heart of the philosophical shift that underlies the rise of consumer-generated media, and the transition of public relations into “public relationships”.

Weinberger is now at Harvard Law School’s Berkman centre for the Internet and society. As he spoke I made some notes on my PDA. This isn’t everything he said - it is everything that he said that I thought was interesting. So not an impartial account at all - and please mail with corrections!

Weinberger:

“If you want to understand at how the internet has impacted information look at Wikipedia. It has 994,000 articles in English alone. I mean, Encyclopedia Britannica has 32 volumes and contains 65,000 articles. That’s not just because the editors decided there are only 65,000 things in the world that are interesting enough to write articles about. It is because of the sheer costs of paper and printing, and shipping books about the place.

“And the Wikipedia is not edited at all, in the conventional sense. No single person decides what’s in or out. Famously, there are articles about the use of the umlaut in heavy metal - something that would never find its way into a conventional encyclopedia. The Wikipedia approach to knowledge management is that the originators don’t manage it at all. They allow people, members of the public to decide what’s relevant, and what’s not.

“What the Wikipedia is to knowledge management, the blog is to personal expression. Everything is allowed. Tonight, though I would like to talk about what a blog is not. A blog is not about advertising …”

Weinberger used the Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit blog. He pointed out that this was not a blog in any meaningful sense of the word. It was not a true expression of someone’s experience. It seemed to revolve around two people arguing which of them liked Juicy Fruit more.

“I mean - even the guy from the advertising agency doesn’t like Juicy Fruit that much … Anyone from Juicy Fruit, here? No. Good. I mean, come on.

“A blog is not about cats. I hear that a lot from people in marketing. People blog about their cats, right? In fact one of my neighbours in Boston really answered that the other day. If I want to blog about my cat, who are you to say that I can’t do that. I should be able to blog about anything that interests me. And in fact, there are many blogs about cats. But that is not the point. A blog is about whatever I want it to be about. It is my agenda, and not yours.

“A blog is not about journalism … although some journalists blog and some bloggers are increasingly being hired as stringers by the news media. The worlds of blogging and journalism overlap, but they are distinct. Bloggers distrust journalists because they suspect them of being corporate whores serving some kind of hidden agenda from the news organisation’s proprietor. Journalists distrust bloggers because they suspect bloggers don’t check their facts (right! and newspapers do, I suppose?) and that they are single issue merchants and cranks.

“Blogging is not about 1 to 1 marketing. 1 to 1 marketing in blogs often doesn’t work, because one of the 1’s isn’t really a 1. It is a big corporation. How can I have a conversation with Wrigley’s, or with Ford? The fact is that blogging is about a conversation. Blogging is a new social space. My weblog is me. It is my body in the new public space.

“One of the key things about blogging which distinguishes it from the stuff that’s gone before - the marketing messages on the one hand, and the conventional journalism on the other - is the freedom to write badly, the freedom to make mistakes. Making mistakes is a sign of authenticity. It is a sign of being human. Of course we are all going to make mistakes. It establishes intimacy. And on the internet pretty good may be good enough. “

Weinberger went on to talk about links:

“Links are little acts of generosity. They are saying: don’t stay on this site, visit this other site. The web is based on links. The web is links. But look at the home page of the New York Times (registration required). It only links to itself - oh, and to advertisers. Journalists talk about bloggers being narcissistic. That’s narcissism. The New York Times home page.

“In the old model, businesses thought of themselves like a fort. They controlled their brand, they released only the information they wanted. But now the fort has holes in the walls. People are having conversations about those companies that the companies can’t control. The fortress business model has been overtaken. Now our customers know more about our business than we do. And the customers trust other customers to tell them about our business more than they do the marketers. You cannot control your customers by the selective release of information. Customers are not there to be managed. We trust Google, craigslist, Robert Scoble and Jonathan Schwarz because they are there for us. They are for us.”

Weinberger talked about Howard Dean’s election campaign, which he was involved with as an election strategist.

“The thing that characterised the Dean campaign was its openness, the sense of involvement that it generated. And typical of that was the way that they got this 31 year old kid Matthew Gross blogging. Traditionally the campaign messages are tightly controlled by the candidate and by the press officer. This time Matthew Gross just blogged the whole campaign, talked about it the way he saw it. It caused a sensation, got huge buzz.”

Weinberger on branding:

“Branding - as a metaphor - is drawn from what you do to a cow with a red hot iron. And that is still - mostly - the way it is done. Branding is done by someone to your customers, the way you might brand a cow.

“And yet business is evolving. You start with brand and you move towards the idea of reputation and then the idea of relationship. That means that every business is going to be involved in blogging one way or another.”

Weinberger on trust:

“Blogging is best - or at least very good - if taken internally. The blogosphere operates as a vast, amorphous focus group - a defocus group. It creates a sense of trust. I feel that this is my company. That is like the relationship I have with Google. I feel that Google is my company, although I don’t own stock. “

What should companies do?

“Public relations needs to turn into ‘public relationships’. Companies need to listen, to audit, to engage, to give up control to their employees. Companies need to develop a blogging policy - not rocket science, just saying that blogging employees need to observe the same standards as anyone else - keep corporate secrets, don’t run down the corporation. Fundamentally companies must try to sound like a human being, to be like a human being. Engage, don’t defend, be transparent, and link, link, link, link, link. “

What mistakes do companies make?

“You don’t know more than your customers. Your customers know more than you. Don’t be boring. Take risks. Blogging is about opportunity, about connectedness, about breaking down the walls.”

Weinberger then fielded a few questions. What would he say to corporations who worried about loss of control:

“You would better ask: do you want people to talk about you? That is the question. If you do, you should blog.

“Thinking we were in control was magical thinking, it was delusional. People have always talked about us, we were just deaf.”

Ross Mayfield from Social Text organised London’s inaugural Wiki Wednesday last night.

It was a chance for enterprises using Wikis and specialists in blogging and corporate communication internal and external to get together over some cold drinks. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein were the enlightened hosts. Ross Mayfield talked about how Social Text had parlayed their understanding of how enterprises needed to set up internal comms into a promising business and discussed how companies can be comfortable with open source technology solutions as long as they have enterprise-level support. Stuart Berwick from DrKW (a Social Text client and evangelist) talked about interesting applications of folksonomy in managing client relationships. We talked about TiddlyWikis, toasting Jeremy Ruston in his absence. Johnnie Moore talked about protecting brands from the impact of sustained negative blogging. Suw Charman talked about working with Danny O’Brien on her DRM initiative … and by that stage the evening was seriously but enjoyably off-topic.

The idea is to repeat the event on the first Wednesday of every month.

Market Sentinel met the great Robert Scoble at the Texas Embassy do on Tuesday night. The room was full of 118 bloggers drawn from all over the UK and further afield. Scoble, who was there with his wife Maryam en route to Denmark, talked a little bit about his situation at Microsoft, the launch of Channel 9 (which is a kind of multimedia communications channel/extranet) and the general business of being a licensed voice of editorial freedom inside an organisation with a reputation for having a closed culture. This is what he said:

‘I want to be sure that never anthing between you and me. I type 80-100 words a minute. I never check spellings. (That’s my advice to bloggers, by the way, learn typing!) I hardly correct a thing. Obviously I know there are certain things I need to be careful about. Anything about new products I have to run by the lawyers first. For example if I happen to leak out something about the RSS aggregator [he winks] I know I will be in trouble. But because we are a rich company the lawyers expect someone to get sued. I mean, we now have 1500 people within Microsoft blogging. That’s just the risk we take. I know that there have been been people in Microsoft who have wanted to have me whacked for what I have written. But I have good protection from the top management. They like what I am doing. Steve Balmer [Microsoft COO] is telling the lawyers: stay away. He is telling the PR team: stay away.’

How does Scoble relate to the corporation that (after all) employs him? ‘I know that I am taking a risk when I say I disagree with Ballmer. For me corporate culture is like a membrane. You can push it so far and it pushes back. If you push too hard – like Mark Jens did at Google, it pushes you right out. Fortunately the membrane at Microsoft is pretty flexible at the moment.’

Later on we asked him how he got started. He worked for Dave Winer’s company, and then made himself redundant when the company couldn’t afford to pay him. Then he sold a Sun box to a senior Microsoft executive, impressed the guy and got hired as ‘a technical evangelist’. ‘We stole the name from Apple,” he added. “We steal everything cool from Apple [winks].’

Scoble had been blogging from the first, so it made sense for him to continue to blog, this time talking about his new job and gradually making the transition into being the trusted voice of Microsoft. He is writing a book on business blogging with Shel Israel.

At the In the City conference on Tuesday 7th June Graham Hansell of Sitelynx observed that the search page for Ford gets more hits than Ford’s own home page. And so it is for all brands … That Google search page is more important to you than your own home page. Search is brand.

That means that you have to go through all your keywords and look at Google results. Prominent detractor sites have to be out-marketed.

Mark Rogers, CEO of Market Sentinel, will be attending the London Geek dinner (guest of honour Robert Scoble) on Tuesday 7th June 2005 at the Texas Embassy, Cockspur Street, London SW1. His mobile number is +44 7866 369181 if you would like to reach him.

Mark Rogers, CEO Market Sentinel, will be addressing London’s In the City conference on Tuesday 7th June 2005, discussing RSS and its implications for business.