Artificial Intelligence - Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity Summit at Stanford

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French Corporate Blogging White Paper

Tubbydev, a French web agency, recently published a white paper called "Blogs and entreprises". To learn more about it or request a copy, go to: http://tubbydev.typepad.com/entreprise_et_blog/2007/01/blogs_et_entrep.html

Photosynth Video Demo

It's been a while since the last time I've been impressed by new ways to leverage technology. This demo of Photosynch, developped by Microsoft Live Labs, was one of them. The lab in not exactly a corporate blog, more a technology showcase but the frontier between the two is actually small. After all, the objectives are somewhat similar: build an open, apparently unfiltered dialog between employees of a company (and not an anonymous corporation) and its public.

Gmail: A Behind the Scenes Video

Here is the GMail video I mentionned in my previous post.

Video and Corporate Blogs

I've been busy with my new job at NETASQ, a European leader providing unified security solutions comprising a range of appliances that combine a firewall with a unique real time intrusion prevention technology and plenty of other security features (antivirus, antispam, web filtering, QoS, etc).

But, one new trend I have been watching is the increasing impact of video in corporate blogs.

For example, Dell's Virtualization Solutions Engineering team posted a video on Dell's corporate blog -Direct2Dell- to show a preview of a virtualization demo system: http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2007/09/13/29651.aspx

Of course, it is not suprising to also see a lot of YouTube videos used on Google's Official Blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

The use of video on the web is no news but its use to make corporate blogs more relevant and interesting seems to be here to stay.

Viral videos also seem to continue to spread. One recent famous one - inspired by several other before (from Amelie Poulain to http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/)- is revealing. Check it out below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKAInP_tmHk

Blogs and RSS: tools for competitive intelligence

I recently met one of the directors of a very promising company called Digimind [http://www.digimind.com].

They design and develop a "Competitive Intelligence Management software platform", which enables companies to deploy and manage competitive intelligence units and projects. It looks like they have been able to build strong momentum and have signed deals with Unilever, Schneider Electric, Burson Marsteller, Remi Cointreau, Société Générale, Bouygues Telecom, Maroc Telecom as well as 200 other companies.

Last June, they published a very interesting white paper named: "Blogs and RSS: tools for
competitive intelligence" and I recommend that anyone interested in learning more about the benefits and danger of corporate blogs reads it.

To download it, go to:
http://www.digimind.com/en/services/publications_Blogs-RSS.htm

Fake Blog or "Flog"

It is somewhat surprising to me to see some recent news related to the use of fake blogs or "flogs" by some major corporations.

For example, recently, one of Sony's PR agencies launched a covert marketing campaign disguised as a blog created by a teenager. The flog promoted the PSP, but was exposed after suspicions were raised over the site's content. The agency created a character and called him Peter. However, under pressure from gamers who guessed Sony was actually behind Peter, the company was forced to post an apology on its website. It read: "Busted. Nailed. Snagged. As many of you have figured out (maybe our speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn't a real hip-hop maven and this site was actually developed by Sony. Guess we were trying to be just a little too clever. From this point forward, we will just stick to making cool products and use this site to give you nothing but the facts on the PSP - Sony Computer Entertainment America."

Finding out that Sony was behind the site was actually quite easy: the flog domain was www.alliwantforxmasisapsp.com. A quick WHOIS search reveals that the domain was registered by Zipatoni (www.zipatoni.com), a marketing and PR agency based in DC. The list of Zipatoni's clients include Sony...easy enough?

Last October, Wal Mart was also caught while using a similar tactic after creating a blog supposedly written by a couple traveling across the US in a rented RV staying overnight in the supermarket chain's parking lots.

It seems obvious that flogs can do more harm than good in the long run. One of the key rules of corporate blogs is to be "authentic" and transparent. Not only can this type of situation be very embarrassing but worse, it diminishes the level of trust companies are spending millions of dollars to create between their brands and their customers.

Monitoring Employees' Blog

A recent article by Michael Felberbaum from the Associated Press and published by Yahoo! News
[http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061029/ap_on_hi_te/military_blogging_2] explains how and why the US Army is monitoring soldier's blogs.

The "Army Web Risk Assessment Cell" based in Virginia, monitors official and unofficial blogs and other Web sites for anything that may compromise security. Of course, the parallel with the corporate world is a little bit of a stretch (US soldiers may be killed if some information gathered in blogs or videocast is used against them) but I listed below two major points I'd like to use to make a recommendation about your corporate blog and corporate blogging policy.

1. "We are a nation at war," Lt. Col. Stephen Warnock, team leader, said. "The less the enemy knows, the better it is for our soldiers." --> well, think about it, if you have a corporate blog and have many employees posting on their own blog, is there a risk some information might be used by your competitors? Blog are already used in Economic Intelligence projects to gather information about a specific company and project. So it could make sense to dedicate some resources to monitor the blogosphere for all posts that your employees publish that talk about their work. You may discover information you may consider in some cases embarrassing or worse, confidential.

2. Now soldiers wishing to blog while deployed are required to register their sites with their commanding officers, who monitor the sites quarterly --> should you do the same in your company? Ask every employee if and where they blog? I don't see anything shocking about that if it is related to their work but what if they have a blog on a topic that has nothing to do with the company? Or a topic that reveals something personal about them? For privacy reasons, I think it is acceptable to limit the registration to personal blog that may talk about work, otherwise, it might be too intrusive.

Of course, as always, I recommend prevention and education rather than "after the facts" sanctions or censorship. Before you event start thinking about monitoring employees blog, you have to tell them what to do and especially what not to do.

Damage Control Blogs?

Recently, three leading global brands have been affected by a major crisis: Dell, Apple and Sony.
Both Dell, and then soon after, Apple had to launch a massive battery recall program because lithium-ion batteries with cells manufactured by Sony can overheat, posing a fire hazard to consumers.

So I became curious to learn how the corporate blogging strategy of these three companies enabled them to do some damage control.

Dell
Dell’s official blog [http://www.direct2dell.com/] has published so far 9 posts on the battery recall issue. Several user comments are posted, some of them actually “applauding” the effort. In addition, Dell established a dedicated site [http://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/] to manage the recall. Of course the blogosphere is pointing out the fact that Dell waited for too long and that the recall will give enterprise IT managers headaches but overall, most bloggers are fairly supportive of the initiative.

Apple
Apple doesn’t have an official corporate blog. It is managing the crisis by providing a link on its home page to a dedicated support section [https://support.apple.com/ibook_powerbook/batteryexchange/].
Debating the recall is left to the usual blogs focused on Apple and I am not impressed with what I’ve seen there:
-scary pictures of destroyed PowerBooks [http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/] (see below picture of a sad PowerBook powered by Sony)
-comments around Apple “following” Dell’s lead.
Apple could have manage the debate more proactively by having a forum, such as a corporate blog, to do so.

Sony
Like Apple, Sony doesn’t have a corporate blog. It seems to be avoiding the debate by simply letting Dell and Apple take the forefront. What is more surprising is the fact that this is the second time in a short period of time that Sony is hit by a situation where damage control is needed. The first time was last year when BMG included a Digital Right Management rootkit on some music CDs without letting users know about it. Already then did many people ask the question: “Does Sony Corporation Need a Damage Control Blog?” [http://blogbusinesssummit.com/2005/11/does_sony_corpo.htm]. I search in vain Sony’s site to find any information about the battery recall. May be the communication team simply know that the problem will go away if they keep quiet?

Conclusion
I believe that corporate blogs are not a suitable tool for damage control unless the company already has one established. A company needs to build trust from readers over a relatively significant period of time before expecting to leverage a relationship to do some damage control. More useful could be a corporate blog to actually do some damage prevention. Comments offer an easy way to ask questions, provide feedback, and put pressure internally on a company to be proactive. At the same time, it seems to me that Dell benefited from being able to communicate on the crisis (from several angles) from its blog. By doing so, it deflected some of the comments out of its core site. Both Apple and Sony suffered from the absence of that alternative communication channel.

More information and perspectives available at: http://www.intuitive.com/blog/blogs_for_damage_control.html

Sad PowerBook Powered by Sony

Corporate Blogs in Europe

Fredrik Wackå from "Your Guide to Corporate Blogging" has a great list of corporate blogs in Europe at: http://www.corporateblogging.info/europe/

Lessons in Corporate Blogging

(this is a copy of an article published in BusinessWeek Online on July 18, 2006 By Nicholas Carr)

What your company can learn about keeping an online journal from the likes of Dell, Microsoft, and Apple

Last week, Dell launched a corporate blog, joining the small but growing group of businesses that have embraced the trendy communication medium. You might think that the blogosphere would have rolled out the welcome mat for the newcomer. Far from it. Dell (DELL ) was treated like a party crasher with bad hygiene. "Ho ho ho," chortled one prominent blogger, ridiculing Dell's site as "a blog in content management system name only." Sniffed another: "Perhaps it might have been better for them to have stayed silent." The irony is that Dell's blog, called "one2one," is actually a pretty good one. It lets employees post messages and videos, in their own voices and under their own names, and it allows readers to submit comments, even negative ones. There are limits to what Dell will publish—no curse words, no defamatory rants—but the ground rules seem sensible, and they're clearly laid out on the site. Dell's one2one may or may not prove a winner, but at least it's been well thought out. MICROSOFT'S MIGRATOR. The disparaging reaction to Dell's effort shows that establishing a corporate blog is not a risk-free proposition. The blogosphere is full of quasi-journalistic gunslingers with anticorporate leanings and itchy trigger fingers. If your blog falls afoul of their unwritten code—as it almost surely will—they'll shoot first and think later. Having a blog can actually make your company a more inviting target. Blogospheric sniping, though, is little more than a nuisance in most cases. Other risks loom larger. Microsoft (MSFT ) found that out in June, when its most prominent blogger, Robert Scoble, announced he was decamping to a startup that offered him a more attractive pay package. Scoble's departure received almost as much play in the press as Bill Gates's announcement, a few days later, that he'd retire from the company in two years. PC Magazine even ran an article suggesting that Scoble would prove a bigger loss to the company than Gates. The blogger had become the story, to the company's detriment. Beyond revealing how bloggers can upstage their patrons, the Scoble affair underscored the tension that can arise between the interests of a corporate blogger and the interests of the company. Scoble's affiliation with Microsoft—he dubbed himself the "Microsoft Geek Blogger"—was instrumental in earning him fame in the blogosphere. But that fame made him a hot commodity in his own right, and when he left, he took his Scobleizer blog, and its many fans, with him. The equity a corporate blogger builds up is portable, in other words. Rather than sticking to the company, it will follow the blogger—even if the blogger heads to a competitor. IMAGE AND STRATEGY AID. Still, a blog can be a useful communication channel. By providing companies with unvarnished feedback from customers, it can serve as an early-warning system for product or service problems. It can also provide an easy and inexpensive way to deliver specialized information to narrow segments of the market. And because subscribing to a blog is a snap, it can be a great way to distribute technical updates, new product announcements, and other periodic messages. There are a few rules of thumb that can help companies reap the benefits of a blog while sidestepping the pitfalls. The first one is simple but critical: Don't blog for blogging's sake. Make sure you have a clear business goal for your blog—and that you stick to that goal and track how well you're fulfilling it. Remember that, for companies, blogging isn't an ideology—it's a tool. Second, make sure your blog reflects your company's desired image and supports its strategy. Dell's blog provides a good model. By emphasizing how the blog provides a direct connection between the company and its customers, Dell reinforces its core strategy of selling gear directly to buyers, without having to go through middlemen. The blog has also been designed as part of a larger coordinated effort to rebuild the company's reputation, which has been damaged recently by service miscues and other snafus (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/19/06, "Dell: Facing Up to Past Mistakes"). RISK ALERT. Third, remember that there's no one "right way" to blog—no matter what the blogerati might say. You can certainly use blogs to let employees exchange information and ideas with customers. But you can design them more narrowly as well. Apple Computer (AAPL ), for instance, doesn't allow employees to blog on its behalf—probably because it doesn't want to risk muddying a painstakingly designed corporate image—but it has set up a blog to promote its .Mac services. A narrowly focused blog can be a particularly good idea if your company is just getting started with blogging. It allows you to test the waters before you open the floodgates. Finally, make sure you educate your employees about the legal and business risks inherent in blogging, such as the possibility that they might inadvertently disclose sensitive or regulated information. Blogging is very different from the kinds of communication activities that employees routinely engage in, like speaking at conferences. Anything that goes up on the Internet is immediately available to a worldwide audience of billions—and it becomes a permanent part of the public record. Independent bloggers may not have to think before they post, but corporate bloggers do.

Corporate Blogs PR Collateral Benefits

In 2004 and 2005, it has been fascinating to see that the fact that a company has a "great" corporate blog can become almost a competitive advantage. In fact, several companies got increased positive media exposure by becoming innovators of the blogosphere.

At Mindjet for example, we had several media hits we were very pleased to see. In particular, MSNBC talked about the Mindjet Blog and BusinessWeek picked up on it.

In general, I don't actually believe expectations should be too high as far as PR positive effects are concerned, especially as blogs become "old news", but it is a nice side benefit of having some creative ideas and metrics about your corporate blog.

And, as CNN said in a recently published article: "Because with a potentially massive audience out there waiting for information, the cost of silence could be far worse."

Blogs Cut Into Search Spending

DMNews recently published an interesting analysis of some of the results Mindjet (disclosure: I am working for that great company), has seen from its investment in RSS feeds and blogs. In 2005, we tested multimedia blog marketing to complement our efforts with the Mindjet Blog [http://blog.mindjet.com] and got some solid results.

You can read the full article at: http://www.dmnews.com/cgi-bin/artprevbot.cgi?article_id=35217

Preventing Blog Spam

Blog spam (also called link spam or comment spam) is a form of spamming that recently became publicized most often when targeting blogs, but also affects wikis (where it is often called wikispam), guestbooks, and online discussion boards.

Any web application that displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors or the referring URLs of web visitors may be a target. In the case of blogs, spam comes if you leave the comments functionality accessible without restrictions to all visitors.

As with eMail spam, there is a clear business incentive that motivates spammers to take advantage of unprotected blogs. Adding links that point to the spammer's web site increases the page rankings for the site in search engines such as Google. An increased page rank means the spammer's commercial site would be listed ahead of other sites for certain Google searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers. As most personal blogs are still unprotected, it is likely that blog spamming will expand and that its sophistication level will continue to increase.

Blog spam can have a very damaging effect on your blog. Not only can the content be offensive, but it pollutes the healthy debate you may want to trigger by making comments available. In addition, unprotected blogs full of blog spam will reflect poorly on your technical abilities to prevent it and potentially damage your image (this is especially true if your blog is somewhat technical as most savvy people know solutions exist and will have a low forgiveness level).

Link spamming originally appeared in internet guestbooks, where spammers repeatedly fill a guestbook with links to their own site and no relevant comment to increase search engine rankings. If an actual comment is given it is often just "cool page", "nice website", or keywords of the spammed link.

In 2003, spammers began to take advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging software like Movable Type by repeatedly placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer's commercial web site. Jay Allen created a free plugin, called MT-BlackList1, for the Movable Type weblog tool that attempts to alleviate this problem. Many current blog software now have methods of preventing or reducing the effect of blog spam.

Blogger (the Google blog network I am using) recently launched a word verification anti-blog-spam solution. It is based on the concept of challenge response and is very similar to what Register.com has implemented for the access to the WHOIS database fro example. If you select this option, people leaving comments on your Blogger blog will be required to complete a word verification step (see image below). What this does is to prevent automated systems from adding comments to your blog, since it takes a human being to read the word and pass this step. If you've ever received a comment that looked like an advertisement or a random link to an unrelated site, then you've encountered comment spam. A lot of this is done automatically by software which can't pass the word verification, so enabling this option is a good way to prevent many such unwanted comments.

On the Mindjet blog, we are using a plugin called Referrer Bouncer. (See: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/word-press-1-5-plugin-referer-bouncer/)
Also, any comment posted which contains more than 10 links automatically get put in a moderation queue and an e-mail is sent to the post author. Wordpress also blocks all comments from open and insecure proxies.

In addition, there is a joint effort between Google, Wordpress and other blogging software to use a new attribute for links in comments. The attribute is rel='external nofollow' what this means is everytime hyperlink is inserted into a blogs comment, search engines will know not to use or follow the link. This makes the spam in comments useless and will not raise their search engine stats. For a complete description, go to: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

Because of prevention improvements in blog software link spam is now increasingly concentrated on wikis including Wikipedia, (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spam).

Do you know Cloud?

amazon apparently apple autopia blog blogs case center chris kohler community computer download earth engine fuel giant global google help holiday idea intel ipod ipods kohler mail media microsoft mindjet mindmanager mobile money nasa new york open source photos popular rootkit running scientists search service slashdot sony space state story university wired magazine xbox 360

To see my live Cloud, go to: http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/Flavaste/default/50

To Link or Not To Link?

If you are thinking about starting a corporate blog (or already have one), one of the questions you'll have to answer is: “should we link our corporate blog from our corporate web site?”

In this posting I will explore the two extreme options you have: Link or No Link.

I use the term “extreme” here because you actually have various degrees of linking. You can put a clear message on your most visited page (typically your home page), make your blog part of the main navigation or on the contrary burry it somewhere in your “about” section.

I believe the answer will depend on the following factors:

• the key objectives you have with your core site and your corporate blog (do you sell on your core site or just provide information, how “corporate” is your site),
• timing (yours and the overall blogosphere’s),
• the level of risks you are ready to take,
• the amount of resource you can dedicate to your blog.
  

Option 1: No Link
I think it is perfectly okay to completely isolate your corporate blog from your corporate site and to not even highlight it on your corporate site. As long as you are making it very clear that your blog is a “corporate blog” and not try to hide that (the blogosphere hates fake and so should you!). One example is GM FastLane blog [http://fastlane.gmblogs.com//], it doesn’t appear to be linked from the GM corporate site (please correct me if I am wrong) but clearly features the GM logo, links back to the official site and is mostly written by GM executives.
Not linking prevents what I call “traffic cannibalization”. All the traffic going to your blog is going to add to your overall visibility and potentially increase the traffic to your core site and not simply divert traffic already going to it. You are probably spending a significant amount of your marketing budget to drive traffic to your core site. Each click to it has a precise cost and you are working hard to decrease that cost while increasing the quality of the leads. Seeing that traffic go to a “non e-commerce enabled” section could not be the best use of your internal resources.
The other factor you should take into account is the risk of “blog spam” (including, in particular, meaningless comments advertising competitors or comments trashing your brands or products). This might be also the right strategy if you want to truly create a “buzz”. Only people “in the know” will learn about your blog and are more likely to share it with others. Last if you have doubts about it or are not fully committed, it might be the safest way. That way, if you decide to terminate the experience at some point, your core site won’t suffer.


Option 2: Link (example Stonyfield Farm– see highlight from their corporate home page below)
Based on my experience, most corporate blogs are linked from their original corporate sites. In most cases, it is a link from the “About” section. For example, Google Corporate blog [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/] is accessible from the “More Google” section under “About Google”. The benefit of linking is that you are just opening a new window into your company, a more personal one with the voices of the various people writing post and customers or partners writing comments. You are also adding a completely new content section that could prove useful to promote new ideas, test concepts or highlight new features of your product. It sends a clear message about the culture you want to establish: open, direct, and dynamic. I think this is the right strategy if you are mostly about content (and not commerce) and I think it is also best when your blog is maturing (lots of posts, proven interesting content…). Over time, as blogs become more mainstream, I think this is going to also be simply a “must” have section for most corporate sites.

So, based on your objectives and your experience, what do you think?

Stonyfield Farm Daily Blog 

50 million Americans visited blogs in the first quarter of 2005

Antone Gonsalves of Techweb published the results of an interesting study sponsored in part by blog-hosting service Six Apart and by Gawker Media.

It clearly demonstrates that blogs are becoming main stream!

A couple of facts caught my eyes:
-Nearly a third of online Americans have visited blogs in the first quarter of 2005!
-Blogspot.com's 19 million unique visitors amounted to more visitors than the NYTimes.com, USAToday.com and WashingtonPost.com.

For more, go to: http://www.internetweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=167600775

Blog and RSS Advertising

"Build traffic, and they will come".

Who?

But of course, the advertisers!

So, now that blogging and RSS feeds are becoming main stream ways for readers to stay "in the know" and for publishers to tell the world whatever is crossing their mind, it is no surprise to see that advertising agencies and blog hosters are offering various options to gain access to this growing audience.

I will mention just a few options marketers have today to spend some of their budget:

• AdBrite [http://www.adbrite.com/]. This online advertising agency offers a product called "Just Blogs". For $1,422.16 (exactly!), you can advertise for 7 days on their network of blogs and expect around 1,811 clicks ($0.79 CPC).
• Blogads [http://www.blogads.com] is a network of bloggers who accept advertising. You can search the directory of blog by topic and decide if you like the price or not. For example, you can get one of two ads atop the regular strip of ads on lockergnome.com for $600/week.
• CrispAds [http://www.crispads.com]. You can start advertising on the CrispAds blog network for as little as $0.35 per click.
• Google [http://www.google.com/] . Blogger - now owned by Google - provides its users a very easy way to join the Google AdSense program. AdSense delivers ads that are precisely targeted—on a page-by-page basis—to the content people find on the site. When a Google search box is added to the blog, AdSense delivers relevant ads that are targeted to the Google search results pages generated by the visitors’ search request.
• Pheedo [http://www.pheedo.com/] a San Francisco based company, develops tools for advertisers. Its network focuses on delivering ads through news feeds and on blogs. They claim to have over 8,000 blogs in their network.
• Yahoo! http://www.yahoo.com]. Recently, Yahoo! announced that they would begin displaying ads from Overture's service - now owned by Yahoo!- within RSS feeds displayed on a users My Yahoo homepage.
  

It is also expected that AskJeeves will soon enable advertisers to have access to Bloglines feeds but so far, their AJinteractive offering doesn't seem to be offering that option.

If you have any other options to receommend, please let me know.

Why Start a Corporate Blog?

"Corporate America Adopts Blogging" writes Nicole Ziegler Dizon in a recent article. But why?

BackBone Media, a online marketing company, recently launched a corporate blogging survey to understand the major priorities in starting a corporate blog. The early results can be reviewed at: http://blogsurvey.backbonemedia.com/

Based on 64 respondents (so far) to the survey, the top four reasons why people started a corporate blog are the following:
1. Another way to publish content and ideas
2. Build a community
3. Thought leadership
4. A way to get information quickly to customers

While the survey concept is interesting, I find those results somewhat dissapointing. What a surprise, people use a publishing tool to publish content and ideas...

I would hope for more specifics. For example, I believe that blogs are not just another way to publish content and ideas but a different one. The blog tone, the authors and the publishing process are very different for a blog than for a regular web site (or at least I believe they should be). The benefits bloggers can expect are also very different.

I would love to see a survey that focused on what really makes blogs unique and different from regular web sites, or newsgroups.

If you know of any, please comment below.

From SPAM to MAPS

Before I get started here, I have to provide some personal background information.

Since September 2004, I am the VP of Worldwide Marketing and Strategy at Mindjet. Mindjet is the leading provider of software for visualizing and managing information and provides applications for business teams to think together, plan together, and work together. MindManager, the company’s award-winning flagship product with more than 500,000 licenses sold worldwide, is productivity software designed for business professionals working as individuals or in teams at Global 2000 companies.
What makes MindManager really unique is the fact that it enables its users to work with what we call “business maps”. Many examples of those maps can be seens at: http://www.mindjet.com/us/products/map_gallery.php. Maps are a visual way to easily capture, organize and share any kind of information (ideas, tasks, plans, data, images, files, text…).

Before that, I was the VP of Marketing at another great software company called Brightmail. Brightmail was a major player in the email security space. It was the anti-spam leader and was acquired in June 2004 by Symantec, the global leader in information security and maker of the famous Norton Anti-Virus product line. For more information go to: http://www.brightmail.com. Brightmail had pioneered the anti-spam software industry and was fighting very hard to free the mailboxes of million of business and ISP users from spam, while delivering accurately valid messages.

So to summarize, Brightmail was a company focused on defeating spam while Mindjet is focusing on promoting maps. And I recently noticed something strange: SPAM in reverse is MAPS!

I started to wonder about this coincidence. How many times in your life do you have a chance to focus exactly on the opposite on what you had been doing before and was I doing just that?

Well, after thinking about it, I realized that I wasn’t doing the opposite at all. In fact, I have exactly the same challenges: establish maps as something as universally known as spam is today. I have the very unique challenge to create a new category and to establish a leading brand and position for my company. I need to build awareness, leverage the viral aspects of our product, encourage positive word of mouth and listen to end-user feedback.
Next, the main issue with both spam and maps revolves around business productivity. But of course, spam has a negative impact on it, while maps have a very positive one. Spam creates information overload, while maps can help solve this 21st century problem. Also, both spam and maps are changing the way we work. Spam changed the way we deal with email, while maps can change the way you work forever for the better.
In addition, both spam and maps deal with visualization: the worse spam has images in it and those can be offensive, while maps leverage images, icons and relationships to add to the meaning of the message.

To summarize, maps and spam are indeed mirrors images of topics that have a lot in common, one loaded with positive, and the other full of negative aspects. I have very similar challenges with both of these. If you believe your experience can help me, have a perspective on this story or a similar experience, please comment!

Where I was recently and why I have not been posting in a while 

Blog Directories and Registries

If you have a corporate blog and want to drive some traffic to it by ensuring people can find it when they search directories, you need to register it. My experience has been that the effectiveness and impact of this activity is somewhat limited so I recommend you don't limit your efforts to it but it surely doesn't hurt to spend a little time to do it!

Here is a list of some of the leading blog specific directories (I am not listing the specific RSS feeds directories such as Feedster here) you need to pay attention to:

• Blogwise [http://www.blogwise.com/submit]
• Moreover [http://w.moreover.com/cgi-local/site/sourcesubmission.pl]
• Syndic8 [http://www.syndic8.com/suggest.php?Mode=site]
• Technorati [http://www.technorati.com/ping.html]
• BlogDex [http://blogdex.net/add.asp]
• BlogUniverse (select a category, then add your site) [http://www.bloguniverse.com/radlinks/]
• Eatonweb portal [http://portal.eatonweb.com/add.php]
• Bloogz [http://www.bloogz.com/man_en/add_your_url.php]
• BlogMatcher [http://blogmatcher.com/u.php]
• BlogHub [http://www.bloghub.com/cgi-bin/add.cgi]
• BlogPulse [http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html]
• BlogCatalog [http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/submit_blog.html]
• GlobeofBlogs [http://www.globeofblogs.com/register.php]
• NewsTrove [http://newstrove.com/suggest_site.html]
  

If you have more time, I recommend a much longer list (of over 100), including regular search engines and directories, published by Robin Hood at the following address:[http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/]

Blog Traffic Exchange

One other way that blog owners can market and promote their blogs is through taking part in blog traffic exchange communities. The model was initially applied to websites and advertising banners (the most famost banner exchange networks during the bubble days were LinkExchange - now part of Microsoft - and SmartClicks - now Linkbuddies).

Most of these networks are probably not appropriate for (or required by) large corporate blogs but could very well help small and medium size businesses.

• BlogClicker [http://www.blogclicker.com/] --> BlogClicker offers a free standard membership with a 2:1 view ratio. Upgraded memberships and credit packages with up to a 1:1.5 view ratio or 1 view ratio are also available.
• BlogExplosion [http://www.blogexplosion.com] --> BlogExplosion offers a standard 2:1 traffic ratio. For every two blogs you visit, one person will visit your blog in return.
• BlogCrowd.com [http://www.blogcrowd.com/] --> A free blog traffic exchange. You earn credits for visiting other blogs during 20 seconds. For every 2 blogs you visit, you get 1 to your blog.
• Blogexchange.net [http://www.blogexchange.net] --> A free button exchange that operates on a 1:1 exchange ratio.
• Pheedo Blogsnob Traffic Exchange [http://pheedo.com/publishers/simpleads/exchange.html] --> When you promote a blog on your site, your blog is promoted on someone else’s.
• BlogAzoo [http://www.blogazoo.com/] --> 2:1 exchange featuring personal profiles.
• Wolf Surfer [http://www.wolfsurfer.com/] --> Website traffic exchange welcoming bloggers.

If you have any experience (good or bad) with some of the networks I listed above or want to add others, please comment!

Pinging Services to Increase Traffic

One of the easy way to increase the visibility of (and therefore traffic to) your corporate blog is to "ping" weblog trackers. I listed below a list of some of these weblog trackers (such as weblogs.com, blogshares.com...).

The main way these sites learn that a weblog has been updated is for the weblog software to 'ping' the weblog trackers. Every time you publish, you will be telling those sites that you made an update. So, if a user subscribes to your RSS feed via an aggregator site, they will be notified that your blog was updated. The concept is very similar to the submission of a classic website to search engines and web directories, but specific to the blogging reader community.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping.php
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.bblog.com/ping.php
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.catapings.com/ping.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

An easy "how to configuring Movable Type to do this is" is available at http://www.cruftbox.com/cruft/docs/pinging.html

The concept of Meta-Ping has also been invented. It works the same way Meta-Search sites work for search. A free service like Ping-O-Matic [http://pingomatic.com/about/] is a good way to execute multiple ping at once.

The Corporate Blog URL Debate

I wanted to share a recent debate I had with my team: “should we dedicate a new URL to our corporate blog or use an extension of our main website URL?”

We explored the following three options.

Option #1= an extension of our existing corporate site URL: http://www.blog.mindjet.com (or the equivalent http://www.mindjet.com/blog)

Pros:

• Clearly identifies it a s our “official” corporate blog
• Distinguish it from personal blogs related to the company
• Easy to implement (both from back and front end perspectives)
• Blog traffic adds to corporate site traffic
• Links to this URL should help our corporate URL ranking in key search engines
• Easy to navigate from blog to corporate site
• Helps build the corporate brand

Cons:

• Could be perceived as less neutral and open than a totally new URL (even if our policy will be to be fully open)
• Could limit the number of third party blogs linking to it
  

Option #2 = a new URL inspired by the combination of our company name and the term “blog”: http://www.themindjetblog.com (or the equivalents http://www.mindjetblog.com or http://www.mindmanagerblog.com)

Pros:

• Leverages the corporate brand
• Could increase the number of third party blogs linking to it
• Clearly differentiates the blog domain from the corporate domain

Cons:

• Could confuse readers (Is this the official blog or not?)
• Requires specific resources to drive traffic to it
• Requires some more back-end efforts (tracking traffic for example)
  

Option #3 = create a totally new name: http://www.totallynewname.com

Pros:

• Creates a new brand which could prove useful
• Could be perceived as “independant” from the company
  

Cons:

• Could confuse readers (Is this the official blog or not?)
• Requires specific efforts to drive traffic to it
• Creates a new brand that could defocus from our main ones
  
  

Our decision:
Based on our philosophy to keep things simple and maintain complete integrity, we decided to select Option #1: http://www.blog.mindjet.com/ . In addition, we also registered all the domains we could imagine would apply to Option #2 and are redirecting the traffic to http://www.blog.mindjet.com/. That way, we will avoid having anyone actually register those URLs and confuse our users.

The Rewards of Corporate Blogs

As I have covered in a prior posting, starting a corporate blog initiative has some risks but it can also have great rewards.

Just to be clear, my perspective is that any company that has a web presence and a traditional corporate website should have a comprehensive blog strategy. In the ideal world of unlimited resources, a company should:

• Have a corporate blog, facilitated by someone in charge of external communication with contributions from various employees (managers and individual contributors)
• Encourage more personal employee blogs, published by individual willing to dedicate some time to it
• Regulate those with a policy or a set of guidelines
• Execute a set of marketing initiatives to promote their blog presence (cross linking, search engine submission, awards...)
• Evaluate various marketing campaigns to advertise on relevant blogs and RSS feeds
• Monitor what other bloggers are saying about them and engage a conversation with external bloggers covering them
• Leverage blog and wiki technologies for internal use to promote collaboration and information sharing

Here are some of the numerous rewards I can see of having a solid blog presence and strategy:

1. Communicate the way an increasing number of customers want to consume information. Both from a technology perspective and from a tone and style one. A blog enables to start a real informal and personal conversation with your audience. It "feels" more like a one on one conversation with a name/face to it that a formal web site which typically "feels" like a brochure.
2. Add yet another way to reach an important segment of your target market and create repetition.
3. Target specific segments of your audience with specific messages. Think about "mini sites", each with a specific focus and tone for example.
4. Create buzz about new products and gather input about them. GM FastLane blog does a good job at that [http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/].
5. Try a new, different image. You don't have to follow the corporate guidelines; you can reinvent your self as cool, young, and sexy or add a tech spin to what you are doing.
6. Drive the debate, engage your audience. A blog is an easy way to get feedback - even if you don't ask for it!
7. Build trust by telling the truth and being more open about what you are thinking and doing.
8. Increase the visibility of your brands in search engine by having more content about your brands published and more links to your corporate website. For example, well cross-linked blogs have the reputation to end-up high on the list of Google search results. For more explanation about Google search technology go to [http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/tech.html].
9. Benefit from a rapid and easy way to announce news, changes, opinions, and perspectives.
10. Engage your employees. You can really create some internal excitement by rewarding popular postings and making individual employees visible to the world.

Francois Sailing on the Safe (?) Waters of the SF Bay

The Dangers of Corporate Blogs

For a company, the decision to encourage or not employees to start individual blogs and to start or not a corporate blog can have some positive and some negative consequences. On this post, I will focus on some of the risks. I will cover some of the upside in another one later.

First, I see three main options (the last two are not mutually exclusive) that companies have chosen so far as far as their blog strategy is concerned.

Option 1: Do nothing.
It seems to still be the case for the vast majorities of companies out there. Most companies simply don't have a corporate blog and/or a policy specific to employees' personal blogs. Even in the absence of a specific blog policy, and as proven by a series of highly visible cases recently, employees should be careful not to violate any other corporate rules. Delta flight attendant Ellen Simonetti and Google employee Mark Jen both got fired over content they published on their personal blogs. Though many companies have Internet guidelines that prohibit visiting porn sites or forwarding offensive jokes for example, few of the policies directly cover blogs, particularly those written outside of work.

Option 2: Formalize the guidelines covering personal blog publishing.
This could actually inspire some blog vocations and trigger the creation of employee blogs. As long as the employees don't reveal corporate secrets or impact the company brand in negative ways, it could actually help create interest in the company and drive traffic to the corporate site. The key in this case is to start a dialogue between employers and employees about what to say and not to say. Sun's Policy is an interesting example [ http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/02/Policy].

Option 3: Launch an "official corporate blog" or a "official directory of employee blogs".
Several technology companies such as Google [http://www.google.com/googleblog/],
Ask Jeeves [http://blog.ask.com/] or Macromedia [http://www.markme.com/mxna/index.cfm] have launched official corporate blogs with contribution from various employees. Microsoft has a slightly different strategy with the notion of the "Microsoft Community Blogs" focused on various topics [http://www.microsoft.com/communities/blogs/PortalHome.mspx] but the spirit is similar.


But, these strategies have some risks associated with them.

The first one - doing nothing - is probably the most risky:

• Competitors can take the lead in establishing a vibrant presence in the blog community and outflank you.
• Visitors to your site might start looking for alternative ways of learning about you, either through blogs or RSS feeds and be dissapointed to not find those. I can hear the "Are their marketing people sleeping or what?" comments.
• Your name will for sure be mentionned in people's blog without any monitoring and you may miss important information or trend by simply not focusing enough attention on it.
• Other people or company can register blog related URLs with your name in it (such as http://www.thecompanyblog.com/ or http://www.companyblog.com/). You should register those right now if you haven't already to avoid having others do it and start "unofficial blogs". It is unclear to me if The Apple Blog [http://www.theappleblog.com/] is officially approved by Apple or if it is just a way for someone to generate advertising dollars.

The second option - formalize guidelines - could also have some interesting negative side effects:

• By "awakening" some vocations, the company could experience a negative impact on productivity. What can really prevent employees from blogging at work? Some URL filtering software can find a new life!
• On another extreme, formal guidelines - as any rules - can be too restrictive and discourage personal initiative. They should be crafted with care and should always reflect the main objective you have. They could also invite gaming, creating an incentive for people to find ways around them or to discover topics that are not covered by them.
• Last, guidelines are somewhat meaningless unless you enforce them. So, you have to ask yourself how much resources you are really ready to invest in monitoring how repected they are and what you are ready to enforce those.

The last option - the most proactive one - is probably the safest route, yet, I can see some dangers too:

• The main one is under-delivering. Starting a blog is one thing, having a good one is another. Some people or companies should never get started if they don' t intent to invest enough time and resources to do it well. Only one third of all blogs are actually alive and active. Make sure your corporate one isn't one of them.
• Also make sure you don't "over invest". After all, only 38% of US adults know what they are. They will only help you at the margin of your business. Sure, an potentially important margin, but still, only a margin.

Let's Look at The Numbers

Why should anyone in marketing care about blogs, RSS feeds, and Wikis...?

I see four main reasons why marketers who don' t care are missing an opportunity:

1) A large and increasing number of people are involved in the blog community. Some are just readers of blogs or wikis (knowingly or not actually), some subscribe to RSS feeds and some get more involved by actually becoming part of the community and actually publishing their own.

2) A large and increasing amount of content is getting published and consumed. That content is typically organized by topic or center of interest. That content is also in general not yet saturated by advertising messages. It is actually perceived by some as more independent and spontaneous than the regular media or corporate websites and therefore more credible

3) The profile of the blog community member is also attractive. Blog readers and writers still tend to display the profile of technology "pioneers".

4) Few marketers have made the jump yet. As usual, some aspects of blog marketing can be perceived as being risky, the rules are not yet well defined, the facilitators are not yet in place, the results are not yet proven. But in exchange for these challenges, the opportunity to be unique and to be heard exist. After all, it is not every day that marketer can pioneer and explore new techniques themselves!

A recent report from The Pew Internet and American Life Project [http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_blogging_data.pdf] is providing some interesting statistics:

• Blog readership shoots up 58% in 2004
• 27 % of online U.S. adults read blogs (this means that by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers)
• 6 million Americans get news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators
• 7 % write blogs (that represent 8 million people)
• 62% of online Americans do not know what a blog is .

Blog creators are more likely to be:

• Men: 57% are male
• Young: 48% are under age 30
• Broadband users: 70% have broadband at home
• Internet veterans: 82% have been online for six years or more
• Relatively well off financially: 42% live in households earning over $50,000
• Well educated: 39% have college or graduate degrees

Blog readers are somewhat more of a mainstream group than bloggers themselves. Like bloggers, blog readers are more likely to be young, male, well educated, internet veterans.

Another good source of statistics about the blogosphere is Blogcount [http://dijest.com/bc/]. This blog collects and organizes the best reports and analyses on this subject.

Welcome

I am quite amazed by how many people and companies are starting blogs around the world every day. The numbers are staggering. They remind me of the adoption of the iPod, where 2004 was THE year! Apple shipped 80% of the total number of units of the portable audio players in the year 2004 alone (8 million in 2004 to be exact and 10 million total since the iPod launch in October of 2001).

The elegant simplicity of the blog publishing technology, combined with the reach of the Internet enables anyone to become a publisher. It took me less than 2 minutes to be up and running! Way better than the traditional web site publishing standard, no FTP, no HTML, no JavaScripts...simple, straightforward, clean. Of course, the functionality is limited and the design flexibility as well, but the satisfaction of seeing quick results is unbeatable.

The amount (and in some cases the quality) of the content available in the blog community is fantastic. I started to like the informal/journal-like tone of blogs. They are typically easier and more interesting to read than regular personal web sites. The fact that they also lack the design cheesiness of these sites is also very positive. Reading a blog feels almost like a conversation. Someone is talking to you without trying too hard to say it the right way. I bet that very soon, we'll see "voice to blog" software that will enable us to blog while driving or blog through cell phones. The result and style should actually be very close to what we can read today.

In this blog, I am going to talk about online high tech (software, hardware and internet services) marketing. My initial focus will be on blog advertising or how companies can leverage the blog community to build their brand, increase awareness, deliver their messages, and improve their image.