BLOG ROLL
ARCHIVES
July 20, 2006
The folks at Pew are at it again - polling, tracking and reporting on blogs. In a report released this week, they've painted "a portrait of the internet's new storytellers."
Some interesting stats:
- 8% of the adult internet users blog - so we're a real minority, but
- 39% of the online population now read blogs - you'll find us yet!
- The gender profile of bloggers is at "statistical parity" - women and men both blog in about the same numbers, so why are most of the "A List" bloggers male?
- 54% of bloggers are under the age of 30 - I'm reminded that we were never to trust anyone over the age of 30 when I was growing up. Are we coming full circle?
- 55% of bloggers blog under a pseudonym - which I find funny. I always wanted to write under the perfect "girl detective" name of Dusty Miller... hmmm.
May 22, 2006
I found a couple of posts recently mentioning Marqui's "Paybloggers" program from 2004 and early 2005 - in which we paid 20 bloggers to post about Marqui once a week for three months, no matter what they said. (You can still read some of the controversy leading up to the program here.)
It seems that Tris Hussey (a consultant who admits freely his blog is sponsored by Blogware/Tucows) and Mark Evans (a journalist and blogger who displays ads on his blog) are discussing the debate around ethics and being paid for blogging.
More and more, people are attending seminars and exploring blogging on their own and for business, and the question ALWAYS comes up:
How do I make money from blogging?
There are a myriad of ways (sponsorships, display ads, etc.) to make a little here and there. Marqui's pay to post approach was one of the first touch off the ethical debate around being paid to blog.
Tris has a quotable quote in his post:
"Just because you pay me, doesn't mean you've bought me."
Believe me, none of Marqui's bloggers were bought by us or sold out to us. Because we demanded their complete transparency and honesty, and behaved that way ourselves. And we posted every negative word they (and others who entered into the conversation) wrote about us personally, our program, our software, and our idea to pay bloggers.
Sometimes it hurt like hell to read and respond to personal attacks and negative posts, especially since it was my entry into the blogosphere. But here, 17 months later, I'm still participating in the conversations, and a firm believer in business blogging and the power of the blogosphere.
Why? It is self-cleansing. Inauthentic, non-transparent posts are outed in seconds. Because someone, somewhere will always know (and expose) the truth behind any situation.
And as long as this debate continues, I will continue to be very proud of our part in it.
10/29/2005 9:52
1) Know what people are saying about you... 2) Responding to what people say about you in a timely manner In my presentation this afternoon, I'll talk about my Six Rules of Engagement in the blogosphere: 1) Develop thick skin 2) Be absolutely honest 3) Have a point of view 4) Do your research 5) Engage your detractors 6) Drive to closure
8/18/2005 8:23
And it's off to a good start -- the event's coordinators have finally wised up and provided power strips at every table. Of course, no one was expecting to have power readily available, so it's been funny to watch people as they come into the main ballroom...60 minutes early...immediately scanning the room for the nearest outlet. Some even came prepared with their own powerstrips. Me? I was part of the early crowd. Here before 8 AM, just in case I needed to stake a claim to an outlet. More to come once the keynote starts...
8/1/2005 16:58
Found in an entry on Rick Segal's blog, a link to an excellent post about blogging, subscribing and tagging from Fred Wilson. It explains in simple, straightforward language how they all work together. Two VCs with plenty to teach. I'm subscribed to each.
7/21/2005 10:43
I read an article on MarketingSherpa today about re-blogging. In it, the author, Anne Holland said:
"...recently I've begun to see an ugly trend emerging. Bloggers have begun cutting and pasting the entire text of our articles in their blogs. Sometimes it appears as though they wrote the article, sometimes they give a little credit "from MarketingSherpa." Either way, I have to contact them with a little cease-and-desist note or risk losing the intellectual property that our company is built on...."I've always said there's a light side and a dark side to the blogosphere. But that it's also self-cleansing, which is essential to the integrity of the whole thing. C'mon, people. Proper attribution and the courtesy to wrap your own thoughts around the essence of any article is mandatory. There are too many tools and honest people out there to ever think you'll get away with fraud. In fact, a dear friend in the blogosphere, Meryl passed along a great idea that I'd like to share with everyone. It's a site called Change This. And they believe good ideas will spread, because people are optimists (and basically good). Take the time to go have a look. Be optimistic. And above all, be honest.
6/30/2005 16:12
One of our fabulous colleagues, Meryl (content maven for hire), has sent over a resource to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Legal Guide for Bloggers. It's a fact-filled site that provides FAQs on legal issues for bloggers in the US. You can click on the fabulously patriotic graphic below to go there.
(It's cool because they provided the HTML to do so, and all I had to do is copy and paste it in! I'm such a geek, yet so HTML challenged, that was easy!)
Bookmark it.
6/23/2005 18:44
Q. How can a company start a conversation outside of the IT industry, if they wish to reach CEOs, CFOs, etc. to consider their telecom product as a productivity tool? A. Tara and I both attended a blogging event last January called the Blog Business Summit. Go here for more info – there's one coming up in August in SFO. We'll be there! One of the most interesting things that I gleaned from the summit was that you can get a long way by ‘influencing the influencers.' For example: If you have a particular group of people you'd like to recommend your product (an influential analyst in telecom, for example), find out who blogs about the industry, and read their posts. Then use Technorati and others to find out who they comment on, and who they like. Start talking to the people they like, by commenting on their posts, asking questions, etc. Once they start talking with you, they might start talking about you. It's likely then, that the analyst will recognize you when you start commenting on her blog. By then, you'll have an enhanced knowledge of the issues surrounding your market, relationships (we hope) with industry influencers, and the confidence that you can speak not only to them but to the CEOs and CFOs themselves. It's pretty standard practice, but much easier - through blogs - to learn more quickly what's resonating with people who are talking about your industry. Q: What are RSS feeds, and how are they used? A: We hope our presentation gave you an intro to RSS. We gave another presentation this month that talked about RSS and the other “alphabet soup� technologies available for marketers. We'll post a link to it here in case you'd like to check it out. At Marqui, we're happy that RSS extends the reach of our blog, our announcements, our news. We can tell it works, because sometimes we'll blog, and then within moments we'll have people commenting on our posts. It's pretty cool. There are many great resources for RSS online – I'd recommend looking at Chris Prillo's summary here. Chris is an entertaining guy who's very much into technology. Go forth and be enlightened. Q: If you already have an email newsletter, are you saying that you can also post that on your blog? A: I think we'd suggest that rather than posting a newsletter in your blog, post a link to your blog in your newsletter. The blog should augment the newsletter, not restate it. And use your blog to explain the stories behind the things you've talked about in your newsletter. Put a human being or two from your company and their stories (with permission, of course) behind your company's accomplishments. That's the kind of thing we'd like to see you do with your blog. Q: Is your blog part of your corporate Web site or is it reached through a separate entry point? A: We have a link to our blog on the home page of our web site. And we have a link to our web site from our blog. Of course, your readers (both web and blog) can bookmark either place and go there directly (or subscribe using RSS) but you should make it convenient to go to either place from the other. We're rolling through the questions as we have time. I suspect we'll be finished with them by noon (PST) tomorrow (Friday, June 24). Cheers!
6/23/2005 12:47
We'll be posting our Gross Blog Anatomy whitepaper tomorrow (Friday, June 24). Meanwhile, if you'd like to download our whitepaper The Marketer's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, you'll find it here.
June 23, 2005
Tara and I had fun in our Gross Anatomy of a Blog presentation this morning. We promised to post the answers to the questions we couldn't get to during the presentation here, so here's our first attempt to answer them.
Because this is a longer than usual post, I'm going to take advantage of an 'extended entry' which will link Our Dear Readers to the actual Q&A on another page. This is a personal preference kind of thing. Many people hate extended entries, and many people hate long posts. We'll offer this up as an example, and let you decide.
6/20/2005 13:41
Thanks to everyone who attended our seminar this morning. As promised, the resources we referred to in the seminar are listed here. And we'll post answers to any questions we were unable to answer here this week. www.marketingvox.com www.marketingsherpa.com www.marketingprofs.com www.thenewpr.com www.sethgodin.com www.micropersuasion.com bloombergmarketing.blogs.com www.blogbusinesssummit.com As we mentioned in the presentation, we'd really enjoy hearing your comments on the presentation and our blog. How often do you get to present to a bunch of smart marketers and then have the opportunity to engage in conversations with them? Now THAT's the power of the blog.
6/20/2005 13:01
I'm preparing to give a presentation on Thursday this week: Gross Anatomy of a Blog - Dissecting Blogs from a Marketer's Point of View. It's in conjunction with Corvent, and you can find out more about it here. Anyway, in preparing for it, I'm looking around for blogs with great designs. (Remember, I'm the one who had trouble picking out a template on blogger.com?) My google search on Blog Designs turned up a plethora of web design firms who are now web + blog design firms. That was inevitable, wasn't it? One promising result was the 2004 Weblog Awards - Best Design. Alas, it yielded little of consequence in terms of innovative results. Of the top four 'vote-getters,' three were nicely put together personal blogs (see second, third, and fourth place winners), without breakthrough designs. The winner was (well, it was only 2004 before there were so many web + blog design firms out there) underwhelming to me. I guess if bloggers would simply adapt to the norms of the 'blog design standard' that exists today, we'd be way ahead of the game. In terms of corporate blogging, I think we're all exploring new ground with our blogs. And most marketers (myself included) can only hope their blog represents their brand well. Improving the blog experience while delivering the brand experience will come. In fact, we're about to redesign our blog. I hope Our Dear Readers will enjoy the result. I'm certain we will. Beyond anything else, a great blog design should make a marketer proud.
6/20/2005 13:01
I'm preparing to give a presentation on Thursday this week: Gross Anatomy of a Blog - Dissecting Blogs from a Marketer's Point of View. It's in conjunction with Corvent, and you can find out more about it here. Anyway, in preparing for it, I'm looking around for blogs with great designs. (Remember, I'm the one who had trouble picking out a template on blogger.com?) My google search on Blog Designs turned up a plethora of web design firms who are now web + blog design firms. That was inevitable, wasn't it? One promising result was the 2004 Weblog Awards - Best Design. Alas, it yielded little of consequence in terms of innovative results. Of the top four 'vote-getters,' three were nicely put together personal blogs (see second, third, and fourth place winners), without breakthrough designs. The winner was (well, it was only 2004 before there were so many web + blog designers out there) underwhelming to me. I guess if bloggers would simply adapt to the norms of the 'blog design standard' that exists today, we'd be way ahead of the game. (Is it me, or aren't there some really ugly blogs out there?) In terms of corporate blogging, I think we're all exploring new ground with our blogs. And most marketers (myself included) can only hope their blog represents their brand well. Improving the blog experience while delivering the brand experience will come. In fact, at Marqui, we're working on a blog module that will help do just that. Stay tuned for more information about it. We'll announce the details on our site and in this blog.
4/27/2005 11:20
In an interesting development, the folks at BlogKits are conducting a blog advertising survey right now. From what I can tell, they're mostly speaking to casual (vs. corporate) bloggers - the first question is: "Why do you blog?" And the possible answers are: It's fun, To make money, Blogging is cool, I like to write, (my personal favorite) It helps me relax and It's fun and maybe I can earn a buck while I'm at it. Survey design issues aside, I think it's very interesting that they're launching a survey (I found it on the Blog Herald site) at all. I was unable to determine when/where/how the results would be published, but I'll probably take the survey (It helps me relax!) and hope to find out.
April 26, 2005
I stumbled across this little prize earlier today. According to Nick Lewis, CNN recently engaged in a rather unusual marketing campaign in the blogosphere. The campaign allegedly combined blackhat search engine optimization techniques, viral marketing tactics, and guerrilla comment spam.
Lewis makes a decent case for it in his blog, yet I couldn't help but wonder...who is this guy and is he credible? (Based on his bio, I'm a little skeptical.)
If Lewis is correct and CNN really is employing such clandestine tactics, shame on them. But what if Lewis is wrong? Will CNN's brand suffer long-term damage from such rumors?
Some might think this is strange coming from a Marqui employee since we pay bloggers to blog about us -- a decision that some have labeled unethical in its own right. However, we have always been very up-front about our objectives and tactics.
Reading through Lewis' post, three things come to mind:
1) Is the blogosphere really as self-cleansing as people believe?
2) How much longer can companies get away with ignoring bloggers when posts like these can spread like wildfire?
3) Given how fast the blogosphere is expanding, will companies be able to react to blogs effectively without using some sort of automated system? And is this sort of thing really unethical?
At any rate, if anyone can confirm or refute the CNN story, I'd be very interested in what you have to say.
4/21/2005 10:02
Sometimes reading blogs is really fun. I guffawed today reading Tara's blog.
"The cracker community tends to use creative spellings as a sort of jargon, and coinages such as warez have even escaped into more mainstream usages."Whaaat? I really enjoyed some chuckles when I happened across Mena's Corner, a blog from Mena Trott, one of the founders of Six Apart, who created the Movable Type blog tool that we use. Mena's one of the few company presidents these days writing a corporate blog. She provides a great perspective on life at the top. My first chuckle came from reading her post from April 13 that Six Apart has opened the Six Shop, where you can buy t-shirts and such. First of all, the fourth-grader (who's still active - fortunately and unfortunately) in me snickered at the name of their online store. Secondly, and with great joy, I read about her favorite tees:
"My personal favorites are the Ladies Rebuilding T-Shirt and the Ladies Wrench T-Shirt. .... Yeah, and there are men's shirts too."In a world where women have been forced for years to wear men's polo shirts to every technology trade show and event, I really got a kick out of her attitude. I'm delighted in looking around once in awhile, that women are making an impact on the mostly white, mostly male world of technology.
4/14/2005 12:37
In a sentence, Rondi Adamson summed up what I feel about the blogosphere. In an article published in today's opinion section of the Christian Science Monitor (read it here), Adamson wrote about bloggers thwarting a Canadian court's press ban, revealing details about a case ("Adscam" - where the Canadian government has been attempting to "sell Canada" to Quebec)currently being reviewed. The article was a fascinating look into the clash between government regulators (in this case, the Canadian court system), and bloggers (in this case, a guy from the US - Captain Ed and his Captain's Quarters blog). Captain Ed published some of the secret testimony from the trial, which was corroborated by other parties. Well, that just didn't go over well with people online (who heard about it immediately) and those who heard about it through the media. Although the traditional media tiptoed around the source of the leaks, lest they be held in contempt of the court ban. You'd probably guess that the court order didn't withstand the furor that erupted. It was mostly recinded last week. A sentence in the last paragraph in the article, though, jumped out at me: "Freedom should not be mistaken for licence." While I applaud the freedom to report information and hold discussions about all sorts of things online (a widely held definition of a blog is an online discussion), I have been pretty apalled lately about the license people have been taking with this liberty. More on that when I have the time...
3/28/2005 13:19
As I type that headline, I smile, thinking: what would my 84 year old mother think of that headline? She'd shake her head and say something like:
"Janet's been in the computer business for years, and I never quite understood what she does. Now I can't even understand what she says."Anyway, there was an interesting article in today's Infoworld, talking about companies (like Disney, Cisco, IBM and others) turning to blogs and wikis in order to foster collaboration among employees, customers and the public. I loved this quote:
“Blogs and wikis play opposite roles,� says Martin Wattenberg, a researcher on the collaborative user experience team at IBM Watson Research Center. “Blogs are based on an individual voice; a blog is sort of a personal broadcasting system. Wikis, because they give people the chance to edit each other's words, are designed to blend many voices. Reading a blog is like listening to a diva sing, reading a wiki is like listening to a symphony.�Finding the harmony in this new world will take a finely tuned ear and the ability to listen well - and practice makes perfect. That's something my mother can relate to.
2/22/2005 15:23
I just got an e-mail from a friend online who passed a funny (and kind of scary) article to me, with the comment: "don't let this happen to you!" The article is all about the addictive nature of blogging that some people have experienced. There are some funny examples of people who've taken blogging (or thinking about blogging) to new levels. I can honestly say that I've thought to myself "this would be a perfect topic to blog about!" while at work. I'm proud, though, that I haven't ever preferred blogging to other outside activites. I'm lucky enough to work for a company who supports - even promotes - this medium of communication. So for now, I get a kick reading articles about those funny characters who get obsessed with the act of blogging. One day at a time.
2/17/2005 15:11
One of the more enjoyable things about this social experiment of paying bloggers to blog about Marqui has been the banter back and forth - among our bloggers, and our blogger wanna be's. Much of the banter was in e-mail threads, so they're not in the public domain, but there were some laugh out loud reading moments. Here are the Top 10 Blogger Quotes so far (with names withheld to protect the guilty): 1. I'm dirty. So dirty… (Marqui blogger) 2. If you don't stop googling yourself you'll go blind. (Marqui blogger) 3. I'd love more information about being one of your bitches. (Wannabe Marqui blogger) 4. Try reaching a little deeper for a metaphor next time. How 'bout, "poo poo pants.� (Marqui blogger) 5. Blog Slut (Category of blog posts - Marqui blogger) 6. Stop bringing a butter knife to a gun fight. You are not up to the task. (Marqui blogger) 7. It's the fact that I disagree with you that makes you think I should shut up. (Marqui program dissenter) 8. This "blogosphere/purity" rap is so, so, so, so 2003ish. (Marqui blogger) 9. Lets use the code name "pond scum", when you are referring to them so they don't get more press than they deserve. (Marqui program dissenter) 10. Dabblemode powers activate. (Marqui blogger) Of course, perhaps these aren't funny, or even fun to most people. Maybe I should worry a bit about developing a warped sense of humor after only ten weeks of the program? These exchanges haven't all been fun, but they've been very creative and full of emotion. There's not much more a marketer could hope to be engaged in.
| Marketing Automation | Web Content Management | Campaign Management Privacy Policy | © 2008 Marqui Inc. |
 |