Blogging for Business

I had the great honor of leading a panel of bloggers in Hawaii including Roxanne Darling, Burt Lum, and Ryan Ozawa for the International Association of Business Communicators.

We were lucky to record nearly the entire 1 hour presentation. If you want to know more about corporate blogging or business blogging, this podcast is really worth your time. I know that 1 hour is a long time to listen so I broke out the timing below in case you want to jump around:

Listen to this Panel Discussion

• 00:00 Introduction
• 03:55: Survey (out of 40) of who uses blogs, rss news readers.
• 04:48: Context of blogging as part of the social revolutions in human history.
• 06:38: How powerful are blogs? Clinton, Rather, George Bush, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Moveon.org, all affected.
• 08:05: How blogging creates main stream media (MSM) reality .
• 10:20: How blogging affected the Hawaii Duke Bainum campaign.
• 12:18: What do blogs look like?
• 14:00: How a blog is really just another Web site but it uses specialized tools and standards, like RSS, to publish its content.
• 14:33: (low volume) viewing a blogging Web site through the eyes of a news reader and how RSS plays an important role
• 16:19: Tracking different news sources with an RSS reader (Pluck)
• 16:53: Question: what’s the difference between going through an RSS newsreader or a Google News Alert
• 19:30: How your daily routine changes when you use news readers and blogging tools. You read blogs and write blogs.
• 20:15: What’s different about this model. How blogs reach a very targeted audience and RSS feeds continue to review your content.
• 21:26: Businessweek quote about 40,000 new blogs created per day and how even a small sliver of a targeted audience can make a blog worth it.
• 22:36: Will blogging take over MSM or will they co-exist? Story about Clear Channel creating a false blog to talk about their own radio stations.
• 24:20: Overview/ review of what a blog is.
• 25:52: Question (low volume) that talks about and RSS news reader (hard to make out)
• 26:20: Comments about copyrights and blogging. How bloggers can cut and paste, potentially violating copyright. Additional discussion of how the cut-and-pasting that bloggers do a lot of actually helps MSM.
• 31:10: the wrong reason to use corporate blogs is to create a press release. The purpose is to increase transparency.
• 33:10: The GM blog and Bob Lutz as a good corporate blogger
• 34:00: How corporate blogging gives you great free market research
• 35:20: The corporate cultural changes that one might need to be ready for. How the GM blog caught a lot of heat about bad cars, yet how they responded intelligently to the LA Times scandal.
• 36:35: If you’re going to get involved with blogging you need to be ready for the truth and be prepared that in the blogosphere, you’re not in control of the message, although you are in control of your message.
• 37:00: How blogging lets you create your own media so that you can respond instantly to events and not rely on MSM.
• 38:00: What is the voice behind your company’s blog? It’s important to understand who the company bloggers will be and what their tone will be.
• 40:00: How the blog can be just another good old fashioned tool to display information. It doesn’t have to be controversial.
• 41:00: What should corporate HR policy be with respect to blogging? Employees have been fired for blogging. Hawaii is home to one of the first bloggers who lost his job due to blogging, Ian Lind.
• 43:28: Question & Answer: Are there tools to find out how many subscribers you have to your RSS feed?
• 46:00: Reviewing Feedburner statistics that show subscribers and how Sitemeter can track statistics.
• 47:00: Using Google to track how many links are going to your site.
• 47:50: You need to have a commitment to regular content publication. There is a major cultural change required for your company.
• 48:20: How people will start linking more often to your site with good practices of publishing content on a regular basis.
• 49:00: Question: How often should we be posting to our blog? Simple guidelines on posting to blogs. At least once a week and about an hour for that time, perhaps 20 minutes if you get efficient.
• 51:00: Blogging is here to stay. Recognized by Business Week online means a lot. Blog now and get it or be left in the dust in 5 years.
• 52:30: Others will be blogging about your company so it’s important to counteract and balance the grass roots blogging that might take place.
• 53:00: You have to have information about your company going out, otherwise perhaps negative information about your company may be the published authority. How a scathing critique of a restaurant became the highest ranking page instead of the official company web site.
• 54:42: Question: how do you get corporate folks up to speed with what’s going on with blogging? One way is to create an blogging Intranet.
• 56:18: Another way is to get management that the blogosphere is part of the media that needs to be dealt with. Once that’s done, it’s easier to get corporate to pour resources. You should have google alerts working and be using newsreaders to get into the blogosphere.
• 57:30: The corporate blogging efforts should be part of a package.
• 58:00: What’s a good example of a corporate blog: besides the gm blog already mentioned, Microsoft has created a bunch of blogs at blogs.msdn.com
• 59:41: What are the demographics of blogging?
• 60:30: What’s the fastest way to get a blog started? Use blogger.com for free. Bizzycast.com is releasing a corporate blogging tool.
• 61:48: How do you find someone’s blog? Just add “blog” on your google searches.
• 62:30: What blogging software do you use? WordPress is a free software and bizzycast is also creating a solution. It’s really not a technical cost but rather a corporate organizational cost.
• 64:10: What is podcasting? Here’s a video presentation on Podcasting you should look at.
• 67:22: Question: isn’t podcasting like blogging? HawaiiUp.com is a good example of a blog that does podcasting.
• 69:30: Why are hobbyists excited about blogging, podcasting, and video blogging?

The panelists also posted some of their own blogs on this:
Burt Lum
Roxanne Darling – Nice pictures!
Ryan Ozawa – contains video too!

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