We make blogs and Podcasts
As the so called blogosphere expands, it becomes harder to identify the blogs that matter. Forbes Magazine has just published its own blog picks under the title Blog Power.
My personal favourite out of the ones they’ve chosen is the shopping blog, ‘Mighty Goods’ with the strap-line, ‘hurray for stuff!’
BusinessWeek has sent its summer intern and a self-confessed former blogger to interview David Sifry, the CEO of Technorati, which aims to be the Google of blogs. There are so many blogs, that Technorati has its work cut-out keeping up with them
I’ve been giving careful attention to a study by the Catalyst Group on how blogs can cause outbursts of ‘net rage’ in some users. We wouldn’t want that to happen here, so I’ve spent some time making small changes to our site in order to avoid it.
Catalyst arranged for a focus group of non-techie types to look at one of BusinessWeek’s excellent blogs. The responses should seriously interest anyone who runs a blog.
This is an old link from Scobleizer, Microsoft’s resident ‘Geek Blogger.’ His Corporate Weblog Manifesto is still well worth reading.
It’s dated February 2003 - which goes to show just how far the US is ahead of Europe in this business blogging thing.
Should your business blog just be another section on your existing corporate site? Some of the pioneers of business blogging, including General Motors, have separate URLs and separate designs for their blogs - GM’s is at http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/.
Boeing host their Flight Test Journal as part of their main site, but it distinctly looks like a blog, rather than just another corporate webpage.
Google and a new service Blinkx have both launched sites dedicated to searching video and audio on the web. Blinkx has speech recognition technology that transcribes part of the clips so that you know what you are downloading. The nice thing is that a blog with a video clip or a radio feature can be lined up along side the BBC or CNN. The web is a great leveler. Perhaps one day a blog will start to challenge the traditional broadcasters for attention, just as some blogs orientated on advertising revenue are making inroads into the publishing industry.
Every far-sighted business wants to grow the market of the future – and a college campus is an obvious place to sow some seeds. It also so happens that the younger generation is quick to cotton onto new trends such as blogs. So you can see why Apple has turned over part of its website to a blog written by students.
Some of the posts are about college life – others are indeed about the superiority of the Mac over the Windows PC. It sounds better coming from more independent advocates than the company itself. It’s just one of the many ways that companies can tap into the blog phenomenon. The corporate blog doesn’t have to be written by the marketing manager.
Jeff Jarvis, just wanted to get his laptop fixed. So he started to post about ‘Dell Hell’ on his popular blog, Buzzmachine.
Andrian Melrose was angry with Land Rover for what he said were shortcomings with his £45K Discovery. After he started to ‘terrorise’ the motor company in his blog, LR decided to give him a replacement car.
A fanzine blog accuses Kingsmill Bread of insulting the memory of its hero, Elvis and urges, ‘Don’t buy Kingsmill Bread.’
Companies are just waking up to the fact that each and every customer is a potential publisher.
The angry Land Rover customer with a blog seems to have settled his differences with Land Rover’s customer services manager, Mike Mulholland. Apparently Land Rover monitors blogs, but has been slow to settle this case. The blogger has now offered him space on his blog to put Land Rover’s version of events. The blogger writes
“I explained to Mike that if he is selling a car with a sophisticated Satellite Navigation system (like the Discovery 3) he can bet that his customers spend a lot of time on-line and that they want to interact with their Brands online.”
Land Rover are facing the wrath of an anonymous blogger who has set up a site to ‘terrorise’ the four-wheel-drive company with ‘the truth.’ Perhaps it is an unfortunate choice of words in the current climate.
He has set up a site where he blogs regularly about his beef with Land Rover after buying a £45K car which he says has not lived up to his expectations. Guess What? The head of customer relations has been on the phone to him.
In the UK at least, it seems the anti-corporate bloggers are ahead of the companies. It’s another case of blog or be blogged.
Jonathan Schwartz, chief of Sun Microsystems, knows how to write a good blog. He doesn’t fall into the trap of marketing spiel (`I’m really excited about this new product of ours’), a style which is correctly criticised as ‘cheesy’ in this acerbic BBC article on corporate blogging. . Even my old colleagues at the BBC admit that ‘Jonathan’s Blog’ engages ‘in debate and revelation about the way he thinks the industry is going’ - but he does get a rap over the knuckles for using jargon, and that’s a big ‘no’ in blogging. Schwartz writes in an informal style, "One of the big upsides of my job is hobnobbing." This is engaging. And in a recent post he argues the case for giving away Sun’s main product, the ‘Solaris’ operating system, for free. In other words, he lets employees, customers and investors understand what he’s up to and why. It’s not a ‘pitch’ to sell his products. As we’ve said before, the language of traditional marketing won’t work in a blog. Avoid it.
