April 2006 Archives

Last week, we held our first-ever Six Apart Business Blogging Seminar and we’re thrilled to report that the response to the seminar was fantastic. The sold-out event here in San Francisco was a great start to our series of events, and best of all, the comments indicate there was a lot of value to attending the event. Some of the highlights from the feedback we collected:

• “The information was very informative, and the anecdotes and case studies were helpful.”
• “Good examples, good guidance.”
• “Very exciting to work with the thought leaders behind MT development.”
• “Awesome seminar - applicable for techies and for entry level bloggers (like myself).”
• “Very good stuff. Helped make a good case for enterprise blogging.”
• “Very helpful in simplifying what blogs are all about.”

With the help of the team from Attensa and an awesome presentation from DL Byron, attendees got to see some really practical advice on real-world deployments of blogs.

In short, what we want to help people do with these events is find out how a company can use blogging and what some of the real problems and solutions are that come up when blogs are deployed. Once you’re set with that information, we’ll show you how you can make the case to your boss or co-workers. That way, you actually get to work with blogs during the day job, not just when you’re geeking out at home.

The good news is, it’s not too late for you to join us for our upcoming events. If you’re in New York on May 25 or Los Angeles on June 22, sign up now before they sell out, and come find out how you can make the most of business blogging. We’ll be glad to see you there.

If you help run a business, imagine this scenario: Someone walks into the lobby of your office, refuses to identify himself, and demands a chance to say whatever he wants to everyone else who’s present, whenever he wants to. Think you’re likely to just shrug your shoulders and say “Oh, well. If that’s what he wants to do, I guess it’s okay.” We didn’t think so.

The same thing goes for your business’s blogs. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with creating a smart policy about what kind of feedback is appropriate, explaining what your expectations are for accountability in a conversation, and enforcing your company’s standards for dialogue in a public setting.

We’ve been using this example scenario for years in talking to businesses, to explain that blogs are about communication, and just like any other form of communication, there are different rules for different contexts. People who are on the sidewalk in front of your office can do much different things than people who enter your lobby, and it’s not just acceptable to ask for identification from those who enter, it’s polite. It’s not just okay to review the statements that are made in the public spaces that your company hosts, it’s your obligation to your employees, your customers, your partners, and your community. And if you don’t want to publish unsolicited feedback to the whole world? That’s okay, too.

All of this might seem fairly obvious, but sometimes these straightforward lessons get lost in the rush to new technologies on the web. One great recent example, which just happens to also use a lobby as a metaphor is The Lobby, an excellent new Movable Type-powered blog produced and maintained by Electric Artists on behalf of Starwood Preferred Guests. SPG is the loyalty program for guests of hotels such as Sheraton, Westin, W Hotels, and more.

Electric Artists and SPG made some smart choices in iterating with their blog, starting from a controlled start and moving towards being more open as their community matures and becomes more clearly defined. Their success has been apparent from the start, as outlined in the Wall Street Journal last week:

The effort is a professionally written and frequently updated Web log open to the public but aimed specifically at members of the “Starwood Preferred Guest” loyalty program. Many of the blog’s posts advertise happenings at specific hotels in the company’s portfolio of brands that include Westin, Sheraton, St. Regis and W. It also promotes ways that travelers can earn loyalty points through special promotions, for example.

Despite the great content, there’s been some questions or even criticism about the control that Starwood has exercised over the content, especially the comments. From the Journal story, “So far, TheLobby.com lacks a place where readers can offer their own comments. Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, which quietly launched the blog in March, says it is planning to make it more interactive but wasn’t specific about plans. It may allow limited reader input, but only in the form of comments that have been reviewed by the company.” And others in the blogosphere have weighed in, too. Neville Hobson, who’s long been an influential business blogger, had some strong comments:

The most glaring negative is the way in which visitors are invited to participate in the site, ie, to comment. The only way you can is via a “contact the editors” link in the sidebar which gives you a popup that thanks you for your feedback, says that due to the volume of emails that the site receives each day it may not be possible to personally respond to your email, mentions terms and conditions and gives you a choice of three generic email addresses to write to.

With all due respect, it ain’t necessarily so. It’s a smart policy to start conservatively, to measure the return on the investment in this new blog, and to learn from an audience over time. They’ll tell your company what you need to be doing. Demanding an all-or-nothing policy about comments is the kind of thinking that can scare the hell out of people. There’s a less intimidating strategy for companies that are new to this mode of conversation. Try something like this:

• Start without comments, but accept feedback by email and read all the feedback you get.
• Begin accepting comments on one or two posts, requiring readers to sign in or to at least provide a valid email address. Moderate these comments judiciously.
• Follow the submitted comments carefully and identify any issues or concerns that arise within your company or from your readers. Take time to address these issues.
• Let the people who’ve made helpful or constructive comments become “trusted” commenters, whose feedback appears without requiring your approval.
• Start allowing comments on all your posts, with the trusted commenters as the seed of the new community.

Starting without a defined commenting policy, or with a poorly-planned system for collecting feedback, can and often does result in some public back-pedaling. And those kinds of adjustments garner not just negative feedback from the blogosphere, but more importantly, they damage trust with the intended audience of the blog.

It’s important to remember that blogs are a flexible tool that can be used a variety of different ways. And your blogs will change over time as your community grows. One of the best examples of this comes from another Movable Type-powered blog that’s of interest to frequent travelers, Randy’s Journal from Boeing’s VP of Marketing, Randy Baseler. After an initial effort at blogging without using a blogging tool, Boeing switched to Movable Type and offered up things like feeds and permalinks to their readers, vastly improving the experience for the audience. It was a great demonstration of how a company can iterate and keep improving its blogs, staying true to a human voice for the business, and making its own choices about how to collect and present feedback. In Randy’s own words:

A note about comments. I’ve read and heard a lot of remarks along the lines of: a blog isn’t a blog if it doesn’t _______. Fill in the blank. … I didn’t realize that the blogosphere had such a rule. Sorry, that’s just not what we’re about. Sure, we’re going to post some of your comments. Even critical ones. But it’s not a free-for-all.

And the post closes with an honest interest in continuing the dialogue, regardless of the form that it takes. That’s exactly what blogs are trying to make possible. “You’re welcome, of course, to start your own blog if you like. We kind of like ours the way it is. But our door is always open to advice from neighbors - even if an occasional brick gets tossed in.”

All of us who work with blogs, especially those of us who’ve done it for years, are excited about their potential. We can come up with lots of useful examples of how businesses can benefit from blogs, but sometimes our own enthusiasm gets the best of us.

To put it more succinctly: A lot of folks who are blogging “experts” talk about blogs in a way that scares the hell out of normal business people.

The thing is, lots of business are already interested in blogs. They’ve heard of them, and maybe they have a kid who’s on LiveJournal or a friend who’s got a TypePad blog. So they’re inclined to think positively of blogs. But too often, we use terrible examples or scare stories to convince people how to start blogging, and that’s just not helping our case. A normal manager or decision maker at a business is going to think, “They vilify Kryptonite locks or criticize Dan Rather — that seems a lot riskier than just doing an email newsletter.”

It’s not just the high-profile scare stories, either. Starting a conversation by talking about how blogs are a “revolution” or “will change the way your company works” isn’t going to sound so appealing to a company that’s doing well, where the people in charge aren’t looking to make radical changes. The good news is, you don’t have to work that hard to persuade your company or your clients to adopt blogs; Just present the facts and they’ll make their own case for you.

To get started, some key points that can help you make the case:

• Blogs are an established technology, having been around for years and used by everyone from the biggest companies in the world to mom-and-pop shops.
• Blogs work with the other technology you have. They’re not trying to replace email, or the rest of your website, they’re just giving your company a new channel to communicate in.
• A blog can be used anywhere that tools like email and IM are: Inside or outside the company, in one location or around the world.
• There’s no set rules about how to have a blog. You can start small, with a lot of control over content and community, and expand over time — don’t jump in with both feet if you’re not ready.

The bottom line is, if you’re trying to convince your boss to start trying blogs, or you have a client that you know would be a perfect candidate for using a blog, don’t start preaching about the scary stuff. Just let them know blogs are safe, and that there’s plenty of examples of the tangible and intangible benefits that businesses can get by embracing them.

Still need more help? Get in touch and we’ll help you show what blogs can do for your business. Without scaring the hell out of people.

USA Today (which is no stranger to blogging) has a article on TV shows for blogs today which offers some cool examples and useful insights into how blogs make TV shows better.

TV show blogs range from factual to fictional to just plain funny… As blogging goes berserk on the Web in general, TV shows are beefing up their blogs to help market their programs in a more community-friendly way, offering eager and younger tech-savvy fans a bonus for being loyal and, in the end, boosting ratings for the shows.

Just like DVDs have made a lot of movies more compelling by adding behind-the-scenes footage and outtakes to the basic film, a good blog for a TV show can give you more insights into the cast and crew behind a show. And of course a lot of shows have blogs that are written in-character which provide more background on the story or character development of the show.

USA Today’s wrapped up a good sidebar of example sites, such as ABC’s blogs for Grey’s Anatomy, which features blogs for everything from the show’s writers to characters and locations in the show. ABC’s gone even further with their show Sons & Daughters, with Out on a Limb, a TypePad-powered blog that gives Fred Goss (the series’ co-creator, producer, director, co-writer and cast member) a venue for keeping fans updated on the show. Perhaps Steve Andrade at NBC puts it best:

“I’ve been in this job for 10 years. For the first time, all the creative people in town are finally realizing how advantageous it is to work in this space. They all know it’s going to be part of their future. There is no model. We’re all trying to figure it out.”

One of the recurring points we’ve been trying to help promote is that blogging is often about having more than one audience, and frequently about having one blog per audience.

The need for a better understanding that there’s hundreds of different blogospheres, and that each should be approached appropriately, is best illustrated by some of the conversations that have been happening between high-profile bloggers lately. The problem, of course, isn’t that the A-listers don’t get enough attention; Rather, the attention focused on them sometimes distracts from the fact that they are often talking to different constituencies.

Enough theory, let’s look at a real example.

Meet the Boys

Last week, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, authors of Naked Conversations and well-known bloggers, attended an event at Amazon to talk about their book and their experiences with blogging. Robert and Shel are both good guys, and we’ve been happy to watch the progress on their Red Couch blog on TypePad as they developed the content and ideas for their book. They’re also both pretty deeply in the “true believer” camp of blogging, living much of their professional lives through the lens of social media, and of course having an investment in making sure their blog-focused book succeeds. In short, they’re terrific at talking about the ideals and aspirations of blogging, and spend a lot of time talking to future-thinking people who are looking for confirmation that their interest in blogs is valuable and useful.

One of the members of the audience at Amazon was Werner Vogels, a stand-up fellow, he’s the CTO of Amazon and someone used to the hard-nosed skepticism that it takes to keep a huge infrastructure like Amazon.com running. Just one recent example of the kind of business Werner helps run is Amazon’s S3 web service, a storage service that’s not only highly available and built with smart APIs, but one that actually charges for service, which sometimes seems like a rarity in these Web 2.0 days. Practical, pragmatic, and built for mainstream business and consumer audiences.

You see where this is going, right? Both sides spend a lot of time talking to audiences that are fairly distinct. And different cultures always have a different goals, different measures of what constitutes success.

That being said, there’s some amazing commonalities. Both the Naked Voice blog and the Amazon Web Services blog run on TypePad, and both companies have employees or staff who run personal or professional blogs on Movable Type or other tools. You don’t need to convince Microsoft or Amazon that blogs are a valuable way to help your business communicate; They’re both already putting their money where their mouth is. Everybody here is in violent agreement with each other!

So what’s the problem?

Despite everyone having similar ideas, we got a classic blogging back-and-forth going last week. Post and counter-post and counter-counter-post flew back and forth. This, despite the fact that everyone agrees:

• Blogs have a role in helping businesses communicate
• Blogs should be measured in business with practical metrics, just like any other tool or technology
• There’s just as much value in having a Grand Theory of Blogs as there is in just cutting the bullshit and getting something done.

So, what can we do about this kind of pointless miscommunication, instead of wasting time feeding the meme-trackers that thrive on flame wars and butting heads? Seems like there’s some smart first steps to ensure your public business blogging is productive.

• Identify the audience you’re speaking to. It’s okay if some people say “this isn’t for me”.
• Point out some of the goals you’re striving for. Most of the time, everyone wants the same thing.
• Acknowledge that some audiences have different priorities. Even a one-line disclaimer of “your mileage may vary” can keep people from losing their cool.

In conclusion: This kind of high-profile bickering scares the crap out of people who are new to blogging, especially companies who are new to blogging. Back when they first got email, they might have worried a bit about spam or something, but they sure didn’t fear that “leaders in the email community” would be flaming each other or be having “touchy-feely” vs. “by-the-book” arguments.

All of us who care about helping people communicate better using new technology, or assisting people in using the web to make their work more effective, would do well to make sure that we’re addressing our audiences appropriately. That way we can spend less time being fodder for Slashdot and more time actually helping people take advantage of cool stuff like blogs.

Today, the New York Times launched its site redesign, announced by a prominent editor’s note on the homepage. There’s a few lessons for bloggers to learn from the redesign, as well as some evidence that the Times itself has been learning from bloggers.

The most prominent change is the new wide page layout, which makes great use of the expanded screen real estate that serious web geeks have available on their displays. A lot has been written about these wider pages recently, but many of the first sites to make smart use of this kind of design have been Movable Type-powered blogs like Gawker Media’s Sploid, Paul Scrivens’ Whitespace, Kevin Cornell’s Bearskinrug, Jason Santa Maria’s blog and Khoi Vin’s Subtraction. The additional space on the page lets the Times use large and valuable ad units online without compromising the amount of editorial information displayed.

And speaking of Khoi, one might think that, having been recently named Design Director of the Times, he’d been guiding the effort behind this redesign. But, as the editor’s note makes clear, the project has been underway for a year, and Khoi offers up some details on what the process and team look like.

But the blog influence on the Times isn’t just limited to issues like screen real estate or the team behind the scenes, it’s visible in the aesthetic and the content of the new site as well. Like the recent redesign of New York Magazine (spearheaded by longtime bloggers), which has frequently been described as looking blog-like. There’s a clear, open aesthetic, with lots of white space and a link-rich footer to help guide you around the site. The pervasive influence of blog design is a bit part of the reason we’re so excited about efforts like The Style Contest, because great blog designers don’t just influence blogs, they influence the web as a whole.

The content of the new site shows how important blogs are to the Times web team, as well. Tabs at the top make blog-friendly content like most popular stories and videos easily accessible. And there’s a new section listing the most blogged stories on the site. Deeper in the site, the venerable Newsroom Navigator has been updated. The page (as its address reveals) used to be called the Cybertimes Navigator, and has long offered a set of links to web resources that the Times’ own reporters would find useful. As it sheds the dated “Cyber-” prefix, it’s also been moved into the 21st century with a Blogs 101 list.

There will doubtless be more new features discovered as the design is explored by readers, and some inevitable back-and-forth about individual design decisions. But, despite the controversies and criticisms that many lob at the Times, it’s uniquely influential in the print media space. Here’s hoping that connecting a little closer to its fans and foes in the blogosphere can help it retain and even expand that influence online.