October, 2006 | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Janet Johnson: Final Chapter

Well, I’m sure it won’t be her final chapter, but it’s my last post on her presentation, which has been excellent. Between her presentation and Shel’s this morning, this has been a really valuable day.

Janet recommends starting your blog where you intend to stay. I think that makes sense, so you don’t lose your links when you move. Don’t let IT change it. From my perspective that wouldn’t be a reason to agonize for a long time about where to start a personal blog. The perfect is the enemy of the good. You can spend a lot of time wringing your hands, wanting to be sure you picked the right service, or whether you should get your own URL (e.g. one that doesn’t have wordpress.com in it).

I would advise that you just do it, pick one of the free services (I like WordPress, but Blogger or others are fine too) and get started.

Then, after you have gotten comfortable with blogging and understand some of the issues better, make your decision on corporate blog hosting and the URL, and stick with it.

Pinging services like pingoat and ping-o-matic are ways to get more people to know about your blog. I had been just using the Technorati ping form, but pingoat can hit a few dozen similar sites, like IceRocket.

Janet also recommends some other blogs that will be helpful as reference:

Janet Johnson, Blog Business Summit, Marcom Blog, Uninstalled, Gaping Void, and Marqui.

Technorati: Blog, Blogging, New Media

Janet Johnson on Blogging Best Practices

Here’s Janet’s list:

For blog fodder, look at other relevant or popular blogs. By bringing together links that are helpful to people who have the same interests, you provide a service to your readers…which will make your blog more valuable to them. Scour vertical media in your niche. Blog at industry events (like I am right now.) Share your own experiences or ideas.

She also highlights some etiquette about blogging, and recommends a book called Publish & Prosper.

Technorati: Blogging, Best Practices

Janet Johnson Part III

Now Janet is getting into legal issues. She highlighted a law firm I think is at fenwick.com that has some information on the legal issues. Privacy policies need to be updated to cover blogs and instant messaging, and the corporate blog should be monitored at least every eight hours or so.

In the discussion Steve Crescenzo, who works with Ragan Communications, was recommended as someone who can help build the case for blogging.

Here’s another case study in corporate blogging Janet mentioned.

This isn’t a great picture…got a little of the red-eye happening because of the flash, but it’s an example of how easy it is to take a picture, upload to Flickr and then link to a blog post.

Janet Johnson's Presentation

And this is actually the 2005 way to do it…a camera phone can upload directly to a site instead of taking out the SD card from the standalone digital camera.

She had a Weblogging Index from Waggener-Edstrom to help us understand where we are in the “readiness to blog” spectrum. That scoring instrument is here.

She also mentioned The Long Tail and the ClueTrain Manifesto.

Technorati: Blogging, Legal Issues

Janet Johnson Part II

If 2006 is the year of the business blog, why do only 8 percent of the Fortune 500 blog? Janet says it’s primarily fear. She mentioned the McDonald’s blog as an example of one of these. As a former Enron employee, she says a blog would have helped bring that situation to light much earlier…so blogging is good from a corporate governance perspective. I agree that it is almost impossible to keep a secret today, as the sight of a dozen teenage girls taking pictures of the Carlsen twins yesterday showed (see the embedded YouTube video on this post.)

She also highlighted the example of the blog fakery from Edelman and Wal-Mart to illustrate the self-cleansing nature of the blogosphere, which Shel Holtz discusses here. She says Edelman will be hurt much more than Wal-Mart, particularly since they went silent on the issue for five days instead of acknowledging the issue and then coming back to address it.

It’s break time, but Janet’s presentation has been really helpful and interesting so far.

Janet Johnson on Gross Blog Anatomy

This afternoon’s session is by Janet Johnson. I believe she just went out on her own, so her current blog is really new, but based on her presentation today I’m sure it will become a good source for helpful PR and marketing information.

We have representatives from FEMA, Wyndham Worldwide, Leiner Health Products, Verizon, several branches of the military, Hewlett-Packard, Dansko,General Electric Energy Division, Prudential Real Estate, and a few others for whom I didn’t get the spelling of their company name.

Janet started out by telling about her experience with the Marqui paybloggers controversy. It highlights a point I will be making in my presentation, that new media can have lots of news media leverage.

She discussed Paul Kedrosky and the concept of “dark matter” – that once something is out on the web, it’s there forever.

The evolution of consumer web use from surfing in the 1990s to search in the 2000s to subscribing via RSS today is a helpful broad overview of the trends, along with the move from publishing to participation.

She suggested that buying up all domain names conceivably related to your organization is smart (e.g. iheartdansko.com) because people guess at domain names instead of just using Google.

Janet showed a Google Heat Map that demonstrates where people look on the Google search results, and said BLOG stands for Better Listing on Google.

She also said smaller, more frequent posting is better than a long post. This one is too long already, so I’m going to post it and start a new one.

Technorati: Blogging, Marketing, New Media