Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

Janet Johnson on Blogging Best Practices

Here’s Janet’s list:

    Get the support of your CEO and others at the highest level.
    Assign roles, responsibilities and processes up front
    Impement a crisis communication plan… just in case
    Establish a clear theme/focus for the blog
    Keep posts fresh, relevant and accurate
    Manage comments in a timely manner
    Link to lots of other relevant blogs
    Actively comment on other blogs
    Keep an eye on who is linking to your blog/posts

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.

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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.

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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.

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ALI Conference on Blogging and Podcasting

For the next three days I am in San Francisco for the Advanced Learning Institute’s conference on Blogging, Podcasting and other social media. It’s been great already, just in the first of two pre-conference seminars led by Shel Holtz. Every time I attend one of Shel’s presentations I get something new that could be applied in my work.

Some of it is Shel (he does a nice job in presenting), but the other factor is that the field is changing so quickly that there really is something new to learn every time.

One of the highlights of the presentation was when Shel showed the Smirnoff “Tea Partay” New England Gangsta Rap video. As he said, there’s no way this could get on broadcast TV, but as of this post it has had 1,582,822 views. One reason is because it is just this easy to incorporate into a blog:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0]

The conference hotel is the Sheraton Fisherman’s Wharf. It’s a nice facility, and the front desk help was even nicer. When I arrived here last night I learned that the whole hotel was sold out, and my reservation was only for one night. Gulp! I don’t know how they did it, but the front desk person got me extended for two additional nights.

Sheraton Fisherman's Wharf

I will be blogging some highlights from the conference over the next few days, primarily as a way for me to save links for sites and resources that people suggest, so I can go home and have a “to-do” list of options to explore in my work.

Maybe it will be helpful to others, too. If you have other related sites to suggest, put them in the comments.

I’m looking forward to this conference. Just getting on the plane last night gave me some downtime for brainstorming about how to apply what I learned in my last session with Shel.

I’m presenting a case study at the conference on Friday.

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