Category: New Media

ALI Conference on Blogging and Podcasting: Day One

The preconference seminars were immensely helpful yesterday, and now we’re going to be getting into some networking and a series of case studies that will, I hope, give real, practical advice and examples.

The conference description promises “practical solutions you can apply immediately…” and based on a quick glance at the workbook of handouts, I’m confident it will meet those expectations.

Shel Holtz is giving the keynote…and even though I’m on Holtz overload (having heard him at the Ragan Conference in Chicago in September, and a three-hour seminar yesterday, I’m looking forward to the review/overview.

Bring it on, Shel!

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New Thread: It’s All Free (and Mostly Easy)

This morning I added a second thread to this blog, which will be a description/tutorial on how to get started blogging for free, and how you can do everything you see on this blog without programming knowledge. Go here — or click It’s All Free (and Mostly Easy) in the navigation bar above) — for the start of the tutorial.

Why do you start a new thread? If you are posting regularly, some of your good stuff will move way down in the reverse chronological format of the blog. For reference material you want to have easily accessed, and which isn’t commenting on news of the day, adding a new page (with child pages or sub-pages) instead of a new post is the way to go.

In this case, I hope to make it easy for people who want to get started blogging to do so, and to eliminate excuses for not starting.

I’m at a conference on blogging and podcasting where people are spending a minimum of $1,699 plus travel and lodging (and two days of their lives) to learn about these topics.

I think that’s a really worthwile investment. Conferences like this are great to get you out of the routine and think about the bigger picture.

Why not take the next step and really apply what we’re learning, especially since it’s FREE? By investing 90 seconds or less now, and no money, you can start a blog. Then, for those who are at the conference, you could even blog about the presentations, as I am. Or, when you go home, you could take a couple of hours to write about (and link to) the blogs and resources you found most helpful. It will be a great way to get hands on experience and really have the information sink in.

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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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