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What lessons from "The Blog that Saved a Business"?

A recent edition of the NAWBO SmartBrief email newsletter used the headline "Cookie maker's blog revived her flagging sales" and linked to a story in the Star Tribune about Katherine Novotny's experience in turning around her business by blogging about its impending shutdown.

One week later, Katie was able to write a Thank You, St. Paul!!! post and announce that St. Paul Classic Cookie Co. had "made it through."

Did Katie's blog save her business?

No, I don't think the blog itself saved the cookie shop. Looking at her archives, Katie has been blogging sporadically since July 2006. Most of the posts prior to the crisis (only 6 in 2006 and 7 in all of 2007) are basically ads for Katie's products, recipes, specials, and the like.

Then, Katie used her blog to do what blogs do best: she engaged with her readers on a personal level.

With business blogs, this includes your customers and your network of contacts. Katie's experience is a classic case of online and offline results. First, her fellow downtown business owner, Lisa Cotter Metwaly, owner of the Q Kindness Cafe, forwarded the story via email to others like Michael Belaen of the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce and a downtown e-newsletter with 3400 subscribers. Another friend from a local networking group, Linda LaBarre, a professional organizing consultant, took it upon herself to distribute flyers downtown on Katie's behalf.

I point out all the time that nobody ever got fired for blogging, though a handful have been fired for doing something stupid on their blog. Similarly, I'd argue that Katie didn't save her business just by having a blog, but by doing something very smart on her blog. She used it to engage with her customers and friends the same way she would if talking to them face to face in her shop or at a networking event.

Over at the Small Company Big Image blog, Katie is quoted as saying,

"Enough people responded that we were able to pay our bills, meet our deadlines and stay open. And we were also able to talk to our customers so they understood why we raised our prices the next week."

The second sentence contains the key. Her blog post enabled her "to talk to her customers so they understood" her business.

The lessons? Use your business blog as a tool for connecting on a personal level. And don't wait until you're about to close the doors to get started.

Blog to Book to Blog

And back again.

The intersection of print and online publishing is where we live (WME Books, WME Blogs). So we are very proud and excited to share this conversation from our blog-buddy Toby Bloomberg's blogtalkradio show entitled Creating and Promoting Books with Social Media/Web 2.0. Toby's guests (she calls them rock stars) are book publicist Nettie Hartsock and our own Sybil Stershic, who blogs at Quality Service Marketing and wrote Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care.

Just click the play button and get ready to learn.

Note: Because there is so much great information in the show covering both book- and blog-related topics, I'm going to cross-post this on A-ha! and WME Blogs, so please forgive. I think you'll want to listen to it more than once anyway ... and take notes!

Toby also blogged about the show and provided lists of tips from both Nettie and Sybil. Here's a taste:

Nettie: "Ask not what a blogger can do for you, ask how you, your book or your product can benefit the blogger and its readership ..."

Sybil: [on applying the "3 Rs" from her book to how authors should treat reviewers] "Reinforce their helping you with appropriate reciprocity (such as linking to their blog or website on your blog)."

There's more on Toby's blog and much more in the interview, so I'll get out of the way.

Note 2: In the interest of full disclosure (and maybe a little shameless self-promotion), Sybil is one our authors and her book is one of our best sellers since it's release last October. And she REALLY "gets" the whole blog to book to blog marketing concept.

We also have a connection to blogtalkradio, John Havens (VP of Business Development). John is co-authoring a book on business transparency with another of our clients, Shel Holtz, for Jossey-Bass and it's IABC book series. WME is acting as their agents.

If you ignore social media, will it go away?

In yesterday's BizReport: Social Marketing Kristina Knight reported on Citi's reluctance to engage in social media marketing, under the title Do social networks hurt brand image? She described as a "downside" of social media that "marketers have basically no control over what will be said about their brand by social networkers."

That seems to be the worry behind Citi's cautious approach. Knight quoted from a Media Daily News article by David Goetzl, in which he quotes in turn Lisa Caputo, Citi's CMO, as expressing concern "that allowing consumers access to Citi logos and other materials related to its brand for their own creations could backfire: 'I am very loath to put it at risk and let some individual do what they want with it.' "

Does she really think that if Citi doesn't engage in the conversations going on about it that the conversations will stop?

Both articles cited the example of Chevy's experience with enabling users to build ads about its Tahoe SUV, which generated some negative ads focusing on the environmental impact of SUVs. The implication is that such consumer responses are a terrible thing.

Are they?

If potential customers feel passionately enough about what they perceive as a problem with your product or service to build an advertisement for you, shouldn't you welcome that? Learn from it? Adjust accordingly?

If they're not telling or showing you how they feel, do you think they're not telling anyone?

As I explained in my post about expanding the Forrester blogging ROI matrix, blogs and social media are especially valuable business tools precisely because they are so efficient in uncovering your customers' reactions to your brand, positive and negative, while you still have the opportunity to do something about it.

Why blog? Because you can? Hmmm...maybe not.

The whole topic of blogging for business seems like a never-ending debate. Back in the day, like two years ago, we (those of us who were blogging for business) thought it was a given. We were pretty smug - insisting that a blog could be the 'real' you, which is what customers want.

Now, we're all a bit smarter and somewhat less smug. Now, we know the blogs can bring a personal voice to your business, but most of us realize that not all businesses need a personal voice (in a blog), and not all businesses are cut out for blogging. Certainly, not all people are cut out for blogging.

The blogging for business environment is a complicated one. First of all, without a strategy (what do you want the blog to do for you? and what do you want people to do after they've read your blog?), a blog is just a noise-maker. Blah, blah, blah.  So they say.

Second, if you don't have time to write three or more times a week, your blog will take a bit of time to catch on. Folks you're trying to reach won't know about it - unless you tell them about it, because not enough content will be there to attract search engine spiders.

And three, if you're not fond of writing - it may come across in your posts, and it may not achieve the end results you were hoping for.

I've decided that some business owners shouldn't blog. Certainly, not right away. Some business owners should contribute content to blogs other than their own, to get a feel for blogging. That way, they don't have to write a lot of content, but they can start developing a voice...and they can start getting noticed.

If you blog because you can, how great is that? If you think all companies, everywhere should blog -  you're delusional and I don't want to work with you. If you like a particular blog because it has content relevant to you and your business, maybe that's where you start. By asking if you can participate.

In the end, don't blog because everyone else is blogging, or because your business partner is worried that if you don't, you'll be looked at as un-hip. Blog because you have a purpose, and because you're the best person to talk about that purpose.

Blog It and ... will they come?

by Yvonne DiVita

Greg and Tom are still doing stuff in the background... hence no posts recently, but, I kinda got tired of waiting so I'm posting.

Ok.. the WSJ says, "Blog It and They May Come," in an article Monday, August 20th. It's pretty lengthy and doesn't really say much except... that if you start a blog, well, by golly, ya gotta write in it!

We build blogs for small businesses, and even some bigger businesses, and we take the view that it's a 3month project, at least. During that 3 months we do three things (funny how things always occur in threes)... First, we design a good blog, not a simple, unappealing, blogger kind of blog - there's nothing wrong with those, but for business professionals, we think a business blog should look... professional.

Next, we teach our clients the ins and outs of typepad... it's supposed to be intuitive but - it really isn't . Some folks are technology challenged, so they need hand holding through the experience of learning the ins and outs of their blog platform.

Then, we take time to help our clients blog. We teach them how to write in a blog! There's a certain writing style that works - personal, authentic, patient, and purposeful. Of course, there are the links to consider, also. I mean, the building of your online network. And trackbacks - why does everyone have such trouble with trackbacks?

Along the way, we've discovered a few key things...

Blogging for Business: What's the Catch?

The world is caught up in qualifying the act of blogging for business - again. Seems like this topic would have evaporated into outer space by now but, apparently, there are a whole lot of people in business who still think blogging is a tool teens use to insult each other. Or, something moms do to brag about their kids. Or, worse yet, a FAD that will eventually go away.

Blogging for business is a successful way to raise awareness,(mainstream media is watching), sell products (softly - not blatantly), enhance your expertise, meet new clients, share information, educate your existing clients - and so much more. If you're in business today, or even considering a business, you need to look at this platform more carefully. Those of us in the blogging for business arena do it because it works for us. It works for us because we do it.

Let me use an example - a recent client who starting blogging on our advice has been contacted by the media (for insight into her expertise), asked about advertising on her blog (because it serves a select market) and identified as a resource for a major PR firm. This is exactly what she was hoping would happen. She wanted to "get noticed," and "promote her expertise."

Her name is Donna DeClemente and you can visit her blog at Donna's Promo Talk.
Ask her how she did it. She'll share. [pic of Why Blogging Matters from mo [nu] ments  -- click to enlarge]

Here at WME, we use blogs to help market ourselves and our authors, on a regular basis. My blog on marketing to women online has been responsible for over 70% of our new business, in the last 2 years. It brings me business NOT because I ask for it. NOT because I promote our services. NOT because we're the best game in town (but we are!), but because I write it to serve the readers. It exists to educate, share, and connect. Without it, we'd be hustling to build business - because we don't have a big enough marketing budget to do PPC, or print ads, or even Google ads. And, why should we - when we have a successful marketing tool right at our fingertips?

A business blog is not a confessional. It's not a platform to push ads. It's not a replacement for your other marketing.

A business blog is a tool. It's a platform to showcase you,  your products and services, and your work. It's a part of your marketing - something that can and should enhance what you are already doing. It's a way to SHOW your clients and prospects that you care.

In short, it's part of business in the conceptual age. (thanks to Andrea Learned for that concept). As someone much smarter than you and I once said, "Conceive it, believe it, achieve it."

I say, use a blog.

Eyes on the Future (of the Greater Rochester, NY region)

Join us at the June 12 event - Register Now!

We're also one of the web media sponsors and hosting the Eyes on the Future Blog, so head over to check it out and join in the dialogue!

Blogs Aid Branding, Marketing, and SEO

And they cure the common cold, too! ;-) Well, okay, the evidence is still sketchy on that one.

But Internet Retailer calls blogging a Marketing Geyser. The article features SEO expert Steve Spencer and the title refers to his contribution to the Mentos/Diet Coke video phenomenon on YouTube (I've mentioned the famous EepyBird version in my Blyopia posts).

But WAIT!!! There's more!

Steve has posted the interview transcript behind the article on his own Stephan Spencer's Scatterings blog. He offers excellent tips on the benefits of blogging, how to do it right, what to avoid, and an example of "clueless" blogging. But the reality-check part is in his advice on the investment of time and money needed to get the ROI we've talked about so often.

As to time, Steve suggests 1-2 hours per workday (5-10 hours per week) spent on writing in your blog and an equal time spent visiting and commenting on others' blogs. How many of our clients have heard me harp on that second part?

On the dollars-and-cents investment, here's the "money quote" as Dennis Kennedy likes to call them:

Developing your blog strategy should probably involve a blog consultant and will likely run in the $5,000 to $15,000 price range. Don’t skimp on the blog strategy: as much time and energy should be put into that as any offline marketing strategy (emphasis added). The initial web development and search engine optimization can run in the $10,000-and-up price range.

I’d also suggest hiring a blog consultant on a retainer basis, to help guide you through that crucial first year of blogging. That can cost anywhere from $1000 to $5000 per month.

(Note: I swear we did not pay Steve to say that.)

[UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Steve will be speaking here in Rochester, NY at the RAMA (our local chapter of the American Marketing Association) event on May 24, 2007.]

A Blogger in Every Firm

Subtitle: Ancient wisdom says, "If the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail."

Sub-subtitle (only a lawyer would write that): If the only legal device you know how to use is litigation, then ...

Okay, enough with the titles. I'm going to send you off to read (and listen to, if your attorneys allow you to) some disparate, but important threads in the development of blogs and social media. The question these all relate to is:

Whether businesses and business lawyers can/should continue to operate in a Web 2.0 world without becoming bloggers themselves, or having one on staff?

As my title suggests, I think not.

But I also think you should spend some time thinking about this for yourself, so rather than spell out my argument, I'm going to connect you to some of the threads I've followed and let you make your own journey down the many paths these may lead you to. I was prodded again by a post by Neil Squillante in the TechnoLawyer blog yesterday, Demand Letters in the Age of Blogs, criticizing the knee-jerk tactic of sending a cease-and-desist letter threatening litigation against a blogger. He's writing about the uproar going on over at TechCrunch over Michael Arrington's allegedly defamatory post last week discussing possible legal troubles that might derail a rumored acquisition of Rivals.com by Yahoo! Note the blinding speed of these events.

• Arrington's original post was on Thursday, April 12.
• The next morning lawyers for his alleged victim sent a letter demanding a retraction and threatening litigation (excerpt above).
• Before the morning is over, Arrington has posted the entire 3-page letter on his blog and added an update inviting the alleged victim to refute the original post, point-by-point, and promising to post the response - unedited - on the blog.
• By the end of the day on Friday, the story had been picked up on Wired and AOL Sports and received 95 comments on TechCrunch.
• By Sunday morning, when Arrington closed comments on that post due to spammers, there were 142 comments.
• Others (e.g. here and here) began writing about the story and the heavy-handed response.
• On Monday (yesterday), Neil posted his critique of the lawyers' approach.
• And the lawsuit deadline in the demand letter doesn't come until tomorrow, April 18!

Neil's words of caution:

Think twice before sending a cease and desist or demand letter to a blogger, especially a powerful one. Bloggers play by different rules and believe in transparency to the extreme. While you may win the legal battle, you may lose the publicity war, which arguably matters more in today's world.

Query: What did the "victim" and his lawyers accomplish with the letter to Arrington?

[UPDATE: It's now April 19 and I can't find any indication that the lawyers carried out their threat to file suit against Arrington and TechCrunch yesterday. Bluff called?]

This latest drama recalls the Spocko vs. ABC/Disney/KSFO fiasco earlier this year, in which the lawyers for ABC's affiliate sent a threatening letter to the blogger's hosting service and "succeeded" in temporarily shutting the blog down. Only to discover that even a small "fifth-tier blogger" (Spocko's own description) has friends in the blogoshpere. The Daily Kos picked up the story in full detail, the Electronic Frontier Foundation pledged support and sent its own version of a cease-and-desist letter to ABC's lawyers, and Spocko's position is now available to everyone on YouTube. Oh, and Spocko's blog was back online in short order using Computer Tyme, as the EFF described it, "a host with more backbone."

What did ABC and its lawyers accomplish?

Or, how about the troubles caused for Tim O'Reilly when the lawyers for CMP (co-sponsor with O'Reilly Media of an early Web 2.0 conference) sent a C&D letter claiming to own trademark rights to prevent an Irish networking group, IT@Cork, from using "Web 2.0" in the title of a conference about, of all things, Web 2.0. Blogger Tom Raftery promptly published the letter (332 comments) on his blog and follow-up letter (48 comments) from the lawyers. Now poor Tim O'Reilly was on vacation at the critical moment when the decision to send the C&D letter was made - a decision he admitted was "a faux pax" and a "screwup" when he finally returned and responded (313 comments). By then he was backfilling for the legalistic and PR-spin posts from his staffers here (278 comments) and here (105 comments).

What did CMP and its lawyers accomplish? Well, for their partner O'Reilly, they created a contorversy that he described as "bad for my most important brand, my own name." Note: in the end, Tim O'Reilly's handling of the situation provides a model for how the blogoshpere can help with damage control, even after a "srewup" occurs; if you follow all the links above, you'll see the tone shift and end up with apologies exchanged, just as publicly as the controversy.

One more: the C&D sent by the estate of Dr. Seuss to a music producer who had created a parody of some of the Seuss classics sung to sound like they were recorded by Bob Dylan. The individual creator caved in to the demand and removed the songs from the Dylan Hears a Who website, leaving an explanatory message that it had been retired "at the request of Dr. Seuss Enterprises, LP." Consequences to date include, an article in Salon.com, harsh criticism of its action ("irresponsible, if not simply abusive") from the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and oh yeah, the songs are still available online, e.g., at WFMU's Beware of the Blog Oh, the Thinks You Can Think and Green Eggs and Ham.

So, once more, did the Suess estate and its lawyers help, or harm, their brand with their tactics? Does every business and business law firm need a blogger to help analyze the effects of blogs and social media on their standard responses to what goes on all over the web?

WME Blogs - noun or verb?

Our dear friend (and blogging client) Cliff Jacobson, whose WebHomeUSA blog takes a serious, but usually funny and irreverent look at online/search marketing in the real estate industry, made us this wonderful desk sign:

Every time I look at it, I'm reminded that the word blog is both a noun and a verb. And I think the verb sense is the more important one.

So, WME Blogs? Yes, we are. And yes, we do.

Extending Forrester's Blog ROI matrix

Yesterday we put on an all-day workshop on business blogs for RAMA, the local chapter of the American Marketing Association, titled "I Link, Therefore I Am" - not original, we know, but it captures many of the elements that go into the ROI analysis for blogs and social media.

One hot topic, of course, was ROI - we had small to medium-sized businesses and colleges represented in the room and several expressed a need to explain the ROI to their bosses, if they were going to venture into blogging. Now that Charlene Li and her collegues at Forrester Research have provided us with a nice, scientific-looking matrix for calculating ROI from blogging, that becomes the starting point for the discussion. Those of us who get asked the question all the time owe a deep debt of gratitude to Charlene and folks like Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion, who've experienced the ROI (both tangible and intangible) and keep trying to help explain it the bean counters.

That said, I've been fiddling with the matrix ever since Charlene so generously shared it with the world in mid-January, because I think it misses three major pieces of blogging ROI:

1. it treats "negative user-generated content" solely as ... well, a negative;
2. it's framing of the first four benefits as "increased brand visibility" seems biased toward large organizations with existing brands and ignores the power of blogs to help individuals, small businesses, or small/new segments of large organizations create their brands from scratch; and
3. it leaves no room to consider the kinds of intangible, non-linear, and longer-term benefits of developing a network of links and trackbacks over time that I discussed in my Blyopia series (start here).

So yesterday I included a slide with a sort of "mash-up" of the Forrester matrix with more boxes for taking into account those additional ROI factors:

The blanks at the bottom are meant to remind you to think about and articulate those intangible, non-linear, not-immediately-measurable - but nonetheless VERY REAL and often most valuable over the long haul - benefits.

The global microbrand creation sections and the "low cost web presence" piece will help take into account the value of this communication medium for individuals, small businesses, and small or new ventures within large organizations. For more on these elements of ROI and links to various sources and example of Hugh Macleod's global microbrand concept see my recent "WME as a 'publishing conglomerate' " post.

Sharp-eyed readers will note that I moved the negative UGC boxes to the bottom of the Forrester matrix so that I could connect them to the top of my add-on. The question mark and Chinese characters (Wei Ji, Zhuan Ji) express that point that negative comments are not necessarily a negative. In fact, in most cases they are an opportunity for a business to shine. This has been true since before we had blogs to help. Back in 1996, when Janelle Barlow and Claus Moller published A Complaint is a Gift: Using customer feedback as a strategic tool, they devoted a chapter to urging businesses to "generate more complaints" - but the only tool they could offer was a toll-free phone number. Calls to a toll-free customer service line are important, but they help one customer at a time.

On a blog, the opportunity for great customer service and turning around a negative comment can be played out in public, where the benefit can be linked to, passed on, and magnified many time over. The GM Fastlane blog experience is instructive. After customer feedback and responses like the famous "What I meant to say ..." post from Bob Lutz relating to the Cadillac line, GM has just added a new blog, especially for their Cadillac CTS line. I'm guessing they're happy with the ROI from blogging openly with their customers, including the "negative" comments they get. What do you think?

WME as a "publishing conglomerate"

Pssssst ... It's all about the BLOGS!!!

Anita Campbell's post "Multi-Business Entrepreneurs - You Too Can Be a One-Person Conglomerate" yesterday at the Success Magazine Blog features our own Yvonne DiVita as the example for how one person can build a multi-business company, while staying focused on his/her "core compentencies."

So ... before you dive into blogging your business, you do need to have those core competencies ... but that's pretty much a given to think about any kind of business.

But Anita's description of the growth and development of Yvonne's Windsor Media Enterprises to include her Smart Marketing to Women Online consulting work, then WME Books, and now WME Blogs, leads me back to Hugh MacLeod's concept of small businesses being enabled to create "global microbrands" via the power of BLOGS!!! Here's a link to the Global Microbrand category at his gapingvoid blog and to his wiki page where you can list your own global microbrand.

As Yvonne transitions from her one-woman-enterprise to incorporate the complementary "core competencies" of others (Dianna, Greg, Karin, Steve, and me - yes, intros/links will be coming soon), it's easy to trace the growth through the blogs: Yvonne's Lip-Sticking, our Authors Helping Authors blog, A-ha!, and right here from the original Business Blogging Boot Camp identity to WME Blogs.

So if you want to act on Anita's excellent concluding Success Tip ...

Pssssst ... It's all about the BLOGS!!!

Blyopia (Part III): An Ounce of Prevention

What can you do to protect yourself and your company from Blyopia (see Part I and Part II)?

First, I recommend daily doses of folks like Andy Sernovitz (link goes to his "free stuff" page, but click his blog and then on to the entire WOMMA site), Seth Godin, and Charlene Li at Forrester Research.

Buy Andy's book. Read it. Absorb the practical lessons and step-by-step advice. And while you're at it, get Seth's latest book, too. Go back and review Charlene's informative video presentation on social media (it's over a year old now, but she provides still-relevant, real-world examples like GM Vice Chair Bob Lutz's "What I Meant to Say Was..." post in GM Fastlane Blog).

Of course, it won't be enough to nourish your mental muscles with healthy information.

You've got to exercise!

Adopt and apply the philosophy of engagement with your customers. Let go of the notion that you can "control the message." You and your product/service are what Google and your customers say you are.

Put the blogging and social media tools and techniques to work in your business. Engage in the conversations going on about you and your company (at the very least become aware of what's being said, written, and passed on).

Can blogs and other customer generated media produce sales? Sure. Think back to the Blair Witch Project movie, or the more recent The Purpose Driven Life book (over 25 million copies last I heard; info about the word of mouth campaign here). Recall the Mentos side of the examples in Part II.

But focusing too much on the sales benefits of blogging is itself a mild form of Blyopia!

Expand your view. Let's reconsider Andy's email campaign example described in Part II and add some "RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES" flavor to it.

Suppose the email campaign was designed as part of a new product launch for a really cool new wireless device that delivered streaming media so fast users could download and listen to music and engage in real-time, online gaming simultaneously. Your R&D folks did some user-testing in controlled environments the way they thought users would use the device. They designed the battery pack and wrist strap based on those tests.

But suppose real-world users didn't see the device the same way as the engineers. Users quickly wrote scripts to monitor web content, subscribe to RSS feeds, and thus wanted to leave the device on most of the time. And when they were free of the testing environment, they used the device in their gaming more, shall we say, enthusiastically than the engineers had expected.

Under real-world user conditions, the battery packs caught fire and the wrist straps broke. Injuries to nearby objects and to some users themselves occurred, not to mention tarnishing the company's brand value. Product recalls and damage claims followed.

In this example, perversely, the more "successful" the email campaign was in generating sales of the defective product, the greater the harm to the company's overall health.

How might a blogging and social media strategy have helped the company? It's not much of a stretch to imagine potential customers reacting to leaks of the coming new product -- months before the launch -- on their blogs and MySpace pages and sharing their "wish lists" of features (go spend some time on the GM Fastlane Blog, if you doubt customers will do this). Maybe some speculate on ways they could use the product as a mobile monitoring/downloading device that might have allerted engineers to the "always on" power problem. Maybe one jokingly refers to the Nintendo Wii and suggests that your company design a wrist connector "like a biker's wallet chain" -- adding both indestructability and a cool-factor.

Monitoring what's being said out there is the barest minimum any business should be doing in the blogging/social media realm. Had our hypothetical company been monitoring the blogosphere, it might have understood its customers better and designed away the problems before they happened.

Engaging with the customers, however, could also provide an early warning system and enable the company to react quickly and positively when a defect is found. It's easy to imagine the hypothetical company's initial response to reports of broken straps and fires coming from the PR department and consisting of defensive statements about the product's careful design and testing and the need to investigate the reported incidents. The result would likely be further customer anger, blog and YouTube postings of user-generated videos showing the defects in action, and additional harm to the company's brand.

But if the company president got the reports in the comments on her own blog, the response would likely be more direct, personal, and ... well ... responsive. Chances are she will have had some serious discussions with legal, engineering, marketing, and so on. But if she's smart, those discussions will be short and the responses to her personal contacts in her market (her blog readers) will be prompt, meaningful, and provide effective solutions.

Perhaps part of the lesson is that blogging and social media as a business tool is a higher level function than can be entrusted solely to the marketing or PR folks? A recent Fast Company article criticizing heavy-handed attempts at viral marketing closes with, "if there's a way [for marketers] to miss the point, they'll find it."

We can't cover all the possible benefits from engaging with your customers via social media in one post. The books, blogs, and other resources I've cited and linked (as well as many of the posts right here at WME Blogs) will give you much more detailed information. Heck, new benefits along with new forms of these tools, remain to be discovered, like the measuring sticks we'd all like to have. (For some explanation of why the measuring criteria we have don't work and why it may be a while before we get new ones that do, see Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine post, Size doesn't matter: the distributed media economy.) So just brainstorm a bit about your own situation. And then get started. If you need a jump-start in business blogging, let us know.

And once more I want to extend my apologies to Bob Bly for having some fun with his name -- and thanks for being such a good sport about it. The point should not be lost that his book, too, is well worth reading. He does acknowledge some of the benefits of blogs and offers many cautionary observations that will help you avoid misusing them. His contentions will force you to think (usually a good thing) about how blogs can -- and can't -- help your company.

For some additional reviews of Bob's viewpoint and Blog Schmog check out Yvonne's Lip-Sticking Top 10 Business Books post and, for a mixture of serious criticism with a few rather unreasoned rants (which unfortunately tend to demonstrate one of Bob's legitimate complaints about a small minority of bloggers), read the post Bob Bly Is Wrong About Blogs, with comments, and related post links over at Simplenomics.

Blyopia (Part II): Are You Susceptible?

My own field observations of Blyopia (see Part I - including Bob's comment and my retort) indicate that the condition seems to spread more easily among people with a need to appear "hard-nosed" and "business-focused." These are often the same ones locked into the instant-gratification, quarterly report mentality that requires numerical results that THEY can take credit for NOW!

To me, they're just hard-headed and short-sighted: their focus on the trees (short-term results) prevents them from seeing the forest (the long-term health and success of their business).

In Bob Bly's case, I noted in Part I that his criticisms of blogs as a business tool focuses on comparing them to his own field of expertise: direct marketing sales campaigns. In the first place, Bob's confidence that his ability to measure things like click-throughs, responses, and conversions equates directly to ROI is itself open to question. A serious problem with insisting on measurement is that it makes you dependent on only those factors you selectively chose to measure and forces you to ignore things that we don't yet know how to measure -- regardless of how crucial to success those things may have become.

Consider this hypothetical example from Andy Sernovitz's new book, Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking -

These days, all marketers are obsessed with measuring results, so let's do some math (actually some story problems).

. . .

Problem #3. We pay for an email campaign to one million opt-in (we hope) email addresses. we get 1 percent click-throughs, and close 10 percent of them, giving us 1,000 new customers. But 10,000 people don't remember opting in. So they get angry and decide never to buy from us again. And they each tell five friends that we spammed them. Two thousand of those [50,000] people were current clients who are now mad at us. And they each tell five friends.

How many prospects do we lose forever? Was the potential lifetime value of these customers greater than the new accounts we acquired? What is the lost revenue from current customers who left because they think we are spamming? What happens when people start blogging that we spammed them?

In the hypothetical, the direct marketer chose to measure click-throughs and conversions. The measured results might look impressive. But the long-term impact on the company would be harmful.

But putting aside for the moment such unintended consequences of the measurement obsession in general, or direct marketing in particular, if blogs were designed or meant to be used primarily as a sales tool for generating immediate response purchases, then Bob's criticisms might have some validity. We should not be willing to allow those with Blyopia to frame the question so narrowly.

The "engagement" with customers enabled by blogs and other social media (yours AND theirs) feed much more than short-term sales.

Blogs can feed R&D.
Blogs can feed customer support.
Blogs can feed product/service design.
Blogs can feed the company's brand value.

I can't be the only one amused by the irony of Bob Bly's Blog, where he's recently been hosting a discussion on the viability "branding" as a way to build company value. If there's anyone out there besides a few of Bob's readers who doubts the balance sheet value of brand equity, look at the comments to Bob's post (#s 10 and 12) from Diana Huff and the research article cited in another comment, Madden, et al., Brands Matter: An Empirical Demonstration of the Creation of Shareholder Value Through Branding, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 34, No. 2, 224-235 (2006) (abstract here).

Even more ironic is hearing about anyone at Coke purporting to focus on the "how many cases" question (see Part I), in view of Coke's enormous brand value. What would Warren Buffet think about that? His philosophy of recognizing the value of a company's "brand" and insistence on taking a long-term approach to building a profitable business is well known. And Coke is one of his shining examples. There are differing approaches to measuring the value of a company's brand (example, example), but Coke's most recent 10K balance sheet lists nearly $4 Billion in trademarks, good will, and other intangibles -- nearly a quarter of its shareholder equity.

Shortly after Stichweh spoke at ad:tech, Brian Kardon of Forrester Research spoke at the AMA's mPlanet conference and used the Diet Coke - Mentos videos as examples of the impact a company's willingness to engage with customers and embrace social media can have. After playing the Eepybird video (go ahead, watch it again), he reported that Mentos publicly announced it was "delighted" by the video, while Coke's initial response was pure PR Dept. spin: "it doesn't fit with the brand personality."

Want numbers? According to Kardon, Mentos sales were up 14.5%, due in part to a "significant hit" from the video. Coke, as discussed in Part I, is playing catch-up and still seems ambivalent about it.

In my retort to Bob's comment under Part I (he'd quoted Lord Kelvin on the value of measurement), I wrote:

Take gravity. Long before we could describe it accurately or measure something, humans built buildings with cantilevers and invented keystone arches. Would it have been "smart, tough-minded business" to operate as if gravity did not exist, just because we had not yet figured out how to measure it in numbers?

History has favored those who acted on what they could observe happening, without waiting for someone else to wrap a scientific explanation and measurement tools around it.

For those willing to act on what they can observe about blogs and social media, without insisting on numerical measurements that haven't yet been invented, in Part III we'll examine how to avoid Blyopia and put these new tools to work.

State of the Blogosphere . . . A-List, Schmay-List

[Note from Tom: I will get back to Blyopia, I promise. Bob Bly has joined the discussion in the comments to Part I and I put a short retort in there, but Part II is sitting in a rough draft and Part III is even started, so please forgive the intrusion of ... life, business, and ...

New to WME Blogs ... Introducing ... Posts by Greg!

Greg Bell, our new WME Blogs blogger, is a partner in D.S. Leach Consulting, with his wife Dianna Leach. Both of them will be posting about blogs here and about book publishing at our Authors Helping Authors blog, A-ha! More formal announcements and introductions will be coming, but Greg has much to share from his experience in building and publishing blogs (check out his Jazz@Rochester blog), so let's just dive right in with Greg's first post on WME Blogs.]

Early in November, David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati posted another quarterly State of the Blogosphere report. Here are some of the basic findings that Sifry and his staff at Technorati have compiled:

• Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days
• About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts
• There is a strong correlation between the aging and post frequency of blogs and their authority and Technorati ranking
• The globalization of the blogosphere continues

Thankfully, Sifry reports that the noise from splogs and other spam in the blogosphere is being filtered more effectively from the Technorati numbers. While the doubling of the size of the blogosphere has decreased in its intensity, much of the decrease may be credited to Technorati’s more effective measures in filtering out splogs. Showing the continued interest in blogging, Sifry reports that more than 50 percent of blogs are active (updated in the past 3 months).

So what can we draw from the latest State of the Blogosphere report? Sifry remarks that "[t]he 'short head' (as opposed to 'the long tail') is still predominantly made up of traditional media sites, like The New York Times, Yahoo! News, CNN, and MSNBC" and reports that there are three blogs in the top 50 in terms of traffic, and 12 in the top 100. However, taking a broader view of the top 5,000 blogs, Sifry notes that as you go further down the list "blogs have essentially taken over, with very few well-funded mainstream media sites listed." Others see it somewhat differently. Like Nicolas Carr over at RoughType, who sees a more negative trend in Sifry's numbers, concluding that "blogs are being squeezed out of the short head and pushed ever deeper into the long tail." Even with their explosive growth in the past few years, the number of blogs sharing the top has been trending downward. According to Carr, this indicates that:

[T]he mainstream media is successfully making the leap from the print world to the online world. The old mainstream is the new mainstream. . . . As for blogs, they’re taking their place--an important place, if a more modest one than some might have hoped--publications, as the new trade journals, newsletters, and zines. The idea of there being an A List of bloggers, then, is something of a misnomer now. The real A List of online media is made up almost entirely of the sites maintained by mainstream media companies. Bloggers seem fated to be, at best, B Listers.

It was inevitable that well-funded, mainstream media would someday really "get it" and start retaking the space, but do most of us really care whether Technorati's rankings show that you are an A- or a B- or even a C- or D-List "blogebrity" with a badge to prove it? No. Most of us are D-List and proud of it! The question is whether in your space in the blogosphere and in your part of the world, is your blog accomplishing the goals you have set for it. If it appears to be reaching the audience you want to reach and you are having or beginning to have a conversation with that audience, then you are an A-List blogger. The long tail is where we live, isn't it?

Based on the "level of influence or authority "of a blog, or the number of distinct blogs that link to a particular blog, which forms the basis of Technorati's ranking, Sifry also has looked for common characteristics of the top bloggers. He believes that the numbers point to a couple of things—top bloggers have been at it for well over a year and post much more often, like 2 or more times daily (he also points out that those big-time blogs that post many times a day (think Engadget and Boing Boing, which are actually the top two) have professional staffs and are becoming more like the aforementioned mainstream media. The fact is that these aren't stunning epiphanies, they're basic Blogging 101:

• It takes some time for your audience to find your blog. You may have to toil in relative obscurity for awhile until you find the right voice to reach them (or Google page rank).
• The more you post, the more likely that audience will find you and keep coming back.

For most of us, who are using a blog as a tool in our business, or perhaps just for the sheer fun of it, these are enough. Blogs have clearly hit the big time, but one of their most powerful and effective features is how they allow the creativity and flexibility to fill niches—the place where many of us will find what we're looking for.

The Art(s) of Innovation

I'm going to keep posting on the Fortune Innovation Forum for a while, because I came away with 11+ pages packed with notes, plus the scraps jotted on business cards, the margins of the program, etc. In other words, lots to digest and share. It's likely that the topics will be in no partcular order and probably will overlap some.

Proving the point, the last session of the Forum "Lessons from the Innovator's Studio" gathered the creative talents from the four ongoing workshops exploring the innovation value of play, painting and sculpture, story-telling, and music. The session was capped by blues band perfomances from Face the Music (listen to samples here) and two groups of Forum attendees who had created original blues songs around the innovation experiences at their companies during the workshops.

Before the music ended the show, we heard a summary of the experiences in each workshop from Sophie Marsham, who ran the painting and sculpture workshop (you can see a couple of her paintings hanging behind the band on the main stage), Lea Thau, from the story-telling workshop provided by The Moth (listen to some stories here), Paul Kwiecinski, managing partner from Face the Music Blues (I describe him by his title simply to remind you that these folks are serious business people with much to teach about creativity and innovation as essential business processes), and Andy Stefanovich of Play, mentioned in my initial "live" post from the Forum.

Just a couple of quick takes from my notes:

Lea Thau talked about how framing a business presentation on some new project as a story can help, noting "when you're talking about the future, most people haven't been there [!], so it helps if you can find a way to take them there" -- which stories can do better than bullet lists and S-curve graphs.

Paul Kwiecinski noted that writing and singing "blues songs are not about whining and complaining (that's country!), but about expressing the truth of a situation." He asked, "How true do you want it?" I'm hoping Fortune can find a way to get at least the audio files from the songs performed at the forum posted on their Business Innovation Insider blog.

As I sat listening to their stimulating discussion a startling thought came: the four people sitting on the stage represented sports (play), drama/literature (story-telling), art, and music.

At last year's Forum, Yvonne heard a number of speakers sound the alarm for improving the education system in the U.S. to keep us innovative and competitive. But when most people thank and talk about improving education, they focus on math and science. Often in the same breath they're proposing cuts in spending for "extracurricular" activities.

The deeper lesson from the workshops at this year's Forum might well be that sports, drama/lit, art, and music art not "extracurricular" -- participation in them provides essential tools for business people who aim to lead innovative organizations of any kind.

Rewarding "Failure"

The audio post below was made "live" via cell phone from the music workshop room at the Fortune Innovation Forum.

The title comes from the mention of Scott Cook's innovation at Intuit, giving out "The 'Failure' We Learned the Most From Award."

Click the Play button (">") to hear more.

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Blyopia (Part I): Is it contagious?

[Update: just republishing to add live links at the end of this post to parts II and III.]

We may have a new pandemic to worry about: Blyopia.

Bly-opia: n. (comb. from Bly, as in Robert Bly, and myopia) 1. mental tunnel-vision thought to be caused by an idea virus that blocks the ability to see any value that cannot be both immediately measured and traced directly to one's own activity.

Okay, it's not really Bob's fault alone, but we've been reading his upcoming book, Blog Schmog: The Truth About What Blogs Can and Can't Do for Your Business, and his name fits together so well with my opinion of what's wrong with his thesis that I couldn't resist. So, apologies, Bob.

As you might guess from the main title and the icon on the cover, Bob has a lot of negative and precious little positive to say about blogs. The root of his problem is his inability to compare business blogging with anything other than his own field of writing copy for direct marketing campaigns. Hence Blyopia as the name for his disease.

And the disease appears to be spreading.

A Blyopia Pandemic?

It's been widely reported that John Stichweh, Director of Global Interactive Marketing at Coca-Cola, questioned the value of "engagement" with consumers at the recent NYC ad:tech conference in a session entitled, "Marketing Mashups: Navigating Consumer-Driven Marketing." Stichweh is quoted as expressing doubts about the value of Coke's adoption of the Eepybird video showing Diet Coke fountains from adding Mentos mints and inviting consumers to submit their own videos to Coke's Poetry in Motion Challenge:

"How many more cases
of Coke am I selling?
I don't know."

Quoted by Wendy Davis at Just an Online Minute (subscription required), Max Kalehoff at Engagement by Engagement, and Donna Bogatin at ZDNet's Digital Micro-Markets, among others.

So Blyopia apparently infects those attempting to employ other social media in their businesses, not just blogs. Bob's thesis in his book is, basically, that a direct marketing campaign is better than a blog, because he can measure the results of his campaign and tell John "how many more cases of Coke" he sold.

What Bob and John are missing in that comparison is that it tries to equate the blog with the marketing pieces Bob creates. It tries to draw a straight line from the blog or the piece to a sale. But social networks hyperlinked with social media (blogs, video sharing, etc.) are more than straight lines. They are intricate, extended linkages.

From a marketing perspective, a social media message may result few or no sales to the first recipients and efforts to "measure" the ROI immediately may be disappointing. But that same message remains in the network and over time can grow legs, accumulate supporting messages (generated by consumers, not the marketer), and yes, generate sales later that simply cannot be traced in a straight line from Bob or John's message to the case of Coke.

Ego-deflating for the marketer? Perhaps. Good for the business? What do you think?

Lots more to say, so:

Blyopia (Part II) will explore what makes marketers susceptible to its narrow fixation on measurement and more about the pervasive business benefits of social media and "engagement."

Blyopia (Part III) will consider ways to immunize yourself and your business from Blyopia (cures are reportedly rare).