On The Bleeding Edge: Bleeding Edge TV 280: E3 2008 Xbox Media Briefing

Blog Business Summit: 10 Ways To A Killer Blog

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Features, Marketing, Planning

Robert and Maryam are speaking on getting noticed in the new word-of-mouth network.

1) Blog because you want to. A story without live is not worth telling. Maryam talks about how Robert kept pushing her to blog for four years. Then one day, she started to blog. As soon as she started, she was blogging about Robert and he tried to get her to stop talking about him on her blog.

If you are blogging about something you don’t really care about because you think it’s profitable, you won’t have passion to go long-term.

2) Read other blogs. Use Technorati to find blogs that are similar to the topics you want to discuss, pick up writing styles, and learn about your competitors. If you read 50 blogs in two weeks and you aren’t compelled to answer back the things that you are reading, you probably won’t be a good blogger.

Maryam started blogging because she was going to a lot of conferences, but people told her they had no way of linking to her. It brings out community and a bond that she hadn’t experienced before. Through blogging she has gotten a much better job and has made a lot more friends. She loves it.

3) Pick a niche you can own - be different. There are two kinds of bloggers - ones that want to make things, and shake things. Others just want to talk to their friends and use their blogs to post baby pictures, talk about books they read, etc. Either way, each group should have a common set of values. When Robert visited people outside of Silicon Valley, he studied the way people use their computers. People go to Google and search for Yahoo because they want to get to Yahoo. Same for Yahoo, one of their top terms is Google.

Normal people outside the tech world aren’t using things like Google Maps, Google Groups, or Picasa. Everyone comes at this world through the search engine, so how do they interact with that?

Question - if you were to pick a category to be different in, would that be the tech category? Yes, it would be hard, but Mike Arrington came in late to the game and went to number one. He was also very focused on a very specific part of the tech industry, being Web 2.0.

There was a niche blogger in London who talks about the London Underground transportation system. After the London bombing, everyone hit her site, and now she is popular. Of course, we don’t want to have a terrorist act happen to make us famous, but you get the point.

Click to continue reading Blog Business Summit: 10 Ways To A Killer Blog


Advertisement

Blog Business Summit: Jason Calacanis Keynote - From Weblogs, Inc. to Netscape

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Features, Marketing

9:07: Jason hits the stage and says you don’t have to have the gin tasting the night before the conference instead of the night after.

9:08: Blogging is a great way to build a business, and it’s a business in and of itself. back in 1994, people thought the web was the place to get text, and then thought it was a magazine, then maybe the future of TV. However, you can do a lot of different things with it. Same with blogs - they are like paper. You can make a marketing brochure, a beautiful book, or toilet paper.

9:10: Blogs are real and authentic. There is a movie called “Homepage” which Jason recommends to the attendees. No one knows who Justin Hall is, which blows him away. In 2002-2003 there was a lot of mistrust overall. This is where blogs became free, and started gaining traction. People wanted to express themselves, and that created the perfect storm for blogging. Enter Weblogs, Inc.

9:12: Rafat Ali over at www.paidcontent.org earns about $70,000 from blogging, twice what he was earning working for Jason at Silicon Alley Reporter. Jason started to see the power in the medium. Xeni Jardin flourished after working for Jason, which is when he started wondering if he was holding people back rather than letting them loose. The proof was that when they left, they did better and more interesting work.

9:15: When Silicon Alley Reporter was over, Jason and his CTO Brian Alvey started talking about blogging. They started building blogs in the fall of 2003, and Jason’s idea was that they make is similar to About.com with a bunch of mini-portals.

Click to continue reading Blog Business Summit: Jason Calacanis Keynote - From Weblogs, Inc. to Netscape


Blog Business Summit: What’s Next In Online Communication?

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Design, Features, Marketing, Planning

Jeremy Pepper, Jeanette Gibson, and John Starweather

How does Cisco manage relationships with End Users when there is a reseller middle man?

By providing them a unique way to interact with the company online. They can log in and get a personalized view, along with interactivity.

Can they talk about steps they are taking to educate employees internally about the potential for engagement, so that they understand the impact of blogs, podcasting, etc.?

To educate, you need to have some good data so that you can show how influence really moves across the Internet, and how something you might post online actually reaches customers and hits the community. Cisco puts a blog, podcasting, and news section on their Intranet system, so global employees can all get to that information easily.

Click to continue reading Blog Business Summit: What’s Next In Online Communication?


Advertisement