Extremely doutbful I’ll be signing up fo this seminar here in Seattle next Friday, Dec 17, 2004 on blogging and marketing. Robert Scoble is one of several speakers and is letting folks know via his blog that seats are still available. This doesn’t surprise me because I checked out this event, looked at the schedule including who was speaking, what they were speaking about and what I felt would really be learned beyond the typical seminar spin.

There are still seats available at next Friday’s American Marketing Association’s hot topic series on blogging and marketing (I’m speaking).

At $645/$695 a pop? Sorry, seems a bit pricey. Besides, our business budget for 2004 for this kind of thing is pretty much gone. What small business owner’s budget isn’t pretty much tapped at this point in the year? Also, we’ve got a drain coming up for the two conventions we’re already hitting next month in Vegas in January 2005 (new tax year, though). What I’m saying here is that I’d happily find/expense/drop $645/$695 if I thought I’d get the value back out of this event for either of our two businesses. The problem here is I just don’t see it. Here’s where and why specifically I don’t see this event being worth it and please anybody who can counterpoint me on this, use the comments section and do so.

The overview for this event: “Internet surfers, advertisers, journalists and even politicians do it. But are blogs a credible marketing strategy for your brand or company? Experienced bloggers answer your questions and show how to incorporate the newest internet-based strategy into your organization�s marketing plan. Leave this marketing blog workshop with innovative ideas and specific techniques to apply directly to your own marketing strategy.”

The overview doesn’t seem to know/hold the answer to the bolded question (I bolded that, BTW). And who do they have that’s speaking to answer this question? The full schedule:

Toby Bloomberg, President Bloomberg Marketing. Let’s look at Toby’s blog. Where is Toby making money from this blog? I don’t see Google ads, I don’t see any ads. It’s just a blog about marketing and though it is well written and interesting, there’s no proof of concept here. They say: “Come away with a high-level understanding of the who-what-where-why of marketing blogs and how they can complement your company’s existing customer communication strategies.” I say: It’s a chance for Bloomberg to pitch it’s own customer communication strategy to seminar attendeees seven hundred bucks lighter on the bottom line.

Next on the agenda is Robert Scoble. I like reading Scoble’s blog, it’s one of my favorite reads in fact, and he seems like a really down to earth guy and I would enjoy hearing his speech. However, besides being an excellent example of the type of person every business would/should want blogging for them, I don’t see Scoble doing much, if any, marketing inside his blog (am I missing some place that he is making money with his blog? No ads, no paid spots, etc, and he’s gone out of the way several times to point out that he does this outside his job at Microsoft). So please tell me where there’s proof of concept marketing advice using blogging here? I see where Scoble can discuss business networking, you bet, but I don’t see where there’s marketing specifically using his blog as an example. I do realize from the subject that he is talking about, however, that he is very skilled and knowledgeable. I’m sure it will be a wonderful speech. They say: “You�ll walk away from this session with techniques you can use to increase your blog�s visibility, as well as, strategies on how to handle media crises.” I say: Walk away knowing that Robert Scoble is the type of blogger you’d like to have representing and evangelizing your company. Next.

Bill Flitter, Chief Marketing Officer, Pheedo, Inc. Let’s examine Pheedo Blog (note that the link on the seminar website is broken pointing to his blog; it’s missing one of the “w” in the “www”). The Pheedo blog is used to pitch the Pheedo’s range of services which offers ad feed management, ad traffic exchange and an ad network, which they use the word “simple” for all these features. This blog was started in February 2004, according to the archives. This is a really good example, actually, of how a company uses a blog to market its own services. They say: “Walk away with a clear understanding of how to incorporate these new tools into your marketing plan, where to best spend your budget, where we are and where it�s all going.” I say: This could be a worthwhile session if only to learn about Pheedo’s products and services, however I bet one could do so much more affordably by “simply” visiting pheedo.com. No offense, Mr. Flitter, but this smells like a speakertorial.

Have to mix in at least one author or two into every conference and Ben McConnell will be there to fill this diet. He represents Church of the Customer. I’ve followed this blog with interest, especially their info on the whole TiVo and Kryptonite lock issues (though originally I saw at Engadget like most other bloggers). Like the first speaker, though, Ben is speaking it seems to promote his own services (speaking being the first one on the list, just look at their website navbar for the prominence). So his marketing strategy to share is how to write a blog to get keynote speaking gigs and promote his own book? That will help a lot of businesses get into blogging, I’m sure. They say: “Learn the fundamentals to launching a blog that supports your marketing goals, tool terminology, key players, strategic uses and the unwritten rules of the blogosphere.” I say: Here’s a better idea for business owners in the Seattle area, just meet Bill for dinner (dutch treat, much cheaper) in Seattle’s Weslake Center food court on the third floor. There’s even a cell number contact to RSVP.

The other two speakers: Dana VanDen Heuvel, the managing directory from BlogSavant [Dana’s blog]. They say: “How smart marketers are using weblogs” I say: How one marketer is using his blog to increase his future speaking engagements and give his opinion on who the smart marketers are out there. Though I’m not willing to pay to see/hear him, I subscribed to Dana’s blog.

Finally, Dave Williams Chief Strategist and Co-Founder, 360i with search engine scoop. They say: “In this session, learn how to develop a blog search optimization strategy for Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, as well as other search engines.” I say: Check out Dave’s blog, it’s very poorly optimized for all the major engines. It doesn’t even have titles for the blog entries, just dates. No links to anybody else in the sidebar except for Blogger. Not even any meta tags to describe the pages. This thing looks like it was thrown up in 10 minutes, but he’s been blogging since February 2004. Yowsa! 

This event just seems like another turkey conference dressed up to suck money from  small business (or large business) owner’s bottom line, not add to it. These are all nice people, I’m sure and probably good at what they do (Scoble is the only one I know for a fact is good at what he does), but IMO they are there to pitch their own products, services (consulting, future other speaking engagements, etc), and of course their own blogs (which some of them aren’t good case studies). The old adage practice what you preach applies here. All of this adds up to the certainity that the people running the event will be making money and the people attending will pick up a few ideas. Almost $700 worth of ideas? You decide. I did and the figures didn’t compute.

I’d like to ask Scoble this serious question: how is a business owner who is already blogging supposed to budget for a Tablet PC if they use their business budget to attend events like this? Sure, if it’s some big business with money to throw away that has zero presence in the blogosphere then there could be some value to be gained here. From my detailed consideration, it just seems to me that this event isn’t designed for small business owners who have budgets, nor those who already have blogs (so why promote it on a blog to other bloggers?). This would be good for an end of the year tax writeoff, but to pay to be pitched to by mostly professional speakers? Thanks, but no thanks.

I fully intended to lay off blogging about this when I read about it earlier this morning in Doug Kaye’s wiki. Earlier, I sent Doug a private email with my suggestions and recommendations in detail about IT Conversation’s dilemma. However, my mind changed on the blogging issue when I saw Scoble point to it and then Rob from WebTalk Radio also:

Doug Kay, the creator of IT Conversations has posted his business model dilemma publicly and he is getting feedback from his listeners. This is an important discussion as it is currently difficult to keep and online radio show funded and operating. I am interested in hearing any of your thoughts on the topic of podcasters making money to pay for the bandwidth and content production time. Dana and I are generally covering our time and costs, but that forces us to host other websites and streams to pay for our 5 web servers and bandwidth.

I briefly met WebTalk Rob at the last Seattle meetup, but he was engrossed in other conversations so I couldn’t really spend any time with him beyond a brief introduction. Hopefully that will change at a future event because we are only 15 or 20 minutes away from each other.

IMO, the problem with most audio commercials is that they suck. Most of them sound the same (NASCAR and wrestling-like over-produced and over-polished pitches: Shouting! Special! Messages! [insert cool or weird sound] That! Folks! Need! To! Hear!) and ultimately aren’t creative, interesting and/or useful to listeners. All too familiar audio pitches without any real soul and nobody wants to be pitched in the middle of listening to an interesting content program. It’s an interruption, it’s the phone call in the middle of something important, the mosquitoes at the picnic; a nuisance. TiVO had this right, but now even TiVO wants to screw with commercial skipping.

Here’s a thought: what if a show (or station) switches gears and tries to entertain listeners through the commercials — especially in a niche audience — for an intermission from the content … well, now you have a model that can and does work.

This is what we’ve done with our web-based radio show that is and has been profitable for nearly five years now. We haven’t tried to go ego crazy and be the show with the most listeners, or the most professional setup or have the best guests (though we’ve definitely had some notable guests) or blah, blah, blah, we have primarily focused on providing good, relative content to an influential and active target niche audience. This makes selling advertising much, much easier. Advertisers don’t care about huge numbers if those huge numbers don’t convert. It may sound good to say: we have 50,000 listeners a day, but if 0 listeners a day actually are conducting any business, then what value is that to advertisers?

Ask the advertiser who they really want to advertise to and they will all say the same thing: the people most likely to buy their products and/or services. Bingo.

The problem with podcasting is that anybody can download, including machines and machines burning bandwith for shows that don’t guarantee actual human listeners is a waste of bandwith. The auto-download concept is flawed because of this. You are hoping that subscribers will actually listen to your downloads, but like the overweight kid in the Willy Wonka movie, it’s much too easy to over-indulge. If there was some way to force listening of files before downloading more files from the source, then that would make this more attractive for advertisers inside podcasts. Until then, it’s almost like piling up material in a closet for a rainy day that never comes. Advertisers collecting dust on hard drives.

We’ve done very few downloads, mostly streaming as Rob described was better for advertising for their show. However, we are now experimenting with podcasting and downloads with our newest web radio show (which contrary to our established show, is definitely not profitable yet, just like the situation IT Conversations is facing, it seems). Our newest show is currently commercial free, though we do have some ideas where an audience is shaping and how we can turn this show into a money-making enterprise. But our focus at the moment is establishing our target audience and refining the content of the program. We couldn’t do this new show if we didn’t have other ventures (including our established radio show) that do make money. Just like Rob said that WebTalk relied on other ventures to help support the podcast stuff, we’re in the same boat.

I found Scoble’s comments about Microsoft, a company with billions in its coffers, particularly interesting:

I am a HUGE fan of Doug’s. His stuff is first rate. I don’t have any good answers for him either. It’s hard to get sponsorship money for anything out of groups at Microsoft. Particularly for something that’s new like blogging or podcasting or streaming audio shows.

If Microsoft isn’t at the forefront actively supporting audio like this through spending advertising dollars marketing in these areas, despite the fact that they have Windows Media Player and that they do sponsor some shows like .NET Rocks (do they support WebTalk Radio too?), then this could be sending a discouraging message for tech-related radio shows trying to get advertiser support for their respective audiences. Then again, how much more advertising does Microsoft need?

Anyway, I’ve gotten away from the point I was trying to make about audo commercial creativity. More creativity can change listener or viewer interest, just look at the SuperBowl — the ads are part of the tradition instead of separate from the event.

For audio commercials to work effectively for the advertisers, then they need to strive to become a part of the program. That’s how radio and TV advertising used to work anyway, product-placed advertising. It does work.

What is the saying: loose lips sink ships? I’m clearly in the minority on this recent Joyce Park AKA troutgirl firing from Friendster because she blogged about her job apparently without a disclaimer or advance permission. I think she should have gotten permission to be doing PR, because she seems to have been hired to do coding, not PR. The media and all too many bloggers that I’ve read today seem to be running with Friendster being the Dark Side because they fired a good employee “for blogging” Please, isn’t it possible that it has more to do with talking about internal company business without permission? Almost all the Microsoft bloggers I’ve seen carry disclaimers about what they say. This includes Scoble who was also somewhat critical over this move:

And, along that vein, I’d never fire someone for blogging. I’d make sure there were at least three other reasons for firing first. Why? Because if you fire someone for blogging you just guarantee that you’ll make them a martyr and you’ll do horrid damage to your brand.

This isn’t about employees blogging, this is about employer-employee confidentiality and common sense. Perhaps Friendster is indeed the bad guy here but I haven’t seen any official word from Friendster except that they don’t talk about employee terminations (ZDNet article). So here we have one side taking the high, professional road and the other side stirring a hornet’s nest with some very passionate, outspoken bloggers like Jeremy Zawodny. I notice that Jeremy doesn’t have a disclaimer either and he also teeters on the edge, IMO, with talking about some of Yahoo’s business, but it is possible that he has enough clout with them not to get fired and Joyce AKA Troutgirl didn’t with Frienster. It’s somewhat ironic in fact that he starts his post off with “No, not me. (But would it surprise you?)” — and no, Jeremy, it wouldn’t surprise me if Yahoo axed you over comments made on your blog.

I’m probably wrong but it seems to me that if this troutgirl had simply in advance cleared this PR with her superiors and/or included some sort of disclaimer, she could have avoided being fired. Or even if she was fired she have a great wrongful termination suit at her disposal. Also, was she compensated for these articles that she wrote about her experience with Friendster? Could this maybe have had something to do with her firing? Was she working on this instead of doing the coding work they paid her to do? I think there are far more questions than answers to simply write this story off as “fired for blogging” and that’s it. Many of those who think like employees are going to cry at the injustice without all the facts and those who think like employers are going to be left pondering the text of their NDAs with their counsel.

To reduce the amount of links for basically the same thing and to better coordinate comments made on this blog, I’ve added a mod to blend the trackback inline with comments made. This way, bloggers can comment from their blog using trackback and the comment will show up here in the related comment. As with any other comment, spam is not acceptable nor are off-topic or crazy comments. We reserve the right to remove any comment or trackback that is insane, off-topic or spam. I’ll add this disclaimer to the comment form eventually.

Occasionally the subject of website censorship comes up. Recently at Blogcritics an article was posted by a newer blogcritic/writer named Mike Larkin which at least one blog and many commenters at that blog, found to be out of bounds and needing to be censored by the webmaster (Eric Olsen).

My response to the question: should Blogcritics censor posts follows, and though it is somewhat direct it is also a general guideline for all websites, I think. I should make the disclaimer that I’m not an attorney, so this isn’t meant to be construed as a legal point of view, but that of a fellow webmaster who owns and operates many different websites and has done so for several years:

Every website follows some doctrine of censorship, either written or unwritten.

However, I have posted before that if there is going to be an editor(s) that would be fine and if there is going to be no editor(s) that is fine too. With no exceptions that I can think of offline and few exceptions online, every professional publication has editors and editorial guidelines. Writers are used to this, or become that way quickly if they are newer to the profession.

And have no false illusions, writing is a profession.

My prediction is that someday editors and eding will become necessary (at Blogcritics) despite Eric posting that he doesn’t want it to be this way. The reason it will be become necessary is that some people will abuse the freedom that Eric has put in place. Historically, a small few spoil policy and procedure for the group as a whole.

It’s just a matter of time.

While most writers, the good ones usually, can police themselves the majority of the time on the nature of the content they produce, editors still perform a very viable and necessary service for publications.

Also, there has to be at least a limited form of censorship on all websites because there are certain things that cannot be posted for legal reasons. Those common sense items: things promoting illegal activity, copyright infringement, plagiarism. Things that can and will get the host to take action on the content. Host level censorship.

Mike Larkin’s post, whether one finds it in extremely poor taste, some great literary achievement or somewhere in between, doesn’t cross the threshold of something a host would have to intervene on for legal reasons. The webmaster has the ability to allow the content to reach certain boundaries and then he must take action — or the host will.

If something is that egregious (illegal) that the host would probably take action on complaint(s), I would argue that there is little point in people whining about it publically. The logical course of action is to take it to private email with Eric and then to the host, and possibly even the authorities, if necessary.

Bottom line is that webmasters know where these legal limits are because they are usually written in the Terms of Service in his hosting agreement. There is legal precedence for hosts being responsible for the content/activities maintained on the server (legally they cannot plead ignorance), though many hosts will identify spam as being the number one actionable offense because that will get them shut down the fastest, they also will intervene — sooner or later — on illegal content, when notified. If they don’t then they can and will be shut down eventually. That is, if the complaints are serious and legitimate.

So it’s not really, factually up to the webmaster, as he/she rents hosting and the host decides the Terms of Service boundaries.

Eric has posted that he already conducts a limited form of copyediting, which seems good enough to me in most cases to protect the quality of the work produced on the website. But he cannot completely turn his head on the content posted here — and I don’t think he does. At least as long as his name is on the hosting agreement.

I’m going to make this one an article, because it’s over 1000 words, but I’ll share it here first. Feel free to critique or offer commentary so I can make it better

Blogs vs. Messageboards
by TDavid

One thing that has really impressed me about the blogging community to date and the process of blogging is the amount and frequency of interlinking

Some would say that this is the blogging Achilles heel, in that it is nothing more than a SE spam technique, but actually, I’ve found that it is more akin to personal recommendations; a personal web of people’s journals sharing what interests them. This is very similar to co-workers, associates or friends sharing tips with each other face to face.

One of my frustrations over the last year or so is that some messageboards have become very internal political. By this I mean that there are all these ego-driven moderation rules and one of which seems to be declaring what is spam and what isn’t spam very, very liberally in both the text of posts and even in signature/taglines.

For example:

If I surf by your blog and read something interesting and comment or trackback you to my blog, that is smart, acceptable and encouraged in the blogging community.

However, if I surf by (some) messageboards and read something that interests me and point to something on one of my sites that is relative or has been inspired from the thread(s) in question then that could be considered spam. At some boards if I point to things which aren’t even on my websites or websites that I’m affiliated with but are still relative to the thread that is labeled as spam. On some boards if you link anything through a tracking URL that is considered spam because, oh no not this, it could be a money-making sponsor link

Huh?

spam is … the crap that fills my inbox daily, which makes me want to move away from ever even accepting unsolicited email from the general public, and moving towards strictly a whitelist-only setup.
spam is … the reason I’m writing this post instead of sifting through the 739 filtered emails I’ve received recently where the vast amount of them is spam. These days I pretty much dread the inbox instead of embrace it because of the BS I must endure to get to the legitimate email — and I use heavy spam filtering.

spam is … mindless, off-topic, undesirable advertisement for one’s website, product or service. Related and/or inspired information is not spam. Never has been. Who thought up the idea of calling relative linking spam?

I realize one of the duties of a messageboard moderator is moderating those not-so-random, real spam posts but moderators should take heed that not every post containing links to third party websites should be interpreted or over-analyzed as spam.

Not too terribly long ago, one board where I had posted at hundreds of times over a couple month period (which at most boards would make me a regular poster), and had given away prizes, and had promoted it to webmasters on my sites, actually chastized me for a single post I made as “being spammy” because in the body a single link contained a tracking code. The moderator went so far as to remove the link altogether and alleged that I started the thread with the sole intention of spamming its members. LOL! Actually, I started the thread to get others thinking creatively and out of the box as I have many other threads in many places and the tracking code was for me, not a clickthru sponsor! Thinking of other ways of doing things can lead to new opportunities in business and those who choose to moderate this type of creativity will lose at least my posting activity and my guess many other webmasters who feel the same kind of restrictions.

BTW, I don’t think Netsurprise messageboards are moderated this way, I’m just saying this about messageboards and moderation in general because I have seen and experienced this firsthand.

Just because it’s cool to have broadband doesn’t mean everybody actually has it — or even a significant majority of netizens have it. So that leaves everybody else fervently hoping that your page, site, blog loads fast.

Unfortunately some of them don’t.

Why the rant? Well I’m still looking for blogs to roll and some that I’m coming across are loading so slow that I’m moving pas them. And btw, I’m on a 500K DSL, so if it’s loading slow for me, then heaven help the poor soul in the boonies working at 21K on a good day.

So how can a blog be slow when a busy blog is lucky to get a few hundred unique visitors a day? Here’s how:

- 300K page sizes. Who said every blog has to archive monthly? Solution: Archive weekly or daily if pages sizes are going much over 100k.
- Uncompressed graphics. Actually saw two blogs (sorry no negative pointing today) that had images that were over 100K+ each. Ouch! Solution: no images over 30k if you have one image on a page or go with 15k or 20k maximum if more than 1 image. Do not have more than 5 images of any non-thumbnail size on a single page. If it’s a moblog, well, you might have to go to more of a textamerica type gallery approach. [9/10/07 8:54am PST: Textamerica linkrot]
- Slow speeds could be the result of an overburdened and/or cheap hosting setup. Solution: pony up and pay for a dedicated server or switch to a quality host that doesn’t try to squeeze 100 people through a tiny pipe. And if you are one of those crazy, determined folks who thinks that they can save a few bones and serve their own website from their cable or DSL? Forget it. Ok, maybe you can serve a first effort home page, conduct a videochat with your mother, or run the odd quake session, but you can’t reliably host a website on this bandwith. You’ll have others frantically looking for the exit because nobody wants to date the hour glass icon. Yeah, I’ll wait for my wife to get her hair done, but little patience for that hour glass.

Plenty of other ways to speed up your pages. Just keep in mind that the best content in the world will go unnoticed if it isn’t readily accessible

This blog was created on July 4, 2003 and in that time I’ve sent out several links to others, added sites to my blogroll, and removed some too. This entry is to confirm that my search is still very much active and ongoing for interesting blogs that I can add/update to the site. So what is this blog’s criteria for linking (or linking back to) another blog? It’s really pretty simple:

Something well written, frequently updated, useful, and/or compelling on pretty much any current event or web or tech-related topics (but I will link other than web/tech-related events).

Here’s the problem:

I can only visit and search through so many blogs a day, looking for those gems in the slushpile (sorry, but a lot of the blogs I’ve visited are like reading unsolicited novel manuscripts). So if I don’t know that your wonderfully fresh perspective blog exists, I cannot visit and read through for entries I can link up – I won’t be able to find (well maybe eventually I will find your blog) in order to add it to my list of regular reads. You might have the best blog in the world but unless you stop by and comment on something I’ve written and/or put a link on your blog to an entry of this site so that you show up in the referrer logs then how will I find you?

The outgoing link value, blogshares players, for this site is currently: $277.54. From my very basic understanding and analysis of this game, this isn’t too bad for a youthful blog and should help raise up your value if this site links to you. But in order to do that I do need at teensy bit of your help

I know you are out there, gentle blog owner, and wanting links, traffic, readers, so please you just have to help me out by raising your hand and making it known that you are there.

Keeping this in mind, I’ve put up this entry so that you can click on the comments and tell me what your blog is about. Oh, and if you want to tune in or call into my radio show and tell me about your blog that’s ok too. Email isn’t the best or most reliable contact option for me because of the volume (mostly BS like the everybody else) that I need to sift through. We stream across the internet in multiple bandwidths every Friday at 2pm PT / 5pm ET. Today is our 156th week of broadcasting and we have a toll free caller line for those in the United States. Plenty of ways to get the word out to me that you are there and you are blogging.

What do you say? Comment and link away

Thanks to Jeremy for linking up this guy who is blogging about his experience taking penis enlargement pills. I was just telling a friend yesterday that you can pretty much blog about anything. The man says it isn’t spam, though he does admit using his affiliate link (wise move). Yes, he says he’s just an average guy from New York with a penis that is 5 1/2 inches and he would like it larger. Blogging ideas are everywhere: I think I just might start a blog about all the spam I receive every day.

Amphetadesk is a news reader and aggregation program which is available for download in Windows, Mac or Linux. It sits quietly in your system tray as a fuscia/cyan-colored pill that you can right click on. In the background it will load various weblogs and/or news generated from RSS files that you define. This will allow users to see the headlines and perhaps read some of the text from their favorite weblogs. This review is based upon version 0.93.1 which was last updated (best as I can tell) Oct 31, 2002.

Out of the box Amphetadesk doesn’t come with comment functionality but you can add it by editing the AmphetaDesk/templates/ default/index.html template. Part of the fun of reading weblogs is seeing what comments others have regarding them, so it’s nice to see the ability to add comments. Trackback functionality, however, doesn’t seem to be an option at this time without hacking.

While I was typing this entry (the very first time) I stopped to refresh the channels list and it loaded into this same javascript window (which has no navigation bars, doh!) so I couldn’t go back and lost everything I had typed I bet if I had been able to go back, however, that the IE cache would have been destroyed and everything I typed would have been lost. I looked through the built-in settings and I didn’t see a built-in way to force Amphetadesk to always launch the results in a new target window, but there might be an easy way if you hack it. So a word to the wise: don’t refresh the channels while you are typing your blog entries into a javascript window with no navigation menu.

Support-wise, well, it’s free software so there really isn’t any (I don’t expect any support for free software). You can join a mailing list to find out about hacks and new announcements but I don’t know about anybody else but I’m not too down with mailing lists any more. They do have an RSS feed which is loaded by default when you first run the program.

There are other news reader / RSS aggregation programs that you can try, but for Amphetadesk’s ease of use, simplistic but useful features, and price (free, donationware; you can optionally donate to the author if you like) it’s well worth downloading and trying. Grade: B-