Professor of Practice of Behavioral Economics
Global PR Blog has two interesting articles on CEOs and blogging:
In the first article, I love Phil Liben’s (President of CoreStreet) comment:
“I would recommend blogging, but it depends on whether or not you have
anything to say,” he explains. “Blogging is not the only way to move
the conversation forward. If you’re good at golf, you have the golf
course, but unfortunately I’m not. Blogging is my golf game.”
This entry has been reproduced from my 21Publish blog.
I have a new MBA blog over at BusinessWeek Online here.
I’m not only a vendor but also a user and participant in the community.
I’m personally excited that the MBA blog community at BusinessWeek
(* a blog community just being launched this afternoon on the 21Publish platform*) has turned out so nice
looking! Also very happy to see Clear Admit (one of the influential blog sites in the MBA world) and other cool MBAs early in the process of
signing up at BusinessWeek. Stefan has some personal words over at his blog
which are quite visonary and address end-user generated content. Kudos
to both the BusinessWeek and McGraw-Hill folks we’ve worked with to get
this done!
Someone recently sent me an email asking me if I make a lot of money. Well although I am a compensated blogger (which is not my primary profession since I do a mix of management consulting and hired gun start-up work as my day job), I am surely not making tons of money from contracted blogging. The Blog Herald sheds some good light on market rates for compensated bloggers.
Blogging is primarily a networking and learning experience for me. But there’s another aspect. I have had a fortunate life both personally and professionally, I view blogging as a way for me to give something back to the world in small doses. I keep looking for ways to build even bigger social marks on the world. Not quite where I want to be in helping the social good, but part of the fun is in the hunt.
Blogged about this over at my 21Publish blog.
Stefan points folks to a new paper by DB Research entitled, "Blogs: The new magic formula for corporate communications". Some interesting charts in here. Also a nice chart of blog growth in Germany.
I think I’m getting dense. No doubt many non-bloggers will be confused too. I’ve been trying to make sense of all this business around:
#1-3 basically have to do with introducing blogs to non-bloggers or new blogs to existing bloggers. OK.
I think I understand #6 too. A-list bloggers are protected by reinforcing and amplifying patterns in how other bloggers link to them. This sort of thing may discriminate against certain classes of bloggers (e.g., women). Makes sense to look at that for certain professions.
But #4 and #5 … what is this supposed to do for anyone? Blog readers at a micro-level do not care. And as for blog writers, at least what I care about are three things: a) finding out who is saying things about me, b) searching for relevant information to doing my job or carrying out a cause, and c) figuring out what people are reading on my blog so that I can write more relevant stuff. I’m not running the Intel computer of blogs, and most people are not. Why should bloggers care about either a global measure of popularity or how links should be tracked if you can answer the three things I’ve mentioned here?
The sad thing is that it is hard to measure readability through tools today. Inbound links only relate to bloggers and discriminate against readers/non-bloggers. There are way more than 3 times as many readers of blogs out there compared to bloggers. Although I could care less about popularity, if one is going to measure popularity, shouldn’t the measure include non-bloggers? Measuring stuff has also been complicated by RSS. RSS has created a situation that people don’t even have to visit a blog to read it, but then there’s not that many people that use RSS so if one gets metrics about RSS usage, one is still stuck with an incomplete answer. If one puts some software code veneer on the blog, it may be possible to measure stuff better, but you need a PhD in computer science to do this. I can barely teach long division anymore.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not in a huff about this. I just know I’ve lost track about what folks are trying to accomplish in the blog search engine space and what the fuss about lists is all about.
As for something I do care about is how customer loyalty plays a role and how it may shift given the explosion of blogs. I’ve not come to any conclusions on this yet, but Jeremy Wright’s post on unsubscribing to A-list bloggers makes me pause to think about where the market will go. Is there a macroeconomic trend that we may see beyond the Long Tail stuff? I’ve seen a lot of blogs that I used to like to read move to del.icio.us tagging instead of blog writing. Maybe the information market is getting saturated in terms of bloggers as individuals.
Anyway, this post was triggered by Andrew’s post at Changing Way, and then a quick flurry of research on A-list bloggers by me. Suffice it to say that I think this post at Blogger’s Blog does a nice job of summarizing some of the A-list blogger issues and characterizing some of the things I’ve mentioned above. Mark Cuban’s post does a good job at providing some insight at what blog search engines are doing. Mark is a very smart guy, and I like the openess he is doing regarding exposing the code, but I have little clue how some of this search engine stuff helps the average blogger (provided one can get reasonably close to the three items I mentioned above).
See my blog post over here.
If you haven’t been following the FedEx Furniture guy, well here’s a good chronology of how a blog thing is just tipping from the blog world into mainstream media (becoming a story covered and to be covered on Headline News, ABC, NBC). Ignore it? Crisis? What’s the thought? Personally, I can’t wait for the Cast Away commercial with Tom Hanks and FedEx Furniture guy to smooth this all over. Hanks would have lived a lot more comfortably on the desert isle with some of FedEx Furniture guy’s stuff.
But seriously, this could be some of the cheapest advertising that FedEx has gotten in awhile.
Update (8/18/05): Bomb diffused very easily by FedEx (blog scoop by Jeremy Pepper). Via Steve Rubel.