Category Archives: blogs

blogging, blogs

Why Your Company Should Have a Blog

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While doing some research for a consumer products client over the holidays, I was surprised to discover that almost half of this company’s competitors, distributors, and other related companies did not have any type of corporate blog presence. Since most of my clients are technology companies, I sometimes forget that companies in other industries aren’t as focused on social media technologies and blogs.

The research shows that more people are reading blogs, those people expect your company to have a social media presence, and blogs influence their purchasing decisions. Those sound like very compelling reasons for companies to start blogging or to improve their existing blog!

The Research

Cone Finds that Americans Expect Companies to Have a Presence in Social Media: September 25, 2008

Sixty percent of Americans use social media, and of those, 59 percent interact with companies on social media Web sites. One in four interacts more than once per week.

According to the survey, 93 percent of social media users believe a company should have a presence in social media, while an overwhelming 85 percent believe a company should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media. In fact, 56 percent of users feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.

“The news here is that Americans are eager to deepen their brand relationships through social media,” explains Mike Hollywood, director of new media for Cone, “it isn’t an intrusion into their lives, but rather a welcome channel for discussion.” (Quoted from Cone: September 25, 2008)

Forrester Research: The Growth Of Social Technology Adoption on October 20, 2008

One in three online Americans now read blogs at least once a month, while 18% comment on them. Blog readers as a group grew by nearly 50% over this past year. (Quoted from Forrester Research: October 20, 2008)

BuzzLogic: Blog Influence on Consumer Purchases Eclipses Social Networks on October 28, 2008

Blogs influence purchases: One half (50 percent) of blog readers say they find blogs useful for purchase information.

According to the study, blogs factor in to critical stages of the purchase process, weighing most heavily at the actual moment of a purchase decision. When it comes to respondents who said they have trusted blog content for purchase decisions in the past, over half (52 percent) say blogs played a role in the critical moment they decided to move forward with a purchase. (Quoted from BuzzLogic: October 28, 2008)

Quick Summary: What This Means for Companies

For those of us who regularly consume information from blogs, we expect to be able to grab an RSS feed of your company’s blog to keep up with news and information relevant to your industry. The research above shows that the number of people who read blogs in growing, and these people expect you to have a blog. Not only are more people reading blogs, these blogs are influencing purchasing decisions, which is important for every company.

Additional Benefits

Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is probably one of the biggest advantages of having a corporate blog. Because blog content is updated frequently, blogs have some built-in search engine benefits. The blogging culture also encourages linking to other blogs, which can also improve your rankings in search results.

Thought Leadership. A great blog can position your company and key employees as thought leaders within the industry, which puts your company in a position of greater authority within your industry. The O’Reilly Radar blog is a great example of how O’Reilly employees and the company are seen as thought leaders, thus putting O’Reilly in a greater position of authority for books, events, and other products.

Should Every Company Have a Blog?

Yes and no. The benefits of blogging seem to be fairly clear; however, these benefits are only achieved when the blog is updated regularly with great content. Unfortunately, this can be a significant time commitment. For companies who are not willing to put in the time and effort, it is better not to have a blog than to have a blog that hasn’t been updated in months.

Here are a few things to think about:

  • Can you commit to at least one post per week? (2-3 is better)
  • Do you have people who have interesting things to say and with good writing skills?
  • Is someone available to manage the process and make sure that the blog never gets neglected?

If the answer to any of the above questions is no, this might not be the right time for you to start a corporate blog.

If you are still on the fence, here are a few tricks to help overcome the above hurdles:

  • Start a group blog with several authors to spread the load across more people. With 4 authors, each person could write one post a month to meet the minimum requirement of one post per week. A dozen authors writing 2 posts per month would give you content for a post each business day.
  • Recruit bloggers from the lower ranks of the company who are smart and passionate about the industry. While the CEO might not have hours to spend blogging, someone further down the org chart might be able to carve out a little more time.
  • Manage the blog process by having someone who already manages content for other purposes also pick up management of the blog. A community manager is a good choice for this if you have one.

Recommended Reading

blogs

A New Host

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Last night, we moved the Fast Wonder Blog to a new host, Dreamhost to be specific. Everything looks pretty good so far, but if you notice anything strange or buggy with the site, please let me know here in the comments.

blogs, rss, Yahoo

Find Top Blog Posts Using Yahoo Pipes with AideRSS

I’ve been really excited about the potential of Yahoo Pipes recently, and as a result I’ve spent quite a bit of time playing with Yahoo Pipes over the past couple of weeks. I recently put together a pipe that I am finding really useful, and I thought a few others might find it interesting, too.

The problem:

When reading my rss feeds, I tend to skip blog posts with titles that do not immediately catch my eye as something interesting. As a result, I sometimes miss important news or ideas that everyone else is talking about.

The solution:

I decided to put together a pipe that takes some of my favorite blogs as inputs and sends the posts through AideRSS to find the ones with the most comments, discussion, bookmarks, etc.

Details:

  • I put together a csv file with some of my favorite blogs formatted without the leading http:// to make them easier to process through AideRSS (alternatively, you could also bring in the complete URL and use pipes, to reformat the strings, but I was striving for simple). I then pulled this into the pipe as input using the Fetch CSV module.
  • I then used the Loop module with an embedded URL Builder module to append the appropriate string (blog url from the csv file) to an AideRSS URL (filtering on only the “great” posts). The output from this module produces a bunch of URLs each looking something like this:
    http://aiderss.com/rss/great/webworkerdaily.com
  • I ran this output through another Loop module with an embedded Fetch Feed module to fetch each individual blog post from each URL built in the previous step.
  • In order to filter out any duplicates, I then ran it through a Unique Filter module based on item link. You would only need this step if one or more of your original sources in the csv file aggregates feeds from other sources.
  • I also wanted to limit my results to blog posts from the past 5 days, so I used the Filter Module along with the Date Builder module to restrict the dates.
  • The result of the above steps gives you the basic information, but I decided that I also wanted to reformat the titles to add the AideRSS rating and post date directly into the title, so that I could easily see which ones were the most important. I used yet another Loop module with an embedded String Builder module to add additional data to the title. I then stored the output back into the item title, which results in titles like this:
    Rank 10.0 1-19 This is the blog post title
  • My final step was to sort the items using the Sort module to put the highest rated posts (using AideRSS rating) at the top with a secondary sort by date that puts the newest posts at the top when you have several posts with the same rating.

Viola! I have a pipe that finds the most important blog posts for me. Keep in mind that this will never help you find breaking news, since it usually takes a day or so for many posts to accumulate enough comments / links / etc. to have a high AideRSS rating, but it does keep you from missing really important news and ideas.

You can view the source of the Top Blog Posts pipe or get the RSS feed. You can also clone the pipe when viewing the source if you want to use it as a starting point for something else you want to do.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

barcamp, barcampportland, blogging, blogs, career, community, ignite, ignite portland, job

Can the Average Person Get Rich Blogging?

Yes and no (there is never a simple answer).

Now that I am back from lounging on the beach, I thought it was time to get back to blogging, and what better way to start than with a debate over whether or not people can really make money blogging. On Read/WriteWeb today, Alex suggests that . Well, yes and no.

I really liked Anne Zelenka’s response on Web Worker Daily. Her take is that

you can earn money because of your blog instead of with it. Blogging can be the centerpiece of your professional promotional and networking activities, leading indirectly to new money-making opportunities. Plus, blogging offers psychological riches — through the opportunities for personal expression and social connection it brings you.

The best reason for an individual web worker to blog isn’t to make money directly with the blog. It’s to boost your online persona, to make professional connections, to learn about your field, and to attract new opportunities, whether paid or unpaid. And note that unpaid opportunities are not necessarily less important than paid ones — because they can provide you with attention, reputation, education, and new connections.

(Quote from Anne Zelenka: Web Worker Daily)

I absolutely agree. I don’t make any money directly off of my blog (no ads here), but it has made a huge difference in my career. My career was in a bit of a lull until I started blogging a few years ago. At the time, I worked at Intel and did my job really well. I received great internal recognition, but almost no one outside of Intel knew who I was.

When I started blogging and actively commenting on other blogs, people started recognizing me. I went to conferences and people would approach me! I started getting emails from people who read my blog and wanted to know if I was interested in being on panels for conferences. While I do not make money off of Fast Wonder directly, I do think that I have made more money indirectly through blogging. Through blogging and getting involved in a bunch of unpaid tech community activities (organizing BarCamp, Ignite, etc.), my career has improved in so many indirect ways (financial and job satisfaction).

Related Fast Wonder Posts:

blogging, blogs, business models, collaboration, community, open source

What Does it Mean for Movable Type to go Open Source?

While I like to see Movable Type going in the direction of open source, I am also a bit skeptical. According to Movabletype.org:

“The Movable Type Open Source Project was announced in conjunction with the launch of the Movable Type 4 Beta on June 5th, 2007. The MTOS Project is a community and Six Apart driven project that will produce an open souce version of the Movable Type Publishing Platform that will form the core of all other Movable Type products.”

Aside from their inability to correctly spell open source (or run spell check), they are not particularly clear about what will be in this new open source “publishing platform” vs. their commercial products. By announcing the new open source project along with the beta of their new version (not open source), it is a bit difficult to see how the open source project will fit in with their commercial products. I suspect that some of this announcement might be to put Movable Type in a better position when compared to open source rival WordPress to reduce the numbers of people migrating off of Movable Type due to licensing concerns over the past few years.

Skepticism aside, I really do like to see commercial companies embrace open source. If Movable Type embraces the open source community in a collaborative fashion, this could be a great step. Companies who work with a community to create an open source product that is awesome by itself when used without the commercial product can successfully sell commercial products with additional functionality and services needed by enterprise customers. I sincerely hope that this is the direction that Movable Type is headed.

blogs, clearspace, clearspace x, collaboration, community, enterprise, enterprise 2.0, jive software, open source, web 2.0, wiki

Clearspace X Community Software

Yesterday, we issued a press release about Jive Software’s new Clearspace X product. Clearspace X is:

a special edition of Clearspace for companies interested in creating productive and engaging online communities for their customers and partners. In the past, companies have had to “glue together” separate applications for blogs, wikis, documents and forums, resulting in disconnected people and content, and low participation rates. Clearspace X unifies these collaboration tools into one system, bringing them together through a clean, user-friendly interface and integrated incentive system.

Using Clearspace X, companies can quickly and easily create compelling public-facing communities, enabling users to share information and ideas with each other via discussions, structured wiki documents, moderated blogs and even files (like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF). Users can keep abreast of recent activity in the community through email notifications, instant message alerts and RSS feeds. (quoted from the Press Release)

We use Clearspace internally to manage our company as a community with constant interactions using discussion forums, document sharing, wiki editing of documents, internal blogging, tagging, and much more. This software is the main reason that I was able to be so productive my first week on the job. Clearspace X is similar to our Clearspace product, but tailored to the needs of an external community.

An added benefit of my role as Director of Developer Relations at Jive is that I get to give the product away for free to non-commercial developer teams. This includes open source projects, student coding projects, and other non-commercial teams of software developers. I’ll have a simple web form for requests available on the Jive Software website in the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, drop me an email if you qualify for a free license of Clearspace X: myfirstname at Jivesoftware dot com.

barcamp, barcampportland, blogging, blogs, clearspace, clearspace x, collaboration, community, conference, dawn foster, enterprise 2.0, forums, ignite realtime, im, jive software, openfire, OSCON, productivity, spark, web 2.0, wiki

Dogfood: aka Week 1 at Jive Software

My first week at Jive has been a whirlwind of activity, and I think that I have been super productive for the first 5 days on the job.  I’ve completed a first draft of how we might build Jive’s new developer community on our newly released Clearspace X infrastructure. I am re-working the process for how we give away free licenses of Jive’s Clearspace and Forum products to open source projects. I’ve put together a new demo script for our CEO to use at BarCamp – customized for what I think will be the audience at BarCamp. I was also able to get confirmed speaking engagements at Defrag and OSCON this week.  All this while being constantly distracted with last minute BarCamp details as the co-organizer of the BarCamp Portland event this weekend (note to self: next year, do NOT start a new job the week that you are holding BarCamp!)

How was I able to get all of this done while getting up to speed in a new company?  It comes down to dogfood, specifically, to eating our own dogfood at Jive.  We use the current Clearspace beta product for all of our documents, to hold discussions, for blogging, and more.  Most of the information that I needed was already in Clearspace.  For new information, I just started discussions in Clearspace where I asked other Jive employees about things like what to name the new developer community, how to promote our new developer community, and more.  I posted all of my work as wiki documents in Clearspace, and because everyone uses it, I was able to get feedback and information from across the company.

We are also avid users of our Openfire / Spark IM solution with every Jive employee already populated in our buddy lists from day 1 on the job. I worked with an employee in Canada over IM to help him reproduce an issue that I was seeing in our beta product, discussed our Ignite community with our CTO, negotiated with our web developer on resources to get some web forms completed, and much more.

I have to say that Jive seems to be a great fit for me.  I’m working with people who are just insanely smart, who live web 2.0 technologies, and we’re working on some really cool collaboration software.  Did I mention that we are hiring?

blogs, infoworld, new media, news, podcast, rss

News: Online or Print Format?

InfoWorld announced today that it is folding the print magazine to focus on events and online content. I think this is a good move for InfoWorld, and it made me think about how I personally use online and print content.

I still subscribe to several magazines, and it is a great format for anything that is not time sensitive – cooking, business analysis, etc.; however, I gave up my print copies of technology trade magazines and other news sources long ago in favor of online access facilitated by RSS feeds (official news sources, blogs, and podcasts). Technology moves way too quickly to be suited to longer lead time print format publications. Even articles in daily newspapers are usually out of date by the time the print version arrives on your doorstep.

Most of my daily news comes from podcasts, which I listen to during any downtime activities (getting ready for work in the morning, doing dishes / laundry, grocery shopping, driving, and much more). Podcasts are an ideal news format for me, since I can get quick snippets of news from NPR, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNET, InfoWorld, … If I need more details on any story, I can always check my RSS feeds or Google News to find a few in depth articles with more information.

Over time, I think that we will start to see news moving away from print sources in the direction of online content. Like with the InfoWorld example, this will happen first for technology publications. Although most newspapers have embraced online content, Newspapers will be one of the last to move their news to an online-only format. They are still the best source of news in rural areas and other places where access to the Internet is more difficult and for older readers who may never be comfortable using the Internet as a primary source of news. I could even see newspapers gradually shifting more of the news content onto the Internet while focusing the print version on news analysis, lifestyle (fashion, cooking, travel, etc.) and other features (comics, crossword puzzles, etc.) I still think that magazines have their place, but not as a primary source of news.