I totally dug hanging out at Joe T. Garcia’s yesterday at the Fort Worth Ad Club Luncheon. Here is a clickstream for the talk I gave — a little social media jumpstart link kit:
Blogging Buzz/Confusion
BusinessWeek story — "Blogs Will Change Your Business"
Forbes paranoia — "Attack of the Blogs"
Blogging Delivered
Blogging Not Exactly Delivered
The Situation: Attention Scarcity
Long Tail blog on Mainstream Media Meltdown
John Moore on the influence of word of mouth
Brand Hijack manifesto
Sifry’s latest state of the blogosphere
Wrong! NY Times on tv-style ads on mobile devices. (Note: don’t try this at home)
Extinction Management
Tools
SixApart (Typepad, MovableType)
Wordpress (hosted option as well)
About RSS
Bloglines
NetNewsWire
(Example of syndicated headlines at Architel site)
Technorati
IceRocket
Delicious
Digg
tech.memeorandum
flickr
Odeo
iTunes podcast support
Robert Scoble
Jonathan Schwartz
English Cut
Stormhoek blog sampling
The Bad
Dell Hell
Dude, You’re Getting Dell’d
The Ugly
Essential Reading
Cluetrain Manifesto
Naked Conversations (check out the blog, too)
Small Pieces, Loosely Joined
Useful Marketing Stuff
MicroPersuasion
GapingVoid
BrandAutopsy
What’s Your Brand Mantra?
Church of the Customer
Media Orchard
New PR Wiki
Marketing Begins at Home
HorsePigCow
Like It Matters
PDF of my slides. (9.67 MB)
Technorati Tags: ad club fort worth, social media, Weblogs Work
Who knew?
AT&T billboard on I-35 (Stemmons Freeway across from the INFOMART) in Dallas, Texas.
We are in the process of upgrading our blogs to the new version of WordPress - version 2.0. We just finished with the release in our dev environments and applied it to the SimpleTicket blog. Over the course of the next few days we will upgrading all of the blogs (please excuse our dust in the meantime).
The Architel corporate web/blog site has been launched. The open source WordPress architecture allows the company to launch the site and make continious changes to it over time. So you can never say a site is ‘done.’ Kudos go to Dan Cederholm from SimpleBits for the xhtml/css design (as well as the new Architel logo). Weblogs Work integrated the xhtml/css into WordPress (actually three WordPress installs).
Architel is a boutique IT support company located in Dallas, Texas that supports small businesses (20-100) employees. Their unique IT service delivery model (one flat-monthly-fee for all-you-can-eat support) aligns the interests of the small business owner and Architel. The company was a pioneer in this space and is now a pioneer in the ‘blog as corporate website’ meme. Here are screenshots or just visit the site yourself here @ architel.com.
The site was entered in the website design contest at SXSW conference and we are crossing our fingers that the judges will enjoy the tight integration between the blog CMS and Dan’s xhtml and css. What do you think about our work?
Selena Maranjian with The Motley Fool authored a piece I found on MSNBC titled, The Business of Blogging, How blogs are influencing business — and helping investors.
Would you be more likely to buy stock in a company whose CEO blogged on a daily basis or one that never blogged? I can hear the snipes already, "I would never buy stock in a company whose CEO had enough time to blog!"
Selena’s article suggested a few insights blogs offer investors including:
To read the full article click HERE.
I ran across an old report from Forrester that I thought was interesting to read in hindsight: "Blogging: Bubble Or Big Deal? When and How Businesses Should Use Blogs." There is an updated powerpoint you can download for free (after registration) here. Here is the summary:
Although Weblogs (blogs) are currently used by only a small number of online consumers, they’ve garnered a great deal of corporate attention because their readers and writers are highly influential. Forrester believes that blogging will grow in importance, and at a minimum, companies should monitor blogs to learn what is being said about their products and services. Companies that plan to create their own public blogs should already feel comfortable having a close, two-way relationship with users. In this document we recommend best practices, including a blogging code of ethics, and metrics that will show the impact of blogs on business goals.
Related reports include:
In a first, Budget Car Rental is using ‘blogadvergaming’ as a marketing tool. Budget is hiding a $10,000 prize in four cities over four weeks giving away $160,000 total. Clues will be delivered on Budget’s blog in cartoon format (featuring our favorite cartoonist Hugh MacLeod). The ‘blogadvergaming’ program was organized by B.L. Ochman. Via Adrants and Business Week.
Technorati Tags: adrants, blogadvergaming, budget, budgetcarrental, hugh MacLeod
So says Voodo VC, Rick Segal from Canada. He claims his blog has given him:
Here are a few of his recommendations: "Despite all the “new new” things, don’t forget the basics. A wiki may be nice, but answer the phone. Podcast the company meeting, but respect my privacy. Blog your deep thoughts but offer good value to your customers. The only thing that has, for sure, changed is your customer is a single click away from your competition. Keep the faith with them and let the rest of this evolve as it will."
I will have to admit that product placement works for companies selling to me. BMW used their 745i in the first Transporter movie and just before my M5 fell out of warranty I traded it for a new 7 series. Jason Statham trades his BMW for an Audi in the second installment of the Transporter and I it has caused me to start considering the Audi for my next ride. So what? Audi figured out a way to get ‘way’ more bang for their buck by using blogs to get their message out.
Brian Clark, CEO of GMD Studios (Audi’s ad agency), indicated that almost a third of the traffic to Audi most recent A3 compaign was generated by advertising on various blogs. The most interesting thing Brian revealed was that these advertisments only took one half of one percent of the budget. McKinney + Silver and Adrants indicated:
"The media cost of the entire blog ad buy was less than the cost for one ad on a mainstream site such as Yahoo!" Of course "one banner ad on a mainstream site such as Yahoo" is a nebulous statement at best, however, again 29 percent of traffic to an A3 promotional website came from one half of one percent of the budget. Shall we say it again?
Josh Hallett (I really enjoy his blog, this is the second post in a row I have blogged about) posted an interesting post about tagging. His point? The truth is, it difficult for novices (who barely understand the concept of tagging) to tag their posts in TypePad or Blogger. Obviously, WordPress and Movable Type make it easy as pie to tag (we typically launch client blogs on WordPress). Why tag? Here is Josh’s thought:
"I know that tagging my posts has led to increased traffic from Technorati and other search tools that support tags. Granted it is very easy for me include them in my posts."
In our recent post here, we detailed the migration of M | Ventures corporate website to WordPress. Lots of folks have commented on the migration including Matt Mullenweg (who happens to be lucky in love) who posted about it here. Matt reminds us that it was a Texan who developed WordPress (i.e. him).
NewsForge has an interesting article about using WordPress for your website. Here is their conclusion:
"WordPress is a powerful tool, and in many ways exemplifies open source at its best. It gives any user an array of features with minimal technical effort, and its extensibility and versatility are displayed by the large pool of user-designed plugins. This power and versatility extends beyond WordPress’s traditional use of blogging into more traditional Web design, and — as our new AmSteg.org site displays — makes WordPress a powerful tool for many kinds of Web sites. Our site would not have many of the features it has, nor would it be as easy to administer, if it were not for WordPress and its plugins."
The IMC’s Management Consultant’s Forum chapter meeting scheduled on Monday, September 19th is titled: Blogging - Learn about this new tool and how to harness its potential. The IMC D/FW Chapter is a professional organization comprised of management consultants from a broad range of consulting disciplines and firm sizes.
The meeting promises to help management consultants "understand how blogging, and other on-line tactics, can build their brand communities and extend their reach." It is quite interesting that we are starting to see more and more of these sort of events - especially here in Dallas.
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