RED Magazine and the Dallas Opera held their 6-Month Anniversary (I know anniversaries happen once per year) Party and concert at the Gypsy Tea Room this evening. They celebrated the release of RED’s “Music Movement” issue - featuring all the high notes around the Dallas music and entertainment scene.  I heard a rumor that weblogs are going to start working for RED. 

Om Malik agrees with us — Vonage should be blogging. Om ran a piece yesterday on the ‘massive outage’ they suffered, and they had no direct way to broadcast updates. Sure, they emailed, but, meanwhile, the ‘Vonage has a outage’ meme is running around the Web, overshadowing their own news about bulking up their enterprise offering. This is another key thing we do for our clients — monitor the conversations that are going on and helping them respond in a timely manner. The conversations don’t stop just because you’re not participating. If you’re not paying attention, you might be getting Dell’d.

Are you using pay-per-click advertising?  You may be wasting up to 30% of your investment due to click fraud according to one study.  We were spending around $2500 per month doing pay-per-click advertising for an IT services company.  This figure, while significant, was small compared with the average contract value of $45,000.  Two deals would easily cover the cost of the advertisments.  We had several bites, but to date none of the PPC deals have closed. 

We discontinued the advertisments and plowed half of that budget in the development and management of a blog for the company and saw a 50% increase in leads and at least two new clients.  Lower cost with better results and no chance of fraud.  Weblogs work for IT service companies. 

Mary Wagner wrote a great article about retailers taking their "first step into the brave new world of blogging."

"Blogs, personal online diaries or journals and short for “web logs,” have become highly influential in American society and can affect a retailer’s brand faster than the retailer can react. “The power of web logs is that they allow millions of people to easily publish their ideas, and millions more to comment on them,”

"Marketers are just starting to probe the marketing applications of web logs. For those who are watching them to see what others are saying about their products and brands, blogs have been called the world’s largest free online focus group. For those who take the next step and enter the dialogue by putting blogs on their sites, they’re an easy way to post fresh and fast-changing content that offers the prospect of conveying corporate attitude and opinion beyond traditional marketing messages—if the blogs are handled transparently, if they’re compelling enough to garner readership, and if the marketer is willing to risk taking some lumps from others who respond with posts of their own." [via Internet Retailer]

Jeff Jarvis is famous for having problems with Dell customer support. He detailed his trials in his blog and as a result he was able to share his disatisfaction with Dell with thousands of people. Rick from the Post Money Value blog explained how he overheard two bank clerks discussing how Dell screwed Jeff Jarvis over and they were going to stay away from Dell. Rick’s point? Assuming ‘average people’ or ‘the masses’ don’t read or see blogs is simply wrong. We are working with a couple of local periodicals here in Dallas and one is spending quite a bit of time discussing the other. The other is trying to ignore the conversation. Instead of responding and capitalizing on the publicity they are missing the boat. My point? It doesn’t matter if you are Dell or a local periodical you need to assume your customers are on the net. If you do, you will figure out how to start talking to them and ultimately listen to them.

Doernberg created the D&O Insurance Blog. Imagine making a subject as boring as D&O insurance interesting. That is what Doernberg is doing with his blog. Could a blog work for your insurance company? Weblogs work for Doernberg…

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Have you ever wanted to send someone a link to a blog post or an Amazon book only to find that the URL was over 100 characters long? If you paste it in an email it is likely that the ‘link’ will break and make the recipient think that the ‘link’ is broken. What if a program could shorten it, allow you to give it del.icio.us tags, and provide you with statistics via RSS all at the same time? Basically URL redirection for the Web 2.0.

The Weblogs Work elves have created a simple tool to do just that called elfURL. Check out their work (it is still in beta).

This week InformationWeek published an article by GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz titled: Nothing to Fear From Executive Blogging.

“To blog or not to blog? For a lot of senior executives these days, that is the question. The answer, simply enough, is to blog. No better opportunity exists to engage in an open dialogue and exchange of ideas with customers and potential customers.”

“The key is to leave the corporate-speak behind and keep the tone conversational, open, and honest.”

“To any senior executive on the fence about starting a corporate blog, I have a word of advice: Jump.”

In a previous entry I detailed the FedEx Furniture Guy and offered FedEx the idea of embracing his use of FedEx boxes instead of threatening to sue him. They decided on the latter. Once he was forced to remove his site I recieved thousands of visitors to this blog to catch a glimpse of the FedEx Furniture Hack. I followed up on my first entry with a second update regarding an email that I recieved from a friend of the FedEx Furniture Guy clarifing some details that I got wrong. Next I was contacted by a group calling themselves the FedExaminer Administration. They offered to help the FedEx Furniture guy with his legal woes. So I recieved around 20 emails, 10,000+ visitors to the blog entry, and nothing from FedEx despite my direct contact via telephone and email.

Imagine how much goodwill could have been generated by FedEx by listening to all of this communication. Perhaps even Ikea could have been involved - i.e. FedEx could have bought the kid an apartment full of Ikea furniture and made him a spokesman. Even the tree huggers like the idea. The ideas are endless. Blogging can work for your business or against it.

Thomas Korte wrote a simple application I use to submit my RSS feeds to multiple sites called Feed Submitter. Check it out.

According to a study from Harris Interactive more Americans use search engines to find a lawyer than the yellow pages (54% search online rather than using a phone book).

Getting your firm listed in Google is hard if you are not creating useful, interesting and regular blog content. Weblogs clearly work for lawyers (we will be detailing how they work for three firms in an up coming series of interviews).

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HP conducted a survey of small businesses and determined that 10% have included blogs in their marketing plans and 16% plan to invest in blogs over the next three years.

[via Small Business Pipeline]