Whatever your political persuasion — right, left, or center — the blogosphere is a great place for bloggers to share their political views and make plenty of friends and enemies. We try to follow the conservative, liberal, and everything in between of politics and political blogs/blogging — but only when it intersects with business blogging.
Have a read below of our latest entries on politics and political blogging…
Debbie Weil’s WordBiz organized a teleseminar on the topic of Business Blogs a few months ago, in which I partook as one of the “experts.” She’s done a nice job packaging the audio of that seminar with a companion PDF report. Some of the points she promises you’ll learn from the report:
Price: $59.
WordBiz: Blogging for Business
This article in the Washington Post describes how popular advertising on weblogs has been in this political season. The story notes that most of these ads are going through the BlogAds network.
The story includes an anecdote of A.B. “Ben” Chandler, a Kentucky Democrat running for a special House election back in January who spent $2,000 for ads on 11 blogs, which was perceived as a risky idea in a tightly funded political campaign. The ads were so successful that in two weeks, some 1,700 readers from the blogs donated $80,000 to the campaign, mostly from out-of-state, which the campaign plowed back into tradiational broadcast and print ads and went on to win the campaign.
The popular blog publishing platform Movable Type, from Six Apart, is starting to accept beta-user accounts for its long-awaited version 3.0 upgrade. Much excitement in the blogosphere for this announcement.
(Updated info on the 3.0 release here.)
Business Blog Consulting uses TypePad, which is also by Six Apart.
CEO Henry Copeland launched this do-it-yourself ad network for blogs nearly two years ago, and at that time there was a fair bit of skepticism that the business would ever pan out. Well, it has. The service now has more than 200 blogs using the system, each of which has at least 3,000 ad impressions each week. Some, such as InstaPundit and DailyKos, have millions of readers per month. The service has proven particularly popular with political advertisers — more than two dozen candidates in the presidental and other races have used it to reach political junkies through blogs. But many smaller and medium-sized companies are also find blogs a great way to advertise niche products. Blogs are ideal “for products that have a sensibility, not commodities, those looking to find audiences with a particular mindset,” Copeland said. Some of the biggest bloggers using the system are now earning thousands of dollars a month in advertising.
I have counseled BlogAds about its overall business strategy.
A New York Times reporter, Julie Flaherty, attended BloggerCon II and wrote this piece about the discussion at the conference about trying to make blogs make money for their writers.
NY Times: Many Started Web Logs for Fun, but Bloggers Need Money, Too
Hugh MacLeod is best known around the blogosphere as “the guy who draws cartoons on the back of business cards.” Something about his cartooning style has really struck a nerve with bloggers. His own blog features a lot of his original drawings. His background is in advertising creative, and I think he still does some of that on a freelance basis, as well.
Rafat Ali, formerly a journalist for Silicon Alley Reporter, runs this blog about trends in online publishing. He also sells advertising for the blog, which is his sole occupation for more than a year. He says he earns more off the blog than he did as a staff reporter, although he also spends a considerable amount of time selling ads himself. He notes that he has also lost advertisers due to his uncompromising coverage of the industry. He’s a pioneer among one-man-brands as far as commercial blogs go.
MarketingVox (formerly named MarketingWonk, Up2Speed and MarketingFix) is a new aggregation blog focused on Internet marketing trends. The site is funded by Andy Bourland, who pays a salary to the site’s full-time editor Tig Tillinghast. The site accepts advertiser and aims to be a commercially viable nano-publishing media property focused on an industry niche.
I am one of this site’s co-founders, and I remain a shareholder, contributor and strategic consultant to the business, although I am no longer involved in its day-to-day operations.
Adam Kalsey’s firm specializes in web site development and online marketing. He is also the moderator of Marketing Vox’s Publishing forum.
Marketing Vox (which I co-founded, I mention both for bragging rights and full disclosure) produces this email discussion list / blog about online publishing. Blogging, and particularly business-related blogging, is a major theme of the forum. I used to be the moderator of this forum for a few weeks, anyway, but it got to be too much work, so it is now capably moderated by Adam Kalsey.
I had the pleasure of sharing a car ride with Judith from Boston to NY after BloggerCon II and got to hear a lot about her remarkable professional background: an impressive mix of executive experience at marketing, operations, technology and more (she programs in something like 8 or more languages, after having been sent to programming classes by the IT department of a F500 company when she worked as a marketer constantly pushing the IT department to outdo themselves with special programming requests).
These days, she’s a high-priced (I’d assume) consultant focused on knowlege and social networking, and other corporate collaboration issues. She also blogs at socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com.
Amy Gahran is a writer, editor, trainer and speaker. One of her recent posts (as of this writing) is “More Corporate Blogging Resources,” each of which I’ll be sure to scrape as individual entries in this blog as soon as I have time.
Ross Mayfield is CEO of Socialtext, what I would call knowledge management software, but he’s told me should be called “enterprise social software.” Anyway, Ross is a leading thinker in the space of social software and people-powered publishing (such as wikis, business blogging, social networks). In addition to his personal blog (linked in the headline of this entry), which itself tends to be more about business than his personal life, he also blogs on Social Text’s site as well as part of a great group blog about social software called Many2Many on Corante.
BzzAgent is a really interesting marketing agency that has put together a network of more than 25,000 BzzAgents, orginary people who sign up at the site because they like to be in on the “next big thing” in the world of consumer products. The agency’s clients include Penguin Books, Kellogg’s cereal, Monster.com, Estee Lauder, Lee Jeans and others. When the agency has a campaign, it sends out products to hundreds of its BzzAgents, who are then encouraged to recommend the products to their friends, provided they like the products. The agency provides the agents how to be effective brand evangelists? What’s in it for the agents? Mainly just free product samples and bragging rights to be the first to know of hot new products. But that is apparently motivation enough for thousands of participants.
Anyway, the agency also has a fairly active blog since November, 2003, charting the company’s growth, letting it communicate with its agents and share agent’s ideas with the rest.
Thanks to Todd S. for the link.
A new blog (as of this posting) by British consultants Wayne Robinson and Tim Duckett. The About Us reads:
We run a marketing and technology consulting business that helps smaller companies in the UK. A lot of our work is now centring on using technology to reduce information problems. So this blog is designed to share our knowledge and first hand experience.
A criticism I have of this blog, other than its somewhat clunky layout (e.g., the page is too wide for my laptop screen and I hate blue link borders around images, but whatever [UPDATE: they’ve since fixed that, but the CSS is still acting a bit funky for me]), is that the above About Us statement claims “we run a marketing and technology consulting business,” but there’s no information about that company anywhere on the site that I can see. The consultants link to short profiles of themselves, and I gather that is the “business,” but it’s not even clear what the business is called (the URL is Infosential.com, but the blog seems to be titled “Cutting Through”), but I’m nitpicking. The content seems worthwhile (particularly since they already linked to my blog).
A serious film fan site for independent film lovers, updated daily for nearly a year as of this posting, from GreenCine, “the #1 DVD Rental Site for the Alternative Scene: For People Who Like to Watch.” Written mostly by David Hudson, with some outside contributions
Thanks for the link from Todd S.
Ray Ozzie is a well-respected commentator in the tech space on his blog, while his day job is running Groove Networks, “virtual office software that allows teams of people to work together securely over a network as if they were in the same physical location.”
Microsoft is certainly a bastion of innovation, but over the years it has demonstrated an inclination towards secrecy bordering on paranoia. It is therefore somewhat surprising that Microsoft has been so welcoming of the whole blog phenomenon. Certainly hundreds, if not thousands, of Microsoft employees maintain blogs, among the most high-profile of which are Robert Scoble’s and Channel 9. In addition, however, Microsoft links to more than 100 blogs (see link in the headline above) by employees about products and programming topics.
Macromedia, the software firm that makes a range of web and multimedia authoring tools, has been a pioneer in letting its knowledgable inner circle of product architects communicate directly with customers through a series of weblogs. These blogs, many of which both note that they represent the private opinions of their authors and carry the Macromedia company logo (go figure), touch of a range of topics, including the authors comments on general technology trends, as well as comments specific to Macromedia products. The company’s blogs include these:
Blog from outerspace. No kidding. Expedition 7 NASA ISS Science Officer Ed Lu actually blog from the International Space Station. He has since completed his mission.
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Business Blog Consulting is a site devoted to demonstrating how effective weblogs can be for communicating with customers and marketing to new customer prospects. You will find here lots of examples of business and corporate blogs, as well as resources to help you learn more about the topic.
Looking for a company that offers consulting on corporate and business blogging, including design, development and strategy? Consider Netconcepts.
Other stuff? Email us.
Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing
Andy Bourland of Bourland.com
Rich Brooks of Flyte
Paul Chaney of Blogging Systems Group
Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus
Josh Hallett of Hyku
Tris Hussey of Larix Consulting
Lee Odden of TopRank
Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts
Dave Taylor of Intuitive Life for Business
Jim Turner of One by One Media
Dana VanDen Heuvel of BlogSavant
Des Walsh of Thinking Home Business
Debbie Weil of WordBiz and BlogWrite
Jeremy Wright of Ensight
Rick E. Bruner is co-author and principal analyst on this report
Our own contributor Jeremy Wright is the author of this book
"The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right" with a foreword by GM's Bob Lutz..and the rest by Debbie Weil.
Produced by contributor to this site Debbie Weil. Rick E. Bruner is one of the featured experts in this report
This report is written by contributor to this site BL Ochman
I guess this was inevitable
