The report, titled Influencing the Influencers: How Online Advertising and Media Impact Word of Mouth (PDF), talks about how marketers can make use of word-of-mouth marketing by “influencing the influencers,” those whose buying decisions tend to have greater impact on friends, family, and associates than others.

As you probably know, Bloglines was acquired back in February by Ask.com. Bloglines creator Mark Fletcher assumed the director position, but left the company in June to pursue other interests.

I’ve written an op/ed on my Allbusiness.com blog, Strategic Business Blogging, so let me invite you to read that post as well.

I educate companies about the tools that foster conversation and collaboration. In big companies, advertising competes with sales, sales competes with marketing. I show them that really great things cam happen when smart people within their company start talking to each other.

That may sound simplistic, but here’s what just happened with a Fortune 500 company I am working with. I did two days of workshops to bring them up to speed about how other companies use social media.

I showed them what their competitors are doing, and gave them literally a hundred examples of what works and doesn’t for a wide range of companies. My goal was to help them find ways to take advantage of the tools, both internally for better employee productivity, and externally for market outreach and for products.

I invited their head of IT and two other people from divisions within the company to describe how they were looking into or already working with blogs, wikis, etc.

Lo and behold, they found that they were often re-inventing the same quest and they realized that collaborating would help them all.

Now they have created created an in-house online community where everyone in the company can communicate about how social media is being used across the company’s many entities and who is using these tools. The site also contains many useful links to third-party sources who are involved with these technologies. Here’s a quote from their email about their project: “Our goal is to share knowledge and best practices, and learn from others — so that we can all better take advantage of these tools.”

The fact that they took what I taught to heart makes me one very happy social media marketing consultant. :>)

B. L. even blogged about this on her own blog.

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday said that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.

In a staff opinion issued yesterday, the consumer protection agency weighed in for the first time on the practice. Though no accurate figures exist on how much money advertisers spend on such marketing, it is quickly becoming a preferred method for reaching consumers who are skeptical of other forms of advertising.

I’ve ranted about the PayPerPost, need for full-disclosure debacle a couple of times and have one more such rant in me, which I’m considering posting here later this week. However, if the FTC steps in, it may make my harangue moot. More to follow on this I’m sure.

Via TechCrunch and CopyBlogger

One of Dave’s blogs, AskDaveTaylor.com, has been nominated for a very prestigious award as the Best Technology Blog in the 2006 Weblog Awards. If he wins, Dave will beat out the likes of tech blog notables as Gizmodo, Slashdot, and TechCrunch.

While those other blogs are certainly award worthy, I look at it this way. Dave Taylor has contributed more intellectual capital to the storehouse of business blogging knowledge than just about anyone I know. He is a master teacher who can explain technically complicated matters in a way that make sense to even the most nascent. Conversely, he is never belittling toward those of us who ask the simplest of questions. That is the mark of a true statesman and gentleman. Dave is both.

At the recent Blog Business Summit in Seattle, I had the privilege of attending a session where Dave was a panelist. I was amazed at the ease and fluidity with which he presented his ideas. Dave spoke as one having a deep knowledge and understanding of his subject. It was a privilege to sit under his tutelage.

Real masters of their craft are few and far between. Dave Taylor is one such artisan. For that reason, I urge you to cast your vote for AskDaveTaylor.com. And, if you’re so inclined, because the award hosts allow you to cast votes every 25 hours, do so repeatedly.

Just for fun, I asked Toby what that was and here’s her reply.

My off the cuff answer would be – to help clients maneuver their way through the blogoshpere mitigating risk .. in other words helping them avoid the land mines. (Social media is the only strategy I know that has its roots in a culture; and the culture self-corrects if people color outside the
accepted lines.)

That begins with developing a strategy and setting goals. The benefit to that, as in any planning exercise, is spending time thinking through the process and the details. Success in social media is greatly attributed to making sure t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted. The more this industry matures (and yes, I do believe it is an industry) the more moving parts it seems to have .. it reminds me of a kinetic sculpture. By moving parts I mean: authoring a blog (multiple genres), blogger relations (see my post today www.divamarktingblog.com), social media as a research tool
(secondary and primary), advertising (on blogs and in RSS feeds).

Sure you can launch a blog without a strategy or the help of a ‘social media consultant’ but I would caution people who think that social media is a just a nifty, new type of a website .. they are missing the larger picture and the more significant long-range benefits.

Wow! Seems to me Toby knows from whence she speaks. I told her she should teach a course on this.

I’ve asked a couple of other consultants to speak to this issue, and will post their replies later on. You may wish to opine as well. If so, please leave a pithy (or not so pithy) comment.

The program airs today at 12 noon pacific and is being streamed live. You can download it later if you don’t catch it live.

Des says it won’t be tech-talk or “how to make money from blogging,” but about how he and others have used blogs to build their business (Which would be just about everyone who contributes to this site.).

Steve addresses the issue head on with the question, "Does anyone care…?" I’m sure people do, but if so, where’s the outcry? Other than Mark Cuban that is. Perhaps splogs have not sullied the reputation of the blogosphere to the degree that something obviously has to be done. But, from a marketing standpoint, I don’t know of any other tactic that could turn marketers off to using blogs than splogs and I challenge us to take a proactive approach. And I’d really like to know what other BBC contributors think.

It seems to me at least some of the more longstanding blogs (or blog-related sites) used org. Case-in-point, Jeremy Wright’s Ensight blog, the Threadwatch blog, and Movable Type’s site. Now, I realize this might be a silly thing to think about, and that it might have been due to nothing more than the dotcom domain was already taken. If so, stop reading. But, I think there is a deeper question here and the BBC site is an appropriate one to discuss it.

It is this: At what point did the paradign shift take place from when blogs were viewed as a purist medium for self expression and become used for commercial purposes? It’s stating the obvious to suggest such a shift has taken place. Perhaps it was gradual, a Gladwellian tipping point sort of thing. But, was there a seismic shift and, if so, when did it occur? If there are any blog historians or anthropologists reading this, I’d enjoy your answer to the question.

With all the newbie bloggers there are out there, it seems to me there might be a need for a book (an essay at least) on the history of blogging. Though blogging has morphed, in that it is being used for a number of purposes now, the essence of it remains the same and we don’t, in my view, need to lose touch with the past just because we are embracing the future.

Here’s the cool thing, Patti has blogged the entire incident, along with the story of her rebuilding process, on her blog at DiamondDivaOnline.

There are a number of remarks I could make about her willingness to do this, not the least of which is that it represents a vital way blogs can be used to communicate with customers and others — blogging during times of crisis, chronicling the entire process on a blog for all the world to see. She’s done it with genuine openness and transparency too, which in my estimation represents the highest ideals to which we bloggers aspire.

Let me make a simple request. If you’re a business blogger, why not write a post retelling Patti’s story. It is indeed one worth telling. Oh, and don’t pity her. She’s a real trooper, both stalwart and optimistic, determined to "rise from the ashes" and rebuild her business better than before. Knowing her, I have no doubt she’ll do just that. You’ll know too, because she will blog it all.

This takes the Naked Conversations approach one step further and, so far as I’m aware, he’s the first to actually upload chapters as they’re being written. You can download them at no cost too.

Denise tells me that doing this actually increases sales of the book once it’s printed. She indicates people see the book as a "souvenir." After all, who’s going to download the entire book? (Other than me that is.)

Yet another innovative use of blogs.

I admit I’m an adherent of Web 2.0 (I’m guessing he’s not), and each one of the "future fads" he mentions are components of this internet iteration. I want to give Sean the benefit of the doubt. After all, he’s been around the net a lot longer than me. Even though he’s considered a notable futurist where it comes to web trends, I just feel he’s speaking from an outside looking in perspective. Even "futurists" can be wrong. (BTW, I write about this with greater derision on my own site. I’m just trying to be nice here.)

The funniest thing about the article is that, just to the right of the headline, is a banner that says "What is Web 2.0? Web 2.0 isn’t about technology, it’s a call to action. Take a look at the Web’s most exciting new developments." Exciting new developments or "future fads." Publish.com, which is it?  We know where Sean stands on the subject.

In case you’re not familiar with the religious end of the blogosphere, it’s big, especially among evangelicals. Hugh Hewitt is a name many people would recognize. He’s one of the Godblog superstars.

I have to give a shout out to one of my best friends, Stacy Harp, of Mind & Media. She’s a speaker on a session called Making Money with Blogs, and is keeping up with the convention on her blog.

Lulu provides print on demand publishing services and many bloggers have taken advantage of their service. BTW, they call blog books, "blooks." (These are not necessarily books about blogging, but books written from blog content.) Lulu offers its services free, making its money on each sale.

They offer prizes in three categories: Fiction, non-fiction, and comics. Prizes will be awarded April of next year.

I won’t go into detail here, but I do invite you to read my glowing review of the app on my blog. Trust me, you’ll like Writeboard. Like the rest of 37Signal’s products it’s an easy-to-use software application that really works. 

Blogspotting’s Stephen Baker makes a good point. He says, "[T]his is one more sign that the mainstream and bloggers are swimming in the same pool of data." The line between blogs and mainstream content is getting fuzzier.

Yahoo! is pulling content from the over 750,000 blogs in their MyYahoo! database, so it’s a good idea to get your blog indexed if it’s not already. 

[Via Blogspotting]