Everyone has secrets to their success. It’s what makes them tick and it’s what makes them get things done. I’d love to share with you the secrets to success that I have found and would love to hear about yours.

I think that regardless of what we do in business, be it blogging, administration, bookkeeping, etc., we still need to have that secret in order to push forward.

1. The Speed of Implementation.

I can’t take full credit for this. I mean, I’ve always done it but I didn’t come up with that line. I don’t really know who originally said it but I saw it on an Eben Pagan video and it resonated so well with me. To be successful, you must take your ideas and implement them - FAST. Don’t hold back and don’t dilly-dally with details and with trying to be perfect. Get it up there and out there and tweak as you go.

2. Using Your Strengths & Delegating the Rest.

Don’t try to do everything yourself. Let’s face it - we all know you’re brilliant but to be successful, you need to learn that you aren’t the best person to do everything in your business. Read the E-Myth Revisited for a great take on what it means to wear many hats as an entrepreneur. It’ll make you realize that you should focus on what you’re good at and then delegate out the rest. Find the right people and they’ll pay for themselves.

3. Surround Yourself with a Good Support System.

This is essential. I’ve always been blessed with a great support system. My family has always supported my dreams and has never held me back (even if some of them - like wanting to be a millionaire before I turn 30 - seems far-fetched) and my husband is numero uno in terms of providing me with space and time to grow and build my business. Learn to surround yourself with positive people and rid yourself of the toxic people.

4. Only Do What You Love to Do.

I try to implement this daily. I don’t do anything I don’t love to do. Why? If I do things I don’t like to do, I run the risk (the high risk) of doing a poor job at or taking light years to turn it around to my client. We’re not meant to do everything. We’re just not. It’s the same with clients - we’re not meant to work with everyone. We’re meant to do the work where our passion lies and where our heart is because THAT makes us successful.

5. Only Work With People Who Energize & Inspire You.

This is really important. While it sounds similar to the support system, this refers more directly to your clients and/or customers. I’ve had an interesting entrepreneurial life thus far and I’ve met both really amazing clients and other clients whose styles did not mesh well with mine. I’ve come to learn that I’ve got certain characteristics that not everyone can get used to - for example, I only do scheduled calls due to my busy work schedule - and if the people I work with can’t come to terms with that, we won’t work over the long-term. So, find people that you are inspired and energized by and who embrace your talents and understand the way you work.

6. Limit Your Overhead.

Don’t do things in a complicated way. I swear to you, for everything you want to do in your business, you can usually do it on the cheap AND get a really professional result. I’ve hardly spent any money on marketing or advertising for my business. Aside from my website, I have very little marketing overhead. My websites are done inexpensively too because I do them myself. I understand that not everyone has that talent but do your research, stay in the green and you’ll become more successful. Think of how much less stress you’ll have when money is not an issue!

7. Be Aware of Your Human-ness.

I love this one. I often find that in the land of the entrepreneur, too many people forget that they are human (or that those they are talking to are also human). What I mean is that often times, things are done or said that would never be done or said if both parties were standing in the same room. Treat your fellow entrepreneurs with respect and you’ll go a lot farther. This too is something I’ve learned as I’ve grown as a business owner and moved out of that ‘corporate’ mindset.

8. Be Generous.

Don’t be afraid to give away information or help out your fellow business person for nothing in return. I don’t mean start giving away your services for free but sometimes, provide advice or give away an ebook and do it for free. Don’t ask for a favor in return and don’t ask for payment. Just do it. It feels great and people will remember you. Michael Port, a past client of mine, used to quote often “Long after you’re gone, people won’t remember what you said but how you made them feel.”

What are your keys to success?

So first let me dispense with the obligatory acknowledgment that I’m sorry I haven’t blogged here in ages. I have wanted to often, but one thing and another…

On thing I’ve wanted to write about is Twitter. I’m hooked.  So far, I’ve seen precious few Tweets (as I gather its adherents call themselves) use it especially well for business communication. Mostly people complaining about being stuck in airports. Like the rest of us might find that interesting. One who does a good job keeping the posts interesting and on topic is Steve Rubel, not surprisingly.

Another shout out I’ve meant to give is the IAB’s new blog, the IABlog, under the stewardship of the IAB’s new, compelling leader, Randall Rothenberg, who also has his own blog. I’ve gotten to know Randall a bit in the past several months, and he’s a fun guy, a great intellect (excellent panel moderator), a strong leader for the IAB and really interested demonstrating the new directions of online media with initiatives like the IABlog.

When you click through to the blog, you’ll notice a photo of yours truly serenading the original IAB chairman Rich LeFurgy.  The uke is my new hobby for the past year-plus. Soon I’ll have to do a round-up of the many photos like this that already exist of me playing the uke at industry cocktail parties on blogs around the web.

The real point of this post, though, is that I’m currently at the IAB’s Annual Meeting, Ecosystem 2.0, in Phoenix, AZ. So far, it’s one of the most exciting conferences I’ve ever attended, really. Attendee list is who’s who of the industry. As I type this (blazing fast free wifi in the conference hall; see, they get it!), Randall is interviewing Susan Decker, president of Yahoo! and Jerry Yang, CEO/founder of Yahoo! You can see the other speakers yourself here, but they are consistent with these two.

Steve Rubel is here and we’re both giving running commentary on Twitter, plus the IABlog is providing updates, too. Keep your fingers crossed that they’ll post videos of the content. Wenda Millard’s speech last night, accepting the mantel as new chairperson of the IAB, was really great. I’ll post the link of the transcript or video if it’s made available.

Is the term “social media” moot? Steve Rubel thinks so, but a majority of his commenters, including some names you’d recognize, beg to differ. I’d love to hear your opinion. Are the lines blurred to the point there should no longer be a distinction? Fellow BBC bloggers (and others as well), what do you have to say?

I’m sure most of the readers of this blog know technology consultant and business advisor Dave Taylor. He is a fellow blogger here at BBC as well.

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.

I’m moderating a discussion this week about CEO Blogging over on the IAOC blog. I’d love to hear your two cents on the numerous questions surrounding this topic du jour.

First question: Is it OK to ghostwrite a CEO blog? Waddya think? Click here to jump into the discussion.

Fortune 500 CEO blogger Jonathan Schwartz was quoted over the weekend in an AP story by Rachel Konrad titled Sun CEO Among the Few Chiefs Who Blog:

“The blog has become for me the single most effective vehicle to communicate to all of our constituencies - developers, media, analysts and shareholders,” Schwartz said in an interview in his Silicon Valley office. “When I go out and have dinner with a key analyst on Wall Street or a key investor from Europe and ask them if they’ve read my blog, they almost universally say yes.”

Check out my backstory on Rachel’s article, which ran in dozens of newspapers, as well as links to a list of CEO bloggers, etc. Dave Taylor and I were both quoted in the AP story.

Kate Kaye of ClickZ reports that spending for marketing budgets for real estate is waining in the regular newsprint of old. Realtors are spending more and more of their ad budgets online. Citing a study performed by Classified Intelligence she indicates:

So, if 58 percent of real estate agents surveyed are raising ad budgets this year, where is the money going? Where they are spending the bulk of the money online, in fact, is on their Web sites. Twenty-six percent spent 10 percent and 29 percent spent 20 percent of their budgets there. Just 6 percent did not spend at all on their Web sites.

Impressive numbers but where are they actually spending the money? Andy Beal believes he knows where the revenue is going and that is to blogs. In fact as Mr. Beal states:

While Realtors are reducing their offline spend, the report shows there is no clear winner for online ad spend.

But I know the answer. Want to know where real estate agents are investing their online efforts? Blogging! Yep, I lose track of the number of new blogs that I see each day that relate to the real estate industry. But don’t just take my word for it, take a look at these charts…

Andy makes a good point about the discussion of real estate, but what is interesting to find are blogs about real estate that are being tracked by Technorati have reached nearly 1000. The reason I find this interesting is because less than a few weeks ago I did the exact same search for a presentation to a real estate agent and it turned up only half that number. Real estate blogs are popping up all over the blogosphere and Google shows that over 91,000,000 search results come from searching blogs for real estate. After doing some other snooping around it looks like some in the real estate businesses are spending huge amounts on pay per click campaigns and for paid search. Of these companies I was unable to find any of them working natural search through blogs. Being the investigator type, I was curious if I could find a blogger on Google that was in the denver area. Real estate always seems to be on the rise here in Denver so a realtor can be found on every street corner. I searched Denver Realtor. At the time of this writing, I was able to find that the number 2 search result turned up Kristal Kraft. It just so happens that Kristal is a realtor in Denver that has a blog. Today she has a beautiful picture of balloons being launched in the blue Colorado sky. I’ve not personally talked with Kristal but rest assured, if I was looking for a realtor in Denver, she may get my call only because I was able to find her easily.
Realtors in the real estate business are clamoring for a piece of the online pie, but those realtors that hop on the blog bandwagon will find themselves out ahead of those still trying to attract the home buyers and sellers via that thing rolled up on the driveway. A very small investment has given one blogger a leg up on the competition.

Onalytica has published the results of their analysis on the most influential authorities on “blog marketing”. The top 20 influential sites/blogs include:

• New York Times
• Josh Hallett - hyku
• Seth Godin
• Steve Rubel - Micropersuasion
• Businessweek
• ClickZ
• Wired
• Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakeman - Next Level Biz Tips
• WebProNews
• Danny Sullivan - Search Engine Watch
• Fast Company
• Lee Odden - Top Rank Results
• Marketing Sherpa
• Darren Rowse - Problogger
• AllBusiness.com
• Hugh Mac Leod - Gaping Void
• Jeff Jarvis - Buzz Machine
• Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba - Church of the Customer
• Mitch Joel - Twist Image
• Steve Hall - Adrants

Business Blog Consulting alumni Steve Rubel was listed and I’m happy to report current contributor Josh Hallett of hyku and my own company TopRank were listed as well.

The analysis focuses on influence and popularity showing that the most popular authorities are not necessarily the most influential. Popularity was measured by the number of referrers and influence was measure by the authority of the referrers.

Limiting the measure of popularity to link referrers seems a bit simplistic. Traffic would appear to be a logical factor as well.

In the previous analysis on the most influential authorities on “business blogs” (full report pdf), Business Blog Consulting was listed as the fourth most influential sandwiched between BusinessWeek and CNN.

Marketing Sherpa is at it again with their third annual blog awards and this year they’ve added more categories including one for podcasting. Here are this year’s categories:

B-to-B marketing, Search marketing, Affiliate marketing, Email marketing, PR, Advertising, Marketing to a specific, consumer demographic (ie. women, kids), Blogging or podcasting as a marketing tactic, Viral, word of mouth, buzz, social marketing, Small business marketing, Non-English language blogs on marketing, General (multiple topic) marketing, Other specific niche topic related to marketing.Nominations were taken last week and this week there is voting until this Friday. Voting criteria include: Personality, Usefulness & content value, Usability & design and Would you revisit?. For some reason, and I’m not sure why, there are quite a few well known blogs that were not included.

Of course several Business Blog Consulting contributors have been nominated including:

• B.L. Ochman for best PR blog
• John Jantsch for best small business marketing blog
• Dana Vanden Heuvel for best btob marketing blog
• Toby Bloomberg for best blog on general marketing
• Wayne Hurlbert for best blog on general marketing
• Top Rank for best blog on search marketing.

You can vote for all or some of the blogs by rating them. Cast your vote today.

One of the great things about this blog is that Rick gets pitched by lots of people and we tend to get some good scoops. Dave Frankland zapped this nice tidbit over to Rick today about Richard Edelman’s keynote at Syndicate 2006. Here’s the really interesting thing … the link to the PRWeek story yielded this:

Edelman keynote at Syndicate touches upon industry changes
NEW YORK: Edelman CEO Richard Edelman, facing an audience at the 2006 Syndicate Conference in New York City that has traditionally been hostile to PR professionals, launched into a discussion of how blogs and other new media are changing the business.
From the PRWeek website … that’s all folks.

Oh man. Man oh man. Edelman, I think, gets the blogosphere, but PRWeek doesn’t. Check out his own blog post on his keynote. He also links to David Weinberger’s live blogging of the keynote (I love live conference blogging … it’s fun, it’s exciting, and it helps get the great messages and quotable quotes out there as soon as the speaker has said them), which I have yet to pour over … but I am looking forward to reading asap.

In Richard Edelman’s post and the snippets I read in the PRWeek article (because Dave forwarded it to Rick), it’s clear the PR folks have to change tactics to adapt to the new communications and media realities. I’m not saying that bloggers are all powerful, what I’m saying is that bloggers can get a message out fast. That message can be good or bad. Things like PRWeek (and other publications) blocking off content behind the walled garden of subscribers only, yeah that doesn’t fly. It especially doesn’t fly when the article blocked is about a luminary of PR talking about how PR professionals have to adapt to the new blogosphere reality. Sheesh. I hope they open this article up to the world, because Edelman really says great stuff.

Let’s take how he described, and apologized for, Robert Scoble’s recent experience with PR people:

Microsoft employee and blogger Robert Scoble, who was scheduled to interview Edelman for the keynote, has experienced a family emergency, which he wrote about on his blog. Despite broadcasting his tragedy, he noted in a follow-up post that he was still receiving PR pitches since he wrote about his family’s situation.

Scoble could not attend, but, sent a question asking why PR people, who presumably value his opinion enough to have read his blog, were still sending him product pitches while he was facing tragedy.

“On behalf the PR field, I apologize to Robert for the misbehavior and tell you that there is a better way,” Edelman said.

[snip]

“A lot of PR people regard blogs as another form of the mainstream media to be pitched,” Edelman said. “Our methodology has traditionally been to throw out 1,000 flowers and one might bloom. That’s not the way to interact with the blogosphere.”

That’s good, that’s smart. Robert, though, really hits the nail on the head:

But, in today’s world of search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Technorati, Feedster, and others, it just isn’t good to be clued out. —Scoble

Edelman also “gets” how blogger love to get sneak peaks at stuff … oh do we love it.

“Our great triumphs are persuading clients to show beta versions of products to bloggers months in advance of actual product launch,” Edelman said. “By the time we started talking to the MSM [mainstream media], we had some momentum.”

That’s totally it. I’ve been apart of a few beta tests recently (Ether for example) where after the beta period (and bloggers are among the testers), we were asked for our feedback and if we wished to be included in press materials. Smart, very smart. Hey, we’re interested in your opinion and would you like to be included in stuff to get you some attention. Hmm, umm, yes!

Richard Edelman knows that the PR world is changing. PR folks can’t just spin and massage the message any more. They have to deal with citizen journalists, bloggers, and just plain everyone. It’s going to take a while before blogger stop getting e-mail pitches out of the blue, but here’s to hoping.

Tags: Richard Edelman, Syndicate Conference, Robert Scoble, PR

When I started riding motor bikes some years ago, for commuting and occasional touring, I was made aware by other riders that Ducati owners were a special breed of enthusiasts. And the machines themselves were clearly serious racing bikes, which I usually saw disappearing very quickly out in front of wherever I was.

I don’t know how many Ducati owners are blogging just now, but my hunch is that the number is about to rise with the news that Federico Minoli, the corporate turnaround man who took the reins at the Italian company some nine years ago, is one of the newest CEO bloggers on the block. Two weeks ago, Minoli and his company launched Desmoblog. The company announced at the time that the blog would tell what is happening at Ducati and in the world of its fans, as well as decisions about new products, Ducati events, business strategies, ‘behind the scenes’ news from the race track and more.

In his welcome to the blog, Minoli says:

This new space online gives me a new way to communicate with colleagues, fans and bikers about my life, my experience with Ducati, the company, the motorcycles and of course Ducati Corse (link added).

The blog and the company website design are seamlessly integrated, and the Desmoblog is bi-lingual, in English as well as Italian.

The announcement of the blog on the Ducati website presents the blog as providing for a dialogue directly between blogger and readers and offers the opportunity of sharing ‘the fever for Ducati’, receiving frank comments from fans and replying directly.

Podcasts are also foreshadowed.

The many comments on the Desmoblog site in just two weeks, some in English, some in Italian, suggest that the ’Ducatisti’ tribe has taken up the challenge with gusto, as for example in the comments on Minoli’s After the race March 11 post from Daytona. 

Malcolm Gladwell, author Blink and The Tipping Point, (two of my favorite books that I read last year,) has started blogging over at http://gladwell.typepad.com.

This only makes sense, since Gladwell has long been providing bloggers, especially business bloggers, with fodder for their posts.

What I love about Gladwell (and Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner and Seth Godin) is how he makes you reflect on your own world view. You won’t always agree with these guys, but it does cause you to examine your own preconceptions that you might be holding onto out of sheer laziness.

BTW, I had never visited Gladwell’s home page before today, but I’m pretty sure he stole the idea from us.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Malcolm. Glad to hear your voice in the first person!

Yes and no. Many blog entries just don’t elicit a response, even if it’s a popular or well-read blog. But sometimes a blog entry hits a nerve and it’s like uncorking a geyser.

That’s what’s happening today over on Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion blog where he’s announced that he’s moving to Edelman as a Senior VP. 42 comments and counting (”hey, congrats!” and “you da man!”) as of 2:48 PM Eastern. Hey, Steve, what’s the most comments you’ve ever gotten on one of your blog posts? We’d love to hear.

Micro Persuasion is #72 on Technorati’s Top 100 blog list.

Steve Rubel has made the big leap from CooperKatz to public relations giant Edelman:

“After five years at CooperKatz, I felt it was time for me to take the next step in my evolution. So I am excited to announce that I will be joining Rick Murray’s team at Edelman (the world’s largest independent PR firm) on February 27 as a Senior Vice President. I will be working out of their New York office.”

He humbly says he’ll be doing pretty much the same thing, just a bigger organization. One big question is, what happens to Micropersuasion? Apparently CooperKatz will rename their blog practice to Cogence and Edelman will not use the Micropersuasion name in any of their service offerings. Steve will be able to continue using the micropersuasion.com domain name. Further details can be found on the Micropersuasion blog.

Congratulations Steve!

Marqui, the blogging and communications company, in conjuction with FreeRange Communications, the mobile RSS company, have released a great whitepaper on RSS entitled “RSS Rx: How Marketers Can Make the Most of RSS Technology.” The document is a quick read, at only 15 pages, but gives a really great overview of RSS for marketers in a conversational tone that is very much a Marqui thing. (I mean, really, look at their website and you’ll see what I mean)
The document cites nearly every RSS study done to date, and highlights some of the prominent RSS purveyors throughout the document. (Full disclosure: Pheedo is mentioned in the document)
There is also a fair bit of prescriptive content on ‘what do do next’ with your new-found RSS knowledge, such as the following:

Marketers interested in incorporating RSS into their activities should first take a hard look at their Web site. What content does it have that can – and should be – distributed? For example, does your site have blogs, forums, press releases, product information, support information, email newsletters, audio presentations or whitepapers? If not, can any of these items be added?

Even companies relying on third-parties to manage some of these items might be surprised to find that adding an RSS feed is an option. For instance, companies using a newsletter service to manage their newsletters should ask if the service comes with RSS feeds since more and more services are adding this capability.

Marqui has made the whitepaper available for download on their site in the downloads section.

Technorati Tags: Freerange communications, Marqui, RSS, whitepaper

Guy Kawasaki, start-up guru and Mac enthusiast, has started his own blog called Let the Good Times Roll.

The blog offers good info for start-ups, including recent posts The Art of Evangelism and The Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists.

Mac fans like myself will also find interesting items, such as Guy’s take on Steve Jobs latest keynote and other Mac-centric posts.

I do wish he included trackbacks and categorized his posts, but you can’t have it all.

Whether it’s the debate raging in the online professional networking community of LinkedIn about spammy waves of invitations received by LI members from competitor Doostang, the breathless hype about Web 2.0 or even blogging itself, I argue that many of the discussions in the tech industry parallel the societal debate about evolution versus intelligent design. Do things evolve, does change beget improvement, or do we all just spin our wheels pointlessly, foolishly thinking that creation is a series of small steps?

Read my thoughts on this topic for yourself at:

    Intelligent Design, Evolution and the Tech Industry

I tried to remain agnostic, but you’ll learn more about my own theological and philosophical viewpoint as you read the article too. And, please, don’t hesitate to add your own commentary on this topic!

Microsoft has taken a number of hits over the last dozen or so years. From viruses and security issues to being declared an illegal monopoly and more recent executive outbursts, the company has given vocal critics more than enough to talk about.

It may surprise you to find out, though, that one of Microsoft’s most vocal critics is an actual Microsoft employee. And he has a blog. Mini-Microsoft is written anonymously be a current Microsoft employee.

This month, he gets called "Microsoft’s ‘Deep Throat’" by BusinessWeek, in a decidedly un-chilly expose.

Mini’s often critical, always honest and generally passionate posts go from saying Steve Ballmer should resign and the company needs a complete restructuring to a recent post where Mini crows that "it is a heel-clicking time to re-energize and re-focus on who we are and the great potential we have."

Why does he write a blog which is so openly critical of Microsoft? Well, to quote the BusinessWeek interview: "Sometimes you have to destroy the village in order to save it."

When noted offline direct mail copywriter and author Bob Bly launched his blog about 6 months ago, I felt that business blogging had indeed tipped (A nod to Malcolm Gladwell’s popular book, the Tipping Point).

Now, even the most cynical holdouts have more proof that blogs mean business. Forbes.com recently released the annual "Best of the Web" issue and the feature story was titled "Blogs That Matter."

From the Forbes article: In this Summer 2005 edition of Forbes.com Best of The Web, our editors have trained their sights on the rapidly expanding world of blogs, collectively known as the "blogosphere."

Editors from Forbes spanned the blogosphere and unearthed 6-10 favorite picks in 20 categories ranging from Art and Literary Blogs, to Small Business, Marketing, Shopping and Music Blogs. Each blog was given a brief review and a quick what’s best and worst about the blog blurb. The collective list, totaling 100 blogs, is a virtual road map of the established blogging landscape. Without a doubt, there are omissions of deserving blogs in every category but, as a tool to advance the spread of business blogging, they have done the blog world a good deed.

Blogging longevity and previous blog notoriety seemed to score high marks in the selection process as a scan of the winners turned up many very established blogs. But, every category also seemed to possess one or two little-known titles. (At least little-known to me)

A scan of winners in the technology category, for instance, gives us a list that likely already appears in many a blogger’s RSS reader, mixed with one or two new finds.

• Slashdot
• BoingBoing
• Engadget   
• Gizmodo   
• Kuro5hin       
• Lifehacker       
• O’Reilly Network       
• Think Secret

       
The Forbes name carries with it some major credibility for the world of blogging and I, for one, can attest to the fact that this type of mainstream media exposure for business blogs is advancing the form and function of blogging at an increasingly rapid pace.

Good buddy Nick Aster, a great web designer and Movable Type jockey, who designed this site, as well as some Gawker Media properties and others, has just launched a blog with a conscience: TriplePundit, which he describes to me in an email as "geared towards MBA students and other interested people, and is a digest of daily information, oriented toward a triple-bottom-line (people, planet, profit) aproach to business."

I love that mission statement, both for its concision and its purpose. I just wish he’d post it to the site, as the current upper-left blurb doesn’t say it so well: "Bringing out the green in green: Triple Pundit is a daily serving of relevant, business focused news that will help you integrate the well-being of society & environment with success in business." (For one thing, I’d never heard the term "triple bottom line" before, though he writes about it like it’s something familiar; I do, however, LOVE the idea.)

In any event, way to have at it, Nick. Best of luck!

Link

Communication consultant Debbie Weil dings the executive bloggers at Boeing and GM for neglecting to comment on recent big negative news about their companies (CEO resigning in sex scandal and major drop in earnings forecast respectively).

She’s got a good point. It’s also probably the kind of scenario that freaks out most companies about blogging. But, as she points out, if you’ve got it, you might as well flaunt it (i.e., you’ve earned positive credibility with an audience of readers through these blogs, so you may was well use the channel to advance a positive interpretation of such bad news rather than ignore the elephant in the room).

Debbie Weil: GM & Boeing: Corporate “Tell-It-Not” Blogs

Tim Bray thinks the media obsession with bloggers getting fired for blogging is a crock. Rather, he makes a compelling argument that blogging is actually good for one’s career. He’s a posterboy for the idea himself; after being a prominent blogger for years stemming from his experience as an experienced technologist and entrepreneur, he was appointed Technology Director of Sun Microsystems last year, a company that now has several senior managers blogging.

Another case in point: Microsoft just announced its acquisition of Groove Networks, makers of a peer-to-peer-style employee knowledgement management system, whose founder CEO, Ray Ozzie, has now been appointed chief technology officer at Microsoft. Granted, Ozzie is well known in some circles for having founded Lotus Notes once upon a time, but he is also a revered blogger, although curiously he hasn’t posted to his once-popular blog in a year.