I don’t have much to add to that conversation, so I figure I’ll send over a recent post by Shel Israel about being human while business blogging. It’s something we’ve talked about before, our department’s dependency on marketese (“solutions” and “best in class”), and how that’s never going to fly if we want to start blogging.

In the past, she has professed to be in 100% agreement. The only problem is our leadership, which is very risk averse and in love with dry, one-sided messaging. If she had it her way, we’d be honest, open and all the other things you’re supposed to be in communicating with your market in the world 2.0.

Anyway, I send the link over and receive this wonderful response.

Thanks for sharing this info. Its always helpful to broaden our perspective
--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

If you look at the sources linked above, you’ll notice that they’re all geeks posting on blogs about blogging (except the New York Times, of course, which is writing about geeks posting on blogs about blogging). My question for everyone so concerned with this is how much has Web 2.0 penetrated average Americans’ homes and lives? Sure, Flickr and del.icio.us have lots of members, and not only that, many of those members are passionate about the tools. But, does that passion make up for the fact that probably 90 percent of America (think about most people’s parents) would give you a blank stare if you told them you’d put your Christmas photos on Flickr, or to search for something on del.icio.us instead of Google (or, more likely, “in the top bar on Internet Explorer”).

Case in point. I got a dog recently. (She’s wonderful, by the way.) I wanted to see what kinds of dog resources were out on the Web. Forums, cool sites, blogs, whatever. I tried Google, but not surprisingly, got lots of commercial sites and stuff that was more interested in making a buck than fostering dog-owner communities. So I tried some del.icio.us searches. Without saying anything more, take a look at the “popular” pages tagged “dog.” Yes, anecdotal, but it’s the kind of thing I see repeated over and over on Web 2.0 sites.

I think before we start debating if this is a boom or a bubble, we should look at just how big Web 2.0 actually is. I think it has vast potential, but right now, it doesn’t have the breadth that Bubble 1.0 ever had, where Mom and Dad were day-trading on E*Trade and dinner table conversation was about how so-and-so’s son got a job working in Silicon Valley right out of college and is pulling down at least six figures.

I couldn’t find who designed the site, but kudos to them. I’m perhaps unhealthily obsessed with using and adapting WordPress to serve as a CMS (they’ve released forum software based on WordPress now, bbPress, will they ever just break down and create a non-blog CMS?) and this is only furthering that obsession.

The Keys’ site puts categories to work in an innovative way, which is what makes the different feeds easily manageable. It also uses some nice plugins to pull in fan photos from Flickr (and from the number of cell phones I saw being used to take pictures at the Keys’ concert in Minneapolis last night, they have no shortage of fan-created content). They also mix in pages for more static content, but it’s all very seamless.

I’d love to see the backend of the site. I would hope the designers did a little something to make the content management process easy-to-use. Even if they didn’t, I’ve found most anyone can create and maintain content pretty easily with WordPress’ dashboard… everything you need to do is no more than one or two clicks from the landing page.

In a way, WordPress and The Black Keys are a logical fit. This is the same band who, after getting a lucrative record deal with Warner Bros. imprint Nonesuch, recorded their new album where they always have, in drummer Patrick Carney’s basement:

“DIY” to the Black Keys means DIB: Do It in the Basement. Instead of leveraging their new record deal into a monthlong stay at some fancy hi-fi studio, Carney and singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach recorded the entire album downstairs at Carney’s house in Akron.

The CD sleeve for “Magic Potion” features hilarious photos of a microphone stand emerging from a laundry tub, and a drum kit set up between the washer and dryer. Kenmore, it looks like.

Minneapolis Star Tribune (free subscription required)

• MySpace
• Private off-topic forum
• Boundary Waters forum
• Fly Fishing forum
• Several blogs I frequently read and comment on (mostly on Blogger)
• Flickr
• Del.icio.us
• LibraryThing
• Google
  • Gmail
  • Reader
  • Orkut

I don’t know what it all means, and lots of people are trying to figure out what it does and how we might have persistent identities on the Web someday, but for now it’s just something to think about.

Ultimately, it was not the ideal place to wait for results to come in: it was too loud and the only way to get results was by watching some MPR geek surfing the Web on a projector above the stage or CNN on the flatscreens next to the stage.

We did run into an old friend and his wife who we literally haven’t seen for six or seven years. I talked with Mike quite a bit. He’s been working for a public affairs firm doing a lot of online advocacy work and is about to start up his own consulting business, aimed at the niche of higher education using social media for advocacy. Yes, there’s a market there, and yes, I think he’s going to do well at it.

We talked briefly about the work I do with a small environmental non-profit. As chair of the communications committee, I recently helped launch a new Web site for the group. It was a long time coming and very generously donated by a Web designer. It was a project well underway before I got involved with the group and there are some things I wish we could have done differently, but it works for now. I’d like to redesign it, but I think I’m going to focus on trying out a blog, a wiki, or both, first.

This non-profit is focused on the conservation of one of Minnesota’s crown jewel parks and the group’s membership and potential membership is mostly people who love the park. How great would a wiki about the park be? We are constantly seeking ways to engage our membership and engage people who love the park but aren’t members (but who should be). Part of our mission is to “promote” the park and the Web site’s primary mission is to provide information about it.

A wiki would engage our membership and potential membership and provide valuable information and promotion for the park, at minimal cost to the cash-strapped organization.

I went in with high hopes, though I’m not sure why. Ragan seminars typically try to be something for everybody and, because of that, end up appealing to a low common denominator. I’m not saying the lowest because I always get a little out of it so obviously they occasionally venture into territory that’s above me, which frankly isn’t much of an altitude to achieve.

Anyway, most of the value of this seminar was restricted to the first half, before the moderator breathlessly asked them to “tell the Letterman story.” It was a good primer of YouTube and how businesses might use it. Perhaps my high hopes were most sustained by the presenters’ early emphasis on the idea that we can’t exploit the communities or the idea of viral campaigns.
Coming from the corporation that I do, I’m always afraid of being party to the next big Web 2.0 faux pas, where we try to force some viral campaign or respond in a real nasty way to some social media and it ends up on Boing Boing and Digg a million off-topic forums and blogs. “Look at these evil bastards,” they’ll say, and there goes me ever putting this job on a resumé.

I digress. Gotta stop doing that. Anyway, our presenters took the idea that marketers can’t exploit the viral a step further by actually stating that we have a responsibility to protect communities like YouTube. Perhaps it’s selfish, that we just need to protect them so they are still viable when we want to use them again, but whatever you have to say to get the point across, because social communities are important and only becoming more important, and that they can exist in a somewhat mainstream way while still exercising a great deal of sovereignty is a fragile phenomena.

And why are they a viable medium for communicators? Because it gives voice to people who are just like the people watching. And it’s been said many a time that people don’t trust advertising, they trust people that are like them.

I think Capstrat was right today when they said that these communities will not adapt to the marketers, it must be the other way around. But what if the marketers don’t adapt but keep hammering at the communities? They’ll flee. The Web is transient, and that topic didn’t come up today but it’s certainly something to consider when looking at the Google/YouTube deal. What’s to say all those people are going to stay there? I think they probably will for the most part, but YouTube won’t enjoy its disproportionate following for long, mark my words.

Then Capstrat departed into the “Letterman story” and I lost interest. I kept waiting for the punchline, the metric, the result, and they kept saying they achieved that result but it was merely more hits to their site (which I suppose is a good thing and not a bad result of a pretty cheap campaign) and awareness, which is not really not much of an objective at all. In any case, I couldn’t help watching the video of their Post-it project and wondering about how many potentially-billable hours all those people spent in time-elapse.

As Ragan hosts these seminars and as trade magazines have more cover stories about public relations and marketing in the Web 2.0 world, the unscrupulous or the merely confused will come out of the woodwork and there will be more horror stories about cease and desist letters and companies trying too hard to be funny and irreverent and only making themselves come off as pathetic, and ultimately, of companies trying to play the game while still controlling the message in all their old ways.

Ed comes from a business unit that my department has struggled to break of an addiction to press releases.

As Ed described his market, how their efforts were segmented to best penetrate the areas deemed most profitable, and who they were competing with, I began to understand his world a little better, and I began to see some possibilities.

Venus has a decent market share of a market in which there is one other product produced by another large corporation, and many small products that are often the sole product of small businesses. As it turns out, those small businesses use their size to their advantage, namely in the churning out of press releases.

Because Venus is one product in a large corporation made up of many businesses and many products, they are required to abide by the corporation’s rules about press releases, rules that my department is left to enforce at times. The rules of the corporation dictate that small feature releases do not warrant a press release, nor do upgrades in technology, buying a new server, signing a $50,000 contract, or any number of things which they would love to announce to the media, but which they can’t, and which their competitors do all the time.

Customers read this news from the competition in the trade pubs or on their list servs or hear about it from the competition’s sales reps and they go to Venus’ Web site and click on the “news” link to see if they too have announced such a thing recently but all that’s on the news page is the corporate-permitted releases. Not very many of them, and about news much larger than the release of a new small feature.

So Venus’ sales reps go into these customers’ and the customers say, “Well, competitor X just announced feature Y… do you have that feature?” The rep says, “Yes, in fact we launched feature Y eight months ago, and have actually since enhanced it with Z.”

It’s a big hassle and puts the reps on the defensive and all manner of bad things, which, to some degree, negatively impact revenue. (Which, by the way, brings me to a joke that Ed shared with us, “When I started in marketing, my boss at the time told me, ‘There’s one thing thing you need to know about sales reps, Ed… they’re coin-operated.”)

So, what is that news page missing on Venus’ Web site? More press releases about smaller news? Maybe, but that’s not going to happen as long as this huge corporation is worried about diluting itself and its message. What I think is missing is a blog. Or two.

The media would love it. There are reporters out there working for the trade pubs in this space who want to know every little thing, every little release. But they get hundreds of press releases. Give them RSS, let them “pull” the news they want, make them happy.

And let those customers, who live and work with this product every day, know everything that’s going on. Heck, you might even engage them a little bit so the next time a friendly sales rep from competitor X calls on them and says, “Well, we have feature F,” the customer won’t fire up their browser and go to look at Venus’ Web site to see if they have some sort of response. Instead, they might turn to the sales rep and say, “Yeah, but do you have a blog?”