Books, Blogs, and Beyond

Learning about the FTC Endorsements & Testimonials Guides at BlogPaws 2010

One of the coolest parts of working on the BlogPaws 2010 pet blogger conference has been connecting — or re-connecting — with some amazing people involved in the online pet community. That's especially true of the speakers! Today we released a preliminary speaker page, with keynotes including Charlotte Reed (check out her Pet Writing Conference coming up next week), our pet blogging buddy Dr. Larry McDaniel, and Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer.

I'm not going to list the other 18 (and counting) speakers here — that's not why you came — but one of them is Mary K. Engle, Associate Director for Advertising Practices at the FTC. She'll be speaking on a panel disussing "The Dos and Don'ts of Product Reviews." As part of putting together the speaker page, Mary sent me to a page on the FTC site where she's posted a set of videos discussing the FTC's Revised Endorsement and Testimonial Guides. In several of the videos, she speaks directly to how the Guides affect bloggers. Here's an example:

Fun Stuff and Big Ideas from OMMA Global 2009 in NYC

By Tom Collins

Quickly, over lunch, I'm going to share a few of my live Tweets from the sessions, Scott Monty's slides from his keynote yesterday morning, and a video that Terence Kajawa of GCA Savvion Advisors showed at yesterday's luncheon, to give you a flavor for the "radical" ideas floating around here. The theme is "The New Socialism" afterall.

From my tweets yesterday through this morning:

Digital Literacy is an Essential Part of Literacy

By Tom Collins

Yvonne and I had a wonderful dinner last night with our friend and client, Sybil Stershic, and her husband Mike. Sybil found us a quiet little Italian restaurant in Canandaigua, NY, Casa de Pasta, where the food and service were excellent ...

But I digress ... it's a part of the enjoyable conversation we had last night, combined with Gord Hotchkiss' Search Insider piece that hit my inbox this morning, The New Speed of Information, I logged in to write about.

More on Lawyers vs. Social Media

By Tom Collins

If you read the title of this post out loud quickly, you'll get an idea of my personal opinion about lawyers — and their clients — who take a "sue first and ask questions later" approach to the feedback they get from customers via social media. A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called A Blogger in Every Firm, in which I asked, 

"Whether businesses and business lawyers can/should continue to operate in a Web 2.0 world without becoming bloggers themselves, or having one on staff?

The uproar about a Chicago real estate company suing a tenant over her tweet implying there was mold in her apartment prompts me to update my opinion: I think every state should make it a mandatory CLE requirement for ALL lawyers to take a course on how social networks spread information and then participate in a blog, Twitter, or similar social media experience before being allowed to offer advice in this arena.

In the earlier post, I gave several examples where the lawyers' knee-jerk response of firing off a cease and desist letter seemed more likely to harm the clients' public image than accomplish anything positive. In the present case, here's the sequence of events:

16 Flavors of Social Media ROi

By Tom Collins

Yvonne and I spoke recently on social media to Paul Nelson's MBA class in Marketing at the Simon Graduate School of Business. I spent most of my segment talking about the business benefits of social media from a slide with this graphic:

 

This series will explore a multi-faceted approach to ROi that, I think, should drive everything from initial strategy and planning, to your day-to-day online interactions, to what you measure and what you do with the results. The focus is moved away from analytics, toward analysis. Away from automatically counting these and tracking those. Toward understanding how engaging in social media can create business value and then seeing whether your involvement needs course adjustment.

So, what are my 16 flavors?

Business Blogs: Build It and They Will Come

By Yvonne DiVita and George Kittredge

Roughly ten years ago, when businesses started to realize that they should have websites, and decided that they needed to hire professional website designers to build it - their thinking was, "Build it and they will come."

We are reminded of the 1989 movie, Field of Dreams, and that one great scene where James Earl Jones as Terrance Mann says, "People will come, Ray...And they'll pass over the money without even thinking about it."

Ah yes, being on the Internet held tremendous promise - all those millions of eyeballs gazing at your stuff. And they'll come and pass over the money. Many, many businesses jumped on the Internet band wagon and waited and...waited, and...waited, and some are still waiting.

Why Doesn't Anyone Comment on Your Blog? Maybe They're Hiding in the Honey Clusters.

By George Kittredge

This morning I read an excellent article on a website published by the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE). The title of the article was, "Why Doesn't Anyone Comment on Your Blog?" Although written last September and directed at non-profit organizations, the article is just as relevant today and applicable to the for-profit sector as well.

Apparently, association executives around the country are lamenting the fact that their association blogs attract very few comments. I have a feeling that a number of business executives and marketing gurus may have the same lament. Is this true of your blog? Maybe they're hiding in the honey clusters.

The authors of the ASAE article, Lindy Dreyer and Maddie Grant, focus in on this concern and offer what I think are five great tips to maximize potential blog comments. Here they are.

Department of Defense Recommends: "Embrace" Social Media

By Tom Collins

In today's emails I received two contrasting reports: a BtoB Magazine article entitled 'Fortune' 500 slow to adopt blogs as communication tools and a KMgov-list message linking to a new DoD study, Social Software and National Security: An Initial Net Assessment.

It may seem hard to believe, but it looks like business has a lot to learn from our military thinkers. The DoD study comes from Drs. Mark Drapeau and Linton Wells II at the National Defense University.

Their executive summary offers the following rationale for why engaging in social media has become essential to national security:

The "i" is little, but It's Essential to ROi from Social Media

By Tom Collins

I keep wondering if we'll ever get to the point where social media will be understood as a communication tool. Will people who "demand" an ROI analysis for their business to use social media get strange "how-long-have-you-been-off-planet" looks from everyone, just like they would if they said it about having a phone or an email address for your business?

But I digress. Go read the Forbes article, Yes, I'm a CEO Who Really Uses Twitter, by Communispace CEO Diane Hessan. Read it again. Print it out and pass it around.

It's full of lessons for how to get started in social media. Don't think of it just as a Twitter piece. Much of it applies to any social/business networking endeavor — even offline.

My ROi point here relates to the one investment that must be made in any business use of social media: time and attention. Small, but essential.

Here's a taste of what Diane says she — and her company — got out of her first six months using Twitter:

How Big is the Blogosphere?

By George Kittredge

The answer to this question in one word - BIG - and its getting bigger. But to give you an idea as to the size of the blogosphere, here are some statistics that may interest you.

Both Blog World Expo and Technorati report that there are over 70 million blogs in existence today. But even as I write this, the number is rapidly increasing. Blog World also reports that an unbelievable 120,000 blogs are being created every day - so we are adding over 3 million new blogs every month.

As for business blogs, the same report noted that 89% of companies surveyed said they think blogs will be more important in the next five years - so it appears that, at least on the professional level, blogs still have quite a bit of room to grow. It would be interesting to find out what the other 11% plan to do - obviously not much on the world wide web.

Technorati also had some interesting stats to share in their 2008 State of the Blogosphere report. Here are some of their findings.