The next Blog Business Summit is only a few weeks away now. The event is to be held in Chicago, 17-19 September, and its structure is an interesting reflection of how blogging in the business sector has evolved since the first Summit in January 2005 in Seattle. (NOTE: the Chicago event scheduled for September has been cancelled.)
The archives on the BBS site have blog posts going back to late 2004, but not, as far as I could see, other historical information such as the session and speaker listings. But thanks to the wonderful Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, I …read more

You could quote the old saying that imitation is the best form of flattery, but I feel neither flattered nor otherwise pleased when, as happened again a few days ago, I come across more of my blog posts reproduced in their entirety, without attribution, in another blog.
Gordon Finlayson at the Download Squad reports today on recent experience with this blog post piracy and observes that
…while linking and references may be the lifeblood of blogging, there’s a submerged undercurrent of blogs and Web sites looking to get something for nothing, sailing the high seas of the Blogosphere with a view to …read more

One of my favorite blogs is that of Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz. But the author clearly doesn’t want to be known as a “CEO blogger”.
His post “The Internet vs. Stone Tablets” was prompted by an enquiry from the media. A reporter asked him, as a “CEO who writes a blog”, to comment on a story about another chief executive who had admitted to posting comments under an assumed name in a stock market chat room (presumably this story).
Jonathan takes aim at the practice of identifying people like him as “CEOs who blog”, observing that we don’t talk about, for …read more

Darren Rowse has an interesting post today which might seem at first glance a bit esoteric for anyone other than dedicated bloggers, but which raises some important issues about how pleasing or otherwise the experience is for readers of blogs.
As Darren observes, the question Should Links Open in a New Window? is “an oldie but a goodie”.
The issue is whether to arrange that, when someone clicks on a link, a new window will open (or, in some browsers, a new tab – essentially the same effect). The idea is that the reader is then less likely to leave your blog …read more

One of the many benefits of maintaining a blog is that you have a way to publicly test out ideas about challenges you face in your business. That might seem odd to people who believe you should always be “up” in communicating with your customers and others in your industry.
Don’t share any challenges (a.k.a problems), that sort of thinking goes, because the market might downgrade its estimation of you, thus damaging your business.
For a blogger however, the idea of sharing challenges as they emerge can make perfect sense – after all, there might well be one or more readers who …read more

The morning television here gave us the visual on the just-launched logo for the London 2012 Olympics.
The first site my online search brought up was the BBC, which displays the image, with the explanation
The jagged emblem, based on the date 2012, comes in a series of shades of pink, blue, green and orange and will evolve in the run-up to the Games.
and quotes the organising committee chairman “Seb Coe” as declaring:
“This is the vision at the very heart of our brand”.
I presume he knows what that means. I find it obscure.
Seth is less than complimentary about Lord Sebastian Coe’s commentary.
And …read more

Today on the b5media business channel we are looking at the theme “work and play”.
I thought about virtual worlds, such as Second Life.
In an interview with me last December, Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book, asked me if I had tried Second Life. I hadn’t, and the question took me a bit by surprise, because we had been talking about blogging in a business context and here was Debbie asking me about – as I thought – online games with people “dressing up” and playing roles in a virtual world.
Since then I have come to realise that Debbie …read more

I used to think succession planning in business was essentially or primarily about having a process and a plan to replace the CEO when he or she moved on – or was moved on.
That was a while ago and shows that in fact I wasn’t thinking a lot about succession planning.
My friend Stephen Sandor, an insurance expert and Principal of Complete Cover, has helped me understand the importance of a more comprehensive approach to succession planning, and by no means just for corporations. It’s just as essential for the smallest “mom and pop” business as for the multinational corporation.
Not just …read more

The emphasis of this blog is on how blogging can work as part of an overall business strategy, especially for marketing and communications. Not so much on how to generate income directly from the blog itself.
However, the two are not incompatible. As well as having advertisements for its own products or services, a business could well decide that it made sense to run advertisements for other companies’ products or services, without that detracting from the blog’s purpose.
This needs to be handled with care, especially with contextual ads served dynamically by another party. I’ve had the situation more than once that …read more

I’m working with some colleagues on a couple of business initiatives and as a keen blogger I am naturally thinking about how to use blogs to help with the marketing.
And precisely because I am a blogger and I read and comment on other blogs, check my RSS readers regularly, listen to podcasts and am generally an engaged social networking, social computing person, I need to be careful not to project my interests and enthusiasms unthinkingly onto our target audience.
Some research would help.
So I was interested to pick up on a couple of blog posts about the Social Technographics® report issued …read more