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Minneapolis Chamber B2B Group Talk – 3/19/2008

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Hello,

Thank you again for the time you carved out this morning to listen to me pontificate about blogging and the social media space, and my hope is that you walked away with some value from your time and energy investment today.

With all my heart and soul I believe we’re living in a time of the biggest shift in human communication and connection any of us have ever experienced. Since so much of any sort of shift happens in tiny increments, it’s easy to go on about ones daily business and pay little attention to it. While it may take years for any material shifts to directly impact your livelihood, the Internet platform, social media, bandwidth, mobile access and more is not going to reverse itself and become less efficient and less powerful, but not paying attention or being engaged will certainly negatively impact your ability to compete and livelihood!

Since so many of you asked for next steps, resources and so forth, I thought I’d put together this page for you to access as well as comment below if you so desire. As always, feel free to email me at steve @ iconnectdots dot com (spelled out so the spambots can’t grab it!) or call my direct line at 952.486.7678 and we can discuss any strategic social media needs you may have and what I offer as a management consultant in the social media space.

Blogging
How do you get started?

1) Decide on why you’re blogging, what your focus would be, and to whom your blogging would be targeted…in other words craft a strategy for your blogging adventure.

There are a tremendous number of resources out there on the ‘net, and these are ones I think are the best to help you get started:

  • ProBlogger’s “Blogging for Beginners“. While this is a compilation of posts about blogging and is now two years old, there is great content here and most is free as are the links to other resources. I’ll refer again to our pals at ProBlogger since blogging is Darren Rowse‘s singular passion and he’s very good at it
  • Books: The first one is recommended and the others are optional:
    1. Though I rail against the “Dummies” series of books — since none of us
      are dummies…we just don’t know yet — this one is quite good Blogging for Dummies
    2. The New Rules of Marketing & PR is fabulous and will take you far beyond where I did at the outset of my talk about the “shift” occurring
    3. Though getting a bit “long in the tooth,” this is the book I mentioned about blogger Robert Scoble (key blogger with Microsoft at the time) that discusses the new transparency being driven by blogging and is called Naked Conversations

Two of you talked to me about justifications for blogging and while many exist from multiple sources, I brought up a video I’d seen from 2005 where Robert Scoble, then of Microsoft as a blogger and a videoblogger with their “Channel 9″ initiative, interviewed CEO Steve Ballmer who said this (higher quality video is here on the original post):


2) As part of your strategy creation for blogging, it’s important to understand the competitive landscape. Discovering this can be as simple as doing blog searches and seeing who, if any, other folks are already blogging about your topic, industry or boundary pushing thought leadership you’re bringing to the world.

Search engines include:

3) Tools abound but there are key ones that I’d recommend you look at in order to get started:

  • During my talk, I mentioned that I use Typepad for my blogging at the Pro level for $150 per year (pricing here) and chose them since my start in blogging saw me wanting to focus on the content and not the software, and they were the solution I was willing to bet my blogging future upon.

The parent company is SixApart which started Typepad after the initial success of Movable Type, the software engine underlying Typepad, which is available as an open source download or as enterprise-class software with the service and support many organizations demand. They’re stable, solid and have a good user experience for a blogging tool.

  • Blogger, now part of Google, is another free service with many advantages and also has the integration and free Web services might behind it from their Internet juggernaut parent company.
  • For more information on these and other blogging platform tools, review this USC Annenberg page on blogging tools and this accompanying chart (mostly relevant…but this is from 2005 but is a nice comparison and worth viewing).

NOTE: Your big decision with a platform is the answer to this question: is my blog stand-alone or part of my Web site? This will help you narrow your choice as will this second question: Will the stand-alone providers give me a design/template I like and am willing to use, or do I need 100% design control since design will be one of my differentiators?

One benefit to hosted is that you can do what I did when I started: focus on
content instead of futzing with the software. The only downside is that I sometimes need complete customization and
integration flexibility by using downloadable and installable software (like we will be doing with Minnov8.com built on WordPress which is installed on one of my servers),
but this group struck me as folks more interested in just using the
blog value container for its value and impact.

4) In case you didn’t jot any of them down, here are links to other content from slides I delivered today:

  • Cluetrain Manifesto: Still amazes me how many people keep finding this book, reading it and proudly proclaiming how they’ve just “climbed aboard the cluetrain”
    since it makes more sense today than at the beginning of the Internet. You can also read it for free here
  • Discussion of “cloud computing” and all the Web 2.0 hosted application out there. The site I referred to is Go2Web20.net and its links will amaze you once you realize the volumes of Web applications
  • My own Rise of the Participation Culture report — originally published in November of 2006 and has seen >11,000 downloads of the PDF and nearly 8,000 of the Web version — is currently undergoing a refresh and is offline…except for you and you can get it here for free
  • Blog “feed readers” allow you to find the RSS or “feed” link on a blog and “subscribe” to that feed in one of these (and many other) feed readers. Then, whenever a new post gets published and hits those “ping servers” I discussed, the reader automagically sees that it’s available and refreshes itself and the new article appears. Readers mentioned include: Google Reader; Newsgator
  • I mentioned authentically placing comments under posts and, if appropriate, pasting in a link to one of your posts (or your web site) so people can find you within the context of another person’s post. Managing all of these comments is a challenge BUT you can do it one place, with one dashboard, at this site: coComment

The data above is by no means a comprehensive or total list. But I’m confident it will “get you in the game” and playing vs. being on the sidelines with a hot dog and a beer as the action takes place.

As I’ve seen individuals carve out thought leadership positions and make major leaps forward in their careers due to blogging; to companies that have turned around a sinking PR ship like Dell did; I believe that being competitive in today’s marketplace means using, embracing and figuring out how to best leverage social media tools is “table stakes” to be in today’s increasingly Internet-centric game. Blogging is the easiest stake to get you started whether metaphorically you use it to “ante up” or think of that stake as something you stick in the ground as a goal to strive toward.

Steve2_sig