I walked in late to a session on business blogging hosted by blogger and Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner. Panelists were:

Here are my rather stream-of-consciousness notes on the discussion

Kirsner asks: “Why do you blog?”

Responses include:
Hyatt: It fills the space between press releases
Sabet: Great way to communicate with colleagues across the country
Hyatt: We have 10 employees nd four of them blog. We have internal editors go over all the entries. It may sound weird, but my opinion is that anyone who’s writing for the NY Times is writing on behalf of the NY Times. We want anything we release to be collective.

Kirsner says (jokingly) that the Globe probably hasn’t noticed his blog yet. I didn’t want to wait six months to start writing it. To have the Globe logo on the blog has issues of oversight and I don’t want that. I think I have the same standards for the blog as for the column, but there are things you can post there that you can’t put in the column. In other words, he applies journalistic standards, but is a little freer about language on the blog.

Jimmy Guterman notes that Kirsner’s blog voice is more engaging than his Globe voice. One of the appealing things about corporate blogs is that they better reflect the voice of the writer.

Don Dodge says 60% of his traffic comes from Google. He could write what he writes on a corporate website and wouldn’t get anywhere near that traffic. “For anyone starting a company, I would highly recommend that you blog. You will get far more juice from that than from having a company website.”

Dodge worked at Alta Vista at one point and knows about search. Some blogs get searched every hour and some get indexed once a week or once a month. Frequency of update relates to search engine performance (something I was unaware of).

Barb Heffner says her agency treats bloggers generally as they do other journalists.

Kirsner asks who’s more powerful: TechCrunch or the WSJ? Barb says Journal is an enterprise sell and TechCrunch is a consumer sell. Both powerful in their own way.

Audience member notes that you should read the blog before sending an e-mail to a blogger. “It’s extraordinary the number of e-mails I get who haven’t read my blog. From that perspective, there’s no difference between a journalist and a blogger.” Heffner says good PR practices apply equally in the blogosphere.

Don Dodge tells of bumping into Robert Scoble, who had two suggestions: put your name in the title and put your picture on the blog. “Those two things made an amazing difference. If your picture isn’t there, you can walk down the halls and no one will know who you are. If your picture is there, everyone knows who you are.”

Bijan Sabet says one of his favorite blogs is Flickr. Every now and then he wants to quick Flickr, but the genuineness of the blog keeps him coming back. He says he just invested in a company where the founder decided not to use PR but to use a blog instead. They wrote all their entries last week and were ready to go, but the bloggers picked it up before the embargo ended. “we’ve had a fair share of press releases that have gone out on the wire and I don’t see much return from that. We had one investment company get picked up on Engadget and got a 14:1 return versus a mention on TechCrunch.”

Barb Heffner warns against ghost-writing CEO blogs.

Nabeel notes that a lot of technologists aren’t great writers, and that’s why they need some oversight and editing. We’ve got people who are great and passionate in front of an audience, but when he sits down to write, he’s pretty timid.”

Dan Bricklin notes that not everybody writes well, but maybe they should be doing podcasts. That’s part of the job of marketing and PR people: figure out what’s the best way to get the message across. He cites a great podcast by the head of the US Navy. If you listened to it, you wouldn’t be surprised by what he said to the press.

Scott Kirsner asks how metrics-obsessed people are…

Author of 93South blog says he bought an iPhone so he could check his traffic while driving. “I used to check two or three times a day, but I’ve learned over the past six months to let go because I’m not doing it for traffic. I’m doing it to speak.”

Guterman notes that metrics are misleading. They tell you different things. “It’s as misleading as an author who writes a book and then starts checking his Amazon ranking 30 times a day. There’s a lot of talk about authenticity, but people confusing authenticity with spontaneity. Don’t think of a blog as a way to get around having to think about what you’re writing.”

Audience member George Jenkins writes a blog about identity theft. “I write because I’m passionate about the subject. I’ve had a lot of fun meeting people through the blog. I know that people from IBM visit my site (he worked at IBM at one time) but they’re reluctant to comment.”

Scott Kirsner tells of an executive taking him to task for something he said on the blog. He spoke to the exec on the phone and recommended the guy comment on the blog but it was clear that the exec was uncomfortable doing that.

Bijan says he has a Technorati addiction. “Blogging software is still one-way, it’s not two-way enough. We need to surface links from one blog to another.”

An audience member from Sphere asks whether people are using widgets to drive traffic.
Bijan says widgets are useful for driving traffic. “I’ll put them on my site for a while to see if people are engaging with them.”

Nabeel Hyatt says that when his company recently did A-round funding, they posted on a blog instead of issuing a press release. “We saw a ton of traffic, and by watching the inbound link, we learned of small competitors we had never seen before. Perhaps they thought no one was watching, but I was.” He says he’s addicted to MyBlogLog for its widget that tells who’s coming to the site. There’s about a 5% higher return rate from visitors who like to see their faces there.

Bijan says he’s seeing 3-4% CTR from Feedburner. He signed up to be an Amazon affiliate, so he does a lot of geeky product reviews (gives the money to charity). That leads to a few good-sized transactions every month.

A discussion ensues about taking gifts from businesses, quid pro quo and disclosure. Don Dodge tells of meeting Patriots owner Bob Kraft at a conference, ending up with free tickets to a Patriots game and still writing a critical article about the Patriots.

Guterman says disclosure isn’t enough. Just revealing your affiliations doesn’t excuse extreme bias. You can’t assume people notice your disclosures. Don’t let yourself be influenced and don’t take the graft.

Sabet notes that people come to his blog to read about the companies he’s funding and he sees no problem with promoting those companies. “You have to give the reader credit. The reader isn’t assuming that the venture capitalist isn’t biased.”

Discussion turns to most popular topics. Don Dodge notes that one of his most popular was about 1% of the search market being worth $1 billion. But the number one post of all time was a reference to a porn video site, although watching porn is not that safe anymore, since there are information about porn induced erectile dysfunction which could be a real issue for many. “I know how to get a lot of traffic if I wanted to, but I don’t do it for that reason.” Tr

affic alone isn’t that important to him.

Dan Bricklin says some things lend themselves to video. He went to see Vern Rayburn, who’s got a factory that makes jets. “The only way to really show people was to take the video and let people hear Vern’s voice. Sometimes the short, two-minute form is what you need.” Kirsner says it’s hard to drive traffic to Internet video.

Dodge says we’ve been conditioned to professional standards by TV. Your standards are high. Most people who try to do video on a blog stink compared to TV.

Kirsner says the most watched video on YouTube is Evolution of Dance, which was filmed by an amateur and looks it.

Dodge says he tried to convince Robert Scoble not to go to video. He’s a great blogger, but when he went to video, his traffic fell to 10%.