BlogHer was the best conference I’ve attended in some time. The participants were thoughtful and reflective and there was none of the chest-beating and posturing that you see at most conferences (is that a surprise?). Consider adding this conference to your schedule for next year. You won’t be sorry.

Instead of blathering myself, I thought I’d let the attendees do the talking this time. Here are some quick audio interviews with BlogHer participants chosen more or less at random.

Leah Jones

Accidentally Jewish

A recent convert talks about life in a new community.

Millie Garfield

My Mom’s Blog

80 years old w/attitude. Check out “I can’t open it!” Hilarious!

Erica

The Alternative

This intensely personal blog by a eating disorder sufferer helps others cope with similar problems.

Kristen Chase

CoolMomPicks.com

Displaced New Jerseyite relates slightly snarky tales of motherhood in the Mississippi delta. “It’s who I am.”

Tiffany Brown

TiffanyBBrown.com

Blogging has helped her programming career.

Corey Dennis

NotShocking

She’s a music marketer and serial blogger who thinks social media will change the world of marketing.

Whitney Brandt

The Ugly Green Chair

You’ll have to listen to the end to find out how this blog got its name.

The best thing about being a writer is that you get to sit at the feet of people who are doing incredible things. Yesterday was one of those opportunities, as I had the pleasure of interviewing Doug Kaye, the brain behind the Conversations Network, at his home in Marin Country.

Journalists are supposed to be impartial, but I have to admit my unabashed adoration for Doug and what he’s contributed to the Internet community. I have attended at least a half dozen conferences in the last year thanks to his work, and I never set foot at one of them. The work he is doing will forever change our expectations about access to information from great thinkers. That’s why I’m devoting a chapter of my book to him. Please read the draft. I’d appreciate your comments.

I read Media Post pretty relgiously because it does a good job of documenting changes across the industry. You didn’t have to do much more than read this morning’s headlines to see what’s going on. Check out this selection.

NBC Local Sites Tune In To CGM (Consumer-Generated Media)

Teen People Folds In Print, Remains Online

Forecast: Networking Sites’ Ad Revenue To Reach $1.86 Billion In 2010

Kelsey: Newspapers Should Bolster Online Alliances

All Vincent Ferrari wanted to do was cancel his AOL account. But he wound up in the tarpit of inept customer service. So Ferrari blogged and oh, how AOL now wishes he hadn’t. You can read this remarkable story of the power of viral marketing at the blog I write for Ziff-Davis.

Categories: Viral marketing, Blog

The first three-and-a-half chapters and three profiles of my book-in-progress, The New Influencers, are now online. These are draft chapters posted for your review and comments. I welcome all feedback. Thanks!

I mentioned in the previous post that teen-focused social-networking sites are searching for a business model. Apparently, they’ve found one: take your intellecdtual property. BoingBoing.net points out in this post that YouTube and MySpace have both revised their licensing terms to give them the privilege to redistribute the content you upload to their servers. If they are allowed to do that, then you should consider going here to buy YouTube subs. The terms differ from service to service, but the net effect appears to be that content you create can be liberated and reused for whatever reason – including in ads and promotions – without your consent and without compensating you.

Facebook is giving political candidates a chance to buy exclusive access to its audience of teens and college students. It’s a great idea and one that I think will become more common as social media sites become established.

Sites like MySpace, YouTube and Facebook have struggled with revenue models because their audiences, while vast, lack buying power. One path to building established businesses is to limit access to the sites and then charge advertisers a premium to reach those users. MediaPost’s Cory Treffiletti has an interesting analysis of the Facebook initiative that basically endorses this gated community concept (you have to register to read it).

The bottom line is that the days of open access and rapid growth may be numbered for new online communities. These services have experienced amazing growth rates over the last two years but they’ve done so using a very Web 1.0 approach, which is to throw everything open and try to build audience as quickly as possible. It’s very expensive to build infrastructure to handle that kind of growth and the logical next step may be to tighten up on qualification criteria and begin excluding users in the name of improving demographics. Facebook is gambling on that approach and it’ll be interesting to see if the business materializes to prove it right. One area of the economy that is still seeing robust growth is political contributions, so Facebook is certainly targeting the right market.

Speaking of gated communities, note that the Wall Street Journal is going to start selling ads on its front page. I guarantee you there was blood on the walls at the Journal’s offices over this decision. Journalists are very protective of prime editorial space and this concession to business realities must have been hard for a lot of editors to swallow. It’s another indication that all is not well in the print newspaper world. The New York Times will reduce its page size and lay off another 250 employees. The Times says about half the losses in editorial space will be made up by printing more pages but you know that isn’t so. Issue sizes are determined by ad sales and those are headed in the wrong direction. With less editorial space, there will be less space for the in-depth coverage that the Times provides. That coverage should move online, but knowing how the accountants at print publishers work, I suspect it’ll just lead to more layoffs.

Categories: Journalism, Social Media

I just returned from a week of Internet-deprived vacation to find that Dell has joined the blogosphere, and what a welcoming party it’s been!

In the 11 days since Dell launched the one2one blog, it’s received more scrutiny in social media land than the anti-abortionist who took an article in The Onion seriously. Having the benefit of a little hindsight by being late to the party, I have to give Dell credit for quickly fine-tuning its blogging voice to adjust to the early comments from critics.

If you look at Dell’s inaugural post on July 5, it looks like something created by the advertising department. Very promotional, very boring, very disappointing. Dell shoulda known better, really, after the drubbing it took last year from Jeff Jarvis and a band of sore customers.

The blogosphere was quick to respond. Jarvis ridiculed the effort as being too self-promotional. Fair enough. Steve Rubel said he was disappointed and invited Dell to join the conversation, not just talk at people. Both Jarvis and Rubel got their fair share of comments from Dell-haters, of whom there are apparently many.

I thought Nicholas Carr’s review was the most interesting, though. He upbraided Jarvis and Rubel for blogger smugness and pointed out that one2one is a conversation between Dell and its customers, not its blogger critics.

Carr nailed it. There’s a real risk of bloggers looking smug and insular now that their ship has come in and blogging is suddenly popular. A-listers like Rubel and Jarvis should be welcoming Dell to the conversation and offering gentle advice, not lashing it for cluelessness.

I suspect the decision to launch a blog was a very difficult and political one inside Dell. Last January, a Dell spokeswoman told me that there were no plans for a corporate blog, so this is a big turnaround. I’m sure Dell knew it was going to get plenty of feedback from customers when it went live and that it was going to be no small task managing that response. Customers certainly haven’t disappointed with their comments. Dell isn’t responding openly to many comments on the blog, but it’s possible they’re handling a lot of that offline. In any case, Carr is right that one2one is a conversation between Dell and its customers, not a Broadway show playing to critics’ reviews.

It’s true that Dell’s initial blog entries were weak but the company deserves time and patience to get it right. And the company is trying. On July 13, Dell’s Lionel Menchaca defended the company against criticisms that it isn’t listening. The same day, customer support director Laura Bosworth issued a rather remarkable confession about Dell’s support woes. And on Friday, Menchaca was back elucidating and elaborating on the blog’s commenting policy.

All in all, I think Dell came a long way in a week-and-a-half toward adapting its blog to the standards of the community. It launched its blog under a spotlight, made some quick adjustments and is demonstrating that it’s willing to listen. Jarvis has provided running commentary that is still on the shrill side. Steve Rubel came back with a positive and constructive attaboy.

Category: Corporate Blogging

Ford is taking openness to the next level in the innovative campaign. The company hired an award-winning documentary film crew and gave them unprecedented access to the behind-the-scenes world of Ford as the automaker struggles to reinvent itself. A new short video will be posted every week.

This certainly is a step toward transparency in a market that needs to reinvent itself. Among the quotes from Ford executives in the first episode:

“Maybe we didn’t care for as we should have.”
“We’re in trouble because we lost touch with the consumer. “
“It’s very easy in our own little offices to create our own idea about what it means to be competitive.”
“The auto industry is in a stage of major crisis…this is a company that really could go down.”
“Our pricing is irrational.”

These are Ford executives talking.

The video also features prominent headlines about auto industry losses and clips of its competitors’ cars and logos.

The home page is adorned with a headline ticker that this morning includes this: “Ford Motor’s June U.S. Auto Sales Decline 6.9% to 269,404.”

As advertising goes, this campaign certainly breaks the mold. It is startlingly honest. Ford deserves a lot of credit for trying it. The company reportedly is spending $50 million on the Bold Moves initiative.

Not that the site is perfect. The point-counterpoint columns on today’s home page aren’t really as controversial as they could be. And, as BL Ochman points out in an excellent post, the site’s commenting policies and disclaimers are excessive. The registration confirmation message also contains this strange line: “If you no longer wish to receive any email communications from Ford Division call 1-888-829-8149.” Huh?

But given how difficult it must be for a company to take a chance with a campaign like this, the product is remarkable. I’ll look forward to future weekly episodes.

Categories: viral marketing, corporateblogging

This is my first Gnomedex but certainly not my last. I haven’t been to a conference in years that was this relaxed, upbeat and even festive. It’s the most interactive event I’ve ever attended. The audience actively participates – even shouting out comments at times – and the speakers encourage feedback and conversation. It’s very Web 2.0.

It reminds me of the early days of the PC industry, circa mid-80s, when conferences like PC Forum had a kind of we’re-all-in-this-together camaraderie to them. That all changed with arrival of market growth, venture capital, profitability and winners and losers. That may well happen to social media, but let’s hope money doesn’t spoil all the fun. At this point, there’s a spirit of mutual support and shared purpose that hasn’t existed in the computer or Internet business for a very long time.

Categories: Gnomedex, blog_culture