I met with a team from a major technology company this week to talk about their interest in launching corporate blogs. They’re skeptical and they had some good questions. Here are my responses:

I can’t even read the industy publications I already get. Who’s got time for blogs?
Information overload is a problem for everyone in business. The blogosphere only adds to the crush. The thing to remember is that it’s not how many people read your blog, it’s who reads it. One very important constituency is reporters and analysts. If you’re the head of an influential, publicly held industry company, I guarantee you the press and Wall Street will read your blog. That makes a blog an ideal place to float ideas, spin current events and communicate good news that these influencers might otherwise miss.

There’s also a huge disparity between the great mass of blogs on the Internet and the ones that really get read. There are no definitive numbers, but I’d guess that the vast majority of blogs get daily readership in the double digits. However, the leaders count hundreds of thousands of daily visitors. If you know how to build audience, you can generate tremendous traffic in a fairly short period of time. If you do it right, you actually can put up big numbers.

The people who read blogs are mainly teenagers and people with lots of time on their hands.
I think that was more true a couple of years ago than it is now. The explosion of popularity and media interest in blogging has driven a lot of business people to test the water and I’ve got to believe they like what they see. Again, reliable statistics are hard to come by, but when you look at the number of really busy, influential people who are actively blogging, you have to assume there’s a reason for that.

The blogosphere is still developing its own self-organizing principles but link-popularity engines and RSS feeds are improving and enabling readers to separate wheat from chaff. It takes a few minutes each day to check for new content via RSS and blog content is becoming almost indistinguishable from CNN in the indexing services that people already use. I think blogs will simply become part of the fabric of Web news that people are already monitoring. To the reader, it won’t matter what the source is as long as the content is useful.

Does the CEO have to blog?
Not necessarily. It depends on your strategy. Microsoft clearly chose not to have blogs by Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. That’s because the company was interested in promoting smart employees and actually reducing some of the focus on the company leaders.

At the other end of the spectrum, Bob Parsons at GoDaddy.com has used his blog very effectively. Parsons is a dynamic leader and GoDaddy was very interested in promoting his personality and opinions in a market that is perceived as being bland and undifferentiated. Different strokes.

The one bit of advice I’d offer is that if your CEO is going to blog, he/she has got to be committed to it and has got to have something to say. The worst thing you can do is put out corporate oatmeal or update your blog once a month. You’re actually going to hurt yourself more than help your cause if you do that.

How should we choose company bloggers?
Again, it depends, but the basic rule should be to select people who line up with your company strategy. If you’re trying to expand your partner channel, look to people who manage partner relationships. If your company has a product quality problem, then maybe your developers or engineers should do the talking. If there are rumors that the company is in trouble, the CEO can use the soapbox to demonstrate leadership.

The most important thing, though, is to choose people who have something to say and who can express their opinions persuasively and constructively. Blather and tirades won’t help you. Look for debaters and articulate writers.

Really? What about people who can’t write well?
Oh, you mean the developers! 🙂

Seriously, good writing skills are not a necessity in some fields. People with strong technical skills who can speak the language of their communities can do just fine without having an English degree. However, you do need to match the author to the audience. I’d suggest that a marketer who can’t write is not a good candidate for blogging. On the other hand, a farmer who speaks in plain language and has passion for his work might be just what your company image needs.

Libsyn: Podcast Audience Tops 45 Million

The podcast hosting provider says the most popular podcasts get more than 100,000 daily downloads, but the 3,800 podcasters who work with the network get a total of about 1 million daily impressions, which is an average of less than 30 per program.

The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago.

That’s not hyperbole, it’s Technorati’s quarterly blog report. The blogosphere continues to double every six months. Technorati says the number of blogs it monitors has increased more than 16-fold in two years, from 2 million to 34.5 million.

These are impressive numbers, but they aren’t going to continue to go up forever. At some point, in fact, the blogosphere will decline as existing bloggers let their diaries go fallow. That’s when things really get interesting. Growth is exciting, but periods of consolidation are when people and organizations really make sense of something new. Any guesses on when that’s going to happen? My bet is within the next two years.

Red Hat to buy JBoss for at least $350M – Computerworld

So Red Hat is going to be a consolidator rather than being consolidated. It would be interesting to see an industry giant emerge with a pure open-source pedigree. It’s also interesting to see how quickly these open-source companies are getting snapped up. Some of them only got funding in the last year. No one’s waiting for this market to develop independently. They’re buying in before they have a chance to get swamped by new competition.

Check out this rather remarkable example of corporate self-flagellation at Microsoft. Port 25 is a new blog launched by the open source development group within Microsoft (there really is one, though less than 10 people). The director of the group, Bill Hilf, posted an introduction on March 28 and explained what the blog was all about. He invited comments and that’s surely what he got: over 400 comments in two weeks.

Many of the comments are the usual venomous anti-MS spew by Linux zealots. Why these people think they’re advancing their cause through name-calling and insults is beyond me. Anyway, they rage away on this blog and Microsoft just lets it all sit there for the world to see.

If you had told me five years ago that corporations would invite their worst critics to insult them and then publish the insults on the corporate websites, I never would have believed it. But there it is.

Also note Microsoft’s response to the critics. It’s calm and reasoned and not at all defensive. Good move. Not the comments following the response. They’re much more reasonable, too. BTW, Sam should really identify himself. We have no idea who this Microsoft guy is other than he looks good in a bike helmet.

Firefox market share passed 10%. That doesn’t seem like much, but it’s a near doubling in the last 18 months. Some weird variation of Moore’s Law here? 🙂

The question is when Firefox becomes a problem for MS. I think it already is. The issue isn’t total share but who’s got da buzz. The Firefox users I know are computing enthusiasts who’ve taken the time and trouble to download, install and learn how to use a new browser when IE was sitting right their on their desktop. Firefox’s barrier to entry is really quite high, which makes the 10% penetration all the more notable. I’d also presume that those 10% are the kind of demographic Microsoft would really like to have.

On the other hand, since the “stable” 1.5 release of Firefox came out, I’ve experienced more freezes, crashes and weird behavior in Firefox than in Internet Explorer. Maybe success = feature creep = bloatware. It happened with IE.

InformationWeek’s Johanna Ambrosio writes about a new GM campaign for the Chevy Tahoe that invites website visitors to create their own commercials and enter a contest. The social networking experiment has had mixed results.

To date, 20,000 ads have been created with about 20% of them negative, a GM spokeswoman says. GM says it’s leaving the ads slamming the SUV on the site along with the positive ones. It’ll be interesting to which ones get mailed around the ‘net. My guess is that a lot more than 20% of the e-mailed ads will be parodies than love letters.

Give GM credit for being willing to take its lumps on this idea. Marketers had to know that they were taking a gamble when they put a massive SUV out for a social marketing experiment just as gas was being forecast to hit $3/gallon this summer. It was the proverbial waving of the red flag in front of the bull. And some SUV critics are taking the bait. Check out this one. It’s funny, but probably not the kind of viral marketing GM wants.

You gotta give a company credit for taking a risk, though. GM could hunker down and play defense but in its current situation, that’s not going to go very far. Good for GM.

I just submitted a 2,700-word package on the state of social media to BtoB Magazine.Here are some summary thoughts based on my research:

We’ve seen this all before –Social media (mainly blogs and wikis) today is uncannily similar to the Internet of a decade ago: there’s intense user activity, with growth rates of more than 100% per year. Users are experimenting with all kinds of new ideas. Some businesses are rushing in to play. Most are hanging back, though, trying to figure out where the payback is. Almost no one is making much money. It’s wild and chaotic and lots of fun, but there’s not much structure to it. That will all change, of course.

ROI is a huge issue –the number one question I hear from businesses about social media is where’s the payback? I don’t have a good answer for that, and, apparently, neither does anyone else. There are lots of intangible benefits, such as career advancement and visibility, but those factors don’t wash with corporate marketers, who are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the return on everything. This will be a problem for social media in the short term, but I believe ROI will become more evident with time. They simply will be no choice but to play here. And that fact will tend to overwhelm any resistance based on financial factors.

The business benefit so far is just listening –several Internet startups are generating good revenue streams by the monitoring and interpreting what’s being said in the blogosophere and elsewhere.Business assigns a value to this and is willing to pay for.They know that focus groups cost a fortune and the blogosphere is a giant, free focus group. They’ll pay good money to take advantage of that.

RSS is the killer app – usage rates are still very low – on the order of 10% – but RSS is the killer technology of social media. The other day, a friend told me about a new technology that embeds RSS feeds in advertising banners to deliver up-to-date within the ads themselves. This is just one iteration of RSS that could change fundamentally the way we distribute information. RSS tracking services are springing up that provide a rich trove of information that clickstream analysis can’t.

However, RSS has got to get easier to use. Cutting and pasting URLs into news readers is primitive and will hold RSS back from wider adoption. But I think everyone knows that, and we should leave it to smart technologists to figure out solutions. The killer app may be some future iteration of a reader that we haven’t even considered. Something has to give this technology the “wow!” factor that it so richly deserves.

Corporations are treading carefully for good reason–I asked in an earlier post why we don’t see more prominent corporate bloggers. I think the reason is that a lot of corporations don’t see the need to blog in the first place. They’re paranoid about controlling their corporate message and they see no benefit to casting off that control in the name of transparency or approachability. This idea might have seemed old school in the pre-compliance day, but corporations are under such intense pressure these days to document and track every single thing they say that I can see that the blogosphere would look to them like a black hole. I’ve talked to some business leaders who are doing very innovative things in social media but who see no for them or their executives to blog. I can’t argue with that thinking.Until the benefits are self-evident to corporations, corporate blogging will not happen in a big way.I believe that will happen, but probably because some business will turn a blog into a big financial windfall and everyone else will feel obligated to follow suit.

Podcasting is the low-hanging fruit –businesses will pay to market on podcasts before they pay to market on blogs. That’s because they understand radio and podcasting’s similarity to it. Emarketer expects podcasting advertising to reach $80 million this year. I’d be surprised if blogs are that big or growing that fast. Certainly, on a CPM basis, they look like the better opportunity.

There is a shadow blogosphere that very few people know about – in recent weeks I’ve come across blogs devoted to manufacturing, engineering, process control, environmentals, energy exploration, supply chain optimization and many other business topics.I wouldn’t have found many of these blogs through conventional channels.I can then follow link paths from one blogger to another.I’m not sure why these blogs aren’t more widely known, but they represent the biggest opportunity for b-to-b marketers to take advantage of social media. Marketers have the expertise to develop their own market-specific expertise and capture the high ground of customer attention. They just need to bring news of the existence of the channel to other interested people.

Bottom line: there’s no doubt in my mind that social media is going to be a huge disruptive force in the way we consume information.Its impact will not be welcome in all segments of business and society, but it will ultimately be a very good thing. Users are way ahead of businesses in the adoption cycle, but that won’t last for long.The inevitable backlash against social new-media is already beginning, and will continue for a while.In the meantime, businesses will “get” the concept and start to spend intelligently on these new channels.And when that happens, watch out.

Ironically, social media’s future looks most promising just as the naysayers are begging to predict its demise.

Debbie Weil writes in BlogWrite for CEOs about the decision by noted bloggers Dave Winer and David Allen to retire from blogging. I guess you could take this as a warning bell that the influence of blogs is declining but I prefer to think of it as more of a “mission accomplished” thing. Blogging is a lot of work. Steve Rubel recently told me that he spends about 20 hours a week on his blog, an ungodly commitment for a busy executive. Winer is broadly credited with having kicked off the blogging craze almost 10 years ago. His activity level is astonishing and I can see where he may have just decided that it was time to move on. David Allen, well, he doesn’t need the work. Good luck to them both.

Speaking of Steve Rubel, reports that he is leaving Edelman to join forces with foe Jeremy Pepper are all over the blogosphere. But be sure to check out the date on these posts, folks. 😉

Wikia raised $4 million in series A funding. It’s not a huge amount but it’s a start. Wetpaint raised $5.25 million late last year, which means there are now four venture-backed companies in the market.

Still, is there a market there? The Seattle PI quotes Philip Evans of Boston Consulting Group saying “Almost by definition, there isn’t a business making wikis, because they get made by the users. You could sell wiki software, but there is so much of that around for free that you would be hard-pressed to make a business out of that.”

It’s a good point. Wikis are cool because they’re so simple. A lot of what gets done these days in expensive groupware or content management systems can really be handled by a wiki. Venture money is used, in part, to develop product functionality. But the more bells and whistles you add to a wiki, the more it gets to look like a complicated content management system.

And there are more than 300 open-source wikis out there, which makes getting started in the commercial market a challenge. I guess we’ll know soon, but this looks like a low-dollar proposition to me.