Janet Johnson and Robert Scoble at the Blog Business Summit
- Marqui paid bloggers to talk about the company
- Received a lot of bad press, was called lots of nasty names
- Positive or negative feedback aside, it did raise the level of brand awareness
- Develop a thick skin, be absolutely honest, have a point of view, do your research, engage detractors, drive to closure on topics
- Pitching bloggers: build a relationship by sending information that's not about your company, then pitch the blogger
- Some bloggers don't want anything from PR people
- Never act like you're entitled to a link
- Marqui now focuses more on blogging themselves instead of paying bloggers
- Steve Rubel gets his companies stories into the blog world by being a resource for information first, and inserting messages from the companies every 10 or 20 posts
- Microsoft product teams are changing the way they develop products based on the feedback they get from customers on the blogs they run
- Simply Hired used the blog as a way to make fun of the error messages they were sure to give users as they went into a beta product launch
- Silence at a problem causes people to think that the company has something to hide
- Scoble had a journalist libel him, he responded and made himself available to bloggers that linked to the story, ended up turning the tide against the journalist
- People are not fanatics, they are smart about what they read
- Bloggers are the kind of people who help shift public opinion
- Podcasting is powerful because the human voice feels more real
- The legitimacy gained by linking to someone that gets your story wrong is short term, credibility is long term
- Linking to people that disagree with you also shows credibility
- Businesses can also use their blogs to give the people that use their products advice on best use cases or tutorials the product and other parts of their jobs
- Great amplification effect for little time and money invested
- Blog search traffic is growing at about the same rate as blog writing - doubling every 5 months
- When you're in a crisis - overcommunicate