Andrew Baio, creator and co-founder of Upcoming.org
Matt Haughey, blogging pioneer and builder of one of the first community weblogs, MetaFilter
Derek Powazek, Writer and Web Designer
DL Byron, Principal of Textura Design, Inc.
- There are a lot of control issues to try to bust through in business blogging - DON'T have a PR firm run your blog.
- Our panelists help and encourage corporations to find and bring their voice to their blog, getting away from the static, traditional way of corporate, legal-safe communicating.
- PR doesn't normally do a great job communicating business ideas and projects -it's the people who are blogging that cut through the BS.
- Beware: it's easy to do business blogging badly. If the reason to blog is to build and maintain the same legal process in the blogs, the end result is completely inauthentic.
- Write your blogs your own way - find your voice.
- The proof is in the blog: Boeing's corporate site went from 5,000 to 30,000 hits a month, purely based on their initiative of a company blog, unleashing all of the latest features for their hottest, slick plane.
- Here's a goal: Get executives high-fiving one another over the interest generated on their corporate site and hits going way up, due to blogging!
- To use blogging as a promotional tool for your company is obvious. Taking this further, use the blogesphere to find folks out there that provide or share a similar service or product and join their social network. LINK!
- For the blogging world, blogs gives bloggers something to link to. Your google index will rise.
- Give your audience a place to be on "the inside". Bring them into your company through a blog.
- Humanizing your business is a great idea. Creating an open source conversation works.
- One way to make bloggers LOVE you and write the goodness about you and your company: treat them like a journalist, feed them a press release, make them aware you respect them as a writer.
- In a larger corporation, start small with one person in one department blogging, allowing you to grow positively and graciously. Why? Well, if you're Dell, for instance, and you open up a big ol' blog for the masses, the hate-blogs, vengeance, hair-pulling customers will have a field day and bring you down! You want to avoid this.
- Find the passionate people in your corporation and make them your blogger.
- The blog machine growing and a great first step: Internal blogging is extremely useful as a corporate communications tool, as some internal blogs have now evolved into a positive external blog.
- You want to make news and get your company name out there? BLOG! It connects and communicates
- Quote of the Session: "My favourite kind of blog posts are the ones that could get you arrested." - Andy Baio