Blogging gives you the power to expand on your own story. You no longer have to be satisfied with the media account, hoping they’ll amend the story, print a retraction, etc. Mark Cuban said he started his blog for just that reason. (And he gives another example of how he felt his comments weren’t accurately portrayed in a New York Times story over the weekend.)
Here’s a more local example. Alex Muse wrote a blog post not too long ago about his biggest failure — his inability to max out the value he was building with his telecom services start-up, LayerOne. Right after he did that post, the Dallas Business Journal named LayerOne’s acquisition by Switch & Data one of the best corporate turnarounds of the year. How could the company be both a failure and a successful turnaround?
For that, you’d need to go back to the TexasVC blog to get the rest of the story. Alex lays out, in self-deprecating detail, how it all really went down. He even apologizes to his first round investors who lost serious money on the deal. The net net, LayerOne went bankrupt after putting $20 million into a growing business that was just starting to take off. They put together a new team to buy the assets for a fraction of that, got a few centers cashflow positive and then sold the business off to Switch & Data for a few million more than the initial investment. Who won? The management and the post-bankruptcy investors. Who lost? The first round investors and the 60+ employees who built LayerOne, but who weren’t around to share in the post-sale windfall. Including one very smart cookie, Catarina Wylie, who hired me to work on the LayerOne launch. I’m glad to have had that rocketboom experience with Cat, Alex & that great team. I’m also proud of Alex for using his own DIY media tools to tell it like it is. Or at least tell his version of things. The great part is, others can come behind and add their own experiences to the story.
Technorati Tags: alex muse, dallasbusinessjournal, layerone, mark cuban, texasvc
One of the great things about hitting the Syndicate show last week was that I got to talk with Shel Israel again. After my panel, in the speakers room and again during the corporate blogging panel. He was taking notes like crazy, doing the best he could without an ‘I’ key.
If you are a Firefox user you are already familiar with the little orange RSS icon in the lower right hand corner of your browser. Microsoft has decided to adopt it to signify RSS features in their products. Read more about the news on Microsoft’s blog here.
I get this question a lot, ‘what is a trackback?’ Wikipedia says, ‘a TrackBack is a mechanism used in a blog to show, around an entry, a list of other blogs that refer to it.’ They continue:
The term TrackBack was introduced by Six Apart which introduced a mechanism in their blogging server, Movable Type, that works by sending a ‘ping‘ between the blogs, and therefore providing the alert. The blog receiving the ping typically displays the TrackBack information below a blog entry. This usually includes a summary of what has been written on the target blog, together with a URL and the name of the blog. The Referer field in the HTTP protocol was originally intended as a means of supporting features similar to those TrackBack offers.
Tom Coates has answered the question here. Another beginner’s guide can be found here. The official specification can be found here. Trackback issues relative to WordPress can be found here. Good luck!
The Architel corporate web/blog site has been launched. The open source WordPress architecture allows the company to launch the site and make continious changes to it over time. So you can never say a site is ‘done.’ Kudos go to Dan Cederholm from SimpleBits for the xhtml/css design (as well as the new Architel logo). Weblogs Work integrated the xhtml/css into WordPress (actually three WordPress installs).
Architel is a boutique IT support company located in Dallas, Texas that supports small businesses (20-100) employees. Their unique IT service delivery model (one flat-monthly-fee for all-you-can-eat support) aligns the interests of the small business owner and Architel. The company was a pioneer in this space and is now a pioneer in the ‘blog as corporate website’ meme. Here are screenshots or just visit the site yourself here @ architel.com.
The site was entered in the website design contest at SXSW conference and we are crossing our fingers that the judges will enjoy the tight integration between the blog CMS and Dan’s xhtml and css. What do you think about our work?
As reported in the Washington Post, "Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans will deploy the nation’s first municipally owned wireless Internet system that will be free for all users, part of an effort to jump-start recovery by making living and doing business in the city as attractive as possible."
Read more about it here, here , here and here. We needed some good news!
Want to get people to remember your name? Well, start out with a cool name, say like Pajamas Media. Now change it to something boring like Open Source Media. Be sure to pick something that is either a direct or indirect infringement on someone elses trademark. Wait for the warning letter, make a little bit of a fuss, blog about it, get a few other people to blog about it (don’t worry they will have fun at your expense). Now hire a branding company and get them to suggest that you change it back to the original ‘cool’ name. At the end of the day everyone will know your new name… [via]
Just a couple of years ago everyone was looking for the next ‘new’ thing in design. I can recall sitting with the Architel guys. They wanted a new website with all of the coolness of Flash and the complexity of Amazon. This year they decided to go ‘retro’ and focus on simplicity. Check out their new site and blog interface at architel.com. Fast Company latest article titled, The Beauty of Simplicity details this new trend. Jason over at 37signals details the article , he suggests,
"staying simple on purpose"
He also expands on the idea by indicating,
The big guys are discovering what the small guys have always known. The small companies leading the way and have been for years. The big guys are following the small guys. The Less movement is bottom up, not top down. There’s a big story here. I wonder which journalist will grab it.
Selena Maranjian with The Motley Fool authored a piece I found on MSNBC titled, The Business of Blogging, How blogs are influencing business — and helping investors.
Would you be more likely to buy stock in a company whose CEO blogged on a daily basis or one that never blogged? I can hear the snipes already, "I would never buy stock in a company whose CEO had enough time to blog!"
Selena’s article suggested a few insights blogs offer investors including:
- Business-centric blogs can help an investor understand companies in a new way.
- Technorati can help you ‘value’ businesses in new ways.
- CEO’s of the companies you invest in are blogging or reading blogs. Find out why.
- 20 million people are blogging, better find out what they are saying.
To read the full article click HERE.
Drew Neisser, CEO of Renegade Marketing, predicts that,
In 2006, expect blogs to be standard items in the marketer’s playbook. Corporate blogs will continue to proliferate. Some will earn kudos for their honesty and informative nature, while others will be recognized as blatant, homogenized propaganda and ignored. Content blogs (such as www.AfterHoursCity.com) will deliver “street cred” for marketers smart enough to create their own slice of aggregated info and brave enough to let the consumer-generated content run unfiltered.
Brian coined the phrase and now marketers like Drew are using it. "Blog Monitoring" services are going to be huge according to Drew,
Blog “Monitor” will be the newest, hot job in corporate communications, as marketers try to stay up on both the positive and negative buzz in the marketplace (Dell found out the hard way the importance of this role, as Jeff Jarvis’s “Buzz Machine” shamed them into replacing his malfunctioning computer). Consumer blogs will continue to multiply as mobile devices like Sony’s AIBO support blogging on the fly. Blog networks like WebLogsInc will make it easier for marketers to advertise on these sites, especially the ones that attract consistent audiences with quality writing.
Finally, Drew suggests that partnership between big players and smaller, niche players (like WeblogsWork) will become the norm, not the exception,
In the last few months alone, smaller agencies have delivered slap shots to the biggies, stealing away such prestigious accounts as Heineken, Volkswagen, Sprite and British Airways. Agencies like Mother, Strawberry Frog, Renegade Marketing and Crispin Porter and Bogusky (the Wayne Gretsky of the idea pack) are among a handful of firms that are building reputations for delivering channel neutral multi-disciplined campaigns, and driving what will be an enormous shift in how clients approach their agencies in 2006. Big clients are already starting to see the benefits again of having multiple partners, and asking each for “media neutral” ideas; it might not be long before clients designate one firm as the “idea agency”, tasked with coming up with the media & channel neutral idea, while other firms are tasked with execution according to their specialty.
