Odeo’s Noah Glass & Tim Roberts handle the blog thang with perfect aplomb. Right after we stuck a ‘send us an odeo’ button on our Like It Matters blog, Noah & Biz Stone zapped us an odeo saying ‘cool, thanks for playing.’ Tim & I have since exchanged notes (via their new feature) about how to improve it, questions about RSS, etc. A few quick moments on their part translate to a great experience with the company on our part. So:

• Listen in (they pinged me within a few hours of my post)
• Respond appropriately (they used their own tool to communicate, which really cements the point)
• Keep the conversation up (quick replies to my question proved, again, that they are paying attention)

Technorati Tags: blog+monitoring, blogs, noah+glass, odeo, tim+roberts

Adam Keys of Pure Discovery is kicking off Barcamp Dallas with a preso on web services. We had to open a third track to fit in all the presos, so our lounge will serve as a stand-in ‘mash pit’ (in honor of chris) for that overflow. Great crowd so far.
Follow the backchannel at irc.freenode.net #barcampdallas.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcampdallas

More & more, we are getting clients who come to us for blog monitoring.  We don’t see a one-stop solution yet, and so we handroll a process that includes all the top blog search services.  As blog monitoring becomes a given for PR & marketing types, we’re going to keep working in this area.  Help us out by telling us what you’d like to see.  We’re conducting the survey below from now through January 31.  

Everyone who emails answers to the questions below (to brian@weblogswork.com) will be put in the hat for a drawing, and Weblogs Work will do free blog monitoring for the winner during February 2006.  Plus, we’ll gather up all the answers and post the results for everyone to get a sense of what people are doing to track blog mentions of their brands.

• How do you track what’s being said about your brands, products, services, executives on blogs?
• What do you usually do when you find a valid link?  What sort of action do you take?
• How does blog monitoring fit in or differ from the other types of media tracking you do today?
• What do you want out of a blog tracking tool? 
• On a scale from 1 to 10, how effective do you think your current method of blog monitoring is? 

One of the questions I get all the time is how to measure ROI for social media. (A better question is how do we value return on attention, but, let’s bracket that.) Naturally, you want to know if this stuff is helping you achieve your business objectives. As Hugh correctly points out, blogging’s impact is mostly indirect. And it’s also a long-haul thing. You have to stick with it to build your tribe. Some of the metrics we look at are readership, feed subscribers, comments, links, inquiries, leads, partners and so on.
That said, sometimes the gains are so immediate and direct you sort of get slapped in the face. Exhibit A: the blog for the as-yet-unreleased open source ticketing system called SimpleTicket. SimpleTicket was developed by Architel, who started blogging about it on their own site. Soon, they were getting so many inquiries for the code & questions about the project, that they needed to launch a blog just to more efficiently communicate with this growing community. So, we put together another WordPress-driven site for SimpleTicket, and they started blogging the project progress there.

Results to date:

• A new crackerjack employee for Architel, who found them (and thought they were cool) because of SimpleTicket
• Over $75,000 in annual billings from new clients who hired Architel after discovering them through SimpleTicket
• Immediate improvements to the base code for the project; questions answered
• An international group of beta testers ready for the code release on the 28th

Again, the impact of blogging & social media is often indirect, but these are some pretty good results for a blog that is just a few weeks old.

Technorati Tags: architel, hugh+macleod, simpleticket

We’ll be talking about the new marketing — telling compelling stories in the age of do-it-yourself media — tomorrow at a luncheon put on by the Advertising Club of Fort Worth. Thanks much to Lynne Swihart, of Blanchard Schaefer Advertising & PR, for inviting us. It’s at Joe T. Garcia’s at around 11:45. Google Map. I’ll be posting up the clickstream for the talk as well.

Technorati Tags: ad+club+fort+worth, brian oberkirch, blanchard+schaefer, lynne+swihart, weblogs+work

We are in the process of upgrading our blogs to the new version of WordPress – version 2.0.  We just finished with the release in our dev environments and applied it to the SimpleTicket blog.  Over the course of the next few days we will upgrading all of the blogs (please excuse our dust in the meantime). 

Start Up guru & evangelism evangelist Guy Kawasaki sent out word that he’s going to start blogging on January 1. We encourage you to watch his site for it. We really dig Guy’s style. You can also participate in a free online seminar on some of Guy’s ideas in a recent book, The Art of the Start:

http://snipurl.com/artseminar

This is the link for the online seminar for The Art of the Start. It’s
January 4th at 10 am Pacific, not 9 am Pacific.

Technorati Tags: artofthestart, guy+kawasaki

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

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.