High Octane Blogging — Susie Gardner weighs in

Susie Gardner has given great, detailed, and constructive feedback to the High Octane teams. She focuses on effective communication strategies, the key to succeeding in an essentially textual enterprise.

Susie Gardner has provided some impressive feedback to the High Octane Blogging teams. She really emphasizes getting all the small points right that when summed together lead to effective communication. You can see in both her criticisms and her praise that she sat down and took the time to read the posts and let them speak to her. Here are her remarks as she applied them to each group:

• Review of Restoration and Cleaning Industry Blog
• Review of The Art and Science of Commercial Restoration Blog
• Review of Restoration & Remediation Industry Blog
• Review of Restoration University Blog
• Review of Restoration and Catastrophe Clean Up News Blog

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Bud posted this on June 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

High Octane Blogging — Jeremy Wright weighs in

Jeremy Wright is providing some excellent feedback to The High Octane Blogging Bootcamp leading me to feel the coaching model we are testing here will work. Next up is Susie Gardner of Buzz Marketing with Blogs fame.

update: Jeremy has completed his final two reviews, and I have added them to the list below.

Jeremy Wright is posting his critiques of the first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp over at ensight. He has done some really in-depth reviews, and I very much appreciate his effort and insights. As you may recall, The High Octane Blogging Bootcamp is dealing with the restoration and cleaning industry. Here are the specific reviews he has published so far:

• Restoration Catastrophe
• Restoration Commercial
• Restoration Residential
• Restoration Fire Smoke
• Restoration Water

I'll update the list as he adds.

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Bud posted this on May 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Blogging interaction — A sane posting strategy

Finally, a well-known blog consultant talks about the value of more in-depth blog posts. I have two tactical suggestions for making these work: a newspaper writing style, and editing long posts to the main message.

I find most discussions about posting strategy boring because they are repetitive. They typically boil down to something like the following formula: frequently post short write-ups on focused topics. James Farmer gives a great description:

if you want a lot of readers, lots of links and a place in the pantheon then you’d sure as heck best be peddling frequent bite size content with a good line in cyclical stories / issues, some political drama if possible and a fair bit of ‘not the first but the first you’ve read’ linking [i.e., don't get to the original source, just link to the available source out of expediency].

The long and the short of posts - the soapie versus the soapbox

What's more enlightening is what he says next.

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Bud posted this on May 27, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

High Octane Blogging — How to form business community

Online communities usually form around information honey pots. They thrive when individual contributors get reinforced, and the reinforced behavior makes the honey pot richer.

In blogsavvy today, James Farmer makes a very good point regarding how to organize online communities:

While the hub model of online communities has each person coming to one place, the hubris approach has each participant secure in their own space and the ‘centre’ simply being an administrative / aggregation portal to these different spaces. Through the portal context each user is able to find relevant users to themselves and aggregate individually each of them. In essence you have a blogosphere… just right on your doorstep.

Blogsavvy » Creating and sustaining a local blogging community - hubs, hubris & your neighboursphere

In the new High Octane Blogging Bootcamp and the original Learning Blogosphere, we used a combination of the two to a little bit better effect than either alone. In my experience with both of these efforts, there are really three dynamic components required to create an effective blogging community:

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Bud posted this on May 24, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

High Octane Blogging — Off to the Races

The first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp has started, and we are inviting feedback.

We began our first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp last Saturday. As I mentioned before, participants are working in the Restoration and Cleaning industry with Coach's, a local area cleaning and disaster recovery firm employing approximately 80 people.

Participants are divided up into five teams who are competing to write effective blog posts and gain Internet visibility in five weeks. We have a bootcamp aggregation site at: http://highoctane.portspaces.com. On the site, you can see my blog about the bootcamp with several entries. You can also see, from the left-hand pane, an aggregation of each of the participant's team sites.

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Bud posted this on May 18, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

High Octane Blogging — What makes blogging different?

A consensus view is emerging in the blogosphere that blogging is merely a form of web publishing. This is correct. The real question is how to turn that form to your advantage.

Frederik Wacka makes a great point:

I guess the question is when to stop saying You should consider blogging and start saying You know blogs, right, what if you should use that kind of publishing to strengthen your web presence? or even Hey, shouldn't you write more openly and authentic on your site?

CorporateBloggingBlog: ...Once Known As A Blog...

For the past several months I have been presenting blogging as pushbutton web publishing with syndication and interaction. This view is fundamentally different from the static web site that has not been updated in 6 months to a year. It also implies that you cannot make a separate, high-value career out of simply maintaining a blog. Most companies that are blog candidates simply cannot afford those kinds of fees for that one activity.

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Bud posted this on May 9, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

High Octane Blogging — Computing platform

We will be using The Port Network, a great RSS-based system that has the potential to marry back-end information consumption with front-end publishing. Issues we are working around include social bookmarking and training with a very short time frame.

Yesterday, I mentioned that we were using The Port Network's platform for the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp. This decision is deeply rooted in what I expect to be the main value creation dynamic for bootcamp participants:

• Learn about the target industry: cleaning and restoration.
• Collect ongoing information about cleaning and restoration.
• Determine who the target audience is and how to influence them. I expect the target audience to be a mix of: customers, media types, and web opinion makers.
• Write blog posts that leverage the information collected to influence the target audience.

Participants will be working in teams of five or six. So, the question is how to get this dynamic to work in a team?

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Bud posted this on May 3, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

High Octane Blogging — Much Progress

The High Octane Blogging Bootcamp will begin in two weeks. We have students, judges, a company, and a community blogging platform. I will likely devote a whole post to the platform decision soon.

The High Octane Blogging Bootcamp will start May 14, 2005. There have been a number of developments since my last post. Let me lay them out:

• Twenty-nine students have signed up to be in the Small and Medium Enterprise course of which the bootcamp is a part. That's a good number to start. Not too big and not too small.
• In alphabetical order: Susie Gardner, Sarah Goldman, and Jeremy Wright have agreed to be blogging judges for Bootcamp. They will do two evaluations each of the six teams.
• We will be working with Coach's, a local Ann Arbor company in the cleaning and restoration industry. A good web resource for this industry is the Association of Specialists in Cleaning and Restoration.
• The Port Network has agreed to host the blogging communities.

This last point is worth some elaboration. There are really a number of factors here. The two that weighed the most heavily in my mind were: (1) getting a simple enough environment to use that would allow us to fully unleash the power of xml syndication; (2) various network effects related to using widely adopted vs. narrowly adopted yet well-tailored technology. I will likely devote a post to the platform decision soon.

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Bud posted this on May 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

High Octane Blogging — First Cut Syllabus

The high octane blogging bootcamps help participants use emerging Internet tools like blogging, RSS, and RSS analytic services to improve their business's effectiveness in its online communities.

The first high octane blogging bootcamp will start May 14 at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. The bootcamp immerses students in blogging so that they have a practical basis for assessing three elements critical to the newly emerging face of the Internet: pushbutton web publishing, xml syndication, and mass interaction. In combination, these elements allow companies to more easily discover and engage their online community, with potential to influence key customers and opinion makers.

The bootcamp takes place in three installments:

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Bud posted this on April 7, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

High Octane Blogging Bootcamp at Michigan Business School

We're going to do a high test blogging bootcamp at Michigan Business School where students are going to race to get industry blogs up and noticed in two months. We've done blogging communities before but have never blurred the lines between the educational and “real” worlds to this extent before. We'd like advice.

In six weeks time, I will be helping teach a course on small and medium enterprises at Michigan business school. We're going to use blogging in an innovative way, and I would like some feedback.

The course is a project course where evening MBA students (4 – 7 years experience) work with a small enterprise to help it improve its business. The business that will participate is interested in a blogging strategy to increase Internet visibibility.

In a nutshell, our plan is to divide the students up into five or six teams of five people. Then the fun starts. Each team blogs about the industry the company is in. They learn who the blog opinion leaders are for that industry. They learn how to track the company's products and competitors in the blogosphere using tools like technorati, pubsub, del.icio.us, and flickr tags. They're graded on making effective blog posts with a portion of the grade being decided based on getting themselves noticed and cited by opinion leaders. The blogging efforts will be completely open for all to see, so competition will be based on how well the team does its research, networks, and crafts its message.

I would really like feedback and ideas about this from experienced bloggers. I suspect it will be a lot of work for the students and could be hard to pull off. Think of it as sort of putting your blogging feet to the fire.

Bud posted this on March 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (2)