The Community Engine Blog: HighOctaneBlogging Archives

Safari U: Great Idea, Right Way to Market?

I wonder if Safari U's Web 2.0 business model can really outproduce the storefront copy center, the traditional channel for custom books. In the latter, publishing and delivery are integrated. O'Reilly's Safari U decouples publishing and delivery, making the process more complex and less certain for customers.

I'm building a text book for the next rendition of the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp using O'Reilly's Safari U. The main advantages I see are:

Good corpus of material.
(Potentially) Convenient web interface.

But, I wonder how they are bringing this thing to market. In many ways, they are tied to their book publishing model. A lot of the recent content is not really available because it has not been converted for custom publication. Also, the custom book has to be ordered in quantity, no one-offs. This requirement essentially dictates that the book be pushed through traditional marketing channels. You can't really offer it to small client groups over the web. Finally, any access to the book is only available online for a fee. Why not provide a preview as in their regular Safari offering? Frankly, such previews would just provide more reason to purchase a Safari subscription.

I'm having some frustrations getting the material I want out of this service. I may resort to a last minute coursepack from a local copy center. The copy center will call O'Reilly for permissions, and the book should be done in time for the January class. Ironically, although the bootcamp is about Web 2.0, we are likely going to have to resort to pre-web methods to get the textbook produced.

Local copy centers integrate publishing and delivery, simplifying up the process of creating custom books for customers, and providing more certainty. Oddly, O'Reilly decouples these two processes making the process more complex and less certain, all under the veneer of advanced web technology.

Bud posted this on December 7, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

MBA High Octane Blogging Bootcamp 2.0

In the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp, we teach MBAs blogging as an interactive business process. MBAs, create blogs, find conversation partners, execute blogging strategies, and measure success.

Over the past couple of months, I've been developing a new rendition of the high octane blogging bootcamp. We ran the original at The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business last Spring. In that bootcamp, 33 MBAs were able to alter the search landscape in Southeast Michigan for queries on the cleaning and restoration industry with 6 weeks of blogging effort.

This rendition will be offered at University of Michigan's Ross School of Busines starting in January and at Quinnipiac University starting in March. In the bootcamp, we treat blogging as an introduction to the interactive web. Teams of participants will have as their project to create a family of blogs around a partner business or their own business. The projects will be judged on the extent to which they follow strategies that build search visibility and traffic.

The bootcamp is broken into a set of seven modules that build on each other. Each module includes an overview, some practical examples, and exercises for participants to complete in service of their project. Here are the modules:

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Bud posted this on December 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

The Real Work of Blogging and Technical Wizardry

The real work of blogging is in posting. The value of any technical wizardry tracking blog conversations or searching for nuggets of information in blogs really depends on post quality. I'm going to make these points in a presentation at Quinnipiac University. Slides attached.

I'll be giving a talk at Quinnipiac University this Saturday, home of the famous Quinnipiac presidential poll. They're interested in some of the things I have been doing with High Octane Blogging Bootcamps and our current Learning Remix projects.

In the first half of the talk, I'm going to introduce people to the basic value proposition of blogging. Even though blogging appears to be taking off in the corporate world, I agree with Shel Holtz that a lot of people have heard the term without really knowing what it could do to help their business. Further, it may be inapparent at first glance that the real work of blogging is in generating posts, not in technical wizardry. These slides attempt to cover these points succinctly.

The next set of slides show what technical wizardry is possible if you have done the real work of blogging, making posts. Here, I focus on things like search and conversation tracking. If we get time, I may talk about our attempt in the learning remix to use tags to mark conversations (I sense this is it own presentation). Here are the slides for the second half of the conversation.

Bud posted this on October 20, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

spam is automating the social without the social

It's interesting to me that you can set up a mechanism for social interaction, use it, and then discover that voila, you have search visibility.

Richard MacManus makes an interesting tie between blogging for business visibility and spam in referring to our recently reported bootcamp experience:

This is what could be termed The Good Side of blogs for businesses. The Dark Side is the spam and fake blogs I wrote about above. It seems to be relatively easy nowadays for both sides to gain search engine ascendancy over old-school websites.
Read/Write Web: Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 8-14 August 2005

Well, I'm glad to be on the good side, but I wonder what that really means? Where did that comparison to spam come in?

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Bud posted this on August 16, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

MBA Bootcamp Changes Local Web Search Landscape

Over seventy percent of households in the U.S. use Internet search to find local products and services. We ran a bootcamp where Michigan MBAs used Web 2.0 technologies to compete with a prominent local business for searches on its targeted keywords. Bootcamp sites beat the local company in just under half of the searches and placed on the first page of search results over half the time.

From May 10 through June 23, 2005, we ran the first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp for 33 MBAs at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our client for the bootcamp, Coach's, served the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan market for disaster cleaning and restoration services. Recent surveys indicate that over seventy percent of households search the web when shopping locally for services such as Coach's. We wanted the bootcamp to demonstrate how Web 2.0 technologies like weblogs and RSS could help better establish a company's search presence to take advantage of this channel. To really push the idea, we informally set a goal that bootcamp participants' team weblogs outperform Coach's site on searches for its own keywords.

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Bud posted this on August 11, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

Work Overload

I've been busy, keeping me away from blogging.

I've been away from blogging because I have been caught up in other things. I'll be back to posting more regularly. Let me list a few of the things I have been up to:

I attended both Vertical Leap and Where 2.0 in the Bay Area.
We're getting another High Octane Blogging Bootcamp up and started.
I got xFolk moved onto microformats.org where it seems to be getting a lot of attention.
Various consulting engagements have been keeping me busy.
I have been strategizing a microformats plug-in for reblog.

Bud posted this on July 17, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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:

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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:

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 (2) | TrackBack (0)

Those Guys in Oceania Are Kicking Ass

Blogs enable even small companies to participate in the global information economy. A group of high-profile bloggers in Australia and New Zealand illustrate well the skill set required.

I'm kind of impressed with James Farmer, Richard MacManus, and Darren Rowse. In case you did not know, James Farmer just started a consultancy called Blog Savvy and is a well-known pioneer in educational blogging. Richard MacManus has slowly been building a reputation as a sponsored blogger for Web 2.0. Darren Rowse supports himself to the tune of 6 figures using targeted advertising on his blogs. As a one-man, self-funded operation, he is more impressive in his personal earnings than bloggers for old-new media networks like Weblogs, Inc.

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Bud posted this on May 18, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | 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)

FastLane and Hass MS&L Blogworks — A conversation with Mike McClatchey

Hass MS&L Blogworks is a marriage of PR and technology services with GM's FastLane as its most noteworthy client. One suspects that this mix of PR and technology is what will carry the day in the emerging field of Internet buzz marketing.

I had a conversation with Mike McClatchey at Hass MS&L (part of Publicis, a giant PR firm) last week. We talked about how GM's FastLane Blog had been done by their Blogworks practice, run right here in Ann Arbor. Based on our conversation, Blogworks' strategy, as illustrated in the GM case, represents an innovative marriage of PR and technology done at a large scale:

Blogworks has a “Movable Type server” which they use to host FastLane and other client blogs. This arrangement effectively insulates GM and other clients from technology management while still allowing a custom solution. Blogsite, another Ann Arbor company, is also an example of this strategy, though starting more from the technology end. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw more integrated technlogy and PR efforts. It's clear that the value add of the technology service is to reduce complexity for clients, getting the sales pitch back to pure business value terms.
Hass MS&L is also handling comment moderation for FastLane. It winds up that two types of comments are moderated out of FastLane. If a customer comments on a post with specific problems they are having with a vehicle they purchased, the comment is routed to customer service for that vehicle. Inappropriate comments are also routed out. There is only a handful of this latter.
Otherwise, Hass's blogging strategy is similar to that of other firms. As publicly illustrated by Steve Rubel's and Robert Scoble's open recommendations to the Target chain, Hass advocates a listen first, blog second approach. This makes a lot of sense as listening is so cheap on the Internet, something I will emphasize in my May 10 talk on blogging analytics. Listening is an easier sell to businesses. They can watch without the risk of participating.

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Bud posted this on May 6, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

Blogging Analytics at the Ann Arbor IT Zone

I'll be giving a talk at the Ann Arbor ITZone about how to use blogs for business intelligence.

I'll be giving a talk at the Ann Arbor IT Zone entitled: “Understanding Your Customers, Market, and Competitors Better with Blogging Analytics”. The IT Zone is at 330 E. Liberty Ann Arbor, MI (here is the google map).

Blogging is really about two-way communication. This might translate into buzz or communications forums on an Intranet. The question of course is, 'How do you close the loop?' That's where blogging analytics come in. They can tell you who is talking about you, how your messages are faring, and start to give you some idea about how to influence people. I'll be covering blogpulse, technorati, feedburner, feedster, and blogsite. I'll use the GM FastLane blog as an example.

Bud posted this on May 6, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | 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.

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.

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

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