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	Phil's Blogservations Wednesday, August 17, 2005 Posted by philgomes 7:57 PM Notes from Dave Taylor's Talk At Blog Business Summit Here are some choice bits from the first part of today's talk by Dave Taylor at Blog Business Summit. Unfortunately, the authentication for the wireless Internet access kept booting me off, so real-time blogging wasn't possible. Some of his talk is in this post, and the rest will be addressed in other one. (I eventually defaulted to Windows Notepad.) "A blog is something that separates the content from the presentation." - 13:18pm I felt that this is an important distinction that few recognize. Also, Taylor did a good job of reiterating that blogging is a tool, first and foremost, and was careful not to ascribe any philosophical baggage to it. "How many of you know what a phenomenal disaster these [SEO companies] can be?" (Audience response: "Amen!") - 13:23pm Ironically, Dave can't reliably find SEO companies' sites using search engines. Hilarious! When he presses the SEO companies as to why they don't show up higher, the response is "Well... It's a crowded space." Seems to me that would be true of any SEO firm's customers as well. "First aggressive statement of the day: Your homepage is absolete. Why? Because people don't come to your homepage anymore." - 13:28 Spot on. My blog homepage and its full-text RSS feed are a third of the traffic to my site. The second-third comprises blog archives and permalinks. "Flash sucks. Don't use it on your website." (Light applause.) - 13:30 Reminded me of Tom Murphy's Flash Hall Of Shame. "RSS is crippled with terrible terminology. If you don't like 'RSS' you can use 'RDF'. If you don't like 'RDF' you can use 'XML'." - 13:36 Now, really, those terms aren't nearly as interchangeable as I heard Mr. Taylor describe them, but my position is that it won't matter what you call it. "RSS and blogs are only coincidentally related." - 13:40 Another important point. After all, he points out, The New York Times is probably the furthest thing from a blog and yet it offers its content as RSS feeds. It amazes me that many people don't get this distinction. To tell you the truth, I think I might have missed it early on several years ago. "Why do I have four weblogs? Because I can write about parenting without it getting in the way of [my business] site." - 13:45 I keep a perso-professional blog because those two parts of my life are so intertwined. For some, like Amy Gahran, the issue isn't so cut-and-dry. Mr. Taylor's life is such that he maintains four just to avoid confusing his audience(s). "RSS feeds are like Marimba seven years later." 13:47 Comparisons to "push" vendors like Marimba, Pointcast, and BackWeb kind of disintegrate after scrutiny (something I did early on as well), but it does seem to switch on some lightbulbs among the syndication-uninitiated. "You don't have to timestamp your articles. It's just a tool. You can subvert it however you want. There are no rules. There are no blog police, though there might be those in this room..." 13:51 Corporations that are blogging are already making very big leaps. It doesn't help that sometimes they're met with gripes like "if you don't do these [x] things, you don't have a blog." Like, for example, people get dinged if their blog is anything less than the unfiltered, extemporaneous musings of the blogger. These same people even go so far as to say that typos are encouraged because they're supposed to demonstrate a degree of authenticity. I'm not saying that corporate blogs should have labrynthine layers of PR/IR/legal red-tape between the blogger and his/her post but, sorry, some of us like to think and go over what we write before sharing it with the world. Phil sidenote: I noticed that the Israel/Scoble book Naked Conversations is available for pre-order on Amazon.Com. I'm trying to order mine, but Amazon is fighting me. - 14:01 Now back to the regularly scheduled programming... "I work out of my basement and I get quoted in BusinessWeek about stuff." - 14:02 This pre-saged a predictable, praeteritio-laced, "I'm-not-saying-fire-your-PR- team-but-PR-is-now-useless" train of thought that continued after the connection became unreliable. Fear not, because I captured a lot of it in my text editor and will address that part of the talk in another post. The gist of it, though, it that Mr. Taylor clearly felt that "public relations" and "an entity that generates press releases" are completely interchangeable terms. As you know, I'm pretty unapologetic about what I do for a living because I believe I do it ethically and that it serves a role in the business ecosystem. Does PR need to adapt to current technologies, methods, standards, and expectations of public conduct? Yes. Will it? Of course. Taking cheap shots at the PR profession, though, is not only less-than-helpful but it's about as original and rhetorically interesting as a lawyer joke. A conference called "Blogs For Business" shouldn't try to marginalize the functional group within organizations that will most likely be charged with crafting the policies that govern corporate blogging. (And Mr. Taylor does advocate putting such policies in place.) "Trackbacks are an interesting concept, poorly implemented, and don't have a lot of value." - 14:12 Mr. Taylor's argument against trackbacks is that he likes to see all of the relevant comments about a post or item all on the same page, instead of dispersed across a number of sites. This is a usability issue on which reasonable people might of course disagree. I take the view that trackbacks enhance the discussion ecosystem. Frankly, I think most people would want to spend more time writing their posts than commenting on those of others. Trackbacks allow for a comment-like mechanism that satisfies that group. Mr. Taylor admits that he's in the minority on this point. UPDATE: 12:40 a.m., Aug. 18, 2005 Mr. Taylor weighed in, clarifying my notes on the homepage issue. "home pages are obsolete EXCEPT for those people who get a business card or see an advert" True that. In fact, I think that it was Dell's global Internet programs manager who was among the first to say that it was considered imperative that "dell.com" appear on everything — business cards, letterhead, and so on. Answering a posted question: "Praeteritio" is a rhetorical device wherein the orator says "I'm not going to bring up [x], but...". (Look for it during election season. "I don't mean to keep talking about my war record, but...") Mr. Taylor said that he wasn't advocating firing the marketing/PR guy at your company but, especially to the uninitiated, PR people later started to sound like parasitic elements in your org chart. And... Of course, more of my thoughts about the PR-related comments are below, as promised. Now... Back to my conference notes... "Just as someone shouldn't be picking up a brush and taking it to a canvas, not everyone should blog." I'll tellya... He's right. That BusinessWeek cover story about blogs from earlier this year both helped and hurt the cause. It helped in that the Dilbertian pointy-haired boss now knows that "blogs" aren't something his teenage son was diagnosed with at the school clinic. It hurt in that we now have a bunch of folks that read the story, maybe listened to a webcast or two and are now "experts" — not because they've had their hand in it for an appreciable period of time, but because they read it in their favorite business publication. "BusinessWeek told me to 'catch up, or catch you later'", you'll hear. "I guess we need a... What did they call it? A...'blog', now. Dave? Make it so." Here, an agency's role is to put billings-beyond-the- dreams-of-avarice aside and ask "Is a blog really a tool that this client should have in its toolbox at this time?" So, when you find blogs from exactly the folks Mr. Taylor is talking about, now you'll know at least one possible backstory. Which brings up the question... If properly preparing a company for business media is somewhat akin to pursuing a date with Salma Hayek, what kind of ridiculous simile can I cook up for preparing a company for full-frontal blogosphere participation? Actually, I'm going to leave that well enough alone, since ya'll gave me so much crap for the Hayek post. Salma... If you're reading this... I did move to Los Angeles and... Anyway... Blogs aren't for everyone at every company, but ya'll knew that. "Press releases are dead. PR is dead." People do seem to like saying this. Steve Rubel started on this fairly recently and clarified his position somewhat in his podcast. It's not enough for some folks that a new technology, method, or skill be novel and noteworthy. No... It must destroy the previous method. Why is this? As of this writing, a blog post is not "disclosure" in the eyes of regulatory bodies. I would go further to say that most journalists still consider a press release as a form of official communications and would not ascribe the same to a blog posting. This is changing, certainly — I know at least one Wall Street Journal reporter who scans blogs regularly — but saying "the press release is dead" is a bit strong. Press releases have a well-defined role. Blogs have an emerging role. And both instruments, much like the handgun, have the potential for misuse. Properly, ethically, and judiciously applied, however, PR is the marketing discipline most commensurate with the blogosphere, if any marketing discipline is to be applied at all. This is because both hold credibility as the highest-order variable. "The purpose of public relations is to increase your 'findability.'" I'm sorry, man. I really gotta call you on this one. Actually, this comes from the specious notion that "there's no such thing as bad PR." I mean... Enron was pretty "findable." Job well-done, boys! Again... credibility. Thankfully, Mr. Taylor says that he runs into a number of PR people who are thrilled that the conversation is opening up and there are new models and methods. This is good to hear. Frankly, we as a profession should've blown past the whole field-NDAs- then-brief-analysts- then-brief-long-leads- then-brief-short-leads- then-distribute-press-release pothole ten or twenty miles back. A well-heeled rollout strategy in some instances, but not in all of them. (And I argue the number of instances is declining.) The companies that want to be written about need to do things worth writing about. I maintain that's only part of the story. Arguably, a lot of companies do things that are worth writing about. Unfortunately, far too many PR programs try to rise above the noise by turning up the volume. Now: In a world where there are so many companies doing so many innovative things, I'm willing to bet that a company's audiences (press, investors, analysts, customers, prospects, and the general public) want a level of transparency at the day-to-day and philosophical levels. Right now, blogs and other web-based technologies are emerging as the best tool for that job. "Rethink how you're spending your marketing PR budget." These tend to be remarkably unexamined, really, both in fat and lean times. To the degree that companies focus on press releases, tradeshows, and stunts, I'm sure that some of them can be made to divert attention to online-community-related efforts, especially these days. One audience member asked a question about the risks and rewards (mostly the former) about "Letting employees 'play' in the blogosphere." Since the conference is called "Blog Business Summit", Mr. Taylor pounced and I agree with him — why must it be described as "play"? Reminds me of the episode from early in my career, described in Dan Gillmor's book, when my monitoring of a customer-run listserv was charitably considered kind of... well... cute. "Companies need blogging policies." Most importantly, though, Mr. Taylor rightly pointed out that a lot of company-handbook rules that should govern an employee's blog also apply to, well, everywhere else. (Here's my litmus test.) One can't really argue that, say, distributing leaflets printed with company secrets isn't a termination-worthy offense. The best blogging policies, really, are medium-neutral to a very large extent, with refinements as required. "You should allow comments. If you do, it's very important to have a stated policy on what kind of comments that you will approve. It is imperative in the business blogging space to moderate the comments." I only changed my mind on allowing comments on this blog when I got a position where the word "blog" showed up in a job description. Some people treated my decision with a PC-versus-Mac fervor, but they misunderstood my intentions. When I started this thing in 2001, it was a resource issue — I couldn't afford to spend a lot of time on this. Now, it's more commensurate with what I do, so I've opened up the dialogue. That said, I'm definitely not as quick as most to jump on bloggers who don't have their comments turned on. Rather than a stated policy on deleting comments, I've just been satisfied using common sense and ethics, though recognizing that I would demand more of an organization. I deleted my first comment earlier this week, in fact, where the comment stood the risk of identifying a private person. (And you know how I feel about that.) Mr. Taylor is definitely down on linkblogs. "Tell me why you think I should read this." True, but I tend to think that linkblogs are more for the bloggers who write them. A public form of bookmarking, really. Tagging is not constrained enough to be of any value. Think about it: Eventually, it will self-organize the way wikis seem to, but Mr. Taylor rightly warns that people can toe-may-toe/tom-ah-toe the concept to death. It reminds me of the ID3 tags on my MP3s. Some songs are genre-listed as "metal", and some "heavy metal". Here's the money-quote of the talk — and a warning to those who will attempt to get ahead by trying to game the system: "The evolutionary path is better and better content." Search algorithms change, but your content is hopefully some measure of "good" and getting better. Thanks very much for the talk. Looking forward to the rest of the conference. | HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil's demented imagination. Hell, to be perfectly honest, even Phil disagrees with what he thinks sometimes. This site has virtually no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Clicking on a link doesn't automatically send a 1/2-cent donation to UNICEF. You can't buy, sell, auction, swap, find a date, win friends, influence people, cross the chasm, or decode the human genome using this site. You won't get free email. You won't win a PalmOne Treo or a Playstation2. This site will not end world hunger, foster peace in the Middle East, help you smell better, teach you how to swing dance, or move the global economy from petroleum to hydrogen fuels. You'll learn a lot about this site's master, though, which amounts to a haphazard collection of strange and useless facts that pretty much won't help you at all.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This is the blog of Phil Gomes, VP with Edelman Digital and senior advisor to the Society for New Communications Research. This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. Phil currently resides in Chicago, IL. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes.com View my page on PROpenMic SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! IM SKYPE WISH LIST PITCH POLICY MY PHOTOS www.flickr.com Photostream RSS Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz COMMENT AND TRACKBACK POLICY Comments and trackbacks are unmoderated, though I will delete the patently offensive ones. Any comments and trackbacks are the opinions of the individual writer of those comments and trackbacks, and not those of Phil Gomes, his employer, its clients, or its business partners. 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