Recently in Blogging Category

Only a few hours left in the year, and I haven't fulfilled the apparent obligation of bloggers to post some sort of year-end list. Best of, worst of, predictions... you've seen 'em all by now. I have my predictions, most of which are embedded in my business plan, but the prediction that is most on my mind is this: 2010 is looking big from here. So, before the ball drops and the fireworks go up, here's a look back at the most-viewed posts in 2009:

1. Monitoring Social Media Before You Have a Budget - May 2008

2. The Sentiment on Sentiment Analysis - September 2009

3. Defining social media relations - November 2006

4. Visual text analysis - April 2007

5. Corporate social media specialists - September 2007

6. Sorting out social media measurement - July 2007

7. Human vs. machine analysis - April 2007

8. Social Media Analysis for Workgroups - August 2008

9. Guide to Social Media Analysis - June 2007

10. Companies Downplay Online Reputation Risk - March 2009

I'll keep focusing on quality over quantity, but I'm not about to stop writing here. Any topics you want to get into?

While the archive looks back, I'm definitely looking forward. '10 looks big from here. I hope it's big for you, too.

I turned off the automatic tag posts from Delicious today. Murphy being on the job, the post linking to the recent New York Times article on sentiment analysis promptly got a comment when I did that—a good one, too. But the tag posts are gone. The list of recent posts was overrun with "links for [date]" entries, and I lost some email subscribers who were probably tired of them, too. So they're gone.

I'll continue to use Delicious; it's part of my publishing workflow, as well as my bookmarking service of preference. I'll also continue the practice of adding editorial content in the comments to my tags. Depending on the tag, these items will continue to appear on my web sites. If you want to see all of them, they're also available as an RSS feed.

I have some good stuff in the drafts folder. I really don't want it to be lost is a sea of links posts.

I don't know if this is one of the recognized corollaries of Murphy's Law, but I've long known that you can't game the system. If you count on Murphy to make something work out in the end, it won't.

I'm not even going to ask if it's happened to you. If you have a blog, it has. You work on a big idea and a great blog post, and while it's stuck in the drafts folder, someone else posts on the same topic. Man, I hate when that happens. It makes it look like the other guy thought of it first and I'm just echoing. So let's do something about it.

Would it help to have a little extra motivation? A challenge, perhaps? Here's the plan:

1. Pick the two best topics spending too much time in your draft folder and give us the quick version in a new post.

2. Tweet your post and tag it with #stuckindraft so we can find it and encourage you.

3. Commit to finish that post! within a week.

4. When you finish the completed version, update your StuckInDraft post to link to the completed posts.

5. Tweet it again to let us know you've finished.

Now, you know where he is. Go! Confront the problem! Fight! Win! And call me when you get back, darling. I enjoy our visits.
—"Edna Mode," The Incredibles

Oh, yeah, my list.

• Questions to ask before shopping for listening tools and services
  I've heard from social media analysis vendors that clients are issuing RFPs before knowing enough to ask the right questions. This is a list of questions that clients should ask themselves to discover their own requirements.

• Opportunities in the intersections of analytics
  What value is hiding in the overlaps between social media analysis, web analytics, text analytics, business intelligence, customer relationship management...? What are the important connections in business processes and at a systems level?

No, actually, this post didn't spend much time in the draft folder. Why do you ask?

If it's in your drafts folder, someone else is about to post it.

I hesitate before posting about the blog, because blogging about blogging is the poster child of Internet navel-gazing, and, well, I never wanted to be a poster child. But I keep having variations on the same conversation, so here we are. Specifically, here you are, which is proof that something interesting happened along the way.

I started this blog with the idea of explaining social media and online intelligence concepts to a non-technical audience, but the content shifted. I ended up with a more expert audience, too, which works for me. It turns out that I enjoy exploring more specialized topics, and I lack the Cosmo/Men's Health talent for writing the same articles every month (Abs! Exercise! Diet! Sex!).

So the blog gradually became a blog for experts, featuring a mix of news and insight. Conveniently, insight posts represent one of the more difficult styles of blogging. Oh, well. My parents read it, which helps them understand what I do.

All quiet in the comments
Watching subscriber numbers go up is always good for the ego, but there's another metric that isn't so encouraging: the Conversational Index, which is the ratio of comments and trackbacks to posts. I welcome your comments, but most days, you don't leave any.

I can think of four reasons for the silence that follows any particular post.

1. The post was stupid. I really hope that's not it (and I don't think it is).
   
2. It was obvious. Better than stupid, but not much.
   
3. It was brilliant and insightful, but you don't want to point that out to your competitors who also read the blog but may have missed the point.
   
4. You're just not the comment-writing type.

But if it stays quiet, I just might start making obvious mistakes to bate you. Would that be better?

I think there's a new meme going around. I haven't found the announcement, but it has something to do with picking fights with A-list bloggers. I don't think it's going to spread, though—the participants keep forgetting to tag someone new to spread the meme.

Stowe Boyd vs. Steve Rubel

Steve, on the other hand, suggests that he, and a short list of those bloggers he thinks are worth reading, can turn the tide. The rest of us are just a bunch of lazy bastards, too busy twittering and echo-chambering to do anything meaningful.

I fear that success (and thus celebrity or quasi-celebrity) breeds fear and/or protectionism. If you’re supposed to be an expert in a subject and people are disagreeing with you, there may be a fear that your expert status is being put at risk.

The whole tech blogging with insanely heavy doses of ego doesn't appeal to me. I've met him a couple times and he seemed nice enough but that doesn't come through in the me-me-me blogging style he invokes... It's hard to read his opinion on things because it seems clouded by self interest.

Up next: baiting celebrities to get unattractive photos of them.

So, you want to embarrass your company with your efforts in social media, and you don't have a lot of time. You could invent an original way to screw up and let everyone else learn from your mistakes, but that would require effort. Instead, you want something easy that you know will work. What you need are best practices identified by early adopters. Follow their examples, and you can have your very own blogstorm.

10 easy ways to embarrass your company in social media

1. Create a fake blog. Nobody will notice, and even if they do, they won't remember.

2. Dare bloggers to complain about you. Because, you know, nobody reads blogs.

3. Broadcast your press releases to bloggers. They love that.

4. Flame a blogger critic in email, because that way it will stay between you and the blogger.

5. Impersonate someone else in blog comments. That transparency stuff is overrated.

6. In any dispute, lead with the lawyers. They can take care of everything for you.

7. If you want good reviews of your expensive product, send free samples to bloggers. You don't need to mention anything about disclosure.

8. Oh, heck, just review your own products. You know them better than anyone else, anyway.

9. Make improvements to your company's Wikipedia entry. After all, it's the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, right?

10. Tout your company's stock on the message boards. If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.

All we ask is that you let us be the first to blog about it when you invent a new one.

You say you want all the information overload without loading up on individual subscriptions? There's a trend to build aggregator sites from the feeds of individual blogs, especially in the social media/web 2.0 headspace. I usually prefer to subscribe to the individual blogs, but the aggregators can be useful for finding the individual bloggers who write on a topic.

Here are a few I know of. Even this short list generates a lot to read, until you get practiced at skimming titles.

1. Enterprise Irregulars
   
2. Media 2.0 Workgroup
   
3. Planet Social Media Research
   
4. Planet Web 2.0
   
5. Social Media Today
   

Tags: social media blogging

I came across two posts today about corporate culture issues that can limit a company's success with social media. The interesting thing is that similar issues arise whether your work is internally or externally focused. Benefitting from social media in a business requires more than a technology deployment and a single, clued-in group.

Josh Hallett writes about the risks of customer-facing blogs setting high expectations that the rest of the company can't meet:

Company A (think cell phone company) has a really great, personable blogger that really connects with customers online. However Company A also has about 1000 call center reps and 20,000 associates in the field. The majority of them have the traditional corporate attitude, i.e. "Not my department" - "I can't help you, call customer support" etc...

If I were able to magically snap my fingers and have a world-class social media platform in place, I don't believe that it would go anywhere, at least not immediately, in a fundamentally authoritarian culture.

Large-scale adoption of the architectures of participation would represent a revolutionary change in organizational dynamics because—by giving lots of individuals a voice and audience through a networked platform—they force decisionmaking to be more transparent, democratic and consensus-based.

Rather than going all-out for the revolutionary applications of electronic collaboration, look for areas where new technologies can help people do their current jobs more effectively and efficiently. It doesn't have to be dangerous.

Tags: social media blogging enterprise

The growth of Chinese blogs is a popular story. People's Daily reports today on the new blog search service from Chinese search engine Baidu (via Search Engine Land). Look at the growth numbers they include:

A report released by Baidu earlier this week showed the number of bloggers who use Chinese had reached 19.87 million, a 24-percent rise over the same time last year, producing 52.6 million blogs.

The number of blog service providers rose nearly 55 percent in the past year to 1,460. Qzone, run by Tencent, had the most bloggers and visitors. It was followed by Sina.com, MSN Spaces and Sohu.com.

Also today, Matthew Hurst used varying estimates of Chinese blog growth for an example of an idea he's exploring, the Data Web. It's an interesting change of pace from the usual focus on text on the Web.

Want more on social media and China? Look up the Technorati/Edelman relationship, Richard Edelman's observations on China and Korea, Technorati's State of the Blogosphere, Sam's China Word of Mouth Blog, and, of course, my post on CIC Data.

Tags: blogging blog search Baidu China