Author: Stephanie Booth

BlogTalk 2008 Proposal — Being Multilingual: Blogging in More Than One Language [en]

Here’s the proposal I just sent for BlogTalk 2008 (Cork, Ireland, March 3-4):

The strongest borders online are linguistic. In that respect, people who are comfortable in two languages have a key “bridge” role to play. Blogging is one of the mediums through which this can be done.

Most attempts at bilingual (or multilingual) blogging fall in three patterns:

  • separate and independent blogs, one per language
  • one blog with proper translation of all content, post by post
  • one blog with posts sometimes in one language, sometimes in another

These different strategies and other attempts (like community-driven translation) to use blogging as a means to bridge language barriers are worth examining in closer detail.

Considering that most people do have knowledge (at least passive, even if incomplete) of more than one language, multilingual blogging could be much more common than it is now. The tools we use, however, assume that blogs and web pages are in a single language. Many plugins, however, offer solutions to adapt existing tools like WordPress to the needs of multilingual bloggers. Could we go even further in building tools which encourage multilingualism rather than hindering it?

Extra material:

I’ve gathered pointers to previous talks and writings on the topic here: https://climbtothestars.org/focus/multilingual — most of them are about multilingualism on the internet in general, but this proposal is for a talk much more focused on blogging. Here is a video of the first talk I gave in this series (by far not the best, I’m afraid!) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2096847420084039011 and which was about multilingual blogging — it can give you an idea of what this talk could look like, though I’ve refined my thinking since then and have now fallen in the grips of presentation slides. I also intend to base my talk on real-world examples of what bloggers are doing in the field.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you would like more details for evaluating this proposal.

We had a long discussion on IRC about the fact that the submission process required a 2-page paper for a talk (in all honesty, for me, almost the same amount of sweat and tears as preparing the talk itself — I’ll let you figure that one out yourself). BlogTalk is a conference which aims to bridge the space between academics and practitioners, and a 2-page paper, I understood, was actually a kind of compromise compared to the usual 10-15 page papers academics send in when they want to speak at conferences.

The form was changed, following this discussion, to make the inclusion of the paper optional. Of course, this might reflect badly on proposals like mine or Stowe’s which do not include a paper. We’ll see!

I’ll also be speaking on structured portable social networks during the workshop on social network portability, the day before the conference.

Du lavage de linge sale en ligne [fr]

[en] Nearly two years ago, I did a piece for a paper magazine on blogging, Netizen. I still haven't been paid, and I'm not the only one to have this kind of complaint towards the company Pointblog's CEO, Christophe Ginisty. I think that there are circumstances, when you're wronged, where it's legitimate to use blogging to expose what has happened -- against popular ethics which discourage you from washing your dirty linen in public.

“L’affaire” Ginisty-Pointblog, dont j’ai l’honneur d’être une des victimes, refait surface avec la fermeture de Pointblog. J’attendais que Chryde nous raconte sa version des faits, après les quelques mots de Gilles Klein à l’adresse précédente, la “défense parfaite” de Ginisty, le lavage de linge sale de Cyril Fiévet il y a déjà longtemps de cela, pour faire un petit dossier récapitulatif sur ce qui a été dit.

Mais je les entends déjà, les bien-pensants: “laver son linge sale en public, c’est pas beau!” “citer des extraits de conversation privée, ça se fait pas!” “arrêtez d’étaler cette vilaine histoire sur vos blogs!”

Oui… oui. Oui mais. Quand il y a un conflit, et que la discussion n’est pas possible avec l’une des parties concernées… qu’est-ce qu’on fait? Eh bien, quand il s’agit d’argent, par exemple, on fait des procès. C’est public, les procès. Salement public.

En ce qui me concerne, on ne me doit “que” 1050€. Je suis une petite joueuse à côté d’autres lésés, j’en ai bien conscience. 1050€, c’est quand même une somme, pour moi. Cela représente près de la moitié de mon budget mensuel. Bah, j’ai appris à vivre sans, depuis le temps (bientôt deux ans!) que j’attends cet argent, envers et contre tout. Mais je peux vous dire qu’en temps de vaches maigres (comme ces jours) j’y repense, j’y repense.

1050€, il n’y a pas de quoi aller s’amuser à faire des frais d’avocats pour ça. Surtout si on habite en Suisse, et que le débiteur est en France, lui. Ah, s’il était en Suisse! Un petit commandement à payer, et voilà, le tour est joué. Mais en France, c’est pas si simple, à ce qu’il paraît.

Donc, nous y arrivons, au linge sale sur les blogs. Parce qu’un blog, comme je le dis souvent, ça peut être utilisé pour trois fonctions principales: partager, informer, dénoncer. Oui, dénoncer.

Alors non, en effet, ce n’est pas très beau de laver son linge sale en public. Mais c’est pas très beau non plus de mener les gens en bateau, de faire des promesses qu’on ne tient pas, de les laisser dans le noir, avec (probablement) l’espoir qu’ils se lassent. Au risque de passer pour hargneuse (je veux bien assumer), je ne vais pas me la coincer.

Mais il y a des circonstances, où, merde, on a bien le droit d’utiliser son blog pour parler de nos mésaventures et montrer du doigt ceux qui nous font des sales coups. Il faut assumer les conséquences, ensuite, bien entendu. Comme dans “la vraie vie” (que je déteste ce genre de distinction), quand on dénonce, on court le risque de s’en prendre plein la figure. Eh bien soit. Christophe Ginisty ne va certainement pas apprécier que je le montre du doigt, ou que je rapporte des choses qu’il m’a dites (il m’a quand même fait l’honneur de 2-3 conversations par chat, figurez-vous!). Peut-être m’écrira-t-il (enfin! depuis le temps que j’attends un signe de sa part!) comme à Chryde, pour me menacer ou m’expliquer encore à quel point il est la victime dans cette histoire.

Peu importe. J’en ai ma claque. Pour le billet plus long, mesuré, avec citations et tout le toutim, il faudra repasser dans quelques jours/temps. Ou pas — on sait jamais, avec ces satanés blogs, si et quand on écrira ce qu’on a l’intention d’écrire. Donc au cas où (et si vous voulez prendre de l’avance et vous faire votre propre opinion), voici ma petite collection de liens sur cette triste histoire.

Ridding WordPress Plugins of Template Tags [en]

[fr] Cet article décrit une méthode permettant de se défaire des "template tags" qu'utilisent certains plugins. Plutôt que de copier le fameux template tag à 3 endroits différents dans son thème (comme c'était le cas auparavant pour Basic Bilingual), il est possible de modifier à peu de frais un plugin pour qu'il injecte automatiquement son contenu dans le blog.

If you’re like me and use a bunch of plugins to liven up your WordPress blog, you’ve probably noticed that adding template tags in your favourite (or favourite-of-the-week) theme files can quickly become a royal pain in the neck.

One of the things I wanted to do with Basic Bilingual, and which I did with the last release, was make the plugin inject the text for the “other excerpt” (the French text you can see at the top of this post) automatically into the templates and feeds.

Once I’d figured out how to do that, I realised I could modify other plugins, too. And I’m going to tell you how you can do it, too. This method should work for any plugin which generates a template tag, as long as you want the content generated by the plugin to go immediately after or before the post content. (I’m still working on advanced rules for cases where you want to make modifications elsewhere in the template.)

Christine‘s Inline Tag Thing put me on the track (thanks!), as it does just that. Here’s the trick:

  1. create a function which concatenates (= “adds”) the plugin output to the content
  2. add an action hook to the plugin to apply that function to “the_content”.

Fear not, I’ll explain all. You don’t need to really know much PHP to do this, as long as you’re comfortable wading through a bit of code and copy-pasting stuff and making a few small modifications.

Let’s take an example: the Similar Posts plugin, which I’m now using to point out posts related to the current one (normally, in a box at the top of the post if you’re on the website, and as a list at the end of the post if you’re reading the feed).

Similar Posts provides a template tag, <?php similar_posts(); ?>, which you can paste in your template where you like the related posts to appear. Personally, I want them to appear on the main blog page, on the individual archive pages, and on the monthly, category, and taggy archive pages. This means I need to paste the tag into at least 3-4 different template files. And if I decide that I want the tag at the top of the post rather than the bottom, or I decide to remove it, there I go again. Not optimal.

So, here’s how I made it “better” (for me):

A. First, I looked at the plugin code to figure out where the template tag function was; in this case, quite easy, it’s the function called similar_posts(), logically. Here are the last two lines of this function, which do the actual data output:

print $result;
if (defined('POC_CACHE')) print $cache_time;

I changed them to:

return $result;
if (defined('POC_CACHE')) return $cache_time;

So that they didn’t print directly (ie, output text), but just return the value of the data we want to insert.

Then, I created the following function:

function sp_embed_similar_posts($content) {
    $content = similar_posts() . $content;
    return $content;
}

This function takes one parameter ($content), and sticks the output of similar_posts() in front of it. Now you see why we needed to change the other function so that it didn’t print. We’re just modifying the value of the $content string. This new function returns the modified value for the content (in our case, imagine it as being the content of your post with the code for the similar posts listing stuck in front.

Now all that is left to do is to tell WordPress to actually use that function at some point (plugins are usually a collection of functions, followed by a series of “hooks” which actually execute the functions at certain chosen moments). Here’s the action we’ll use:

add_action('the_content', 'sp_embed_similar_posts');

Try it!

This will also add the list of similar posts to the feed.

So, in summary, here is what we have done:

  • modified the template tag function so that it returns a value instead of printing it (in some plugins, you’ll find a function that already does that!)
  • created a function to stick that value on the beginning or end of a parameter, $content
  • add an action hook on the_content to execute the function.

Happy hacking!

Basic Bilingual 0.3 for Multilingual Blogging [en]

[fr] Une mise à jour de mon plugin "Basic Bilingual" qui permet de rendre WordPress bilingue. Modification majeure: il n'y a plus besoin de bidouiller son template pour faire apparaître l'extrait du billet dans "l'autre langue". Par contre, c'est toujours nécessaire pour rajouter les attributs lang.

Long overdue, an upgrade of my plugin Basic Bilingual. Grab the tgz archive or check out the code.

Some explanations. First, you all know of my long-standing interest in all things multilingual and in multilingual blogging in particular.

Years ago, I switched to Movable Type and then to WordPress because I was blogging in two languages. Movable Type allowed me to assign more than one category to each post — so I used two huge categories, fr and en, to indicate what language I was blogging in. This soon made the rebuilds a real pain in the neck, and WordPress allowed me first of all to happily hack it into being multilingual, and then actually write a plugin to do it in a cleaner way. The plugin hasn’t changed much since, and this upgrade isn’t a major one, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Ideally, I’d like people to be able to use the plugin without having to modify their templates at all. I’d also like the plugin to allow filtering out one language if that is what the reader desires. I still hope that WordPress will one day “see the light” and let us define language at post-level (Matt saw the light for tagging ;-), so I do have hope). By the way, I stumbled upon this Ajax Language Switcher for Basic Bilingual earlier today, and it will probably greatly interest those courageous ones of you who tend to have translations of each post or page.

Back to the plugin. It installs normally (unzip everything in the /plugins directory). If you’re using other languages than French and English, you’ll have to manually change the language codes in the plugin file (not very difficult, you don’t have to know PHP to do it; just look for “en” and “fr” and put the language codes for your languages instead).

I’ve fixed an annoying problem with slashes that popped up at some point (somebody else gave me the fix, but I can’t remember who — let me know!).

But most of all, I’ve made the “other language excerpt” appear automatically in the post content. Yes, you hear me: no need to add <php bb_the_other_excerpt(); ?> in your templates anymore. Yay! Added bonus: it will show up in the feeds, too — for that reason, I’ve added a text separator between the excerpt and the post so that there is a separation between the languages.

Basic Bilingual in Google Reader

Obviously, you’ll want to hide these separators and style your posts a little. Here is roughly what I’m using right now:

.other-excerpt {
font-style: italic;
background: #fff;
padding-left: 1em;
padding-right: 1em;
border: 1px solid #ccc;
}

.other-excerpt:lang(fr) p.oe-first-child:before {
content: "[fr] ";
font-weight: bold;
}

.other-excerpt:lang(en) p.oe-first-child:before {
content: "[en] ";
font-weight: bold;
}

.bb-post-separator {
display: none;
}

div.hentry:lang(fr) .entry-title:after {
    content: " [fr] ";
    vertical-align: middle;
    font-size: 80%;
    color: #bbb;
}

div.hentry:lang(en) .entry-title:after {
    content: " [en] ";
    vertical-align: middle;
    font-size: 80%;
    color: #bbb;
}

Now, notice there is fancy stuff in there which relies on the lang attribute. If you’re mixing languages on a page, you should use the lang attribute to indicate which language is where. This means (unfortunately, until I become buddies with PHP’s ob_start() function) that you need to touch your template. It’s not that hard, though.

Find the outermost <div> for each post in the template (it should have the CSS class hentry, by now). Add this inside the tag: lang="<?php bb_the_language(); ?>". Do so on every theme template which produces posts. With the Sandbox theme, it would look like this:

&lt;div id=&quot;post-" class="" lang=""&gt;

That’s it!

If you’re using this plugin, please leave a link to your blog. I’m also always interested in hearing of other examples of multilingual blogging or multilingualism online.

Tags and Categories, Oh My! [en]

[fr] Il est temps de faire de l'ordre dans les catégories de CTTS. Je veux en garder 20-30. Vos suggestions sont les bienvenues.

The time has come. WordPress now has native tagging. I’ve imported my old tags and my even older keywords (yeah, even though tags and keywords are slightly different… what the hell). I’ve created an index page for my tags and an index page for my categories. Go and look, then come back.

So, what do you think?

I think the “tags” page looks pretty good (just needs a little CSS fixing so that the huge tags don’t prevent you from clicking on the smaller ones they hide). I mean, it’s a sprawling mess, but that’s what a tag collection should look like. Later, I can add fancy stuff like related tag clouds in the sidebar, or something like that.

But my, look at that listing of categories. It’s a huge sprawling mess, and it shouldn’t be. It should be a concise listing of rather widely defined areas I write in. Not easy. So, dear readers, I’m going to ask for your help.

See, I’ve installed this neat plugin, Tag Managing Thing, which does a lot of what I was dreaming up for a possible future version of Batch Categories. Well, one thing Tag Managing Thing doesn’t do which Batch Categories did, was to assign posts to categories and remove them. Tag Managing Thing only deals in organising tags and categories — including converting one into the other. Update: Rob Miller has a Batch Categories plugin which should do the trick. I can’t remember if he used any of my work or started from scratch, but in any case, it looks very much like what I had dreamed up for it 😉 [/update]

So, here we go. I want to keep — oh, let’s be reasonable — maximum 20-30 categories. (I’ll convert the rest to tags.) Some of the new or obvious ones will remain: Events, Youth, Social Software (maybe Social Tools?), Languages… Here’s what we’ll do. I’m going to write a list of categories at the bottom of this post, and I’ll keep modifying it until it looks reasonably good. I’ll be (heavily) relying upon your input for this. Thanks in advance. I really don’t think I can do this alone.

New categories for CTTS:

  • Events
  • Languages
  • Youth
  • Blogging
  • Technology
  • Social Tools
  • Travels
  • Livre (the book)
  • …

Please leave your ideas in the comments! The category index handily gives a post count for each category or subcategory.

Blogging in Internal Communications [en]

[fr] Notes de la conférence que j'ai donnée aujourd'hui à Zürich sur les blogs dans la communication interne.

First of all, let me thank all present for their participation, and Nils (Enzaim Communications) in particular for making this happen. I also appreciated having Stefan Bucher amongst the audience — it’s particularly nice when fellow bloggers show up, share their experience, and to top it all tell me my talk was interesting to them, too. Thanks!

Two months ago I gave a talk titled “How Blogging Brings Dialogue to Corporate Communications”. This one is quite similar, but focused on internal communications.

As I explained, the dynamics involved are very similar. It’s about having conversations, whether it’s behind the firewall or outside on the big bad internet — about engaging with people (employees, customers, colleagues) rather than talking at them.

Although the talk I prepared was very similar (with some added stuff specific to internal communications), it did of course turn out rather different. Different people, different questions. I like it (particularly with small audiences) when instead of giving a lecture-like talk, there are lots of questions and I am derailed from what I had planned.

That’s a bit what blogging is about, isn’t it? Having a dialogue. So, when the setting permits it, I try to do the same thing with my talks. My impression is that people get more out of them that way. (Do feel free to correct me if you think I’m mistaken.)

You should probably go and have a look at the notes from my previous talk, as I’m not going to rewrite everything here. I’ll just concentrate on what seems to me was the important additional stuff we talked about. If you were there and want to add things to what I’m writing here, please feel free to leave a comment. I’d be very happy if you did.

If you look at the slides, they’re very similar in the beginning, aside from slides 9-10-11 in which I try to clarify the difference between blog and wiki, as I was told confusion was common.

Blogs

Content on blogs is organised based on the time they were written. From an editorial point of view, blogs also put the author(s) forward. He has a very different status from the commentators, who are guests on his blog.

Wikis

Wikis, on the other hand, are organised solely through the links created between the various pages. The focus is on the documentation produced rather than on who produced it. The various author voices tend to merge into a uniform community voice.

Both blogs and wikis are part of the larger class of tools one can name “social media”. These are the online tools which help us publish information in a way that connects us to other people, and encourages us to engage in conversations and relationships with them. You’ll also come upon the expression “social software” used with roughly the same meaning (though the emphasis is in this way more on the technology than on its usage). “Social tools” can be considered a wider category including all technology that explicitly connects its users to one another. (I have to say, though, that many people — I included — will sometimes use these terms interchangeably.)

Short version: it’s “social media” that is important in this discussion, more than “just blogging”. I’m talking of “blogging” inasmuch as it is a popular incarnation of social media.

We spent quite some time commenting the blog examples I showed. These are of course examples of blogging externally, because unfortunately, it’s kind of hard to find examples of internal blogging on the internet ;-).

There are a lot of “damage control” or “crisis” examples, because blogging is a good tool to use in this kind of situation where real communication is required.

Here are a few quotes I read out. First, the beginning of the open letter to Palm on Engadget:

Dear Palm,

Man, what a crazy year, right? We know things haven’t really been going your way lately, but we want you to know that we haven’t given up on you, even though it might seem like the only smartphone anyone wants to talk about these days is the iPhone. It can be hard to remember right now, but you used to be a company we looked to for innovation. You guys got handhelds right when everyone else, including Apple, was struggling to figure it out. And it was the little things that made those early Palm Pilots great — you could tell that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to think about what made for a great mobile experience, like how many (or rather, few) steps it took to perform common tasks.

The problem is that lately we haven’t seen anything too impressive out of you guys. Sure, over the past few years the Treo has emerged as a cornerstone of the smartphone market, but you’ve let the platform stagnate while nearly everyone (especially Microsoft and HTC, Symbian and Nokia, RIM, and Apple) has steadily improved their offerings. So we’ve thrown together a few ideas for how Palm can get back in the game and (hopefully) come out with a phone that people can care about. (And we’re not talking about the Centro / Gandolf.) Read on.

Dear Palm: It’s time for an intervention

And two days later, the response of the Palm CEO, Ed Colligan

Dear Peter, Ryan and Joshua:

Thank you for the very thoughtful post about Palm. I really appreciate the fact that you guys and others care enough to take the time to write such a comprehensive list of actions. I forwarded it to our entire executive staff and many others at Palm have read it. Although I can’t say I agree with every point, many are right on. We are attacking almost every challenge you noted, so stay tuned. Let’s remember that it is very early in the evolution of the smartphone and there is enormous opportunity for us to innovate. We have only just begun to fight!

Thank you for taking the time to write. I really do take your comments to heart and I know the team at Palm is totally committed to delivering the best mobile computing solutions in the world.

Ed Colligan

Not bad, huh? This is the kind of openness people want to see more of.

Corporate types will always be concerned about negative comments, which is a valid concern; however, if you’ve got a product or service that’s worth blogging about, your fans should be coming out to support you — which they have, in Yahoo!’s case. Also, by allowing full comments, and better yet, responding to some of them, you gain a valuable sense of integrity and, as loathe as I am to type these words, “street cred” — that you just can’t buy.

Negative comments are the price you’ve got to pay for having a Real Blog, and companies that have them deserve to be recognized. It shows that they believe in their own business, and they respect their customers enough to allow them to have a public opinion on their business.

Yahoo’s Blog Takes Its Blogging Lumps, Like a Real Blog Should

We talked a lot about negative comments and what to do about them (they can actually turn out to be a good thing if you respond to them openly and honestly). We also talked about ghost-writing (don’t!) and human relationships in general. Things that are true for offline relationships, I find, are also true for online ones you can establish through blogging: if somebody is willing to recognise they made a mistake, for example, or acknowledge that you are upset about something, it goes a long way. Same is true on blogs.

Here’s a link to the corporate blogging 101 I mentioned in passing and I said I would point you to.

I also skipped a bit quickly through the Do/Don’t lists, so here they are again:

DO:

  • eat your own dog-food
  • trust your bloggers
  • read other blogs
  • be part of the community
  • use a feed-reader
  • link! even to competition, negative stuff
  • be human
  • learn the culture
  • use an existing blogging tool
  • discuss problems
  • define what is really confidential
  • give existing in-house bloggers a role (evangelists! learn from them!)
  • tag, ping, use the “kit” and other social tools

DON’T:

  • try to control
  • use a ghost-writer or outsource blogging
  • “roll your own” tool
  • ignore established blogging conventions, they’re there for a reason
  • copy-paste print material in posts
  • use corpspeak
  • force people to blog
  • write happy-clappy stuff
  • write blog posts or comments as if they were e-mails (starting with Hi… and ending with a signature)
  • be faceless (signing with the name of the company instead of the person)

Employees know (and so do internal communications people) that the best sources of information are usually one’s direct boss and… the cafeteria. If you think about it, your boss is probably one of the main people you actually have real conversations with. You don’t often have a real conversation with the CEO — but you probably have regular briefings with your boss. Hopefully, you have something resembling a human relationship with her/him.

The cafeteria or the corridors are the informal networking spaces of company life. And often, these informal relationships can actually be more useful to your work than the hierarchy. “Networks subvert hierarchies”, says the Cluetrain.

Well, in a company in which employees can blog, subscribe to their feeds and leave comments on each other’s blogs, the online space can become a kind of “virtual cafeteria” — only in the public eye. This might sound scary to some. But you’re not preventing people from having conversations in the cafeteria, are you? By having these conversations online, in a “public” space (which may still be behind the firewall), you can help them be more efficient if they’re positive, and debunk them more easily if they’re rumors.

RSS is an important technology to be aware of. It’s the one that allows people to subscribe to blogs, comments, or other sources of news. In a company where employees can have their own blogs, they’ll need to learn to use an aggregator, which will enable them to create their own news channel. One can expect an employee to know best exactly what sources of information to follow or people to stay in touch with to get her work done.

People who work remotely, who are on different sites, different silos, or who simply have different working hours can all benefit from the online cafeteria.

A few key checkpoints, if you’re thinking of introducing blogs in your company (“are we ready?” style). 5 prerequisites:

  • the management/CEO/company needs to care about their employees. Blogging won’t work well in an “abusive” relationship.
  • be willing to engage in real, honest dialogue, also about problematic issues (difficult, but often the most rewarding, as with normal human relationships)
  • blogging takes time, so it should be counted in as part of people’s workload/job
  • accept and understand that communication cannot be controlled
  • understand that blogging is not just a technology/tool, that it is mainly a culture/strategy

5 ingredients to “make it work”:

  • training. Don’t assume blogging comes naturally to people. We “natural bloggers” are the exception, not the rule. The technology is cheap — put money in the training, so people have a chance to really “get” the culture.
  • eat your own dog food. If you want to get people in your company blogging, do it yourself, too.
  • blogging is a grassroots phenomenon (bottom-up), so enable it (top-down), knowing you can’t “make” people blog. Create a blog-friendly environment.
  • read blogs and comments. This can easily be 50% of the workload involved in “blogging”
  • speak like a human being.

There… that’s about it. Did we talk about anything else important that I missed?

Focus Page on Experiential Marketing [en]

[fr] Une page sur le marketing expérientiel, en anglais seulement j'en ai peur. Feedback bienvenu.

There, here we go. I’ve written up a page on Experiential Marketing for my new Focus section. Feedback, ideas, reactions, etc… all welcome here in the comments.

And please, don’t hesitate to be critical if you think it’s required. Just stay constructive — thanks.

Stowe Boyd on Experiential Marketing [en]

[fr] Quelques citations (audio et texte) de Stowe Boyd sur ce qu'il appelle "experiential marketing" (marketing expérientiel en français). J'ai eu quelques discussions récentes avec des clients pour des mandats de cette nature, et je prépare une page d'explications à ce sujet pour ma section Focus (pas encore en français, désolée). Si vous êtes curieux, manifestez-vous dans les commentaires, ça me donnera probablement l'occasion de parler de tout ça en français!

I’m preparing a page on experiential marketing for my Focus series, as I’ve been in discussion about this kind of work with a couple of clients lately. It’s a term/concept coined by Stowe Boyd (not to be confused with the related but different independently named experiential marketing you can read about on wikipedia), so I dug around in his archives to see if he had blogged anything significant about it.

I found a few quotes in blog posts, but most interesting was this audio interview he gave Daniela Hinrichs in April 2006. Start listening just before the middle of the interview (the first half is about other stuff). Oh, and keep on listening after they’re done on the topic of experiential marketing — Stowe tells the story of why he wears a cap. 😉

It’s interesting to see how the idea evolved from the moment of this interview, just after he came up with the idea, and subsequent incarnations which he blogged about between then and now. Here are a few quotes I picked up:

Experiential marketing — as an increasing social consciousness pervades the online marketing world, advertisers will realize that ads are becoming less effective, even when streaming and animated. One answer is what I am calling experiential marketing: individuals or groups will be solicited and directly compensated to try out products and blog or otherwise chronicle their use. With highly trusted advocates acting on behalf of the community these campaigns will become a mainstay of product marketing 2.0.

Stowe Boyd, 15.06.2006

So, I will be posting on this “experiential marketing” project over the next few months, as I attempt to follow the advice of OpenBC’s staff and most knowledgeable users about how to achieve these aims, and I will examine everything involved: from the creation of a detailed profile, to developing a personal network, and the ins and outs of trying to use the system to accomplish real business goals. Because my goal is to spend more time in Europe, I am calling this the “More Europe” project.

As I said, I will be candid and critical. If I think some aspect of OpenBC’s user experience is dumb, I will say so. If I start drowning in social spam, I will write about it. If I get no traction on my plan, I will chronicle that.

Stowe Boyd, 20.07.2006

As I announced a few weeks ago, I am doing a new experiential marketing program for the folks at Blogtalkradio.com, one that entails me running a talk radio show. The first show was Thursday, and I had a great time interviewing Ted Rheingold of Dogster about Online Community (see /Talkshow Tomorrow: Ted Rheingold of Dogster on Online Community).

I started using the term experiential marketing a few years ago, in a project I was doing for GoToPC, and then again last year in the “More Europe” project for OpenBC (now Xing). The premise is that true understanding of a product or service can’t be gained from a half-hour demo: it requires hours, and perhaps weeks of use.

In this project I will be running a web-based talk show relying on the Blogtalkradio.com technology platform. Along with doing the show, I will be writing up my experiences with the software, recommendations for its improvement, and guidance for others trying the software.

Stowe Boyd, 14.04.2007

More details on all this when I put the Focus page online!