Category: Social Media and the Web

Social media, blogging, tweeting, facebooking, web design, and all the stuff that isn’t here yet. Subcategories highlight some areas of particular expertise.

Blogs en entreprise, un peu en vrac [fr]

[en] A brief overview of important points to consider/keep in mind when thinking about blogs in a corporate setting. The two posts with my conference notes, How Blogging Brings Dialogue to Corporate Communications and Blogging in Internal Communications, roughly cover this.

Quel est l’essentiel à savoir lorsque l’on commence à s’intéresser aux blogs?

D’abord, que le blog est trois choses:

  • un outil (technologique) permettant de publier très facilement du contenu
  • une culture avec des usages, une histoire, une éthique
  • une stratégie de communication misant sur le dialogue, l’authenticité et la transparence

L’outil lui-même est relativement simple à mettre en place et est gratuit ou presque.

Apprendre à utiliser le blog pour publier des textes est aisé. C’est très similaire (côté processus et interface) à publier un e-mail. C’est entre autres pour cela que le blog est un outil aussi populaire et que “n’importe qui peut en avoir un”.

Pour une entreprise, il vaut la peine d’avoir une personne à l’interne qui soit capable de gérer le blog côté serveur: mises à jour, installation de plugins, adaptation du thème (gabarit) à la ligne graphique désirée, résolution de bugs dus à des changements de version (PHP, base de données) sur le serveur — ça peut arriver.

Maîtriser les fonctions plus complexes de l’outil de blog peut prendre plus de temps: catégories, tags, gestion des commentaires, insertion d’images ou de vidéo, mise en forme, liens, contenu annexe. La plupart des blogueurs devront avoir une partie au moins de ces compétences afin d’être réellement autonomes.

Utiliser un blog comme outil de communication n’est pas une chose naturelle dans le milieu des affaires. Le style d’écriture est différent de ce dont on a l’habitude (assez proche de l’e-mail) et revêt une grande importance. Etre exposé à la critique et aux questions difficiles est quelque chose dont nous protège de façon générale la communication unilatérale. Renoncer à la langue de bois ouvre parfois la porte à des situations difficiles à gérer.

Etre un bon blogueur requiert en fait des compétences relationnelles et humaines assez génériques et qui font souvent partie de la “personnalité” — ou du moins, qui ne sont pas enseignées de façon formelle. Le coaching sur la durée est le meilleur moyen d’apprendre à gérer ces situations dues à la nature conversationnelle du blog.

Installer l’outil et apprendre à l’utiliser, d’un point de vue technique, ce n’est donc que la pointe de l’iceberg. L’investissement financier est minime pour l’outil lui-même, mais il vaut la peine de mettre le paquet pour accompagner le/les blogueurs dans leur apprentissage de la culture propre à ce nouveau média, et de soutenir l’entreprise dans ses difficultés (inévitables) avec une stratégie de communication qui ne correspond probablement pas à ce qu’elle faisait jusque-là.

En cas de réticences budgétaire face au prix d’une accompagnement de qualité sur, disons, une durée de six mois — il est bon de (se) rappeler qu’on investit souvent sans sourciller des dizaines de milliers dans des solutions techniques ou du matériel. Pour un blog, point de cela: l’argent ainsi économisé doit absolument être consacré à la formation et au conseil stratégique par un spécialiste du média.

Le plus possible, on cherchera à faire bloguer des personnes provenant de l’entreprise elle-même. L’efficacité du blog consiste à mettre en relation de vraies personnes: les blogueurs, et les lecteurs, qui peuvent laisser des commentaires, ou vont peut-être publier des réactions sur leur propre blog. Les blogueurs deviennent vite la “vitrine” ou la “face humaine” de l’entreprise. Il est à mon avis très dommage de confier ce rôle à des personnes externes uniquement — il y a là une incompatibilité entre le rôle du blog, qui est de rapprocher, et le fait de confier ce travail à des externes, qui montre qu’on ne veut pas “se mouiller”.

Le blog lui-même, a priori, ne va pas rapporter d’argent. On fait de l’argent “à cause” du blog, non pas “avec”. Le blog apporte visibilité et crédibilité, d’une façon difficile à imiter avec une campagne de publicité ou de marketing “classique”, car elle est basée sur le dialogue et la relation. C’est en discutant avec les gens de notre entourage que nous changeons d’avis, et prenons des décisions. Internet, via les blogs, permet de démultiplier l’effet bouche-à-oreille de la conversation personnelle.

Ces thèses sont développées de façon plus générique dans l’ouvrage The Cluetrain Manifesto (à lire absolument): nos décisions d’achat sont basées sur les expériences de nos amis; personne n’aime qu’on lui “parle contre”, ce que fait habituellement la publicité; nous ne sommes plus dupes, nous savons que la publicité est mensongère. Sur internet, avec les blogs, les forums, les wikis, les réseaux sociaux, ces conversations qui existaient déjà bien avant l’ère d’internet acquièrent un pouvoir supplémentaire en étant sur la place publique numérique.

La communication ne peut pas être contrôlée. Les blogs permettent aujourd’hui à n’importe qui de se faire entendre, si ce qu’il raconte est jugé assez important par ses pairs. On ne peut pas “taire” les gens à coups de communication bien léchée. La langue de bois est montrée du doigt dans les commentaires et les forums de discussion. Internet nous force à renoncer au contrôle absolu de son image et à se jeter à l’eau, à participer aux conversations qui ont déjà lieu à notre sujet, ou à les encourager à venir se passer chez nous.

Pour bloguer il faut être passionné, et c’est quelque chose qu’on ne peut pas “truquer”. Si le coeur n’y est pas, les centaines de personnes du public vont finir par le sentir, un jour ou l’autre — et les gens n’aiment pas la facticité. Le choix des bonnes personnes pour bloguer est donc crucial. Ce n’est pas un travail pour n’importe qui.

Ecrire dans le blog, ce n’est que la moitié du travail. Il faut garder un oeil sur les commentaires, y répondre, modérer parfois. Il faut surtout lire — d’autres blogs sur des sujets apparentés, ce que le public dit au sujet de son entreprise, de ses produits, ou du contenu du blog. Tout cela prend du temps. Cela ne se fait pas en 3 minutes entre deux meetings. Aimer ce dont on parle et être passionné, ça aide.

Idéalement, je l’ai dit, on choisira ses blogueurs parmi ses employés. Il faut tenir compte dans leur emploi du temps qu’il vont passer un certain nombre d’heures par semaine à bloguer, lire des blogs, échanger e-mails et commentaires là autour. S’ils n’arrivent pas à faire leur travail, éviter la solution facile de mettre la faute sur le blog. Chercher la vraie cause, et y remédier.

Voilà… voyez, c’est un sujet sur lequel on peut vite s’étendre. J’en resterai là pour aujourd’hui, non sans vous donner quelques pistes pour explorer plus loin (pas impossible que j’en rajoute après la publication de cet article).

Livres à lire, en anglais:

  • The Cluetrain Manifesto, incontournable et en plus, disponible gratuitement en ligne
  • Naked Conversations, panorama de plus d’une centaines d’utilisations des blogs dans le monde des affaires, de la politique, ou des médias

Livres en français:

  • Blog Story, pour une introduction générale au phénomène et à son histoire
  • Blogueur d’entreprise, que j’ai reçu mais pas encore lu (pour cause de pile de livres) mais qui est tout à fait recommandable, j’en suis certaine

En anglais:

En français:

N’hésitez pas à laisser un commentaire si vous avez quelque chose à ajouter, ou une remarque, ou même une question.

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.

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!

Netvibes Widget of my Shared Items [en]

If you read this blog “on the blog”, and look at my very cluttered sidebar, you probably noticed there is a feed of my “shared items” from Google Reader hidden in there (grab the feed!). “Sharing” is the reason I switched to Google Reader over a year ago.

I’m sitting in a workshop about UWA widgets at Paris Web, which had me looking at netvibes again. Even though it never clicked for me, I know lots of you use it (I check my stats, yes I do).

So, here we go. One thing leading to another, I created a widget with my shared items in it. It’s more for fun than because it’s really useful, as you netvibes users can create it really easily — but hey, here it is:

Add to Netvibes

Update: how disappointing! I thought it was going to look like this in the blog post:

My Shared Items Netvibes Widget

Not there yet, it seems.

Update 2: something I’ve been wanting to do with netvibes (not sure how feasible it is, actually): create a tab with “my stuff” in it. See, I’m scattered online. And the stuff I “share” is also scattered. If I found it through my feed reader, it’ll appear as a whole post in my shared items. If I was randomly browsing around, it’ll be in my del.icio.us links. If it was a video I watched on YouTube, it’ll end up in my VLog. If I wanted to share a quote, it’ll be in my Tumblr. Creating something to collect all these “things of others that I consider worth passing on” would be really nice. I wonder if a netvibes tab would be a solution — and if people would use it at all.

Talk: Being a Blogging Consultant [en]

[fr] Notes d'une conférence que je viens de donner en Serbie sur ce qu'est le travail d'une "consultante en blogs" (notez les guillemets). Je préfère en fait me définir comme une spécialiste de l'internet vivant (celui des dialogues et des relations humaines) et de sa culture. J'interviens partout où ce genre de connaissance est utile à mes clients.

Here are some rough notes of the talk I gave at Blogopen, reason of my presence in Novi Sad, Serbia. I hope they can be useful to some. Number between square brackets refer to slide numbers (presentation on Slideshare embedded below).

If you have notes of this talk or by any chance have recorded it, please leave a link in the comments.

update: yay! some short recording snippets. see the end of this post.

[1] [2] Two years ago I was a teacher, and if you had told me then that I would be here in Novi Sad, talking about what it is like to be a freelance blogging consultant, you would probably have seen me make a face like this:

Expressions (Stephanie Booth) 9

[3] Later on I’ll tell you about what a “blogging consultant” like me actually does, but first of all, here’s my story. I grew up with computers in the house, discovered the internet in 1998 and soon after created a website. I started blogging in 2000 and gradually built a small reputation for myself online. By the time the Swiss media discovered blogs in 2004, I’d been at it for a while. When they started looking for Swiss blogs, they found me, and the phone started ringing.

You know how it is with the media: once one journalist has written about a person or a subject, all the others follow. I started giving interview after interview, exciting at first, but somewhat tedious after some time. But I was lucky to have very good local media coverage, which did help people find me or hear about me.

Just before the press started to show an interest in me (and blogs), a friend of mine asked if I could explain to her how to make a website. We sat together for two hours, and I told her how the internet was made of servers, and websites were in fact files that lived on those servers, files you can make in a text editor with special markings known as HTML, with CSS to control the visual aspect. She said “wow, you’re really good at this, you should get people to pay you to do it!” I was a bit skeptical, but thought it would be cool. So just before my first appearance on TV, I created a professional website (just a few pages, and if you look at it now, it’s really out-of-date — I’ll be working on it during the “Website ‘pro’ day” in a bit over a week). And on that website, I made a page saying something like “I’ll explain to you how to make a website, this is how much it’ll cost”.

Shortly after my TV appearance, I was contacted by a school who wanted me to come and talk about blogs to a class of teenagers. It went surprisingly well and I really enjoyed it, so I added an extra page on my professional site saying “I give talks in schools”. Little by little, through word of mouth mainly, I started having clients. And at one point about 18 months ago, I started having enough clients that I could consider quitting my day job (teaching).

That’s how I became a professional blogging consultant.

[4] So, what does a “blogging” consultant do? It’s not just about blogs. Actually, one of my ongoing struggles is to find a “job title” to define myself. “Blogging consultant” already existed, and people knew about blogs, so it wasn’t too bad.

[5] Blogging is more than it seems. It’s a tool, but it’s more than that. It’s also a culture, and if you’re a company or an institution, blogging is a communication strategy. We see companies and media corporations using the blog tool to publish press releases or official documentation. That’s using the tool, but they don’t get the culture, and they haven’t changed their strategy. (You might want to see the notes on my talk “How Blogging Brings Dialogue to Corporate Communications” if this topic interests you.)

[6] One expression we hear a lot in this kind of context is “social media”. Traditional media go in one direction. Journalists write, people listen (or put their fingers in their ears). It looks like this:

Cluetrain 101 Sketch 1

With social media, on the other hand, we have a new type of media (well, reasonably new) where conversations take place. Communication goes both ways:

Cluetrain 101 Sketch 3

So basically, being a “blogging” consultant has a lot to do with social media. (Understanding and explaining it.)

[7] All this kind of stuff is explained in a great book that everybody should read: The Cluetrain Manifesto. You can read it for free on the Internet or buy it as a real book if you prefer. The Cluetrain Manifesto was written in the year 2000, so quite some time ago, but it’s still spot on. It tells us how people are sick of being marketed at and talked at, and how people are already having conversations everywhere about brands, companies, and these conversations are happening on the internet. Companies, politicians, and media empires would be smart to step in and join the conversation. Anyway… read the Cluetrain Manifesto if you have any interest in what’s going on on the Internet.

[8] So, in my job, I don’t just work with blogs. In addition to blogs, sometimes solution require wikis, podcasts, or social networks. [9] Using these tools brings up values like dialogue, transparency, authenticity, and often leads to rethink strategy. [10] Finding a solution for a client can be helping them re-organise their e-mail, set up a mailing-list, or simply build a website. Maybe it requires social tools like Twitter or Dopplr, or they might even want to know about virtual worlds like Second Life.

This is clearly not just about “blogging”. It’s about this bigger world blogging is an important part of.

[11] I like to think of myself as a specialist of the living web and its culture. The living web is the internet of people, conversations, and relationships.

My work is anywhere people need this kind of knowledge. Who needs this kind of knowledge?

[12] Schools, politicians, companies big and small, freelancers, non-profits, media, startups, people…

[13] Here’s a little more about what it means to be a freelancer consultant in today’s world.

[14] The Balance of the Soloist according to Stowe Boyd:

The most difficult challenge for soloists is to find a balance between the various activities that must take place to survive. I like to oversimplify these down to three:

  1. Doing The Work — The heart of consulting — of whatever description — is delivering the work. A soloist has to deliver value to the client in order to make money. Most consulting-oriented people start with this capability: it’s the other two that cause problems, in general.
  2. Marketing and Networking — I have already noted that I principally market myself through blogging, and that I attend conferences: those are the outward signs of a willingness, or even an obsession with networking with likeminded others. When I find out about a web product that sounds interesting (my beat), I sign up for the beta, fool with it, write a review, ask for more info, and very soon I am involved in a direct communication with the company’s management. I read other people’s blogs and comment on their ideas. When attending conferences I try to chat with both old friends and folks I have never met before. I know many consultants whose natural introversion makes such activities difficult if not impossible. But these interactions are just as critical to being a soloist as performing the work, and are likely to take up just as much time!
  3. Prospecting, Contracts and Cash Flow — I am always happy to talk about money, and as a soloist it is imperative to get what you are worth, and then to collect the fees. This is a blind spot for many, and a make-it-or-break-it issue. I know a lot of folks that find it hard — even with people they know well — to ask for a project, an engagement, whatever, and to demand payment later on. It may seem obvious but many consultants only get involved with this as a necessary evil, but it’s not. It’s just as central as delivering the goods and networking.

Stowe Boyd, “Going Solo: A Few Words Of Advice”

These are the three skills the freelancer needs. Often people drawn towards freelancing are people who are good at doing something (the work) and reasonable networkers — and the third part (money) is the most difficult.

[15] the work

This will of course vary from person to person. Depending on your skills and abilities, you will be doing different things. For example:

  • talking (like this talk I gave — speaking engagements)
  • explaining — talking with clients to tell them about things they need to understand
  • solving problems
  • gathering information (about your client, about a subject you need to know more about)
  • managing projects
  • installing tools (WordPress, wikis…)
  • coding HTML, CSS, or even PHP
  • doing graphical design in Photoshop (I don’t do this, I’m really bad at it, so I usually tell the client he needs to have somebody else for this)
  • training — it’s not that easy for “normal people” to learn how to use a blog tool… and more importantly, understand the blogging culture. Linking can be the topic of a two-hour class! (what to link, when, with what text, trackbacks, linking technique… suddenly text has two dimensions instead of one, so it changes writing style…)
  • “cluetrain 101” — explaining the basics of what the internet is changing to the way we communicate
  • experiential marketing (I’ll blog more about this later) — where you use a client’s product and blog about it
  • blogging for a client (even though it’s not something I believe in, and I don’t do it — some people might)

[16] Marketing

  • blog, blog, blog. And blog more. Demonstrate your expertise. Look at how Thomas Mahon used his blog to demonstrate his expertise at being a high-class tailor. Blog about what you know and what you’re doing.
  • be a good connected net citizen. Use LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter, IM… be out there
  • talk around you offline
  • go to events — try to speak! send in proposals! Barcamps are a great place to start because anybody can talk. Get somebody to film you and put it online. If you’re not speaking, publish live notes of the talks on your blog (live-blog). People who weren’t there or didn’t take notes might appreciate yours.
  • in short, take care of your social capital (whuffie) — your social connections
  • if you’re lucky enough to have journalists call you — be nice with them. I would probably not be here today if it hadn’t been for the local press in Switzerland.

[17] Cash

Often a difficult point, as I mentioned.

  • how do you actually get to the point where you close a deal?
  • contracts
  • you’re worth more than you think! Have friends help you keep that in mind before you negotiate with clients.
  • will you be paid per day, per project?
  • how much? fixing the right price can be tough — I haven’t completely figured out pricing yet.
  • when do you ask for money, when do you not ask? Sometimes it’s not that obvious.

In addition to this, going freelance might mean you have to think about:

  • insurance
  • taxes
  • laws
  • accounting
  • invoicing

And also… balancing your personal and professional life. All this “taking care of your social capital” does tend to blend the two — in a good way, often, but also in a way that makes taking days off or going on a real holiday very difficult. Pay attention to that.

[18]-[23] So, looking back… After my initial “no way!” reaction to the idea of being a “blogging consultant” two years ago, even though I went through phases like this

Expressions (Stephanie Booth) 2

and this

Expressions (Stephanie Booth) 12

and this

Expressions (Stephanie Booth) 11

and even

Expressions (Stephanie Booth) 3

overall… I’m pretty happy about my life as a blogging consultant:

Expressions (Stephanie Booth) 14

note: I took all the rather cheesy “emotion” photos myself the morning before the talk, because I didn’t have the time and resources to go hunting for good “emotional faces” stock photography… I hope you’ll forgive me!

You can find more stuff about consulting in my del.icio.us links.

Thanks to everybody who attended my talk and gave me kind feedback. Many Serbian bloggers also mentioned my talk in their blog posts, but I’m afraid I can’t understand any of it! Here are the links, though:

As far as I can tell, some posts simply mention me. But if there’s anything said worth to be translated or paraphrased, feel free to do so in the comments! (Just tell me what link it’s about…)

Update:

Thanks a lot to darko156 who filmed two short video sequences and uploaded them to YouTube. Here they are. The first video is slides [4]-[7] (what exactly a blogging consultant is, social media, The Cluetrain Manifesto):

The second is slides [7]-[10] (Cluetrain, social media tools and values — dialogue, transparency, authenticity, strategy…):

Curious about what I was waving in my right hand?