Citizen-Generated Media (CGM)

Business Blog Summit

Today, I attend the Blog Business Summit, a three-day conference in Seattle.

Some of the people that I profile in The Blog Ahead, including conference speaker Robert Scoble, The Search author John Battelle, and Weblogs, Inc. CEO Jason Calacanis, are going to be there, so I’m toting copies of my book to surprise them with.  I must say, this is one business blog that doesn’t bog down like many do.  It mixes aesthetics and information well, and is deep enough to reward someone that spends more than thirty seconds perusing it.  One of the major presenters at the Summit is going to be Ben Edwards, the Director of New Media Communications at IBM.

Blog Entity Reviews

1) Blogworks is the blog for a public relations firm in Michigan, Manning, Selvage and Lee.  They are the agency of record for Fast Lane, a blog by the vice-chairman of General Motors that has done much to repair GM’s battered image (as noted in my new book, The Blog Ahead).  Every business blog has some kind of unique focus, and that of Blogworks is word of mouth marketing and corporate blogging.  It has been around since April, 2005 and covers the most obvious business of the blogosphere, but their bloggers seem to have succumbed to the understandable temptation to lard up their posts with YouTube selections. Perhaps they should consider adopting the name ReBlogworks.

2) The Social Media Club is an example of what occurs when trendiness trumps content. Social media is one of the emerging buzzwords of the last couple of years, but this does not mean that everyone who proclaims themselves to be a part of such social media has something profound to say.  The Social Media Club wants to join the conversation, but has little new to say about it.  So it makes an innocuous plea – join us in the eternal conversation, and make that “us” include non-geeks as well as the usual suspects.  The one intriguing thing they did introduce me to was the New PR Wiki, a proposal to recapture the immediacy and importance of press releases by adapting them to the best practices of new media.  For a slightly less jaundiced view, visit this announcement from Earth Times.org on their first conference, which occurred in Palo Alto on Monday.

3) Social Media Optimization is a pretty narrow field, but it’s a field where the ad dollars congregate.  If you want new takes on things like the impending Google/YouTube marriage, this is one good place to visit.  This blog is short on aesthetics, but long on information and financial projections, maintained by Braveheart Design, a web design and SEO company in New Hampshire.  For an article that argues that social media and e-commerce are beginning to merge into social commerce (“s-commerce”), visit this recent Clickz article by Matthew Nelson.