Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Images of BlogHerCon

   

         Renee and JD                Pre-Conference Dinner          Business Blogging BOF

   

  Charlene after her BOF              Deborah Schultz             Patricia, Denise and Mary

   

Susan, Mary, and Christine      Elisa before her panel               John and Anina

Tags: blogher, bloghercon

BlogHerCon Liveblogging: Blogging for Business

Session: Blogging for Business – 2:30PM-3:15PM

Panelists:

• Moderator: Lisa Meyers Brown from the American Cancer Society. Besides being a blogger herself, Lisa has overseen the introduction of both internal and public blogs for the ACS.
• Susan Getgood is a marketing consultant who is working with a client to not only introduce a corporate blog, but one that lets customers have authorship rights!
• Christine Halvorson is, of course, well known as the Stonyfield Farms blogger...but did you know that the blogs were their CEO's idea, and that Marketing were the ones who had to be convinced?
• Mary Smaragdis is a marketing director in the Public Relations department at Sun MicroSystems. She has also been one of the initial bloggers in the company. Sun as a company has a prolific list of bloggers, including the COO (Jonathan Schwartz) and the CTO (Greg Papadopoulos). Another top Sun blogger is Tim Bray.

The panel was actually be self-moderated since Lisa Meyers Brown could not attend to the conference.

The other liveblogger was Nancy Tubbs.

Christine talks her (best in the world job): blogging for a company that has established a communication channel through 4 blogs. The idea came from the CEO (who worked on the Dean campaign) in February 2004, and hired her in March. The blogs launched on April 1st. Christine states that the most important issue for businesses deciding to blog is which audience they want to serve, and how they plan to do so. The most successful blog for Stonyfield Farms is the Bovine Buggle in which the blogger, Jonathan Gates, strikes a personal cord with his readers talking about his farm. The traffic on these blogs took off thanks to 1) the use of banner ads on affiliate sites, and 2) the work of the PR team (who had to be convinced by the CEO) that gave an enormous exposure (coverage by BusinessWeek, WSJ).
The ROI of the campaign is not measured neither in terms of revenue impact or customer satisfaction (which I found surprising), and Stonyfield’s management reportedly does not “care”. They expect that increased goodwill regarding the brand will lead to positive effects (and it seems to have worked on the PR side).

Mary talks about Sun’s blogging infrastructure that was put in place after a number of employee bloggers (who hosted their blogs somewhere else) asked for support from the company. This obviously created a lot of potential issues for Sun (being a public company), especially when it comes to financial disclosure. Their initial blogging policy was (and still is) “Don’t be stupid”, and “don’t put anything out there that can be construed as a forward looking statement”. Sun has decided that they would trust employees to do the right things, and the initiative has been supported by top management. And given the breadth of Sun’s product lines, this was perceived as a great way of serving their large and diverse customer base.

Susan, a consultant,  talks about a company blog developed  for one of her clients (Software Secure), written at least partially by (happy) customers. A blog was seen as the most appropriate infrastructure to engage with their customers.
What do you need to have a successful customer blog: 1) they need to love, be fans of your products, 2) they need to be online (a good clue is whether there are already fan blogs or buzz in message boards), 3) establish a secure way of engaging with your writers, and 4) let go a bit of control: you can not ask to review posts before they are published.
In this case, there are 5 writers on the blog today - this actually can create the issue of disjointed voice. An important resource is the blog project manager, who administrates the platform. Finding writers implied interviews with clients to identify potential candidates, train them thouroughly, develop FAQs, and get a minimum commitment from them (30 mins per day, with a mimum 6 months involvement ?). Every now and then, the company is sending emails to these writers suggesting some topics, giving them early access to news so that they can blog about these, and commenting on their behalf on other blogs in order to foster a dialogue with the rest of the community (the idea being that they don’t have the time to read other blogs and comment).
Developing a collaborative blog is hard work because of the required involvement of multiple bloggers, and the management of this micro-community.

Q: what sort of guidance does Sun provide to its bloggers.
A: the guidance is still “Don’t be stupid”. Nothing financial-related, or that has not been disclosed by Corporate PR. And write about what you know, i.e what is related to your expertise. In the Business Blogging BOF led by Charlene Li in the morning, Mary explained that Jonathan Schwartz does not seek approval from PR or Legal before publishing on his blog (just spell checking).

Q: How much time can a Sun employee blog ?
A: No limit, but the workload is still the same (i.e Sun does not allocate time for its bloggers to publish)

Q: How do Sun and Storyfield know who their readers are, and which constituency are you addressing ?
A: Christine offers to people the ability to suscribe to her blog(s) posts to receive them by email.
A: Mary’s audience used to be developers, and then realized that Sun execs were reading her as well. And so does a financial analyst covering SUNW, quite critically so.

Q: Blogging as a KM tool ? Do you get pitches from third party companies to write about their products ?
A: Being pitched means that the market has acknowledged you (and your blog) as a reference, and you have to decice whether you want to develop that profile.

Q: How to bootstrap product blogs ?
A: Figure out who is writing about your products, and see whether you can develop a relationship. Example mentioned are Treonauts, published by my friend Andrew Carton, and the Red Room Chronicles, a blog published by Rob Safuto, the producer of Podcast NYC.

Q: Would Mary congratulate competitors on her Sun blog ?
A: Yes. She also talks about the fact that some bloggers are anonymous (such as "ThinGuy" whose blog is reportedly famous for this post), and that Sun supports that.

Q: Why is Sun not “compensating” its bloggers by giving them time to blog, or recognize the benefits ?
A: Mary agrees and talked to her boss about it.

Post-session remarks: Susan was kind enough to detail her experience with the customer blog in two detailed posts on her own blog.

Tags: blogher, bloghercon

BlogHerCon Liveblogging: Women who want to fund, build & sell things

Session: Liveblogging Women who want to fund, build & sell things – 1:30PM-2:15PM

Topic: Moderator Mary Hodder gets Denise Howell and Patricia Nakache answering questions about doing business from the POV of lawyers, VCs & Angels.

The livebloggers reporting on the sessions were Tony “Buzzhit” Gentile and Tricia.

Mary introduces herself mentioning that she recently started a new company (still in stealth mode), and raised angel money for it. Her blog has been instrumental in succeeding in her fund raising, establishing her ideas and her street creds. She recommends to have an executive summary, a basic financials spreadsheet and a definition of the market and products she is planning to build. And try and raise money from sources that can be a great reference for the company.

Denise Lowell is a lawyer with Reed Smith, one of the 20 largest firms in the US. She explains that she is sitting on the panel because lawyers can help companies get funded: making introductions, giving advice, and supporting a startup team.

Patricia Nakache is with Trinity Ventures, a $1B venture capital firm based on Sand Hill Road (in Menlo Park, CA). Her investment focus is on business and online consumer services. She explains that angels will typically invest their personal capital in opportunities, as they choose. Venture Capitalists act as proxies on behalf of their own investors (Limited Partners) investing in startups with a VC-type return (5X to 10X depending on the stage of the company) as a target. This means (as I wrote a number of times) that only a subset of companie will actually provide VC returns that can be funded by this group.

Mary has been raising/seeking $350K, in multiple tranches. It is difficult for VCs to rationalize an investment of that size, hence the involvement of angels.

Patricia shares a metric, responding to a question on “Where is the money for women”: only 4.5% of venture-funded companies financed in 2004 were led by women.

One of the key questions is: how can women get funded, and are they at a disadvantage when raising capital (Liza Sabater’s stance), especially if they are not building technology.

Mary’s experience (and reputation) are such that in her field (involving social engineering), being a woman has actually not been a disadvantage at all. Adina Levin (a SocialText co-founder) explains that what is key is to show investors the kinds of returns an opportunity can generate, and why you and your team can actually execute on this opportunity.

Another key question is: where are the Angels? How do you find them ? There are a few organized groups (Band of Angels, Tech Coast Angels,…) that can be approached with a business plan. The number one way though is networking, and accessing funding and advice sources through people you know.

Post-session remarks:  There are a number of VC bloggers who address elements of the questions that were raised during the session, and could not be addressed due to time constraints.  VentureWiki (when it is up) points to a few interesting posts (many from Ross Mayfield) that are worth a read.

Two points: 1) not all businesses are meant to be funded by venture capitalists, who have strict metrics in mind to determine whether a project is “worth their while” (for example, can they feel that you can reach $50M to $100M in revenue over 5 to 7 years), and 2) the best way to access VCs, angels, advisors, etc. is to network: through your friends, colleagues, school alumni, lawyer, accountant, the PTA,… there are people you know who can help reach valuable contacts who will answer for you many of these questions.

Tags: blogher, bloghercon

BlogHerCon Liveblogging: Charlene Li's BOF on Business Blogging

About 25 people gathered around Charlene to discuss the use of blogs in a business context. Few real-time tidbits:

• Started with a discussion on linking and discovery behavior, and how to “surface in the index”. Charlene explained that in a business context, the key metric is one’s ranking on Google. She recommended to study MarketingSherpa’s reports on the topic.
• There was then a discussion on personal vs. business topics to cover on a business blog. Someone makes a reference to David Hornik and the fact that he writes on VentureBlog for venture-related “stuff”, and SaysMe for personal items. The consensus is to draw a line in the sand as to how personal one wants/can become in her/his writing.
  My comment (I know I shouldn’t comment, but heck) is that it really depends on the personal. VB is a group blog, and it is natural to leave personal things aside. I pointed to Brad Feld and Fred Wilson’s blogs that contain a mix of personal, technology, VC stuff. The value of getting more personal is that your readers tend to get a better picture of your personality. And getting personal does not necessarily mean to talk about family-related stuff, opinions, experiences, thoughts are just as good.
  It was agreed that service-related businesses seem to be more appropriate for a mix, because the individual is “sold” as much as the firm (VCs, lawfirms, consultants, …).
• Blogging in business, and how it changes the internal dynamics ? Mary from Sun’s PR talked about Jonathan Schwartz’s blog, and the fact that he does not get a review from Sun’s PR or Legal (just spell checking). I asked her why he does not turn on comments or trackbacks on his blog. The answer is that “opening” his blog would create a responsibility (burden ?) to follow up on the dialogue, and it would become a time issue for him. The solution is to email him (provided that you know/guess his email in a first place, since it is not listed on his blog).
• Drifting on expectations regarding women senior executives and how challenging it is for them to be seen as performant in a very male context.
• Networking is the next topic: Renee Blodgett states that women tend to be perceived as lesser networkers than men, and generates respect for her 1000+ contacts on LinkedIn (with people she has met).
• Moving to networking vs. blogging, and the fact blogs are great for personal expression, but not creating networks. A lawyer blogger points to the fact that BlogHer attendees might gather a lot of blogs to add to their blogrolls today, but may not have met/discussed with the people sitting on their table. Someone points to a counter example (that I  have lived many times): meeting someone that you have been reading/engaging with on the blogosphere first and have this sense of “proximity” with.
• Marketing: need for better tools, such as group blogs, and the need for a shift in the marketing approach. Blogs are not a "fire and forget" thing anymore, and need to be integrated in the whole marketing plan.

Tags: blogher, bloghercon

BlogHerCon I Starts

I will attending BlogHerCon I this Saturday, liveblogging the session on Blogging for Business and translating into French the summary of the conference (I’m so in trouble on this one). I plan to attend the other business focused sessions, including Women who want to fund, build & sell things and $$$ and Sense.

I also attended the pre-conference dinner, at a very nice mexican restaurant. Not surprising given the event, but so unusual compared to the conference attendance I am used to, there were 20 guys max and over 100 bloghers – getting ready for tomorrow. I am really looking forward to the a great program.

Actually, the "unusual" attendance mix is leading to unprecedented "logistics adjustments".

Renee has more about the dinner.

Tags: blogher, bloghercon

Computer Associates takes out Qurb

Linus Upson, one of the co-founders of Qurb sent me a note announcing that Computer Associates Acquires Qurb. This is not a real surprise as the anti-spam market is still undergoing a consolidation after acquisitions from Symantec (BrightMail, TurnTide), Sophos (Activestate), Mc Afee (DeerSoft) and Microsoft (FrontBridge) in the space. And there are still a lot of independant players: MailFrontier, CloudMark, Proofpoint,...
The acquisition was actually announced last Tuesday (press release here), but I missed it as I was traveling back to the US.

I hope that the Qurb team did OK in the cash deal (terms not announced). They had licensed their technology to CA for inclusion in its eTrust platform, and as often, got acquired as a logical next step. CA is not renowned to pay great multiples though.

Qurb was actually developing a couple of other products, bundled together in a suite they were selling $29.95: an email search that was ultra-fast (so much faster than LookOut) and that I had been happily using ever since Linus introduced me to it, and an Outlook-based RSS feed reader that was still in beta but included a couple of interesting concepts.  The anti-spam product  was good, I was not really making use of it since Gmail filters very effectively most of the spam I get.

All the best to the Qurb team for the integration in CA, and to Linus for his pre-announced next move.

Paris entrepreneurs dinner: fun and promising

We had a great time last Thursday for our dinner. Thanks again to Rodrigo for having picked up a great venue (good food, wine, service and location), and for organizing the logistics of our gathering.

As I wrote a couple of weeks back, there is a lot going on in France these days, and I was delighted to hear about the projects of the entrepreneurs who joined us. Lots of discussions around vertical search, blogging, tagging, funding, etc.

Special kudos to David Guilloteau for having finalized the creation of his new venture, Talent4Jobs, on the day of the dinner. To Thierry Verrecchia for having licensed Atafoto's photo album technology to Fotovista's myPixmania.
And to Yann Lechelle, who was one of my developers 12 years ago (I'm that old ?), for having  rolled out 7 deployments of his academic&professional community management platform, and for having built Etheryl on cashflows up until now.

I look forward to hearing more about all these projects as they mature, and look forward to the next installment of the CGSdinner series on my next trip to Paris - most likely in December.

Technorati tag: CGSDinner2

Murdoch: Yeah, I get this Internet thing - and here is a $580M check to buy a place for my friends

A few weeks back, there were reports of Rupert Murdoch “getting the Internet” (at least now) and being ready to make some major acquisitions. Here is the first one: MySpace, the “music+social network+cool features+tons of page views and users” company that was started less about two years ago. For how much ? Well, its parent, Intermix Media, was just picked up for $580M – and Intermix bought back for $125M the shares they had sold/granted to Redpoint and MySpace management back in February (that is – 5 months ago).

As discussed with friends at the last SuperNova, MySpace not being a mainstream blogging phenomena – unlike Flickr – did not generate a buzz commensurate to their hypergrowth and stunning numbers (as shown on this blogpulse chart) but the magnitude of the exit consideration surely is!

I am sure that Accel partners felt even better about their investment in Thefacebook this morning.

Check out:

• PaidContent for details and comments of NewsCorp execs about the deal
• Bill Burnham’s great piece on the engineering of the deal, and the returns of VantagePoint and Redpoint, the two VCs involved
• Bambi Francisco’s analysis of the deal (sub req’d), that can be summarized: “If next-generation media is about user-generated content, then MySpace.com may be the perfect centerpiece for tomorrow's media conglomerates“
• SiliconBeat’s question:  “Could this represent the peak of the current Web 2.0 wave?” Answer: No, IMHO.

Tools: my holiday wishlist

This is really an addendum to my piece on blog posting tools. I have been catching up on blogs and podcasts over the holidays, working mostly offline. This has allowed me to discover a few issues or annoyances that ought to be addressed eventually by these tools providers.

• TypePad: I have been using the comments/trackbacks moderation made available through the new version (1.6). It is a very useful feature, but it would be a great to add the notion of “certification” (for lack of a better word) of a source of comments or trackbacks, i.e once someone’s comment/trackback has been accepted then it is possible to register that source as “straight through”, not requiring a new moderation. Also, for people using TypeKey as the authentication mechanism, I would point to their TypePad blog as a home page as opposed to their TypeKey home page (or I would seriously refine that one).
• Odeo: for the record, I might have been a bit unfair in my initial assessment of Odeo (which is now officially released). I have been using it to download my favorite podcasts, and on a Windows XP machine running Windows Media Player 10, it is actually quite good. There are a few issues that would be great to fix though:
• I would like to setup an absolute priority amongst podcast feeds so that new podcasts are added to the download queue according to this priority
• OdeoSync should pick up changes made to the download queue during a sync operation, or it should be possible to stop/restart a synchronization
• Odeo needs to setup a ping beacon so that podcasters notify them of updates – too often do I find myself forcing a feed update (because I received an enclosure in my RSS reader)
• Speaking of RSS reader, Odeo needs to develop the equivalent of chicklets to easily subscribe to a feed or a podcast
• Windows Media Player 10: I have been using it to upload automatically my (Odeo-delivered) podcasts to my phone, and it works quite nicely. However the management of synchronization priorities is cumbersome, and I would like to be able to move podcasts up/down in the queue without using the Up and Down icons when editing a Sync List. Not trivial, but feasible. In order to change the priority order in which podcasts are saved on a device: Click on Library Options and select "Show List". In the newly displayed list pane on the right of the Windows Media Player window, select "Edit Playlist" and point to the playlist you are using for your podcasts. The playlist is then displayed in the pane and you can select individual podcasts to order them according to your own priority. Re-sync with your device in order to have this order be used.
• Del.icio.us: it would be great to have a way to bookmark when offline. My current approach is to mark a post with a yellow Outlook flag (remember I am using NewsGator) and then do a bookmark when I am back online. Which means that I almost never do it.

To vendors of these tools listening to their users through watchlists, do let me know if you have any question.

Weblog posting tool: I chose BlogJet

After losing the "fruit of my labor" (blog posts) a couple of times because network or server errors, I decided to look for a Windows-based blog posting tool that would allow me to prepare posts offline, save my work locally and post at the first (network connection) opportunity. As I was packing for the holidays, and I knew that Internet access would be limited at least the first week, I started seeking the "perfect" tool - based on my requirements:

• Ability to save posts locally, post drafts and final versions, modify previous posts
• Support for standard blog features: categories, turning on/off comments and trackbacks, sending trackbacks, etc.
• Ability to configure multiple blog accounts since I am now authoring two different blogs, and contributing to a few others, on different blogging platforms
• Offering Wysiwyg editing  with direct access to HTML, spell checking with multiple dictionaries, etc.
• Dealing with multimedia uploads automatically (i.e no need to pronounce dark incantations to add a picture to a post)

Looking around, I found 4 different products, some free, some licensed: Ecto, Qumana, w.bloggar, BlogJet. I was already familiar with the NewsGator Outlook plug-in that offers relatively basic editing capabilities for TypePad.While the latter is useful, it is too limited and does not offer the functionality I outlined.

I ultimately chose to go for BlogJet (4 weeks trial, $39 license), essentially because it offered the best coverage of my requirements. It does the job rather well, as an efficient KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) implementation of a blog posting tool.

What were the issues with the other tools, and things I liked in them ?

• Ecto (2 weeks trial, $20 license): it is feature rich, and does include a very cool table creation/edition feature that might be of use. However I found the lack of a real Wysiwyg editor and easy picture upload to be problematic.
• Qumana (free): has a great editor and user interface, but  does not give access to HTML editing and picture upload management. And setting a category seems to require online access to the blogging platform. Update: Unfortunately, Zoli seems to have faced “I lost my posts” issues with Qumana.
• w.bloggar: is OK functionally but does not offer a Wysiwyg editor.

What else would I want to see in BlogJet ? The table functionality is useful (though I am not sure how often I would be using it). I have been having some stability problems, like getting error messages stating that a post could not be uploaded whereas it was. And I would like to be able to set an option for my comment/trackback default settings. Apart from these details, I am quite happy with my selection, having now used it quite a bit.