Liveblogging the Web 2.0 Expo

In case you have not been able to make it to O'Reilly's Web 2.0 expo in New York (like me), you can still follow along from this live blogging effort.

O'Reilly themselves have provided a few more resources to read along about the goings on...
O'Reilly's Expo Blog
On Twitter

What not to do with Web 2.0

I know I must sound like a cheerleader going rah-rah for Web 2.0. In spite of all my enthusiasm for new technologies, I acknowledge certain technologies are not for everyone. Here is an interesting blog listing some really weird Web 2.0 startups....

I guess there is a market for every silly idea ;)

Stengthen your core audience and Promote your blog

This post is the third in the series of entries about creating a blog. We looked at basic blog setup yesterday - now that you have a place to write with a cool name and all - the question is what do you do with it? What do you write? If you are a corporation, who writes? Who is the intended audience? What is the goal you want to achieve with the blog? Lots of questions!

Naturally, the most important thing to do is to come up with some clear goals for what you want to achieve with your blog - you could be looking to simply express yourself, in which case you may want to write about whatever interests you. Corporate bloggers on the other hand, have a different kind of maze to navigate - the motivations behind corporate blogging would normally point to who would be the natural choice to blog...Let's look at a few possible motivators -

• Public Relations: Southwest Airlines has a blog for a similar purpose that serves as a bridge between Southwest's customers and the airline. The content is created by the airline's PR team and executives. It serves as a way for Southwest to gauge customers' mood over the airline and relate to them on a more personal level than news releases can ever allow. The airlines gets to write about their initiatives and get direct customer feedback in the form of comments.
• Community-building: This is a little like PR in that this kind of blogging is supposed to humanize a corporation to the customers, but the end goal is to build a network of customers - a community that generates it's own content - instead of using the customers simply as a source of feedback. This kind of a community would definitely need to be kick-started by a few original bloggers who plant the seeds that the community then picks up on and continues.
• Broadcast Knowledge: For companies that thrive on information - by being sources of information and by providing services to other companies, blogs can be great tools when you can get the company's thought leaders to write entries related to their areas of expertise. These articles when indexed and used as information outlets by others, create free advertisement for the company and touts it's employees as experts in the field.
  

Frequently updated blogs with interesting, insightful and/or funny commentary is key to holding audience attention and keep them coming back from more. Keep entries short and the information in them distilled. Don't insult the reader's intelligence and try to avoid taking extreme positions - controversy creates temporary spikes while people stop to watch the car wreck, but the traffic spikes do not translate into long-term traffic.

The beauty of blogging with comments enabled is the instant feedback-loop that will steer your future vision. Moderation of comments on the other hand, is very important since an overly negative set of comments can turn into a public relations nightmare real quick and can be a community-killer.

Most importantly, stay honest and learn to backup assertions - someone is bound to call you on erroneous assumptions!

Setting up a Blog

This is a sequel to yesterday's post about creating blogs. We are going to take a more detailed look at the setup and configuration of a blog and the various decisions involved.

First task, picking a host for the blog - free or paid. A lot of newbie bloggers tend to start free (I did, eons ago), gauge interest, get addicted and move on to their own domain and web space as the content increases. Corporate bloggers of course, are better off starting on their own domain in the first place.

Advantages to having your own domain are numerous - you have complete control over the content-generation, presentation, access and authorization for the content. You can use an enterprise-level infrastructure to ensure availability and an effective user experience. The biggest implicit advantage of social media and blogging in specific, is brand-messaging through the content being published and exposed to a user community. This brand-messaging can be conveyed in the most effective manner when the corporate domain is used for the blog, creating a seamlessly integrated user interface to the corporate website visitors.

Freebie blog options: Blogger, Wordpress
Paid blogging options: Typepad
Domain/Web space options: GoDaddy

Second task, pick a name for your blog. Easy enough? Not really, since this is essentially your identity - how you will come to be viewed by the online community and your readers. Too formal a name will put off readers, while something too informal might sound like you are not serious about what you want to say - well, maybe you really don't want to be too serious, in which case, go ahead and have fun (my first blog's name had "two mad Asian girls" in it, so I am not one to preach). An ideal name will reflect your brand identity to the world or yours and will come off friendly and inviting (hopefully) and not offensive or off-puttingly staid. For good or for bad, once your online identity is established, it is here to stay - so put a lot of thought in what you want to be known as and known for.

Now that the tough part is out of the way, what is left is to make your content search engine friendly so your blog can be indexed and viewed freely or setup stringent access controls so only authorized users can access it.

More in the next post about generating content that is relevant to the audience you want.

How to start a blog?

This was an interesting question that came out of a lunch conversation with a client recently - how does one go about starting a blog? Well, the smart-ass way of answering that would be to get one at Blogger or Typepad and start writing away.

If you dig a little deeper, there is a lot more to the question than what it initially seems like - creating the shell of a blog is easy enough, but to get something interesting in it, attract an audience and sustain their interest in the long term. Per Business Week, there are more abandoned blogs on the internet than active ones...almost a ratio of 1:4 (active:inactive) - I should know, since about 50 of them belong to me...

Getting a little more serious though, we can break a blog's lifecycle into about three broad stages (thanks Diana, for help with the stages!):

• Setup: This involves everything from picking out a blog host, a template that is unoffensive visually, if not actually pleasing to the eye, picking out a good name for the blog - a configuration-intensive process that is also pretty crucial in the later stages, since this establishes the identity of the blogger(s).
  
• Strengthen: This is when the newly minted blogger(s) actually start putting content on their blog - you start writing, you embed your stat counters, watch as the number of visitors goes up and start building up your core audience - start building up the momentum that will sustain your blog in the future.
  
• Sustain: So, you have your blog, you have been posting enough to build up a good group of core audience you interact with on a regular basis via comments and trackbacks - this is when you keep the momentum going that you have built up with all your hard work and great content through the lean-visitor months.

I am going to break up the discussion of each of these individual topics into a separate post so as to not shortchange any of the topics and hopefully in the process we will hit upon some insights as to how to make blogs work in a meaningful manner.