Technorati's Peter Hirshberg on Japanese bloggers, Jello and the shoe shine guy

Technorati chairman Peter Hirshberg gave a fab opening keynote at last week's conference on corporate communication and technology held by The Conference Board in New York.

Apologies for taking so long to get this post up. I've been going non-stop. I was on the blogging panel for The Conference Board, did blog training with a corporate client and then was on another panel for the Annual ASJA meeting. Fun week in nyc.

Here are a few highlights of his presentation:

Why Japanese is the leading language of the blogosphere

Texting! In Japan, blogging often means texting a one-liner which automatically posts to your blog. (Read more about Japanese bloggers and their mobile Internet use.)

Want to ignite CGM (consumer generated media or content)? Your brand has to match the passions of your customers

He gave as an example use of the word "Jello" on Elise Bauer's popular Simply Recipes blog. She wrote a post titled Why I Love Jello...  on November 29, 2006, noting also that she had a case of "wicked bad flu." The entry received 97 comments from readers.

By mentioning Jello, Elise was tapping into her readers' passion. They in turn linked to her post on their own blogs. Mention of the brand spiked in the blogosphere (also because of the holidays).

Her blog gets one million visits a month, according to Peter.

What the shoe shine guy knows about digital media strategy... A lot

Peter has made a series of very funny man-on-the-street videos over the past few years, asking New Yorkers what the word blog means, asking directions "to the blogosphere," etc.

(You can see some of his videos here.)

He showed us one of his classics, a video interview with the shoe shine guy at Grand Central Station in July 2004.

While he's shining Peter's shoes, the man opines about whether blogging will take off. And if it does, what it will mean.

"I really don't think this blogging thing will take off... But if it does take hold and become infectious I would imagine it's going to take several years."

Peter interrupts to ask: "Who's it gonna hurt and who's it gonna benefit?"

The shoe shine guy replies: "It's gonna benefit whoever owns it... and it's gonna hurt the publishing companies."

Remind me again why we need all those MBAs to explain business strategy to us?

We're at the inflection point for corporate blogging

As I noodle around with a number of presentations** I've got coming up (I've finally figured out Keynote for the Mac), I want to take a stand.

It's the end of marketing, advertising and corporate communications "as usual"

It's not enough to say that blogging is important or that social media tools are going mainstream.

Here's my little manifesto

I'm still noodling with it. Feel free to jump in and add something, help me clarify my thoughts or tell me to stuff it:

The Inflection Point of Corporate Blogging

- Blogs and other social media tools are here to stay

- Blogs are just next-generation Web sites

- Social media tools (RSS, blogs, podcasts, video, wikis, etc.) can be used by any company, large or small, B2C or B2B

- They symbolize community, conversation, mutual respect between users and an ethos of sharing

- These tools are more powerful at informing/influencing/persuading than traditional forms of marketing, advertising and corporate communications

- They help you get found online

- If you can't be found, you don't exist

Conclusion: This isn't optional

You gotta start using blogs, podcasts, online video (social media) today!

Defining an inflection point

Google's acquisition of YouTube yesterday for $1.65 billion is extremely significant. (Watch the CNN video with the announcement.)

Yes, it's a lot of money. Yes it's eerily like the dot com boom days when companies with no revenue were perceived to be hugely valuable.

But I see it as more than that. It's a tipping point (thanks to Malcolm Gladwell). Or an inflection point.

Intel's Andy Grove popularized "inflection point" as a business term. It's really a mathematical expression meaning a point on a curve at which the tangent crosses the curve itself. I don't pretend to understand calculus so don't ask me to explain.

Translated into business, it means something new is happening and there's no going back. No more "business as usual."

Read Andy's explanation here. It's an excerpt from his 1996 book, Only the Paranoid Survive:

"Strategic inflection points can be caused by technological change but they are more than technological change... They are full-scale changes in the way business is conducted, so that simply adopting new technology or fighting the competition as you used to may be insufficient. They build up force so insidiously that you may have a hard time even putting a finger on what has changed, yet you know that something has. Let's not mince words: A strategic inflection point can be deadly when unattended to." - Andy Grove, founder of Intel

** I'm speaking at a bunch of different venues over the next two weeks - both here in the U.S. and also in London (Oct. 18th and Oct. 25th) and at a private event in Paris! (Que j'adore Paris!)

2006 is the the year of "how" for corporate blogging and other social media - we're beyond the "what"

It's no longer a question of "what" (as in "what in heck is a blog?"). The question I get most often these days is "how." "How do we incorporate blogging into our marketing?" "What about RSS, podcasting and all that other stuff?"

That's the theme - or the premise, really - of this year's New Communications Forum in Palo Alto, CA from March 1 - 3, 2006. The event is organized by Elizabeth Albrycht and Jennifer McClure (can't wait to meet these divas of new media) and includes an all star lineup of speakers including Rebecca Blood, Pete Blackshaw, Toby Bloomberg, Katie Delahaye Paine, Tom Foremski, Dan Gillmor, Elisa Camahort, Charlene Li, Sally Falkow, Jeremy Wright, Robert Scoble, DL Byron, Anita Campbell, Denise Howell, Stephan Spencer, Dana VanDen Heuvel and lots of others. 

I'm excited about participating as a speaker (I'm moderating a panel on Corporate Blogging Case Studies on Thursday March 2nd at 10:15 - 11:15 AM). So excited in fact, that I'm flying in a day early to attend Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz's podcasting bootcamp. They're going to record a special edition of their popular podcast, For Immediate Release, as part of the session. Sounds cool.

If you're going to pick one event to attend in upcoming months - to get up to speed on the new social meda technologies - I highly recommend this one.  And no, I don't get a penny for saying that. But you can get a $200 discount if you use this promo code: NCFR200. This will be an information rich couple of days. You can learn more and register here. Or you can call Jennifer McClure at 650-331-0083 to register by phone.

Web 2.0: Consumers are now producers

It really just boils down to that. Even non-geeks will begin to understand, I think. For example, digital cameras - almost ubiquitous now - mean uploading to your computer, then uploading to Flickr or your blog, etc. That's what "creating Web content" means, if you've been puzzling over the phrase. It all just flows together. As Doc Searls put it in his opening remarks yesterday at the Syndicate conference in San Francisco:

"The biggest fact about the live Web: individuals are in charge. The group we used to call consumers are now producers. The demand side is supplying itself. Dealing with that fact, and taking advantage of it, is the biggest challenge and opportunity for everybody who wants to succeed in the live Web."

Wish I could be at the conference. Sounds fab. Hey, Doc. Say hi to Jonathan Schwartz from me! I've emailed back and forth with him for an interview for The Corporate Blogging Book (see Hugh Macleod's cartoon). But haven't had the pleasure of speaking with him in person.

Ask Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems' President & COO)
Ask Jonathan about the ROI of blogging by a top exec or CEO. Assuming it can't be measured precisely, how do you justify the time it takes to write a thoughtful blog, which he does?

SyndicateQNA

David Weinberger on blogging and Web 2.0

I had the pleasure of interviewing David Weinberger last night for my book. David's one of the co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto and a fellow this year at Harvard's Berkman Center. We ended up talking about whether blogging was part of the something "new" that is Web 2.0. No, David opined, it's not. Although Web 2.0 "expert" Tim O'Reilly suggests that it is. Weinberger's point is that the "making your voice heard" part of blogging is really what the original Web was all about.

What's new, he grants, are the RSS pings and the discrete links for each blog post. And tagging. All of which can be mixed up and re-combined in Web 2.0 ways. It occurs to me that since blogging is still "new" for many companies and organizations, it doesn't really matter to them whether it's Web 1.0 or 2.0. Anyway, read his thoughts on blogging and Web 2.0 here.

Cool Women Bloggers at the Blog Business Summit

One of the great things about participating in a three-day conference like Blog Business Summit is meeting in the flesh people you've been interacting with online. (I ran a session featuring dueling corporate blogs: GM's Fastlane blog vs. Intuit's QuickBooks Online blog.)

Dave Tayor, who ran the BBS's popular Blogging 101 pre-conference session, has penned a thoughtful article on this topic: The Critical Business Value of Attending Conferences. BTW, it's been hugely fun for me to meet Dave in person for the first time after several years of email correspondence. It was also wonderful to get to know Tris Hussey better. He lives and works on a tiny island off the coast of Canada, near Vancouver. The lucky guy.

In addition, I've had the chance to meet a handful of whip-smart A-list women bloggers. In no order, a tip of the hat to Mary Hodder, Sally Falkow, Laurie Mayers, Rebecca Blood, Molly Holzschlag and Evelyn Rodriguez - all of whom presented at BBS. It's been a thrill...

Technorati tags: BBS05, blogbusinesssummit, blogher

If you're not familiar with tagging, click the links above. You'll go to pages where you'll see dozens of entries from other blogs about the Blog Business Summit.

Delirious with del.icio.us

Never should have gotten started with this today... it's totally addictive. Click on this link http://del.icio.us/wordbiz and you'll see the beginnings of my social bookmarking (which is part of the social networking phenomenon). Sarah Lewis turned me on to this (thanks Sarah!) and now I can't stop. In a nutshell, del.icio.us lets you do three things:

1. Quickly tag, annotate and save links you want to refer to later.

Rather than sending emails to yourself (am I the only one who does this??) or struggling with an endlessly long bookmarks folder in your browser, you can use del.icio.us to organize your links. Normally, you can only find your browser bookmarks on your own computer, of course. With del.icio.us, you can log in from anywhere and see your own bookmarked pages. You tag (i.e. assign keywords) and annotate them so you (and anyone else) can see why you bookmarked them. It's totally cool.

2. Enable  others to see what links you find significant and how you've tagged them.

I.e. see http://del.icio.us/wordbiz  Note the tiny pink highlighted link under "Blogs Will Change Your Business." As I write, 161 other people have linked to this Business Week (May 3, 2005) cover story. That number will probably be higher by the time you read this.

3. Search on tags (think of them as keywords) you're seeking information about.

For example, click on  http://del.icio.us/tag/corporate+blogging  Now you see what everyone else interested in this topic has linked to.

BONUS: Subscribe via RSS

Of course, you can subscribe via RSS to anyone else's list of tags... or your own for that matter. Or on a category (like business+blogging) that you're interested in.

Just set up a free del.icio.us account and you're ready to rip... but beware if you have a deadline for something else.

And whence the name del.icio.us?
Oh, and do you get it about the name "delicious"? The folks behind this service wanted a URL that spells out an easy-to-remember (and fun, like google) word. So... they chose a .us domain extension. And set up "del." as the subdomain. Clever branding, huh?!

Addendum
Forgot to mention. Flickr (acquired in March 2005 by Yahoo) does the same thing for photos that del.icio.us does for links.