Ok, I admit it. I haven't been walking my own talk. I say how important it is to comment on others' blogs, that a blogger should spend as much time commenting on others' blogs as posting on their own blog. You might have read my (hopefully compelling) case for this here or here. Yet, ashamedly, I have been terribly lax in commenting in the blogosphere. I've been, for the most part, a lurker. My excuse -- "I'm busy enough as it is just trying to keep up with my blog" -- isn't going to wash any more. It's about time I get out more.

As of the past few days, I've made a conscious effort to start chiming in. For example, I commented on the personal blog of a well-respected WordPress code contributor and plugin author. I commented on Google engineer Adam Lasnik's blog to inform him of a typo in one of his links that was sending link juice to a domain squatter. Why bother you ask? Because it helps build relationships! Being successful in the blogosphere is as much about relationships as it is about content. Heck, being successful in LIFE is about relationships. For instance... what SEO in his/her right mind WOULDN'T want to nurture a great relationship with "Mini-Matt"?! (Mini-Matt is the nickname affectionately used by some SEOs to refer to Adam Lasnik. Matt being Matt Cutts.)

Another thing I'm going to do RIGHT NOW (as soon as I hit the "Publish" button on this post), is turn off moderation. Yep, that's right. Call me crazy, but I'm going to risk having some comment spams (those that sneak past the excellent Akismet plugin) showing up temporarily (until I discover 'em and nuke 'em) on my blog. The reason being: I want this blog to give instant gratification to commenters. Having to wait a day for the blog author (me) to approve your comment is a let-down. It's not conducive to an intensively participatory blog. I'm going to remove that barrier.

Care to comment? :-)

Now here's another great little service I've recently discovered.

Say you've just released a news story, blog post, product page or any other web page, hopefully people all over the Internet are talking about it. And you'd like to keep track of all those conversations, right?

TalkDigger will help you find, follow and display conversations evolving around a subject (URL). It works like this: If you want to know who is talking about you, copy the URL, paste it in the TalkDigger search box at TalkDigger.com and hit "Dig it!"

TalkDigger then returns results from various search engines, all of which contain a link to the URL.

Having access to these conversations is a truly powerful tool for webmasters and bloggers, and online marketers can discover what people think of your new product — its strengths and weaknesses. Pretty neat, eh?

Hat tip to Jeremiah Owyang for this one.

Well, it’s been six months since his last State of the Blogosphere address, but Technorati’s Dave Sifry has been busy tracking and mapping the latest trends, comprehensive results for which are to be found in his latest five-part blog post series.

Part 1 on Blog Growth reveals the number of weblogs out there has been doubling in size every five months. The folks at Technorati have found a burgeoning 14.2 million weblogs and over 1.3 billion links. 80,000 blogs are created daily and a new weblog created every second, and 55% of new bloggers are still posting three months later. Those receiving top marks for attendance are the 13% of blogs that are updated daily (yes, I am aiming to be one of them, but haven't gotten there yet... sigh!). Dave’s report on Blog Growth here.

Whether a single post is a long essay or a short entry, each qualifies as a post. The State of the Blogosphere Part 2 reports on Posting Volumes, the aggregate number of posts per day. As at July 2005, 900,000 posts were being created daily - that’s 37,500 per hour or 10.4 per second, with obvious spikes during world events such as Live 8 or the London Bombings. The full research findings on Posting Volume here.

Over 25 million blog posts now use tags for categories or topics. 12,000 are being discovered each day, and photos and links are now being tagged too. The State of the Blogosphere Part 3 Report on Tags here.

Part 4 Spam and Fake Blogs dwells on the darker side of the blogosphere – created to influence results on a search engine by filling the results with spam or fake postings, usually to some advantage. here

In Part 5, Dave Sifry reports on the The List and the Long Tail - the impact of weblogs on mainstream media, the A-list, and the measure of influence or authority of a site or blog by the number of people linking to it. here

All interesting stuff and a great place to check out if you love statistics, graphs, and a one-stop update on The State of the Blogosphere.

I'm finally getting a chance to blog my panel session which took place last week in Las Vegas at the Shop.org conference.

The session was titled "Alternative Marketing: What Happened When Etailers Dove into Blogs, Podcasting, and RSS"

Moderator:
(yours truly!)

Panelists:
Seth Greenberg, CEO, eHobbies
Pinny Gniwisch, Founder & EVP Marketing, Ice.com
Steve Spangler, Founder & CEO, Steve Spangler Science

You can download the Powerpoint slides here.

My esteemed colleague Brian Klais, one of our VPs here at Netconcepts, graciously took notes for me which I am posting below:

Stephan:
- Gave an overview of RSS technology and blogs
- 439 million Google search results for "blog"
- RSS is not the same thing as a blog, it is a way to deliver / syndicate content to consumers
- Search for "trustrank" in Google for an example of how RSS builds inbound links = top rankings
- Retailers can deliver news alerts, specials, new resources that have been posted to the site
- VMware builds customized feed around my interests
- Highlights of podcasting, moblogging, and a new buzzword "vodcasting"
- You don't have to blog to benefit from blogosphere
- Voltaic has a solar powered backpack, blogging friend Treehugger blogged it, then picked up by CoolHunting then Gizmodo and sales skyrocketed
- Negative buzz for Kryptonite = blogstorm
- The power of link text from the blogosphere that contain your brand names profoundly impacts your rankings in Google, Yahoo, MSN. Just look at what ranks in top 10 for "kryptonite"

Seth:
- Blogs: ehobbies.blogs.com/sethgreenberg and ehobbies.blogs.com/rc
- Seth admits this is a new pioneering area and wanted to experiment with the channel
- Was able to "dumb down" the sign-up for RSS: the link to the "Bestsellers RSS Feed" beneath the Best Sellers sidebar takes the user to an instruction page.
- Launched the feeds just a week ago, so too new to reveal results. Feels similar to email channel.
- Affiliates could be a great application of RSS technology.
- Goal for blog: build trust, keep customers coming back, build loyalty
- Ran a promotion that resulted in 5% of all purchases redeeming the blogged "coupon"
- In June, added "blog" to the header navigation. 5% of sitewide traffic touched blog. Conversion of those who touch blog is 2x non-blog readers.
- Their "male nurse" collectible doll blog post was indexed next day by Google.
- Summarized experience as the good, bad, and ugly. The good: organic search results very good, personality, good press, effective for audience. The bad: more of a diary than a dialog with customers (message boards still have a proper place), has to convey an overall company strategy, has to be nurtured. The ugly: new technology is hard to pinpoint when things go wrong

Pinny:
- Blogs: SparkleLiketheStars.com, JustAskLeslie.com, Blog.ice.com
- 10 commandments of corporate blogging
1) Editorial - uses blog for editorial to converse with customers on jewelry advice
2) PR - PR blog talks about charity events
3) Current - hired a writer to talk about the stars and current events, talks about style, and then promotes similar products available from ice.com
4) Promotions - targeting "ice discounts" etc to target discounted jewelry
5) Customer feedback - customers can provide feedback
6) Natural search rankings - links from blog improved rankings over 2-6 weeks time
7) Sales - low volume but acquisition clear
8) Company vibe
9) Being at forefront - press is good and easy to get
10) picture of him with Beyonce

Steve:
- Blogs at SteveSpangler.com
- Steve pulled out his flaming wallet
- Steve played a funny video clip showing Diet Coke + Mentos explosion, and later gave the recipe. Was an example of a video podcast.
- One of Steve's products, "Instasnow," got posted onto BoingBoing popular blog, and created a 3x sales outcome. Record high for that product sales.
- Steve was sold on blogs, and launched
- Steve had the audience rolling over with his stories of Instasnow and related fun science products.
- Sales spikes were directly related to blog posts.
- Played an experiment: Can I own a search market by blogging it? Tried it with "launching potatoes."
- A blog post can be 3 sentences.
- Result = top 10 rankings.
- Steve says to blog best selling products, behind-the-scenes information, "Did you know?" product information, lets him voice his opinion and feelings on subjects.
- Podcast - can talk about what he is doing by speaking it, not writing it.
- Has learned the art of linking to other blogs, and filling his posts with links.
- 13% of online sales attribute to blogs
- Closing tip: 1 roll mentos, 2 liter bottle of soda for the explosion experiment!

Q&A:

Q: How do you calculate ROI?

Pinny: Don't look at blogs from ROI perspective. Low cost. Took time to get system in place, difficult to calculate actual cost and therefore ROI. Looks at it as free money.
Steve: Maybe 30 minutes per post, tries to blog a few times per week.

Q: Are blogs being commercialized?

Seth: They tend to be more informational
Pinny: Not done for sales, more for info.
Steve: Blog is a soft sell, a sense of authority, people enjoy it

Q: Do you need special skills or expensive software to blog or just use Typepad or similar?

Stephan: Advocates just download software (eg WordPress) and install on your webserver - free, functional.

Main takeaways:

1 - Have the proper motivation of trying to provide useful customer information and sales follow - often with dramatic though unpredictable results.
2 - Experiment with the technology and gain some learnings
3 - Check out Steve Spangler's funny science videos!

My friend and colleague Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing Blog posed an interesting question to me and a small group of other bloggers whom I hold in high regard (Tris Hussey, Paul Chaney, Wayne Hurlbert, Yvonne DiVita, and Dana VanDen Heuvel). Her question was this:

What is best practice for scheduling posts?
If you're not going to post 5 days a week, should posts be scheduled consistently for the same days of the week e.g., if you're posting 3 times a week Monday-Wednesday-Friday? How do you feel about mixing up posting days? One week post M-W-F and the next week post T-TH-F. Or does it really matter? For the most part are the only blogs that are doing a consistent schedule the networks?

What a great question! And what great answers from the group. So great, in fact, that it evolved into a podcast group Skype-conference call that we conducted just yesterday. The 53-minute audio recording should be ready soon. I'll post it when it is.

In the meantime, my take on the issue is this: as far as retaining your readers, frequency is not nearly as important as recency. A couple weeks of inactivity makes the reader feel like nobody's home. Conversely, having the latest post be only a day old makes the blog appear "fresh". Personally, I don't like keeping feeds in my newsreader that haven't had recent activity.

It also depends on the type of blog you have. A "writer's blog" (as defined by Seth Godin) doesn't need the same level of recency or frequency as a "news blog" (also defined by Seth in the same post).

Relevance overrides both recency and frequency. Searchengineblog.com recently posted (paraphrased) "I'm going to stop posting about SEO for several months but I'll post about my vacation". Making such an announcement wrecks even more havoc on recurring readership levels than two months of inactivity, because the blogger is in a sense inviting his readers to unsubscribe from his RSS feed. After all, how many of them would want to read irrelevant I'm-touring-the-world posts? My guess, in this time-pressed world of ours, is not very many.

As far as gaining new readers, the trick is getting noticed by the "connectors" (using Malcolm Gladwell's terminology) in the blogosphere and then getting them to link to you. Again, this isn't necessarily an issue of frequency. One blogger could post to his/her blog once per week and be more successful at getting coverage by A-list bloggers than a prolific blogger who posts many times per day. This could be achieved a number of ways. Linking to other bloggers can get you noticed by them. Mentioning their names could get you noticed by them (see my recent post where I described the name dropping tactic). Already having some of them as friends helps too. ;-)

A lot of the blog entries floating around in the blogosphere strike me as "filler." I strive to have this blog be filler-free. I only blog when I have something I believe to be valuable for you, my dear readers. I won't blog about "Adobe acquires Macromedia" unless I can come up with a unique angle that would deliver real value to marketers who read my blog. Unique commentary, I believe, is key to the value proposition. Last week for example I blogged about "how to search engine optimize your podcasts" - something I believe has not been adequately addressed by bloggers. This I'm hoping will get some coverage in the blogosphere because of its uniqueness. "News blogs" can get away with less unique and practical posts than "writers blogs", but they tend to make up for it with volume - increasing the frequency.

Finally, posting too frequently increases the ephemerality of your blog posts. Mike Davidson made the insightful comment:

"The relative importance of the feed vs. the site depends almost entirely on the ephemerality of the posts. Scoble’s posts are extremely ephemeral because he a) has so many of them, and b) only comments briefly on each item. Their place in history is rather fleeting, in other words. In the case of a more traditional blog, you have far fewer posts with more in-depth writeups. In this case, the site is of utmost importance and the feed is merely a notification technology."

With all that said, Wayne Hurlbert has an interesting case study to share of how he doubled his blog traffic by doubling the number of posts per day from one to two. Have a read. (Paul Chaney makes the point that "every blogger is different, the way we write is different, and our personalities are different," so there's no right or wrong answer here and of course your mileage will vary.)

Bottom line of all this: the blogosphere is still the Web and the basic online marketing principle of testing everything, rather than just believing whatever I say, still applies.

As a follow-on to yesterday's post about getting your blog noticed by influentials, i.e. A-List bloggers, I thought I would describe a scenario just recently presented to me.

I have been asked by analyst Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester Research if I would be willing to blog about their upcoming boot camp on integrated marketing on May 5. It's a full-day intensive workshop being held at their offices in Cambridge. I said "Sure, I'd be happy to mention it, but I don't think it will get picked up by other bloggers and thus it won't spread through the blogosphere." So the effectiveness of such a promotion strategy is limited.

A-List bloggers, like everyone else, are forever tuned in to the station "WII-FM" — What's In It For Me. As such, Forrester's message would be much more contagious, if there was a "free prize inside," so to speak, for the bloggers who read my boot camp "plug." In other words, the way to spread the word about the Forrester boot camp is for Forrester to make an irresistible, exclusive offer to bloggers who blog about the boot camp.

For example, what if Forrester gave away some exclusive piece of research that normally only their clients have access to? It doesn't have to be an entire report, just something exclusive and something bloggable. Like a "scoop" on an upcoming report. Or a synop0sis of key points or perhaps a mini report. Now what if the bloggers who blog about this integrated marketing boot camp get access to this exclusive information as part of the deal? In fact, what if Forrester Research turn this into an ongoing program, kind of like how Microsoft is wooing influential bloggers with their "Search Champs" program (where they hand-pick influencers and fly them to Redmond to wine-and-dine them and to discuss how Microsoft might improve their MSN search engine).

Hmm... "Forester Research Champs." Sure, they'd be buying off bloggers. But everybody would win, including blog readers. Bloggers get access to exclusive research early and often — as long as they agree to blog about Forrester. It is an interesting proposition. Forrester, what do you think?

Public relations in the blogosphere seems to operate under a new set of rules than traditional PR. With traditional PR you hire a PR firm that has relationships with various journalists and media. With the new PR, you start your own blog (assuming of course you have something worthwhile to say) and you work to become one of the blogging elite. The goal is to get the more influential bloggers to notice you and blog about you. You wouldn't just leave this to chance; you'd help the process along. If, for example, you want to catch Scoble's eye, then you would say something interesting that somehow relates to Scoble and work in a mention of his name. Scoble, like many other bloggers, follows what's being said about him in the blogosphere by subscribing to a PubSub search results feed for the word "scoble." If Scoble likes your post, you could end up with a mention on Scoble's link blog or, better still, on the Scobleizer blog.

Imagine telling a PR person 10 years ago that, in the future, the way to catch the eye of various journalists is to become a journalist yourself and then write about THEM, that PR person would think you were off your rocker. My, how times have changed!

As an up-and-coming blogger, you might be tempted to brown-nose the A-List bloggers. Don't kiss up to them, but don't denigrate them either. This isn't necessarily a hard-and-fast rule, just a suggested guideline. Some bloggers are quite open to being taken to task. They even encourage it.

There is a line of course that shouldn't be crossed. Always act in good taste. Scoble himself described, during our MarketingProfs Thought Leaders Summit last month on business blogging, how it really isn't a "line," it is more like a "membrane." There is give-and-take, and flexibility with what's ok to say in your blog and what's not, particularly as you build rapport with different bloggers in the blogosphere and you build up your reputation. But don't push too hard or too often, or that "membrane" may rupture!

Now I wonder if Scoble will blog about this post...