Ways Businesses Screw Up With Blog

Social Signal’s Rob Cottingham put up a terrific blog post in February that you should go look at if you missed it. Titled Nine (or ten) ways to stumble in social media,” the post is absolutely required reading for businesses who are already involving themselves in the blogophere, or those who are considering it.

Actually, come to think of it, I suppose it’s a great article for those who have chosen NOT to get involved, in order to be able to explain their decision—not that I think any reasonably sized company can afford to ignore blogs today.

Here’s just one of the examples Rob features:

Playing coy: Outright dishonesty isn’t the only thing that can trip you up. Wal-Marting Across America was a blog by a middle-aged couple driving their RV across the U.S., camping overnight in Wal-Mart parking lots and telling stories about the wonderful people they met - a remarkable number of whom had glowing things to say about Wal-Mart. None of this was untrue; the couple was genuine, the RV was an RV, and nobody’s disputing the stories people were telling. But what the blog didn’t mention - anywhere - is that the whole thing was paid for by Wal-Mart itself: from airfares to the RV itself. The blog was outed, the story hit the mainstream media, and both Wal-Mart and their PR firm, Edelman, were left looking very much like they’d tried to pull something sleazy.

My quick rule of thumb: disclose everything, even if you don’t think it’s important, and if you ever used the phrase “we’ll just make them think...” when describing what you’re doing—don’t.

Knit Yourself a Keyboard Cover

Check out these cool “body technology interfaces” from Sternlab! Well, perhaps “cool” is really the wrong adjective. I’ll go with the catch-all “interesting.” Be sure to scroll down the page for some really funny photos on this site.

If you’ve read Blogging for Dummies, 2nd Edition, you may have noticed that there are too many screen shot examples from knitting blogs to be coincidence. In fact, I love to knit, and one of the ways I tried to make things fun during the writing of this book was to find knitting blogs to use in the book. And there a lot of them out there—the knitting community has embraced blogging as a way of sharing experience, patterns, and tips, not to mention connecting with each other. And now we have these hilarious examples of how knitting and blogging can be united into one passion: knitted keyboard covers are just the start. A little silly, sure, but what a fun idea.

Although my hands do get cold typing all day…

Photo by bekathwia

Blogging Survey Puts GenX Age Group Out Front

Session 1 at BlogHer Business in New York this morning (man, an 8:30 start is rough when your body tells you it is really 5:30) is “The State of the Social Media World.” Elisa, Jory and Lisa of BlogHer kicked things off and then ran through a new survey of the blogosphere. Here are my big takeaways:

* 36 million women are in the blogosphere as readers or commenters
* 15 million women are publishing blogs
* the third most common reason for a blogger to stop publishing a blog (after lack of interest or time) is dissatisifaction with blogging tools
* although the media tells us that only young people are logging in significant numbers, it’s actually GenX (21 to 47, I think) that are really most active with blogs
* there are a lot of more men at this BlogHer event than the last one I went to

They’ve promised to post the survey presentation today, so when I know where you can get more information, I’ll update this post.

Hey, and if you’re here, leave me a comment so I know to look for you!

UPDATE: Here’s the link to the presentation PDF of the survey data.