Morgan McLintic on PR

Halloween

Halloween is a big deal here in the US. People decorate their houses with fake spiders' webs, plastic pumpkins and put illuminated skeletons in their window. It always catches me by surprise. Halloween is right up there with Thanksgiving and Christmas when it comes to celebrations and parties. Almost everyone dresses up on the Saturday night. People even dress up to come to work. I don't mean kids going to school dressed as Dracula, I mean adults going to work in full costume. And not even scary costumes but as Big Bird and The Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz.

That's not the case in the UK. Halloween is a non-event. Some enterprising local kids will arm themselves with toilet roll, buy some plastic masks and call themselves Trick or Treaters (the trick being to put toilet paper over your lawn if you don't cough up the candy), but it really passes without notice.

In France, November 1, All Saints' Day is a bigger deal. They have the whole day off to honor their ancestors. Same in Germany. And Spain. And Singapore. And Mexico. And many other places around the world. In an age of globalization, it's easy to forget how sharp the cultural differences are.

For instance, the other day I was trying to explain why on November 5, in the UK we set off fireworks to celebrate Guy Fawkes' foiled plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. It's a bit like our version of July 4 (in the UK we don't celebrate that). Part of the tradition of Bonfire Night (as November 5 is often called), is for kids to make a 'Guy', which is basically a scarecrow-like model of Guy Fawkes. You then carry him round in a wheelbarrow and collect money from your neighbors, a bit like trick or treating. But then, we put him on the bonfire and burn him.

Normally at this point my American friends stare wide-eyed in horror at this tradition. Makes putting spiders' web on your house seem a little cutsie. Why not go the whole hog and burn effigies of traitors? But as a kid, I quite liked it. It's normal. Just like bumping into Big Bird at the water-cooler.

So Happy Halloween. Or All Saints' Day. Or Guy Fawkes' Night. It's good to celebrate our differences.

Testing TagCloud

I'm testing out the latest blog navigation gizmo, TagCloud, which you can see on the right. Here's a description of TagCloud from its site:

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag's link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

So bascially it's a navigation tool which helps you to find certain topics. I've set it up here to look at my RSS feed. The larger the font size, the more frequently that word is used. Seems I've been talking about blogging rather a lot lately (mainly due to the recent event) so that figures quite strongly. My apologies for that since I like to keep a fairly broad perspective about communications and agency management.

It does seem to select some odd words which are only mentioned once in my posts and I'm not sure why yet. For instance, some of the names of people I mention just once e.g. Dave Sifry are tagged while others I've mentioned more frequently e.g. Loic Le Meur are not. Poor old Loic. Maybe I should mention Loic, a few more times, to see if Loic appears.

It's only beta at the moment and seems useful, so let's give it a whirl. Be interested in your thoughts if you too have tried it. Thanks to LifeHacker for the tip.

Technorati Tags: TagCloud, Tags

Accountancy blog gives us another insight into benefits of business blogging

A month ago, my journo pal Dennis Howlett dropped me a note to say he'd started a new blog about accountancy. Thirty days later that blog, AccMan Pro, is off to a flying start. In just that short period, he's clocked up 136 posts (over 4 a day), 1,722 visitors and 3,805 page impressions. More importantly, he's made new contacts, generated some project revenue and has several prospective clients in the offing.

In a 30-day milestone post, Dennis also shares with us the types of company visiting AccMan Pro:

* 3 merchants banks
* 16 practices with more than 10 partners
* 5 practices with more than 25 partners
* 17 individuals deemed the stuff worthy enough to sign up for automatic receipt of postings (timed daily)
* EU Commission (they had a serious dig through!)
* HMRC (at least a couple of their people are looking at this site)
* Readers come from 11 countries (so the issues ain't so local after all!)
* 16% of readers in the US

This is great testimonial for how a business-related blog can take off, and what the benefits have been to the author. It also shows the marketing opportunity for companies who want to reach a targeted audience like that. Say you wanted to sell to accountants, if you were to sponsor Den's site, he'd continue to reach out to that audience and take your brand with you. There aren't many people at the moment who are attempting to blog full-time. Den's one of the pioneers (or perhaps just plain stubborn enough to give it a whirl). Judging from the first 30 days - it might just work.

Technorati Tags: AccMan Pro, accountancy, Bazaarz

Technorati - Daily Posting Volumes

Dave Sifry, who heads up Technorati, has started another edition of his State of the Blogosphere series. Today he shows that the blogosphere is doubling every 5 months. Technorati is now tracking up to 19.6m blogs, meaning sometime this week they'll hit the big 20m, since it was 19.1m last Tuesday when we held our Blogging seminar.

He also shows the peaks in posts around key news events. Bear in mind that the fact there are more blogs out there reflects the increased number of posts as you move to the right of the graph, rather than the relative importance of each event. Still interesting to see bloggers break, analyze and dissect the news.

Technorati Tags: Technorati

Webcast and presentations from Blogging seminar

The webcast of this week's blogging seminar in London is now up and available here.

You can also download the presentations from the site. Mine is here, Loic's here, and Jo's here.

If you couldn't make it, please do take a look and send me any questions you might have. I'll pass them on to the speakers, who I'm sure will be happy to respond, if I can't.

Technorati Tags: BBC Online, corporate blogs, LEWIS, SixApart, webcast

Boeing corporate blogging case study

The Anchorage Daily News has a case study about Boeing's use of a corporate blog in its fight for sales against Airbus. Randy Baseler, VP of marketing, blogs about the company at Randy's Journal. And he's pulling no punches in his competitor messaging, here's an extract from his October 7 post:

So Airbus has officially launched the A350. Nobody should be at all surprised. Well, maybe there is one surprising aspect to all this. The fact that it took them so long to respond to the 787.

I suppose 23 airlines signing up for 273 Dreamliners finally got their attention.

But now that they've woken up, they still haven't got it right. I say that because, despite the four or five times they've changed this airplane over the last nine months, the A350 still falls short.

Ouch. Apparently the site gets 16,000 hits per month, peaking at 26,000 in June when Baseler blogged during a major international airshow.

“If you're a customer deciding between an Airbus product and a Boeing product,” [Jim] Condelles [a member of Boeing's communications team] said, the blog is a place to come and review Baseler's arguments. “Maybe it tips you a little in your decision making.”

The site isn't a classic blog since you can't comment directly to to specific post. Instead you have to use a separate email form which then enters all the comments together on a different page, divorced from the original post. It's not really a discussion, more a series of remarks, but it's a start. And it gives Boeing a more human and immediate voice. It would be great if we could get some testimonial from a Boeing customer that they were influenced in their decision-making by the blog. But the mere attempt by Boeing suggests the company believes it could affect sales, which says something in itself.

Technorati Tags: Airbus, Boeing, corporate blogs

Jon Fine of BusinessWeek launches media blog

Following its revamp, one of the best new elements of BusinessWeek for communicators (and anyone involved in media) is Jon Fine's page about the media. To add to this must-read, he's now started a blog on the BW site here.

One of the first publications to get the treatment ('awful or what?') is the new Saturday edition of the WSJ, as highlighted by his colleague at Blogspotting, Stephen Baker. It's gonna be a great read.

Technorati Tags: BusinessWeek

David Rossiter launches UK IT PR blog

Analyst Insight blogger, David Rossiter, who also runs a tech PR firm in the UK, has launched a PR blog named, PR Insights. I'm looking forward to reading his perspectives, since I find his views on the UK analyst scene very useful. Almost immediately he's picked up another new UK IT PR blog by Anthony Mayfield who also runs a PR firm. I think it's Insight Marketing, but apologies to Anthony if not.

UPDATE - Anthony Mayfield is with Harvard PR, part of Chime Communications, as David clarifies in the comments below.

More travel tips

So an hour into my ten hour flight, the entertainment system failed, which has taught me a couple more traveling lessons.

The first is to always fully charge your laptop and all electronic devices such as PDAs and iPods before boarding. My laptop was drained, which only gave me about an hour of juice.

The second is not to rely on the plane having the correct power adapter for your laptop. They use universal adapters with a kitty bag of roughly 20 male/female fittings to connect to your PC. Of course these tend to go walkabouts. So no juice and no power. Lesson being - bring your own adapter.

Third lesson is to chog your iPod full with podcasts before you go. I had two hours worth which is normally ample, but with no laptop and no ents, those hours are soon used.

Fourth is to bring some light reading, not just business-related stuff. There's only so much edification you can take at 30,000ft.

Fifth is to slap a DVD in your bag, so you can watch it on your laptop if the inflight entertainment dies (or if you get an old plane where you can't control the movie selection.) This would be a good time to watch that latest series of 24 (which incidentally is almost as good as the first IMHO).

Thank goodness the Blackberry has a wireless off, plane safe mode. And hurrah for moblogging so this can wing its way once we touch down.

Apologies for the volley of posts - clearly going cabin crazy...

Technorati Tags: travel

Reasons not to start blogging

One of the main objections I hear from people when I encourage them to start a blog is - 'Well I would start one, but what would I say?'

These are often senior people with a good grasp of their industry and specific knowledge of what is going on in their market. Credible, experienced, articulate professionals who have no problem entertaining and educating you on a one-to-one basis.

They certainly don't lack the content. I think the subtext here is more - 'Well I would start one, but who would be interested in what I'd say?'

Most successful marketers that I have met, and indeed most successful entrepreneurs and business people in general, are fairly insecure. They fear failure, and so push themselves twice as hard as their more assured counterparts to make damn sure they succeed. (Interestingly and paradoxically these same people also embrace and learn a lot from failure when it does come aknocking.)

One of the things though about blogging is that no-one need know how many people are listening, if you don't want them to. You can have the party without the fear that no-one will come. This is good since at first you will be your only reader, the only one at the party. But gradually others will come and join in. That's where the conversation begins and you start engaging.

It's easy to become obsessed with gaining more traffic, more readers. Just look at how many guides there are to building traffic. Sure there are some basic rules - you post more often, you have more content for your audience etc, etc.

But while the amount of traffic is a reasonable quantitative measure, it shouldn't become the goal or a reason not to start in the first place. Just trying to win new readers can defeat a higher goal of communicating with those you have, of interacting and learning from them. For instance, I like to spend time meeting people who kindly read my blog. For me that's one of the most valuable and fruitful parts of the medium - it has nothing to do with traffic stats.

So to circle back to my point, I don't think you need worry about who will read your fledgling blog. If you say what you believe and know, your readers will find you and love/hate you for it. Don't worry how many you have. It's bound to be more than if you didn't blog at all, and if you keep at it, the numbers will grow.

By the same token, when I go running, I sometimes leave my watch behind and just run as fast and as far as I like. It helps me to focus on the sport, not the numbers. It might not be a personal best but it's still satisfying. I think sometimes the same is true for blogging. Don't be put off by marathon runners, or A-listers - you don't have to aim to be Paula Radcliffe or Robert Scoble. Just yourself.