RDVP Seminar: Elisa Camahort (2/16/2005)

Elisa Camahart, the "Queen Bee" of WorkerBees, spoke at the RDVP Seminar, on using blogging as a corporate marketing tool. Her comment was that blogging was not a revolutionary new breakthrough, but rather a new way to do traditional corporate marketing. The “blogging elite” are doing a disservice by introducing this as something revolutionary: It’s not the death of PR or old media, rather a complementary way of performing those services. It’s asking the same questions that traditional marketing asks: Who are you attracting? Why are they coming? What do you want them to do as a result of their visit?

If the conventional wisdom is that blog entries need to be full of links, short posts made daily, and obtain a large readership (to support themselves with ad revenue), that’s making assumptions about what you are trying to do and who you are trying to reach. Elisa asked "If people are coming to your site just to click through on a bunch of links that you found interesting, are you gaining any real mindshare from them?" This approach is antithetical to what companies are traditionally trying to do to communicate with their customers and stakeholders.

Elisa cited 5 attributes of blogs that make them interesting:

• Immediate
  
• Accessible
  
• Interactive
  
• Informal & "Insider"
  
• Inexpensive

She cited some of the common ways of building traffic: Blog rolls, Blog Rings, and tracking back. While these are one piece of a traffic attraction strategy, they don’t really impact the reader. Rather, having an engaging "voice" and connection with the reader, along with freshness are what really keep people coming back, the elusive "stickiness" of the website.

We talked a bit about some of the intellectual property questions: who owns the material of posts (the author? the hosting service?) What about comments? The commentor? The original author? The hosting service?
We talked about the different functions of blogs, including:

• Marketing and PR (distributing trackable offers, for example)
  
• Customer Support and Service
  
• Project Management
  
• Education and Training
  
• Publishing and Evangelism (a CEO's blog)
  
• Customer Outreach

We talked a bit about the benefits of syndication (convenience for the reader, but also to the publisher for creating multiple feeds that share common information elements), noting, however, that most syndication obscures the readership to determine whether people actually read it.

Elisa mentioned Corante, a company that provides research on blogs and their usage as well as a company that provides blog-based tools for project management (which Mans later identified as BaseCamp. She also talked a bit about the perceived value to her customers, who had a harder time justifying the market-writing hourly rates, even though the value is probably greater than that of the traditional white paper.

Mans raised some good points about the hazard of relying on information sources that lack editorial compunction. They may have commercial motivations that are not disclosed, there may be little reason to ensure accuracy or refrain from sensationalizing in order to attract traffic.