Over 50% of all Sales and Marketing respondents said PR impacts Lead Quality.

About 50% of all respondents said PR impacts the length of the Sales Cycle.

About 25% of all respondents said PR can increase the size of a first-time order.

Most tellingly, 49% said that Lead Generation was the best measure of PR success.

Yet just 30% of all respondents felt that Lead Generation is a function of PR! And fully 36% of respondents "sometimes" to "never" use PR in the Sales process!

Source: http://www.pr-squared.com/2005/09/pr_as_profit_center_truth_or_f.html

Thoughts and conversations that are not a formal announcement, but just open dialogue with people in that industry or customers.

A great way for me to communicate my passion in life, to customers and employees

As of March, only 4.6 percent of Fortune 500 companies had public blogs, according to an online research project. None of Colorado's Fortune 500 companies - Qwest, EchoStar, or Liberty Media, for example - have blogs accessible to Web surfers.

"People tend to think of blogging as a technological development, but it's really not," said IBM's blogger-in-chief Chris Barger. "The real benefit is the sense of community and interaction between the audience and blog, and individual and blog."                          

"But, what's kind of neat or inspiring about the blogosphere is that it's very American. The idea that someone could enter into a conversation, you know, based just on having an opinion and an argument. And it's a conversation that includes people who have real power in the world. I mean, that idea is very seductive."

I will be a course leader and keynote speaker at this event:

Profit from the publishing revolution
Maximizing the Impact of Corporate BloggingSeptember 25 & 26, 2006, Toronto

COURSE HIGHLIGHTS

• The blog advantage
• How to manage your blog and bloggers?
• Measuring blog profitability and intangible results
• Finding the right “voice” for your blog
• Blogging and the law
• How to choose a platform
• Incorporating blogs into the marketing mix
• How blogs can circumvent traditional media bans and rules
• Managing blog use within your company
• Do you need guidelines for internal blogging?
• The future of blogging

See: http://www.federatedpress.com/PDF/MICB0609-E.pdf

 I’d be pleased to share my research for the conference with you. I am also keen at presenting at other events. 

Poised between media, blogs can be as nuanced and well-sourced as traditional journalism with the immediacy of talk radio. Blogging ...   more »

A new, national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively ...   more »

A weblog, which is usually shortened to blog, is a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order. Blogs often offer commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual although many focus on photographs, videos or audio. The word blog can also be used as a verb, meaning adding an entry to a blog.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblogs

http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/studies/cmrblogstudy.pdf

A survey published by Nora Ganim Barnes, from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Her report, Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere (PDF format, 60 pages, 1.32 MB) suggests that blogs will make or break your business.

more..... a great quote by Rupert Murdoch

"To find something comparable, you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media – which, incidentally, is what really destroyed the old world of kings and aristocracies. Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control."

Ideas on Project Based Business Blogs - Instant Knowledge Management for the Rest of Us:

- Use simple blogs to management projects.
- Use postings as a bulletin board.
- Seek feedback for validation.
- Spread the word on your project - post your pictures, powerpoints, ideas,
status, progress, issues.
- Post analyses and comments to give your project credibility.
- Start “trackback” conversations.
- Include articles and background material.
- Tell the underlying story you want the media to cover on the public
pages.
- Invite team members to share sensitive information on password secure
pages.

WIWNlogs for Technology companies draw their power from Social Commerce and other Web2.0 concepts

Social Commerce Blogs enable customers to collaborate online, get advice from trusted individuals, find goods and services and then purchase them. This shrinks research and purchasing cycles by creating a single destination powered by the power of many. Social commerce facilitates "bottom-up" community development, in which membership is voluntary, reputations are earned by winning the trust of other members, and the community's mission and governance are defined by the communities' members themselves. 

Social Commerce also has a political and aesthetic sense, acting as a kind of glue for a collection of inter-relations formatted by the blog environment. Understandings are shared with a common language.

One example is Yahoo!'s Shoposphere -a place to discover interesting and cool products thematically arranged into Pick Lists by other shoppers. Another is the Treonauts blog. Treonauts provides rich tips, tricks, advice and news about the Treo smartphone. Treonauts partnered with leading merchants to develop branded stores. The commerce partner maintains and fulfills all orders. Business is directly generated from the blog.

Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities.

Broadly conceived, this term could encompass older media such as mailing lists and Usenet, but some would restrict its meaning to more recent software genres such as blogs and wikis. Others suggest that the term social software is best used not to refer to a single type of software, but rather to the use of two or more modes of computer-mediated communication that result in community formation. In this view, people form online communities by combining one-to-one (e.g., email and instant messaging), one-to-many (Web pages and blogs), and many-to-many (wikis) communication modes. In many online communities, real life meetings become part of the communication repertoire. The more specific term collaborative software applies to cooperative work systems.

Common to most definitions is the observation that some types of software seem to facilitate "bottom-up" community development, in which membership is voluntary, reputations are earned by winning the trust of other members, and the community's mission and governance are defined by the communities' members themselves. Communities formed by "bottom-up" processes are contrasted to the less vibrant collectivities formed by "top-down" software, in which users' roles are determined by an external authority and circumscribed by rigidly conceived software mechanisms (such as access rights).

The term also arose in the late nineties to describe software emerging out of alliances between programmers and social groups whose particular kinds of cultural intelligence are locked out of mainstream software. In this understanding of the term, the social is understood to also have a political and aesthetic sense, not simply acting as a kind of glue for a collection of normatively understood 'agents' whose inter-relations are formatted by software. What both positions share is an understanding that particular design decisions and the grammar of interactions made possible by each piece of software is socially significant. As the term has become more important to the computer industry, this earlier use of the term has often been edited out of memory

Tools for Online Communication
Instant Messaging
Internet Relay Chat
Internet forums
Blogs or Weblogs
Wikis
Social network services
Social network search engines
Social guides
Social bookmarking
Social Citations
Social Libraries
Social Shopping Applications
Peer-to-peer social networks
Collaborative real-time editing
Virtual presence
Virtual worlds and Massively-Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs)
Other Specialized Social Applications

Adated from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_software

My friend David Bradfield is joining the New York office of Fleishman-Hillard to set up a new interactive, digital and social media group. Here is a recent comment from his blog:  

"From my perspective, every PR agency that offers "full service" should be learning about this space and embracing new opportunities to reach the niches. Social media, or whatever you want to call it, is an integral element of the future of PR. It's a neccessity.

PR and communication professionals have specialized for decades in generating coverage in "uncontrollable" media and other venues through relationships with influencers such as journalists, analysts and opinion leaders. It takes a true professional to understand what will add value and create a unique angle or perspective that makes an organization/product/service contextually relevant, timely and reliable.

In the new communication climate, understanding who's who online, what they write/talk about and providing information that is useful and adds depth or variety to their perspectice is key to successful public relations."

From: http://navigatecommunications.com/

Congradulations David!

note the interesting parts in red

What are blogs?

Blogs are a way to share facts, ideas and opinions directly between people. This blog is run by the makers of Skype and our friends, helpers and partners.

We set up the Skype blogs to present our view of the world, business and technology. Not least, making Skype is an incredible journey and the blogs are a humble attempt to document and capture it. We find making Skype both demanding and fun — it used to be so in the beginning and continues to be.

We see skype.com and the blogs to be complementary to each other. On skype.com, you can find our product and service information, as well as the official company profile, jobs info and press releases. In the blog, we hope to capture a bit more dynamics of what goes around them all. It is important for us to know what the world thinks of Skype and we hope to contribute back to the discussion with the blogs.

There are many different category areas here, which you can browse by using the links in the “Categories” section in the righthand menu.

For in-depth info about what are blogs and blogging, see the Wikipedia entry.

We use Skype extensively at What If What Next(TM). The service has really flattenened the world for us, enabling us to talk to journalists and clients around the world. They also have, as it happens, a well evolved corporate blog.

Do take a look at the Notebook section for a deconstruction of thier Blog. They are doing some cool things that are highly applicable to the business bloggers.

Howard

MEMES: noun. A meme is considered to be a discrete idea that replicates itself, with the connotation that memes replicate themselves and are propagated by people through social and technological networks, much like both real and computer viruses.

(Coined by Richard Dawkins)

Here are Memes on Blogging that we have written:

• Publishing is the art and science of moving content from the author to their reader. Getting the right content to the right person at the right time -and making a profit at it. Our concept of the Business Blog gives companies their own digital media vehicle. This is an opportunity to reduce advertising costs and gain dependable traffic by integrating editorial content, advertising and digital media. 
• Folks in the blogsphere tend to be early adopters.
• The target audience of any business blog should be the end-user and usually an individual.
• Ideas coming to you quickly look better via the Doppler effect - repetition influences buyer behaviour
• Corporate blogs linked to relevant publications will get targeted traffic.
• Corporate blogs build your reputation as a thought leader and bring visibility for your products and promotions with decision makers.
• Blogs can deliver content that is contextually relevant and sensitive to prospect needs, based on their interests and their stage in the buying cycle.
• They can be a valuable tool to shorten sales cycles and influence multiple buying centers in a target organization.
• Company blogs are a great way to answer questions you may receive from potential or actual customers.
• By putting the question and answer in your blog, you are now generating information out to potentially huge numbers of potential or actual clients.
• The Internet is an indispensable companion to print. Many magazine publishers are building up their Web presence to keep up with a generation of readers who automatically turn to the Internet instead of the printed page. Magazines are publishing with a large Internet component with original content. These investments mark a new level of commitment. A magazine can spark an idea but the Internet will provide the real vehicle for deep research, the purchase of products and the referral system to friends. You gain a broader audience and more loyalty from your subscribers if you extend the experience into the Web.
• The web created a sense of urgency, the sense of moment, is crucial.
• Event, time limited and strategically focused blogs will get attention and solve marketing and sales problems
• Traditional trade advertising is expensive. Blogs are in the news and will attract attention – in effect, your own Digital Magazine.
• Emails of blog entries to media, customers and prospect lists can attract up to a 30% hit rate (according to WIWN experience).
• Magazines and Newspapers are scrambling to add online content and blogs.

Add your own meme - click on Leave Comment and contribute your thinking!

The target audience of any business blog should be the end-user and usually an individual.

Corporate blogs build your reputation as a thought leader and visibility for your products and promotions with decision makers.

Blogs can deliver content that is contextually relevant and sensitive to prospect needs, based on their interests and their stage in the buying cycle. 

They can be a valuable tool to shorten sales cycles and influence multiple buying centers in a target organization.

Company blogs are a great way to answer questions you may receive from potential or actual customers. By putting the question and answer in your blog, you are now generating information out to potentially huge numbers of potential or actual clients.

The search engines do index blogs as well as websites, so it will show up in search results. Good Google rankings will be achieved.  

Business blogs that are successful have a feel of casualness to them that is not forced - they don't read as if they are an advertisement for your company, but more like the day-to-day life of your company.

You may have one blog and still have many different people contribute to it. Each one will present a different view of the company from their angle and provide more variety for the readers of your company's blog.

The most interesting blogs seem to be the ones that vary in length - sometimes they have longer entries and other times just short entries - plus this gives your company blog the appearance of a personal touch.

Be sure to make entries frequently. There is no requirement that you make an entry every day, but don't let too long go between entries.

If you are a small company, you might want to consider making a company blog the highlight and center of your website.

According to a study conducted by the Project for Excellence
in Journalism (May 11, 2005) only one percent of blog ...   more »