From the BlogHer Business conference, being held in New York over the next 2 days, some quick fire casestudies of different sizes of companies using social media to support their businesses

Susan Getgood and Shirley Frazier - GiftBasket Business Blog

There are 2 blogs on the giftbasket business; have lots of information about this business. a $4.8billion business. I help educate people, find plenty of news and share out. I speak around country on this subject, help people find their niche. One is Solo Business Marketing, for people who work alone and need marketing advice. I have an experimental blog, laughingchow.com, all about photography tips, helps people have a good time. Uses wordpress.

Q: so why blogs and not a ‘website’

A: they are complimentary to a site; SBM started as a promotional tool for my book, and then added on a website. GBB was the site first and added the blog to complement. I get very few if any comments, but I get a tonne of traffic coming through.

Q: so how do you measure results.

A: it comes from the sale of my educational materials. They sell well, I have the best selling books on gift baskets; I follow people from blog to the site to the sales. the other part is through the passive revenue, I use multiple ad serving idea, and GBB draws a fair bit of revenue. GBB people do not know what is a blog is, but they come to the site, see the contextual ads and click on them. the third way is from speaking engagements, they increase. before the blogs I had 20-25 engagements a year, now they are almost doubling. the blog gets more traffic through search engines. they get cited quicker than the sites, people can find me, when looking for specific niche topics.

Q: so blogs have been successful

A: I was dragged kicking and screaming, but very successful.

Q: so what advice would you give the solo business people?

A: be proactive in having and maintaining you blog; it was difficult for me to understand at first, but kept looking it up and learning. the sweat is worth the effort. it;s like running your own newspaper; it;s nice if the press finds you, but this way you have your own voice, can solicit opinions, its good to share your voice around the world.

Q: do you get people coming who do not know what a GB is?

A: not really, but get a lot of referrals for people who are just starting.

Elena Cantor interviews Caroline Little from Washington Post

Q: we were talking about newspapers that were getting it. at the washington post.com you;ve been doing it a while

A: we publish newsweek, post and slate. we got on the web 10 years ago; a lot of what we were doing 3 years ago was just re-purposing paper info, but i felt we were not doing enough. the post is a local newspaper but the web is global, so 90% of the readers come from outside the market and never see the paper. I felt we needed to reach out and utilise the web. we’ve made mistakes, but it’s important to make mistakes otherwise you are not doing new things.

Q: so when did you decide to be blog friendly; when you were weighing those risks, what were you saying to the journalists.

A: the risk side internally was not that much. suddenly the journalists had a whole audience that they never had before. we opened everything up, There were issues about pay etc, but most people were happy. A lot of grief came from when we had bloggers who were not from the WP, but comments came that these people did not write for paper, and were representing the WP.

Q: mistakes?

A: one of our writers had alleged plagiarism problems, which was difficult for all of us. When we posted comments, we have had a lot of issues in our politics area, we had some totally irate people, the comments were useless at some point, we shut down the comments as they were mean and threatening. and we written up for shutting down, we were the first to do this and we got slammed.

Q: so what is the opinions out there?p
A: we have taken the position that the web is open; our role is to help people in navigating the web; hopefully we provide enough of a road map that people will come back to us as we contextualise it. we link out. Other sites have taken the route that they never link to a competitor, we link to other news sites. We do link to competitors, why wouldn’t we. There are different approaches about how you will provide news, what to put behind walls and we would kill our national aspirations if we did all of this.

Q: so how are you evaluating?

A: I evaluate based on …we won an Emmy last year, we have a lot of rewards, our audience grows, our revenue grows, Our goal is to make revenue to support the newsgathering. but it is working

Q: how are journalists reacting to change?

A: it’s across the board. some want it to reflect the papers, others think it is the coolest things and want to do more

Q: where is it going?

A: the paper may not go away, and we have to think about news gathering on multiple platforms. the paper delivers the most revenue and that tends to be the most dominant mindset; apart from the economics the audience story is so different and we have to be thinking about reaching in different ways and it is tough coming from an entrenched position but we have a shot.

Q: you link to bloggers if they link to you

A: that is our benefit, if we can help, people are having a conversation; people are talking about important issues; we have 12m readers online, we never had this before.

Q: when you started this, so what is the biggest surprise?

A: the more successful you get the harder it is. surprised at success in multimedia as not a core strength. there is an intimacy that comes with blogs, its a different way of reporting. video that works well on the web is very intimate, we do not have a lot of boundaries and it is interesting to see that media evolve.

Lena West interviews Carmen VanKerckhove

A: New demographic is an anti=racism company. I have 2 blogs, one about intersection of race and pop culture, and the other about anti racism parenting and a podcast about americas addiction to race.

Q: why open a public free for all about race in america?

A: i stumbled into it. I had no strategy. I started the blog before the company. I was inspired by angry asian men blog; i wanted a blog like that to track media representations of mixed race. The podcast was the same way, we wanted our radio show. we are open and honest, we joke, it is not PC, so we separated the two, then we realised that our brand was our attitude, we do not make it a scary subject, you can treat it casually. at this point we needed to tie it all together. The blog was too much of a catchall, so we decided to focus and split into 3 different ones, The new one deals with race and workplace issues.

Q: you started without a strategy…but how are you doing now. How do you do it!

A: I’m really passionate, it does not feel like work. They are not just marketing tools, they are a core part. I do seminars, i do grassroots as anyone can join in these conversations. I do lot of timed blogging, blog in spurts and then they come out throughout the week.

Q: so how stay time relevant?

A: the preposts are not ness time sensitive. I also publish my delicious links daily. that gives me some relevant content is I run out of time.

Q: what are your results?

A: I have got a lot of media coverage, CNN, Newsweek, etc etc. Established my reputation and I get called upon to give my opinions, Speaking engagements have increased, clients have come through blog or podcast, I’m starting to see a payoff, all this time I’m seeing a strong connection.
I got interest from daytime talkshows and a book agent. I don’t have huge amounts of traffic, raceioulous have about 1500 a month. the parenting about 2-300 a week, not huge amounts, podcast 1-2k downloads per episode. so you can accomplish a lot in your niche without huge traffic.

Q: what’s the one thing you wish you had known?

A: don’t forget your traditional email newsletter; there is still value in this. Put on your homepage. I always have some kind of free offer. I have so many sign ups since doing the offer. Make it obvious who you are and what you do, so people can contact you. I idiot proof my sidebar, make it clear what I do, It cuts down confusions.

Maria Niles Interviews Staci Schiller from Wells Fargo Bank.

Q: please give us some history?

A: it started in 2005, we delved into Stagecoach island, we saw comment sin blogs etc and thought it was another way to talk with customers. we have a lot of history and our first blog was about the 1906 SanFran earthquake. we thought it would be a short site, we thought it would die after the anniversary. we continued to get traffic on the site and it evolved, into a disaster preparedness and advice site. From there we were hooked. We decide to keep going.

Q: and now you have more?

A: the Student Loan DOme is about college financing and managing debt. its a pretty wide audience. we researched and found few people talking about this; there is a lot of angst, We looked at it from an education POV, providing guidance. A good opportunity to talk to people in a new way. Our customers were online, we wanted to be there.

Q: how do you manage all of this, in a highly regulated industry

A: the SLD is multiple audiences, have bloggers at different phases of life. I did not have any debt, so wrote a post early on explaining this. We try and make it a humanising piece of the bank, with names and faces and stories. It took a lot of convincing for the compliance and legal people, we had to be persistent about it. Compliance reviews every post I put up, this is a bank.. they are doing that to protect me and the bank.

Q: what are the results?

A: The earthquake blog continues to evolve, it looks at history in general, traffic continues to grow. On the SLD traffic grows, we get spikes at certain times of the year.

Q: any challenges or successes?

A: one of the rewarding things is that the community has embraced it. I’m a real person, and people come and seek advice and i fele fortunate that I can o this.

Today's NYT had an interesting snapshot about factors affecting entrepreneurs compensate themselves (balancing between a desire to keep cash in the business and, you know, live).  Some businesses must use balance sheets to secure financing from vendors, others may need it to keep or attract investors/VCs.

However, an  interesting rule of thumb appeared, courtesy of Andrew Corbett, a professor at RPI:

If the business has started to generate some income, the best way to calculate what to pay the owner, Mr. Corbett advised, is to figure out what the job is worth on the open market.
“You want to be true to yourself and to the firm so you don’t want to overpay yourself and you don’t want to shortchange yourself,” he added.
That means looking at what you do day to day and putting your job in one or several categories, for example, sales executive, product developer or general manager. “Calculate how much time you’re working and how much time is spent on each role. Your salary should reflect the work you do.” Ask what it would cost to hire someone else outside of the business to fill that role, he suggested.
The formula he offered includes paying the owner a 30 percent premium over what the open market would pay to cover health benefits and another 20 percent to 30 percent more for the risk. So if a manager or product developer with comparable skills is making $100,000 a year in salary, and that’s mainly what the entrepreneur will be doing, she can expect to pay herself $150,000 to $160,000 a year, Mr. Corbett suggested.

This probably works if the business has revenue, or the market rate in the region isn't buoyed by local living costs, like New York's.  Other entrepreneurs quoted in the article essentially said they had to wait to attract investors before they could pay themselves.   

Brand Reputation is a discipline separate from that of traditional branding campaigns. Brand Reputation recognizes that due to increased transparency and access to information, “traditional branding” whether through mission statements, marketing or affiliations can easily be verified and evaluated. Thus reputation plays an increasing role in keeping organizations honest and forcing them to take definitive actions, rather than simply making public statements. Both consumers and employees are getting into the game.

Brand Reputation is sort of like “Brands 2.0.” Until recently brands had largely been considered “intangible” concepts.  Accounting contributed to this conception by identifying ‘goodwill” as the excess over the book value one company was willing to pay for another. That excess was brand value.

Times have changed. More than ever before brands are increasingly the key element of any business model. Much of this power is because people view brands as a means of personal identification. Brands now trump actual products in terms of importance. For example, Abercrombie & Fitch used targeted branding and outreach to drive incredible revenues despite its products being of questionable quality. Brands now must interact with an audience, as explained by the brothers Heath in “Made to Stick.”

Another shift has been organizations coming to embrace themselves as brands. For example, the university one attends, or the organizations one affiliates are increasingly recognizable and monetizable. Knowing that someone attended a certain college, or is affiliated with certain brands conveys all sorts of ethnic and class related information. Globalization has further complicated branding due to differences in cultural and geographic interpretations.

Still, the primary catalyst for these changes is the ever increasing prominence of the internet. As consumers have been given greater access to information they have become empowered (better informed) to decide how and where they spend their money. This empowerment has resulted in creating greater accountability on the part of businesses and organizations alike. Even Congress and international legislators have begun to demand increased accountability and sustainable practices partially as a result of online advocacy and scorecard groups who have now found an audience.

In business school we learn that the ‘goal of management’ is to increase shareholder value. As it turns out, the definition of a “shareholder” is increasingly broad and can encompass anyone from a holder of company equity to management to employees to vendors. While traditional business practices have focused on the bottom line, a shift toward focusing on brand reputation takes a more holistic approach and recognizes that revenue and corporate social responsibility are not mutually exclusive. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Think Patagonia, think Ben & Jerry’s. Think of the amazing things you hear about working at Google.

Recent business trends have proven that brands by themselves are of increasing importance. Business leaders and financiers are recognizing that a strong brand can ultimately be monetized down the road. For example, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are all companies with exceptionally strong brands but whose revenue streams (in recent memory) have been low or non-existent. Nevertheless, these companies all either received buyout offers or additional investments at valuations unrelated to actual cash flows. That says something.

Brand Reputation is community driven. Its appeal is often on a more human or emotional level and is acted out through user-engagement. It is greatly enhanced by the interactions of community members with the brand itself and by community members interacting with other community members. As discussed previously, Brand Reputation Optimization has both internal and external components. The strongest brands are grown organically and start with a focus on building internal relationships - allowing collaboration to flourish and building passion to drive the organization’s mission and objectives. After establishing such internal buy-in, the potential for building a strong brand is limited only by the degree of external engagement a firm builds into its online presence, marketing and CRM efforts.

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As things move forward with the planning of cafeBricolage, we’ve decided to move the conversation off my blog and on to an independent blog and wiki.

The blog will be used for announcements and opinion pieces, like an ordinary blog, and the wiki will be used for organizing.

Right now, our main focus with the wiki is to begin collecting names of people and companies who are “friends” of cafeBricolage. If you think you may want to hang out at cafeBricolage once it opens, or you think you may work out of the coworking space occasionally — and if you have a business, and you think your 2 - 5 person team may want to use the cafeBricolage space — then please come visit the “Freind of cafeBricolage” page and let everyone know.

Thanks for the encouragement everybody. There’s been a lot of excitement around cafeBricolage and I’m glad to report that things are moving forward! I had a wonderful time talking to folks about the project last night at the Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs Meetup, and I’ll be sure to post it on the new blog.

“Brand Reputation Optimization” is a new term that I am coining. I encourage you to read this introduction, to email it to a friend and to discuss it with me. I will also be publishing a more detailed white paper on the same subject.

Brand Reputation Optimization (BRO for the acronym lovers!) refers to how an organization best positions its brand for long-term sustainability and success. Success in this case refers both to the bottom line and to applying socially responsible business practices sometime referred to as corporate social responsibility. Since the web is now the preferred method by which people receive and digest information, BRO focuses primarily on online practices though it often complements, or is a catalyst for offline engagement.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) taught us that we can be proactive in helping people to discover companies and information online. However, now that every company has established an online presence, and given that the internet is increasingly the medium by which people receive their information (thus evolving their perceptions and first impressions) the “key test” becomes that of brand distinction and differentiation. As it turns out, like search engine optimization there are best practices and concrete actions that can be taken to distinguish and optimize your brand.

The most important aspect of BRO is to recognize that people build brands and brands drive revenues. Many a company and business fails to capitalize on its most valuable asset – its own people. Social networks have taught us the power of passionate users and social media tool have helped us to unleash the power of collective intelligence often by breeding innovation organically. Passion drives engagement.

Brand Reputation Optimization has two central applications: Internal and External. Traditionally (and bound to continue going forward) is the primary focus of brand optimization on the external (such as interactions with media, the public and customers). Still it is important to reiterate that brands are in fact internally driven. If an organization’s own people to do not believe in the underlying objectives and ethics, the brand will never flourish.

External optimization can be further segmented into Proactive and Reactive Actions. Traditionally, brand development has focused more on reactive actions such as responding to customer complaints, providing warranty services after the sale, or increasing transparency practices after Sarbanes Oxley. However, thanks to new technologies (in particular social media) we now have the opportunity to focus on building brands proactively.

This new era in brand building is largely made possible by an unprecedented ability to provide online engagement in a way never before possible (think Ajax interface and social media functionality). Following Metcalf’s Law, “the more people using a given system, the more valuable it becomes.” Now that much of the World’s population is embracing the internet as their primary medium for interactions (shopping, dating, research, collaboration, etc…) the need for organizations to humanize and to appeal to people on more of an emotional level (as opposed to simply through the use of static text and image) is paramount.

The importance of Brand Reputation Optimization should not be underestimated and I look forward to seeing new applications of this concept going forward.

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I recently had coffee with Noel Hidalgo, whom I met via NextNY. In addition to being a cool guy, and a great guide for learning about Drupal, CoWorking and other stuff, he's the kind of guy who believes he can go around the world on the open-source donations of friends and strangers.

Hey, who am I to argue? If I could, I'd hit 7 continents in 7 months, dive into the seven oceans, and attempt to visit the seven ancient wonders of the world. Well, I can't but, here's to living vicariously.

I've donated to Noel. Won't you? It's just 11.11 to let Noel roll.

Seth Godin, the A-List blogger, marketing author, and extraordinary speaker has written a great post about venture capital. Even though one would attribute him as solely an author, he’s had experience at the helm with Yoyodyne, a leading interactive agency acquired by Yahoo in the late 90s.

Rarely touching upon venture capital and finance, Seth has ventured into a heavy hitting top list that goes against many highly optimistic entrepreneurs. Personally, I happen to find his list quite interesting and agree with him on many points. Below is his list - and my notes next to each point.

1. Investors like to invest in categories they’ve already invested in. If your business is so new that it’s never been tested before, or is in a category VCs hate, think twice. (DH: There was no in-game advertising company in our space before came to market and we landed over $17 million in funding…)
2. Investors want you to sell out. As soon as possible. For as much as possible. They have no desire to own part of your company forever. (DH: this reminds me of record labels in the music industry. They sign a band and want them to change 50 million different things about them. I’ve had positive experiences with our VC’s but I’ve seen and heard about companies getting pushed to sell)
3. Investors want to invest in a project that’s tested. If you can’t make it work in the ’small’, why do you think it’ll work when it’s big? (DH: fairly agree)
4. Being a little better than the market leader is worthless. (DH: as Seth says himself, be remarkable)
5. Investors don’t want you to use their money to cover your losses. They want you to build an asset (a patent, an audience, channel relationships) that’s actually worth something. (DH: patents aren’t worth that much in the digital media space, but relationships are. Get those contracts!)
6. Investors want someone to run your company who has successfully run a company before. (DH: depends on what stage you are at and how you’ve done so far, but as an entrepreneur, get ready to give over the reigns at a point in time)
7. Investors want to be able to come to one of your board meetings and still make it home in time for dinner. (DH: cute)
8. VCs like curves more than they like cliffs.
9. There are actually very very few business problems that can be solved with money. (DH: this is very true, usually a bleeding ship is a sunken ship)
10. You will probably have to replace many of your employees if you raise money from someone. (DH: could happen)
11. VCs understand that being the best in the world (#1) is the place with the biggest rewards, so it’s unlikely they will settle for any performance (even a profitable one) that puts you in second or third place. (DH: being the first ’sold’ isn’t necessary the best as they could have many influences to that acquisition. There are many reasons why someone in #2, #3 position may sell for more eventually)
12. VCs are very smart and very connected, but they’re smart enough to know that their connections and their insights can’t fix a broken business. (DH: very true!)
13. Investors are very focused on the company, not you. They’re not interested in having you take out your original investment or paying you a large salary as profits go up. (DH: yep)
14. Business plans are bogus. The act of writing one is critical, but no one is going to read more than three pages of what you write before they make a decision. (DH: all VC’s are different, but most will tell you that the act of writing the plan is crucial for any founding team)
15. The companies that VCs most want to invest in are the companies that don’t need their investment to survive. (DH: very true, as these companies are sustainable and have shown a good track record)

Today we’re launching the new nextNY blog. If you’re not familiar with nextNY, it’s a group that started as an informal gathering of young people in the NY technology and digital media community. It all began with a single announcement made by Charlie O’Donnell at a Meetup last year. Since then it’s grown to over 600 people, and we’ve had a lot of great events since then.

At one of these events, we talked about the future of the NY technology community, and proposed ways to help it grow. One of the issues raised was that NY companies and personalities just don’t have a very high profile. This blog is designed to help change that. It will cover NY technology, entrepreneurship, startups, digital media, events, personalities, companies, success stories, and bring together the leading voices of the industry.

How does the nextNY blog work?
Anthony from SquareSpace did a great job setting up our original blog, which was run by a team of authors from nextNY. Unfortunately, it garnered only a few posts per month. Maintaining a separate blog was just too much extra work. To really make an impact, we needed more content, updated more frequently.

The new blog is designed to make this happen, with minimal extra effort. In true “Web 2.0” fashion, this blog builds on user-generated content that’s already out there. It’s an aggregator, automatically pulling in posts from authors’ individual blogs.

Who can join?
Anyone who blogs about the technology and digital media industry in New York is welcome to join up and post their content. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a venture capitalist, programmer, designer, entrepreneur, or journalist, as long as you have an interest in the NY technology and digital media industry.

How do I join?
It’s simple.

• Send us the URL of your RSS feed.
• Wordpress users: Set up a ‘nextNY’ category in Wordpress, and apply it to any posts you want to appear on the nextNY blog.
• Blogger users: Use a “nextNY” label for any post you want to appear on the nextNY blog.

We’ve posted a nextNY Blog FAQ containing guidelines, content ideas, and other information. Let’s get started and help ensure NYC’s place in the future of technology and digital media.

So a debate I had today was over what constiutes a new product: is it really just marketing? Or, is there a true distinction?

Take for example any number of the social networking platforms that exist. If one says “hey let us design a social network for your customers” and then comes back and says “we can also sell you a solution for your events”….. and then once again “we can sell you a solution for your alumni” - are those all unique products? Is a product unique even though it’s created using the same platform as another product?

As an analogy, consider a car. All cars have four wheels, axles and breaks. At what point is a car a unique and new product versus being “highly customized.” Are products differentiated simply by the brands that sell them? If so, what about cars that are exactly the same model, but simply sold under different brands. Like the Old Audis and Jettas? Are those still unique products?

Maybe it really just doesn’t matter.

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