Blog Business Summit Q&A

The first Blog Business Summit will take place here in Seattle Jan. 24-25. Robert Scoble will keynote; other speakers include well-known bloggers like Glenn Fleishman, Molly E. Holzschlag, Hayley Suitt and Biz Stone. Prominent business guru Tom Peters is among those intrigued enough to sign up.

The Summit's goal, according to the tagline on its site, is to "show you how your business can leverage current real-world blogging techniques, tools and platforms to promote and enhance your ventures."

I recently interviewed conference founder Steve Broback by e-mail and asked him to amplify that a bit.

Q: What's the target audience for the conference?

Broback: I built the event for three audiences:

1. Traditional marketing and PR types who need to get up to speed on blogs and blogging.
2. Entrepreneurial types who see this as a "new media" business model play.
3. Existing bloggers who want to turn "pro."

Q: What has the response been?

Broback: This first time won't bring in huge numbers, but from what I hear, we are having a significantly stronger response than all the other business blog events that have been slated. We are still a bit early in the curve. I think businesspeople are a bit apprehensive of blogging right now. I have seen this before. It's like trying to get photographers to use Photoshop back in 1994: no way! They by in large were terrified of digital; scared the daylights out of them. Now most photographers are enthusiastic pixel pushers. The tide will turn soon. I expect 100 attendees or a bit more.

Q: How do you define blogging?

Broback: That's a great question, and one that will get quite a debate started if you sit down with a bunch of bloggers. I sometimes cheat on this question and say that a blog is a website hosted by blogging software or a blogging service. These services and programs include TypePad, Movable Type, Live Journal, Blogger, MSN Spaces, etc. There are a couple dozen of these services and server based database programs.

The fact that it is a database-driven site is critical in my mind, and that the database has certain capabilities. We aren't talking about individually coded pages being created and uploaded here. There are several unique aspects to these served pages compared to static hosted pages.

One is that you are will be inputting your posts (new entries) into a database engine that automatically lays out the page and puts the newest items at the top, while shifting older info to the bottom and eventually off to a remote virtual page. Critical to the blog advantage is that as this data moves, the links to it remain constant. That way a 2-year-old entry that might have vanished off the Web before is still accessible. What's great about this is that a post continues to drive traffic long after it's been written.

Another essential point is that your entries are "broadcast" over the Web as individual syndicated "feed" items. A regular, static site cannot do this. Someone using a newsreader (and who has subscribed to your site or to a specific topic) will then be automatically sent these relevant snippets as they appear on the Web. Newsreaders can really cut down on the effort to surf the Web using a browser, so they are rapidly coming into more and more use.

Q: What are the key points that you think are most often overlooked in recent coverage of blogging?

Broback: The main one is that people tend to confuse content with the system that delivers it. In 1993, the Web was primarily a place for academics to share physics papers. I suppose if you talked to a business person about the Web in 1993, they would have said either "I have never heard of it" or "oh yeah, that thing for viewing physics papers -- I have no interest in reading those, we do ads on AOL." They would have missed the point. The point of the Web was what you could do with the architecture that had been built. In 2003, most business people would say about blogs either "I have never heard of it" or "oh yeah, that thing for reading online diaries -- I have no interest in reading those, we have a Web site." Like with the Web, things are changing rapidly.

Q: What can blogging do for businesses?

Broback: If you like getting traffic to your Web site, bear in mind that Google LOVES blogs, and feeds drive a lot of eyeballs. If you want visibility, communicating and working with bloggers is a great way to get a TON of buzz. For example, my little site blogbusinesssummit.com (a blog) launched in late October, and I have never written a press release about it. I recently compared my site's visibility to that of the largest PR firm in the Northwest. They have been online for ten years, and have issued thousands of press releases. According to Google, my site has a significantly higher PageRank, and more mentions. Alexa says I get much more traffic! This is because my site is a blog, and I had bloggers talking about the site.

Also, my budget for the site was the equivalent of what the PR firm finds in their lobby couch every year. And it's SO easy to maintain. The fact that it's database-driven means that you can easily have multiple remote authors as well.

Bottom line is that blogs are cheaper, easier and superior to almost any static site imaginable. Tell your readers to type the name of their business in quotes into Google and count the results. Then type in "blog business summit" and count. If they have fewer mentions than my 3-month-old business, we'd love to get them up to speed at the conference.

Q: Do you think we'll need to come up with a different name for "blogs" before they'll be accepted widely as business tools?

Broback: The name has definitely affected mainstream acceptance. It's hard to say whether "blog" will stick or not, as "syndicated" sites or "RSS" is a little less goofy. On the other hand "Macintosh" was a very informal prototype name for a computer and it stuck. My guess is we'll still say "blog" long term.

Q: You brought up the matter of feeds. A recent Pew Internet survey reported that only 5% of adult U.S. Internet users used some form of feed aggregator. Given the low penetration, do feeds really offer businesses a new or better channel for communicating with their customers?

Broback: The number you put forth indicates the great opportunity, and one of the reasons we are doing this conference. What were the Web browser usage stats in 1994? I suspect 5% would be about right. Feeds are a great way to deliver content. Aggregators offer real advantages over email and browser site access. Even if it stalls at 10% usage (highly doubtful), we'd still have a doubling in audience.

Q: You know, you're one of the few people I've talked to about blogging who focuses on the syndication aspect of the technology. But they can exist independently of one another. Would feeds get more acceptance for business applications if they were divorced from blogs?

Broback: Great point, and I think I agree with that hypothesis. Yes, I do believe feeds can certainly be sent from a site that is not structured as a blog, and that more tools will be created to assist in that effort. This should accelerate acceptance. Because the current blog engines have it built-in, and are so inexpensive it's the path of least resistance right now to be issuing feeds.

Q: Who do you think will be the typical blogger five years from now?

Broback: I think anyone who likes to write, and has a a modicum of computer skills will be blogging unilaterally. I also think in five years, many others will be asked to contribute to internal team blogs as a work requirement.