Blog summit reflections

It's been three days since the 2005 Blog Business Summit so I've had some time to reflect on the running themes and memes that I took away from the event:

There are many ways that blogs can help build a business -- but building a business out of a blog is another matter. Sustainable business models remain elusive; the most viable idea at the moment appears to be selling advertising or taking part in an ad network like Google AdSense. It's hard to judge how viable that is since Google's confidentiality agreements don't allow participants to reveal how much they make.

If someone out there has a radical, innovative, eye-opening business model, they sure weren't bragging about it.

On the other hand, I heard many persuasive arguments that blogging can be invaluable in supporting myriad objectives of an existing business. Public relations, crisis communications, customer service, guerilla marketing, fast-feedback-loop market research, internal communications, external networking or fund-raising -- blogs and related technologies can help with all of those.

Blogging is like playing with fire: you have to know what you're doing. The speakers at the summit all displayed a healthy respect, if not outright wariness at times, about blogging's potential for causing grief and impugning reputations. Firestorms of criticisms can -- and do -- erupt in blogspace from out of nowhere; they often propagate quickly and are difficult to contain.

Company blogs or employee bloggers can get a company into trouble as easily as outside critics. And a poorly thought out blogging policy can be as dangerous as having no blogging policy. (Recall the controversy over Six Apart's initial pricing scheme for Movable Type 3.0 or this week's blogcrisis at Google.)

You can't ignore what the bloggers are saying -- and you have to talk back. They have influence, they have audiences, they've become part of the media food chain. Rapid -- and thoughtful -- response can be essential to staving off a firestorm.

Monitoring, responding to and containing potential problems isn't easy, however. It requires serious investment in up-front community building and a deep understanding of the social and network dynamics of the users, customers and others who might blog about you.

I'm not saying that those are reasons for organizations not to blog, but they are important issues to consider in making the decisions of whether and how to blog.

Blogging is just a communications technology. By and large, the speakers focused on how to use blogging tools effectively; the cultural baggage of the blogging phenomenon was seldom mentioned. Yes, blogs can build communities, foster dialogue where communication was only one-way before, empower the disenfranchised and more -- but that's because blogs are just tools that can be harnessed for many uses. The technology is value-neutral. That message was no surprise, considering how summit founder Steve Broback defined blogging when I interviewed him earlier this month.

Blogging is here to stay. That may sound absurdly obvious but in past years, it was also "obvious" that community publishing, unrestricted MP3 trading and local Web portals would become permanent, ubiquitous fixtures of the online landscape. I'm sure a lot of people think or hope that blogging is just another "next big thing" fad. While specific implementations like photoblogging, videoblogging and writing personal diaries that the entire world can see may prove short-lived, I don't think blogging, as a medium or a technology, will turn out to be a fad. It could evolve into a basic "foundation" tool -- like text messaging or XML -- from which new applications, trends and businesses spring. In five years, it may have evolved into something we would barely recognize. (Of course, it's also possible that all significant development will suddenly stop, as happened with the Web.)

There's no substitute for meeting people in person. Early in the conference, I mused about whether such events made sense for an audience as interlinked and accustomed to sharing information as the blogging community. As Frank Catalano pointed out in the comments thread, the answer's unequivocably yes. Sure, technologies like IM, videoconferencing, WebEx and e-mail have eroded the disadvantages of distance but nothing can really replace meeting someone in person and talking face to face. For example, I made a point of introducing myself to Glenn Fleishman after his talk. I've been reading Glenn for years, and corresponding with him for months, but we'd never actually "met" before this week.

And let's face it, most of us don't go to conferences just to glean intelligence and info from the program. We go to network, to bounce ideas off of other people or to sit down and catch up with friends and colleagues we haven't seen in ages.