Lessons Learned at BlogOn

Last week I had the amazing opportunity to participate and attend the first BlogOn conference, which took place at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

The academic setting could not have been more appropriate for this relatively new blogger to meet and learn from the giants of the blogosphere. Here (in no particular order) are some of the key learnings I sponged up during the two day event …

1) Building a Following is Fairly Formulaic
Building a following for your blog is relatively easy, according to Halley Suitt of Halley's Comment. However, it does require a significant commitment. During Thursday's bootcamp she said bloggers need to:

• Blog often. "Bake fresh rolls," Suitt said. "People always want to go where the fresh stuff is happening…Let's kick publishing's ass here. They have three month old bread."


• Be funny. (This easy for Suitt, but not as easy for others.)


• Be brief and link to others


• Overload readers with information


• Write op-eds - be original


• Be fast


• Be daring

2) Use Trackbacks in Lieu of Comments
Business bloggers are naturally concerned about turning comments on. Six Apart's Anil Dash suggested that trackbacks work better in a business blogging environment because the comments live on the author's site as well as yours, fostering greater accountability.

3) Firefox is Trumping IE
All the influencers now use the Firefox browser. A rather embarrassing moment brought this to light. Even many of the Mac users at the conference were using the Mozilla browser and not Safari.

4) Shocker! Small Frys Think Super-sized Big Media is Dead

I'm sorry, but this is soooo 1998...

Tony Perkins: "I think [social media] is the biggest thing that's ever happened [in media]. Just as big media was bottoming out, bloggers came in and said, Wait a minute, we have something to say here. We'll see the complete blowing apart of the media world and get high quality content that fits in your pocket."

Greg Jarboe: Yahoo! News and Google News are filling the void left by the 72,000 media jobs that have been lost over the past four years. He says this makes public relations harder than it was four years ago. He calculates these lost jobs means there are 720,000 less stories in the press than there were four years ago (72,000 reporters x 10 stories per month that are no longer there)

Don't buy into this hype folks. These are exciting times, but Big Media, although a changed animal, will be around long after the daisies have started growing on my grave.

5) The Corporate Blogging Conundrum
Lisa Poulson: "There's a continuum between openness and control. Companies need to think about what side they're on."

For more...
Rafat Ali, Lee Waters and JD Lasica.

Comments

[Greg Jarboe]

I'm not as optimistic that new 72,000 media jobs will be created in the foreseeable future to replace the ones lost over the past four years. If they are, they will be created at new media like blogs, not old media like the ones found at http://www.iwantmedia.com/layoffs.html -- which are supported by forms of advertising that aren't bounching back in popularity, either.