Thanks to Steve Rubel, here are the highlights from iBreakfast on the Business of Blogging that took place on Wednesday 22nd September. There is so much good blog stuff and I will attempt to select only those bits that made me go 'yes' and punch the air. Brace yerselves.

Henry Copeland:

• Big advantages over traditional media (not corporations, not generalists, highly networked) - networked nature of medium means Bloggers are 10 times more productive per keystroke than traditional journalists

Stowe Boyd:

• Saw an ad on a bus shelter this morning saying “The rules have changed but the game is the same” - but now, he feels the rules are changing so much the game itself is changing too


• Blogging is so profoundly different – we will see it drive a revolution - a revolution that will upset an array of applecarts (traditional media; the core principles of marketing; how governments and other entities interact with constituencies; etc.)


• Blogging works bottom-up; as a result, organizations that want to adopt it must shift to a bottom up mode as well (important warning to those who go into blogging thinking corporate business as usual (e.g., hiring someone to ghost-blog for CEO); stories abound of people/companies being called out for mis-using blogs - 2These attempts will fail profoundly")


• "The world is made up of small markets"


• How can business apply blogging?
  
  • Use blogs to open authentic dialogues with customers (look at MS or Macromedia as great examples)
  
  
  • Burn all brochureware and let the service/product people converse directly with constituents re: plans and goals
  
  
  • Develop a community of those who use products
  
  
  • Build blog networks inside organizations to make communication more efficient (forget the org charts; let teams build from bottom up)


• The ‘old saw’ that a 'brand is a promise' is changing – now it should read: 'a brand is an invitation to become involved'

Bob Wyman:

• We are going through a fundamental shift in the way we relate to the network and the way we communicate


• This change is not blogs per se – blogs are both growing out of this shift and being driven by it


• Today the market is moving toward new patterns of accessing information: PubSub addressing "the other half of the search problem"


• He outlined retrospective vs. prospective - Need to bring prospective approach into overall toolkit of search capabilities

Ishwari Singh:

• Talked about how to use blogs to promote person or company, as well as how his organization uses blogs internally for project management / collaboraton


• Noted that blogs can draw high ranks of search engines


• Noted that instant publishing, cheap and easy software, no need for programming knowledge makes barriers to entry low


• Internally, blogs make managing communications easier for his teams
  Anecdote: his programmers need to submit daily status reports. Instead of reading them all in email, they publish internally via RSS which he reviews and can search via his RSS reader.

Told you. Marvellous stuff. We have got to start doing something like this in London. Watch this space...

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