Janet Johnson Part II

If 2006 is the year of the business blog, why do only 8 percent of the Fortune 500 blog? Janet says it’s primarily fear. She mentioned the McDonald’s blog as an example of one of these. As a former Enron employee, she says a blog would have helped bring that situation to light much earlier…so blogging is good from a corporate governance perspective. I agree that it is almost impossible to keep a secret today, as the sight of a dozen teenage girls taking pictures of the Carlsen twins yesterday showed (see the embedded YouTube video on this post.)

She also highlighted the example of the blog fakery from Edelman and Wal-Mart to illustrate the self-cleansing nature of the blogosphere, which Shel Holtz discusses here. She says Edelman will be hurt much more than Wal-Mart, particularly since they went silent on the issue for five days instead of acknowledging the issue and then coming back to address it.

It’s break time, but Janet’s presentation has been really helpful and interesting so far.

Janet Johnson on Gross Blog Anatomy

This afternoon’s session is by Janet Johnson. I believe she just went out on her own, so her current blog is really new, but based on her presentation today I’m sure it will become a good source for helpful PR and marketing information.

We have representatives from FEMA, Wyndham Worldwide, Leiner Health Products, Verizon, several branches of the military, Hewlett-Packard, Dansko,General Electric Energy Division, Prudential Real Estate, and a few others for whom I didn’t get the spelling of their company name.

Janet started out by telling about her experience with the Marqui paybloggers controversy. It highlights a point I will be making in my presentation, that new media can have lots of news media leverage.

She discussed Paul Kedrosky and the concept of “dark matter” – that once something is out on the web, it’s there forever.

The evolution of consumer web use from surfing in the 1990s to search in the 2000s to subscribing via RSS today is a helpful broad overview of the trends, along with the move from publishing to participation.

She suggested that buying up all domain names conceivably related to your organization is smart (e.g. iheartdansko.com) because people guess at domain names instead of just using Google.

Janet showed a Google Heat Map that demonstrates where people look on the Google search results, and said BLOG stands for Better Listing on Google.

She also said smaller, more frequent posting is better than a long post. This one is too long already, so I’m going to post it and start a new one.

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