Blogging has been heralded, among other things, as a very inexpensive way to do buzz marketing. Companies, especially smaller businesses, have found blogging to be indeed helpful with reaching out to consumers. And what’s best is that this can be done with minimal cost. You don’t have to hire PR professionals or advertising agencies just to get the word out. Usually, it’s the people who will do that for you.

However, blogging does have its costs, especially in a business environment. It’s not always a rosy picture, I tell you. And I speak from experience.

For one, blogging can be very distracting and time-consuming. Most small companies that engage in marketing through blogs do so by having some of their employees write about their products and services. Sometimes, it’s the CEO him/herself who blogs about the company and its products and services. However, in many cases, blogging can be very time consuming and could eat up time that could have otherwise been used for more productive purposes.

And if your employees end up just blogging all day, won’t that be a waste of precious dollars you pay for their salary. I guess it’s okay if a person’s job directly involves blogging. But what if he’s your lead developer, and your project suffers months of backlog because he can’t focus on work?

Then what about PR nightmares? Blogs have been known to cause PR problems to some companies, particularly when bloggers write about problems and failures of your products or services. Remember the Kryptonite incident? It’s not exactly about blogging, but new media helped spread the word that Kryptonite locks are vulnerable to hacking with a simple ball point pen. What about the exploding Dell computers? What about overheating MacBook Pros and iBook batteries?

Sometimes it takes more than just blogging to counter the negative PR effects of these. Of course, users are just reporting their opinions, and they have every right to (especially if your product is really problematic). But the cost of product recalls and replacements and having to issue media releases to get information out would probably be huge. What about lost business and tarnished company reputations?

And then of course there’s the leakage of proprietary information. How often have trade secrets been revealed on blogs? More often than not, company insiders are involved. Maybe someone in your organization is blogging anonymously about your top secret plans. Or maybe someone is feeding information to other external blogs.

The cost of blogging for businesses doesn’t only involve the internal matters like installing blog software and running/renting a server. Blogs and bloggers are a highly independent form of media, and chances are you cannot really influence what information is published, especially from the outside.

Duncan Riley writes over at 901am that Wikipedia has expressed financial difficulties unless it gets more funding real soon. I agree with Duncan that this smells of an attempt, indeed, to get sympathy from the general public.

In a rather extraordinary example of begging for money, Florence Devouard, Chairwoman of the Wikimedia foundation has told an audience at the Lift07 conference that Wikipedia has the financial resources to run its servers for another 3-4 months, and that without further funding Wikipedia “might disappear”.

Does Wikipedia really need money to keep on running? Probably, yes. It is one of the most visited destinations online (I’d say 30% of my daily surfing is on Wikipedia–checking out episode recaps of my favorite shows). And that amount of traffic requires a ton of processing power, bandwidth and people to make sure nothing screws up. But should Wikipedia really have difficulty sourcing funds? I think not.

After all, as I just said a few sentences ago, Wikipedia is one of the most visited destinations online. and it’s only reasonable for a site of Wikipedia’s stature to be able to raise funds easily.

However, it may not be that easy for Wikipedia to find a good business model. First and foremost, it’s seen by the public as a trustworthy and authoritative source of facts and information. Wikipedia practically controls the truth. Now any monetization activities might just taint that reputation. If Wikipedia starts to get corporate sponsorship, then there is a risk that the site gets branded as a sell-off (possibly biased towards the interests of the advertisers). If Wikipedia gets acquired/bought by another company (say any one of the biggies like Google, Microsoft, News Corp, etc.), then there is also a high likelihood that the site might be seen as serving the interests of its new owners.

Is it really that difficult to make a business out of Wikipedia? Well, in the first place, I would say something of Wikipedia’s status in the community is really difficult to turn into a business in the first place, if it intends to keep the trust value high. When money is involved, there will inevitably a general perception of self-serving interests being catered to.

But Wikipedia has to keep afloat. It would be useless if they choose principle over money but end up closing shop.

Here’s one question to you: Would you feel comfortable having ads served on Wikipedia pages?

First of all, you ask Ly-What?

Okay, I’m old enough to remember what Lycos was back in the day, and probably like most of you, don’t really care what Lycos is up to these days. But in its glory days, I believe Lycos was one of those top portals/search-engines people went to when they wanted information. It was also one of the choice destinations for email and personal Web space (anyone still using Tripod and Angelfire these days?).

That’s so Web 1.0. Ah, the good old days.

Anyway, here’s this PR mess Lycos has to deal with. The policies for the Lycos email service seem to say you have to access your email at least once every 30 days, or your messages will be deleted. I guess there’s no bad with that, but it’s with the way the company tells you blatantly to your face to buzz off that’s annoying.

Whitney from idaho-hum.com writes about her experience with a snarky customer service rep named Mike Jandreau (apparently the Lycos customer service rep) when she complained about lost email. The response after several level-headed notes from Whitney :

I’m sorry, no one here has any intentions of helping you with anything. I am the manager of all of Customer Service. There is no one higher than me that you will speak with. You violated our policy, which is, despite what you say, completely clear. No one is holding anything hostage. Your e-mails have been completely deleted, and no amount of money can now restore them. This matter is closed.

Here’s a good take on the matter from consumerist.com:

Policy it may be, but this is no reason to treat a customer, even if most people aren’t even sure that your company exists anymore. Lycos owes Whitney an apology and the restoration of all her deleted email.

Lycos says you can pay the $19.95 subscription if you wanted to have your emails restored. Sounds like they’re taking your emails hostage just so you’d subscribe.

Then again, if something’s important, it’s always best to make backups, especially if the information is on a free service that can just go kaput anytime. But that still doesn’t excuse anyone from treating a customer like crap.

Okay, so Shiny Media, UK’s (and Europe’s, as claimed) largest blog network has recently received venture funding.

The UK’s Sunday Times newspaper yesterday broke the news that Shiny Media have secured US$4.5m worth of funding, thanks to Bright Station Ventures who now take a 50% stake in the company.

Now the next question is what they would be doing with that money. If I were Shiny, I’d be asking for wads of cash in a few backpacks so I can just run off to some unknown island and splurge there. Okay, kidding aside. Here’s what Shiny Media says it will do with the dough.

1. Compete with mainstream media.
2. Develop the commercial side of the business.
3. Get into video production.
4. New projects and ventures.

The plans actually look promising. I mean if you’ve got several millions at your disposal, then you won’t have to worry about paying the bills and putting food on the table–at least in the medium term. That goes the same for your employees, mostly your bloggers who are the creative talent behind it all. They won’t have to worry that the network might suddenly go bankrupt one day. But then again there’s the question of creative control. Shiny’s investor now owns 50% of the network.

Well we have worked really hard to develop Shiny and we wanted like-minded entrepreneurs who were prepared to ‘sweat’ with us, not just look over our shoulder. Shaa and Dan are both dynamos who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. They don’t just bring the backing of an exciting new fund to Shiny, they also bring experience, contacts and the kind of commercial nous Shiny needs to achieve its goals.

The investors seem to know what they’re doing, with apparent experience in new media. This notwithstanding, I can see potential problems here. Sure, there’s no single entity that owns an actual majority (more than 50%), but at the end of the day, it’s he (or she) who has money who usually has the say. Remember the rumored DIGG buyout?

[R]eports came in that News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch was offering over $100 million for Digg. In Leo Laporte’s TWiT podcast netcast ( This Week in Tech Episode 77: Kiss My Ring, 1:16:25), he mentioned that Kevin (and maybe even CEO Jay Adelson) wanted to take it.

BUT and that’s a big but, the investors weren’t willing to settle with anything less than $150 million. Now, that’s what happens when you take investors. You don’t really get to say when and how you want to get compensated with a pet project that turns out get a lot of attention. Kevin’s original $10,000 capital turned $100 million in 2 years is a huge success. He surely deserves to reap the fruits of his success, and if he wants to cash in now he has every right to do so.

But then again I may be wrong. And the business model in this case is different. DIGG is surely a Web 2.0 behemoth, but blog networks aren’t probably big enough to warrant a quarrel over a matter of 50 million bucks or so.

Good luck to Shiny!

Lorelle’s entry yesterday touched something I have been thinking of a lot lately. And the topic came up today in a discussion with a colleague as well.

WordPress is a great platform, but a service which has become even more admirable is Akismet, the spam filter created by Automattic.

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I use WordPress, I really like WordPress, but sometimes I doubt. Not because of the WordPress platform (I have already decided that I will use other platforms in a near future), but because of what the WP core team publishes. Because of certain statements they make.
I will immediately counter you. I surely am not not controversial in times (I have been worse, lots worse), I have been there in my sector. I have reached the top in my area.

And when I was there, everyone had to listen to it, and to me.
Today I know better. I have learned my lesson.
More even, every time I have read or hear similar statements I automatically shake head. And reading the NeoSmart Files last night I thought this was the beginning of the end.

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Only thing needed to create a big controversy were some notebooks..
And who is the loser in all this? Apple of course. Blogs of well known Apple users have been mentionned several days already in the same sentence as Microsoft. No matter how much I disagree with Edelman, the business person in me must admit that the whole buzz created with only some emails and a very small amount of notebooks was an example strategy of efficient marketing. Was there an easier, and cheaper way, to remind everyone, Apple freaks inclusive, that Vista will hit the shelves in the next days?

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Hugh MacLeod tells us why companies should blog

When I first started working with Stormhoek in May, 2005, they were tracking about 50,000 cases sold per year. By year’s end that figure had doubled to 100,000. Right now we’ve doubled again, to just over 200,000 cases a year. By Second Quarter 2007 we’re on schedule to be tracking around 250,000 cases shipped per year.

Disclaimer : Image © by Hugh MacLeod

Being blogically correct is a tricky thing. The MS Scandal is still fresh and although I respect the opinions from many A-Listers, I don’t want to condemn any blogger/community leader who decided to keep his laptop.

From the earliest days of the (public) internet its users have been trend setters. Trend setters in new technology, but also trend setters in mentality.
The internet was a place to help people. The USENet was a huge helping domain. The interenet has grown to become THE place to ask/search for advice, help in no matter what topic.
The users have made out of the internet a helping community. eBusiness only came later.

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It is surprising to see how much todays blogging culture has changed the way people analyze things. Maybe I immediately have to include the mention that I am 100% pro disclosure and pro critical minds.

But sometimes people’s opinions just hit me. Hit me too hard. We judge differently. We get judged differently.
Because bloggers (try to) preach disclosure, they get judged differently. No matter if they disclose or not.
Companies get judged differently.

Lets take a look at this weeks Microsoft scandal . It has been all over the place already. A typical blogosphere scandal.
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