Debbie Weil is a corporate blogging and social media expert, online marketing consultant, speaker and author of The Corporate Blogging Book (Portfolio). She consults with large companies, CEOs and senior executives on how to create blogs that connect with customers and attract media attention.

I've compiled a handful I thought you'd find useful (or funny): Top 14 trends from Seth Godin's new book, Meatball Sundae; 10 tips for new bloggers from Jorn Barger who coined the term "Weblog" 10 years ago; Pete Blackshaw's Official 2008 Web 2.0 Buzzword Forecast; the best of Harvard Business Online. Merriam-Webster's 2007 Word Of The Year is w00t! More…

2007 Word of the Year 

Merriam-Webster's 2007 Word Of The Year is w00t! (Yes, those are double zeros.) It means yay! and yippee! as in, "I won!" #2 in M-W's Top 10 words for 2007 is facebook.

Best of Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin's new book

Seth Godin's Top 14 Trends from his new book, Meatball Sundae. You can also listen to Bryan Eisenberg's interview with Seth on Web Master radio.

Top 10 tips for new bloggers from the guy who coined the word "Weblog"

10 Tips for New Bloggers from Jorn Barger, who coined the term "Weblog" exactly ten years ago on Dec. 17, 1997 "to describe the daily list of links that 'logged' his travels across the web." He's a little scary looking, dontcha think?

Pete Blackshaw's Web 2.0 Buzzword Forecast for 2008

Pete Blackshaw's Official 2008 Web 2.0 Buzzword Forecast is quite funny. Friendiligence means doing due diligence on all those "friend requests" you get on Facebook.

Harvard Management Best Of's (free)

The Best of HarvardBusiness.org includes blog posts, video, podcasts, an interactive tool and an interactive case study. All free.

Blogging is a key piece of Web 2.0 or the Social Web, as it's called. The Social Web means crowdsourcing: looking to your customers and fans for knowledge and smarts. It means that painstaking creation of static, stuffy, stilted Web pages is out. Blogs (interactive) are in. Here are my Top 8 Tips to launch an effective corporate blogging program in 2008.

1. Use humor

I don't mean funny ha ha. Poke fun at yourself. Be self-deprecating.  Readers love it. It may be the #1 way to make your blog appear human and to strip the corporate edge from your voice.

New for 2008! Click here for my Corporate Blogging in a Day in-house workshop. Book before Jan. 25, 2008 to get 15% off. 

2. Write short. Less is more.

Who said every blog entry has to be a magnum opus? Short (150 - 300 words) can be very effective. When something happens in the news that mentions your company or product,  professional or trade association, jump on it. Create a blog entry with the relevant links. Add a few sentences of commentary. You're done.

3. Post at least once a week

Do I sound like a broken record? The best way to get your blog noticed by readers, bloggers and the media - not to mention blog ranking tools like Technorati, Bloglines and Techmeme - is to blog consistently. 

4. Link to naysayers and competitors

Grit your teeth and do it. Otherwise you're not credible.

5. Appoint a blog editor

If you can't hire somebody, identify your internal blogging enthusiast (or evangelist) and appoint him/her to oversee regular posting to the blog. It helps if this person has a knack for bloggy writing style and can also proofread for typos. If not, then appoint two people - one a copyeditor and the other a more senior person. More about blog editors.

6. Build redundancy into your approval process

See above. But this applies more specifically to getting approval for each blog post. Set up your blog program so that you have two senior managers responsible for okaying each blog entry. Since either one can do it, you're more likely to get through to one of them when you're in a hurry. Read about Southwest Airlines' blog approval process.

7. Consider joining the newly-formed Blog Council

I have no affiliation with the corporate Blog Council (paid membership) but by all accounts it seems to be a great idea. The brainchild of Andy Sernovitz, founder of WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association), the mission of the council is to:

Function as a collective voice in support of responsible, ethics-based corporate blogs.  Other issues the Council will address include:

• How do global brands manage blogs in more than one language?
• What do you do when 2000 employees have personal blogs?
• What is the role of the corporate brand in a media landscape increasingly geared toward consumer-generated media?
• What is the correct way to engage and respond to bloggers who write about your company?

Founding members include Cisco Systems, Coca-Cola, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP and Wells Fargo. Learn more here.

8. Just do it… 

More and more companies and organizations are waking up to the idea of using a blog - an informal, interactive Web site - as a key piece of their online strategy. I can't offer you any precise statistics on the number of company, employee or corporate blogs (nobody has done an official tally). But I can tell you that the pendulum has swung.

As of Dec. 9, 2007, 9.2% of Fortune 500s are blogging, according to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. 

Your customers or constituencies expect to be heard. They want to be listened to and they want you to talk back with corporate-speak stripped out. A blog is one of the most powerful ways to monitor the chatter about your brand, bring it back to your own turf and shape the discussion. Not control it per se. But demonstrate that you know people are talking and you have something useful to add.

Social Media Reading List

Here are some books for your social media bookshelf:

Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin 

Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel

Now Is Gone by Geoff Livingston with Brian Solis

The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil

The New Influencers by Paul Gillin

The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott 

My holiday gift to you, dear reader, is dressed up in a smartly packaged PDF. It's an enhanced transcript of the teleconference I did for the Personal Branding Telesummit marking the 10th anniversary of Tom Peters' now iconic article: The Brand Called You. You can also listen to the audio recording of this session.

Download Link

Download the PDF: How to Write a Great Business Blog 

Listen to the audio recording

Download the MP3 audio recording of this teleconference.

In this one-hour audio conference we touched on the distinction between personal and business blogs, writing for search engines, blog writing tricks, inviting conversation with readers, blogs vs. e-newsletters, how to handle controversy, measuring success and more.

The Personal Branding Global Telesummit celebrated the 10th anniversary of the publication of Tom Peters' article: The Brand Called You with round-the-click teleconferences by dozens of speakers including William Arruda, Krishna De, Kirsten Dixson, John Jantsch, David Meerman Scott, Guy Kawasaki, Andy Sernovitz and many others.

Special Offer: Corporate Blogging in a Day

2008 will be the year of corporate blogging

Want to get your group ready to blog, internally or externally? See page 3 of the PDF (or below) for my special offer on a customized one-day in-house workshop: Corporate Blogging in a Day. Note: I can only do three of these workshops so call right away if you're interested.

You provide the computers, Internet access and conference or training room. I will train your group (up to 20 people) in one day how to write an engaging, useful blog for your company or organization. It can be an internal or public-facing blog. You will learn:

► How to write blog-style in a warm, conversational voice and yet still be substantive

► How to write Google-friendly titles for your blog entries

► What to write about, what to link to and how to find material for your blog

► How to publicize your blog (internally or externally)

► How to handle controversial topics

► How to keep your blog fresh and topical

► What the role of a blog editor is and how to designate (or hire) one

► How to craft a Comments policy

► How to insert photos and images

► How to insert video clips

► Everything you need to know about the technical aspects of running your blog

At the end of the day you and your group will have learned how to blog. You will have created a fully-functional, attractive blog filled with enough content to convince your boss or other decision-maker to take the next steps to launch an internal or external blog program.

Included: 10 copies of The Corporate Blogging Book, workbook and handouts. Follow-up consulting by phone and email for four months beyond the engagement date.

To schedule your in-house workshop (15% off)

Fee: 15% off regular fee of $10,000 (plus travel expenses). Offer good until Jan. 25, 2008. Engagement must be booked by the deadline but can be scheduled for a later date. Be sure to mention you are a subscriber to WordBiz Report.

Reach Debbie at +1 202.364.5705 Eastern or by email at debbie.weil@gmail.com or use Contact form. 

Available for purchase

The Corporate Blogging Book

Chapter 7 of The Corporate Blogging Book focuses on blog writing tips for multiple author and executive blogs. It contains examples, tips and checklists you won't find anywhere else. It's also one of my favorite chapters in the book. You can order TCBB on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or 800-CEO-Read. 

PDF and Audio Recording: Content Strategy

Also available for purchase and instant download: How to Create a Content Strategy for Your Corporate Blog (MP3 audio recording and enhanced PDF transcript including screenshots).

Should you ghostblog for your CEO? Is anonymous blogging OK? Do you need a blog editor? All is revealed in the audio recording and enhanced PDF transcript of my April 2007 teleconference. Buy and download instantly. When the rubber meets the road, the content of your blog is what will determine its success or failure. By content I mean the topics, the writers, the voice, the links, the Comments from readers. The first teleconference in my series on corporate blogging focused on the knotty problem of how to create a content strategy for a corporate or organizational blog. [more]

I've ordered four novels from the British publisher, Persephone Books, which specializes in 20th century novels written by neglected women authors. Each is wonderful reading and is published with a distinctive gray cover and a beautiful endpaper. Decidedly non-digital book selections but just what I'm hungering for.

Leave a comment below to share your reading picks for the summer

What about you? Click below on Leave a comment with your own suggestions for summer reading.

I'm currently reading one of Persephone's newest re-issues: The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett. If that name is familiar, it should be. Burnett is the author of one of my favorite books as a child, The Secret Garden. But she also wrote adult novels. The Shuttle, 504 pages long and first published exactly 100 years ago, is about… [more]

This report is free. The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0, is a meaty guide to social media (great charts, tables, screenshots) that focuses on blogging in the public sector. The most intriguing case study is about how blogging is being used as part of the War on Terror by the U.S. Military. General James Cartwright, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), offers a fascinating glimpse into how blogs are part of STRATCOM's online information management system.

Blogging enables decision-making on a dime, 24X7, he explains. Information supplied by a 19-year-old private may be just as - or more - important than what a commanding officer contributes. Currently, the system is logging 250,000 - 350,000 blog entries or comments (he calls them transactions) per hour.

The report covers some of the same ground as my book, The Corporate Blogging Book, but it's written in a dryer, more academic fashion. The author is David Wyld, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. My one quibble is that, while the report is heavily footnoted, he makes no mention of any other books about blogging (including mine).

Seems like a conspicuous omission to me. (I reference several "competitor" books at the back of mine in a Recommended Reading suggestion). The report is nicely laid out, however, and I highly recommend it.

You can download and print out the report, published by IBM's' Center for The Business of Government. Or request to have a bound copy sent to you. It's a 97-page, 8 1/2 X 11 inch softcover. Download page

If you're not a regular reader of my blog, I hope you'll check out recent entries and subscribe via RSS: What grownups are doing on MySpace; Dilbert cartoons skewer CEO blogs; What a good corporate blog should look like; Technorati's Peter Hirshberg on Japanese bloggers, Jello and the shoe shine guy. (Great video.) Start here and scroll down. You can subscribe to the blog through the RSS feed. Or by entering your email address at the top of the blog (left-hand side).

Good blogging is good writing. Or, as they say more lyrically in French, "Un bon blog repose sur une belle plume." Join me for a one-hour teleconference on how to write an effective blog on Thursday May 24, 2007 at 1:00 PM Eastern. I'll discuss: how to choose your blog writer(s), why you need a blog editor, tips and tricks for effective blogging, etc. Learn more and register now ($97 fee includes audio link so you can listen to the session later as well as an enhanced PDF transcript of the event.)

Note: this is a per-person fee and not a site license. 

I will cover:

- How to choose your blog writer(s)

- What the role of a blog editor is

- How to train your writers in the basic elements of blog writing style

- Advanced tips for effective blog writing (linking tricks)

- How to keep the momentum going (finding content, motivating your bloggers)

As a loyal subscriber to WordBiz Report, this 15-page PDF is yours *free.* Secret download link [here]. I've updated the examples of effective business blogs and added new material. If you're not already a subscriber to WordBiz Report, go to the sign-up page to get your free copy.

The April 12, 2007 teleconference is now available as an MP3 audio recording & enhanced PDF transcript. So you're serious about launching a blog for your organization. You're asking: who should write our blog? Can we ghostblog for our CEO? Can it be multi-author? How do we choose topic(s)? Do we need a blog editor and what should his/her role be?

 
Learn more…

Special thanks to my teleconference sponsor, Conference Calls Unlimited.