Straight Talk PR .com

Blog Council Forms, Adding More Web 2.0 Power to Chicago

It was cool to read about establishment of the Blog Council in Brad Spirrison's "Tech Matters" column in today's Chicago Sun-Times. The Blog Council (created by Chicago's Andy Sernovitz, who founded the Word of Mouth Marketing Association three years ago) is a roundtable, and an exclusive one at that, for large corporations with major blogging presence. It's a place to share ideas with people in similar positions.

I get that. But some of the biggest and most respected names in blogging are skeptical. Being present as vendors seems to be the problem. And the necessity for the new organization in the face of so many other blogging organizations and conferences is also an objection. European blogger Nicole Simon wrote a great wrapup of the debate.

I guess I get it because I've been there. As I wrote in my comment to Simon's article, the situation reminds me of the National Council of State Housing Agencies. During five years as marketing director for the Indiana Housing Finance Authority, I participated in several NCSHA conferences. We had little problem keeping some discussions to ourselves, and no problem having vendors in other discussions. And the hundreds of vendors help to pay for the organization, which is the voice of state housing agencies on affordable housing policy in Washington.

In the world of old-line public relations, at least in the U.S., it's also analogous to the different missions of PRSA and the Council of Public Relations Firms, an association of the big guns. Moreover, if more major companies blog, more of the middle-market and smaller companies will also blog. And that's a tide that lifts all boats.

Which Came First - The New Employee or the New Employee's Blog?

It's a joy to see the devotion of cutting-edge companies like Cisco to a cutting-edge panoply of blogs.

But I had to chuckle when I read the Chicago Sun-Times story about Padmasree Warrior, age 47, who on Monday departed Illinois' Motorola, where she was chief technology office, to take up the same post at California's Cisco.

Howard Wolinsky reported on Tuesday in the CS-T that Ms. Warrior made the move on Monday. He added this: "In her personal blog at Cisco, she said: 'It is an exciting time to join Cisco. Cisco is the company whose leadership legacy defines ‘The Network’ in many ways. Today, it is a company driving many new paradigms in communications and information technology. In the future, it will be a company poised to lead the industry to the next phase of Internet.'"

Now, that's speed! She leaves on Monday and has a blog post on Tuesday. Kudos! (Here's the link.)

They See Obscurity. I See Opportunity.

Q. Any idea how many of the 109.2 million blogs you track get no hits in the course of a year? A. Just over 99 percent. The vast majority of blogs exist in a state of total or near-total obscurity.

Link: Welcome to obscurity: Blogs and the real world -- chicagotribune.com.

This is a brief but informative interview by Patrick T. Reardon of the Chicago Tribune with Derek Gordon, vice president for marketing for Technorati.

My take on this is that there's lots of opportunity for the less-than-one-percent crowd. The Long Tail works.