The consistently insightful Valeria Maltoni over at Conversation Agent shared her thoughts on Penelope Trunk’s career-catalyzing advice, as taken from the pages of Trunk’s book, Brazen Careerist. Among suggestions like turning down promotions and making sure you hit the gym, you should:

Start a blog—starting a blog is the equivalent of letting people into the way you process information and form opinions; it’s a way to see if you exercise critical thinking and flex your writing muscle articulating on topics of your choosing. This is part ideas lab—the place where I test concepts to see for myself if they hold water. Sometimes I do not know exactly what I’m thinking until I commit it to writing and invite others to poke holes into it. The process is so transparent that it cannot be easily faked. It’s also a way to let others inform our thinking without having specific agendas—on a peer to peer level, with peer being defined as interested person/thinker. This is a very different process from the one we encounter in corporate America, where the person’s title may be the driver in decision making.

Right on the money, Ms. Maltoni.

Blogging is a way to take ownership of your professional, intellectual turf. It puts you in the spotlight (or the crosshairs), but understanding that responsibility liberates us, allows us to take risks, worry less about appeasing authority, and concentrate on innovating, on evolving—on being a thought leader. If a blog is a conduit to that kind of dialog, or allows you to raise your expertise profile, then by all means blogs are on the thought-leadership vanguard.

Put your ear up to the boardroom door; that panicked, scrabbling sound you hear is the old guard trying to understand what the kids are up to these days and grousing about how they can’t control it.

A few months ago, I mentioned an article by Tom Kuhlmann called “5 Myths About Rapid E-Learning.” It seems I wasn’t alone in being impressed by Tom’s take on the subject because now he has launched a whole blog on the subject.

Tom’s blog offers tips, tricks, and information about the world of rapid e-learning, a world that most of us are involved in as either developers or students taking e-learning courses. I am looking forward to Tom’s insights.

Oh, I love meta-analysis, so here goes. Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen is rippling the pond with his missive on whether or not it’s better for one write too-brief blog posts or author more extensive posts similar to traditional articles. His thesis:

To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.

The man makes some great points, and there’s much to be said for an industry expert who would be better served building his or her credibility and profile with lengthier, well-supported posts. They might tax reader patience, but then, those aren’t the readers you’re trying to reach.

That said, let’s not blame an apple for not being an orange. A blog is a somewhat schizophrenic outlet. One day, you may have the stuff to author an elaborate post dissecting a specific issue. You may, the next day, dash off a quick comment on an industry-relevant item from that morning’s headlines. And again, there may be days when you want to post a few picks of your dachshund rooting through a sack of hamburgers.

Nielsen fears (perhaps appropriately) that less relevant posts hurt your “brand equity”. Interesting, but couldn’t that frequency build rapport with your audience? You may not snag major traffic when a post is less than profound, but your audience will make that call regardless. If they like it they stick. If they don’t have time, they click. Simple.

He’s emphatic about about in-depth content being value-added content, pointing out that audiences appreciate well-conveyed expertise if it meets their immediate needs.

For most sites, the content is not the point. Instead, you want to answer customers’ questions as rapidly as possible so that they’ll advance in the sales cycle and start buying (or donate, or sign up for your newsletter, or whatever else you want them to do).

Elite, expertise-driven sites are the exception to the rule. For these sites, you don’t care about 90% of users, because they want a lower level of quality than you provide and they’ll never pay for your services. People looking for the quick hit and free advice are not your customers. Let them eat cake; let them read Wikipedia.

Many of our clients deal with extremely well-defined audience segments, and need to consistently convey expertise with clarity and authority. As such, a content-driven blogging approach would be ideal. It takes intellect and energy, but as Nielsen demonstrates, it adds tremendous value to a messaging effort, and boosts brand equity.

Is the blogosphere nothing more than a vanity press? Jay’s post, Lighten Up Keen, citing one entrepreneur’s low opinion of amateur bloggers, got me thinking. If there’s one thing that I believe the internet and social networking has proven, it’s that if you’re thinking about something, someone else probably is too. Andrew Keen is not the only one thinking about what bloggers are doing to traditional media. The media is watching closely, and the stakes are serious–as in a $2,000 wager placed on the long-term prediction archive site longbets.org.

A bet by Dave Winer–placed in 2002–claims the following:

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times‘ web site.

Putting up stakes against this claim is Martin Nisenholtz at, where else, the New York Times.

Winer explains the powerful trend and what it means to traditional media giants:

“…we’re returning to what I call amateur journalism, people writing for the public for the love of writing, without any expectation of financial compensation.” It is the big publishing houses he says, that will have to figure out “…how to remain relevant in the face of a population that can do for themselves what the BigPubs won’t.” And this leads him to his prediction, “…in five years, the publishing world will have changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want.”

It’s 2007, and the deadline for this bet is fast approaching. One amateur to another, I think the blogosphere is about to prove Winer is correct, and I’m not the only one. A longbets.org poll shows that out of roughly 300 people surveyed, 66 percent agree with Winer.

But hey, don’t read too much into it–we’re just a bunch of amateurs.

Entrepreneur Andrew Keen has it in for amateur bloggers, vloggers, and social networkers. Ye are of an inept ilk, so says he in his book The Cult of the Amateur, nicely encapsulated in this recent NYT article.
According to Andrew:

. . . Web 2.0 is . . . undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights . . . creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

And what happens when mentally calcified entrepreneurs push back against overwhelming paradigm shifts by authoring what are essentially vanity-press screeds against new forms of interaction and innovation? Oh, yeah: The Cult of the Amateur.

Let employees or associates contribute to a blog, and you’re ensuring that your organizational voice will be diverse and dynamic. Of course, you need to be prepared for backlash should someone post something controversial. That is, in effect, the “cost of doing business” in the blogosphere.

Such was the case when a Google employee shared some critique of the new Michael Moore film “Sicko“; this San Francisco Chronicle article sums it up nicely.

In Google’s case, Lauren Turner, an account planner for Google, wrote on Google’s health care advertising blog that “Sicko,” a newly released expose of the health care industry, was one-sided and said that it failed to show the health system’s positive contributions such as attention to patient care and philanthropy.

Backlash has been fervent, and Google has bent over backwards to repent–saying the post represented that employee’s opinion exclusively, and did not speak for the company itself. The backpeddling is perhaps pardonable, but Google could show a bit of backbone. Expression, not apology, is blog lifeblood. Of course, there’s no room for the profane, pornographic, or prejudicial, but let’s not let mob mentality squelch topical conversation.

It would be nice to live in a world where people respected individual opinion without incriminating an entire corporation, but that’s not the case. All the more reason for companies to keep a weather eye on their blog content. If your company has a wide-open blogging policy, then be ready to ride it out. If you need a little more command of message and control of content, develop a guiding statement of purpose, and then set up an editorial system that quickly reviews and approves posts.

The days of a blog on every organizational website are fast approaching. The time to start thinking about focus, tone, and approach is now.

Over the past few months, I’ve offered up tons of info nuggets and assessments on new media’s evolution and impact on marketing, communication, and society….

But this weekend (while searching YouTube for Lloyd Dobbler’s, a.k.a. John Cusack’s, “future plans” monologue from Cameron Crowe’s much-loved 1989 film, Say Anything), I stumbled upon something that really brought all of those referenced metrics, articles, and white papers to life—16-year-old aspiring musician Eric Striffler’s MySpace band profile, featuring the song “She Wrote About Me in Her Blog.”

Lyric highlights include:

She wrote about me in her blog,

and I read it,

and thought to myself she goes deeper than anticipated… 

She came online,
and I lost track of time,
we talked into the morning,
and not once did it get boring… 

Now we’re both out in the open,
we can’t hide behind the keyboards anymore…

The song tells the tale of how a someone used a blog to create specific content to reach a desired target audience in order to start a conversation and ultimately build a relationship.

I can’t imagine better evidence to prove the relevancy and impact of blogging than a song based on blog interaction. For the younger set (tomorrow’s older set, FYI) blogging is more than mainstream.

Then check out this snarky diagram by famed designer Paula Scher. It breaks down the all-too-typical flow of blog comments and content.

It’s a great depiction of how any idea can get turned inside out, and how the presentation of any perspective is sure to invite its counter-punching counterpoints.

(Props to Ze Frank for pointing this out.)