Blogs: interesting stuff

Links to essays, blogs and a book about blogging

The Internet, mobile phones and blogging. How new media are transforming traditional journalism (PDF). Rena Kim Bivens, University of Glasgow, Glasgow media group. (Currently posted on Glasgow University Media Group’s homepage.)

Agenda of the Corporate Blog, by Todd Defren on PR Squared (Dec 10).

Also see Institute of Network Cultures.

Content strategist: definition

A List Apart has an interesting blog defining content professionals.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/contenttiousstrategy

Also see Skillset’s definitions of content professionals, starting with content strategist at http://www.skillset.org/interactive/careers/profiles/article_4746_1.asp.

Corporate blogging

Had to stop and think when I read the corpcomms magazine’s feature story about corporate blogging.

According to the article PR departments don’t get it:

“Blogs are supposed to be personal, opinionated, informal and discursive. The idea is to create a buzz, to start a debate and to stimulate interest. But a lot of buttoned-up, controlling PR departments just fail to understand this.”

What does the article’s author want: corporate courage? For the sake of what? A low-cost marketing tool?

Back from the brink of extinction: the content strategist

Why do organizational websites become unweildy beasts?

By ‘organization’ I mean both companies and non-commercial entities.

What do I mean by ‘unweildy beasts’?

Everything that makes Jakob Nielsen cry:

Common sense and usability rules

There are a lot of best practices when it comes to online content and usability. Some of them are best, and some of them are merely practices.

Three “practices” that have made it through to corporate marketing and web departments are: making users scroll is bad; opening links in a new window is good; lists (and secondary navigation) of more than 5-7 items are bad.

Traffic — the tools and the tasks

WebTrends, Google Analytics, HBX — which one’s best?

It’s always a pain for corpcomms web teams to decide which one to choose. Not least because whenever you read books about this stuff (or go to courses) they’re inevitably geared towards e-commerce sites.

Corpcomms webteams have to use their imaginations (not a bad thing) to figure out some way of taking action based on the information from metrics.

So what if there are a million visits to the site every year. So what if the bounce rate is high. So what if the unique visitor traffic is going up.

Airports are ace websites

See, the thing is, you go to a smallish airport – London City or Berlin Schoenefeld – and it all works so well. I don’t just mean as an air traveller: I mean as a pilot taking the plane from runway to gate; or a guy who drives a baggage cart or a petrol refill tanker (or the stairs-gangways for passengers to disembark), etc.

Corporate websites are windows into the bureaucracy

I’ve worked on more than one corporate website (not selling products online) with more than 1,000 pages. In fact, I’ve worked on a couple that have many thousands of pages (now, I’m not cheating: I’m not counting countrysites as one site: these are individual sites in a single domain).

And the pages I’m talking about are static, often with more than 250 words per. Don’t even try to figure out how many words are locked into these virtual corporate mazes.

Slander not libel on discussion forums

Defamation is slander not libel on discussion forums, Outlaw.com reports and Stuart G. Hall discusses.

What happened to the Bear Stearns website?

Out of curiosity I checked out Bear Stearns’ website to see what had happened to it after ‘merging’ with JP Morgan Chase.

As far as I can work out JP Morgan Chase has dumped most of Bear’s content (good move, no doubt) and shoved its website into the old Bear Stearns template.

Above: Bear Stearns today (http://www.bearstearns.com/)

Below: JP Morgan Chase today (http://www.jpmorgan.com/pages/jpmorgan):