It’s good to see the success of Kellogg’s new chat website to support their Drop a Jeans Size campaign. Drop a Jeans Size – a smart name for what was the Special K diet – advocates a simple two-week diet where two meals a day are replaced with a bowl of Special K (in any of its varieties). To support the campaign, the site uses online message boards and blogging Continue reading →

I hear a lot of talk about what – if anything – makes a good corporate blog. Not surprisingly, I’m a firm believer that a blog, if managed well, is a brilliant way for companies to talk to their customers. Many of us are passionate advocates of the companies we work for (and will happily bore our friends to prove it). What better way to tell people about the issues Continue reading →

We are working with a customer in the automotive sector looking at commentary in both message boards and blogs. It has brought out some interesting characteristics of web users. The volume of commentary in blogs is somewhat lower, and that in message boards somewhat higher than we had anticipated. I am not aware of any research which compares blog-writers with message board contributors. It seems to us that there are Continue reading →

Traffic has been slow here recently and there is a good reason for this. My wife Chloe and I had our first son, Dallas, on 13th December 2005. He is a sweet child, but has tended to take up many of those “blogging moments” (first thing in the morning and last thing at night). Sorry. Normal service will be gradually resumed.

An excellent article in Red Herring reporting on work by Umbria in Boulder, Colorado, draws attention to the increasing problems posed by spam blogs or splogs. Apparently spam bloggers have targeted 44 out of the top 100 brands. This problem has vastly increased in severity since September/October 2005 when the blog spammers seemed to change their game. It is worth pointing out here that blog spam differs from email spam. Continue reading →