Cymfony's Influence 2.0

Legal info for Bloggers

It's amazingly easy to start blogging.  Even those without a lifetime of geek credentials can be posting to a new weblog in a matter of minutes with Manila, RadioUserland, LiveJournal, Blogger, TypePad, MSN Spaces, and on and on.  It's often even free.  And you can blog in many languages, including Arabic and Farsi and Chinese, with multiple character formats.  Publication and syndication have never been easier.

What's much harder is knowing what the rules are.  Fortunately, a few good souls out there have done some work to give you a starting point on the law as it relates to blogging.  For one, the EFF has developed a web site, with a number of FAQs, devoted to this purpose.  EFF's staff is chock full of some of the most cutting-edge lawyers in this space, so their guidance is ordinarily sound.  Along with the usual caveats, EFF notes of its guide: "The goal here is to give you a basic roadmap to the legal issues you may confront as a blogger, to let you know you have rights, and to encourage you to blog freely with the knowledge that your legitimate speech is protected."  A great place to look for more detail on an ongoing basis within the EFF world is Wendy Seltzer's blog.

Another great place to go in looking for legal information about blogging is The Committee to Protect Blogging's site, which aggregates resources from elsewhere.  Most of what I found there, including a link to a page at the Berkman Center's site (where I work!), looked pretty trustworthy as well.  It points, for instance, to a wiki set up by the truly amazing Nart Villeneuve at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which demonstrates their excellent judgment in terms of sources.

Of course, these sites by necessity are just starting points; good legal advice, unfortunately, must be fact-specific and requires good in-person legal help.  But these sites might help you stay out of trouble as you start blogging.

Finding Blogs that Count

The WSJ had an interesting article on May 26 where the author, Carl Bialik, 'The Numbers Guy', explored several techniques for counting the number of blogs worldwide. He consulted numerous blog search companies such as Technorati as well as popular blog sites including The Truth Laid Bear to hear different perspectives on blog counting, ranking and popularity. Depending on the counting approach involved, there could be anywhere from 30 to 100 million blogs already created. There is no perfect method to determine the real number.

The most important point is that the actual number of blogs isn't all that meaningful, but finding blogs that count is very important.

A quality control manager may only need to find a relatively small sample set of product owners discussing issues in order to determine if there are new problems with a particular product that haven't bubbled up through a company's CRM system or channel partners yet.

If a marketer is more interesting in emerging trends they may need to look at a larger sample set over a longer period of time to understand shifting sentiment or variances in discussion on a particular topic. But even in the case of trend analysis, the number of blogs that are meaningful to assess could be counted in the hundreds rather than in the millions.

It's important to focus on a representative set of blogs that reflect the audience that you are trying to communicate to or gain knowledge from. Rather than worrying about how many millions of blogs there might be, it's important to identify a large enough sample set across the many millions of blogs to find the hundreds of blogs every day that are discussing the companies, products, people and issues in your space.

How Many Blogs Should You Read Every Day?

For marketers with little time on their hands, there is a tendency to focus on either a small set of blogs to read every day or to rely on RSS aggregators or blog search engines to find important new stories. Each strategy has its attractions and its problems.

Most people can easily find a dozen or so blogs that focus on most of the topics of interest to their industry or customers. If they only review this small set of sites every day, they could limit their research time to several hours of reviewing posts and following links to other interesting sites. But this strategy is only successful if those sites focus on all of the topics, products and people related to your business, which is unrealistic. The downside is that you may miss some important discussions that were not picked up on these selected sites.

Another strategy is to use blog search engines and RSS aggregators daily to collect new posts. These services do some heavy lifting for you in terms of organizing posts so that you can quickly scan titles and abstracts. Search strings can be set up so that you can look for key terms across a broader array of blogs. The problem of course is that you end up scanning many more sites that contain posts with no relevance to your business. You also have to set up a long list of keyword searches to try to find stories about specific issues. Again, this strategy can work but it takes a lot of time and effort every day to peruse the many relevant posts and sift through those that aren’t meaningful. The upside of this approach is that it is currently free to get started with many of the good blog search and RSS Aggregator services available such as Technorati.

Business Week wrote about many different tools in their cover story on blogging this week. The authors, Stephen Baker and Heather Green, did a great job summarizing the rapid growth of the blogosphere and the tools used to build and search blog sites, but what they failed to mention were the new solutions like Cymfony’s Digital Consumer Insight (DCI), that use a very different approach to monitor and analyze millions of blogs, message boards and user groups every day. They had an awful lot of ground to cover so I hope this is an area that they can get to soon. One of their readers, Nombert DePlume already made that request in a comment on their new blog site Blogspotting.

So for his benefit and many others who have recently come to know Cymfony, let me describe our solution briefly. Cymfony's approach to reduce the review time for executives down to minutes is to look for new posts across a wide array of online content that are directly related to their company, brands or industry. The posts are automatically analyzed for contextual information that would provide clues to valid mentions of the company or brands. But DCI goes even further. It also identifies posts on sites that you probably wouldn’t have found using the first two strategies. With an automated analysis approach, you do not have to limit your scope to tens or even hundreds of sites. The software does the work to identify what’s important to focus on. It also finds stories that you weren’t looking for in sites that you never thought to look at.

As an example, we have a demo site focused on the technology industry. We often find posts about people’s favorite new laptops, operating systems and consumer electronics. People regularly express what they love, hate and desire. It makes sense that we find many comments on product review sites, usenet sites and technology oriented blogs. But we also find important comments on many other types of consumer sites such as automotive forums and blogs. A hot discussion on one BMW site is compatibility issues of Bluetooth enabled devices with the new BMW models. In a thread on www.bimmerfest.com a contributor shared a letter he received from BMW North America explaining that "Your Palm Treo 650 will probably not ever be able to pair with the Bluetooth system in your bmw ." Other people responded with similar integration troubles but they also described work-arounds.

If you were the brand or PR manager for either the Palm Treo 650 or the BMW X5, you would definitely want to know about both the problem and the solutions so you could share helpful information quickly to consumers, partners and your colleagues.

By looking outside of a narrowly defined sphere of 'top' blogs, you can discover great nuggets of information by people who are excited about new features and even marketing promotions. This insight provides you with an opportunity to get more compelling messages out to new audiences by co-marketing with other industry leaders. It also provides a new dimension to measure the effectiveness of your communications strategies.