AllBusiness.com - The Conferences Blog

Bartering Can Help You Save Cash

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 09:35:00 GMT

Cash flow is never more critical than in your first year of business. One way to control your cash outlay is to barter instead of paying cash for something you need. My consulting group swapped marketing strategy services for a website with a web design firm. Barter is as old as the hills. Before money was invented, everything was simply traded. A whole industry of barter companies has emerged in recent years. Search for "barter services" on Google and you'll get over 6 million results. The web ...

Setting Goals and Measuring Success

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 05:17:53 GMT

The metrics presentation is given by Sally Falkow & Mary Hodder Everyone thinks they should have a blog now because they're afraid they're missing the boat. What's important, though, is to first look inside your company to determine whether you should blog at all. Primary question is whether the company is ready to be open and authentic with customers. After that, the question is, what does the company want to accomplish? It's not simply about joining the conversation. If you don't know where ...

Why Microsoft is Betting Big on Bloggers and RSS

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 10:52:45 GMT

The opening for day two of the Blog Business Summit is the keynote from Microsoft on IE, RSS and Windows Vista (nee Longhorn). Last night Scoble and Hachamovitch said they were going to be tweaking the original presentation a little given what they'd seen and heard today. My presumption is that this means they're going to take the crowd through what RSS is, why a business should care about it, and how and why Microsoft has decided to devote a good deal of resources to the technology. The primary ...

Buzz Marketing: Using Blogs, Forums, Conversations and Community to Build Brands and Traffic

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 04:22:42 GMT

David Wharton, head of online marketing for Nintendo America. Their ambition is to help explain products that might not be intuitive to the user immediately. To help promote the game Animal Crossing, they created a closed environment of game players called the Pioneers Program, and gave the Pioneers the game and the tools to write about their experiences. Following this closed release, Nintendo gave the press access to the journals and allowed the press to write about the experiences of users.

Blogs That Sell: Creating Content That Drives Conversion

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 03:10:39 GMT

The cetnral issue addressed in this session is creating blogs that sell. It's given by Buzz Bruggeman (from ActiveWords (which is a favorite of our own Slacker Manager)) and DL Byron (of Clip-n-Seal fame). Buzz Bruggeman opens the first afternoon session promising to dispense with all the technical talk that characterized the morning sessions. Buzz believes that just as markets are conversations (referencing the Cluetrain again), he believes that products themeselves are conversations. In ...

Movable Type 3.2

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 01:56:25 GMT

It was just announced here that Six Apart is going to be demoing Movable Type 3.2 here as part of its official release tomorrow. Should be very interesting to see what they've been working on. tags: blogbusinesssummit, movabletype ...

Building traffic: Posting Isn´t Enough

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 12:28:29 GMT

One of the biggest challenges any site faces is how best to build traffic. Blogs are often touted as a great way to do this and have built a bit of a reputation as an instant traffic-building product. This is, of course, not true. And so the question is, how does my blog actually build traffic? As the session title announces, posting isn't enough. This session is a presentaion on those issues from Robert Schoble and Dave Taylor. Scoble opens with a preview of a link analysis site which appears ...

Blog Business Summit: Staying on Top of the Buzz

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 10:16:08 GMT

All companies need to stay on top of what's being said about them and their products. Even if you're not blogging, you need to monitor and respond to what's happening on the Web. First presentation is from Evelyn Rodriguez whose central focus is on why a company should be listening to the conversation. (Slides of her presentation are here in .pdf form.) Recent experiences of Dell and Kryptonite show the importance of listenting to what customers are saying about your company and its products.

Blog Business Summit - San Francisco

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 05:37:47 GMT

The second Blog Business Summit is coming to San Francisco on Thursday and Friday of this week and AllBusiness has to cover it live. The first such summit was earlier this year and was held in Seattle. That gathering proved such a success that the organizers decided to follow it up with a summer session. The roster of sessions and presenters is impressive and boasts a who's who of business blogging. It should be great to see what they all have to say. I'm particularly excited to hear how Scoble ...