Before blogging became a big business, Stern created a tech blog called Center Networks, which became a go-to destination for many in the early Web 2.0 movement. Later, he sold that business and shifted focus to a new startup called CloudContacts — and more recently, he moved from his home town of New York to Austin, Texas to start a company called Let’s Talk Fitness.

My good friend @allenstern has passed. Founder of @centernetworks back in the day. The original blogger king, and a heart of gold. :(

—
Louis Gray (@louisgray) April 07, 2013

Having struggled with his weight for much of his life, Stern poured his energy into becoming more healthy, and had lost more than 125 pounds in the past year or so, according to his friend Louis Gray. His most recent business was aimed at helping others achieve similar results with the use of fruit and vegetable smoothies and other products, and he had built a large following for his newsletter.

Here’s what Om had to say about Allen:

“He was a stand-up guy and always spoke his mind. He never took to fools and as a result always found himself defending those who couldn’t defend themselves. I met him once, briefly at a Techcrunch 50 event, but we were internet friends and often exchanged Facebook and Twitter messages. He was always in good cheer, ready to share a moment of sadness and spread the happiness. As a fellow Yankees fan, he and I would often talk baseball during our exchanges.”

Tech and health blogging innovator Allen Stern has died. He was a kind man with a lot of integrity & hustle. facebook.com/allenstern/pos…

—
Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) April 07, 2013

Louis Gray, a startup advisor who now works at Google and wrote a remembrance of his friend on his blog, had this to say:

“I’ll miss Allen. I missed it when he stopped posting as regularly to CenterNetworks as he once did. But more, I’ll miss the fun email threads and fun phone cals that always left me laughing and feeling better. Death sucks and tonight, I’m sad. Bye, Allen.”

So terrible to hear that @AllenStern, a longtime NY tech fixture, passed away this week: bit.ly/14NHAq9 (via @DanDotLewis)

—
Caroline McCarthy (@caro) April 07, 2013

Others have also posted their memories of Stern, including Dan Lewis — who founded the site ArmchairGM and is now the director of new media for Sesame Workshop — and another early blogger named Duncan Riley, who said Allen would be sorely missed by friends who “came to appreciate a big guy with a huge heart who spoke as we all should: honestly and from the heart.” Author and entrepreneur Jesse Stay posted on his Google+ page:

“This is devastating news – even though we never met in person (but I sincerely hoped to, and have had numerous remote video conversations with him), I considered Allen Stern a dear friend of mine. He always knew how to lift people up and make them laugh. I sincerely enjoyed his health posts as of recent, and am very sad to hear of his death. This was way too soon, and many, I’m sure are mourning with me.”

Oh my. My friend @allenstern has passed. A big loss to our community. Very sad.

—
Micah Baldwin (@micah) April 07, 2013

As tech blogging became more and more of a cut-throat business, Allen remained a personal friend to most, and was always sincere in his openness to others. As Om put it: “The world just got a lot less nicer because of this one subtraction. Give heaven a taste of your heaven, Allen — you will be missed by me and thousands of others whose lives you touched.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Chris Tingom

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Every so often, a storm erupts in the blogosphere over comments, and whether they are worth having or not. The latest entrant in this ongoing debate is TechCrunch writer-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler, who doesn’t have comments on his blog and has written several posts defending his decision, saying they are 99-percent bile and a waste of his time. On the other side of the debate is fellow VC Fred Wilson, who says Siegler is missing a lot by not allowing comments. I think Wilson is right — while comments can be a royal pain at times, they are a crucial part of what makes a blog more than just a bully pulpit.

Siegler’s blog posts were triggered by another blogger’s decision to turn off comments: developer and user-interface designer Matt Gemmell made the move a month ago, and recently posted an update about his decision, in which he recommended that all bloggers take the same step (Siegler hasn’t allowed comments for some time). Gemmell reiterated some of the arguments made against comments, including: They are only used by a tiny minority, they allow anonymity — which he said “encourages unhealthy behavior” — they don’t contribute much and they place a burden on the blogger.

Comments get in the way and are mostly noise

In his follow-up post, Gemmell says that since he dropped comments, he has gotten more considered responses to his posts (via e-mail mostly), has seen no reduction in traffic, his website loads faster and he doesn’t have to spend any time moderating. “If you have a blog, I’d advise you to consider switching off comments too,” he concludes. Siegler, meanwhile, says that he realizes many people like the ability to comment, but he has no intention of allowing comments because they are a waste of time:

Here’s the thing: while some try to paint comments as a form of democracy, that’s bullshit. 99.9% of comments are bile. I’ve heard the counter arguments about how you need to curate and manage your comments — okay, I’m doing that by not allowing any.

Obviously, Siegler (whom I consider a friend) is entitled to his opinion about whether comments are worthwhile or not, just as Gemmell is. And they have plenty of illustrious company when it comes to refusing comments: one of the most popular examples is John Gruber, author of the blog Daring Fireball, who has turned his one-man Apple commentary into a thriving business. Other notables include Instapaper creator Marco Arment and marketing guru Seth Godin — who wrote a post five years ago saying he found them distracting and was afraid they would change the way he writes.

Let’s be honest — there’s no shortage of reasons not to allow comments. They are annoying and distracting, they are often filled with sound and fury but signify little (in part because of anonymity or pseudonymity, many critics argue), they take a lot of time and energy to moderate, and there are flaws in almost all the major commenting systems — including third-party solutions like Disqus and external providers like Facebook, which is a special kind of Faustian bargain unto itself. All that said, however, I still agree with Fred Wilson that blogs — and bloggers — are better off having them.

A blog without comments is simply a soap-box

The most compelling reason to have comments is that you actually care what other people think. It’s true, as Siegler and others argue, that readers can find other ways to comment: they can post a remark on Twitter with a link, they can do the same on Facebook or Google+, they can send an e-mail, or they can write a response on their own blog. But doesn’t that make it even harder for a blogger to find and respond to all of the thoughtful comments, since they will have to check all of those other sources? I think in most cases, bloggers who shut down comments don’t do this — they simply don’t respond.

@parislemon you are missing out on a rich experience by dissing comments, commenters, and the dialog that results. parislemon.com/post/152882106…—
Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) January 04, 2012

Is there another way? There is, and Fred Wilson’s blog is as good an example of it as anyone, as even MG admits. The Union Square Ventures co-founder has one of the highest signal-to-noise ratios in the tech blogosphere, and one of the main reasons for that is he makes a point of reading and responding to the comments he gets — and not just now and then, but regularly, and at length. As Anil Dash of Expert Labs (and formerly blog platform Moveable Type) noted in a post, the only one to blame for a blog whose comment section is a cesspool is the blogger whose name is on the top of the masthead.

I have my own history with comments, since a big part of my previous job as the social-media editor of a large daily newspaper was promoting comments, writing and enforcing a comment policy and dealing with moderation wars. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had about how useless comments are, how we shouldn’t bother, how most commenters are morons, etc. But I still defend comments as a crucial element of what blogging is, and more than that I defend anonymity as well.

A blog without comments is a soap-box, plain and simple. Not having comments says you are only interested in passing on your wisdom, without testing it against any external source (at least not where others can watch you do so) or leaving open the opportunity to actually learn something from those who don’t have their own blogs, or aren’t on Twitter or Google+. That may make for a nicer experience for you the blogger, and it may make your blog load faster, but it is still a loss — for you, and for your readers.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Jeremy King and Nany Mata

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Is social media really the future of marketing? Join me as I talk about how the power of social media is grossly exaggerated. Social media is a powerful tool, but it is just one of many gears that you need to make up your marketing machine.

I agree with this statement, and it got me thinking about all the hype we’ve seen recently over social media. Where is this thing going?

History Repeats Itself

As happened in the early days of the Web in the mid-1990s, social media has its nay-sayers, doers, exaggerators and believers — that’s all par for the course in the cycle of a technology as it goes from introduction to mass adoption. If you started riding the social media wave early on, you have probably gone from curiosity to interest to avid enthusiasm to evangelizing. Then as the landscape began to change and others swooped into what felt like “your territory,” you may have experienced some irritation, nervousness, competitiveness, even fear. Then perhaps you regrouped and shifted your focus to carve out your space in an ever-increasingly crowded marketplace. Some of you may already be curious about something newer on the horizon, something shinier and more interesting than blogs, microblogs and social networks, like mobile and augmented reality.

No matter where you are in this cycle, one thing is clear: Social media is not just hype, in the same way that the Web was not just hype, or the Internet or the cell phone or the personal computer. HubSpot’s promotional email got it right that social media is a powerful tool (or perhaps more accurately, a “set of tools.”) But like any tool in your marketing, communications and customer relations toolkit, it is not the be-all and end-all.

The Masses Are Here

Two things happened to me in the last week that made me realize that this is the “big moment” for social media, right before the hype starts to die down, and we begin to take for granted that these tools exist because they will be assimilated into most people’s work and lives:

1. My dad told me he watched a segment on CNN about Facebook and social media for small businesses. My dad is a civil engineer and would admit to only being moderately active on the Internet. The fact that he took the time to watch the segment was significant. Social media, Facebook and Twitter are all becoming a recognized part of his world, although he still scratches his head about them. He’s “getting it” more, although he may still tell you he just doesn’t “get it.” Yet the information has reached him and has sunk in.
2. A friend asked if I knew how she could get a Facebook Page for her church’s youth group. She’s an accountant and other than having a personal Facebook profile is not a techie, unless you count financial and Quicken skills, of course. Her budget was about $200. And I knew she could get a suitable page for that amount of money because someone out there is proficient enough to build it for her for a few hours pay.

Basic Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts are fast becoming commoditized. The more challenging and critical aspects of using social media — the aspects that we need to pay attention to — are being strategic about how we enhance our social media properties; how to incorporate them into our processes, including our communications and marketing mix; and how to manage our social media properties and the people who connect with us through them.

Do you feel that social media is about to become something we take for granted, like the web?

image released into the public domain via Wikimedia Commons by GravisZro

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The solution? Develop a system around your blogging efforts. Here are the steps I took to create a system for producing and managing content for my own site.

About a month ago, I was approaching yet another week of blank canvases, so I set out to find a way to be more intentional and focused with my content. The first thing that came to mind was an editorial calendar. Big magazines and newspapers have used them since the dawn of the publishing industry, so I was fairly confident the solution would work for me, but I didn’t want to just throw together a calendar in spreadsheet form and think that all my problems would go away. I really wanted to approach this as a big magazine would, so I started by thinking in terms of a single magazine issue and how an editor might produce and manage its content.

Step 1: Choose a Theme

If you think about a single magazine issue, there’s generally a theme to it, a common thread that ties together the articles within it, so that was my first step — develop a theme. I decided to have “focus months” on my site to guide the content for a given month. This would help me accomplish a couple of things.  First, it would make my content more intentional. It would center my efforts around keywords and information that was relevant to my target audience. Second, it would help me better anticipate the content I was going to create, which would allow me to line up guest experts and interviews that were relevant to the content. I was immediately able to come up with themes for the next six months.

Step 2: Choose Your Sub-Topics

Once I had a theme in mind, I was able to think about sub-topics within that theme that would deepen my coverage of the content that month. At first, I just listed out the possibilities for sub-topics without thinking too much about them, and created a list of ten or twelve ideas. As I created the list, I noted possible guest experts who might provide greater insight into the sub-topics than I could provide on my own.

Step 3: Establish Your Schedule and Content Needs

With my topic and sub-topics ready, I had to decide on the frequency I would publish. I settled on publishing one content piece per day (could be an article, an audio piece, etc.). I decided to interview guest experts within the sub-topics and then spread out the content over the course of the month. My plan would be to line up and interview guests the month before I intended to publish the content. That way, I would avoid last-minute scrambling to produce content and could instead focus on quality well in advance of publishing. This would also help when I got sick or took time off, since I would already have content on tap for the given week or month and could simply schedule it to be published (or, even better, hire someone else to do it for me).

I decided that the number of weeks there were in a given month would be the number of guest experts I would line up for that month (five weeks, five guest experts). And to make things simple, each guest expert would produce one week’s worth of content (five content pieces per guest).

My site has a mix of articles and audio, so I decided to do one-hour interviews with each guest (and then each interview would be divided into four shorter content pieces) and then have each guest contribute one article in addition to their interview. That made it really easy on my guests, since they only had to show up for a one-hour interview and create one article. Plus, that little bit of effort on their part would equate to weekly promotion for their businesses, since I would be spreading their content out over the course of the month.

The great thing for me was, instead of having twenty to twenty-five separate content pieces to create on my own in a given month, I would simply do four to five interviews (depending on the number of weeks that month) and knock out four content pieces in one hour. Of course, that meant a lot more planning on the front end, but then the actual content creation part would become very easy.

Step 4: Produce the Content

So, I knew how many guest experts I would have (the same as the number of weeks that month), and I knew how many content pieces I needed from each of guest (always five), so that let me know how many titles I had to create for the month. Say, for instance, the month’s theme was “balance.” I knew I needed five content pieces, so I created five generic titles.

• Stress-Reduction Tips
• Personal Renewal
• Food and Mood
• Balancing Home and Work Life
• Disconnecting from Technology

Then I could create more interesting titles from the generic ones:

• 60-Second Stress-Busting Techniques
• The Importance of Personal Renewal
• Is Food Affecting Your Mood?
• Creative Ways to Balance Work and Home Life
• Cut the Cord: How to Disconnect from the World

This part was surprisingly simple. While I normally could sit and ponder blog post titles for what seemed like hours, I was immediately able to think of several ideas when thinking about picking the brains of experts on a given topic.

Step 5: Create an Editorial Calendar

I had my theme, my sub-topics, and even the specific post titles for the content I wanted to create. All that was left to do was actually create the content, edit it, and publish it. That meant that I actually had to conduct the interviews and then lay out exactly when I was going to edit and publish the audio and articles contributed by the guests.

Tom’s Planner is actually a great tool for organizing an editorial calendar (as mentioned by Simon just the other day, you have until SUnday to sign up if you’d like to get a free premium account for a year).

The first step was getting the content and editing it. Within Tom’s Planner (see image below), I created a place for each contributor and all of the content he or she would be creating. Next to each content piece, I put when we would be recording it and when I would be editing the content.

The second step was then organizing and publishing all the edited content, so at the very top of Tom’s Planner, I created an “ALL” group and listed out the types of content I had available for publishing and then evenly distributed it across the month (see image). I knew I would have one article per person, four audio pieces per person, plus a few other pieces of content. The thing I didn’t know, at least until everything was edited, was where I would use the content, so for instance, lesser quality audio pieces (say, if the sound wasn’t as good as with other pieces) might be used on the “Conversations” section of my site instead of within my premium audio program.

As I would edit and publish, I would be able to move content up from the individual contributor sections.

This has been a really great system so far. I have all of my audio content recorded for September, and with the exception of a few articles, I’m all set on content for the month. Now, all that’s left is editing and publishing, which makes my job a lot easier.

Why a System? Why Not Just Blog?

If you’re running a business blog, there’s generally an underlying purpose behind it. Maybe you want more clients or to create a fan base for an upcoming book. Whatever the case, there’s a reason that you blog, and the content you create should help you reach your end goal. By being more intentional and focused with your content, you’ll achieve greater success in a much shorter period of time and make sure that your content is, in fact, serving the audience it’s intended to serve.

My favorite things about having a system?

• Content has become so much easier to create
• My efforts are more focused and are helping me reach my goals
• I’m more intentional when it comes to guests, which means greater cross-promotion, back links, and visibility with new audiences.
• I’m no longer staring at a blank screen wondering what I’m going to write.

So, what’s your system? How are you staying on track and organized when it comes to your blogging efforts?

Photo by Flickr user Gustty, licensed under CC 2.0.

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As you are looking to fill in the blanks in your social media calendar? Here are some ideas you can use to develop the content for your blog posts, tweets and status updates.

Start with some “Marketing 101″ questions:

Next, you want to think in terms of “big picture,” longer-term items, then narrow your view to the more immediate and daily. Here are some questions you can answer to start filling in those blanks:

Annual, Quarterly and/or Seasonal

Start by thinking of “big picture” umbrella events and messaging:

• What events are taking place six months to a year out that inform your marketing efforts?
• What other marketing efforts do you have scheduled — or do you need to schedule — including press releases and social media releases?
• What are touchstone issues for your company that can inform messaging that expresses your company’s values?

Monthly

Concentrate on you want to achieve each month, including date-specific events that you can use to anchor your messages:

• What are you promoting?
• What actions do you want your audience to take (particularly ones that are measurable)?
• What’s happening with your company this month?
• What’s happening in your industry this month?
• What’s a hot, current or trending topic this month you can comment on?

Daily

Here are some ancillary ways to keep conversations moving and draw out the lurkers in your social networking communities:

• What are you reading?
• What are you thinking about?
• What are you doing?
• What do you want to know about your audience (i.e what questions you can ask them)?
• What’s happening with your company today?
• What’s happening in your industry today?
• What’s a hot, current or trending topic you can comment on?
• What are your friends, fans and followers saying that you can repeat?
• What are your friends, fans and followers doing that you can acknowledge publicly?
• What calls-to-action can you announce to attract attention and stimulate conversations and participation?

Also think of the types of conversation starters you can use to achieve particular goals while taking your community’s needs into consideration. Here are some ideas for posts, tweets and updates:

• Brand-related: Something about your company or brand to establish values, tone and “personality”
• Fun facts about your company or industry
• Press releases with specific company news announcements
• Coverage of real-world events
• Creation of online events
• Hybrid online/offline events
• Customer service oriented
• Crowdsource a FAQ for your company
• Ask for feedback
• Respond to feedback
• Ancillary but relevant or related topics
• Current news (relevant but not too controversial)
• Twitter trending topics
• Customer recognition (birthdays, accomplishments, etc.)
• Quizzes, polls and surveys
• Quotes (but make sure they are relevant and don’t overuse them)

An important thing to remember when you are filling in your social media calendar is to stay focused on useful messaging, but even more important is to be present and genuine. No amount of planning can ever take the place of those spontaneous moments in your social networks when you act or react in the moment and your friends, fans and followers respond in kind.

How are you planning for the content you produce and messaging you publish in your social media channels?

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stock xchng image by user tome123

In another groundbreaking move, The Guardian newspaper in Britain has launched a plugin for the popular blog-publishing tool WordPress (see disclosure below) that allows web sites to embed the full text of Guardian news stories and other content for free. The plugin comes with a catch though: Sites also have to embed the newspaper’s advertising. The new tool is part of an ambitious program of opening the paper up to the web — a move that got its start in May of this year when The Guardian launched its “open platform,” which allows developers to use the publisher’s open API to create apps and services that include the newspaper’s content.

Matt McAlister, lead developer at The Guardian and the architect of both the open platform project and the open API, says the rationale behind both the open platform and the WordPress plugin is the same: to allow other sites and services to make use of the newspaper’s content, and at the same time to enlist them as partners in monetizing that content by carrying advertising (The Guardian also has platform partners who share the revenue from their services with the newspaper). The paper has had thousands of developers sign up to implement the open API.

At a time when newspapers like The Times of London and the Sunday Times are implementing paywalls — both papers erected them yesterday — and other newspaper, such as the New York Times, are working on their own pay restrictions, The Guardian’s move toward creating an open platform is unusual. But despite the newspaper’s losses, Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger has said that an open strategy is the key to the newspaper’s future.

The big unanswered question is whether any web sites — or enough to make it worthwhile — will actually want to implement either The Guardian’s open API or the new WordPress plugin. Since the newspaper already provides an RSS feed of its full content, some sites may simply decide to use that instead of carrying the paper’s advertising. It’s also not clear whether embedding another publisher’s news stories is something that a lot of sites or publishers want to do: Silicon Alley Insider, run by former stock analyst Henry Blodget, has had an “embed this post” feature for some time, but such posts are rarely seen on other sites (Blodget said the feature gets “solid use” but didn’t provide any numbers).

So why not just use The Guardian’s full-text RSS feeds? McAlister said in an email that since the feeds are designed for personal use, the paper would handle sites republishing it the same way they do “scrapers” — that is, “request they use our API. Then chase them legally if we have no other choice.” The plugin makes it easier for sites to use Guardian content, he said, because it doesn’t require anyone to implement an API. And it allows the paper to develop a relationship with bloggers such as Tim Kevan, who blogs at BabyBarista.com. Kevan severed his relationship with The Times when it announced it was putting up a paywall, and will now publish at The Guardian and use the WordPress plugin to post it to his own blog simultaneously.

One could even see an open blog network evolving, in which bloggers publish through The Guardian as well as on their own blogs, and then both sides share revenue from the advertising sold around that content. Regardless of whether The Guardian’s platform and plugin turn out to be a runaway success or not, however, it is refreshing to see a newspaper opening up to the web rather than trying to shut it out. In the video embedded below, Chris Thorpe — then the Guardian’s developer advocate — talks about the open platform and the rationale behind it:

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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It was clearly a mistake on the bank’s part — one which highlights the prevailing subtle forms of homophobia and/or lack of understanding we see periodically from some big corporations. Someone there made a misguided decision in reviewing our content and the systems and policies of the bank allowed it to go through.

According to a statement released by Citibank, the institution conducts regular “due diligence” on its business accounts, and says it reserves the right to “decline or suspend an account if we find illegal or discriminatory content, or if the site involves gambling or pornography.” However, it adds that as a result of certain (unnamed) incidents, “we have made it clearer to our bankers what the due diligence process entails [and] beyond that specific due diligence…we do not monitor or evaluate our customers’ web content.”

As far as I’m concerned, the part of the Fabulis incident that makes Citibank look the worst isn’t the blocking or threatened termination of the startup’s account, although that is pretty bad — it’s the repeated attempts to sweep the issue under the carpet and/or change the bank’s story as it was happening. At first, the bank tried to pretend that the affair was simply a “misunderstanding,” and blamed it on some missing documentation. Only after Goldberg refused the initial apology and continued to blog and post to Twitter about it did the bank finally admit that it had made a mistake and apologize.

Here’s a quick tip, guys: When something like this breaks loose in the blogosphere or on Twitter, your best option is to get out in front of it, not to pretend it didn’t happen.

Post and thumnail photos courtesy of Flickr user autumn_bliss

Focusing only on traffic numbers, instead of the concentrating  on sharing content and building relationships will send you down the path to burnout. Here at WebWorkerDaily, we have multiple writers contributing  to help keep the content fresh. But for one-person blogs, blogging daily works for some and not for others.

If I had been blogging daily since the day I wrote my first blog entry back in 2000, I would have quit long ago. I know this because I’ve been burned out by blogging many times — and I’ve never blogged more than a few times a week.

It’s natural for bloggers to want many people to stop by, read and comment. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with pressuring yourself to churn out content daily like a machine for the sake of traffic when blogging is just one of many things you do. If you do that, you’ll sacrifice quality and your mental state.

So how do you decide how often to blog ? What’s the magic formula? There’s no definitive approach to figuring this out. Instead, take time to ponder these questions to help you find what will work for your blog.

• Review your business goals. Increasing blog readership is a worthy goal, but how does the blog support your business’ goals? If your web site itself is the income generator, then you’ll need frequent fresh content. If the blog is for promoting you as an expert in your field, which in turns supports your consulting business, then you probably don’t need to blog daily.
• Know your audience. What jobs do your readers have? How much of their time do they have for reading blogs? How active are they on blogs and social media? What industry do your readers come from? Are they reading during the workday or after hours?
• Identify your contributors. Is your publication a a one-person blog or a group blog? Group blogs cut the chances of burnout.
• Look at the length of your posts. Some people with large followings write 1,000+ word posts; these people tend to publish less often. Readers may better tolerate daily posts when they’re shorter: 200-400 words. Some bloggers mix it up with longer posts on a weekly basis, with shorter posts filling in the other days.
• Check web site stats. After adjusting your blogging frequency, check to see if the stats have changed. Remember that while a change could be associated just with the frequency or posting, it could also be because the content quality or level of blog promotion changed.

If social media teaches us one thing, it’s this: There are no rules. This doesn’t mean all those “golden rules” and “commandments” are off the mark; these give folks an idea of what works. But blogging endlessly blinded to your goals gets you nowhere. Stay on the path and steer clear of burnout by knowing your goals and audience.

What other factors help you decide how often to blog?

Photo by stock.xchng user Jorge Vicente.

Updated: Fabulis, a new venture-backed startup from Jason Goldberg — founder of socialmedian.com and Jobster — says that its bank account was recently blocked by Citibank, without any notice from the bank. According to a phone conversation with someone from the bank, the block occurred because of “objectionable content” on the startup’s blog. There were no details on what the content was, but could it have something to do with the fact that Fabulis is a social network and lifestyle service that is aimed at gay men? Goldberg describes it in a blog post (hat tip to TechCrunch for noticing this first, along with Feedjit CEO Mark Maunder):

In a bit of strange and disturbing news, fabulis discovered today that someone(s) at Citibank had decided arbitrarily to block fabulis’ bank account due to what was described to us on the phone as “objectionable content” on our blog. In fact, the account — it turns out — was blocked a few days ago without anyone letting us know about it by phone or email.

As Goldberg notes, there are at least two issues here, and possibly three: one is that Citibank appears to be blocking or putting a hold on bank accounts because of content on a company’s blog — and doing so apparently without providing any notice to the company itself. Since when do banks review the blogs of companies that have accounts with them, and determine whether to give them access to their funds based on what they find there? The other issue is that the bank appears to have done this solely because there was gay content on the Fabulis blog (which doesn’t seem to have anything else on it that might fit under the term “objectionable content”).

In a comment on a post at Hacker News, Goldberg says that he spent three hours on the phone trying to sort the issue out, and that while he doesn’t think Citibank is a homophobic institution, he does think that “some compliance officer is a moron who made a really stupid decision.” The Fabulis founder also points out in his blog post that Fabulis isn’t exactly some shady red-light web site, but a well-funded startup backed by the Washington Post, Mayfield Fund’s Allen Morgan and Burson-Marsteller’s Don Baer. Goldberg, who was a co-founder of Jobster, also started and ran socialmedian.com, which was sold to Xing in 2008. For more on Fabulis, check out the site’s Q&A with Goldberg here.

The Fabulis founder says that a Citibank employee promised to review the site today, and that “if we do not get a good response to this on Thursday we are moving our bank account to a bank that respects and appreciates our business.” Goldberg is right to be upset if Citibank has in fact blocked his company’s account because of some unspecified content on the Fabulis blog. Could it be some kind of “cataloguing error,” as Amazon explained when gay-themed books all of a sudden disappeared from its index last year?

Update:

In a new blog post, Goldberg says that he spoke with a Citibank employee about the issue, and was told that the bank had decided to terminate the startup’s account because the “content was not in compliance with Citibank’s standard policies.” The Fabulis founder says that the bank’s management promised to review the situation today, but added that “regardless of Citi’s response we have decided we’re taking our banking elsewhere.”

We’ve contacted Citibank and will let you know if and when we get a response.

Update 2:

A new update on the Fabulis blog says a Citibank representative has called and apologized. According to Goldberg, the bank spokesperson said that “all 3 of the citibank individuals who over the past 24 hours each individually claimed that fabulis’ account was to be terminated for compliance issues around the content of our site, were all wrong to have said what they said.”

Update 3:

Citibank emailed this statement:

Citibank sincerely apologizes to Mr. Goldberg for this misunderstanding. This situation had nothing to do with the content of his web site and any comments by our staff to the contrary were incorrect; we are reviewing what happened. This was a technical issue about missing documentation that is required for new business accounts. Once we resolved the situation, we unblocked the account immediately. Mr. Goldberg is a valued customer and we appreciate his business. Also, Citi is strongly committed to diversity, including support for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, and other organizations promoting diversity. In fact, this week Citi has announced the financing for the True Colors Residence, a housing facility for homeless GLBT youth in New York City.

Update 4:

Citibank may have thought that an apology would make its Fabulis problem go away, but they were mistaken. Jason Goldberg wrote a follow-up blog post called “Inside the Citi circus,” about how unsatisfactory Citibank’s apology was, and giving even more details about how various employees of the bank had referred to objectionable content on the site — at one point even suggesting that he actually come down to the branch to view the specific content — and how this clearly was not just some kind of “misunderstanding” over some missing documentation. In response, he got a further apology from the bank, which he also posted, saying it was much more sincere and that he had accepted it in good faith.

A couple of things seem fairly clear from this whole episode: 1) Citibank got a substantial amount of bad publicity, which it will probably get over, and 2) there are probably a lot of people at the bank who will wish that they had never heard of Jason Goldberg or his website before this week ends.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Bob.Fornal

In the study, bloggers cautioned PR professionals that traditional outreach methods would not be effective with them; they were adamant that a smart, well-researched approach would work best. The study goes on to say that “most bloggers tend to write about subjects they are passionate about. And most of the time, the product (blog) is wholly owned by them. Therefore, their blog and the subject matter are extremely personal endeavors.”

I haven’t seen a more recent study of a similar type to show what has changed, but as someone who engages both in blogger outreach with my company and blogging, I feel that the landscape has fundamentally shifted.

I’ve noticed a significant decrease, year over year, in how responsive bloggers are — or more accurately, are not — even to individualized, customized and thoughtful outreach. In 2007, response rates were between 20-25 percent positive (the percentage of bloggers who published information provided to them or responding to our outreach). Toward the end of 2009, I began to see a marked drop-off of in acknowledgments from bloggers, much less actual published responses to email outreach. In my company’s experience, we’ve found the response rate to decrease to less than 10 percent, even less than five percent in some cases. This poor response rate is even despite the fact that our relationships with individual bloggers have strengthened over the years.

The decrease in blogger outreach effectiveness can be attributed to a myriad of factors including

1. The recent FTC rulings on marketing firms and blogs
2. A glut of PR requests to bloggers, so most no longer get opened
3. The realization by many bloggers that they now hold an increasing degree of power and influence in terms of information distribution, so they are becoming more selective
4. The fact that many bloggers are still not businesspeople, and don’t even look to PR as a source of fodder for their blogs
5. A continued misunderstanding about blogging culture and what bloggers need or want by marketers
6. There’s a misconception that all bloggers want to be approached by PR reps or to receive press releases, so firms keep throwing stuff out there to see what sticks
7. The fact that not everyone who blogs is open to blogging about things other than their own lives or work, especially products they don’t actually use.

Putting On My Blogger Hat

As a professional blogger as well as a personal blogger, I find myself drowning in pitches from PR firms. On the personal side, I find that unless they use the correct email to pitch me and keep the pitches very short, to the point, and on target with my blog topics, I pretty much ignore the emails. I simply don’t have the bandwidth. Plus, my personal blogs aren’t really commercial endeavors.

On the professional side, I look for a prominent mention of the blog they’re pitching me for (such as WebWorkerDaily); exactly what they are pitching (a new application to help web workers do something better, for example); and how familiar they are with what I write. There is nothing more effective in pitches to me than one with a highly targeted phrase like “I noticed your blog post about RSS feeds last week and wanted to let you know about my client’s new app that would really benefit web workers by helping manage their feeds.” Bingo!

I can’t say that I read every email pitched to me — it is just not humanly possible. I can say that the PR people who politely but regularly nudge me several times to gauge my interest in their pitch have gotten a lot farther with me than the ones who threw a pitch at me like spaghetti to a wall. Kindness and consideration along with persistence wins the ink. Getting annoyed that I haven’t responded, or that I’ve had to switch a demo call at the last minute isn’t going to win any brownie points. We’re all just people trying to make a living, and we all have a life.

The other thing I find incredibly effective in terms of pitching me on behalf of a client is not only the thoughtfully targeted pitch but regular pitches that can provide me with ideas for new blog posts. I look forward to those emails and count the PR people who help to make my professional blogging life just a little bit easier as important contacts. That’s the power of relationships. You care, I care, we work together, everyone wins.

Alternative Ways of Engaging Bloggers

Because of the decrease in effectiveness of blogger outreach carried out in the manner of traditional media outreach, there needs to be alternative ways to engage bloggers to help produce valuable and educational content for our clients; build greater awareness of client brands; and have a measurable impact in the blogosphere. Some of these tactics include:

1. Blog panels. Select bloggers who are knowledgeable in a given area to provide guidance on a company or organization’s blog editorial calendar that can be syndicated on their own blogs in a coordinated fashion. This is a more credible and effective tactic when the participation is a voluntary and non-compensated position; however, there must be a mutual exchange of value and all value exchange must be disclosed.
2. Blogger pools. Select bloggers who can be guest authors of a company or organization’s blog by identifying a pool of qualified, expert and diverse bloggers who can contribute content – with or without compensation – for the exposure. Again, if compensation is involved, it must be disclosed.
3. Blog sponsorship. Identify key blogs and bloggers reaching the “right” audience and offering to pay them to sponsor content that meets particular guidelines. For the bloggers who are in the business of blogging, this can be a more attractive relationship, and both parties must make sure a paid sponsorship is properly and prominently labeled as such.

As the blogging landscape continues to change, it is important for us to engage bloggers in the conversations about best practices in blogger outreach and continue to build more meaningful relationships with bloggers similar to the way we’ve cultivated relationships with the media but realizing the differences. If I feel we have a strong base of blogger relationships in a given industry or area, I may recommend blogger outreach to a client in the future. However, building a targeted blogger list from scratch without relationships solidly in place is proving to be a less effective and more expensive endeavor than it was three years ago.

Do you engage in blogger outreach? Or are you a blogger being approached by marketing types? What are your thoughts on the topic of blogger outreach as an online marketing tactic?