The Challenge

Live! WordCamp Argentina 2007 – Part 3

Published by Esteban Glas on October 31st, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: Blogs, Business, Web 2.0

Lunch Break is over. My only concer so far is that this is running a Little late. The afternoon themes are more on my fields of expertise. This will all start with Analyitics & Metrics.

Juan Damia is the first speaker on the subject. Starting a little too simplistic from my point of view, but since this is a blogger conference more than an analytics summit I guess that is the right thing to do. ABC on how to tag pages. Mainly focused on how Google analytics is implemented. As a matter of fact, too focused on how to implement google analytics for my taste, but, once again, I guess that is right for most people who can’t afford to pay for a metrics vendor. The notable thing I didn’t know is that GA shows estimations much of the time and not really analyzed data. That explains quite a bit some of the odd behaviors I witnessed on the reports when I still cared for this blog’s traffic (too busy caring for other sites traffic, conversions, SEM, etc to obsess with my own blog’s analytics)

Aviansh gets mentioned, as well as his book.

Getting into “what can we learn from our users using analytics tools”

Micro$oft Gatineau will be launched soon, will use MSN or Live! Information to populate data into the tool to get demographic information (creepy!)

Juan Pablo Lantrevi is going to talk on long tail blogging. He starts asking the most obvious, yet less asked question, “why?” Why have a site, a blog, or whatever. Juan recommends reading the long Tail. Blogs can take advantage from the long tail.

There is a lot of competition on blogs with highly popular themes, yet there is less competition on the less popular but much more eclectic “long tale” themes. Aim to blog on those subjects no one else is talking about but people search nonetheless. “Long search query strings make good long tail”. He recommends using hittail.com. I need to look into that tool ASAP.

One can always re-optimize old content. Excellent talk by Juan Pablo.

Next: Corporate Blogging.

Sergio Hernandez moderates and makes an introduction.

Not too many companies blog. Brand blogs are not corporate blogs. Ad-blogs are not corporate blogs. Not all companies can take advantage of corporate blogs. Examples: those companies that have something to hide, those that have a conflictive relation with its customers (Note: maybe they can start fixing their relation by suing a blog?)

Marcelo Bertolami (Intel) introduces Core Life Blog. It is orientated towards lifestyle. After the success they launched Latin Insights @ Intel. This latest is tech-oriented.

Intel also held a blog contest. That yielded a 3x boost on visits for Intel pages in the region.

“Blogs can’t be thought as a traditional way of advertising”. Employees that blog for a company need to be committed. The “Social media coordinator” figure is gaining importance, helping to answer comments, and keeping the community committed.

“We believe in blogs” “We want to advertize on blogs” “Why not invest in them as if they were traditional media”.

Next speaker is Leo Piccioli Officenet’s General Manager. Officenet sales office products and they were bought by Staples.

His YouTube video talking on why work at officenet had 25.000 views, which boosted their decision to get 2.0ish… “If we’re so good, why not letting everyone know”.

They have developed a Wiki (400 pages) and a FAQ with over 10′000 questions about their products (online and RSS enabled).

Why they blog: Communicate & tell, listen and receive and transparency. “A blog is the place where lawyers are not in the workflow”: now that is a definition I love.

Critique against blogging:

• Waste of time, Leo says it is part of his job and makes it part of his job description.
• You are going to attract bad comments. He only deletes those that are “harmful”
• People will find out about our secrets. He couldn’t find any secrets that were at risk by blogging. One of the comments he received was “I hate not to understand why you publish negative reviews about your own company”. He does it to add value and weight to his posts and writing.

Next steps they will take: how to talk to those used to new technologies as well as with those from previous generations. They want to coordinate their activities. They don’t want to do advertising, they want to interact with the blogosphere on more interesting way.

Very interesting talk. Highlight #2 on the day.

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