BlogHer and the culture of generosity

By Charlene Li

I'm heading to the BlogHer '06 conference today, being held in San Jose (disclosure: I'm on the advisory board for BlogHer). I'll be hanging out with hundreds of other women bloggers, learning how to "primp my blog" (look for some changes soon here!) and leading a session on tagging.

As an analyst, I attend tons of conferences every year and this is the only one that I really, really look forward to (OK, I admit that the geek side of me also enjoys CES). In fact, I enjoy it so much that I give up a sacred weekend day with my family to hang out with like-minded women.

I love BlogHer because I learn and grow so much personally -- as a blogger, a woman, mother, wife, person. That's because the level of engagement is so high -- the attendees are here not because their company sent them but because they want to share their passion for blogging.

This passion comes from what I call a "culture of generosity". As I wrote earlier about generosity, bloggers tend to be very giving by nature. So if you put a whole conference together of them -- and galvanize them with the common goal of supporting each other -- you get a powerful, moving experience with heated discussions, moving moments, and loads of laughter.

But why even have a conference focused on women bloggers? The idea of a conference first surfaced in March 2005, just a short 18 months ago. The theme of the first conference last year was "Where the women bloggers" and one of the goals was to highlight and support women bloggers. The goal: to dispel the myth that the blogosphere was heavily male (and white).

And here's some data that we have to further dispel that myth -- this comes from an online survey we did in Q1 2006 of US online consumers.

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	Writes a blog at   least weekly	Writes a blog ever	Reads a blog at   least weekly	Reads a blog ever
Women	4%	11%	11%	33%
Men	6%	20%	13%	46%

Base: US online consumers
Source: Forrester’s NACTAS Q1 2006 Devices & Access Online Survey

While women still aren’t writing and reading blogs as often as men, we’re catching up, especially when it comes to reading blogs at least weekly. But there’s still a lot of work to do – and I’ll be doing my part to support women bloggers this weekend.

Ladies, we’ve come a long way and I’m looking forward to the journey ahead.

Update: I just ran into Caterina Fake and had a quick discussion with her about the "culture of generosity" which she wrote about last fall on her blog. Kami Huyse's also has a nice post on "The Culture Of Generosity In Social Media". I wanted to not only give credit where it's due but also hopefuly further the dialog around this idea.

Update: And here's a post about footwear that you'll probably never see at any other technology conference!

How to get a briefing at Forrester (specifically, with me)

I was at the AlwaysOn conference today and had a chance to meet with several old acquaintances, sit on a panel, record a few podcasts, and especially fun, hear about some new start-ups. Something I get asked quite frequently is how a company goes about getting a briefing with Forrester and I promised I'd put up a post on how to do this.

So at the risk of opening up the briefing request floodgates, here are a few details.

Requesting a briefing
By far the best way to request a briefing is to fill out the request form at www.forrester.com/briefings. The more specifics you can provide, the better -- this way, our Briefing Central team can figure out who the best analysts are for you to brief.

Some of you may think, hey, I'll just email the analyst directly. There are a couple of reasons why this isn't always a good idea. First, you're relying on the analyst to have their act together and be able to respond to your request. On average, I get between 20-30 requests a week for briefings and if they don't come from our Briefing Central team, a few are bound to slip between the inbox cracks. Second, you run the risk that you're not briefing the right analysts. For example, my colleague Brian Haven covers online video so he'll want to hear about developments in that space.

Actually getting a briefing
Now, just because you request a briefing doesn't mean you get one! And please note, you don't have to be a Forrester client to get a briefing - I accept briefings based on the merits of the request. The best way to get a briefing is be right square in the middle of an analyst's current research stream. In general, I won't take a briefing unless I plan to use the information within the next three months. And there are times when I would like to get a briefing, but my calendar is full (in which case, I usually ask for information via email). So look at my current research at Forrester, read this blog (which you're already doing), and do a search for topics I've commented on.

How to have a good briefing
One suggestion on making the most of a briefing -- I have little time and little patience for what I call "background". You can assume that I'm pretty up to speed on the space! To this end, I tend to schedule 30 minute briefings and it's worked well. It forces the company to cut to the chase and give me the most important things that I want to know, which boil down to:

- What problem are you solving?
- How do you create value for the user?
- How do you make money?
- How do you differentiate yourself from the competition?
- How will you market your product/service?
- What is your vision of how the market will develop, and how will you fit into it?

And my pet peeve: companies that show up at briefings and start by saying, "So, what do you want to know?" My hope is that with the short list of questions above, you'll be well prepared to make the best use of your 30 minutes!

Disclaimer: these are thoughts are my own and other Forrester analysts will and do handle briefings in completely different ways.

Update: My friend, former Gartner analyst, and now CEO of EZBoard Rob Labatt suggested a very worthwhile addition to my list of what makes a successful briefing: "Make the analyst smarter". One commonality to what I consider great briefings is that I come out of them thinking differently. So share your vision of how the world is changing and how your company is going to make a difference.

Generosity and Dell's new blog

Steve Rubel wrote an interesting post a few weeks ago about a conversation he had with Keith Ferrazzi:

“…to build a network you must be generous. This got me thinking. How generous are individual and corporate bloggers? The answer is some are very generous, others completely aren't. And those who are generous are by far more successful and influential than the rest of the pack.”

This got me to thinking about companies how should be approaching their blogging efforts. One of the things companies struggle with in launching their blogs is what the “voice” of the blog should be. This is understandable, especially since many companies have only spoken to their customers through traditional, blast mediums like TV, print, and email.

So let’s take the idea of how a company could be “generous”. Steve points out it includes things like "links, advice, news, ideas, commentary, freebies, you name it.” Now that seems fairly obvious, but it’s still so hard for many companies to do this because they don’t have a culture of generosity already. So they’ve got to learn, often “on the blog” (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun) and in public.

Case in point: Dell’s new blog, one2one. When it launched, it consisted mostly of videos a la Channel 9 where engineers and product managers talked about their products. Initial reviews from the blogosphere was varied (negative ones and positive ones), but the Dell blog has really grown to provide a fascinating look into not only Dell but also the numbers behind a new blogging operation, such as comment moderation (80% get posted, 18% get redirected to customer service, and only 2% are deleted because they were “off topic”). And most importantly, they are directly addressing areas of key concern like customer service problems, bloatware, and yes, even the famous “flaming notebook”.

In a just a few short weeks, Dell has moved from being a gawky newbie in the blogosphere to truly engaging with its customers. And it’s doing this by generously providing lots of information, putting itself on the line, and in general, being very forthcoming about when things work and things don’t. That generosity takes time to develop and kudos to them for doing it so quickly and to some extent, painfully, in public.

So as companies ponder venturing into the blogosphere, they should prepare themselves for an initial rough patch as they learn their way around. One of the best things they can do is to prepare for the ineivite missteps And we watchers of corporate blogging efforts should cut them some slack when they launch. It’s like watching kids grow up – as the parent of two young school kids, I am continually giving them feedback on how to behave and yes, how to share and be generous. The important thing is that they learn, improve, and serve their customers in the long term, not how well they do out of the gate. So let’s also be generous ourselves in how we evaluate these corporate blogging efforts.