We’ve seen a lot of well-intentioned but, shall we say, poorly executed blogs out there. Just because you and your organization decide to begin blogging doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it well. While there are general rules on what makes a good blog, here are a few tips from Blogging for Business on what NOT to do with your blog:

1) Don’t stay on topic!

2) Be insular.

3) Write like traditional writing, not speaking.

4) Don’t let us know who you are!

5) Lots of colors, dozens of fonts, flashing lights, autoplay audio.

They elaborate quite a bit on each point on their entertaining and educational post. Read the rest here.

The Wall Street Journal published an article a few days ago about the pros and cons of blogging for small businesses. The pluses can be counted in new clients, new business and an increased profile in one’s professional community. The downside is most definitely the time-consuming writing that regular blogging takes.

I’ve found that there are blogs out there by consultants and strategists who are paid to attend conferences, write books, and blog about a given topic day in and day out. It is what they do for a full time living, much like print journalists must write their stories or TV journalists must produce their reports. Their business is, in a lot of ways, their blog.

For those of us who have more of a business than a blog, blogging multiple times a day to keep up with the pros is an impossible goal. Focusing on a more realistic goal — one post a day — is a fair target for busy professionals engaged in client service and workload management. While visitors to your site want to see new, fresh content, they also don’t want to see meaningless posts. They want to see that you are proactive, knowledgeable, and able to help them face their challenges.

For political candidates, my advice would be the same. Your campaign blog is an important tool to communicate with your target audiences and should be updated accordingly with news, pictures and links pertaining to your candidacy. But it should not be the centerpiece of your communications strategy. Blogs (and associated tools such as podcasts, vidcasts and microblogs) are tools to be used as part of an overall outreach strategy and resources should be allocated to them as such.

Is blogging worth it? If you have something to contribute to the marketplace of ideas, then you have something to contribute to the blogosphere. It’s just a matter of taking the time to share your perspective with a world of potential clients.

Those of us in marketing communications hate to see a perfectly good organization hand over their website to IT. It’s clearly a recipie for disaster.

But, what if they hand it over to marketing? Who owns it - marketing proper or PR specifically? Should IT still have a voice in this conversation?

Fundamentally, as far as we’ve moved in terms of corporate branding online, we have not reconciled the fundamentally different disciplines which are needed to really make “new media” work. It takes marketing, PR, IT and others (not to mention buy-in from management) to collectively work together to really make a project successful. But we haven’t merged those people effectively. More on that soon…

A lot of these thoughts are the result of something said this weekend at BarCamp Nashville by Chris Houchens, who writes a blog called Shotgun Marketing. While talking about social media (Facebook, MySpace, etc etc) in the context of corporate marketing he said, “It’s about reaching the audience that has already identified itself as your audience; it’s not about sales.”

His premise raises a much deeper question than how corporations should approach corporate marketing. It’s often a given that internally, marketing should own managing the online experience. But is that so? If the online experience is not about sales, then fundamentally it’s not a marketing function. Marketing is all about sales! So social media seems to fit in a different category, such as PR. Or are we back to IT?

Should it be that way? Who owns online?

There’s a lot of energy here in the room as BarCamp Nashville gets under way at the Exit/In on Elliston Place. There are a lot of good, grassroots speakers lined up today. It’s not about large corporate sponsors, but several great Nashville new media companies have pitched in to make the event possible.

There’s a lot of interactive tools for the “un-conference” today, including Twitter and a chat room.

Kudos to Marcus and Dave for having the vision to bring BarCamp to Nashville! Look forward to posting more insights and feedback later.

The RNC is getting into the interactive game trend, which is really smart on their part. See how well you know the Democratic candidates!

http://www.gop.com/ShowOfHands

It appears that we, as web surfers, like content. That’s essentially what a new Neilsen/NetRatings study has to say:

Internet users spend nearly half their time online viewing news or entertainment content, surpassing activities such as sending e-mails, shopping or searching for information, according to a study released by the Online Publishers Association on Monday.

We’ve written on this before, and no matter who writes it (or produces it in the case of podcasts and video) it is most important that your website have content. This isn’t new information, and I’m proud of our clients who work hard to keep their content up-to-date. Kudos especially to Backbone America, What’s News Colorado and A Line of Sight who do a terrific job putting up new content several times a week, if not daily.

“Is there a doctor here?”

 It’s the first question we ask if we happen upon an ill person at a sporting event, restaurant, or otherwise. What if online networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn offered something similar? Is there an AJAX developer in my network of friends (or connections)? Is there an intellectual property attorney? There’s been much ado about social networks and Web 2.0, and for good reason. What if instead of just connecting with networks, we could leverage them? LinkedIn is moving in that direction, but not to the point where you could actually search skillsets.

It’s a feature they should offer though. It’s an opportunity to move Web 2.0 to the next level.

Over the weekend, we launched a new official website for Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma:

http://www.cole.house.gov/

The new website features advanced content management, a creative, user-friendly interface, and an expanded media section with RSS and video for Congressman Cole’s regular TV program “Cole on Congress.” Usability was a key factor in the redesign, and we have built audience-specific portals for major constituent groups in the Congressman’s district, so they can find tools and information quickly.

The features for the site were strongly influenced by the Congressional Management Foundation’s best practices guidelines, and we thank them for their advice and insights throughout this redesign project.

Of course, no web design is ever complete, so stay tuned for exciting new Web 2.0 features in the coming months, many of which will be used for the first time by an official Congressional website!

Oh-oh. This doesn’t bode well for traditional media…

A study finds that U.S. consumers are increasingly shifting their attention away from traditional, advertising-supported media in favor of entertainment such as the Internet, video games and cable TV, which consumers pay for.

As a result, the boom in online advertising is expected to continue, with all Internet advertising spending - including ads on Web sites of traditional media outlets - overtaking print newspaper advertising in 2010 as the largest advertising category, according to a report released Tuesday by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a media investment firm.

Time to take another look at the marketing mix?