The Corporate Blogging Book

Outtakes from the book: Q & A with GM's top blogger, Bob Lutz

I've got lots of cool ideas for how to use this blog as a "companion" to the book. Here's an obvious one... a series of outtakes, if you will, of stuff that didn't make it into the book. Below is an interesting Q & A that I did via email with GM's Bob Lutz in October 2005.

Q & A with Bob Lutz, GM vice chairman of global product development

Q. How do you find the time to blog?

A. I’ve never really found the time to blog, so to speak. For me blogging isn’t about sitting down on a regular basis and dreaming up something to say. It’s more about indignation, frustration, pride and beliefs. I always have my Blackberry with me. When I’m feeling inspired I jot something down. I’ve always been this way. My memos used to have a limited internal circulation, now they don’t.

Q. What personal reward do you get from blogging?

A. Sometimes it is incredibly difficult to get your story out there. The mainstream media has a tendency to engage in repeating conventional wisdom and tailoring their stories to what they think their readers already believe to be true. Blogging has given me the opportunity to question this conventional wisdom and to reveal facts that would otherwise never have been exposed to a mass audience. In addition, blogging has allowed me to connect directly with a large number of people.

Q. How has the blog impacted GM from a business perspective?

A. We still view the blog as a grassroots effort...

Plogging on Amazon... new for authors

I've got a "plog" on my Amazon home page. Do you? Frankly, this plog thing is a bit confusing. As Amazon puts it, every person's plog is different - hence the term "plog" and not "blog."

So... if you buy my book (I assume this works for pre-orders too, but don't know for sure) I can "plog" to you - with updates about the book or whatever - next time you log on to Amazon. (Or you can just read this blog!)

The plog I see when I login to my Amazon account is different. It's by an author whose book I've purchased (Marcus Buckingham's The One Thing You Need to Know). 

More on the new Google China Blog and what it means in relation to Google's cooperating with the Chinese government to censor search results

I'm quoted in today's San Jose Mercury News in an article about the new Google China blog: "Google launches China blog a day before China hearing." The reporter, Elise Ackerman, has just been assigned full-time to "Google" as a beat which she was really excited about. She phoned me late yesterday for an interview. Could hear her madly typing as we spoke, as she was on deadline. The story got a "weird edit" at the last minute, Elise said in an email this morning.

As in a, um, run-on sentence:

"Debbie Weil, author of the forthcoming "The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right,'' said the idea was sound, but did not bring up the questions Google faced about its dealings with China overshadowed what would otherwise be a chirpy corporate branding effort.

[Update: the run-on was fixed.]

The point of the article is the rather odd timing of the launch of Google's chirpy China blog one day before the contentious hearings in the House this week.

BTW, I agreed with Joe Nocera's provocative column in yesterday's New York Times about the hearing: Enough Shame to Go Around on China. His point:

Putting aside all the money to be made in China — which of course is their [Cisco, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google's] prime motive for being there — the companies make two fundamental arguments. First, they say, no matter how hard China tries to block information, it can't block everything; clever hackers will find ways around government filters and censors. Thus American technology, even with the restrictions, is helping make China a freer place.

I still say this is a between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place issue -- whether you look at it from a business perspective, or from a human rights & censorship perspective. If Google isn't in China at all, then Chinese Internet users can't use its search engine.

Note that Google is not offering Chinese Web users access to gmail or to blogger.com. And that search results which are filtered or censored are marked as such.

Does anyone know how to say "google it" in Chinese??

Technorati: google; China; google china blog; corporate blogging

More blogging to blooking deals

Entertaining update from David Kline on the latest publishing deals inked by blogger-authors. Two that caught my eye (David's comments in quotations):

- "Former Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox's first nonfiction book, on the next generation of political activists, again to Riverhead, reportedly for "mid-six-figures" (Washington Post)"

[Her "juicy" political novel Dog Days, just published, is reviewed here.]

- "Seth Godin's SMALL IS THE NEW BIG: And Other (Little) Ideas that Change Everything, a small collection of big articles - from blog posts, ebooks, and magazine articles, to Portfolio [note: this is my publisher], for an advance somewhere between $100,000-$250,000"

When I can turn entries from BlogWriteForCEOs into a 6-figure - plus deal then I'll know I've arrived. Don't hold your breath... But heck, who knows?!

Manuscript lost in the snow? Thankfully not...

Raced to the FedEx up the street on Saturday afternoon (Feb. 11, 2006) to make the 4 PM cut off. I had promised my ever patient editor, Adrienne Schultz, that I'd get the copyedited manuscript back to Penguin Portfolio's lower Manhattan office first thing Monday AM.

A few wet flakes were beginning to fall in Washington DC. And we got a nice dump of snow by Sunday morning. But it wasn't what I call a storm (the snow was wet and heavy; no winds; no thigh high drifts). Well, New York City's record snowfall (the biggest since recordkeeping began in 1869) was the REAL thing. And FedEx failed to deliver the manuscript Monday morning.

I was just a wee bit worried... there's, er, only one copy of the copyedited manuscript as far as I know. That is, the 250-plus pages covered with the copyeditor's red pencil marks and my corresponding pencil scratches and inserts.

But just checked through the FedEx tracking link and it was delivered at 9:30 this morning to Penguin's offices on Hudson Street. Phew...