48th and Broadway today

Attending the AMA’s “blog day” in NYC today. Toby Bloomberg led off with an anecdote about, as a little girl, going to a bakery with her grandmother. The ladies behind the counter always gave her a cookie, “forging a personal relationship that kept her grandmother coming back for more.” In the era of mass-markets and bigger is better economies of scale, business has lost the personal touch. Blogging can return humans to commerce, she said. Toby gets the Cluetrain — will be interesting to see whether the folks here — way down the corporate hierarchy with a focus on making their numbers — can escape their corporate boxes and think p2p and try to win on metrics that haven’t yet been invented.

Dozing on the plane coming here, I kept mumbling: lattices are stronger than ladders. Too many companies (certainly all publicly traded companies) believe in ladders, indeed were born and bred as ladders.

Ben McConnell offers an amazing graphic from the Harvard Business Review, correlating airline company profit and positive word-of-mouth over a three year period. He seems to have focused his business on promoting customer evangelism. Happy customers breed success and new ideas.

Steve Rubel gives a great and funny evangelical romp about blogs.

On course for a PhD but practicing in the trenches at a giant trucking company, Dana VanDen Heuvel has great graphic representations of blogging’s relationship to marketing and companies. (Talks about the role of sharing personal details even in corporate blogging — my view is that offering some personal flavor is essential both for the reader’s pleasure and your own — btw, I forgot to mention my wife dreamed earlier this week that she was playing chess with our dog Taco, who seems increasingly human to us. We keep expecting him to talk. Apparently, he’d made a nice move with one of his white paws. We chuckled all day long.)

Sitting on the day-wrapping panel, I was asked to name my favorite industry blog. I cheated and picked two: Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine for its pugnacity and perspicaciousness on topics that fascinate me, and Rick Bruner’s personal blog, because it’s unique weirdness has rekindled my affection for someone I knew well but briefly a dozen years ago on another continent. (Rick edited a newspaper called The Budapest Week when I got started as a journalist in Budapest.)

Sign up to attend the AMA Chicago blogs and advertising event on February 18, where I’ll lead the day-wrap panel. (Apparently ticket sales are on a record pace.)

And while you’ve got your credit card out, sign on for the May 17-18 Syndicate conference, where I’m chairing a day on marketing and leading a panel on “conversational marketing.”