Congratulations to the Shidler College of Business, part of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
The Shidler College was ranked 19th out of all AACSB-accredited programs in a recent survey of international business programs, based on responses from deans and faculty at AACSB-accredited programs.
As business blogging becomes a key success factor in some industries, business bloggers sometimes face pressure to produce excellent metrics right from the start. Their managers sometimes try shortcuts to success, only to find that the online community can see through these tricks.
SEO 2.0 has posted an excellent list of 10 things a business blog should not do. These include:
Number 1) Writing under an assumed name. I use an old email address (billso) for my domain name (billso.com). My real name is listed on my about page.
Number 9) Requiring employees to read, rank and promote the blog. I do not require my employees or students to comment or rank my blog articles. I do assign blog articles for my students to read with their assignments. My blog articles provide up-to-date examples that my course textbooks cannot provide.
Building reputation and authority
SEO is an acronym that means search engine optimization. There are thousands of blogs and online businesses that offer advice on getting more advertising revenue, more readers and a higher Google rank.
Many bloggers get caught up in revenue generation, as I mentioned in my billso.com article of 27 March 2008. It’s much more difficult to build a blog’s reputation and authority. These attributes can be measured by counting the number and kinds of inbound links to a blog, a blog’s search engine ranking, and quotes in the mainstream media.
For readers, reputation and authority are difficult concepts. It takes little effort to lose these attributes. SEO Chicks has some more good examples of what not to do with a business blog. It’s a bad idea to set up a flog, especially in the United Kingdom:
A ‘flog’ is a fake blog usually created by a PR or online marketing firm for the purpose of falsely representing themselves as a consumer, usually for the purposes of creating a buzz around a specific product or brand. Sometimes this is done as a brand or online reputation management activity.
There’s usually hell to pay when the mainstream media or the blogosphere discovers a flog or a fake.
AT&T has finally released the Apple iPhone to business and enterprise customers, according to TidBITs. Previously, US customers had to provide a Social Security Number to open an iPhone account. This rule made early adopters use their own credit to get an iPhone, although it didn’t stop sales to corporate and small business customers.
This new change should help AT&T unload its inventory of first-generation iPhones before a second-generation iPhone with 3G data services and stereo Bluetooth audio is announced in the next few months.
Software vendors like Salesforce.com needed this change to spur corporate adoption of iPhone CRM software, as I discussed on 30 October 2007. On 31 January 2008, I mentioned that iPhone applications are in the pipeline. I’d guess that availability may be tied to the second-generation iPhone release.
