Pinny Gniwisch, Founder/EVP Marketing, Ice.com and Anil Dash, VP, Moveable Type Professional Network, Six Apart, led a breakout session to a packed room on how to create/use blogs for WOM. Lots of interest in this topic.

Pinny started the session with a humorous look back at the Internet past, from the early adopters to boo.com to the rise of blogs. Pinny highlighted the November Forbes article - Attach of the Blogs. Immediately after that article he created a blog. Of course there is a blog overload, but if you post consistently and honestly you will build an audience.

Flog: Pinny provided a quick review of the fake Wal-Mart blog scandal. You need to be honest with your audience.

At Diamond.com they created a blog called Sparkle Like the Stars. The blog discusses what jewelry the stars are wearing and shows comparable products they offer. Traffic has been great, around 6-7K uniques per day. Another blog they've created is JustAskLeslie.com which answers questions about jewelry.

You need to keep your blog fresh, post at least three times per week. Many of our fans follow us via RSS. The blog has also generated a number of press.

Next up was Anil, he decided to skip the slides and just spoke from the podium. Anil did a brief overview of how SixApart used blogs to build their business. Anil started his blog back in 1999, and thought he was late to the game, but then these other 50 million people show up and you realize you're ahead of the curve.

Until a year ago they had never purchased an advertisement. They built business by using the tools they create. They experimented on a number of different things, and screwed up a lot.

The power of self-expression is a powerful thing. There is sense of empowerment with self-publishing tools.

Anybody that says bloggers are (insert adjective), i.e. evil, have no life, etc...don't know what they're talking about. There are so many people blogging that it's impossible to segment or classify them.

More and more people are creating public blogs and personal blogs. Ultimately it's just a tool. There are a number of business cases that blogs can apply to. There are people building journalistic blogs and of course you might want to reach out to them, but the majority of blogs are personal. How do you reach out to them?

Working with General Motors it was amazing to see how a big company could work so quickly. Yes they are a large company and they have lots of red tape, so if you think you have problems launching a blog, it's not that hard. If the US Government can do it, so can you.

All that content you send out via e-mail newsletters disappears....it's gone once it's sent. Why not take that same content and put in on a blog? You now have the opportunity to build relationships and commentary around that content.

Think about a blog as a content repository. Often you have people creating content in your office now, why not publish it via a blog.

There are so many times that Anil will be writing an e-mail or some other content and he'll think, "Why not publish this to the blog?"

In Boeing's case, why create a blog for a plane? There is nobody reading this blog that will ever buy this plane. But what they found was the content that normally would be buried in press kits was now available online. Aviation enthusiasts and travelers visited the blog and saw the new interior of the Boeing 787 - Dreamliner. Carriers actually saw demand from passengers who wanted to fly in the plane. Carriers began to increase orders.