I had the pleasure of presenting with Helen Love today at the Social Media Forum and encouraged people to Love The Orange. The orange in question is that one up there - you know, the RSS icon. The room was full of media folks from some big organisations like Vodafone, ING Direct, BAT, Kone and others. You can find out more from the Melcrum blog.

We were followed by the wonderful Debbie Weil who presented some of her recent research on blogging. Apparently 85% are not using blogs. Wow! I hope we helped convince a few of them to join the blogosphere. We were both pretty forceful about saying GET IN THE GAME - people are blogging about your company. Look at www.technorati.com and find out who. Join the conversation.

Here are my slides but you'll notice something - they're mainly images. I go along with Seth's views that slides aren't much use without the person. You can probably infer what I said from some of it but I'd like to think I added something to them. The guys at Vodafone thought so as they asked me to come chat with them about it. Guess what...I'm more than happy to. So here's the deal,

• If you'd like me to chat with you or your company about this, let me know. I'd be delighted to share our experiences if I can.

Some great qustions today. Here's the ones I can remember

• How much time do I take blogging?
  Too long but my management see the benefit and empower me with the latitude
• Should we start internal or external with our blog?
  External. Now. Do it. The internal people will read it anyway so you get 2x the power. At least
• How do you deal with criticism in comments?
  By defusing the emotion and engaging the person in a conversation. Most people are surprised when they hear Microsoft is listening
• Why did you remove "be wary of team blogs" from your slides
  This would be my number 11 item. I'm not saying don't but just recognise that a team blog has difficulty in having a personality.
  

Final point. Go read Debbie's book. Along with Scoble it's the other bible.