We can’t help but get in on the list action, too, in part because 7 of our top 10 blog posts in 2009 also included lists. What is it about lists? The scannability? The fact that someone prioritized information for us? Our inherent need to weigh in, disagree, and state our own opinion?

As we move ahead in 2010, we’ll be thinking about why some of our posts sparked more interest than others—lists are not the whole story, as promotion, headlines, relevance, and other factors always play a role—and we’ll use that analysis to refine our own best practices for successful Web content and share the results with you. But for now, we bring you the 10 most popular Tendo blog posts of 2009.

10. Learning from success: 4 social media triumphs

9. Twitter click-through percentages: Fool’s Gold

8. 6 good infographics sources–and how USA Today fooled everyone

7. 10 killer iPhone apps for marketers

6. Shock marketing: rolling out the red asphalt carpet

5. 26 jargon words to avoid (like the plague)

4. 9 video highlights from the O’Melveny & Myers social media panel

3. 26 killer jargon words for writing sassier copy

2. 2009’s 10 most embarrassing marketing & PR blunders

1. Martin Eberhard: How blogs helped build the Tesla Roadster

The setting: Venture Capital Alley, aka Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park.
The gracious hosts: O’Melveny & Myers, fresh off their victorious settlement in AMD vs. Intel.
The panelists: Karla Spormann (president and CEO, Tendo Communications), Martin Eberhard (cofounder and former CEO, Tesla Motors), Patrick Ewers (founder, Mindmavin), and Dr. Marc A. Smith (chief social scientist, Connected Action).
The occasion: An opportunity to get perspective from local executives who are putting social media to work for business.

Below are several video highlights from the social media panel:

Dr. Marc A. Smith:

“The clustering of social connections is fascinating and really revealing.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Smith/Martin Eberhard:

“The downside to social media is that you’re going to have a conversation with someone that has a lot of time on their hands. With you. Now. And you may have other things on your agenda and this becomes an issue because then those people feel scorned and they have the same amplifier you have.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Karla Spormann:

“Understand where your audience is and what tools and channels they’re using. Listen first, and then determine whether or not you want to engage.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Patrick Ewers:

“Common ground is about making people think, ‘I am like you.’ And that’s what you want because ‘I am like you’ means ‘I like you,’ and this is important because…once you get to “I like you,” doors open, things go faster, people start looking for excuses to overlook your mistakes.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Eberhard/Spormann/Smith:

“Social media has already overtaken traditional media. General Motors has had more success getting people to understand the Chevy Volt through Bob Lutz’s own blog than through any advertising.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Smith:

“The more your message propagates, the more Google focuses on it.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Smith:

“Most opportunities flow not through strong ties/connections, but weak ties—the ones you know casually. In addition, humans evolved in tribes of 150 or less, so you can really only have strong ties with 150 or fewer people.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Eberhard:

“The social media thing really is about being a human being and this is why the Bob Lutz blog works. He says things in his rough-and-ready way that doesn’t align itself with the marketing speak that’s all over the rest of their website.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Spormann/Eberhard:

“So my advice is if you have done a good job of developing a network of people that are following and into what you are doing, you just kind of need to give the right people a hint that there is something bad being said about you on some other site and let them be the bulldogs.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

I proposed the topic about which I last blogged—Do Corporate Blogs Require a New Approach to Corporate Leadership? Blogging requires a level of authenticity that some corporate cultures might not support. We might have all had management training at some point in our careers, but that was before the advent of social media. In today’s connected world, do you lead your team differently than you did when Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube and Google/Yahoo didn’t exist?

I was pleased when about 10 people showed up for the discussion. As was explained at the beginning of the day, if no one attends your session, it just means no one was interested in the topic, e.g., don’t take it personally. Yeah, right. I was equally pleased that everyone stayed for the whole hour. We didn’t focus solely on leadership for blogging, as you’ll see from these key take-aways:

Roles. Corporate blogging is best achieved when the company hires a community manager, a person with strong editorial, management, and communications skills who can work with internal employees to encourage their blogs and manage them against guidelines, plan content, edit blog posts as needed/requested, sometimes write blog posts and comments, etc. etc. One community manager in the group shared stories of the challenge of getting executives to blog on a regular basis.

Internal vs. External Blogging. Two of the people in my discussion manage internal blogs that are kept that way since their communities include developers or research scientists who are blogging about company trade secrets. But the internal blogs are also used as a training ground to identify employees who’d be especially effective blogging externally. Once they’ve identified potential external bloggers, the community managers work with the employees to make sure they understand that blogging to the world requires different content than blogging internally (for one, it can’t contain sensitive trade secrets). And the manager will moderate an external blog more stringently than an internal one.

Motivating the discussion. Some companies are starting blogs and don’t have a huge audience; others have the huge audience and just need the bloggers. Regardless of your audience size, the community is better galvanized if it includes feedback and incentives and positive reward. Use other employees to comment back on blogs; measure and publicize page views for blog posts; pick a “comment of the week” and promote it; post a blog that extracts text from comments to encourage more conversation. Being a community manager is a bit like being a party host—you have to seed the audience and encourage their attendance and provide a nice environment for their interaction.

Leadership. In the end, we did decide that blogging requires a different approach to management. Blogging doesn’t work in a highly controlled culture and necessitates a more inclusive leadership style that invites participation.

What’s your corporate blogging experience? Does your company employ a community manager or have an internal blog? How do you motivate and seed the discussion? —Charlotte Ziems, VP, client engagement

But what about the employees who are, well, shy? Afraid, even? Or who aren’t sure they have anything of value to add to the conversation? They may be smart and they may represent your company well and be perfectly social in face-to-face situations, but just aren’t as zealous on the Web. How does your leadership style encourage them to participate in your company’s online strategy?

My hunch is that two factors are critical in answering this question: trust (check out this post from Jeremiah Owyang, one of my favorite bloggers) and making sure employees feel they have permission—maybe “empowerment” is the right word.

I’ll post more about this in coming weeks, especially after attending the Online Community Unconference next week in Mountain View. In the meantime, send me your thoughts. Has your management style changed since your company instituted a blogging policy? Or do you manage people the same way whether they’re online or not? —Charlotte Ziems, VP, client engagement