Business Blogging

I’ve been asked to talk about blogging and how it relates to business at the Rainier Club in Seattle on May 12, if you’re a member and plan on attending. Let me know what questions you have ahead of time and I’ll tailor my presentation. Steve [at] blogbusinesssumit [dot] com

It’s abundantly clear by now that the internet is a double-edged sword for business ventures: On on the one hand, the rapid dissemination of information and content can lead to mass market exposure with the lowest cost-benefit ratio in the history of mankind.

On the other hand, this very same process can often take a gigantic chunk of the “benefit” by effectively killing a business’s ability to monetize that same content.

I saw today on Chris Pirillo’s blog that Cory is releasing a new audiobook completely DRM free AND with a generous license to re-hash the content (up to 30 minutes can be redistributed wherever). This is from the e-mail Cory sent to Pirillo:

The audio book comes with the author’s sampling license: once you own it, you’re free to take up to 30 minutes’ worth of material from it and remix and then redistribute it as much as you like, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis, make sure that it’s clear that this is a remix and not the original, and make sure that you tell people where to find the original. This is in addition to all the fair use remixing that you’re allowed to do.

Anybody who embraces DRM-free internet distribution with a paid product is undoubtedly forfeiting a good chunk of potential revenue.

In the future I think that the “widgetization” of content will allow businesses to monetize their content via ads regardless of where it goes. But for now, when is the right time to let your product go? Should you risk the lost revenue for the possible gain in exposure?

I’d be really interested to see some data on this. Finding and downloading content of all kinds—music, movies, audiobooks, etc—is so easy already that the amount of revenue captured by DRM has got be relatively minor. For the most part, people who will steal the book will steal the book regardless of whether it is a DRM release.

Given that assumption, I’d say it’s almost always the right decision to release content without DRM. Enabling open sharing will help drive the technology to monetize it using some new model. What do you think?

I wrote a post a year ago about how the fear of blogging had been replaced by the fear of not blogging. Boy, was I wrong about this being the case on a national level. A few months later I discovered that (at least for businesses in and around Chicago…) most of the dozens of directors of marketing I spoke to were still terrified or completely apathetic about the idea of blogging. Almost zero had any interest in our conference we built significantly for them. We had to cancel an event that in San Francisco drew 300 rabid attendees.

I’ve noticed that there’s barely a startup in Silicon Valley that doesn’t have a company blog. I dare you — find me a company that’s announced a round of funding that doesn’t have a blog. Okay, maybe a few don’t, but for every one that’s not blogging there are at least ten that are.

Now I read in the Wall Street Journal about how in the heartland of America, Miller Brewing Co. has created a very successful blog whose intent is primarily to needle their rival Anheuser-Busch:

The corporate marketing battlefield has long been strewn with pithy digs in ads and selective news leaks about others’ business woes. But it’s unusual for a company to go to the trouble of creating its own media arm to grind out news on the competition. While the site lets Miller tweak its famously tight-lipped rival, it also gives the company a platform to take a first crack at spinning industry news.

“They are trying to aggressively go around the gatekeepers” in newsrooms and the trade press, says Stephen Quigley, an associate professor of public relations at Boston University. “It’s something you couldn’t do five years ago,” before the proliferation of blogs.

The article doesn’t say if Anheuser-Busch is responding with their own blog, but the implication is that they’re largely in denial:

Anheuser declined to answer specific questions about Brew Blog or make an executive available for an interview. It wouldn’t say whether it considers the site a concern. “Our focus is on our consumers and delivering great brands,” Dave Peacock, Anheuser’s vice president of marketing, said in a statement.

Hey big companies: If this whole “transparency” thing is still terrifying to you, wait until competitor blogs are launching assaults on you and you have no defense. Hey wait, maybe your competitors will let you comment on theirs!

I know a lot of people who are reluctant to start blogging because they feel like they’ll have a hard time coming up with stuff to blog about. And they’re right that coming up with the right stuff to blog about is one of the more daunting tasks you face if you’re aiming to blog regularly.

The first great solution, which I recommend, you can find at Copyblogger here.

Fortunately, there’s a loophole for this problem. You can write about the same stuff more than once.

It turns out that repetition is a great tool for teaching and persuasion. If you’re trying to get an idea through people’s heads, it’s actually a good strategy to approach the issue for four hundred different angles. I can’t count the number of times that we’ve blogged about how a blog should be your business homepage.

The point is this: repetition is a teaching strategy. As long as you’re not simply re-posting something you wrote before, re-hashing the same subject is fair game.

According to George Dearing at InformationWeek, Acquia has raised $7 million to develop and sell a “suite of services it says will make Drupal enterprise-ready.”

In other words, Drupal will be getting the structure and support that many enterprise-level customers like to see.

Dearing is also absolutely right about the existence of social publishing opportunities, and I think he’s also right about the larger shift they indicate.

We’re starting to see more and more clients in the social media space looking to build ambitious and robust community systems on the LAMP stack, and we consistently recommend Drupal for the more expansive projects.

I think Acquia is making a good investment here.

Last week Jason Calacanis wrote a list of about 20 ways that startups can save money. It’s a good list with a lot of sensible advice.

Fred Wilson also went through the post, and added his thoughts to several of Jason’s points. I couldn’t agree more with Fred on this one:

Really think about if you need that $15,000 a month PR firm. - There are some really good PR firms out there and if you can get one of them to work with your company, then it may be worth considering it. But a mediocre PR firm is not worth it for sure. I encourage our portfolio companies to hire a person inside the company to be an “evangelist”. That job includes blogging actively, reading and commenting and linking to other blogs, reaching out to the media and industry analysts and gurus, going to conferences and events, and generally getting the word out. That person can be young and not particularly expensive, certainly nowhere near $15,000 a month. And they have two things that a PR firm cannot offer. They work for you and they represent your company exclusively.

I am consistently surprised when startups choose to forgo blogging as a PR strategy. A startup environment lends itself so well to blogging, and no other approach packs as much bang for the buck.

Fred is absolutely right that having a dedicated, energetic blogging evangelist will go a lot farther than a monthly contract with most PR firms. It will help create personal relationships between your company and your customers, give you an authoritative, authentic outlet for new information, and can create opportunities for feedback and community involvement that surveys and focus groups will never provide.

If you’ve been paying attention to travel, tech, and the blogosphere (or just Engadget), you’ve undoubtedly noted that the TSA recently caused Michael Nygard to miss his flight because they couldn’t figure out what the hell his MacBook Air was.

It’s a funny story.

I’m also willing to bet it’s an isolated one. MacBook Airs are probably zipping through security lines in airports all over the world. But it only takes one story like this to generate all kinds of negative buzz.

What not everyone knows is that the TSA does in fact have a blog: Evolution of Security. Their last post was March 4th.

Step up to the plate, guys. This is a perfect opportunity to respond and engage. You may even make a few friends if you do it right.

If you haven’t heard about “1,000 True Fans” yet, you should go read Kevin Kelly’s post.

In it, he argues (roughly) that that the Long Tail creates a problem for any creator: how do you make a living? Kelly’s solution is that an artist must find their 1,000 True Fans, and through the use of new digital technologies, rely on that “sweet spot” for a realistic living.

Or, in his words:

But the point of this strategy is to say that you don’t need a hit to survive. You don’t need to aim for the short head of best-sellerdom to escape the long tail. There is a place in the middle, that is not very far away from the tail, where you can at least make a living. That mid-way haven is called 1,000 True Fans. It is an alternate destination for an artist to aim for.

For the more detailed version, go read his post.

He writes for “artists,” but I think the concept absolutely applies to a business. In the digital “Long Tail” world, not every business can be a “hit.” But wallowing at the long end of the spectrum is not the only other option.

By using new technology — blogs, social media — you can connect with a core group of customers that will be your “True Customers.” They could provide a support base for your business and allow you to reach out and grow in different areas.

It’s an interesting idea.

One of the beautiful tricks you can pull on the world is to use the internet to convince people that you’re an expert in something.

In ways that people do not fully realize, the internet is incredibly democratizing. In order to be an expert, you don’t need a long and thorough record participating in a given industry. You don’t need to have credentials from any particular institution.

You just need to know what you’re talking about.

Maki over at Dosh Dosh does a weekly “advice column” based on questions that get sent in by readers. This week’s article is about how to build a reputation online. The advice is geared towards a student looking to build a name in the art field, but the branding advice applies equally well to companies aiming to establish a good online reputation.

Maki breaks it down into four big steps. I’ll let you read the article for the meat and potatoes, but here’s the dressing to get your taste buds wet:

1. Build a home base on the web.
2. Identify and participate in the right communities.
3. Initiate media outreach to get publicity for your brand.
4. Create online ventures to develop your net worth.

There’s a big article in today’s New York Times about Check Out, Wal-Mart’s employee-driven blog.

The NYT calls out the obvious:

Known for its strict, by-the-books culture — accepting a cup of coffee from a supplier can be a firing offense — Wal-Mart is now encouraging its merchants to speak frankly, even critically, about the products the chain carries.

This unusual new Web site, which was quietly created during the holiday shopping season, has become a forum for unvarnished rants about gadgets, raves about new video games and advice on selecting environmentally sustainable food.

Of course, in many ways it should come as little surprise to see a company plagued with bad public image in a digital age turn to blogging. Letting Wal-Mart buyers (people who choose what is sold in Wal-Mart stores) blog about the products sold at Wal-Mart is a particularly smart move, since it kills several birds with one stone:

1. Wal-Mart gets a set of public-facing personalities
2. Wal-Mart commands enough market share that bad-mouthing a product won’t force a supplier away
3. Wal-Mart appears to open up while not opening up at all

I’ll have to keep an eye on the blog over time to really back-up my third statement. But from looking it over the posts are talking about the products they carry, or products they might carry, or who they’re working with to determine what products they should carry.

They’re not really talking about anything internally Wal-Mart.

I have to hand it to the Wal-Mart team. That is a pretty smart move. It’s still an interesting blog, and I think that it’s a blog that will be well worth having as people learn to know and like the people who are blogging. After all, these are Wal-Mart employees!

It’s a good trick to think about if you’re worried about the risks of starting your own blog.

Occasionally, when I’m talking to people about the work I do building blogs for clients, they’ll ask the question that everyone still seems to have about blogging: “I don’t get it. Why does having a blog help?”

I usually look at them like they’re crazy for a few seconds, and then say, “OK. Give me an example of a business, and I’ll tell you how having a blog can help.”

Then they tilt their head for a bit and think about it. They invariable say something like “What if I have a trucking company?”

Then they smirk: they’ve got me!

“Well,” I respond, “let’s say that since you’re a trucking company, you primarily need two things: you need people to drive trucks, and you need clients who want things trucked.

“There’s a lot I don’t know about the trucking world. There’s probably a lot that nobody outside of the trucking industry knows. It’s pretty safe to say that there aren’t a LOT of people who dream of being truck drivers, but I bet that there’s something interesting, or at least oddly appealing, about traversing the open highways for a living.

“If you wrote a blog about the ins and outs of trucking, and people who were interested in trucks (or being a truck driver) could find the answers to their questions and get a sense of your (undoubtedly good) personality, what company do you think they’ll look to first when they need to get hired?”

The point of blogging for your business, in many, many cases, is about generating relationships and awareness in your target market, before they’re even looking for your product (or service, or whatever). When the times comes, they’ll look to you first, because you already have a relationship with them.

Let me start off by saying that if you’re not reading ProBlogger, you should be. Consistently good content? You will find it there.

Today (well, tomorrow if you go by the post date) there is a guest post there by Sudeep D’Souza with his 9 tips for successful blogging.

I think the most important one is tip number 9:

9. Writing a good post takes time and patience

There may be few gifted bloggers out there that can churn out interesting posts easily. Some have this skill from practice, and for some, it is a gift, but for the majority of us it is hard work right from coming up with the title to the way the post is structured to the content of the post. Be prepared to go through many iterations of it before you come up with the post that you would feel proud to publish.

I like to think of myself as one of those few, talented, sometimes annoying writers who can spit out well-oiled posts with nary a re-write and few ticks of the clock.

But the fact is that I need to check my grammar, look up words like “nary” to make sure I’m using them right, and re-write my headline a few times to make sure I’m including the right keywords. In fact, I think the “gifted, write-once” blogger is largely a myth.

I bet that if you look at the top bloggers, almost all of them re-read their big posts before they take them live.

The good think about blogging is that you don’t have to be literary to be successful. But that doesn’t mean that good posts come easy. You still need to think about structure and phrasing.

Concise and convincing writing will be quoted, credited, and linked to far more often than mangled sentences, no matter how good your ideas are. It’s worth a second pass to get there.

Mike Grehan over at the Clickz network claims that the “super-booster link,” by which I assume he means a link from a high-profile, respected blog, is worth more than hundreds of unimportant links.

He’s certainly somewhat right. Getting linked from a site with a high PageRank will do a lot more for your own PR and authority than getting a bunch of links from a couple of splogs. That is as it should be.

This goes in line with what I wrote last week about writing good SEO blog posts: writing good content is the same as writing content for SEO. Why is it the same? Because good content will generate links from real bloggers, which will give your site more authority in Google’s eyes.

I would caution, however, about the difference between a real ’super-booster’ link and something that shoots up the list on Digg.

A big hit on Digg is far more transitory than good relationships with other bloggers. Don’t get fooled by big traffic spikes, it’s retention that you’re really after.

There’s an amazingly big market for buying links on pages with high pageranks. At least, I assume there is based on the number of offers made and the kind of prices being attached to them.

If you want a real-world account, you need look no farther than Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger, who recently fended off a particularly persistent link-buyer.

While it can seem tempting to throw cash at a problem like “low page rank,” as I’ve said before, it essentially comes down to having good content. Many bloggers choose not to sell links for the very reasons that Darren outlines in his post. Most importantly: they feel it compromises their integrity.

You’ll be better respected and, in the end, you’ll have more success if your links develop organically.

Why is an organic link better than a paid link? Here are two reasons:

1. It is completely legitimate, and there’s almost no chance of getting sandboxed by Google or others
2. An organic link is likely to be followed by more links from the same source

Over at MarketingVox you’ll find a list of 10 trends for enterprise blogging in 2008.

It’s a good list that puts a finger on a lot of the important shifts that blogging has caused and will continue to cause in marketing. It also serves as good advice for anyone looking at corporate blogging as they move forward.

I think this is the real gem in the list though:

Marketing democracy. Blogging is the great democratizer. No one can buy their way up to the top of the organic search pages. Blogging technology is cheap, easy to use and doesn’t require IT assistance or equipment. You only pay for consumption.

This is one of the reasons blogging is so trusted. Combine the cost of blogging software (basically nil) with the “fairness” power of Google search (REALLY hard to game it), and people generally wind up on blogs thinking that, some way or another, you’ve earned your place with good content.

That’s a powerful assumption.

There are a whole range of different options for a company facing the often scary, usually slippery dive into the blogosphere. Some companies opt to have what amounts to a company spokesman blogging (or sometimes it comes naturally - think Calacanis and Mahalo). Some companies choose to sponsor blogs like InFlightHQ, which lets them dip their feet into the blogosphere while also remaining essentially hands-off and risk-free. Some companies have company blogs, where multiple employees are encouraged to post.

These are all smart strategies for getting your company out there.

My personal favorite is the company spokesman approach. It’s hard to imagine how much good Scoble did for Microsoft while he worked for them. Imagine how much it helps to have Major Nelson personally apologizing to gamers for difficulties on Xbox Live. And one thing that Scoble does exceptionally well is make himself a public figure.

Take a look at his travel post. He’s got dopplr tracking where he is at any given time. He’s got his calendar published on Google Calendar, so that people can see when he might be available without having to bug him first.

I remember at the last BBS Seattle, Scoble talked about how he ended up with on a TV interview because he had his phone number posted on his blog, and the expert they were looking for didn’t have their contact information readily available.

The point is this: if you’re going to be the company evangelist, you really should make yourself publicly available. Post your phone number. Tell people what cities you’re in. Put your calendar online so people can see when you might be available.

The more people can reach you, the more they can feel like they know you, the better you’ll be at your job.

I spent part of last night poking my nose through various books in Barnes and Noble, including All Marketers are Liars, which will probably end up being the first Seth Godin book I actually buy (I never get tired of his blog).

One of the themes that I see recurring in Seth’s writing is this idea that a good marketer will tell stories, and a better marketer will tell authentic stories.

For any given business, this is so much easier than it ever was before. Blogging as a medium conveys a different feel than a press release or a television commercial. Viral YouTube videos have an aesthetic that no prime-time spot can ever hope to emulate.

What if the Blair Witch Project had come out as a series of YouTube videos? The medium affects the content.

Remember that when you blog, you’re not crafting a reality for your docile viewers, you’re sharing your reality with other people. And that can be a powerful story.

Newsweek recently ran a piece on companies that do online reputation management.

The idea being that pretty much any employer nowadays is going to type your name into Google before making you an offer, and you want that presentation to be as pretty, white, and clean as your actual resume. When you boil it all down, what these companies are essentially trying to sell is SEO for the individual.

If you’re not careful as a company, other sites can creep above your home page as a result in a Google search for the terms that you want to own, even if they’re searching for something that matches your exact domain. I’ve seen it happen.

For example (and no, it’s not a business), if you search for Jason Preston on Google, hoping to find Jason-Preston.com, you get a bunch of profiles and posts about some other Jason Preston, who apparently needs to have his Marc Jacobs tattoo removed. It looks like this:

My point is this: simply owning a domain doesn’t mean you’re going to own the search result.

There are several factors that affect your results, some of which you have a lot of control over, and some of which you really don’t have control over.

Here are some tricks you can use on your blog to improve your showing:

1. Make sure you write descriptive post headlines that include the keywords you’d like to see rank high in Google. If I posted more about myself, or at least shoved my name into my headlines more often, I’d have a better spread of the Google results page.
2. Use the SEO Title Tag WordPress plug-in to put extra keywords into your permalink post page headers. This means that Google has an extra set of keywords, aside from your post headline itself, to associate with a page.
3. Include outbound links in your posts. It makes Google notice your site more, and it makes other people notice your site more, which can get you inbound links, which makes Google notice your site more…
4. If you have multiple blogs at multiple domains, link between them, and use the terms you want associated with your site as a link, the way I’ve used my name to link to my site in this post.

By now it’s almost common knowledge that an unbelievably large portion of your traffic is coming from Google, followed by the rest of the search engines combined, and then finally, you have a few referrals from other sites.

One of those other search engines is actually often overlooked, because it’s search database is filled, tagged, and categorized voluntarily by everyone as they surf the web: del.icio.us.

Fred Wilson posted recently about how you can get a surprisingly large amount of traffic from del.icio.us search if your posts are being tagged on their system. Here’s the traffic chart he posted:

So make a habit of tagging your posts in del.icio.us with relevant tags, and you could see your traffic take a jump.

ProBlogger Darren Rowse says he’s got a contest going for people to win a copy of Web Design for ROI, a book that he’s been enjoying in the past few weeks.

The book is called Web Design for ROI, and I have not read it, but I know that there’s plenty of research out there showing that web (and blog) design can have very significant impact on your ROI. I would be surprised if this book turned out to be a waste of time.

The funny sound bite that turns up most often on this subject is “the uglier your site, the more money you make.” Often this can be true, and while it’s a bit baffling at time, I chalk up a lot of the revenue to mis-clicked PPC ads. If you’re not paying for your site with AdSense, you might want to look a little bit further.

When I’m sitting down to sketch out a new blog or web site layout, I always ask myself two questions before I start, and the answers guide the layout and structure of the page. I suggest you do the same with your web site, and it might just improve your ROI:

1. Where is the user most likely to arrive at my domain?
2. What is the most important thing for them to see on my site?

In a lot of cases the answers will be, respectively: individual blog pages, and google ads. That’s what gives rise to “ugly” sites (permalink pages plastered with ads). But in your case the answers might be “Users land on FAQ answer pages and I want them to see our accessories store.”

That right there informs your web design. Check your pages - do they make a sensible path for the user?

The contest at ProBlogger is pretty easy to enter - just go leave a comment on that post letting him know what your favorite blog design is and why. Give it a shot.