Blog Marketing

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.

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.

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.

Not all business blogging is about attracting a bazillion visits every day. Blogs work great as internal tools, and function just as well for 50 people as they do for 50,000.

But I think those blogs are a minority. “How do I get more traffic?” has to be the number one question in mind for a lot of business bloggers. Blogging is a get-the-word-out type of tool, after all, and having more people read it means the word is getting out and around town.

I like to tell people that there are three secrets to getting lots of blog traffic. Two of them are hard. One of them is easy.

1. Create compelling content (hard)
2. Get people to link to you (hard)
3. Post more (easy)

As it so happens, number 1 begets number 2, and number 3 often begets number 1. I’ve done the research myself, and it’s almost always true (yes, yes, I know–there are always exceptions): more posts means more traffic.

Surprisingly, it’s nearly impossible to find a service that tracks a blog’s number of posts per week. Blogpulse has a beta service up, but the number of blogs in their database is incredibly small at this point. Regardless, we collected the data anyway, starting from a list of blogs we accumulated when monitoring posts about CES last January.

When you take a blog’s number of posts per week, and plot it on a graph against their Alexa rank (I know, I know, it’s flawed–but it’s the only consistent public stats tool we can use at the moment), you get a scatter plot that looks like this:

It may not be the clearest statistical correlation in the history of statistics, but it’s not hard to spot the upward wedge on this chart, or how every blog posting over 100 times per week is in the top tier of the Alexa ranks.

There’s a reason that Engadget averages around 25 posts every day. People only come back to the site when something new is up. And while I wouldn’t recommend posting 25 times a day to most business bloggers, two a day will get you more traffic than one.

And of course you have twice as many chances to write something compelling.

I spent the cramped and sweaty duration of a Southwest flight between Midland, TX and Seattle, WA, reading a copy of Fast Company that I picked up at one of the numerous concourse news stands. I don’t normally read magazines cover to cover, but this is the first issue of FC that I’ve ever picked up and I was pretty impressed.

I remember a column about branding tucked somewhere in the middle that ruminated on the value of making your business a talking point.

It’s well worth a read. I guess basic idea is that it’s a lot harder to generate “buzz” about your product if your product is inherently boring.

The cool part is that having “personality” is enough to get yourself talked about. Giving out cookies at a hotel check-in counter. Or I’ve always liked the snarky copy on the side of Vitamin Water bottles.

If you want to join the ranks of talked-about companies, a blog is a great way to give your company a personality.

Remember what Scoble was able to do for Microsoft? Transforming it, for many people, from a gigantic, faceless monolith into a slightly geeky, good-humored guy you could leave a comment with. Personality! Every company should have one.

Chris Pirillo has nine excellent points about how to do business on the Web. I’d like to expand on his first point.

Chris writes:

It’s not just about having an open mind; it’s about having an open strategy. You can’t control the Internet. Once you put something out there for the world to consume, assume that they will consume it but not just in the format you offered. It doesn’t matter if it’s audio, video, text, software, hardware or any other service—they’ll want to use it in ways that you can’t even imagine.

This is what Michael Raynor was talking about when he told PR Squared’s Todd Defren that social media injects additional uncertainty into business operations.

And it has more serious implications than the simple re-purposing of content. Businesses need to approach all aspects of social media with an open strategy. Unlike traditional marketing efforts, nobody can control the pace or subject matter of a conversation online. Each individual that participates can take any discussion or line of thought in myriad new ways.

So how does traditional goal-setting jibe with this lack of control? I think it works something like this:

1. Set a reasonable goal for your online interaction.
2. Listen to each individual and how the community responds to the individual.
3. Ask intelligent questions and listen to the responses.
4. Ask, “is my reasonable goal still reasonable?”
5. Either adjust goals to fit community response, or take another step toward your goal.
6. Repeat steps 2-5.

What do you guys think?

To give bibliophiles a look at the people behind their favorite contemporary works, publisher Simon & Schuster plans to launch a book channel on YouTube. The channel will feature two-minute clips of the CBS-owned publisher’s bestselling authors discussing their work and their lives as authors.

Their goal here is right on. The channel is an indirect way of giving users additional content that they find useful. But I think they should focus their distribution methods more broadly than just a YouTube channel. I’d like to see them host the videos on a blog of their own making, just as popular YouTube channel LonelyGirl15 ultimately did. Also, I’d like to see the series as a video podcast on iTunes, so that I can download it onto my iPhone and watch it on the bus.

An excellent examination of authenticity and branding floated through my RSS reader this morning, courtesy of Fast Company. While there is no foolproof recipe for authenticity, they do a good job of breaking it down to four key elements, based on the histories of authentic, and not-so-authentic branding strategies.

As I read the article, I found myself thinking that each of these four key elements of authenticity — sense of place, point of view, serving a larger purpose, and integrity — could be well served by a business blog.

Here’s how:

1. A sense of place. This isn’t true of all brands. I don’t think anyone really cares where Jack from the Jack in the Box commercials lives. But for some brands, a link to heritage or culture is integral to the coveted sense of authenticity. The problem is that in many cases, the sense of place is nothing but smoke and mirrors, done with varying degrees of aptitude. And as we all know, smoke and mirrors does not translate well to the blogosphere.

   That said, if a brand truly does trace its origins back to a place, a blog can help bring that place — and the brand itself — alive for people the world over. For example, Plymouth Gin which sponsored our speaker dinner after last year’s conference, would benefit from just such a strategy. It lays authentic claim to Plymouth England, where the gin has been made since 1793.

2. A strong point of view, fits in brilliantly with the goal of a blog. Fast Company uses Martha Stewart as an example of a brand that comes across as authentic because of the presence and distinct point of view of its leading lady. Martha’s recipes “stand in the face of a world where food is mass-produced and preparation for the average dinner is measured by the number of minutes it takes to microwave the thing.”

   If point of view is the secret sauce that makes a brand tick, then blogging is an organic extension of that brand. After all, what better way to express a point of view than a daily stream of posts written from that perspective? Wells Fargo does this brilliantly with it’s “Guided by History” blog, whose writers integrate the historical with the present by telling stories from their own lives. It has nothing to do with banking, yet it extends the Wells Fargo brand perfectly.

3. Serving a larger purpose. According to FC, brands that fall into this category include Google, which stands for progress with a “do no evil” attitude and Whole Foods, which stands for a gourmet, organic lifestyle. Both are about more than just making money.

   If your goal for your brand is to explain the larger context in which your company makes the world a better place, then a blog can accomplish this. Just look at how General Electric has expanded its vision of innovation with its Global Research Blog. Recent topics include everything from statistical modeling and the HIV epidemic to what GE is doing with thermal science.

4. Integrity McDonald’s used to take a defensive approach to its image as a destroyer of the environment. It even went so far as to sue Julia Hailes the author of a book about green living because she implicated them in the destruction of the rainforest.

   But McDonald’s realized quickly that if the brand said one thing while the company did another, people would no longer trust them. Today, Ms. Hailes’ criticisms are openly welcomed at McDonald’s corporate events. The company has extended this growing sense of environmental and social responsibility with its corporate social responsibility blog, where the brand’s integrity is put on full display.

Authenticity has growing cachet in marketing, and so should blogging. Because the single best way to seem authentic is to be authentic. Why fake it when you can do the real thing?

Jeremiah Owyang makes a very astute observation when he points out the difference between creating a flash in the pan viral video and a long-term online community:

Many marketers want to ‘make their mark’ on the world and create such a viral video but let’s be honest the successful ones are few and far in between. I would be so bold to suggest that the best viral videos are rarely corporate created either, so let’s stop trying to do something unattainable.

Think long term, build out tools and programs that let product teams have ongoing dialogues with real customers and prospects to build better products.

It’s like the difference between a passionate fling and a stable, happy 20-year marriage. The fling can feel a lot more powerful, but you have to ask yourself what matters more?

So how do you build a long-term, stable community around your brand? You blog about what your customers care about, or you hire us to do it for you.

And no, this entire post was not written just so I could plug our consulting services. Jeremiah kicks ass!

Steve Rubel points out that Bill Marriott — who just launched his blog — is in his seventies and, by his own admission, does not use a computer well.

Obviously, Bill Marriott is no dummy. He understands the spirit of blogging because he understands how important his customers and associates are. But he is an older guy who grew up in a world where the personal computer wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. You have to be a person of some vision and some humility to see the changing landscape, listen to people who are younger and less experienced than you are, and embrace it instead of treating it as a threat.

So, if Bill Marriott can find time in his busy life to blog and podcast, there’s no reason why you can’t make it happen. If blogging or podcasting or social media will work for your business, then you should use them. Don’t let your lack of technical skill or your desire to cling to the way things used to be deter you. Sometimes new tools are scary, but take inspiration from Bill Marriott and be not afraid.

Oh sure, he’s only formed an “exploratory committee”, but for all intents and purposes Barack Obama has thrown his hat in the ring for President.

Whether you support him or not, you have to admire his strategy. Rather than just coming out and running for President, he’s formed a very public exploratory group and posted videos of his musings about the future of our country on YouTube.

He’s betting that the blogosphere will be all abuzz by the time he announces his intention to run on February 10th. It’s a great strategy.

Flip: Hey, bloggers! here’s an expensive laptop pre-loaded with the new Vista. You can keep it if you want. Play with it and have fun.

Flop: Umm….wait. Actually, we’re gonna need those laptops back. We got…er…criticized by the blogosphere for just giving those to you…Something about being unethical.

Flip: Well, actually…you can do whatever you want with those laptops…keep ‘em, sell ‘em, give ‘em away or give ‘em back to us. Really, it’s cool, Do what you want!

There may be a lot of debate about the best practices for giving review products to bloggers, particularly when those products are worth a whole lot of money. But there’s no debate about best practices when it comes to consistency. The only thing you’re going to get if you keep changing the rules mid-engagement is a bunch of irritated bloggers.

Lesson for other companies: Think these issues through before you start giving out pricey toys. Then come up with a defensible position and stick with it. Haven’t you people learned anything from our President?

Note: the political references here are made with tongue firmly in cheek. They do not necessarily reflect any particular political stance. My political opinions do not reflect those of my boss…company…etc…

If there’s one thing we can be accused of here at the Blog Business Summit, it’s that we’re crazy about blogs. But blog and blog marketing alone do not determine the success or failure of a product. After all, not everyone reads blogs on a regular basis. And while a growing number of people rely on search engines to get information, many people do not spend a great deal of time on the Web.

That’s why reaching out to offline constituencies the same way you’d reach out to online ones is so important. The approach is the same. You want to ask for people’s opinion about the product rather than giving them a sales pitch about why it’s so great. You want to involve groups that have been historically negative about your product–like moms and video games–and emphasize honesty over sales language.

This strategy is part of the reason the Nintendo Wii has been such a great seller. The organization has reached out to moms and families as well as the traditional video game demographic. The result is that they’re seen as combating the sometimes unhealthy video game culture, bringing families together, promoting exercise, all while expanding their market.

The world “evangelism” gets used so often in the blogosphere that sometimes, I think people forget where it originated. According to Answers.com, the definition of evangelism is, first and foremost, “zealous preaching and dissemination of the gospel, as through missionary work.”

Now, I don’t want to get into a religious debate on this blog. There are a lot of viewpoints when it comes to Evangelical Christians, especially given the Bush administration’s policies on faith-based initiatives and the like. But no matter where you stand on the political/religious spectrum, I’m sure we can all agree that Evangelical Christians have done a hecukva job marketing their cause, particularly in recent years.

This effort on their part is the subject of a recent book by secular, liberal, feminist journalist Lauren Sandler. In Righteous, she delivers a collection of informative if not entirely unbiased “dispatches from the evangelical youth movement.”

In her book, Sandler repeatedly portrays Evangelical youth as disaffected by American consumerist society. In chapter two of the book, pastor Mark Driscoll of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church tells her, “America has been marketed to so constantly and shamelessly that it has produced a generation of jaded cynics desperate for what feels real.”

This attitude is reflected later in the book in her interview with Ryan Dobson, scion of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson. In recent years, Dobson the younger has been podcasting to what Sandler calls the “Disciple Generation” in the same way that his father has reached out to their parents with his well-produced radio show.

Writes Sandler:

Ryan’s podcast is the Disciple Generation’s answer to his father’s airwaves. Podcasting feels more real, Ryan says, because of its low production values. He amps up those values on his show, answering his cell phone, having conversations off-mic. Its makeshift rec-room sound is what he says makes his message seem–and here’s the buzzword of this generation again–more “authentic” than his father’s programming.

It’s pretty clear that if you want to market to the under-30 crowd these days, you’re going to need more than a snappy jingle and a celebrity endorsement. You need that authenticity, that human connection to your audience. And one way to achieve that authenticity is to reach out through new media. The success of the Evangelical youth movement is another feather in the cap of passionate people using the Web to connect to a huge audience in a human way.

Keep that in mind the next time you start thinking about how to get the kids on board, no matter what your politics are.

I’ve never been a big fan of MySpace. The interface is counterintuitive, the flashing ads are an eyesore and the code is a mess. The news that the site is over the proverbial hill doesn’t come as any shock.

Social networks are very helpful for people that want to reach hip, tech-savvy young folks. But eventually, the walled-garden model will fall by the wayside entirely. In its place will be a set of easy-to-install widgets that attach to a server like add-ons attach to Firefox. These widgets will allow folks to blog, share and tag photos, respond to messages, generate feeds, network personally and professionally, or whatever else they want to do. Social networks as we know them will meld seamlessly with the other functions of the Web.

So where does that leave musicians, record labels, clubs and other organizations that want to use MySpace, Facebook and other social networks to promote themselves? Back at square one: hosting their own blog.

I couldn’t agree more with Flick of Puddlegum when he writes, “I’d rather focus my energies developing my own traffic than nursing off of a corporate monster.” Organizations should build out their own websites, host their own blogs and make social networks an offshoot. Building your own hub of information about yourself is always a better solution than scattering your information to the winds and hoping that your fan base will continue to frequent whichever site you’ve spent the most time and energy building a presence on.

Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: MySpace, Facebook, social networks, widgets, blogs

I had the privilege of meeting Danah Boyd at this year’s BlogHer. I always enjoy reading the results of her efforts to apply her enormous brainpower to the world of social networking. Today, she posted about the marketers who have recently been using her comment section as an SEO tool. “Dear online marketers,” she wrote, “I am not humored that you wish to use my blog to up your pagerank. I’m not stupid. It’s obvious you’re posting pithy comments debasing competitors on lots of highly trafficked entries with your URL and the search terms you wish to associate with your company.”

Danah has every right to be irritated at this behavior. I spend about an hour each week deleting comments like this from our spam trap. It puts me in a bad mood every single time.

Don’t get me wrong, as a business blogger, I recognize that comments on other blogs are a big part of the marketing equation. But there is a thin line between using other people’s comments as a marketing tool and becoming an out-and-out spammer. If you want to avoid having bloggers associate your company with the scum of the Web, then you need to think a little more organically.

Genuine participation in the conversation means interacting in a thoughtful, relevant and timely way with other bloggers that share your interests. It’s the only way to engage in SEO without deeply pissing off the bloggers. You have to actually show some enthusiasm for the conversation and the SEO will follow organically.

There are two kinds of SEO practices in the blogosphere, those that require interaction with others and those that do not. Non-interactional tactics include making sure your code is clean and creatively integrating your target search terms into the headlines of your posts. Those are the kinds of things you can do with your goal of more search engine traffic in mind.

But when you’re interacting with other bloggers, you need to be a little less goal-oriented. Instead of keeping your eye on the SEO prize, focus on having an interesting conversation about a passion you share. The inbound links and search engine love will naturally follow at least some of the time. This isn’t a system you can game. It has nothing to do with “link exchanges” to fool search engines. It’s about developing personal relationships.

Amy Tenderich is a communications professional with diabetes. Her blog, Diabetes Mine aims to be “a gold mine of straight talk and encouragement for people living with diabetes.”

There are many different kinds of communities on the Web. There are those who are brought together by gender, or sexual orientation, by age or ethnicity or level of eduction. There are groups for people with an interest in knitting, politics, or Star Trek. And there are groups for people who are coping with difficult situations: reproductive challenges, HIV/AIDS, depression, obesity, and diabetes, to name a few.

And just as there are communities for every conceivable facet of the human condition, there are companies that want to reach those communities. It’s a facet of blogger outreach that I had never considered before until I read Amy’s very thoughtful post about blogger outreach to communities with these difficult conditions. She has some excellent advice for pharmaceuticals companies, hospitals, treatment centers, and any other businesses that want to reach out.

She’s started a very interesting conversation, which I’m eagerly following. I highly recommend that you check it out.

Our keynoter Jason Calacanis told me today that if a blogger has to have a conversation with herself about the ethics of taking a product for free and then writing about it, or going on a blogger junket and writing about it, she has already lost the battle in terms of her credibility.

I vehemently disagree. Things are rarely that black and white, and I think there’s room to develop best practices surrounding pay-per-post.

Obviously, lack of disclosure is not an option. If someone pays you or gives you something for free, you have to say that. If there’s a black and white rule surrounding this, that’s the one.

#1: Is this product potentially harmful?
One of our sponsors is Plymouth Gin. They make alcohol. Alcohol has ruined some people’s lives because they are alcoholics. If you drink, do so in moderation. I think the folks at Plymouth would absolutely agree with that.

That said, Plymouth makes a damn fine gin. I’m not an alcoholic, and I’m not allergic to alcohol. I can and do enjoy a good drink. During our dinner last night, the gin expert had us taste three brands of gin in a blind test. I liked the Plymouth best, and far better than I expected I would, even before I knew it was the brand that was sponsoring us. I am genuinely a fan of Plymouth gin. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t say so.

Which brings me to…

#2: Can you genuinely say something positive at least constructive about this product?

If you can’t say something nice constructive/positive about someone’s product and be telling the truth, then don’t engage with the people evangelizing that product. Just don’t do it.

If I’m talking positively about something, money or not, it’s because I mean it.

#3: Do my readers care about this product?

If I blog about high-end lingerie and someone approaches me and asks me to talk about how much I love Plymouth Gin, I might do it because there’s some overlap between the luxury of fine underoos and the luxury of fine gin. But if someone wants me to talk about stock car racing, I’ll say no. My audience cares more about stockings than stock cars.

That’s all I can think of at the moment, but I’m really really tired right now, and I’m sure there are more guidelines I haven’t considered. Feel free to bring stuff up in the comments.

About a week ago, while watching King of the Hill on FX with Andy, I saw a commercial for the Sonic strawberry cheesecake milkshake. A man and woman are in a car at the drive-thru, talking about the deliciousness of the shake.

The man turns to the woman and says that he wants to post about the milkshake on his blog. “My readers will really enjoy hearing about my experience of this milkshake,” he says.

The woman then teases him, saying that only his mother reads his blog.

“That’s not true,” he responds, “she said she’d tell her neighbor about it.”

Not having TiVo, I spent the next few days hunting about the Web looking for a capture of the commercial and having no luck. I even would up calling Barkley Evergreen and Associates & Partners, the advertising firm responsible for the spot. They said that unfortunately, they hadn’t paid the talent to distribute that particular commercial over the Web and couldn’t oblige my request.

So until some kind soul TiVos the commercial and uploads it to YouTube, the best I have to link to is this transcript courtesy of Randy who blogs at photos-ect.blogspot.com.

But Barkley Evergreen/Sonic isn’t content to make fun of small-time bloggers on television. No, they’ve issued a mock challenge to the YouTube crowd, which has been creating their own hilarious versions of the Sonic Ads and uploading their own versions to the Web.

The challenge features the two guys who star in most of the Sonic Ads, issuing a challenge to the YouTube crowd to “bring it.” I would love to embed it here, but I can’t because the people at Barkley Evergreen have restricted embedding of the video in blogs (see left).

All in all, I think this is a good approach, engaging bloggers and social media addicts in a number of simultaneous media. It’s an amusing conversation, and one that has already boosted awareness of Sonic.

The only problem I see with this approach is that there is still a command and control mentality when it comes to the original material. Any time you start a conversation with a blogger, no matter what the original format, you have to make that opening salvo available digitally. Otherwise, you’re missing out on a boatload of free, viral advertising. By refusing to allow embedding of their YouTube challenge, and failing to make the milkshake commercial available online at all, Barkley Evergreen has missed a key opportunity to take their deservedly award-winning campaign to the next level.

We’ll be covering how social media, absent a command and control mentality can drive your marketing efforts to the next level at next week’s conference.