Out-Smarts Marketing Services

Our blog hit 2 rather dubious milestones this week. Both occurred yesterday when someone was good enough to post our blog peice about the SMEI event with links and all. We love link love here at Out-Smarts and we are always glad to share as long as blog etiquette is followed.

In this case it wasn’t, the post, on a site that had little or no original content, even credited our article to someone else!

They referred to it as a great article - thanks but next time please GET IT RIGHT:

• If you’re not sure of the author don’t include fake or false info.
• If in doubt about the source - DON’T post it.
• Always credit the true author and include a link back to the original article.
• Be aware that the Internet by its nature is very transparent - if plagiarism is your game then chances are you’ll get caught out sooner or later.

So in fine Monica Hamburg fashion - we set to correcting the situation with a well worded comment demanding the error be corrected. Which brings us to the second milestone, our first abusive email following a post that was full of profanity and bluster.

Thankfully the post has since been removed and I won’t give them them the satisfaction of linking to the site.

I’ve already had some feedback from some of my friends on Facebook as to how to deal with this and what I can do to counter both plagiarism and abusive emails but I would be interested in your advice too. What should I do next? What have you done that has worked for you and what can bloggers do to mitigate the risks of putting their good words out there?

The blogosphere is a great way to get your message across and reach wider audiences but if you are thinking about harnessing it for PR purposes, be aware.  As with all things web 2.0 blogging for PR can be done and done well but you have to approach it in a new way.   When approaching a blogger:

1. Don’t try to sell to them or buy their good words - it won’t go over well;
2. Establish rapport up front if you can, network with them in other forums and develop a relationship that shows your sincerity;
3. Relate your offering to a blog post they may have made on an applicable subject;
4. Contact a select few bloggers via a personalized email that include links to pertinent pages or info;
5. If applicable, offer a reciprocal link;
6. Don’t use a traditional press release format - it will be perceived as too “suity”.

A client of mine recently came upon the Real Finder Link tool and asked me my opinion. As will most of these things that pop up on the Internet advertising free and easy results I was sceptical. However I decided to take a closer look and actually installed this one to test it.

What it is is a utility that crawls blog sites for keyword terms of your choice then lists them and autofills the website, name and email address forms saving you time. Say you wanted to find posts on business development, you would enter “business development” and it would bring up all the blog posts it could find on that subject (you can segment this by number of comments on the post if you like). It then auto fills your details and you can add appropriate comments.

Its actually quite a quick way to identify posts that you may want to comment on and I will probably end up using it to save me some time.

Here are the downsides:

• took about an hour to download the software and get it going and bogged down my machine while doing so
• heres no time limit as to the blogs it finds so it often comes up with ancient blog posts or dead blogs that there’s no point in commenting on (other than for the link - but maybe thats the point?)
• it doesn’t catch all blogs (I entered Internet marketing and nothing came up)
• and once they have your email address they start emailing you daily (and more) - but I have to say that when I complained about this I got a very personable email from Neal Shearing the founder explaining his over enthusiasm.

With Real Finder Link you have to take time to read the post and make a valid comment - its not an engine so it doesn’t completely automate the process which is a good thing - to me the whole point of using a commenting link strategy is to establish your expertise at the same time as growing your links. It really does save you time in that it autofills your forms and also in the search process. I suppose you could ask it to find a post that has 100 comments and add something irrelevent in the hope that no one will read - giving you the link but risking your credibility but I don’t think thats a good idea. Question is, is it about links at all costs or valid commentary (I err on the later off course).

Regarding your link strategy - commenting on blogs is a great way to do it and I always encourage you to comment more and add links back to your site that way but its a 2 way street. Companies should always add a blog roll or links section to their web sites where they can add links to both blogs they read that would add value to your clients and web sites that would be useful resources for clients to use.

An article on Collective Thoughts about raising your Twitter profile got me thinking about the social media wave that is upon us. The article discusses why Twitter is a viable marketing tool and how the writer went about increasing his Twitter profile in 30 days. It has many valid points and yes Twitter can be a great marketing tool but so can blogging, social networking, wiki’ing and forums - to mention but a few. If you spend time marketing in each and everyone of these as the buzz out there would suggest, you would have very little time to spend on actual revenue generation or traditional marketing efforts (woe betide you would do those).

Its important (as with any marketing project) to do some research and planning up front when considering these new collaborative web 2.0 technologies. Don’t just rush out and start Twittering your head off just because its the latest in thing. Take time to consider your client and determine whether they are Twittering. If they are then its great to use Twitter as a marketing tool but schedule the time you spend Tweeting and set goals so that you can monitor the effectiveness of your efforts. Same goes for the other Internet networking hubs, always ask yourself first and foremost if your customer is active in these and how they are using these technologies. Plan your marketing campaign up front: time spent, strategy, goals and measures. Otherwise you might find that you get to the end of the day and Twitter has sucked up all your time and nothing else on your list has been done. Take it from me I am talking from experience!.

Back by popular demand is our monthly reasons to be cheerful post where we share the new media discoveries we have made over the last month so that you too can feel the joy!

Process and operations have been a big focus lately - getting our shop in ship shape as it were so you’ll see a bit of a pattern in this month’s reasons - they all help us do business a little more effectively:

Toggl - allows you and your project managers to track their time effectively over the Net. Because its all done on-line it allows your managers to track their time even when they are at customer sites. Simple yet so powerful.

Ta-da Lists - our friends over at BlueLime Media tipped us off to this one. Here at Out-Smarts we are always writing lists for everything from sales targets and marketing to-do’s to lunches. Ta-da provides a great way to keep track of these on your desktop and to share them with colleagues. No excuses now for forgetting those 2008 resolutions.

BlogFuse - recently launched with their first app which makes it really easy for you to create a Facebook app based around your companies blog. In about 5 minutes (or so!) we were able to launch Out-Smarts first Facebook app using this sweet technology - thanks to the folks over in Kansas for that and also for their unparralleled support.

Reasons Archive:
Nov 2007
Oct 2007
Sept 07
Aug 07
Jul 07

Here’s a quandary: you have something valuable to say, you set up a blog and set about sharing your ruminations. The blog begins to attract visitors and subscribers but they trickle in at best. What do you do to attract a larger audience? Check out how other bloggers do it thats how! Here are some great success stories with vital tips you can take advantage of:
ProBlogger has a really detailed post from the writer of ThinkSimpleNow sharing the detailed strategies they used to go from zero to 2000 visitors in the space of 3 months.

Dosh Dosh celebrated 10,00 subscribers by sharing the reasons why people subscribe to that blog.

Entrepreneur Magazine featured an article from John Chow a local boy who makes huge amounts of money from his blog.

Out-Smarts has already started to implement some of the ideas these bloggers were kind enough to share and our visitor count has gone up by about 50% in just a few days. I guess the results speak for themselves.

Thanks guys!

The new Wired magazine arrived today and in it (p132) is a great map of “The Secret Life of a Blog Post” - a cartographic view of what happens between hitting publish and your post reaching its audience. Apparently when you post, your musing goes through several scrapes, pings, indexes and crawls automatically before reaching the reader.

Well that might be the case for blogs hosted in a blog service like Wordpress but I have found that for corporate branded blogs that are an extension of a companies web site that this is not the case at all: you have to do the legwork yourself if you want your blog to be picked up by all the right creepers.

Here are some tips:

• Always remember to set up auto pings or manual pings with blog engines like: Technorati so that these servers know your blog is out there and crawl it for updates and new posts.
• Remember also to submit the blog URL to search engines and set up auto pings with those too.
• And lastly submit your blog feeds to RSS aggregators or appropriate on-line media mashers.

Once you’ve done that go back to the map, track the process and you should be good.

1. Use Twitter to market to you audience (assuming your audience are Twits that is (or should that be Tweets?). It can be used for branding and networking effectively. Dosh dosh lists 17 more Twitter marketing applications and innovative Tweet uses.

2. Participate in the blogosphere. Find blogs pertaining to your industry or your target audience and get commenting. You would be amazed at how this can help spread the word.

3. Find out about new technologies that make it easier for people to do business with you - like Skype - the on-line phone service or that help you present your offering more effectively - like Flickr the photo site -  and make full use of them on your website.

4. Get creative with video clips about your company: make them quirky, funny or alternative and post on YouTube. You never know, this could be the next big meme.

5. If your not comfortable with writing blog comments or posts or are camera shy, why not consider a Podcasting your message. Its much easier than you think.

6. When you find interesting articles, pages or clips, share them with your others in your field. I Stumble but hear that Magnolia and Deli.cio.us are great for this too.

7. Join Facebook, MySpace or Linked In (or all three) and get networking. You know the old adage about a friend of a friend being your friend too: its so much easier to do business with people you’ve been referred to by a friend or colleague.

8. Use Internet advertising technologies such as AdWords or Facebook Social to reach and promote to the right audience.

9. Forums or chat rooms where your audience collaborate are great ways to get involved, join the conversation and establish expertise with a wider audience.

10. Get wiki with it. Join Wikipedia and share your knowledge (but be careful not to be blatantly corporate or your posts will just get deleted) with the global audience.

I attended a great presentation last night at the Professional Women’s Network meeting here in not so sunny Vancouver. It was all about leadership and it was great to hear that I am not the only one who gets her knickers in a twist (metaphorically speaking off course!) in advance of unknown situations.

The speaker, Tana Heminsley talked about measures that you can take in advance of challenging meetings to make it easier on yourself. I found them particularly interesting as many of these can be applied to new blogosphere participants, nervous about joining the conversation.

Preparation - in advance of a meeting Tana pointed out that its always good to find out as much as you can about the subject matter, research the topic and get a feel for issues. Same goes for the blogosphere: before commenting on blogs or launching your own blog its important to research and find out what people are already saying about your area of interest, find out what the hot topics are and watch and learn about whats appropriate in a blog and whats not.

Formulate - Once you are comfortable with the kind of information flowing in the blogoshere, it is time to contribute. Formulate your opinions on the topic in question - its always good to write them down so that you can reference back if need be. Get ready to join in.

Confidence - when contributing to the blogosphere always believe in your abilitities. You know as much as the next person and probably more and your opinions are valid - always remember that. Have confidence to launch your own blog and/or comment on others especially on a high profile sites that may make you nervous. Feel the fear and get on with it!

Reflection - its always good to reflect on your posts or comments. Don’t just write them and forget. Think about what you said, how you said it and feel proud that you were able to communicate your opinions in the way you did. Consider ways that you can get your points across more effectively next time or how you can improve on your posts to make them more interesting for your audience.

Becoming active in the blogosphere needn’t make you nervous. With a little preparation up front, a pinch of confidence and the ability to reflect and improve your contributions, you will banish blog nerves. Thanks to Tana for the inspiration!

At a session I attended this week at CES questions were posed of 4 panelists on the subject of taking the blogosphere seriously. The panelists consisted of industry experts including “rock star” blogger (the mediator’s title not mine) Ryan Block from Engadget. Here are a couple of the questions posed with my slant on the answers:

Who isn’t taking the blogosphere seriously? Answer - there are 70 million blogs out there and thousands more added daily if corporations aren’t taking it seriously then a heck of a big chunk of their client base is. Simply put there are people who get it and people who don’t. Those who do are reaping the rewards and those who don’t face extinction.

When asked how the panelists would approach convincing a CEO to blog, the general consensus seemed to be that if a company isn’t using the blogosphere (either to listen or to communicate) then they risk losing control of their brand completely.

Judging by the turnout at the session most CESers were more interested in gadgetry than the fine art of blogging - more fool them perhaps. For more ruminations from the panelists:Taking the Blogosphere Seriously, Consumer Generated Media, David La Plante, Really? This is my job.