Out-Smarts Internet Marketing

Corporate blogging is a regular topic here with the focus often on the positive promotional benefits a good corporate blog can bring. I was reminded lately of the impact of blogs as a tool to facilitate market research when I read an article in this month’s CPSA’s Contact Magazine called “The Battle Over Blogs” by Ally Motz. A random study conducted by SiriusDecisions of the media mentions of 10 large software companies discovered that consumer product or service experience posts were, for the most part, not positive in nature.

The article looked at this prevalence of negativity in blog postings and pointed out that this feedback provided a valuable opportunity. If companies monitor what’s being said about them they can respond more effectively to negative PR and can improve their offering based on real customer insights.

Monitoring blog comments and posts relating to your product is a must and will help you keep your finger on the pulse of your business. Criticism is never easy to take and a thick skin is an asset. Look on the blogosphere as an opportunity for your company to track user sentiment and by doing so you will uncover a mine of information to improve your product offering, enhance your service standards and promote your offering more effectively. The best part is that all this key data can be unearthed at a much lower cost than via traditional market research studies such as surveys and its all right there today waiting to be tapped.

1. Customer Service - your company could provide a blog aimed at improving customer service. Users can share their experiences of using the your company’s product or services but beware, not everyone will be positive about their experience giving you the perfect opportunity to resolve their issues and prove your customer service excellence in the blogosphere. Not only that but it provides the perfect forum to monitor customer preferences.
2. Which leads me to market research - your blog, the comments it gets and the blog of others in your community are vital resources that you should be using to conduct market research.
3. Humanising - a blog can be used to put a face on your company familiarising customers and prospects with the people behind the brand and building trust. Company board members and staff members can contribute and in so doing make them seem more real - more approachable. See the effect company wide blogging had on Microsoft as referenced in Naked Conversations.
4. Internal communication portal - a blog is a great way to communicate personnel changes, policy updates, CEO commentary and company events.
5. Establish expertise - this is the main focus of this blog i.e. to show people like you that we know what we’re talking about so that perhaps you’ll think of us us when considering your Internet marketing strategy.
6. Expand Network - a blog is a great way to expand your network. Its always good blog practice to respond to those who comment on your web page and in so doing you are establishing contact and networking.
7. Leads - I am not too enthused about using a blog to generate leads but it can be done. Remember if you do this though that outright selling and self promotion are considered taboo in the blogosphere and will only piss people off.
8. Brand - a blog is a great way to further entrench your brand.
9. Generate revenue - many successful blogs put their traffic to good advantage by promoting related products and affiliate services to them through ads that are tailored to the intended audience and earn affiliate revenues in doing so.
10. Grow your base - a blog is a great way to extend your companies reach beyond its traditional geographical base. This blog gets comments and traffic from people as far and wide as India and the UK.

Outsmart Sales and Marking is going through a transition to focus on new marketing methods rather than traditional ones and during this time of change we’ve had 2 websites mirroring each other www.outsmartsales.com and www.out-smarts.com. We did this to give us the chance to tweak the new site until its right for launching (it’s still a work in progress - watch for a new look really soon). We thought that if we didn’t register the site with the search engines, didn’t promote links or use ads then no one would find it. How wrong this assumption has proven to be. I can safely say that the new Out-Smarts site is getting almost 75% of the traffic that the Outsmartsales one gets with no promotion at all, none, nada.

The reason for all this traffic is the blog itself. By blogging regularly and adding value the site is being noticed and gaining loyalty in the blogosphere which means increased traffic. Not only that but the Google juice is really flowing - when Googled the site has strong positioning and regularly appears high in the rankings.  Not quite what you’d expect from a site that’s supposed to be flying under the radar until the launch in September. Just goes to prove that blogging regularly has true tangible benefits and measurable impact on the traffic to your site.

Worried that your good work could be plagiarised or that someone’s going to steal your thunder on the Internet and not reference your writing appropriately? There’s a solution to every problem and this one comes in the form of Creative Commons. An offshoot of a US non profit organisation , Creative Commons was founded in 2003 with the help of the University of Ottawa Law and Technology Program and the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

The service allows you to license your work easily and at no cost. With various different license offerings based on how much freedom you want to give people to use your writing and in which forums, Creative Commons steps you through an easy process to find the right license and then you simply download some HTML to your web-site and your covered like so:

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License

People using the works are then morally and legally obliged to use them accordingly (or not at all if you so choose). Whether or not people act appropriately remains to be seen and there’s also the issue of the global reach of the Internet with different laws governing different jurisdictions but if this plagiarism is a concern for you then Creative Commons is definately a step in the right direction to protecting your work.

If you write a regular blog then you’ve no doubt suffered from blog writers fatigue. It gets us all from time to time: you wake up one morning and you have no inspiration - can’t think of what to write and can’t be bothered. Here are a few ideas that you can use to counter this symptom of blogging:

1. Read, read, read - open the newspaper, read articles in magazines and on-line publications and books: you’re sure to find inspiration for a post.

2. Share the responsibility - get other members of staff, partners and even customers to contribute to your blog thus providing a fresh viewpoint for readers.

3. Think outside the box - cover a topic that is peripheral to your business - one that you wouldn’t normally cover in a typical blog post but that is still relevant to your central subject.

4. Just do it - stop making excuses: you’ve started a blog and you see the benefit in terms of increased traffic - its takes discipline and commitment to have a successful blog so just quit the complaining and get it done - its worth it.

5. Take inspiration from every day experiences - Have you had an experience in your every day existence that strikes a cord? Share these experience in your blog. It could be as simple as a positive customer service experience or a negative one that made your blood boil.

6. Ask friends - this is my favorite one and one I use it often. If I am stuck for an idea for a blog post subject, I’ll ask friends and colleagues for suggestions. You will be amazed by the ideas a fresh mind can come up with. I have my husband to thank for this one!

7. Attended and event, trade-show, presentation or movie? - review it in your blog.

8. Been on vacation? - I like to use travel as an inspiration as it gives me the chance to review how things are done differently in other places and to share these new innovations with you.

9. Learned something new? - if there have been new developments pertinent to an old blog post there’s no reason why you can’t write an new post based on a previous one giving your audience an update on developments.

10. Reward yourself! - if your having a day when you’d rather have teeth pulled than write a post, then give yourself and incentive and reward yourself when its done. I have a penchant for chocolate so Green and Blacks here I come.

My daughter who is in Grade 1 recently came home all demoralized: one of the kids in her class had written some negative comments about one of her stories and she felt bad about it. I explained to her that everyone is entitled to their opinion and that simply by having the nerve to write the story in the first place and let her friends read it made her brave and smart.

The whole episode got me thinking about blogging. When you blog, you must expect that not everyone who reads will agree with you. Prepare yourself for it - be brave! You’ll sometimes get negative comments but the simple act of blogging gives people the opportunity to learn from your insights and you can learn from them in turn. Fortunately for bloggers (unlike my daughters story episode), we can choose to read and review all comments prior to posting and root out those that contain spam or aren’t constructive or applicable but I always encourage people to post comments that have valuable counter arguments or added insight - even if its a post from the competition. In this way your blog will gain credibility with your audience, you will give readers the chance to see all sides of the equation and it will encourage more comments from interested parties.

One of the objections to blogging that I regularly hear is that “it’s for a younger crowd”. Well, it turns out that the demographic landscape of the blogosphere is changing and companies should take note before the get left behind.

A recent survey conducted by TSN Canadian Facts into blogging, social networking and gaming trends found that 50% of Canadians on the Internet use blogs. Granted, most of those who have their own blogs are teenagers but I was happy to see that 38% of the over 50 wired crowd were actively reading or commenting on blogs (a percentage that grows steadily through the younger age brackets) and that only 9% of Canadians in Western Canada surveyed hadn’t heard of blogs.

These statistics suggest to me that blogging is quickly being accepted by the masses as a vital source of independent information. Companies take note the burgeoning demand across all age groups: if you don’t feed the need by blogging and prove your worth in this medium, you risk becoming dinosaurs - relics of an earlier age.

And what better a way to facilitate this than to take advantage of the fact that the majority (78%) of the incoming workforce are already using blogging technology socially and expect to use these professionally too - according to a recent article by Information week entitled Younger Workers Demanding Web 2.0 Tech on the Job.

I had the opportunity tonight to attend my first Professional Women’s Network meeting and I must say what a pleasure to meet so many smart ladies doing invaluable work, especially given the typically male dominated events I have been attending of late.

But enough of that, I want to talk about the presentation which was given by AHA Creative Strategies co-founder and CEO, Ruth Atherle called “Maximizing the Power of Web Communication Tools” and specifically the security issue that came up.

Ruth did an excellent job in discussing the advantages to having a corporate blog and the reasons why every company should have one such as establishing your credibility and driving prospects to your web site.

The talk quickly came around to the perceived downsides to blogging and I’d like to provide a brief synopsis of the security issue: how safe and secure is it to blog?

It’s a question that has constantly plagued Internet business innovators and Ruth countered it well by pointing out that the Internet is in many ways safer than the physical world in that you have a barrier between you and potential harm doers:the worst that can be done is to place unwanted comments on your blog and you can counter these by looking on them as an opportunity to address the issue in a positive manner the public forum, choosing to vet all comments before posting or, as a last resort and unlikely to happen you can contact a lawyer.

It was noted that bloggers are in general upstanding members of the community and are loyal, when someone posts inappropriate comments they tend to rally round in support.

As far as I am concerned, I believe that we all have a right to our opinions and if we wish to use blogging as a means to share our knowledge and establish our areas of expertiese we should feel comfortable in doing so. However, anyone who is ready to put up a business blog must accept that it will open their business up to critisicm and counter opinions and they should put in place policy guidelines to help guide contributors and establish limits.

Here’s a link to AHA’s blog which has some great resources for anyone seriously considering blogging as a means to enhance their marketing efforts.

To save me time and effort I like to subscribe to information on the web and have it come to me so that I can read and enjoy when I have a moment. Doing so helps me avoid the frustration of sifting through the internet wilderness trying to re-find cool feeds I have enjoyed in the past. My tool of choice to do this is Google Reader.

I recently wrote a blog piece that describes how to easily set up and use this to your advantage. Read The Scoop on Google Reader for a Google Reader How To….

Did you know that the Forrester Group estimates that there will be 100 million bloggers worldwide this year and that there are a further 200 million ex bloggers who got bored and gave up the ghost? Did you also know that around 40% of people who write on-line have had their work published in other media?

Its true there is a lot of opinions out there in the blogosphere jostling for attention. Many of them are intelligently presented and many seem to be pure drivel (I guess thats purely subjective) but if you are patient and consistent in your blogging and you have something unique and interesting to say - your blog will draw attention and it will have the added benefit of keeping your customers and prospects up to date with what’s happening at your organisation.

Remember, the key is consistency - if you can’t consistently post a valuable peice (minimum 2 per week) then you may as well not to bother. If that’s a struggle for you then get creative - ask colleagues, customers and employees to write for you or simply link back to articles you’ve found on the web yourself that are relevant and appropriate and introduce them by summarising why you found them interesting.