The Out-Smarts Blog and Podcast

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”.

Social media for marketing and business development is the hot topic on the networking circuit in Vancouver these days and today’s SMEI event was no exception. With expert panelists from BCIT and Oracle bringing their unique experiences in SM to the panel, the event proved to be insightful.

It started off with a brief intro to Web 2.0 described as being “Tech, Process and People - but most of all collaboration” then went on to a 101 of web 2.0 terms such as RSS, blogs, podcasts for the real newbies in the audience.

Once the panelists got started the true value of the event became apparent. Justin Kestelyn, Director of Development Programs at Oracle discussed their web 2.0 adoption and the benefits they have gained from using a more transparent strategy and involving their customers and partners more. He made a great point in that by involving their customers and allowing them to have a voice these invariably become evangelists at little or no cost to Oracle. He points out that Web 2.0 is an attitude, a new way of doing business and not just an Internet term.

Next up was Robert Duncan from BCIT whose presentation centred on LinkedIn as a means of developing relationships (a topic close to my heart). He focuses on LinkedIn in particular of the social networks available and has over 800 contacts that he uses extensively to spread awareness of what he is doing at BCIT and in his work with innovators. He pointed out that by joining groups in LinkedIn you have access to all other members of that group - a great way to extend your network further. Its easier to do business with people you already know something about.
The last panelist to get up was James Wells also from BCIT and a founder of Lendary Social Financing a company that uses web 2.0 technology to build trust online and to put investors in touch with entrepreneurs looking for money. “Word of mouth is vital to growing any business these days”, he pointed out - “go out and do it - if you fail you learn”.

The conclusion - if companies don’t embrace web 2.0 then they face failure or a steep catch up. It costs very little to adopt these technologies and the benefits in terms of buzz are profound.

Interesting to see Vancouver mega blogger Miss 604 there. I am looking forward to her take on proceedings too.

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.

Lately I’ve been adding more images to my blog to brighten it up.  I’ve even been taking photographs when I am out and about.   This cartoon from Being Five explains why you haven’t seen any of them yet!

Seems like 10 is the number of the week here at Out-Smarts. We’re off to Northern Voice today and we’re so excited we’re practically rippling. Here are our ten (tongue in cheek) reasons to attend.

1. For the free lunch - didn’t you see that photo (drool).

2. To snag a T shirt - hopefully with a big Moose on the front. How Canadian eh?

3. We would do anything to get a day out of the office.

4. To get much needed and aforementioned podcasting advice.

5. Its much cheaper than the social media telesummit(although much shorter) that is also taking place this week. Granted that could be the Scottish in me coming out there.

6. To meet some rockstar bloggers. I met the Engadget guy earlier this year. I’m on a roll….

7. To find out if blogging really is dead or if its just that the early adopters have moved on to the next new thang.

8. To check out the beautiful UBC campus. Terror alert or no terror alert, we will be there.

9. To live blog on my XO. It is charging its little green and white battery as I type.

10. To make some new friends to add to my Facebook profile.

By this I mean Google juice and not pictures of hunky models. Here are 10 great ways you can easily improve your search engine positioning without putting your hands in your pocket and without having to be a SEO technodweeb.

1. Update your site regularly - this may seem obvious but many corporate sites rarely change.

2. Post a video - it can be short and sweet but has the added benefit of enhancing your image.

3. Add a podcast - we did it this week and you can too. Our traffic has gone up by about 50% since. Coincidence? I think not.

4. Label your images - most sites don’t bother but this is viable real estate on your site, use it. Image titles should relate back to your keywords and offering for maximum impact.

5. Use Google’s webmaster tools - make sure your site is crawled regularly, submit your sitemap (okay I concede you might need a technodweeb for that) and identify any problems so that you (or your technodweeb) can fix them.

6. Get bookmarks - book marks are like links the more you have the better. Hit on employees, partners and colleagues to bookmark your site.

7. Comment regularly on relevant blogs and always remember to insert your url correctly.

8. Spend some time developing a keyword map for your products and services so as to identify the most effective words to use and those to avoid.

9. Use bold and headings to identify key terms in your text.

10. This one should be first on the list but it seems so obvious I almost left it out. In case you haven’t done so, remember to submit your site to Google and other search engines otherwise there’s no hope whatsoever.

The Internet and especially the blogosphere is a breeding ground for plagiarism. People like the idea of blogging but can’t come up with good content so they steal from others. Now that’s usually okay as long as you credit the source and link back but in some cases that simply doesn’t happen.

I witnessed exactly such an event this week when Monica Hamburg’s posting Behold the Power of Facebook for Business appeared on another site on 1st February. How did I find this out? Every time another site links back to mine it shows up both in Wordpress (if they link to this blog) and in other sites like Technorati. I noticed the new link, clicked to read and follow up in true blog etiquette form only to discover no mention of the true author.

On alerting her, Monica immediately went into action with a great email she offered up on her site that others can use in dealing with situations like this:

I can see that you “added” my name, but this most certainly does not make it clear that the content is mine, nor that I wrote it. Please remove the post immediately - unless you are prepared to do the following:

1) Begin the post by CLEARLY STATING that it was written by me

2) Giving a link to the actual postIn this exact manner: “This article was written by Monica Hamburg on her blog, Me Like the Interweb, http://monicahamburg.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/behold-the-power-of-facebook-for-business/

I will be taking appropriate action if this is not performed in 2hrs.
Monica Hamburg

It worked and the piece has since been removed but it just goes to show how blatant plagiarism on the Internet has become. The good news is that due to the transparency of the web, its hard to avoid being caught out - so copycats beware get with the programme and write your own material or at the very least have the decency to link back to the rightful author!

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!

Local new media aficionado and funny girl Monica Hamburg known for her hilarious “Your Dose of Lunacy” posts and the more serious “Me Like the Interweb” blog, wrote a great piece recently on Facebook for business. Here it is in it’s entirety - you can’t fail to learn from it:

Behold the Power of Facebook For Business

With Facebook’s more than 55 million active users, it would be a tragic oversight for a company not to have a public presence on the site in some capacity. Facebook offers more than a way to keep up with friends – it has the ability to keep you in touch with your clients, gain attention for your brand and provide a more personal face for your business.

The nature of Facebook is entirely viral, and users can garner information from their friends and their interactions. Facebook can be an unintrusive way of making people aware of your business.

Recently, the social networking website has allowed businesses to create profiles for free, and innovative companies are fast employing the tool. Kris Krug, President of Raincity Studios, added the “fan page” application for his company, commenting that such an option “means companies can have a place of their own in the FB empire allowing them to send out announcements to “fans” and build up yet another presence to promote their projects, give details and promote events.”

Mhairi Petrovic uses the profile page for her company, Out-Smarts, to “extend our brand reach and reinforce it. When people become a fan, our logo appears on their website and in turn is seen by more people. Having a page and encouraging fans to join establishes Out-Smart as an innovator in social marketing (one of the services we provide).”

Utilizing this particular tool to its full capacity is the Palo Alto restaurant, Junnoon,
whose page contains essential information such as hours of operation, payment options and parking and further entices customers by prominently displaying pictures of the interior of the establishment, the food and posting its culinary philosophy, accolades and reviews.
(more…)

Here for your Friday enjoyment is a funny little clip found on YouTube all about the social networking tech bubble.  Blog in the womb indeed!