The Out-Smarts Blog and Podcast

A recent article by a local Vancouver writer Sheena Daniels, in Blitz Magazine debated the benefits of newsletters versus blogs. A blog and newsletter are two totally distinct tools marketers can use to grow their business. Each should be aimed at an entirely different audience and used for different purposes.

The article points out 3 important considerations should you have to choose between the two:

1. Audience you are trying to reach;

2. Internal resources available;

3. Message you are trying to communicate.

Unless limited by the 3 above, why choose between the a blog or a newsletter at all? Each can and should be used for distinct purposes to enhance marketing communications and by using both you can hone in on 2 distinct audiences with distinct marketing messages and increase effectiveness of each.

A newsletter, unless you’re a spammer, is aimed at adding value to existing contacts, partners and customers (people that have already “touched” you) and should be used to keep your company at the forefront in the minds of those important in your network and to reinforce your presence with them.

An blog is aimed at a wider audience many of whom are unknown entities. It should be used to bring attention to what you do, spreading awareness and establish expertise with new prospects or new markets. They key difference is that a blog is a collaborative medium aimed at supporting on-line interaction between interested parties via comments. Its a two way street whereas newsletters are a one way push.

Both are complementary technologies and as the article points out, you can blog a newsletter via RSS allowing your efforts to reach people the way they want to be reached. But consider this, if you intend to focus on newsletters and use RSS you cannot call this a blog as the article suggests, not unless your newsletters go out at least once a week. A corporate blog, to be considered effective and established should be updated once a week at the very least.

Last month saw our first 2 podcasts and there’s more to come.  Wouldn’t you like to share the Podcasting learning process I am going through it so that when its your turn you can learn from my mishaps?  This week I recorded the first podcast interview on the hop in a coffee shop near the beach, lots of background noise and all.  I was trying out a Belkin plugin for my iPod which worked like a dream.  Sound was great, the process to record and upload was all automated and very simple - perfect.  Podcasting couldn’t be easier.

I was lulled into a false sense of security however.  The problems began when I tried to do some editing with Garageband.  Not an easy task as I found out and this isn’t my first time using it either by a long shot.  Garageband isn’t as intuitive as I’d like it to be, its slow and cumbersome.  And wizard would help - if you’re listening Apple.  Now I am trying out Audacity but off course how to import a file from an iPod to Audacity: the fun goes on.

There is another Podcast planned soon this time over Skype which brings more technology to the mix guaranteeing another interesting experience.  With any luck the interview recorded this week will finally be published by then.  Watch out for the uncut version - coming soon!

My experiences have led me to believe that Podcasting is far from being a medium for the masses.  Not yet anyway.  Before it can become mainstream, it has to go through a simplification process making it easier for the non tech majority to adopt and enjoy its benefits.  In the meantime, if Podcasting is something on your corporate agenda, hire a professional and save yourself some pain.

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.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing takes advantage of the fastest growing networking hubs on the Internet to enable companies to reach out, collaborate and market effectively to their target audience in their on-line haunts.

Out-Smarts’ services include:

• Social Media Strategy - where do your prospects hang out on-line and how to reach them;
• Corporate Facebook Pages - we build and manage effective Facebook presences;
• Facebook Applications - developing innovative add-ins that promote your business.

Out-Smarts works with clients to determine which networks clients are active in and which are most appropriate to their industry, what messages will appeal to their niche audience in these forums and determines and implements the best approach to using these burgeoning technologies to effectively:

• increase brand awareness;
• create buzz;
• promote and advertise products and services;
• generate sales;
• establish expertise;
• drive more web site traffic
• showcase and demonstrate product effectiveness.

Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube alone get millions of visitors daily. Tap into this vital social phenomenon and reach this vast untapped audience, contact Out-Smarts today to find out how.

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.
Read more

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.

Julie Anderson, VP of Marketing at PeopleMaps was kind enough to share their experiences with corporate blogging on our Facebook discussion forum. PeopleMaps puts blog technology to good use for different purposes in their organisation:

“PeopleMaps has been blogging for a while - and we do it in a few different ways:

We use our main company blog as our news channel out to all our audiences. We ask new customers to subscribe to email updates to be sure they’re kept up to date with our activities. We don’t blog all the time on this channel - people are too busy to read our news every day!

We use 2 other blogs to speak to two separate audiences - our consumer audience and our corporate audience. This allows us to be specific in our topics - and builds up our traffic independently from our website SEO and online advertising activities.

Internally we blog to keep various other groups informed of our activities - e.g. our shareholders. These blogs are private as we don’t want just anyone to read that info - the blog technology is just really easy to use and a great way to push out information informally, without relying on email.

Oh, and we use Typepad currently as it was the easiest platform to get started with. We’re messing around with WordPress for some other activities though.”

Out-Smarts has a business profile in Facebook and within a day of creating our page we have 7 fans! We’re testing the waters to see how we can use this profile to share our knowledge and expertise; to collaborate with interested parties and to assess if Social Ads is a viable Internet advertising tool. Become a fan and check up on our progress or submit to our discussions - the current one being innovative corporate blog uses.