Out-Smarts Internet Marketing

Your corporate blog is up and running. You’re off to the races with lots of witty anecdotes and already traffic to your website has increased. In order to build on this initial success, don’t forget the three C’s of blogging.

Consistency - write consistently. Many bloggers write posts daily. For corporate blogs the recognized minimum is 2 blogs per week so get on with it will you! If you can’t write consistently or if you set up a blog get others involved and you ultimately lose interest then bring it down: there’s nothing more frustrating than finding a blog that hasn’t been updated since 2005 or worse, has three posts and then nothing.

Clarity - it should always be clear to readers what your posts are about. Write short sentences and keep articles brief to maximize effect. Get your message across in the most straight forward way. People don’t have the time to read page upon page of your ruminations.

Collaboration - blogging is all about collaboration so stimulate your audience and encourage them to join in. Ask for questions and opinions in an effort to elicit comments and always remember to follow up with those who comment to encourage them to come back.

Do you have any C’s to add to the list?

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.

I see long tails all over the place these days. Its probably something to do with the book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson that I finished reading a while ago. A long tail market is one where the diverse needs of every consumer are met regardless of what makes them tick. I got to thinking about social networking and what happens once it goes beyond the masses. Will there eventually be social networks for every possible interest and segment of the population? Why not? the technology is there to do it and likely the demand too. I decided to do some research….

First everyone flocked to Facebook and MySpace - these are the popular “hit” services today with millions joining and interacting daily but change is afoot. I began to notice long tail applications within MS and FB such as the facebook dog club a social network for pooches (that incedentaly has over 270,ooo users) then I began to receive invites from other social networking applications aimed at niche segments such as Melcrum the social network for communicators, O’jeez the social network for entrepreneurs , and Naymz for professionals. Looking on Wikipedia for a list of social network I found 90 in categories ranging from football to gothic industrial culture.

Social networking is the perfect application to reach long tail maturity rapidly and I predict that today’s 90 social network sites will grow quickly to encompass corporate networking requirements as well as the networking needs of individuals no matter how diverse.

There are many reasons to be cheerful right now, it’s summer in Vancouver the sun is out and all is well with this part of the world (we’ll it is if you don’t count the municipal strike). Reasons to be cheerful indeed but these aren’t enough to justify a serious blog article are they? My warm fuzzies are thanks to developments in technology and I see these improving business processes in the near future and making my life better in general:

1. There’s finally a real alternative to cable TV in the form of Joost. Joost is a new application that allows you to watch TV shows over the Internet (sign up to try out the beta if you can). Hopefully in the near future I will be able to watch what I want when I want without being bombarded with unwanted ads.

2. My pbwiki environment just got better - they’re incorporating spreadsheet capabilities not to mention voice and IM. We use wiki technology to map out and share processes internally and to track services provided so the easier it is to communicate in different media in one application, the more streamlined our business becomes, the better the service we provide.

3. For a while now its been driving me crazy that I have multiple different logins for every social network I track. Thankfully the Facebook people have recognised my pain and incorporated Twitter so that I can have a Twitter with my Facebook friends. Its nice to see the convergence of these Web 2.0 technologies and I am hoping there will be more integration in the coming months.

Reasons to be cheerful indeed - what a wonderful world!

If you’ve been hanging around the blogosphere for any length of time you’ll probably have heard about Robert Scoble co-author of this book.  I picked up the book because I had heard that he was a prolific blogger by night and a Microsoft employee by day.  I new that he would have a story or two to relate about his blogging experiences and I was right.

Naked Conversations is a book that is written and structured well.  It was easy to enjoy and doesn’t bog you down in technical jargon.  It covers everything bus blog related from: what corporate blogging is all about and how to approach it (which companies should and shouldn’t blog); what types of blogs are out there; which companies do it well and which have failed miserably (and why).  The book gives interesting anecdotes on companies that have harnessed blogging in different forums.  It also looks at adoption rates across different parts of the world and considers why people have been fired for their blog posts.

This was a good read for me because its so pertinent to what I do.  Much of the information contained therein wasn’t new to me but there were many nuggets of inspiration and anecdotes that I can draw on in my own business blog evangelism.  I really appreciated the fact that it took on blogging from an alternative perspective from my own - that of the blogging well for blogging’s sake and the resulting positive business impact.

Every-time I read a newspaper these days there seems to be an article in there about Social Networking. Most of these talk about MySpace or Facebook in the personal context (keeping in touch with family, catching up with old friends etc) but few touch on the business implications of these new media technologies. I was pleased then to read last weeks post by One Degree - Move Over, Corporate Blogs – Make Way for Corporate Social Networks. The article discusses the collaborative aspects of these technologies and their business potential giving a great example from Specialised whose MySpace/Facebookesque page allows bikers to share stories/photos etc whilst further entrenching Specialised customer loyalty.

Social networking applications not only provide the opportunity for businesses to build loyalty, they also offer a great forum to attract new customers as witnessed in my recent lunch at Inifinity Dining here in Vancouver. I went to Infinity because the owner, Alex Rotherham, befriended me on MySpace and I was interested to find out more about their on-line efforts to develop business.

Alex told me that a whopping 75% of new business coming to the restaurant results from their on-line efforts and that they are using the MySpace application to really develop a true network of clients that they can promote events and new menus to. He found that Facebook didn’t offer the same functionality to truly reach the right network. Given that Alex, like any new proprietor, is operating on a shoestring - social networking has allowed him to easily spread the word with very little cash outlay.

“The key to MySpace marketing is having as many friends (in your targeted segment) as possible and that takes time”, said Alex in between greeting guests.

Every business new or established should seriously consider the value of social network and new media marketing not only because its more likely to hit the mark than traditional mass marketing efforts but it also costs less - way less.

The bain of my life and perhaps of anyone attempting to conduct legitimate business using the Internet is spam. On a daily basis I receive literally hundreds of spam e-mails trying to sell me something or other that I don’t need. Like most people, I’ve installed an Internet security a application with a spam filter and yet it still gets through. On the day I published my first corporate blog, I was inundated with unwanted e-mail posted to my site most of it simply disgusting.

Luckily, there’s a lot you can do to arm yourself in the battle against this unwanted intrusion. I could live to regret this but I’d like to share with you some tools that you can use to help you reduce the amount of spam you (and your audience) have to see.

If you have a blog and have your blog page set up to receive comments, you’ll likely have been the recipient of unwanted comments and trackbacks from spammers. One of the best ways to deal with this is to set up your blog so that comments must be okayed prior to posting. Another essential tool is blog spam blockers. Akismet is at the forefront of this helping Wordpress users to avoid spam by allowing them to easily download a plugin that filters and stops these messages. Other software such as Captcha protects against spam in many forms to protect blogs, wiki’s, feedback forms etc. Yet more applications and add-ins allow you to download and use spam blacklists to block them out such as Habeas.

If you have a blog or use a wiki, there are many sites out there dedicated to countering the efforts of spammers. One of my favourites is the SpamHuntress which has a running documentary of counter spam tips and real world experiences.

For more ways to protect yourself against general spam read: The Top 10 Most Popular Anti-Spam Tips, Tricks and Secrets by Heinz Tschabitscher.

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.

Many companies do great damage to their brand when developing or enhancing their web presence. Avoid these pitfalls by reading the following articles written for FMWalsh and Associates that discuss how to effectively brand your web presence.

Creating A Successful Corporate Internet Brand - Part 1
Creating A Successful Corporate Internet Brand - Part 2