August 2006 Archives

Being a new form of communication, blogs have yet to find their exact niche. The questions of whether bloggers are journalists, and to what extent they are protected by the First Amendement, remain open. Corporations should pay attention to and get involved in the discussion--the issues impact a company's policies with regard to its blog's content and comments.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers a comprehensive rundown of pertinent legal issues.

Commentary from David L. Hudson on blogging and the First Amendment.

Commentary from Jennifer L. Peterson on the touchy subjects of defamation, privacy, and copyright protection.

An A-to-Z explanation of podcasting legal issues from Creative Commons.

Do you have information to share? Please let us know!

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the art and science of driving qualified traffic to a Web site. All SEM programs should operate on two fronts--paid search and organic search.

Paid search encompasses a wide range of advertising options, the most familiar being pay per click advertising. Properly executed, paid search is one of the most efficient and measurable forms of advertising a company can engage in.

Organic search involves engineering the company Web site to be search engine-friendly. When properly constructed and maintained, a Web site achieves high search engine rankings on relevant searches and therefore attracts highly qualified traffic.

A corporate blog enhances organic search--big time. Here's how.

1. Blogs continually add fresh content, a site characteristic stongly favored by search engines.

2. Blogs can (and should) contain relevant, keyword-rich content, providing multiple opportunities for online searchers to find the company site.

3. Blogs contain numerous outbound links and incoming links, or backlinks. Both types are rewarded by search engines, especially incoming links from high traffic sites.

4. A blog establishes a company's presence on the widely expanding array of blog-specific search engines and directories. More and more, customers, suppliers, and journalists first search blogs when looking for information about a company, its products, and its performance.

5. By engineering the blog with a variety of search-engine friendly features, such as using bold and/or large fonts in key areas, the blog will steadily improve in search engine performance. (This, by the way, is an area where Whoast can greatly assist in separating a company's blog from the pack.)

Is organic SEM a reason to launch a corporate blog? Perhaps. Since the overwhelming majority of Americans use search engines to find products and services, it would be dangerous for any company to underestimate its need for a strong Web presence. But even when a company has more compelling reasons to blog, such as opening up a new communication medium for its customers, improved SEM is a superb side benefit that will only grow in value.

Blogs are here, but where are they going?

Neville Hobson reports on the latest blog trends from a Pew Internet study.

Duncan Riley predicts a tsunami in The Blogging Times. If blogging can be said to have a status quo, it won't be around for long.

Jiboneus predicts an audio-based blogosphere in this short and entertaining post.

An excellent discussion of trends in blogging and traditional journalism from Steven Berlin Johnson, highlighting how bloggers and journalists are defining new roles for themselves and each other.

Do you have predictions, ideas, or information to share? Please let us know!

Once you start blogging, you can tap into all sorts of online support tools to make the job easier. Here are a few.

Technorati is a widely used blog search engine and link tracker. Among many other things, Technorati tells you how many blogs link to yours, the ranking (popularity) of those linking blogs, and how your blog ranks in terms of links. Over time, these statistics help you gauge the growth of your audience.

BlogRolling automates the job of building a blogroll. On many blog platforms, the task requires cutting and pasting URL's into HTML code, a rather tedious and time-consuming affair. With BlogRolling, you can add a site to your blogroll with one click. BlogRolling also shows you the number of times your blogroll has been viewed, providing a quick handle on your traffic.

Feedburner is a feed management provider that you can use on your blog to process subscriptions. A nice Feedburner option is the ability to offer site feeds via email, which is more intuitive and convenient than news aggregators for many subscribers. Feedburner also offers a variety of tools for tracking and measuring subscription traffic and monetizing your blog.

Bloglines, in their own words, "is a FREE online service for searching, subscribing, creating, and sharing news feeds, blogs, and rich Web content." Instead of surfing your favorite blogs for new content, use Bloglines to see them all in one place. With Bloglines, it becomes easy to keep track of hundreds of blogs (or traditional Web sites that offer feeds). Although many sites aggregate subscriptions, this one is the most intuitive and versatile.

PubSub tracks new blog posts that match keyword phrases you enter into a "subscription stack." Marketers use PubSub to keep tabs on what people are saying about their company, new products, and the competition.

IceRocket, the powerful and popular blog search engine, is another great way to get time-critical information. IceRocket works like a normal search engine, but search matches are listed in order of how recently they were posted. If you want to know what's happening in the blogosphere now, IceRocket is the place to find out.

del.icio.us is a bookmarking site that allows you to tag, save, and share URL's of your favorite blog posts and Web pages. With user-defined tags, del.icio.us allows you to categorize URL's any way you want--advantageous if you're saving information for research, reporting, or sharing with colleagues.

Please let us know about other helpful blogging sites!

Blogs are, of course, part of a bigger marketing picture. And because of rapidly evolving technology, conventional thinking about marketing is fast becoming obsolete. Here are just a few examples of how the experts are re-evaluating tactics and strategy.

ProBlogger Darren Rowse explains how to target your readers. An example of social networking at work.

A fascinating post from 2004 by Jennifer Rice in her Mantra Brand Consulting blog titled "Brand as Ecosystem". Putting blogs in a broader marketing context, she looks at brand building as a series of connections, not components.

Guy Kawasaki discusses Chris Anderson's groundbreaking book on marketing, "The Long Tail". The advent of online niche marketing needs to be considered in business blog strategy.

A brief but powerful post from BtoBOnline.com about how blogs improve Web traffic and media attention.

Do you have a blog post to share? Please let us know!

To expand on our recent post about why a business should blog, we want to offer just a few ideas of how you can use a blog.

Executive blogs are authored by the person calling the shots, or someone very close. They tend to be popular, because people always want to know what the company leader thinks. Mark Cuban's blog, Blog Maverick, is one of the best. Ideally, the executive will do his own writing, but sometimes, he or she gets help.

Employee blogs can be just as popular. Typically, an employee blog will offer help and insight on a particular product or service offered by the company. Microsoft, for instance, runs many employee blogs to support its various software products. For instance, this Microsoft employee writes about some highly technical products in his blog, Solutions Monkey. An employee blog such as this might have a long or short life span.

Thought leadership blogs are less concerned with specific products and services, and more concerned with providing insight and new ideas. Such blogs indirectly enhance sales by building the company's reputation for innovation and expertise. A good esample is Creating Passionate Users, written by Kathy Sierra and some other talented contributors, offers extremely edgy and though-provoking commentary on marketing topics.

News aggregator blogs provide links to other blogs and Web sites with content of high interest to a particular industry. The strategy here is for the company to become the "go-to" site for industry news. GM's popular FastLane blog, besides being a great example of executive blogging, positions itself as the place to go for information about GM and auto industry trends.

News blogs may or may not encourage online conversation, but the other types definitely do. As comments roll in, a company can see how the public is reacting to a product, a position statement, some bad press, a new idea. Comments are unfiltered, immediate, and (at times) brutally honest. That kind of market intelligence is hard to come by and hard to beat.

"Best of the Blogs" is a selection of helpful and thought-provoking posts from around the blogosphere. Today the topic is blogs.

Detailed statistics on the growing popularity of blogs from WebMetricsGuru. Advertisers will notice a high percentage of blog surfers are at the high end of the income spectrum.

The difficulty of achieving quality content on blog posts provokes a lively discussion on ProBlogger.

Suggestions on how to measure blog performance from SEOmoz. Tracking results is critical for business blogs. There's more ways to do it than you might think.

A list of top blogs for and about entrepreneurs from Scott Allen at About.com. Excellent resources for businesses of any size, really.

Do you have a blog post to share? Please let us know!

Whether a company blogs in-house or out depends a lot on internal resources. Although they are inexpensive in terms of software and programming, blogs take considerable time to write and market. For example--

Posting on a frequent basis attracts a steady audience. You should strive for at least one post every workday.

Responding to comments is a good problem to have if your blog becomes popular. Promptly getting involved in online discussion of your own posts attracts and holds your audience.

Building a blogroll. Links and information are valued in the blogosphere. Most blogs have a list of favorite blogs, or a blogroll, on the sidebar. For many visitors, a helpful blogroll may be as important as your actual content.

Social networking is sometimes the most effective way to build traffic. By visiting other blogs, leaving comments, and striking up online business relationships, you encourage other bloggers to visit your site and recommend it to their audience.

Active search engine marketing likewise builds an audience, often in a big way. Common SEM techniques include optimizing content (especially on headlines and hyperlinks), registering with blog directories, notifying search engines of updated content, and managing and promoting subscriptions via RSS feeds. (Get some ideas from blog guru Steve Rubel on how to use RSS feeds.)

If you or your staff is ready, willing, and able, running the blog in-house has advantages. No one from the outside has your industry, company, and product knowledge. Writing posts from the inside adds a level of authenticity and openness visitors crave.

On the other hand, outsourcing to experts saves time and delivers a more professional-looking and more effectively marketed blog.

As usual, the soundest approach is somewhere in between. A workable mix is to hire reliable outside talent for content development and SEM, but maintain editorial control on the inside. Often, writing responsiblities can be shared among employees and outside writers. As long as the company has a blog champion, any combination of resources can get the job done.

When laying out a blog strategy, companies should handle comments with care. Blogs are informal, conversational social networks--unfamiliar marketing territory for a lot of organizations. Usually, concern about comments centers on negative comments and legal issues. While there are no cut-and-dry answers, consider these points as you look for an approach that is right for you.

1. Allowing all comments without review is the most freewheeling policy. For obvious reasons, this option is not often used for business blogs, unless the aim is to shock or provoke controversy.

2. Allowing comments with moderation is a sound middle ground. By moderating comments, you can edit out inappropriate text or remove it entirely. The company can elect to review comments before or after they are made public. The tradeoff here is speed versus discretion. The faster a visitor sees her post, the better she will like it--slow publication of comments tends to irritate visitors. If you have the ability to review comments quickly, publishing comments after review will work fine.

3. Not allowing comments is the most conservative approach. Since many blog surfers highly value the conversational quality of blogging, a no-comment policy may make it quite difficult to build an audience. On the other hand, lots of people neither leave comments nor particularly care to read them. Established blogs have more flexiblity with commenting. Marketing guru Seth Godin does not allow comments, but it has not seemed to diminish his popularity.

4. Look at your platform. Some blog platforms, such as MovableType, allow you to change comment settings for each post. Others, such as Blogger, set comment rules globally. Selectively allowing comments may be an appealing option.

5. Look at your objectives. Seems like the obvious--but how often do we overlook it? If your blog is meant to assist in a new product launch, customer feedback is critical. But, if your blog serves as an informational resource with links to major industry sites, comments may not be important at all.

6. Make sure your legal team is in the loop. Internet law is evolving--to determine what kind of commenting (and posting, for that matter) might put a company at risk, consult the experts. A key to successful blogging is being able to balance legal considerations with genuine and open communication. It is being done all the time--but it takes work!

7. Finally, don't be afraid to experiment. Comment settings and internal policies can--and should--be changed as circumstances dictate. The better you know your audience, the easier it will be to find the right approach.