The New New Thing in Blogging: Why Blogs Are a No-Brainer for Your Business
By Kate McPherron
Why blog? What’s the value for deep business-to-business or technology companies, if a blog is so much like a PR tool of posting an article? The difference is regularity and voice: when done effectively, a blog is a very transparent tool. Microsoft proved the value of blogs by humanizing its brand. The company gave users insider information, behind the scenes, good and bad, in other words, “Yeah, we make mistakes, but here’s how can you help us improve that.”
How is a blog different from discussion-board content? It can be identical. The nice thing about a blog is that the software is already there, already built in. All the other tools, like RSS, make it more cost-effective than building your own discussion board.
Blogs are meant to establish a particular area of expertise, a specific domain. In eROI’s case, these different pieces of knowledge include e-mail marketing and its sub-themes, e.g., What makes an e-mail stand out? Use the blog to do work for your readers by writing about and searching for the best of your industry, then include snippets and links in the blog. Then you’re a repository.
Blogs help SEO (search-engine optimization) because a blog post is content-rich text that generates a new page each time a new post is added. In the template of the blog, you should have several links back to your home page. Every post of the blog will then have multiple links back into main site. Google is very good at spidering blogs, and all the search engines highly value these links.
The cost of a blog can be free, or close to it. There are lots of free blog tools out there, but you need to have a strong brand message in the blog, so there can be other costs like design and coding. But these are usually upfront; after that a blog mostly requires time to generate new content. It takes at least 30 minutes a week. If this is a drawback, try having an intern do it or write a bunch all at once, then schedule for the next few weeks/months.
Blogs are trackable (via RSS enterprise-level tracking tools). There are even free tools such as Feedster or Feedburner that allow you to track your traffic, like the WebTrends of blogging. They’ll tell you how many people come, where they come from, when, what they do, how long they stay, and so on.
Blogs promote viral marketing. Blogs can be a powerful viral tool for online marketing and PR, and are ideal for event marketing. Blogs have built-in RSS technology, so there’s an engine with which you can syndicate the content. They provide an easy way to reach media you might not reach otherwise. Very, very easily.
What should a blog have/look like? A well-designed “brand wrapper” is ideal, so that it takes advantage of built-in technology features and includes tools to make the blog searchable. Buchanan’s blog, email days, includes visuals, short text and more information in links, plus the expected etiquette enabling users to link out. A good blog also includes lead-capture mechanisms: dangled carrots like white papers, or promoted events, that capture a little bit of information on the reader each time. Most blogs invite dialogue; to engage with your readers, you can always ask them to “Please comment” or “Do you have anything to add?”
Involving new blog posters
OK, but once you start a blog, how do you get users to take part? In fact, it’s very easy to train new blog posters, inviting innovative ways to capture information. So, take a risk, do something unique—think outside the box.
Example 1: Capturing on-the-fly data.
Buchanan did a contest like television’s The Apprentice, selling vegan health bars. Each team was posting on their own blog every two hours. Most had never blogged before but learned in minutes and blogged well as they discovered what worked and what didn’t on the fly—essentially, sales and marketing research for the company.
Example 2: Increasing customer involvement.
Consider web support of the book Tony and Me, by Jack Klugman. At first, it was just another book web site, until a month after its launch when Klugman decided to start a blog. His first post was, “What the hell’s a blog?” which really connected with his fans. The blog was the perfect tool for reconnecting with the fan base, since he had been out of the limelight. It got great feedback: 36 people commented back within a week. This would not have been so simple with just a web site.
Jack’s son did moderate the blog—something you definitely want to do because of blog spam—but being “transparent” means you don’t want to screen out legitimate feedback even if it is “bad.”
One of the blog entries included video, so they used Feedburner to syndicate that video clip with iTunes. Since this was free content when iTunes was launching paid video, all of a sudden there was demand, which helped spike the web site and blog. Feedburner started with 29 folks the first week, and that jumped to almost 300 in a few weeks due to the iTunes link.
They also put the book on Wikipedia. Now, there was some risk because this is self-managed and thus self-cleansing, so if an entry is too self-promotional, it’ll get dumped. But the book, web site and blog were considered resources, so they got good play.
The new New thing is social tagging
This is hugely popular because it works—really web-like navigation built into the design of the blog and one-click RSS syndication—so it blurs the difference between blogs and web sites. For example, Delivery Agent talks about the products that people wear, and gets revenue from affiliate links with online stores on the site. This becomes viral with a contest, for example, to spot an item someone is wearing. This in turn creates a culture of watching what people are wearing, with spotters who post new content and get “points” for the number of posts. Those viral components are very powerful.
Some 75 million Americans use RSS, and the power of that is built into blogging. Blogging is making a powerful tool really affordable.
Social tagging. del.icio.us, dig, flicker and other online communities provide relevant search results. You can subscribe to articles or feeds with those tag areas. When setting up or editing your account, you can select from tag categories or choose your own. When creating your own content, put a list. One-click RSS will automatically link from, say, flicker, to, say, dig, a site that gives “diggs” as a way to rank how popular an item is.
What about approvals/legal issues? Most blog software has approval processes built in. But how those are used ultimately depends on the corporate culture, because a blog must be spontaneous. It’s not limited by company size: Microsoft has 5,000 bloggers. Adobe has them, and IBM, too.
Monetizing blogs. Some models include affiliates and banner advertising, but the most common is lead capture, PR, brand exposure, candidate targeting and educating, and conversion.
Conclusion
There are so many touch points; that’s why blogging is No. 1 on the Top 10 list of Marketing Things To Do. “Coopetition” means we help each other out with knowledge; an insiders’ community. Blogging is almost old news now, but we still aren’t implementing it!
Resources
About the author
Kate McPherron, a technology evangelist, has helped technology and industrial firms manage and market their products and services for the past 20 years. She can be reached at klm54@cornell.edu.
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