This Crafter is No Dummy

Posted on December 16, 2009 by Paul

I met a woman this week at the Supergenius conference who’s quietly making her mark on the giant crafting business. If I was writing a book, I might even call Jenny Barnett Rohrs a New Influencer.

Jenny is a professional music therapist who put that career aside for a few years to care of her kids. But the artistic instinct didn’t die amid the PBJ sandwiches and homework. The Lakewood, Ohio mom continued her passion of crafting and nearly two years ago launched a blog under the clever name of Craft Test Dummies.

Jenny was urged on by husband Jeff, who works at ExactTarget, an e-mail marketing term. Jeff knows a thing or two about digital promotion, and he urged Jenny to sweat the basics in organizing her site, writing good headlines and tagging all content. Jenny further promoted her own brand by volunteering to write for CraftCritique.com, a popular reviews site. Her Facebook fan page is a cornucopia of advice and offers. There’s a Ning community. And she’s on Twitter because, well, who isn’t?

The result: Craft Test Dummies is now the number nine result on Google for the keyword “crafting,” beating out even very large retail enterprises. Imagine that. In a population of hundreds of millions of crafting enthusiasts worldwide, this blogger has reached search nirvana in less than two years all by herself. Now Jenny gets hundreds of daily visitors, invitations to speak and samples from crafting supply makers around the country who hope to get one of her coveted reviews. She gets paid to demonstrate at trade shows and craft fairs and recently signed a contract to consult for an online retailer.

Jenny Rohrs is successful because she took care of the basics:

The blog is polished and well-organized. Categories are selected with care. Entries are thoroughly tagged;
The site is optimized for search. One trick: nearly every page title contains the word “craft” or “crafting;”
Jenny’s a good member of the community. She links to crafters she respects and they return the favor;
She uses every platform to her advantage, and the cross-links create more search awareness;
Most importantly, Jenny writes good stuff. Her entries are conversational, friendly and easy to read. They’re also full of ideas and advice. Not only does this appeal to crafting enthusiasts, but Google is tuned to love that kind of content.

With so many millions of blogs out there, you might fear that it’s too late to get into the game. But look at the results that this recent entrant has achieved. The secret is to deliver good content in an accessible format and to spread the word through as many channels as possible. The total cost of all the social media platforms Jenny Rohrs uses is $0. Her time may be invaluable, but the tools are cheap.

Integrating Social Media Platforms? Let’s Talk

Posted on December 16, 2009 by Paul

Photo by Adam_T4. Click for profile.

I’m undertaking a research project to assess the value of integrated social media marketing programs to a company’s overall strategy. I have a sponsor for it (who has to remain anonymous for the moment because of an upcoming product announcement) and am seeking others.

Here’s the premise: One of the big changes we’ve seen in the social media marketing landscape over the past year is that companies are beginning to expand beyond using point social tools such as blogs and Facebook fan pages and building multiplatform programs that incorporate elements like video, podcasts, social networks, Twitter and branded customer communities. Early feedback indicates that there may be a multiplier effect that comes from integrating these programs. In other words, when you tweet your blog entries, you get better results than if you had used each platform independently of the other.

This research attempts to assess what best practices are emerging at these early stages. In my dreams, it’ll also yield some kind of formula for calculating this multiplier. There are two parts to the research:

A survey; and
One-on-one interviews.

I invite everyone who coordinates social media efforts for a business with multiple employees to take the survey by filling out the form below. It probably takes about 20 minutes to complete if you respond to the optional verbatim questions and less than 10 minutes if you don’t.

I’m also seeking marketers at medium to large companies to consent to an in-depth telephone interview of approximately 30-45 minutes’ duration. I’ll ask you to will expand upon some of the information you provide on the survey.

I’m hoping you’ll agree to go on the record for the phone interview, but I’m flexible if that’s a problem.

Please contact me by any of the means listed below if you’re interested in helping with my research, or just add a comment at the end of this post. Thank you!

E-mail

paul@gillin.com

pgillin@gmail.com

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+1-508-656-0734

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Message to Marketing Graduates

Posted on December 8, 2009 by Paul

Photo by Shoshanah (click for Flickr page)

I spent 90 minutes speaking to Dr. Nora Barnes’ social media marketing class at the University of Massachusetts/Dartmouth this morning. I try to speak to college classes at least four or five times a year, in part to give back something to the next generation and in part to learn more about what’s on their minds.

I asked the students – all of them senior marketing majors – the same question I always ask college classes: How many of you subscribe to a daily newspaper? The response was pretty typical: three students out of a class of 34.

Here are some of the things I told them:

Much of what you’ve learned about marketing over the last four years will be irrelevant five years from now. The field is changing too quickly. You’ve been learning about how to tell a story and position a brand, but in the future your job will be much more about listening to customers and working collaboratively on brand definition.
You should discard much of what your teachers have been telling you about the media. Traditional media is collapsing and what emerges from the rubble will look very different than the institutions we now know.
The best skills you can bring into the marketing field today are resourcefulness and curiosity. You must be willing to reinvent your skills constantly because the playing field is in a constant state of turmoil. This is very exciting for you and it’s very scary for the people you will be working for. Be sympathetic, but don’t get stuck doing things the old way.
Traditional media was built upon a foundation of inefficiency. The clothing retailer who wanted to reach the .01% of the population who want to buy a wedding gown at any given time has had to pay for the 99.9% who don’t. That’s crazy, but it’s the only way we could get a message across in the past.
The worlds of media and marketing are undergoing enormous improvements in efficiency right now. Unfortunately, efficiency is usually painful because it destroys institutions that were built upon inefficiency – institutions like newspapers and magazines. In the end, we’ll be better off, but we’re still in the ugly destruction phase right now.
In the last decade, Americans have shift from browsing to searching for information. This has huge implications for the way decisions of all kinds will be made in the future. Search engine marketing and search engine optimization should be part of any core university marketing curriculum today.
The shriveling of traditional media creates new opportunities for organizations — and that includes businesses — to fill the trust gap that’s been left behind. Businesses can become media if they so choose. Most of them haven’t accommodated themselves to that fact.
Trust is complex in the new world because we are losing our traditional trusted brands. I trust Wikipedia to tell me the date the Yalta Treaty was signed, but not necessarily to interpret the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Trust is also situational. We are learning to trust some sources for certain kinds of information but not for others. It will take time for us to sort this out.
Today, individuals can choose to be celebrities all by themselves. They need to have something interesting to say and the knowledge to use new channels to say it. This is very cool. We no longer have to depend on others to decide if we can be important or not
This is a great time to be a college student getting into marketing. The old guard is struggling to learn the new tools that this generation intuitively understands. Companies like Edelman are going so far as to create reverse mentoring programs in which younger employees train senior executives. This doesn’t mean you young people know it all. Be open-minded about learning from the experience of others and be generous about sharing what you know.
In the old days, the marketer’s job was to media-train a few key executives. In the future, the marketer’s job will be to media-train the entire company. This will be enormously empowering for marketers.
Marketing’s traditional role has been to talk. Its future role will be to listen. Branding and positioning will be defined as much by a company’s constituents as by its employees. If you choose simply to talk, people will choose simply not to hear you. Marketers have an unprecedented opportunity to increase their importance in the organization by becoming listeners.
Messages spread from the bottom up much faster than they spread from the top down. Cindy Gordon’s story at Universal Studios is just one example. She told seven people the news and within a couple of days, 250 million others knew.

And finally: By the time you graduate, have a LinkedIn profile. And for goodness sake, clean up your Facebook profile!

More Tips for Unblocking the Idea Jam

Posted on November 30, 2009 by Paul

This is the second installment in a multi-part series on how to write killer content for your blog. It continues the thread I began last week on how to come up with ideas for topics.

Defy conventional wisdom. This is an old newspaper columnist trick, but it works well. Think of a topic that most people agree upon and argue the exact opposite point of view. For example, try to build a case for why social networks are a passing fad or the New York Jets are the team to beat in the NFL this year (okay, that last one’s a stretch). You have to think creatively to argue your point, and the result may be more satire than opinion, but just let the idea take you where it wants to go. Going against conventional wisdom is one of the best ways to fuel creativity.

Get Angry. The best writing is driven by emotion. Think about something you’ve heard or seen recently that really made you mad. Are there lessons you can share? Or can you abstract the issue into a more general commentary ? Maybe you got cut off by a driver talking on a cell phone. That could lead to a bigger essay on distraction. Let your passion guide you, but be careful not to push the “publish” button till you’ve calmed down.

Aggregate other opinions. Go to a news/blog aggregation site like Alltop.com and browse a category that interests you. Find a topic that several people are commenting upon, summarize their comments and add your own. For an extra twist, try the tactic mentioned in the first item above and arguing the opposite case.

Tell a story. It’s the most powerful form of human communication. Reach back to an experience that was meaningful to you and start writing it down. What did you learn from that experience? How can those lessons help others?

Revisit. The simple act of scrolling through your past blog entries can yield ideas about new topics or new angles on old topics. If your predictions were wrong, tell why. If they were right, build on them.

Conduct a small research project. Two of my most well-received blog entries of the last year were quick experiments, each of which took less than an hour to conduct:

Last year, I visited 15 corporate blogs shortly after the financial meltdown and looked at what they were saying about the economy. The lack of attention to this hugely important story was stunning. It made me angry, and that’s a good formula for writing.
Last month I picked a stream of 100 tweets at random and analyzed them for content and value. The results surprised me and my essay generated quite a few tweets from others.

Make a list. This is the most popular organizational tools in the blogosphere. Pick a topic about which you have some expertise and offer quick hits of advice. For example: “10 Ways to Research a Company on the Web,” or “Seven software utilities I couldn’t live without.” Or you can skip the numbers and just organize your thoughts in modules, like I’m doing here. I get tired of all the numbered lists after a while, but I have to admit, readers love ’em.

Predict. Predictions are hugely popular at the end of the year, but you can make them any time. To add variety, limit your time frame or endpoint. Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz did this effectively with the 500th edition of their “For Immediate Release” podcast by asking their listeners to predict what topics the two will be discussing during their next 500 shows. Pick a topic, make a prediction and argue your case. Then revisit later and write about how you did.

Recommend. Are there blogs, discussion forums, podcasts or how-to websites that you love? Write them down, tell what you like about each and share them with your readers.

Explore everyday things. This is an offbeat approach, but it’s a great way to satisfy your curiosity while delving into little-known corners of the Web. Pick a topic about which you know very little and research it. For example, learn why golf balls have dimples or find the origin of the phrase “the whole 9 yards.” This work may have limited relevance to your business, but it’ll probably yield a fascinating tidbit of information and help you learn new ways to find things online.

Serialize. Take any of the ideas above and publish it as short thematic entries. Few people read long articles anymore, anyway, so break out those ideas and sprinkle them around. Just be sure to tag and categorize them appropriately so you can reassemble later.

I could go on. There are dozens of other ways to generate ideas. But let’s hear from you. Comment below on some tactics that you use to unblock those creative juices.

Overcoming Blogger’s Block

Posted on November 18, 2009 by Paul

The best way to sustain visibility, name recognition and search-engine love in our information-saturated world is to write a lot, particularly on a blog, which is a magnet for search engines.

But writing is hard for most people. Just coming up with a topic to write about and something new to say is often the biggest struggle.

I’ve learned a few tricks about how to overcome Web 2.0 writer’s block that I thought I’d share with you over the next couple of issues. I also hope you’ll come to the blog version of this article and add your own. We’ll start at the beginning.

Choosing a Topic

The first step is to write about things that inspire you and about which you have strong opinions. If the subject doesn’t move you, it’s hard to get motivated and create ideas.

Use Feeds. All blogs and most news sites support RSS feeds. In some cases, the feed delivers the entire content of the site. In other cases, they’re organized by topic. You assemble feeds in RSS reader.

RSS readers are basically mini newspapers you create out of information streams from online sources. I use Google Reader to set up topical feeds from bloggers and publishers I like who cover these topics. Here’s an example of one I set up about journalism and news. It’s usually a two-click process to add a feed to Google Reader, and another couple of steps to organize the feed into a folder. You can even republish the collection of feeds as a single feed of its own.

Topical feeds inspire great ideas. You can easily see if a topic is trending by the amount of attention it’s getting. Feed collections also give you a quick idea of whether a topic is controversial, since you can easily see if a lot of people are writing about it.

Tweet and be Tweeted. I’ll admit to not being very good at jotting down ideas when I have them. My teachers always told me to carry around a notebook for this purpose, but I’d either forgot the notebook, the pen or both.

Twitter has helped me surmount this disability. Now when I see something interesting, or have an idea, I tweet it. I can then go through my own tweet stream later and look for ideas that have since slipped my mind.

Twitter is also an endless source of ideas. If you carefully manage the list of people you follow, the stream of tweets is a great source of inspiration. With the new Twitter Lists feature, I can now read tweets from people who share interests or affiliations. It’s like the topical RSS feeds described above, only shorter and less predictable.

Bookmark. When you see an interesting article or video, bookmark it and write a comment. Services like Delicious, Reddit and Clipmarks make this easy. My personal favorite is Diigo, because it allows me to highlight and annotate the items I bookmark. Here’s my personal list of the most interesting articles I’ve bookmarked recently. Choose a tag you’ll remember, like “ideas.”

Listen to Your Audience. Conferences, meetings and consulting work are good sources of material because they tap into what’s on people’s minds right now. Find an article that interests you and look at the comments to see what questions people are asking. Maybe you can be the one to answer them.

Refresh old material. If you’ve been writing for more than a year, chances are there’s some material in your archives that could use a fresh look. Revisit an old prediction and see if it came true. Or discuss new ideas on an old subject. Be sure to link to the original article to drive a little more traffic to it.

I’ll continue with more ideas next week. Also, as I was writing this piece, I came upon an article by Steve Aitchison on the very same topic. He suggests 100 ways to generate ideas, and many of his suggestions are very good.

Big Blue’s Social Media Numbers

Posted on October 30, 2009 by Paul

From yesterday’s BtoB magazine NetMarketing Breakfast in New York, here are some facts and figures from Adam Christensen, Social Media Communications Manager at IBM, about Big Blue’s use of social media tools:

Internal blogs: 17,000
Members of the Beehive social network: 60,000
Daily page views on IBM’s internal wiki: 1,000,000
Participants in its four Innovation Jams: 500,000
IBMers on Twitter: 3,000
IBMers on Facebook: 52,000
IBMers on LinkedIn: 198,000

For a company with 400,000 employees, those numbers are pretty impressive. They’re all the more remarkable when you consider that, 20 years ago, IBM had one of the most buttoned down command-and-control cultures of any company on the planet.

Adam works on strategy and standards for IBM’s global social media activities. Follow him on Twitter.

How to Host a Great Podcast

Posted on October 15, 2009 by Paul

Murrow A few weeks ago I shared some tips on being an effective podcast guest, but what about handling the other end of the microphone? Having recorded several hundred podcasts over the last three years, I’ve learned from my mistakes and you can, too.

There is actually little difference between podcasting and talk radio, but there’s a big difference between any kind of audio recording format and ordinary conversation. Most podcasts take the form of a Q&A interview with an expert guest. If you’re the host, here are some tips to keep in mind:

Prepare, prepare, prepare. The goal of the interview should be to make both parties sound good. The more time the host puts into understanding the topic and the expertise of the person being interviewed, the smoother things will go. It’s even better when the host can share interview questions in advance with the subject. That way, there’s no awkward fumbling while the guest comes up with an answer to an unexpected question.

Use the right technology. This is huge. Many people record podcasts using conference services such as Free Conference Call. While these are great for calls — and you certainly can’t beat the price — the quality of the recording sounds like, well, a conference call.

The best way to record an interview is in person using a digital audio recorder. If you can’t record in person, I recommend recording the call using a computer with a VOIP service like Skype. Any of the talk services from Google, Yahoo, AOL and others will work just as well.

If both parties are using VOIP and decent quality headsets with microphones, the conversation will sound almost as good as if the two of you were in the same room. Even if only one party is on Skype, the sound quality is still superior to that of a phone call. A key variable is to use a headset and microphone instead of the standard telephone handset. Companies like Logitech make headsets that deliver very good quality for as little as $30.

If you’re using a VOIP service, inexpensive software like Pamela, MX Skype Recorder and PowerGramo can record both sides of the conversation on separate tracks with outstanding quality. Gizmo is an open source option, but I don’t like the recording features as much as the commercial alternatives.

Dana Gillin For editing, Dana (my wife and expert podcast editor, at right) and I use the open-source Audacity software. Other free or inexpensive options include GoldWave, WavePad, Wavosaur and GarageBand (here’s a tutorial on how to use GarageBand).

Make yourself scarce. Your goal as a moderator is to make your subject sound good. Limit your presence in the program to an introduction, questions and occasional comments on the subject’s answers. Unless the interview is really about you, don’t spend a lot of time telling personal anecdotes or restating what the subject said. Guide the conversation but don’t try to dominate it.

Make it a conversation. We’ve listened to too many podcasts in which the host was clearly reading a list of questions. In one of our favorites, the host habitually follows up each guest’s answer by saying, “Excellent.” It’s as if he’s relieved that the answer was completed successfully!

An interview is a conversation, not an exercise. Listen to what your subject says and be ready to follow up on an interesting comment. If the new direction causes a break in the conversation, stop and do it over. You can always fix interruptions in the editing stage.

Avoid yes/no questions. You want your subject to tell stories and expound upon opinions. Avoid questions that force the person to deliver simple answers. A good tactic: start questions with phrases like “Tell us about,” “What do you think about?” and “Give us examples of…” In other words, force your subject to go into detail.

Limit length. While I don’t like to give absolute guidelines for the optimal length of any podcast, 15 to 20 minutes is considered about the norm. If your guest is searingly interesting, let the tape roll, but in general, keep an eye on the clock. Avoid letting answers go beyond about 90 seconds.

Do it over. The beauty of digital recording is that bits are free. If you don’t like the answer your guest gives you, don’t hesitate to record it again. And again, if necessary. Guests will appreciate the extra attention you give to helping them sound their best.

Remember the ID3 tags. Doug Kaye of IT Conversations gave us this advice three years ago, and it’s some of the best we ever received. Most search engines can’t index audio, so your great work is invisible to them unless you fill out the ID3 tags. This is simply a text description of your program, but it’s very important because it’s the only means that search engines have to understand what you’re talking about.

If you want to shortcut this learning curve, contact us about our PodcastNOW! service. We deliver high-quality podcasts without all the trial and error. We also provide training services that can get you up to speed quickly. Dana can even turn you into an Audacity expert in no time using a screen share.

Blogging Blunders, Part 3

Posted on September 9, 2009 by Paul

In Blogging Blunders Part 1 and Blogging Blunders Part 2, we looked at problems like failure to interact or to publish distinctive content. Let’s wrap up with the most frequent and frustrating blogging problem that I encounter: Failure to persist.

Perhaps I’m unusual, but the first thing I look for when visiting a blog is the date of the most recent entry. This tells me a lot. Knowing whether the essay I’m about to read is one week or three years old can make a huge difference in its relevance to me. But it also tells me a lot about whether the author is committed to the blog.

Too many business blogs suffer from lack of attention. The same pattern appears again and again: There’s a burst of early activity followed by a gradual decline in the frequency of updates and eventual abandonment. But nothing ever dies on the Internet, so these blogs drift along like ghost ships. They’re monuments to good intentions gone awry.

I don’t think many people start blogging with the intention of failing at it. Most are tripped up by one of four scenarios. See if you can avoid them.

Nothing More to Say – This happens when the blogger chooses a topic that lacks staying power. The subject is hot for a while, but then public interest wanes or the news value recedes. Any blog about a newsy or trendy issue is at risk of this fate. To avoid it, choose big issues that have staying power. For example, instead of writing about Blu-ray, write about the bigger issue of next-generation video formats.

Too Busy – So are we all, so think about that going in. It takes about an hour a week to contribute two brief new insights to a blog. You need to put some thought into developing and supporting a theme for a few hundreds words. If you don’t think you have that kind of time, don’t start. Twitter is an ideal alternative for people who are too busy to blog. The 140-character limit is actually a welcome restriction that forces them to keep their comments brief.

Nobody Came – This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. New bloggers put all kinds of effort into their work for six months and find that traffic still numbers in the few dozens per day. There are several reasons for this. One is that the topic they choose is highly competitive and their approach undifferentiated. If that happens to you, then look at ways to approach your topic from a distinctive angle or with a unique voice. Another common problem is that bloggers fail to promote themselves. This can be addressed via some basic outbound e-mail and sharing tactics (contact me if you want ideas). A third is that they simply don’t give the project enough time. It’s rare for a blog to catch fire during its first six to nine months. You need to build visibility with people who have traffic to send your way. If you’re persistent, then you should see rewards by your first anniversary date. But don’t be disappointed if it takes that long. Word of mouth isn’t always fast.

Turnover – This is a huge issue with business blogs. The internal sponsor leaves the company or gets reassigned and there’s no succession plan in place. This is why I encourage clients to view blogs as a business-wide initiative. Support has to come from the top and a backup plan must be in place to continue the conversation if the product champion leaves. A branded business blog is no place for cowboys. You need a team commitment to sustain the momentum.

Those are my candidates for the most common factors that derail business blogs. What are yours? Post your comments here and let’s discuss.

Blogging Blunders, Part 2

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Paul

Part 2 of a series on common business blogging mistakes. Part 1 is here.

Blogs are a new form of communications medium but many marketers still are stuck in the old one-way mode. To really appreciate the value of blogging, you have to approach it as a conversation. That means listening as well as talking. Here are some common mistakes:

Failure to link – Links are online currency. Not only do they enable more efficient communication than that available with the printed word (see my earlier post” “What You Probably Don’t Know About Links”), but they’re an acknowledgment that someone else has published something of value. Bloggers covet links. Links improve their search performance and drive traffic that leads to business opportunities. Mentioning someone else’s work without linking to it is considered rude.

Too often, novice bloggers fail to observe this simple protocol. They cite but don’t link. It takes only a few seconds to add links to your copy and it has all kinds of benefits. Linking engenders goodwill with the source of the information. That may lead to a reciprocal link, which improves your own traffic. It can also start a dialog with a person whose work you respect. You don’t have to agree with people to link to them, but you should always acknowledge that their work had value to you.

Here’s another reason to sweat this detail: failure to link can actually make you enemies. Thanks go Google Alerts, people now know instantly when their name pops up somewhere else online. If that mention doesn’t include a link, they’re going to be annoyed. So linking isn’t an option; it’s a necessity to maintaining good relations with people you respect.

Treating the blog as a wire service – Don’t use your blog to distribute press releases. That’s missing the point of this two-way medium. Blogs are a way for people to connect with each other. They’re a conversation, not a channel. If you treat your blog as another way to deliver a templated mass mail, then readers will abandon you faster than they’d flee a flaming building.

There’s nothing wrong with posting the occasional news release on your blog, but always add a personal message to frame its importance. Even better: link to the release and comment about why it’s significant. Humanize the interaction.

Being irrelevant – Shortly after the stock market crashed last fall, I visited 15 prominent corporate blogs. To my astonishment, only one even mentioned the most perilous financial crisis in two generations. Most were filled with marketing happy talk. These bloggers failed to address a critical customer need for information. Worse, they looked clueless. touch. Imagine if Wells Fargo had used the opportunity to educate its customers about why the markets were in turmoil. Instead, it posted a travel video. What a missed opportunity.

One of the great advantages of blogs is that they’re fast and easy to update. Use them to comment on current events that affect your customers. You don’t have to run afoul of regulatory guidelines to explain something. Educate and inform. Become a trusted source.

Turning off comments – According to some estimates, about 20% of business blogs don’t accept comments. Those companies are missing the point. A blog is a basis of discussion, not a TV program. Turning off comments is the same as saying you’re not interested in what your constituents think. What an insult.

The reason people most often cite for banishing comments is that they fear negativity. Those companies shouldn’t be blogging in the first place. Occasional negativity is part of the fabric of good discussion and it should be embraced as part of the feedback process. If you’re worried about inappropriateness, then enable comment moderation and filter responses. However, you should never delete a comment simply because it’s negative. The writer will simply take his gripe somewhere else.

Blogging Blunders, Part 1

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Paul

First in a three-part series on better blogging.

Your last entry is dated April 17. Most of your entries are press releases. Your headlines are dull as dirt. Your articles are devoid of links. And you wonder why no one comes to your blog.

Fail Blog photo (https://failblog.org)

I’ve done many content audits of clients’ blogs over the last two years and found the same shortcomings cropping up again and again. Most businesses don’t use blogs to their full potential. Often, they treat them as just another channel to distribute information they’re distributing by other means. It’s not surprising nobody comes.

A successful business blog uses the unique characteristics of the medium and engages in a discussion, not a speech. Pay attention to details and give it some time. Over the next couple of entries I’ll look at the most common failings of business blogs and how to avoid them.

Let’s start with three big mistakes:

Handing it off to PR — When businesses start a blog, they often designate the corporate communications/PR department to maintain it. This almost never works. Communications professionals are skilled at delivering messages, not promoting conversations. When presented with another channel, they tend to use it to push out a message. In the worst cases, these messages are nothing more than press releases. Lacking interactivity and insight, they fail to generate any reaction. Worse, they make the company look clueless about the medium.

Communication professionals should be actively involved in a company blog, but mostly on an advisory basis. Contributors should be the experts within the company. They are most likely to be the ones who will have meaningful dialogue with the audience. The communications people should focus on big picture issues like voice, topic selection and quality of writing. They should also sweat details like copyediting. Like orchestra conductors, their role is to bring out the best from the individuals in the ensemble.

It’s All About Me — A publishing mentor once recommended that editors find a picture of someone to represent their target reader and paste it on the wall of their cubes. The purpose was to constantly remind them that they were working on behalf of somebody else, not themselves.

Blog contributors would do well to heed this advice. Too many blog entries are self-serving and egotistical. They talk about awards, sales wins and accomplishments as if somebody actually cares. In reality, few people do.

What attracts people to your blog is useful information. The key word is “useful.” You should constantly ask yourself what insights or valuable information your visitors will take away. Blogging is a “give to get” strategy. The more information you share, the more goodness will come back to you in the end. If you don’t believe that, don’t start blogging. If you’re just looking to push out a PR message, here’s a list of free PR services you can use.

A Look That’s Boooooooring! – Blogger, WordPress and TypePad all offer small selections of default templates for your blog. Ignore them. It’s difficult enough to distinguish yourself from the millions of sites that are already out there. Don’t make it worse by looking just like them.

All the major services support third-party templates. There are literally tens of thousands of free templates for WordPress alone. Pick one that’s distinctive. If you’re willing to spend a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, you can get one designed to your specifications. I strongly recommend a custom design if your blog is tied to a company website.

While you’re at it, get rid of the default wording and links that these services impose on your site. There’s nothing like scrolling down a blog page and finding links to the WordPress developers forum. This just indicates that the blogger isn’t paying attention to details, which doesn’t do wonders for your credibility.

These are just three of the most common mistakes business bloggers make. In the next entry, we’ll look at links, multimedia and other frequently overlooked features.

paulgillin.com

Social Media and the Open Enterprise

Category Archives: blogging