What’s Up With So Many Boring Blogs? - Marketing WTF?
Friday, October 3rd, 2008A recent Wall Street Journal article based on a Forrester Research review of 90 enterprise blogs describes most B2B blogs as “dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion.” A few highlights from the WSJ article:
- 74% rarely get comments
- 70% stuck to business or technical topics
- 56% simply regurgitated press releases or other already-public news
- 53% of B2B marketers say that blogging has marginal significance or is irrelevant to their strategies
I’ve written before about the success we had at NetQoS with www.networkperformancedaily.com. But what I’ve never talked about were the challenges we faced in the early stages of the blog’s development. At first, we struggled to make a network management blog interesting without the ability to rely on a technical thought leader. So, we took the unusual approach of hiring a full time blogger – a former journalist who could not only report on news but who could entertain and dig deep into stories. Something like an investigative reporter with a twisted sense of humor.
We positioned the blog as “anything and everything that affects network performance from the mundane to the bizzare” and published sometimes humorous, sometimes scandalous, and often educational content. We mixed in relevant company content and interviews with technologists on staff. The blog was an immediate success. One of the early stories our blogger broke netted inbound links/mentions from the Washington Post, Wired Magazine, etc. At its peak, the blog reached 10,000 monthly readers. The key to success was developing original, humorous content, fun videos, and digging deep into breaking news stories.
I am now the VP of Marketing for BreakingPoint and we just re-launched our blog/community. While we don’t have a full-time blogger, we are working with some of the more visible experts in the company including our CTO, Dennis Cox, and others experts in our BreakingPoint Labs research team including HD Moore to provide useful and entertaining posts and videos that are relevant to our target audience. We are just getting started but already have more than 350 subscribers and I’m looking forward to another blog success. One of the keys to driving readership is the use of Twitter and other social media sites to highlight new content on the site and attract new readers.
Looking for great tips on how to make your blog a success? Try The Secret to Writing a Successful and Outstanding Blog by Liz Strauss, one of the most influential relational blogger on the Internet.
Would also love to hear from the rest of you on techniques for finding your blog “voice.”
Blogging to Reach Your Buyers - ReachForce Book Club
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008This is a fantastic chapter for anyone thinking about or embarking on starting their own company blog. I have blogged about this subject quite a bit in the past but I want to pull out a few great tips from David (and one of my own) that I have not covered before.
Following the ethical guidelines for blogging David outlines is very important. Here are the high points:
- Transparency - Let readers know that the blog is tied to the company, don’t try to pass it off as a third party. When commenting always leave your real name and don’t comment for someone else.
- Privacy - always ask for permission to blog about anything that could be considered private. If a customer emails you to share their success using your product, be sure to ask permission before sharing it on the blog.
- Disclosure - Always disclose any connection you might have to what you are blogging or commenting about. If you are recommending a product be sure to reveal that they are a partner.
- Truthfulness - Don’t lie, period.
- Credit - It is very common practice to read someone else’s blog post and write about it on your own blog. This is fine but always give credit to the source. (Tip: be sure to add some new idea to the topic and don’t just regurgitate their ideas)
Another tip David suggests is password protecting your blog in the beginning so you can get input from those you trust before opening it up to the entire online world. I would add that it is a good idea to build up a few posts before you begin promoting your blog so that visitors can get an idea of what your blog is all about. When we launched The B2B Lead, we wrote about ten or fifteen posts before we actually posted a single one. That way it was easy in the beginning to post something everyday.
One of the best reasons to start a blog is for SEO, but keep in mind you will be not be ranked #1 on Google your first day. From what I understand (and please correct me if I am wrong) Google searches sites only every few months. When it notices that content changes have been made it will crawl that site again sooner that a site with no or only minor content changes. Your blog should have lots of new content so you want Google to crawl it everytime you have a new post. Over time, Google will recognize that it it a site to be checked frequently, but there is a way to “train” Google to crawl your site frequently. You can submit a new site map to Google everytime you post. I am not a technology expert so my advice is to ask your webmaster how to do this in your blogging software.
For more blogging tips, check out these posts:
Blogs – Don’t Underestimate Their Reach - ReachForce Book Club
Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Corporate Blog
Keep Your Blog on Track to Support SEO and Other Business Objectives
Business Blogging Tips - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #141
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008Check out our rock star Leigh Anne on Hubspot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog! In her interview she highlights tips for business blogging and what has worked for us on The B2B Lead.
Some of her points/tips:
- Why the domain or URL of your blog is important, our domain is separate from ReachForce. We wanted to build a place for B2BMarketers to come and share tips and not have to worry about ReachForce corporate speak or promotion. Now don’t get me wrong, I try and slip it in every once in awhile but subtly, hopefully.
- Blogging is a great way to position yourself as a thought leader
- Blogging is a good tool for lead nurturing and can lead to speaking opportunities
- Don’t forget, you need to post frequently to keep readers engaged
- Be sure to re-purpose content for email campaigns and newsletters
- Most important – know your audience and produce valuable content
Blogs – Don’t Underestimate Their Reach - ReachForce Book Club
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008How many B2BLead readers are bloggers? Do you have a corporate or company sponsored blog? If so, do you have set goals for the blog?
Chapter 4 is all about blogging. David (I feel like we are virtual friends now, so I’m referring to him by his first name) talks about the history of blogs and outlines a few different ways to use them. In this chapter David tells a story of Alacra, a company that creates online technology and services for financial institutions. The CEO of Alacra said and I absolutely echo the thought, “We didn’t know what would happen, but we wanted to try it.”
This week The B2B Lead turns a year old. In fact, we’re having a birthday party to celebrate. We’ll be sure to share the pictures later this week. Anyway, back to the book…
When we were putting together our ideas for what the B2BLead would be we knew we wanted a place where we could interact with customers and prospects about their day to day jobs as Marketers. This was not going to be a place for ReachForce promotion (although I do try and slip it in every once in awhile). Our goal was to serve up bite size tips and tricks that could be used in our real jobs.
Still not sure how this was going to increase ReachForce awareness or drive more leads, we jumped in with both feet. And much to my surprise, The B2B Lead has taken off. Here’s a few exciting things that have happened to us since launching the blog –
- We have connected with key industry influencers that we’d been trying to reach for over a year.
- We are able to engage with and leverage our partners via joint thought leadership
- One of our tips was picked up for MarketingProfs newsletter (we didn’t pay for this)
- A post about us was ranked #1 on Sphinn
- Provided us an opportunity to be seen as thought leaders in our industry
- As bloggers, we’re building out a Twitter following
- The B2B Lead was added to Guy Kawasaki’s Marketing Alltop list
- Through this book club, David Meerman Scott now knows who we are
In addition to the external PR, we felt like we’re putting great content out on The B2B Lead and we wanted to be able to leverage it in different ways. We’ve now also developed programs around repurposing the stuff out there. Here’s a few examples of what we’re doing.
- We use The B2B Lead content for our lead generation programs.
- We use blog content in our newsletter.
- The blog is now also integrated with other programs, both lead generation and PR.
- We now get net new leads every week from the blog.
Since we tend to share Tips on The B2B Lead, here are a few tips that have contributed to our success.
- Don’t use your blog as another version of your website or a sales pitch.
- Don’t just post boring press releases.
- Humanize your authors, provide some color around them, their experience, what they are going to contribute, etc.
- Good content will take you a long way.
- We try to post at least 3 times a week (usually more like 5 or 6). We don’t want people to forget about us.
- Linking is REALLY important.
- Set goals for the blog and stick to them.
- Don’t be everything to everyone. Know your audience and speak to their needs. It is better to have the right readers rather then just a lot of readers.
If you’ve got a blog, how are you using it? Any big successes you’d like to share?
Re-think Blog ROI - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #123
Thursday, July 17th, 2008Yes, you read that right, I did actually use the words “Blog” and “ROI” in the same headline. But this isn’t a post about how to calculate the ROI of your blog. If that’s what you are looking for, reading further will be a frustrating exercise.
Whenever I speak about social media and blogging, the questions always follow the same path from cynical challenges to reluctant how-to questions. Sort of like the 5 stages of grief (disclaimer: I am not a clinical psychologist and really have no idea if these stages are even accurate):
Shock - “Is a blog right for my audience?”
Denial - “How can I justify the value of a blog, I can’t measure the ROI, can I?
Bargaining - “How can I justify investing in such a time-consuming exercise? Isn’t my time better spent elsewhere?”
Anger - “Where do I even start? Social media is out of control.”
Acceptance - “How often do I have to post?”
Just like death and taxes, blogging is inevitable. It helps you establish a closer relationship with your customers. It gives your company a face and a personality letting you share your evolving philosophies and lessons learned with your readership. And, it helps with search engine optimization so that buyers can find you. For all of these reasons and so many more, you will eventually be forced into embracing blogging. I mean, when was the last time a journalist or blogger wrote a wildly exciting post linking to your web page? Not happening? You’re not alone. People don’t get excited by web copy. But they do get inspired and passionate about blog posts—if they deliver value.
I recently read an extremely interesting post by Phil Baumann’s entitled Blog ROI: It’s About Value, Stupid!, in which Phil makes an excellent case for why hospitals should have a blog. His reason: “value.” According to Phil:
“Until someone establishes a standard measure of Blog ROI, I think it’s helpful to focus our lens on a fundamental question: What information is needed to decide whether a blog is worth its cost. There’s probably a complicated answer to that question, one which depends on the economics of your particular organization. In its place, I’d like to offer up three simple intuition pumps:
- Value drives ROI
- Price is a function of Value
- Value-Multiplied is replacing Value-Added”
Now, here’s the real genius behind Phil’s post. He claims that: “Value-Multiplied is Replacing Value-Added” - And that’s where intelligent applications of social media come into play. Can you think of a better way to multiply the shared values of your going concern? Word-of-Mouth (WOM) was always king. But know the kingdom of WOM has come. Know thy king. He’s a little different this time around. He’s wearing new clothing: a crown of truth, a cape of respect and a staff of democracy. In fact: he’s you! If you lay down the tracks for your customers’ value-train then ROI will come chugging along.
Ready to get started delivering value? Check out Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop Blogging for tips and resources.
Blog Mission Statement - Blog Master…Not
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008If you are an avid reader of The B2B Lead, you know that we are all about targeted marketing, specifically targeted lead generation. And I have said before that having a targeted blog can support lead generation better because it is focused on a specific audience so targeted messaging will resonate better. I recently created a mission statement for The B2B Lead to help focus our blogs to topics most relevant to our customers and prospects as well as in line with our in house expertise. Our mission is to share B2B Marketing best practice ideas and tips with our customers and prospects - enabling them to drive the most ROI possible from their lead generation initiatives.
There are lots of good examples of good mission statements out there that have driven a company to success. Southwest began as the low cost airline; every decision they made came back to that mission. Herb Kelleher would not have implemented any new program unless it helped Southwest to be THE low cost airline. It seems to have worked. Southwest does have a new mission statement these days and is the driving factor that helps keep them successful even when most other airlines are failing.
Once I created the mission statement I was able to sit down and create a list of more focused topics. This helps keep our whole team of bloggers on task and hopefully will help us to create more relevant content to help our fellow B2B Marketers drive increased results from their lead generation initiatives.
Social Media is Not One-Size-Fits-All - Blog Master…NOT
Monday, March 31st, 2008Last week, we hosted a B2B Marketing Roundtable in Austin on Social Media. It was great to see what other marketers are doing with social media. Some were very advanced with huge customer communities while other were still trying to figure out how best to integrate social media into their overall marketing strategy. It seems, overall, executives are aware of social media but do not completely understand it. If you are feeling pressure from your bosses to start a blog or user community because it is the hot thing right now, you should really sit back and analyze what tactic would be best.
One attendee said she was supposed to be starting a user community but they only have 70 customers. For most companies a user community is a lot of time, effort and money for only 70 customers especially when you consider that only a fraction of customers will actually be active in the community. Knowing your customer is also something to consider when deciding to start a blog. Some companies believe that blogs today are what websites were 5 years ago, you just have to have one. The truth is they are a lot of effort. If your customers and prospects are not active online, starting a blog is probably not a good idea. The point? Research and know your customers’ behavior before launching any social media program.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Corporate Blog - Blog Master…NOT
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008Companies create blogs for different reasons. Some use it as a tool to communicate with their customers. Others try to leverage their blog for lead generation. Some use it to supplement their PR strategy. Whatever the reason, all companies should have set metrics to follow in order to track the effectiveness of their blog. I just read a great MarketingProf’s article by Mack Collier (this one does require a premium membership, but I highly recommend it).
To give you a recap of what Mack suggests, there are three major metrics to track:
- Traffic
- Feed Subscribers
- Links
Traffic can be easily tracked using a tool like Google Analytics. You can use traffic measurements to help you determine what subjects are being read the most, what days of the week you get the most traffic and if outside activities like a press release or commenting on another blog gave you a boost.
Feed subscribers are different than traffic and will not count as part of your traffic. You may actually see your traffic decrease as your readers find your content to be valuable and subscribe to your RSS. Feedburner is a tracking tool for feeds and offers a few other benefits as well. (Just as an FYI is owned by Google now.)
You can track your links through Technorati or Google Blog Search. This will help you determine which topics resonate the best with your readers and will help you to create relationships with other bloggers.
Want Bloggers to Write About You? Make Sure Your Website is Blogger-Friendly - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #83
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008Attention Conservation Notice: The following post shares a few counter-intuitive tips for getting bloggers to write about you.
Cory Doctorow – the genius behind Boing Boing, and the inspiration behind ReachForce’s attention conservation notices–has shared more of his brilliance in 17 TIPS FOR GETTING BLOGGERS TO WRITE ABOUT YOU.
If you can get past the InformationWeek’s annoying, in-your-face advertising and survey requests, you will find several great nuggets in this post. Many of which will really throw most marketers for a loop. Here are a few of the more interesting suggestions:
- Have a permanent link. Don’t just change the front page of your site every time a new speaker for your speaker-series in announced. A blogger who links to the front page of your site today in a post about the upcoming address by Philo T Farnsworth, wants that link to stay good for in the future,
- PDFs stink. It’s not a Web page (see “Have a link”). It’s hard to copy and paste out of. It doesn’t show up in browsers half the time. The Web is made of HTML.
- Put your URL on your images. If you’ve got cool photos or other images up on your site, stick your URL in unobtrusive type at the bottom of it.
- Forget the “copyright protection” Javascript. Some sites have bizarre Javascript that pops up snotty little copyright messages when you try to right-click on an image to save it. OK, we get the point: you don’t want people to copy your images. We’ll just move on. Enjoy your obscurity.
- Enough with the legal boilerplate. If every page on your site ends with “(c) 2008 Paranoid Co Inc, all rights reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced without permission,” then bloggers may just take you at your word and write about someone else’s site.
The world of Marketing has changed drastically in the last few years and it’s time for B2B Marketers to question the status quo (and their legal counsel) and make some changes to thrive in this new world.
Blogging to the Beat - BlogMaster…NOT
Friday, March 14th, 2008I was cruising through my Google Reader (one of the best things I could have ever set up as a blogger) and stumbled upon a great post about blog writing on Diana Huff’s B2B MarCom Writer Blog. She suggests that bloggers have a beat just like journalists. If you are just starting your own corporate blog, this is a great tip to help you figure our what to write about. If you can define your “beat” then you will find yourself soaking up everything you see about those topics and inspiration will come more easily.
Also, if you are one of several contributors to your blog, each writer having a unique beat will help each author to be differentiated from the others.
I’ve always loved the saying “a jack of all trades is a master of none.” If you can really narrow your focus, you have a better chance of positioning yourself as an expert in that area which will increase the quality of your content and hopefully your readership.
