11 posts tagged “blogging”

Last night, Honda was the first to air a live ad on Channel 4 in the UK.  The ad was nothing short of spectacular - a skydiving feat that no doubt left most of Britain and some of the rest of us talking:

If you like my blog, this video will make you laugh, cry, or both! 

The folks at Activeweave (makers of Stickis, which I've written about before), have just introduced a great new website and plug-in called BlogRovr.  BlogRovr is a great little tool aimed at blog enthusiasts.  It allows you to see whatever your favorite bloggers have written about anywhere on-line. 

Here's how it works:

1. Visit Blogrovr.com and sign-up for an account
   
2. Enter the URLs of your favorite blogs
   
3. Anytime your favorite blogger mentions something about a site you're visiting, BlogRovr will deliver the related blog content to you via a Sticki. 
   

• The note is unobtrusive - a small icon in the bottom right hand corner of your browser window. 
  
• You can expand the button into a web overlay by clicking it.  Similarly, you can close it just like any other window. 
  
• You can turn BlogRovr on or off any time.
• No spyware, etc. in the app.
  

Not only does BlogRovr keep you in touch with what your favorite bloggers are thinking about what you're looking at, it also presents a great opportunity to learn what products/services/websites those on your blogroll are writing about.  This is especially useful tool for:

• Researching new product/service providers
  
• Doing market research/ getting to know a new industry or topic
  
• Investigating what bloggers are saying about you and your competitors
• Etc.
  

Give it BogRovr a try and post a comment with your thoughts. 

Today, on Webpronews, Steven Bradley addresses some interesting questions raised in a couple of other blogs - namely:

• Is there an optimal post length?
• Will shorter posts help to retain readers and even lead to more links?
• What makes you unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed?

Bradley’s ultimate conclusion is that the best blogs have a mix of long, medium, and short posts.  He’d “prefer to focus on quality and let the length of the post be what it is… to find [his] blogging voice than consciously attempt to stifle it.”

I struggle with the same questions when writing my own blog.  Plenty of my readers tell me that they appreciate my more in-depth (translation: really long) posts.  But, I seem to get just as many comments (if not more) on short posts as I do on long posts.  Bradley’s blog made me realize that we still have a lot to learn about social media and web 2.0 optimization:

• What are the best ways for companies to engage customers through social media?
• How should individual bloggers and social media mavens (i.e. those who set up social networks/ groups on sites like Ning, Vox, Gather, etc.) structure their content to best engage with their peers around areas of mutual interest?

There are certainly a lot of assumptions to test.  So far, it seems that marketers and bloggers are throwing ideas against the wall and seeing what sticks. In time, there will more scientific ways to answer these questions.  Marketers are only beginning to understand the "science" behind web 2.0, social media, and targeted delivery of information to customers.  As web 2.0 and social media evolve, there is a growing buzz about:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO),
• Social Media Optimization (SMO), and
• Website Analytics/ Testing/ Website Optimization, which includes things like A/B Split Testing and Multivariate Promotion Testing, Targeted Content Delivery based on the profile of a specific visitor, Landing Page Optimization, and Predictive Delivery / Cross Selling, etc.  

These three topics are closely intertwined...  When a company spends money on SEO to ensure that their websites and/or corporate blogs/ social media properties are well placed in search results pages, their efforts won't result in customer conversion if the person who lands on their site can’t immediately find relevant information they’re looking for.  Similarly, if corporations are writing blogs that are too long or too short for their desired audience, they’ll lose that audience.  With that in mind, I think that concept testing, website optimization and analytics are the key to answering the key questions about the value of social media.  These topics will be of growing importance in the coming years as marketers strive to better understand and target customers to capture greater returns on web-based investments.

There are a some interesting players in the testing and optimization spaces (Offermatica - which, in the interests of full blogging disclosure, is a company that I recently interviewed with; Optimost; Touch Clarity, which was recently purchased by Omniture; Kefta; to some extent Google; and others).  If you are a marketer with experience working the products/services of any of these (and similar) companies, I'd love to hear your thoughts on their usefulness.  In my opinion, web marketers are only just starting to realize the value of testing and web optimization.  It will be very interesting to watch this space as web 2.0 and social media continue to grow. 

If you're interested in web optimization and testing, the following are links to blogs that you might like: Optimize & Prophesize, This Site Is Dead, Out of My Gord, Thinking Aloud. 

Internet search engines and social networking sites are enabling companies to do their "due diligence" on prospective employees more extensively than ever before.  According to an article I read this morning, Google (and other big companies) are researching prospective recruits by investigating their on-line presence on social networking sites.  But, businesses aren't the only ones benefiting from the research made possible by on-line social networking sites.  Real people are using social media to their advantage by researching prospective friends, significant others, and even criminals.  With that in mind, I thought you might like the following two real-life social media "research" success stories... I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried!

...

A good friend of a friend ("FoaF") was held-up at gunpoint last month just one block from his house in the Mission / Noe Valley area of San Francisco (AKA: "Baja Noe"). The robber stole his wallet and briefcase, which had his laptop and business cards inside.  Three days after the incident, he got a phone call from a woman who claimed to have his laptop... She said that she was calling from "Microsoft XP" (hilarious) and needed the log-on password to verify that the laptop was his (even more hilarious).  When he said that he wouldn't give the password out over the phone, the woman on the phone proposed that he email it to her, and she gave him her Yahoo email address (most hilarious!). 

From her email address, FoaF was able to guess her MySpace ID.  He looked her up and discovered her full MySpace profile including (gasp) a photo!  He also found that she was linked to a "friend" who FoaF recognized as the man who robbed him.  Best of all, the robber had a photo of his gun on his web page!).  FoaF gave all this info to the police and they recovered the laptop last week.  The woman who the police recovered his laptop from alleged that she bought it from "someone she didn't know."  Unsurprisingly, they don't fully believe her story.

...

A group of tech-savvy friends and I recently "saved" a less-tech savvy friend (I'll call her "Jane") from a second date with "Jack," a blind date she was introduced to by an equally non-tech-savvy acquaintance.  Jane went on the first blind date and was captivated enough by Jack's superficial charm and wit long enough to consider a second date.  Prospects were good for Jack (who is apparently very smooth/sociable in person, once held a senior managerial position at Merrill Lynch and is now an accomplished management consultant) until our "Google Intervention," which uncovered his personal blog.  Jack's blog chronicled his last 18 years of "sex-ploits" (including shallow 'apologies' to women he claims to have raped in college), on-going misogynistic views about "chicks", and less than savory (ahem) medical history.  It was so graphic that it made Tucker Max's blog read like a children's bedtime story.  Everyone involved (except maybe Jack) agrees that Jane was lucky to have emerged from her date with Jack unscathed and that date number two never materialized.

Web 2.0 is changing the way that people publish, access, and spread news.  Newspaper subscriptions are down, and the number of bloggers is up.  Six Apart and other companies are making it easy for everyday people to self-publish on-line “blogs”.  Gone are the days when journalists and authors were the only ones who could voice their opinion.  Now, anyone can do it.  At the same time that conventional newspapers are struggling to keep up subscriptions and bloggers are growing in numbers, the book market remains stable.  There’s something special about books beyond the words printed on their pages and the stories they tell.  For me, it’s the way that they look together on a shelf, their unique smell, their simplicity and tangibility. Laptops and Sony Readers haven’t replaced coffee table books.  Bookshelves still sell well, and bookstores are still profitable.  The problem with books is that until now, it has been difficult and expensive to self-publish books.  San Francisco-based start-up Blurb is changing that. 

Blurb is capitalizing on the rising interest in on-line self-publishing (e.g. blogs) and the continuing popularity of books.  In their beta release, they’ve made it simple and inexpensive for people and businesses to self-publish hardback and paperback books in both small and large quantities.  Blurb allows people to self-publish all types of quality books up to 440 pages– blog books, photo books, text and picture books, cookbooks, poetry books (coming soon), personal portfolios, novels and dissertations (coming soon), and more.
 

My favorite Blurb concept is the "Blog Book".  Bloggers, who use TypePad and WordPress (and soon Blogger, LiveJournal, and Moveable Type), will find Blurb’s “Blog Slurper” technology particularly useful.   Blog Slurper imports and maps blog text, comments, images, and links into a draft book, which can then be customized. I sent a note to Blurb yesterday asking whether VOX will be a supported platform for their Blog Slurper, and I’ll update this entry if/when I hear back.

I also like how easy it is for everyday people (non-bloggers) to easily create books with full-color pictures using Blurb’s BookSmart application (compatible on both Mac an PC).  Blurb offers templates for a variety of different types of “ready made” books – baby, dog, cat, and more.  Imagine what the ease of self-publishing means for families, friends, students, professors, small businesses, and more!

The best part about Blurb from a Social Media perspective is that it offers users the ability to promote and sell their books to others via Blurb’s on-line bookstore. Blurb is making it possible for aspiring authors to leverage the Internet to start their own publishing empires – just like musicians Clap Your Hands Say Yeah  and others did on MySpace.   I wish there was more of a community aspect to Blurb, where users could join “groups” like Vox and Gather and talk about their favorite “blurb” books written on specific topics.  Who knows, since the current version of Blurb is a beta, that functioanlity may come in time. In the meantime, I like how easy Blurb makes it for everyday people almost anywhere in the world to self-publish books, inexpensively.  Pricing starts as follows, with 10% discounts for 25-199 books, 15% discount for 200-400 books and larger discounts for even bigger quantities:

Barack Obama just launched a social media/ social networking website to further his presidential campaign in 2008: my.barackobama.com. While I haven't made any decisions about who I will support in the 2008 presidential election, I signed up for a "test account" on My.Barackobama.com to test the social media functionality of Obama's website.  The features/functionality of the site are robust. Users can:

• Write a blog
• Help Barack fundraise
• Discover events nearby/ Create events
  
• Network with other supporters
• Invite friends
• Write messages to "friends" (e.g. fellow Barack Obama supporters)
• Join groups/ start groups (just like VOX or Gather)
  

If you're a Barack Obama supporter, the site looks like a great way to interact with other supporters.  If you don't support Obama, the site looks like a good way to get the inside scoop on what his supporters are saying.  I didn't find any noticeable bugs, which is a good sign.  It looks like the site uses a customiseable white label social media platform - ala Five Across or Social Platform, though I couldn't find any sign of which solution was used.  I did notice that the blogging feature disables adding  hyperlinks, which is a little frustrating, though it's not difficult to understand why disabling hyperlinking would make the site easier to administer.

I'm looking forward to seeing what role social media plays in the 2008 presidential election.  So far, Barack is the first candidate to launch his own on-line social network.  Hillary Clinton launched her campaign using an on-line video to announce her candidacy and has a blog.  Her campaign supporters are also using 3rd party social networking sites like MySpace to make waves.  However, at the time of writing this blog, Clinton has yet to launch her own social network.  Two different strategies from two different democratic candidates.  One thing is clear - the forthcoming election campains will provide interesting case studies for anyone interested in social media marketing.  I expect that by 2008, social media marketers will discover a lot more about how to properly target and ignite a winning word of mouth campaign fueled by social media.

According to a new survey, published by The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, “the hype” around social media “is real.”  In November and December or 2006, U Mass Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research, under the direction of blogging researchers Eric Mattson and Nora Ganim Barnes, completed a telephone survey of “Inc. 500” list to find out if and how they’re using social media.  The “Inc. 500,” published every September by Inc. Magazine, is a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States.  According to the executive summary, existing research shows that 8% of Fortune 500 companies have a public blog, and the U Mass team set out to find out whether the use of social media was the same in companies that were “selected by growth rate rather than revenue.”  What they found was encouraging.  Fast growing companies are utilizing social media at much higher rates than earlier research indicates for Fortune 500 companies.  In the executive summary, the researchers write:

“As one of, if not the, first studies of social media adoption with statistical significance, this research proves conclusively that social media is coming to the business world and sooner than many anticipated.”

The full results of the study will be published throughout 2007 in a variety of journals.  Keep your eyes peeled for an article in The Journal of New Communications Research coming this March. The researchers from U Mass have promised to send me a link the the article soon as it is available. When they do, I'll post it in this blog. In the meantime, the executive summary is well worth a read.

Included in the summary are several interesting graphs. The highlights include:

• When asked how important social media was to a company's business/ marketing strategy, most respondents felt that it was important:
  
• 26%= Very important
• 40%= Somewhat important
• When asked what type of social media companies used, responses were as follows:
  
• 33%= Message/Bulletin Boards
• 27%= Social Networking
• 24%= Online Video
• 19%= Blogging
• 17%= Wikis
• 11%= Podcasting
  

I can’t help but wonder: Did social media help propel the responding companies into the Inc. 500, or is it just coincidence?  Then again, I’m still wondering, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
 
 

It's been a slow news week in the world of social media and social networking - what, with the holidays, people are spending time with real life friends and family, rather than at work or with their on-line network.  But, there is one social media/ social networking story that is still making headlines and drawing crowds of millions with wide eyes and dropped jaws this week - yep - the 'Washingtonienne' case.  For those of you social media-ites who have been living under a rock, click here to read the latest on the status of the lawsuit, which is proving just as elicit and sexually-charged as the blog that sparked it.

In my opinion, this case is thoroughly ridiculous and a waste of the court's time.  Apparently, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman feels the same way:

"I don't know why we're here in federal court to begin with," Friedman told attorneys for both sides in April. "I don't know why this guy thought it was smart to file a lawsuit and lay out all of his private, intimate details."

Despite this frivolity and mis-use of the already over-burdened court system, I'm concerned by the way the outcome of this trial may impact social media and the way that bloggers and other social networkers freely express themselves.  I don't believe in hanging out dirty laundry to dry in a public forum, but this is America, and if someone wants to do that, it's their right, so long as what they're saying is, in fact, true.  However, I also agree with

Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center:

"Anybody who wants to reveal their own private life has a right to do that. It's a different question when you reveal someone else's private life," he said, adding that simply calling something a diary doesn't make it one. "It's not sitting in a nice, leather-bound book under a pillow. It's online where a million people can find it.

That said, if you want your private life to stay that way, it is advisable to know a little something about the integrity and personal habits of a girlfriend/boyfriend before you share your "private" life with them.  Apparently, Robert Steinbuch didn't.  According to the AP:

"Cutler, a former aide to Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, says she created the blog in 2004 to keep a few friends up to date on her social life. Like a digital version of the sex-themed banter from a "Sex and the City" episode, Cutler described the thrill and tribulations of juggling sexual relationships with six men."

What will the outcome of this case mean to social media in the long term?  Only time will tell.  In the meantime, the case highlights the importance of personal accountability.  In summary - It's not nice to kiss and tell, but if you're stupid enough to get involved with someone who clearly has a history of kissing and telling, don't be surprised to read about yourself in their blog.

For those of you interested in using Social Media as a way to communicate to your customers, partners, etc., I recommend reading the following blog post by Rohit Bhargava, VP of Interactive Marketing for Ogilvy Public Relations.  Back in August, Rohit started an interesting conversation about Social Media Optimization (SMO), summarizing a series of rules for implementing a successful SMO strategy:

1. Increase your linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound link
4. Help your content travel
5. Encourage the mashup

In time, Rohit linked to a few additional “rules,” for SMO, as offered by other bloggers.  Including:

6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you (Jeremiah Owyang)
7. Reward helpful and valuable users (Jeremiah Owyang)
8. Participate (Cameron Olthius)
9. Know how to target your audience: "If you don't even know your target audience you are in trouble. I would love to have everyone using my product too, but you need to be realistic. There is always going to be a certain audience you can appeal to and others that you can't. So know your appeal and who it is appealing to." (Cameron Olthius)
10. Create content (Cameron Olthius)
11. Be real (Cameron Olthius)
12. Don’t forget your roots, be humble (Loren Baker)
13. Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh (Loren Baker)
14. Develop a SMO strategy (Lee Odden)
15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely (Lee Odden)
16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices (Lee Odden)

A couple of weeks after publishing his original post, he wrote:

At this point, I think it's safe to say the term has grown beyond a point when I feel like I can (or should) be the gatekeeper to decide what the 17th rule should be or how this area evolves.  So, to that end, for those interesting in continuing the discussion and helping SMO to grow - here is my quick list of things you can do to help spread the word about SMO:

• Post your thoughts on your own blog
• Add a comment to the original SMO post on this blog
• Add a comment to a relevant blog post about SMO (whether they mention it or not)
• Tag any blog posts or online content about SMO with the tag "socialmediaoptimization"
• Update the Social Media Optimization page at the New PR Wiki
• Translate the rules into more languages (apart from those already done)
• Tell your colleagues (especially those outside online marketing) about SMO

I agree that SMO is an important topic of conversation, and while I don’t want to “own” the conversation either, I would like to add a new rule to the list - building a bit on rule 9:

17. Make your Social Media Optimization strategy targeted and multi-pronged.  Know your audience and customize marketing messages, making them relevant and compelling to the core groups of people you're targeting (e.g. YouTube users, bloggers, social networkers, people interested in specific topics, etc).

In my view, one of the most important parts of implementing a successful social media optimization strategy is not just knowing your target audience but making marketing messages to your different target audiences relevant.  I advocate using social media to articulate marketing messages in a slightly different way to different target groups – ensuring that the message a prospective customer received is tailored to their specific needs/interests.  From a customer’s perspective the best “sell” is a “soft sell” – one that makes them excited to buy a particular product/service rather than one that makes them feel “forced” to buy it.  In other words, people want to buy products because they actually want them, not because they’re told they want them.  

The companies who participate in Second Life (as discussed in my blog on December 7, 2006) are doing something right.  They’re making their message relevant to a specific group of people with a particular interest.  These advertisers are offering Second Lifers something that is relevant to/ enhances one's “second life”.  I recommend that companies take a similar approach to other marketing via other social media avenues.  So, for example, if you’re trying to attract YouTube users to purchase your product, talk about why your product is relevant to YouTube… If you make a mobile phone, place a targeted ad on the site that emphasizes about how easy and fun it is to watch YouTube using X, Y, or Z model of phone.  If you’re selling Mentos or Diet Coke, plug the YouTube videos that feature your product. 

When you're building an SMO strategy, take a more targeted approach by:

• Customizing your ads, making them relevant to different target groups
• Writing blogs and posting relevant track backs / comments in high-traffic blogs that point out the positive aspects of your products
• Participating in popular social networking sites and “making friends”, etc.  

In other words, don't just know who your target audience is, but make your messages more relevant to each of the target audiences that you expect will read/watch/hear them.  Because product evangelism through social media can be done inexpensively (or, in some cases, for free), it is possible to execute a multi-pronged approach that is more relevant to target prospective customers than more conventional forms of advertising.  The goal should be to develop a multi-pronged SMO strategy that is more relevant/ compelling/ convincing to groups of target customers with different interest, with the aim of increasing the probability that marketing messages "speak to" different groups in different ways and therefore improve customer acquisition and result in increased sales.