As corporations catch on to the potential of adding a blog to their company’s marketing arsenal, our MarketingProfs Thought Leaders Summit tapped into some of the best minds in the blogosphere for advice. In a 90-minute session, I called on the wisdom of Toby Bloomberg (Bloomberg Marketing), Seth Godin, Shel Israel (Conferenza), B.L. Ochman (whatsnextonline.com), Steve Rubel (CooperKatz & Co), Robert Scoble (Microsoft), Doc Searls and Debbie Weil (WordBiz).

In Part 2 of this two-part article, our experts reveal their top most effective blogging tactics. They talk about what business bloggers must do to be an accepted member of the blogosphere. They shared their tips for getting syndicated on other people’s Web sites and blogrolls. Our experts also told us their heroes and mentors and did a bit of crystal-ball gazing on what the blogosphere will look like in years to come. Read on…

Thou shalt not…

Business bloggers who know how to break the rules can create very interesting conversations. But you’d first better know what the rules are.

If you want to change a company, or change the world, or if you want to get people to adopt something new and through the process still keep your job, you can tread a fine line (or as Robert Scoble describes it, a “membrane”) when it comes to The Rules. They are simple, really:

Rule No. 1 — Use good judgment.

Rule No. 2 — Violate Rule Number 1 and you’re in deep trouble (”trouble” is a euphemism for a stronger, more descriptive word used during the session!).

The rules you exercise when conducting business extend to blogging. After all, you have a responsibility to represent your company in a professional manner.

People get fired for acts of disloyalty or dishonesty and for revealing company secrets. Things that will certainly get you in trouble include leaking product information before your executives are ready to launch it, disclosing your company’s financial results a week before they’re announced or playing with your company’s or competitor’s corporate image.

When you’re representing your company in public, you must understand what you are trying to achieve in terms of its image. We’ve all heard of executives who’ve been fired because of things they wrote in chat rooms. People have also been fired because their blog did not match the public persona the company was trying to portray.

If you work in a large company, you have to understand what your boss wants to see up there and what he or she is willing to defend. An image of you in your company uniform in a provocative stance, for example, will not impress your board of directors.

Bloggers have always been known to push the boundaries. Call it a little strategic risk-taking if you like. A gold miner who walks into a mine with a stick of dynamite is taking a risk, yet his reward is that glimmer of gold among the quartz.

Remember that a good blog is both passionate and authoritative. Saying nice things about your competitors (and providing links to them) will place you as an authority above those companies, because they may not be prepared to take the risk to link out themselves.

Let’s take a moment to differentiate between an authority and a hub. An authority is a site that gets a lot of authoritative inbound links. A hub is a site that links to a lot of useful Web sites.

It pays to be both. In fact, a hub may be the easiest way to start down the road to success in this medium. Rather than talking about your company’s product or service, you can set yourself up as both source and expert on what’s happening in your little corner of the universe.

Here’s an example. Say you work for one of the 20 yo-yo companies that yo-yo people are really into, and you find yourself writing about yo-yos from you and your competitors every day. In effect, you become the yo-yo go-to guy.

Your blog becomes a natural place to show up for people who want to hear about, because they know that you’re keeping your ear to the ground. And then, when your company decides to launch a new yo-yo, you’ve got the power to talk with authority about a new yo-yo, as long as you don’t compromise that status by saying something about it that’s not true.

There are some more “rules of the road” for bloggers that need mentioning. For one, attribute your sources. Say where you got your information from and link to them. Linking is one of the distinguishing features of a blog post. Another is to keep it short and stick to the topic. And do not post press releases or write in corporate-speak. A blog is a way to tell a story with your voice, with opinion, within context, and with links to others.

And, finally, a blog is new — not a place for stuff written weeks ago. It’s immediate, it’s fresh and it’s happening now. Much of this is not obvious to companies getting into blogging for the first time.

As for your boss… well, he’s likely to take less of a hands-on approach once he becomes comfortable with having a more conversational style of marketing in his arsenal.

Make a name for yourself

How does a business blogger get syndicated onto other Web sites and mentioned on other bloggers’ blogrolls?

Begin by identifying your audiences. There are two constituencies:

First, there are other bloggers — in other words, the blogosphere. When you’re going to promote a blog, you really need to get out there and talk to other bloggers. Begin by reading other blogs and responding to them — using trackbacks and comment when somebody says something interesting. Get into conversations with other bloggers. Having a blogroll is an important part of this, so that people can see what kinds of things you’re looking at.

Your second target is a much wider audience — the clients you’re trying to reach within your particular niche who are not necessarily bloggers themselves. For the most part, those people are unaware of the blogosphere. The latest statistics from the Pew Internet & American Life Project reveal that 27% of Internet users are reading blogs. Well, that means over 70% are not! This is really the key. You may be amazed at how many marketers out there don’t know about blogging… so how can you expect your customers to know about it?
So how do you promote your blog to Internet users? For your non-blogging audience, the key is to get them intrigued with your company and the voices behind it.

The promotional strategies you put into place will include both online and offline strategies. If you’re already sending out newsletters and emails, tell them you have a blog. Tell them to go to your blog. Give them a link.

You could also encourage them to sign up by Really Simple Syndication (RSS). And of course there are the subtle things you can do to promote your blog, too, like putting it on your business card and in your email signature.

The importance of having an RSS feed cannot be understated. Robert Scoble proclaims on his blog: “If you’re running a marketing site and you don’t have an RSS feed, you should be fired!” RSS is a huge opportunity, not just for bloggers but for Web sites in general. It’s a new distribution channel for your content, so use it to its full potential.

Provide your constituents not just one RSS feed but a feed for each of your categories. That way, if there’s a certain category your readers are interested in subscribing to through their newsreader or Web-based aggregator, they’ll be able to do that easily. And from your perspective as a marketer, all your RSS feeds should support tracking of the subscribers and the reads and click-throughs.

Even though your blog isn’t the place to post press releases, press releases are a great place to announce that you are starting to blog. Try contacting or emailing reporters about what’s on your blog. If you’re a Fortune 500 company, it’s news! Every time one of these big companies starts a blog, all the bloggers start blogging about it. And then the Fortune and Newsweek columnists pick up on it, and so it goes.

In 2003, former President Jimmy Carter began his first foray into blogging, at Netconcepts’ suggestion. It was only for an eight-day period during his trip to West Africa, and it wasn’t even a full-featured blog in that it didn’t support trackbacks or comments. The posts were, in fact, just Web pages that were published on the Carter Center site.

But the fact that an ex-President blogged made big news in the blogosphere. And the next thing you know, there were thousands of sites linking to his blog and buzzing about it. The Carter Center figures that it was the most successful Internet marketing it has ever done.

Take a look at other blogs, particularly the ones you like, and see why so many people go to them. Try to add something to a topic. Follow what other people are writing and write back about it. All you have to do is write interesting stuff about things you care about. If other people care about it and you’ve got an RSS feed, they’ll find you.

How to win bloggers and influence the blogosphere

Bloggers are evangelists to the blogosphere. They show both passion and expertise in what they’re doing. Great bloggers use their heads and their hearts and speak in a clear language that makes sense. They avoid corporate-speak. They link to other sites. They refer to companies that share an interest in their topics — whether they agree with them or not.

Bloggers need to be brutally honest, because at its core a blog aims to build a new level of trust. The stuff of brochures and press releases really doesn’t work any more. No one is listening to it!

An effective marketing blog is more like conversational marketing. It’s getting closer to your customers by just showing them there are real people doing real jobs inside your company — a company that cares about what its customers and constituencies think about it.

Treat other bloggers like people. Bloggers are not people you “pitch” to. You contact them and you get to know them and you develop a relationship with them.

One way to influence bloggers is to give them information before anybody else gets it. Bloggers like to break news. They like to be the early identifier of trends. And they like to know about things before others do.

If you’ve got a product, you can send it to bloggers. But be aware of the new freebie mentality that’s developing in the blogosphere. In effect, you’re buying off the blogger. You may end up courting an audience of bloggers who are happy to send you email, comment all the time and maybe even link. It may take you down the path to having an audience that you actually don’t want to talk to. Get back to people who are blogging for a living as opposed to just spreading ideas. And remember that not all bloggers are created equal.

If you’re pitching to a blogger, do it carefully. Bloggers like Robert Scoble receive pitches all the time. He likens it to receiving an email with a paragraph that says, “Hey, I think I’ve got something that’s interesting to your readers. Here’s a link.”

“If somebody leaves a paragraph on a blog I just wrote, I’m all for that and will put it in my blog folder to look at later. But if they’re only pitching me, and I don’t see any repetition in the blogosphere, it makes me nervous,” Robert says. “But if I see five other people writing about something, it makes me more comfortable in that this isn’t something lame or that other people haven’t seen value in. So, I’m looking for that repetition, particularly in the early stages of a news article. It also gives me stuff to link to. But you need to show me you have, at least, taken time to read my blog.”

Scoble adds: “I get really defensive about people who are pitching me stuff that does not have RSS on it. If you don’t have an RSS feed, I’m going to be very defensive. And if you don’t have a blog of your own, I’m going to be very defensive. So if you’re pitching me a static Web site, I’m going to be yelling back at you, and I’m probably going to even make fun of you on my blog.”

Another really great tactic is to link a lot. And thank the people who have linked to you. Thank those who have made comments. If you have 5,000 people commenting or linking to you… well, writing back may be a little difficult, but every once in awhile it sure is nice to receive a little note back. It creates a relationship and opens some doors.

Heroes and mentors… and villains

Our Thought Leaders certainly constitute a mutual admiration society! They looked to each other for their heroes. Robert Scoble named panelist Doc Searls—he’s been reading him for five or six years now. Dave Winer is another winner with Robert, as is Steve Rubel. In fact, Robert admits to reading about 1,300 blogs, but few stand out for him. He likes reading people like Evelyn Rodriguez who survived the tsunami, and others not on the A-List, like IT blogger Mike McBride.

Returning the favor, Doc Searls named Robert Scoble as his hero; in fact, he went so far as to say that Robert is the hero of the entire blogosphere. Dave Winer’s name came up again in many respects as godfather of RSS, PowerPoint, weblogs.com and html. We have Dave to thank for badgering Doc into blogging!

Debbie Weil abandoned the predominantly white male fraternity to mention a heroine — Halley Suitt. Halley’s Comment is one of her favorite blogs, for her writing style and for not being afraid to reveal she’s a woman. Halley writes about things that women are hot on — stuff like her feelings about men, her son, her clothes and her shoes. She earns big points from Debbie because she’s also intellectual.

Steve Rubel also cites Robert Scoble as his hero, with Buzz Bruggeman being another. And Tom Murphy, one of the first PR bloggers out there, as he’s been blogging for a couple of years now. He also cites Jeff Jarvis, Dan Gilmore and Marc Orchant, who writes the Microsoft Office weblog.

As for the villains… ah, let’s see. The only one that comes to mind, although it’s been pretty good so far, is the US government. But also a few lawyers.

What the future holds

There’s no doubt about it. In the next five years, we will be seeing many more blogs. In fact, among the huge number of blogs there will be niches. People looking for blogs will find them in the niches that interest them, whether they are businesses or hobbyists. It will be difficult for people to keep up with the number of feeds they keep up with now — although, hopefully, there will be tools to make it easier. As more and more blogs come online, people will begin to narrow their focus to 10, 15 or 30 blogs—or, for those with real appetite, 100 blogs.

More importantly, we’re likely to see a merging of mainstream media and conversational media in the sense that they are going to be using the same tools. We are already seeing this with some sites adding trackbacks and comment features.

Another interesting development will be the end of corporate-speak. People will have a hunger and appetite for things that are written in a human voice.

The general public are also going to learn more about their power to influence corporations and their ability to get what they have to say into the search engines. A recent Pew study said that 25 percent of all content on the Internet right now is generated by consumers. Consumers are generating posts on blogs and forums. As they begin to realize they can have an impact, people are going to have more interaction in both the blogging world and the corporate world. Corporations are going to have to find a way to deal with their publics.

One of the annoying things about the Internet now is the proliferation of Web sites where you can’t find a human. In the blogosphere, you find humans. A lot of companies that are apprehensive about blogging may well be saying, “What would we do if we had all those people responding to our blogs.” Yet they need to join the conversation, because the voice of the consumer will have such impact. Not only will this be one of the biggest changes that companies will have to deal with, it will be a very positive change that will come about because of blogging.

In the next five years, blogging will become an established communications channel in business. The power of people to reach and access real humans inside the corporation will have a liberating effect. In the end, marketing departments, as we know them, will be reconfigured to some degree. Blogging is going to change the structure of corporations down the line.

Panelist Doc Searls proclaimed that marketing, as we now know it, will become virtually useless. In many companies, the sales and marketing manager was always a salesperson rather than a marketing person, anyway. Marketing had less power in the company than Sales did, because it was the job of Sales to touch the customer; Marketing’s job was to stay away from the customer and to be strategic about messages. Messages are going to die. The notion of coming up with a message to send, while still having some arcane uses, will fall out of favor. Conversation is going to be far more important.

People will look for credibility in blogs. Smaller companies will have to put “about us” pages on their blogs. You would be amazed at the number of blogs that don’t have an email link, essential to supplement credibility.

What we understand now is that mainstream media is going to change radically, in part because there are just so few channels there. Yes, we have DishTV, and we’ve got channels up to 9,999, and you can’t begin to surf from one end to the other in less than half an hour, but there’s a lot of nothing on there.

It’s only a matter of time, especially with bandwidth issues getting worked out, before everybody is able to feed the new system — the opinion system, the political system and the economic system — with fresh information. That information can then be shared and improved upon, and all this is going to be facilitated by blogging.

Whatever blogging becomes, or whatever the next big thing to descend from blogging is, bloggers will inevitably become trusted stringers for local newspapers. And local news radio will be supplemented by people who are seen in podcasting right now.

Podcasting

Podcasting is going to be an enormous phenomenon, and the video equivalent will be enormous, too. The music industry is going to be revolutionized by podcasting. Just last September a search for podcast on Google revealed 24 results. There are now close to a million, and not one big company among them! That was mostly the work of a couple of stand-out guys like Adam Curry and Dave Winer. It’s a potentially huge phenomenon.

Our panelists love podcasting. One can take in more blogs and scan them more quickly than he or she can take in podcasts. With only so many hours in the day, only so much of one’s time can be spent listening to podcasts. But with cars coming out with MP3/CD players, you can now dump around 200 hours of podcast material onto each CD and listen as you drive. Then it’s as easy to scan a podcast — punch “scan” to the next one, fast forward or rewind — than it is to dial up all those radio stations.

In addition to podcasting, v-logging (video blogging) is going to come into its own soon, and that’s going to be very exciting.

We also foresee the integration of social networking software. The users and visitors will take our blogs, and they’ll convert them to their own uses. They’ll turn them into what they want them to be. For example, the March of Dimes blog was put up initially as a resource, but the organization found that people were using it as support for each other. So the blog is not only a means of information — it’s also a means of social networking.

The blog-podcast-video trio is an interesting trend. Now you’re able to share yourself on the Internet in a range of different ways. You can do your illustrations with Art Rage, photos with Flickr, and podcasting and video blogging with Freevlog. This just wasn’t possible a few years ago, and certainly wasn’t possible without broadband. That is exciting in terms of corporate life.

Look at Microsoft’s Channel 9 (channel9.msdn.com), and see people adding to the conversation right underneath the video. It’s open-source-style marketing, which is really interesting. You get to have your say as a representative of your company, and then everybody else gets to have their say right underneath. In fact, you can get to say anything about the company you like. That’s fascinating!

We’re also going to see passive, static Web sites become passé, replaced with much more engaging sites with striking similarities to MMORPGs, or massively multi-player online role-playing games. Consider that the hugely successful photo-sharing site Flickr, which was recently acquired by Yahoo, is based to some degree on a MMORPG. You get to wander around and meet new and interesting people, go on quests, get lost and eventually find your way back home… and so forth.

How do we keep up with it all?

We can’t. We can’t possibly scale. Indeed, the information glut is already problematic. And it’s going to get a lot worse. But thanks to RSS and related technologies like Attention.xml, we’ll still be able to maintain a steady diet of useful information and commentary without drowning in that information. We’re going to see RSS become the channel of choice.

It’s an accelerating world. And once marketers figure out the usefulness of these new technologies — like blogs, RSS, podcasts and v-logs — and of being really conversational and even bringing your customer right into the conversation on your homepage, then you know the world has really shifted. We’ll get there.

To get answers to these questions and others, MarketingProfs called a Thought Leaders Summit, mustering some of the best minds in the marketing and blogging. In a 90-minute session, we tapped into the wisdom of the following gurus in Internet marketing and business blogging: Toby Bloomberg (Bloomberg Marketing); Seth Godin, Shel Israel (Conferenza), B.L. Ochman (whatsnextonline.com), Steve Rubel (CooperKatz & Co), Robert Scoble (Microsoft), Doc Searls (Linux Journal) and Debbie Weil (WordBiz).

The experts also revealed their most effective blogging tactics. They discussed what business bloggers must refrain from in order to become accepted members of the blogosphere, and they talked about tips for getting syndicated onto other people’s Web sites and blogrolls.

Finally, our experts told us about their heroes and mentors, and they gazed into the crystal ball to see what the blogosphere will look like in years to come. Their ideas on those issues are distilled in the second part of this article, to run next week.

Making a Solid Business Case for Blogging

With almost 10 million blogs out there today, blogging is not just a passing fad. It’s here to stay. And the early birds –those companies that get a head start –are likely to achieve celebrity status, generate buzz and garner attention in mainstream media (at least for a while).

If you work for an organization that needs statistics and proof that blogging is going to pay for itself right away, you’ll fall into the trap of doing it for short-term gain. And if that’s your intent, your blog is going to fail. In fact, you are likely to end up sabotaging the entire operation.

Marketers and business people need to take a long-term look at the strategy of why a company is going to put resources, people and dollars into what is essentially a new marketing tactic.

Obviously, businesses need to address the return on investment (ROI) issue. After all, they are not going to sink funds into a marketing strategy that doesn’t produce results.

Yet, a blog is a tool, like a hammer to a carpenter. The carpenter doesn’t demand an ROI on his hammer. Nonetheless, a blog can serve as a mighty powerful “hammer” in capable hands. For example, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence of success stories, such as Firefox, which allegedly got 25 million downloads essentially off word-of-mouth that was ignited by blogging. How do you model the ROI of that?

In a similar vein, asking for the ROI of a blog is rather like asking for the ROI on a press release. Just as you can measure a press release by the number of images in the media, and the number of people knocking on your door and buying your product, you can measure blogs by search engine rankings. And you can measure those search engine rankings by people knocking on your door.

Let’s say you’re a plumber in Seattle and a prospective customer with a leaky basement pipe is searching Google for a plumber in Seattle. You obviously want to pop up on that first page of Google’s results. But how would a blog help that plumber get there?

It works like this: Inbound links weigh very heavily in Google’s algorithm. That is, a plumber with many inbound links is going to rank ahead of a plumber who has very few inbound links.

How do you get inbound links? For one thing, you refresh your site often with new content. After all, nobody’s going to link to something that hasn’t been updated since 1998. Blogs by their very nature are frequently updated with new and interesting information, thus explaining why bloggers are so successful in garnering links.

Furthermore, those links tend to have keyword-rich link text (the underlined words), which is also key to getting to the top of Google and other engines. If, for example, you name your blog “B2B Lead Generation Blog,” the next thing you know you’re going to be number one for “b2b lead generation” in Google. It’s a powerful tactic.

Finally, underlying the blogosphere is the concept and culture of blogs — the talk of people. The best blogs are ones written by human beings, not corporations — people that have something to say that other people want to hear. Blogs are a way of opening up conversation, encouraging people to actually talk to the people behind company walls. Just as customer service departments produce bottom-line results, so do blogs.

Managing Management’s Expectations

It would be fair to say that managing upper management’s expectations is an issue that polarized our panel! But on one thing they all agreed: Blogging for business is no short-term moneymaker or revenue driver.

With estimates of some 25 billion blog reads out there each day, marketers have to manage expectations of management, who might envision that 5,000 people will read their blog every day. You need to strip away such expectations. Five thousand readers a day is inconceivable.

Here’s why: Companies that fell for the hype of the World Wide Web and built a really expensive needle in a very large haystack are now spending all their time hoping they’re going to get more hits than the search engines. Do not make the same mistake with your blog.

The reality is this: A blog will not lift your sales tomorrow. A long-term focus is what’s required.

A blog is a great addition to your marketing mix, alongside your content-rich Web site, your compelling e-newsletter and your RSS channel. It’s also part of your public relations mix and your branding mix.

Blogs are very effective in increasing search engine rankings. As already stated, search engines like them because they are frequently updated and are richly interlinked.

Add Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to the mix, and you expand your reach to include not just people who are subscribed to your blog but people who are subscribed to searches across the blogosphere. If they’re subscribed to a search about your topic, all of a sudden anybody who is interested in that topic can read your blog if you’re writing about it. It may take you from an audience of one to 50, 100 or 1,000 people — just because you wrote about that topic.

And if you link to particular bloggers, and they see links from you in their watch lists, they are going to want to reciprocate and blog back. There’s an ethic about reciprocation in the blogosphere, and many bloggers like to link back to people they haven’t heard of before.

Several of our panelists use blogs in really innovative ways — to promote and sell books, for example. Another panelist has a client who is a photographer and author in the process of writing a book; his blog is successfully driving people to his Web site to purchase his photographs.

Some Business Blogging Prerequisites

Before you get started, there are questions that need to be asked. Can you be totally transparent as a company? Can you handle negative feedback? A blog is a Web site tool that allows and encourages all kinds of feedback — in fact, that is what happens on all good blogs.

A blog can be powerful in changing a company culture and the way the company sees itself. It’s about very specific groups listening to a human being within a company, so that they can hear the story behind that company — the story the company wants to tell. And if these bloggers can do that without being hamstrung too much by internal politics and if their stories are good and their ideas are worth spreading, then over time they’ll spread. Do you have a story to tell?

Blogging takes some skill as a writer and as a storyteller. You have to say something that’s worth reading, start a conversation worth engaging. If you approach blogging in the same sort of selfish PR way that corporations love to do, then consumers who have a choice — and they all d — will unanimously reject you.

Blogging can be hard slogging. But for some — those who are “born bloggers” — it just comes naturally. Senior management are advised to find the born bloggers on their staff. They don’t have to be in marketing — in fact, in some cases it’s better that they’re not. It’s about knowing instinctively what to say and what not to say.

A writer doesn’t produce content. A writer says things that he or she thinks are going to change the world. Before you know it, commenters come in, add value to it, and by the time the idea has been chewed on by many different people… it’s become a much bigger and better idea than when it was yours alone.

That’s what happens with markets and conversations. It becomes everybody’s idea. You can have many brilliant people inside every company who can bring ideas to the world and spread them. That’s what blogs are really good for.

Every story needs an audience. And a blogger needs to continually develop that audience. That is a lot of work. Usually, people in management have neither the time nor the inclination to do all that is needed to really build and maintain a loyal following of readers. Blogs allow people with no HTML skills to be able to publish on the Internet. It’s like sending an email to the world — like doing “cc: world.”

Does this sound scary? If your company culture is fear-based, then don’t do it. In a corporate setting, it can become untenable if everything has to pass through the legal department first. There are some companies that are probably never going to blog, those whose speech is, in fact, regulated, (e.g., pharmaceutical companies).

With that said, it’s almost better to look at blogging as a way of preventing lawsuits than avoiding them. If you are a corporation, you need to tap into what people are saying about you in the blogosphere. People are talking about you anyway. There are, no doubt, companies in which the CEO or upper management would rather a have root canal than deal with citizen journalism on a daily basis. The blogosphere is a reactive space; you can put fires out just by responding.

As panelist Doc Searls loves to say, “Markets are conversations, and conversation is fire; therefore, marketing is arson.” And you only need one match to start a fire. That’s a lot of what blogging is about. It really shouldn’t be about putting out fires; it should be about starting them — but in a positive sense. It’s about introducing ideas into the blogosphere that can spread quickly.

Who You Gonna Call?

Clearly there’s a lot more to blogging than the few minutes it takes to start a free blogging account on Blogger.com. It could pay to enlist the help of an expert before going into this half-cocked. A new cottage industry has emerged to shepherd companies through the ins-and-outs of the blogosphere: the industry of the professional blogger or blogging consultant.

Your company may already be represented in the blogosphere, and you just don’t know it yet. One panelist made the assertion that more companies discover they have blogs inside them than ones that need to seek some kind of blogging advice. Nonetheless, a little sage advice from an experienced blogging professional couldn’t hurt.

Where do you look for these experts? It’s a little like advertising. You don’t go around looking for advertising agencies. You look for companies whose advertising you really like and respect, and see who did it. Look around at companies with blogs that are really effective.

A consultant can help you set up a blog, help you to understand what your company might be blogging about, and help you to craft your posts so they’ll be search engine friendly. It’s difficult to take the software out of the box, start running with it and expect it to look good. In terms of search engine optimization, consultants can be helpful; and, let’s face it, corporations need to optimize their posts.

By all means, hire in the skills internally to assist in developing your blog and your writing style. But, ultimately, you as the blogger should do your own writing and research. It’s tempting to think of hiring a ghost-blogger to do the hard writing work for you, but that is not recommended. The law of the blogosphere is common law, and transparency is part and parcel of that law. The blogosphere can turn on you when it comes to light that the thoughts represented on your blog as your own are not your own.

And, finally, just to inspire you, here’s a story about a tailor in London’s Savile Row named Thomas Mahon. He’s been blogging for just a few weeks (at www.englishcut.com). As of today, he’s probably the top tailor in London. If you look him up on Technorati (he hasn’t really made it much onto Google yet, but Technorati is really for stuff that’s too new for Google), he’s got 400 or 500 inbound links right now, and he’s been in business for maybe two weeks on the Web. But he’s the guy who’s writing about what it is to be a tailor in London.

It’s really quite amazing: He’s gone from nowhere to everywhere online in his niche in a very short period. That’s the power of blogging and online word-of-mouth marketing!

Tune in next week for part 2 of this article. Our experts dig deeper into the tactics and the technology of how to harness blogs for marketing, name their heroes and villains, predict what the future holds for the blogosphere and more!

Podcasting refers to the technology used to pull digital audio files from Web sites down to computers and devices such as MP3 players. “Podcast” is derived from the name of the iPod MP3 player from Apple, although you don’t need an iPod to partake in podcasts.

Podcasting is a significant departure from traditional broadcasting because it removes the time requirement; you can listen to a podcast radio program or interview any time.

Think what audio books on tape did for the road warrior –turning our cars and airplane seats into mobile universities. Podcasting has the same capacity to change the way we learn and take in new information.

With news sites and blogs, you are anchored to your seat or computer screen to partake in the wisdom of your favorite blogger or journalist. For those sites that are also podcasting, you now have an alternative.

Podcasting isn’t just about downloading MP3 files. What makes it special is that it piggybacks on RSS technology, also known as Really Simple Syndication. Some Web site owners (including MarketingProfs.com), feature their most recently published content in XML files called “RSS feeds.” Software programs called newsreaders that are installed on Internet users’ PCs continuously monitor their favorite RSS feeds for new content.

From this evolved specialized newsreaders capable of accepting “enclosures” — multimedia files included in the RSS feed—and downloading them to an MP3 player or a hard drive (iPodder is one example). A user of this software can be presented with new podcasts of interest collected via RSS feed in a way similar to how he would follow the latest happenings on a blog through a traditional RSS reader.

Newly available MP3 audio files that appear in a subscribed RSS feed can be downloaded to your MP3 player, burned to a CD for playback on your car’s CD player or simply listened to through your computer’s speakers.

The key to the early success of podcasting is its ease of use, according to Doug Kaye, founder of ITConversations.com and a podcasting pioneer. “It’s as easy as waking up in the morning, grabbing your iPod full of podcasts transferred invisibly overnight, and listening on your commute to the office.”

It’s the job of the podcasting client that you’ve installed on your computer (iPodder, for example) to do the hard work of monitoring your favorite podcasts via RSS.

So far, there are hundreds of podcasts out there, with new ones popping up every day. Many are talk shows on technology, business, entertainment, sports and so on. It’s amazing the quality of some of this audio commentary being published out there on the Web, free for the taking.

Business 2.0 magazine calls podcasting the “democratization of broadcasting.” Indeed, anyone with a computer and a microphone can try his or her hand at being an Internet radio talk show host, and building an audience of thousands, potentially millions.

Some early adopter bloggers are podcasting to augment their predominantly textual blogs, such as the very popular and highly regarded Dave Winer. Typically, their podcasts are far from professionally produced, however. Winer’s podcast posted on December 19 was a testament to this fact, as it was recorded during a road trip in his car over highway noise.

Laura Ries, author and reknowned expert on marketing and branding strategy, happens to also be a blogger (of the Origin of Brands blog), but not yet a podcaster. In Ries’s opinion, bloggers may have a hard time successfully transitioning to podcasting.

“Blogging is a written medium, and podcasting is an audio medium,” says Ries. “It takes a unique skill to deliver content verbally. Some bloggers could make the switch, but many I am guessing could not. Also, one of a blog’s unique features is the ability to link to other content on the Web — something that podcasting would have difficulty doing.”

Kaye echoes Ries’s sentiments that podcasting won’t be for everyone. “As the number of podcasts grow, amateur podcasters will find it increasingly difficult to compete with the more formal, information-packed, professionally produced podcasts,” Kaye says.

“People have a limited amount of time to listen to audio content,” he adds. “You can’t skim podcasts like you can skim blogs. Information consumers will become more discerning as they are offered more choices.” Clearly, not all podcasters will win the hearts and minds of their listeners.

It’s still early days to ascertain the ROI of podcasting. But results so far are encouraging. Kaye reports that traffic to his ITconversations.com site has doubled since podcasting came out; he attributes much of that growth to podcasting.

In a bold move, the BBC has started experimenting with podcasting by delivering the series “In Our Time” this way. The BBC also plans to put all of its radio archives online and to continue to deliver new shows online; it is possible we will see thousands of classic BBC radio shows podcast. It’s great to see a traditional broadcaster right at the cutting edge of technology!

Currently, podcasting exists primarily as audio content, but the technology also supports other rich media as well, such as photos and video. The new iPod photo MP3 player supports not just the playing of audio files but also the display of digital photographs, offering podcasters a new opportunity to mix audio with still images. The popular blog Engadget, for example, includes photos of the devices being reviewed.

Podcasting and Marketing

How will podcasting relate to marketing? And why is podcasting important for marketers?

Well, people like dealing with people. Audio commentary injects a human element not present on your typical passive brochure Web site.

Adding that human voice to your Web site through podcasting gives people the opportunity to reconnect with your business on a repeated basis, assuming they find your audio content to be valuable and interesting to them.

What would be some good applications of podcasting for marketing? A few come to mind:

Interview various authors and thought leaders in your industry, then publish these interviews regularly to your podcast on your site. You could even transcribe these podcasts to post on the site as well. It’s good search engine fodder if the interview contains the right keywords.

Provide a thought-provoking idea or tip of the day. Just a short bit of practical advice published on a frequent regular basis coming from one of the thought leaders within your own company helps establish their credibility in the listener’s mind over time, assuming the podcasts are really good.

Offer late-breaking podcast industry news compiled from sources across the Web that you monitor on a daily basis. This is really no different from many of the blogs out there that focus on news. The difference is that someone doesn’t have to sit in front of the screen to get the latest happenings. People can subscribe to your podcast, download it and take it with them as they go out jogging or commute to the office.

Get your listener subscribers to participate in a kind of a talkback show where they can ask thought-provoking questions and make comments, which can then be addressed and elaborated on by your in-house experts or even a panel of experts.

Sponsor existing, high-quality podcasts. This allows you to associate your organization with a reputable podcast, and it gives you an instant audience. For example, sponsors of IT Conversations reach an audience of 14,000-15,000 listeners. Sponsoring others’ podcasts can be a viable alternative to producing your own podcasts and building up the listener base from scratch, for potentially less expense and better ROI. Sponsor slots shouldn’t sound like commercial interruptions; they should be relevant to the listener and add value.
To get started podcasting, all you’ll really need is a microphone and some software. There’s a great tutorial on podcasting, both for listeners and producers, on Engadget.com.

Why You Should Podcast

You will be seen as an innovator on the cutting edge of things. You will most likely be the first mover in your market to use podcasting as a marketing tool.

Loyal listeners will come to rely on you for the latest thinking, news or trends in your field of expertise and interest. As their thought leader, you can influence the listeners’ buying behaviors through a soft-sell approach.

People will regard you as a human being they can relate to. The personal voice of your podcast is more real than the “voice” of your company’s Web site. It is more disarming and makes your company seem more approachable if done right.

Because podcasting is novel at this point in time, there is some PR value to be milked when dealing with the trade press.
In addition, podcasting is quite suitable for recordings of conference presentations. Just think: if you weren’t able to attend the latest Pop!Tech conference, you could still enjoy hearing such thought provoking speakers as Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, offering insight into human nature as it applies to marketing and product development.

It occurred to me that the folks at Sky Radio could make excellent use of podcasting. Sky Radio produces the business interviews you hear on the in-flight radio on airlines such as United and American. I think those interviews would be fantastic material to make available on a podcast RSS-type format. Sometimes, you don’t get to listen to all the shows, or you want to recall something you heard when half asleep at 30,000 feet. Personally, I’d love that.

Podcasting has the power to change the way rich media information is broadcast. It’s kind of a mix of the Web, TiVo and portable consumer electronics, all in one.

Spread the word. Podcasting has arrived.