How do you make a solid business case for blogging for marketing? What about managing upper management’s expectations on the outcome? Should you hire a professional blogger to write your company blog?
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Business Blogging RSS Marketing Case Studies
Thought Leaders on Marketing Blogs - Part 1
Optimal blog posting frequency
My friend and colleague Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing Blog posed an interesting question to me and a small group of other bloggers whom I hold in high regard (Tris Hussey, Paul Chaney, Wayne Hurlbert, Yvonne DiVita, and Dana VanDen Heuvel). Her question was this:
What is best practice for scheduling posts?
If you’re not going to post 5 days a week, should posts be scheduled consistently for the same days of the week e.g., if you’re posting 3 times a week Monday-Wednesday-Friday? How do you feel about mixing up posting days? One week post M-W-F and the next week post T-TH-F. Or does it really matter? For the most part are the only blogs that are doing a consistent schedule the networks?
What a great question! And what great answers from the group. So great, in fact, that it evolved into a podcast group Skype-conference call that we conducted just yesterday. The 53-minute audio recording should be ready soon. I’ll post it when it is.
In the meantime, my take on the issue is this: as far as retaining your readers, frequency is not nearly as important as recency. A couple weeks of inactivity makes the reader feel like nobody’s home. Conversely, having the latest post be only a day old makes the blog appear “fresh”. Personally, I don’t like keeping feeds in my newsreader that haven’t had recent activity.
It also depends on the type of blog you have. A “writer’s blog” (as defined by Seth Godin) doesn’t need the same level of recency or frequency as a “news blog” (also defined by Seth in the same post).
Relevance overrides both recency and frequency. Searchengineblog.com recently posted (paraphrased) “I’m going to stop posting about SEO for several months but I’ll post about my vacation”. Making such an announcement wrecks even more havoc on recurring readership levels than two months of inactivity, because the blogger is in a sense inviting his readers to unsubscribe from his RSS feed. After all, how many of them would want to read irrelevant I’m-touring-the-world posts? My guess, in this time-pressed world of ours, is not very many.
As far as gaining new readers, the trick is getting noticed by the “connectors” (using Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology) in the blogosphere and then getting them to link to you. Again, this isn’t necessarily an issue of frequency. One blogger could post to his/her blog once per week and be more successful at getting coverage by A-list bloggers than a prolific blogger who posts many times per day. This could be achieved a number of ways. Linking to other bloggers can get you noticed by them. Mentioning their names could get you noticed by them (see my recent post where I described the name dropping tactic). Already having some of them as friends helps too. 
A lot of the blog entries floating around in the blogosphere strike me as “filler.” I strive to have this blog be filler-free. I only blog when I have something I believe to be valuable for you, my dear readers. I won’t blog about “Adobe acquires Macromedia” unless I can come up with a unique angle that would deliver real value to marketers who read my blog. Unique commentary, I believe, is key to the value proposition. Last week for example I blogged about “how to search engine optimize your podcasts” - something I believe has not been adequately addressed by bloggers. This I’m hoping will get some coverage in the blogosphere because of its uniqueness. “News blogs” can get away with less unique and practical posts than “writers blogs”, but they tend to make up for it with volume - increasing the frequency.
Finally, posting too frequently increases the ephemerality of your blog posts. Mike Davidson made the insightful comment:
“The relative importance of the feed vs. the site depends almost entirely on the ephemerality of the posts. Scoble?Ĵs posts are extremely ephemeral because he a) has so many of them, and b) only comments briefly on each item. Their place in history is rather fleeting, in other words. In the case of a more traditional blog, you have far fewer posts with more in-depth writeups. In this case, the site is of utmost importance and the feed is merely a notification technology.”
With all that said, Wayne Hurlbert has an interesting case study to share of how he doubled his blog traffic by doubling the number of posts per day from one to two. Have a read. (Paul Chaney makes the point that “every blogger is different, the way we write is different, and our personalities are different,” so there’s no right or wrong answer here and of course your mileage will vary.)
Bottom line of all this: the blogosphere is still the Web and the basic online marketing principle of testing everything, rather than just believing whatever I say, still applies.
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Getting noticed in the blogosphere part 2
As a follow-on to yesterday’s post about getting your blog noticed by influentials, i.e. A-List bloggers, I thought I would describe a scenario just recently presented to me.
I have been asked by analyst Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester Research if I would be willing to blog about their upcoming boot camp on integrated marketing on May 5. It’s a full-day intensive workshop being held at their offices in Cambridge. I said “Sure, I’d be happy to mention it, but I don’t think it will get picked up by other bloggers and thus it won’t spread through the blogosphere.” So the effectiveness of such a promotion strategy is limited.
A-List bloggers, like everyone else, are forever tuned in to the station “WII-FM” - What’s In It For Me. As such, Forrester’s message would be much more contagious, if there was a “free prize inside,” so to speak, for the bloggers who read my boot camp “plug.” In other words, the way to spread the word about the Forrester boot camp is for Forrester to make an irresistible, exclusive offer to bloggers who blog about the boot camp.
For example, what if Forrester gave away some exclusive piece of research that normally only their clients have access to? It doesn’t have to be an entire report, just something exclusive and something bloggable. Like a “scoop” on an upcoming report. Or a synopsis of key points or perhaps a mini report. Now what if the bloggers who blog about this integrated marketing boot camp get access to this exclusive information as part of the deal? In fact, what if Forrester Research turn this into an ongoing program, kind of like how Microsoft is wooing influential bloggers with their “Search Champs” program (where they hand-pick influencers and fly them to Redmond to wine-and-dine them and to discuss how Microsoft might improve their MSN search engine).
Hmm… “Forester Research Champs.” Sure, they’d be buying off bloggers. But everybody would win, including blog readers. Bloggers get access to exclusive research early and often - as long as they agree to blog about Forrester. It is an interesting proposition. Forrester, what do you think?
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Business Blogging Teleconference
What happens when Netconcepts’ president Stephan Spencer gets such blogging and marketing luminaries together over the phone as Seth Godin, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, Steve Rubel, Debbie Weil, BL Ochman and Toby Bloomberg? An amazing discussion about the possibilities and future of marketing blogs, that’s what! Produced by MarketingProfs.com.
Read the Executive Summary: part 1 and part 2
Download the Transcript: PDF (600 K)
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RSS: Hot or Not for Marketers?
DM News covered a controversial new JupiterResearch report on RSS. The blogosphere was quick to respond. Some of the marketer-bloggers that I hold in high regard ?Į Seth Godin, Bill Flitter, Rok Hrastnik, and Rick Turoczy ?Į weighed in with their thoughts. Others chimed in too, as chronicled here. Some even trashed DM News, like in this thread at Threadwatch.org ?Į unfairly in my opinion (Remember the expression “Don’t shoot the messenger.” DM News after all, is only reporting on the JupiterResearch study and its conclusions.). Here’s my reaction to some of the points made in the article/study:
“RSS is not well suited to promotional-offer-oriented content because it does not offer the targeting and personalization capabilities of e-mail, the report said.”
Having been part of the team that developed an email marketing service (namely, GravityMail) from the ground up and honed it over a number of years, with extensive targeting and personalization capabilities built-in, I argue that you CAN target and personalize RSS to the same or similar degree. In fact, you can personalize/customize based on each subscriber’s demographics, psychographics, clickographics, or a combination of all of the above. In order to do so, of course, you’d need to be providing unique feed URLs to each subscriber, not a generic feed URL like www.mycompany.com/myrssfeed.xml. There’s no reason why you can’t collect information from each subscriber before and/or after they subscribe, and then use that information to deliver laser-targeted promotional offers. It’s also feasible to collect data on viewing and click behavior, then use that information to fine-tune the offers over time. You can measure the encoded content reads in RSS items like you would measure HTML opens in email campaigns (both done using “web bugs”), and you can measure the clickthroughs through clicktracked URLs embedded in the feed. More on this here. As Rok notes, out-of-the-box solutions for RSS personalization and targeting already exist: e.g. ByPass, RSS AutoPublisher, and SimpleFeed.
“However, even for use as a supplemental or alternative e-mail broadcast tool, the adoption of RSS for marketing purposes will remain low during the next 24 months.”
My instinct tells me this prediction is going to be waaaay off the mark. RSS adoption of poised to explode. It will be driven by popular web browsers like Internet Explorer and email clients like Outlook shipping with support for RSS built right in, which in my opinion isn’t just inevitable but also imminent. Robert Scoble, technical evangelist at Microsoft and A-list blogger, riffs on his blog: “if you do a marketing site and you don’t have an RSS feed today you should be fired. I’ll say it again. You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed. Saying that RSS is only for geeks today is like saying in 1998 that the Web was only for geeks.” Strong words coming from someone in the Microsoft camp as influential as Scoble.
“However, RSS publishing still faces many hurdles: measuring traffic at least on a subscriber level is nearly impossible to do, which will relegate RSS to a broadcast marketing tool in the near term.”
This claim from the study floored me. Measuring traffic at the subscriber level is anything but impossible. Again, simply provide unique feed URLs to each subscriber and you can track track viewing through web bugs and clicking through clicktracked links. Rok points out some services that offer traffic measurement on a subscriber level: SyndicateIQ, RSS AutoPublisher, SimpleFeed, Nooked, and Feedburner.
“RSS could possibly become as cluttered and confusing to consumers as the e-mail marketing channel is currently”
Not sure where the authors of the study are heading here. I presume they are referring to the spam problem. But email and RSS are quite different technologies in regards to susceptibility to spam. RSS is unspammable: no spammer can infiltrate someone else’s RSS feed, and no spammer can cause an RSS feed that’s full of spam to appear on a user’s subscription list. Perhaps they are referring to advertising in RSS feeds? I’m no fan of ads in RSS feeds, but that’s not spam. RSS is opt-in. If a content producer wants to subsidize the costs of producing that content by taking on advertisers who then add unwelcome noise to that content producer’s RSS feed, well removing the feed from my reader is just a click away.
I do think the overriding message from the article and the study is valid: when it comes to RSS, marketers (including your competitors) just don’t get it, and probably won’t, anytime soon. This comes through loud and clear from Jupiter’s survey findings that 45% of marketers have no plans to deploy RSS to supplement e-mail, and only 5% are currently doing so. So, ponder how you can best leverage this opportunity as the giants in your industry sleep!
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Traditional Vehicle, New Channel - Internet Word of Mouth Marketing
Strategic Branding — Auckland, New Zealand
- Where consumers gather and messages propagate: personal emails, discussion forums, chat rooms, blogs, RSS feeds, wikis and search engines.
- How to harness “word of mouse” to enhance existing relationship marketing programmes and your brand.
- Tips for facilitating the spread of viral messages about your brand.
- Who are the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message?
- Handling input and feedback from your consumers, the public, the media and analysts.
- Success stories and flops: what’s worked and what hasn’t.
- How can Internet word of mouth enhance existing relationship marketing programmes and your brand?
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Move over Blogs: Here come Podcasts
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.
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Talkin ’bout RSS… on the Chris Pirillo Show
Want to listen to me rant and rave about the power of RSS as a content delivery channel for search marketers? That was a rhetorical question. Frankly, who wouldn’t! So now you get your chance, on my interview on the Chris Pirillo Show, which was just podcasted today. Chris interviewed me last week at Search Engine Strategies. Have a listen.
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Will Blogs Become the Ultimate Marketing Tool?
The once neutral territory of the blogosphere is enticing corporates who have awoken to the fact that business blogging entails relatively low startup costs. It’s potential for ROI hasn’t been ignored either.
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RSS and SEO: Implications for Search Marketers
Hello from Search Engine Strategies in NYC. Yesterday I spoke at the Webfeeds, Blogs, and Search session. My talk was focused on on implementing RSS feeds as part of your search engine marketing strategy. I’ve made my Powerpoint deck available online at www.netconcepts.com/learn/rss.ppt.
A lot of people mistakenly lump blogs and RSS together, but RSS has infinitely more applications beyond just blogs! For example: news alerts, latest specials, clearance items, upcoming events, new stock arrivals, new articles, new tools & resources, search results, a book’s revision history, top 10 best sellers (like Amazon.com does in many of its product categories), project management activities, forum/listserve posts, recently added downloads, etc.
There are some important tracking and measurement issues to consider when implementing RSS:
- You should be tracking reads by embedding a uniquely-named 1-pixel gif within the <content:encoded> container. This is known as a “web bug.” Email marketers have been using web bugs to track open rates for ages.
- You should be tracking clickthroughs by replacing all URLs in the <link> containers with clicktracked URLs. You code this in-house or you could use a hosted ASP service like SimpleFeed to do this for you. (Incidentally, Feedburner offers imprecise counts based on user’s IP not on clicktracked URLs)
- You should be tracking circulation (# of subscribers). Again, you could use a service like Simplefeed… Feedburner, which categorizes visiting user-agents into bots, browsers, aggregators, and clients. Bots and browsers don’t generally “count” as subscribers, while a single hit from an aggregator may represent a number of readers. This number is usually revealed within the User-Agent in the server logs… for example Bloglines/2.0 (…; xx subscribers). Today, tracking readership from clients is an inexact science. Hopefully in the future, RSS newreader software will generate a hashcode from the subscriber’s email address and this hashcode would then get passed in the User-Agent on every HTTP request for the RSS feed.
I consider personalized RSS feeds to be “best practice.” As of yet I’m not seeing much yet in the way of personalization within RSS feeds, but that will come I’m sure. It has to. Having only one generic RSS feed per site is a one-size-fits-all approach that can’t scale. On the other hand, having too many feeds to choose from on a site can overwhelm the user. So how about instead you offer a single RSS feed, but it’s one where the content is personalized to the interests of the individual subscriber. Yet if the feed is being syndicated onto public websites, you’ll want to discover that (by checking the referrers in your server logs) and then make sure the RSS feed content is quite consistent from syndicated site to syndicated site so that these sites all reinforce the search engine juice of the same pages with similar link text. Or simply ask the subscriber his/her intentions (personal reading or syndication on a public website) as part of the personalization/subscription signup process.
IMPORTANT: An oft overlooked area of RSS click tracking is how to pass on the search engine juice from the syndicating sites to your destination site. Use clicktracked URLs with query string parameters kept to a minimum, then 301 redirect not 302. This is important! 302 redirects, also known as temporary redirects, can hang up the search engine juice. Search engines recommend you use 301 redirects, also known as permanent redirects. Surprisingly, Feedburner and Simplefeed both use 302 redirects. Tsk tsk!
Sites using your feeds for themed content to add to their site for SEO purposes could strip out your links or cut off the flow of the search engine juice using the nofollow rel attribute or by removing the hrefs altogether. Scan for that and then cut off any offenders’ feed access.
Some more “gotchas” if you don’t set things up right:
- You should own your feed URL (unless you want to be forever tied to Feedburner or whatever RSS hosting service you are using). Remember the days long ago when people put their earthlink.net email addresses on their business cards? Don’t repeat that mistake with RSS feeds.
- You need to proactively ensure your listings in the Yahoo SERPs display the “Add to My Yahoo!” link; don’t just assume it will happen. To do this, subscribe to your feed from your own My Yahoo! page (so you know you have at least one My Yahoo! subscriber), then set up your blog to automatically “ping” Yahoo! every time you post a new blog entry (I recommend using Pingomatic.com to do this because then it will also ping Technorati etc. for you too, all in one fell swoop, every time your make an update to your blog.)
- Configure your website to allow subscribers to subscribe easily using your home page address if they don’t know your RSS feed address. That means putting <link> tags in your HTML. For example:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.stephanspencer.com/index.rdf" />
Also add buttons to your web pages for 1-click adding to the most popular RSS newsreaders / aggregators, such as: “Subscribe in NewsGator,” “Subscribe on Bloglines,” and “Add to My Yahoo!”
RSS is great for link building. Any SEO worth his/her salt should be making use of RSS as part of a link building strategy, or at least making plans to use it soon. In addition to RSS, there are some other effective blog-related link building strategies, like:
- Getting onto bloggers’ “blogrolls” (the list of their favorite blogs that they post on their site for all to see)
- Getting links through “trackbacks” (excerpts of your blog posts that appear on other bloggers’ blog entries in a way that you initiate rather than them)
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