Blogging is one of the hottest trends on the net. A blog (short for “web log”) is a web-based diary where the author can ruminate on whatever strikes his or her fancy. The blogger may share photos, poetry, political views, gossip, industry trends, business advice, or the latest on their personal life. By definition, blogs are organized in reverse chronological order. Many are updated daily. They can have one or multiple authors, such as a community blog.
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DMA Annual Conference — Atlanta, GA
Is something missing in your marketing mix? New channels are opening doors to the increasingly, tech-savvy consumer. RSS feeds and alerts, blogging, mobile communications and “mapping and monitoring” online conversations are among the newest marketing tools available.
Moderators:
Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
Marc Tramonte, Director of Integrated Marketing, Microsoft Corporation
Panelists:
Royal Farros, Chairman and CEO, MessageCast
Gard Gibson, Account Group Director,VML Inc.
Mark Goldstein, CEO, Loyalty Lab Inc.
Mark Grindeland, Co-founder, m-Qube
Dana Vandenheuvel, Director of Business Development, Pheedo
Debbie Weil, President, WordBiz
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“When done well, a blog can help establish a reputation for thought leadership and provides a human face for your customers,” said Netconcepts president Stephan Spencer in an interview with the Dominion Post. “People like doing business with people, not companies.”
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I love Google as much as the next person, but their official blog just doesn’t do it for me. The “voice” just does not seem real, or anything I can relate to. It feels scrubbed by the PR department; I might even go so far as to say it comes off as a mouthpiece of the PR department. I don’t get that feeling from Google engineer Matt Cutts’ blog. The official blog, however, has its face to the company, and consequently its butt to the reader. That’s just a gut feeling I get reading their blog, but the specifics of what bother me I found harder to put my finger on… until now.
I’m not telling you anything new when I say that business bloggers who are overly self congratulatory or self promotional are anathema to the blogosphere. But where do you draw the line? When is it too much? In trying to quantify what bothers me about the Google blog, I came up with what I believe is a quantifiable “sniff test” to ascertain if a blog is too narcissistic or inward-facing: it involves “keyword density.” Keyword density is simply the ratio of a particular word to the the total number of words in a page (or in this case, in a post). Read on, to learn how you can apply this test to your or others’ blogs.
As an SEO (search engine optimizer), I scoff when I hear the words
“keyword density”. Calculating and fine-tuning a page’s keyword density
in order to appear higher in the search results is a fool’s errand.
Yet, I think I’ve finally found a valid application for a keyword
density calculator, and it has nothing to do with SEO. Here’s what you do…
Add up the number of occurrences of “we”, “us”, “our”, and your company name in the blog post. Do the same with “you” and “your”. Calculate the
ratio of these two numbers. And calculate the keyword density for both.
What about “I” and “me”, and “my”? I’ve intentionally not counted them, because I recognize that the blogger needs to claim their thoughts and opinions as their own. It’s the faceless self-important corporate voice that really bugs me the most. And that’s what this sniff test ferrets out.
Let’s work through an example. Take for instance this post from the Official Google Blog:
Compare that with this randomly-selected post from the Yahoo! Search Blog:
In this very small sample set, Yahoo’s blog seems to talk to the reader
much more effectively. Not to mention their blog supports reader
comments, unlike the Google blog.
Now to make this more scientifically valid, we just need an automated
tool that analyzes all of the posts from both Y!’s and Goog’s blogs to
compare. That’d be a nifty little tool if it existed. Perhaps I’ll get
someone here at Netconcepts to code it…
– Stephan
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Steve Spangler of SteveSpanglerScience.com leapt in — boots and all! First time attendee and speaker on my panel “What Happened when eTailers dove into Blogs, Podcasting and RSS” at Shop.org in Las Vegas last week, Steve didn’t let the thought of mingling with billion dollar online retailers intimidate him. And he has a message for all those more modest online retailers — be there next year! His head still hurts, because there was so much to learn.
Steve says:
There was so much information that I filled an entire reporter’s notebook. And I also asked myself: “How is it that we are surrounded by people who are so smart?” In a culture where the Internet is changing so quickly, and everybody has got their different spin on what’s happening, I realized there were 1500 people there, 1499 of whom knew more than I did about on-line retail.
To get to have breakfast with the Internet Marketing Director of Best Buy, or the guy from CNET, or Amazon.com, these people were willing to share their best practices in an open and frank way. I learned how to increase clickthrough rates. Conversion rates. Landing pages. I was overwhelmed by what people were willing to share with us. What was so refreshing was that the major players were extremely honest with one another as well!
There is no magic bullet, nor one thing that anybody can do to make their website search better look to their customers. A website is a living breathing being. You have to feed it, nurture and care for it. Just like raising kids. We are all excited when a child is born, and then it grows and we get into the serious business of parenting.
Walking the exhibit hall for the first time in my life, I visited a booth called BillMeLater. They offer a great service, but don’t take on any company doing less than $15 million in on-line retail. We’re a little smaller than that! But it certainly was eye opening.
From the standpoint of finding out what a landing page was, and what caused people to stay on that page - that was the best takeaway from the whole conference. We were in the process of doing a product page redesign, and what I took away from that session changed what we put on that page. What would be the #1 factor on that page? Price? Shipping? Trust? Answer: Free shipping ?Ĭ or some form of shipping discount. An orange “free shipping!” logo or box drew the greater conversion rate. The key is to get people to put their credit card in and drive those sales.
Kelly Mooney’s “Gender Agenda” session provided a great insight into website viewing habits. The guys tend to stay predominantly on one site, 3 or 4 clicks just to compare prices. To women, however, it is an incredibly enjoyable experience, many taking 20 minutes to browse for products other than their initial reason for visiting. That sort of information is important to an on-line retailer. I have got a lot of work ahead of me.
As for my own panel presentation with Stephan, I looked out at that audience and saw people from those huge billion dollar retailers thinking that this blogging lark could be something we are going to have to explore.
Listen to my podcast interview with Steve after Shop.org for his full and frank views on this remarkable event. And take on board his recommendation: Be There Next Year!
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You may already be familiar with the concept of character blogging, where the blog is actually a fictitious charcter, such as a cartoon character from a cereal box, or a doll perhaps.
I think an interesting twist to this concept would be to have an historical character blogging from the past, as if it were the present day. I think American Girl, with their dolls from various historical periods would make for excellent character bloggers.
As a step in that direction, American Girl has recently launched a Felicity Blog. Felicity is a doll set in the time of the American Revolution. I think it would be a great idea for Felicity and the other dolls to be speaking to girls from the past.
American Girl is done a little bit differently though than a character blog. One of their editors poses questions Felicity faces, and also deals with themes/issues that are relevant to girls today, and asks girls to say what they think Felicity should do.
This Felicity blog doesn’t really give the impression of a character blog, but it is certainly very successful in soliciting comments from readers, with over 250 comments for their first blog post. That is really impressive!
Maybe there are some lessons here to be learned for business bloggers in how to engage with their community of consumers as successfully as American Girl seems to do.
(DISCLOSURE: American Girl is a client of ours.)
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Shop.org Annual Summit — Las Vegas, NV
See the results of actual trials and implementations of alternative marketing techniques used to drive online sales. Learn how online retailers eHobbies.com, Ice.com, and Steve Spangler Science have utilized alternative marketing tactics such as blogs and RSS feeds to expand their marketing reach and build customer loyalty. Panelists will share tips on executing a successful campaign, implementation costs, and how to measure the impact of these new marketing tactics. A must-attend session for retailers looking for alternatives to increasingly expensive online marketing tactics such as SEM. Retailers looking for alternatives to increasingly expensive online marketing tactics such as SEM must attend this session.
Moderator:
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts
Speakers:
Pinny Gniwisch, EVP Marketing, Ice.com
Seth Greenberg, CEO, eHobbies
Steve Spangler, SteveSpanglerScience.com
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Late last month I spoke at the “Successful Online Advertising conference in Auckland. One of the questions that came up during the session on paid search was around the tactics of gap surfing and bid jamming. A lot of people in the audience didn’t know the definitions of these terms; in fact, many had not even heard of them before. I’d guess that many of my readers are similarly unfamiliar with these two concepts. So I thought it might be useful to define them.
First off, bid jamming is something you can do in Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture). Bid jamming is when you increasingly raise your bid amount to just a penny below the top bidder who has foolishly set their maximum bid amount way too high. This forces the top bidder to pay that max bid amount per click, whereas you only have to pay one penny more than the bidder underneath you. Of course, this can cost the competitor a lot of money quite quickly but, if you are not careful, you can get bid jammed yourself in the process.
Gap surfing is a tactic for ensuring your bid is no more than it needs to be to maintain your target rank. So if you are happy to be lower than #1 position and you don’t want to pay too much, you might want to use this tactic. In a nutshell, you scan through the top ranking ads and find the big gaps in bid prices and you bid at the bottom of one of those gaps — e.g. the biggest gap within the top five positions.
I would recommend staying clear of bid jamming, and I would employ gap surfing only if you have a bid management tool that supports this capability. I wouldn’t try and accomplish it manually. Particularly since Google AdWords doesn’t even show you everyone’s bid amounts, so you’d have to continually revise your own bid amounts and monitor your position until you figured out the gaps.
As you can see, there is a lot of complexity and subtleties in pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising, and we’re only scratching the surface here. It goes on to include sophisticated web analytics, and constant automated revisions of bid amounts based on the web analytics data (e.g. the technique of dayparting). Trying to manage pay per click campaigns without the proper tools is like showing up at a gunfight with a sword. 
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Our client Steve Spangler is quite the renaissance man. In addition to being the CEO of a catalog company, he is also a toy inventor, an Emmy award winning television personality, a magician, an educator and a certified professional speaker. Just the sort of person you’d want blogging and podcasting.
The audio podcasts featured on Steve’s blog are targeted towards science teachers and include interviews with leading educators and monologues from Steve with helpful teaching tips. The video podcasts, targeted towards both teachers and parents, are some of the most amazing experiments you have ever seen. From exploding pumpkins to flying potatoes and erupting soda bottles, each episode is a hoot!
Functionality on the blog includes email subscriptions to posts and comments, buttons for readers to submit the post to Digg or del.icio.us, tag clouds and tag pages, RSS feeds, a audio podcast player built right into the blog, and more. Read the case study to learn more about this project and some of the results, including the fact that over 13% of their online sales can be attributed to Steve’s blog. The company’s products, which include science toys and experiment kits, are worked into the blog in a very soft sell way, so the blog doesn’t seem like a shill for the ecommerce shop.
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Visit The Site: Steve Spangler Science
For Further Reading: Testimonial, Case Study and Steve Spangler Portfolio
Russell Brown, Auckland author for Unlimited, conveys the message of marketing change. (as foretold in The Cluetrain Manifesto) Today’s consumers do not have the same shopping trends as they did 5 years ago. If companies want to compete and capture a piece of the market share, they need to seriously focus on the consumer’s needs and wants.
Blogging is a vital part of the marketing mix needed to accomplish this.
Brown references how modern day marketers are making the Web a better place. One of these marketers is Netconcepts, Founder and President, Stephan Spencer.
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