Business Blogging Still Rare: Summer Days Still Hot

Got a heads up e-mail from a friend about a new piece in e-Marketer. The article say Business Blogging is still rare, and most of the people with blogs aren't satisfied with the results.

There are plenty of business-blog skeptics in the US as well, according to studies by Socialtext and eMarketer. Less than 6% of the Fortune 500 and 2% of the Forbes 200 Best Small Companies blogged in April and June 2006, respectively.

One of the major reasons that companies are dissatisfied with their business blogs is a lack of focus in their use. If you ask a company what their blog does, you'll mostly get back "soft" answers about communicating with your customers and being part of the Web 2.0 paradigm. The truth is that most corporate blogs are there because someone decided they needed a blog.

It's hardly surprising that they don't like the results.

Other companies have blog committees in place, but the difficulty of making the blog a catch-all for every executive who wants to be involved holds back the effectiveness of the blogging.

And then there's the lawyers, who view blogs as evidence and aren't willing to expose the company to risk.

So when my friend sent me the note - it actually made me feel good. My clients are happy with their blogs. It does what we said it would do. And as long as they keep at it - they see results. In fact, I don't have a single client who stuck with their blogging who hasn't seen some surprising results, in terms of traffic, recognition, and yes, revenue.

So I look at the 6% figure and say "Great!" That's a big audience, and I'm going to be one of the first to crack it.

The True ROI On Blogging And Social Media

I about fell out of my chair when I read this article at Adweek at the amount of money the Ding Widget has made Southwest. $150 Million in ticket sales.

In its first two years, the Ding application was downloaded by about 2 million consumers and generated more than $150 million in ticket sales, said Kevin Krone, vice president of marketing. While Southwest has been steadily increasing its Ding promotions with e-mail, direct mail and TV advertising, the most effective marketing method has been word-of-mouth referrals, said Krone. "The ratio of referred [Ding] installers to total installers is very high, which tells us that people who download the program often convince their friends to do it as well," he said.

Now that's a widget worth building. But it's more than that. Southwest also has one of the gold standards in corporate blogs with NutzAboutSouthwest. They average 20 comments a day (substantive comments), and when you get them on the phone, they are the nicest people you can imagine. A recent chat with one of my clients revealed a Southwest Airlines marketing employee offering advice to other corporate bloggers with no strings attached.

They love blogging, and want to evangelize it. That's pretty good.

As for my personal experiences - I lost an iPod nano on a Southwest flight a couple of months ago and posted about it here on Brandstorming.

Southwest sent me a thank you letter for writing about their service. It's called online monitoring, and it left me feeling pretty good about them (of course, it was lost in the data crash, but I swear it existed).

Thanks Southwest. I needed that final bullet point for my next client presentation.

hattip: Richard Becker

Apparently, You Can Be Too Bold...

I for one, loved the new iMac ads that touted its svelte silhouette. The ads simply stated: that read "The new iMac. You can't be too thin. Or too powerful." Simple. Bold. Effective. Exactly the way I want my ads (and my hardware) to be.

But alas, the portion of our population with eating disorders (and those struggling to help them) pushed Apple to rethink their marketing strategy.

GeekSugar has the scoop:

After some scolding by the Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness, who asked Apple to rethink the campaign, Apple has taken down the ads, which now just read "The all new, all-in-one iMac." Prior to the edit, the Alliance sent out a strongly worded press release noting that one can be too thin.

As a proponent of bolder, edgier advertisements it bothers me to see a company bowing to external pressures for ads taken out of context. If this were a weight loss product advert, or a commercial for a new line of pants sold only in size 0 and 00 I can see why groups would be outraged. But I must admit I took notice and loved the boldness of Apple's twist on the "you can never be too rich or too thin" phrase. But then again, I'm not struggling with an eating disorder, so who am I to judge?

Now, let's get back to that 'you can never be too rich' bit....

Durbin's Top 6 Blogging Mistakes

We teach a class called blogging boot camp. It's a six-week course that's designed to take corporate bloggers and accelerate their learning curve on blogs to seem they've been blogging for a year. We cover content, tone, software, community, traffic and a bunch of basic stuff that most bloggers acquire from just jumping in.

Our goal is not to teach "blogging," but to teach corporate clients how to learn. The class is based on the idea that there is no one "right" way to blog, but there are hundreds of wrong ways to blog.

In that spirit, and because our RSS feeds have doubled in the last two weeks, let my present my Top 6 Blogging Mistakes, in no particular order, but based on whether it makes my head hurt to read them.

1) Writing! with Exclamation! Points! !
We see this a lot. Beginning bloggers are really excited about what they're doing, and their enthusiasm generally leads to overemphasis of their first blog posts. We teach in the class that exclamation points, italics, bold, and font color and size changes are not allowed for three months. Your writing should convey enthusiasm without the use of crutches, and like pounding your shoe on the table to make a point, exclamation points usually mean you have weak writing (ed. Writing sentences that need exclamation points, but leaving them out - while clever - is lazy writing with bad punctuation. But nice try).

2) The Obligatory Get Back to Writing For Myself Post:
This is more of a social blog problem. When you build up a small audience, it's customary in about the third of fourth month to despair that your writing has gone from self-exploration to shameless pandering to your audience. Most bloggers (myself included), have written the oh-so-silly "I feel like I'm writing for the audience instead of myself" blogpost. Usually some of your readers come to your comments and tell you how great you are, or give you advice on how to write. It's really sad. Like a cry for help (Bonus fact: Some bloggers learn that the only way to get comments is to write such a post. That clearly is a cry for help).

3) Excessive Use of Pictures and Videos:
Pictures and video are great, and it's wonderful that we have the ability to mashup our media, but sometimes, we use pictures and video to make up for a lack of writing. Once is okay, but when you start posting content just to pretend that you haven't really fallen off the blogwagon, it's time to write post number 4:

4) The I'm Back, but Not Really Post:
Blogging isn't for everyone, but some people, mostly three month burnouts, feel the need to go on unannounced hiatus, return with an I'm back post, and then go back on hiatus. Although abandoning your blog for months is usually the most effective traffic killer, we feel like announcing that we're going to return, and apologizing to the no-longer-existent audience, is the content that any straggler readers might really want to finally hear.

5) No Contact Info
It's understandable if you are a social blogger, and don't want people e-mailing you. It's understandable if you're an anonymous blogger, and are afraid of getting found out. But if you're a business blogger, and you haven't figured out how to add an e-mail or contact piece to your blog, then you're in the wrong business.

What's the point of blogging to build your reputation if you're afraid to tell people who you are? What if they want to pay for your services? A big part of what I do is assemble groups of blogs to study trends and information in niche communities. When bloggers, who ostensibly have something to sell, don't list contact information, I shake my head and wonder if they thought this through. (If you don't like spam, make it an image and post it on the site)

6) Top Lists on Slow Days Lists of Information That I Meant To Write, But Someone Else Beat Me To:
When someone in one of my blog communities finds an article I wanted to write about, it's a positive thing. Either I get someone to contrast my views with, or if they say what I wanted to say, they've saved me the time of writing it, and I can just link to it. But when someone writes about a subject, and makes a list that I was going to write about, but left it in my draft file, then I feel stupid. I can't write my own at that point, because them I'm a copycat, and I can't just link to them, because them I'm being lazy. It's usually better just to post a video on those days. Maybe two.

So there you have it. My top list of blogging cliches that make me want to groan. It's not a good list for business, but hopefully some of you can learn from my mistakes, and move forward.

5 Musts For Building A Social Network

There have been a lot of stories lately about Social Networking fatigue. The argument is that it takes time to for people to invest in a new platform, time to build up the list of friends and time to build trust and assess the level of experience of others in the network.

In a short period of time, users have expended their available energy, and they want to stick to the platforms they are comfortable with, which means new social networks lack the growth to take off.

All of that is true, but it doesn't mean you can't build your own social network. It just means that most marketers, and their clients, are too lazy and too cheap to build a platform that advances their needs.

That's right. Most marketers are too lazy to build effective social networks, and most companies are too cheap to pay for them. Personally, I think this is why we saw so many companies in the last two years purchasing fake comments, building fake blogs, and looking to "game" social networks, only to get called out for astroturfing and lame campaigns. Companies wanted something to do with social networking, and didn't want to pay much for it, so they turned to companies who promised them new media strategies with no effort. In other words - we'll take your money and hire people to leave lame comments around the web.

What should have, and should be done, is instead a social networking strategy built around individuals with a proven track record of success (of which there are only a few, and yes, we are one of them, but no, this isn't supposed to be self-serving).

Here are the steps I take to ensure social networking success.

1) Have a Point: Don't start a social media program just to have one. Lay down specific goals, a budget, and milestones. Make your consultant or internal team familiar with social media pick their own goals, and decide if you will sign off on them.

2) Do Your Research: Know your competitors (other people competing for the attention of your target audience). Know your likely allies (anyone who can provide content for you, link to you, send traffic your way, or endorse you in a manner that improves your reputation). Build lists of the people you need to contact and then contact them (This is the major selling point of our social media projects. It's one thing to type your companies name into a search engine - it's another to get a targeted list of people that have online influence in your industry).

3) Keep the Program Small and Focused: One manager, with a small team of 3-5 is enough. Everyone else is superfluous. Your goal is not to bring in the experience of every person in the corporation, but instead to find a team that can deliver on those goals from point one. The more targeted you are, the better chances you will have of success.

Once you have seen small success, you will have the internal experience to grow the program to include other parts of the corporation. Big projects aren't nimble enough, and they include too many people who don't know what they're doing. That's not a slam against the rest of your company - it's a fact. Do you build large teams composed of people from sales, logistic, and PR to help you do your company taxes? Then why add everyone into your social media strategy. Small, and focused. If you need more, the manager can always ask for more.

4) Executive Support: Nothing works in corporate America without executive support, and when you get to questions like blogging policy, or moderating comments, or even access to MySpace and Facebook, you're going to need someone to grant you permission.

5) Build an External Team of Experts: The social networking site is about a topic, and that topic has experts. If you want to build traffic, reach out to experts that already have audiences online and convince them to join your network. This is not easy to do, but it is the investment required to create success. Experts create the "stickiness" you need to make your social network a success. Remember that a social network with lots of members and no interaction is worth nothing. People will sign up for anything. What you want is for them to get involved. If you take the time to build a small, highly active core - the rest of the social network will generate that organic growth.

Contrary to popular opinion, this doesn't just happen. It takes work, but it can be done.

Summary: The people who believe that social networking fatigue has set in are using the wrong label. It's not that social networking is bothering us - it's lame social networks that give us little value. If you knew that adding 500 friends to a new social network would make you $100,000 - you'd do it. Most people would. If all it got you was the "prestige" of having another network to monitor - well - that's not fatigue - it's time preservation.

St Louis Interactive Community Event

Last night, at the invitation of James O'Brien from Lashback Communications, I had the pleasure of attending the St Louis Interactive Group.

The event had over 40 people show, and featured a panel speaking on the topic of integrated marketing, including people from Time.com and Time Magazine. CNN Digital sponsored the event (turns out CNN does a lot of business in St Louis), and so did Eye Wonder (a rich media firm from Chicago) and our own Charter Communications.

Color me pleased. The event was full of bright, interesting people with real jobs in interactive marketing. While most networking events leave me dying to run out the door after 5 minutes of a watered down drink and a vegetable tray, this event was classy, well-attended, and interesting.

We even had a woman who helped create the Monk-E mail campaign for CareerBuilder (who knew she was in St Louis) that was tabbed the best offline to online campaign, ever.

The event was held at the Lucas Park Grille, which has some awesome steaks, cooked perfectly, and if I have one event to attend a month, it's going to be this one.

I'll stop gushing. Get an invitation if you're in interactive marketing in St Louis. It's worth your time. St Louis Interactive Community

Headed Off To The Apple Store

My iMac crashed last night - running it out to the Mac Store later today. Most of the information is backed up, and I can access my e-mail from the web, but my address book is unreachable for the moment.

Should be corrected later day, unless the hard drive is gone, so if you want to get ahold of me (Jim), it's probably best to call.

Update: The hard drive is gone, which means that all of my addresses are gone too. I have paper back-ups, and all my files, except Entourage.

Contrary to popular opinion, Macs do crash, and it hurts just as much as when your PC crashes. Two in three months. Hey - now I get to use the excuse about having my e-mail wiped out! Sweet. I do have web access to my e-mail, but might be slower than usual responding. Should have a new computer in a week.

In the meantime, Franki has a giveaway from PulpFactory over at LifeInAVentiCup.com.

More Reasons For Auto Dealers To Have Blogs

I had a writer ask me to come up with some reasons that automotive dealers should be using blogs to market their vehicles. These are the easy ones. Ask BlogProAutomotive - Web 2.0 is going to be big for dealers.

A. Blogs are great ways to attract attention to your website.

Twice as many people go to your website as read your advertisement in the newspaper, but where do your advertising dollars go? It’s not enough to have a site. You have to market the site, spend money on Search Engine Optimization, and provide useful information to consumers, and you have to do it quickly. A blog is quite simply the best tool available to improve the search engine ranking of your website, and it’s cheaper than paying SEO consultants to improve your site. What is the importance of Search Engines? What is the importance of having someone search for a “new blue 2007 Accord with leather interior in Dallas?” That search could take the customer to a competitor’s website or your own.

Blogs also build regular traffic to your site. A well-written blog builds a community of readers who are naturally loyal to your dealership. These are the people who are currently considering purchasing a car. Would you prefer they search on Edmunds, Ebay, or at your site? A blog emphasizes the local nature of your dealership, which helps prevent the siphoning off of your customers to auction sites.

B. A Blog is Personal:

Websites are carefully crafted to pitch a message. Today’s customers simply don’t trust what it written on a website, primarily because there is no accountability. Are you really the lowest price in town, or did you pay someone to write that? With a blog, the impression that a human being is behind the writing creates trust between the customer and the dealership. What the blogger writes, the customer can verify, either by asking questions or typing comments or sending an e-mail. Providing a human contact to the website helps the customer build a relationship prior to setting foot on your lot. If you poll your customers, one of their biggest fears is being assaulted by a bad salesperson when they come to your dealership. Giving them the option of connecting with someone prior to showing up in person prepares them to buy and makes them more comfortable, more collaborative, and less combative. Any salesperson who has seen a customer walk on the lot with a series of web printouts knows that building a relationship before you discuss price is important in gaining trust. Why not gain their trust before they ever get to your lot?

C. Blogs Improve Your Reputation

Blogging is often described as being about transparency. This doesn’t mean that you have to share your profit margins, but it does require you to open up and explain why it makes sense for customers to purchase cars from you instead of your competitors. There is an element of risk involved – namely, if your competitors are better than you are, it will show. But is that a bad thing? Blogs help you pitch your strengths and they help you identify and improve your weaknesses. They do so by forcing you to look at your dealership through the eyes of your readers. There’s no hiding your flaws, but customers don’t want you to hide you flaws. They want information, and if they don’t get it from you, they’re going to get it from someone else.

D. Your Customers Are Already Blogging About You

There are 15 million US bloggers, and they cover all ages, races, and genders. These 15 million people reach some 40% of the population regularly, talking about their lives, their customer experiences, and their purchasing behavior. If you have not already been written about in a local blog, you soon will be. What that means is you don’t have a choice in hiding information about your dealership. The names of your salespeople, your finance managers, your sales process, even the quality of the coffee in your breakroom is coming under scrutiny, and will soon be readily available to all of your customers through Google. Having a blog gives you a voice in the conversation. Having no blog usually means you don’t know what is being said about you until the customer has gone to another dealer and purchased a car.

E. This is a CopyCat Industry

If one dealer is successful with blogs, everyone else will pile on, but there is a big advantage to being an early adopter. Those who start first will reap the biggest benefits. So take $15,000 out of your marketing budget, and plow it into a blog/social media strategy. Your current agency won’t know what to do with it, so make sure you find people with examples of their work. First ones in the pool win (which means the early adopter has a huge advantage over latercomers).

If you are a automotive dealer and want to start a blog, but no one can tell you how to make money with it - contact me at info@durbinmedia.com

Please Slow Down With The Quality Content

My feed reader (I use NetNewsWire, the Newsgator product for the Mac) has been blowing up with great posts on the nature of social networking, and my usual strategy of marking a story unread until I can post about it won't work.

So here's a round-up of stories I'd like to write, but have already been written, by authors who blog better than I do.

1) Jeremiah says there is no Field of Dreams for entrepreneurs who want to build a social networking community.

“I want to build a community”
Many an entrepreneur are seeking to create vertical communities, monetize on ad sense, or some other hook. Also, folks from large corporations are hoping to launch these communities, let customers self-support, and attempt to centralize the community in a decentralized world. For 95%, it’s not going to work.

The reason it won't work is most of those entrepreneurs aren't willing to do the work needed to make a community successful. Communities, and blogs, are not websites you can pay someone else to build while you reap the benefits. No matter what you read in Ad Age.

2) Rohit points out what people hate about social networking sites.

Unfortunately, everything he lists are the things sites use to make money and lock in users. Good comments on this post as well.

3) Techdirt says that your social networking site is scaring away advertisers.

The problem is advertisers don't want their ads showing up next to embarrassing user-generated content, but it is the content which creates the large audiences the advertisers want to get to.

This is a serious concern for many businesses, which don't want to be seen as supporting or associated with certain groups or types of content. But it's a potentially bigger problem for Facebook and other social-networking and user-generated content sites. These sites' major challenge is figuring out how to monetize the massive amounts of traffic they get, and their poor click-through rates are already one factor that holds down the rates they can charge. Couple those low rates with a dearth of quality advertisers scared off by the sites' content, and it sounds like a vicious cycle for social-networking and UGC sites.

4) Buzz Bin says astroturfing isn't always astroturfing, and explains how astroturfing came about. This is a great link if you know what astroturfing is, but as Buzz Bin points out, most people don't know, and don't care.

Yet, while we discuss these ethical issues in serious fashion (because how our profession conducts itself professionally in the blogosphere matters to us) no one on the outside world really seems to care. On a recent trip to Canada, I asked twenty people about their opinion on these matters… No one — not one — had heard a thing about any of these three blogodramas.

Personally, I think that our definitions of astroturfing have gone too far. It's like campaign finance laws. Don't regulate it - just make sure know one is hiding anything. That's the point of transparency, to own your words. My major problem with fake blogs and fake comments is that they're insulting, and the lazy marketer's way of billing large amounts for very little work.

It's hard to join a community, but effective. It's easy to leave lame comments and create fake blogs, but they are so easily sniffed out, what's the point?

But....most major companies I've spoken to in the last year have had some agency give them astroturf pitches. The problem, is these agencies don't understand social media, and are casting around for something to keep the client happy.

5) And Scoble, who has been on a Facebook promotional rant last week (or so it seemed), says that we don't need need new killer social networking apps, and that Facebook has already won. I don't think that's true, but will let time do my arguing for me.

New Facebook Advertising Campaign

My friend Harry Joiner has been banned from Facebook for uploading his e-mail address book. No warning, no explanation - just a ban and then a second e-mail saying it's final. My first thoughts are here at SeattleRecruiting, and today at StlRecruiting.

I can't say I understand the reason to ban headhunters, but certainly Facebook should at least tell people why they are banned, and allow them to correct the problem. It's possible that he was banned because Facebook bans the use of their site for promotional and advertising purposes. Seeing as over half of their members are over the age of 25, and only joined to promote their businesses and careers, it seems a poor decision to kick those people off, at least if you want to make your company anything more than a dating site for frat boys.

Update: Harry eventually was reinstated, several months later.

More And More And More Social Media Measurement

The PBS Media Shift Blog thinks there is a problem with web measurement. One - it's confusing. Two, the numbers are inconsistent. Three, the value is often different than that which we measure. The answer is to not try and measure all of the web with a single unified measurement.

As nice as it sounds, everyone I talked with — publishers and marketers and measurement firms alike — don’t think it’s possible to have a unified traffic measurement with the current complexity of the web and all the activities going on there.

I think there's a lot to be said for that, and in many ways, the problems we have in the advertising space revolve around metrics for the wrong targets. Social media really confuses the matter, because web analytics are completely unprepared for measuring the value of social media. In theory, it makes sense that 1000 regular visitors of say, a home improvement site are a better match for Home Depot advertising than a site with a 1,000,000 average visitors, but try telling someone responsible for placing Home Depot ads that you want the same money for just a 1,000 uniques!

In fact, most advertisers are sorely lacking in the metrics to measure social media (mainly because it's a constantly moving target), which explains why advertisers rely on Page Rank and Alexa rankings to determine if they are going to put their ads on the site. SEO gurus know this is not a good way to do it, but does anyone have a mathematically proven way to improve the metrics?

Nathan Gilliatt tries, with an excellent post on the way to sort out social media measurement. He gives us four ways to measure social media, and explains how each can be tracked.

1. Measure Online Audience
2. Track Social Media Content
3. PR Measurement
4. Market Research

The criteria for each is different, because the goals of each is different. My earlier post said the goal of social media should be the goals of the business, and after further thought, that sounds too obvious - but if social media is thought of as a tool rather than a destination, I think it can be achieved. Of course, social media is often sold as a destination, precisely because we lack the means to measure its results in a way that is compelling to advertisers.

A fifth way to measure social media is personal branding, as described by Ron Livingston over at Buzz Bin.

This matters more to small companies, instead of big ones, but one has to wonder why personal branding works for small companies, and if that can be translated to the larger corporations. I think that answer has to do more with the ability of small companies to make changes in the way they do business, which favors the small and nimble.

So where does that leave us? One of the major problems with advertising in social media is companies use the same banner and text ads they use in mass media sites to gather the attention of those in the social media space. They don't work well, which is why Facebook users have such a notoriously low click-through rate for advertising.

If our goal is to determine what works best for advertising, we need to determine first, what works better than banner ads, and second, who has the influence to deliver them. Video has the power to compete in social media spaces, and it can be measured in terms of impact (by number of views) no matter the number of uniques on a site. 1000 views from a 1000-reader site is just as good as 1000 views from a 1,000,000 reader site.

So if advertisers could determine what sites were truly influential in reaching targeted audiences, they could use video to drive their brand. So the real question, is who is influential. How do we measure influence? My next post will address that issue with a new project I'm working on.