Taking Magic Cleaners to the Blogging Masses
Today, I got an extremely personalized pitch because of my other blog, Unvarnished. The pitch came from Hass MS&L—a PR firm that’s really on top of the whole blogging phenomenon. They wrote:
Hi, Travis (or do we call you Nep?) I’m writing to you because you blogged (favorably) about Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. This is not spam! I wanted to let you know that Mr. Clean is sponsoring a charity drive and wondered if you’d like to blog about it. How it works is that for every person that visits this site and submits an idea about how they use Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, Mr. Clean will donate $1 to the Hands On Network, a growing charity that helps volunteers keep communities clean. Some of its affiliates are working on Katrina-related projects right now.
Thanks for your time.
My post had been a short post in my link blog about people with kids liking the product.
Why was this a good pitch? First of all, they get that you have to be personal when approaching bloggers. The guy took the time to see what my name really was, it wasn’t a press release. Second, they tie it into a charity thing—bloggers are for some reason extremely focused on donations and fund raising and community, witness everything from the Howard Dean’s presidential compaign to the tsunami and Katrina hurricane fund raising efforts. Third, it’s an extremely soft sell—they tell me about the event and “wonder if I’d like to blog about it.” Lastly, it’s not that expensive—time spent to contact bloggers, plus they put a $15,000 cap on the total donation (they didn’t mention that. 
) If by some chance, and you never know, this gets passed around too much, they’ve limited their financial exposure.
It doesn’t matter that they’re trying to sell cleaning supplies, for whom bloggers are hardly a key demographic. Smart moves, Hass folk.
Blogs as Sedition
While in Singapore with Paul Chaney to conduct the BLOGasia corporate blogging conference, blogging hit the news. Singapore arrested two bloggers and charged them with sedition, specifically with posting racist comments on their personal blogs. The tone of the conference definitely reflected this bit of news – attendees at BLOGasia were exceedingly concerned with controlling the dialogue on their blogs, moderating comments, and keeping the topic of a blog focused in a particular direction. It was frustrating, as a U.S.-centric blogger, to realize that for these folks, free speech doesn’t exist, at least as we conceive of it. Of course, I knew this intellectually, but reading the news and talking with citizens of Singapore and Malaysia really drove the point home. The rules are different over there.
I sat down today to write up a summary of what happened in Singapore, and to note a move on the part of Malaysian bloggers to reporter readers who have left racist comments on their blogs to authorities. However, I’ve discovered a blog that does a much better job than I could do in covering the issues: Global Voices Online, the work of a global citizens’ media group, sponsored by the Berman Center for Internet and Society and the Harvard Law School. These folks have got the world covered when it comes to bloggers and the law!
Rush over right now and read the posts on Global Voices Online about Singapore and Malaysia.
So, this post ultimately has two purposes – to let readers know about these disturbing cases in Singapore and Malaysia, and to refer you to Global Voices Online, if the legal ramifications of blogging are a concern for you.
Incidentally, I think it’s worth noting that most of the blogs that are involved in legal cases resulting from libel, copyright infringement, sedition or racism, are personal blogs – not business blogs. Frankly, blogs about women’s health or lawn care simply aren’t likely to hit those push-button topics that get people really worked up.
And, just in case you are a U.S.-based blogger who thinks you’ve gotten off scot-free, don’t miss this Red Herring article “Bloggers Face the Law.” Things may not be quite as rosy as you imagine. For good measure, I’ll throw a link in here to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers.
Powerpoint Presentations from the BLOGasia conference
By popular request, here are the Powerpoint slides used during the BLOGasia seminar. Enjoy!
Day 1
Introduction to Blogging (2.28MB)
Blog Policies and Best Practices (2.40MB)
Blog Marketing Strategies I (1.76MB)
Blog Marketing Strategies II (2.09MB)
Day 2
Blog Implementation and Design (6.64MB)
Blogs and Your Company (726KB)
Blogging for Specific Audiences (2.11MB)
Dealing with Employee Blogs
Employees can be a great source of marketing and PR, when you hook them up with blog software. On the other hand, not everything they say may be positive! In his final session, Paul Chaney discussed “Blogging and Your Company.”
People blog about a lot of things, but evidence suggests that people blog much more often about their jobs than they do about food, family, or even sex. Assume that your employees are already blogging!
When employees blog, employers benefit from the Googlejuice generated by links, and from the communication between employees that may occur. Companies that encourage the use of blogs create a way for teams of people to collaborate, share knowledge, and manage projects. There is an intangible benefit as well: a company that encourages blogging sends a message about the value of individual voices.
Employees benefit as well, by getting to know their colleagues (besides those in the next cubicle). A good employee that blogs demonstrates his or her expertise to both colleagues and management, enhancing credibility while giving themselves a voice in new ways.
Companies that encourage blogging among their employees lay themselves open for the individual interpretations of their bloggers about what is and is not appropriate on a blog. An employee blog policy is not a bad idea. For models, look to Groove Networks, Thomas Nelson, and Yahoo’s policies.
I’m cross-posting this on three sites: Buzz Marketing with Blogs, Radiant Marketing Group, and BlogAsia. If you’d like to comment, please come to BlogAsia to do so.
Blogging for Specific Audiences at BLOGasia
In this afternoon’s session “Blogging for Specific Audiences” Paul Chaney outlined different corporate groups that should be considering blogging, and why.
CEOs: Influence and Impact
Michael Hyatt, CEO and President of Thomas Nelson Publishers
Working Smart and From Where I Sit
Corporate Board Members: Accessibility
PR Professionals: Trust
Steve Rubel, Micro Persuasion
IT Personnel: Efficiency
Robert Scoble, Scobleizer
Marketing Personnel: Relationships
Company Employees: Evanglism
Microsoft, Macromedia
Industry Thought Leaders: Expertise
For example: Tom Peters
Paul posited that blogs have changed journalism, making consumers into journalists. And as a result, blogs has changed public relations, which has traditionally been targeted to the media.
The old public relations
- Senior management, with a lot of input from marketing people, would work out a company’s message and talking points.
- Internal marketing people, working with PR consultants, would try to burn the message into the retinas of the trade press and analysts.
- The journalists and analysts would do what they do, broadcasting the message to the masses.
The new public relations
- Senior management works out a company’s goals and messages.
- Management works hard to make sure that the employees understand them.
- The people who are really doing the work tell the story to the world, directly.
The session ended with the participants breaking into groups of five and developing a strategy to deal with a public relations catastrophe via blogging. Scenarios ranged from the exposure of the head of a non-profit agency installing luxury fittings in his office bathroom, to a company that manufactures a faulty bedframe that collapses when anyone over a certain weight lies down.
I’m cross-posting this on three sites: Buzz Marketing with Blogs, Radiant Marketing Group, and BlogAsia. If you’d like to comment, please come to BlogAsia to do so.
Step By Step, Blog Tools Explained
Susannah took the microphone and the keyboard today in order to demonstrate via a live Internet connection the details of various blogging tools.
She set up a demostration blog, using Typepad. Then she walked through, step-by-step, how to:
These are very basic things to do, but they were a warm up for one of the most confusing things to do: the trackback. The demonstration was carefully planned, and went smoothly without error. I could see the signs of relief as understanding settled over the audience. (For those reading along, here’s a good primer.)
With trackbacks accounted for, Susannah undertook a review of blog site designs: what works, what doesn’t. Without the screenshots, it’s a little hard to recreate the discussion, but essentially… most blogs share many of the same design characteristics. A few blogs use radical designs, but in a quick survey of the room, it seems that if you want a blog to be immediately accepted, adopted and read, stick with a basic format. In fact, Paul Chaney added that perhaps one reason for blogs’ success is that there’s such uniformity of design—you don’t need to relearn an interface with each new blog.
Basic blog design similarities were covered yesterday. Today, discussion was more about color and font choice, alignment and other structural details, and then how to actually modify the design, yourself through one of the blogging interfaces, or by hiring a consultant.
Other blogging tools were demonstrated, too: Expression Engine, Wordpress and Blogger. All share the same basic tools, but in fact the interfaces do take a bit of getting used to, and each has its own quirks and additional features.
I should also add that the morning tea break had something you never see at North American conferences: instead of bagels and danishes, the food provided was deep fried chicken morsels with spicy red sauce, and “mee” noodles with bok choi and mushrooms. For someone who loves Asian food as much as I do, this was wonderful.
I’m cross-posting this on three sites: Buzz Marketing with Blogs, Radiant Marketing Group, and BlogAsia. If you’d like to comment, please come to BlogAsia to do so.
Good Morning, BlogAsia!
Good morning! We’re here for the second day of BlogAsia.
Last night I found out that a search for BlogAsia on Google returns 21,300 results. That’s pretty good—but it’s not all because of this conference. It turns out that “blogasia” in Polish means “little cute blog”—isn’t that an odd coincidence?
Let’s exclude Polish references for now, though, and take a look at what others have said about BlogAsia.
The Youth.SG Blog has done several posts already about being here, what they’ve learned, the food and other items. Includes photos.
Conference Calls Unlimited blog notes that Paul’s doing a great job.
Top of the Word gave a little preview of who’s here and what it’s about.
Vantan had nice things to say—unfortunately, she’s not here for the second day.
Here’s some other places to check for BlogAsia (or your own blog, just by changing the search term): Pubsub, Google News, Google Blog Search, Technorati, IceRocket, and Feedster.
I’m cross-posting this on three sites: Buzz Marketing with Blogs, Radiant Marketing Group, and BlogAsia. If you’d like to comment, please come to BlogAsia to do so.
Knock, knock. Who’s here?
Most attendees are from Singapore, and all (except the speakers) are from Asia—probably because that’s where the conference is being held. They appear to be in their 20s and 30s—either no one over 40 blogs, or blogging keeps you looking young.
One great point: About a third of the attendees have blogs or have worked on a blog already. Not bad, considering that this is the first blogging conference ever in Asia.
It’s evenly split between women and men, which is wonderful. Most people are dressed business casual—no ties, and no t-shirts.
The biggest variability is in the employers of attendees. There’s folks from many different companies—some large and established and multi-national, some new and very small and local (but some small ones are multi-national, too). There’s people from educational institutes and agencies, looking at blogging as a tool for teaching. Most interesting to me, is that there’s a very large number of people from government agencies, including some rather significant ministries. (I don’t have permission right now to say which companies, sorry!)
Side note: Government and blogging are a natural fit, though it hasn’t happened much yet. For companies, blogging is simply another competitive strategy—one that I think works well, but still just one particular attempt to sell product and influence purchasers. But government is in its very nature supposed to serve the people, and be responsive to its constituents. Government can also be mysterious and obscure. Blogging is a fabulous way to bridge the space betwene bureaucrats and citizens, and may to start building trust and communication and understanding. At least, that’s my idealistic viewpoint, and perhaps the presense of government employees here means that some other share this opinion as well.
At this point, I’d like to the attendees introduce themselves—check the comments on BlogAsia for additional specifics!
I’m cross-posting this on three sites: Buzz Marketing with Blogs, Radiant Marketing Group, and BlogAsia. If you’d like to comment, please come to BlogAsia to do so.
Ten Thing to Consider Before You Blog
Paul Chaney‘s taking charge this afternoon. He’s got the hard job of keeping everyone awake after the large (and surprisingly tasty) buffet lunch. He’s seems to have lists of tens—first of all, ten things that you ought to have answers to before you start blogging (or at least an understanding of the question!)
First, you need to understand why you want to use a blog.
Don’t do it because it’s the latest internet trend or just because everyone else is doing it. Have some sense of your specific purpose. For example, are you using the blog as a marketing channel, or will it be more for company news and updates?
Online retailer Bluefly uses their blog specifically for marketing purposes. The company asserts their blog has had a positive effect on sales, even stating that visitors who click to the blog “have been more likely to make a purchase than those who visit Bluefly directly.”
Second, consider its core message.
What are you going to write about? What topics will be covered? What “tone” will you give the blog? Should it be warm and humorous, or more straightforward and informational, even controversial?
Your approach will largely be determined by the audience you’re attempting to target. Obviously, when writing any blog your primary consideration needs to be your readers, at least the readers you hope to attract. They will have the most bearing on the nature of the content and the way it’s presented.
Third, determine who is going to write it.
If there is a pain point in blogging, it’s this. Blogs, especially business blogs, take time and forethought. They need someone who understands how to write “blog-style.” Invariably, the blogger will inject their own personality, so it’s incumbent upon you to find a writer who understands what makes your company tick and can accurately reflect its persona.
Obviously, the best person for the job would be someone inside the company. You need to consider whether or not you have in-house talent you can afford to assign this task. One Internet retailer, Stone Creek Coffee, uses employees to write entries for the blog.
You might even consider following Stonyfield Farms lead and hire someone full-time to write your blog. Stonyfield has four blogs written by Christine Halvorson, a full-time employee. The company has become a model example of how small businesses can use a blog for marketing purposes.
Fourth, determine whether you are prepared to engage the conversation without attempting to control the communication.
The “blogosphere” is a no-holds-barred free-for-all means of communicating. It’s a two-way street. Using the comments option built into most blog platforms readers can respond to what you have said. Their responses may not always be kind. In fact, depending on their experience with your company and its products or services, they may even be caustic. Not every organization is prepared for such raw unedited content to show up on their public website (blog).
Before your company makes the decision to deploy a blog, it must be willing to accept the good with the bad and have a plan for addressing those less than congratulatory comments if and when they occur.
Don’t be alarmed however. Most comments won’t be of the negative variety. Many will come in the form of questions, while others will have a positive spin to be sure. From a PR standpoint, blogs can serve you well as they lend credence to the notion that you do value what your customers and others have to say. They put a human face on your company that no other form of internet communication can.
Fifth, determine a company blogging policy and establish posting guidelines.
Susannah Gardner‘s book Buzz Marketing with Blogs For Dummies contains an entire section on this subject including such guidelines as:
Sixth, monitor what is being said about your company and your industry.
There are a number of reasons to do this, the most obvious being to find out how people view your company. You may find no one is talking about you at all, or that what is being said has negative connotations (or positive for that matter). If you are not being talked about, even to a small degree, a blog can help change that. If you company is being viewed negatively, you can use a blog to challenge misperceptions.
In addition, monitoring your industry helps you to know what is being said about your competitors. Observing industry trends might help you find a niche worth exploiting or a marketing avenue others are overlooking.
A panoply of online tools have been created to assist you, BlogPulse, Bloglines Citations, Technorati, PubSub, and IceRocket just to name a few. (Oh, and don’t forget good old Google!)
Seventh, decide on a blog platform.
This is not difficult as many good platforms are available. If your blog is going to be self-standing separate from your company website, Typepad is a good solution. If you want to include it inside your overall website structure, Movable Type or WordPress are good options. (One platform not recommended for business purposes is Blogger. Though many small businesses use it, the platform lacks some of the most elemental features included in others, such as the ones mentioned above.)
Eighth, determine ways to market your blog.
If the blog has marketing ramifications, getting the attention of search engines is vital. There are a variety of ways to do that, including submitting the blog to a number of search engines and blog directories.
Ninth, develop a plan to track statistics.
This is an area where bloggers have not traditionally paid much attention. However, when using blogs for marketing purposes, it is vital to know the effect they are having on your bottom line. Blogs are just like any other website in that their effect should be tracked in terms of unique visitors, page views, and conversion rates.
Tenth, be sure to know your keywords.
Blogs can help customers find your business when they are searching on Google or other sites. Therefore, it is important to know what words customers most often use to find you via the search engines, and what words show up in competitor or industry blogs on a regular basis that help place them high in Google’s index.
Knowing which words to drop into your posts on a regular basis will help boost your search rankings. Writing frequent, keyword-optimized entries can help boost search standings, which goes a long way for a business owner on a tight marketing budget. Don’t overdo it though. Readers will see right through any obvious attempts at self-promotion.
I’m cross-posting this on three sites: Buzz Marketing with Blogs, Radiant Marketing Group, and BlogAsia. If you’d like to comment, please come to BlogAsia to do so.
Legal Issues of Blogging
Susannah brought up legal issues, and questions from the audience started popping up like mushrooms after a rain.
All the questions seemed to be variations of “Will my company run into legal problems if we start blogging?”
Well, legal troubles are a very broad topic. But it’s unlikely.
What about libel?
There have been no court-adjudicated libel cases involving blogs, so far. that could be because blogs are new, or because bloggers are poor. But it’s also because bloggers have a natural aversion to libel given that they have a personal, public reputation to uphold of their own. And, it’s because most bloggers have swift, fair policies for how to deal with libelous statements made in comments.
Blogging, because it’s easy to publish and correct, makes it easy to fix information you find to be false or damaging, and also makes it hard for you to ignore requests to do so. So be quick and fair when it comes to writing and correcting your own blog, and libel won’t be an issue.
Is it necessary to run every blog post past your legal department?
No, hardly. You don’t need a lawyer to review every phone call, or every brochure, so they don’t need to review every blog post. Of course, a very few people are working for a company in a highly regulated industry where such precautions are necessary. Having a lawyer review your company’s blogging plociy—that’s a good idea. And having appropriate disclaimers, and making sure you hire or use a reliable blogger, is probably your best defense.
As for policies, you may need a policy for your own company blog(s). You could also need another blog policy for how you deal with employees who have their own blogs.
I’m cross-posting this on three sites: Buzz Marketing with Blogs, Radiant Marketing Group, and BlogAsia. If you’d like to comment, please come to BlogAsia to do so.
Why not have a blog?
The usual objections:
Objection 1: Time
Yes, it takes time.
Objection 2: Cost
Objection 3: Expertise
Objection 4: Mistakes
I’m cross-posting this on three sites: Buzz Marketing with Blogs, Radiant Marketing Group, and BlogAsia. If you’d like to comment, please come to BlogAsia to do so.
Buzz Marketing Is..
Buzz Marketing is about creating conversations, and blogs are by their nature a conversation. Viral marketing is about getting people to help you pass your message along.
Examples of viral marketing:
Can blogs be used for buzz and viral marketing?
One example: PR firm Marqui generated a huge wave of discussion by hiring some bloggers to post about Marqui
Why are blogs good at this type of marketing?
I’m cross-posting this on three sites: Buzz Marketing with Blogs, Radiant Marketing Group, and BlogAsia. If you’d like to comment, please come to BlogAsia to do so.
BlogAsia Live!
Good morning! I’m live blogging the BlogAsia conference, which will be starting in about 5 minutes.
It’s being held in Singapore at the Furama hotel, and so far, it’s going very smoothly. (As I said, it hasn’t started yet. 
)
Who am I? Well, I’m Travis Smith, partner at Hop Studios, an internet consulting and design firm based in Vancouver, Canada.
I’m also the husband of the main speaker, Susannah Gardner, who, along with Paul Chaney, will be taking the attendees through two days of learning, discussion and education about blogs as they’re used in business and in general on the Web.
I should also mention that I’m cross-posting this on three sites: Buzz Marketing with Blogs, Radiant Marketing Group, and BlogAsia. If you’d like to comment, please come to BlogAsia to do so.
Day 2 in Asia
The big event for today was a talk I gave in the MPH Bookstore in the Mid Valley Megamall (Asia’s biggest mall!). This store was huge. Vast. And crowded. I’ve been in large bookstores before, but never one where there were so many bookcases packed in. This place had books.
My talk went well; I spoke for about an hour and hopefully managed not to make a fool of myself. Travis took a bunch of pictures that don’t leave me with much room to believe that, but no one laughed, so that’s OK. I did get a fair number of questions, and good ones, so it became a nice back-and-forth, better than I’ve had in some classrooms!
My thanks to Wiley marketing exec Lai Wai Ching who arranged the event, and ferried me over to it, and then poured a drink into me afterward.
On the sightseeing front, Travis and I went to the Petronas Twin Towers. You may recall these as the tallest buildings in the world. In fact, they are now the second-tallest. They are enormous. You can go up to the skybridge between them but we were too late to get tickets that didn’t conflict with the book talk later, so we’ll try that again on Monday. In the afternoon we went to Chinatown and resisted the temptation to buy bootleg versions of nearly every movie in the theaters right now.
In case you were wondering, Malaysia is hot, at least by my Canadian heat tolerance-weakened self. Hot and muggy.
Observations from Asia
I’m typing this while standing at a free Internet kiosk in the Singapore airport, while waiting for flight to Kuala Lumpur. Today marks the first of several blog-related days in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. I’m here at the invitation of Maitre Allianz to do a two-day blogging conference on the 20th and 21st, and also to do some book promotion. It’s my first trip to Asia, and though very Westernized, both Kuala Lumpur and Singapore are different enough from home to be fascinating—right down to the condiments on offer in the airport cafeteria.
The blogging conference is a joint effort between myself and Paul Chaney, and my kind husband has agreed to live blog the event. Stay tuned for more on that.
While I get my bearings, I thought I’d give you some observations on Internet access, and its value. For a blogger, and a Web designer, I need Internet access in my hotel without question. But I’d actually like to have wireless Internet everywhere, especially airports. It’s valuable enough to me that I’ll pay a fee to get it in either location, but that’s certainly not true of every traveler. Here’s what interests me, though. In the Tokyo airport, there were actually little desks and you could sit down and work in comfort—but you had to pay a fee to connect to the Internet. At the hotel last night, there was a charge of what I think was about US$20 for a day’s access from my room. Here in the Singapore airport, they’ve gone so far as to actually provide the Internet connection AND THE COMPUTER—for free.
It all raises the question for me of whether Internet access should cost money, or whether it should be something that comes complimentary with a hotel stay or as an aiport service, sort of like plumbing and air conditioning. Is it a service, or is it a luxury?
I’ve only got two more minutes of free Internet service on this terminal (though I can see 10 more from here), so I’ll sign off. If this post is perhaps a litte scattered, you’ll have to chalk it up to jetlag. More from Kuala Lumpur.
About
This blog is the companion Web site for "Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies," a book for business professionals looking for advice and solutions for business blogging by Susannah Gardner. In stores now!
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