Blogs and Business
Study Shows Blogs Increase Media Attention for Companies
A Cymfony/Porter Novelli study reports that “the majority of companies surveyed (76%) indicated that they have noticed an increase in media attention and/or website traffic as a result of their blog(s).”
Read more and download the report here.
Increase in Fortune 500 Companies That Blog
The Long Tail blog posted yesteday about the number of Fortune 500 companies that are blogging: 27 out of 500, or 5.4%. It’s not a great number, but it is an increase from when The Long Tail first compiled its list:
In the four months since we set up the site, the number of Fortune 500 companies with public blogs has increased 50%, from 18 to 27. That’s a significant increase, but it’s still not a lot in absolute terms.
There’s a wiki set up to track the companies that are blogging. Remember, this is a list of “active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products.”
The Long Tail is written by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.
Blogsledding at Blogsndogs (and Other Topics)
Well, I wussed out today and didn’t go dog sledding (Do you have any idea what the temperature is here in Banff? It turns out I’m more of a California girl than I thought!). Many of the participants went, however, including Travis, so I expect to see some great Flickr photos tonight.
Participants at BlogsnDogs seem pretty pleased by the program here so far, though there are the usual problems with packing so much technology talk into such a short time. There’s so much great energy and innovation around blogging that it’s really impossible to do much more than skim the surface of a few favorites. My fellow faculty member (and co-author!) Kris Krug did a session on Monday that highlighted some of his favorites, and attendee Monique Trottier wrote up his talk, along with a few highlights from other sessions.
I’ve uploaded my slides from a talk Robert Scales, Darren Barefoot, and I did on Monday, but probably the most pertinent item is the list of strategic reasons for blogging:
- search engine marketing
- direct communication
- brand building
- competitive differentiation
- relational marketing
- exploit the niches
- media & public relations
- reputation management
- position expert status
- build up trust
Tomorrow afternoon’s Blogging for Business session gives me another chance to really focus on this topic. What I’d really like to do is some hands-on exercises designed to talk folks through thinking strategically about business blogging—brainstorming about focus, audience, promotion, and so on. If you’re a BlogsnDogs attendee, help us tailor the session to you by leaving a comment describing what you’d like to explore more, and what you’d like to be able to take back home with you when you go! And if you aren’t attending, well, you can leave you wishlist, too.
Online Influence Talk for High-Tech Communicators and Society for Technical Communication
I gave a talk tonight to a joint meeting of the High-Tech Communicator’s Exchange and the Society for Technical Communication in downtown Vancouver. It was a great group—smart, engaged, and with such excellent questions!
I hit on these topics during the hour-long presentation (at lease I think so!):
- Marketing strategies businesses employ with and through blogs
- The intangible benefits to a businesses reputation and credibility that can be built via blogs
- Ways to reach new and current customers through blogging
- Blogs as tools for product/technical support
- Reading blogs and talking to bloggers
- Actual examples of companies who have successfully used blogs to support their business
- Marketing no-nos in the blogosphere
I promised to post my slide deck so here that is (PPT, 1.51MB).
Members of the STC include writers, editors, illustrators, project managers, instructional designers, web designers, knowledge managers, usablility specialists, help developers, engineers, and others involved in communicating technical information to other professionals or the general public. We work in high-tech industries, health care, the resource industries, the legal system, utilities, and government.
The HTCE is a group made up of professionals from the fields of public relations, marketing, marketing communications and technical communications who are or have been working in the high-tech and/or biotech sectors. The group comprises junior, intermediate and senior professionals who work for companies or agencies or who are independent consultants.
Thanks to Susan Patch for contacting me and making the arrangments, and Catherine Ducharme for helping me get set up beforehand!
Liability Insurance for Blogging?
I spoke with a reporter today whose editor has asked for a story on liability insurance for corporate blogs—what companies offer it, what companies are buying it, and what it covers.
It’s a fascinating question—and one I haven’t been asked before (I love those). Unfortunately, it’s the first time it’s come up, at least for me, so I’m looking for anyone out there who has maybe thought about, looked at, or heard anything about blog liability insurance. the article could go a couple of directions, but certainly the obvious questions are, do you need liability insurance for a corporate blog, and do you need coverage when you encourage your employees to blog about their work experiences. So how about it, folks? Anyone know anything about blog liability insurance? You’ll likely get quoted for the article if you do!
Reading Blogs at Work
Get this—apparently sometimes blog readers are actually killing time at work, instead of being productive members of society. I, for one, am shocked.
AdAge put up a story this week with the headline “What Blogs Cost American Business: In 2005, Employees Will Waste 551,000 Years Reading Them” (free registration required).
About 35 million workers—one in four people in the labor force—visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks—blog readers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.
The real kicker, I think, comes toward the second half of the piece. According to Jonathan Gibs, senior research manager at Nielsen/NetRatings, blog reading is happening in addition to other Web-surfing and Internet use. This seems shockingly significant to me. It would be one thing if blogs were taking the place of other forms of Web tomfoolery, but the that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is that workers are adding blog reading to their existing activities, taking time out from whatever else they are supposed to be doing to read blogs. The AdAge article goes directly to the conclusion that blog reading is actually decreasing productivity, taking hours that belong to the employee and replacing them with an activity that does not benefit the company.
But this seems wrong to me. In fact, we all know that we spend a certain amount of the work day engaged in non-work activities—getting coffee, chatting to colleagues, reading news, whatever. But my experience in the workforce tells me that most people have a little internal censor that keeps a cap on those activities. After all, we know we’re there to do a job, and there’s a finite amount of time you can spend goofing off and still accomplish enough not to get fired. Frankly, my fooling around schedule doesn’t have room for an additional 40 minutes of slacking every day. Which begs the question of why folks think they can get away with reading blogs instead of working. I think the answer just may be that a lot of that blog reading is seen by the employee as working, whether it’s reading blogs that pertain directly to your industry or job, or doing research, or figuring out what the competition is up to.
The Ad Age article acknowledges that some blog reading may actually be blog-related, putting a guess at around 25%. That’s pretty much speculation though, as is my own belief: that employees are reading blogs on work time because they feel that most of this activity is work-related.
UPDATE: Scott Adams has started a Dilbert blog!
Blog ad story: 0.5% of campaign budget, 29% of campaign traffic
My ex-boss, Henry Copeland, runs BlogAds, and I saw this great tidbit in a recent MediaPost story mentioning him and his service that places ads on blogs.
Panelist Brian Clark, the CEO of GMD Studios, recounted a campaign that his agency ran for Audi, titled “The Art of the Heist.” Just one-half of one percent of the media buy budget, Clark said, was spent on BlogAds—a firm run by panel moderator Henry Copeland, which sells ad space on some of the highest-trafficked blogs. Those ads, Clark said, ended up accounting for 29 percent of the traffic sent to the campaign’s landing page.
Of course, it could be that they’re really bad at buying non-blog media 
But I think it points out that blogs are now, and will remain for some time a great way to cut through the clutter of traditional marketing channels.
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)
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.
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.
Another Blog Policy Example
Kudos to Hill & Knowlton for opening their doors to employee bloggers. You might be interested in reading the employee blog policy, to which each blogger has signed up:
- I will acknowledge and correct mistakes promptly
- I will preserve the original post, using notations to show where I have made changes
- I will never delete a post
- I will not delete comments unless they are spam or off-topic
- I will disclose conflicts of interest (including client relationships) where I am able to do so
- I will not publish anything that breaches my existing employment contract
- I will distinguish between factual information/commentary and advertising
- I will never publish information I know to be inaccurate
- I will disagree with other opinions respectfully
- I will link to online references and original source materials directly
- I will strive for high quality with every post - including basic spellchecking
- I will write deliberately and with accuracy
- I will reply to emails and comments when appropriate, and do so promptly
- I will restrict my posting to professional topics
- I will write on a regular basis, at least once each week
Read a bit more here.
The Skinny on Google AdSense
I’ve been meaning to write up something about Google AdSense for some time now, as it’s one of the best ways out there to start making your blog pay for itself (instead of sponging off you and demanding a redesign), but lo and behold, my procrastination has paid off: Denise Wakeman has posted a great overview Google AdSense for me!
“The Evolution of Google AdSense” by Sharon Housley is a great resource for those new to Google AdSense and long-time users alike. Sharon covers
- How Google AdSense works
- its history
- the progression of the program
- and reporting.
Thanks, Sharon and Denise.
Character blogs continued…
Paul wants you to be a new recruit…blogger jobs
Job #1Topic: Investment StrategiesThis is a soon to be produced blog focused on the advantages of using gold as a long-term investment strategy. Content would be provided by the sponsoring company, and the blogger would be responsible for editing that content as well as aggregating other industry news and opinion on the subject.Ideally, we’re looking for someone who has experience or background in gold investing or collecting. It doesn’t matter if you’re currently a blogger, though that would be a plus. This is a Paid Position.Job #2Topic: Small business finance/factoringThis is for a newly launched blog focused on small business factoring.Factoring is the purchase of your accounts receivable (invoices) in order to provide you with the cash flow you need when you need it. Factoring is a widely accepted business practice used by large, mid-sized, and small companies.The blogger would be responsible for supplementing posts done by the company CEO. Topics would include not only factoring, but other news and items of interest relative to small business finance.We’re looking for someone who has experience in the financial industry, particularly if that includes factoring. We’d also consider someone who has been or is now a small business owner and understands small business finance. This is a Paid Position.Job #3Topic: Whitepaper/webinar reviewWe’re looking for a dozen different bloggers to write reviews of white papers and webinars for a soon to be launched group blog. Topics covered on the blog include:* Information Technology* Computers* Internet* Network Communications* Multimedia* Sales & MarketingIdeally, we’d like to find individuals with expertise in one or more of those given fields. Each blogger would be responsible for contributing a minimum of two reviews per month.While this is not currently a paid position, it is an excellent opportunity for building name recognition, and achieving reputational equity as an expert in your field. There will be opportunity for revenue share in the near future.
MBA Students in Blogging Bootcamp
MBA students at the Michigan Business School will be blogging on behalf of small businesses, as part of an effort to increase their online visibility. Bud Gibson writes about the plan over at The Community Engine Blog:
In a nutshell, our plan is to divide the students up into five or six teams of five people. Then the fun starts. Each team blogs about the industry the company is in. They learn who the blog opinion leaders are for that industry. They learn how to track the company’s products and competitors in the blogosphere using tools like technorati, pubsub, del.icio.us, and flickr tags. They’re graded on making effective blog posts with a portion of the grade being decided based on getting themselves noticed and cited by opinion leaders. The blogging efforts will be completely open for all to see, so competition will be based on how well the team does its research, networks, and crafts its message.
Bud is soliciting ideas and feedback for the “High Octane Blogging Bootcamp.”
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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