Given that in four days I will have officially been at my current job for three years – god, has it really been that long? – I feel it’s only appropriate to start ramping up this blog again after almost a year of neglect.

And let me tell you, a lot has happened in this past year.  For starters, my company is almost entirely under new management.  Most important to me was the induction of a new VP of marketing back in, oh, May of this year, and from that, the creation of a proper marketing “team,” the likes of which I hadn’t seen in quite some time.  With others handling the stuff that used to take up much of my time – organizing trade shows, for example – I was free to nestle into my role as the company’s Online Marketing Manager.

Some of you might recall a few of the posts I wrote last fall (1 | 2 | 3) that dealt with the ever-present problem of companies not taking advantage of all that social media has to offer.  Quite frankly, while back then I was definitely pushing for the creation of a social media plan, I found myself falling into the same scenario to which Paul Chaney alludes in his post yesterday, entitled “Social Media in Organizations: What Happens When You’re the Only One Talking?“  That is to say, my social media efforts did more to boost my own personal brand than my company’s.

Buuut … things have changed now.  Our VP of marketing is very, very open to the use of social media as a marketing tool, and I presented him with a plan for the next six months that includes, among other venues, current statistics, strategy going forward, and metrics for our company website and blog (yes, we finally have a blog after months of me yipping about it!), Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and so forth.

Look for a string of posts to appear in the next few weeks regarding social media marketing best practices.  I’m looking forward to getting this show back on the road!

Kill Your Blog

The author, Paul Boutin, seems to be under the impression that blogs are, well, so 2004.  Now, apparently, “the blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge.”

One could see this as true.  He references Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs, all of which are corporate and/or professional blogs making a tidy yearly sum from advertising.  The era of personal, one-writer blogs may appear to have been pushed aside in favor of blogs that have multi-person staffs working twenty-four hours a day to deliver the most valuable content to their readers.

But to be completely honest, I’m not convinced.  I rarely visit the sites that have 5+ posts per day.  Why?  For one thing, I just don’t have the time to keep up with all of it.  Who with a full-time job and a personal life does?  Additionally, the information provided seems less valuable to me than that in single-person shops.  Some of the biggest blogs in the world spit out content constantly, making them, essentially, online newspapers.  I can set up Google alerts for the headlines on any particular topic without having to trudge through paragraphs of news.  No, I find much more value in poignant, thought-out posts from individuals who a) know and honor their blog’s focus and b) take the time to research, ponder, and analyze what they are about to present to the world.

For me, as a marketeer and young professional, this is why luminaries such as Chris Brogan, Seth Godin, and Penelope Trunk keep me coming back.  They don’t spew out superficial content, but rather provide information combined with references and anecdotes … the kind of juicy stuff you don’t get with these money-grabbing assembly lines.

I do not think anyone should go out right now and disband his or her blog.  Ignore your Technorati rank for a second and look inside of your community.  Do you have “regulars,” or people who continue to return to your site?  Are many people subscribed to you via RSS or email?  Is your comments section a haven for discussion, arguments, and debate?  My goal would be to answer all of those questions with a yes. This is the value for me as a blogger.  My aspirations as a blogger – and I realize I’m very, very early in the game here with this particular blog – is not to earn $75,000 per year because of some well-placed advertising.  I’m happy knowing that I give people something to think about, whether they agree with it or not.

Twitter is heralded in the Wired article as being “to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004.”  One cannot deny its influence on the Internet and, specifically, the Web 2.0 world as we know it.  From Barack Obama to Britney Spears to Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco, ‘tweeting’ has become a great means of communicating with particular communities because it’s so fast.  It takes a fraction of the time to write a thought that is 140 characters versus putting together four or five paragraphs for a blog post.  I love Twitter.  I think it’s a brilliant tool to connect with one’s community as well as to follow others who provide you with ideas that you find useful.

But it won’t stop me from reading blogs, and I don’t think it will render blogs obsolete.  As much as people say that information-gathering needs to be quicker and briefer to compliment the fast-past life in which we all live, someone will always find a need to go a little deeper into a thought, an idea, or a concept – and that’s where these speciality, individual bloggers come in.

Keep it up, guys!  Boutin may not agree with it, but I’m still reading … and if you got this far, apparently you are too.

133 million blog records have been indexed by Technorati since 2002, of which 1.5 million have had posts in the last seven days.  And of these bloggers, the report finds that:

• 70% are college graduates
• 59% have been blogging more than two years
• 40% have an annual household income of $75K or more per year
• 66% are male
• 63% are between the ages of 25 and 44
• 48% are located in North America

Bloggers may also be segmented by category of blogging: personal, professional, or corporate.

I’ve gone through two of the three myself.  In 2000, I started a personal blog which eventually carried right on through college and served as my primary means of keeping in contact with my high school friends.  This year I started my professional blog – yes, you’re looking at it – after ten years of internet marketing experience, the last two of which have been in a corporate setting.  The latter is not much, I agree, but I’m a strong advocate for self-teaching.  And I do intend to venture into the corporate blog setting in the near future.

Other interesting subjects within the State of the Blogosphere report are the reasons for blogging and measuring one’s success.  A whopping 75% of bloggers consider “personal satisfaction” to be a major measure of success, but 82% consider more than one factor in determining how successful he or she is as a blogger, including, but not limited to:

• the number of comments or posts (58%)
• the number of unique visitors (53%)
• the number of links from other sites (46%)
• Technorati authority or rank (33%)

How do I gauge the success of this blog?  Unique visitors is the first thing I check every morning, but that’s more for curiosity’s sake.  I analyze the keywords that people have used to get here in order to determine what page on Google I get for those keywords I’m trying to target.  I also analyze where the visitors have come from – was it a Google search?  Was it from a blog directory like BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog?  Was it from an article that linked back to me?  The more I have from different sites, the happier I am, and the better sense of accomplishment I have.

The State of the Blogosphere report is a great tool both for those just getting into blogging as well as the hardened veterans, and I do recommend you read the sections that are there now as well as the final parts that will appear later today and tomorrow.

• Technorati’s Annual State of the Blogosphere Published
• The Real State of the Blogosphere
• Technorati Numbers Highlight the Changing Nature of Blogging

It’s called “social” media for a reason. Have a conversation.

Companies are beginning to realize that telling people what to think and buy is no longer the most effective means of doing business. Begin by participating in communities that are targeted at the types of people you want to reach. In my case, this means making sure I’ve got Google alerts related to all of my company’s major keywords and making sure various employees comment on related blog posts and news articles with useful insight and commentary. This gets your message to the masses in a non-promotional way, fueling conversation and allowing your message to spread more than it would with more traditional marketing methods. Plus, it enhances your reputation as a knowledgeable source of information.

Provide valuable, useful content that is going to attract a targeted market.

Your web site is already its own advertisement; you don’t have to glorify your company in every piece of content you produce (“Go, [company name], rah rah rah!”). Plus, while you may consider yourself to be the most important person in the world and therefore everyone cares about what you have to say, I’m pretty positive that’s not the case. Robert Treat, an open source technology consultant, made a good point in his comment on my previous post by saying, “As more companies turn to social media as an advertising strategy, we’re bound to see some type of backlash amongst consumers when they start to notice that a blog site is nothing more than a marketing stream for a given product/company.” This cannot be limited to blogs, however, and do in fact apply to all methods of social media marketing. It is essential that you offer your audience information and things they can actually use. If these visitors see that you’re offering them value free of charge, they’re more inclined to stick around and listen to what you have to say. For example – and I’m using my current industry as an example – instead of hosting a webcast that covers why your database is better than all the others, which will only attract a limited amount of people, delivering an online event that details the pros and cons of open source versus proprietary offerings, you’re going to nab a far broader selection of your targeted audience. Instead of posting an interview with a key executive in your company that delves into your company’s product offerings and mission statement, post the same interview with that executive as he discusses current trends in the marketplace, what analysts are saying, and recent headlines. Give ‘em stuff they can use or which causes conversation, and you’ve got yourself some winning marketing efforts.

Remember what your parents told you about the importance of sharing.

It’s the same situation: you’re at happy hour with your buddies, and you say, “Oh, man, did you hear about [insert interesting/shocking/funny subject here]?” That’s the in-person method of sharing; now transfer that to the internet, and you’ll find Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and many other forms of “sharing” content. YouTube has a very simple mechanism for sharing videos via email, web sites, or blogs, just as iTunes makes it easy to share podcasts. Syndicate your content via RSS feeds; allow the “forward to a friend” function on your e-newsletter. Don’t let your content stay static. People want to hear what their friends have to say, and if you make it easy for them to get that information to other people, they’ll be more inclined to share it.

Scratch their backs, and they’ll scratch yours.

Going back to the point about participating on other sites, the worst possible thing you can do is post comments that say, “Hey, your site is great! Link back to mine.” I probably get four or five comments like that every day, and what’s my reaction? Delete. It’s a waste of your time as much as it is a waste of mine, and nobody is going to build a solid, positive reputation with that kind of action. In an effort to get valuable links back to your site, thereby effectively performing one of the major “to do’s” of any good search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, don’t be hesitant about doing the other guys favors. If someone posts something that is interesting, informative, and related to your industry, by all means give a shout-out to him and his content on your blog, web page, or elsewhere. If you’re offering valuable content as well, he’s more likely to return the favor. Maki over at Dosh Dosh refers to this as “borrowed trust,” and forms the basis of the most valuable traffic you can get. As he puts it, “Links from other websites bring visitors who are very likely to be interested in your content. These citation links demonstrate recognition of your site in the eyes of others. It builds your brand.”

Honesty is the best policy, and, no, they don’t all like you.

The Internet is a pretty unforgiving place. I should know: my first week on the job at my present company, I neglected to notice Eloqua’s “text-only” option for email campaigns and ended up effectively emailing a list of five thousand people with emails that began with, literally, “Dear First Name.” Thankfully I wasn’t fired for this, but I did get a rather vulgar phone call from one recipient, a blasting in a community forum, and the glorious honor of forever having my name tied to the incident thanks to the fact that nothing posted on the Internet ever really disappears. (And for the record, I learned my lesson really quick and didn’t allow it to happen again.) Keeping in mind that the Internet ‘never forgets,’ it is exceptionally important that you maintain a policy of honesty, transparency, and authenticity. These are the core values of social media marketing. Remember, involving yourself in social media marketing means you no longer have a tight grip on your message or on your brand, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Not everyone is going to say something flattering about you, but allowing such discussion and remaining honest and true in your content makes you look like the ‘bigger man.” I got shot down when I suggested, for a recent e-newsletter, to link to a high-level study that, as it was explained to me, “didn’t make us look good.” But this is the kind of stuff that can help you build a trustworthy following: yes, somebody didn’t say something particularly helpful to your cause, but you used that to your advantage, perhaps by mentioning it in a blog or forum and then responding to it with well-though-out arguments to the contrary. If you’re okay with taking a few punches once in awhile, and responding to them in a way that’s professional and honest, you’re bound to collect more followers than you would if you just censored the information or comments outright.

Set the metrics to gauge your success.

You wouldn’t spend $15k on a webcast campaign without anticipating the number of leads you’ll receive from such efforts. Before launching your social media marketing campaign, you must know what you’re trying to achieve. Do you want to severely boost traffic to your web site? Are you expecting a high conversion rate on your so-called “premium content” – the stuff that requires registration prior to download? Is a low bounce rate – one major sign of a successfully executed web site – your main priority? Are you looking at generating x leads in a certain time period? Or do you just want to increase your share of voice levels in and around the marketplace? Much of this is immediately trackable internally – web traffic, downloads, and so forth – but a lot is not. Considering your objectives, it might be prudent to hire an outside firm to measure consumer-generated content as it applies to you and your company. Dave Evans of the ClickZ Network offers this advice: “The data is there. And just like taking the time to build a solid strategy aligned with your business objectives and audience behaviors, digging in and measuring — rather than chalking the whole thing up to experimenting — will actually take you a long way down the road to reliable measures and a whole lot of experience that will prove useful later.”

For those who are thinking of beginning a social media marketing campaign, the final point to all of this is that it is not for those who demand immediate gratification. It takes time to build rapport and a solid following. You’re not going to get a pre-determined amount of leads from day one; this type of marketing must become as much a part of your day-to-day professional efforts as any other, and requires patience, perseverance, diligence, and keeping the best interests of your potential customers at the forefront of your mind.

• Internet Marketing – Ten Reasons Why It May Not Work for You
• Internet Marketing and Its Benefits
• Are You Already Marketing on the Internet?

[enter social media marketing stage left]

Wikipedia defines social media in its broadest form as “an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.” In essence, social media – or ‘new media,’ as it is often called – encompasses various methods of communication that go beyond the age-old standard of a marketing team talking to potential customers by adding conversation, fluidity, and collaboration into the equation.

Social media is available in many forms, including blogs (Blogger, Wordpress), microblogs (Twitter), photo sharing (Flickr, Photobucket), video sharing (YouTube), RSS, social networking (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn), wikis (Wikipedia), social bookmarks and commentary (Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit), instant messaging (AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger), podcasts (Podcast Alley, iTunes), webcasts and video blogs (Rocketboom), online communities (MyBlogLog, Plaxo, Google Groups), consumer-owned shopping sites (Zazzle), and even virtual worlds (Second Life). This list does not by any means encompass all social media outlets – and, of course, more are being created and developed every day – but it’s a good start.

“This doesn’t sound like anything I have in my so-called ‘integrated’ marketing campaign. Why would we use any of these strangely-named sites for marketing?”

Hmm. I don’t know. Maybe because over 112 million blogs are already being tracked by Technorati, a number which doesn’t even include those sites not submitted to the leading blog-sharing site. In January of this year, 79 million viewers watched over three billion videos on YouTube. User-generated content attracted 69 million visitors in 2006; that number is expected to jump to over 100 million visitors in 2011, generating $4.6 billion in ad revenue. These are just a sample of some absolutely huge numbers, people. Would it make sense to ignore all of these individuals by disregarding social media, one of the biggest – if not the biggest – consumer influencers? Because let’s be honest: consumers trust other consumers more than they trust any advertisement your creative minds could possibly think of.

HubSpot, now one of the leading internet marketing companies in the country, was a no-name startup just two years ago; it got to where it is now through the use of social media marketing tools like blogs and webcasts that deliver honest and useful information to the masses.

And it’s not just start-ups that benefit from social media marketing. Coca-Cola saw sales of Diet Coke skyrocket after they started creating professional-looking videos on YouTube that demonstrated the wonders of adding Mentos to the popular soft drink (and in case you have no idea what I’m talking about, watch one of the hundreds of videos available).

For further examples, the Internet Advertising Bureau released a study this year on user-generated content and its effects that includes a number of case studies similar to the ones above (and does, in fact, mention the whole Diet-Coke-and-Mentos thing). It’s only about fifteen pages long, and well worth a read.

In short, social media is everything ‘old media’ is not: fluid, transparent, consumer-driven, and open to conversation and collaboration. Remember: it’s only too late to embrace the ‘new’ when you realize your competitors have run you right out of business by doing it first.

Once upon a time a small village of developers decided to create a database. This database would be different from anything the world had seen before. It would be built for web developers and wouldn’t be encumbered with all of the baggage that other fully fledged relational databases carry.

The village elders mapped out the architecture for the revolutionary new database. They encouraged everyone in the village, from the smallest child to the most experienced hunter, to contribute to the best of their abilities for the greater good. Word of the project leaked across the land and soon people from other villages joined in the project. The initial releases of the databases were a little shaky, but the villagers worked together to plug the holes.

The relational database giants mocked the little database. But the giants missed a very key thing – the village of database developers was connected to lots of other villages who were working in collaboration, all across the land. The network of villages was able to quickly add many of the features that the giants had, and even offer some new innovation.

Read the rest of the post at Emma’s blog, The View From 25B, and see if you can figure out upon whom this is based.