Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

Maryam and Robert Scoble are now on stage at the Blog Business Summit. they’re talking in simple terms how to blog. It’s entertaining and fun so far.

1. Blog because you want to… Robert pressured Maryam to blog for some time, and she resisted until she was ready. (I’ve done that to my love for the past year… not sure when she’ll start blogging, but I guarantee it’ll put my blog to shame when she does.)
2. Read other blogs… If you want to be a blogger, you’ve got to read other blogs. If you want to be a thought leader, read what others are thinking.
3. Pick a niche you can own (be different)… Non-technical people (Robert calls us all geeks) interact with the world through a search engine. If you believe that people negotiate the internet through a search engine, you need to come up on search terms. People who focus content on a single niche gathers a much bigger audience than a large or defocused audience. And, by the way, Robert says there are 100,000 blogospheres, so you can find a niche more easily than you might think you could.
4. Link to other blogs… When Robert started at Microsoft, he linked to a bunch of people who hated Microsoft - it made them know that Microsoft listened to them. And it diffused issues. You can also see who links to you easily - and it’s human behavior to want to know what others are saying about you. You should go over and comment on those posts, and get more link love.
5. Admit mistakes… Maryam was afraid to start blogging because she read Robert’s comments and saw the personal attacks. But she loved how Robert admitted mistakes - it gained him credibility in the blogosphere.
6. Write good headlines… The world is moving from feeds to keyword searches, in order to find information about very specific information. Think of how people scan lists to find information. Great headlines make you stand out.
7. Use other media… Techcrunch is a good blog to look at in terms of “blog 2.0″ - there are graphics, logos, screen captures, etc. Consider podcasts and video in order to bump up your credibility. Halley Suitt mentioned busblog as a master of using photos in blogs. (She has a great post up now on the IBM presentation from this morning, by the way.)
8. Have a voice… A passion makes people want to connect to you.
9. Get outside the blogosphere… Go to conferences, meet people. Coming to the blog business summit and other blog conferences, you’ll gain relationships that can turn into power structures later. And something that you can blog about. This is where some of the PR people go wrong. (Why aren’t there flocks of PR people here meeting with people in this room?)
10. Market yourself… Robert put about 1400 business cards into a book when he moved from Microsoft, and most of the cards didn’t have the URL of their blogs on their cards. Do the basics of marketing for yourself. Bonus tips…
11. Write well… Do a spell check and grammar check before you post. Check your state of mind, Maryam says, before you post emotionally. She always writes and then waits a bit before hitting publish. Robert recommends mixing up the length of paragraphs in order to grab attention.
12. Expose yourself… but not necessarily Chris Pirillo style. A lot of corporate types are reserved - and are erring too far to the safe side of blogging. If you stay too far to the safe side, you’ll never gain readers. If you become a real human being, you will make interesting connections that you may not have made otherwise. As you move to being more interesting, you’ll have more engaged readers.
13. Help other people blog… Share and build community. Bring new voices into the blogosphere.
14. Engage with commenters… Too many people neglect comments. Robert recommends commenting on others’ blogs in order to get them to realize you have something to say, and they may link back to you.
15. Keep your integrity… You are what you appear to be, and if you’re taking advertising or are taking free product, disclose it. Never try to hide what you are or who you are, or when people find out you don’t have integrity, they will ‘out you’ to the world. Robert publishes his cell phone on his blog so people can do fact checking before they publish information that he’s commented on.

Ben Edwards is continuing to talk about branding here at the Blog Business Summit.  (If you didn’t read the full last post, by the way, check out the link to the video here.  It’s the funniest thing from IBM I’ve ever seen, but then, I’m old enough to remember when the mainframe was HOT.) 

He says when brands fail us, when their products and behaviors no longer help us project our own identies, we punish them.  He’s quoting the Interbrand/BusinessWeek global brand studies (subscription may be required):

Since 2000 -

Gap has lost 31% of their brand value

Sony has lost 29% of the brand value

Kodak lost 63% (and Ben asks, where is Kodak on Flickr?)

Ford has lost 70% of the brand value

And as brands engage with social issues, brand insecurity may be worsening.  He makes examples of BP’s claims of new energy, and yet how there are more and more probes into their messy mining of fossil fuel.

So what has changed?

People can create and share brands themselves. Audiences of all kinds discover communities of interest and publish the brand to each other.  Ideas about a brand can be generated by anyone, to anyone.

Ben did a quick study of the top 20 brands on YouTube, and people are: 

• celebrating your brand
• mocking your brand
• mashing up your brand with other brands
• making your brand perform strange and unnatural acts

And they’re having fun with it. Read more »

I’m listening to Ben Edwards from IBM giving the Blog Business Summit  keynote on the new world of communications.  He’s the head of New Media Communications for IBM, overseeing New Media strategy and corporate policy.  He wrote for The Economist for nine years before joining IBM in 2005.

In August of 2005 he launched IBM’s podcasting program.  Their first podcast has been downloaded more than 200,000 times.  He’s going to talk branding in the terms of this kind of new media.

Skills are of utmost importance - marketers need to be good practitioners by using social media tools - transferring their information to wikis, for example, and learn about them by using them… Read more »

It is day two at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle, and I am now listening to Scott Nieson of Attensa.  Scott’s out of Portland, OR, too, and he and I have been bumping into each other at all sorts of events over the years.  Craig Barnes founded Attensa, which makes a great RSS feed reader.  I worked for Craig at Now Software in the early 90’s.  In Portland, it’s a small, small technology world.  Craig has a great blog on RSS, by the way. 

I’ve used Attensa for Outlook, which is free, and it is a great way to stay in touch with your RSS feeds.  It pops your feeds right into your Outlook file, in folders that it automatically populate.  So you can read your feeds on the go.  And, Tris Hussey just reminded me, it cleans up feeds after I’ve read them, which is the very coolest thing. 

Check Attensa out if you’re looking for an elegant solution to managing your RSS feeds. 

 

Steve Broback (from the Blog Business Summit) is talking about a blog post being like an email going out into a very public world.  And Nicki points out that it’s like that, but it’s something that enyone can respond to.  So you have to be aware of the public nature.

Don’t be tempted to control your employees’ blogs.  Really, it’s better to focus on awareness, and do your best to keep your bloggers out of trouble. (Source: Nicki)

The core of the issue is cultural.  And the key is cultural.  There must be buy-in at the top of the company that it’s ok to blog. (Source: Ben)

Blogging allows greater expression of employees’ personalities.  And it (at least in Microsoft) exploded as a phenomenon.  So the Blog Smart guideline works well for them. (Source: Betsy)

Apple, Steve said, (and this is so ironic to me) is so closed with regard to blogging, does IBM want to comment on that?  (Ben demurred.) 

Look at the relationship between your brand and your employees, your brand and your customers, etc.  And if you’re trying to convince a corporation who’s afraid of blogging (wake up, Apple!) then minimize the risks, and emphasize the rewards.

Betsy - the main reason you want to blog is for your customers.  Want a scalable solution to listen to your customers, get ideas from your customers, and gain greater input, connections and loyalty; then you should do it.

But if you don’t have a management team that will listen to the feedback, then consider that carefully before you begin blogging.