Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I keep getting phone calls from 312.458.9614. They call me every couple of days and never leave a message. I have missed them every time, and I’ve been getting irritated, wondering who it is. I finally decided to Google ‘area code 312′ and found quickly the calls are originating in Chicago. But the better news? The second result in my Google search offered a little hope:

It seems that 800Notes.com will allow you to type in that pesky number and reveal to you the originator, in my case, the Audi service follow up survey folks. Now I’m not irritated any more.

Although my car is currently parked in my garage, for fear of driving it until the service department opens on Monday morning… As we were driving home this morning from the market, it started clunking and making very scary noises, such that I thought we’d popped a tire. That would have been something I could manage.

As it is, I’ll choose not to answer that call until I can drive the thing fearlessly again.

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I’m signed up for Inverge 2008 on September 4 & 5; and have begun to scope out the speaker list for real. And there are some exciting new speakers covering media and content convergence, and the convergence of our virtual and physical worlds… but what makes me especially happy are the people I know who’ve been selected to speak.

Blasts from My Past

My list of familiar faces is pretty eclectic:

Michael Tchao - GM of Nike’s Techlab. Michael used to be my next door neighbor when I lived in the Pearl. Relocating from SFO, I was thrilled that the launch of his Nike+ product (connecting the iPod to running more closely) went so very well. He’ll be speaking on connecting the physical and digital communities. I’m there.

Erin Holland - GM and EVP of Edelman’s Portland office. I almost walked right by Erin the other day on my way to get coffee without recognizing her. Luckily she was with Terri Nopp, also of Edelman, whom I’ve seen more recently… sheesh. Erin and Terri and I met when they were launching the Edelman office here about six years ago. It’s great to see someone work so hard to succeed in building a thriving business here in PDX. We’ve got a rich PR community here, and Erin will be speaking on how PR is impacted by interactive convergence. It’s certainly not getting simpler as a result…

Scott Kveton - VP of Open Platforms at Vidoop and Chairman of the OpenID Foundation. Speaking to Scott is the equivalent of getting caffeinated. His “social everything, everywhere, all the time” topic should be extremely entertaining.

Richard Rosen - I’ve known Richard for the longest of all of these folks, having met him almost fifteen years ago when he was the direct marketing guru here in PDX at Rosen-Brown. I’m looking forward to hearing him speak on convergence in 2008. In 1994 he was talking convergence of brand and direct, which is what he’s known for. It’ll be fun to see how far he’s taking convergence now.

Steve Gehlen’s put together another impressive conference this year. I’m just glad I’m going to be able to reconnect with old friends to boot. BTW, 2 for 1 conference tickets are still available - up through August 31. Join me at the conference.

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As reported yesterday over on Techvibes, Marqui has a new set of owners, an investment group that includes SIL Enterprises, Kystal Financial Corporation, Abraxus Holdings, and Ogilvie Communications.

I found it interesting, in talking with Rob over at Techvibes, that he received three copies of the email notification from three Marqui customers within a couple hours of the morning announcement. The PR agency got around to sending their notice late in the afternoon. I’m sure that was intentional, but really. It just makes the agency look silly.

I think it’s time to admit: staging announcements simply doesn’t work any more. The more we try to orchestrate communication, the more we’re getting in our own way.

Meanwhile, I wish the new owners well. I hope they can take good care of the customers of Marqui, and continue to improve a product that used to make me extremely happy and proud.

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When asked by clients how to measure how their blog is doing, I generally run through a little series of “visibility” tests to determine how vibrant and visible their blog is. Here are my personal steps, and I’d certainly be interested in hearing how others determine a blog’s success.

I recommend running through these steps generally within two-three months of a blog launch, and then periodically (depending on your curiousity/blog strategy) after. I’ve also included recommendations to boost your blog’s visibility. Once you’ve implemented them, you should begin to see improvements in engagement, readership and visibility.

Blog Search Engines - Register, Ping Them

1) Technorati - at the most basic level in Technorati (one of the most well known and well used blog search engines), you have the opportunity to claim your blog and profile it with tags, author information, etc. (your blog categories will be automatically generated into Technorati tags).

Once your blog is active, and have people commenting about it and linking to it, your Technorati Authority Ranking will be developed. A nice side benefit will be that the press will find your bloggers even more appealing as thought leaders.

The higher your Authority Ranking, the closer you are to the “top” of the blogosphere.

A general rule of thumb for new blogs is that an authority ranking of 25 or greater is getting significant. Authority is based on the number of inbound links, and other activity (posts, comments and trackbacks) in relation to other bloggers.

Recommendation: Join and claim your blog on Technorati. Then, once you have an account, be sure to ping Technorati every time you publish a new post. Pings can be set up to happen automagically in your blog software. It’s well documented on the ping page.

2) Similarly, add your blog to IceRocket (another popular blog search engine). And be sure to ping it every time you post. (Again, there are directions on how to have this happen automagically.)

3) Ask.com has a great blog search tool, which is remarkably free of spam blogs, or splogs. It will likely pick up your blog posts before many other blog search engines do - in my experience, if I don’t see results in other engines, I’m usually gratified to go to Ask. Whew.

4) Of course, Google’s blog search engine is a gold standard, and I like Google Blog’s Advanced Search options for their clarity and ease of use. Type in some keywords you’ve been using, and see where you come up…

Other Views of Visibility

5) Compete.com is a great place to see how you compare to others in your space. With a free account, you can check out how your blog compares to four other blogs, in terms of traffic, and how it has changed in the last month/last year; what are the most popular keywords driving traffic to the site, etc. You can upgrade to a paid version that will give more metrics, but it’s a pretty nice, quick way to see how you compete.

6) Quantcast is similar, in the sense that you can see nice demographic information of a site’s visitors (they’re offering the “Internet’s first cookie to people audience estimates” white paper online). You’ll likely (unless your organization is big) need to add a snippet of code to your blog to be able to gather statistics, but they describe how to do it here.

7) AideRSS is a wonderful tool to help you easily see which posts are “hot.” You input your blog feed (right click on your blog’s RSS feed button and copy link location) and it will show you what % of your posts are Good, Great, and Best posts – based on the number of people commenting on them, tagging them, etc.

Once you get traffic coming to your blog, you’ll be able to see what kinds of posts people resonate with most. Mine are all over the board… (click on the thumbnail below for a full view)

Recommendation: Have your bloggers start a delicious account and tag each others’ posts when they are published. It’ll add to the ecosystem of chatter about your blog and keywords… Bonus points for also establishing a mag.nolia account (it’s where the tech nerds hang out), and tagging posts there.

8 - YackTrack is a fun way to see who’s commenting on a particular blog post URL – even when they’re not commenting at that URL itself - they may be chattering about the topic or the post around the web. You can also put in important keywords to see what kind of chatter is out there on a particular keyword. You should put your company’s brand names into the chatter section and see who’s talking on Twitter, other social media sites.

9) Google Links: You can see how many people link to any web site by going into Google and typing in the URL with the word “Links:” in front, e.g. links:http://www.janetleejohnson.com. A healthy system of inbound links is (just as in search engine marketing) a key to visibility and vibrancy.

10) Comments beget comments. How many people comment on your posts? I don’t get a lot of comments on many of my posts, probably because I don’t comment on others’ as often as I should. But we also need to remember 99% of people reading blogs don’t comment. So if you want people to comment on your blog posts, go to other blogs and comment on theirs. It’s human nature to be curious about who’s commenting on your posts… If you get one from someone you don’t yet know, go find out who it is, and see what they have to say.

Every comment gives you the opportunity to put an inbound link right back to your blog. If you do nothing else, do this. Creating inbound links and conversations are extremely important to the health of your blog, and to its visibility to others. Your blog will remain an island as long as you stay only on it and don’t venture out…

Nothing will engender more visibility or engagement than outreach.

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I’ve been fortunate lately, learning the Art of RSS Mixology from Marshall Kirkpatrick, in one of his last extended consulting contracts before he begins writing for ReadWriteWeb full time. Marshall is an RSS and “market intelligence systems” (I like that phrase) guru who’s helping me figure out how to efficiently and completely monitor the social web - including forums, social networks and the blogosphere - for the Academic Network and one of their large pharmaceutical clients.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure…

Monitoring your brand’s online reputation is becoming more critical as social media use explodes. We’ve got quite a system now - of persistent RSS feeds (via Attensa), Yahoo!Pipes (for combining and filtering feeds), Dapper (for those sites without RSS feeds built in) - watching a whole bunch of social media and delivering results right to our client’s (you name it) inbox/private website/RSS reader, in real time.

Thinking differently…

The thing that I’ve found most interesting, though, in learning from him, is the way that Marshall intuitively taps into the collective intelligence as he works.

• He keeps his own RSS feeds automatically rolling in several areas on his machine, so during times he’s forced to wait or scan, he can also scan scrolling feeds:
  • On his GMail account, the feed rolls along the top of his inbox - something might inspire him there…
  • Twitter updates roll along the side of his workspace on his Mac - he’s gotten great story scoops there…
• He has special landing pages built into shortcuts to sites that he visits often:
  • His delicious shortcut always goes to delicious/popular, so he will always see (and search) the most popular tagged sites first. You never know when a hotly tagged page will inspire or enlighten you!
  • His Google Blog Search page opens to a search of his own name, so he can always know whether there’s a new post mentioning his name. (He’s always quick to comment that way… which is inspirational.)

I have a new set of shortcuts in my toolbar now. What can you do - by thinking just a little differently - to take advantage of the collective intelligence as you go through your day?

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