Frontier Airlines recently launched a new ad campaign using a blog.  The blog is at FlipToMexico.com and it seems to be gathering steam with traffic and comments.  The premise is to sign a petition to allow Flip the Frontier Airlines dolphin to get a flight to Mexico, and they have gathered a number of signatures.

This campaign seems to coincide with the Super Bowl, so I would not be surprised to see it come to a final end there.  This is a great example of viral campaigns using blogs.  This blog by Flip, a character blog, is sporadic in its postings, but nonetheless I will be following the feed to see the final ending.  I wonder if this means Frontier is about to join in on the corporate blogging bandwagon?

The Boston Globe reports on a new service called Gather that plans on organizing content from all types of writers into a coherent collection online. Plus, they’re going to pay writers based on advertising that appears with the content. (Back to the eyeballs = profitability model?)
Although similar sites exist (About, Technorati, Bloglines, Topix, Squidoo, and Digg are listed by the Globe in varying degrees of correctness), the site does have the backing of Jim Manzi, former chief executive of Lotus Development Corp. and Bill Bradley, who played basketball for the Knicks before moving to Washington, D.C.

Only time will tell whether Gather becomes a venue for bloggers to “go pro”, but it is establishing its Web 2.0 cred by wearing its “beta” tag proudly by its logo.

I’ve been watching the VOIP marketplace for months now as we get to see the evolution of telephones from fixed wires and crazy, confusing charges to Internet-based phone systems that offer all-you-can-call dialing for a flat fixed fee, or even without any charge if you’re lucky enough to have the person on the other end also using the same service. From Google to eBay/Skype, Vonage to Vbuzzer and Jingle, there are more VOIP solutions than you can shake a stick at. But what about Microsoft? Finally, in a classic Microsoft corporate maneuver, its intentions can be ascertained:

    Microsoft partners with MCI for its VOIP solution

Me? I use both Vbuzzer (they’re offering a free trial period too!) and Skype, for North American and overseas calling, respectively. It’s a brave new world and I like it!

It seems that every virtual corner I turn there’s talk about tracking the buzz from 2.0 social media tools e.g., blogs, boards, Flickr, etc. The marketing research profession is entering an exciting (although some may find it uncomfortable) phase in the development of data collection and analysis techniques. The field (literally!) has gone from asking questions via door-to-door interviewing to listening to virtual conversations.

Granted, the use of consumer generated media (CGM) as a credible research tool, is in its infancy (historically researchers seem to move cautiously…look how long it took for firms to embrace online research); however, consumer generated media is too rich to overlook. Some companies are beginning to explore CGM as a supplement to traditional research for information about:

• Brand buzz -who.what.where
• Competitive intelligence
• Product development and improvement
• Pre launch buzz
• Early warning crisis management
• Advertising effectiveness
• Voice of the customer

I understand that Chrysler is using CGM to track trends. They’ve gone from mining data at a high level – sensibilities about specific models to a more granular level of information about features and attributes. The next step is better understanding the influencers and how the information flows.

Just yesterday I heard from a reliable source that a popular Atlanta beverage company is reviewing research firms that monitor digital conversations.
However, for CMG to become accepted as a mainstream, credible technique marketing research professionals will be challenged to:

• Incorporate CGM information into the findings from traditional methodologies
• Develop a standard of credibility that is acceptable by practitioners and academics
• Determine what is white noise and what is significant information without sanitizing the data

Here’s one to ponder …

Information is any difference that makes a difference. – Gregory Batson

Technorati Tags: Marketing_Research, CGM, Consumer_Generated_Media, Blogs

Announced during MacWorld earlier this week was the release of iWeb, a new part of iLife ’06.

iWeb includes blogging software and integrates seemlessly into the rest of iLife, which includes iPhoto, iMovie and iTunes, among iOthers. By using the rest of the suite, bloggers will have drag-and-drop options, such as dragging an iTunes playlist into the blog. Of course, links will be automatically created to the iTunes music store where visitors can purchase said songs.

Although the software seems to be targeted to personal bloggers rather than business bloggers, a lot of creative types such as ad agencies are likely to give this platform a try, giving it a certain inevitable buzz.

Will iWeb impact the blogosphere? I don’t know…did the iPod change the way we listen to music?

I got this through Wired, which had an opportunity to put iWeb through its paces.

Guy Kawasaki, start-up guru and Mac enthusiast, has started his own blog called Let the Good Times Roll.

The blog offers good info for start-ups, including recent posts The Art of Evangelism and The Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists.

Mac fans like myself will also find interesting items, such as Guy’s take on Steve Jobs latest keynote and other Mac-centric posts.

I do wish he included trackbacks and categorized his posts, but you can’t have it all.

As Rick mentioned, I’ve lent a hand with the recent blog revamp. One of those things is to help search engine optimize (SEO) this blog a bit more. I’m just in Phase 1… there’s plenty more left to do. Here’s a recap on what’s been done:

1. URLs. It’s imperative when switching blog platforms that the old permalink URLs still work. There are plenty of deep inbound links from the blogosphere to specific posts that provide that all-important “link gain” (such as Google’s PageRank) to this blog. We don’t want to lose that! So I ensured that the permalink URLs of all the old posts within our new WordPress 2.0 blog are exactly the same as they were under Typepad. I couldn’t do that with the category URLs (WordPress requires that category URLs include a directory), so for those I did a permanent (301) redirect to the new URL. (In case you’re curious, I did this through a rewrite rule in .htaccess). That way the link gain passes on to the new URL. I also set up a rewrite rule for all pages under http://businessblogconsulting.com to 301 redirect to the corresponding page on http://www.businessblogconsulting.com. This will eliminate duplicate pages in the search engine indices and consolidate link gain. Otherwise when people link to http://businessblogconsulting.com without the www it creates another site for the search engines to visit and explore. For new posts, the permalink URLs will contain full words and hyphens not underscores, since underscores are not considered to be word separators by Google.
2. Title tags. From an SEO perspective, the title tag is the most important thing on the page. Most blogs don’t have optimal title tags. The best title tag is one that LEADS with the targeted keywords. Most blogs, including this one, led with the name of the blog. Instead that should go at the end. I’m happy to say that’s now the case here. And I customized the home page title tag to have some good keywords in them like “corporate blogs” and “business blogging”. Note that now the home page title (which is “Business Blog Consulting: Everything about Corporate Blogs and Business Blogging”) has both singular and plural forms “blog” and “blogs”, as well as the verb tense “blogging”. Creating a custom title tag for your blog’s home page is well worth doing. Consider this: I decided to target the search phrase “web marketing blog” with my personal blog, Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings. By simply changing the home page title tag from “Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings” to “Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings: Web Marketing Blog” and adding a mention of “web marketing blog” once in the body copy, I went from nowhere in Google to currently #8 out of 55,200,000 for “web marketing blog”! That’s an important point, btw… Make sure the keywords you are targeting are not just in the title tag but in the body copy as well. On this blog, you’ll notice that “corporate blogs” is now in the home page title AND in the body copy. Hopefully I’ll be able to report back soon that we’re highly ranked for “corporate blogs”!
3. Tagging. A tag cloud and tag pages are a blogger’s secret weapon. I can’t believe how few bloggers do this. I’m not talking about Technorati tags. I’m talking about using a plugin like Ultimate Tag Warrior, which is exactly the plugin I installed to create tag pages like this one. So now, if we want to target a new keyword in the search engines, we just start tagging some posts with that keyword and, presto!, we’ve got text links everywhere pointing to this new tag page (notice I’ve put a tag cloud on the global site nav so such links are ubiquitous throughout the blog). And of course I made sure the tag name is mentioned at the beginning of the title tag and in the body copy! I’m going to further optimize the tag pages by adding some keyword-rich intro copy to each tag page, but I haven’t gotten to that yet.
4. Related Posts. I installed the Contextual Related Posts plugin so now we’ve got more interconnections between blog posts, which is a good thing. Each permalink page lists related posts at the bottom of the page. Most blogs are overreliant on the chronological archives, which tells the search engines to weight your recent posts more heavily. But an old post may be really well optimized and targeting a really important keyword. So that post needs more link gain, and that means more links pointing to that page and links from pages higher up in the site hierarchy. Related Posts is a good start. I made each blog author’s name a link to their posts, and that will help too. I’m also going to install a Top 10 Posts plugin to provide further linkages, and that will be even better! But I haven’t gotten a chance to do so yet. Ah, not enough hours in the day…
5. Link text. I’ve made the title of each blog post link to that post’s permalink page. The word “permalink” is not good link text, for the same reason that “click here” is not good link text either. (Unless of course you want to be #1 in Google or Yahoo for “click here”!) By having the words in the post title as link text, this tells the search engines what the permalinked page is about much more effectively.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things. If I have, I’ll post an update here.

BTW… Here are a couple other good blog posts to check out if you want more search engine visibility for your blog: Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips, Google Teaches Bloggers How To Rank

I must be the luckiest boy in the whole wide world! About six months ago, after briefly retiring from this blog, I relaunched this site as a group blog. With the help of Paul Chaney, I assembled a crack team of co-bloggers, and those of you who read this blog regularly know that the result has been one of the best resources on the topic of using blogs in a business and marketing capacity out there, if I do say so myself.

Well, this weekend marked a great new milestone. If you visit us regularly, you’ve probably already noticed, we got a significant face lift. Like the site itself, the relaunch was the effort of several folks, so here are some shout outs.

First, after months of bitching about TypePad’s flaky service of late, we’ve made the switch to WordPress. Much as I love the folks and products over at Six Apart, I felt it was as much as anything a good chance to get to know a new publishing platform. What I’ve seen of it so far, I like. Jeremy Wright led the WP installation effort.

Josh Hallett did the work on the new CSS template design, which I personally thinks kicks serious ass. Stephan Spencer then tweaked the hell out of the site with all sorts of Web 2.0 type features, inclucing the ability for readers to bookmark every post on del.icio.us, track links to posts in Technorati, the ability to email posts to a friend (using this plug-in), the ability to add Technorati tags on the fly to posts, displaying those tags in a tag cloud, Swicki search, and more (Stephan, please feel free to elaborate). Finally, Tris Hussey pitched in and made himself generally useful, helping import the old archive into WordPress, among other things.

Thanks to all these guys, all our fabulous contributors and, most of all, all of our loyal readers, for making this site something worth reading every day!

Toyota has launched a podcast campaign to promote its Lexus IS, in partnership with Vibe Magazine and independent hiphop/jazz fusion recerd label Hidden Beach Recordings. The campaign is supported by blog advertising. The site features downloadable MP3s, and the ability to subscribe to them, of half-hour samples of Unwrapped CD series.

According to a ClickZ article, the campaign is targeted at an African-American audience, and blogs play a “pretty heavy part” of the campaign, according to a Toyota spokesperson quoted in the article. I have to say, that seems a bit curious to me. I wonder if they did much demographic research about podcast users and blog readers to determine whether it was a good fit with an African-American target audience. The few black bloggers I know all seem to take perverse pleasure in their being among the few black bloggers out there. I suppose like anything that is changing and blogs will continue to gain traction across all demographic segments, but it strikes me as a pretty rarified audience segment they’re targeting.

Anyway, I do think that the idea of using custom podcast content is a good strategy for making use of podvertising. And the grooves are definitely funky. Good exposure, in any event, for Hidden Beach, which I’m adding to my music watch-list. (Ironically, I don’t see that HiddenBeach.com links to the co-branded podcast site. Details, details…)

Us bloggers have been debating whether we should get the same rights and be held to the same standards as professional journalists for at least a few years now, and it seems like whenever we’re about to end the discussion something else comes along to add oil to the proverbial fire.

This time the incident is the well-respected Toronto Star ripping off content from a friend of mine, writer Randy Cassingham, and publishing it in the newspaper without either fact-checking or any sort of attribution. Perhaps this isn’t an uncommon incident, but this time they were caught out by a blogger who tracks newspaper gaffes and that article was picked up by industry publication Editor & Publisher.

Read the article:

    Of Lazy Journalists and Wanton Plagiarism

The Toronto Star? No word from them yet, but I’d like to think they’ll publish some sort of retraction or apology. And journalists? Are you really going to claim that you’re the professionals in this situation?

We’ve all been there…staring at the empty sandbox that is our future blog post, with not an idea in sight.

Jonathan Kranz feels our pain and has written an article Five Surefire Content Ideas (When Your Blog is Drawing Blanks) at MarketingProfs.com aimed to help us.

Although most of the points are common sense, common sense isn’t always common practice. (Stephen Covey.) Plus, Jonathan Kranz is a hell of a copywriter. He throws in some "blog bonus points" for each item that offer an interesting twist on a common practice.

This article is mostly about creating content, but doesn’t specifically speak to what content will generate the most traffic. While your mileage may vary, I’ve discovered that how-to articles, posts that answer common questions in your field, and exposing scams generate the most traffic.

What surefire content ideas do you have to offer? What type of posts generate the most feedback and traffic at your blog?