Chris Hoyt, president, Hoyt & Company wrote a compelling article on the HUB magazine website about mining the blogosphere for comments and content on your company.

According to a November 2005 Reveries.com survey, over 60% of companies surveyed weren’t monitoring the blogosphere.

On the heels of the WOMMA WOMBAT conference, the emergence of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, and the venture funding flowing into the word-of-mouth marketing space, its never been more apparent that monitoring the consumer media (blogosphere) is an essential function in every marketing department.

So, what might you listen for on the blogosphere?

1. General consumer understanding
2. Find your evangelists & vigilantes
3. Early warning signs on issues
4. Consumer specifics – likes and dislikes
5. Competitive intelligence
6. Product/service improvement ideas
7. Campaign tracking
8. WOM tracking

What would your company listen for?

One benefit–although not the only one–of blogging is increased “findability” of your business through search engines.

I’m a big fan of writing quality content on a regular basis to make your Web site or blog relevant for appropriate searches. I’m not a big fan of continually tweaking your pages or copy to take advantage of any new “hack” that some black-hatted SEO expert may have discovered. It’s a short-term gain for a long-term loss in my opinion.

Still, it’s important to understand what search engines find important, so you can get the most out of the content you have on your Web site or blog.

Jason OConnor has written a great article on the new Google update–code named Jagger–that explains some of the changes he’s observed over the past few months.

It’s a question I hear with some frequency; how can you add an RSS feed to the pages of your own web site, home page or weblog? Many of the solutions are pretty complex, but it turns out that Newsgator Online – a free RSS aggregator and tools service – makes it incredibly easy for you to accomplish just this, even letting you customize the format of the content and intermingle multiple feeds rather than being constrained to just one RSS source.

Even better, the example i show also explains how to set it up and customize it, with detailed steps, meaning that even if you aren’t handy with a computer, you’ll be able to get everything up and running in no time:

    Add an RSS feed display to your Web site

It’s a very cool feature of a very nice application!

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?

Buzz is that  2006 is the year marketing blogs will gain acceptance within the business community. Seems the publishing world is betting that people will want to read about how to use blogs as a marketing tool. For your reading pleasure the contributors of Business Blog Consulting have put together a list of published, and soon to be published, biz blog books.

Business Blogging Books
–We Blog, Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey, Meg Hourihan
–The Weblog Handbook, Rebecca Blood
–Buzz Marketing with Blogs For Dummies, Susannah Garden
–Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS, Rok Hrastnik
–Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World, Hugh Hewett
–Blog, David Kline & Dan Burstein
–Blog On Building Online Communities With Web Logs, Todd Stauffer
–Blogging: Genius Strategies For Instant Web Content, Biz Stone
–Blog Marketing, Jeremy Wright
–The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Growing Your Business With Google, Dave Taylor

Coming Attractions Business Blogging Books
–Naked Conversations, Robert Scobel & Shel Israel
–The Everything Blogging Book, Aliza Sherman Risdahl
–The Corporate Blogging Book, Debbie Weil
–The Rough Guide to Blogging, Jonathan Yang
– Blog Wild! A Blog for Small Business Blogging, Andy Wibbles

Find more books about blogging at Blog Revolt
Heard it from: Debbie Weil, The Corporate Blogging Book

If you come across any new business blog books drop a comment. Let’s keep track of the new releases.

The  #1 concern I’m hearing from organizations interested in exploring blogs to support marketing strategies is, “But what about the negative comments? How do we control people posting bad things about our brand or our company?

Marketing has changed. The world has changed. It changed while you were not looking. It changed when the internet, email and cell phones made it easy and cheap to communicate.

Bottom-line with over 50 million people chatting it up on blogs if you turn comments off you loose the home court advantage. People will talk about your company, your products, your customer service and even your blog. Why would you not want that discussion to take place where you can easily monitor it and respond?

To turn comments on. To turn comments off. This has be come a tired debate in the blogosphere. One of the benefits of a marketing blog is the opportunity to dialogue with customers, prospects and stakeholders.  Sorry, no comments does not make a conversation. It’s called a monologue. One person takes center stage with no opportunity for direct feedback. For my money, a blog without comments and trackbacks is an on-line newsletter. And that’s not a negative comment.

Great example of a highly focused brand kibitz on a non “corporate blog” is McChronicles. This blog about McDonalds recently welcomed it’s 18,000 visitor. A Google search for McChronicles pulls 15,800 results. And with this post the count is now 15,8001. That’s a lot of Big Macs! U.S. News and World Report highlighted McCs in an article about customers creating buzz.

Citizen or conversational journalism. McDonald owners get it. Some are asking McChronicles to review their restaurants. Corporate McD people have been known to drop by to listen (tracked by referral stats). However, the folks at corporate McD’s must be busy chowing down on their burgers since a sanctioned McD blog has not yet surfaced.

If you’re still not convenienced that comments on are a smart business decison, here are …

5 Strategies To Combat Negative Blog Comments
5. Turn off comments
4. Monitor comments
3. Develop a comment policy
Include on your navigation bar and above the comment section
2. Delete comments that do not meet your guidelines

The Number One Way To Combat Negative Blog Comments …
1. Show ’em what you are made of!
Use negative comments (those that express legit concerns) as a way to demonstrate how you handle customer concerns.

Our customers’ sphere of influence is not limited to their around the corner neighborhood or the company water cooler but anywhere there is an internet connection or cell phone access. With the understanding – that companies no longer control the message (influence yes. control no.) – and that customers have more power than ever before in “helping sell your product”, you gain a huge advantage over your competition – those that are trying to swim upstream against the current. It’s an exciting, new world. Don’t be afraid to become apart of it. 

Most corporate blogs are pretty cheery places, with their message almost perpetually positive and the tone reflecting some of the best copywriting on the entire network. General Motor’s FastLane Blog has been an example of this, with interesting and engaging articles from various members of the massive GM team talking about auto design, car shows, features of specific models, and so on. But now that GM the company is facing extraordinarily tough times on the business side, it appears that its weblog is descending into cranky defensiveness, a tactic sure to backfire.

Read all about it at:

    GM FastLane Blog Gets Defensive

Even if you aren’t interested in the automotive industry ,it’s still an excellent chance to learn about how a business blog can backfire if not managed properly.

It’s easy to get started blogging…today’s blogging software is inexpensive, easy-to-learn, and does most of the heavy lifting for you.

However, it’s a lot more difficult to build a successful blog: one that attracts prospects and clients, establishes you as an expert or an industry leader, and helps you attain search engine "findability."

There’s some great advice out there for big companies and CEO’s who want to blog; just check out Debbie Weil’s BlogWrite for CEOs. However, when you’re a small business owner like me, not all the advice is directly transferable.

I wish the "today" me could go back and talk to the "then" me and give him (me?) some good advice on business blogging. It would have saved me a lot of time and frustration over the past year.

If you’re interested in learning from my mistakes, check out The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make. (Email registration required.)

Plus, if you’ve got some of your own mistakes that you’d like to share, please take advantage of our comments and trackbacks below. After all, failure (or a mistake) is a much better teacher than success.

This week the search marketing conference Pubcon X was held in Las Vegas with many great sessions, one of which, RSS Feeds and Podcasting was particularly well done.  Presenters included:  Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo, Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit, Daron Babin of New Gen Media and Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.

Presentations ranged from the how-to’s of podcasting and tools, podcast optimization, using RSS to uncover and promote hidden publisher content, industry data on podcasting and of course, Jeremy focused on Yahoo’s tools involving RSS and Podcasts.

Detailed coverage of the session can be found at: "Pubcon X – RSS Feeds and Podcasting".

Neville talks about an interesting, really cool IMHO, thing the U.K. supermarket chain Tesco is doing.  Not only are they sending out traditional e-mail marketing e-mails to customers (on the quantity or quality concept) they have created a “deal of the day” RSS feed.  Now, this rocks.  Frankly, I’d love to get my store flier in RSS.  Maybe, the just before the end of the day … how about a quick recipe for an easydinner and oh … here are the ingredients … oh and severalof them are on a special web-recipe sale. How about that.

From Neville:

So my prediction is – more RSS feeds by consumer-focused businesses such as supermarkets. It’s getting easier for people to use RSS (often without realizing it) and will get easier still as more businesses offer information via RSS, as simpler ways of describing it emerge (like ‘ live bookmarks ,’ for instance), and as it becomes ever more easier to get the information offered via RSS. (Related development: expect more advertising in RSS.)

It’s the heir to the direct marketing throne.

More and more businesses are starting to discover and explore RSS (Real Simple Syndication) as an alternative to email marketing.

RSS allows you to syndicate your content very easily; it’s most commonly used in blogging and podcasting as an RSS feed is automatically created by most blogging and podcasting platforms. However, RSS can be created for your Web site as well, and is fast becoming an important communication channel for businesses.

In Your 7-Step RSS Marketing Plan, Rok Hrastnik holds your hand while you dip your toe in the RSS ocean.

Come on in! The water’s fine!

As many active bloggers out there know, TypePad has been paaaaaaaainfully slow lately. If you have a TypePad account, posting has been somewhere between difficult and impossible.

Here at Business Blog Consulting
(the other BBC), behind the locked doors of our Yahoo Group, there’s
been a lot of chatter about leaving TypePad for greener pastures. 

Debbie Weil, over at BlogWrite for CEO’s and a fellow BBC blogger, takes TypePad to task with her post Listen Up SixApart: some of your TypePad customers may switch. Because Debbie’s, well Debbie Weil, Anil Dash from Six Apart actually responded on her blog.

I know that other BBC contributors plan on posting their own
thoughts both to BBC and to their own blogs in the next 24 hours, and
as I get a list of those posts I’ll update this post.

For me, this reminds me of the mid-90’s when AOL’s email went down for about two days.
People lost it. Businesses claimed they were being ruined. Congress
held hearings on what could be done. And Steve Case said something to
the effect that it showed how important AOL was to American Business.
(At least that’s how I remember it.)

I believe the lesson business owners learned from that is that
whatever your communication medium is, it needs to be rock-solid.
Piggy-backing your communications on a consumer product like AOL is no
way to run a real business.

Until recently I recommended TypePad as a platform for business bloggers…especially compared to Blogger,
which doesn’t have half the bells and whistles TypePad offers. However,
as more businesses turn to blogging as a legitimate marketing tool they
are going to expect enterprise-level solutions…not “waiting on
TypePad.com” messages.

The recent problems with TypePad and slowdowns at Technorati
show that blogging is growing at a mind-boggling rate; businesses will
continue to flock to it, and so will dollars. Whether TypePad is going
to be part of the solution for business bloggers or an also-ran will be
determined by how they respond to their current problems.

In the spirit of a task the Blog Herald has undertaken in reviewing 100 blogs in 100 days, blogger extraordinaire and small business blogging advocate, Paul Chaney has undergone an ambitious task of reviewing 52 small business blogs in 52 weeks.

Undoubtedly, small business blogs, like small business web sites, represent a significant growth opportunity. Yet most media attention is focused on large company blogging activities. Paul’s project is a great effort at generating visibility towards small business blogs and is sure to uncover innovative and interesting blog implementations.

Paul has received quite a few "nominations" already, however he may have some open yet.  So send any small business blog examples of your own or of your small business clients to him via email.

BTW, Paul did not ask me to post this, I asked him. We’re both blogging at AllBusiness.com and I think the small biz blog review is a great project.

SixApart is one of the companies largely responsible for the migration of blogging from personal musings to the small business and corporate world. Their hosted TypePad service has been wildly popular amongst professionals. IBM legend Irving Wladawsky-Berger uses TypePad (instead of IBM’s blogging platform); Seth Godin uses it. Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing, uses it. Intuit’s QuickBooks uses it here and here. The Air Conditioning Contractors of America uses it. This blog uses it. And lots more.

So when the TypePad service goes down, as it did earlier this week, it’s a pretty big deal. Lots of business blogs disappeared for hours. And if you’re the publisher of one of them, as I am, it strikes fear in your heart. Has the damn thing been swallowed up? All those thousands of words gone forever?

I was in a panic to put it politely. For me, and thousands of other customers, this was a crisis. Frustratingly, there was scant information at the time on SixApart’s supposedly real-time status blog.

Well, I’m delighted to report that 6A now gets this crisis blogging thing (see above). They’re talking to us. They’re telling us, candidly, what happened:

Both Monday’s and Tuesday’s outages were the result of hardware failures…

That’s really all customers want. We care more about being kept in the loop than about how bad the news is.

It’s just that we want the information in real-time, during the crisis. Tell us something, anything immediately. Acknowledge that there’s a problem (even a big problem) and that you’re working on it. But do it in plain English. Get the CEO to jump on the "status blog," if necessary. Don’t for heaven’s sake leave it up to your techies to pen one sentence about a "temporary service degradation." That’s jargon. It’s not communication.

Hard to do in a crisis, I know. But it’s the whole point of having a blog as a channel for real-time communication. To turn your customers, who are momentarily in a panic, into your evangelists. And who better than SixApart to model how this should be done. Thanks guys, for being responsive to my comments.

Note: turns out you can back up the contents of a TypePad blog into a file and download it to your computer. I just did it here. Now that would be a good tip to give TypePad customers, wouldn’t it? Doesn’t reflect badly on 6A and is a gentle reminder that these are just machines after all.

I love Google as much as the next person, but their official blog just doesn’t do it for me. The "voice" just does not seem real, or anything I can relate to. It feels scrubbed by the PR department; I might even go so far as to say it comes off as a mouthpiece of the PR department. I don’t get that feeling from Google engineer Matt Cutts’ blog. The official blog, however, has its face to the company, and consequently its butt to the reader. That’s just a gut feeling I get reading their blog, but the specifics of what bother me I found harder to put my finger on… until now.

I’m not telling you anything new when I say that business bloggers who are overly self congratulatory or self promotional are anathema to the blogosphere. But where do you draw the line? When is it too much? In trying to quantify what bothers me about the Google blog, I came up with what I believe is a quantifiable "sniff test" to ascertain if a blog is too narcissistic or inward-facing: it involves "keyword density." Keyword density is simply the ratio of a particular word to the the total number of words in a page (or in this case, in a post). Read on, to learn how you can apply this test to your or others’ blogs.

As an SEO (search engine optimizer), I scoff when I hear the words
"keyword density". Calculating and fine-tuning a page’s keyword density
in order to appear higher in the search results is a fool’s errand.
Yet, I think I’ve finally found a valid application for a keyword
density calculator, and it has nothing to do with SEO. Here’s what you do…

Add up the number of occurrences of "we", "us", "our", and your company name in the blog post. Do the same with "you" and "your". Calculate the
ratio of these two numbers. And calculate the keyword density for both.

What about “I” and “me”, and “my”? I’ve intentionally not counted them, because I recognize that the blogger needs to claim their thoughts and opinions as their own. It’s the faceless self-important corporate voice that really bugs me the most. And that’s what this sniff test ferrets out.

Let’s work through an example. Take for instance this post from the Official Google Blog:

• 17 occurrences of "we", "us", "our", "Google" or "Googlers"
• 3 occurrences of "you" or "your"
• 6:1 ratio of us-speak to you-speak
• 422 total words in the post
• 4% "it’s all about us" density
• 0.7% "it’s all about you, the reader" density

Compare that with this randomly-selected post from the Yahoo! Search Blog:

• 7 occurrences of "we", "us", "our" or "Yahoo" (in the context of the company not part of a product name)
• 8 occurrences of "you" or "your"
• 1:1 ratio of us-speak to you-speak
• 214 total words in the post
• 3% "it’s all about us" density
• 4% "it’s all about you, the reader" density

In this very small sample set, Yahoo’s blog seems to talk to the reader
much more effectively. Not to mention their blog supports reader
comments, unlike the Google blog.

Now to make this more scientifically valid, we just need an automated
tool that analyzes all of the posts from both Y!’s and Goog’s blogs to
compare. That’d be a nifty little tool if it existed. Perhaps I’ll get
someone here at Netconcepts to code it…

— Stephan

Welcome to the interesting world of business blogging, BSmith4664. I’ve had a chance to read your first posting to the Quickbooks Team Blog, entitled View from the General Manager and would like to offer up a few thoughts and pointers…

First off, whether you’re an executive or using a spade in the trenches, I do think that it’s quite helpful to tell us who you are. “BSmith4664” sounds a lot more like a Hotmail or AOL address than the General Manager of the Quickbooks team, doesn’t it? I realize that 60 seconds with Google reveals that you’re “Brad Smith” and that Intuit’s CEO Steve Bennett has said “We’ve been searching externally for a while and determined that Brad Smith is the best person – inside or outside Intuit – for the QuickBooks leadership role. He’s proven his ability to lead a team to win decisively in an intensely competitive environment.”

Very impressive. But why make me do the work?

A good metaphor for business blogging might well be having five minutes in front of a professional networking group or conference roundtable. Certainly your name, your title, your responsibilities, some comment that indicates you’re paying attention to the discussion and the interaction style that’s become the norm in the group, and so on. Bonus points for something amusing about yourself.

Since we aren’t in the same room, however, I’d really like to see a picture of you here, as part of your introduction, Brad. It really further helps personalize the weblog and helps us establish a foundation of trust for our future discussions. You can see my picture on this page, for example. Now you know what I look like. Something to think about.

Second, I like Quickbooks and your company. I like that you’ve quite successfully held off many competitive threats in the last decade, even from the 800 pound gorilla. You’ve got the industry leading product and produce something that thousands of business people use every day. So where’s the pizzaz, the visual design, the immediate visual feedback that you’re a leader in this marketspace? Surely your team could shanghai a graphic designer from elsewhere in the firm to help make your weblog more visually interesting?

In fact, there’s danger in having it be too bland: it doesn’t give me any confidence that you really are the Quickbooks team and so you lose out on the potential credibility boost that can’t but help you with your blogging mission.

Another point: you have a long, thoughtful article, but you aren’t offering me any visual cues to help navigate the material. You’ll do much better to have a few hyperlinks to other Web sites and even use bold and italics for some visual variety. I realize that there’s a niggling anxiety about pointing to a third-party Web site that isn’t vetted by legal, but if you’re going to be a business blogger, you need to take the plunge and point to other sites. You can always sneak in a disclaimer if you feel you must, but it’s widely accepted that someone pointing to another site doesn’t imply that they’re related in any manner.

Generously linking to other sites is a very blog-friendly philosophy too, and linking to other bloggers will frequently cause them to link back to you and perhaps even help you gain visibility in your target community. It’s certainly a ‘best practice’ for business blogging.

I also have a strong preference for long weblog articles, but expect that some people will shortly be complaining that frequent, short entries, even as short as a sentence or two, are the preferred style for the blogosphere. Ptoi on that. Write what you feel most comfortable writing!

Finally, I’m intrigued by your comment about the upcoming QuickBooks 2006 release. Trickling out feature lists, screen shots, and general tales of beta testing feedback and user stories (and testimonials) would be a splendid use of this weblog, and could also help increase product visibility further.

Again, welcome to the world of business blogging, Brad. Stay in touch.

Someone asked me yesterday where to go for a "blogging 101" and I was momentarily stumped.
There’s so much information out there it’s hard to know where to
begin. I decided to be literal and look for resources labelled Blogging
101… or close to it.  Here are a few 101 links to get you started. I include RSS and podcasting because they fall under
the umbrella of corporate blogging.

Blogging 101

Blogging 101 by Rebecca Blood (on MSN Spaces)

Blogging 101 by Kari Chisholm

Blogging 101 v. 1 on BlogWriteForCEOs

Blogs 101 by Rich Meislin in New York Times’ Technology section

Blogging 101 by Technorati

Business Blogging 101 on the NEWPRWiki

Global Voices’ Intro to Blogs

Weblog Basics on About.com

Wikibooks’ Blogging 101

Wikipedia definition of Weblog

Click "Continue reading" for Podcasting 101 and RSS 101 resources…

Podcasting 101

Podcasting 101 on MacZealots.com

Podcasting 101 on TechWeb

Podcasting 101 by Merle Stinnett

How to Record a Podcast by Glenn Fleishman

RSS 101

RSS 101: "Really Simple" 5-Step Guide to Get Started

RSS 101 Screencast by Alex Barnett

RSS 101 for Marketers (Forrester report, July 2005)

RSS Marketing

These are by no means the only 101 resources for blogging,
podcasting and RSS. If you know of others  titled "101," leave a note in
the Comments below and I’ll add them.

Using the word "mainstream" when it comes to blogs is now, so last
year.
But, based on the frequent questions I receive from readers,
effectively employing a blog as a marketing tool is still a bit of a
mystery to most.

Many of my readers ask some variation of this question: "Should I be using a blog, an ezine, email or RSS?" And my answer: YES

Here’s my take.

By itself, a blog is probably not enough (unless you are Tom Peters or the like.)

Small businesses should take the power of a blog and combine it with
an email distribution list and weekly or monthly ezine newsletter.
When you employ all three you get the biggest bang for your marketing
effort.

A couple reasons why you still need to email delivery.

• RSS is not yet the content delivery method of choice for the average person
• Email content is pushed out to readers as a reminder that you are there – RSS doesn’t allow this same control
• Capturing email addresses allows you to market your readers over and over again

In many cases, someone will visit your blog or web site and like
what they see but get pulled away by some other distraction, never to
return to your blog again. If you capture that same person’s email and
permission to send further communication, you turn that visit into a
lead.

If
you are posting to your blog like you should (3-5/wk minimum) then you
should have plenty of content to repurpose into a newsletter. Pull out
your best posts and expand on them or do a round-up of your blog posts.
You will find that your readers will gravitate towards their reading
method of choice – RSS or email.
I love blogs, I love RSS delivery. But, don’t short your marketing
efforts. Make your message available in as many forms as possible –
that’s how you create marketing momentum.

If you’ve been reading my Intuitive Life Business Blog, you already know that it’s become a hotbed of discussion about the lawsuit that Traffic Power sent to Aaron Wall, and its implications about our responsibility as bloggers for comments left on our blog. That article is Aaron Wall sued over comments on his weblog. As it happens, I also just wrote about how adding comments on other people’s blogs should be a cornerstone of your own blogging strategy too: How do i get more traffic to my blog?

But lawyer Daniel Perry has the best testimonial I’ve seen yet about why commenting on other blogs is such a good strategy. In less than a week he went from adding comments on my blog to being quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

I’ll let Daniel explain what happened…