Whatever your political persuasion — right, left, or center — the blogosphere is a great place for bloggers to share their political views and make plenty of friends and enemies. We try to follow the conservative, liberal, and everything in between of politics and political blogs/blogging — but only when it intersects with business blogging.
Have a read below of our latest entries on politics and political blogging…
When I first started this site, my main interest was really just to catalog examples of business weblogs and generally to comment on the trend. I threw the word “consulting” in the domain name mainly because basic permutations of BusinessBlog.com were already registered. I was making my living at that time as a web marketing consultant, so I though what the heck, maybe I’d pick up a bit of consulting work out of it as a perk, which sounded fun. In fact, aside from a few minor engagements, mostly which were pass-through to a weblog designer friend, I didn’t have much consulting out of it. (I did write a business blog for a travel agent friend for a while, and he did pay me for it, so there was also that.) Now I have a full-time job as a market researcher, so I’m really not interested in persuing the consulting part of business blogs, though I do still enjoy tracking the trend.
I’ve watched with interest, however, as various other folks have set up blog consulting businesses. I don’t have much insight into what success they’ve achieved in that, but I figured I’d round up some links. If you know of others, feel free to advise. (Note: I check comments more often than the dedicated Gmail address for this site.)
If you do want to recommend others (like your own), please try to have actual clients for this and not just hype your intensions as a blogging freelancer.
Christine Halvorson has a job title many would enjoy: company blogger. The company in question is Stonyfield Farm, which actually maintains four different blogs. I’ve written about their blogs before and have frequently cited the blogs as an example of a consumer company doing something interesting with blogs. To wit, I wrote Christine the following note a few days ago:
I was on a panel a few weeks ago talking about blogs at AdTech, a conference about online marketing and advertising, and one of my fellow panelists, Nick Denton, publisher of the blog media "empire" Gawker Media, said cynically that he didn’t see the business case for business blogs, particularly for a CPG like a yogurt company (I had cited Stonyfield Farm as an example moments earlier). He asked whether I knew what your traffic was and what benefit you’d seen from it, but of course I had no idea. But I thought they were questions worth following up.
So, with the blessing of her PR director and CEO, Christine graciously answered the following questions in an email interview:
1) What kind of traffic are you getting to your blogs (individually and/or collectively)?
Since we began the five blogs on April 1, 2004, we’ve had a total of 160,000 visitors. (That number combines all five blogs. We actually didn’t begin measuring until June 6.) We have discontinued one of the blogs, so now there are four. Of those remaining four, the most recent per month visits are:
Strong Women Daily News: 15,603
The Daily Scoop: 4,049
Creating Healthy Kids: 9,659
The Bovine Bugle: 28,237
These have been growing steadily each month.
I like also to measure our [email] subscribers. Even though "subscribing" is not really "blog culture", I like to offer our readers that option. Subscriber numbers to date are:
Strong Women Daily News: 1,701
The Daily Scoop: 129
Creating Healthy Kids: 318
The Bovine Bugle: 276
These, too, have been growing slowly and steadily, with the exception of Strong Women, which has grown dramatically and quickly!
We do have an RSS feed on each blog.
2) What was the thinking behind launching the blogs in the first place?
Our company has experienced phenomenal growth, and we have a certain "personality" in the world–we care about the environment; about healthy food; about supporting family farms. With growth, we fear losing touch with what is a very loyal and committed customer base, and so our CEO, Gary Hirshberg, saw the blogs as a way to continue to personalize our relationship with our customers. He wants to "be real" and saw the blogs as a way to do that–inspired in part by the success of blogs within the Howard Dean presidential bid of early 2004.
3) What is the business rationale? What are you trying to accomplish from a marketing perspective (or otherwise)?
See the above. Again, we want to maintain a close relationship with our customers. As organics grows to be mainstream, we want to show how our brand is in fact different, and invite our readers/customers in to help us do that and participate with us in our struggles and triumphs, to the extent possible. Our blogs "continue the conversation" we’ve had with our readers/customers since the beginning in 1987, when we had 7 cows and a great yogurt recipe. Today we produce 18 million cups of yogurt a month!
4) Are you measuring the benefit? If so, how? If not, why not and may you later? When?
We are measuring things like page views, visitors and subscribers. Much like any public relations effort (and we are part of the public relations department), the "benefit" is somewhat intangible, but we have faith that there is one. Somewhere out there, we have created a positive response to our brand by virtue of someone reading something that tickles them, or interests them, or inspires them in one of our four blogs. If we gave them a bit of information they wouldn’t otherwise have, or inspired them to an environmental action, or asked them for an opinion–we assume they remember us when they stand in front of the many yogurts in the dairy case at the local grocery store. We assume that relationship, that contact, causes them to reach for our product, not the competitors’, when given a choice.
5) What kind of feedback do you get from readers? I see you have comments open and that you don’t get a lot of comments but you do get some. Is there a consistent tone or refrain from the comments? Do you get feedback about the blogs in other forms? Via email, the phone, in person comments? What do investors, staff, executives, board members think?
We get a lot of comments in the blogs when we raise controversial issues (and we’re trying to do more of that). We asked once who should be the first female president–that inspired a lot of comments! And we asked what was important to them in the 2004 presidential election. We asked, "Is God male or female" and that was REALLY popular! In The Bovine Bugle, we get a lot of nostalgic comments. The Bovine Bugle is written by one of the organic dairy farmers who supply us with milk. He just writes about his daily life, and the challenges and differences with running an organic farm, versus conventional farming. Many readers will comment about their memories of a childhood on a farm and how they miss it, and how The Bovine Bugle brings back their memories. They also seem to enjoy this glimpse into where their food comes from. In Creating Healthy Kids, we seem to have inspired a lot of professionals in the nutrition/school food/public policy arena, which is exactly what we wanted, and they have strong opinions on junk food in schools, which is why we started that particular topic of blog.
I often get direct comments to me about how much readers enjoy the blogs. I don’t think we’ve had a lot of comments to our consumer relations lines about them. The "blogging community" seems to like what we’re doing also.
6) Is blogging helping sell more yogurt?
See #4 above. It probably affects someone’s buying decision. The good will generated by the blogs is hard to measure, but we assume it will have a positive impact on our bottom line.
Also, we have a huge website and sometimes our blogs are a great way to highlight some of the web content that might otherwise get lost. In this way too, we assume we’re steering some blog readers to buy our product, and some to become subscribers to one of our four e-newsletters.
7) Anything else you’d like to comment about the experience so far?
It’s been a challenge keeping up with 5 (and then 4) blogs, as a one-person operation, but it’s been incredibly fun and I hope more and more readers and consumers find us and participate. We also plan to add another blog after the turn of the year (topic area still confidential).
8) Do you have a sense of repeat readership to the blogs?
It’s hard to measure, except perhaps by the subscriber numbers above. I get folks writing directly to me saying, "I love your blogs. Keep it up." That sort of thing. I actually had one woman say she was housebound with cancer and looked forward every day to her blog entry coming into her computer!
The American Marketing Association is holding a three-city seminar in the coming weeks about business blogging in Seattle (Dec 17), New York (Jan 21) and Chicago (Feb 18). Chaired by business blogger Toby Bloomberg. From the sales copy:
Internet surfers, advertisers, journalists and even politicians do it. But are blogs a credible marketing strategy for your brand or company? Experienced bloggers answer your questions and show how to incorporate the newest internet-based strategy into your organization’s marketing plan. Leave this marketing blog workshop with innovative ideas and specific techniques to apply directly to your own marketing strategy.
Costs $695 to attend for non-AMA members (only slightly cheaper for members).
>From the "Now Why Didn’t I Think of That?" Department, blogger Darren Barefoot ("Technical Writer, Playwright, Raconteur, Miscellanist") has put his services up for bid on eBay with the auction item title "Rent a Blogger – Online Marketing and Technology Expert: Improve Your Company’s Online Presence and Bottom Line." Barefoot credits Jeremy Wright of Ensight with the idea, as Jeremy also has a similar auction going on.
Both writers are offering their blogging services for three months to the winning company, with 5-10 blog posts per week. More than two days left in Wright’s auction, but bidding is already up to $1,500, and with more than six days to go for Barefoot’s, bidding is up to $500, as of this writing (I’ll update on the close prices).
I suspect there will be more of these to follow and that these auctions will be cited in the future to gage the market value of blogging services.
UPDATE:
The first of the two auctions, for three months of Jeremy Wright’s services, ended today (Dec 3), with the winning bid at $3,350 by Inkspress.com.
FURTHER UPDATE:
Darren Barefoot’s auction had a big close (over $1,000 added to the bid in the last few hours) to close at $2,025.00 by eKiosk (not clear who that is).
eBay: Rent-a-Blogger
I have been woefully remiss in not yet pointing out this event, scheduled for Seattle next January 24-25:
This event will show you how your business can leverage current real-world blogging techniques, tools and platforms to promote and enhance your ventures.
Speakers include Brian Alvey, co-founder of Weblogs, Inc., Glenn Fleishman, old buddy and tech guru (I love the photo of you with hair, Glenn!), Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s tech evangelist and biz blogger supreme, Steve Broback, co-founder of the summit and formerly co-founder of Thunder Lizard Productions, where I had been a regular speaker ‚Äî among others. I had also been invited to be a speaker, but unfortunately with the new full-time job, I couldn’t get away. Lots of great sessions. Sounds like it should be a winner.
UDPATE:
I just read an email Broback sent me several days ago explaining they have a cool sponsorship policy offering multiple levels of recognition, from a link on their site to the ability host a reception, with a clever twist: while the high-end sponsorships cost up to nearly $10,000, they can also be had for free by bloggers, so long as you drive a certain number of visits to their site. At the low end, a "Blogger" sponsorship requires no amount of clicks, you just have to link to them. For the Platinum sponsorship, where you get all the opportunities to be recognized, including the hosted party in your name — a $9,900 value — you just have to drive a mere 25,000 clicks to the site.
Only strange thing is they don’t actually lay all this out on the site, so far as I can see. Broback emailed me a PDF that explained it all. Odd. Not really in the spirit of the blogosphere to make you request a PDF via email.
UPDATE:
The PDF describing the terms of the sponsorship thingy is now online.
Michael Gartenberg, VP and research director at Jupiter Research, writes this piece with three key pieces of advice:
Computerworld: Business Weblogs Are Double-Edged
As B.L. noted in her post about a CBS MarketWatch interview on the subject, Forrester Research’s analyst Charlene Li has released an 18-page report that concludes blogs are an effective business tool. From the executive summary:
Although Weblogs (blogs) are currently used by only a small number of online consumers, they’ve garnered a great deal of corporate attention because their readers and writers are highly influential. Forrester believes that blogging will grow in importance, and at a minimum, companies should monitor blogs to learn what is being said about their products and services. Companies that plan to create their own public blogs should already feel comfortable having a close, two-way relationship with users. In this document we recommend best practices, including a blogging code of ethics, and metrics that will show the impact of blogs on business goals.
Forrester: Blogging: Bubble or Big Deal? When and How Businesses Should Use Blogs
This is a great one for the perennial question of how to make money off of blogs. Rather, actually, it’s an example of how a site with a solid revenue model already — e-commerce — can use blogs to make even more money. (NOTE: this case study from MarketingSherpa will be availabe for free for only a couple of weeks.)
The case study tells of how T-shirtKing.com increased its sales dramatically using a blog. The site was in the habit of writing long essays about the subjects of its t-shirts — for example, biographies on Miles Davis and Albert Einstein — for its email newsletter, which were quite popular with subscribers, but anti-spam filters were taking a toll on the effectiveness of its email program. So, using Movable Type, the site redesigned its site to publish via a blog, and added a blog to its content mix, publishing the essays in that format. The essays and the blog publishing platform worked well to drive more organic search traffic, and played into the site’s affiliate program as well. The results, according to MarketingSherpa, were dramatic:
Site sales tripled during 2003, and have continued strong in 2004. Altogether, blog content helps to bring in about 35% of total site sales — 10% from the email newsletter, 20% from affiliates who often reuse the content, and 5% from Blog traffic itself.
Blog readers are among the traffic most likely to convert to buyers. “Six to eight percent of Blog readers buy something. Once someone finds a Blog entry and reads the whole thing, they are about as qualified as you can get.”
MarketingSherpa: How to Build Your eRetail Business with a Blog (6-8% of Readers Convert to Buyers)
A corporate blog is just like a personal blog, except you don’t get to use the word “motherfucker.”
— Mark Pilgrim
via BigBlogCompany
Dive Into Mark: Corporate Blogging
50 highly subjective points, several amusing, a few actually valuable.
Simon World: Everything You Wanted to Know About Blogging but Were Afraid to Ask
A couple of months ago, I wrote a post titled Promoting Your Blog with some advice about driving traffic to your blog. Since then, I came up with another really good technique: get Farked.
Here’s how you do it:
A) Write a funny post. This step is a doozie, because you may not be funny. Really what you need to do is find some original, offbeat content. Observe something that others haven’t about the world (e.g., a wacky business idea someone has put in place, as was my case recently — see below).
a1) Adding a picture of a scantily clad woman probably helps, as Adrants can attest.
B) Submit the link to your funny, scantily clad post to Fark and/or CollegeHumor. These sites, largely collections of funny links, get absolutely sick traffic.
C) Cross your fingers and hope they accept your submission for publication.
D) If they deem your post worthy and link to it, watch your traffic counter spin like a pin wheel in a hurricane.
I recently experienced this with BizNetTravel, a business blog I help a client publish on the travel sector. In my not-so-humble opinion, it’s quite a good blog that gets too little recognition and traffic for the effort I and Adrants’s Steve Hall put into it. The other day I wrote a post about a funny service called ScooterMan (click the link for details). As an afterthought, I added a picture of a woman in a bikini with a scooter (that I actually stole from someone else’s site who linked to my post). As another afterthought, I submitted the link to CollegeHumor.
I didn’t check the logs for a couple of days, but CollegeHumor published the link. Fark then picked up the link from CollegeHumor and also pointed to BizNetTravel.
KA-BOOM!!!
A site that normally gets a few hundred visitors (on a good day) suddenly got nearly 10,000 visitors on a Sunday. It’s slowed down since, naturally, but we’re still way over normal in the residual traffic. The link has also gotten picked up by many other smaller funny link sites.
Just thought I’d share that happy technique. 🙂
Okay, okay, we get it, Microsoft loves blogs. Yet another advice piece from them for small businesses for blogs.
So, where is Bill’s blog, anyway?
Microsoft Business Solutions: The Four-Letter Word That Can Get People Excited About Your Products
Mark your calendars and call your travel agent: July 23 in Berkeley, CA at the Haas School of Business, BlogOn is an event about “The Business of Social Media,” focusing on blogs, social networks and syndication.
Speakers include Andrew Anker, EVP of Six Apart, Jason McCabe Calcanis, chairman of Weblogs, Inc., Dan Gillmor, columnist and celebrated blogger for San Jose Mercury News, JD Lasica, big deal blogger of New Media Musings, Craig Newmark, the Craig of Craig’s List, Tony Perkins, founder of AlwaysOn Network, Mark Pincus, CEO of Tribe Networks, Doc Searls, big deal blogger, David Sifry, CEO of Technoratic, and many others.
Registration costs $495 before July 1 and $550 thereafter.
A friend, who has had an on-again / off-again blog for more than a year (mostly off-again) writes to say he’s now determined to blog every day and asks how should he go about getting more traffic to the blog. It’s a pretty basic question, one to which I have only some pretty basic points of advice, namely these:
The main thing I’d say is to stick with it. After you’ve been at it diligently for a month or so, you may be able to reach out a bit more to get in-bound links. But until folks have confidence you’re really dedicated to it they may be reluctant to link to you, if they fear you’re going to lose interest after a few weeks.
Also, periodically produce a really utilitarian post (like, for example, this one) that people are going to find particularly useful, not just interesting. Dedicate an hour or more to rounding up a lot of links on a theme or analyzing a trend in detail and debunking common misperceptions or otherwise really doing some real work of investigating, aggregating or articulating something that a lot of people are going to find useful. That is more likely to get you a lot of links to a particular post than just general posts along the lines of “Here’s an interesting article” or “Boy am I steamed about what Bush said today” or whatever. How-to pieces are good for this. Read the lists of most popular links among bloggers on DayPop, Technorati, Blogdex and Popdex to get a sense of what kind of blog posts get lots of people pointing to them. It’s a law of nature that people love lists.
Beyond that…
1) Definitely publish an RSS/Atom/XML feed. Are you still using Blogger? If so, you can click a button and turn on RSS [make that Atom, another version of XML feed, as Mike clarifies in the comment section of this post]. (For that matter, you can start an XML feed with pretty much any standard blog publishing platform.) You’ll get a lot more pick-ups that way.
2) Engage with other bloggers, particularly in their comment sections. Also email them. Politely make them aware of your blog, especially in context (e.g., “Joe, nice comment. You may be interested in something I wrote along similar lines…”)
3) Register your blog, and your RSS feed, everywhere possible. Here’s a list of such sites to start with.
4) Create a “blogroll” list of your favorite bloggers in the margin. Bloggers like the quid pro quo when it comes to links. Just by virtue of listing a bloggers does NOT mean s/he will link back to you, but it certainly improves your chances. It also makes it more likely that you will come to their attention, as they will likely see traffic from your site in their logs and maybe the link itself on Technorati.
5) Of course, plug your blog in your email signature, and, for that matter, on your business cards, if it’s really that important to you.
6) Consider your headlines carefully for the kind of phrases that people may search for on search engines. Remember, B.L.O.G. stands for “better listings on Google.” Also, along these lines, make sure to set your archives to list each entry on a page of its own (possible with Blogger only in its more recently updated version).
Here are some other similar pieces of advice:
I’m sure there are lots of other posts out there along similar lines. I welcome anyone who can point some more out to please do so in the comments, and I’ll update the good ones here in the main body of this post.
Debbie Weil of WordBiz is producing a half-day seminar about business blogging in the Washington DC area on June 30, 2004. Some of the extensive web site copy reads:
Learn how adding a blog to your site can increase its value for your customers, prospects or members, put your online marketing on steroids… and make your job easier!
You will leave this highly-practical seminar with a blue print for how to launch and maintain a business blog and how to integrate it with email & e-newsletter marketing.
The seminar costs $249, which includes several sweeteners, including a Business Blogging manual by Don K. Crowther and an earlier teleseminar WordBiz conducted on business blogging.
UPDATE:
Debbie writes me: “For those who can’t travel or leave their office, this event is now a 90-minute Audio/Web conference on Thursday July 1st at 1 PM Eastern. … This is a highly-practical event that will explain what a business blog is, how a blog works technically, how it can complement an e-newsletter, what to write about, etc. A meaty intro to business blogs.”
WordBiz: The Uncool Blogging Seminar
Wayne Hurlbert has been blogging on the subject of “blogs in business, marketing, public relations, and search engine optimization for successful entrepreneurs” since last October. Is his blog “competition” for mine? Well, it’s a big happy bloggy world out there, so I’m not really worrying about it. He doesn’t seem to be solicitiing consulting business from his blog so directly, which is the stated purpose of my blog. He’s been at it longer, though I think I am on track for more posts per week at this rate. The subject matter is also somewhat different, where he’s offering more how-to stuff, such as his recent post on blog promotion, where I have set myself the sisyphean goal, at least in the near term, of cataloging every example of a business blog I can find. Eventually I’d like to get to more content-oriented posts, too, but in the foreseeable future I seem to believe there’s value in just a big directory of examples of business blogs.
Anyway, Hurlbert is definitely offering value on the subject in his own way, so check it out. While you’re at it, check out his roller derby blog. (Whatever.)
Tim Bray, a technology veteran and long-time blogger who recently joined Sun Microsystem, has helped that company craft a policy for bloggers, not unlike Microsoft’s Robert Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto. Highlights from Sun’s policy include:
And more. Good stuff. (I only copied snippets here; he goes into more detail on all these points.)
Making this post even more interesting, Bray offers a short analysis of the process of how he and his colleagues fashioned this policy in a post titled Making Sun Policy.
Thanks to Olivier Travers for pointing this out.
Tim Bray: Sun Policy on Public Discourse
Another article about how to blog for business, this time by Rich Ottum, general manager of eStrategyOne. Top five pieces of advice:
This post led me to create another category for this blog, “How to Blog for Business.”
WebProNews: 10 Steps To Marketing With Business Weblogs
Debbie Weil published this article in her WordBiz newsletter as advice for business bloggers. Best of all, the main expert source for the article is…me!
WordBiz: 5 Tips for a ‘Useful Resource’ Blog
Debbie Weil’s WordBiz organized a teleseminar on the topic of Business Blogs a few months ago, in which I partook as one of the “experts.” She’s done a nice job packaging the audio of that seminar with a companion PDF report. Some of the points she promises you’ll learn from the report:
Price: $59.
WordBiz: Blogging for Business
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Business Blog Consulting is a site devoted to demonstrating how effective weblogs can be for communicating with customers and marketing to new customer prospects. You will find here lots of examples of business and corporate blogs, as well as resources to help you learn more about the topic.
Looking for a company that offers consulting on corporate and business blogging, including design, development and strategy? Consider Netconcepts.
Other stuff? Email us.
Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing
Andy Bourland of Bourland.com
Rich Brooks of Flyte
Paul Chaney of Blogging Systems Group
Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus
Josh Hallett of Hyku
Tris Hussey of Larix Consulting
Lee Odden of TopRank
Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts
Dave Taylor of Intuitive Life for Business
Jim Turner of One by One Media
Dana VanDen Heuvel of BlogSavant
Des Walsh of Thinking Home Business
Debbie Weil of WordBiz and BlogWrite
Jeremy Wright of Ensight
Rick E. Bruner is co-author and principal analyst on this report
Our own contributor Jeremy Wright is the author of this book
"The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right" with a foreword by GM's Bob Lutz..and the rest by Debbie Weil.
Produced by contributor to this site Debbie Weil. Rick E. Bruner is one of the featured experts in this report
This report is written by contributor to this site BL Ochman
I guess this was inevitable
