Everybodysagenius’s Weblog

Hey Everybody,

I work as a pr and new media guy for an Midwest advertising agency called Bozell. I recently finished a blogging coverage project for the Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder’s Weekend. Our client on the project with Borsheims, a Berkshire-owned jewelry store. It as a fantastic project and a huge success.

I was the one who did all the writing, photography, video and posting for this project. My buddy Max (also of Bozell) built the blog site in textpattern.

I got great stats and I wanted to share it with you as a case study for selling blogs to your clients.

Enjoy:

Borsheims Blog Case Study:

The Development

Berkshire Hathaway is well known for having the most expensive stock price on the market. In Omaha, NE the company is also well known for its annual shareholders meeting, held this year from May 2-4. Of course, this meeting is a lot more than just a shareholders meeting; it has become a destination event for thousands of shareholders and Warren Buffett fans throughout the world. This year, 31,000 people came to Omaha to listen to the World’s Richest Man (Buffett) and to attend the variety of exciting and high profile events that surround the meeting.

Every year, the Borsheims store is one of the most popular destinations for Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Borsheims is one of the nation’s largest independent jewelry stores. Owned by Berkshire Hathaway, the store sponsors several events during the weekend. Throughout the Berkshire Hathaway weekend, shareholders receive special discounts at Borsheims, and thus, the weekend is one of the most important sales times of the year for Borsheims. As the agency of record, Bozell has helped Borsheims with a variety of campaigns and advertising mediums, including e-mail campaigns, print advertising, media relations and more.

When Bozell first approached Borsheims regarding their largest event of the year, the shareholder’s weekend, Borsheims expressed an interest in creating a storehouse of information for attendees in the form of an online presence. Bozell proposed the creation of a blog devoted to the providing a real-time experience of the Berkshire Shareholder Weekend. Like many successful companies, Borsheims initially viewed a blog with some skepticism due to its open nature and interactive capabilities.

The Success

The blog idea, originally proposed as an online information outlet, changed its focus to entertaining shareholders and acting as a surrogate experience for those shareholders who could not attend the event. The blog ended up becoming a two-way communication channel between the company and the shareholders and among the shareholders themselves.

Bozell provided a full-time blogger for all of the events. This blogger also took photography and video of the event. Adjacent to the blog site, Borsheims hosted a YouTube account and a Flickr account. This allowed them to quickly store the photos and video taken from the event and to add it to their blog at will. Before it was launched, the blog was promoted with an e-mail that went to attendees from previous years and through press materials that Bozell developed.

The blog, www.borsheimsbrk.com, went live on April 28, 2008. In the course of one week, the blog was updated with nearly 50 posts, six videos and more than 500 high resolution photos. Most of this content was produced and updated in real time as the events happened. In that same week, the blog experienced a tremendous amount of Web traffic. From the morning of April 28 to the following Monday, May 5, the following traffic results were enjoyed.

6,974 Visits blog site visits

5,801 Unique visitors

24,677 Page views

3.54 Pages per visit

2:58 minutes Average amount of time on site per visit, compared to the usual 30 seconds to 1 minute.

27% of traffic came directly to the blog

*Special note: This is especially high for direct traffic. The site also experienced 45% of traffic from referring sites and 31% of traffic came from search engines.

Visitors to the site came from 55 different countries or territories.

The following pages enjoyed the highest traffic in descending order:

1. The home page, which featured the blog

2. The calendar page

3. The vendor page

4. The blog page, which provides more of an archive to past posts

5. The restaurants page

The blog also proved to be a valuable source of feedback to Borsheims. It received many comments and was used to answer shareholder questions in a quick and in-depth way. It also provided an effective outlet to promote and profile some of the merchandise. It will continue to be a medium to disseminate information and interact with Borsheims’ key audience for years to come. The Bozell blogger continues to respond to comments on a daily basis.

The Additional Reach

The Borsheims Flickr page became a popular area as well. In that same week, the Borsheims Flickr Account received a little more than 5,000 views. The Borsheims YouTube account also did well. The top-rated video received slightly fewer than 500 views in that same week.

The traditional media also mentioned the blog in some high profile stories, and used photos from the Flickr account. The traditional media regularly uses blogs as a source of story inspiration and background information. This blog had some very positive public relations effects.

In the end, Borsheims was completely overjoyed with the amount of traffic and communication that they received via the blog site. They were also impressed by the amount of high quality content that produced in such a short time. Their skepticism concerning open interactivity with their audience was replaced with interest when blog comments were moderated easily and without incident. Overall, they were more than impressed with the tremendous amount of reach that this relatively inexpensive medium provided.

Hope that was helpful,

William Flavell

Hey Everybody,

A friend recently sent me this post by Matt Haughey. It is a great little set of 5 rules for PR people to deal with bloggers. I think that it is pretty good and what a lot of bloggers will agree with. I am a PR guy and a blogger, so I can see some of the disconnect between the two professions. Beyond what Matt says, a PR person can get themselves in a lot of trouble by using the “spray and pray” technique of Cision built media lists. This is because bloggers, unlike traditional media, can lambast your product if they feel you are spamming them. While print media won’t waste ink on complaints and TV won’t burn valuable airtime airing greivances. Bloggers don’t run out of either. So be honest, open and engaging. It is that simple. And no press releases to bloggers! Really! This means you PR people!

Here are Matt’s Rules:

So in the spirit of extending an olive branch to the PR industry, here are some very basic tips I haven’t seen anyone mention elsewhere:

1. Don’t ever send a press release to a blogger based on a purchased list
I keep hearing about this thing called the Bacon/Cision listand how all the bloggers complaining about getting spammed are on it (the idea of someone selling a list with my email on it is another matter). As many PR people have stated, connecting PR and bloggers should be a connection made via reading their blog and contacting them with a personal note at the very least. Adding 200 names to a bcc: list on an emailed press release because you got 200 blogger emails from some list is the absolutely wrong way to go about it. Don’t ever do this.

2. Go beyond the press release
The rare, few times I’ve felt like enduring all this PR hassle was worth it was when someone from a company contacted me with an invite to preview a product, try out a site, and/or obtain a review item. A press release is the thing I line the bird cage with, a review unit is something I can actually use for a week or two and get a full review story written ready to publish on the day your client launches the product. I can’t stress it enough that a press release sent to me is just plain noise and totally and completely useless. Or if you must, at least just send me a link to one in case I want to learn more about the news you are sharing instead of pasting 2,000 words in ALL CAPS into an email.

3. Introduce a feedback loop!
I’ve never been contacted by anyone in PR that bothered to follow-up with me at any point in our “relationship”. I just get a bunch of press releases emailed to me again and again, often by the same people. If you’ve hand-picked out some bloggers covering topics you have clients releasing news about, at least check with the bloggers after a month, or your second message, or some other regular interval. Ask them if the PR they’ve been receiving is helpful and if it should be tweaked, or even ended if it’s not useful.

4. Provide an unsubscribe link
This is totally bottom-of-the-barrel, least-you-can-do-to-appease-bloggers stuff here, but at the very least provide an instant, no-humans-required way for a blogger to remove themselves from contact they aren’t getting anything but frustration from. About 1/4 of the PR email I get is managed with some sort of list interface and provides this option, and I use the option when off-topic, all-caps press releases get blasted my way. I prefer a no-humans-required option because I’ve asked people at an agency to remove me and they said they had and sorry for the inconvenience, only to be emailed by the same person two weeks later.

5. Use metrics to help you do your PR job
If personally emailing a bunch of bloggers with personal messages sounds like a lot of work that doesn’t scale, try using metrics to help you figure out what works and doesn’t. Right now we have the annual “did my PR firm show up on a blacklist?” metric, but if you implement the suggestions above, keep tabs on what percentage of receivers clicked on a link to read a press release (are your press releases effectively written?), figure out what % click on an unsubscribe link (how effective are you targeting bloggers), figure out how often the bloggers you contact ever write about your clients (how effective your PR/blogger strategy is) and when they do was it because of a press release or did you give them something more (to figure out if newer non-traditional approaches are working better).

Just wanna say thanks to Matt for a good post and thanks to my friend Max Riffner for sending this my way.

William Flavell

Hey Everybody,

I rarely put personal posts up. But something very sad happened about a year ago and I just wanted to put up a quick post about it. Last April 11, 2007 one of my heroes passed on. Kurt Vonnegut, was more than just a writer. He was an eloquent speaker, a great humanitarian and a smart man. He gave me reasons and ideas, at times when no one else did.

He lived from 1922 to 2007. He wrote 14 novels and a large variety of other stories, collections and plays. I have read everything that he wrote. My personal favorite is Bluebeard for its beauty. Learn more about his life and work at Vonnegut.com.

Here is the best tribute that I have seen to him.

I just wanna leave this post with what I think he would call the best possible review:

Thank you Mr. Vonnegut, You always made me think.

Hey Everybody,

I know that I haven’t written for a few days, but today’s is gonna be good. It is about the first YouTube contest that I built. It is for WildSmiles. They are a company/orthodontist that sells specially shaped brackets for braces. Kids can get stars, hearts, footballs, diamonds and more.

But, they are a small company that needed to get their name out there. So I poked around and did some research and found that there are already large communities of people with braces. I think that there is something to do with the shyness of this group and the lack of their outlet for their opinions that causes them to amass online. They have thousands of videos and lots of large groups on both Facebook and MySpace.

So we created the WildSmiles Braces Experience Video Contest. On YouTube users can join our group (we are a group not a sponsored contest so ours is free) and add videos. Then other users will join and vote for the winner. We are giving away two Nintendo Wiis as prizes. The contest opened last Friday, April 25.

Here is the video:

So if you have braces or someone you know does, go check out the contest and you could win a Wii.

Results
Well, we don’t have any real results so far since the contest is only 4 days old. But I wanted to share with you some cool stuff that has happened since we loaded the first version of our intro video.

The first time that we ever loaded a video for this contest was on Friday, April 18. This was the first edition of the intro video. I didn’t put it on the contest, just on my account so the client could see the video in the right format. Without any promotion or tags, this video got 500 views by the next Wednesday. Also starting on that Friday, the client saw a doubling in their Web traffic. Now bear in mind that the client doesn’t have huge Web traffic to start with, but still that is an improvement.

Oh and this newest edited edition of the contest intro video has only been up for four days and has about 100 hits.

Enjoy the video, it was a lot of fun to make.

I’ll keep you posted as the contest progresses.

Word,

William Flavell

Hey Everybody,

As you probably know, I blog for several companies beyond this personal blog. As a new media guy working in an agency I often run into fears from different members of our clients’ companies concerning open posting of comments.

Open comments is the best way to handle your blog. First, recognize that these negative comments will be going on with or without your approval somewhere else. At least on your blog you can see the comments and try to reason with them. It will give you an idea of where you need to go with the posts. Think of it as constructive criticism.

It has been my experience that most of these worriers just want to know that you have a strategy for dealing with trolls (irrational negative commentors). That is when I tell the client that I will use the Living Room Rule. I am kinda borrowing a page from Naked Conversations here, but the living room rule works.

So, what is the living room rule. It goes kinda like this. My blogspace (whether that is personal or corporate) is like my living room. If you are interested in a conversation you are more than welcome to visit, but if you  are irrational and only want to argue or spam me, then I will kick you out of my living room. Most commentors like this rule, because it lets the conversation continue.

So, I hearby institute the Living Room Rule on this blog. Though, I don’t really need it cause all my posters are cool.

Thanks,

William Flavell

Hey Everybody,

This was just sent to me and I would agree with the message it came with, this is the greatest iPod hack ever. At least the coolest.

Read more about it on HackaDay.

Hey Everybody,

Just wanted to share this story with you because I think that it is very cool. Google is an amazing company and this could be the leap that finally connects all of America to the Web. It could even be done completely ad-supported (in other words, free). We just have to hope that the US government is forward thinking enough.

By Eric Auchard and Peter Kaplan

SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Google Inc said on Friday that the company would bid on coveted airwaves to launch a U.S. wireless network, pitting it against established telecommunications players AT&T and Verizon.

The Internet leader said in a statement that it was ready to go it alone rather than rely on partners in bidding in the Federal Communications Commission-run auction of 700-megahertz wireless spectrum due to begin on January 24.

The Silicon Valley-based company said it would make its filing ahead of the FCC deadline on Monday for companies to declare their interest in joining the airwaves bidding.

“We believe it’s important to put our money where our principles are,” Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said. “Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today’s wireless world.”

Wall Street investors have reacted cautiously to Google’s latest move to expand beyond its core Web search and online advertising franchises, worried the potential upfront costs and eventual network build-out could exceed $10 billion.

But some analysts have speculated that Google was more interested in ensuring certain requirements for network openness and that it was bidding just to preserve those rules.

“The real question here is whether Google’s intent is to bid up to the reserve price and assure that the openness condition stays in place,” Stifel Nicolaus analyst Blair Levin wrote to investors. “Or is the real purpose to actually win?”

And despite the excitement surrounding a Google bid, Stifel Nicolaus said in a research note that it suspects Verizon will probably end up winning the auction for the C block spectrum.

Read the rest at: Reuters.

Hey Everybody,

I just read Advertising Age’s Seach Marketing Fact Pack of 2007. It is a really cool resource of facts, stats and more on search and search engine marketing. It also has some cool stuff on SEO. I just think that it can be a great tool for anyone in advertising to sell this practice to the C-Suite or to a client. This fact pack also has a great business breakdown of the top 5 search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and ASK.

Favorite Stat:

From the “Budget Being Shifted to Search Marketing” section. 20% percent responded that their budgets came from Print Magazine advertising.

Most Humorous Factoid:

In the “Top Sites by Share of Visits by Category” under “Health” Viagra.com was number three. WOW! That is a lot of ED searching.

Anyway get the Search Marketing Pack here: searchfactpack2007.

Enjoy,

William Flavell

Picture 116

Originally uploaded by swept14

I got this photo of the Scobleizer at the Media Relations Summit. He was a really nice guy and very knowledgeable.

Check out an earlier post I wrote on him at the conference.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.