Everybodysagenius’s Weblog

Hey Everybody,

I just wanted to share a story that I wrote for latest Issue of Bozell Thinking. It covers some of the major reasons that companies should be blogging and entering the social media space from a marketing perspective.

Business Blogging
There are somewhere around 200,000,000 blogs or Web logs online today. Some of these blogs are dormant, but many are alive with conversation. These conversations reach into every category of business and every aspect of life.

Blogging can be a lot of fun. It can open you up to a world of new ideas and new voices. It can be an eye-opening experience to see what your customers have to say to you in a one-on-one environment. And it gives you the chance to learn how they feel, what they want and how they want it. Whether you are engaged in online dialogue with your customers right now or not, there is definitely a conversation going on about your business.

Companies in every category have been making successful and unsuccessful leaps into blogging for a few years now. So, why are so many businesses attempting the leap into blogs and other social media?

Here are a few ways that blogging can help your business:

➢ Blogs let you share your knowledge. They will help you establish yourself as a guru or an expert in your field.
➢ Blogs let you reach interested audiences. They can help you get in contact with potential customers.
➢ Blogging will teach you more about your current customers. Your blog can act as a vehicle for open dialogue between you and your customers. It will let you learn what your customers like and what they don’t like. And more importantly, it will give your customers a way to tell you what they want.
➢ Blogging will help you learn more about your industry. Bloggers pride themselves on sharing the most up-to-the date information with each other. Blogging can also provide a way for you to meet others interested in your industry that might share valuable insights with you.
➢ Blogs can help you reach the traditional media. Most large print and television news media now regularly comb blogs to find the most interesting information on different business categories. Reporters regularly need experts in a variety of fields to add quotes to their stories. They often use highly ranked bloggers for these expert sources.
➢ Blogs rank highly on search engines. Adding a blog to your Web site that is regularly updated and filled with links can greatly increase your search engine ranking.
➢ Blogs are a highly social form of media online. They are often shared, re-posted and referred to. They allow proponents of your brand to share your messages with their friends.

Here at Bozell, we just finished our biggest blogging project to date. We built and wrote an event

Here is a post I wrote and shot on Warren Buffett

blog for the Berkshire Hathaway Weekend in Omaha, NE. It was a way for our client, Borsheims, to report on the festivities that they hosted during the Berkshire Weekend. The blog, borsheimsbrk.com, offered photography, video, interesting posts and links to information on most of the events of the weekend. It was promoted through Google AdWords, e-mail campaigns and special cards with the blog’s address that were given out at the events.
The Borsheims event blog proved to be very successful. It received almost 6,000 unique visitors and almost 25,000 page views in its first week. The blog still appears in the top ten search results for Berkshire Weekend on Google.

Bozell’s Dialogue Relations Department assists clients with blogging and other social media initiatives. We offer the following advice to those of you who are thinking of blogging or who are already blogging.

Good Blogging Tips:
➢ Name your blog and your posts with keywords that directly relate to the subject matter.
➢ Be honest. Simple, but this is very important in the social media space.
➢ Be open. Write an “about” page and leave a phone number or e-mail address where visitors can reach you.
➢ Be passionate. Write about what you care about.
➢ Be personal. It is okay to write about your life and your family. Personal posts help reinforce that you really are a person and not a slick marketing gimmick.
➢ Link to many other blogs. In your posts, link to other Web sites with more information; sometimes that even includes competitors. But this is okay — the more links you have, the more your readers will see you as a trustworthy resource. Links also help increase your search engine ranking and blog authority ranking.
➢ Leave your comment section open.
➢ Ask questions and solicit input from readers.
➢ Share stories of the bad times as well as the good.

Common Blogger Pitfalls:
➢ Don’t use a fake name or blog under the name of someone else, even if they are made up.
➢ Don’t let long periods of time pass between posts. The rule is at least one post a week. The more, the better.
➢ Don’t moderate all comments and always try to respond (in a timely manner) to the comments that are sent to you.
➢ Don’t try to address multiple themes in each post. This will make them hard to sort by category and difficult to search.
➢ Don’t change blog topics. It’s important to decide on your blog’s theme in the beginning and stick to it.
➢ Don’t be a copycat. It’s never a good idea to just re-post other people’s material.
➢ Don’t sell. It’s okay to talk about features, motivation and development, but outright selling is looked down upon.
➢ Don’t be shy.

By now I’m sure you are excited to get out into the blog-o-sphere and see what is being said about your business and your industry. We recommend starting your search with either of these blog search engines, www.technorati.com or http://blogsearch.google.com. If you decide that blogging is right for your brand and want to learn more, please feel free to contact Bozell’s Social Media Specialist Bill Flavell at 402.965.4360 or by e-mail at bflavell@bozell.com. Until then, get out there and open some dialogue!

Anyway,

Thanks for reading and I hope that you enjoyed it.

Will Flavell