Hey everybody,

This question comes up a lot and I don’t see a lot of good answers out there. So I thought that I would take a swing at it. Hope it is helpful.

11 Tips on How to Blog

1. Get Found Easily: Choose a blog name, and tagline that can let people in your niche find you easily through search engines. Use the most effective keywords for you blog and post titles.
2. Follow the Conversation: Read a bunch of blogs and add comments to them before you start your own and as you are writing your own. Try to establish a conversation with other peer leaders in your category. Use blog searching and ranking sites to find out what the most popular themes in your category are at the time and address those. This will also help you get story ideas.
3. Keep it Simple, Keep it Focused: Each post should contain just one idea or one set of links.
4. Demonstrate Passion: Post often, post about what you care about. Take a position on issues.
5. Demonstrate Authority: Blog about what you know. Be generous with what information you give out.
6. Allow Comments: A good blog is a conversation, not a one-way channel so let others make comments back to you.
7. Be Accessible: Make it easy for people to contact you through your blog either through an e-mail or phone number posting. This includes being honest and open with who you are. No lies or misleading.
8. Tell a Story: Tell your story – a compelling story helps entice people to read on. A personal story makes you seem more human. Even your set backs and defeats make you likeable.
9. Be Linky:  By directing your readers to other sites, even competitors, you become their absolute best resource and they, in turn, will reward you with lots of inbound links. These links increase your search ranking and credibility online.
10. Get Out In the Real World: Nothing beats face-to-face meetings. To build relationships you should go out and meet the people you are speaking with in your blog. Invite others to visit you.
11. Use your referrer log: The Referrer Log tracks who’s linking to your site and how much traffic those sites are sending you. Read them often to know what people are saying about you.

An Additional Note on Blog Advice:

These are really the standard recognized rules of blogging. They were originally laid down by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel in their book Naked Conversations. These guidelines have always served me well. The one important factor that I would like to touch on beyond their recommendations is the importance of personality. It seems to me that there are a lot of corporate blogs flooding cyberspace these days, but the ones that we remember – no matter what their category – are those written by people with character. Out of the supposed 60 million active blogs out there, I can only think of about 50 or so that I really enjoy reading. A family story or a disappointing turn of events on a business deal make great blog posts too. It isn’t just about bragging or even conversations, it is about appearing human enough to seem approachable.

If you want anything more in-depth, just let me know. Just send me a comment and I will try to answer. I work in social media and would be glad to give advice.

Thanks,

William Flavell

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,

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,

As you may remember, I work for an ad and pr firm. So, I am constantly having to sell blogs as an internal and external communication strategy. You can probably see the importance/effectiveness of blogs because you are already embracing the technology by reading this blog online, but businesses often have a difficult time with this. Especially with regards to its ROI (def: Return on Investment).

I just read this great excerpt in the book Naked Conversations about a blog’s ROI and I thought I would share it with you and leave it up on my online memory (aka my blog).

It goes like this:

If you need to do an ROI analysis on the value of a blog, you might be hard pressed to find it on a spreadsheet. The evidence is all anecdotal, but it seems compelling to us. Take a look at Firefox, for example. The staff at Firefox used a blog as the cornerstone of a word-of-mouth campaign that generated 60 million subscribers in 6 months. The blog was incredibly successful, whereas a two-page ad in the New York Times generated very few downloads. Blogs may not be direct revenue producers, but they can be extremely good at generating word-of-mouth buzz, and word of mouth remains the most effective way to attract masses of new customers and more sales.

I know, its cool.

Gotta go,

Everybody’s a genius.