Everybodysagenius’s Weblog

Hey Everybody,

This is me as Bill the Blogger.

If you are a long time reader than you know that I also write a few blogs for clients. One of my favorite projects is coming up this weekend.

It is blog that I write for Borsheims that follows the Annual Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder’s Weekend in Omaha, NE. It is a really great experience. My job is to shoot video, stills and write posts on all of the events of the weekend. I try to provide a surrogate experience to all of the shareholders who can’t come to the event.

The event gets huge numbers of attendance. This year they are expecting more than 35,000 people. It is also a really fun time. Berkshire and Warren Buffett are big search terms during this time period and this blog allows our client to contribute to and gain from some of that high search traffic. Needless to say, the blog gets a lot of hits. Check out this case study from last year’s performance.

Anyway, if you are a reader, I hope that you will check out the blog. And if you are in Omaha, NE this weekend, maybe you will see me at the event.

Best of luck,

Will Flavell

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

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