Hey Everybody,

Haven’t posted for a while, but I just wanted to share a set of guidelines for starting a new corporate blog. Blogging can be an amazing marketing tool. If you are thinking of starting a blog to help interact with your customers/ shareholders. Check out this plan and advice sheet. Hope you enjoy.

OVERVIEW

Listed below are guidelines that will help the you make the most of your new blog. These guidelines will help you to grow your blog into a powerful conversation tool. The guidelines are separated into five easy steps:

Step 1: Listen

The best advice anyone can follow before entering into a new method of communication is to become familiar with the tools and voices within that medium. Before a blog launch:

1. Take a month and read relevant blogs in the blog’s category.

2. Check out competitors’ blogs.

3. Subscribe to podcasts related to the blog’s industry.

4. Find groups on the social networking sites (SNS) that pertain to that industry.

This process can be as easy as visiting directories for each of these mediums and searching relevant keywords or industry stories. You can then follow trending stories and learn who the most popular influencers are in this category. You should join these relevant conversations and subscribe to receive updates from influential content producers. The following tools are suggested as a means to locate relevant discussions in different categories online:

Blogs:
Technorati (blog search engine):
Google Blogsearch (blog search engine):

Podcasts:
iTunes:
Podcast Directory (podcast search engine):

Groups:
Facebook:
Yahoo! Groups:

Once part of a group, your bloggers shouldn’t just sit back and watch. They should take a side on a relevant issue affecting their category. They should put their opinions out there for others to read. Before they begin their own publishing, they should let people know who they are and start building their reputation online. This will help the blog develop a relevant audience when they start to post.

Step 2: Plan

To please both the search engines and readers, it is important to regularly post relevant content. Plan ahead and post often. Make a schedule of who is going to be posting about what topic and when. Stick to that schedule. Try to post two to three times a week. Feel free to post more often if there are many product developments or a lot of news. It will be helpful to identify which blogger is exceptionally passionate early on and make them the default writer.

Ideas on Good Posting Content: Good content consists of breaking news, product innovations, money saving ideas, internal visual content such as photos or videos, humorous anecdotes and personal stands on trending stories in your industry. The best content is original, injected with personality and demonstrates authority.

Examples of Bad Posting Content: Bad content is blatantly self-serving content. Your bloggers shouldn’t spend the whole time talking about their products and services. The posts need to be interesting to everyone. Bad content is also content that meanders without a specific theme. And if the blog lacks focus, it will lack an audience.

Step 3: Socialize

Allow comments on the new blog (it’s not a conversation without comments). Respond to all comments in a timely fashion. Link to other bloggers, outside sources of information, and even competitors. Hopefully, they will link back to the your new blog. By providing a very robust source list, the new blog can become the ultimate source of information for users on this subject. This practice also provides the blog with a lot of valuable links and indexible information, both of which will help increase the new blog’s search engine ranking. If the new blog becomes the best source of information, users will submit the blog to social news-sharing sites, tell their friends and bookmark its stories.

Make social bookmarking and social news-sharing links available. Try to make it as easy as possible for users to share your blog’s content.

The new bloggers should make themselves personally available to their readers. The new blog should provide contact information such as a phone number, email and/or Twitter address to a real person. Once a relationship has begun to flourish online, the bloggers should meet up with their readers in real life. Tweetups, tradeshows, and group lunches offer great outing environments that will help the bloggers further connect with their readers.

Step 4: Customize

Blogs are one of today’s most versatile mediums. In fact, many companies are using blogs as their main Web vehicles. Your bloggers can easily add widgets or applications that do almost anything imaginable to the sidebar of their new blog. Some examples of widgets available today are current weather displays, news readers from major newspapers, games, photo albums and much more. Most of them are free. Visit Widgetbox or Google Gadgets and add them to the side bar of the new blog.

Add RSS feeds from other relevant blogs and online news sources to the blog’s RSS feed blogroll.

Write personal and detailed about-the-author pages. This is an often-overlooked opportunity. Don’t let the descriptive pages sound too corporate or be too short. Many readers will judge the blog’s personality and authority from these pages.

Step 5: Tracking

You should equip your new blog with Google Analytics. This tracking service will allow your bloggers to learn where their visitors come from and how they interact with the new blog. Use this information to research and contact sites that refer traffic to the new blog. Tune the blog to match the most popular keywords available to your industry.

It is also a very smart idea to employ an online reputation management (ORM) tool to follow the most relevant and trending stories within your category. ORM tools can help the your bloggers identify key influencers online and trending stories that the your blog can post on. This will take a lot less time then searching through all the blogs, podcasts and groups manually and is an easy way to inject this new blog into the heat of the most relevant conversations going on today which will help expose the new blog to new readers.

TOP 15 TIPS

1. Read other blogs and follow online conversations.

2. Comment and contribute to online groups and other blogs.

3. Develop a schedule and stick to it.

4. Write about what you know.

5. Write about what you are passionate about.

6. Take a stand on relevant issues.

7. Share photos and videos.

8. Allow comments.

9. Tell a compelling story.

10. Link to many other sites.

11. Go meet people in real life.

12. Customize your blog to fit your readers’ wants.

13. Keep an up-to-date and relevant blogroll.

14. Create a great about page.

15. Track and tune your blog’s messaging.

Good Morning Everybody,

I often get asked how to improve an image online. Sometimes, by big brands who are looking for a full-on strategy. But I am often asked by individuals or smaller non-profits. This questions is akin to when people ask dietitians: How can I lose the first ten pounds. So, I wanted to make the post today on how to lose the first ten pounds. These are five simple, easy, cheap strategies to get you (or your business, non-profit, etc.) moving online. Consider them the first steps.

1. Listen: Get into the blogosphere and see what people are saying about your business, about your industry. There are more than 133,000,000 blogs indexed by Technorati, go find out which ones pertain to you and your business.
2. Google Yourself: Where do you appear in search results? Wanna be on the first page? With 2 billion searches daily on Google, you really can’t afford to be unfindable.
3. Tell Your Story: Every brand has a story, what’s your story? Can it be told in pictures, video, text, or audio recordings? The Web can help you share your story with millions of interested people; you just have to provide the content.
4. Tweet: Get a Twitter account. It’s fast, it’s easy and it’s where news breaks today. And it’s only 140 characters.
5. Get the News Delivered to You: Set up alerts and a RSS feed aggregator for the Web sites important to your business. This way, you won’t have to go look for your news everyday, it will automatically be delivered to you.

Need a little help getting started? Drop me a comment.

Until then good luck. Oh, and if you have any real advice on losing the first ten pounds, I would love to hear it.

Enjoy,

Will Flavell

Hey Everybody,

Whether you are actively tracking a recent campaign or just interested in what the chatter online is today, searching the world of blogs and micro-blogs is becoming increasingly important. But with so many different outlets and so many different searches, what is the best. Well, I don’t know if there is a best. But here are a few that I use, I hope that they are helpful to you as well

1. The nine-hundred lb. gorilla, Google. Google tends to find almost everything, big and small. I use it’s blog search function a lot more than its news search function. Google Blogsearch seems to be the most thorough. It’s downfall is in its sorting and ranking. You can only search by post, not by blog-theme and you can only sort by relevance or date. Not a real ranking system. But overall, if you need a lot of hits, this is the first place to shop.

2. The sorting king, Technorati. Technorati is a blog search engine. It is pretty nice. Sometimes, Google will find a few hits that Technorati misses. It also takes Technorati longer to index then Google and sometimes will be a little slower on the uptake. But, Technorati is my favorite, because it allows you to evaluate blogs by their authority ranking and by who has made this post or this blog their favorite. Technorati also allows you to search blogs (not just posts) search for blogs devoted entirely to a subject.

3. IceRocket, is a pretty nice little blog search engine. It returns pretty solid results including a strong images and video search. It also allows you to search by cloud. Another cool feature is that allows you to enter a Blog’s URL and you can see its usage stats, they call this BlogTracker. Another feature is that you can search MySpace. This sounds pretty great, but as anyone who tries to search MySpace on their own knows, it is pretty unsearchable. This feature suffers the same fate. IceRocket has some great bells and whistles, but it is not a thorough as the two big boys above.

4. BlogCatalog, is a very large social network for bloggers that allows you to search posts, blogs and other info that bloggers offer up (their other social accounts). It is pretty nice, but it is a social network, not a powerhouse of search. It is a lot of fun though and I really enjoy how it aggregates all of your presences. If this were a post about social networks, I would definitely recommend it. It is a lot of fun. But for blog searches, it is only okay.

5. Twitter, this microblogging site is often the pulse of the hot issue of the moment (literally the second). But you can go back and search what has been said by keyword. Do this by visiting www.search.twitter.com. Again these posts are limited to 140 characters, but they often provide links with in depth information. And it is an easy way to get a quick reading on whether the world hates, loves, or doesn’t care about you at the moment.

Two others of note are Blogsearch.com, which offers a good starting point by listing a variety of searches and what they provide, and Yahoo! blog search.

Hope you enjoy and if you have any others that you like, please let me know.

Thanks,

Will Flavell

Hey Everybody,

My friend and coworker Scott Rowe and I have been working on a quick article regarding online reputation management and some of the free tools that exist to monitor it. This is a growing area of interest as the tools for online publication are becoming easier, faster and more wide spread by the day. Upset customers can ruin your brand equity overnight. I thought that I would share it with everybody.  Enjoy:

Consumers and their opinions can make or break your brand. This has always been the case. Historically, companies have had to depend on focus groups, surveys or annual consumer preference studies to understand people’s opinions of their brand and products. Now, the world moves faster. Brand equity can be destroyed overnight. The Internet has dramatically changed the way people interact and discuss brands.
Beyond giving every consumer a near instant voice, the Internet has also provided companies many free tools to monitor, manage and interact with consumers. The knowledge gained from using these tools can dramatically improve your company’s awareness of coming trends and crowning concerns. It can also allow for you to quickly respond to problems.

Here are some free tools that you can start using today to help manage your company’s reputation in the digital space.

Google Alerts is one of the most common tools available. This service allows you to select the search terms you would like tracked as well as the type of content such as new, blogs, web, video and groups. You then select how often you wish to receive alerts and the email address you want them sent to. Then, whenever news on your selected search terms becomes available it is delivered to your e-mail inbox.

Twitter is a rapidly growing social networking site. Unlike blogs Twitterers (Twitter users) post quick entries in their feeds. Users can then choose to follow other Twitterers and comment on their postings. What makes Twitter different is the instant response of a Twitter post. You can get up-to-date information regarding conversations on this service by using the Twitter search tool located at search.twitter.com.

Technorati is a search engine specific to blogs. You can use the standard Technorati search to find blog posts about specific keywords or you can use the “watchlist” service. With a free account you can enter any number of key phrases in the system and see real-time listings of blog posts that contain that key phrases. You can also subscribe to these lists as RSS feeds and pull them into your preferred feed reader.

Search Engines are perhaps the most obvious option. Google, Yahoo and Live make up the vast majority of web searches performed on the Internet, so they should be the focus of your efforts. In all three of these search engines you can search for a variety of content types such as web, images and video. Google also allows you to search blogs as well.

Social Networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Friendster house millions of user profiles. Most of these users list their preferences and interests on their profiles. Services like Wink.com allow you to search across many of the social networks. This search can help you to establish what users enjoy your product and list it as an interest. These users have the potential to become brand ambassadors, spreading the good will of your company and product.

While all of these tools are can get you and your company started, there is a great deal more information that can be attained and managed from the Internet. With the right marketing partner these tools along with a variety of sophisticated solutions can create reports on current trends, help develop a strong marketing plan and help to engage and encourage your existing fan base online.

Thanks and I hope you enjoyed the article. Check out more industry tips and news at Bozell Thinking. Another new and interesting system for staying up to day is Alerts.com. Check it out and tell me what you think.

Will Flavell