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,

To prove that I exist outside of the Internet and to spread the good tidings of social media, I often speak to business groups and others in the Midwest. So where can you find me? Well, here is where I will be speaking in the month April (2009). If you can make it, swing by and check me out.

William Flavell

April 9:
I will be at speaking on Blogging at Bozell’s Sausage Factory Seminar Series in Des Moines, IA. We will be at the Embassy Suites on the River from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

April 14:
I will be speaking on Digital Word of Mouth to the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce in Bellevue, NE. We will be at Confluence, from 10-11:30 a.m.

April 15:
I will be speaking at Infotec.

I hope that you will check me out. If you are looking for a social media speaker who with a experience in a variety of online mediums and companies. Give me a call. I have been a social media specialist for about three years for Bozell. I have done a lot of things from blogging, twitter, youtube contests and more for clients.

Anyway, hope to see you soon.

Best,

Will Flavell

Hey everybody,

With the power of Facebook (somewhere around 130 million unique views a month). And MySpace, Hi5, Freindster, Bebo… there seems to be thousands of these. And the ones that I mentioned before are really universal or unfocused networks. But Ning provides a free way to create your own niche social network. It currently has many many networks that range in topic from politics, to business, to art, to everything else.

It is really easy to use. The back end WYSIWYG is very nice, it looks a lot like wordpress. And almost everything is drag and drop. Ning also offers many languages so you can localize your specific, custom network almost anywhere.

You can get your thousands of workers, shareholders, friends and/or family to all connect and share in one place. It is basically a Facebook for whatever you want. One example that I really like of a ning community is RecruitingBlogs. RecruitingBlogs is a powerful, head-hunter or recruiter social network. It has more than 16,000 members. It is a great resource for recruiters, tons of informative blog posts.

Ning can be a very powerful, cheap tool. and I really like it. If you are interested in building an area for your ideation shareholders to contribute and collaborate with you, check out Ning. Good luck getting started. Just remember to keep your brand consistent with the same images and color scheme as your blog and Web site. I even try to pick a theme or template that matches my other themes.

Take it easy,

William Flavell

Amoeba Records

Originally uploaded by swept14

My other Amoeba Records picture has become somewhat popular, so I thought that I would share this one too. You can see all my photos at www.flickr.com/photos/swept14.

Thanks and have a great weekend everybody,
Will Flavell

Hey Everyone,

I know that I haven’t written for ages (traffic is really down). But I do have a valid excuse, one of my organs exploded. That’s right. I have been in the hospital (Bergan Mercy) for about two weeks and I am just getting out today. I still pretty weak, and can’t move a lot, but I am alive. I was in the hospital for about 9-10 days. Read the rest of this entry »

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