Posts Tagged ‘Forrester Research’
39 More (of the) Best Social Media Guides, Tips and Insights of 2011
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012The notion of using social media for business has gone from cutting edge to commonplace in an amazingly short time. And for those laggard firms still resisting social media, recent changes by Google now make it all but imperative.
Of course, there’s no single cookie-cutter approach to social media marketing that works for every enterprise. And many companies that jumped in early experienced failures and disappointments, pulled back, and then re-approached social media from a more strategic angle.
While certain aspects of social media have stabilized (e.g., Facebook is the largest social network and is unlikely to fall to any “Facebook killer” application anytime soon; Google is going to keep trying to build its own social network until it manages to create one that attracts more users than lawsuits), many practices are still evolving. What’s the most effective way to grow a company’s social influence? How widely within an organization should social media tasks be distributed? How can an brand establish trust online? What are the best practices for sharing content on each major social network? What common mistakes and pitfalls should be avoided? Is it really possible to measure social media ROI—and if so, how?
Find the answers to these questions and more here in more than three dozen of the best social media guides, insights, rants and reports of the past year.
Social Media Marketing Tips and Tactics
Social Media, What Matters Most for Marketers by iMedia Connection
Noting that the “trend in digital information sharing (on social networks) is still a huge challenge for many companies,” Rick van Boekel advises marketers to develop a strategy, stay involved (or stay away), and integrate efforts among other guidance for marketing success in social media.
Practical Reasons Why Businesses Need Social Media by Social Media Today
Austen Mayor articulates both qualitative and quantitative justifications for social media investments. Among the hard numbers he lists: according to a social media industry study, 72% of companies active in social media report higher website traffic, 62% say it has improved search engine rankings, and 48% say it has increased sales.
Why Aren’t You Promoting Your Social Profiles? 10 Ways to Make it Happen by The Social Media Chef
Chris Tompkins supplies 10 methods to help “promote your social media profiles OUTSIDE of logging in to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter,” such as adding your social media profiles to company email signatures, business cards, advertising and all marketing collateral.
Stop shoving social media down my throat by {grow}
Mark Schaefer explains why be believes it is NOT a good idea to force “social media down the throats of employees at every level of the company,” contrary to advice given elsewhere. People bring different skills to the job. As Mark concludes, “Being adept at social media is NOT EASY for everybody. And we should be able to live with that human diversity.”
50 Social Media Marketing Tips and Tactics by Jeff Bullas
Jeff Bullas lists “50 synergistic social media marketing tips and tactics to market your content and ideas and help them to spread to a global audience,” divided into six platform categories: blogging, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Slideshare.
Forrester: 5 Stages Of Social Media Growth by MediaPost Online Media Daily
Gavin O’Malley reviews research from Forrester on the five stages of social media maturity that corporations typically pass through, starting with the dormant stage (“one in five companies still don’t use any social media. These companies tend to be highly conservative, heavily regulated, or just not interested, according to Forrester”) then progressing through “distributed chaos” and additional steps before reaching the optimization stage.
A quick guide to 5 social media platforms by iMedia Connection
Linda Ireland offers helpful tips to marketers on going beyond the basics to take advantage of the unique strengths of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and LinkedIn (e.g., “If you’re a B2B company, LinkedIn is a great way to identify, connect with, and build stronger relationships with potential customers by interacting with them through LinkedIn Groups and providing responses to the questions they post on LinkedIn Answers”).
Social Trust Factor: 10 Tips to Establish Credibility by The Marketing Nut
Frequent best-of honoree Pam Moore explains the importance of the trust factor in encouraging brand engagement and offers 10 tips for increasing your social trust factor, such as developing a consistent online brand persona, hanging out with the “right” people in your business social networks, and taking the time to cultivate relationships.
Social Media Marketing – 10 Inspiring Infographics by Jeff Bullas
Jeff Bullas shares some interesting social media statistics (e.g., Tumblr is now attracting over 90 million unique visitors every month; StumbleUpon drives over 50% of all social network traffic) as well as helpful how-to’s (e.g., How to Twitter and LinkedIn Boot Camp) in this intriguing collection of infographics.
How to be a rock star on 8 social media platforms by iMedia Connection
***** 5 STARS
Kent Lewis packs an incredible amount of useful information into this concise post, which outlines tactics for marketing success, illustrated with real-world examples, for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, SlideShare, Quora and Foursquare.
Don’t Let Legal Keep You Out of Social by Social Media Marketing Magazine
Glen Gilmore reviews some high-profile examples of social media legal cases, which, he writes, “have largely been related to cases of egregious misconduct.” He then explains the basic legal and regulatory risks associated with social media, and presents a plan to minimize such risks in business social media use.
Busting Social Media Myths and Avoiding Common Mistakes
Five Social Media Myths You Need to Know by frogloop
Commenting on Facebook’s dominance and huge market reach that, “while it maybe true that your organization needs a better Facebook strategy, it’s also important that you dig a little deeper into social media stats,” Allyson Kapin debunks five social media myths. Though her focus is on fundraising and social media use by non-profit organizations, much of the material here applies more broadly.
For those executives who still block or limit access for their employees to social media sites and mobile devices, Adam Hartung reminds readers that personal computers were once looked at as productivity destroyers (PCs were viewed as toys that lacked the robustness of mainframe applications by some CIOs back in the 80s) and warns that “best practices” (e.g., “We need to control employee access to information” and “We need to keep employees focused on their job, without distractions”) are a dangerous myth.
Four Common Social Media Mishaps by iMedia Connection
Erik Deckers advises against, among other social media faux paus, socialcasting, relying on a single network, or, interestingly, “Putting a B2B company on Facebook or a B2C company on LinkedIn…People go to Facebook to chat with family and friends, not to buy industrial adhesives. People go to LinkedIn to connect with people who can help them do their jobs better, not share their love of your white chocolate macadamia nut brownies.”
Ten Myths About Social Networking For Business by Forbes
Neal Rodriguez provides “a comprehensive guide to social networking misconceptions—each accompanied by a tangible action plan that you can take right now,” such as “Myth 4: You have to spend hours a day on Twitter” (he recommends using Tweetchats—not a bad idea, but not right for everyone).
B2B Social Media Guides
Top social media platforms for businesses by iMedia Connection
Kent Lewis outlines the benefits of social media for B2B businesses, the challenges such vendors face in social media, the essential elements of a B2B social media program, and the best platforms to utilize (blogging, LinkedIn and Twitter are obvious; Facebook and Quora somewhat more questionable).
Turn B2B Buying Into a Social Experience by iMedia Connection
Tony Zambito outlines the changes social media has brought to the B2B buying process and identifies four areas where buyer expectations have changed that B2B marketers need to be aware of and address. Another outstanding post from Tony is The New Social Buyer Ecosystem, which delves into the concept of social Buyer Circles and their implications for marketers in engaging social buyers in the B2B realm.
YouTube Tips and Tactics
YouTube etiquette for 2011 by iMedia Connection
Daisy Whitney provides excellent tips for making the most of YouTube, such as paying special attention to the crucial first 15 seconds of every video you produce; entering your keywords in rank order; and uploading a custom thumbnail image for each video rather than relying on the YouTube default selection.
6 Best Practices For Small Business YouTube Marketing by OPEN Forum
Todd Wasserman shares advice from entrepreneurs who’ve been successful with YouTube marketing on best practices for the platform, including buying ads, finding your niche, using technology such as Hot Spots to test the effectiveness of your videos, and tracking ROI.
YouTube It; You Rank for It – Improve Your YouTube Rankings by iMedia Connection
Chris Adams of gShift Labs explains how to optimize video rankings in YouTube, the factors that affect ranking (beyond the obvious) and the importance of analyzing and acting upon YouTube metrics regularly.
Search and Social
When search meets social by Econsultancy
Due to the growing importance of social signals in search results, Nick Jones writes that “2011 marks the year when social media has shifted from being nice to essential…Social elements play a huge part in the traffic generated, but also…citations and “votes” in the form of Tweets and Likes go a long way to indicating to search engines that this content has value and deserves to rank for relevant keywords.”
How Social Media Affects Content Relevance in Search by Mashable
Shane Snow explains why and how Google and Bing are incorporating social signals into the search algorithms, how these changes may help newer businesses, and which previously helpful SEO tactics are now much less important. The key to success in this new world is creating highly sharable content and building a network of influencers who will share it.
Social Media Monitoring and ROI Measurement
10 Measures of Social Media ROI for Your Brand by SocialTimes
Neil Glassman presents his “ten measures of social media marketing ROI,” though ROI purists may quibble with some of his entries, e.g., raising the quality and quantity of job applicants by creating a “social culture.” But it’s an intriguing list nonetheless.
Forget Social Media ROI by ClickZ
The brilliant Heidi Cohen contends that only a third of companies are attempting to track social media ROI; outlines three reasons why such calculations are difficult (e.g., “Social media interaction tends to happen outside of the purchase process, either before or after”); and presents as alternatives five social media metrics she believes really do matter.
Social Media ROI for Me-Too-ers versus Innovators by SocialSteve’s Blog
***** 5 STARS
Steve Goldner uses a graphical social media activity scale to explain the differences in tactics and related ROI measurements between “Me-Too’ers” (focused on basic activities like setting up social profiles and adding sharing buttons to their websites) and “Innovators” (integrated social media efforts, formalized social media relationships).
Things We Should Ask The ROI Question About Before Social Media by UnMarketing
Scott Stratten makes a concise yet blistering argument against obsessing over social media ROI, noting that social media is held “to a higher level of judgment than most things in business,” then questioning the ROI of things like meetings, logo-emblazoned coffee mugs and employee commute time.
5 Ways to Measure Social Media by ClickZ
Frequent best-of contributor Ron Jones recommends measuring a number of different metrics within categories like Awareness/Exposure (the most basic level), Influence, and Engagement (e.g., number of shares, mentions, comments and retweets).
The ROI of Social Media ROI by iMedia Connection
Scot Wheeler presents a helpful diagram for evaluating social media while also noting that “ROI is not always the best way to evaluate the value of social media engagement to an organization…Often, when management asks for the ROI on social media, what they are really asking for is the value of social media engagement to the business.” He then describes the usefulness of awareness, buzz, reach and sentiment as measures of social media value. Also worth checking out is Scot’s follow-up to this post, The Four Principles of Social ROI Measurement, in which he contends that “the accumulation of ‘likes’ or ‘followers’ and the generation of engagement are not ends in themselves. These are tactics which are meant to prime a growing and engaged users for eventual transactions, but which are no more directly measurable in terms of revenues generated than is PR, print, TV or radio advertising.”
Explaining “social media ROI” AGAIN. And again. And… again. by The Brand Builder Blog
Olivier Blanchard serves up an entertaining and informative rant about the continued inability or refusal of many social media professionals to explain the ROI of social media, writing “As annoying and curious as it was, back in 2009, when so many so-called ‘experts’ and ‘gurus’ couldn’t figure out how to explain, much less determine the ROI of anything relating to social media, it is inexcusable today.” He explains the basics of social media ROI measurement, though conceding in the end that “Not all social media activity needs to drive ROI.”
14 Top Tracking Tools For Your Social Media Stats by Abnormal Marketing
Fiona McEachran takes a look at 14 social media monitoring tools, ranging in price from free to “don’t ask,” including Trackur, Webfluenz and BackType.
Social Media Facts, Stats and Research
INFOGRAPHIC: How Much Does Social Media Really Cost? by Scribbal
***** 5 STARS
Mariel Loveland presents an outstanding infographic detailing the internal and external costs of social media marketing along with the expected savings or return in various business areas, drawing on both statistical and anecdotal data.
The Business Impact of Social Media [Infographic] by ReadWriteWeb
Klint Finley reports on research regarding social media use in Forture 500 companies covering priorities, success measures, rationale, and brief profiles of successful social media use in big companies (Coca Cola, jetBlue, Dell, Red Bull and others).
Facebook, Twitter Shares Outpace Other Social Buttons by MediaPost Online Media Daily
Laurie Sullivan highlights research from BrightEdge showing that “Web site pages displaying the Twitter share button get seven times the social media mentions compared with those that do not…(yet) nearly half of the largest 10,000 sites on the Web still don’t display any kind of social sharing links or buttons.”
10 Intriguing Insights on the State of Social Media and Blogging by Jeff Bullas
Jeff Bullas (again) summarizes 10 key insights from Nielsen research on social media, among them: Facebook dominates the “time spent online” metric—Facebook users collectively spend three times as many minutes with Facebook as they do with Yahoo, and four times as many as with Google. Nearly a quarter of total online time is spent with social networks and blogs. And women outnumber men on eight of the top 10 social networks—but guys are in the majority on LinkedIn.
Social Media Bigger And More Influential Than Ever, Reveals Q3 Nielsen Report [INFOGRAPHIC] by All Twitter
Shea Bennett shares more takeaways from Neilsen research, such as that “40% of social media users access content from their mobile handsets,” with users over the age of 55 driving much of this growth. Social networks and blogs are visited by more than three-quarters of Internet users. And Tumblr is among the fastest-growing networks, tripling its user base in 2011.
Social Media Report: Q3 2011 by Nielsen Research
Want to draw your own conclusions from the research cited by Jeff and Shea above? Here’s the source.
9 Social Media Infographics You Must See by DreamGrow
Mart Prööm presents a fascinating collection of infographics, with stats and findings ranging from the percentage of U.S. adults who use social media every day (65%) and the top buyers of social media monitoring tools (43% are social media managers, 19% are agency professionals) to the leading social networks for small business (78% are on Twitter, 75% on Facebook) and a simple process for creating a social media strategy.
Measuring the Impact of Social Media in B2B Marketing
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010Forrester recently released a report by Laura Ramos and Augie Ray on How to Assess the Impact of Social Media in B2B Tech Marketing. While B2B marketers have been ramping up social media activities over the past 18 months, not all are seeing the outcomes they’d hoped for. As the report notes, “these social pioneers now ponder whether this new social activity will pay off in business results, and when. The tone of our customer inquiries about the role social media plays in B2B marketing has changed from cautious curiosity to healthy skepticism as we see B2B marketers question the amount of effort (required)…struggle to keep activities vibrant…and grapple with social roles and responsibilities.”
Laura and her team further write that “social marketing programs that don’t focus on a specific audience and objective get preoccupied with the tools and fail to connect with customers…Forrester has seen thousands of companies invest in social media, but few understand how to engage in social activity in ways that create a measurable impact on the business…Seeing tech buyers venture into social channels, B2B firms — more than half in a recent Forrester survey — react by spinning up poorly planned ad hoc programs with little organizational structure…as a result, internal teams begin to bicker over social duties, jockey to be the first to launch social programs, and create a disjointed, incoherent customer experience that fosters mistrust, uncertainty and ridicule.”
Wow — “mistrust, uncertainty and ridicule” — obviously not the objectives of any marketing activity. So what can B2B marketers do (other than ignoring social media; a perilous option at best) to avoid this harsh fate?
1. Set goals, understanding what social media is good for — and what it isn’t. Social media is more like a PR activity than marketing or advertising. It’s about engaging with customers, prospects, industry press, analysts, bloggers and other key influencers to increase the amount of positive conversation about your company, product or service. This can be measured in a variety of ways such as number of “mentions” of your company across social media channels, traffic driven directly from social media sites, and increases in branded search traffic (often the result of exposure through social media or traditional PR activities). It may require some creativity to translate these metrics into hard dollar amounts, but that doesn’t mean that social media results can’t, and shouldn’t, be measured. And as with any other marketing or PR activity, social media efforts be focused on a specific audience.
2. Coordinate efforts. This is easiest if different parts of your organization actually work together toward common goals, which should be the case (but isn’t always) in every company. If your internal groups “bicker” and “jockey” as described above, it may require a senior executive to exert control over the process. But “control” is tricky in the social media world. While management needs to communicate objectives, messaging and guidelines for social media use, ultimately employees from different parts of the organization have to realize they are all working toward furthering the success of the company, and coordinate efforts to meet the needs of differing audiences (e.g., separate Twitter accounts for support and marketing, separate business-focused and technology-focused blogs, etc.).
3. Make sure that social media efforts are sustainable. As the authors note later in the report, “Unlike conventional campaigns, community marketing lacks a specific beginning and end to the activity.” In order to avoid in particular the “mistrust” and “ridicule” noted above, social media programs should be designed to be perpetual, or to last at least until they no longer make sense (e.g. a particular platform loses favor; MySpace comes to mind). This requires allocating sufficient staff time to build and maintain social media points of presence, and having a succession plan in place for when team members move on to other opportunities.
The top five social media platforms being utilized by B2B tech marketers according to the report are, in order:
- • Blogs
- • Open, public social networks (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook)
- • Podcasts
- • Discussion forums
- • Video
Microblogging (i.e., Twitter) surprisingly came in at #7, with an equal number of respondents calling it “less important” for the coming year as making it a higher priority.
Measurement remains the biggest challenge in B2B social media marketing. 77% of respondents said they were either “learning about social media’s impact as they go along” or “struggling to find good ways to measure social outcomes.” Among the minority actually able to assess outcomes, however, most reported seeing benefits in the form of unaided recall, online reach, share of voice, and other brand-related metrics. These results, along with the fact that “many B2B marketers treat social media like an outbound communications channel, and our research highlights the consequences of this choice. Few marketers say that they can measure the impact of social activity on sales lead productivity” reinforce the value of social media as more of a PR-like tool than a direct marketing channel.
The report concludes by recommending that marketers use a combination of value chain analysis and total economic impact (I’ll leave the explanation of these to Forrester) to assess the impact of social media investments on B2B marketing success. Many marketers may find these analytical models difficult to implement and the results of even a successful exercise somewhat fuzzy. What’s most important, however, is to treat social media as an engagement channel rather than a broadcast medium, and structure measurement appropriately.
What’s the value of single phone call with a prospective customer, or a single email exchange? What’s the value of taking a call from an industry journalist who wants to include a quote from your company in a relevant news article? Any of those may be difficult to quantify, but that doesn’t mean you’d even consider ignoring an email or phone call from a prospect or influential journalist. In the end, it’s the same with social media value. It may be difficult to quantify precisely, but B2B vendors can’t afford to ignore it.
What’s the Best Social Media Monitoring Tool? It Depends
Wednesday, October 13th, 2010Until fairly recently, keeping track of your organization’s online presence was relatively easy. Other than your company’s website, most mentions were likely in well-known online news sites or trade industry publication sites. Your PR team was aware of most of these as it often had a hand in generating those placements. A simple tool like Google Alerts would pick up most stray citations.
No more. The explosion of social media has led to a corresponding need for more sophisticated monitoring tools that can crawl the hundreds of social networking and bookmarking sites and millions of blogs across the globe. A rapidly proliferating collection of tools are being developed to meet the need. You can find a list of more than 150 social media monitoring tools here or close to 200 here, but—that can seem overwhelming. For those short on time and seeking a shorter list of tools to evaluate, below are nine tools at various price levels that may or may not be the best but are certainly among the most popular and capable social media monitoring tools currently available.
Budget: $0 (I have no budget, I need something free!)
Though limited (in terms of filters, number of search terms and results) in comparison to the fee-based version of the tool, SM2 Freemium is still an excellent tool for getting a snapshot of your social media landscape—discovering who’s talking about you, your competitors and your industry, what they’re saying, and where they are saying it. Results can be exported to Excel for further sorting and analysis. I’ve used this tool on behalf of small clients for finding hundreds of key influencers on Twitter, blogs and various other social networking sites and forums. The only caveat is that this may whet your appetite for the full version (see below).
UPDATE February 21, 2012: The Freemium version disappeared from the Alterian site. When I inquired about it, I received this response: “Thank you for your question. Alterian (acquired by SDL on January 27, 2012) no longer offers the Freemium version of SM2 online. If you are interested in licensing our product, the initial license fee starts at $18,000 per year.”
Another excellent free tool for finding relevant influencers across the social media sphere, Social Mention is a real-time social search engine that also provides alerts and a cool buzz-monitoring widget you can add to your website or blog. If Google Alerts had been developed with a focus on social media, this would be it. This tool is fast, easy to use, and offers a useful set of filters for finding mentions of a company or topic in specific types of social interaction (e.g. blogs, microblogging sites, social networks, etc.).
Budget: Under $500 per month
An easy-to-use, graphically rich tool that provides monitoring (who’s talking about you, your competitors, key industry terms and trends, etc., and where they are talking about it), sentiment analysis, and collaboration tools for acting on the information. It may not catch everything, but it finds a lot (via blogs, Twitter, social news sites and Facebook public pages) and presents the information through useful charts and graphs. Several pricing options are available, most under $500 per month.
Along with the monitoring and alert features you’d expect, Trackur also includes a proprietary algorithm for displaying the influence and reach of individuals discussing your brand or topic—so you can focus on power users and ignore trolls and spammers. Andy Beal and his team have built a nice tool that’s garnered favorable reviews from TechCrunch and other prominent tech sites. As with UberVU, several pricing / service levels are available under $500 per month.
Budget: $500-1,000 per month
Social Media Monitoring
The fee-based version of SM2 does everything the freemium version does plus providing unlimited searches and results, filters, boolean search strings and alerts. Its monitoring covers blogs, message boards, forums, microblogging sites, wikis, media sharing sites, social networks, online classifieds and review sites. SM2 provides enough social media monitoring power to be relied upon by some fairly large brands, at a price point affordable to midsized and even socially active smaller companies.
Popular with agencies as well as corporate users, Radian6 offers a rich set of tools for social media monitoring, responding, tracking, benchmarking and analytics. The Radian6 Dashboard enables you to monitor conversations in real time, while the Engagement Console lets you respond directly or route posts to appropriate individuals or teams and analyze the results of social media interactions.
Traditional PR + Social Media Monitoring
Cision combines its own PR tracking capabilities built on the former Bacon’s clipping service (older PR pros, you may need to explain to your younger counterparts what a “clipping service” was back in the day) with a white-labeled version of Radian6 to provide markets and PR professionals with a 360-degree view of brand mentions and trends across traditional and social media. Cision’s tools are designed to help organizations of almost any size that are active in PR and social media relations “plan their stories, connect with audiences, monitor media coverage and analyze results.”
Vocus provides a rich set of tools for traditional and social media monitoring, media outreach and news distribution. The company’s built-from-the-ground-up monitoring tools cover more than 50,000 traditional media outlets, every major social media site and 20 million blogs. Its database of 270,000 U.S. / 500,000 global media contacts is invaluable for connecting with the right writers and performing effective outreach. Through PRWeb, which Vocus acquired in 2006, it offers extensive news distribution and tracking capabilities. Social media monitoring can be purchased separately for $3000 per year (putting that tool effectively in the $0-500 per month category) though most users combine at least a subset of the PR tools with this.
Budget: We don’t need no stinkin’ budget
If you’re familiar with terms like product placement and slotting fees, and your brand is familiar to consumers through prime time TV advertising, you should probably evaluate this tool. If all of those things are true and your company is social media savvy, there’s a good chance you’re already using it. Nielsen’s monitoring covers more than 100 million blogs, social networking sites, discussion boards and other sites where consumers can post content. It provides capabilities for capturing customer insights, response, brand management and social media outreach tracking. Forrester Research has named Nielsen a leader in brand monitoring solutions, saying “the vendor has the strongest strategic vision and currently competes at a scale unmatched by any other competitor.”
These tools are among the best for social media monitoring, whatever your budget and needs. But, as noted above, the social media monitoring space is highly dynamic, with new tools and improvements to existing tools constantly being introduced. If I overlooked your favorite tool, leave a comment below.
Also, as a test—since this post is about social monitoring tool vendors, let’s see how many of them promote it or respond to it, either with a comment here or on other social media outlets, and how quickly they do so.
Why Businesses Need Blogs
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009In short, because blogs are well beyond the novelty stage, and now a mainstream communication medium for b2b vendors. They are generally trusted and progressively more widely read, and they draw an attractive demographic. They are search engine-friendly and one of the easiest, fastest and least expensive ways to increase the online exposure of your business.
Technorati now indexes more than 133 million blogs; nearly a million new blog posts are written every day. According to a recent study, 77% of active Internet users now read blogs. 51% of businesses view blogs as the most useful social media tool. Forrester Research reports that 91% of b2b buyers use social media in some form, and 58% react to content in social media (including blogs). And it isn’t just middle-management types using social media for b2b decision making; 77% of senior management team members listen to podcasts or webcasts, and 61% visit company blogs.
Consultant Suzanne Falter-Barns has echoed the blogs-are-mainstream theme and suggests that blogs will displace email newsletters and e-zines. Growing and maintaining an opt-in e-newsletter list has gotten more difficult for several reasons. First, due to their proliferation (almost every business now has a company newsletter – I even get one from my garbage collection service!). Second, due to overstuffed in-boxes, largely because of spam. Third, and related to the last point, over-zealous spam-blocking programs end up preventing many legitimate marketing emails from reaching recipients, leading to low deliverability rates. Fourth, they are a lot of work.
Blogs, on the other hand, are fast and reasonably easy to create. Anyone in your company with an interesting story to tell or knowledge to share can contribute. They are less formal than a newsletter. They are interactive. And they are loved by the media as well as by search engines.
Search engines (particularly Google) love blogs, for reasons partly philosophical (Google owns blog creation service Blogger) and partly technical. Blogs make your site “stickier” and more likely to be revisited by prospects looking for fresh, interesting content. A blog is also far easier to build than a Web site, requiring no or at least very limited knowledge of HTML and FTP. Keyword competition is also less intense for blogs and RSS feeds than for commercial websites (through with the rapid growth of business blogs, this is changing).
As blogger Ankesh Kothari has pointed out, blogs are fundamentally nothing more or less than a form of communication. If you can make money using other forms of communication (e.g. email or direct mail), then you can make money with a blog.
Most blogs don’t draw large audiences, but with a narrow industry focus, they do draw a highly targeted readership. By creating a blog that provides real value within your industry niche, and promoting it effectively, you can attract those highly relevant readers, create interaction, and enhance your company’s image by demonstrating your unique expertise.
