Posts Tagged ‘WordPress Tips’
Social Media Strategy? Think Like a Reporter
Monday, July 12th, 2010Recent surveys have shown that while businesses are embracing social media in droves, many are doing so without any real strategy in place. Without a strategy, there may be no clear ownership, or definition of success, or measurement, or integration with other marketing and PR efforts—all of which can lead eventually to wasted time and effort, abandoned blogs and Facebook pages, and even the erroneous conclusion that social media doesn’t work for us.
Yet developing such a strategy can be challenging; where does one start? Most of us have, through the classroom, TV shows or somewhere in life, learned about the reporter’s questions: who, what, when, where and why. Just as these questions are critical to solid journalism, so they can be invaluable to social media strategy development.
Who: the first who question is who will be in charge of social media efforts? Responsibility should be placed as high as possible—with the CEO ideally (think Tony Hsieh, or Jonathan Schwartz before the sale to Oracle). If not possible, then responsibility should rest with an executive in marketing, PR, product management or customer service. If absolutely necessary, this leadership can be outsourced, but only as part of a close long-term relationship. Who else will be involved? In all but the smallest companies, there are often multiple individuals tweeting, networking and even contributing to the company blog. In these situations, it’s imperative to have a social media policy in place, encourage subject matter experts (SME’s) to share their unique knowledge, and remember that everyone who participates is acting as a public face for the company—social media isn’t a job for an intern.
What: what type of information will you use to attract a social media following? In b2c, contests, games, apps and coupons are popular content. In the b2b world, thought leadership content is key, but this can take different forms depending on your resources and style: blogs are the most common media, but video, podcasting, online presentations and articles are other ways to share information and education with prospects. What also refers to subject matter—in b2b, that usually means reporting on research, offering a unique perspective on industry developments, solving problems, providing how-to guides, or presenting other information that is of value to your audience and positions your people as the experts.
When: how often will you write new blog posts? Tweet? Update your company’s Facebook page? The answers will be different depending on your company’s resources, the amount of content you have to work with, the number of employees involved in your social media efforts, the specific social media tool and other factors. In general, more is better, and most companies could probably benefit from greater social media activity, not less. There is a risk of over-doing things, particularly on Twitter, but as long as your focus is on adding value rather than self-promotion, few followers are likely to complain. Most companies find that the amount of time they need to devote to social media, particularly to engagement, starts out modestly and increases over time as their blog readership, Twitter following, Facebook fan base and other groups grow.
Where: which social media sites and tools will you use? There’s no question that blogs (which usually mean WordPress), Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have emerged as the “big four” social media venues. According to recent research, these are used by 70% or more of those active in social media (no other single tool was used by more than half of respondents). Twitter is probably the closest thing to a universal social media tool for business, while Facebook is huge in b2c, and LinkedIn is indispensable on the b2b side. These are the tools to start with, but by no means should a social media strategy be limited to these: depending again on talent, resources, corporate personality etc., other tools to take into account include YouTube and Vimeo (video sharing); SlideShare (presentations); social bookmarking sites like Digg, delicious and Propeller; online forums (there are specific forums for almost any industry); Ning (for creating your own community or finding others to engage with); PitchEngine (social PR); and social profile sites like VisualCV and PeoplePond, just to name a few.
Why: possibly the most important question of all. What is your company aiming to accomplish through social media? What are your goals? How will you measure them? There are at least a hundred ways to measure social media success and more than a hundred tools for monitoring them. While measuring social media ROI is difficult to do with any precision, it’s important to use what measures you can to help gauge the impact and continually improve your efforts.
Crafting a social media strategy is vital to achieving success and avoiding wasted efforts. It’s a challenging exercise, but one that can made easier by thinking differently—such as like a reporter.
The Insidious Nofollow Tag: An SEO Rant
Sunday, February 14th, 2010I’m normally a positive, upbeat kind of guy, and as someone who’s been writing professionally since the days of disco, rarely at a loss for words. Yet mention the “nofollow” tag, and that all changes. I, like many other many other web marketing professionals, am left sputtering with a mix of disgust and rage, fumbling for an adjective that conveys sufficient contempt: despicable, vile, loathsome, abhorrent, abominable, wretched, odious, detestable, downright evil.
The nofollow tag was misguidedly inflicted upon the online world by Google in 2005. According to Wikipedia (among the worst nofollow offenders), “The nofollow HTML attribute was originally designed to stop comment spam on blogs. Blog readers and bloggers were well aware of the immense problem. Just like any other type of spam affects its community, comment spam affected the entire blogging community, so in early 2005 (Google and Blogger engineers) designed the attribute to address the problem and the nofollow attribute was born.”
Though the originators of WordPress have developed a far more elegant and inoffensive solution to the comment spam problem with Akismet, the execrable nofollow tag remains with us, like a cancer impervious to drugs or radiation.
The justification for the continued use of this repugnant scrap of code is to prevent passing link juice from listings on directory and social bookmarking sites to spammy or other objectionable content. But, to be charitable, the nofollow tag is to the world of web links what “let’s just be friends” is to romantic relationships. It’s a way for site owners to say: “I’m happy to use your content to build my traffic, but not to reciprocate. I don’t want anyone to think we’re together.”
An alarming number of once-respectable social bookmarking sites—Digg, delicious, Mister Wong, Reddit, Mixx, Bibsonomy, Jumptags, Faves, Yahoo! Buzz, Simpy—have now instituted dastardly nofollow tags. It’s easy to determine if your favorite site should now become an ex-favorite, just “view source” in your browser and search for rel=”nofollow.” If it’s there for any reason other than Pagerank sculpting (e.g. nofollowing pages like “Contact Us”), move along. If you’re trying to promote your own content, it won’t work. If you are trying to promote some else’s, you won’t help them much.
Hey, here’s a novel idea: if someone is using your blog, social media site or directory to link to spam, porn, hate speech, discount online pharmaceuticals, miracle weight loss nonsense, or work-at-home scams—DELETE THE LINK. Why is okay to have such crap listed on your site, regardless of whether or not you’re passing link juice?
In fairness, this pernicious string of characters once served a purpose, as a less-than-ideal solution to a serious problem. But today, Akismet solves the link spam problem on blogs. The community can be used to solve the problem on social bookmarking sites. A little bit of old-fashioned work can deal with issue on directory sites.
I’m not alone on this. It’s time to demand better, to rid the world of the reprehensible, insidious nofollow tag once and for all. Ideally, Google should announce it’s no longer recognizing the tag. Absent that, site owners should boycott it. And if they don’t, users should walk.
Note: This post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in October 2009. But it all remains true.
How to Write an Effective Business Blog
Friday, January 8th, 2010Blogs are not a traditional marketing medium. Blogs written like extended brochures (in promotional language) don’t get read. They’re boring. A blog is rather, a place to share useful content. Instead of saying “We’re the leading producer of widgets…” or some other such self-promoting statement, demonstrate your leadership by writing about the many creative uses of widgets, what to look for in a widget, recent developments in the widget field, or whatever. Certainly you can promote your company and product in your blog, but this should be more in the form of sponsorship than selling language. The Marketing Eye blog once recommended an 80/20 rule for content; spend 80% of your words sharing knowledge, and 20% on promotion. I’d recommend more like a 90/10 ratio of interesting content to self-promotion.
A blog is not an ad, a traditional Web site or an online brochure. It is rather a place where your employees can speak to customers and prospects in their own unique voices. It is a place to demonstrate the collected knowledge and expertise of your company (that is, your people). And, through comments, it is a place to have a conversation with your customers and prospects, informally and openly. Compared to other marketing media, a blog is closest to a (well-written and informative) newsletter, but easier, faster, cheaper, and with the benefit of interaction.
To get started, select a blogging platform such as Blogger, TypePad or WordPress. All are easy to use, but each has its own quirks and advantages. Factors to consider include the option of hosting the blog on your own existing Web site, RSS feed capabilities, Trackback functionality, and of course personal preference. Personally, I’ve found Blogger to be the easiest, but WordPress to be the most powerful.
Who should write for your blog? Anyone in your company with 1) halfway decent writing skills and 2) knowledge of value to your customers and prospects. This means customer service reps, consultants, engineers, technicians (as well as, yes, marketers and executives) – anyone with in-depth knowledge of your product/service and who has direct interaction with customers. While your marketing group should have overall ownership of the blog, contributions should be open to those closest to the product and the customer, with interesting information or stories to share.
Make it easy to contact the author(s) of your blog. Most blogs have a contact link somewhere on the site; a few don’t provide any contact information at all (a pet peeve of mine). If you want to drive business with your blog, MarketingSherpa recommends adding a contact email link at the bottom of every posting. (To avoid being picked up by automated email address extraction programs used by spammers, write the email address as something like “nameATcompany.com” or “name-at-company-dot-com.”) Adding contact information to each post is particularly critical when you have multiple authors contributing to a single blog. Include each author’s Twitter link as well.
How often should you post to your blog? A good general rule to keep content fresh, yet not over-stretch your resources, is at least weekly but no more than daily. An exception to this is in the case of breaking news (for example, an insurance company tracking the progress of a hurricane, a company announcing a merger), where several posts in single day may be justified. Two to three posts weekly is decent frequency for a business blog, with Monday and Tuesday posts generally drawing the best traffic.
Avoid being derivative. Commenting on an industry news article or a post on another blog is fine, but devote most of your effort to creating unique and interesting content; after all, you want your company to be seen as a thought leader and expert in your field. Excessive use of content that been posted or reported elsewhere may generate search engine hits, but it doesn’t add value and so won’t make your blog stand out. An exception is periodic “best of” posts from other industry bloggers, which are often popular with readers and search engines alike.
Keep your posts related to your business and industry. Granted, this can be wide-ranging (such as posting on specific new laws or government regulations affecting your industry), as long as the topic is both relevant and of interest to your customers and prospects. Avoid off-topic postings, general musings and rants.
Keep in mind the nature of blog traffic; according to research firm comScore Networks, “Because blogs often source their visitors from search engines or links from other sites (often other blogs), many draw relatively large audiences that visit infrequently.” This means that each post has to add some value in and of itself. If you refer to a previous post in your blog, provide the link to it. Posts don’t need to be long, they just need to be useful.
Provide an RSS feed of your blog. (RSS stands for “really simple syndication.” You can find a useful and not overly-technical explanation of RSS here.) Information consumers have embraced RSS because of the control it gives them over the information they receive (generally without spam).
In addition to an RSS feed, allow visitors to sign up to receive your new posts via email. This also gives you some insight into who is visiting your blog.
Should you accept outside advertising on your blog? If the purpose of your blog is make money itself, ads are a potential revenue generator. Ad programs such as Google AdSense are popular and easy to integrate. But if you’re building a blog to promote your business, the only “ads” should be promotion of white papers, special offers or other information specific to your company.
Follow blogs that provide helpful tips and insights on business blogging, such as Conversation Marketing, Copyblogger and ProBlogger.
With a well-crafted blog in place, you can turn your attention to promoting your blog (the subject of another post in the near future here).
The Wonders of WordPress (from a Blogger Bigot)
Friday, November 13th, 2009When I first started work on the WebMarketCentral blog back in early 2005, I evaluated both Blogger and WordPress. At the time, it seemed that:
- There were a similar number of popular blogs on both platforms.
- The features and capabilities of the two platforms were roughly equivalent.
- Blogger was easier to use.
Today, while I’d argue that the last point above still holds true, on the first two items – it’s not even close. It’s hard to even think of any “A list” blogs on Blogger (okay, Paul Dunay’s excellent Buzz Marketing for Technology, but I mean other than that). And in terms of capabilities, WordPress has advanced with each new release, while Blogger seems stuck in the past. And then there are plugins, of course. As the iPhone commercial says “there’s an app for that,” for almost any cool thing you want your blog to do, on WordPress “there’s a plugin for that.”
To consider just a few differences in capabilities between the two platforms:
- Subscribe by email. This can be accomplished relatively easily with a plugin in WordPress. In Blogger, it can be done, but requires a painful and convoluted workaround using Google Groups.
- RSS feeds. Both platforms make it easy to set up a single RSS feed for all blog content. But WordPress provides far more flexible options as well, allowing users to subscribe only to specific categories, only to comments, whatever.
- Use as a CMS. WordPress can fairly easily be adapted for use as a CMS for a general purpose website, with or without a blog. I’m not sure this is even possible with Blogger, much less simple.
- Add a quick poll. Easy in WordPress. Tried for two years to figure out a way to do this in Blogger, gave up.
- Set up “who links here.” Automatic function in WordPress, painful manual process in Blogger.
- Trackbacks. Again, automatic in WordPress. Blogger requires use of a third-party app and another painful workaround.
- SEO. Don’t even get me started. While WordPress is naturally optimized for search, Blogger seems at best indifferent, at worst hostile to making a blog search engine-friendly.
Perhaps this is unfair to Blogger (feel free to leave comments/corrections below if you think so). I will concede that blogging on Blogger, like most habits, is a hard habit to break. The platform’s quirks and inconveniences can become almost charming. I’ve tried before and failed, but this time I’ve got to quit and take up a healthier alternative. It’s not for me; I’m doing this for the children.
