Blogging can be a powerful marketing tool for businesses with interesting stories to tell. I believe this is especially true in businesses where building a personal relationship with propsects or showcasing one’s expertise has the potential to translate into sales.
A few industries where this has proven to be particularly effective include:
1. Real estate - builds personal relationships between agents and prospects. Rain City Guide and St. Paul Real Estate Blog are two examples.
2. Software - Microsoft has been able to build closer relationships between Microsoft’s software developers and the developers who user Microsoft products to build applications. I’ve seen less success with Microsoft using blogging to communicate with consumer end-users of products like operating systems and Office software.
3. Authors - Blogging has proven to be a great way to build an audience for a book, keep the conversation going with readers, and drive pre-sales of future books. Speaking engagements come out of this as well. Seth Godin and the guys behind Freakonomics stand out here.
I haven’t seen much success with direct to consumer companies that aren’t known for personal relationships. For example, while Wal-Mart interacts with millions and millions of people a day in their stores and on their website, it’s a rather impersonal relationship. People shop their stores based on price and the convenience of finding everything from Kleenex to tropical fish and guns under one roof.
Of course, this doesn’t stop companies like Wal-Mart from testing the waters with things like blogging or Facebook sponsorships. For the cost of trying things like this, they’d be stupid not to.
Jeremiah Owyang from PodTech.net has taken a look at this subject in recent posts on his blog including one where he compares his blog’s Facebook group audience with Wal-Mart’s:
I’m checking up on the group, and have noticed that the group size is very low, in fact only 934 members. The Web Strategy Group that I promote is at 1500 members in just a few weeks longer, and it’s certainly a much smaller ‘brand’ than Wal-Mart.
Personally, I don’t think Wal-Mart’s marketing success can be measured by its Facebook group membership. Neither can the web success of other large consumer serving companies like Mobil or Xcel Energy. These are companies that easily ignore Facebook’s existance.
Adding someone as a friend or joining a group on Facebook is an act close to an endorsement of that person or business. Wal-Mart, and companies like it are basically utilities in the eyes of typical Facebook users. You use them because you need them, not because you love them.
What Wal-Mart will probably learn from their Facebook experiment is that they’re not cool; just like friending your parents isn’t cool. However, it’s not bad to be not cool as long as you’re respected and deliver on promises. In the case of Wal-Mart, the promise they should be pushing is, “we have cheap crap for your dorm room, from school supplies to aquariums.”
On the blogging front, Wal-Mart should NOT open up to the world. Can you imagine purchasing people from Wal-Mart blogging?
“Hi, I’m the guy who demanded such low prices on [insert product here] that your town’s main company packed up and moved production to China. Now you know why your dad can’t help pay for college.”
Bad idea.
As we’ve seen, Wal-Mart’s PR firm has struggled with this in the past by going as far as creating fake blogs supposedly written by customers about how much they love parking their RVs in Wal-Mart’s lots. Just face the facts: if you have to fake it, it’s probably not a good fit.
In summary: Understanding your customer’s relationship with you - rather than your relationship with your customers - is key to successful marketing.
Blogging can be a powerful marketing tool for businesses with interesting stories to tell. I believe this is especially true in businesses where building a personal relationship with propsects or showcasing one’s expertise has the potential to translate into sales.
A few industries where this has proven to be particularly effective include:
1. Real estate - builds personal relationships between agents and prospects. Rain City Guide and St. Paul Real Estate Blog are two examples.
2. Software - Microsoft has been able to build closer relationships between Microsoft’s software developers and the developers who user Microsoft products to build applications. I’ve seen less success with Microsoft using blogging to communicate with consumer end-users of products like operating systems and Office software.
3. Authors - Blogging has proven to be a great way to build an audience for a book, keep the conversation going with readers, and drive pre-sales of future books. Speaking engagements come out of this as well. Seth Godin and the guys behind Freakonomics stand out here.
I haven’t seen much success with direct to consumer companies that aren’t known for personal relationships. For example, while Wal-Mart interacts with millions and millions of people a day in their stores and on their website, it’s a rather impersonal relationship. People shop their stores based on price and the convenience of finding everything from Kleenex to tropical fish and guns under one roof.
Of course, this doesn’t stop companies like Wal-Mart from testing the waters with things like blogging or Facebook sponsorships. For the cost of trying things like this, they’d be stupid not to.
Jeremiah Owyang from PodTech.net has taken a look at this subject in recent posts on his blog including one where he compares his blog’s Facebook group audience with Wal-Mart’s:
I’m checking up on the group, and have noticed that the group size is very low, in fact only 934 members. The Web Strategy Group that I promote is at 1500 members in just a few weeks longer, and it’s certainly a much smaller ‘brand’ than Wal-Mart.
Personally, I don’t think Wal-Mart’s marketing success can be measured by its Facebook group membership. Neither can the web success of other large consumer serving companies like Mobil or Xcel Energy. These are companies that easily ignore Facebook’s existance.
Adding someone as a friend or joining a group on Facebook is an act close to an endorsement of that person or business. Wal-Mart, and companies like it are basically utilities in the eyes of typical Facebook users. You use them because you need them, not because you love them.
What Wal-Mart will probably learn from their Facebook experiment is that they’re not cool; just like friending your parents isn’t cool. However, it’s not bad to be not cool as long as you’re respected and deliver on promises. In the case of Wal-Mart, the promise they should be pushing is, “we have cheap crap for your dorm room, from school supplies to aquariums.”
On the blogging front, Wal-Mart should NOT open up to the world. Can you imagine purchasing people from Wal-Mart blogging?
“Hi, I’m the guy who demanded such low prices on [insert product here] that your town’s main company packed up and moved production to China. Now you know why your dad can’t help pay for college.”
Bad idea.
As we’ve seen, Wal-Mart’s PR firm has struggled with this in the past by going as far as creating fake blogs supposedly written by customers about how much they love parking their RVs in Wal-Mart’s lots. Just face the facts: if you have to fake it, it’s probably not a good fit.
In summary: Understanding your customer’s relationship with you - rather than your relationship with your customers - is key to successful marketing.
Jordan McCollum from Marketing Pilgrim breaks down the results of two recent online advertising studies that showed web visitors becoming more blind to online advertisements.
An eye-tracking study by usability guru, Jakob Nielsen included this image reinforcing how hard it is to get people to even notice ads:
McCollum’s conclusion based on the studies:
The bottom line: don’t go for the flashy and annoying ads—make them look like content. For your biggest ad purchases, work with webmasters to integrate your ads into their design—use their site’s colors and fonts, tinker with placement, etc. It just might pay off.
The studies appear to look at this from a publisher’s angle. If you’re getting paid on a per click basis, how do you make the ads stand out next to your site’s content in order to generate click revenue? There are some things that can be done to trick users, such as the tip McCollum provides above. However, that’s not an ideal solution.
An IDEAL solution is one where the viewers find the ads relevant and valuable. And two things are preventing this today:
1. Marginal ad targeting technology
2. Low-quality ads.
High quality ads are ads that build an emotional attachment between the viewer and the advertiser’s company, product, or service. They’re ads that intrigue (rather than annoy) a reader. They’re ads that are as interesting (or more interesting) than the content they’re served next to.
With this in mind, I’m blaming advertisers for not building better advertisements. They’re hurting their own return and the return of publishers serving marginal ads. It’s time to turn it up a notch with truly compelling online advertising that turns readers on.
This annoys me: I found a site with my favorite password on it.
This is a problem since the combination of letters and numbers is absolutely unique. The only way it would show up on the web is if I put it there or a site’s security was breached.
In this case, it looks like the latter since the Chinese site displaying it has a long list of terms that are clearly passwords ranging from things that are extremely obvious to rather complex terms.
One thing I noticed was that many passwords seem to be simple variations on what’s presumably the username. For example, a password like johndoe1 could probably be tied to a username “johndoe.” That’s still pretty vague, but it’s not nearly so vague when the password + 1 is a much less common name.
To me, this marks a good time to switch up passwords. Nothing that I’m aware of has been compromised, but why wait for that, eh?
In case you’re wondering, my new password will not be edkohler1.
A new type of comment spam popped up on Technology Evangelist today: scraping the post itself for comment content.
The comment below showed up on this post.
When I saw that comment in my comments feed, I thought, “That sounds strangely familiar.” It turns out that that’s because I WROTE THAT in the post.
This may seem pretty obvious, but it really hit home with me tonight: most bands should use MySpace as their primary online communications platform.
Why? Because it’s simply too hard to create what MySpace already has in place.
That, and the fact that most musicians don’t seem to have experts on building web communities as friends. They’re more likely to have designers as friends who can build beautiful web sites that the band has no idea how to update. That’s kind of a big deal when your fans are looking for information on upcoming concerts, new CD releases, etc.
MySpace really is the ultimate band site, with easy to blogs, bulletins, community building, an RSS feed, photos, videos, and song samples. Recreating that from scratch would take a lot of work, and it wouldn’t provide easy access to the fans who are already on MySpace.
Of course, there is one big advantage to building something independent of MySpace: Access to Facebook and other audiences beyond MySpace’s walls. And MySpace tends to be very stingy with the content you contribute to their site, so don’t expect to be able to easily retrieve your own content should you choose to more to Facebook or your own site in the future.
Ah, crap. I may have just talked myself out of using MySpace as a band platform.
I think what bands need is a resource for helping them find band-specific web developers who can build the right type of site for them so they won’t get trapped into something like MySpace or an underpowered site built by a friend.
Any thoughts?
I don’t know if Yahoo Pipes has gained much traction since launching, but I do know that I find the service useful.
For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a relatively easy to use platform for creating RSS feed mashups, filters, and other related fun stuff. I say, “relatively simple” since you don’t have to be a programmer or own a server in order to create mashups, but it still has a bit of a learning curve.
Here is a very simple use of the service that I think helps illustrate the power.
There is a an online running forum called dyestat.com Track Talk that has a lot of content that’s interesting to me. However, it also has a TON of stuff that doesn’t interest me at all.
What’s nice is that there is a Minnesota-specific section to the forum. What isn’t nice is that there isn’t a Minnesota-specific RSS feed available for the forum.
That’s where Yahoo Pipes comes to the rescue. I simply took the RSS feed for the entire dyestat.com Track Talk forum, dropped that into Yahoo Pipes, added a filter for the word “Minnesota” in the item descriptions (which they happen to add to all items posted to the Minnesota sub-forum), and generate a filtered RSS feed of the remaining posts:
This took about 2 minutes. Yahoo Pipes has given me easier access to content that’s of interest to me.
And now that it exists, others can use it as well or clone and edit it to personalize it for content that interests them.
Malok asked in the comments on my pre-Inman Connect Conference post for some insights. This is a shot at that.
The theme this year, as I mentioned before, was blogging. And they did a great job covering the topic. Real estate agents who’ve used blogging as a marketing strategy gave testimonials on how much business it has generated for them. And the numbers were impressive.
Sessions covered a wide array of blogging angles, from panels of real estate bloggers sharing tips on how they deal with comments, what they choose to blog about, what makes for a good real estate blogging voice, etc. Great stuff.
And, of course, many companies were on site offering tools to help real estate companies and agents get started blogging.
Sitting there watching non-bloggers learn about a marketing tactic that costs little to nothing and is capable of generating significant amounts of new business was an interesting experience. While every experienced blogger I heard speak made a point of mentioning that blogging takes time and can be hard work, that seemed to be glossed over by the audience who focused on the dollar signs.
While some of the attendees likely went home, started a blog, and found that it was a good fit for them, others surely started a blog that’s already growing stale. That’s not a big deal, since the cost of getting started is so low. In fact, one company was offering free t-shirts to people who created a new blog on their platform.
My suggestion to agents who caught the blogging bug at the conference was to start by reading other blogs and commenting on other sites. It’s hard to find a voice for yourself before you have a feel for the flow of a blog’s content, understand comments and commenting etiquette, and learn what seems to work for others when it comes to building an audience.
The other impression I got was that some people seemed to think that they’d already missed the blogging wave. Perhaps they think that once it’s the topic of a conference, the secrets out of the bag and the returns are diminishing. Personally, I don’t think that’s the case at all in real estate since it’s such a locally focused business. If you’re a real estate agent, can you honestly say that the area you work is overwrought with great real estate blogging coverage? I doubt it.
Overall, it was a great experience, and will hopefully lead to more great real estate blogs across the country.
I’ve been trying to figure out why newspapers don’t make more money online, and think I stumbled across one reason that’s so obvious I previously overlooked it.
It’s summarized well in one sentence on the Minneapolis StarTribune’s advertising information page:
Just contact us and we’ll help you put together a marketing plan to meet the needs of your organization.
Why do I have to talk to someone in order to give the StarTribune money? If I talk to someone on the phone, I’m essentially taking money out of my ad budget and giving it to the person on the other end of the line. And this person’s interests are clearly not aligned with my own since they’re likely paid a commission, or at least expected to meet certain revenue goals.
An ad platform that enables me to place ads without human intervention makes the most efficient use of my ad dollars.
Say I want to place a job listing:
To register for Star Tribune Jobs online, simply fill out the following information and hit the “Register” button. You will be contacted within one business day and assigned a confidential id and password.
It’s shocking to me that in 2007, large daily papers continue to rely on humans to conduct tasks that Google automated in 2004.
Large dailies are making a lot of their own news lately with layoff and buyout announcements. A lot of this is blamed on differences in advertising dollars spent in online vs offline versions of their product.
When I look at the difficulty involved in buying online advertising through a newspaper vs. the many other alternatives available for online ad dollars today, I wonder if their lack of investment in a competitive ad platform may have something to do with the under-performance of their online properties?
I’ve been trying to figure out why newspapers don’t make more money online, and think I stumbled across one reason that’s so obvious I previously overlooked it.
It’s summarized well in one sentence on the Minneapolis StarTribune’s advertising information page:
Just contact us and we’ll help you put together a marketing plan to meet the needs of your organization.
Why do I have to talk to someone in order to give the StarTribune money? If I talk to someone on the phone, I’m essentially taking money out of my ad budget and giving it to the person on the other end of the line. And this person’s interests are clearly not aligned with my own since they’re likely paid a commission, or at least expected to meet certain revenue goals.
An ad platform that enables me to place ads without human intervention makes the most efficient use of my ad dollars.
Say I want to place a job listing:
To register for Star Tribune Jobs online, simply fill out the following information and hit the “Register” button. You will be contacted within one business day and assigned a confidential id and password.
It’s shocking to me that in 2007, large daily papers continue to rely on humans to conduct tasks that Google automated in 2004.
Large dailies are making a lot of their own news lately with layoff and buyout announcements. A lot of this is blamed on differences in advertising dollars spent in online vs offline versions of their product.
When I look at the difficulty involved in buying online advertising through a newspaper vs. the many other alternatives available for online ad dollars today, I wonder if their lack of investment in a competitive ad platform may have something to do with the under-performance of their online properties?
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