Archive for the 'Business Blogging Masterclass' Category

Continuing the Conversation from the Social Media round table I chaired in Slovenia….

One of the business communicators at our discussion was working with a company who had developed and implemented an internal social network for their research and development teams to innovate new products through facilitating sharing of ideas and communications between the individuals and teams. But not many of these staff were using this tool. My colleague wanted to know how to increase staff take-up of the tool.

The Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams, brought us the visionary saying: “if you build it, they will come”. That may have worked in the movie and it may work for some business ventures. In most cases, we all have to be somewhat more pragmatic in adding a few more steps into the process after we present the world with our exciting new baseball pitch or mall or product - or social media tool. And one of those crucial steps is communicating with the people who are ultimately going to use or benefit from that product or tool

So in our discussion, we explored what processes the company had used to encourage the teams to integrate this social network tool into their research and development work. What were they already doing to share ideas and communicate with each other? What activities (eg team and individual meetings, face to face workshops etc) where they involved in as part of their innovation of new products? How were aware were they of the benefits of the tool and how it could increase their communication efficiency?

My colleague came away from this session with a concrete plan to implement training sessions for the relevant teams at her client company so that they could learn the benefits of the tool and how to use it in their work.

A key message here, I think, is to view social media tools as just that: tools. And as with any tools, people need to be trained to use them and also, understand how they can help improve or facilitate the relevant processes.

Photo: thanks to soundtrackcollector.com

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NOTE: ZenGuide is updated Mondays and Thursdays

We had a great discussion at the round table discussions on Social Mediathat I chaired at the IABC European Leadership Institute last week. For the next couple of weeks, I’ll be blogging about some of the issues we talked about and asking for your thoughts on it - whether you came along to the round table discussion or not, I think these issues are relevant for communicators and businesses generally. I hope you’ll add a comment or email me to share your views and experiences.

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Thirty Million Blogs and One Lifetime

How to avoid information overload

One question we grappled with at the Social Media round table discussions was: there are so many blogs out there and busy business people and professionals have only a finite time to spend surfing the web, how can we keep track of them all?

Well, we can’t. It’s impossible to even expect that we can keep up with the estimated thirty million blogs that populate the blogosphere.

But we can keep up with some of the blogs that interest or intrigue or inform or amuse or entertain us. A business leader I know enjoys political blogs so he follows UK Member of Parliament Boris Johnson’s blog and the satirical by “Guy Fawkes’”. I follow the blogs of Malaysian writers (eg Lydia Teh and Sharon Bakar) as well as marketing blogs and new media blogs and a range of others. I don’t read them all every day but have them in my Google Reader blog aggregator and dip into different ones as the fancy takes me.

Some of the benefits of following blogs for me are:

• learning tips and information straight from an expert’s mouth eg how else could I pick up useful gems from Seth Godin, the marketing guru, from the comfort of my own home?For businesses and professionals, it goes without saying that diverse ways to increase your learning, knowledge and skills has long-term business benefits.

• picking up news some time before it is picked up by the traditional press eg I learnt about Twitter long before it hit the news; I was following the Kathy Sierra death threats story at least a week before it came on the news. Having early knowledge of what’s going to hot can help add to one’s competitive edge.

• being entertained and challenged and having my horizons broadened by videos, stories, writings etc that would never make it into the traditional media eg great YouTube videos; Asian community blogs ; “flash fiction” writing. New, fresh ideas beyond what everyone else is receiving can spark creativity and contribute to new ideas within one’s own business.

So, find the blogs that are helpful to you or that you enjoy and follow those.

How to get noticed in the crowd

For those businesses and professionals who have blogs, the question then is how can you get your blog noticed in the melee of so many competing voices?

It is unlikely that you will have the whole world coming to your blog. You don’t necessarily want or need the whole world to come to your blog. Once your accept that, I think the key to drawing an audience and getting noticed in the clamour of thirty million blogs is simple:

* Know your audience.

Who are the people you want to connect with? If your target audience is a global audience of teenagers, you’re going to create different content and have a different marketing strategy from a situation where your target audience is insurance brokers or accountants or lawyers. Think about who you want coming to your site eg Your clients. Your stakeholders. Focus on their needs and interests. If what you offer is relevant to them, they will come back for more.

* Create great content.

Write well. Make a visit to your blog an enjoyable or informative experience. Offer an incentive to come back eg prize draws (”become a subscriber and get the chance to win XXX”), a cliffhanger (”to be continued next week….”), trailers (”next week, I’ll be interviewing Brad Pitt….”). Break up serious content with personal interest or lifestyle stories.

* Pimp your site

Make your blog site visually distinct and a delight to behold. I don’t mean add so many bells and whistles and colours so that it takes ages to load or is really difficult to read because there are so many distractions on it. I mean show that your care about your readers’ visiting experience by making it user-friendly to navigate and a memorable visual experience - just as you would take care to present your brand or logo beautifully or maintain a striking and comfortable office for your clients to visit. I explore all this in more detail in my post “Are You Worth It?”

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Photo: thanks to pacifica-group.com

Note: ZenGuide is updated on Mondays and Thursdays.

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One of the great things about what they call Web 2.0 is the way that communications tools are always evolving and becoming easier and easier for ordinary people to use - and all for free.

By mashing up various free online tools you can create an dynamic Events Calendar for your speaking engagements or other activitites for your website or blog. In the old days, if you wanted to update your website with new events, you had to contact your web guy and get him to update the Events page of your website or fiddle around yourself with HTML. It all took a lot of time and effort. Now, after some initial time spent setting things up, you can easily update an online calendar with your event and it will automatically appear on your website or blog.

Take a look at the new Events page I’ve created (click on Events at the top of this ZenGuide page) and you’ll see a list of events involving me and/ or my friends. Click on any of the events listed and you will be taken to a more detailed page with a brief description of where and what it’s all about.

If you want to create a similar Events Calendar for your blog, this is what you need to do:

1. Sign up for a Google Calendar
2. Create a public calendar
3. Enter your event(s) in the calendar
4. In Settings, you will find the URL for the calendar under “Calendar Address”.

5. Sign up for a Feedburner account
6. Create a Feedburner feed for your calendar by copying and pasting the Calendar URL (item 4 above)
7. In the “Optimize” tab, go to Event Feed and create and event feed
8. In the “Publicize” tab, go to BuzzBoost and activate the event feed
9. Copy and paste the code from BuzzBoost and place it on your website or blog

10. Update your Google calendar from time to time with new events and they will automatically appear on your website/ blog where you pasted the code.

According to a Microsoft survey, 75% of blogs hosted by Blogger.com are spam blogs. These are the free blogs that have “.blogspot.com” as part of their domain name that up till now have been used primarily by personal bloggers and those who don’t want to spend any money on their online presence. This disturbing new trend was reported on a legal blog, Real Lawyers Have Blogs, in April 2007, by Kevin O’Keefe a US lawyer.

He makes the point that law firms who use the free Blogger platform to save money are therefore in a blogging network surrounded by spam blogs. I would add my voice to this concern - as a business owner, are these the kind of blogging neighbours you want associated with your corporate blog? If “.blogspot.com” is widely known as the blogging platform of choice for personal bloggers, people who don’t want to invest any money in their web presence and now spam bloggers , what does it say about your brand to have that as part of your domain name?

I reported awhile back on the recent US survey that indicated that 75% of the wealthy in America read blogs. This is a great opportunity for businesses who would like to reach this group via blogging. But the wealthy and powerful are most likely to be used to top-quality, high-value goods, services and experiences. Will your .blogspot.com domain and generic template give them a blog-visiting experience that is going to meet those expectations?

I came across a US-based life coach who was offering services that would help his client achieve “excellence” and “peak performance”. His copy was all superlatives of that nature. But his blog was a .blogspot.com blog - and he was using the first template you come across when signing up to a blog on Blogger. I have to say, I didn’t believe that he believed a thing that he was saying.

There is a reason why designer goods stores and top-notch service firms are fitted out luxuriously with top quality wood and shiny marble, gleaming glass and indoor exotic plants and water features. They all add up to say “We’re worth it” and “You, as our customer, deserve the best visiting experience.”

For a business to have a free .blogspot.com domain - especially if you don’t even make an effort to customise the generic template - seems to me increasingly like trying to setting yourself up as luxury goods outlet offering Gucci and Versace products and then selling them out of the back of your car on a lay-by.

The survey “Connecting Web Spammers and Advertisers” can be read as a pdf file. It has been said by other commentators that the survey was commissioned by Microsoft, who are rivals with Google, the company that owns Blogger.com and the outcome was bound to have something negative to say about Blogger. Personally, I like Blogger as a starting point for new bloggers - because it’s free and it’s easily customisable, it’s a great place to practice your blogging skills. It’s also ideal for personal bloggers and others who have little or no budget. But for business or corporate blogging, you really need to see blogging as part of your brand and marketing strategy and act accordingly.

I’ve also blogged earlier on the merits or otherwise of free blog platforms in my post “Are You Worth It?”.

Disclosure: we offer a bespoke website and/ or blog design service starting from £500 and a year’s hosting from £30. But you don’t have to use our design services - our consultancy is about helping you enhance your online presence not just selling web design services. So, if you want a bespoke blog, one place to start is to speak to the people who designed your main website and see what they can do for you - or if you’d like to find out more about how we can help with designing your integrated website and blog, by all means email or call me via the Contact Us link at the top of this page.

Photo: thanks to alaska.net

Blog platforms usually require you to go online, log on and write your post online. This is fine - until your broadband connection decides to let you down. On a number of occasions, I’ve written a long post online only to find that when I hit “save”, the connection cuts out or some other horror occurs - resulting in all my lovely prose vanishing into the ether. Aaargh!

To my joy, I discovered a free offline blogging tool called W.Bloggar that allows you to blog offline on your PC or laptop. Then, when you are ready to post it on your blog, all you have to do is click “Post” and it automatically connects to your blog online and shoots the post through the ether, magically posting it right into your blog.

The great thing is that you can also set your Categories offline and add image links just as you would normally do online - as well as setting the time and date of the post (eg if you only want it to be visible on the site at a future date)

To download the software, go to www.wbloggar.com and click through to the downloads page.

UPDATE: I’ve just come across a post from The Wrong Advices which lists a number of offline blogging tools in addition to Bloggar called, unsurprisingly, Offline Blog Editing Tools

A few weeks ago, I asked my readers to email me any aspects of blogging that you’d like me to explore on ZenGuide.

One of my readers, who is new to blogging this year, emailed to ask “How do I protect content - or what is the least I can do?”

The bad news

It is very difficult to protect your content once it’s posted up on the web, whether in a blog, on a website or on a social media site like flickr.com for photographs.

Anyone can come along and cut-and-paste your text or save your image to their computer or download your music or podcast as an mp3. If you make a pdf document available for download, someone can come along and download it to create into a book that they then sell as their own, as happened to marketing guru, Seth Godin - I blogged about this on my writing and arts blog, Fusion View.

Some bloggers take your feed and run it on their site to use your content as bait for visitors - whom they hope will then click on their Google or other ads and thereby earn them some revenue.

So if you put stuff up on your blog or any social networking site, you are at risk of having it nicked.

The good news

A lot of web and social media developers give tons of their expertise and skill away for free. Wordpress, which is the platform that this blog and many others are built on, offers you a free blog on their Wordpress.com site. You can download their Wordpress files for free and re-design them and upload them again onto your own server - this is what my blog designers did for me. Many people develop Wordpress “plugins” to add functionality to their blogs and then offer them for free to anyone to download and use.

In the offline world, businesses and professionals often give free seminars and workshops, send out free newsletters and expert journals, do some initial work for free. They are giving away their expertise gratis as a way to showcase their talent and raise their profile. Other businesses give away their products for free or at huge discounts - again it’s a form of marketing and raising awareness of what they have to offer.

In that light, making your content - whether it’s written or a photograph or a video or music or whatever - available on the web allows it to be seen potentially by anyone who has a computer and is connected to the internet - ie millions of people. And if many of them think your content is fab enough to take and share and pass on to their friends - well, that’s free word-of-mouth marketing for you!

As for those people who then nick your stuff and make money out of it, you can try and get them to stop it (very difficult, especially across international borders) or take it in your stride as one of those risks. And perhaps if it’s annoying you, you can work out how you can make money out of your own content in the future before someone else does.

Practical things you can do

I have a policy here as follows (and a similar one on my other blog Fusion View):

All the content of my posts is copyrighted - copyright belongs to ZenGuide unless otherwise stated.

You may use portions of a post or copy and paste portions of a post into another site or document provided you put that portion inside quotation marks and you acknowledge clearly on that site/ document that it is taken from ZenGuide and also that you credit ZenGuide clearly with it. A portion for these purposes would be up to one third of the text from the relevant post. This broadly reflects the UK law on copyright.

So far as I am aware, most people who have quoted my posts have done so honourably as per this policy.

I’d recommend having a similar policy clearly stated on your blog or social media site.

The Creative Commons Licencee also provides a standardised framework for licensing your work.

If people don’t comply, a policy on your blog and/ or the Creative Commons Licence gives you some leverage when trying to rectify that breach - but be aware, it is likely to be difficult to enforce (again, especially across international borders).

For photographs and videos, you can watermark them with your name or website but you may feel that that could interfere with the enjoyment of viewing them.

Take home message

There are practical things you can do to try to protect your content but at the end of the day, when uploading your content onto the web, it’s best to choose things that you are prepared to give away for free

Photo: thanks to RBerteig from flickr.com

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Links Masterclass 1

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It’s tempting to use your business blog as a dumping ground for all your press releases in the belief that - hey, presto, there we have it: a blog, easy-peasy. Unfortunately, that isn’t really what blogging is about. Press releases are one-way communications from you to the press and they tend to be marked by a particular tone that reads well enough by the time it gets into the papers or magazines or other media - but that smacks of insincerity and PR spin when encountered on a blog. At best, you won’t get many readers or return visitors to your site. At worst, you’ll get ridiculed out of the blogosphere by other bloggers.

To create a great blog you need authenticity and passion.

Authenticity is about being real, taking off that corporate mask and sitting down for a good discussion with your visitors. Don’t think of them as your “audience” or your “readers” - those words again suggest a one-way communication from you to them. Think of them as your visitors, or your community, or network - it’s not about you and them anymore; it’s about “us”. It’s about plain old you - no games, no false sincerity - just you, making a connection with others.

Passion is about what excites you, what makes you tick. Blog about those things. If you write about something you’re not particularly interested in just because you think you ought to write about it ” ‘cos, well, you know, it’s related to the business so I guess I should write about it”. Ho hum, you’re going to be so bored - and if you’re not interested in it, why should your visitors be either?

If you’re interested in football, why not mention it in your business blog? Especially if you can use a great play or a particular match as an example in something you’re talking about in the business context. Your interest in football and your passion for your business make you who you are. Share that part of you in your blog. That’s authenticity and passion all in one.

I’m fascinated by tecchy things and gadgets and new developments in web and communications technology. I used to feel that maybe it was a bit weird for a girl and an English grad to have this geeky side and my literary friends would often laugh about it. I also used to think: what do I know about electronics and the nitty-gritty of megabytes to be able to have an opinion about tech stuff?

But then I realised that what excites me about tecchy things and blogging is how such things can help us improve communication. Not just in the technological sense of getting a less crackly phone line or faster page loading speeds, but also in how they influence the way we as humans communicate - in the old-fashioned sense of the word. And I’m fascinated by how technology is affecting our lives - and changing the way we live and interact with each other. My interest in tech is also my interest in human relationships and story.

Here’s an example. One of my cousins (let’s call him Mark*) is a mathematical whizz but a mono-syllabic strong silent kind of a guy - until his baby was born. Now, Mark has started a blog for the baby where he writes with great fluency and wit about the day to day life of his baby boy and about being a dad. Wow - if it weren’t for blog technology we would never have seen that side of Mark.

That’s what excites me: technology AND people.

What’s your passion? What’s your story? These are the things you need to be sharing on your business blog.

On ZenGuide, I’ll be sharing with you great blogs - and especially great business blogs - in my Blogs to Explore section. And if you’d like to tell us about a great blog - business or otherwise - that you like, please do add a comment here or email me via the “Contact Us” tab at the top of this page.

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*Name changed for privacy reasons.

Photo: thanks to hesston.edu

You may not have a blog or even a website. How can you market yourself online without these tools? A simple and effective way is to guest-blog on an existing blog run by someone else.

Here are some success stories of a number of people who were guest-blogged on my writing and culture blog over at Fusion View.

Case Study - Nicky Harman

Nicky Harman, translates books and novels from Chinese into English. She doesn’t have a website of her own for her books and translations although she is profiled briefly on her work website. I was curious to learn more about the process of translation and asked her to write a first person piece about her translation work and the Chinese author Han Dong whose book Striking Root she was working on at that time - and for which she was looking for an agent and/ or publisher. She produced the article very quickly over a weekend and I had it up on Fusion View the next week.

A few weeks later, I was contacted by a leading publisher in China who had come across the article on Fusion View, asking to make contact with Nicky. I forwarded her email and Nicky started discussions with her about publishing her book. Around the same time, a UK-based literary agent was told about Nicky’s work and Googled her. Up popped Nicky’s article on Fusion View and the agent invited her to submit her manuscript. Go Nicky!

Case Study - Pey

My cousin Pey Colborne is an aromatherapist and poet based in Bath. She doesn’t have her own website for her business. I interviewed her for a podcast on Fusion View, talking about her fusion life and how she uses her Western and Eastern experiences and interests in her poetry - and also in her aromatherapy practice, which incorporates Chinese herbal medicine as well as Western aromatherapy principles. She has gained at least one new aromatherapy client through that podcast - he specifically mentioned it as he had had a choice of therapists and decided on her after hearing more about her practice and healing principles on the podcast.

Case Study - Lucy Luck

I interviewed Lucy Luck, a UK literary agent for advice to writers hoping to find an agent in the UK - and specifically answering emailed questions from overseas writers. She talked about how to submit your work, how to write your covering letter and what agents re looking for. She also invited Fusion View readers/ listeners to submit their writing to her agency. I chatted with her last week and she told me that she has had over 30 submissions from potential new clients, mentioning the Fusion View podcast. The quality of their covering letters and submissions have been much higher than those who had not listened to the podcast, which has made the process of working through them much easier for her. She also feels that the podcast has raised her profile in the search engines, coming up just after her own literary agency website, and also generally for her business as the podcast was also featured in Mslexia, the UK journal for women writers.

Action point

So could you offer an article to a blogger you know? Here are some ideas to get you thinking:

• your article needs to be relevant to the theme of the blog you’d like to write for

• what you write about needs to be helpful, interesting or useful for the readers of that blog

• read the blog you would like to write for and read the About page

• think of the blog and its readers as a community that you’d like to be a part of

• does that blog regularly have interviews/ guestbloggers? If not, will your approach be appropriate?

• make your approach courteously

• remember that the blogger does not have to take your idea, so accept “no” gracefully

• how might you help the blogger in return, as part of his/ her community?

I am always on the lookout for interesting guestbloggers on both Fusion View and ZenGuide - please make sure you read my Guestblogger Submission Guidelines: click on that Category in the far right sidear. Email me first with an outline of what you’d like to write about, who you are and why you think the readers of Fusion View or ZenGuide would be interested in the story. If I like the idea, I can then invite you to write the full story. I may decide it’s not appropriate, in which case, I will let you know.

Pic: thanks to
www.dnrec.state.de.us

“Free blog hosts are great for getting started - but if you are thinking of using a blog for professional purposes, use the free blog to get a feel for what blogging is about but don’t get too attached to it just ‘cos it’s free.” That’s what I wrote last week in my post “Have a Go at Blogging”.

Why shouldn’t you use a free blog host for your business or professional blog? It saves costs, doesn’t it? And it’s easy to set up and link to your main website, it’s quick, it’s hassle-free - what’s the problem?

That’s all true. But consider some of the following:

1. As I mentioned last week, a free hosting site isn’t really “free”. It lumbers you with “advertising” the hosts brand and product with the same prominence as your own brand or company name by giving you a domain name that reads www.yournamehere.blogspot.com. In a business context, that’s the same as mentioning another business’s product every time you mention your own.

2. You can get around the domain name issue by buying your own domain name and pointing it to the hosted site name and visitors will not know the difference by just looking at the domain name. However, whenever your blog comes up in a Google (or other search engine) search, it will show the original site name. Again, lovely free advertising for the other business alongside yours.

3. Blogger.com allows you to re-design the look of their templates entirely by giving you access to the code that the blog is built on. A lot of people like that flexibility. But you will always retain that strip at the top of the screen that has the Blogger logo and options for your visitor to create their own blog in Blogger. The search facility in that top strip takes you to results that are displayed on the Blogger site - a nice touch of theirs to take visitors off your site into their own.

4. Wordpress.com offers free hosting as well and it isn’t as intrusive as Blogger. However, the free version gives you limited templates and restricts your ability to edit them so most free Wordpress blogs are variations on the same 10-15 free themes though some bloggers who are adept at fiddling with the template within those restrictions manage nice semi-personalised looks. Also you are limited in what multi-media elements you can incorporate into the free site.

5. On the free sites, there is no facility to back up your content. In particular, Blogger does not have an easy way to export your content should you wish to use another platform later - you will have to manually copy and paste each post and each multi-media element into your new site. Another clever way to keep you bound into their product.

It may be that as a solo professional like a writer or for a personal blog, there are good reasons to stick with the free version - cost being one. You may also like the fact that your blog isn’t too “establishment” or “corporate” and it shows you as part of the democratised, everyone is equal mix of the blogosphere. You may not care about having a unique look on your blog or about maintaining a smooth interface with your special professional image or brand. It may be that your free generic blog can give you the opportunity to show a different, more casual side of who you are compared with the carefully branded look of your main website. All these are good and valid reasons to stay with the free blog.

On the other hand, if your brand or profession is aimed at high-value clients who are used to quality service and quality products, it’s worth having a think about what impression look and feel of your blog is going to give them. If you want to stand out in the crowd so that your visitor notices that what you have to offer is different from others, you may want to look at whether your blog is giving a sense of your uniqueness. If you want to give your visitor a special and memorable experience when visiting your blog, you need to ask if the free stuff is going to be able to deliver that Wow! factor. If it is important to you to own and control the content you have invested time and resources into producing, you may not want another company over whom you have no control or influence over being the ones who control what you can and cannot do with that content.

As a business or professional person, you know the value of designing your logo just right, getting quality headed paper and business cards, commissioning a great website, making sure your office or shop or therapy clinic is projects the right welcoming image. You of course take time and care to dress well and look your best at business meetings. Your presentations are professional and you work hard to develop your reputation or brand.

A business blog needs to be an integral part of your business and image. It is powerful means of communicating with your clients and stakeholders, with a potential reach of millions. Through your blog content, you can showcase your know-how and expertise to the world - literally. Your blog represents you and your voice on the internet. So, is it worth paying for a bespoke blog design and your own hosting to commmunicate the value and quality of what your business has to offer? I don’t know about you but I’d say: Yes, definitely.

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Disclosure: we offer a bespoke website and/ or blog design service starting from £500 and a year’s hosting from £30. But you don’t have to use our design services - our consultancy is about helping you enhance your online presence not just selling web design services. So, if you want a bespoke blog, one place to start is to speak to the people who designed your main website and see what they can do for you - or if you’d like to find out more about how we can help with designing your integrated website and blog, by all means email or call me via the Contact Us link at the top of this page.