A little while ago I wrote a post, dubbed “Blog Last.” It examined the strategic process that should proceed blogging in today’s social media environment, in response to the 86 percent failure rate companies are experiencing (image: Blogging and Recording by Jacob Botter). That being said, there’s still tremendous benefit available to those who can successfully blog, including:

This Network Solutions Solutions Stars blogging video (disclosure: we helped produce this) gets into greater details about the benefits of blogging.

But we’ve reached a point in the blogging era where marketing blogger rarely talk about best practices anymore. Darren Rowse still does a fantastic job of providing prescient tips. It seems like a good idea to dust off the cobwebs and put together a list of best practices for those who are just starting out. Here are my tips for writing a great blog.

Structuring Content

You need a guidepost to serve your readers. They are the people that matter, the stakeholders you are trying to serve with the blog. An editorial mission serves as a compass, and keeps a blogger from wandering into the inevitable eddies and pools on the social web that while personally interesting, your readers don’t care about. Write out a simple mission that generally determines the topics you’ll discuss.

What to write about on a day-to-day basis (image: Blogging Readiness by cambodia4kidsorg)? Ever have a creative session? Coming up with ideas can be a brainstorm. When stuck, I try to do anything but sit in front of the computer. Often relaxing, going to the gym, reading other blog posts and news sources online can trigger fantastic ideas.

Another source is my actual day-to-day work. If you’re working on it, it’s likely other professionals or stakeholders are interested in it, too. Your offline experiences are valuable & a great platform for a unique idea or perspective. Keep an idea log for future posts.

Do you have commentary to add? Let’s hope so. Because there are plenty of safe blogs out there. Choose a position, have a stance, offer a point of view, and take a risk. I’m more comfortable being wrong then being boring. And I’m not afraid to be criticized for standing up against what my be deemed popular in the echo chamber. That’s distinguished this blog from other social media conversations.

But opinions are not the only way to add value. Your company must have subject matter expertise of some sort that your stakeholders need. Offer it, show it, and let it shine.

Blog content does not need to be perfect like a white paper or a corporate document. Think in brush strokes. That’s blogging. Taking an idea that wouldn’t necessarily make for a full article in a trade publication, but still has value for your readers is a natural. Remember, add some color commentary on pertinent topics.

Usually, except when writing a long position paper or primer like this one, try to limit posts to 3-10 paragraphs in length. Fully researched concepts can be broken into several posts, and later banded together for an ebook.

If you are trying to build readership, you want to post a minimum of two to three times a week. Great posts and events often drive readers into your blog. Consistent on topic discussion and frequency is what creates loyal readers.

Tone

It’s not a formal business document, folks. This kind of over-massaged approach to blogging kills efforts quickly. Minimize your approval processes and get away from fear-based control.

Personality should be included (image: 2000 bloggers by elaine vigneault). You have to be you, right? Let your humor, your attitude come through. It may not be perfect, and you may learn some things about how you affect people, but it needs to be genuine. Personality infused blogging attracts others to your writing, demonstrates transparency and authenticity, and really just returns your company to a human level.

How do you do this? Just write it like you were talking with someone on a Saturday afternoon.

Proof for grammar and typos, not business style. It’s a good idea to proof a couple of times. You won’t catch every typo (or at least I don’t). Remember, it’s a blog, not the Sistine Chapel. Let it go. Another thing is to try and remove unnecessary first person references (I, me) as the post is about them, not you.

Prepping Your Post for Primetime

It’s a good idea to link to a minimum of three other blogs per post. This gets you read by other bloggers, and also demonstrates that you’ve researched your topic, and actually have subject matter expertise to offer. Find an entire discussion on cross-linking here.

An ideal post offers at minimum a photo, and if at all possible additional video, and audio to supplement the post. This breaks up a post and tells a more compelling story. Shel Israel once noted that when he inserted multimedia into his post, he saw dramatic increases in readership. There are plenty of places to research this kind of cross-linking, multimedia and information.

Check out Flickr Creative Commons for Images (Make sure to provide attribution). A wide variety of video channels and hosting sites beyond YouTube can provide video resources. Places to research blog posts for cross-links:

When searching use key words and phrases from posts to find links. Reading these posts will also make your content stronger as you will be forcing yourself to take an extra half hour and fact check. In an
ideal world, you or your social media marketing partner is using del.icio.us (or other bookmarking service) to build a reservoir of links to informative posts for later use.

Getting Read

Comment on and link to other blogs as other bloggers will become aware of you and link back. Building relationships with other bloggers and influentials online is essential for your blog to become accepted.

Really, I cannot emphasize this enough. Rarely is content special enough to be discovered on its own. You must be participating, and become an active part of a community if you want your valuable content to be discovered and read. This in its own right could be another primer.

Don’t forget to register the blog with Mahalo, Technorati, Google, and other relevant search engines. Other smart tips include adding the blog’s url as a call to action in your email signature, on your business card, and on your social network profiles. In short, integrate with your other outreach efforts.

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

17 Ways to Use Twitter for Business and Some Not

More and more small business folks are giving in to what seems like an insurmountable mountain of hype and jumping on the twitter bandwagon.

But, some people still look at twitter on the surface and conclude that it’s one big waste of time. I can’t say I disagree completely, however, like all social media and marketing tactics, before you can determine if something makes sense you need to analyze your objectives. So, instead of asking why you would use it, ask how it might help you achieve some other already stated objectives.

1) Would you like a way to connect and network with others in your industry or others who share you views? It’s a good a tool for that.

2) Would you like a way to get instant access to what’s being said, this minute, about your organization, people, products, competitors or brand? It’s a good tool for that.

3) Would you like a steady stream of ideas, content, links, resources, and tips focused on your area of expertise or interest? It’s a good tool for that.

4) Would you like to monitor what’s being said about your customers to help them protect their brands? It’s a good tool for that.

5) Would you like to extend the reach of your thought leadership – blog posts and other content? It can be a good tool for that.

6) Would like a way to quickly find vendors, partners, tech help, even employees for your organization? I can be a good tool for that.

7) Would you like to promote your products and services directly to a target audience? Not such a good tool for that, but it can light a path back to your web site!

Now, if that weren’t enough, the open nature of the twitter platform is spawning uses far beyond what was ever imagined or what many people can grasp - and this use of the technology will only get bigger.

Here are few things you may have never considered

Publish your Flickr photos on twitter - Visit twittergram and set-up an account and then just upload to Flickr but tag your photo twitter and it goes into your twitter stream.

9) If you use online todo list Remember the Milk - you can set it up to flow into twitter - this might be a way to assign todos to remote teams

10) Using strawpoll you can create mini polls into your twitter stream - great for flash feedback

11) Use twitter to keep up on traffic jams with commuterfeed

12) Have twitter alert you when you have a meeting with timer

13) Get and fill current job openings with tweetajob

14) Track FedEx, UPS and DHL shipments with TrackThis

15) Get help quitting smoking

16) Keep a diet journal

17) Get a tweet when your plants need water - - okay this one would be way cooler if it simply tweeted you when the plant watered itself.

Illustration: Pasquale D’Silva

By Rich Brooks
President, Flyte New Media

What is Social Media?
Like any emerging idea, the definition of social media is still a little blurry around the edges. And, like that other popular Internet pastime, social media may be something that is difficult to define, but you’ll know it when you see it.

Social media is an umbrella term that includes interactive broadcasts such as blogs and podcasts, as well as social networking Web sites. These Web sites often allow visitors to become users or members, create profiles, and upload and share content through the Web site. There are hundreds–if not thousands–of social media Web sites out there, but here are a few of the more popular ones:

• MySpace: Originally a place for bands to promote themselves, it has become one of the most popular sites on the Web today. Anyone can create a profile and there are no identity checks. Companies targeting consumers often set up shop here.
• LinkedIn: This networking Web site allows you to create a profile and connect with colleagues, give and get recommendations, and find people outside your immediate network for new opportunities.
• Facebook: One of the fastest growing social media sites out there. It started as a site just for college students but is now open to everyone. Although it has fewer members than MySpace, its growth and buzz is enough to make Google nervous.

As you travel outside the U.S., there are plenty of other social networking sites that are more popular in other parts of the world.

Read article…

by Darren Rowse

There are many reasons that a blog post might get spread widely through ‘ReTweets’ (when one person passes on the tweet of another) but one fairly obvious, yet often overlooked one, has to do with the length of your blog post title.

Yesterday on TwiTip I published a post with a formula for getting ReTweeted on twitter. You can read the full thing for yourself but the author of the post (@louisedoherty) proposed that to increase the chances of one of your tweets being ReTweeted that you need to keep your own tweet shorter than the 140 characters allowed by Twitter so that the person can include other information (your username, the @ symbol and the letters RT).

I’ve seen the wisdom of theory of Louise many times in my own use of Twitter. If I tweet something that is the maximum of 140 characters it make it more tricky for followers to retweet - they either have to change my tweet or don’t do it.

OK - so this applies to bloggers how?

Twitter can send you a lot of traffic if a link to one of your posts gets spread around via ReTweeting. Just look at the Top 100 Retweeted Links on Twitter at the moment - as I write this the top one has been passed on 331 times which means it is a link that could have been viewed on Twitter by many thousands of people.

To help the ReTweet thing along a little keep your titles short. They don’t need to be 3 words long - but keep in mind that when someone is going to tweet a link to your post that they will usually include:

1. The title of your post

2. A URL (often shortened using tinyurl or some other shortening service which means it’ll be anything from 20 to 26 characters)

They may also want to include a comment about your link.

That’s not all you want to think about - you then should consider that for the link to be ReTweeted it will include all of the above information plus:

1. The username of the person being retweeted with the @ symbol (usually 5-12 characters)

2. The letters RT and sometimes a : as well as a space after it (3-4 characters)

You can see that the number of characters is starting to add up so shorter Titles can definitely help.

Lets workshop it:

• The title of this post is ‘A Secret to Writing Posts that Go Viral on Twitter ‘ - that’s 52 characters (with space at end)
• Lets say that the URL is shortened with Twurl - that’s 22 characters
• Lets say that the person tweeting it adds the words ‘Reading: ‘ at the start of the tweet (9 characters with space) and ‘ - cool post’ at the end (12 characters with spaces).

So far the original tweet is 95 characters long.

And would look like: ‘Reading: A Secret to Writing Posts that Go Viral on Twitter http://twurl.nl/qejpzq - Cool Post’

Lets just say it was @chrisbrogan who made the above tweet. As Chris has a lot of great followers at least one of them is bound to retweet it.

At the very least their retweet would read:

‘RT: @chrisbrogan Reading: A Secret to Writing Posts that Go Viral on Twitter http://twurl.nl/qejpzq - Cool Post’

We’re still under the limit of 140 and with 29 characters to spare could have added a few words to our title.

This is not something that I would spend a lot of time on and I would not compromise my titles too much to get them down in character length - however as someone who has seen significant traffic from Twitter over the last 6 months it is definitely a factor that I keep in the back of my mind as I blog.

PS: another reason to keep titles down in length is that Google has a cut off of 70 characters when it displays page titles in search results. A title over 70 characters gets chopped off mid title which could decrease the chances of someone clicking it. I’m told that other search engines cut off titles at as little as 65 characters so perhaps that is a better cut off point.

Written by Ravit Lichtenberg / January 27, 2009

“Social media” was the term du jour in 2008. Consumers, companies, and marketers were all talking about it. We have social media gurus, social media startups, social media books, and social media firms. It is now common practice among corporations to hire social media strategists, assign community managers, and launch social media campaigns, all designed to tap into the power of social media.

But social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie.

Facebook, a once groundbreaking online community, has become the ant colony of third-party applications. Twitter users now have a dozen or so additional applications they can use to overcome Twitter’s ever-present shortcomings. People spread themselves across a number of tools and maintain different networks on each (large portions of which they don’t even know), making it nearly impossible to decide what to share and with whom.

Users, marketers, and companies face an incredible amount of noise, too. For every new application that relies on a network, another crops up that helps users manage it. While “eyeballs” used to be the coveted metric, both ad publishers and investors now realize that having smaller well-targeted niches can lead to much better returns than marketing to one large undifferentiated mass of users.

Read article…

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Explore the Twitter Hashtag

There is a pretty useful trick that twitter insiders use all the time called a hashtag. The roots of the #tag are buried somewhere in IM coding, but it’s what you can do with it using twitter that matters. (More on hashtags if you want to techie stuff on this.)

The hashtag or #tag added to a tweet acts as way to create categories, groups or topics for tweets that others can use as well. This way, tweets can easily be grouped together using the search.twitter.com feature.

Let me give you a very commonly used tactic for this. Let’s say a group of folks are attending a workshop and tweeting their notes in real time. If everyone at that workshop were asked to add something like #mkt101 to their tweets, everyone present or not can see and share all the notes in one place.

During earthquakes and fires hashtags are a great way for people to get news.

Promoting events and product launches via a hashtag helps keep the word in context

Companies often use hashtags as a way for remote employees to use twitter as a communication tool for all the stuff people should stay on top of.

I use a hashtag for each of my live webinars and then people tweet and ask questions via twitter and I have a back channel of conversation and notes and another source of relevant content to support the webinar.

You can also find hot trends via hashtag at search.twitter.com. The homepage lists the trending tags. More than one twitter user has found that jumping into a hot trend conversation is a great way to connect with folks on something of shared interest.

Anyone can create a hashtag by putting # in front of anything. Keep is short so you don’t use up your 140 and try for a little unique. If you use a tag that others are using you will mingle your results with others.

Here’s an example of a search for the hashtag I used during the call with Seth Godin last week - #dtmseth

Today we’re covering Part 4 of our Budgeting 2009 Web Strategy Series - Social Media.

Social Media

Cost: Free - Completely variable depending on scope

Time: An hour a day - at least

As a preface - I am not a social media expert. If you want expert analysis, see the resources below.

Social Media is all about community and conversations. You cannot simply sign up for Twitter and Facebook and consider it social media marketing. The biggest part of a social media budget, at least for us at 48Web, is time. It takes time to build community - and community is one of the most powerful facets of a an effective web strategy. There are three steps to using social media as a marketing tool - listen, join the conversation, and engage discussions. (If you think there are more or less, please share them with us in the comments).

Listening is easy and can be automated. This is the simplest step to get into social media - start listening. Subscribe to Twitter and Google Blog Searches to get started. Set up Google Blog Alerts for your company. All these listening tools are free. And if you want to really start researching - start using Trackur or FiltrBox. Setting up this research environment is easy and takes little time - but has a HUGE ROI. Joining the conversation is often the hardest part because social media is very adverse to traditional marketing messages. In fact - I’d just start joining discussions without any marketing broadcasts. Next up - engage conversations.. Start discussions and gear them towards your brand. Again - I am not a social media expert, but these methods do work. If you have other recommendations, please leave them in the comments.

Social media is a low budget (time and cost), high ROI method of marketing - It’s a must-do internet marketing tactic for an effective web strategy. If you are looking to get started in Social Media, check out Zane’s simple Social Media Starter Kit… Or, check out the Social Media Cheat Sheet. Or, see the resources below.

Tools and Services

There are dozens of tools and services to help you embrace social media and this is a very short list of those. Please let us know any additional tools or services you use in the comments.

• Conversations: Twitter, FriendFeed
• Research: Google Blog Search, Google Alerts, Twitter Search, Trackur

Resources

• Need Help? Ask us!
• Get ahold of Lava Row or Dosovo
• Follow on Twitter: Nathan, Jeremiah, Louis Gray, Danzarella, Mike Templeton, Todd Defren
• Blogs: Social Media AllTop, Christopher Penn, Lava Row, ConverStations, Louis Gray, Chris Brogan, GrowMap
• Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day(book)
• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies(book)
• Have other resources for us? Leave them in the comments…

Budgeting 2009 Web Strategy

• Part 1: Hosting
• Part 2: Analytics
• Part 3: SEM/SEO
• Part 4: Social Media (you are here)

Featuring: Ask Andy I’ve done the research, so you don’t have to.

(more…)

(socialmediatrader.com) February 28, 2008

There is no denying that Social Media websites have made huge strides on the web. The immense number of people who participate in social media websites has led to increased investment in the growing field of social media marketing. As we see a rapidly growing number of small businesses include social media ideas and strategies in their goals, we will look at exactly what a social media marketing campaign means and where the benefits are for small business owners.

If you’ve not been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you’ve probably heard about sites, such as, Facebook, Myspace and Youtube. It seems that many small businesses have embraced these sites and have diligently filled out their profile pages and waited (and waited and waited) for a rush of traffic and new business to arrive.Despite what you may hear, there is no “silver bullet”. If you want to attract new visitors to your site then you have to actually participate and become involved in a community.

There are also social news websites, such as, Digg and StumbleUpon that have the potential to send up to 40k unique visitors to your website in a short space of time as well as a good number of backlinks if you manage to reach the front page. If you don’t get your story to the front page, then you are unlikely to see much more than a handful of visitors.

(SearchEngineWatch.com)

April 29, 2008
Are there really opportunities for small business to succeed using social media?

Absolutely, if one factors the strengths and weaknesses of the media with the strengths, weaknesses, and goals of the company.

The reality of the matter is that various social media have different strengths and weaknesses. While it is true the most obvious benefit of social media is branding and traffic, the truth is that social media can also:

• generate lots of good, quality, relevant links, which we all know can help a site perform better in the search results
• help to forge relationships. Not necessarily relationships with potential clients, but with those who help to influence potential client decisions i.e. indirect sales
• generate direct sales
• build a company’s authority in an industry

In order for a small business to utilize social media to its fullest, and to determine which social media it should be using as part of its effort, it must understand the trade-offs it faces. Without being able to commit time or money to social media, many small businesses will seriously need to question their commitment to winning in their space in the foreseeable future. Read article…

How can your company harness the power of rave reviews? A customer-driven social networking site makes it possible.

Home Energy founder Phil Wheeler is embarrassed to admit that he has no idea how his company’s name first showed up on Kudzu’s website, kudzu.com. He just knows that his business has doubled in the three years he’s been actively working with the customer reviews and social networking site. Kudzu, named after a fast-growing Southern plant species, stands apart from other social networking and review sites because it focuses specifically on helping consumers connect with services they need in their everyday lives, like doctors or home or automotive repair providers. The site lists about 13 million businesses, and 6 million jobs were performed last year through leads from the site.  Read article…