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This Blog is Moving / Morphing

Hi all, Thanks for subscribing to this SEOBlog. Now that we have launched ScoutBlogging, I will be posting about SEO, PR and Blogs over there. I will leave this one up and running and monitor for comments but please point your feed readers towards

http://www.scoutblogging.com/blog.html

Best regards,
Stephen Turcotte

Announcing SCOUT our new Corporate Blogging Service

I've hinted about this in some previous posts but now it's official. See the press release. Backbone is starting a new corporate blogging service called SCOUT. You can read all about it on our new website www.scoutblogging.com. We've also developed a the SCOUT Flash Demo, which is a neat little overview of the service. I'd love to hear any comments or questions about the service. I'm particularly interested in hearing feedback about the service from real bloggers, SEO and PR Communications professionals.

If you're going to critique, here are a few FAQs

Is this a service or a product (software)?

Scout is a service, although we do provide some technology to make sure we deliver the service efficiently.

Do you use your own custom software?

No, we use off the shelf packages. Moveable Type and Wordpress are our favorites right now but we can also use Expression Engine and more.

Why Moveable Type or Wordpress? I prefer Typepad/Blogger/etc?

From a search engine optimizatoin and long term marketing perspective, we believe the blog content should be published and associated with your primary domain, not at yoursite.hostedblogsystem.com. Moveable type and Wordpress enable this to work reliably. Also, these systems are commercially supported and have a large network of resellers, so there’s lots of support we can rely upon.

Is this a ghostwriting service?

No, Scout is not ghostwriting. We provide guidance and advice, but we don’t write your post for you. It’s your voice, but we give story leads, and help with research on follow up to your ideas.

I already know a lot about blogging, why should I use your service?

It’s a time issue. Do you have the time to keep up with the industry and analyze your section of the blogosphere? By providing extra coverage and insight we leverage what you do best. Writing with research and information keeps you informed and connected.

How am I going to make money off of this?

Blogging helps companies to build their brand online by demonstrating value, brand and thought leadership. By becoming a great blogger, you will become
one of the leaders in your industry. That’s what Scout does for you, lets you become a great blogger.

Many blogs do well with SEO; do you offer plug-ins to optimize posts in any way?

We provide advise that will teach and help the blog writer to optimize their posts over time. The key to blogging is the volume. By following some simple steps our strategy is to get you some higher rankings.

How much time and effort would someone have to put in to maintain a blog?

For five posts a week, I’d say 5-10 hours a week. We help to cut down on the time.

Will I have to write any code?

No code writing is needed.

Why can’t bloggers do the work for themselves?

They can, but it’s a matter of time and managing the process much more efficiently. Scout helps to make you a great blogger.

How will blogs be used in the future?

With still more follow-up to my original post, here’s another pithy answer to one of Bob Cargill's perplexing questions for us to answer for direct marketers at the NEDMA event.

How do you think blogs will be used in the future?

I think many companies will empower their employees to blog on the company’s behalf according to a set of loose guidelines. Blogs will be connected by blog aggregation system that is a way to feature the most active blogs and also connect the audience to the most relevant conversations. Blogs will also be incorporated as tools for

• employee evaluation- who has the best ideas and audience, who's slacking
• product development - what are customers saying about what's in the pipe
• customer services - respond to questions and let customers support other customers
• market research - hmm pay a research firm or do it ourselves
• company communications - default
• marketing - speak with your potential customers
• pr - cultivate your relations and just be open
• seo - do all of the above and you won't have to worrry about search engine rankings

Also see the Macromedia Blogging Case Study in the Backbone Corporate Blogging Survey

Why do you think more marketers aren’t blogging yet?

In a previous post I mentioned that I would try and answer a number of provocative blogging questions posed by blogging panel moderator, Bob Cargill. In response to an earlier comment from Mariah Hunt, I'm going to try and keep my answers to around 100 words. Here's the question...

Why do you think more direct marketers aren’t blogging yet?

We have a questionnaire for companies that want to blog. One of the questions is “Please list any individuals within your organization that are passionate and forward thinking about the business." The joke is that some companies could read that and leave it blank. Blogging is NOT for the faint of heart and it's not just something that you can tie up in a neat little package and sell to an organization like an ad run. Corporate blogging for business benefit involves a risk and a fundamental shift in the way a corporation interacts with its customers. Most marketing decision makers don't want to rock the boat if they don't have to.

There's a risk in putting ideas / intellectual capital out there for the world (customers and competitors) to see and judge. Gut check - What if people comment and critique your ideas? It also requires an investment of time not just in the writing but also in Blogger Relations (interacting with your blogging community). The pay off for the risk is that blogging can be time well spent but it’s much more complicated than bidding for a keyword or sending out 2000 postcards.

From here, to web 2.0

There's a continuing discussion about where PR is heading and blogging is headed. The consensus is PR is not going to stand still, web 2.0 (please get over yourself if you don’t like the term) is the new frontier and much of it is up for grabs. I see that some big PR companies (like Edelman, Ketchum, Hill & Knowlton) have already started placing their bets. Other companies are just walking into the room, some are stepping up to the table, and a few don’t even know there’s a casino in the city.

Lee Hopkins from the land down under sums up the general state of mind very nicely beginning at minute 37:20 of For Immediate Release, The Hobson & Holtz Report, Podcast #99. FIR is a twice weekly podcast on communications and PR, hosted by Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson. I later found a transcript of his entry on Lee’s blog, which is aptly titled -- Where to now, then?.

Lee starts off with a sober questioning of where blogging or podcastig fits into life and whether the big promise of blogging and podcasting has “run out of steam” as the early adopters drop off once they realize that producing podcasts and blogs “of value takes time (a considerable amount of it) and dedication.” Lee expresses how he is “constantly amazed that Shel and Neville are able to create the time to put together their shows” and how “They show a level of commitment to this new medium that staggers and humbles” him. This is not just an exquisite piece of suckupery by Lee but more of an eloquent way of asking whether blogging might be too expensive of an undertaking for the ROI (Just listen to FIR, it truly deserves the kudos).

At first listen, Lee’s report seems a little tentative about the viability of blogging for dollars. Near the end, he seems to succumb to just being happy with the social benefits he receives from his little community and then half heartedly relinquishes the blogging greatness of a GodinCity or a Scobletown, as a nice aspiration; but not a necessary measuring stick of validation for one's existence. An interesting way to put things Lee, I am in Boston thinking that you would be a pretty good guy to do business with if I had the attention span for your business communications training. I’m not sure if this helps but, Hopkinton MA, is the starting point for the big marathon that leads to the big city of Boston :)

Ironically, I think Lee’s post supports a strong case FOR the PR punch of a value blog and for the growing market opportunity for blogging service providers. What I mean by value blog is a blog that adds insight or value to the ongoing conversation, and provides usefullness and ideas to a certain community.

Here’s how I see it… Blogging or podcasting has a low barrier of entry but building a little community of like-minded individuals takes effort, availability and a dedication by the blogger. This work does count for something because it creates an archrival reference point of content for that potential customer to find and view. This content can be a significant differentiator in a cluttered world of spin.

Building a metropolis may have a higher barrier of entry but that speaks to the case for blogs leveling the playing field. If all that it took was a willingness to spend money online, then we'd probably see that someone from Vonage had become an A list blogger by now. Those Vonage guys sure know how to spend on web advertising (but i digress)

The bacteria fighting world of 2.0 tames the hucksters and helps the thought leaders refine their sweet spot within the online conversation. This explaines why the top of the food chain is filled with interesting people that understand how to cultivate a community around ideas. This is what I think it means to blog. If it were so easy for humans or predators to make it to the Galapagos Islands would it still be such an exotic place? The barriers to entry means that the blogosphere is a great breeding ground for the fittest ideas. Anyone can throw their ideas into the mix.

Here's why there is money in them thar hills. Bottom line oriented companies will want the goodies of the blogosphere (which are SEO Rankings, Branding, Thought leadership, Market research) but they will not have the expertise or the manpower to do most of the heavy lifting. I've spoken with a lot of C level folks from big companies and they tell me that they don't want to be left behind on this one. To me that means there will definitely be a market for many of the Marketing and PR blogging folks out there to provide services that help a company become a good corporate blogger, while also being strategic and leveraging the qualified traffic and goodwill. Stonyfield Farm BLOG "Cow"munities! are a great example of a low ticket, high volume consumer products company leveraging the goodwill of value blogging for branding and sales. Now the caveat here is Stonyfield Farms had a great product before blogs came along. The product needs to be good. The blog is not going to sell it for you. You can lead a horse to healthy stories that hit on the target audiences for an organic yogurt company but you cannot make a horse eat yogurt.

If a random company is trying to sell ice to Eskimos, then all the blogging value in the world will not translate into a directly correlated ROI. I think the sweet spot for corporate blogging is for companies who are selling niche high-ticket products with high margin to national or global audiences. Web 2.0 can be a winning marketing and branding strategy.

The question is not if the big bucks will come from blogging and podcasting but when. I think Web 2.0 is still a very new concept with people. Many a CEO has read the BusinessWeek story, Blogs Will Change Your Business, and they’re saying "blogging, pod casts and wikies are great" but I don't think a lot of people really understand why they're great yet. I remember when I first started a blog for a client in 2002, (original site here) I thought it would be great for search engine marketing at that time because it was enabling my customer to produce keyword focused content on a regular basis and I knew that would provide great search engine position results. I had already been in the Internet business since 1995 but I really did not get blogging at that point. I just saw it as a great way to make a few friends and improve search engine rankings. I did not see all the angles. We obviously get it a lot more now but I think 2.0 is in its infancy.

2.0 is in it’s infancy relative to the mainstream. Remember that there was a time when the web was looked at with skepticism. Like it was another ham radio thing. Ten years later we see that the Internet has changed our world, created billions in wealth and has made millionaires out of many (maybe you know some intimately :).

Let me preface this next paragraph by saying I don't believe that blogging is for every company.

Once serious business leaders begin to really get 2.0, many will say 'oh shoot', my company really needs to embrace blogging. Maybe they will start out by trying to do it all on their own. That will be a mistake for many companies because doing blogging RIGHT not only requires writing talent and insight but research, relations, and responsiveness. This is a huge time suck. Show me a CEO that has the time to do all that. When companies realize this, is when 2.0 services companies and maybe even some PR agencies will make big bucks. Is that going to be in 2006? I think to a tip of the iceberg degree, yes.

The Pitfalls of Blogging

For a long time now I’ve been touting blogging as the next big thing in online marketing mainly because of its ability to achieve organic search engine rankings. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm going to be on a NEDMA (New England Direct Marketing Association) panel later this month on The Pros and Pitfalls of Blogging. The session's moderator, Bob Cargill, from A New Marketing Commentator has provied the pannelists and I with some advance notice on the questions. Here's the first one on the list...


What are the pros and pitfalls of blogging?

Through this blog and blogsruvey.backbonemedia.com, John Cass and I have written plenty on the benefits of corporate blogging but possibly not enough on the pitfalls. It’s true. If you aspire for high rankings on your most valuable keywords then blogging can get you there. If you want to make friends with some influential folks and ultimately get some great PR out of it, blogging can do that too. However, this powerful communications tool cuts both ways so before you go off and start your own blog, I think it’s important to understand a few things before you publish your first post.

One thing that you will find once you start reading blogs or blogging yourself is that the blogosphere is made up of some amazing people who are very knowledgeable, curious, and passionate about their general area of interest. Many of them are also great writers. All of them (to my knowledge) are human and so are you. Humans can be friendly kind and respectful, and humans can also be mean jerks looking to take you down a peg just for the sport of it. Humans make mistakes. You need to be ready for that.

I think corporate blogging is about putting your company within the context of relevant online conversations. Just for the record this does not mean pushing your products. I always like to point to Stonyfield Farm's BLOG "Cow"munities! which are four auidence oriented Blogs that discuss strories and topics that their "Cow" mnities care about. This is a great example of how a company can use blogs to connect with their auidence and sell more product without directly pitching it.

If you want to engage in a conversation with people in the blogospher, you will mainly find a blogging culture, a group of humans that are willing to read, listen and respect what you have to say if it adds substance to the conversation. Make a strong point and your blogging community could make you feel like a star by linking to your post and commenting on your idea. That’s the benefit of buzz and PR.

Here’s the potential pitfall, substance or lack there of can be a double-edged sword however. The edgier it is the sharper it can cut in either direction. Dull is just dull. Bloggers are passionate and that can also mean that what you thought was inspired genius was not perceived that way at all. Make a controversial point and you could end up feeling like the blogosphere has turned you into the guy who invented email SPAM. This is usually where people who are not accustomed the critical side of blogging may get turned off. However, the potential of a negative reaction or attack is not something to look at as a pitfall but more as an opportunity. This however, could by your golden opportunity to engage your adversaries in an online conversation and set the record straight and more importantly establish your credibility. This is what’s great about the blogosphere and why people like it. Bloggers are bullshit detectors and they don’t like to spin or be spun.

New England Direct Marketing Association Dishes on Blogging

Here’s an opportunity for anyone who will be hungry for a catered dinner and blogging insight on the night of January 19th 2006. Some leading Boston area marketing and communications experts ( Moderated by Bob Cargill, Founder of A New Marketing Commentator, Panelists: Julie Woods, Executive Vice President of Product Strategy, Cymfony, Ted Demopoulos, Principal, Demopoulos Associates, Steve Ustaris, Associate Media Director, Media Services, Carat Fusion) and I will be participating in an interactive discussion with an auidence of Boston area direct marketers about the pros and cons of blogging.

Bob Cargill, the Moderator has developed a great set of questions for us panelists to answer. The interesting part about this whole thing is that we’re speaking with direct marketers. I would bet that many a direct marketer and advertising exec are trying to figure out how blogs can be used to directly market their customer’s products. In this session, we, the courageous group of panelists will attempt to answer Bob’s provocative questions.

What skill set does an organization need to have in-house in order to publish a blog?

What are the biggest reasons to – or not to – blog?

Why do you think more direct marketers aren’t blogging yet?

How can blogs be used as a marketing research tool?

How can an agency provide blogging services to its clients?

How can a blog be used to sell products and services?

How can a blog help an organization with its search engine optimization strategy?

How will blogs be used in the future?

The reason I say they are provocative is because I think that the majority of bloggers and people who read blogs would agree that blogs should be free of commercialism, with the exception of clearly defied ad insertions down the side of the page or in-between content.

So where does that leave direct marketers. You could apply that question to any Marketing service; Search Engine Marketing companies, Advertising agencies, PR firms. That’s the interesting question here.

I have the answer. Of course you're all welcome to disagree. But I think that the best way to use a blog for advertising, direct marketing, PR or SEO is not to do it with any of these tactics as the primary objective. The primary focus should be on creating a great resource for the audience with which you want to communicate.

I know that some say a blog should not be preachy but if that's how you write then don't try and sound like someone else. Your blog needs to be coming from the right place. No offence to any practitioners of the aforementioned marketing tactics (which I am also one of) but I don’t think a company blog will work if it’s JUST a marketing strategy. Sure keep your SEO keywords close by, and keep your target audience in mind as you write your post and think about how you will directly communicate with your audience once you've established one but don't let these notions keep you from maintaining a blog that keeps your auidence coming back for more.

Now some of you may be saying yea but Steve, you’ve been telling us that corporate blogs are great for search engine rankings, thought leadership and product development and so much more. How are you supposed to do that if you’re not doing it for those results? What I’m saying to you is that if you want to get all the great benefits of blogging you need to be a great blogger. And being a great blogger is not about great SEO or PR or DM or Advertising. It’s about being a great conversationalist within your corner of the blogosphere.

Anyway. I think the night is going to be fun and I’m sure there will be more than a few ruffled feathers before the night is through. That alone will be worth the ticket.

Here’s a link to the blogging event home page at NEDMA.org

Somebody’s got plenty to say about SEO, Online PR and blogging

Hello to all who have subscribed to this blog. Judging by the traffic, there are quite a few of you coming here everyday even though I have not posted anything here since August. Thanks for your interest. Sorry for such a delay in posts. I could run down a long list of reasons, which would all be lame excuses so I’ll just use three of the best ones …

1. Most of the blogging focus has been on our http://blogsurvey.backbonemedia.com blog for the past several months.
   
2. My wife and I had a second child in August. Her name is Sophia and she's the cutest thing but she and her big sister Paige love to keep us on our toes.
3. My other baby. I've been in the process of developing a new corporate blogging services company. Its code name is MediaLogger. We have not gone public with the project yet but we started pitching and taking beta clients in December. Backbone will be officially announcing the new company (which is a strategy / web technology / and ongoing service) sometime between now and the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York City this March 2006. Let me just add that this is not some sort of ghost writing service.
   

Ok, not off the hook yet. I’ll be posting here more often, so go ahead and move this blog up to a higher level in your speed feed reading system.

Enjoy 2006!,
Stephen

Blogging is Better for a Small Company

John Cass, Director of Internet Marketing Strategies here at Backbone recently posted about a conversation we had about whether Blogging is better for bigger companies or smaller companies. While I do agree with much of what John has written in regard to larger companies having more resources to blog, I submit that blogging has leveled the playing field giving smaller companies the opportunity to share the stage and leapfrog ahead of their closely sized (non blogging) competitors. Sure, as John argues, larger companies have great resources in terms of existing customer base and depth of personal. Those are great reasons to blog and big companies should do it too. I don’t think either one of us is saying that blogging is good for small companies and bad for big companies. I think the biggest determining factor of whether a corporate blog is successful is the people who blog not the size of the company. Nevertheless, this is a fun case to argue so I will stick by my statement and try to prove the case even further.

Here’s my line of thinking. In mainstream online and offline advertising, small companies are at a disadvantage because they cannot match the marketing budgets of their “bigger” rivals. However, a savvy company can leverage their ideas to establish thought leadership, improving coverage by journalists and influencers and also develop a great contextual back link network to improve long-term organic search positions. Traffic and coverage from these activities can be parlayed into lead generation and brand equity. A small company can get the benefit of several marketing activities from a single comprehensive corporate blogging strategy.

Since a key currency of blogging is ideas, a small company is not limited by the size of their budget; they are only limited by the importance of their ideas and ability to cogently communicate them through posts on their own blog and through their specific blogging community.

Now, what does it take to have good ideas? A couple of ideas come to mind, and I don’t think large companies hold a monopoly on any of these -- Imagination, research, communications. Good ideas do not develop in a vacuum. The large or small company creating and providing the ideas have to be aware of their surroundings. Otherwise you’re putting forth a good idea that is about six months old, and then you’re not a thought leader, you’re late to the party and that’s possibly worse that not showing up at all. This is the essence of my argument. A small company can beat the bigger company to the punch.

Leaders of a small business need to stay fully aware of their niche. These are not blogging investments; they are all essential qualities and practices for any business leadership. Whether you’re going to blog or not, the key visionaries in your company should have a real sense of how their business fits into the larger picture and how that business may or may not fit into the picture three years from now.

I believe blogging provides a medium for the best ideas to rise to the surface. In my experience small dynamic companies are intensely aware of their niche. Their advantage is also in their ability to react quickly to changes.

Usually big companies have an advantage when it comes to marketing budgets, but with blogging, it’s no secret that the tools needed for blogging are cheap. The real investment needed for blogging comes in the time involved with developing a strategy, monitoring your sphere of influencers, researching and generating ideas. These are activities that any sized company should be doing whether they are blogging or not. So I would not consider it an investment into blogging, it’s an investment into the business. A small company can do this just as well as a large company and apply the intelligence into developing an influential blog if they understand the medium and know who there audience is.

The benefits of blogging are documented in our corporate blogging survey. A key benefit is organic search engine positions, link building that supports search engine marketing efforts. Due to lack of budget, many small companies cannot compete Paid Click for Paid Click in the paid search regime, but they can compete for organic search engine rankings. The act of blogging has been proven to help with organic rankings because focused blogs are search engine friendly publishing engines full of relevant organized content. The culture of blogging supports contextual back linking, which is a strong factor in how a search engine like Google decides on who gets the top search position. So, a small company can blog and get their ideas out into the public while also improving the natural search traffic and link popularity. To me this is an effective use of a small company’s limited marketing resources.

Small businesses have more to gain and less to loose. A large company has many employees, investors and lawyers. Company leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to this group of stakeholders, which can hider the ability to blog. Many companies like Microsoft, Maytag, and Macromedia have dealt with this issue and decided to blog but I’m sure they did that knowing that they are taking some risks. I think that they rightly decided the risks of not blogging were greater than the risks of blogging.

Another advantage that a small company has over a large one is its size. A smaller company theoretically can act quicker to changes because they’re less cumbersome.

Last point (for now) is based on a theory that smaller companies can do more with less and that the measurable gain in terms of annual revenue has a higher probability of being relatively greater for a smaller company. Now I’m sure there is a simpler way to explain that. Here’s another way of saying it -- the relative benefit of a successful corporate blog could be more substantial for a small company. For example, a small company selling a high ticket complex product could pick up two or three new customers in one year and those new business sales attributable (at least in part) to blogging efforts could mean 100% increase in annual revenues for that company. The bottom line is that a small company can gain relatively more, more quickly and they have only time and a bit of face to loose.

John’s argument is essentially that blogs are better for a big company because it’s ‘easier’ for them to do while my argument is that blogging can be more ‘beneficial’ (relatively speaking) for a small company. I’m sure there are at least 40 bullets that we could generate for both sides.

Doing a quick search i found a couple of blog posts to support my case. Carson at Buzzmetrics argues in favor of blogging for a small company vs. big by saying "a small consultancy has an even BIGGER imperative to blog than a big advertiser, given what a great thought leader marketing technique they (blogs) can be." Seth Godin covers Small Vs. Big from a different angle in his post titled Small is the new big. Specificly referring to blogging he writes "Small means you can tell the truth on your blog."

I’d love to hear what our readers have to say on all of this.