Your Social Media Toolbox: Blogs
- Filed under: Blogs, Social Media
- Date: Jun 30,2009
Blogs Are Here To Stay
Blogs prove to be more than a passing fad; they aren’t going away. They’ve become your most important tool for engaging the Social Media conversations surrounding your personal or corporate brands.
Blogs became a popular choice for communication because they satisfy one basic human need: our need for self-expression. Self-expression used to be private - you kept a personal journal, snapped photos at a family function, or painted a picture. Or, Self-expression was difficult – you struggled to sell and promote a book you wrote.
Self-Expression Made Easy
Now, as technology progresses, you can go public with your personal creations both quickly and easily; you can use lulu.com to publish your own hardbound books – they even provide you with an ISBN so people can order your book from anywhere in the world. In fact, that’s how blogs started; they were a public platform on which to publish your personal thoughts. Most early blogs were personal journals we published publicly to keep our friends and family updated on our current situation.
A Good Source For Reliable Information
Today blog posts read more like excerpts from a technical publication than a personal journal. Powerful voices have emerged, transforming the blogoshpere into a source of reliable information. Consumers seek out credible blog authors for purchasing guidance, trip advice, technical know-how, and news. New authors enter the conversation and contribute their own unique voice; as a result the quality of communication continues to improve.
Blogging remains a popular form of communication because we can distribute our thoughts, to millions of people, quickly and cheaply. You can garner a lot of attention by having your blog posts voted for on sites like Digg or Sphinn. You can publish your articles on sites like Helium or Gather or your videos on sites like Youtube. You can join blogging communities like MyBlogLog and share your blog posts with people who have similar interests. Even sites like Myspace and Facebook encourage users to update their profiles with a blog feed.
Conversation is a Two-Way Street
People can provide you with instantaneous feedback through your blog site. Now we see many companies using blogs to unveil new product concepts to their customer base. Customers can reply directly to the blog post providing the company with instant evaluations. Dell’s ideastorm takes this approach a step further by allowing users to vote on ideas to improve the companies’ products; Dell then implements the most popular ideas. The commentary on your blog post doesn’t stop at the feedback section of your blog site.
At their core blogs enable relationships. They promote feedback; there is a comment section at the bottom of just about every blog post, and they encourage citation. Blogging is about sharing ideas and one of the unwritten rules of blogging is: you can cite my idea, paraphrase it, remix it, or do just about what ever it is you want as long as you link back to me.
Links: The Currency of The Internet
Links are important. Interlinking creates relationships between blog authors and forms the blogoshpere - an intricate web of blog posts that connect to one antoher via HTML hyperlinks. It is a lot like “ill scratch your back if you scratch mine”. Blog authors will link to your blog post if they find it interesting; likewise they expect you to acknowledge their . The link is like a vote for your blog and the more votes your blog receives the larger your reputation becomes.
Listening 101
You can use blogs to bring your message to your target audience. First, you should listen to the conversations going on in Social Media. Read the blogs and message boards that talk about your company or target market. Think of it as joining a conversation between several people, you wouldn’t want to jump right in without first listening to the topic of discussion.
To help you locate the conversations worth listening to you can use Google Blog Search and Technorati – both are excellent free tools with powerful search options.
Locate the influential blog authors in your field and bookmark their RSS feeds (Google Reader is an excellent RSS aggregator); keep up with their daily topics of discussion even if they don’t directly pertain to your brand.
There are some professional brand monitoring services out there like Buzzlogic, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, and TNS Cymfony which do most of the heavy lifting for you and then aggregate the information they collect into a tidy user interface. Of course, these services can come with a hefty price tag. Several monitoring services also provide sentiment monitoring. This amazing bit of technology automatically discerns the disposition of a comment or forum post. A simple example: a forum post contains your brand name and “sucks” or “not good”; instead of scanning hundreds or thousands of comments for signs of unrest you are immediately alerted to this forum post for review.
Join The Party
Your next step is to start commenting on blogs, industry websites and forums. You expect feedback on your blog posts so you should start by contributing to the community. More importantly, authentic and insightful comments go a long way in building your reputation as an industry expert. Also, once you have your blog up, a well placed comment can guide new readers to that fresh blog post you just published.
After that, Start your own blog! Need Help? We can help.
