I'm a web strategist and aspiring know-it-all with a passion for all things digital. I've worked in PR, advertising and not-for profit industries, and now I run a creative agency. These are the things I think about, and am sometimes compelled to write. More...

Category Archives: Blogging

I’ve been called worse…

Jan 17 2007

I just came across Sean Moffitt’s “Canada’s 1% Blogging Army,” and I have to say, I’m genuinely impressed with the number of Canadian marketing bloggers there are out there. In my research over the past months, I’ve been disappointed with the lack of really good Canadian blogs I could find, but this list gives me hope.

I’m referred to as a “Renaissance man in a PR body,” and I think that’s about the best compliment I could ask for, with the possible exception of Paul Zanettos, who called me “the Jon Stewart of Canadian PR bloggers.” (You have to hover over the link in the sidebar, but I swear it’ s there).

Anyway, thanks for putting together this list, Sean. Hopefully, more dedicated people like you will use their efforts to create a better Canadian blogosphere.

Kids today

Oct 25 2006

I recently did a guest lecture in the school of communications at Carleton University for an advertising class about the change in the mediascape and its impact on advertising. Thing is, across all of the eras of advertising, media, tactics and tone never go away – they’re just replaced as the front runner.

This morning, a former colleague of mine (and the professor of that class) forwarded me an article from Advertising Age that said that young people aged 12 – 24 will never open a print newspaper, own a landline and think email is for their parents. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been said before, and yet the message really goes against the grain.

We’re married to our media of choice. Just as advertisers are married to the 30-second spot, PR people are married to the press release and journalists are married to the printed page, we as consumers are loathe to give up our media of choice, even for a better alternative.

I have a cell phone, and no landline, and so do most of my friends. My parents each have cell phones, a land line and a fax line, and I don’t see them going completely mobile anytime soon.

I’ve seen a number of magazines “transition to online-only formats” in the past six months. Some of them major, some of them fly-by-night. I have yet to see a newspaper make that transition, even though the Web surpasses print for news in every place that print used to rule. Speed of breaking news, depth of coverage, breadth of coverage and portability are all rendered null by online media that has no limit to column depth, no limit to pages, no limit to circulation and for anyone with a web-enabled cell phone, can be accessed anywhere, anytime. Yet, every journalist I know personally has a romantic notion of the printed page. I probably do too.

The first local newpaper to make that transition will cause a major stir.

I think the reason that we are so hesitant to accept a change in the media is that we are comfortable with what we have, even if it’s inferior. It’s the reason RSS adoption is low, it’s the reason that I still have colleagues who refer to blogs as “just another website,” and it’s the reason that many agencies still only think in terms of the 30-second spot.

As professionals, we can’t just jump on the bandwagon of every media trend that comes along, but it’s important to remember that those who accept change have the biggest successes and the biggest failures. Mediocrity is rarely rewarded either way.

Five steps to starting a successful blog

Oct 09 2006

I’ve had a lot of colleagues of mine ask how to go about starting a blog. After helping a few of them get started with varying results, I would have to say that these are the five most important things to keep in mind when starting a blog:

Get your feet wet. I equate becoming a blogger to moving to another country. While in this country you can speak whatever language you like, there is a very specific culture that you have to understand (though, not necessarily follow) in order to be successful. Once you start reading blogs regularly, and more importantly, commenting, you’ll better understand the ethos of the blogging culture, you’ll have an easier time fitting in and becoming part of the conversation.

Worry more about being good than getting traffic. While the blogosphere isn’t exactly a meritocracy, it’s very difficult to be popular without being good. Don’t try to get Seth Godin to link to your site before you get your second post up. Start slow, and build a depth of quality posts before you start aiming for link exchanges. If you’re good, people will recognize you.

Start with success in mind. Okay… this one sounds like self-help pop psychology, but it’s important. Social media is simultaneously easy and virtually impossible to measure. Google Analytics is free, and will give you a depth of stats that would make an economist nervous. For the same reason, it’s very difficult to know if your blog is successful unless you know what success is going to look like from the outset. Is 1,000 visitors a month good? Is 100 RSS subscriptions your goal? Are you trying to move a product, get a job, establish yourself as an expert? Decide that from the beginning, and the rest gets easier.

Write for your audience. The obvious thing to keep in mind is that you need to start a blog with a purpose. If you’re just writing about yourself, then “success” is fairly irrelevant. If you’re writing about your business, your industry, your band, or your upcoming film, you need to decide from the outset the type of content you are going to write about, how often you’re going to write and the voice you’re going to take. If those things are inconsistent or incongruent, you’ll lose your reader, you’ll lose recommendations and your blog will be less successful. Audiences want some level of predictability. If you write about advertising almost exclusively and then start writing about your cat, people will get confused and annoyed. Confused and annoyed readers do not stay around long.

Don’t write cheques your ass can’t cash. A former colleague of mine who works in government relations (code for “lobbyist”) put it best when he said to me, “a blog is like a bird feeder. It might seem like a great idea, but if you can’t keep it maintained, you’re doing more harm than good.” If you’re going to leave the blog sitting static for a month at a time, don’t bother starting it. Blog success is based on momentum. Traffic in motion tends to stay in motion, and once it is at rest, it’s hard to get it going again. Call it the first law of blogging physics, if you like.

These have all been said before my much smarter people than me. Anyone else have anything they’d like to add for neophyte bloggers?

PRWeek to launch editorial blogs

Sep 20 2006

Keith O’Brien at Ubiquitous Marketing (and news editor of PRWeek) announces that starting September 28, PRWeek will be featuring free blogs on its site.

The primary blog will be populated by our entire editorial team, giving our audience a chance to get to know the reporters, editors, production and art editors in a new way.

As someone who spends a lot of his time doing media relations, I think this is great – and I wish more publications did it. It’s a whole lot easier to know what to pitch someone, and more importantly what NOT to pitch them, when you can read them on a regular basis outside the formality of AP style.

If other major publications followed the lead of the few blogging publications, I expect there would be a lot fewer complaints about PR people pitching them stories that don’t fit with their editorial coverage.

What makes a successful blog?

Sep 19 2006

I was watching the special edition of Glengarry Glen Ross this evening, and one of the special features on the disc is an interview between Jack Lemmon and Charlie Rose talking about “success.”

Success, said Lemmon, is usually judged by what others think of you, rather than what you think of yourself. Real success can only gained by defining it for yourself. While this line of argument probably won’t fly with your CMO when he asks if a campaign was successful, I believe it’s still an important point to keep in mind when planning a project like a corporate blog.

Bill Sweetman’s on the Canadian marketing blog OneDegree.ca covers a pretty thorough list of metrics that can be used to evaluate success, but what’s missing from this list is the fact that the value of a blog cannot be measured entirely quantitatively. To me, a large part of the benefit of a corporation taking up blogging is in the necessary cultural change that a (good) corporate blog requires.

Success for a corporate blog is dependent largely on how you as an organization defines success. For some, it may be by the numbers, but blogging is something that can only be quantified to a certain degree.

I met with a colleague of mind today who just launched a blog for the theatre company that he works for. It has mediocre stats by any measure, but has markedly increased the number of patrons who introduce themselves to the Artistic Director on opening night because their goal was to make a position that is usually fairly stale and almost figurehead-like more closely tied to the community of the company.

I’ve had job offers, made friends, dated, and made business connections as a result of blogging. I’d consider this fairly successful… but to be honest, I rarely check my stats, if ever. Technorati can’t measure these things because it’s not part of the standard definition of success.

Success can be an improved marketing culture, it can be the quality of feedback from customers, and it can be business relationships (monetary or otherwise) that come from adopting a philosophy of conversation with your customers, with your market and with your entire community.

The benefits of blogs for organizations can go far beyond mere numbers, and before you can say whether or not a corporate blog is indeed successful, take a page from Jack Lemmon and decide exactly what success means to you. ROI is important, but if that’s your sole reason for taking up a corporate blog, you’re best to stick with something a little more traditional.

The future of blogging and journalism

Aug 02 2006

It’s hard to call anything that has to do with social media and blogging “the truth,” but I think this article from Steven Johnson comes about as close as you can to the truth about how blogging will affect journalism.

Five Things All Sane People Agree On About Blogs And Mainstream Journalism (So Can We Stop Talking About Them Now?)

P.S. I’ve been a bad little blogger lately… will be posting more soon – stay tuned!

Who’s listening – and more importantly, who’s talking?

Jul 18 2006

There has been a lot of talk recently about the impact of the blogosphere on a product or a company. Some accuse bloggers of being rabble-rousing communists drunk on power, hell-bent on making companies run the way they deem fit. Others view it as the responsibility of companies to listen to their individual customers and respond to each of them in kind.

The answer, it seems, lies somewhere in between the two extremes.

The reality of online buzz is that the only way to ensure that nobody talks about your product is to make it completely unremarkable. There’s a reason that nobody talks about their showerhead or their favourite brand of toilet paper online – it’s because nobody talks about it in real life either. As I have said before, there are only two types of people who create buzz about a product online:

Extremely happy people.
Extremely pissed off people.

The only way to get your product talked about is to ensure that your product, your customer service, your advertising or your company in general positively delights or angers your customers. If you have miserable customer service and draconian policies, people are going to hear about it – and likely from Jeff Jarvis.

If, on the other hand, you go out of your way to give great customer service, people are going to hear about it too. They’re probably not going to announce it as often or with as much passion as when you screw up, but if you make enough individual customers happy, you’re going to develop a reputation for making people happy. The same is true for the opposite, though that reputation is not nearly as easy to shake.

So what does that mean for the influence of bloggers? The blogosphere is a brilliant barometer of your success, and one that people are going to check before investing in a relationship with your company. In that respect, the blog influence is huge – bloggers have become global opinion leaders in their respective knowledge circles. Companies need to listen to bloggers, not so bloggers can dictate how business is run, but because they represent a larger community, and will report back to that community how the company really conducts itself.

However, we must always keep in mind that bloggers are not representative samples of a given customer base. Sure, the percentage of bloggers will skew high with various products, but for the average everyday consumer stuff, we have to remember that we are a specific market. Sometimes a little more educated, usually a little more geeky, and seemingly more prone to outrage than the average consumer.

The effect that bloggers cause is for now, short term. Companies that are most affected by blogstorms can easily bounce back, but as more and more casual consumers start to develop their online voice, dusting oneself off after a blog knock-out is going to get more difficult.

At the same time, bloggers must be careful not to tarnish the reputation they have developed. Already, the image of torch-wielding extremists has been conjured by many critics, and if bloggers continue making demands of the corporate world, that image may sap the influence from the blogosphere one boycott at a time.

Just think of how much stock the average consumer puts in activist groups. That’s not what we want to become.

Companies have to remember this – blog buzz as a general indicator of where you stand in the mind of the consumer, but don’t forget about the majority of your consumers who don’t live online.

The blogosphere is a barometer. Ignoring it before you go out to sea could be disastrous. Viewing it as an infallible metric of your customer base, however, may be just as short-sighted.

Dell launches blog, suddenly everyone an expert

Jul 11 2006

Only in blogland would a company launching a blog be considered news, but hey – I’ll admit to being social media nerd, so I’m going to write about it too.

Dell, if you’re unfamiliar, is one of those companies that we PR bloggers are talking about when we refer to clueless old-school companies who are too big and Hell-bent on control to ever enter into a conversation with their market. Apparently, however, there are still some free-thinking communicators with enough sway to convince the company with one of the worst reputations for customer service in the blogosphere to take that leap of faith and start a-bloggin’.

Steve Rubel, Jeff Jarvis and countless others have offered their (actual) expert opinion on how to make the Dell one2one blog work. Dell would do well to heed this advice. I’m not even going to bother putting in my two cents, since the big guys have said pretty well all there is to say.

I’ll tell you what, though – reading through the comments on this thing, I would HATE to be the guy who had to spend his time responding to them. It seems that every self-proclaimed blogging expert in the world has taken it upon themselves to tell Dell what they should do with the blog and how.

Ranging from “drivel” to “such a boring blog” from someone who calls themselves “Microsoft Employee,” to rants about customer service and complaints that Michael Dell himself isn’t writing daily (hint: CEOs are busy) Dell has opened Pandora’s box for customer conversation, and there’s no closing it now.

Here’s how I predict it will play out:
- “Everyone hates us! Let’s start a blog!”
- “Welcome to the blogosphere – here is everything that is wrong with you.”
- “We’re trying! Bear with us as we grow!”
- “Um… yeah… I was trying to download Comet Cursor on my computer, and everything froze. What should I do?”
- “In order to make sure that we can address comments in a timely fashion, we’ll have to moderate them.”
- Blogosphere: “Rabble, rabble, rabble!”
- “We’re trying! Bear with us as we continue to grow!”
- Blogosphere: “Rabble, rabble, rabble!”
- “Everyone hates us even more now. Blogs are failures – let’s go back to shouting at our customers about how great we are.”
- Blogosphere: “RABBLE!!! RABBLE, RABBLE!”

*fin*

Rent this space

Jul 05 2006

I was perusing messages on a public relations message board that I frequent this morning, and someone had asked about "PayPerPost" and whether they should sell their clients on the service to create online buzz.

My answer, and the answer of everyone else who responded was a resounding "NO."

PayPerPost is a service that allows advertisers to provide incentives to bloggers (about $5) to write pre-approved posts about their product. In short, they give bloggers a couple of bucks in exchange for any credibility they may have, turning them into little more than shills. Disclosure is optional, of course, but I sense that most posts that carry "I was totally paid to say this, and don’t believe a word of it" won’t end up in the "approved" pile by most advertisers.

This, to me, is about the worst thing that can happen to blogs. The only reason the blogosphere works is because of transparency, honesty and communal policing. My feeling is that the only bloggers who will bother with these are your run of the mill cat bloggers who nobody cares about anyway. The second a reputable blogger tries this, they will be found out and called out by fellow bloggers, which will be bad for their reputation and bad for the advertising company.

It’s the nature of business, I suppose, to try to make money off any new trend that arises. That’s fine, but it’s degrading the quality of blogs as a true communications medium. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that this service is to blogs as spam is to email, but then… maybe I’m overreacting.

Anyone want to disagree with me?

Highly Effective Blogs

Jun 27 2006

Steve Rubel points to a study by UMass identifying the traits of successful business blogs. Anyone starting a business blog should read this before even registering their domain name.

(Via: Micropersuasion)

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