Blogging for Business

Ali Luke from Ali Ventures (@aliventures) spoke about using blogging as a business first. I found this really useful, as I’m hoping to have a company blog on our website – and the tips she gave will actually make a real difference to what I’m trying to do. The points she made were:

• ‘Blog’ can confuse people – try ‘articles’ or something like that instead. Dependent on your audience and what impression you want to give of it
• Use familiar technologies – RSS by email, as most people aren’t aware what RSS is. Use feedburner to utilise the technology whilst not scaring people away if they don’t understand. Also, use Facebook to attract comments by posting a link there – people are comfortable with it and use it as a medium already, so use it!
• What’s in it for them – make it useful so they’ll keep coming back, will link to it etc. Make it informative, so they want to read it. I would also say that if possible an action at the end would be hugely beneficial – but not always possible/feasible/worthwhile any further than making a comment
• Quality not quantity – don’t blog once a day because you’ve decided you should. Just do it when you have something interesting/useful/beneficial to say. It’s better to leave them wanting more. People are likely to unsubscribe if they get a load of uninteresting material, which defeats the purpose!
• Avoid advertising – it looks unprofessional
• Write for other blogs – you’ll get traffic and links by doing this

I love the point about quality not quantity – it’s exactly what I think about social media. Say something because it’s interesting, not because of a timetable.

Five ways to drive business using social media (instantly)

Marcus Taylor of SEOptimise (@MarcusATaylor) spoke about driving business using social media. He first explained that that’s not the point, and not how you should do it, but that there are a few simple ways to boost traffic (and hopefully sales) to your website. The ROI is not as obvious as with traditional marketing, as it’s all about building conversations and engagements. His five top tips (based on having 1 month to improve the bottom line) were:

• Use Twitter search to listen and act on opportunities. There are some advanced search tips on how to do things like preventing links in your results, so you don’t get other people’s advertising etc. There used to be an advanced Twitter search, for those who don’t know the protocols for advanced searching (or are too lazy to remember them!), but that seems to have vanished recently.
• Social event networks (e.g. MeetUp) – you can sponsor meetings and offer perks, which will get you traffic if you target it at the right groups.
• Video marketing around keywords – creating a video on key terms means you’ll rank in Google and in YouTube. You can use a service like Tube Mogul to distribute to the main video channels, so you get even better coverage
• Facebook landing pages to drive leads – give them a way of getting money off if they like you on Facebook. You can track these so you know where the sales are coming from
• Reach out to bloggers in your niche and involve them – ask them a question they can answer for you and build on those. You both get exposure to each others’ contacts, so it’s win-win.

I’d never heard of Tube Mogul before, so I’ll definitely be exploring that option – an easy way to get videos put up in different locations suits me!

Q&As – the answers

It’s more important to monitor trends than to monitor ROI – then you can learn what is and isn’t working and develop your strategy based on that. But don’t be too prescriptive because of it – you don’t want to miss out on something in one place because you’re putting all your effort somewhere else

Blogging is best somewhere between planned and not: you want to make sure you don’t slip and not do it enough, but you don’t want to be over-prescriptive and stifle your creative juices and end up posting boring posts for the sake of posting. If you’re stuck for inspiration try doing ‘this week’s Q&A’ or ‘link day Friday’ to show you have your finger on the pulse without having to think as hard about what to say

WordPress is the recommended tool for blogging (made me feel good that it’s the one I chose!). You can have it hosted on WordPress or on your own site, and it’s easier than most to change it at a later date. Blogger is very user-friendly, but less flexible and less powerful.

Articles seems to be the most popular alternative to Blog – but use the language of your customers. Try looking at what they refer to it as and use that.

If you’re stuck for ideas for blogs, try visiting larger blogs – even if they’re not relevant to your blog. You might get some ideas of the sort of headlines that prove interesting to readers, that sort of thing. Change the name from ‘Top 10 gardening tips’ to ‘Top 10 x tips’ and all you have ot do is write the text (easier than having to think up the subject too).

Summary

As usual, this was a great event. I talked to a few different people who were all there for different reasons, but the main one was the lack of anything else like it in the area. People are willing to travel a distance to get to these events, which proves the need for something like that.

There are plans afoot for a conference some time next year, so it will be interesting to see how that pans out. I’m already looking forward to that and the next meeting!

What is happening in London and other cities is terrible – I completely feel for the people whoa re suffering at the hands of the rioters and whose lives and livelihoods will be or have been negatively impacted by what has and is happening. But there’s so much more to it than that…

It’s all well and good saying the rioters are ‘stupid’, ‘ignorant’ and so on – but have those of you who are so quick to denigrate them considered that maybe, just maybe, there’s a reason that trying to burn down the city seems to them to be a logical thing to do? Maybe they don’t have your sky-high IQ, but they’re still human beings whose reasons should be considered as well as their actions. Because they do have reasons, and they’re not actually just ‘cos we felt like it’. If it was, this sort of thing would happen a lot more often than it does!

So maybe, rather than just complaining about how they’re all idiots and should (yes I saw it) have their hands chopped off, we should be trying to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing (and no, probably for a lot of them, the shooting is not relevant) so that we can learn from that and make changes if we can so that this sort of thing stops, and doesn’t happen again.

Criticising them won’t get us anywhere – understanding them just might.

This is a summary of the main points that I came out of the session with:

Search and SEO

- Page 1 gets approx. 88% of the clicks

• Searchers don’t go past page 1, they change their search terms
• the top 3 get 70% of the clicks

- Majority of the traffic (50-70%) is from search

- You should optimise different pages for different keywords

- Keywords need to balance the:

• Number of visitors (make sure there’s enough)
• Relevant to customers (what they’re looking for, what they’re searching for)
• Right commercial intent
• Realistic competition (make sure it’s not too great) – do a phrase search to check the number of competing pages (<30k = low, 30-100k = medium, >100k = high)

- Need other people with good reputations to link to you

• The more you can influence a link, the less it is taken into account

SEO

- 1 keyword per page is better, more focussed

- Optimise by page, not by site

• If they get straight to the right page, they’re less likely to bounce. It’s unlikely someone will want your homepage
• Google ranks pages, not sites

- Optimise the:

• Title of the page (Include keywords, and preferably only keywords)
• URL to include keywords
• Meta description (what search engine shows as the summary)
• Headings
• Opening paragraph, body text, closing paragraph
• Images (alt tags for the visually impaired voice software, but also picked up by search engines)
• Links from other pages (blogs, press, news sites, forums)

- It’s all about helping the search engine work out what your page is about

Social Media

- Treat it as you would face-to-face networking

• you don’t go and shout at people about what you do and why you’re so good there, so why do it online?!

- Mindset:

• No pitching
• Participate
• Add value (show what you know and people will ask you for help if they perceive you as knowing what you’re doing)
• Be transparent

- Find information to share

- Monitor your area of expertise/retail to show you know the marketplace/latest happenings etc.

Blogs

- Great for SEO for your website!

• Having a blog tells Google your site is alive and means it will check back to see if anything has changed

On-site v. off-site

• More powerful if it’s on your own website
• off-site means the hosting site gets the indexing benefits
• off-site means you can add links onto your site

- Do as much as you can cope with

- Regularity is better

- It doesn’t have to be a thesis (either in content or length!)

• People tend to prefer short and sweet online

Forums

- Find where your customers congregate

- Post regularly, build reputation to earn your right to sell

Video

- It doesn’t have to be a film of you, it can be slides with a voiceover

- Amazon S3 is an alternative hosting site, where you control the content more

• You don’t have to have the YouTube ‘try this’ type content at the end of the video

- You can use animoto.com to produce your own videos

LinkedIn

- Build connections

- Join groups and engage

- Optimise your profile – use keywords here as well

- Can export contacts to Outlook

Twitter

- It’s a way of relating to people

- It’s not just for self-promotion; more about helping others and joining in conversations

Facebook

- Much more of a business tool now that they have included pages, and made it more business-focused

- Facebook social plug-in tools for websites

- Facebook Insights

• Traffic, demographics

- Can now embed any website page within a Facebook page

I feel like I today attended an event remotely for the first time. There have been previous events where I’ve followed the goings-on via Twitter etc., but NESTA’s event today was organised really well, so it felt like I didn’t have any disadvantage from not actually being there (apart from the occasional slight technical glitch).

Social media – a force for good?

In case you’re not aware of this, it was an event where Stephen Fry, actor, journalist and celebrity ‘Tweeter’ and self-confessed technophile; Biz Stone, Founder and Chief Executive of Twitter; and Reid Hoffman, Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn discussed the phenomenon of social media and its future impact (I stole most of that from NESTA’s web page about the event: http://www.nesta.org.uk/assets/events/social_media__a_force_for_good).

Keep it simple!

This event didn’t try to use any fancy technology, there was no logging in, it was all extremely simple: all you had to do was go to the web page and watch the live, streamed video! The great thing about this was that it meant I could easily open Twitterfall in another window (the easier to keyboard-shortcut it between the two) and follow what people were saying, both those at the event, and those following remotely like me.

I’ve heard of events being held in SecondLife, but that tends to crash my machine, or I can’t find where I want to go, and this was ridiculously easy to join in. I wouldn’t actually have minded having to register to get to the page, so they know who attended (although my tweets probably gave that away!).

Accesibility

I hope they chose this method because a large proportion of people won’t be allowed to access Webinar websites, or download software to their machine. Hopefully, most people should have been able to access this, even if they have a lot of websites blocked. I’m very lucky to have unrestricted computer access in my company, but I know that a lot of places put so many restrictions on access that even some work-related activities are impossible.

I’ll take this lesson away as one that UKeiG, or Oxford Innovation, could use in future. You don’t need to use fancy technology or anything like that – just a video connected to the website (which I’m sure is more complicated than it sounds!).

At last – content!

Well, what did they say? Because of the nature of the event, I think there was a lot said for the time it took! Rather than being speakers sermonising at you, they had a really interactive session, with lots of questions and answers. For me, the main points that I thought were of interest were (and I apologise for not being able to say who said what – it all happened so fast!):

• Twitter comes from a mobile DNA, and as technology and Twitter develop, it will probably revert to its roots again
• We don’t know where twitter might be going, or what competition might develop, but if you spend too long looking in the rearview mirror, you’ll drive off the road.
• The value of Twitter is that it is personal, it comes from people. It can (and does) have value in a business context, but that comes from the people you interact with on it.
• There are many ways the internet reflects more general human nature, with the same ebbs and flows from open groups, gradually becoming more closed and going open again. It’s like the way we used to roam the land freely, then gradually enclosed sections, created villages that became towns that became cities. the people decide they want to be more free again. Our interaction on the internet mirrors that
• They discussed the validity of just listening to sycophants over and ignoring our enemies. I think that listening to your detractors can have more power than your sycophants – it will teach you how you can improve and grow
• Twitter learnt from the images showing campuses, where the pavements weren’t where people actually walked; they left an ‘open campus’ and are paving where people are walking (of course, whether they pave in the right places is still debatable, given the uproar over the beta ReTweet update!)
• Stephen Fry doesn’t tend to read blog comments, because they’re people who want to be heard to be nasty, people who are vitriolic. I’m not sure this argument is completely valid, as the comments can be where you get fascinating discussion, but the people who leave comments will tend to be people with strong opinions, and this can spill over into rudeness that is unnecessary
  
• 25% of Tweets have an outside link, so Twitter is being used to discuss already-created news a lot. I think this could be more an indication that a lot of people are using twitter as another way to publicise their own blog, which is quite different! But not a bad thing
• Politicians have an opportunity to be honest and open on twitter and allow us to trust them again by hearing from them without the spin from their press office, or from the newspaper’s spin.
• Someone asked whether Twitter is reducing literacy levels – Stephen Fry pointed out that Byron used text-esque abbreviations, since paper was so expensive as to be prohibitive! He reasoned (this may be slightly my interpretation of what he said) that there are some people who delight in making the modern world seem inferior to the idols of the past simply by not being the same. He also believes the stereotypes of modern ‘youth’ are rubbish anyway!

Summary

So, what did I learn from this? Not a lot in practical terms, but I feel that it was well worthwhile listening in. The speakers were interesting and had a lot to say in an intelligent way, the audience asked interesting questions, and there were some insightful thoughts on what social media can bring and where it might be going. I’ll be looking out for events from them in the future, and events that are run like this, as it worked so well!

The only thing I think could be improved was the focus on Twitter – the event was branded as being about social media, but that seemed to translate as Twitter. I assume because Twitter’s founder was there, as the recent brouhaha about Stephen Fry’s Twittering (or lack of it). The event only last an hour and a half, so they couldn’t talk about everything, but it did feel sometimes like a discussion on the merits of Twitter!

NESTA have put the video on the website (http://www.nesta.org.uk/assets/events/social_media__a_force_for_good), so if you missed it, you haven’t missed your opportunity!

Elizabeth Elford

Elizabeth is responsible for marketing at the British Library, and she had some really useful insights. A lot of them were things that are fairly obvious, but sometimes you need someone to point them out first!

She talked about RSVP: Relationships, Strategy, Value and Professional. These included things like getting people involved to get buy-in, developing a message for the detailed strategy to hang off, persuading people of the value of what you’re selling, making sure it looks REALLY good.

She also talked about social media – something I am most definitely a believer in, so she didn’t have to convince me of its value! She cited the example of a woman who started a group on Facebook in disgust at M&S pricing larger bras at a higher price, and drove them to do an about-turn and remove the price difference. now that’s powerful stuff!

Elizabeth’s suggestion was to supplement traditional methods with these new methods – so as well as a traditional press release, why not send a link to an electronic press release, which has video and photos, so they already have their quote, photo and information ready to go straight into an article.

Social media has to have the same principles as traditional press, but I think people find it easy to forget this. I treat anything that goes onto any of these platforms as public information, and assume that anyone and everyone will be reading (since they can). But I can see how it could be easy to forget and think you’re just talking to your friends. But you have to keep it:

• Credible
• Consistent
• Responsive
• Integrated (make sure all your communications in various places have the same basic message)
• Civil (you’re an ambassador for whatever you’re representing, even if it’s just you on some platforms).

Rest of the day

We spent the rest of the day working on practical examples of how we would market an event. As the group I was in was given a 2-day conference, I volunteered using the UKeiG Conference from June as an example, to make sure we didn’t have to invent a whole new event as well as our marketing strategy!

Using some of the ideas from the day and some suggestions from Kathy Ennis and Lyndsay Rees-Jones, the organisers, we came up with some interesting ideas not only for the marketing, but further ideas on how the conference itself could have been tailored to attract different, additional audiences.

Summary

On the whole, the day was really interesting and worthwhile.I took some useful ideas away, and made several notes throughout the day about things i should do in my UKeiG role.  So I might be asking other committee members for help – be afraid, be very afraid!

The day was well organised, and the fact that we got to meet and chat with other professionals is always a bonus. especially when you already have the common fact of being committee members to give you something to talk about! Kathy and Lyndsay were very helpful, and had some useful ideas to contribute.

I also got to meet Jo Alcock (aka Joeyanne Libraryanne), who I have been following via RSS feeds and Twitter for a while now!

So, who knows what this will be about – hopefully information-type stuff, and web 2 stuff (to use the technical term!), but we’ll see!