Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

Hugh Macleod on Why Corporate Blogging Works

Yesterday, I did a little spring cleaning of this site - basically reducing the number of categories that I have on the site - and came across a number of early blogging articles that I had written. One that caught my eye was a very quick post that I did in May 2005, entitled Why Corporate Blogs Work. It featured this diagram by Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void:

And this is what it represents:

• 'Y' is your market or The Conversation
• 'A' represents your company - the suppliers. Hugh calls it the"internal conversation" 
• 'B' represents peopl ein the market who are buying (not making) 

He goes on to further say:

"So each market from a corporate point of view has an internal and external conversation. What seperates the two is a membrane, otherwise known as "x".

Hugh identifies that you want 'A' and 'B' to be as closely aligned as possible. An example he gives is of Apple - the staff and people at Apple love the products and so do their customers - this is alignment. When the two elements are saying different things, this is is misalignment.

He concludes by saying:

"The more porous your membrane ("x"), the easier it is for the internal conversation to inform and align with the external conversation, and vice versa." 

It was right back in 2005 and holds as much weight in 2009.

To Be Digitally Active Or Digitally Passive?

You may have noticed that this site has been regularly updated over the last week - I do believe I haven't missed a day of blogging and even created two blog posts on some days. Like others I suppose I have been Twittering a little too much and neglecting my blogging duties! It is easy to see how this can come about. Tweets are 140 characters in length and take virtually no time to think about or knock out. Blogging, however, requires more thought on the type of article you're going to write, the reason you're writing and the tone you wish to set. 

There are people who don't seem to have taken their eye of the people in this respect; people like Chris Brogan who actively blog and actively tweet. In fact Chris uses his Twitter account to give people a taster of his articles and these blog posts, in turn, are very active in terms of the numbers of people who participate. Other people like Seth Godin purely blog and probably only use Twitter for research or for monitoring.

And as one of Gordon Brown's ministers said some months back, I can see some green shoots coming out of this new approach to blogging. 

Here are some stats which compare this month with last month (like Parliament I have blacked out 'sensitive' data!)

Over a one month period the visitor traffic has gone up by 17.06% which represents quite a significant change.

These visitors are also looking at more pages when they visit. They are probably viewing the blog articles (on home page) but also drilling down.

 There has also been a huge increase in the number of pages that these pages are actually looking at.

As one of the core objectives of Marketing Tom's website is to get people viewing and requesting solutions and training, these are pages which interest me a lot and here you can see some big increases:

I will endeavour to create blog posts, where I can,on a daily basis as I can see that it has made a difference. I have also noticed that Google is spidering the site more frequently. Yesterday, I even noticed that Google had spidered the home page, including an article I published in the morning on that day. 

Often when working on client sites - doing SEO, new articles, press releases and more - I have seen a similar upsurge in traffic. The more relevant information you start uploading to the web, the more noise you create and the more traffic you receive. 

Moral of the story - don't forget to give your blog some love!

Focus On Your Customer's Needs For Online Success

I was just watching the wonderful Mary Portas on the BBC's Mary, Queen of Charity Shops. If you haven't been watching it the series revolves around Mary's attempts to transform charity shops into must-stop-shops on the high street.Throughout the series she has attempted to change the mindset of employees, many of whom are set in their ways and do things because "that's the way we always do things"; change the way the shops look (new refits) and change the way they operate.

In the final episode I was struck by one comment that she made:

We need to make this successful not because of our opinions but because we need to raise money for Save the Children.

This line got me thinking about some of the things that I have often observed and heard from clients, colleagues and friends in relation to digital marketing. Here are some things for you to consider:

The name that you give your product or service is not important, what the client calls it (usually on Google!) is.

The headline you may use for an article is important only when it reflects the words people type in to Google.

You may think Twitter is for twits but there's a good chance your customers are Tweeting about you. Now!

Just because you can navigate around your product ranges, doesn't mean that clients can.

Who cares if you don't use Facebook? You may want to care if your customers are on it.

You may clever click on Google AdWords but some of my customers generate between 50% and 90% of their revenue from it!

It's possible that some customers know all your products and services. It's likely that most don't.

Your company name is worthless to those who don't know it. However, what your company represents is priceless (on Google!).

The bottom line is that when dealing with customers, on or offline, you have to set aside any preconceptions you may have about them or your products. Just deal with the Absolute Truth.

Scoble On Bebelplatz, Marketing Tom On Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is great in that it allows you to stumble across something on an application like

from where you may decide to blog about it,

by putting content such as an image

or text

www.berlinvista.com/Bebelplatz.html has more on the 25,000 books burned in the Bebelplatz. On the memorial is a plaque that reads "this is just the beginning. Wherever books are burnt, people are burnt too" from the poet Heinrich Heine whose books were among those incinerated.

The memorial is a plate of glass in the ground through which you view this room with empty bookshelves. Very powerful reminder of what took place there.

and thus take the comversation to another part of the web.

[Image and text taken from Robert Scoble's Scobleizer photstream on Flickr]

When Technology Fails You

Even though August in the UK is "set to be wettest in 100 years", visitors to this blog will have seen that there has been a bit of a blog drought. Many apologies - I have been away on holidays and didn't touch a PC. I did take my Blackberry though and thought that I could blog articles from it. It looks like the TypePad application I downloaded for it had some bug in it or could it just have been the sangria!

Anyway, this is my first attempt at 'moblogging' and I thought I'd share it with you:

This is quite exciting as it is my first blog post from a Blackberry. Having had a couple of problems with the first Typepad App I downloaded, it now seems that everything is working properly (if you can read this it does work!).

I am now on holidays in Spain and aside from enjoying the break, have had a chance to catch up on some reading. Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, offers a fascinating look into what companies can achieve, and have been achieving, with the latest social technologies. Instead of just detailing all the tactical tools available to marketers, it also assesses when, or even if, companies should be considering them.

Freakonomics is a book which reminded me very much of the Tipping Point and the Wisdom of Crowds. It offers an alternative view of economics and the authors try to unravel how some statistics - including abortion rates, drug deals, cheating and parenting - may have come about.

I have also found some good statistics - courtesy of .net magazine - which I will use on my courses. Here's a fascinating one - Google's share of the UK market is 87.3% and 17000 copies of Firefox were being doaoaded per minute at its peak on 'Download Day'.

I'd better fire off an email to TypePad to find out what I can do next.

Congratulations To Gower Surf

Simon Jayham is passionate about surfing, he also loves to write about it on his blog and this combination has brought him more peer recongnition (he regularly features on news sites, like the Times Surf Blog). Just last week Simon's weblog, SurfGSD, became a TypePad Featured Blog - if you're a TypePad blogger, this is indeed the badge that  will put a smile on your face! Over the years Simon has managed to combine blog articles with , YouTube videos, Flickr photos and even slideshows on Slide. His site is a nice mixture of articles about places he's visited (Hawaii, Madeira, Portugal), surf stories from around the world, things that interest him - rugby, Glastonbury, local stories - and obviously his own surf school - Gower Surf.

It's quite pleasing for me as I introduced him to blogging and TypePad when he came on my eMarketing Award course a couple of years' back. More importantly for Simon it looks like he now has a new buddy at TypePad Headquarters in San Francisco who is a keen surfer!

Well done Simon!

Mobile Marketing Through Blackberry

I got a Blackberry 8320 device last month and am quite excited about some of the things that I can do with it. Many of the things I have been able to do with other mobile devices though, in most cases, have never bothered to try out.

I haven't used Twitter too much of late but am now starting to get into it and have set myself a target of a 'twit' a day! Though I will have to be careful about using it when watching the football or after a beer, having read somewhere last week that you can easily damage your 'brand' through Twitter in a drunken moment! I suppose that Blackberrys and beers shouldn't be mixed.

I must admit that the best thing so far about the Blackberry is the push email facility, which allows me to receive emails from my main business email address instantly. It means I can respond to important emails as they arrive, throughout the day. In addition, I am able to view all manner of attachements that are sent through to me and, likewise respond straight away. It is a little addictive, though!

I was quite a heavy user of the Gmail app on my last phone but have now managed to pretty much move all email contacts over to my @marketingtom.com email address. However, I still regularly check emails through the Blackberry and still get enquiries for Madrid tours (a little sideline of mine) on it. Unlike the old phone the most recent emails appear to be 'pushed' to my phone.

TypePad is the only application that so far I have been unable to get working properly - the application says that there is some sort of network problem. I am sure though, that once I get it sorted, it will prove to be my favourite Blackberry app. The issue I had with doing articles from a mobile device previously was the keyboard - the qwerty keyboard I now have doesn't raise that issue.

I've also added some of my favourite RSS feeds to the browser application within Blackberry and can now read my favourite blog articles from pretty much anywhere. This is neat - especially if you're trying to kill time when standing in a queue at a bank or the supermarket!

So far, I have been mightily impressed by this little device. I can now take my office with me and ensure that clients and colleagues get quick responses to their queries through email. It also means, once I get TypePad sorted, that I can update my blog, add new twits and keep my Facebook profile up-to-date. How did I ever live/work without it before?

See Also
Filing From Flock

Embedding - A Great Way of Bringing Your Other Channels Into Your Blogging Hub

At present there's a bewildering array of Web 2.0 applications, social networks and social bookmarks available on the web, everything from Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook to Odeo, Digg, Basecamp and YouTube. I sometimes wonder how some people keep track of where they're at or where they should be throughout the day.

The way that things are tending to go is that companies have their social side and then they have their business side. At its most simplistic level, the social side builds community and develops loyalty - it often is the area that creates the leads; and the business side is just that - the place where people go to buy, view products, learn and enquire, etc. The social side is the one that interests me and the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that companies need to firstly develop a blogging hub and then create social experiences which can be plugged into the blog. These experiences are basically a way of taking the conversation over to another neighbourhood, whilst still keeping a close eye on it.

Quite often it's possible to create a conversation (or borrow a conversation) and embed it straight into your blog - thus offering visitors a media experience which differs from the usual text and photos. Here are some examples of embedding that you may want to consider for your blog:

YouTube
Most bloggers when they experiment with embedded media will generally start by using YouTube.  Take a look at what Blendtec did to demonstrate the durability and quality of their products.

Flickr
More and more people (and businesses) are starting to appreciate the reach and power of Flickr. Here's a selection of images from a Flickr set (http://flickr.com/groups/11604231@N00/pool/tags/sixnations) which are displayed as a slideshow:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Odeo
If you'd like to create a link to your favourite podcast, then why not consider Odeo, which also allows you to customise your Odeo player.

powered by ODEO

SlideShare
If you would like to share your business or personal presentations online, it may be worth considering SlideShare. The presentation below is a favourite of mine as it combines both pictures and sound.

| View | Upload your own

Google Maps
And what list would be complete without Google? (Here's a map of my hometown!).

View Larger Map

Observer Publishes 50 Most Powerful Blogs But ...

OK, so they've got Techcrunch, Kottke, Engadget, Boing Boing, Gaping Void and Chocolate and Zucchini but I can't see how some of the others rank in the listing of 50 Most Powerful Blogs. There is no Seth Godin, Steve Rubel, Search Engine Land, Google Blog, Matt Cutts, Slashdot, Lifehacker or Guy Kawasaki. All of the latter are the really powerful blogs which have a much bigger influence on their own sphere of business.

Some Reasons Why Businesses Should Blog

The Headline TypePad Customers In The News just caught my attention as I was about to open my TypePad account to write another article. The folks over there have come up with a brief list of weblogs that have hit the headlines over the past week.

Here are some good reasons why businesses should blog:

"BusinessWeek highlighted Dover Canyon Winery in an article about small businesses that blog. The article mentions that the winery's "Mail-order sales have almost doubled in the past year, and the blog is an inexpensive way to reach the growing number of online buyers."

and

The LA Times also ran a couple of articles featuring TypePad blogs. One, an article about food blogging (requires login) and how food critics blog their critiques rather than use print publications, includes the TypePad blog Restaurant Girl."

whilst

The New York Times ran a story about how small businesses are starting their online presence with blogs rather than Websites. The article includes an interview with Jody DeVere, the president of AskPatty.com, about her TypePad blog of the same name. In the article, DeVere says, “Our blog has been the driving force of our branding effort and become the way we find our readers and our customers.”

It's always good to find new examples which reinforce why businesses should blog.