Their title, not mine. But the truth is that most blogs out there – especially business and corporate blogs – aren’t doing such a great job. If yours is one of them, have a look at this from Dan Reimold, writing at MediaShift. It’s about a student newspaper blog, but I suspect the conclusions he reaches apply to a lot of other blogs, as well.
Category Archives: blogging
Upon reflection: was I too hard on The Blog Council?
Last week I joined a legion of business bloggers in poleaxing the shizizzle out of a self-satisfied new project called The Blog Council. Josh Catone of Read/WriteWeb stomped them. Dave Taylor, who’s probably forgotten more about blogging than the entire council put together knows, took them to school. Robert Scoble – another guy who knows a thing or two about blogging – explains why he’s skeptical. Jordan McCollum goes door-to-door on some of the group’s players. Mike Moran prays that it’s all just a big mistake. And so on.
Then Jake McKee comes along and explains that all us “experts” don’t get it. In fact, our failure to get it proves that the Blog Council is right in doing things behind closed doors. Continue reading
A great new how-not-to resource for business bloggers
When a new innovation comes along, corporations typically follow a predictable arc. First there’s the “Ignore It” phase. Then, once it becomes clear that it’s actually important, they dive into the “Getting It All Wrong” phase. The first step in Getting It All Wrong is “pretend that the new thing works like all the old things.”
Eventually they get past these early “ballistic podiatry*” activities and begin to figure things out, although there’s often a step, which falls late in Getting It All Wrong, called “Hire a Consultant Who Was Successful at Other Things But Barely Knows More Than You Do About The New One.” Sometimes these outside hitters have read a book, but mainly they rely on the tendency of executives to overgeneralize about prior successes.
Which brings us to The Blog Council, Continue reading
S&R hits significant milestone: you, too, can be a social media star
On April 16 some colleagues and I launched Scholars & Rogues, a team blog covering politics, media, art and literature, culture, sports – really, we wanted to cut a pretty broad swath through our readers’ lives, and whether you agreed or disagreed (heck, we don’t even agree with each other all the time), we wanted to encourage thinking and intelligent discussion. Continue reading
Customer service: the “desk jockey” past vs. the “service ranger” future
I’m reading Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba’s Citizen Marketers on a friend’s recommendation. A lot of folks in his agency are starting to tweak on social media and this highly regarded (and extremely readable) examination of viral and customer-generated marketing activity is guiding a good bit of their thinking and questioning. Good on ’em – a lot more companies need to be exploring these issues, as well.
My only complaint so far really isn’t about the book, which is a very worthwhile read, so much as it is a general idea that all this online activity, and corresponding company attention to it, is a very new thing. To some extent this is true, of course – as I note above, it’s not like engaging the blogosphere and the “citizen marketer” is something that a lot of companies are doing, and even fewer are doing it effectively. I guess I’m frustrated because I’ve been carping on this for years and haven’t seen the kinds of uptake and results that I know are possible.
Here’s an example. Continue reading
Pimping the Dog
Show, don’t tell: of blogs and splash pages
You may have noticed something a little different about the Black Dog page. It’s the landing spot for my business, but it’s also a blog. The blog isn’t hanging off a link – it’s the center of attention.
I’m not the first person to do this, but it’s extremely rare. I heard some reservations from people I asked to advise me, too. Landing pages are supposed to tell the visitor right away what you do. Landing pages can’t be cluttered. Never put your opinions up front. All sound advice from a traditional perspective. And it may turn out that this is a bad idea.
However, if the Black Dog brand is about innovation and unconventional, and if it’s going to have things like online PR and social media marketing as a centerpiece, it makes sense that I should show, not tell. Continue reading
Redfin – a case study in the value of openness
In my last post I talked about how the Internet can be your online PR friend if you understand how it works and let go of the fallacious idea that you can control it. Now Shelley Jack at Ripple Effects Interactive in Pittsburgh forwards along a Wired story I had missed about how one company turned near-catastrophe into what looks like a major success.
Last year, [Glenn] Kelman was the newly hired CEO of Redfin, an online brokerage firm that was, as he puts it, “the ugly red-haired child” in the real estate world. Continue reading
wordSmith | Writing / Content Marketing 