To promote the fact I’ll be speaking at the next Maine Innkeeper’s Conference, the group asked me to write an article on blogging for their newsletter. (PDF, 1.3MB)

There’s also an article in there on podcasting as well.

What site has atrocious design, usability issues, a frustratingly restrictive web page creation platform, and countless junk/spam/abandoned profiles, yet the highest number of pageviews out of any other site? Why, MySpace of course!

MySpace.com is a slice of humanity – a very big slice. With tens of millions of users (and most of them NOT teenagers), MySpace apparently drives more traffic to online retailers than MSN Search, according to some recent Hitwise data.

MySpace is a site that should concern retailers and business bloggers alike. It’s where our audiences hang out.

The MySpace ecosystem is host not just to teenagers, but also concerned parents trying to keep tabs on their kids, college students, obsessed sports fans, realtors, and every one else in between. And companies too, from bars to bands, brands to quirky dotcoms.

Before you go off half-cocked with your MySpace marketing initiatives, you need to understand it. Just like with the blogosphere, the MySpace community can turn on you the moment you make your first misstep. So rule #1 is ‘keep it real’.

Another one of the critical factors is having ‘Friends’ in your network. For instance, Apple’s iPod Nano registered 1,500 friends on October 15; by October 27 that had risen to 37,070 friends. Nice marketing job Apple!

“Weird Al” Yankovic breathed new life into his musical parody career, thanks in no small part to MySpace and YouTube. On MySpace, Weird Al has accumulated 420,000 MySpace friends since he joined the site in July last year (I chronicled this a bit more here).

I interviewed Michael Boldin at Pugster.com, who has been using MySpace to generate traffic, sales, and a very respectable 8,000 friends. He shared several great tips for cultivating friends on MySpace, among them:

• When starting out, you need to get friends, even “bad” ones that tally up to a respectable number on your friend list. Start with bands; they are really easy, as they always grant Friend requests.
• Have patience. Invest time. Give people something interesting that isn’t related to your business. Develop trust.
• Keep it personal – just like emailing a friend.
• Fancy and high end vs. simplicity, school’s out on layouts, but don’t frustrate your visitors by moving stuff around.
• Seasoned MySpace users won’t wait for content to load, so no slow loaders.

More MySpace marketing tips here

This morning I wrote a post on my blog called “Bush No Longer a Miserable Failure, Claims Google.” It was in reaction to Google’s new algorithm that defuses “Google Bombs.”

At the bottom I linked to the post on Google’s blog that goes into more detail about what they did and why. (Whoops! I did it again!)

At the bottom of the post they have a section called “Links to this post” which has…wait for it…links to that post.

About a third of my traffic so far this morning is from that Google post, obviously from the blog’s readers.

Caveats:

• A spike in traffic is not the same thing as a spike in business.
• Don’t link to the Google blog unless you’re adding to the conversation.
• I’m not seeing a hard coded link to my blog from this page, so you’re probably not gaining any PageRank.

This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten this reaction from linking to Google’s blog. To make the most out of it, you probably want to get your link in their early, while there’s still a lot of people coming to that post.

Alternatively, you could link to it late, and hope few people link after you, pushing you down the list.

Like any other technique, this is easily abused. Use it only for good, my young padawan.

Sean Kelly, who writes the Franchise Pick blog for b5media (where I am also and author and channel editor), has a pretty disturbing, if true, post about the coffee franchise Cuppy’s (formerly Java Jo’z).

The gist is that few months ago Scoble wrote about his brother Ben’s problems with the franchise.  A tempest ensued over allegations of bad business practices from Cuppy’s.  Fair enough, standard fare for the Blogosphere.  The odd thing is that suddenly Scoble’s post disappeared.  So did posts on both of his brothers’ blogs.  Then other negative posts started disappearing and blogs critical to Cuppy’s started to have problems.  To make it more interesting, comments on the LJ and Xanaga sites for Cuppy’s turned effusively glowing.  There are now questions regarding the company threatening or even (maybe) bribing bloggers to delete posts or change their tune.

Sean has heard from Ben Scoble and he can’t talk about the issue, which means that some legal maneuvering has been taking place.  So the question remains, what’s going on here?  Is a company trying to silence critics?  While there might not be any thing wrong going on here, it certainly doesn’t look good.

Tags: Cuppy’s, Java Jo’z, franchises

A just published Fortune article makes the point (quoting IBM CEO Sam Palmisano) that the 3-D virtual world of Second Life is not just “eye candy” and may represent the “next phase of the Internet’s evolution.”

But as Alex Manchester puts it on the Melcrum blog: “… the waters are definitely still very, very muddy and I still think few senior execs that aren’t in the tech industry would go for it [Second Life].” Alex, I agree.

Although… I’m increasingly convinced that something is very real about this place (I’ve explored Second Life briefly). For example, the equivalent of US $1 million exchanged hands inside 2L in the past 24 hours. And the World Economic Forum, in Davos this week IRL (in real life), is doing interviews at Reuters’ Second Life bureau. Go figure…

Useful Link

Second Life: It’s Not a Game by Fortune senior writer David Kirkpatrick (Jan. 23, 2007)

One of the big questions us business blogging consultants have to answer is “So, what’s the ROI here?”.  Sure, we all have good answers.  As a group we’ve all bantered this around, especially when we get together and we’re bantering over a round … of drinks, and we’re pretty much all on the same page here.  One thing that has been lacking is that all-important uber-consultant seal of approval.  I know it’s silly, but hey it’s the truth.  Big companies like to see Gartner or Forrester reports that back what you’re saying.

Today Forrester released their blogging ROI whitepaper and real-world application of the model to GM  (hat tips to Steve and Charlene).  Finally!  Now if I could just get my hands on a copy of that report …

If you’d like to read a little more in-depth analysis of the report, check out my post on the OBO blog.

Tags: Forrester, blog ROI, Charlene Li

Good article over at eWeek called “RSS Offers Relief from Enterprise E-Mail Overload.”

It talks about how email has fallen out of favor as a way of distributing information to large groups of people, and how certain businesses are starting to use RSS.

The article also covers some negatives of RSS, including:

• Problems with adoption and inertia from some users
• How RSS feeds can reduce page visits, and
• How RSS can create bandwidth bottlenecks for popular feeds.

This definitely isn’t one of those “email is dead” articles, but instead shows how forward thinking companies are looking to RSS as a new distribution channel.

Can blogs be optimized for search marketing? Absolutely! Blogs are basically content management systems with additional functionality such as comments, trackbacks and RSS. In many ways, blogs are no different than web sites.

If a document can be optimized and that document gets indexed, categorized and ranked by any kind of search engine, it’s an opportunity for search marketing. As such, marketers should be aware of how document optimization within various channels can be used within the overall online marketing mix. Blogs are one of many platforms that benefit from optimization.

At a minimum, using blog software to manage certain kinds of content on a web site such as an online media room, to archive newsletters, post frequently asked questions and to provide product updates can make a site that is otherwise very search engine un-friendly, become a viable source of great rankings. This applies to both regular search engines as well as blog search engines. These are applications for a blog besides the common use as a platform to increase credibility and communicate a more personalized voice for a company.

Blogs are no silver bullet though and require working hard and smart – especially smart. However the payoff can be significant. To prove the point that blogs are effective tools for improving search engine visibility, I can offer that my own blog (Online Marketing Blog) receives the majority of it’s traffic from search engines.

Here are a few Google ranking examples of the top referring search phrases in the past month for Online Marketing Blog:

• “marketing blog“
• “online marketing“
• “rss buttonâ€?
• “social bookmarks“

Even more niche phrases bring in quality search traffic such as:

• “blog optimization“
• “press release optimizationâ€?
• “social media optimizationâ€?

which are all services our search marketing agency provides. Of course the rules can change slightly over time, but here are a set of benefits I often find myself explaining to people wondering about the search engine optimization benefits of having a blog.

1. Structured content – Blog software with category features allows the aggregation of content according to themes. This makes it easier to algorithmically categorize content. If you can make it easier for search engines to understand your content, you have a much better chance of ranking well on those topics.
2. Crawlable URLs – Most blog software offers uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.
3. Internal links – Blogs that post product or service related information can deep link anchor text to product information or purchase pages deep within the web site. This is very beneficial for ranking on long tail phrases.
4. Inbound link magnet – One of the biggest benefits, blogs link freely to each other – much more than web sites do. Blogs are also a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs. The more media available, the more likely it will attract incoming links. Additionally, there are many widgets and plugins that make it easy to share blog content, thus encouraging links and traffic.
5. RSS – Links to RSS feed urls that use the blog domain name will assist in building link popularity and when RSS content is syndicated or cited by other blogs, any embedded links will also assist in sending traffic.
6. Fresh content – Both readers and search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. From a search engine perspective, that means your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Fresh content is also indicative of a more authoritative web site.
7. Active community – Comments and trackback features in blog software encourage interaction. An active blog community creates the kinds of citations or signals from other sites (annotated and contextually relevant links) that search engines tend to reward in the rankings. Loyal blog readers can boost a site’s visibility through advocacy on other blogs, in forums offline at conferences as well as on their own blogs and within the comments of your blog.
8. Non-Search traffic – I think the greatest benefit of having an active blog has little to do with improving your search engine rankings though. The best thing about blogs is that they allow you to generate substantial amounts of traffic via RSS and links that have NOTHING to do with search engines. My recommendation to marketers in 2007 is to pursue traffic alternatives to search engines as aggresively as their budgets and marketing programs will allow. The result will be incremental increases in site traffic with search engine referred traffic an added bonus, if not correspondingly enhanced.
9. Blog & RSS Directories – With a blog and corresponding RSS feed(s), your site can now benefit from visibility within blog and RSS search engines. Web sites without feeds (your competition maybe?) are not included in these kinds of directories and search engines.

Felllow BBC’er Stephan Spencer has also written extensively about optimizing blogs and using blogs as SEO tools.

So there you go. A basic list of practical reasons a blog can be beneficial as a site optimization tool and for improved web site traffic along with practical examples. What SEO benefits have you found from having and promoted a blog?

Tris Hussey today posted about a debate that has gone through the blogosphere like wildfire.  I too have been following this furor about the social press release and can see that it is clearly at a crossroad in its evolution.  I hear screams of kill the press release and others saying that the press release is not dead and each side has its own strong beliefs.  So as business blogging advocates where do we see the social media press release and what is its future?  I’m sure we could have numerous opinions within the small ranks here.

It seems that everyone has a different idea of how they want information to be presented.  The mainstream media has long had the press release in it’s bag of tricks, but with blogging becoming more and more of an information portal, their appears to be new players in the game that bring with them their own rules.  Bloggers want the information quickly and in such a way as to relay that information in a format that can be easily posted. I, like Tris, can see that a new animal will be launched soon with a new meaning and with different rules.  Until that time the debate continues and I will be sitting back to see the lines drawn in the sand.  What side of the line do you stand on and where do you see the social media press release finishing?

Tags: Tris Hussey, Social Media, Press Release, PR Blogs

Yesterday’s New York Times article “Some Bling for Your Blog” got me thinking about widgets and plugins and how most of them are serve no real purpose to the average blog reader and simply frustrate them by slowing the page downloading. The article showed screen grabs of a few cool-looking widgets: the trivia game Blufr, the Streampad music player, and the fund-raising widget ChipIn. But do those widgets really add value — enough value to counterbalance the extra download time?

What I would have liked to have seen in the article is a list of the best of the bling. Well, since they didn’t, I will take a stab at it myself. And please jump in with your suggestions too, via the comments. Here are my personal favorites:

• Swicki “Hot Searches” Buzzcloud (from Eurekster)
• Recent Readers (from MyBlogLog)
• Flash Photo Stream (from Flickr)
• Preview Anywhere (from Snap)
• “What Am I Doing” Twitter Badge (from Twitter)
• Film Loops (from FilmLoop)
• Number of Readers FeedCount (from Feedburner)
• “I’m online” Skype buttons (from Skype)
• del.icio.us Tagometer (from del.icio.us)
• del.icio.us Linkrolls (from del.icio.us)
• del.icio.us Network Badge (from del.icio.us)
• Timelines (from MyTimelines)
• Link Count (from Technorati)
• Polls (from PollDaddy)
• Now Playing (from SIGamp)
• BuzzBoost (from Feedburner)
• Books in my Library (from LibraryThing)

and these which are not really widgets, but plugins (for WordPress):

• Ultimate Tag Warrior (tag clouds)
• Share This (add to social bookmarking services)
• Recent Comments

Plenty more widgets at Widgetoko

Another CEO has thrown his hat into the blogosphere, and decided that a blog is the best way to communicate with the customer.  Bill Marriott, CEO and Chairman of Marriott International had his initial blog post on January 16, 2007.  He realizes the importance of blogs by telling us up front:

I’ve checked out Jonathan Schwartz’s blog at Sun Microsystems and "Randy’s Journal" at Boeing. I’ve listened to Senator Barack Obama’s blog podcasts. I know blogs will be a hot communications tool in the 2008 Presidential campaign.

He finishes this thought after what I consider to be a rather long post, with:

Bottom line, I believe in communicating with the customer, and the Internet gives me a whole new way of doing that on a global scale. I’d rather engage directly in dialogue with you because that’s how we learn and grow as a company.

At the time of this publication, he had already received 49 comments.  It seems that he has already made a big splash on his first day.  This is a blog that should be added to your feed reader to see if he actually posts regularly and how he does with the communication tool. Welcome to the blogosphere Mr. Marriott.  I wonder if all of the Marriott’s will provide free hi-speed wifi to every blogger now?

Tags: CEO Blogs, Marriott International, Bill Marriott, Jonathan Schwartz, Randy’d Journal, Boeing, Barack Obama, Wifi

Chris Richardson at WebProNews has a good article outlining some of the complaints against Google’s Blog Search.

Seems a lot of blogs are scraping content to either redirect visitors to another page or to sell Google Ads on their own blog. Who makes money on Google Ads? Well, Google of course! What’s especially frustrating is that many if not most of the offending blogs are on Blogger, owned by, of course, Google.
By running a Google Alert on “flyte” I’m finding about one blog a day that’s scraping my content to drive traffic to their sites to sell more Google Ads. However, since not all of my posts include the word “flyte” I’m only catching a fraction. (I share a name with a college football coach, so the Google Alert on “Rich Brooks” was not helpful.)

Is it even possible for me to write a paragraph about the Web that doesn’t include the word Google or a product owned by Google? Only time will tell….

Just wanted to point your attention to another in a great series of posts from Brian Clark of Copyblogger.

This one’s called Permission Marketing 2.0, a riff on Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing and the fact that anything being revisited today needs to have a 2.0 on it to be taken seriously. Kind of like dot com in the late nineties.

One of my favorite lines…

Somewhere along the way, people became overly obsessed with search and forgot everything else. Many businesses today would disappear if their rankings tanked. And that’s no way to run a business.

Too true.

So what is PM2.0? It’s all about RSS my friends. Read on….

We have told many of our clients that ask us about the Blogger platform that we would rather they did not use Blogger as the application for their company blog.  The reason was simple, it was a matter of branding.  We felt and still feel that blogging can help strengthen a company’s brand.  The problem with using the Blogger application was not that it was a free service or that it is not as easy to use, it was because the domain that was required had to have "blogspot" in its address.  This required companies to share their URL with another brand. 

The people at Blogger have upgraded their service to include the ability to now use a custom domain.

If you already own a domain named, say, mysite.com and want your blog to be served at that address instead of at a blogspot.com address, we can host your blog on that domain for you — for free. Your old Blog*Spot address will forward to your new custom domain, so the switch will be seamless for your readers.

This is a good move by Blogger and will open up new and possible future customers that will be using their service.

Tags: Blogger, Blog Applications, free hosting, business blogging

There’s something rotten in the state of the blogosphere.

Like most neo-narcisists, I have a Google Alert going on my name, or more specifically, the name of my company. Every day, I get reports on posts I’ve done that mention “flyte,” or traffic reports involving people named “Flyte,” or updates on the Brideshead Revisited movie that may or not be made, or, more recently, seeing my work appear without my permission at other blogs.

These blogs have invariably scraped content from a post of mine, sometimes w/credit, sometimes w/o, and used the content w/o comment to sell Google Ads. Of course, anyone coming to the site will invariably click on one of those ads, because the scraped content is often incomplete and thus incoherent. For example:

Although there are several Web sites dedicated to organizing and promoting … To start, I?d recommend using a hosting service that specializes in Podcasts. … His podcast, flyte: Web strategies for small business, is available at …

Yeah, I’d be proud of that.

Each time I find content that’s been scraped selling Adwords I report it to Google. Here’s how:

1. Click on the link that says “Ads by Goooooogle.”
2. Scroll down the following page and click on “Send Google your thoughts on the site or the ads you just saw.”
3. Click on the “Also report a Violation?” link.
4. Report to Google that this blog/site is scraping content from your blog (assuming they are.)

If it’s a Blogger blog you can also flag it for in appropriate content.

Unfortunately, I’m concerned that Google’s not concerned enough. After all, they make money every time someone clicks on one of these ads. While I like the people at Google, and I think they’re bright and they want to do the right thing, this may be a case of the fox guarding the chicken coop.

Recently, Search Engine Roundable reported that Google had a patent application named “Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system,” so maybe they’re taking it seriously.

However, until they do take it seriously bloggers need to be watching that their own content isn’t being scraped and Adwords advertisers should probably require that their ads only appear at Google, and not on 3rd party sites.

ABC/Disney is on the warpath against Spocko, a media critic who took umbrage to some of the content aired on KSFO-AM.According to Media Post the conflict stems from Spocko’s criticism of a right-wing talk show that had some comments that were particularly venomous.

Disney has spooked Spocko’s Internet service provider into taking down the blog–but Spocko isn’t giving up the fight just yet. He’s contacted the Electronic Friont Foundation and intends to continue the fight – legally if necessary.  And what might have been a storm in a teacup has become a very public fight – and we’re all blogging about it.

A good lesson in how not to deal with negative comments online.

 

According to Nick Wilson of Performancing.com, the proposed purchase of portions of Performancing.com has not come to fruition.  Nick stated in his post:

After much discussion, we’ve decided that the deal proposed by PayPerPost just isn’t right for us or our community. It’s regrettable that we should part ways as I still feel that Dan and Ted are stand up guys breaking new ground, but in the end, the deal was just not right for them or us.

In addition, Nick reports that Performancing is no longer going to support their metrics application and are releasing the software to the community for their use while Performancing continues to lend a hand where they can and to hosting the package.  In a classy move, Nick refers people to the new release of the Feedburner stats package which was just launched. I’m hoping to see a review of that service from a few of the contributors here.

Nick goes on to reveal the future of Performancing stating:

Well, more details to follow but the short story is that we will continue to develop Performancing Partners, our growing blog advertising network and focus the Performancing domain entirely to that end as well as our "grassroots" community — We’re proud of what we’ve helped build here, and want to continue to evolve, develop and help the community grow — the business of blogging isn’t always easy, but it’s easier when you can get some help from peers 🙂

Finally, it is stated that the Performancing blog editor for Firefox, now known as ScribeFire will launched separately under its own brand.  I think this is the perfect move for Performancing and a smart business decision to leverage this tool that has been adopted by a great number of bloggers both professional and amateur. 

I am going to try to follow up with Nick as this story progresses as I’m sure there will be more information that will be of interest to those in the blogging community. 

Tags: Performancing, PayPerPost, PPP, ScribeFire, Feedburner, Performancing Partners, Nick Wilson, blog stats

The Daily ‘Dog, the daily newsletter from Bulldog Reporter that goes to over 40 000 PR professionals in the US has a Pulse of PR survey on the site right now that shows more than half of the respondents regard blogs and new media as the trend that will most impact PR in 2007.

Yes, it’s an informal survey, and we don’t know how many people have responded so far.  But it is an indicator.  The  number two item is ‘online media will continue to splinter into micro-granular niche outlets’.  So I htink it’s safe to say PR has got the heads up.  Online PR, new media, blogs and RSS feeds will be on their radar in the coming year.

About time, too. Marketers have seen the light – and it is a train coming the other way – the Cluetrain. Search results are affecting brand perception and conversations are in full cry online. Corporate communicators need to learn how to join the online conversation.

 

During the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago recently, the managing editor of WebProNews Mike McDonald did a video interview with BBC bloggers Stephan Spencer and myself about the “participatory web”.

Public relations agencies are scrambling and sometimes floundering at their efforts to use social media to further client branding and marketing goals. Mike asks some great questions ranging from “how do you make money with the participatory web?”, “What things should you do and what do you need to watch out for?” and thoughts on things like pay per post.

Stephan does a much better job at pronouncing “participatory” than I do, 🙂 He also provides some great examples on how to be transparent as well as the consequences for not doing so.

Being good BBC bloggers, both Stephan and I mention Business Blog Consulting, in unison no less! Be sure to give it a view.