Think about your company newsletter. If you’re not that hip to blogging yet, your company newsletter is probably still printed and circulated in everyone’s box in the mailroom. Or maybe it’s mailed to everyone’s house. But in some form or fashion, some printed piece of information is circulated monthly or bi-weekly to everyone in the company. There are pictures of new hires, company softball team news, maybe even some tips and tricks articles for the sales team and a list of birthdays.

The problem with that mechanism of communication is that the information has a limited life cycle and, due to costs, the publication has a limited circulation. Only a few people can access it.

With a blog, even if just focused on internal news, everyone, in or out of the company, can access it. There’s less hard cost to produce and adding news or information doesn’t add cost to the project. And the information can be updated on a whim, giving it a forever life cycle. Not to mention, the content can be more easily found thanks to the ubiquitous power of search.

Those reasons alone make a blog a much more powerful communications mechanism — internally or externally — than a company newsletter.

Capitalizing on that same analogy, though, think about how many company newsletters you’ve read that were interesting enough to want to read again.

It’s a comparable medium, but not the same. With more power, comes more responsibility.

It’s time companies grasped that and made their new newsletter, in whatever form, worth reading.

Have You Registered For Explore Dallas-Fort Worth?

Don’t miss a day of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Copyblogger’s Brian Clark, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Edelman Digital’s Zena Weist and more headline one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, February 17 in Dallas, Texas! DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! The first 100 to do so get an incredible discount! Reserve your seat today!

The post The Power of A Blog appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

And that’s usually because they are filled with things you know you should do but can’t commit to doing. They’re too aspirational. Too shoot-for-the-moon-y.

Which is why I’ve kept this one bare-bones, tactical, and hopefully useful for you beyond the 4 days it typically takes us to crash and burn through our empty new year promises.

1. Check which pages on your site earned the most inbound links

Any search engine optimizer who knows her SEO clichés will tell you that inbound links count as votes in the eyes of search engines, and having links point to your content will help you rank better in search. It’s a feel-good moment that brings value to your domain. It’s a win-win.

Take a look at which of your posts attracted the most inbound links and see what they have in common. Were the headlines provocative? Were they exhaustive posts on a singular subject? Were they curated round-ups of the industry’s top events?

Figure out what type of content is earning you links (votes) and produce more of it in 2012. Also, look up to see who the human is behind a link. If this person made an editorial decision to link to your stuff they are paying attention to you and think your content is worth sharing. They’re someone you probably want to network with on Twitter if you haven’t started already.

2. Look at search terms that drove visits to your site

It may seem obvious: monitor keywords that lead traffic to your site and celebrate your SEO dominance. While it’s ok to pause and celebrate your search victory, the real opportunity is to find mediocre-performing keywords and exploit them for your purposes.

(It is way less sinister than it sounds.)

Basically, search through your top few thousand keywords and find keywords that your site ranks for somewhere on page one of the SERPs (search engine results pages) but not at the top of the page.

Identify the articles which are ranking for these terms and tweak them to more strongly target the keyphrase. Then, find opportunities in your own relevant content to link to these articles and consider sharing them in social media (if they are still relevant, of course). The idea is to find keywords you are already competitive on and try to turn a #7 ranking into a #3 ranking and earn more share of the clicks for that given search term.

3. Test your page load speed

When is the last time you’ve checked how quickly your website loads? If you’re one of the people taking advantage of Google’s Analytics pageload feature (or Google Page Speed Online, or Pingdom’s website load speed calculator), then you’re probably on top of it. If you’re not, it’s a good thing to start looking at.

Load speed is a huge factor for search engines when they are choosing what content should rank for a given phrase. Knowing what pages or elements on your site that are holding things up is the first step in addressing and fixing any issues.

Give your site a website speed audit  and prioritize fixes based on severity (the tools will tell you what is high, medium, and low importance).

4. Check for page leaks

Make a list of the pages on your site that have the highest bounce rate (i.e. pages with the highest percentage of visitors who leave your site almost immediately after arriving, without clicking through to more content).

Start with the pages that get the highest volume of traffic (and are therefore leaking the most of it away). Examine the page for possible causes:

• Is there a relevant call to action?

• Are there links to related content that users may enjoy?

• Is page load speed extra slow on this page?

• Is there an obvious issue with the layout of this page?

If the answer isn’t immediately obvious, consider setting up an experiment on fivesecondtest.com or a similar service to see how viewers are experiencing the page and try to get insight on how to improve the page’s performance.

5. Look for dead-ends

Similar to page leaks, dead-ends are places on your site where users run into a hurdle (and we all know that most people would rather avoid the hurdle on the web rather than get over it themselves).

Take note of any 404 errors you may have on your site and consider creating a more user-friendly 404 error page. Run Xenu’s Link Sleuth and see if there are broken links from your content that are frustrating users and search engines.

Fixing dead-ends will help you maximize the experience for the traffic you already have.

6. Follow top blogger actions, not advice

Top bloggers don’t always practice what they preach. And conventional wisdom isn’t always the path to success in the world of digital marketing. Best practices may prescribe a course of action that lead you in the wrong direction.

For instance, I once looked at what the top 10 blogs in content marketing were doing (as opposed to saying) and found some interesting results, like, the average blog in AdAge’s Top 10 in the Power 150 write 2.4 posts per day with an average word count of 1,278 every day and have been doing so for nearly 7 years. (Doing this is probably not the answer you’d get from them if you asked them how to be successful online. See what I mean?)

A lot of sites publish a list of “best of” content at the end of the year. Take the top posts and see what they have in common. Check word count, style of post, layout, use of images, etc., and uncover patterns.

Sometimes it’s not what people say, it’s what they do.

7. Get in tune with the right social media channel

Take an honest look at the volume and quality of traffic from popular social media. Where are you getting solid traction? Are you spending time building a presence in the right social media channels?

Ten thousand visits from StumbleUpon could be a mixed blessing if visitors only stay for a quick few seconds. Likewise, if you’re spending an inordinate amount of time hustling your content on Twitter but not seeing a return, it may be time to reevaluate your priorities and focus your efforts on other social media outposts.

Some sites I’ve been working with have had low traffic volume with high engagement from LinkedIn, and vice versa with Twitter. We now know that spending more time earning the good traffic from LinkedIn is well worth our while.

8. Conduct an old-fashioned customer survey

Magazines have been doing reader surveys with great success for years, gleaning valuable data directly from their audience. This simple but often overlooked tactic can provide mountains of business intelligence and hard to get insight, but can also help tell a more compelling story to your advertiser base. The more clearly you can define your audience, the better off you’ll be.

Nothing beats conducting customer surveys and many web services offer the ability to do this at a fraction of what the cost used to be.

9. Consult your real-life network

This is the time of year to shake the holiday lethargy and get socially active in real life. Talk to people you know that operate web sites (regardless of the niche) and attend events in your area where you can meet people also in the content marketing game.

Look through your LinkedIn connections list and find a few people to schedule coffee with in the first month of this new year. Talk to them candidly about what you’re trying to do with your site in 2012 and ask for their honest feedback.

And make sure you offer to pay for the coffee.

10. Read boring industry research

We’re in an environment of quick tips, sound bites, and real-time reactions. And who can blame us? It’s easy to feel productive if we stay on top of industry-leading blogs and skim the points they make. But how much more value could we get if the next 500 pages we read online were part of a research report or a book?

Research reports pack a lot more effort, analysis, and peer-review into what they publish and can be worth their weight in gold (or bytes, at least).

These aren’t the only places to look, but sometimes the less glamorous places have the biggest payoffs when it comes to creating a content marketing strategy for the new year.

Read your fair share of top 10 posts – they do have value – but don’t forget to look in the nooks and crannies of your own operation, too.

Where do you find your business intelligence and inspiration?

Have You Registered For Explore Dallas-Fort Worth?

Don’t miss a day of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Copyblogger’s Brian Clark, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Edelman Digital’s Zena Weist and more headline one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, February 17 in Dallas, Texas! DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! The first 100 to do so get an incredible discount! Reserve your seat today!

The post 10 Better Ideas Than Looking at a Top 10 List for Advice appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

The Railcats put on a fantastic evening of entertainment. The 6,000-person stadium was comfortable, without a bad seat in the house. On the night we were there, they had a well-known minor league baseball clown, Myron Noodleman, to entertain between innings, as well as the two Railcats mascots, Rusty and Rascal. Past right field is a kids area with a playground, bouncy house and bungee jumping contraption. Throughout the game, guests were invited down to the field for little prize-winning competitions. T-shirts were tossed by the announcer at the crowd during the 7th inning stretch. And at the end of the game there was a fantastic fireworks display.

The Gary Railcats have got their content strategy right.

What they’ve done is exactly what I recommend to anyone who is defining or revising their content strategy: broaden beyond your core. The Railcats know that they’re going to get baseball fans.  After all, they offer a local alternative to the Chicago teams, at a very reasonable price, in a beautiful, nearly new stadium. But for an independent team like the Railcats, who play in the challenging urban center of Gary (I’m trying to be diplomatic), they know that they need to attract more than just baseball fans. They have to appeal to many different types of people, in the hopes that they can convert at least a few non-fans into fans over time. Maybe 12-year-old Emma will walk out in a Railcats t-shirt. Or 3-year-old Gabe will decide that the Railcats are “his” team and he’ll still be fond of them in college. Or maybe mom will feel like it was a great value in family entertainment, so she’ll schedule her kid’s next birthday party there. Each time those things happen, kudos to the Railcats for opening those types of people up to their brand of baseball.

What can content marketers learn from the Railcats?  Consider this simple diagram.

Your topic, the topic you believe your business is most centered in, should be only a small part of the content you put out into your conversation streams.  In Twitter, Facebook, your blog, and even in video or podcasts, you should broaden your content in order to appeal to people beyond your immediate target audience.  You need to grow your audience around the periphery of your topic, and that broader content will help to attract people who might have never even considered your product or service.

An example: I have a client, a non-profit who provides a very valuable, but extremely niche, service for a particular community.  Reaching people in the niche community has proven to be very difficult, as they’re a group that doesn’t always self-identify within the niche. Our content strategy has been to help the organization create and deliver content that appeals to a much wider demographic, though still within their main community, with the expectation that we will build awareness for the non-profit through the sharing of valuable content.  By writing, Tweeting and posting only about the main service and topic, we’d likely bore people to tears and we’d very quickly hit a wall with regards to the available content on that topic; we also wouldn’t have much hope of bringing in people who hadn’t already raised their hands as fans of the organization. With a broader content strategy, we now have a mechanism by which we can spread the word about the service in a very helpful, and rather clever, way. And it’s in no way disingenuous: we are not going outside of our community interests for the content (that would be spammy), we’re just going broader than one might naturally think this organization could go.

You content marketers, be brave. Sketch a diagram with all of the tangential directions your content could go in. Go big, but also think narrow.  Imagine an editorial calendar which includes this new, broader content.  Convince the boss that this is worth a test; after all, you’re not spending any more if it’s the same amount of content.  Then stop writing three blog posts a week that all reference your company; start writing two out of the three on topics that you think could help you find new faces.  Fill your Twitter stream with interesting links that circle around your main topic, touching it only occasionally.

Give your new content strategy a while to work. New fans, and new customers, are not grown overnight. But I’ll bet that if you do this well, you’ll see a slow uptick in the number of followers, comments, shares of your content, and maybe…maybe even more sales or leads. This strategy is particularly useful if you are a B2B or very niche brand who might have difficulty finding your target audience.  The new follower you generate tomorrow may not be in the market for your product right away, but if you hadn’t attracted them with tangential but valuable content, they wouldn’t even know about you at all.  So when they are in the market for your product in six or twelve months’ time, lo and behold, now they do know who you are.

Take this broader content strategy out for a spin. Who knows what could happen. You might even see fireworks.

As always, we’d love your thoughts in the comments.

Related articles

• How to Get Your Senior Team Excited About Your Content Strategy (mpdailyfix.com)
• 4 Ways To Improve Your Social Media Content Strategy (davefleet.com)
• The First Step In Creating A Social Media Content Strategy (socialmediaexp.wpengine.com)

The post Broadening Your Content Core appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Marshall and I have been friendly for several years. I even contracted him to teach me the then-mysterious ways of RSS back in my agency days. While we don’t exactly hang out, I love Marshall’s writing and insights. He really is a brilliant guy. His work has helped ReadWriteWeb become one of the top blogs in the technology world. I’ve pitched him a few stories over the years. He’s called me for a few quotes, too.

But it was that passing tidbit in the hall at a hotel in Austin, Texas, that Marshall became a media member rather than a blogger to me. Not to discredit his work to that point! He’s always been a journalist if not labeled as such — and a good one, too. But he broke a story. He scooped the competition. It wasn’t just about providing great content in a new medium and sometimes eschewing the norms of traditional communications anymore. Marshall, and ReadWriteWeb, are playing the media game.

I love the fact Marshall gets jazzed about breaking stories. It’s exciting to have information before others. And when the others include competitive websites that can beat you to the punch and benefit from it, the excitement is palpable. Mind you, it’s not that people will run and read the story on TechCrunch, never to pass RWW’s servers again. But rather that the first web source to the punch often gets the lion’s share of both credit and traffic … search engine benefits and more. When Marshall scoops ReadWriteWeb’s competition, the traditional media notice and link appropriately.

Ironic isn’t it that blogs find themselves competing for inbound links from the old gray ladies of the world, isn’t it?

And if you don’t think the big blogs worry about the competition, try pitching them on a tech story. TechCrunch, Mashable GigaOm, RWW … all believe a valid reason not to write about a start-up or news item is that one of the others, “already covered that.” These blogs, and others in various niches, are as competitive and paranoid as the New York tabloids or competing dailies in big markets.

But playing the media game makes blogs of that ilk not blogs at all. While there’s no solid, black line that a website crosses one day, winning a virtual promotion to the category of “media outlet,” the bigger the audience, the more focused the business goals and the more respected a blog’s outputs become, the less of a blog it really becomes.

Perhaps the labels are unnecessary. Any publishing platform is technically a media outlet. Credibility and consistency seem to be the biggest factors in whether or not that media outlet will have an audience. But even those are variable. Perez Hilton, for instance, doesn’t really have journalistic credibility. But for some good gossip and entertaining tidbits to nosh on, it beats many.

Do we need to distinguish between blogs and media sites? Does the tie to traditional, off-line outlets make a difference anymore? Or is the proof just in the pudding. I trust ReadWriteWeb for tech news as much as I trust Wired, Fast Company or even the Technology section of the New York Times (which, by the way, offers RWW headlines on its website). RWW is a trusted source. Marshall is a trusted journalist … whether he would call himself that or not. (He does, by the way. But many at his competitors still call themselves “bloggers.”)

In 2009, Michael Stelzner at SocialMediaExaminer tried to position his then infant website as an “online magazine.” He specifically wanted to avoid the word “blog.” My guess is because his target audience included people beyond the social media world, many of whom associated “blog” with a publishing platform that is, shall we say, unpolished. Mention the fact you author a blog to many mainstreamers today and you’ll still get an unspoken roll of the eyes. So, perhaps labels are still important.

Regardless of what we call what we do, the fact that these little online journals have evolved to produce mega-profit driven publishing platforms that garner thousands of dollars per month in advertising revenue and are authored by teams of people who have goals like scooping the competition or breaking a big story means there’s a New Establishment. Certain blogs and bloggers are now the gate keepers of information. They are the holders of the public conscious, at least in their spheres of influence. And, as a result, we the public owe it to each other and them to hold them to the same high standards we’ve tried to hold the old guard.

We must question their motives. We must insist they source, credit and fact-check. We must hold accuracy, fairness and balance precious when considering our content selections.

Because if we don’t, then we’ll never be able to distinguish truth from the noise. And when you can’t do that, in the strangest of ironies, you have what now passes for traditional news media.

The post The New Establishment appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Don’t get me wrong; it was fun while it lasted. You were always making me smile with your clever headlines and funny captions. And I’ll never forget all the times you thoughtfully gave me advice.

I thought we were a match made in heaven. I thought we’d be together forever. But you ruined everything. You took advantage of me. You weren’t faithful. You shattered my heart.

And now I have to dump you.

I’m sorry. Just know that I feel terrible doing it like this, so publically, so abruptly, and so callously.

But someone had to. Or else you’d keep on trampling on innocent hearts of other readers.

Not that you probably care, but my therapist said it’d be good to get this off my chest.

Here are the 10 things I hate about you (as a blogger):

1. You neglected me.

We used to interact every day. When I woke up in the morning, I knew I could count on you having something interesting to say. But then you sort of just disappeared. Daily conversations turned into weekly, then monthly, and now you don’t post with any regularity at all.

I’d @mention you on Twitter and bare my soul to you in your comments, but all I got was radio silence.

2. You made it so hard to stay in touch.

You just weren’t available to me – I couldn’t find your RSS feed button, there was no obvious way to sign up for email updates – you didn’t even have an about page. I wanted to reach out to you, but you were never there. And from now on, I won’t be either.

3. You lied to me.

I used to hang on every word you said. Every sentence was an a-ha moment I could take with me to work. But then I started to find out that your intellectual advice didn’t hold up in my practical world. You presented statistics without verifying their accuracy. You broke news that turned out to be rumor.

I trusted you and you made me look like a fool when I presented your best practices to the rest of the people at my job. It was humiliating. And you told me I should just get over it – that it’s only a blog!

4. You started to sound just like everyone else.

You used to be so unique. You had your own voice and you played by your own rules. You didn’t care what the suits had to say – you called it like you saw it. You were a rebel. But all the attention is softening you. The other day you used “leverage synergies” in a headline. It broke my heart to see you go so corporate.

5. You seemed so desperate for attention from other readers.

I can live with the fact that you might have a wandering eye, but you didn’t have to be so obvious about it. You know I’m a loyal reader but you keep asking me to subscribe with long, invasive forms, begging me to Retweet you and insisting that I share your stuff with my friends.

I used to tell them how great you were in my own way, but you wanted me to use that formal template on your website. It felt so … clinical.

6. You were too needy.

First you wanted me to subscribe, and that was fine. But then you jammed the ebook down my throat, wanted to charge me for access to your most intimate thoughts, kept interrupting our dates with pop-up ads, every link I trusted you enough to click on tried to sell me something, and you didn’t give me any warning!

Listen, I’m here to support you, but I’m not in this for charity. I need a relationship that centers on respect.

7. Your attention drifted.

When I met you, you were so focused, but you’ve drifted and now conversations with you feel like I’m flipping through TV channels and I don’t have the remote.

Why are you telling me about the 10K race you just ran and your recent trip to Target? I mean, it’s nice to know those kind of details, but don’t forget that I’m not a captive audience. There are a lot of other bloggers out there who will respect my time and attention.

8. You let yourself go.

I understand that you’re going to go through rough patches – maybe you’re having server issues or you tried something new and it didn’t work out – it happens to everyone.

But it’s just sad to see you with broken plugins, images that don’t load correctly, weird alignment issues with your fonts and ads running amok in your posts.

9. You only ever talk about yourself.

And not only do you only talk about yourself and never ask me about MY day or MY experiences, you just drone on and on and on and on. Our relationship has become a test of endurance.

10. I felt like I was talking to a 7th grader.

It started when you made some gross comments on Twitter. And then it leaked into your blog. And then you stopped caring about punctuation, spelling, and well, grammar.

Listen, I don’t expect you to be a polished as William Strunk Jr., but you do have a high school diploma, why not use it?

So for now, I’m going to see other bloggers. I hope we can stay friends and maybe there’s a future for us. But are you willing to change?

I’d love nothing more than for us to have a happy future together, but you need to be willing to make it work.

The post 10 Things I Hate About You (As a Blogger) appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

OK, so maybe destroyed is a bit dramatic, but they were at least heavily distracted by it.

And so it goes. We in the world of content marketing have a lot of things to click on. There are blog posts to read. There are whitepapers to download. There is research to skim. There is news to dissect. There are viral videos to watch. There are infographics to print out. There are webinars to attend. There are podcasts to tune in to.

It all becomes a bit exhausting after a while.

And oh yeah, damn, we still have to get that blog post written?

So we go back to the web for inspiration:

“Can I post a counterpost to this blog post?”

“Can I blog about the highlights of this whitepaper or research?”

“Can I write about why this viral video was so … viral?”

“Can I embed this infographic and write about why it rules?”

“Can I post my ‘takeaway’ from the webinar I just watched?”

The answer to all of the above is yes. That is if you’re okay with contributing to the echo chamber and putting people to sleep.

But if you really want to create compelling content, if you really want to bring something fresh to the table, if you really want to make a name for yourself there’s really only one thing to do: work.

Why You’ll Never Run Out of Blog Post Ideas if You Just Get to Work

• You’ll run into real-life problems that you have to create a solution for. Your story will make an interesting tale.
• You’ll break things and have to fix them, and the way you did it will provide a great tutorial.
• You’ll get tough questions from smart people that you don’t have the answer for. You’ll have to figure it out and find one for them.
• You’ll experiment with things just to see how they work, and your failures and accidental successes will make for interesting case studies.
• You’ll spend less time as the audience and more time as the actor, and the experience will improve your credibility, build your skill set, and add bullet points to your resume.

Sure, maybe diving in isn’t as fun as floating around on the web, but when you come up for air, you’ll have better stories to tell. And the blog posts will write themselves.

Related articles

• 5 Easy Ways to Come Up With Blog Post Ideas (internetmarketingformommies.com)
• 50 Small Business Blog Post Ideas: To work w/ Cindy’s Blogging 101 Post from Friday (azhomeshowwomengroup.wordpress.com)
• Future Posting ideas. (jeffaday.wordpress.com)

The post Want Infinite Blog Post Ideas? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

I’ve written a lot about what makes a corporate blog successful and why most fail miserably. Infrequent posts. Content inconsistency. Lazy editors. Buried calls-to-action. Take your pick—these mistakes are all symptomatic of impending blog disaster, but none alone are a death sentence. So what is?

The curse of company-centric content

Nearly all of the ghost town blogs I’ve evaluated share a common focus: themselves. And yet, I’d be willing to wager that none of their corporate owners would blink before telling you that their company was customer-centric. This is the dire disconnect that keeps a blog from delivering value to its readers, and few companies seem to realize the hypocrisy of investing millions in marketing campaigns to convince customers that they care while simultaneously blogging almost exclusively about themselves.

This problem originates with a fundamental misperception about the ideal role of the company blog. Too many see it as nothing more than a place to plaster press releases, company updates, event promotions and product information. When is the last time you saw a tweet from someone you follow that led you to a “content dump” like this? The blogs that end up thriving focus intensely on serving their current and prospective customers.  They address common pain points, explore fascinating ideas, share unique perspectives and generate spirited discussions about things their customers care about. These blogs tell stories in which they are not the main character.

Don’t burn the press releases

An informal, anonymous survey of our blog readers found that only 3% are interested in seeing posts that offer “info on our products and services,” while only 10% want to see “updates about Bazaarvoice” on the blog. The rest were interested in strategy, thought leadership, how-to guides and other externally-focused content. Think about it: Do you like people that only talk about themselves? Why would customers feel any differently about companies?

So, should you just burn all the press releases, product updates and event promotions you’ve queued up? Of course not. These content types are useful when they live in the right places. Keep the press releases in the press section, and so on. If you’re worried that some blog visitors are actually looking for this content, simply make sure it’s easy to find through clear navigation to other areas of your site. Alternatively, establish separate blogs for product- and company-centric posts (Radian6 is a perfect example of how this split can work; see their distinct Social Strategy and Radian6 Platform blogs).

A different type of conversion

There’s always the possibility that company-centric content can be converted into customer-centric content. For instance, announcing an award win, by itself, is the type of chest-beating that you typically won’t see on the most successful corporate blogs. But there’s more to the story than that, isn’t there? What went in to your award win that others might find helpful? What lessons are applicable to your larger audience? Frame the post like this, and you’ve converted a self-congratulatory “we won” piece into something that adds value. Now you’ve got content worth sharing.

Who are you serving?

Content that appears as though it’s self-serving will actually serve neither company nor customer in the long run. You want SEO value? Blog about the problems your customers are Googling.  Thought leadership? Say something new about ideas that are larger than your brand. Conversions?  Give them something valuable before you ask them for anything.

A customer-centric blog does not need to be about customers, but it does need to serve them. You could, in fact, never mention your current customers by name and maintain customer-centricity. As long as you’re taking the focus off yourself and placing it on the world outside your offices, you’re practicing what you preach.

Your blog is your brand. If your company is truly customer-centric, your blog needs to be, too.

Ian Greenleigh is Social Media Manager for Bazaarvoice, the industry leader in social commerce solutions that increase revenue. Find more of his writing on The Social Commerce Blog and Dare to Comment, and follow his tweets from @be3d and @bazaarvoice.

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The post Can Your Company Be Customer-Centric If Your Blog Isn’t? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

November research from the Pew Internet and American Life project shows that only 29 percent of the public thinks the news media gets their facts straight and a paltry 18 percent think they deal fairly with both sides of a news issue. Online news has eclipses all channels other than local TV as the top source for local news for Americans. Online news has eclipsed all channels other than television for American’s source for national and international news.

It’s over. Put a nail in the coffin of newspapers and traditional media.

Or wake up and get a healthy dose of reality.

Just for gits and shiggles, I decided to run traffic comparisons of local newspapers and top news, politics or entertainment blogs in several markets across the U.S. Without exception, newspaper websites still kick blogging’s ass.

In Philadelphia, Philly.com trounces Phillyist and Philebrity:

In Albuquerque, The Journal has around 150 times the traffic of DukeCityFix, a leading entertainment and events blog.

In Portland, The Tribune is hardly worried about competition from The Portlander.

In Chicago, the distance between the Tribune and Chicagoist is like that between the Cubs and a World Series title.

And in my hometown of Louisville, The Ville Voice gets around one percent of the traffic of the Courier-Journal.

Certainly, Compete.com data is not 100 percent accurate, but I would venture to guess none of the blogs would surrender their actual analytics for fear we would know their actual traffic, which I’d be willing to bet many are reporting much higher than it actually is. The simple fact of the matter is that while local news and information blogs have niche audiences that are appealing to a number of advertisers for a number of reasons, when you look at traditional media versus new media in online news, the majority of people still prefer their news from the traditional media houses.

Just another reminder that social media is an emerging and relevant channel to which public relations professionals should pitch stories and brands should connect with audiences. But the rest of the world is outside the bubble. Forget about them at your own peril.

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• The Reason Newspapers Are Going On The Web (brucemarler.com)

The post Think Traditional Media Is On The Online Ropes? Think Again. appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Perhaps it was my Monday exploration of Google Reader trends. Perhaps I’m inspired by (nay, copy-catting) Amber Naslund’s recent post, What I’m Reading, Vol. 1. But I want to make sure Twitter isn’t the only place I tip a cap to some good bloggers I’ve been reading of late. Consider this a bit of an extension of Follow Friday on Twitter. In the era when industry watchers are declaring blogs dead, These are five blogs I enjoy reading and why.

Louis Gray – louisgray.com | RSS Feed

Louis’s blog is billed as a, “Silicon Valley Blog for early adopters, technology geeks, RSS addicts and Mac freaks.” And it delivers on those promises. Louis is very smart and takes gadget blogging well beyond just that. He’s quickly becoming a go-to commentator on social media, technology trends and tools.

Louis’s latest posts include:

• What Is This Real-Time Thing, And Where Is It Going?
• Seesmic’s Web Offering Is The Best Twitter Browser Interface Yet
• Real-time Search: What’s Most Important Now, Not Most Accurate

Mark Schaefer – {grow} | RSS Feed

I had the pleasure of meeting Mark in person recently and I’m glad I did. Not only is he a fellow West Virginia Mountaineer, but has some fantastic experience and insights on the marketing world, particularly with respect to the B2B space. He’s also a teacher – adjunct professor at Tusculum College – and brings a bit of the how-to vibe to what he shares as well. Besides, he called Kim Kardashian a “Twitter-pie.” Well worth the subscription.

Mark’s latest posts include:

• A Great B2B Marketing Learning Opportunity
• Goodbye, Kim Kardashian
• Six Ideas To Beat The Social Media Time Tornado

The Ad Contrarian – The Ad Contrarian | RSS Feed

I know who authors the Ad Contrarian as I’m sure many do, but I’ve also heard him say he’d prefer his clients not know he blogs, so I’ll respect that and just refer to him as a crotchety old bastard who’s funny as hell. The author is the CEO of a west coast ad agency. He’s a social media skeptic, but with the title of his blog, you’d expect him to be. He’s actually contrarian about a lot of stuff which is sad if you take what he writes too seriously. I’m sure he doesn’t. I don’t and he makes me laugh a lot.

Ad Contrarian’s latest posts include:

• Friday Follies
• A Skeptic’s Guide To Twitter
• Like We Said …

Ricardo Bueno – Social Media Strategies For Real Estate | RSS Feed

Ribeezie (a/k/a Ricardo Bueno) has done something really smart, in a sense, by putting his stake in the ground and going after the real estate market as a social media consultant and thinker. I love the fact he’s boiled it down to a niche vertical in a niche industry. It takes vision and guts. But Ricardo is not just a real estate industry blogger. He’s a smart, up-and-comer in the social media space. He’s got a ton of energy and the kind of attitude that tells you he’ll be around in the industry a while.

Ricardo’s latest posts include:

• Embeddable Facebook Pages: The Facebook Fan Box!
• Carnival of Social Media – The Stars & Stripes Edition
• I Don’t KNow Who You Are!

Tom Fischer – The Bourbon Blog | RSS Feed

What fun would it be if I just did social media blogs, right? Tom Fischer is a broadcasting pro and a hell of a guy who happens to love bourbon. He’s spent a lot of time and effort revamping The Bourbon Blog recently and produces some great content. Because he’s a broadcast journalist by trade, his videos and interviews are high quality for some ole’ bourbon blog. He’s created kind of a third party home of bourbon online for the masses, not just the grizzled bourbon nutters. And if you like bourbon, or may want to explore, you ought to subscribe to it. And while one of his latest posts is about one of my clients, I’ve hung out with Tom and know him pretty well. I’d plug him and I read him regardless of his fondness for certain brands.

Tom’s latest posts include:

• Bourbon Barrel Foods Bluegrass Soy Sauce
• Jim Beam Master Distiller Fred Noe and Kid Rock Visit Jim Beam NASCAR Driver Robby Gordon
• Genuine Old Fashioned Recipe

Those are five of my faves. Please share some of yours in the comments section.

The post Five Blogs Worth Reading appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Adding context to one’s web browsing or reading experience is as old as the web itself. The easiest activation of context is the hyperlink. If you want to know more about, say, Bruce Springsteen, and the author of the article takes the time to add a hyperlink to the Bruce Springsteen bio on Wikipedia, as I did here, the article offers more context and, thus, a more enriching experience.

But adding links takes time for the author. Not just time to add the code or use the convenient WYSIWYG link adder, but to find the right article, website or resource to use as context. It also means that the website visitor will have to leave your page (or at least look at the contextual content in a new window) which takes the focus off your blog or website.

Zemanta, one of my favorite blogging tools, took a step toward solving half of that problem with their tool. It offers up one-click link options to various keywords presented in your copy. Often, it will offer option to link the words, “Bruce Springsteen,” to the Wikipedia page or perhaps even The Boss’s website. That, coupled with Zemanta’s other tools, which I’ve written about here, make it very useful for bloggers.

But now the other half of that equation – taking traffic and focus away from your blog or website – has been solved. Now, using a plugin for your blogging software or content management system, you can offer up context, including images, videos and other multimedia, via hyperlink-like functionality, but right there on your website without losing visitors.

Apture is an amazing new plugin that you can add to WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type or Typepad blogs, or customize the functionality for different content management systems. It allows you to add Zemanta-like contextual links, but brings that content to your website in a pop-up window. Go ahead and click on or roll over any of the following: Bruce Springsteen in concert; Pittsburgh Pirates spring training; Kipp Bodnar and Wayne Sutton’s Social Web podcast.

Or try this one on for size: When I link to someone’s Twitter stream, like say, @LizStrauss, the tool brings up Liz’s stream in the pop-up without you ever having to leave Social Media Explorer. You can immediately see what someone is talking about on Twitter. If you’re blogging about a certain conference or topic with a hashtag, say, #sxsw, your visitors can see the latest in that conversation with a click.

(Click on a few of these links to experience it. Leave the window open if you want or close it out.)

You never leave SME. You also get a more contextual experience around this post and have a plethora of multimedia available to you in your visit here. While I will say I don’t like the roll-over-enabled pop-ups, it’s still pretty impressive. I’d like for the roll-over pop-ups to go away if I roll off, or just have the pop-ups only appear if I click. But that’s my personal preference. Perhaps Apture will add a setting (I didn’t see one) to enable that preference per user.

(For those of you with a not-so-tech-savvy audience, it makes you look like a web wizard or big-time publishing house.)

Speaking of big-time publishing houses, Apture is currently deployed on The Washington Post, BBC News and SF Gate (the San Francisco Chronicle online), among others. It gives those online publishing outlets a more engaging experience for their readers which is certainly something the traditional media outlets can use in the online space.

You can even set it to enable a Wiki mode and have your visitors allowed to edit your website. (Not on your life. Heh.)

The installation is fairly simple. You add the plugin (which for me required a download, unzip, FTP the files, then activate in WordPress), install a script in your blog’s footer, which Apture conveniently does for you if you want, then start using it.

Because your link options are based on search, the actual implementation of the links using the tool in your site’s admin can be a little slow and clunky. Zemanta’s links are on-click. But the functionality you get is a much better.

But here’s a real differentiator: If you’re logged in to your website’s admin and simply browsing the actual page, Apture’s tool allows you to highlight a word and add contextual links as you see the page – you don’t even have to be in the admin to add the context. It creeped me out at first, but when I started browsing back through old posts and popping in links left and right, I liked it. A lot. In fact, that functionality might be better for adding links than using the interface in the admin tool. (Strange they’d be different, but they seem to be.)

You will have to sign up for an account (free) at Apture and make sure the tool is talking to your website or blog, but the instructions are easy to follow and it doesn’t take much effort to make it all work.

Just to clarify, Apture takes the contextual practice of linking to a whole new level. In that sense, it is Zemanta on crack. However, Zemanta still offer better ease of use (one-click linking), embeds images with one click (like the Apture logo above) and performs searches (either semantic or manual) to offer related articles to link to from your post. I’ve used both Apture and Zemanta tools on this post to take advantage of the strengths of both.

And if you’d like to add context, multimedia and a more enriching experience to your website or blog, I’d recommend you do the same.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zemanta: Real-Time Semantic Discovery & Blogging Tool (andrewapeterson.com)
• Apture Raises $4.1 Million Round For Contextual Rich Media Overlays (techcrunch.com)
• Apture Packs a Lot of Media Into a Little Pop-up (readwriteweb.com)
• Hands On: Apture Makes Adding Media to Your Site a Snap (appscout.com)
• Zemanta Spreads To Safari, Chrome, Opera (mashable.com)

The post Apture Offers The Next Generation In Contextualizing Websites appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

What follows is the presentation I gave, focused on how to find relevant blogs for outreach, how to differentiate between them for prioritization and some pointers on blogger outreach from my perspective.

The simple fact of the matter is that, at least for now, there is no one tool, website or service that can help public relations professional identify blogs for their outreach. Technorati is a good place to start, but is essentially a search engine with no organization in results. Hunting for authority numbers through search results and not being able to organize them using that parameter makes most people wonder if there’s anyone inside the big green box focused on improvements or innovation at all. In their defense, they aren’t there to serve PR people trying to target blogs, though. Google Blog Search is helpful, but prioritizes on Google’s relevance scale, often burying significant blogs in results because their latest content isn’t less than an hour old. I’ve also found that a regular Google search often helps. If you’re looking for the top blogs in education, search for “Education Top Blogs.” Someone’s probably posted a list at some  point.

As an aside, I am close to having research conducted on top education blogs which I conducted for a client, but also to supplement my work for this presentation. I’ll publish those results soon.

And then when you do identify a few blogs worth targeting, go the extra step of looking at their blog rolls. If Angela Maiers is a relevant education blogger you are trying to reach, there’s a good chance the education blogs she reads and links to are going to be in your sweet spot as well.

Of course, media database companies like Cision can help, but are paid services. What I presented today was how to do it using free tools.

Once you have your list of blogs you want to target, you may want to find ways to differentiate among them. The default answer is normally those with the highest traffic, but there’s really no good way to find out how much traffic someone else’s website gets. The three tools you can use for free to make an educated guess are Alexa, Compete and Quantcast. Alexa and Compete, however offer vague numbers based on people savvy enough to download and install Alexa and Compete browser tools, so the numbers are skewed to tech geeks and, like Nielsen or Arbitron traditional metrics, are small samples of the total data out there. In short, I’m not confident those numbers are altogether relevant. As a follow up though, I promise to dive into Alexa and Compete a bit more thoroughly soon.

Quantcast is by far the most useful traffic tool, even offering demographics, geographics and more, but it only offers information for bloggers who insert Quantcast tracking code on their sites. AngelaMaiers.com, for instance, doesn’t show up in Quantcast. That could be because Angela doesn’t know about Quantcast or it could be because she doesn’t want the public to have access to such telling metrics about her blog. Either way, it’s a crap shoot to get this kind of information since bloggers have to opt-in to use it.

So then you’re left with other relevance metrics to determine which blogs are better. Number of RSS subscribers, quantity and quality of comments, number of bookmarks or in-bound links are all relevant numbers to look for when researching blogs. I would also argue that number of Twitter followers could be used as a comparison. If a lot of people follow a certain blogger, that’s one measure of his or her influence.

I talk a bit about Postrank, formerly AideRSS, as well, which is the first tool I’ve found that takes a step in the direction of differentiating blogs and blog posts. Their Google Reader plug-in focuses on differentiating between posts, so you read what’s most important based on in-bound links, bookmarks, comments and more. But I would suspect they’re coming up with some magic to compare blogs in general since folks like Mack Collier and myself are constantly bugging them to do it manually for us (they’re helping me with the education blogs post).

The outreach portion of the presentation essentially regurgitates my ongoing philosophy and stance that individual, custom outreach and focusing on building relationships with them is the way to go with both bloggers and media. I see the two as no different, only that e-mail and fax blast technologies have lulled the PR industry, in large part, to laziness and quantity over quality outreach in the past 20 years or so. PR folks have been treating all media wrong. The media just hasn’t pushed back the way bloggers do. Bloggers do not need to be handled differently than media. Media need to be handled better.

But again, that’s probably another post altogether.

Check out the presentation and supplement the information with your best practices, thoughts and insights. Maybe our ideas will inspire Postrank, Technorati or someone else to build a tool that makes blogger outreach research easier. Until then, it’s roll up our sleeves and work it.

Here’s the link to the video on RSS I promised the attendees. [RSS in Plain English]

The comments are yours.

Related articles by Zemanta

• HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Technorati
• Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche
• 15 Tools for Monitoring a Website’s Popularity
• Why Quantcast will rock 2009, and why you should be using it instead of Compete

The post How To Pick The Right Blogs For PR Outreach appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

One of the comments on that post, however, found here and from Michael Bertoldi, a social media evangelist and copywriter at The Barco Firm, actually asked for some more thinking on linking. Since linking certainly is an instrumental strategy in promoting your blog and building an audience, I thought it might be good to visit the topic. While linking is at the core of social media behavior — you’re simply sharing good content — there are some strategies behind smart linking to not only provide your readers with a better experience on your blog, but also to promote it to others and expand your reach.

What Content Is Linkable?

In general, anything relevant to your blog topic is worthy of link consideration. Think of your linking as providing context and supplemental information on the topic to your readers and try not to think much beyond that. Following that principle will keep your links purposed and useful.

The way linking actually promotes and attracts visitors to your blog is that when you link to someone’s blog or website, your blogging software (I don’t know of one that doesn’t do this) sends a pingback, or electronic notification, to the owner of that blog or website saying their content has been linked to. If they see the notification (some people don’t care who links to them) they’re likely to click through and see the context of how you linked to them. Many blogs are also set up to list the pingbacks to a given post in or beneath the comments section of the post, giving you an inbound link, though likely discounted by search engines, that can attract readers of the post you’ve linked to.

That said, while you’ll get more blog exposure and promotion by linking to other blogs, you’d be foolish not to link to traditional websites or news outlets that also contain good content. Some bloggers are unnecessarily self-righteous when it comes to traditional news outlets and think there’s better content to be had in the blogosphere. Frankly, they’re short-sighted. Some blogs offer great insight and context. Most traditional media outlets do.

It’s also fair to say when you mention a tool or a service, like Twitter or Blog Catalog or Evernote, take the opportunity to link to it. (Just on first mention. Additional links are redundant.) Keep in mind, large services aren’t going to suddenly start linking to you or reading your blog — they likely don’t notice inbound links due to sheer scale — but it’s helpful to your readers to be able to click through and discover more about those services without having to take the extra step of typing it in a search box or keying in the URL. It’s also a good idea to set your links to open in a new window. Not only is it self-serving — it keeps visitors on your site longer — but it serves your audience, too. They may want to go find out what Evernote is, but want to keep reading your post. Opening Evernote.com in a new window allows them to browse to that tab or window when they’re finished reading.

How Do I Find It?

Finding the right contextually appropriate posts and content elements is as easy as you might think — just search for it — but there are some useful tools and tricks I use to ensure I’m finding both the most relevant content and also promoting my blog to the most useful influencers in the subject matter. Certainly, good, relevant content trumps promotional value, but if that pingback I mentioned earlier goes to, say, Chris Brogan, as opposed to a new blogger, my blog is noticed by someone who might later write about it or link to me in front of a much larger audience.

In fact, the growth strategy I implemented for Social Media Explorer starting about a year ago was just that – link to the most influential bloggers in the social media, public relations and advertising space consistently so they not only see my blog, but see it often. The more top of mind I am with them the more likely they are to read me, link to me and even perhaps recommend my blog to others. This strategy worked, first because my content was good. Second, because people like Brogan, Valeria Maltoni, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis, Todd Defren, Jeremy Pepper and Geoff Livingston — all established A-listers in the social media and public relations space a year ago — started reading SME, linking to it and occasionally even recommending it to others.

But is search the only way to find posts of relevant relation? No and yes. No, not just a Google Search. But yes, a smart search using some useful tools. Here’s how I find my relevant links:

1. Zemanta – I met BoÅ¡tjan Å petič (Boss) at South by Southwest in March. He showed me Zemanta and I realized I was looking at one of the first useful semantic search engines on the web. This free blog plug-in, available for a number of blogging platforms, offers a menu of relevant links (as well as images, tags and one-click link insertions for your post) within your blogging tool. So as you’re writing your post, or copy-pasting it in the field, the tool searches your post, then looks through other content online that has semantic similarities. While the links it offers aren’t always spot-on (it’s a machine, remember) many of them are and with a simple click, you have a “Related Posts” menu like you see at the bottom of this entry. I supplement Zemanta with my own finds and simply add, “and Jason Falls,” to the, “by Zemanta,” indication.
2. Personal RSS Reader Search – Searching for posts relevant to the topic in my Google (or any other) Reader does something very simple, yet powerful. It provides search results of relevant posts from blogs I read. These are the blogs I am more apt to share, and want to share, with others because they are ones I find useful enough to read regularly. Many of them are also blogs of the influencers I want to continue linking to.
3. Blog Catalog 360 Search Widget – A new addition to my link-finding arsenal is the Blog Catalog Search widget nested over there in the sidebar just above the “SME Community” widgets. This allows me to search not just Social Media Explorer (it’s okay to link to relevant content on your own blog, too) but also the blogs I’ve identified as part of my Blog Catalog communities on their site. I wrote more fully about it here. It serves a similar function to the Personal RSS Reader search, but can cast a wider net as some of the blogs I’m connected to on Blog Catalog aren’t necessarily in my feed reader.
4. Google Blog & News Search – If I haven’t found three or four relevant links by now, then I’m about to win a search result with my post since no one else has written about it. (Very cool.) However, I will broaden the search even farther just to ensure I don’t miss something good out there on a blog or a news site. Instead of doing a basic Google search, however, I go to the Google News and Google Blog pages to search. This eliminates the cacophony of crap that often populates the general search result and gives me more timely and content-centric posts to link to. I might use the general Google search as a last resort, but haven’t done so in months because all the previous steps produce a good number of relevant content to highlight.

How Much And How Often?

As you can see from this post, plenty of links is certainly not a problem. If it adds context, supplements the content in a relevant way or points people to useful sites or tools you mention, link away. I’ve heard some people say that linking every word in a sentence to a different post just to add a bunch of links to other blogs, even if each is relevant to the topic, is self-serving and annoying. For example: “The ROI of Social Media is a very popular topic on great blogs everywhere.” I disagree. It’s giving the audience more resources and perspectives first. The additional promotional value is nice, but less important.

In terms of a list of relevant links roundup at the bottom of your posts, again, I say the more the merrier. But I also realize my readers don’t have scads of time to bust out a blog-reading tangent every time they read SME. So I keep the list to about five or so. This forces me to review the ones I find and make sure I’m really linking to the best stuff.

That said, I don’t always offer a list of relevant links. When the topic is particularly thick or personal, I have a passionate stance or I want to immediately engage the reader with a question at the end of the post to spark comments, I’ll often leave out the links list to keep readers focused on their reaction. This results in more immediate, passionate responses in the comments, which leads to vibrant conversations. And those, ironically, lead to lots of people linking back to me.

What are some link habits and tricks you’ve learned? Are there other tools that you find useful in finding relevant articles? Tell us in the comments and we’ll all learn a little something.

IMAGE: “Icy Chain Link Fence” by existentist on Flickr.

Related articles by Zemanta and Jason Falls

• Linking Out: Often It’s Just Applying Common Sense (From Google’s Webmaster Blog)
• Self-Linking Can Make You Go Blind
• Now Is The Winter Of Linking’s Discontent
• A Copywriter’s Practical Guide To Smart Internal Linking
• Linking Still Matters

The post How To Use Links And Linking Effectively appeared first on Social Media Explorer.