Wildfire Tech PR Blog – Business and Consumer Technology Public Relations

So, recently I spotted a Facebook update from a friend saying: “thinking about the pros and cons of blogging”. It initiated a variety of comments, from a “yes, do it, your public needs you!” to “the pros are more expensive” and a simple “oh dear”.

It seems my friend isn’t too convinced himself at the moment, stating in response he was finding “lots of cons – not many pros”.

Now I’m not saying I’m a blogging expert, but it struck me the ‘cons’ were getting an unfair advantage.

Blogs are arguably easier to control than other social media methods and, used well, can drive traffic, encourage engagement and help create community and new relationships. They’re also a great way to boost search engine optimisation (SEO), convey the personality of a brand or individual and demonstrate expertise in specific areas.

Admittedly, effort needs to be spent establishing the platform. And it will take time to regularly put those nuggets of wisdom down ‘on paper’, more time to monitor the blogosphere to find like-minded people, and even more time to respond to and engage with them. There’s also cost to consider, for paying a dedicated blogger or the salary of an employee spending time writing blog posts.

But I know through Wildfire’s work with clients that the investment in blogging can really pay off, increasing a company’s influence, generating business opportunities and delivering measurable benefits to an organisation.

So if you want to get involved, then read on for Wildfire’s practical tips on running a corporate blog, taken from our recent benchmark report – putting the ‘social’ into social media:

Tips for running a corporate blog

1. Set realistic frequency targets and stick to them – don’t pretend you’ll blog every day if you know that will be a challenge. Be realistic, making it easier to stick to goals and setting expectations for web visitors
2. Keep posts, paragraphs and sentences short – we read differently online. Around 300-500 words is ideal with sub-heads to break the text and help readers navigate through your post
3. Make your content interesting and relevant – think about your audience. Who is it you are trying to appeal to? Make sure your content will be interesting and useful to them
4. Convey personality – set the right tone, but don’t be afraid to give your bloggers the freedom to convey their own individuality
5. Demonstrate your expertise and knowledge – show your readers you know your industry and make them feel they can trust you to come up with the goods
6. Always reply to comments on your blog – even if it is just a sentence or two. Make your readers feel valued and they’ll return again and again
7. Add RSS and email sign-ups – RSS feeds allow your readers to subscribe to posts without having to visit regularly. Alternatively, you can let visitors subscribe by email
8. Share your posts on social networks – ensure you remember to alert followers on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin about your latest blog posts
9. Read and respond to other blogs – as a blogger, you need to participate in the community to really reap the benefits. Reply to posts on other blogs in your sector and they may start to return the favour
10. Be controversial – make your blog stand out from the crowd by saying something different. This will help you attract and retain readers

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The lustre of other companies’ success in the social media sphere has put it firmly on the agenda for many brands. Blogging is often seen as an ‘easy’ way in – a social media portal that is easy to set up and control.  But it’s not all plain sailing.

When a blog works well it can bring you closer to your customers and prospects whilst allowing you to engage with the wider community. Unfortunately, all too often, blogs become stagnant voids with reams of old, out of date content.

What follows is the first part of a series of posts we’ll be running over the next few weeks looking at all aspects of blogging. Here we examine why you might want to have a blog in the first place and how it might tie in with the rest of your social media strategy.

If you’ve any questions on anything you think we might have missed then leave a comment or get in touch – we’re always happy to help.

WHY BLOG?

Before leaping in, it’s well worth taking a step back and working out exactly what you hope to achieve and what your blog will be for.

Three key questions to ask are:

1. What are my objectives for blogging?
2. What’s my strategy (e.g. for content generation, driving traffic and SEO, getting ROI and integrating with other marketing, social media and PR activities)?
3. What does success look like?

If the answers to any of these questions are uncertain, then you need to think very carefully about why blogging is the right path to go down.

Setting objectives

Identifying the purpose of your blog can be a defining moment that paves the way for  success – or failure. The objectives for a blog can be very different for different companies, for example some may want to demonstrate their expertise and industry knowledge to customers and prospects, while others may see it as a great way of improving SEO.

It doesn’t matter what your objective is as long as you have one- as time goes on, you’ll better understand how your blog is benefitting you and set new ones. It’s also worth identifying specific and measurable business goals that your business hopes to achieve through blogging over the coming 12-18 months.

Strategic approach

Blogging is about much more than just content.  You could have the best posts in the world, but if no-one finds your blog,  knows about it or shares it, then there really isn’t any point!  Equally, if you have lots of traffic to your blog but it isn’t making an difference to your business, the investment is wasted.

Confronting these issues before you start is vital, so apply a bit of strategic thinking. When you’re considering all your campaigns, bear in mind the breadth of what is now possible and integrate your blogging activities into a much wider marketing and social media strategy.

Measuring success

Remember how I said it’s important to set some objectives?  The reason is simple. If you don’t know what you want your blog to do for your business then how can you measure its success in achieving those goals? Whether it’s increased hits on your website or more interactions with your brand,  make sure you know what success will look like.

BLOG WHAT?

Above all, your blog should strive to offer something new and valuable to your audience, becoming a source you’d follow yourselves. Asking yourself whether you’d be interested in reading your blog is a good litmus test!

For example, you could look at it as an opportunity to elevate topics that aren’t getting enough exposure or comment on what others are saying in your industry.  Tell people something they don’t know or draw their attention to articles they may not have seen.

Try and identify examples of blogs that you read and would like to emulate.  What do they do right? Where are they missing a trick?  Be sure to interact with them once you’ve got everything up and running.

WHAT NOW?

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be discussing where you go next and giving you tips on how to get a blog off the ground and how to get people interacting with it.

In the meantime, if you think there’s anything we’ve missed or you have questions, get in touch or leave a comment below!

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We are often asked about the benefits of having a blog. And whilst there are many valid answers to this question, it’s always good to be able to use facts to back them up.

So it’s great to see some research from web platform Hubspot in the US, which reveals that blogging can increase traffic, inbound links and the number of indexed pages on a website.

By analysing data from the company’s 1,531 customers, Hubspot found that those with blogs had on average 55% more website traffic. Of course, this could be down to other factors as well but the figure is so high that there seems to be credibility here.

In addition, when it comes to search engine optimisation, the websites that contained blogs had 97% more inbound links (a measure of how many other pages or sites are linking to a particular website) and 434% more indexed pages (a measure of the number of pages that show up in search engines).

These last two statistics are hardly surprising, they just confirm what we would expect; because blogs are essentially creating valuable (we hope!) content – and lots of it – there is more content for visitors to read (and link to) and more content for search engines to crawl and rank.

Of course, establishing the blog is only the first step and it takes time and effort to keep it updated, making sure the content is both appropriate to your business and ‘valuable’ enough for people to want to read.

If you think a blog might be good for your business, let us know…

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A slightly dubious, non-scientific investigation by a US PR firm has revealed that CEOs are not particularly active on social networks.

The thrust of the argument is that they should be more socially connected: “What CEOs need to realize is that millions of their customers are communicating this way, and it’s foolish for them to dismiss this”. That is quite a big jump between not being active and dismissing it, but I get their drift!

Blogging v. Twitter

However, a recent blog from tech-supremo Robert Scoble suggests that ignoring Twitter and the like might not be such a bad idea:

“The other night Jeremiah Owyang told me that thought leaders should avoid spending a lot of time in Twitter or FriendFeed because that time will be mostly wasted. If you want to reach normal people, he argued, they know how to use Google.”

It’s an interesting argument. There has been a lot of talk recently about the role of blogs and how they will adapt and mature as ‘microblogging’ continues to grow in popularity.

Scoble’s point is that blogs are great for search engine optimisation (SEO) and so will help drive (if you do it right) relevant traffic to you from search engines.

Twitter obviously doesn’t do the same job as there are too many titbits of information. But, it can still help you drive traffic. Build up a big enough following and you will get click-throughs if you share valuable content. Of course, you need something for your followers to click-through to in the first place and, chances are, this will be a blog post.

A happy medium?

So, I’m not sure the answer is black or white. I think blogs still have an important role to play, especially in setting out your position or argument as a ‘thought-leader’.

But social networks are vital to increasing your sphere of influence; engaging and communicating with new people on a regular basis.

So I guess what I’m saying is that both have their place, but need to be approached in very different ways (even if they are ultimately complementary).

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I have been alive for 9,471 days and share the same birth date as Blue singer Lee Ryan – the 17th June (yes, just round the corner), which incidentally, was 168th day of the year in 1983 when the sun set at 9.20pm and there was a waxing crescent moon.

And you would be quick to ask: what does this mean and why I’m writing about it?

But the right question to ask is how I know this useless information. And the answer to that is through the internet’s latest Google-killer: Wolfram|Alpha (I’m not sure if the vertical line is obligatory, but included it just in case!).

The computational knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha was launched this week to the usual flurry of media attention whenever a ‘Google-killer’ comes along. Despite the rather strange moniker (named after the creators, Wolfram Research, in turn named after British businessman Stephen Wolfram), the search engine is seen by many as the way the web in going. The semantic web.

Others far more wise than me have described in detail how the site works:

“It doesn’t mine the Web for pre-existing facts. It mines limited databases that the Wolfram Alpha team has amassed, curated and vetted for accuracy. Then it performs computations on those facts, giving you new, original data. Makers say it’s a Web engine that “answers questions.”

And many have poured scorn on the site (which is clearly still short of a lot of data). And not surprisingly, The Register has questioned its usefulness:

“I know that in evaluating a Stephen Wolfram production, my meager intelligence quotient may not be sufficient to grasp the gravity of what I’m dealing with. So I don’t feel all that put down that I can’t figure out how Alpha is useful to anyone outside of a small audience of college professors and professional engineers.”

This strikes me as unfair. I can certainly see a use case for a data bank of knowledge that deals in facts (unlike Google) that are credible and reliable (unlike Wikipedia).

And calling the service a Google-killer is way off the mark too as Andy Heaps from Latitude explains:

“Wolfram Alpha couldn’t help me in finding cheaper car insurance. However, when I needed to know the number of vertices of a truncated icosahedron it did the job brilliantly! That optimises everything about the perception of Wolfram Alpha – it’s not a Google killer, it’s not a Google competitor, and was probably never meant to be – its self-proclaimed long term goal is to make ‘all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone’.”

So, it’s got some way to go. It’s not Google, or Wikipedia and has some early detractors…

Seems like one to watch!