Digital Blogging Classroom

The conversation threads in this online classroom have now switched to a private classroom only accessible for teams taking part in training programmes in this area. If your team are interested in this type of training, workshops or strategy development then simply email Admissions@DigitalTrainingAcademy.com to find out more.

EXTRA RESOURCES

Since launching this classroom we created additional support for the Social Media Academy, Viral Marketing Academy and community Academy. if Web 2.0 is of interest, then try this link too...
http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/viralmarketing/

Always test your blogs well before you plan to make them live. If you're an organisation looking to use blogging then don't simply test the technology, test the workflow and content processes too, and then test the readability of what you're writing.

Here are some key questions to ask yourself...
1. Is the content sustainable?
2. Is the content interesting?
3. Is the content helping develop my business or brand?
...and knowing that a few heads are better than one, why not set up a small advisory group to act as a sounding board as you're refining and developing your content?

Should I test a blog before it goes live?

Remember that there are dozens of tools on our Digital Training Academies that can help you put into practice the ideas we disucss here. If you missed the last Digital Training Academies in your country, then check the termtime pages to see when the next public access courses are in your areas: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/termtime/
... and remember that most of the time firms invite us inside their company to train the whole team in one go! Email me for details of how we could do this for you and your team. We're waiting to help boost your group's output straight away!

LISTENING TO YOUR CUSTOMERS: IT’S AS EASY AS GOOGLE

There’s so much going on within the web that it seems crazy most marketers are not tuning in to the signals. This giant world wide wireless has maybe hundreds of thousands of voices all talking about your brand or your sector. Failing to listen would be a crime against market research, yet it’s almost common practice inside many firms. However, there is a real simple solution. Googling up your terms is a great place to at least start getting a handle on what’s happening out there in the unregulated and democratised webby world. Look for the match of keywords, follow the links and tumble down through the blogoshpere to the place where debate is happening. It’s a chance to hear from customers, prospects and stakeholders in their very own words, and being the web, conversations are often neatly archived so you can explore the bits you might have missed, as well as the links the participants came from. There has never been a market research tool like this, and any brand manager not regularly ambling through these spaces is missing a big trick.

And Google is just the start. For many brands, the web is now as much about reputation management as relationship management, and for smart marketers, there are no shortages in toolkit providers who can help crunch the numbers. Google itself offers a range of ways to see what content has been published, mid-weight tracking tools like Meltwater can take things further, while the heavyweights of social network analysis (tools like Onalytica) much more deeply join up the dots. In fact, the academic discipline of social network analysis, along with other parts of social geography, have enjoyed a rebirth on the web as communication models fleshed out in the 1970s suddenly get to be applied readily to issues, people and brands in a way their architects never envisaged.

In the digital networked society much of the friction preventing the flow of information is removed, but most firms still wholeheartedly fail to realise that even if they’ve never measured anything online before, by the end of today they could be enjoying fantastically deep knowledge about who is out there, what they are saying, who they are listening to, and what patterns are emerging.

How do we find out what’s happening to our brands on the web?

COPYRIGHT, BLOGGING AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Get a lawyer.

This is a question that just doesn’t go away. Copyright issues are still a nightmare for pretty much everyone in the process. When this crops up with commercial sites and marketers, it reveals that there’s a need to get up to speed with the issues - even if there's no solution, then the understanding of the challenges alone is pretty handy.

Each firm needs to take their own view on how to apply and police copyright, in what at times, can feel like a lawless medium: the wild wild west. There’s always been a massive amount of copyright infringement on the web, some accidental (kids copying images of their fans onto their own social profiles), some overzealous (retaining credits, but lifting massive chunks that nullify the need for anyone to click through), some malicious (the bottom dwellers ripping off your content and passing it off as their own), and some even organised (video and music piracy networks). Across the spectrum there are breaches, but that doesn’t mean that what’s common elsewhere is acceptable to run on your own site. Back in the early 90s I found myself regularly invited to the Law Society to talk about the challenges to copyright that would mushroom up through the web.
Each firm needs to take a view about how to respond, but for getting a fast download of the bigger picture, there’s a great place to get started in understanding the copyright wars… Jonathan Zittrain from the Oxford Internet Institute gave a fantastic and witty keynote about copyright. Stripping away the law from the themes is useful to those who want to quickly access the debate, because the confusion lies in the challenge to the law itself and the disconnect between law and practice in society.

Click To Play

Zittrain starts with the basics of property rights, exploring what assignment of ownership of property means, then the right to destroy property, the right to use property however the owner chooses etc. It’s a really useful journey, because the complexity of copyright law rests on an understanding of property law. (He also has a wonderfully accessible style that means you really don’t need a law degree to follow). From there, he explores the rights related to land, and the complexity of the rights that allow people limited access to other people’s property, and incursion into some form of space that that is owned by someone else.
All of which crescendos rather neatly into a full frontal assault on current music copyright. Here’s two schools of thought:
• Copyright regime 1: Section 16 from the Copyright designs and patents act 1988.
• Copyright regime 2: “…what I call reality… there are certain things that are fair and not fair in what you do with it”.
Interestingly he points out that the song Happy Birthday is copyrighted to Warner Music, “…which means that if we sang this right now then we could be at risk of infringing these rights.” Then Zittrain delves further into where the grey line is in defining what element of material has to be copied in order to trigger an infringement: 50% of the notes? 5% of the notes? Or just 3 notes? …and of course Zittrain has a neat example of how the copying of 3 notes was enough for one lawsuit.
Where does this leave us? Back at the start, looking for a lawyer, and inviting someone else to take responsibility for the decision. The internet has created an environment that demands a review of the model of copyright. Creative Commons, CopyLeft, and other new initiatives may have the answer, but as Zittrain’s reality and section 16 of the Copyright Act now go head to head, and how this plays out still feels like it’s anyone’s guess.

Can I use things I don’t have copyright to?

GETTING STARTED IN WEB ANALYTICS

Without knowing where people are coming from, it’s hard to know which elements of your online marketing activity are really working.

The good news is that help is at hand, and in the form of a thousand flavours of web analytics tools and techniques that can instantly give you a good understanding of the trends. However, many companies readily bolt in their web analytics, but then forget to invest the time and energy to interpret the outcomes. Get it right, and it will show you, at every step, how customers are progressing through their journey to reach a sale or deep interaction with the online presence of your brand.

Here are some tips:

* Once the tools are in place, harness them as part of the weekly or monthly management reports the organisation uses to measure performance
* Set yourself goals by extracting a few of the key performance indicators from the data
* Pay particular attention to where traffic comes from, how it discovers you, and which part of the site it arrives at

Where does my website traffic come from?

INFLUENCING THE INFLUENCERS

Every community has its influencers. There are many ways to describe them, but by influencing the influencers, you’re more likely to fast-track the distribution of your message. In the distribution of messaging, it can be useful to distinguish between people who are interested in the topic, and those likely to distribute the message to others. While there is still value in talking directly to customers, nurturing the connections of the influential will have disproportionate payback.

Among the well connected, there’s also a difference between reaching those who are popular and those who have influence. It may seem small, but the effects are significant. The popular may have high traffic through their pages, but the bottom line with the influential is simple: if they promote an idea, it’s highly likely to get strong take-up.

Finding all of them may prove impossible, but finding some can be real easy – you probably already know them. Here are a few tips to get you started:

Listen to the activity on your blogs and emails: investigate who they are and follow the links to look for people and sites with influence
Look at your web analytics for patterns of traffic: uncover who links to you, and topslice the sites to work with the 5% that generate the most traffic, first
Examine the content of the large vertical sites that position themselves as the providers of knowledge and context about your industry: for example Amazon’s reviews in the book industry

Who influences the book market: what about opinion trend leaders?

HOW DO YOU FIND THE BEST BLOGS?

There are some great services on the web which will help show where your customers are and which blogs carry the most weight. Google blog search and Technorati will point you in the right direction, but for more detailed information you might want to take a look at some of the high end tools that track influence as well as citations. Next up there are a layer of packaged services from suppliers such as Meltwater, and if you want to drill deeper, then it’s time to look at the new generation of social network analysis tools such as Onalytica. Those guys start to unpack the difference between influence and popularity which is particularly interesting when you’re aiming to uncover who the right people are to approach.

But why not simple ask your customers? Having some simple ways of connecting to your customers and asking them where they go and what they do will really help you uncover the reality of what influences your community. It might be the places you expect, but as is so often the case on the web, you might be in for a bit of a surprise.

Looking for the blogs to connect to? Try these five simple steps…

1. Use the free online tools like Google and Technorati to give you a sense of who the bloggers are in your sector
2. Build up a customer panel of 100 people that agree to be asked the occasional question about your brands and their behaviour – give them something in return, but listen carefully to their advice
3. Explore the events and focus groups that might already be in your marketing calendar – explore whether you can feed in some questions about the websites people visit so you can learn more about their claimed behaviour
4. Put in place some performance tracking so you can see where your business is today, and how it’s changing as a result of your efforts
5. When your blog and social media marketing activity is running, follow through to see where your audiences come from and where they link to – link trails can help you untangle the web of popularity, as well as uncovering the sites that matter

Hi,

Coming from an illustrated non-fiction publisher, I'm a little concerned about getting the quality and depth of our product across via blogging. We've had some contact with blogs and it's been very positive, but mostly regarding our content led reference titles, rather than our more image based books.

We currently use Google blog search and technorati, but can you recommend anything else to find the best blogs?

I also wanted to ask about whether there would be value in setting up category blogs of our own. Are the general public suspicious of this kind of thing?

Thanks

IT’S NOT HOW MUCH YOU SHOUT, IT’S HOW MUCH YOUR AUDIENCE WANT TO LISTEN

Blogging, like much web marketing, is turning the traditional ‘push’ model of communications on its head. The market industry’s rapid growth from the 1970s was based on the ability to push messages to large volumes of potential customers, and do structure the communications in ways that persuaded people to buy. The crescendo of print and then broadcast advertising was based generally on these models, and delivered much success. The era of mass marketing proved so successful that it triggered a new level of economy of scale and globalization in markets. The tactics worked just as well from New York to New Zealand, and even the channels such as direct mail that often had the appearance of customization and dialogue, were little more than the crude database driven swapping of names.

Then came deeper relationship marketing. A paradigm of marketing thinking that began to gain ground in the late 1980s as the innovative application of databases enabled firms to begin segmenting their audiences and then segmenting their segments. Around the same time the exponential growth in the supply of media outlets triggered the fragmentation of media audiences, pulling the rug from under the feet of marketers who had relied on the mass media tools for aggregating their customers into a viable communication platform.

With all this change in media, consumers start to rethink where they spend their time and how they choose to value the media they are involved with. It’s a reappraisal that happens irrespective of the web, but it does trigger some start changes in media consumption behaviour.

Then the web arrived. It mushroomed up in homes and offices in most countries (and for most marketers) within a terrifyingly short period of time. Not only was there a new media channel in place, but one which the consumer had exceptional control over. That tendency to evaluate and rethink media offline, was amplified with the aid of Google, back buttons and bookmarks, to create a new type of media consumer: one that’s both in control, and knows it.

So what does this hold for blogging? Audiences are being more selective, but strong content will always find its audience. Just in the way the web has removed many of the frictions that held back the supply of poor information, it’s also removed those that held back the spread of strong information. If the material on the blog satisfies a customer need, then, eventually, customers will discover it and tune in.

There are many tools and tactics website publishers can use to help with the process of getting their message out, but it’s not about how loudly the site (or the blogger) shouts. Instead, it’s about how much and how deeply your audience want to listen. And that’s the challenge most site publishers face, and why most sites fail to gain the traffic they seek.

surely the problem with Blogs is people want to make sure their voice is heard, especially where it's not their blog but rather someone elses. How do you ensure their voice IS heard, as otherwise they tend not to come back, right? Simon

FOUR QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF

There are lots of hurdles to creating successful blogs, and ironically many firms leap straight to the technology and the production process. On the Digital Blogging Academy, we’ve found that taking a step back to gather your thoughts helps you evaluate what you’re doing and decide where and how you use your effort.

To help you, we’ve uncovered a series of simple questions that are worth reflecting on before launching yourself and your team into the blogosphere. For the seasoned marketer they may all be obvious, but they’re worth some discussion with your colleagues before making that commitment.

1. Do you have something to say?
2. Is what you say interesting to your community?
3. Can you articulate what you want to say effectively?
4. Can you produce and sustain your voice and your space?

BLOGGING: NAKED MARKETING

What scares many firms about the concept of blogging is the raw and unprotected nature of the medium. It’s neither familiar, nor comfortable. Whether you’re the marketing director, the CEO, the product’s creator, or the hands-on field worker, then when it comes to blogging, this is about you. It’s also just about you. There are none of the clothes of a brand ad campaign, the layers of cosy corporate ID you’ve been cloaked behind, the protection and management of an ad agency, the vault of statistics a research department can manufacture, the glitz of events, or event the padding of a simple brochure.

Instead, you stand naked before your customers. Unclothed, and under a spotlight. They can see you, and you can only see them if they choose. The playing field is level, or even skewed in their favour. They can judge you and you might not like what you hear. Their voice can be as loud as yours, and you have only your knowledge and beliefs to fall back on. There is nowhere to hide and no criticism that won’t find you. Layers of hierarchy and the frictions of the traditional world all melt away.

Conclusion? Naked marketing takes guts, as well as skill.

BLOGGING AND REVENUES

Whenever there’s the chance to create a new marketing channel, marketers always have to make a detailed evaluation of where the benefit really comes. In digital marketing it’s particularly easy to be investing time and getting no return, because the sense of intuition we all have about cause and effect is less mature than in the classic channels.

A useful technique our team developed is to look at blogging through two lenses:
- Influencing the influencers
- Customer journey analysis

In the first, what blogging as a tool provides, is a hyper-efficient way of letting your message reach people who choose to select it. It’s still about the content rather than the technology (the material has to be powerful, engaging and satisfying to the customer), but the combination of blogged content and rss feeds can prove to be devastatingly effective at getting the message into the hands of those most interested. Where the ‘influencing the influencers’ model kicks in, is simply that in a world where we trust our peers more and institutions less, on the whole, people are more likely to pay greater attention to the messages that come from their friends. In the Digital Viral & Buzz Marketing Academy we looked at how messages spread, and by joining the thinking of message diffusion, to the model for blogging, it becomes clear how one well written post can be picked up by an enthusiast and taken much further. And all that before you’ve even thought about the syndicated headlines, blogrolls and Google indexing.

Customer Journey Analysis is a technique we’ve explored deeply in digital marketing. Back in 2000 Digital’s team started to uncover the way purchase decisions are rarely concentrated on a single moment, but instead spread across many steps in a more complex journey. When you buy a can of Coke you may just be satisfying a simple need (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is still useful in understanding some of those drivers), but for many purchases, people weave rich and winding journeys before parting with their cash. If the purchase requires the need to be stimulated, understand the perspective of others, reflect on their stance, or drill deeper for more information, then blogs can provide a powerful catalyst. They can move a prospective customer further from one step to the next, and whether it’s about buying a new car or a new novel, for those connected to the digital networked society, these new resources can be powerful.

The big healthcheck in both cases is one of quality. Just in the way there can be strong or weak advertising, so too can there be strong or weak blogging. Corporations struggle to find their voice in these new egalitarian blogging spaces; authenticity and personality regularly evade, and if the brand doesn’t have something to say, then there isn’t much reason to listen.

In educational publishing the value added by the publishers is the tremendous amount of work done to hone content and present it in a professional manner. Yet I feel we're missing out on making the most of what the web has to offer as a result. Blogs seem to be one way our authors could communicate with their audience directly. But, I'm keen to hear how blogging can become a revenue driver, how the quality of content is monitored and how you can create a community from scratch.

Hi
I'm a big fan of the blog and it's power to generate quick n easy editorial but one that does tax me and I'd like to hear your thoughts in the seminar is about striking the balance between allowing drawing people in via the blog and potentially distracting them from the product in the site. I know there are ways to integrate 'buy now' possibilities but what are your thoughts in keeping the blog to editorial and something to attract fans and keeping the buying devoted to the store in your website? To put it another way, sites that have been historically a shop front could become much more editorially focused - is there the potential to lose income as people spend greater time on your musings (depeneding on whether they're worth reading or not!) and less time browsing in your store?
Thanks
Nick

Here's a place where you can list some of the key questions you have about blogging and marketing. Use it before your Academy to steer the content, or afterwards to follow up with your tutor on areas you'd like more information.

We hope you enjoy your Digital Training Academy as much as we've enjoyed putting it together for you :-)