The Web Pitch

Welcome to Social Media Week! This week, conferences are taking place simultaneously in New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto and São Paulo. The overall goal of Social Media Week is to advance the use and understanding of social media and the impact it has on culture, business communications and society. Also, it is a great opportunity to meet other bloggers, tweeters and thought leaders in the social media space.

I attended a talk entitled “Social Media in the Enterprise” at Cass Business School earlier this week. Each speaker had 10 minutes to present their thoughts to the assembled collective of approximately 40 people. The remainder of this post are the notes I made from listening to each of the speakers. I hope you find it interesting.

Alan Patrick from Broadsight, kicked off the event with the challenges social media faces when looked upon by Enterprise. He looked at three areas where it can present a Return On Investment. These include:

• Innovation (Crowd sourcing and buzz catching)
• Operational Value (Sales, and reducing operating costs)
• Speed to Respond (Business agility, JIT and the speed to react to market changes)

Alan’s presentation can be seen below:

Umair Haque presented an enlightening talk on how organisations can be improved. He argued that today’s Enterprises are built around an outdated structure of rigid hierarchies – this structure is no longer efficient. Creativity is stunted and thus these organisations can be termed “Peak Organisations.”  A new dynamic structure could be the answer. Today’s social media tools allow the most skilled individuals to lead, not just the the hierarchal manager. Gifted leaders emerge organically. Therefore, do we need leadership at all? Social tools allow us to connect to people with the knowledge to help us make decisions that maximise value

Benjamin Ellis’s talk focused on how people are the key component in business. However, most Enterprises are scared of going social. (They associate social as a term relating to a “lack of control.” They prefer using email, as it is the quickest method to get your point across in the shortest time. He went on to state that businesses also spend a lot of time examining ROI. However, in the businesses that Benjamin has worked with, ROI actually meant Randomly Oriented Integers! .   Social Media, (if not used with caution) can cause more problems than solve answers. Knowledge and access to information could be withheld. For social media to succeed, the tools have to be simpler than using email.

Mat Morrison delivered a presentation detailing the research that he has carried out within organisations. An interesting insight from his research showed that, if an organisation grows organically, a few people within the company are actually the most connected to other parts of the organisation. If they are removed, the network fails. Therefore, some level of design planning is required to ensure that everyone within the network is “properly” connected to everyone else. Therefore, if some people are removed, the rest of the network does not suffer. Mat also juxtaposed market norms versus social norms. Employee social capital is good for the business, especially if they tweet about the company and products. However, it is difficult to account for all the positive benefits that it can bring to the balance sheet.

Mat’s presentation can be seen below:

Dr Sue Black described her live case study on how she used social media to raise awareness and funding to save Bletchley Park. Since the war, the historic site has fallen into disrepair. Through an adhoc Twitter campaign, Sue managed to get support from London Twitter users to raise awareness. Twitter also proved to be a disintermediary.  She managed to reach out to Stephen Fry, without the need to go through PR agents or other traditional “blockers”. Fry, visited Bletchley Park and used his public image to further spread the message. Sue’s (part time) campaigning, saw her blog traffic jump to over 8,000 visitors! Her success was due to her passion, and her ability to use Twitter to find and connect with people who were equally likeminded about the cause, and were able to help.

Flickr Credit: Benjamin Ellis  Dr Black and I talk to J G Rae at the event

Adriana Lukas’s talk looked at how social media can act as catalyst for business. However, she pointed out that transforming companies from within is going to be difficult. Not everyone is convinced at how social tools can help the business. Some departments may not understand them and therefore may support the use of them. Thus, she suggested it may be an idea to deploy the use of social media tools secretly and completely independent of the IT department as a “skunkworks” project. Build a successful pilot, before proving the worth of it to others in the business. (This scares me). The idea here is that the creativity and “openess” that social media brings, does  not affect existing business processes.  A classic line from her presentation read “Wave good-bye to business cases, say hello to case studies.” Those who want to change are not the ones building the barricades!”

Finally, David Terrar presented an opposing view to Adriana’s talk. Rather than deploy an “under the radar” approach. David, discussed that the way forward was to get management buy-in, before deploying social tools. His overarching point, social tools MUST work together with existing business processes. Over time, the social tools will help to modify existing business processes as their value is demonstrated. He went on to show examples of how social tools have been successfully applied to large businesses such as Cisco, Swiss Re, and ICAEW. 

Overall, it was a very stimulating evening of discussion surrounding Social Media, and how people view it both internally and externally to the Enterprise.

A big thanks to all of the speakers and especially Alan and Patrick for putting on the event.

Andy Serovitz posted a very interesting blog post on how Coca Cola have devised a new set of social media principles. Coke have developed 10 “Principles for Online Spokespeople” which make good sense for other brands to follow.  You can read the main set below.

1. Be Certified in the [Coca Cola] Social Media Certification Program.
2. Follow our Code of Business Conduct and all other Company policies.
3. Be mindful that you are representing the Company.
4. Fully disclose your affiliation with the Company.
5. Keep records.
6. When in doubt, do not post.
7. Give credit where credit is due and don’t violate others’ rights.
8. Be responsible to your work.
9. Remember that your local posts can have global significance.
10. Know that the Internet is permanent.

Watch Andy’s interview with Coca Cola’s Adam Brown, on how they developed the social media principles.

Coke’s complete policy document can be found below. At three pages, I like this a lot!

Coca Cola’s Online Social Media Principles –

Trendsspotting posted their annual Social Media Trends Predictions earlier this week. Predicting trends is a dangerous business especially in Social Media. However, the slide deck does offer some very interesting insights from a variety of social media commentators. I have included some of the ones that I found interesting in this post.

Across many of the predictions, Trendsspotting identified the following trends that are “suggested” to influence Social Media in 2010: Mobile, Location, Transparency, Measurement, ROI, Privacy. Though, you could argue that these same trends were visible in 2009.

Pete Cashmore from Mashable predicts:

Fuelled by the ubiquity of GPS in modern smartphones – location sharing services

Geo location of our "social movements" – Twitter, Facebook, blog comment, videos that we post.

Augmented Ready – cool technology, but will it be useful?

Social gaming and virtual currencies  – Will big players seize the mobile payment opportunity?

Expect personal privacy – or rather its continued erosion to be big in 2010

David Armano – Blogger Logic and Emotion predicts:

Social media begins to look less social… more "exclusive"  – getting value, while filtering out the clutter.

Firms will look to scale and uncover cost savings by leveraging social media e.g.  Best Buy’s Twelpforce

Firms will have a social media policy  – social media to social business

Mobile becomes a social media lifeline

Sharing no longer means email – content producers will use other means to distribute their content e.g. iPhone and Android apps.

Marta Kagan – Managing Director, US Espresso Brand Infiltration predicts:

Real-time reviews will scare the pants off many a brand & foster a new ‘radical-beta’ mindset.

Tracking & Alerting" become the new searching.

Business finally admits that social media ain’t some fad for kids and B-list movie stars.

Dan Zarrella – Social & Viral Marketing Scientist Hubspot predicts:

With augmented reality and mobile social media, the real world will be important again.

Micro targeting and personalization – business will begin to leverage the wealth of data we share about ourselves to deliver individualised messages.

 

2010 will certainly bring in new applications and services, though whether they will “push the envelope” of brand engagement will yet to be seen.

Yesterday evening, I attended the Gary Vaynerchuk Crush It event organised by Sprouter, at The Water Poet pub in London. Overall, Gary was on top form and shared some interesting insights with the audience.

My rough notes from the talk follow below. But I recommend that you watch the complete talk to gain all of Gary’s insights.

Consumer Expectation

- Free Shipping was once considered the greatest thing that ever happened when consumers bought online. However, 10 years later, no one cares! It has become a standard and we are used to it.

- Imagine checking into a New York based hotel and discovering that they only had dial-up internet?  You’d want to punch the concierge in the face, and pick up the phone to call home and tell someone about your bad experience. However, we have only been used to a better dial-up experience for only a few years. Our expectation of a better Internet connection in hotels has grown.

- One of the big trends to emerge in 2010 is going to be "Consumer Expectation."
Consumers will expect brands to respond to them, when consumers leave comments on a company’s Facebook wall, or when consumers send tweets to the company. They will expect a response.  Customer Service and actually "caring" will filter out contenders and bullshit artists.

- If customer service is not the backbone of the business the you are looking to build, you are going to be in trouble.

- When Amazon bought Zappos, Jeff Bezos recognised that Zappos was a threat to them and had no choice but to buy Zappos.

- Zappos will make an interesting case study for many people. It was the only company in the retail world that was a threat to Amazon. Amazon doesn’t consider companies such as Walmart, Target and Tesco as real competitors to their business.

- Zappos was a threat to Amazon, because they were beating Amazon on "DNA and culture."  Buying shoes from Zappos were not inexpensive, Amazon beat Zappos on price here. However, they ‘cared’ more about the customer.

- When you called Zappos, they trained their staff to stay on the phone with you as long as needed (to get the sale). They rewarded staff for being on the phone with you for an hour! If a dog barked in the background, and you (the person in call centre) were authentically into dogs, you were to talk about that. If you ordered a large number of shoes that didn’t fit, you could return them for free.

- All the dumb things that our grandparents did, has been lost in history. Everything you do, will be documented forever. You grand kids will know all the silly and ridiculous things that you have done. You have to pay attention to this! In the book, Gary talks about "legacy being greater than currency.”  Think life in the long term, everything is being documented forever.

- Today’s fundamental shift, is that the gatekeepers have lost their keys. The fact that anyone who is connected to the Internet gets a chance to show the world their "stuff" is a game changer. If your “stuff” is good, you can breed word of mouth.

- Today’s social web, breeds word of mouth on steroids.

- The movie Bruno flipped Hollywood on its head. Bruno opened in the States to one of the biggest openings of all time. The next day, it was one of the biggest drop off’s in cinema history. Why? Because nearly everybody who saw the film, walked out and started Facebooking, Twittering and texting that the movie was no good.  In 24 hours the word of mouth for that movie collapsed, and people didn’t go to see it.  In Hollywood, the norm used to be 3 weeks before traditional word of mouth travelled. Due to Bruno’s failure. About 75 movies got shelved this summer because of it. 

Gary makes some very interesting points about Amazon’s purchase of Zappos.  As a bonus, watch the video below which explains the corporate rationale for Amazon’s purchase in July 2009.  Also, the video does a good job to explain how Amazon’s culture compares with that of Zappos.

Picture Credit Andre Jenny

The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) recently published its “2009 Chinese Social Networking Sites User Research Report”. The report contains the results of phone surveys of Chinese Social Networking user behaviour conducted through July 2009. The report is in Chinese. However, Chinese Internet Watch has pulled some interesting data from the report, which you can read below.

• By the end of 2009, the number of Chinese online social media users is about to reach 124 million.
• Every social media user owns on average 2.78 social media accounts.  (Anyone have a 0.78th of an account on a social network? )
• Top 5 social networking sites: QQ alumni (50%), Renren (37%), Sina Space (36.6%), 51.com (27.1%), and Kaixin001 (26.4%).
• The male to female ratio in SNS users is 52.9:47.1.
• Majority of SNS users are youth (52.6%).
• 17.8% of China SNS users’ monthly income is over RMB 3,000, higher than 13.4% Chinese netizens.
• 47.5 of SNS users’ month income is lower than RMB 1,000, also higher than the percentage of overall Chinese netizens (44.2%).
• 59.1% of Chinese SNS users own college degree and above, 34% higher than over Chinese netizens.

China Social Networking Sites Usage

• Almost 80% SNS users are referred by friends, classmates, or colleagues.
• 75.8% indicate their SNS friends are friends in real life.
• 34.3% SNS users visit social networking sites every day while about 40.2% visit SNS once a week or longer.
• Over half SNS users spend no longer than one hour daily on SNS sites; 26.6% between one to two hours; 12.8% over two hours.
• China SNS users are mostly interested in status and photo album updates from friends.
• Sending messages and uploading photos are the two most popular activities on SNS.

Which Social Networking Site to Choose?

• 63.5% users pick the number of known friends, classmates, and colleagues on a social network as the top reason for choosing that network.
• 32.4% users find it important to get useful information on a social network
• Having lots of interesting topics is important to 21.4% users for choosing that social networking site
• 18.4% find a social networking site attractive if it provides lots of online games

The primary purpose of logging in a social network is entertainment for over 42.4% users being interviewed. 27.4% just log in to play games.

Why Abandon A Social Network?

• 31.3% users interviewed have abandoned a social network after registration. The main reasons are:
• No interesting activities (29%)
• No useful information (27.9%)
• Not many friends (26.5%)
• No common topics (24.9%)
• No feeling of being engaged (18.3%)

China Social Networking Sites VAS

• 40.9% SNS users would like to have mobile access and 25.6% SNS users want 3rd party payment service
• Women are more passionate about Value Added Services (VAS) on SNS than men. 19.8% women want to trade virtual goods (men: 16.8%).
• Men are more interested in B2C e-commerce and real goods trading.

China Social Networking Sites Advertisement

• Acceptance to different types of ads in SNS are less than 30%. About 30.1% of users have never clicked on an ad. 39.9% users indicate they will click on an ad if it’s interesting.
• Ads on personal profile, photo albums, and polls are more acceptable to women than men.
• The more educated people are more likely to click on an ad.

Some interesting food for thought here. The primary purpose for logging into social networks is entertainment. Engaging content, extends to online games. Therefore, it would be interesting to see how Chinese users responds to marketing messages within games.

5 of this year’s great Social Media Books via Mashable, books definitely worth investing in.

FOWA Highlight Reel 2009

It’s autumn here in London, and this means it is time for the Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) conference! This year’s venue has changed from the Excel Centre to Kensington Town Hall. A smaller venue than the Excel, but much easier to get to. The Carsonified team led by Ryan Carson, put on one of the best conferences in the UK. FOWA is targeted towards Developers, Designers and Decision Makers. Though, many attendees don’t fit into any of these boxes. In this post, I offer my reflections from the event with some details of the stand out talks.

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users – Kevin Rose (Digg)

This year’s event kicked off with Digg’s Kevin Rose, on how to take your website from one to one million users. Kevin offered ten top tips for budding web entrepreneurs on how to stroke your visitor egos, avoid analysis paralysis, attend event parties and woo key influencers and even how to hack the press (my favourite). You can watch Kevin’s keynote talk below.

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose

Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications – Francisco Tolmasky (280 North) 

The next stand out talk was by Francisco Tolmasky from 280 North. Francisco talk focused on how true web applications can be used with the richness of desktop applications. 280 North has launched Cappuccino, a JavaScript framework inspired by Apple’s Objective C language. Cappuccino uses a visual development tool called Atlas Tolmasky’s featured a demo called 280 slides, a presentation web based application which was amazing. it looked superb. Take a look at 280 Slides here.

Francisco provided an interesting insight. Developers provided feedback that their companies were unwilling to trust pure web based. Therefore his company had to produce a desktop version of Atlas, which allowed the creation of local computer based applications. You can watch Francisco’s presentation below.

Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications by Francisco Tolmasky

 The Future of HMTL5 – Bruce Lawson (Opera)

Bruce Lawson provided a very interesting overview of HTML 5.  In particular, how it would make life easier for developers. He demonstrated some media demos working in HTML 5 and he made two standout points during the talk:

1. “HTML 5 is in direct competition with other technologies intended for applications deployed over the Web, in particular Flash and Silverlight”.
2. “The web is too important to place control in the hands of any one vendor”.

Two very important points, with the latter gaining a loud applause from the FOWA audience.

Bruce’s presentation is available to watch below.

The Future of HTML5 by Bruce Lawson

How The Guardian is using APIs, Frameworks & Tools to Build a "Mutalised" Newspaper – Chris Thorpe (The Guardian)

The Guardian’s Chris Thorpe delivered an interesting talk on how the Guardian newspaper looks to weave itself into the fabric of the internet, through its open platform. Chris introduced the idea of a ‘mutualised’ newspaper’, a society in which each person has the means to produce content, either individually or collectively. This journalist and the reader work together to tell the story. His presentation is available below.

How People will use the Web in the Future - Aza Raskin (Mozilla)

Aza Raskin of Mozilla, delivered a talk on the role of the browser in the future. A fundamental shift is occurring, where the  browser forms a “you-centric” view of the web. A future where the browser understands your interests, and the interests of your friends by tapping directly into your “social graph” . His talk touched also on HTML 5, in particular how tomorrow’s browser could even hold a SQL database! His talk particularly touched upon:

1. YOU-Centric browsing
2. How browsers will manage your identity
3. Browsers with native natural language processing
4. Built-in payments in browsers

You can watch Aza’s talk below.

You-Centric: The Future of Browsing

The Future of The Cloud – Simon Wardley

Simon’ is an excellent orator and his talk focused on the future of the cloud. He discussed the confusion that surrounds cloud computing. Experts disagree even on the definition of it. Vendors define the cloud, as “their product”. The big surprise to me, was the number of different cloud protocols that currently exist. The situation is similar to networking protocols in the the early 1990’s, IPX/SPX vs TCP/IP. Simon ended his talk with a thought provoking point:

Either the cloud is based on open source or you’ll risk losing internet freedoms".

 Basheera Khan, formerly from TechCrunch Europe caught up with Simon after his talk. She asked him to explain exactly why tech startups need to pay attention to how vendors are shaping cloud computing frameworks and standards, and why open source is the way to go if you don’t want the rug pulled out from under your cloud-based web service. You hear Simon’s comment on the audioboo below.

A modified version of his presentation can be seen below:

Marketing your Web App – The Future of Brands Online – Alex Hunter

Alex Hunter discusses the DOs and DONT’s of developing a powerful and positive brand. Nothing particularly new here for people who are familiar with online brand building.

However, Alex is a great speaker and delivers his talk with passion. His talk is available to watch below.

Branding and Marketing Essentials for Your Web App by Alex Hunter from Carsonified on Vimeo.

The Q & A Keynote with Gary V – Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV)

Watch Gary’s keynote videos below.

Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk

And Finally…

I made a small cameo appearance in a CNET video of FOWA with @natalidelconte. The video has some great interviews with various FOWA speakers including Kevin Rose.

Earlier this week, I was fortunate enough to attend the TedxTuttle event in London. The event featured a host of great speakers, mixed in with some Ted Talks and an opportunity to meet some great people.

The keynote speech was presented by Maggie Philbin, who presented a series of great clips from the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World program. This was a real treat, as I was avid fan of the programme and even today, the theme music still brings back many happy memories of the programme. The clips centred around three decades (60s, 70s and 80s) and showed a number of technologies that became popular and others that did not. Incidentally, the BBC are now presenting an archive of Tomorrow’s World clips which can be accessed here:  www.bbc.co.uk/archive/tomorrowsworld.

Maggie also presented “Philbin’s Fact File”, which touched on a number of points, the she believed would make a business successful. Nothing new here, but all good stuff nevertheless.

Communicate as if person to person
Be outstanding
Innovate, don’t imitate
Go beyond "just enough"
Create an experience
Exceed expectations

In all, it was an excellent keynote and it is great to see that she is still so passionate about science and technology.

The next talk was presented by Rachel Armstrong and discussed the future of architecture. Rachel, is a TED fellow and presented a fascinating talk, which at times was a little above my head, but interesting nevertheless. Rachel’s interest in architecture surrounds the materials that we choose to build structures. Her ongoing research examines how low tech biotech technologies could be used to build sustainable structures for the future.

Next up was Tuttle founder Lloyd Davis, who described the Tuttle experience to the audience. The Tuttle Club meets every Friday at 10am at the ICA in London and has been running for eighteen months. This is remarkable, since many social media networking meet-ups, disappear after only a few months. Lloyd, mentioned that there was no real secret to Tuttle’s success. However, he believed that ‘diversity and inclusion’ were important factors. Anyone is welcome to attend Tuttle and judging by the slideshow of photos that were presented, the event is growing with ever increasing numbers of people.  Tuttle exists and is supported by social technologies such as Twitter. However, many argue that online social networking lacks opportunities to actually meet people in the flesh. Tuttle is the antidote to such thinking.

I grabbed a quick chat with Lloyd during one of the coffee breaks. I last met him during the Blue Monster Coffee morning, at a time just before Tuttle started. It was a great to catch up and I’m going to do my best to get along to the next Tuttle meet up.

Next up was Ben Walker, who delivered a great talk (mainly in song) about the value of Twitter.  Babble+Context=Conversation!  Conversation=Value!  Ben is known for the viral Twitter Song, which you can see below.

The last of main speakers was Mat Morrison of Porter Novelli who delivered a very interesting talk on social media metrics. Mat debunked the traditional held view on viral marketing that person tells everyone in a cumulative fashion to spread and idea, instead he proposed that great ideas don’t spread evenly. In other words, not everyone in a network is equal. If, you take Gladwell’s theory from the Tipping Point, you get the idea here. He also, focused on Clay Shirky’s recent points that we are currently experiencing “social media overload” – We need adequate social media filters to reach out to people, to enable a great OTS (Opportunity To See).

He also shared with the audience some interesting words in relation to social media:

“Eigenfactor” – A Page Rank  for people

“Betweeenness – Someone who is very well connected

“Egonet” – A relation where size = popularity

“Homophily” -  A term relating to people who hang around other people who are most  like them. (Birds of a feather that flock together)

Mat is conducting some very interesting research into the area of influencers and has some great examples here.

Mat summed with the following excellent point, 

“We tend to associate ourselves with people who are like us, allowing us to judge people on the people they follow”.

Photo credit – @maggiephilbin’s twitpic

He ended his presentation with remarkable honesty, “insufficient evidence for a real conclusion”. His research into this areas continues.

Between, each of the speaker talks, there were a number of excellent Ted Talks that were shown. You can view each of them below. Overall, TedxTuttle was excellent. Great speakers, inspiring talks and a great venue.  Congratulations to Alan Patrick and his Broadsight team for delivering such an excellent event.

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

Clay Shirky: How social media can make history

PW Singer on military robots and the future of war

I was fortunate enough* to receive an advance copy of Shel Israel’s – Twitterville recently. The premise of the book is an examination of how businesses (of all sizes) can thrive in the digital space with the micro-blogging tool – Twitter. This is Shel’s second outing as an author, after co-authoring the highly successful book, Naked Conversations with Robert Scoble. After completing the book, I felt strongly that Twitterville was the spiritual successor to Naked Conversations.

If you are looking for a book about how to use Twitter, then unfortunately Twitterville is not designed for you. In my opinion, this is a key strength and helps to separate it from the many other Twitter books already available. Shel’s book contains a number of case studies on how individuals and companies have used Twitter to extend their reach out to lots of people, unlike any tool that they have probably used before.

The case studies featured within the book describe, how both large and small businesses have successfully used Twitter to connect to wider audiences, and the interesting results that they have achieved. Companies such as Dell, Comcast, Evernote, Starbucks and Zappos are all featured among others. Shel does a great job of sharing the insights that each company has learned during their own Twitter experiences. The chapters make great reading and contain a good blend of content versus size. Shel interviewed many people for the book, and I’m surprised at how he managed to keep the book’s size so relatively small!

My only criticism of the book is that Shel often presents an overtly positive Twitter story, while passing over some of the negative aspects of the service. For every positive contribution, there are hundreds of examples of random chatter or shameless promotion. However, Shel does present a chapter that does detail the effect spammers. Therefore, at times the book can appear to be a little one sided. Putting this point aside, if you are looking for a good business book, and are interested in how social media can be applied within a practical commercial setting. I would highly recommend that you buy Twitterville. The book is sure to become a great classic.

My good friend, Steve Clayton sums up the book with a great quote, which you can find on the back cover.

I couldn’t have put it better myself!

Twitterville is available to order from Amazon here.

*With thanks to Maureen Cole at Portfolio

Paul Boag presents an excellent post on corporate blogging over at Smashing Magazine.
I completely agree with each of Paul’s points. However, what do you think?

1. A blog does not magically generate traffic

When companies first started launching corporate websites, they perceived them as a marketing channel that would generate leads. They had a “build it and they will come” mentality. Over time they realized that a website is more like a storefront. A few people might wander in off the street, but most of the time you need to advertise to attract trade.

Many marketing departments are making a similar mistake with corporate blogs. They perceive them as a way to generate new traffic, when that is not their primary role. Admittedly, the keyword-heavy nature of a blog will help your organic rankings, but that is a secondary benefit.

To generate traffic, you need to sincerely commit to your blog, establish a relationship with your readers and engage them in conversations. And, as Rand Fishkin’s article 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic suggests, you also need to use some strategies to build up the traffic over years.

The real goal of a corporate blog is to generate recurring traffic which is considerably more likely to complete a call to action. A successful blog has a regular readership that is being constantly reminded of your brand and products. And yes, of course, building up a readership takes time.

2. Good corporate blog requires long term commitment

Building a readership is a long term commitment. It can take months for users to recognise your blog as a consistent source of useful information. Only then will they start visiting it regularly and recommending it to others.

It doesn’t just take time, it also takes commitment. That means posting regularly and to a schedule. Users are more likely to visit your blog if they know you release a post on a certain day each week. Of course, ultimately you want them to subscribe, so they don’t need to continually check your site for new content.

3. Teaser feeds are a wasted opportunity

Users can subscribe in a couple of ways. Usually they can either sign up to receive email notifications or subscribe to an RSS feed. This is a crucial step in engaging readers. That is because users are effectively giving you permission to remind them about your site and brand.

However, it is remarkable how many organisations fail to grasp this opportunity. Instead of using the chance to push content to users, they only provide a teaser of blog posts. This means users have to click through to view the whole post.

This practice is born out of a false belief that users need to see your site. They don’t. Unless your revenue is driven by site advertising, there is no need for users to click through to read your blog.

McDonald’s blog doesn’t get it right: teasers in feeds aren’t useful in corporate blogs.

The purpose of most corporate blogs is to build and maintain brand awareness while motivating users to engage. None of that needs to happen on site. The blog post itself builds and maintains awareness, while requests for comments or calls to action motivates users to engage. Users do not need to see the rest of your site to respond to the blog post. Of course for that to be true, posts need to be engaging.

4. You are not “engaging” anyone

The most successful blogs are more than a broadcast tool. They are a dialogue between the individuals within your organisation and your users. It is important to listen, as well as speak. Unfortunately, the most corporate blogs fail to engage.

Instead they focus on telling readers how great their products and services are. Rarely do they ask for feedback or ask questions. In fact it is not unusual for companies to disable comments for fear of criticism.

Nokia Conversations blog does a great job of engaging users in conversations, asking for their opinions and starting discussions that generate many comments and gather many opinions.

Instead you should be encouraging users to contribute to your blog through comments and constructive criticism. It is a superb opportunity to get free feedback from your customers, something many organisations pay market researchers for. Part of the problem is that most corporate blogs offer nothing more than rehashed press releases.

5. Press releases shouldn’t appear on a blog

Let’s set aside the debate over whether press releases have a role in today’s web centric world. Whether they do or don’t, you need to realize that a press release preforms a different role to that of corporate blog. As the name implies, a press release is meant for professional journalists. It is designed to encourage journalists to write about your product or service. It is not designed for your customers.

A blog, on the other hand, is meant to be read by prospective and existing customers. It should be engaging, informative and helpful. When writing a blog post, you should always have the end reader in mind. What will they learn? What insight will this give them into who we are? How will it help build our relationship with the reader? You should never simply copy and paste press releases or news stories.

The other problem with press releases is that they are corporate statements. A blog should have a more personal tone.

6. You sound like a faceless corporation

People don’t like interacting with organisations, corporations or machines. People like talking to people. One of the things I have learnt about selling web design services is that once people have established that you offer a good service at a reasonable price, the next thing they care about is you. Do they like you? Do they trust you? Do they think they can work with you?

People don’t like, trust or want to work with corporations. We associated those feelings with individuals, not companies. It is therefore important that a corporate blog is about the people within your organisation, not the organisation itself. Your blog should focus on different people and the role they perform within your company. They should be able to demonstrate their personality as well as share their expertise.

A blog is a place to let readers see behind the marketing spin and glimpse the real people within your organisation.

7. You need to show the warts and all

If you are a marketeer this may all sound a little scary. Its hard to control “the message” when you are blogging. You have multiple bloggers from across your organization who are effectively becoming corporate spokespeople, and you are allowing users to publicly criticize you on your own blog. This is a long way from traditional marketing.

However, today”s consumers are very savvy. They are distrustful of traditional marketing and can sense when they are being sold at. A softer approach is required, one that is more “real&” and less managed. One part of that is admitting when you make mistakes.

Dell consistently ignored criticism they received about poor customer service. They ignored the voice that the web provided their customers, until eventually a single disgruntled user stirred up a major PR nightmare with a single post entitled “Dell lies. Dell sucks.”

Contrast this with the “warts and all” approach adopted by photo sharing site Flickr. When faced with community criticism over the poor performance of their website, they wrote a post on their blog entitled “Sometimes we suck.” They acknowledged the problem and laid out a plan for correcting it. This non traditional approach to their brand image allowed Flickr to quickly defuse a situation that could have grown out of control. Perhaps when it comes to corporate blogging, marketing is not always best equipped to handle the task.

8. Marketeers often make bad bloggers

Let me be clear. I am not saying that all marketeers should be banned from blogging. What I am saying is that traditional marketing skills are not always best suited to the medium. Because blogging should be personal, transparent and not shy away from the organisation’s flaws, it can seem an uncomfortable communication tool for some marketeers. Also the traditional writing style of many marketeers does not fit well with the informal style of a successful blog.

If you are a marketeer responsible for the corporate blog, look for ways to encourage others within your organisation to blog. Think of yourself as an editor rather than an author. Target people who are particularly knowledgeable or already act as spokespeople for your organisation. Encourage them to blog and act as a copy editor tweaking and refining what they write. And don’t forget to give them raise once in a while, encouraging them to write more high quality content.

You may find it hard to encourage others to blog. If that is the case try interviewing them instead. You can then turn those interviews into blog posts and hopefully encourage them to respond to comments. But remember, whether you are posting an interview or an article, do not expect too much from your readers.

9. You expect too much from your readers

Most of the corporate blog posts I have read are long, really long, text heavy and boring. They take considerable commitment to wade through. In short, they ask too much from readers.

With so many blogs online you need to make your posts stand out from the crowd. Always ensure that users can get the gist of what you are saying by just scanning the post. This can be achieved using a number of techniques…

• Summarize a post at the beginning and in the title. Don’t leave users guessing what the subject is.
• Be controversial to grab users attention.
• Use headings as a way of grabbing attention and summarizing content.
• Use images to break up the copy and communicate key points.

Do not feel all of your posts need to be an essay. Short posts that propose a question or draw the reader’s attention to another site are just as engaging. Anything that is of value to the user is worth posting.

Finally, remember that not all blog posts need to be textual. Consider buying a flipcam and recording some video interviews with people around the company. Record an audio interview or post some photographs of corporate events. Just don’t expect users to read lots of copy. The only people who do that are your competitors.

10. Your competitors will read your blog – Get over it!

I am amazed at how many organisations will slow down the growth of their corporate blogs because they are worried that their competition will read it and rip off their expertise and ideas. Although it is true that your competition will do exactly this, what is the alternative? One the primary opportunities a blog provides is the chance to demonstrate your expertise. People will be motivated to buy from you because they understand that you “know your stuff.” However, if you don’t talk about your expertise, how will they know? You might be the best in your field, but if nobody knows it then what is the point?

I write about my knowledge of web design all the time. I know that many of those who read my posts are competitors and learn from what I share. However, I know that a lot of prospective clients read the content too. Should I silence myself for fear of being copied or should I prove to my clients that I am a professional who knows what he is talking about? I think the answer is clear.

Conclusions

Many organisations are still finding their voice online and corporate blogging is one way to achieve this. It is not surprising that they are still making mistakes. The secret to success is accepting that a blog is not a traditional marketing tool. In my opinion, it has more in common with a customer service. Once you realize that and release it from the shackles of press releases and corporate news, it will start generating return on investment.