Author Archive for Stephan Becker

Tapping into competitive behavior on the web via search data

Published
by
Stephan Becker
on March 16, 2009
in Competitive & Internet Intelligence, Metrics and Web Analytics
. 2 Comments

While perusing Avinash Kaushik’s book Web Analytics – One Hour A Day (you can visit Avinash’s blog here on visit our blogroll), I stumbled upon a cool tool that I had used before, but had not touched for a while. I must admit that although I am rather refractory when it comes to using Microsoft products beyond the bearable minimum, its adCenter Labs is a pretty cool tool worth mentioning. If you are in search for intelligence in the field of competitive web usage behavior, Microsoft adCenter Labs may be something you should be looking into.  Although it has been around for quite some time now, this powerful tool is pretty underutilized and therefore worth being put on the front burner, especially in tough times where the optimization of existing business processes is king.

Microsoft’s AdCenter Labs - the intelligence layer

AdCenter Labs uses search data to retrieve competitive and demographic information related to keywords. Imagine just for a second the huge amount of information collected in the process of people entering keywords into Google, MSN, Yahoo etc. You will certainly agree that each of these keywords represents an intention. For example, when you enter the keyword ‘Dell’ into Microsoft’s Live Search, chances are you are looking to buy a computer. You may be interested in learning more about the models that Dell has available, interested in learning more about the features of a specific model or may even be looking into comparing prices but in the end, your search for ‘Dell’ indicates a clear intention to buy a computer.

On the other hand, Microsoft collects a huge amount of personal data through its Microsoft Live ID network and is therefore able to link search queries to demographic data such as your age, sex, location, etc. If you have a Hotmail account, use Messenger or regularly visit MSNBC for example, your search Live Search queries are linked to your demographic data and therefore provide valuable insights into your preferences and web search behavior. What more is the search engine knows what keywords you have been entering before the Dell keyword and it knows what you will be entering afterward… doesn’t that provide for a nice potential to predict web behavior? Now don’t think that you are immune of this kind of data logging if you don’t use any of the aforementioned Microsoft websites or other tools.  Ever been to Expedia? Bingo! Expedia is part of Microsoft’s Live ID network and so are other web services.

Don’t you think for a second that Microsoft is alone in collecting search data and matching it with demographic data. Biig brother in search land actually is… well you guessed it: Google!  Google uses a similar  approach.

How you can benefit for FREE

But what does this mean to you as an organization maintaining a website, doing business on the web or analyzing competition? Well, it would be of no use at all if the data was stored on Microsoft or Google servers and was being used  for internal purposes only, yet here is the scoop: Google and Microsoft both provide FREE ACCESS to the intelligence buried in the matching between search data and demographic data, completely legally!  Let me give you a couple of examples:

MS - Demographics prediction tool:

Would the following intelligence be of interest to you if you wanted to gather some basic demographics about who is looking up ‘Quebec investment’ on the web? What if you were an organization with a goal to attract investment? What if you were to launch an Internet marketing campaign and were looking for the right keywords to target your audience?

Quebec Investment - demographics prediction tool

What if you were a private consultant selling life insurances? Would the following information help you in the design of an online marketing campaign? What if you could repeat your query with this tool, entering additional keywords and combination to find out more? Useful, not useful?

Demographics prediction - Life insurance

MS - Search funnels tool:

If you are a company using the internet to sell products or to generate leads, would you be interested in knowing what people were thinking before they entered your product in the search engine? What about gaining insights into their intentions after they entered a keyword that relates to your product?  What about knowing what names pops up in their heads when searching for a specific product or service? Valuable intelligence when it comes to determine keywords for your own online campaigns or to adapting your ad copy to what you know goes through the heads of your target groups:

Microsoft adLabs Search Funnel tool

Web Analytics Focus: Why Cookies May Be Not So Bad After All?

Published
by
Stephan Becker
on February 12, 2009
in Web Analytics
. 0 Comments

No, this is not an article going into a detailed analysis of dangerously high levels of cholesterol or hydrogenated fat. We all know how important it is to avoid both. What we are trying to understand are the deeper reasons for which 40% of Internet users are deleting third party cookies on a regular basis, while first-party cookies are accepted by 98%+ of visitors.

Cookies are small portions of text (usually no bigger than 4K) that are transmitted to a web browser so that it can keep track of a user’s activity on a specific website. Most anti-spyware and anti-virus programs define some type of cookies as undesirable and block them by default. These are the aforementioned third-party cookies and we will come back to them later.

Maybe we should get rid of a myth right away: Cookies cannot act maliciously on a computer. The main purpose of cookies is to store user preferences and activities while browsing webpages.

Cookies are installed on your computer’s hard drive when you visit a website and there is nothing bad there, as long as it is a first-party cookie. First-party cookies help websites to collect mainly two types of anonymous information: web analytical data pertaining to your usage of the website and personal preferences that you want a website to remember.  For example. “Welcome back Steve!” is a typical example of how cookies make our life easier when personal preferences have been recorded during previous visits and are now presented to you. The content of a shopping cart is another good example. How tedious would it be to come back to Amazon.com and to have to fill that basket again with all those books you enjoyed to discover and that you wanted to set aside for a later buy?

Web analytical data on the other hand is collected to help website developers to improve the usability of websites. Data pertaining to the first page you visited, the number of pages you viewed, your visit durations, the links that you clicked are just a few examples. All this information is counted, stored in huge databases and put in relationship with each other to provide usability experts and web marketing analysts with insights that help to find out what works best for both you and them.

Marketers are there to ’sell’ things. ‘Selling’ in the context of a website can mean anything from enticing you to to download a PDF, to fill out a form, to send a message and of course, to buy a product. However, when selling fulfills the purpose of providing you with what you are looking for in the first place, collecting the data that makes this easier or rightous possible should be heaven sent. While this may be true for first-party cookies, other types of cookies, so-called ‘third-party cookies’, play the cookie-monster game differentl but more about that in my next blog.

Why organisations better get wise with web analytics - fast!

Published
by
Stephan Becker
on January 28, 2009
in Web Analytics
. 0 Comments

Recently a webcast presented to the members of the Web Analytics Association (WAA)* presented a forecast of the web analytics market in 2009. More than 600 businesses ranging from 5 to 5000+ employees took part and provided insights into their perception of - and spending intentions for – web analytics** products and services through 2009.

Web analytics - a necessary tool for any organization

While a relatively important percentage of organizations depends directly on the web to generate revenue, there is no exception to the rule that websites find their legitimacy of existence in fulfilling a specific objective such as in the form of providing news, putting people in contact with each other or generating leads. Without a clear objective in mind, maintaining a website becomes a hazardous undertaking at best and counterproductive to an organization’s mission at worst. This is to underline the importance of web analytics not just for ebusinesses, but for any organization that maintains a website: governmental agencies, corporations, non-governmental organizations, charities, foundations and of course,  ebusinesses.

Knowing who is watching you, where they are located, what specifically they are looking at on your website, what path they are taking to get there and how long they stay on your website becomes crucial strategic information to achieve the objectives that your organization is hoping to see fulfilled.

What can we learn from those that use web analytics already?

In this context , it might be interesting to learn what organizations have to say that use web analytics already – from early adopters some six to eight years ago when web analytics were still in their infancy  to companies that have added web intelligence to their portfolio only recently.

the purpose of web analytics

Web analytics to improve website functionality and conversion

In 2008, Over 75% of companies indicated that they used web analytics to improve website functionality in the context of conversion. Conversion is anything from downloading a document to filling out a form or making a sale. Conversion represents the fulfillment of a specific objective that has been defined beforehand and that must be taken into account for the design of web functionality, usability and  visitor path to name just a few.

For example, if your objective would be to collect email addresses from people that are potentially interested in your product or service, you could decide to write a white paper about your industry sector and demonstrate how well your product or service answers existing needs in this industry sector. You would then place a banner on your homepage and send people form that banner to a page that allows you to collect your visitors name and e-mail addresses before they are allowed to download the white paper. The number of downloads of that white paper would be your conversion.

75% of companies indicate that website functionality in the context of conversion optimization is their main purpose of using web analytics. This is to underline how many companies have understood that,  of course,  it is not enough to have a website and hope for the best, but how much more important it is to have a website that achieves goals. Web analytics helps us to better understand how our website attracts and hopefully keeps eyeballs. Turning eyeballs into assets is an integral part of that process when it comes to achieving precise goals. These assets may come in various forms: increased readership, more product inquiries and higher sales volumes.

In my next blog, I will be continuing my analysis of answers to important questions in relationship to web analytics, such as: What type of solutions are available? How much do they cost? How satisfied are users with their solutions? Stay tuned…

* For more information on the Web Analytics Association, please visit: www.webanalyticsassociation.org

** Web analytics include the measurement, collection, analysis and interpretation of online marketing metrics for purposes of understanding and optimizing web site usage.

About the participants of the web analytics survey:

web analytics - survey participants

web analytics - survey participants

web analytics - survey participants

web analytics - survey participants

ArcelorMittal Writes A New Page For Corporate Blogging

Published
by
Stephan Becker
on February 4, 2008
in Corporate Blogging and Web 2.0 Strategy
. 1 Comment

The other day, a colleague referred me to the media center of ArcelorMittal – a communications platform made up of a variety of corporate blogs, podcast sites, public relations blogs and internal TV documentary ‘episodes’ that have all been integrated into a highly effective ‘media center platform’.

If I were to develop a tag cloud for ArcelorMittal, it would probably look similar to this: communication, acceptance, honesty, openness, sharing, respect, difference, marriage, corporate culture, challenge, human resources, learning from others, integrating cultures, consolidation challenges.

ArcelorMittal writes a new page for corporate blogging

Corporate media centers have been serving the purposes of effectively supporting branding strategies, public relations activities, mitigation of perceived risks, customer service, employee training and research and development efforts.

ArcelorMittal writes a new story of corporate blogging that may well be of use for businesses pondering the usefulness of maintaining a corporate blog or media center to support selected business-, communication- and research and development strategies or activities related to human resources (recruitment, management, training).

The story

In May 2007, Arcelor and Mittal announced their merger – a move that would make the newly constituted group the largest global steel manufacturer, combining more than 320 000 people under one global roof spanning over more than 60 countries.

ArcelorMittal is facing huge challenges: Rethinking strategic planning, shifting production and refocusing sales, integrating different corporate cultures are just a few of the challenges that the group has vowed to tackle within a five-month period.

How do you ensure people of different corporate backgrounds, living in different geographical areas around the globe will be able to work with each other while ensuring long-term goals of increased competitiveness, efficiency and productivity?

When two different corporate cultures unify, changes are inevitable. Reviewing production cycles, delivery procedures, changing the manufacturing focus of geographically distinct production sites, reviewing supply-chain management, determining new responsibilities – all these bring uncertainty and trigger fears in people that have to be addressed early on in the process to avoid a collapse in corporate culture and business perspectives.

Businesses are defined by people and how they work together – something ArcelorMittal President Lakshmi Mittal understands perfectly well. It is not surprising that Mr. Mittal defined communication and discussion as the center piece of his integration strategy. For this charismatic leader, the success in integrating people into the merger process has been as important as the integration of business processes and he uses Web 2.0 technologies to achieve this objective.

ArcelorMittal stands as a compelling example of how corporations may use corporate blog and Web 2.0 capacities to achieve business objectives that would have been difficult to achieve only 5 years ago. In analyzing some of the ways the new steel group uses corporate blog, podcast and videocast capacities to achieve its integration objectives one can learn a great deal about the effective usage of the new Web 2.0 tools – allowing to do ‘business almost as usual’ but with a far greater potential for outreach and based on functionalities that provide readers with a greater array of choices in terms of preferred communication channels.

Stay tuned for more on ArcelorMittal – in the meantime, I invite you to access the groups Communication Platform entitled “Creating History - Documenting the Creation of one Of The Greatest Companies In The World” at the following address:

http://www.arcelormittal.tv/season1/episodes/

Corporate Blogging and ‘Faceblogging’ – Two Worlds Apart, or Partners In Crime?

Published
by
Stephan Becker
on December 20, 2007
in Corporate Blogging and Social Media Marketing
. 0 Comments

Writing a blog takes place on blogsites – while writing to our friends takes place in social media, right?

Hmm, maybe not quite so much anymore: Social media utilities such as Facebook now have become true business hubs for some industry sectors. One of the more obvious examples includes the leisure travel market, where corporate blogging has become part and parcel of an effective orchestrated Social Media Marketing Strategy.

  • With this evolution in mind, it may be worthwhile to learn more about the features that make Facebook such an incredibly effective social media-marketing tool. If you are asking yourself what your PR & Marketing department should be looking at to get the most out of each dollar spent – both a corporate blog and a Facebook presence may very well be it. This article will help to get you started and will also provide you with some basic Facebook techniques that will help you increase your traffic on this social media platform. But first, lets have a look at some examples:
  • Generally speaking, ‘corporate blogs’ are said to be effective in the realms of branding, customer service, research & development and risk & crisis management. Interactions now taking place in Facebook groups are very comparable to the ‘customer service’ function of business blogging. On Facebook, I call it ‘Faceblogging’ – have a look:

Tour Operator STA customer service on Facebook:

STA Travel - customer service

  • To take a tour of Tour Operator STA Travel on Facebook, click here. For more, go to Facebook and hit ‘travel’ into the search box, then watch groups with sometimes over 30 000 members popping up.

Facebook extending its reach beyond college students

  • You may think that the media lends itself only to younger age groups, but that is not true anymore either: What about the fact that more than 30% of all Facebook users now are post-grads of over 35? We may be in for a surprise in the very near future. Corporate blogging is a way of writing and sharing content, and is never linked to a specific technology, tool or platform such as WordPress, Blogger or what have you… business blogging its also and increasingly happening in social medias like Facebook.

Facebook age distributionSource: www.techcrunch.com

You perceive Facebook as a thread to employee productivity? - Read on!

  • Interesting from a Human Resources – or even Social Media Marketing point of view: Numerous corporations just don’t know how to deal with employees spending company time in their preferred social media network. Here is what Serena Software has come up with to tackle the ‘problem’: Based on an initiative of Serena CEO and Facebook addict, Jeremy Burton, the entire company gets a Facebook treat for one hour every Friday, where all employees are invited to Faceblog away with their colleagues, friends, families and …their customers. If you cant beat’em, join’em.

Create your profile – then create a group

  • The first step to do anything in Facebook is the creation of your profile. Once you have a profile, create a group. Obviously, keep your business perspective in mind: while your profile should be ‘professional without being boring’ your group must provide your target group with something they can relate to and that provides a true benefit. An important tip: don’t try to openly sell a service or product on Facebook, people come on this social platform to exchange with friends, meet new people and discover interesting news and information – they want to be entertained. Your strategy would need to take this into account and your product or service should be indirectly linked to the group’s focus… you will need to be creative here to not be perceived as a boring salesman knocking on the Facebook door. One good tip may be: make sure the people taking care of your Facebook group will have fun in animating the group – that’s probably the best advice you can get to make sure that other people (your target group) will have fun too… A possibility also is to outsource your social media strategy to someone who is experienced with social media/PR.

Now that you’ve got a profile and a group – drive traffic!

  • Post in other groups – posting in other groups may be the single most important activity to drive traffic to your own group, but you would have to be smart when posting in groups. Just posting ‘Hey, what a great group – click here to see mine!’ won’t do it and may likely be perceived as comment SPAM. So here is the trick: Provide value – that always works! For example, you could gather a list of all Facebook groups containing content related to your group and then post your list as a service to these groups. Sure, you will also promote other groups by doing so, but you provide value and that ultimately makes people click on the link to your group (which hopefully you will put on top as an introduction to your list).
  • Streamline your ‘Faceblog’ – A business blog, to be effective in keeping your communication channel open, should be updated regularly. Depending on your SMM (Social Media Marketing) objectives, a healthy mix of long-feature articles and short entries may help you in achieving this objective. This is no different with your Faceblog. Several tools help you in keeping in touch with your target group, will speed up the communication process and shorten your ‘time to audience’. If you are using Firefox, you may want to try out the ‘Facebook Toolbar for Firefox’: In this toolbar, you will find a ‘Share’ button, allowing you to produce fast and effective short entries such as commenting on interesting articles you found on the web. Using the ‘Share’ button allows you to push your entry directly into your Facebook minifeed – and from there into the minifeed of all your Facebook ‘friends’. You can download the ‘Facebook Toolbar for Firefox’ here. For more Facebook plugins, click here,

There are numerous other ways to drive traffic and I will talk about it in future blog entries. For organizations for which the fit in terms of target group seems obvious, integrating Facebook into your overall marketing budget may tempt you. Facebook “Sponsored groups” may be a great way of reaching out to new customers in identified segments – it may be a bit pricy though (: $200K – $300K per 3 month), but it all depends on the ROI you are looking for. Click here if you are interested to learn more about it.

Corporate blogging and Web 2.0 at ‘Webcom Montreal 2007′

Published
by
Stephan Becker
on November 21, 2007
in Corporate Blogging and Social Media Marketing
. 0 Comments

What has Montreal got to do with business blogs and Web 2.0? Surprisingly, quite a lot – this French-Canadian city seems to be a real beehive of developers, programmers, consultants, internet and gaming specialists – making large foreign ‘Techy companies’ to elect domicile in Montreal… the newest additions: Both YAHOO and GOOGLE this year opened development offices in this European-flair city – while the second largest global gaming company, UbiSoft continues its expansion with now over 3000 employees on one site alone.

Webcom 2007, held in Montreal last week, allowed us to get a glimpse of where thought leaders stand in terms of how Web 2.0 technology and tools may change the way corporations will do business in the future.

A quite impressive selection of speakers lured me to visit the event - and I must say I did not leave the place disappointed: Debbie Weil (debbieweil.com) - The “Mona Lisa” of the corporate blog and author of “The Corporate Blogging Book”; Teresa Valdez Klein (teresacentric.com) - Self-proclaimed facebook “punk kid”; Thomas Vander Wal (vanderwal.net) – The father of tagging; Lee Bryant (headshift.com) - The “Royal Jelly Hive Mind Guru”; and Robyn Tippins – “The Online Community Queen” are just some of the great speakers that have made this Montreal venue a truly outstanding one.
Please find following some notes gathered from the speakers:

Debbie Weil – The “Mona Lisa” of the corporate blog and author of «The Corporate Blogging Book»

Debbie Weil and Stephan Becker at Webcom Montreal 2007

Debbie Weil opened the dance of WebCom Montreal 2007 – and provided the community of Web 2.0 ‘gatherers and hunters’ with insider knowledge coming out of her vast experience and know-how in terms of corporate blog consulting:


• Debbie: “Corporate blogging is one year away form mainstream adoption.”

To illustrate this projection, Debbie presents a slide coming out of the GARTNER labs. According to this slide from August 2005, corporate blogging back then was projected to be less than 2 years away from the ‘plateau of productivity’.

Gartner

If this projection was right, corporate blogs should become mainstream anytime soon – but is this the case? Out of my own experience: We are now beginning to see more and more marketing directors, heads of the PR departments, communications agencies and business consultants roam the corridors of conferences, seminars and colloquiums to inquire about corporate blogs, podcasts, videocasts, social media tools and other integrated Web 2.0 technologies. Corporations have become increasingly aware about the potential for outreach using “easy-to-implement and handle” Web 2.0 tools: Early adopters – mostly comprised of larger organizations such as General Motors, Nortel, Dell and consorts – have made their move for quite some time now and we currently assist in the emergence of smaller organizations, para-public organizations (thechildrenmediaportal.com) and individual CEO blogs.

• Debbie: “Fear is an important issue that refrains corporations from maintaining a business blog!”

Fear of being criticized, fear of loosing control. As we all know, fear is rooted in the unknown – we fear what we do not know, so we imagine the worst and from that projection, fear raises. Blogs are essentially no more different than picking up the phone and sharing insights about our products, services, new projects or market insights to a business prospect or existing client. The first step to tackle fear is to face it in asking questions – it is that simple. Questions about what a business blog can do, what its advantages are and how it works. Questions also about what its limitations are, what it cannot do and how to strategically approach the use of this powerful tool. Knowledge takes fear away – and there is a lot to gain from getting acquainted early with a tool that is about to shape the way we and our competitors will do business tomorrow.

• Debbie: “Strategy is important!”

While in the past, corporate blogs have often adhered to the erroneous principle of Ready-Fire-Aim instead of Aim-Ready-Fire, the new generation of business consultants such as Debbie (www.debbieweil.com) or myself (www.intelegia.com) leads corporations back to established business principles that impose rigor and strategy before implementing a business blog.

• Debbie: “Corporate blogging is a revolution in communication – its true customer service!”

I join Debbie in pointing out the important role a business blog can play to reinforce customer service objectives – in my opinion though, corporate blogs can do more. While some organizations are slow in perceiving the advantages for maintaining a simple business blog or a full-blown ‘Media Center’ featuring integrated blog, podcast and videocast capabilities – others have come to realize that staying behind may cost them valuable points on the level of reinforcing brand awareness, improving customer satisfaction and retention, research & development and risk & crisis management.
• Some examples to demonstrate the effective use of corporate blogs and the power of upcoming use of Web 2.0 technology:

1) CUSTOMER FEEDBACK ON CORPORATE BLOG TRIGGERS CHANGE - SOUTHWEST AIRLINES: After announcing on its corporate blog changes in the advance booking reservation program, the blog receives over 200 comments form Southwest customers asking them to please maintain the initial policy. Surprised about the fact that customers actually cared about this specific program, Southwest not only maintained the original policy but improved it for the holiday season!

Southwest Airlines Blog

If that is not corporate blogging at its best to improve customer service and retention, then I don’t know what! Thanks Debbie for this nice example.

2) SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY DRIVES USAGE - VERIZON: Verizon just launched a Facebook application that will allow its customers to write a message from within Facebook that will be sent to a Verizon customers’s cell phone. With this, Verizon provides a compelling example of how to use Web 2.0 technology to effectively implement a social media marketing strategy that drives usage - and possibly sales. Surprise your kid by sending a message to his/her cell phone from within Facebook and you are ‘cool’ again…;-)

3) CRISES MANAGEMENT THROUGH BUSINESS BLOG - DELL: You did here about Dell laptops going up in flames - here is a nice picture of it…:-) And here is how Dell dealt with it on their blog, used this time for crisis management. Ok, it took Dell a bit of time to react and defuse the bomb, but they did in the end – and customers were happy again.

Dell computer going up in flames

Next time – read about Teresa Waldez Klein’s insights into facebook - Stay tuned!

Top 5 sources to measure the success of your corporate blog

Published
by
Stephan Becker
on August 16, 2007
in Corporate Blogging, Metrics, Social Media Marketing and Web 2.0 Strategy
. 0 Comments

The question arises inevitably sooner or later: How do you measure the success of your corporate blog activity?

Now that you have a corporate blog up and running and your head of department is regularly dropping by asking “And, ? Are those reader numbers going up already?” - what are the tools that you have at your disposal to help you measure the success of your blogging, podcasting and videocasting activities that compose your “Online Media Center”?

In answer to this question, I have drafted here some of the most effective tools that will help you in measuring the success of your online media activities:

1. GOOGLE Analytics

There seems to be no way to avoid the might of search engine giant GOOGLE. Among the various diversifications, we find in the GOOGLE shopping basket, its website analytics tool certainly is a heaven-sent gift for any Internet marketer - and blog-and podcast editor! Here are some of the metrics that GOOGLE Analytics provides you with:

  • Visitors stats (Visits, Unique Visits, Pageviews, Time on site, New Visits, Page Views, Bounce Rates, Average Visitor and Browser Profiles)
  • Traffic Sources (Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, Search Engines)
  • Content stats (Page Views of Top Content)
  • Goals (Measuring business objectives after specific actions such as a purchase, a download or a registration)

The map overlay in the visitors section for example allows you to access a graphical representation of the origin of your readership:

Google Map Overlay

2. RSS Analytics tools

There is a great array of RSS feeds analytics tools that you may use to measure the success of your corporate blog activities. I invite you to type “RSS analytics” or “RSS metrics” (quotation marks included please!) into your preferred search engine to find the one you are most comfortable with. For reasons of simplicity, I will present Feedburner - one of the market leaders which does a good job for me.

Feedburner stats

Feedburner (www.feedburner.com) provides a great service that allows you to track the number of people that have subscribed to your feeds. Any blog installation comes with a feed address - usually an ‘Entries feeds’ address (your blog entries) and a ‘Comments feeds’ address (comments left to your articles). Have at look at the right menu bar of this blog, and you will see these, together with their orange RSS logos. By opening a (free) account with Feedburner, you will gain access toi nformation in regards to the readership of your blog. Feedburner also offers a variety of paid services that increase the pertinence of your tracking efforts.

3. Podcast and video download numbers

The success of your media platform can also be measured by the number of downloads you achieve per month. Although this ratio does not provide you with detailed information such as return visits, new visits and time spent viewing or listening to your podcast or videocast , the overall volume of files downloaded provides you nevertheless with some valuable information about the interest your blog is generating. Be aware though that this number does not provide you with any information in regards to how ‘high’ the quality of your podcast or videocast really is - increased download rates are affected by a variety of factors such as improved search engine ranking - especially in the initial phases of your new online media platform installation.

Top25 URL’s of Beautiful OCeans
This screenshot comes out of a “Webtrends” web statistics page of www.blogs.beautifuloceans.com - one of my clients - and shows the top 25 links and the respective access numbers to individual media files. As you can see, some mp3 (podcast) files of the Beautiful Oceans blog & podcast media center are right on top of weekly access - and growing numbers form one week to the other are an indicator of success of a particularly successful article and media file (podcast, videocast). For example, the podcast with the title, “Great White Sharks - Top Predators” has been accessed 64 times during the time interval for which the table above has been generated.

4. Links pointing to your corporate blog

If someone links back to your corporate blog there is fair chance that your work has caught the attention of someone - otherwise, why would he want to share your entry with his readership? There is a straightforward way to know not only how many websites link to your corporate blog but also who exactly that is! Go to GOOGLE and enter the following operator for your search:

link:mycorporateblog.com

The result being a list of all websites containing a link to your corporate blog. Isn’t this convenient?..:-)

5. Number of comments on your postings

The number of visitors, the number of downloads of your media files and traffic numbers are all metrics that allow you to track the success of your blogging and podcasting activities - but it does not necessarily provide you with a clear picture whether your entries are as much appreciated by your readers as you would like to believe. Numerous factors enter the ‘quality metrics’ of your blog & podcast activities, to name just a few: finding a catchy title for your blog (but don’t make the mistake to mislead your public for the sake of getting hits!), the fit between your topic and your readership, your writing style, the way you entice readers to take part in a discussion (to leave comments) and many more. Knowing some writing strategies is tentamount and you are best off to know where you are going before you start - although you will be able to adapt the way you write and to learn more blogging techniques while being on your way. The best metric in terms of the quality of your blog and podcasts are feedbacks left in the form of comments. Controversial or ‘hot’ topics are more likely to generate feedbacks just as much as well thought through and professionally written blogs.

I am sure that I left some good sources out here - so please feel free to add any source I may have forgotten.

Cheers, Stephan

Integrating A Link In Your blog Is Like Introducing A Friend To Your Reader.

Published
by
Stephan Becker
on August 13, 2007
in Corporate Blogging and Web 2.0 Strategy
. 1 Comment

While browsing through my daily RSS feeds about blogging strategies, tips and tricks from fellow bloggers, a blog entry on ‘Lorelle on WordPress’ caught my attention this morning: “Why A Link Post Should Be Like Mingling at a Party” seemed like a catchy title to me and so I opened it.

Lesson #1: Write catchy titles if you want to be read, but not just ‘any catchy title’ - more about that in a future blog post.

Jan, a guest blogger on Lorelle’s blog eloquently writes about the necessity to consider any link you might want to include on your own blog as a new friend you are introducing to other friends (your readers). Here is - in essence, Jan’s advice to blog entries containing links:

” When you write a link post let people know what you are linking to, why you link to it and what’s in it for them. Make clear that it is relevant and why. Qualify what you link to and you will find that people appreciate that they are better able to pick what interests them. That they are not clicking away unprepared. That they enjoy exploring what you present and don’t find themselves wasting their time. The right introduction may just be the difference between a good experience and erratic clicking to find the suggested great reads. They may be great in their own right, but if they aren’t what I like or seek I probably won’t even care.”

Lesson #2: Consider links you add to your blog as ‘a new friend’ you will be introducing to your readers.

You may access Jan’s original article here - it sure makes for a good read for those inviting a lot of ‘new friends’ to their blog readers and striving for improving their writing skills… ;-)

What do you think about this? Certainly, there are ‘links’ and ‘links’ - should they all be treated the same? Do you treat a link like a ‘new friend’ or does this seem a little far fetched to you?

Blogging strategies: From ‘one-way information’ to ’social media communication’

Published
by
Stephan Becker
on July 11, 2007
in Corporate Blogging, Social Media Marketing and Web 2.0 Strategy
. 0 Comments

Blogging to create brand awareness

In my last blog, I argued that blogs within the social media marketing mix – among others – aims at creating brand awareness. As you know, brand awareness can be achieved through various tools : traditional media, press releases, the organization of events, product placement and sponsoring to name just a few.

Blogging can be a (low-cost) solution in reaching out to potential customers, business partners or suppliers to create brand awareness that may come back to the organization in the forms of goodwill, customer loyalty and increased revenues.

How to avoid corporate blogging of firing back

Yet, what sets blogs apart from the aforementioned media is the possibility to obtain feedback. Feedback allow readers of the blog to comment on a post and these comments in turn are open to the public. Furthermore, readers of a corporate blog may very well be blogging about the subject at hand themselves – otherwise, they would not be interested in the blog in the first place. This means that what is written on a corporate blog is very likely to be picked up and commented in the blogosphere at large – for better or worse. Some simple, basic rules apply when blogging on a corporate blog. Without wanting to go too much into detail – corporate blogs should definitively avoid topics that incite controversy or be founded in partisan politics.

Using feedback strategically

Blog feedback and commenting capacities come as a double edge sword - while they allow to engage into a productive discussion with your public, they can also receive open criticism from those not agreeing with your point of view. Yet there is no need to fear reactions coming from the blogosphere. Instead, feedback can be embraced as a God-send tool allowing the instauration of a sense of community, helping to improve customer goodwill and may even be strategically used to contribute to product development!

In this context, it will be useful to talk about ‘corporate philosophy’ and how the latter will influence how blogs will be used by the organization. Roughly, we can divide corporate blog philosophies into three main orientations – giving way to three main ‘corporate blog strategies’. Each of the following corporate blog strategies will tell us something about a company’s communication philosophy and will hence define the editorial strategy of the corporate blog:

1. Thought Leadership
2. Openness and Transparency
3. Customers feedback & ideas

This classification is the fruit of an extensive corporate blogging survey established in 2005 by Backbonemedia (www.backbonemedia.com) on which I would like to comment on below. Each of these philosophies not only represents a ‘choice of blogging strategy’ that an organization should make prior to begin corporate blogging, but it also indicates a path that may lead the organization to a change of corporate culture where it crosses the so-called ‘corporate blogging cultural divide’ to realize all of the benefits and opportunities blogging presents when exchanging within the blogosphere:

The blog chasm

Backbonemedia: Crossing the corporate blogging cultural divide

For further reading, please click here to access the ‘Strategy’ page on this blogsite.

About the role of corporate blogs in the ’social media marketing’ mix

Published
by
Stephan Becker
on July 9, 2007
in Corporate Blogging and Social Media Marketing
. 0 Comments

In case you would not have known already, blogging and podcasting have definitively gone mainstream - kids’ and teens’ blog pretty much about everything in this post ’sex & the city’ era, including lovepain and - what a surprise - glamorous Paris Hilton. Even grown-ups like Ms. Neighbour have gotten infected by the blogging virus and are sharing recipes for the latest homemade cookie adventures while Mr. Neighbour lets you into his secrets of the perfect golf swing.

Blogs catch your eyes for a reason…

Thing is, when you start to research blogs on Technorati about topics such as ‘golf swing’, ‘cookie recipe’ or even ‘market development’ to change the subject focus a bit, you would be surprised that an overwhelming portion of the results lead to blogs set-up and maintained by organizations or individuals having a vested interested in catching your attention: most often they have products and services to sell or brands to build.

Chances are that if you are looking for insider information in relationship to a specific topic, you might find ‘better’ information on blogs than you would find on Google - well maybe not ‘better’, but rather… different. Let’s take ‘market development’ for example: While Google and consorts will lead you mostly to websites with organizations offering related products or web documents containing the keyword ‘market development’, Technorati will lead you to blog posts and addresses that actually ‘talk’ about the issue at hand and lead you to more insight in regards to your interest… As blogs are becoming an integral part of corporate e-marketing strategies - you will often find that more and more blogs that you may find through Technorati for example are maintained by organizations - my own blog is a good example for this trend.

Blogs, and the power of the ’social media marketing’ mix

Blogging and podcasting have become part of corporate strategies that can be collectively called ’social media marketing’ - the good question to ask however is: How do these new tools fit into the marketing plan? Blogging and podcasting certainly are about communication, but then what can be achieved with it - and what might be other complementary tools that may be used to reinforce its effectiveness?

Social media marketing is - among others - a method of promoting a brand: It drives and nurtures brand awareness. The brand could be a person, a product, a service or even your company! It involves making your presence known, strategically, across social media networks in a multi-channel strategy that may combine blogs, podcasts, social network sites (Such as myspace.com), video sharing or photo sharing sites to name just a few. The choice of the right tool(s) for your mix obviously depends on the type of product or service you are offering while each tool calls for specific methods to be used for it to be effective within the mix. This is where the tricky part begins: these marketing tools are so new and evolve so quickly that mastering them comes close to an art.

Blogs seem to be an essential part of most social marketing activities. There is a reason for this: Blogs have been around for quite some time now, and are often integrated into other tools of the social media marketing mix. For example, blog capacities are part and parcel of the My space (www.myspace.com), Flickr (www.flickr.com) and You Tube (www.youtube.com) community experience. New community models are on the rise… making this a truly fascinating new marketing - or more precisely - branding, PR and communications eldorado.

More about social media marketing next time - enjoy your day!