Creating Content and Opinion – Blogging and Podcasting

Everyone has an opinion, and the Internet allows for everyone to share their opinion. Blogs and podcasts have emerged as social media that are being embraced across the Internet population.

Blogging

A blog is a web site where entries (blog posts) are typically displayed in reverse chronological order. Technorati, a blog and social media tracking engine, defines a blog as a “regularly updated journal published on the web.” Blogs usually allow for comments on blog posts. A typical blog will feature text, images and links to other blogs and web sites related to the topic of the blog.

Blogs range from the personal to the political and everything in between. They can be written by one person or by a group of people. Some are aimed at the blogger’s immediate family and friends, and others rival leading newspapers in terms of reach and readership. Blogs are mostly textual, but can comprise solely of images, videos, audio or any combination of these.

According to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs created and over 1.6 million posts updated every day (over 18 updates a second). That’s a lot. The power of blogs is that they allow anyone to publish and share ideas, and anyone can read and respond to these. They have given consumers and companies a voice and blogging has opened up a world of information sharing possibilities.

The basic elements of a blog post are:

Author – the person who wrote the blog post.

Blog post title  – the title of the blog post, which is usually used to create a unique URL, or permalink, for the blog post.

Tag – tags are the categories used to describe the blog post, and aid services such as Technorati in categorising blog posts.

Comment – comments left by readers of the blog are shown with the blog post.

TrackBack – a notification of other blogs linking to a post, often displayed below blog post.

Some other elements of a blog include:

RSS feed – an RSS feed allows for readers to subscribe easily to the blog.

Categories – blog posts can be allocated categories.

Blogroll – a collection of links to other blogs or web sites commonly read or used by the blogger.

Archives – previous posts remain available for visitors to search through. Archives are usually categorised by date.

RSS readers can be integrated with an email client, can work offline or can be online only. Some are free, and some are not. Look at your email client to see if you can set one up there, or try www.bloglines.com, www.google.com/reader or www.feeddemon.com. Find the one with the features that suit your needs.

RSS readers are a useful way to keep up to date with blogs, as most supply an RSS feed of their posts. Still confused? Take a look at commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english.]
Whether blogging as an individual or a company, there is plenty to be gained from the process. You can:

Create an online identity.

• Create a voice for yourself or your company.

• Promote engagement with your audience

• Create a community.

Blogging and SEO

• Search engines value regular, fresh content, and by blogging you can create just that. The more you post, the more often search engines will spider your site, looking for additional, relevant content. Basing your blog on your keyword strategy created in the SEO process can also aid your web site in ranking for those key phrases. Blogs, by their social nature, can also increase the incoming links to your web site.

• Using a blog platform that has been designed to be search engine friendly is crucial to harnessing the SEO power of blogging.

Some features of SEO-friendly blogging software include:

• Each blog post should be assigned a unique page which can be easily accessed and indexed by the search engines. This is called a permalink.

• Pages should be able to be tagged with keywords relevant to your SEO strategy.

• Each post should be able to have its own unique meta data (title, description and key phrases).

• Social bookmarking functionality should be built in.

Corporate blogging

• Blogs can be very successful marketing tools. They’re an excellent way to communicate with staff, investors, industry members, journalists and prospective customers.

• Blogging also helps to foster a community around a brand, and provides an opportunity to garner immediate feedback on developments. This is an audience made up of players key to the success of a company: that makes it important to get blogging right.

Generally the tasks that a blogger undertakes include:

Writing posts.

• Replying to comments from readers.

• Monitoring other blogs within the industry.

• Keeping up to date with the latest industry news.

• Building relationships with other bloggers in the community.

• Commenting on other blogs

For corporate blogs, it is important to outline a strategy and establish guidelines before starting the blog, especially as there will most likely be a number of contributors.

Transparency and honesty are important, but companies need also to be aware of sensitive information being blogged. If there are “no go” areas, they need to be clearly defined to the parties involved. While certain topics can be restricted, ultimately the bloggers should be granted the freedom to express both negative and positive points of view about the approved topics.

Positive claims are more believable if the blogger is able to express negative views as well. For example, Robert Scoble in his popular blog www.scobleizer.com admitted that the Firefox browser was better than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Robert Scoble was an employee of Microsoft at the time. This honesty gave him a credible voice, and so his positive views on Microsoft are respected by the community.

Corporate blog content should be:

• Industry relevant

• Appealing to your target market

• Transparent and honest

• Personal and entertaining

• Related to what’s going on in the blogosphere

• Posted regularly

Promoting blogs:

While Technorati may be tracking 112.8 million blogs it doesn’t mean that all of these blogs will still be active by the end of the year - in fact only 55% of blogs make it past the first three months (Sifry, 2006). Longevity rests in the hands of the blogger, but here are some tips to raise the profile of a blog:

List the blog in blog directories:

While they’re not as popular as search engines, many Internet users do in fact visit them while looking for information. Examples include: Google’s Directory (www.google.com/dirhp)and BlogCatalog (www.blogcatalog.com).

Ping web services with updated content:

Sites like Ping-o-Matic (pingomatic.com) and Feed Shark (feedshark.brainbliss.com) offer a service whereby they ping multiple web services, blog directories and search engines to let them know that a blog has fresh content.

Use TrackBacks:

If a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry on your blog, and both blogging tools support the TrackBack protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify your blog with a “TrackBack ping”; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. This allows for conversations spanning several blogs that readers can easily follow.

Participate in the blogosphere: You can’t expect anyone to engage on your blog if you’re not engaging on theirs. It’s all about fostering a sense of community.
Make use of aggregators: Examples of aggregators include Technorati, Amatomu and Afrigator.

Use traffic generating tools like MyBlogLog: The MyBlogLog (www.mybloglog.com) widget allows you to see who in the MyBlogLog community has visited your site and they can see if you have visited their site in return. Bloggers will more often than not click through to your site from this widget, as they are interested in learning more about who is reading their blog. If they like what they see when they get there, they may become regular readers.

Microblogging

Microblogging is a form of blogging that allows a user to publish short text updates, usually limited to 200 characters that can be viewed by anyone or restricted to a specified community as specified by the micro-blogger. This can be accomplished using various communication tools such as Instant Messaging (IM), via the web, text messaging on your mobile phone, even a Facebook application. Microblogging can also refer to the publishing of short posts using a limited number of images, audio or video files.

Currently, the most popular text micro-blogging service is called Twitter (www.twitter.com), which was launched in July 2006. Other similar sites includes the likes of Jaiku (www.jaiku.com), Identi.ca (www.identi.ca), as well as Yammer (www.yammer.com). Examples of rich media based microblogs include Tumblr (www.tumblr.com), Streem (www.streem.us) and Soup (www.soup.io). On Twitter, posts are called tweets and are limited to 140 characters. Despite frequent disruptions to Twitter’s service, its users are fiercely loyal. These posts are usually short thoughts or URLs to interesting articles.

Twitter has also become massively popular due to the nature of its immediacy. Major news events such as the Mumbai attacks in November 2008 were extensively covered by Twitterers, and breaking news can also regularly be found here first. A year on year study from November 2007 to November 2008 saw Twitter’s monthly unique visitors increase by 600% to 3.5 million visitors. Twitter has entered the mainstream, with public figures such as Barack Obama (www.twitter.com/barackobama) and Britney Spears (www.twitter.com/britneyspears) having set up accounts.

Blogs as a marketing tool: listen and engage

Blogs are powerful because of their reach, their archives (information is seldom deleted and is thus available long after it has been posted) and the trust that other consumers place in them. For a marketer, they present opportunities to learn how others perceive your brand and to engage with your audience. Some brands get this right; some get it wrong.

Above are some guidelines for corporate blogging, but marketers do not need to be bloggers to use this tool. As with all other social media, blogs provide a snapshot of audience sentiment regarding a brand. Marketers can also listen to blog activity around competitors in order to gain market insights.
Although blogging is the best way to respond to and engage with bloggers, companies can also interact with bloggers by commenting on relevant posts. Demonstrating the capacity to listen to bloggers, and then responding using the same medium, can reap tremendous benefits with this community.