The Blog Medic

In this series of short entries entitled “One Action a Day”, every exercise is designed to help corporate bloggers gain insight into the readership or inspire for future posts by looking at your site statistics. Best of all, it should only take a few minutes of your day, so you can get on with the many other projects you’re responsible for!

In the last entry, I suggested looking at the top keywords your readers use to discover your site. Today, we’ll look at your referral traffic.

Referrers are the fellow bloggers or website owners who link to you. If you’re using Google Analytics, look at Referring Sites, under the Traffic Sources tab, and expand the list beyond the default top 10. How many of these do you recognise? Are there some unknown or new sources?

Click through to their site and educate yourself on what the site is about, who runs it and in what light your site was mentioned. If it was mentioned in a positive or neutral light, why not leave a comment thanking the author for the unexpected link or drop them an email? On the other hand, if the post stinks, take your time and be level-headed in your answer. Remember that if you can solve this person’s problem, you may find yourself with a new brand evangelist.

Make it a regular activity to look at your referring sites, and build relationships with their owners. Not only are these inbound links valuable in terms of SEO, but you’ll be growing your network and building a livelier community around your business.

Read all “One Action a Day” tips.

With the responsibilities of a company blogger often stretching beyond purely writing a daily entry, time can be a bit short. In depth analysis and personal education, two habits essential to quality writing, get neglected.

In this series of short entries entitled “One Action a Day”, every exercise will help you gain insight into the readership or inspire you for future posts by looking at your site statistics. Best of all, it should only take a few minutes of your day.

What are the top 10 search terms people use to get to your site? Have a look at the keywords list, found under “Traffic Sources” in Google Analytics. Now, look past those obvious 10 and look at the lesser-used terms. Do any of the terms surprise you?

We often get in a rut and use the same jargon every day, so what new words could you use to describe your business well? There’s nothing wrong with using the thesaurus or asking colleagues how they present the company to friends. Think of broader terms as well as industry-specific ones.

This will give you hints as to what themes to cover in your entries, widen the net of the search terms you rank highly for and make your writing more interesting and colourful!

Read all past “One Action a Day” tips.

In this series, I’ll be writing about the challenges of becoming a corporate blogger, from choosing your company and building a community to getting the right technical setup and getting support from your board of directors.

You’ll find the full series here.

The best way to make your role as company blogger as productive and fruitful as possible is to have the support of your colleagues and management. Getting everyone internally on your side should make it easier to go ahead with wild and wonderful ideas, since they’ll be confident that you can be trusted and are measuring results of every new idea you put in place.

While we may be creative softies, those sitting across the table are likely to think in measurable terms and KPIs where every decision is backed by hard numbers, so it’s worth learning to speak their language.

In a future post, we’ll look at how to communicate the more subjective qualitative information you’ll encounter but first, let’s focus on the hard stuff.

These hard stats are easy numbers to acquire so once you’ve picked your analytics package (Lee Odden lists 20 tools for blogs, some of which are better than others - I recommend Google Analytics to get you started), these are the first numbers I suggest reporting to your team on a weekly or at least monthly basis.

1. Unique visitors: How many people in total have visited your site during a given period? Note the difference between “visits” and “visitors” as a single visitor can come back for multiple visits. Count each visitor once for a better gauge of your readership.
2. Loyalty: How often do readers come back in that period?
3. Top content: Which articles, categories or tags have had the most readers?
4. Referring sources: How many inbound links? What kind of traffic do they bring in?
5. Keyword analysis: What keywords are leading users to your site? Are they relevant?
6. Geography: If your product is limited geographically, are your readers in regions where they can act on their interest? Can they buy, order or visit it?

Note that if you can, find out the IP addresses used by your office and add them to the exclusion list in your analytics package. This will give you a more accurate figure of the “real” traffic to the blog, since it’ll filter out the many hits you create when pottering around maintaining the site.

In addition to these basic figures, I would suggest reporting the number of subscribers to your RSS feed if you’re using a service like Feedburner to manage your feeds, as well as Technorati score and authority ranking, on which you should register/claim your blog.

Next, we’ll look at reporting softer measures like opinion shift, discovering your evangelists and forecasting traffic, but this should get you started.

Day to day, I wear many hats. On one hand, I’m a blogger, I need news and stories to feed my writing, occasionally receiving these useful tidbits from PR and marketing people in the industries I cover, most of the time sourcing them from my RSS feeds. On the other hand, I find myself in the position of - or working closely with - the people who need to send out those press releases to bloggers.

It’s a fascinating, if sometimes morally uncomfortable, place to be. Over the years, I’ve built up a list of the best and the worst ways I, or other bloggers around me, have been accosted by PR people.

1. Untargeted email: This one’s pretty simple. You send me a press release about Windows Vista when I’m obviously an Apple fangirl since I was a child, you invite me to try your new product when it’s only available to US residents, you tell me to listen to this new awesome tween band when I’m as far from a tweenie bopper as it gets. Epic fail!
2. Fake personal email or friendliness: Don’t pretend to be my best mate in a cold email or cold call. I’d rather have an impersonal email than to be sung the same canned song as everyone else.
3. Large attachments: This isn’t specific to PR, but when I receive a handful of releases with videos attached on the same day, it’s a real pain. Suggesting that I should post your video online without directing me to a YouTube account where YOU have already done the hard work of uploading and tagging it shows that you haven’t got a clue. You’re fired!
4. Secretive/partial release of information: So you’re looking for a hook, something to grab me and keep me at your mercy, waiting for baited breath for your next announcement. But unless you provide enough info to allow me to write confidently about the product, it’s a waste of my time.
5. The carbon copy: Blind carbon copying someone is the cheapest way and laziest way to broadcast to a number of people, but unless they’ve specifically signed up to a mailing list, this is an unacceptable way to introduce yourself to a group of bloggers. Worst yet is putting multiple recipients in the “To:” field, making their addresses public to others.
6. The boaster: This is often down to the client rather than the PR agency, but it’s a pet peeve nonetheless. Companies that claim to be “the best”, “the first” and “the biggest” grate our collective nerves something nasty. Let us decide if you’re great or not.
7. Getting our names wrong: It’s Vero. Not Vergo, not Vera, not Verona. And yes, Pepperrell is a triple double consonant name. Yes, it’s hard work for me too, but it is written on my blog, you could even copy/paste it. Thanks. Now get it right.
8. Lack of responsiveness: You’re hoping I’ll post as promptly as possible about your product, so be responsive if I have questions. You don’t want me to post wrong information, neither do I, since we’ll both look like numpties. Quicksticks!
9. Failing to provide plenty of digital assets: Colourful screenshots, high quality logos and readily available video will make my life so much easier, and could make the difference between posting now and putting it in the “to write later” inbox (known as the press release graveyard).
10. Calling it an exclusive when it’s obviously been around more than Paris Hilton’s first video: It’s great to flatter our ego every so often, but don’t pretend you lurve us so much as to give an exclusive, then let it become obvious you’ve been saying it to two dozen other bloggers.

Thanks to the many bloggers who suggested items for this list, and here’s to hoping that marketing and public relations managers hear us loud and clear. What are your pet peeves coming from those who want you to write about them?

This post was inspired by Rohit Bhargava’s panel during SXSW called “Core Conversations: 10 Easy Ways to Piss Off A Blogger”, which I unfortunately missed but heard much about afterwards.

[Update: Adam Ostrow has also posted on 12 Things Not to do when Pitching to Mashable. There you go, PR people, don’t say we didn’t warn you!]

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Whether it’s your own business endeavour or you’re writing for a corporate blog, you’ll want to track who’s talking about you and what they’re saying. Traditionally, PR agencies would put together daily all the press cuttings for a company and send them through.

When the boss said “let’s launch a blog”, he might not have allocated the budget to do this large-scale tracking, but will expect you to circulate some metrics and reports on the buzz you’re creating. Thankfully, the Internet is full of useful and free resources.

Find the buzz

What are people saying? What low-effort, automated ways are there to track the buzz? Keeping in mind the limited amount of time you’ll want to dedicate to analysis (you want to spend your time writing, don’t you?), there are great ways to automate or simplify the research.

• Google Alerts: Setup Google Alerts with your company name, your competitors’ names and some industry keywords. You’ll get reporting from news, blogs, videos and pretty much everything Google indexes. Get it as an email or RSS feed* on a daily basis.
• Twitter tracking: If your users are likely to be active on Twitter, you might want to track a few keywords relating to your brand.
• Yahoo Answers: Do a first search for your company name (For example, Priceline) and click the orange RSS icon in the address bar to start tracking it. This feed will bring up any mention of your search term - it may also pick up some irrelevant flotsam along the way if your brand name is something too common.
• Google Analytics: I think you should be using Google Analytics for a number of reasons (which I’ll reserve for a later post, alongside a review of multiple other free stats packages), but amongst them lies a priceless tool - Referring sources. Find out who is linking to you and how much traffic they’re sending you. It’s often a good way to quantify how much visibility the author of the praising or criticising article gets.
• Del.icio.us bookmarking: Visit Del.icio.us and search for related keywords. Look at which posts have been most bookmarked by readers, it may hint at what kind of content they find most useful.

[* Not clear on what an RSS feed is? No shame in asking! Back in Skinny Jeans has one of my favourite simple explanations of all times.]

Share the buzz

Now that you’ve found out what’s going on, there are ways to share the information (aside from the dreaded weekly spreadsheet) which your colleagues may find refreshing.

• Del.icio.us (yes, again!): Create an account and aggregate your findings by bookmarking their URLs (The Firefox toolbar plugin makes it so easy) and sharing either all the bookmarks, or simply those tagged with a specific word. For example, if I worked for Campaign Monitor, I could share http://del.icio.us/thatcanadiangirl/campaignmonitor with the team, having tagged all relevant news with “campaignmonitor”. [Bonus points: Integrate the feed to your blog as Twitter have done on theirs to share the buzz with your readers.]
• Google Reader: If your colleagues are somewhat technically inclined, they may be using RSS readers already. If that’s the case, exploit the “Shared items” feeds in Google Reader to instantly distribute useful links. Danny Sullivan has a great explanation of Google’s “Shared items” feature and how to use it.
• Twitterfeed: Want to communicate your findings with your Twitter followers as well? Plug the RSS feed of your choice into Twitter with Twitterfeed. A word of warning, be sure to balance it out with non-automated genuine conversation or you’ll annoy your readership.
• Internal wiki: I’m personally not a big fan of wikis because they take active attention to remain up to date, but if multiple people are likely to report on links they found, it can be a good solution, enabling anyone in the team to modify a given page where all useful links are saved. Wikimedia is an example of a self-hosted wiki you could use.
• Google Docs: I hear you say “enough with the Google love already!” but just one more. Google Documents, provided your colleagues also have a Google account, also allows multiple users to update and edit the same document, whether it’s a text file, spreadsheet or slide presentation.

All of the above are free tools, which should help when you’re working on a tiny or non-existing budget but need to quantify and qualify the buzz to support your reporting to your boss and your colleagues.

In this series, I’ll be writing about the challenges of becoming a corporate blogger, from choosing your company and building a community to getting the right technical setup and getting support from your board of directors.

Being a corporate blogger was completely unheard of a mere 5 years ago, but now that businesses and organisations are starting to pick up on the benefits of a blog, more of us “fall into” this kind of position.

Writing for your current employer

If you like the company you work for, you’re proud of what you do and you’re relatively extroverted, your company may actually welcome your interest in blogging. It takes a relatively forward-thinking company to do it well but it probably won’t take that much to convince your boss that it’s worth trying. It’s a reasonably low-cost experiment and the rewards can be significant.

Lionel Menchaca, is a great example of an employee who started as tech support for Dell, to later on become Dell’s first blogger. Michael Dell was perceptive and listened to his team when they suggested that a blog could help improve the perception of the company in the public eye. It paid off.

“When we started, the tone of the blogs out there were at their worst point for Dell, with about 48% of them negative toward us. Now we’re at 24% negative. I’d say we’re having a positive impact,” says Lionel in a Globe & Mail interview.

Writing for a new company

This one’s tricky in the sense that you don’t really know what you’re in for. You’ve seen the public face of the company so far, but you don’t know what’s waiting under the bonnet - Either a great, happy team who’ll provide fabulous support once you start or a group of risk adverse people, set in their ways, weary of new media and change.

Regardless of which background you come from, there are a few ways to assess what the landscape is going to be like along the new path you’ll be taking.

Before you say yes

1. Pick your product/service carefully

Think long and hard about whether you support the company’s work. You may be getting excited that, as a coffee lover, you’ve been asked to write for a coffee company. But what if they don’t use fairtrade and organic coffee but you’re a strong believer in equitable trade? You can hopefully change the company from the inside, but are you willing to risk writing for a product you don’t believe in?

Dig deep before you start, get to know as much as you can. The good but also the bad, the dirty and the historical. Your faith and passion for your product will ooze from your words if it’s genuine; the Campaign Monitor guys, for example, clearly love what they do and it shows in every single blog post they write.

2. Pick (the brains of) your future boss

As much as possible, whether it’s your current or future team lead, manager or CEO, be sure to quiz them about their views. This can be tricky in an interview, but try to glean what you can of the overall moral values of the company as well as the individual attitudes of those who will be involved.

• How do they feel about new media? How much do they really know about it?
• How much control do they plan on giving you and the team that will support you?
• How brave and wild do they want the blog to be? Is this an improved PR platform or genuinely a conversation? How well do they cope with crisis when things go a bit pear-shaped?

When Lionel started blogging for Dell, the first crisis he tackled was a report of laptop batteries going up in flames. He immediately started talking about the issue, saying Dell was investigating. His team, like most traditional PR teams, gasped at the thought of giving the problem attention publicly rather than attempting to brush it under the carpet. Lionel’s approach paid off, as customers were kept informed every step of the way until a battery replacement program was put in place.

Will your team be receptive to admitting to flaws, asking the community for support and being more transparent?

3. Do your own sanity check

Hopefully, you’ll have done this before you started looking into blogger jobs, but it’s an essential part of the process. Be introspective for a moment and think of how you feel about putting yourself in the spotlight. If you’re already a blogger, you’ll have had a taste for it, but it’s likely that the spotlight will be a while lot brighter this time around!

In a regular job, a small team of people will be intimately aware of your success or failure at the end of the year, but as a blogger, you’re seen by everyone, assessed by every reader every day. Can you cope? Are you ready to be the rockstar of the web? Will your ego bruise easily when fellow bloggers disagree with you?

Every job brings its own challenges, and here you’ll need to be very resourceful since not every improvement can be measured through quantifiable metrics, something most directors and managers have come to expect. Can you illustrate to them the progress you’ve made? (We’ll cover ways to achieve in a future post.)

Getting started

1. Set expectations early on

Before you get down to the nitty gritty of daily posts, get everyone who’ll have a finger in the blogging pie for a kickoff meeting. Let them talk about what they want to achieve with the blog. This can be only you and your line manager, or people from all departments including the CEO.

Why not use the old focus group Post-it technique? Give everyone a small stack of Post-its and ask them to write down what objectives they think the blog has, what topics they want to cover, what they want to ask the community. Look for common themes, educate where expectations might be unrealistic or off-target and get objections nipped in the bud.

By doing this early on, everyone will have a chance to express themselves before you build your strategic plan. It isn’t a guaranteed way to avoid internal disagreements, but it should help the team be in tune with each other.

If you’re expected to play multiple roles in the company, let your blogging needs be known; it’s more than just putting a few hundred words into a blog platform and hitting “publish”. Coming up with ideas takes time, dealing with comments & keeping on top of the buzz takes some time, so ensure your manager is aware of the time you need.

2. Strategise, but be flexible

Now that everyone’s cards are on the table, create a strategic plan.

• What are your objectives?
• Who is your target readership? How will they find out about our blog?
• What kind of material will appeal to those readers? What frequency is suited to them?
• How can blogging efforts tie in with other company marketing? How much of a hand will the marketing department, or a PR agency, have (if any!) in shaping the blog?
• How can colleagues contribute or support blogging efforts? What do we need to do to get internal awareness?

Remember, once these are on paper, that they’re not set in stone. In my first corporate blogging experience, 50% of the strategy went out the window after two months, and we changed our tactics altogether. Be flexible and remember that, as Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Be patient with colleagues and directors who make suggestions or try to steer the blog in a direction you may not agree with. Be diplomatic in explaining what will and won’t work, back it up with articles from fellow business bloggers and breathe deeply.

3. Listen

Your team and your fellow bloggers will provide some support and steering for the blog, but the most important people to listen to are your readers. Obvious, I know, but sometimes we forget.

Reply to comments from your readers, look at their behaviour and the posts they seem to be more responsive to. Which of your posts create ripples across the web where, not only do readers comment, but fellow bloggers continue the conversation on their own blog?

Ask these questions both online and offline. Lionel and some of his colleagues attended South by SouthWest Interactive in March on behalf of Dell, getting the opportunity to talk to users face-to-face. Find out where they hang out and let them talk to you. Don’t be tempted to sell to them while you’re there, just listen and share the feedback with your colleagues.

These are just some of the early stages of launching a corporate blog. Next time, we’ll look at getting the right technical foundations and setup to make the most of your company’s blog.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing a series of posts on the challenges of becoming a corporate blogger, from choosing your company and building a community to getting the right technical setup and getting support from your board of directors.

I’ll begin the series at the beginning: The different types of bloggers out there. Do you recognise yourself here? Did I miss your “type” altogether?

1. The leisure blogger

The most common kind of blogger you’ll find, he’ll have launched his blog on a whim one late night after getting angry at something in the news. Posts tend to be few and far between, varying in quality from gems of insight to blurry cat photos. Very hit and miss, these usually have a small readership of friends and family mainly, and the author feels little guilt if it becomes a ghost town.

2. The semi-organised leisure blogger

This type of blogger has put at least a few evenings into planning the blog and there will generally be a common thread and theme to the blog, something he’s passionate about and could discuss all night long.

He’s more likely to have customised his template and may have even put some ads or an Amazon link in the sidebar, in the hope it might cover some basic hosting cost or a beer at the pub. The author will occasionally tut and say “I really need to update my blog. I should write about this…”, feeling a slight twinge of guilt at choosing to watch tv instead. He probably doesn’t feel such guilt to secretly blog on company time.

He probably hasn’t bothered putting any analytics on his site and vastly underestimates his readership. These readers arrive due to a few posts’ keywords getting picked up by search engines for terms that are probably a bit niche, to do with gorillas and peanut butter or something…

3. The freelancer

This blogger isn’t a full time writer but tends to be dedicated to getting her name out. She writes regularly, providing incisive insight into modern day issues, but for someone else’s brand, getting a small payment for every post.

She probably has a personal blog which has been deserted since the pressure of a regular job and the writing deadlines have sucked all her ideas out. She’s confident that One Day, She Will Be A Real Writer, but for now, it doesn’t quite pay the bills, so other priorities occasionally take priority over writing.

4. The full-time blogger aka journalist 2.0

This more unusual animal will introduce himself as a blogger in most circles, but will just say “oh I’m a journalist” when speaking to traditional media people, knowing very well bloggers aren’t taken seriously everywhere.

He can make ends meet through writing but feels like battery chickens in weeks surrounding big events in their field, being pushed to the very limits of how much he can write. This blogger is most likely to die from blogging exhaustion, or start regurgitating press releases just to meet targets.

5. The corporate blogger

The corporate blogger is a dove.

By that I mean, some people will watch it in awe, as some being that has fascinating connotation attached to it. A representation of world peace, magic and great wonder. Others will sneer and say “They’re just white pigeons. They’re still a pest like rats, and need to be shot”. They’ll both be right. (well, except for the shooting part, I hope.)

As a corporate blogger, she faces the challenges of pleasing not only readers and other bloggers in a similar niche, but also those put forward by her boss who may, or may not, understand blogs. It’ll involve setting targets, KPIs and forecasting, which can be a bit tricky without prior knowledge of the market!

Now, let me say that I’m not particularly fond of the term corporate blogger. “Corporate” is a big dirty ugly word in my books, which I associate to the big dirty ugly highrises in the city, faceless companies and suits where your tie is hiked up so tight that you almost turn blue.

But I’m going to use the term corporate blogger anyways. Why? Because I think everyone understands what it means: A blogger who writes on behalf of and, often, about the company that hired him/her. It can be both a blessing and a curse: Lucky enough not to have to hide your blogging window when the boss approaches, but married to a brand, for better or for worse.

While I surely don’t have all the answers, I hope that I can shed some light on this last segment of bloggers in this series of posts. I’ll offer tips & tricks based on what I’ve discovered working as a corporate blogger, as well as some fantastic gems of wisdom fellow bloggers have shared with me over the past few years.

In the next post, we’ll look at choosing the product, team and company you blog for wisely.