In this politically charged environment where everything about our borders is under fire, did I just use the word “Maquiladora“ in the title of a post from a social media centric blog?  Yes I did!  And it gets worse, as my first example has ties back to the German pornography industry!

It is all in good faith, however, as this discussion is going to be about the integration of blogs and social media into the customer feedback loop with a strategy that can redefine manufacturing.  Customer service blogs are a huge opportunity for manufacturing businesses to connect with consumers.

To start this post, I am going to use one of the most hilarious manufacturing mistakes that I’ve personally witnessed and how a broken feedback loop cost a European furniture manufacturer a lot of money.

When I was in high school, way back before Al Gore invented the Internet, I worked at a local mall in a contemporary furniture store that had about 50 locations across the United States.  The majority of the products we sold came in boxes and were assembled in our stores or by our delivery teams.  Most of the products came from Europe.  In late 80′s in Dallas, TX, our customer base consistent primarily of conservative born and bred southerners.

One day we got a frantic call from a customer demanding her money back on a small desk she had picked up in a box at our store the day before.  She wouldn’t discuss it over the phone.  When the box was dropped off, I pulled them apart to make sure none of the pieces were damaged.  It was then I realized what the problem was.

This manufacturer used newspaper to stuff the open sections of the box to protect the item during shipping.  We used to get a kick out of these newspapers as they were generally in foreign languages.  This particular manufacturer was German.  The problem with the box in question was that the newspapers used to stuff it consisted of German pornography.  After the adolescent giggling came to an end, reality hit me: I was going to have to unpack every box from this manufacturer to see if more of the offensive material existed.  Unfortunately for the manufacturer, we could have changed our mall honing to “Adult Periodicals” based on what we had in inventory that day.  This literally led to a massive recall of their products from our home office.

The Customer Feedback Loop

So where am I going with this?  Well, there is a huge opportunity to get out in front of the curve for manufacturers.  Let me tell you a little bit about my first encounter with the concept.

While at Microsoft I had the opportunity to visit a decent number of the world’s premier manufacturing and assembly plants.  These ranged from Toyota’s Formula One unit in Germany to assembly plants along the US/Mexico boarder.  All of these facilities had one thing in common: they benefitted from timely feedback.

In the world of Formula One, this was instantaneous due to the sensor and data collection technology built into the car.  For a television assembly plant in Mexico, however, their first point of customer feedback was in many cases a returned product from US retailers.  Much like the furniture store example, by the time they find out about issues it is too late.

In spending the day with the general manager of one of these maquiladoras, he told me, “If we could get instantaneous feedback, we could make real time changes to our assembly processes and force our parts suppliers to do the same to provide solutions to problems before the next lot of merchandise leaves our facilities.”

Unfortunately, the road to getting to this point involved building massive business to business intranet systems that would take years to deploy.  Fast forward 10 years and enter social media.

Social Media and Consumer Pulse

How many times have you been on the comments section of a blog, Twitter, or Facebook and seen phrases such as, “My iPad is awesome!”, “AT&T sucks!”, or “My Chase banker saved my day”.  I actually tweeted a few nasty comments yesterday after an Intuit representative admitted they flat out lied in their representation of a product’s capabilities.

The bottom line is that consumers voice their opinions everyday on social media.  This is a great place for manufacturers to connect with consumers.  Not only can they gain valuable insight but it presents the opportunity to connect with consumers.  Though there are a plethora of social media monitoring tools that can allow you to tap into the social media ecosystem, there is a much more simplistic way–a customer service blog.

Customer Service Blogs

Customer service blogs are blogs dedicated to helping customers maximize the value of their purchase decision.  These blogs contain information ranging from how to use a product to troubleshooting, care, and maintenance.

A good customer service blog can impact a customer prior to a sale and increase post sale satisfaction.  It also gives product manufacturing teams detailed insight into customer expectations, common problems, and ideas for future product improvement or development.  Lastly, if you can connect with a disgruntled customer in a timely manner, you can shape their perception of your company and product.

A good customer service blog should contain:

• Personalized authors with whom customers can relate.
• A variety of information formats including manuals, videos, images, and detailed content (more content than the enthusiast blogger is producing who is your main source of competition).
• Clearly defined areas including a forum where customers can self help.

The “Made In Mexico” Image

“Made in Mexico” has gotten a bad rap.  Consumers will be drawn to the name brand marketing of a major American, German, or Japanese brand and then discount it a bit based where it is manufactured.   It isn’t fair but it is true.

You have companies like Fender who have converted American icon products like its flagship “Stratocaster” guitar to a Mexico-based factory, thus creating heartburn for their image.  Still, a blog can help to shape this opinion as seen in this post on Fender guitars Made in Mexico.

The bottom line is that Mexican manufacturing is mature and has been heavily influenced by the American and European manufacturing titans who invested in it.  Still, a national television commercial won’t sway American consumers on that message.  When it comes to staples such as consumer electronics and automotive subcomponent assembly, the blogosphere can help.  Sure, reviews such as the Fender post above are one thing, but what can really turn a customer is a corporate based blog supported by the factory.

Let’s say you purchased a television at a local Best Buy and realized when putting it together that one of the cables had a defect not allowing it to properly connect.  Today, you will probably head to the Internet.   If your first hit in a Google search was a customer service blog that had representation from the teams responsible for your product, you might be enticed to leave a comment.  After doing so, if you had a factory representative identify the issue and remedy the situation for you, you might be compelled to tell your story.  Some executives might fear too many comments or overload.  If that is the case, you might actually have a manufacturing problem!

Word of mouth marketing is powerful and inexpensive–a lot of it starts with an Internet experience.  Why not make it your customer service blog?

At a McCuistion TV taping earlier this year, I had the opportunity to meet Sharon Allen, the Chairman of the Board for Deloitte.  In a brief conversation, she mentioned the outrageous number of downloads they had of the online posting of their 3rd Annual Deloitte LLP Ethics and Workplace Survey entitled, “Social Networking and Reputational Risk in the Workplace“.  The survey is excellent and I highly recommend that you download and read it.

Though I could get into all kinds of statistics and facts regarding the survey, I’ll summarize it by stating that there is a huge disconnect between the board room, employees, and social media.  So when it comes to employee blogs in corporations, you can rest assured that the topic strikes fear in minds of senior leadership; and where there is fear, comes rules, policy, and inhibitors.

In this post, I’m going to argue against this approach and make the bold statement that every employee in a company should have a blog!

Michael Hyatt, the CEO of Thomas Neslson Publishers, wrote two different posts on his blog that made me an instant fan of his.  Ironically, they are both very applicable to the this post on employee blogs.

In the first post, Michael Hyatt shared his company’s corporate blogging guidelines.  These guidelines were written by him and not an attorney.  In one section, it very clearly states:

At Thomas Nelson, we want to encourage you to blog about our company, our products, and your work. Our goal is three-fold:

• To raise the visibility of our company,
• To make a contribution to our industry, and
• To give the public a look at what goes on within a real live publishing company.

source: michaelhyatt.com

The second post Michael wrote that really resonated with me was one entitled “Five Reasons Why Your Company Doesn’t Need A Social Media Policy“.  In this, he clearly talks about trusting employees when he says:

Your people can be trusted. In my experience as a leader, people pretty much do what you expect. If you expect them to be honest and trustworthy, they will be honest and trustworthy. No, I am not hopelessly naive: I know some people misbehave. But why punish the many because of the few? Deal with the exceptions as they occur. Most people will do the right thing if given the chance.

In the end, employee blogs are just like any other tool we entrust employees to use; they require guidance and education.

Enable Your Employees to Blog

In most organizations, a high percentage of employees will have opinions and be passionate about one topic or another.  A percentage of that population will actually have the skills and take the time to effectively put their thoughts in writing.

When I say “effectively”, I mean the types of communication skills that allow them to clearly and concisely articulate their thoughts, drive home their points, and tackle tough or even controversial subject matter in an “above the line” manner.  Within this population, a very small percentage will actually understand how to write in a manner that attracts search engines and socializes the thinking via other avenues that will allow the message to be heard outside of their normal channels.

Herein lies the opportunity!

Enable your employees by providing them:

• Guidance on how to select a blogging platform.
• Writing and communication review training.
• Knowledge as to how optimize blog posts for search engines.
• Corporate policy, employee policy, and/or a digital copyright law review.

If you have to set policy, start with a “Best Practices” approach and highlight the work of peers.  I’ll give you a “right way” vs. “wrong way” example:

The Wrong Way

You are forbidden from copying any material from our corporate support site and including it in your blog.

The Right Way

When discussing product fixes and work arounds, a best practice is to link to the actual knowledge base articles on the company support site.  There are several benefits in doing so which include:

• You won’t have to find and replicate changes from these pages on your blog.
• It creates a more consistent support experience for our customers.
• It allows you to write more concise and readable blog post.

Summary

Employee blogs are a great thing.  They enable your employees to express themselves and drive energy and awareness around your company and its products.  Even in a regulated industry, you can find ways to embrace your employees and blogging.

Though not every employee will want to blog, every employee should be given the opportunity if they choose to do so.

One of the most critical aspects of digital marketing in the corporate arena is creating a corporate blog strategy that accounts for the company, key brands, and key individuals/roles.  In many cases this will require a marketer to design and implement a multiple blog strategy.  These multiple blogs can include brand blogs, product blogs, and even individual leadership sites like a CEO blog.

With multiple blogs, however, comes higher levels of complication and management.  As we’ve stated before, you really want to get this right on a piece of paper before launching blogs.  The first step is to decide whether your company needs a single blog or a multiple blog strategy.  If a multiple blog strategy is the right choice, the strategy will need to define business goals and interaction overall and at the blog level.

Confused yet?

I will try to demystify by providing using a hypothetical electronics company that makes sound amplification products for bass guitars.  Then I’ll provide some guidance in creating your framework.

The Hypothetical Company

Clear Wave Audio is in the business of building musical instrument amplifiers for bass guitars.  The company has two primary lines.  The Blue Wave line is created for enthusiast musicians ranging from teenagers to adults.  It features sound and quality worthy of the Clear Wave name but is at a price point affordable to all.  The Black Wave line is targeted at professional musicians and is the flagship product that put company on the radar screen.  Black Wave amps are used by several prominent professional musicians and carries a price point beyond the reach of average consumers.

Clear Wave Audio’s CEO, George Schultz, is the founder of the company and is known in the industry for his personality and presence at trade shows and appearances with the company’s endorsement musicians.

Let Your Target Audiences and Business Needs Define The Numbers

To start this discussion, I’m going to layout a couple of options and then I’ll we’ll apply some criteria to make a decision.

Here are our blog options:

• Individual CEO blog and a corporate blog featuring categories for the two brands.
• A corporate blog featuring the two brands where the CEO is a featured author.
• Create individual blogs for the two brands and have a CEO blog.
• Create a corporate blog, two brand  blogs, and a CEO blog.
• Create individual blogs for the two brands.

One could make an argument for any of the options above or even add some additional twists.  Thus, I am going to suggest starting at your target audience and business goals for blogging in order to back into the right answer for your company.

Let’s start with the business justification.

It is important to have a business justification for a blog and to measure the blog based on a set of metrics defined by that business justification.  Some popular business justifications include improving brand awareness, increasing sales, and lowering customer service related cost.

If our primary goal at Clear Wave Audio were to lower the cost of customer service, we could settle on a single corporate blog that featured “how to”, “repair”, and “equipment care” articles in a specialized category.  The blog could still be generic enough to host general announcements and other information about the company and its product line.  However, if our main business goal was brand awareness and increasing sales, we would have to closely analyze our target audience and potential brand dilution in hosting a single blog for our two products.

In the case of Clear View Audio, one argument might be that the Blue Wave Line and its lower end products could deteriorate the Black Wave brand.  It could be determined that the Black Wave consumer is looking for content and articles specifically geared toward professional musician.  On the flip side, the shear profits in the company could be driven by the Blue Wave line and the shear fact that it from the same company that produces the Black Wave line could be of benefit.

My recommendation is that if there is brand association at the consumer level and you meet your business goals with both target audiences, use a single blog.  Where a company has acquired brands to gaine market share and the consumer isn’t fully aware of it, target a two blog approach.  An example of this would be where hockey equipment maker Bauer bought rival equipment maker Mission/Itech and markets the brands separately.

What About The CEO (or other “C” Roles)

Since CEO’s don’t have egos, they couldn’t possibly want their own blog, right?  All humor aside, individual blogs within the context of a company come down to a single deciding factor–the power of the individual’s brand.  If you look at Bill Gates, for example, his brand is as powerful, if not more powerful, than Microsoft’s.

How about Ray Ozzie?

Who is that you ask?  Ray is one of the top minds in the world in the software industry and became Bill Gate’s replacement as “Chief Software Architect” at the company.  Ray is awesome!  Still, his brand is nowhere near that of Microsoft and should probably be a guest author on one of many brand or corporate blogs the company has.  Then again, maybe the blog’s goal is to build his brand since most still don’t realize that Gates no longer works at the company on a day to day basis.

Another thing to consider about individual blogs is that a blog is a digital asset.  What happens when the person leaves the company?  There is a lot of re-branding to do that could potentially impact the blogs results in search engines and other factors.

A High Level Framework for Corporate Blog Strategies

The following is a quick framework you can use to jump start your blog strategy:

First, start off by all of the moving parts in your organization and desired business goals.  These steps include:

• Clearly stating the business justification for blogging at the corporate level.
• Defining individual goals at levels such as product, brand, and/or division.
• Delineating roles versus potential authors with individual brand power at the company or in the industry.

Next, apply your variables to a single blog strategy and do everything possible to make it work within the taxonomy of modern blogs which includes categories, tags, and featured authors.  If you cannot do so, go through the same exercise with a multiple blog strategy.  If you choose a multiple blog strategy, you might want to consider whether these blogs are “subdomained”, individual directories, or are separate domains.  Though geared toward WordPress installations, the following article can help you to better understand options related to domains and URLs.

Derick Schaefer is a social media consultant, blogger, and founder of Orangecast Social Media. Derick has consulted on a number of corporate blog strategy engagements including with his previous employer The Microsoft Corporation.

One of the primary ways that corporations can leverage blogging is as an extension of their corporate communications.

In all of the excitement surrounding social media, however, a common mistake that corporations make is losing sight of the fact that a blog is simply a way to transport a message.  A corporate communications strategy should incorporate blogs and define their role versus letting the blog or blogger define the strategy.

In this post I will provide some advice for successfully incorporating a blog into your corporate communication strategy in the context of targeting both internal and external audiences.

I got my first real exposure to large scale corporate communications back at Microsoft when I joined the leadership team of their Global Accounts program.

As an organization, our goal was to bring together the sales, marketing, and financial functions of cross divisional teams who worked on the 40 largest global corporations that the company serviced.  These 40 accounts literally had thousands of down stream entities across the world that were called on by 60+ downstream subsidiaries and over 1,000 employees.  This model was further complicated by a partner ecosystem that consisted of tens of thousands of employees speaking a variety of languages.

Though we constantly faced challenges created by global currencies, corporate governance models, and a plethora of financial reporting nuances, one thing that we did very well was communicate.  In a world prior to the uprise of blogs, our communication strategy consisted of Microsoft Word documents, emails, and a corporate portal.

Yes, I did just use all of those “freeze dried terms” in one sentence!

Regardless of how unattractive those means of communication seem now in light of modern day social media platforms, our communication was successful not due to the technology but due to our strategy, which clearly defined our goals, messages, and our target audiences.

Communications Goals

I am going to keep this very simple.  Review your corporate and/or divisional goals and commitments. Then, ask yourself how communicating through a blog will impact these.  Next, quantify it.  This could range from increases in employee satisfaction due to increased transparency to increasing revenue through improving partner readiness.

If you do not have a goal for your communications strategy, get this sorted out before you move on to messages, audiences, and blogging.

“The Message” and “The Timing”

If you could get all of your employees, customers, and business partners into one room every week, what would you say?

Many executives actually go through this challenge on a yearly basis as a part of their “companywide meeting” or “partner briefings”.  The diference in strategy is timing.

A corporate blog that only has a yearly or quarterly post is probably better referred to as a “repository” versus a blog.  So, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you are responsible for a corporate blog that communicates with employees, partners, and even customers, and you aren’t posting on a weekly basis, you might want to consider another mechanism.

With this said, we have to come up with a communications strategy that is geared toward weekly updates.  Elements of this message could be some of the following:

• Individual/Team highlights, wins, and updates.
• Progress updates toward financial goals.
• Reviews of upcoming products or status updates of products and services currently being piloted.
• Call to actions for upcoming events or initiatives.
• Reviews of current events and how it impacts the business.

Does this sound a lot like a newsletter?  One could make that argument.  Still, a blog will have the following elements that differentiate it from a “PDF sent via email”:

• Blogs have one or more personalities.
• Blogs are a mechanism for talking with people, not at them.  A significant part of your message will come from your interaction and responses in the open comments section.
• A blog post should probably be limited to one topic; newsletters are better suited for 5-6 topics.

Figure out your messaging strategy and your timing based on your existing corporate communications strategy.  If you don’t have a corporate wide or organization communications strategy, starting one or more corporate blogs might not be the best idea.

Target Audiences

A very important part of corporate communications is defining an audience.  This audience could be categorized as internal, external, or both.  In many cases, corporate executives will want to keep messaging internllyl and tag communications as “Internal Only” and “Confidential”.  This is fine for truly confidential information.  Though there are all kinds of technologies for securing content and limiting access, I’ve never associated blogging with words like “limited access”.   Thus, an “internal only” blog might have limitations and you might want to reconsider whether a blog is the right platform for this type of communication.

You can still have internally targeted communication that is appropriate when seen by individuals outside the corporation or organization.  When it comes to “setting rules”, I prescribe more to the the Michael Hyatt approach, which says this isn’t a social media or technology issue as it is already covered in policies such as general employee guidelines.

Don’t let the concept of “blogging” get tagged as something that is out of control and that will put confidential corporate communications at risk.  That is a modern world communications problem and not a blogging problem.

The following are four audiences that you should consider for your corporate blog:

Employees

Employees are essential to an organization and companies should communicate with them.  A corporate blog that has elements targeted toward employees should convey messages that are important to an employees performance and should have objectives such as:

• Improving performance by providing knowledge and insight
• Communicating bigger picture goals and removing uncertainty

Peer Executives

In larger companies, the problem is often not communication within a group; rather, it is communication between groups.  A corporate blog is a great way to provide transparency, share best practices, and encourage intergroup communications.

Partners and Service Providers

Though the leadership and employees of your partners and service providers are not part of your direct organization, they are vital to your success.  If you treat them as an audience that is a hybrid between peer executives and employees, you can enhance the performance of your organization and improve overall relationships.

Customers

In some organizations, customers should definitely be considered as a target audience for your blog.  From a corporate blogging perspective, this is probably more relevant to enterprise level customers where you already have an established personal relationship with the customer.  Customers are different audiences than partners, employees, and peer executives.  Thus, their communications might be limited to a subset of your message.  I’m going to encourage you to read my upcoming posts on brand blogging or customer service blogging before you decide how you communicate to customers through a blog.

Summary

Corporate communications is an essential part of business.  Blogging doesn’t change the overall goal or the message.  It is simply an enabler that provides a new format for your message and opens the door to conversations versus one way messages.  As I always say, get your message right on a napkin before you take to the fast paced world of the blogosphere.

If you fail at a corporate blog, it isn’t the end of the world.  If you succeed, the upside can be huge for employee satisfaction, corporate readiness, and inter-organization communication.

**********

Based in Dallas, TX, Derick Schaefer is a blogger and social media strategy consultant who founded Orangecast Social media in 2007.  Derick is a contributing author to the business section of How-To-Blog.TV and can be followed on Twitter at @orangecast .

Blogging has made inroads into the business world at an impressive pace, and business blogs come in all different forms.

Other World Computer (OWC), a favorite online retailer of ours, runs a classic “brand blog” called Other World Computer Blog that talks about everything in the MacWorld and is used to announce product sales and promotions at the company.  Pepsico’s Food Frontiers Blog is dedicated to the topic of balanced nutrition.

Small businesses have also capitalized on blogging; a favorite of mine is a blog that Jerod manages for one of our clients called “The Button Blog“.

Still, some have struggled with the concept and wisely chosen to stay out of the business blogging arena until they were ready.  Conversely, the “do nothing” approach has its dangers as well.  Starbucks’ Gossip is a classic example where a company’s customers have inserted their own voice into the absence of a corporate blog.

Regardless of the size of a company, blogging has become mainstream in the business world.

In my 3 part series entitled “Business Mindset” I tried to drive home the notion that a blog takes some degree thought and planning.  This is especially true when it comes to corporate blogging.  Thus, I am going to dedicate several posts to this topic in a series on Corporate Blogging.

In my corporate blogging series I plan on covering the following topics:

• Extending Corporate Communications Through Blogging
• Brand Blogs and Multiple Blog Strategies
• Executive Blogs
• Employee Blogs
• Customer Service Blogs
• Multinational Blogging

Of course, corporate blogging is part of a grander social media strategy.  Thus, when I get to the office today, I’m going to talk Hannah into providing me some “social media air cover” and write a few posts on the integration of corporate blogs into a grander social media strategy.

I’m really excited about this series as it takes me back to a bread and butter communications skill set I developed in my career through several roles I had at Microsoft.  Though blogging takes corporate communications to an entirely different level of transparency and adds components such as personality and socialization into the mix, it does rely on a corporations public relations and communications foundation.

If you have topical matter or any ideas that would help me with this series, please reach out as I’m just getting started on the content for this one.

One of the biggest challenges any blogger will face is the actual launch of their blog.  If they succeed, they will take their blog from being just another blog to something that has visitors, participation, and actual followers.

Regardless of how good of a writer you are or how knowledgeable you are about the topic of your blog, getting a blog off the ground is tough work.

When we started How-To-Blog.TV, we had a very long list things to accomplish before we felt we could officially launch the blog.  We also realized that failure in getting this blog off the ground would not be good for our careers…after all we are professional bloggers and social media consultants.

In the end, we also knew we’d need some lucky breaks.  Maybe Chris Brogan would tweet about us?  Well, actually he did!  Believe it or not, though his tweet set a traffic record for us, there have been other aspects of our promotional efforts that rendered more meaningful results.

(Note: if you haven’t subscribed to our RSS Feed, we are picking the winners for the rest of our giveaways this week from it)

The Game Plan

Hannah, Matt, Jerod, and I started How-To-Blog.TV with a game plan that included a content roadmap and a bunch of ideas to promote it.  When it came to the promotion of the blog, we assumed that the usual suspects would be our best friends.  These included search engine optimization and social media promotion.

Still, I thought about writing this post since the day we started the blog.  I envisioned writing a post that talked about the power of social media and natural search, but I quickly balanced my one sided thinking and forced myself to include traditional promotional activities in our game plan.  This game plan was to include a few things that could be downright embarrassing to a social media marketer.  Still, I was committed to leaving no stone unturned.

Traditional Marketing

Before we began to focus on SEO and social media promotion of How-To-Blog.TV, I pulled the trigger on the following classic marketing materials:

• Auto Decal – For $75, I purchased an auto decal that read “How-To-Blog.TV”.  After all, my car is exposed to thousands of eyes everyday.
• Post Cards – I purchased 100 post cards to send to Small Business Development Centers in the State of Texas.
• Business Cards – I ordered 250 promotional business cards for How-To-Blog.TV
• Word Of Mouth – We all began to socialize with our contacts in the business community and talk up our new blog.

Web 1.0 Marketing

Our Web 1.0 efforts were simple.  Jerod and I decided to throw up a couple of banner advertisements on the Orangecast website and MidwestSportsFans.Com.  After all, we get a lot of traffic on these sites so we figured it couldn’t hurt.  We also began to talk up the launch of this blog in our monthly newsletter that we send out via Constant Contact.  Last, I put a reference to the blog in my email signature.

Search Engine Optimization

Matt, Jerod, and I are SEO junkies.  We are constantly thinking about search engines.  One of the reasons why we seeded the blog with three months worth of content prior to launch was to create some link bait (articles that would hopefully be linked to by other bloggers), and we also picked a few topics that would rank in Google.  We content optimized our blog posts to compete on specific keywords.  One of the tools we were beta testing at the time was Scribe and it actually became a permanent fixture in How-To-Blog.TV.

Social Media Promotion

Social Media is what we do.  Thus, it made perfect sense for us to use our social media accounts to promote this blog.  From Hannah’s presence on Twitter to Jerod’s devotion to other powerful sites like StumbleUpon, we leveraged social media to its max.  We also got lucky in that social media powerhouse Chris Brogan actually tweeted about a post that Jerod wrote.  Chris has over 100,000 followers!!

Leveraging The Power of Others

We also embarked on a couple of strategies for promoting How-To-Blog.TV where we marketed through others.   This included asking Grace Boyle of Lijit to write a guest post for us and our decision to use How-To-Blog.TV as the home of our newly launched WordPress Plugin.

So What Worked?

We’ve gotten a handful of surprises in launching this blog.

The first surprise was that the overall mix of search engine traffic versus referrals from social media and other sites was completely opposite from what we expected.  Sites like our sports blogs see over 70% of their visitors coming from search engines.  Though we’ve had some great visitors through search engines, and have ranked much better than we expected in both Google and Yahoo, only 17% of our traffic comes from our SEO efforts.  The majority of our traffic comes from social media referrals(66%) and direct visits (18%).

The second surprise is what contributed to growing our subscriber list.  Subscriber lists are kind of like restaurants.  If a restaurant looks empty, people won’t come in.  You can’t make the restaurant not look empty without people.  We caught our break with our subscriber list when the Collin SBDC included us in their electronic newsletter that reaches thousands of small businesses owners.

To be fair, each of the authors of How-To-Blog.TV have volunteered for this Small Business Administration funded organization for over 3 years.  Thus, we had built up a reputation and a level of trust inside the organization.  This single newsletter took our subscriber list from 22 to 125 over night.

We also saw subscriptions to the feed from a one click subscription link we included in the dashboard widget of our WordPress Plugin, WP-MalWatch, provide a steady increase in subscribers.

Traffic Records

We caught a few lucky breaks in our pre-launch promotional activities.

The first was the aforementioned tweet by Chris Brogan.  The tweet from this social media powerhouse led to a record of 240 concurrent users and our first 500 visitor day.

The second break we caught was when Jerod’s post comparing two popular Twitter clients hit the front page of Digg.  This was responsible for our first 1,000 visitor day.

Still, with every swing for the fences, there are standard base hit posts that bridge the gap.  Hannah is responsible for the post with the most page views that doesn’t have any promotion from Digg or Twitter.  The post is just a great article on social media and innovation.  Matt wrote the post that drove the top keyword based search.  Matt’s post is a straight forward preview of WordPress 3.0.

Summary

In the end, there is no magical formula for getting a blog off the ground.  Still, I can draw several conclusions from our experience. The first is to utilize your network of both traditional and online relationships as these can give you meaningful traction. Second, definitely target search engine based traffic but also diversify as social media can be an equally ,if not a greater ,source of visitors. Last, controlled failures are OK, so feel free to experiment.  We tried a lot of different ideas in promoting our blog.  Though we failed at a few, it was this broad reach that gave us our surprises.  Still, failure has to be controlled so be cognizant of opportunity cost.In my case, my brilliant idea of putting an auto decal on my car cost $75 and will cost me a Saturday afternoon getting it off.  I could have used that time to write a blog post and the $75 could have gone toward a few months of a service like Scribe!

(Be sure to register for our RSS Feed as we have some great giveaways this week and will be pulling from our subscriber list.)

If you have read any of our posts on blogging platforms, you know the authors at How-To-Blog.TV have an affinity for self-hosted blog platforms.  We like self-hosted platforms because they provide bloggers with maximum flexibility and control, which can help them reach larger audiences, provide outstanding reader experiences, and minimize future problems.

One of the downsides of self-hosted blogging platforms, however, is that there is some upfront blog theme customization and other development involved.  Since your end goal is blogging and not being in the business of customizing software, I will give you a few tips to quickly and successfully get past the “tinkering” stage and onto the “blogging” part of your venture. Most blogging software consists of a base content management system, modules or plugins that provide specific functionality, and a theme that renders the look and feel of your blog to your readers.  Though you do not have to develop any software to bring your blog to life, you might want to customize your blog’s theme or some of its functionality. You may decided to pay an outside resource to customize your blog, and thus you will still have to switch your mindset to one of an executive at a software company in order to deliver on time and on budget .

The following are a couple of guidelines:

• Contract a resource with experience and references in the platform you have chosen.  Just because they are a “web developer” does not mean they are going to be effective on the blogging platform you chose.
• Do not build what you can buy or assemble from components that are already built
  • Buy a quality theme and have your developer/designer customize it versus building a theme from scratch.
  • Use best of breed plugins and modules to extend the functionality of your blog versus having a developer hand code it.
• Don’t let your developer make decisions for you based on their skill set or comfort zone.  Make decisions that are right for you.

These points will help you to save time and money.  Still, there is more to delivering software than these starting points.  I will now take you through a mindset that will help you succeed in launching and evolving your blog without driving yourself crazy.

There are several business processes that you outsource to specialists.  A few examples are filing your tax returns or moving offices.  These tasks have a definitive start and finish.  Software, on the other hand, requires a “multiple release mindset”.  If you try to build the perfect website and bring closure to it like you do your tax returns, you will likely fail or be unhappy with the result.  The beauty is that software can easily be undone or changed.

The following are a few rules to keep in mind when designing and deploying your blog:

• Take a 3 release approach
  • Release 1 is 70% of what you want.
  • Release 2 picks up the additional 30% and fixes what didn’t work in the original release
  • Release 3 is to tweek and/or completely change your blog based on user interaction and feedback.
• Pick a fixed delivery date.  Increase resources or cut features but do not miss the release date.  Remember you have two more releases to get what you want.
• Don’t be afraid to release with minor flaws as these can be quickly fixed once the site is live.

In addition, understand that your developer will have strengths and weaknesses.  Developer strengths include their technical know-how, creativity, and personal drive to get the job done.  Their weaknesses can include time management and communications skills.  Manage to their strenghts and weaknesses and you will have a much smoother experience.  Also keep in mind that it is very tough to wear the role of both developer and tester.  If you can step up to the role of testing the site, this will greatly increase your chance of discovering flaws prior to the launch of your blog.

At Orangecast, Matt designs and develops many of our WordPress blogs.  We also outsource some of this work firms like our friends at Prism Web Media or Nick Ohrn (WP-MalWatch developer).  Regardless of whether we develop our blogs internally or externally, we force ourselves to use the same guidelines we recommend above.  We too have a laundry list of changes that we’d like to make to our blogs and future visions for their designs and functionality.  Still, we don’t allow ourselves to get drowned in the design and development process as every day that a blog is not online is a day that it is losing the opportunity to interact with readers and gather inbound links from other bloggers.

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Derick Schaefer is a blogger and the founder of Orangecast Social Media.  Prior to starting Orangecast, Derick spent 15 years in the software industry including 10 years at The Microsoft Corporation.  During his time at Microsoft, he was influenced by a talk given by Chris Sells who stressed techniques for delivering quality software on time. One of Derick’s favorite books about software development is Show Stopper by G. Pascal Zachary which tells the story of the race Microsoft had to deliver its next operating system after parting ways with IBM.

One of the most powerful aspects of the WordPress platform is the concept of plugins.

In a nutshell, WordPress was designed to allow third party developers to “plugin” programs that extend the platform.    I’ve often explained the concept of plugins to WordPress newcomers by saying “anything that you want on your website or blog to do that you’d normally have to pay a developer to write generally already exists in the form of a plugin.”

One of the most amazing things about WordPress plugins is that the majority of plugins are free.  Still, you can make donations to a plugin’s developer and I highly encourage it.

In this post I will walk you through the decision process of making a donation to the developer of a free plugin. I’ll also share with you who we made donations to this year and why.

One of the first and most important things to think about when considering using a plugin on your blog is the plugin’s true value.

There are hundreds of novel and cute WordPress plugins available at WordPress.Org.  Beyond the “wow factor”, however, many of these plugins really won’t help make your blog a better blog, and installing too many plugins can become a problem.  Every plugin you install on your blog complicates it and uses resources.  Poorly written plugins can consume a high amount of server resources, cause your blog to crash, or even open the door to security vulnerabilities.

So how do you determine whether a plugin is of value to your blog?

Criteria For Evaluating A Plugin

I look at WordPress plugins from three different perspectives.

The first question I ask is “what does the plugin do to help me be a more efficient blogger?” There are a good number of plugins that can help save you time.  One that comes to mind is Automatic SEO Links.  This plugin automatically creates internal site links from defined keywords to create a “page sculpting” effect that is similar to Wikipedia’s internal linking structure.

The second perspective I evaluate is what a plugin can do to facilitate a reader’s experience.  A good example of one of these plugins is TweetMeMe.  As a reader, adding something to Twitter can be a pain.  You have to copy the link, shorten the link, and then write something in Twitter.  TweetMeMe turns this into a single click allowing me to share great content with my followers in 1/10th of the time.

Last, I evaluate a plugin’s ability to fill gaps in the WordPress platform.  I’ll talk more about this later in the post.

Determining Whether You Should Donate

Once you have determined the appropriate plugins for your blog, I encourage you to make a donation to a subset of these plugins’ creators.  Plugins are time consuming to create and maintain.  A monetary donation helps the plugin’s creator justify expanding the functionality of the plugin and ensuring its compatibility with future versions of WordPress.

When I evaluate making a donation to a plugin’s developer, I do so based on the value that the plugin provides to my blog.  This goes beyond determining whether it saves me time or provides a user a better experience.  I literally look at it from a “return on investment” perspective.

Let me introduce the three plugins we donated to at Orangecast this year and then I’ll come back to this topic of ROI.

2009 Plugin Donations by Orangecast

#1 – Platinum SEO Pack

Platinum SEO Pack is a plugin that fills a massive gap in the base WordPress platform.  By default installation, WordPress does not allow for the manipulation of title and description meta-tags.  Platinum SEO Pack allows a blogger to have control over the meta tags in their blog.  This includes pages, posts, and the home page.  Without this plugin, we could not compete in search engines.  We use Platinum SEO Pack on every blog we own and recommend it for every client we work with.

#2 – Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps is a plugin that creates and maintains an XML file that is used by Google’s crawler.  This file can be discovered by Google or submitted through Google’s webmaster tools.  Creating and maintaining an XML sitemap, even with a third party application, is a major pain.  Having this functionality automatically happen every time you hit post is essential.

#3 – WP Database Backup

Writing a blog takes time.  All of the content posted to a blog is stored in a MySQL Database provided by the hosting company.  In addition to all of your content, this database stores all of the configurations of your blog and its plugins.  In the event of a problem with your blog, a backup of this database becomes crucial.  With a backup, your blog can be restored in minutes.  Without it, you could loose your blog.

WP Database Backup brings backups to your administrator console and allows you to automate the process.  Installing WP Database Backup on your blog IS NOT optional; it’s necessary.

Continuing The ROI Discussion

At Orangecast, time is our most precious resource.  We looked at a variety of plugins when we made our donation decisions for 2009.  There are a lot of plugins we appreciate.  Still, our decision to donate to these three WordPress plugins was based on time recovery and peace of mind (backups).  We literally viewed these three plugins as WordPress plugins that we could not do without.

Every blogger has different needs.  The three plugins we chose to donate to might not even be installed on your blog.  Therefore, you have to make these decisions on your own.  As you go through the process, be honest with yourself in terms of the value you get from a plugin and the overall return it provides you.

After you’ve done this, pay it forward accordingly.

How-to-Blog.tv Disclosure of No Material Connection: How-to-Blog.tv and its authors received no material compensation for writing this post. We are disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

The goal of this post is to expose you to a few potential legal aspects of a blog that you will want to be aware of as you journey into the blogosphere.  I want to be very clear in that I AM NOT AN ATTORNEY; yet, do speak often for the legal community about social media.  With that said, the goal is to open your mind to legal aspects of a blog so you can have a productive conversation with an attorney before launching your blog.  The topics I will cover include overviews of The Communications Decency Act, The Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and disclosure requirements for blogs.

Liabilities

A blog is online editorial.  Judges have ruled, however, that blogs do not qualify as journalism.   Regardless of first amendment debates, blogs are very visible and can land you in the world of civil law maneuvering much quicker than you think.  Furthermore, if your blog has multiple authors, your actions with regard to their content could determine whether you have liability.  Before we get into this, we have to understand a couple of key laws that apply to cyberspace.  Let’s start by discussing The Communications Decency Act .

The Communications Decency Act

Passed in 1996, The Communications Decency Act (CDA) originally addressed pornography and obscenity online.  What is significant about this federal law is Section 230 which provides immunity to Internet Service Providers and Internet Content Providers.

As a blogger, you are held accountable under the law for what you write and are responsibile for respecting the copyrights of others.  Section 230 provides you protection from two areas of potential liability, however.  The first is from the statements made by people who comment on your blog.  If someone posts a comment that is considered slanderous, defamatory, or anything else for that matter, you are not responsible for it as long as you play by the rules.  More on that in a moment.  The second area is if you host a blog with multiple authors, you are not responsible for their publications.  There are some exceptions, however.  Before we go there, we have to discuss The Digital Millenium Copyright Act.  Let me provide you a quick review.  Did I mention that I AM NOT AN ATTORNEY?

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act

Signed into law in 1998 by President Bill Clinton, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) heightened the penalties for copyright infringement amongst other clarifications that have become very important in the copyright world.   This law is significant as it gives individuals and corporations alike certain rights as to copyrighted material which includes written copy, digital images, video, and music.  Copyright items covered in the DMCA are exceptions to the safe havens provided in Section 230 of The Communications Decency Act.

A Quick Blogger Summary of These Laws

As a blogger, The Communications Decency Act is generally your friend and The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is generally a pain in your side when it comes to photos, vidoes, and other fun things to include on your blog.  Clear as mud?

How You Can Stay Out of Trouble?

Without getting really deep into cyberlaw, here are a couple of quick guidelines you can use to reduce your exposure online.  The first is respect copyrighted material.  Since CDA Section 230 does not provide immunity for copyright violations, this means that the contributions of your guest authors and commenters have to be free of copyrighted material as well.  Written copy is fairly easy to deal with as proper sourcing and crediting will help you to avoid problems.  Obviously this has to be within reason.  You can’t put a chapter of someone’s book online and simply source it!  So stick to the same rules you learned in citations for college papers.  Keep it to a quote and link back to the source versus thinking you can copy an entire article from someone.  Images, music, and video, on the other hand are more complicated.  Just because someone has posted an image or video online doesn’t mean that you can just use it.

A couple of guidelines we use on our blogs are:

• Only use videos that explicitly provide embed code and we feel the publisher is the owner of the content.
• Don’t assume that just because it is on YouTube that it hasn’t been illegally posted there.
• License photos from services like “iStockPhot.Com”
• Use a photograph that has a creative commons license
• Ask the owner of the photograph, video, or other copyrighted work for permission.

You should be very cautious with the use of intellectual property which does not belong to you on your blog.  It is highly advised that you consult with an attorney if your blog is going to be dependent on video, photos, or other forms of digital intellectual property.  Section 230 of The Communications Decency Act specifically excludes digital IP from immunity meaning that if one of your authors uploads a video that they do not own, you ARE NOT immune from this and have liability.

The second quick rule to use in order to maximize your protections under CDA immunity is “keep your hands out of other people’s copy”.  I’ll provide an example to explain this.  Let’s say a commenter on a blog post of yours calls someone an idiot and then follows it with a couple of obscenities.  If you get in and remove the obscenities but post the comment calling someone an idiot, you’ve now had your hands in it.  Though case law is all over the map at this point, you could be considered an editor who willfully made the decision to exclude the profanity but include the part calling someone an idiot.  The same applies for the works of guest authors.  Here are a couple of quick guidelines we use to reduce risk here:

• Limit your actions to Approve or Reject of blog comments.  If a comment violates one of our personal policies such as profanity, we simply reject it versus editing it.
• Stick to grammar and spelling edits on guest author posts.
• Any copy added to title and description tags (SEO) is pure cut and paste from the guest author’s original work.

In addition to navigating the world of copyright and CDA immunity, the most important thing you can do as a blogger on your own posts is write responsibly.  This doesn’t mean you have to write bland and boring posts with no opinion or flare to them.  And even if you write responsibly, you can still find yourself at the center of controversy.  Jerod found this out after writing one of the most well researched posts he’s published on MidwestSportsFans.Com.  The post was about a baseball player who was off to a great start in this year’s major league baseball season.  Due to his age, however, rumors were starting to fly about potential foul play.  In his post entitled “The Curious Case of Raul Ibanez: Steroid Speculation Perhaps Unfair, but Great Start in 2009 Raising Eyebrows“, Jerod analyzed several factors about the player’s performance and summarized the article with an opinion.  This opinion was quickly misconstrued on Twitter and became the center of controversy in both mainstream media and major league baseball.  The player himself threatened legal action against him.  In the end, if you publish a researched opinion on the Internet there is some risk as not all will agree with your opinion.  Still, we are believers in responsible free speech and encourage all bloggers to do their thing.

Blog Ownership

In terms of your personal liability with a blog, this is where you will have to put your business hat back on.  If you are a professional, my advice is to register and pay for all elements of your blog under your corporate entity.  If you are a in a professional that is highly sensitive to law suits (e.g. healthcare) you might even consider consulting with an attorney to form a separate entity for your online venture.  If you are an individual and do not have a corporate entity, keep in mind that all liability could come back to you.  If you are an individual and cannot afford an attorney, do your own homework online and look in your local community for free advice and counseling that is available to small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Disclosure

Another important legal topic for your blog is disclosure.  If you want to affiliate market or run impression based ads from Google Adsense, for example, you will likely need to disclose in a privacy policy blog that you are “dropping cookies”.  If you have a sponsor, the FTC recently indicated through a unanimous vote on the topic that you will need to disclose your sponsorship associated with the blog post.  FTC requirements will become clearer in the future but the botton line is that you will inevitably have some disclosure responsibility on your blog.  I will dedicate a post or two in the near future to this topic.

Summary

Did I mention that I AM NOT AN ATTORNEY?  I did write this post, however, to open up your business mindset to include the notion that the Internet is not immune to civil nor criminal law.  I will be soliciting several guest authors who are attorney’s to write future posts that do cover these topics in depth.  Regardless of what we say on this blog, you and your blog have their own unique situation and in the end is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.  Regardless of what we have written above, prior to starting a blog YOU SHOULD consult with an attorney who is knowleable in crafting terms of service, privacy policies, and understands case law related to The Communications Decency Act and The Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

One of the great things about Twitter is their respect for people and brands.  Twitter’s terms of service and rules have explicit policies that can help you protect your brand online.  Unlike in the domain name world where ICANN doesn’t enforce rules or provide clear procedures for dealing with name squatters, Twitter does.

In this post, I’ll walk you through Twitter’s terms of service in this area and how to claim what is yours.  I’ll even provide Twitter’s fax number, which is not highly publicized.

First, you need to be clear on what you are asking of Twitter when claiming what is yours.  There are three areas of Twitter’s terms of service under which you can make a claim.  These are name squatting, impersonation, and trademark.  I’ll walk through each of these.

Name Squatting

When the Internet began its ascencion in the 90′s, speculators called domainers created a marketplace for domain names.  Some of these speculators made a lot of money in the process.

When Twitter began its rise in popularity, speculators predictably entered the Twitter name market.  Their only miscalculation was that name squatting is against Twitter’s terms of service and Twitter’s operations group has been very diligent about taking those names away from the offenders.

Per Twitter’s help resources page on name squatting, Twitter takes the following factors into consideration when reviewing name squatting cases:

Two other areas related to name squatting are the mass creation of accounts, which violates Twitter terms of service on spamming, and offering Twitter names for sale.

To report name squatting, you can file a Terms of Service report ticket directly with Twitter’s customer service.

One thing to understand is that Twitter may not release names they take from squatters and unless you have a trademark claim, your reporting of the name squatting does not entitle you to the name.

Impersonation

Twitter’s terms of service defines impersonation as:

“impersonation is pretending to be another person or business as entertainment or in order to deceive. “

However, the very same terms of service allows for “parody impersonation” and defines the standard for parody impersonation as:

“would a reasonable person be aware that it’s a joke?”

Twitter accounts found to be impersonating for the purpose of misleading or deceit will be suspended.

If you would like to file a complaint and have Twitter investigate an impersonation violation, you have to either be the person being impersonated, be the representative of a business or brand being impersonated, or be an official representative of a person or brand being impersonated.  If you have a Twitter account, you can submit a impersonation web request online or impersonation@twitter.com.

Trademark Infringement

Twitter’s terms of service defines trademark infringement as

“Using a company or business name, logo, or other trademark-protected materials in a manner that may mislead or confuse others or be used for financial gain may be considered trademark infringement.”

Unlike other areas of their rules, trademark infringements are one area where they have legal liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and are specifically NOT provided immunity under Section 230 of The Communications Decency Act..  Therefore, this is the one area of their terms of service that they will be very serious about and quick to respond to requests.

In order to report a trademark violation to Twitter, you can file a request online through your Twitter account or send an email to terms@twitter.com with the following information:

Username of the violating account (or the URL to their profile page):

Company name:

Company Twitter account (if there is one):

Your First and Last Name:

Title:

Address:

Phone:

Fax:

Company domain address:

Your company domain email address:

Registration Trademark number:

Requested Action (for example, removal of infringing account, or transfer of trademarked username to an existing company account):

What Do You Do If Twitter Support Isn’t Responding In A Timely Manner?

Twitter is a startup and dealing with the typical growing pains an online service faces when they explode in popularity.  If you are not getting responses or actions in a timely manner from Twitter customer support, take an old school approach by sending your communications via US Postal Service or to Twitter’s fax number.  You can mail certified mail to:

Twitter Inc.,

c/o Trademark Infringement

795 Folsom Street, Suite 600

San Francisco, CA 94107

You can also submit your request to Twitter’s fax number which is: 415-222-0922.