Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

We are frequently involved in the creation and promotion of corporate blogs (this is our own version) and we are frequently asked about the value and potential issues associated with starting a business blog. We’re mixed in our answers because though we are ardent readers and writers of multiple blogs including many business blogs, it is our experience that they are not for everyone.

First, a blog must legitimately reflect the culture of the business or it will be considered little more than PR spam. This is a more complex statement than it may appear at first glance. Frankly, many business cultures don’t lend themselves to social marketing. If your company is secretive, in an extremely competitive sector, highly regulated or constrained by the need to ‘run everything through legal’, forget blogging. It is something that simply doesn’t work in a controlled environment. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not implying that there is something wrong with your company if it fits these descriptions- there are many businesses that must safeguard their IP (intellectual property) to survive. That’s why we can love Fake Steve Jobs’ blog but will never have a Real Steve blog. Apple’s market advantage is based on a strategy of surprising the market and their competitors with new technological benchmarks.

A successful business blog requires a charismatic author or authors and they must be empowered to speak freely and frankly. This is a huge stumbling block for most would-be business blogs. Blogging takes a lot of time and effort and most companies won’t get the value equivalent to taking the time of a key employee and directing it towards a blog. The best scenario to beat this obstacle is to have several key employees who enjoy communicating and get them to each post weekly or bi-weekly. This keeps a steady flow of fresh content (more on that in a minute). One employee with writing skills should be assigned as editor and should vet the others’ contributions for errors, inaccuracy, grammar, etc. The rule here is that nothing goes live on the blog without two pairs of eyes checking it out.

Some businesses just don’t have a lot to write about, or so it may seem. A constant stream of good, relevant and fresh content is critical to building an audience for the blog. The easiest way to determine if you’re going to have things of interest to write about is to start by defining a category list like the one in the category cloud in our right column. If you have enough interesting categories then you probably have enough to write about.

One important secret is to not limit the subject matter to strictly business-related subjects. A primary purpose of social marketing, including blogging, is to put a face to the company and to enter a community of like-minded people. For example, we’re planning a blog for the CEO of an electronics parts sourcing company. He travels extensively checking out manufacturers in Asia and visiting customers all over the world. He takes a lot of pictures in the process. We suspect that his readers and customers will be as interested in his travel experiences, pictures and tales of strange businesses in exotic locations as they might be in business info. So we’re reflecting his personal experiences and linking to Flickr galleries of his photos as we plan the blog.

What is the purpose of a business blog? Besides the examples noted above, there is an overriding purpose: When people ask what Supernatural Agency does, we don’t simply direct them to our homepage, we recommend they read the blog to get a feel for the way we think and work. It helps them understand what drives us to be Internet marketers and domain developers.

We were at the bank today dealing with some stuff and I got into a detailed conversation with the bank manager regarding what we are doing. Because our media sites are dealing with a specific link between men and women (not porn and not dating!), I’ve been running my elevator speech past people to get their response, primarily with women, who tend to be a lot more pragmatic about business ideas.

This kind of research works if you are targeting regular people not web 2.0 geeks, bloggers and other technocrats. When targeting the man or woman on the street you don’t get to explain things, teach them about your idea or even spend more than a few minutes on it. You have to get right to the benefit, i.e. what’s in it for them?

Even better, once you’ve laid out your beautiful concept they should immediately start doing two things:

• Thinking of how their friends and family might use your service
• Offering ideas for helping you get off the ground

The woman at the bank did both. She loved the idea and immediately said she would tell her son about it, ‘because he does everything on the Internet’ and she offered some great feedback on a feminine response to the idea.

Now I’ve probably ran this concept past ten people in the past week and the response was completely the same. So even though it may not be the most technologically sophisticated idea we’ve ever had, it has the broadest market imaginable and people get it in two seconds, very often interrupting me to tell me what a great idea it is.

So what practical purpose does this serve beyond ego-gratification? I’m a marketer and I know that marketing a complex story to a wide audience is practically impossible. Telling about a very simple solution that anyone can benefit from is a lot easier. For example:

• Google. Go to a page, enter a question, find a good answer.
• Apple. Their current ad for the new iMacs has no messaging- just a beautiful flight around the elegant thing. Their iPhone launch ads showed exactly how easy it was to do stuff with it. Dead simple and they had everyone talking, not just the gadget freaks.

We don’t want to fight for attention. We just want to simply explain what it does and why you’d care. My ‘research’ is telling me that is going to happen. I’d recommend the same approach to anyone with a new idea for a business. If a regular person has no idea what you’re doing, you need to refine your message unless your target audience is nuclear physicists or uber-geeks.

Virtually every start-up business has a prominent place in their launch plan for PR- after all it’s a very cost-efficient way to promote your business, right? You send out a few releases, Techcrunch writes you up and the VCs start calling. Uh-huh.

It can work that way. I worked on a software product launch last year and yes, we did get Techcrunch and Digg front-paged. Unfortunately, it happened on a Sunday (not a big day for tech blog readership). Even so we had several thousand people sign up for the service. But once that very momentary exposure died down things went back to normal and we were struggling to get coverage. And this was with a PR agency on a $15k/month retainer. When you don’t have a $180,000 PR budget, how do you leverage this powerful marketing tactic? You have to go at it strategically and know the relatively untapped power of search optimizing your PR efforts. Here’s a road-map:

• Start the company blog. IMHO, this is more important than the company website (brochureware) and it may soon be that blogs supersede those old school ‘Welcome to our website’ sites. After all you can always include all that mission/vision statement stuff in a sidebar on the blog. The blog is the place you want your press contacts to land when they get your release (more on that in a moment).
• Build it and write it, everyday. Chronicle your pain and your ecstasy (no, not that kind), your trials and tribulations. Write about your area of expertise, the core knowledge or abilities you are building a business around. For example, we are hardcore Internet marketers so we’re writing about marketing on the web- d’oh! Don’t pitch your business with superlatives like ‘groundbreaking, innovative, market-leading’, etc. These days our bullsh*t detectors are fine-tuned for hype. Just talk about your business in depth, with passion and humor.
• Link like crazy to others in your field. Send them notes and ask that they link to your. Read Aaron’s SEObook for the best practices in link-building (and everything else SEO).
• Take your keyword research (if you don’t have keyword research, stop what you are doing and go learn how to do it- it will be critical to all of your marketing) and make sure the top ten or twenty phrases are used in your blog posts and site.
• Write a press release or pay a pro to write one (better in most cases). Now, optimize the release for keywords by adding them into the title and any subheads in a way that does not detract from the story you are trying to convey. Don’t write a bad headline just so you can cram as many keywords in as possible- bad writing will turn off most journalists, bloggers and readers.
• Embed links to relevant information online into the release doc. Don’t use text like like ‘Click Here for Free White Paper’, use relevant keyword-based anchor text (anchor text is the text in the doc that is the link- don’t use URLs. If you don’t know how to make anchored links ask any web programmer- it’s easy). So your anchor text might read: We’re now offering a free whitepaper titled Elastic Widgets As Revenue Machines: A Gartner Report. The title would be the link text. That way if someone is searching for that report or ‘Elastic Widgets’, your release will come up.
• Have someone, besides you, proof the release for both errors and readability. Make sure you test the links.
• Use a service such as PRNewsWire to distribute the release. You upload it, choose the markets you want to target, and pay them. They release it at the time you choose (preferably not weekends or Fridays). It will be sent to thousands of places including the search engines which is why you optimized it.
• Finally, and this is critical, sit by the phone number you put in the release and the email account you referenced. You must respond to any requests ASAP, in person. No calls or emails? Do not despair.

The goal here is to get another information source out there on the web that points users to your blog, site or service. It will be out there for a while. Make sure you put it in your News section or Press Room (more on Press Rooms in another post).

It may cost you a few hundred dollars to distribute the release. If you don’t have a great story, don’t expect coverage. However, absent a great story you might put out a release covering one aspect of your product or service that you know attracts a lot of organic search traffic based on keyword research. The release will help to capture some of that traffic.