March 8th, 2009 §
I write several blogs, and not necessarily from a viewpoint of “enhancing my online brand” or generating leads for my business.
That’s why I felt it necessary to shutter The Engagement Principles for a short time; my professional life didn’t allow the room to write the articles I find interesting, though it wouldn’t have been hard to continue posting “keyword rich” but intellectually pointless posts.
That’s not adding anything to the online conversation; it’s simply gaming Google.
What Teaching Teaches Us
I can’t say the space to write has magically reappeared, but after teaching an online marketing boot camp – to a bunch of micro-entrepreneurs who grasped the logic of engagement marketing very, very quickly – I realized it was time to beat the drum once again.
Engagement is a term much bandied about these days, though many now view it as simply a measure of how engaged someone is around a particular site or campaign.
By contrast, my definition of “Engagment Marketing” remains focused on brand equity, long-term connection, and the lifetime value of engaged customers.
As I explained it to my class of eager entrepreneurs, I’m an experienced direct response copywriter, so I’m perfectly capable of selling their customers a widget, for which they’d make a widget’s profit.
Yet, if I can successfully engage customers – bind them to the brand around shared passions, values and interests – then I just potentially made them a lifetime of widget profits.
They understand that logic just fine.
Engagement is Personal
Most of the entrepreneurs in my class are not in the content-generation business, and reject the idea their primary goal in starting their business was to sit in front a PC and lard the Internet with SEO content or manage huge keyword lists.
Most of these entrenpreneurs are enamored with simple, proven channels like email/e-newsletter lists – which are rapidly merging with newer media channels like blogs and social media.
Show them the flowchart on the whiteboard, and they instantly see the beauty of leveraging content across multiple media channels, and providing return channels of communication for those customers and prospects in the process of engaging with their brand.
In simple terms, I showed them The Engagement Principles in (crude) graphic form (my drawing skills beggar belief), and they showed me it made perfect sense.
I plan to fire up a couple posts every month on the Engagement Principles; a grievously low article count in the age of “publish daily or die” content generators, but a reasonable schedule for reasonable articles from a working professional.
Stay engaged, Tom Chandler.
engagement, engagement marketing, marketing, online marketing boot camp
July 12th, 2008 §
Corporations are struggling with business blogs – at least according to a recent Forrester Research report mentioned by Ken Magill in his Direct Magazine article:
Business-to-business blogging took a nosedive this year, mainly because returns on corporate blogs haven’t matched investment, according to a recent report by Forrester Research.
However, analyst Laura Ramos, the lead author of the report, recommends businesses take a second look at corporate blogs.
“Rather than cross blogging off the marketing communications list, marketers would do better to embrace one of the four strategies prominently used by bloggers to attract readers, build conversations, and engage community members in sharing their experiences with their online peers,” said Ramos’s report, “How to Derive Value From B2B Blogging.”
Still, the number of new corporate blogs has dropped sharply in the last year and a half, according to the report, with 36 companies launching them in 2006, 19 in 2007, and just three in the first quarter of 2008, according to Forrester.
In my online marketing classes, I tell small business clients that engagement marketing is the great leveler; big businesses don’t engage well, but that small businesses do.
That’s a function of several elements, but in simplest terms, small business are often more “real” with customers. Corporations? They fall victim to their inability to escape boring, meaningless “corporatespeak.”
Indeed, Forester’s report speaks to the traits required to successfully engage customers:
Successful corporate blogs “talk openly with an authentic voice,” and are “humble and honest,” two traits that run counter to many corporate egos, said Forrester’s report.
Ouch.
Too many corporations see blogs as merely another pipeline into which they shovel PR materials, or worse – as Web-based showcases for preening executives.
The ugly truth is this: customers and prospects want useful information or thought leadership. While both are available inside your average corporation, the fear of transparency is a barrier most corporations won’t overcome.
Another trap lies hidden within the language itself; many potential contributors to corporate blogs aren’t very good writers, a fact which suggests the need for an editor.
Some organizations have shown excellent returns from blogging (like Patagonia’s Cleanest Line), and the benefits of engaging with customers (binding them to the brand via shared passions and values) are significant – and will grow more so as marketing costs rise.
The fact that growth in business blogs is slowing should provide additional fuel to those who are getting it right.
Stay engaged, Tom Chandler.
July 31st, 2007 §
In this month’s installment of my series of business blogging articles for Chief Marketer, I look at the new Britannica Blog — a blog from a knowledge-based brand that’s been around since 1768 — but one that’s plenty capable of learning the latest blogging tricks.
In this case, Brittanica’s wide-ranging blog includes some posts clearly designed to provoke engagement — challenging their readers with intellectually charged posts on controversial topics.
Some deride it as “linkbaiting” — the practice of deliberately baiting readers with controversial posts — but the term carries a negative connotation that doesn’t apply, at least not in this instance. Still, the UK Guardian had this to say:
And as Britannica standard-bearer bloggers proceeded to press every hot button of internet culture – Google, Wikipedia, copyright, even hoary complaints about the youth of today – it turned into an impressive demonstration of the contradictions of putting a style in the service of a contrary cause. Like fighting for peace, this was flaming for scholarliness.
True or not, you can’t deny the effectiveness of a traffic-building strategy that generates mentions in other leading online media, especially if you can avoid the negative aspects of controversial posts.
Avoiding the Downside of Linkbaiting
One downside of linkbaiting is that conversations often spiral downward into a morass of petty name-calling, but Britannica’s blog short-circuits that tendency with blog guidelines that prohibit personal attacks, testy language, etc.
It’s a good example of putting blog editorial standards in place before discovering you need them — an excellent idea for any business blog. Spelling out the limits of behavior in any business-related forum is an often-overlooked step, though a critical one, and Britannica sets out their mission right in the sidebar:
Britannica Blog is a place for smart, lively conversations about a broad range of topics. Art, science, history, current events – it’s all grist for the mill. We’ve given our writers encouragement and a lot of freedom, so the opinions here are theirs, not the company’s. Please jump in and add your own thoughts.
Off and Running
The Britannica Blog boasts an extremely wide range of topics (everything from pop culture to quantum physics — and pretty much everything in between) and a blue-ribbon list of intellectual heavy hitters.
The range of this blog is enormous, which could prove both a benefit and a hindrance, especially given the proliferation of narrow-focus blogs.
In the final analysis, there’s nothing wrong with challenging content, and Britannica clearly isn’t trying to simply irritate readers into responding via obnoxious posts. What they have accomplished is simple; they’ve drawn attention to themselves, done so in a way guaranteed to attract visitors, yet avoided the traditional downsides of the strategy.
(You can read my Chief Marketer article here (it’s longer and significantly differently from this post)).
Technorati Tags: britannica blog, linkbaiting, britannica, blog, blogging
