The Voice of the Blog

MBA Dissertation

I submitted my dissertation in July and have just heard that it's been accepted. So I'd like to say a huge "thank you" to all the bloggers who helped me by agreeing to be interviewed. When I started work on this project just over a year ago, I had no idea just how big a cultural phenomenon blogging was going to become. Will blogs now become an essential business tool? Download the dissertation to find out more: Download MBADissertation.pdf

Interview with Griff Wigley, blogging coach

Northfield, Minnesota, must have the largest concentration of small business blogs anywhere in the world. This is due to one man, Griff Wigley, who has coached over 20 small business owners in the art of blogging (see Griff's company site for the complete client blogroll). Griff has recently returned from a trip to the UK where he shared expertise in the area of civic leader blogging. We talked about blogging over the phone.

    

JH        What does a blogging coach do ?

GW     I think the dilemma of the small business person in a weblog is how do I keep my website up-to-date in a cost-effective way. If that’s all it was going to be, there probably wouldn’t be any need for a coach because most of them can see how to put little blurbs in their blog that update people about their products and services, but they tend to do it in what I call PR lingo. They tend to write in press release language; they’ll write in the third person, “Our company is pleased to announce that…” - that sort of language and there’s a whole other array of types of blogs posts that never really occurs to them. So my role as a coach is firstly to get them to write in a language that is more appealing to their site visitors and secondly to get them to consider the wider range of posts and then to do it. One of the ways I build a coaching relationship with them is to help them with some of the technical stuff. I’ve got a couple of bloggers who are doing audioblogging, so I’ve taught them that. I’ve got a couple that are wanting to use their camera phones to post photos to the blog. So there’s a two-pole coaching role that I take – the technical and then the content.

JH        What benefits can a blog bring to the type of small businesses that you coach?

GW     I think the one that seems to resonate with them is bringing a voice of authenticity to a medium that they have typically thought of as a brochure. The stock-in-trade of small business owners – it helps them compete with much bigger rivals - is their personal approach. This whole personal touch that they bring to their business dealings typically goes out the window with the website. The website is this dry, impersonal brochure that it just sitting there. So I think the voice of authenticity and keeping the site current are probably the two main benefits. I also think a lot of them are surprised when they see how low they come up in a simple Google search for some of their products or services. So another benefit is that Google and the other major search engines now key in on weblogs because weblogs are typically full of links. So once you let Google know you’ve got a blog on your site and you post to it regularly, its spider comes back frequently. A lot of these businesses are small enough where they’re not about to buy a Google text ad, let alone pay somebody to optimize their site for search engines, so another major benefit that I pitch is that once you add a weblog to your site, it’s much more search engine friendly.

JH        Do you think that anyone can do it, given a minimum amount of coaching?

GW     One of the things I've started to do more regularly when I pitch a blog to a business owner is ask them to show me their typing skills because that's a major inhibitor. I think that that would probably be something I would assess more regularly right up front and say 'Right, are you more comfortable with the keyboard or are you more comfortable with the telephone?' and get them comfortable with audioblogging if they're not comfortable with the keyboard.

JH        Do you think that all small businesses should be blogging?

GW     I don't know. I've seen some of that discussion lately and it's hard for me to endorse everybody always in every case without really thinking it through. Likewise, it's equally hard for me to see why this would not work for a small business. I think, all things being equal in this age of spin and press release and canned promotional materials, that the general consumer out there would appreciate a voice of authenticity on a small business website so I'm sort of torn about it. I'm reluctant to be proselytising to the point that everyone should have one. On the other hand, it's hard to see what the drawbacks are. I think that time-wise the major hurdle is spending the time to do it and what gets them over the hump is the feedback that they get, whether it's from employees or people in the community or customers or citizens; but unless you get that serendipitous feedback be it via e-mail, telephone or face-to-face, it's easy to stay in the mental mode of thinking of blogging as one more busy work task.

JH        You talked about audioblogs before, podcasting. Do you think these will be adopted readily by small businesses?

GW     Yes I do. Text is just so convenient and easy to scan for users, site visitors, but I think people are surprised at how easy audioblogging is. I think the next one that I'm waiting to try is v-logging, with video. There's a hundred dollar v-log software package that should be out in month or so. I don't know that small businesses will use it a lot but I think for them to say "I'm going to make this quick little one-minute video clip that explains my product or service. I'm going to put that up on my blog." To be able to do that over and over again for very little money, I think that's going to be a common usage of blogs in the next year or two.

JH        How much time do you spend on your own blogs?

GW     I try to put something up there once or twice a week. I've actually got another interview today with a guy who's doing a blogging book and I said to him via e-mail that my blog is not one you'd want to profile in your book about notable blogs. It's my own Wigley Associates Consulting Practice and I profile my new clients or things that existing clients are doing that I find interesting. I've got my companion book sites leadershipblogging.com and smallbusinessblogging.com that I try and update with little tidbits here and there but my Wigley Associates site's been very good for me. It's not so much I get local businesses contacting me - it's not as if a local retailer would stumble on Wigley Associates on the Internet and contact me that way. Virtually all my local business clients are gotten just through word of mouth and me approaching people here in town. It brings me national and international contacts in ways that are always surprising, so I get more speaking engagement invitations, I get article/interview requests and all of that helps to get the word out about my coaching.

Interview with Eric Rice of Audioblog

Eric Rice is the founder of Audioblog, a publishing service that enables you to put audio and video on your blog. I spoke to Eric over a Skype connection that was so clear I could hear the birds singing in his garden.

   

JH        What exactly is your role at Audioblog?

ER       I am the founder and chief evangelist so I do lots of the marketing, the word of mouth, evangelizing the product and also the concept of audioblogging. I have a lot to do with the product management. We're a small company, about 4 people. I look at the product, look at what's happening in the industry and decide what we need to work into the product.

JH        How satisfied are you with the blog as a marketing tool?

ER       I don't necessarily look at the blog as a marketing tool. Maybe it's because I've used blogs for so long. I've probably done it since 2000 and prior to that I would still do blog-like things on the website. I know that it's there. If it's important enough news, if the blogosphere thinks it's worthy, then they'll link to it. I really don't have to engage in any word of mouth activities. I think the blog is a very useful marketing tool because people can take part in it and ask questions and that conversation surrounds a marketing effort. The other thing is that when people start publishing audioblogs or make podcasts by phone, the little player's got the URL on it. People see it and they follow it up. I like the viral nature of how the blogosphere works. I can actually save dollars that I would probably spend on big marketing campaigns for other offline marketing activities.

JH        How much time do you spend blogging?

ER       Well, I have multiple blogs. I think for me it just slipped into the daily routine like checking e-mail or voice mail. It's just part of the flow, it doesn't strike me as anything that's out of the ordinary. What I love about having audioblogging available to people is you can actually get out of the house and post your thoughts of the moment and it takes very little effort. People do this when they're moving and they're packed up and they don't have their computer. They just pick up the phone and call it in.

JH        What would you say are the marketing possibilities of audioblogging or podcasting in the small business context?

ER       I think it really depends on the content that somebody might talk about. There's a customer that we have who does something very innovative. The gentleman is a retired advertising executive who lives in the southern United States and gives fishing tours. His website traditionally has been "Well, here's where we're located, here's how much it costs, and here's some pictures." Very basic stuff. Then he put up a blog to talk about fishing things. Then he got set up with an audioblog. So what he does is that he calls in reports from the river and when people come down and book fishing trips with him, he interviews them and he says "I'm out here with so and so from this city and we had a great day and he caught a big fish." It actually makes for an interesting piece of content because it's almost like listening to a little fishing show. And his customer can now come back to the website when he goes home and send a link to everybody going, "Look at this, this is cool." So I think it can be used as a viral tool but then I also think that it can be used as an information tool. Things like the Hobson and Holtz reports - that's just pure business and gets right to the point. I think that having an audioblog or having a podcast is almost like having a blog. It's a different form of getting information out there and talking to an audience. Motivational speakers could really benefit from this. Their product is their voice. So give me ten minutes of motivation every morning. So on a case by case basis I think it's going to be really useful. I think big companies can also take advantage of this. Sue Sharman, who writes for Strange Attractor over on Corante, had a post some time ago that said street teams do not maximise the technology that's available. Street teams being when you have a local radio station and you go out to do an event on location. What do they do? They park a van, they hand out T-shirts and that's about it and the conversation stops there. I would be podcasting that. I would be reporting that live to the web so that when everybody goes back home it ties it together. It becomes part of the customer experience. So that could be a good opportunity for big business like a radio enterprise.

JH        Do you see any weaknesses or threats with regard to blogging as a marketing tool?

ER       The medium's not for everybody. I do regular good old-fashioned blogging, I do audioblogging and podcasting and I do videoblogging. And those are three distinct forms of media. None of these media are better than the other, they're just different. So if your content doesn't lend itself to a certain medium, then it's probably not the best thing. It's like a travel agency - I think a travel agency would be better off doing videoblogging than they would doing audioblogging. I mean, show me the beautiful vistas of France. You could tell me about it, and you could write about it but show me how beautiful it is. I think that that would be the weakness - not picking the best medium for your uses. I think the threats are for people who don't get involved in lots of different types of media publishing. I'll give you an example. There's a magazine called Fast Company. I would love to have Fast Company as a podcast but they're not doing it and all these other people that are providing similar content are doing it. I'm going to be paying less and less attention to Fast Company as a source of information even though they might have great people. So I think the threat's more for the people who don't do it, just because those who show up get the benefit. You see that all the time. Robert Scoble had a post in which he chewed out a marketing person going "If you don't have RSS, then you should be fired." OK, that was maybe a little extreme but I'm very busy. I don't have the space to remember to go to some place, I need it to come to me. If you're not part of the RSS party, I can't follow your content. So you kind of miss out on information if you don't jump on the appropriate technology.

JH        How do you see the blogosphere developing in the next few years?

ER       Well the blogosphere is a very, very big place and I'm starting to segment the types of blogospheres. I think that inadvertently when we talk about the blogosphere we're talking about the blogger blogosphere, you know, the people who talk about blogging. There are communities and massive ecosystems that exist and that do quite well that have nothing to do with blogging. They don't even care about blogging - they just do it and they talk about their content. I think it's going to be huge for all these niche and cottage industries and communities. eBay is a massive business. Imagine if there's a blogosphere attached to that. So it's going to benefit a lot of smaller communities or, in eBay's case, bigger ones. I think that the mainstream media will eventually adopt parts of it. You're seeing that with blogging, you're starting to see that with podcasting right now and I don't consider that to be a threat because I listen to both the independent voice and the corporate voice and I just balance my consumption of it. I'd love to get some stuff from mainstream radio on my iPod in addition to stuff that's made by everyday people.

JH        The take-up among small businesses seems to be quite small.

ER       It's early. Because I live in the Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay area, it's a lot more tech-oriented out here and if any place has got the connection first it's us. But I am always running into everyday folks, people that are very technical in some aspects, and they still go "Yeah, what's a blog? I've been hearing about that a lot lately." In just a few weeks I'm giving a talk about what's a blog and the room is going to be packed. We have this expectation that it's supposed to happen tomorrow. It's not going to happen tomorrow, it's going to happen in two years, it's going to happen in five years.

Interview with Priya Shah

Priya Shah is an electronic publisher and serial blogger with no fewer than 7 blogs to her name. Priya lives in Navi Mumbai, a suburb of India's financial capital, Mumbai. I spoke to Priya over a rather crackly phone line at 2 a.m. her time. Don't bloggers ever sleep?

JH        How did you get into blogging?

PS       As a publisher I found it an easy way to post new information online. I started off in 2003 and I found it a very convenient way of posting stuff I could not write about in my newsletter. I found it a very easy add-on to e-zine publishing.

JH        You've got several blogs. How much time do you spend on them?

PS       I guess I spend about 3-4 hours a day. It's not just posting, it's also reading up on news, compiling news and then posting stuff.

JH        Would you say that blogging is your business?

PS       Yes, it is to some extent. It's a way of growing my business. I use it a lot to enhance my search engine listings. I've got very good results using blogging. Even though I've only been using Blogger and Wordpress, I'm quite happy with the results I've got with them.

JH        What do you do to increase the traffic?

PS       I write articles, I sometimes compile the posts I write into articles. I also blog about what other people are saying. If you write useful information, people will link to you. You get traffic without even asking for it.

JH        How much traffic do you get to your blogs?

PS       It's not much because as I'm using Blogger, which doesn't give me the opportunity to ping back someone's blog and stuff like that, but I do link to other people's blogs and they get to know where I'm linking to.

JH        Have you any idea how many visitors you get?

PS       I wish I knew better. I haven't been able to track that very well. I can see that people are referring to posts I've made in my blog. They comment on my blog and thank me for posting.

JH        How do you measure the effectiveness of your blogs?

PS       So far I've been measuring the effectiveness in terms of search engine rankings. I also measure effectiveness by the kind of publicity you can get for yourself. When someone like Steve Rubel blogs about something you wrote, you know that you're getting noticed. I measure the success by the kind of visitors I get because of my blog posts. It's a brand building exercise, it's not just in terms of sales and profits. Blogging is more about building relationships. I think blogging has also helped me to do that, so that's also how I measure the effectiveness.

JH        How would you describe your blogging voice? Do you have a particular style?

PS       I have different blogs for different purposes. Some of them are just useful resource blogs where I just post news and updates and stuff like that. I don't comment a lot on those blogs but there are a couple of blogs where I post mainly opinions and rants and stuff like that. I tend to be a little controversial at times, I tend to be provocative. I make posts that may sometimes irritate people. You could say that I have different voices on different blogs because I use different blogs for different reasons.

JH        What do you feel about blogs as a marketing tool for small businesses?

PS       It depends on what you are trying to do. I find that newsletters are very effective because far more people use e-mail than RSS right now. A lot of people are not very familiar with RSS. Today I shifted one of my health newsletters to a blog and I had to explain to my subscribers what RSS was. There's a lot of confusion and many of them said they preferred to receive posts by e-mail. They don't want to go through the process of subscribing to them by RSS. It depends on what you are trying to achieve, it depends on who you are trying to reach, where your market is. You have to ask yourself those questions and then decide if a blog is suitable for your business. It's not suitable for everyone but if your business is creating a brand and creating a name for yourself online, expanding your reach and building a network online, then I think that blogging is fine.

JH        What advice would you give to a small business thinking of starting up a blog?

PS       I would suggest that they first learn as much as they can about blogging and how they should go about it. Don't jump into it headlong. Don't just start blogging. Then decide what kind of platform is the best for you because you have to decide whether you want to spend more time posting or customising your blog. You assess exactly what you want to achieve with it and how you're going to measure the success, whether it's more in terms of sales or search engines or whatever. Then go into it, only after you've assessed what you are trying to achieve.

JH        Can you think of any weaknesses or threats with regard to blogs as a marketing tool?

PS       There's always a possibility of biting off more than you can chew. You have to be careful about what you post sometimes. You can alienate people. A blog is a place where people can respond and sometimes the comments can be nasty, so you have to be very careful how you respond to them. You have to be cool-headed, you can't just shoot your mouth off, especially when people take the trouble to comment on your blog and respond to your posts. There are always people who will try to provoke you and there will be people who post nasty comments. You've got to maintain your dignity when you're responding to people's comments.

JH        What are you plans with regard to blogging?

PS       I'm planning to start a blogging consultancy service in India. That will probably be the first one of its kind over here.

JH        Is blogging big in India?

PS       No, not really. In fact, I'm going to have an uphill task trying to educate people about the benefits of blogging out here. A lot of CEOs and marketing people have no idea what a blog is.

Interview with Bill Flitter from Pheedo

Bill Flitter is Chief Marketing Officer of Pheedo, a company which provides publishers and advertisers with RSS advertising solutions. If 2004 was the year of the blog, then 2005 could well be the year when RSS really takes off. Bill kindly agreed to a phone interview and we talked about the Pheedo blog and the growing importance of RSS.

   

JH        How does the blog fit into your overall marketing strategy?

BF       When we started our Pheedo, over a year ago now, our blog was our only marketing tool. We didn't have a big budget for marketing so we decided to start establishing ourselves as an expert in our particular field: RSS Advertising. We started publishing information that we gathered through knowledge of the industry and what we'd been seeing at our own company. The blog is really a vital component of our marketing strategy. People started linking to us, we found other people, we started participating in the community and up came this great viral effect. We got customers through our weblog, we got speaking engagements through the weblog and that was the catalyst, that really started it off.

JH        Have you got any way of measuring the effectiveness? There's a big question about the ROI and whether it justifies the time spent.

BF       As far as ROI is concerned, I don't have hard numbers to say the weblog equalled this but I can definitely say that's all we had in the beginning as our marketing tool and we're surviving. I think it helped us to establish ourselves as an expert and then also network within the community.

JH        Do you think that the blog is a good marketing tool for businesses in general?

BF       In general yes. Blogs aren't good for every company but I think that generally speaking they are a good tool to add to the marketing mix. The next question is where do they fit into the marketing mix. I think the most obvious area is public relations. Post all your press releases to your weblog. I think it's a great tool to alert your readers what you're doing and also the press. We've actually had stories picked up and people calling us to ask us if they could use similar content for a story that they're doing, so it's just a great way to establish yourself as an expert.

    

JH      Where does RSS fit into this?

      

BF      Marketers spend a lot of money on e-mail marketing and there are quite a few problems with that now that spam has really devastated e-mail marketing business. Just to send an e-mail to a customer is pretty tough. You have all the ISP filters, you have human filters, you have the client filters, and you have to be very careful if you send any e-mail in bulk. You have to work closely with the ISPs and such to make sure that your e-mail does get through. But it's just a cluttered mess and a blog within an RSS strategy can really take care of that information at delivery. I'm not naïve enough to say stop sending e-mail but start early and introduce your customers to blogs and RSS because RSS is a direct delivery channel to the consumer, a direct pipe. With RSS you don't give up any of your personal information, you can unsubscribe at will. Publishers are going to recognize that fast, that the consumer's now finally in control in an RSS environment.

JH        But if you read RSS feeds rather than actually visiting the blog, aren't you missing out on some of the features of blogs such as the ability to post comments?

BF       It depends how you format your RSS feed. Are you doing full post or are you driving customers back to your website? It's a delivery tool for content. That still can be interactive depending on how you format your RSS feed. But you're right, you do lose some of that but if I still want to make a comment I go back to the website.

JH        Is there any downside to using blogs as a marketing tool?

BF       The expense for a weblog is keeping it up, it's the content. The tools are cheap enough right now. If you want it to succeed and establish yourself, you need to do regular posts and you need to keep it updated and fresh. So the kind of magic number I use is about 50 posts a month for a larger company, if they want to grow the traffic. Maybe a small business could do two or three posts a week. It doesn't always have to be original content. It could be commenting on someone else's content or even about the space you're in - talk about the particular news that's going on in the space that you are involved in.

JH        What about RSS and advertising? How does that work?

BF       You can opt in to get ads into your RSS feeds. We have a service that monitors your feeds and helps you understand the traffic in your feeds. We also insert ads to help you monetize your content.

JH        How do you think RSS will develop in the future?

BF       I honestly think it will grow exponentially over the next few years. Again, it's just a clean channel to deliver content and as consumers find out how easy it is to use. The big hurdle was in the beginning to understand what to do. You click on those little orange boxes scattered around the web and get to this ugly looking page full of code. Most people think the page must be broken. They don't know what to do with RSS but that will change and I think it will grow exponentially because it's so easy to use, so easy to unsubscribe from. Microsoft will make it a feature of their browser. My Yahoo is making it more popular. Most people on My Yahoo don't even know they're using RSS. I think that the term RSS will be in the background.

JH        There are two competing standards, aren't there? Is Atom a different thing altogether?

BF       Yes, I use RSS kind of generically to mean content syndication. It's like the debate we had over VHS and Betamax in the seventies for VCRs. Atom might be a better format but RSS seems to be winning.

JH        I've had some other interviewees say that they don't visit blogs any more. If you don't have an RSS feed, you don't exist as far as they are concerned.

BF       That's basically how I look at it too. I only consume content via RSS. I get no e-mail newsletters any more, it's all RSS.