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
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.
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.
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.
Christine Halvorson is that rare commodity in the corporate blogosphere: a full-time company blogger. In her role as Chief Blogger at Stonyfield Farm, Christine oversees no fewer than five company blogs. Christine was interviewed by Rick Bruner back in December, so when I spoke to her on the phone I was keen to hear about the latest developments at Stonyfield.
JH Has your traffic progressed since you were interviewed by Rick Bruner back in December?
CH The traffic is really variable. It's sometimes up, sometimes down. We've decided internally that if the traffic doesn't keep moving upwards, then we'll pull the blog and try something else.
JH Is that why you've pulled one already?
CH Yes, exactly. So we started with five, then we went down to four, now we're back up to five. We started a brand new one since the Rick Bruner interview.
JH The baby blog?
CH Yes. It really seems to be very popular early on in its life. We started it because we knew that one of our most popular lines is baby yogurts. I also read that 'mommy blogs' were very popular in the blog world. So we just decided to combine those two and see what would happen. I thought it would be a success and so far I think we can say that it is.
JH Is that a policy then, to keep renewing the blogs or introducing new ones?
CH Yes, I think so. We are closely monitoring the traffic and we've made a decision that if it stagnates for longer than a week or two, then we'll have to re-think things.
JH But don't you risk losing some of your audience?
CH Sure, but when we did pull that blog, we gave some warning and we said the topics that we were talking about here we would continue to talk about over in this other blog. So we sort of merged the topic areas. But you probably are aware that the measurement tools are not really as sophisticated for blogs as they are for websites. As it stands, our CEO has agreed to just play it by ear and we're going to assume that there is some value in terms of a return to our company in doing this at this moment.
JH The return is, I suppose, on your time spent blogging.
CH Exactly. Our biggest expense is me.
JH Are the blogs particularly expensive to run?
CH Absolutely not. We have hardly spent any money. We bought the software, hired a contract designer once or twice for a couple of hundred dollars worth of work, but it's really minimal.
JH Are you surprised by the success of the blogs?
CH Frankly I am because prior to taking the job, I was not a person that did blogs myself. I didn't read them. You know, I'm too busy to sit around and read somebody else's writing. That just means I had to put my own prejudices aside and understand that there are people out there for whom this is a very important medium. But that said, I'm surprised that we have developed an audience who is following us - we are a food manufacturing company.
JH How did you end up as the company blogger?
CH They ran a classified advertisement and I think they called the position 'web writer'. I was a journalist, a public relations person and a freelance writer. So I learned blogging on the job.
JH What does your CEO think about the blogs now?
CH I think he is pleased with the fact that they are still gaining traffic and there seems to be interest. He wants to stick with it because it's still in its experimental stages. I think he's as interested as I am to see how this will play out. Will blogs go away totally or will they become the next big thing that everybody predicts?
JH Has he laid down any blogging guidelines? Do you have a blogging code in your company?
CH You know, we don't and it's interesting that you say that. I'm part of the public relations department so obviously we are people who are sensitive to how the public is perceiving us, but Gary Hirshberg, the CEO, said he's not concerned about that; he's more concerned about building relationships with the people who are our loyal customers. His directive to me was to be real, to be authentic. And because of the nature of our product, organic yogurt, we do get people who are very loyal and committed to eating organic food and supporting organic agriculture. So because we know that about our customers, we assume that the risk of communicating with them directly and on a personal level is one worth taking.
JH What form does that conversation take, in fact, because I notice that on the blogs you get some comments but not an awful lot?
CH It's not huge and every now and then we do intentionally try to put some controversial topics in there to get people revved up. We just assume that people are reading it but they're just not taking the time to comment.
JH How would you describe your blogging voice?
CH I try to be funny, light-hearted and personable but at the same time provocative to get people to think or to take some action or to go read more about organics or read more about some new law being proposed in Congress or whatever.
JH How much time do you spend on the blogs? Is it a full time job for you?
CH I was hired as a full-time employee with the idea that I would do the blogs and also maintain and write website content. I take care of the five blogs and it takes about 60% of my time.
JH Do you use the blog for PR purposes?
CH Every now and then I will do something in the blog that's totally promotional: we won the award for best yogurt or whatever. I will throw that in there but I will do that without trying to sound like a public relations practitioner or an advertisement. I'll try to say, "Well, we're quite thrilled that we got this award up in San Francisco and aren't the people of San Francisco nice?"
JH Are you aware of any limitations of blogs as a marketing tool?
CH I think there are people my age and up who will never adopt this medium. I mean, I'm 45 and I'm barely able to hang on technologically speaking. I tell people I'm the oldest blogger in America! The technological world changes so fast that the twelve-year-olds know how to do stuff better than us older people who have too many other things to worry about in life. So I think that might be a limitation if you're trying to attract an older audience. It has the same limitations as any website and e-newsletter. Those that are comfortable with technology will find it and use it.
JH To what extent do you think the Stonyfield experience can be a model for other companies?
CH Well, I think it can be a model, absolutely. I might suggest to start with one rather than five and I wouldn't suggest that every company in the world should have a blog. I think you should have a blog if you have a particular point of view in the world, if you have opinions and you have something to say about the way your industry operates. That's the real reason it works for Stonyfield. It's because we're not a conventional company just putting out a product in order to make money. Our CEO would tell you we put out yogurt so that we can educate people about organic food and the environment and the yogurt is just a medium for doing that. You know, if you're sitting in Topeka, Kansas and you're producing paper clips, I'm not sure that'd be an interesting thing to blog about. But we had a built-in audience, we have built-in, interesting ideas and we have a CEO who is willing to share his opinions.
JH Have you thought about getting into podcasting or audioblogging?
CH Yes, it's down the line. I think we'd like to experiment with some of that. You know, I think the underlying theme would be as long as you don't expect immediate, measurable, dollar return, it's a great thing to experiment and see what works.
JH Do you have any final thoughts about blogging?
CH Just for the record, I'm having a good, great time doing it and I do think there's great potential there. There's probably more potential than we're even tapping into yet.
Dennis Kennedy is a lawyer who practises in Missouri. He has a very successful blog (or should that be blawg?) which gets more hits per month than most blogs will get in a lifetime. In a wide-ranging phone interview Dennis had some extremely interesting things to say about the current state of the blogosphere and where it's going.
JH What's the purpose of the blog? What are you trying to achieve with your blog?
DK I always like to tell people that when I first started to do the blog, I truly saw it as an experiment in writing. I had done a whole lot of writing on different legal publications and I had done it in a certain style and it's been very successful. I decided I wanted to try some different things and let my writing find a new audience and I thought that the blog would be part of that. But I also was leaving a law firm to start up my own business and I thought the blog would be at the same time a way to get the word out about what I was doing, to cover some issues and, in an informational way, to market my expertise, my practice and my business.
JH Do you have any idea who reads the blog and in what numbers?
DK No, I don't have. I know this is going to sound weird but in a way I don't really care about the numbers. I have some numbers and I can tell you that the traffic to my website in the two years I've had the blog has basically gone up about fifteen fold. Before I started the blog I had a site where I was very happy with the numbers on it and I was getting 12 to 15 thousand hits a month and I thought that was phenomenal, I was really pleased with that. In December I was just a shade under 200,000 hits which is amazing, and the majority of those are going to the blog.
JH How effective has the blog been in generating business? Are you able to measure the ROI?
DK A lot of people are looking and that and there's been a lot of discussion especially in the last few months. Somebody was saying that they had worked up some sort of calculations and figured that the average blogger probably spends around $10,000 worth of time on his or her blog during the course of the year. That sounds plausible to me. You know, it's just adding up the time you spend writing it and doing the research that's related to it. I would say that, being a lawyer, what I find is that is hasn't generated a lot of business. That's because due to regulations here in the US I have a licence to practice law in Missouri, so I need Missouri clients. The contacts that I will get will typically be from California or Florida, that sort of thing, so that won't turn into business for me of the classic law practice type. Where I've found it's helped me is in visibility, in speaking appearances, getting paid to write articles and the consulting side but not so much on the law practice side except in the sense that it builds a general reputation.
JH I notice you don't have comments enabled on your blog. Is that a deliberate decision?
DK Yeah, that was very deliberate and I'm really questioning that these days but the fact is that blogging goes in different ways, people have different approaches to it. I see blogging as a publication vehicle first and foremost and so my feeling was always that this is my blog and I'm writing my stuff and if you want to write something, either comment privately by e-mail or criticise or talk about what I'm doing on your own blog. So that was always my approach and the comment spam also deterred me. I've written about that and I've said I can't pick up the phone because people are calling me with some sort of Direct Marketing thing all the time. Spam ruined e-mail for me, I'm not going to give the spammers another platform to ruin blogging, which is something I really love. So that's a piece of it and the other thing is I see comments as something you need to look at and manage and respond to and to me it's hard enough to keep up with e-mail, it's hard enough to do all those other things. I really don't need to give myself another place, especially a public space where I need to check things and respond.
JH What would you say were the benefits of blogs as a marketing tool particularly for lawyers? It seems to have emerged as a genre of its own.
DK I think that you get the quick credibility for having expertise in a subject matter. I think that happens very quickly with blogs. I think that potentially, because of the way that the Google search engine is working these days, that blogs just really jump you into the search engines quickly and up your rankings. It's hard to underestimate that.
JH Have you ever thought of putting ads on your blog? With 200,000 hits a month, there must be some potential there.
DK I've looked at that and I've given it a lot of thought. Last year I did some sponsor things on the blog just as an experiment. It worked well for me but I don't like the advertising model and the whole notion of the randomly served ads. My latest theory that I haven't really written about yet is that it's not the advertising model that works for blogging, it's more what I call the entertainment model in that as a blogger you have this great credibility, you have an audience and you have a trust with your audience and popularity. It's almost like the benefit to people is that they can hire you to make personal appearances or for speaking, that you can sell products, that you can do endorsements. It's almost like you're an entertainer in a very limited way. That's one of the ways I'm looking as a better way to turn blogging into a revenue stream. That to me is a lot more preferable than just saying I'll serve up a bunch of ads and make 17 dollars a month from putting random ads on my site. I want to protect the credibility and I want to build on things that help me and I'm just not sure that for the average blogger, especially on a niche topic or even a blog that's associated with your business, that the advertising model really makes sense. It causes more problems than it's worth.
JH Do you see any weaknesses or threats with regard to the blog as a marketing medium?
DK It's interesting because I think that blogging is kind of the sideshow and that the real change is coming through RSS.
JH At one point I think you described RSS as a 'life altering technology.'
DK I have this new term - I've become 'feed dominant' because after all these years of being on the Internet and living in a browser, I now use this newsreader called FeedDemon and because the browser is built into it's become the way I experience the web. I don't go to the point of saying that if you don't have a feed, you don't exist, which some people will say, but I don't actually type in URLs and go to sites anymore so it's very important for me to find the feed.
JH Do you see any other developments taking place in the blogosphere?
DK I look at blogging and say it is a writer's medium and podcasting is interesting because that opens it up to people who are more comfortable with audio but you know not everybody wants to be a publisher, not everybody wants to live in the blogging world. I think there's going to be some sort of a backlash against bloggers this coming year. It's just the nature of how the news media and people view things. You build something up to be popular and then you knock it down. I see some of that. There'll be some shakeout in what blogging is but I think that it's tapped into something really amazing and I think that the collaboration and the people who start to work together will be the real story behind blogging and whether blogs continue to exist in the form that they do. As a lawyer, I worry about when the lawyers come into blogging and what kind kind of regulation and what kind of liabilities and sorts of things are going to come in. I worry to some extent about consolidation of the industry and any number of things that can happen. We live in a dangerous world and it's possible that something could happen that drastically either takes down the Internet or drastically affects it or that it's locked down in certain ways that you won't have this free ranging discussion and use of technology that you see in blogs now. I mean those things are concerns but I'm more interested in where it's going to go and how it evolves. The other thing I think that's an inevitable backlash is that everybody's saying blogging is this great marketing tool, we'll accomplish all these things and 80-90% of the people who do that aren't going to find that to be the case. It's not in their temperament, they're not going to be willing to do the hard work that it takes and they're not going to love it in the way that the initial generation of bloggers really loved it and that'll make the difference.
JH Could you give me some background information about yourself and Mellow Monk?
PK Mellow Monk started operations last April. It's something I do on the side; my full-time gig is technical editor-writer at a national laboratory.
JH How did the blog come about?
PK The blog was not originally part of the site, but I soon realized that a blog would serve multiple purposes and do so more efficiently than my previous approach, which was to hand-code multiple pages.
JH What has the blog achieved for you in marketing terms?
PK The blog page is now the second most frequently viewed page on the site after the home page, and that's exactly what I want. When I first started this business, I wanted to promote it online and wasn't looking into other forms of advertising except for sponsored links, and I thought that Google would be the best way to go. The campaign I used was a little too broad so we got a lot of clicks and we were spending a lot of money but it wasn't a very efficient way to advertise. You get about a hundred clicks and out of those, two people would buy tea. All of our revenue was going to the Google fund. I'm trying to focus on a certain market niche, not just green tea, Japanese green tea produced by small family-owned operations, and so it wasn't nearly targeted enough. That's what I'm trying to do now. The whole blogging thing really ties into that because it's such a good way for promotion.
JH How do you decide what to talk about in your posts?
PK I've established a fairly broad range of topics, either directly or indirectly related to tea. If I come across a topic that I think fits, I write a posting about it.
JH I notice you put quite a lot of cultural information on your blog.
PK Right, and that's the challenge because green tea is a very, very specific subject and there's no way to write a blog just on the topic of green tea because it would get too technical and boring. I thought "I've got to expand on it", so that's the connection with Japan, because it's green tea from Japan. You want to branch it out but you want there to be a legitimate connection between your original theme.
JH How much time you do spend writing posts or preparing them?
PK I would say that the average post takes about maybe two hours. I'm including everything: the writing and the rewriting, logging in, posting. If there's a picture then it would definitely be two hours. The blog has that nice feeling of accomplishment: you sit down, you write it, you post it and boom, it's up there.
JH How would you describe your blogging voice?
PK I try to sound friendly instead of stiff, but not too informal. Professional, but accessible. Knowledgeable, but not overly technical.
JH What qualities are required to be a successful blogger?
PK As with any form of communication, knowing one's audience is the most important requirement. After that, writing ability and the discipline to post regularly are two qualities that come to mind.
JH Do you have any other thoughts about your experience with blogging?
PK When it comes down to it, the blog is all about the content and substance, not form, and if you can write interesting posts that people want to read, then your blog will be popular. It's not about whether you have the money to advertise during the Superbowl, it's how interesting your blog is that determines whether people come back. It's also how good a writer you are and what kind of interesting stories you have. That's your most important asset. It's a way of levelling the playing field. If you know your subject and you're good at writing about it, that gives you a really big advantage over the big boys. I think that's what's so powerful about the whole blogging thing: it's content, it's not flash. It really doesn't have anything to do with how much money you have. Advertising would be comparable to movies, where how much budget you have, what sort of stars you can afford to hire is a big determination. Blogging, on the other hand, is more like writing, where one author working by himself on an old computer or word processor, if his writing is good enough, can compete with the best-selling authors out there. It's all to do with creativity and content.
JH Do you plan to give up the day job? PK I don't see myself giving up the day job. You have to think big and ideally this would become the Starbucks of green tea, but if it ever got to the point where it got too big for me to handle I would probably try and hire someone to run it before I gave up my day job. We're still some way from the point where I'd think this is taking up too much of my time.
Blogthenticity is a new venture started up by Paul Woodhouse (of Tinbasher fame) and Robert French (infOpinions). The idea is to provide 'authentic' business bloggers with a forum to share ideas and discuss business blogging. This promises to be THE place to get information about what's really going on in the business blogosphere and a necessary antidote to all the hype currently surrounding blogs and blogging.
JH How did The Tinbasher blog begin?
PW I set up a little sheet metal directory just for the sake of it and I put a blog within that site. It was just a case of messing about with a few RSS feeds for sheet metal news, but there isn't that much news you can get hold of. It was just really boring and I soon lost interest.
JH So how did it become as well-known as it is now. It's cited on lots of other blogs, mentioned in articles.
PW I basically just revamped it and thought, "Right, I'll start writing from a company perspective", which I wasn't doing before. It was from a strictly sheet metal news perspective and it was terribly dull but once it became a company weblog and I could talk more about the things that were going on besides general industry news, it became more interesting. I think that was the crucial turning point.
JH Are you surprised at how 'famous' you've become?
PW I must admit I'm terribly surprised, although it's more novelty value than anything else. It became a bit of a diversion but due to the fact that there isn't necessarily a niche in the blogosphere for small businesses per se and definitely not one for sheet metal, I found myself being drawn towards marketing blogs and the blogs which were talking about business blogs.
JH Who reads the blog? Do you have an idea of your audience?
PW I don't think it's necessarily all sheet metal workers. I can obviously track the referrals so I know what they're looking for. For example, we have a lot of people at the moment looking for 'stainless steel scratches' and all that kind of business so I'd classify those as being from a more home decorative market.
JH And in terms of numbers? How many visits would you get a day?
PW At the moment on the site meter, it's probably averaging about 70 but it's gone up tremendously this past month ever since I got some PageRank. I got a RageRank of about four and all of a sudden people started to find it on Google.
JH I was going to ask you about PageRank because I'm not sure I quite understand that.
PW The way it's supposed to work is that you link to sites and sites link to you. Google's algorithm then works out how relevant you are and how many links you have and that's supposed to transfer itself into PageRank. Theoretically, the more PageRank you have, the more likely you are to be found for whatever search terms may be put in and that's obviously the beautiful thing in terms of blogging. People are just naturally linking all over the place to people who are supposed to be more relevant. That means you get a natural boost in PageRank without having to go through all that nasty business of contacting sites and trying to get them to link to you. The updated content helps as well.
JH How does the traffic compare with your regular website? Do you get more on the blog?
PW Probably twice as much. I was probably only getting between 7 and 20 through the main Butler Sheet Metal site and then as soon as I integrated the blog into the whole web presence, it went from something like 240 to 1,500 and that was in the first month. Last month with the PageRank it had gone up to about two and a half thousand and this month it's two and a half thousand in two weeks.
JH How effective has the blog been in generating business? Can you make a connection?
PW I can, quite easily. Obviously, you've got more people looking, you've got better targeted key words and not only are we getting more enquiries, we're getting a better quality of enquiry. As opposed to people who are sending you an e-mail, doing the rounds, sending a quote off to maybe five or six companies, people are now starting to ring up. We're now actually getting fewer e-mail enquiries and far more telephone enquiries which are transferring more into sales. I'd say the blog bolsters the web site, but it's starting to bring in traffic in its own right.
JH How would you describe your blogging voice or blogging style?
PW I'd probably say it was parochial and colloquial. It's maybe my strongest point and also my weakest point. The people who like it are going to like it a lot, and those who don't will be quite turned off by it. But I'd rather have just one really good customer relationship through it than maybe 5-10 average ones.
JH Humour seems to be quite a big part of what you do. Most posts seem to have some element of humour.
PW That's possibly just the way I am and the way we are at work. I do write very personally and I find that quite easy to do. It's not necessarily the way we talk to customers but it is the way we talk to customers once we get to know them better. I commented just the other day that there's a lot of pressure on me being the world's foremost sheet metal blog comic.
JH As far as small businesses in general are concerned, what are the qualities you need to become a successful blogger? Can anyone do it?
PW I think that anyone can set one up and that's a very strong plus point but also to its detriment. I think there's a lot of people saying, "It's the easiest thing since sliced bread." I think it's also quite easy to make a hash of it and not do it as well as you necessarily might do. I keep finding ones that are either a blog about testimonials or blogs with just various products and that's not what it's about. As far as I'm concerned you don't use a blog purely and simply as an easy web publishing tool.
JH But there's the question of time as well. Small companies perhaps don't have a lot of time to invest or limited resources.
PW I think that's a very valid point. For example, there's obviously been more people who have taken up the idea of getting a web site than I think will take up the idea of getting a blog because you can conceivably throw as much money as you want at a website but you can't necessarily throw any money at a blog and expect it to work. You have to invest some time in it.
JH What would you say were the benefits of a blog as a marketing/communications medium in general?
PW The fact that we can explain ourselves as a company. A website is only an online brochure. There's obviously a lot more that goes on behind the scenes on a daily basis where you can actually expand upon who you are as a company. It's obviously the whole transparency thing - what you're like as a company, the personalities behind the business. I really do honestly believe that people can actually judge whether they want to do business with you.
JH What advice would you give to any small business thinking of starting a blog?
PW I can imagine that there are certain people who are wanting to get on the bandwaggon. I don't think that's enough. If it's not you that wants to blog, then you've got to find somebody within your company who does want to blog. There's got to be an authenticity, there's got to be a reliable voice - I'm not sure I like all these terms like authenticity and transparency and all that kind of business. But also the other thing that I'd say is actually get a feel for the blogosphere, spend a little bit of time reading a few other blogs, see what good business blogs are, see what good blogs are, see what they have in common, see what you like about them. There's got to be a blog somewhere floating about that you have an affinity with. Even go to certain blogs and learn how to post comments. Even though it's not the most difficult thing in the world, you've still got to get used to it.
Ray Cox is the owner of the Northfield Construction Company as well as a Minnesota State Representative. The NCC Blog provides a great showcase for the company's services. He took time out from his busy schedule to answer my questions by e-mail.
JH How did the NCC blog originate?
RC I was introduced to blogs shortly after I was elected to the State Legislature in 2002. I was speaking with a friend that is into computers and commented that I didn't like most websites but thought the electronic world offered a good communication tool. He suggested I look at a blog...I liked it and have used it ever since.
JH What's the purpose of the blog? What are you trying to achieve?
RC My company blog is an effort to let people know the variety of work we do. We are not a cookie cutter home builder...we create custom projects for both residential and commercial clients. I also want to put forth a person first and a company second....clients will deal with people at NCC.
JH Who is your audience? What sort of traffic do you get to the site?
RC I am posting to new clients and repeat clients. I have good traffic to the site. People like to see their projects on the site. A recent client sent me a thank you note and asked when completed photos would be posted.
JH How effective has the blog been in generating business for your company? Can you measure the ROI?
RC This is much more difficult to measure. I have had a few clients who make electronic contact and said "You look like a company that fits what we are looking for" etc. They identify themselves as locating NCC from the web. A blog is pretty inexpensive to run so the ROI is about paid back if you get one decent job a year from the site. The time investment I also view as a community building activity.
JH Has the blog brought any other benefits, either to you personally or to your company?
RC My blog has been referenced in several magazines, on the floor of Parliament in the UK, etc. Lots of talk about both my NCC and Ray Cox blogs.
JH How do other people in your company feel about the blog?
RC They like it and are starting to think more and more about photos for it, projects, etc.
JH How much time do you spend on the blog?
RC I try to post once a week if I can...it slips sometimes. It only takes 10-15 minutes to put together a good posting...less if it is short.
JH What has been your experience as a blogger?
RC I find it a very positive experience. NCC gets good feedback from our clients about it, and my personal site has great contacts.
JH What qualities would you say are necessary to be a successful small business blogger?
RC You can't be boring....short, to-the-point blogs work best. And you absolutely cannot have someone else write for you...that is always "outed" and people feel very betrayed.
