Regardless of how popular or visible Twitter is currently, your corporate social marketing and new media strategy still need to maintain an effective blog. Twitter or FaceBook alone cannot solve all your marketing challenges, but a corporate blog remains a very strong and viable marketing channel. Whatever you do, you’ll need to pay special attention to 2 key elements of corporate blogging: content relevancy and trackable analytics.

Content Relevancy

Content has been king, and will always be king for your corporate blog. It’s hard to defeat great content using anything else, tricks or otherwise. If you don’t have great content, then whatever you do won’t affect your site’s popularity or traffic in any meaningful manner. In fact the goodness of your content correlates directly to how relevant you are to your prospects and customers. Are you providing the right information that your prospects are looking for, at the time they’re looking for it? Are you making available help to solve your customer’s dilemma in a timely manner? Are you providing solutions that eliminate your clients’ problems before your competition does? In short, your corporate blog is a very powerful tool, and it can help you provide relevant content that is totally under your control.

Trackable Analytics

Analytics play several different important roles. One, it can help you find out what visitors are looking for and how they are finding them. It can also show you how your company may be able to satisfy that need. Two, it can be used to help guide your content generation plan. As we discussed before, relevant content is critical, and knowing what content is relevant before you generate it is a no brainer. As a bonus, trackable analytics can also give you a roadmap with which to directly engage with your audience, at the specific time and place in the blogosphere when they congregate.

Tips to Running Effective Corporate Blog

So how do you maintain a strong corporate blog in order to engage with your customers, build your brand, while at the same time drive potential sales? Consider these following tips:

1. Go where the buzz is. Know where the conversations are taking place that either talk about your brand or discuss something that your brand can help solve. Get involved with genuine desire to help, to build relationship and to establish yourself as subject matter expert. No marketing spiel is needed here; just stick to the facts. That’s what people are looking for. To help with this discovering and listening task, there are social media “listening tools” available to help.
2. Making and maintaining contact. Once you find out where you can beneficially contribute to the conversation, interact with both those already familiar with your brand and those new to it. Think carefully before you engage to make sure you understand the conversation and meaning behind each and every conversation thread. Again your involvement in the conversation must be relevant and helpful, or at least contributes on an informational level, otherwise you’ll be looked at as someone just out for personal gains. Lastly, maintain all social networking etiquette at all times, because you need to. To read more on social networking etiquette, here are a couple of articles to help: SEO and Social Networking as Reputation Management Tools, and Putting Twitter in Your Marketing ToolBox.
3. Maintain a powerful corporate blog. Make it exciting. Make it attractive. All rules about good website designs still apply, including easy and clear navigation, fast loading speed, simple yet effective interface, etc. And most importantly, post fresh and relevant articles often, and invite interaction and feedback.
4. Stay in control and work smart. A successful corporate blog doesn’t have to cost an arm or a leg. Once you established your plan and strategy, it’s easy to post new posts, it’s cheap to use monitoring tools and follow/track the blogosphere, and it’s painless to participate in dialogue to help other people. Corporate blogging does take time, so it helps to keep it simple and institute a routine and stick with it.
5. Continuously develop your social networking and new media skills. Common stumbling blocks abound. They include falling behind with regular posting of fresh and relevant articles, failing to follow and keep engaged in conversation threads, running up against corporate policies that should have been created at the beginning of your corporate blogging venture, and not taking advantage of all possible effective social networking traffic channels. You may be leaving free customer traffic on the table without realizing it.

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Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Corporate Blogging – Minimum Must-Have Elements For Successful Strategy

Over at eBizMBA there is a list of the top 30 social bookmarking sites that just went up, dated December 2008. Based on a combination of Inbound Links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank and U.S. traffic data from Quantcast, the list gives an relative view of who are the biggest players in this social media field.

We all know that these are real big names and many are recognizable even to the most casual Internet users. On the other hand there are many that you’ve never heard of! That’s what amazing about the list. Regardless, I must say some of these numbers are staggering! They really show how huge and popular these sites are, and how small the rest of us are. Here we go, courtesy of eBizMBA, the sites are:

1. digg.com - 382,792,751 – Inbound Links | 22,578,945 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 10,300,000 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 124 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 8
2. Yahoo!Buzz - 900,571 – Inbound Links | **128,556,575** – Compete Monthly Visitors | 2,500,000 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 1 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
3. Technorati.com - 75,306,437 – Inbound Links | 3,231,709 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 1,400,000 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 216 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 8
4. del.icio.us - 171,593,051 – Inbound Links | 1,699,128 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 1,300,000 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 248 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 8
5. Propeller.com - 997,000 – Inbound Links | 1,454,912 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 2,180,176 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 2,308 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
6. StumbleUpon.com - 19,050,177 – Inbound Links | 1,313,586 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 695,239 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 300 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 8
7. reddit.com - 45,307,577 – Inbound Links | 2,587,503 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 344,383 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 852 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
8. mixx.com - 6,175,082 – Inbound Links | 507,100 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 475,000 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 1,880 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
9. Fark.com - 11,438,723 – Inbound Links | 306,597 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 1,767,165 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 1,958 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
10. MyBlogLog.com - 1,742,265 – Inbound Links | 1,972,847 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 84,922 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 432 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
11. Slashdot.org - 13,555,035 – Inbound Links | 724,424 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 269,884 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 579 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 9
12. kaboodle.com - 100,266 – Inbound Links | 1,751,763 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 851,858 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 9,125 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
13. Bloglines.com - 50,717,948 – Inbound Links | 382,663 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 103,711 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 853 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 9
14. newsvine.com - 24,200,775 – Inbound Links | 315,857 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 203,761 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 3,977 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
15. blinklist.com - 23,770,576 – Inbound Links | 243,277 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 165,306 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 4,647 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
16. netvouz.com - 8,112,272 – Inbound Links | 75,507 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 54,325 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 15,048 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
17. clipmarks.com - 164,419 – Inbound Links | 196,107 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 147,131 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 6,740 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
18. Furl.net - 49,595,144 – Inbound Links | 148,975 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 57,547 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 4,112 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 8
19. Mister-Wong - 13,214,146 – Inbound Links | 25,416 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 3,432 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 1,889 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
20. dzone.com - 1,065,009 – Inbound Links | 100,784 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 117,897 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 5,187 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
21. ma.gnolia.com - 13,701,444 – Inbound Links | 110,662 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 32,363 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 7,454 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
22. Tailrank.com - 5,320,211 – Inbound Links | 71,563 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 35,783 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 28,920 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
23. ShoutWire.com - 168,480 – Inbound Links | 101,738 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 55,337 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 10,552 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
24. simpy.com - 13,107,730 – Inbound Links | 62,645 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 49,205 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 10,948 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7
25. BlogMarks.net - 9,748,453 – Inbound Links | 61,740 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 28,075 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 11,880 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
26. BlueDot.us - 1,159,780 – Inbound Links | 107,717 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 60,045 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 12,072 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
27. Spurl.net - 18,628,253 – Inbound Links | 42,300 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 3,483 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 14,300 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
28. linkswarm.com - 150,842 – Inbound Links | 14,504 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 10,476 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 47,267 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 5
29. Spotback.com - 97,564 – Inbound Links | 42,838 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 5,037 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 42,015 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 5
30. MyBookmarks.com - 25,191 – Inbound Links | 10,934 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 7,727 – Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 108,226 – Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 5

By comparison, digg.com has 10.3M and Yahoo!Buzz 2.5M. Very impressive numbers and I think they will continue to grow at least for the foreseeable future, regardless of any market condition. Social bookmarking is only a subset of this whole larger social networking movement, which is probably one area that is pretty much independent of any social, market or political conditions around the world. In fact any new or extreme social changes will only serve as fuel for the social network to grow as we’ve seen it already time and again.

Despite this, many of us marketers are still struggling with this thing called social marketing. Well social marketing is here to stay, so just don’t get left behind.

So here are some questions:

What’s your favorite social bookmarking site or sites? How many of these accounts do you have? What’s the reason(s) for the multiple accounts and how do you manage them?

Do you prefer to get the news from social sites like these or from more traditional news sites?

Finally, as social networking evolves, what tools do you think will become important (or need to be developed) for us to streamline our online activities? Are there enabling technologies that we have yet been able to master? Your thoughts are welcome

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

30 Largest Social Bookmarking Sites, December 2008

Here’s something older but especially relevant in this time of continued growth in social media marketing. Most online marketers know it’s from a post by Josh Bernoff called “The POST Method: A systematic approach to social strategy” at Forrester Research, Inc. I include it here for my own benefits, and maybe for those who reads my blog.

P is People. Don’t start a social strategy until you know the capabilities of your audience. If you’re targeting college students, use social networks. If you’re reaching out business travelers, consider ratings and reviews. Forrester has great  data to help with this, but you can make some estimates on your own. Just don’t start without thinking about it.

O is objectives. Pick one. Are you starting an application to listen to your customers, or to talk with them? To support them, or to energize your best customers to evangelize others? Or are you trying to collaborate with them? Decide on your objective before you decide on a technology. Then figure out how you will measure it.

S is Strategy. Strategy here means figuring out what will be different after you’re done. Do you want a closer, two-way relationship with your best customers? Do you want to get people talking about your products? Do you want a permanent focus group for testing product ideas and generating new ones? Imagine you succeed. How will things be different afterwards? Imagine the endpoint and you’ll know where to begin.

T is Technology. A community. A wiki. A blog or a hundred blogs. Once you know your people, objectives, and strategy, then you can decide with confidence.

Still very wise words.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

The POST Method: a Mental Note.