Speaker and business consultant Dale Collie offers tips on "courageous leadership". Collie trains leaders "how to go from Klump Klump to Zoom Zoom". Collie’s referring to the unwillingness of some team members to embrace change, both change in general and new technology in particular. 

A lot of what Collie had to say hit the mark for me.  When I’m working with a company to set up a business blogging strategy and I’m training that company’s employees to post blogs, quite often I hit the sort of resistance Collie describes. It’s not unusual for some employees see blogging as just one more task in a series of duties that makes their work load heavier.  Then, too, some employees are "minder" or "grinder" types, not creative thinkers, and certainly (as they’re very vocal in expressing) not writers, for Heaven’s sake!

Even when I am (or perhaps one of my Say It For You ghostwriters is) the one actually going to be composing the posts, it’s crucial that the businessowner enlist the support of the employees.  The employees are the ones in the field and on the phone with customers and clients, and they are the best people to elicit testimonials and anecdotes that can be used as wonderful blog content.  The employees are the ones who know the strengths and best uses of their own company’s products and services, and how customers can use those to maximum advantage.

To turn around team members’ resistance to change, Dale Collie advises leaders to find out if they themselves are setting the example of resistance to new technology or to any other change in the workplace situation. (In my work, the business owner is usually the one that seeks out my blogging services, then brings me in to present the concept to the team members.)

The business owner him/herself (more often than not the least technologically savvy) must lead the way, embracing the blogging tactic and making time to write posts with regularity. It’s amazing – when the owner steps out in front in willingness to learn this new marketing strategy, the employees often step up to help with ideas for how to use the blog as part of conversation online with customers and prospects. 

In fact, what often happens, just because the owner of the business has made the commitment to blogging to the point of bringing me in to "Say It For You", at least some employees will "catch the urge", piping up with, "Y’know, I think I’d rather "say it for myself!" 

A combination tactic quite often  turns out to be just right, with professionally ghostwritten posts maintaining the regularity and research needed to win search engine rankings, and employees providing their very special touch when time and their regular duties allow.

"Search engines are the key to finding specific information on the vast expanse of the World Wide Web," explains Webopedia. There are robot-like engines called "web crawlers" and human-powered search engines that submit data to be indexed.

Each search engine visits a website, reads the information on it, follows any links that connect that site to others, and uses an "algorithm" to measure the relevance of the material it finds to what the online searcher appears to be looking for. Periodically, the crawler returns to the site to see if any of the information has changed.

When you type in a phrase on Google (or Yahoo, MSN, About.com, etc.), you’re actually searching the index for that phrase.

Remember me saying in a former blog post that business blogging uses both science and art? Proper use of keywords to enhance Search Engine Optimization is the "science" part the equation; writing interesting and relevant content for the blogs is where the "art" comes in. In fact, the reason ghost blogging is so fascinating a profession for me is that very combination of art and science.

One of my favorite "reads" is a magazine called MentalFloss, and a recent article dealt with modern technologies whose discovery was based on studying the animal kingdom. 
A featured creature was the lobster.  A new x-ray technology is based on the way lobsters see things.  X-rays don’t like to bend, and are therefore difficult to manipulate. The only way we have been able to scan bags at airports or view bones and organs is by using very large machines that emit a torrent of radiation.

Lobsters, crawling 300 feet below the surface of the ocean, have more efficient x-ray vision.  They can take different reflections and focus them together to a single point, forming an image by "bending" those reflections. (The Department of Homeland Security has already invested millions in the LEXID  – Lobster Eye Xray Imaging Device – they hope LEXID will find contraband).

In a way, web crawlers use a LEXID-like process to gather many bits of information from many different locations on the World Wide Web and index that information into one source.  Web crawlers are the ultimate lobsters of the Internet!