Even Critical Comments Bring “Bang” To Your Blog

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In an earlier blog post (see Buildings, Like Blogs, Can Be Interactive)  I  explained that one of the special things about blogs is that they’re available not only for reading, but for acting and interacting.  Good blogs invite readers to post comments and make it easy for them to subscribe to the blog.


As a professional ghost blogger, I’m a member of each client’s marketing team.  One of the things we discuss is comments that we hope will be posted on their blogs.  However, the topic of comments is one that elicits different responses from clients, largely because of fear those comments might be negative or critical . It’s interesting that a recent Indianapolis Business Journal article called “Critic Cutback Panned” addressed the same concern when it comes to local arts organizations; the reporter offered what I thought is the perfect answer: “As much as people in the arts wince at a critic’s stinging words, there is one thing they dread more than an unfavorable review:  no attention at all!”


I heard from humorist and author Dick Wolfsie that it takes two to make a joke funny.  The listener or reader needs to figure out the punch line of the joke in order to find it humorous. If a reader posts a comment to your blog, even if that comment disagrees with what you’ve said or is critical of your product or service, the fact is, now there are two in the game, and you’re getting bang for your blog with the search engines.   
 
As theater and concert producers would apparently agree, even bad reviews help ticket sales!

Likewise, even critical comments help blog rankings!

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Blogging – The Backdoor Approach To Sales

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If you’ve ever attended a sales meeting, you’ve been reminded to “ask for the sale”.  Sales trainers vouch for the fact that novice salespeople often go on and on about the features and benefits of their product or service, and then literally forget to ask for the order!


Enter the Internet, standing that advice on its ear… With blogging for business, guess what? Don’t ask! As blogging expert Ted Demopoulis explains in his book “What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging And Poscasting“:, in creating buzz through blogs you “cultivate an audience of people who ask you to sell them something!”


Posting blogs is how businesses take advantage of the main reason people use the Web – to find content.  Instead of running traditional ads for your brand of hats, or vitamins, or travel, you provide lots of information on the history of hats, on why vitamins are good for you, and about exciting places to go on safari.  Consumers interested in your subject, but who never even knew your name come to see you as a trusted resource, possibly as a business to do business with!


As a professional ghost blogger, when I’m working with a new business client, we select just the right “tone” and direction for the series of blogs. As I explained in Ask Not What Your Business Blog Can Do For You, I need to pick up on their unique corporate culture and style, so I can “speak” in their voice to their type of customer. At the same time, though, I need to make it very clear that this effort is different from all the other marketing and sales that company’s doing. 


We’re not asking for the sale, remember.  It’s a “Don’t Ask, But DO Tell” arrangement. “Watch out, world!”, I want to say.  “We’re coming in – but through the back door!”

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Would You Find You?

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The Indianapolis Star “Careers” section posed an interesting question for job seekers: “Would you hire you?” Writer Michael Goss advised that seeing ourselves as others see us is a good way to prepare for interviews. Goss added a caution: Making a good impression with an interviewer might be the least of your worries if no one grants you an interview in the first place! The real question, he admits, is “How can I get someone to look at me?”


When I thought about it, I realized that’s precisely the challenge I help my business owner clients face in the world of online marketing. While there are different sorts of blogs for different purposes (see Cat Blogs And Boss Blogs Are Fine, But Viral Blogs Mean Business), the overriding purpose of the business blogs I help my clients write is to attract consumer traffic to that business’ website.


Businessowners who are not yet on board with blogging have heard all the buzz about blogs, but may be wondering whether they need a new marketing initiative.  And that’s exactly when I pop the question “Would you find you?” I challenge business owners to imagine someone seated at a home computer, or perhaps navigating the Web on a laptop at the corner WiFi coffee shop, searching for information about the kinds of information, the kinds of products or services their business has to offer.  Except, I add, you have to remember – that customer has never heard of your business name!


“Go ahead”, I say, “assuming you don’t know the name of your business, type into Google (or Yahoo, or MSN) what you as a customer need. Does your website come up?  On what page of the search engine?”  (Are you a mortgage broker? Search under “mortgage rates in Indianapolis” or “qualifying for a mortgage in Morgan County” .)  (Are you a home health care provider?  Type in “home healthcare for mom in Indiana” or “nurses at home for parents”.) Try many different combinations – how easily would you find you?


Posting content on the Web is the best form of marketing there is, says David Scott in his book “Cashing In With Content”. With blogging, Scott explains, content is not forced on people – they access it because they want to.  Search engines organize the content, and direct people to it.


A business blog targets organic search. Simply put, that means people who don’t know your name.  They don’t know that you have exactly the information, the products, and the services they’re looking for, and they won’t know that until they’re “introduced” to you by the search engine through your blog.  So, if you were in those customers’ seats right now, the question is, Would You Find You??

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Blu-Ray Blogging For Business

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Monday following Thanksgiving, a radio talk show host offered listeners a prize if they could name the #1 product purchased in the stores on Black Friday.  The correct answer (alas, not from me!) was Blu-ray high definition disc players.


Later that week, USA Today helped demystify that answer in an article called “10 top discs and questions”. Blu-ray got its name, I learned, from the fact that it uses a blue laser beam to read data from discs, rather than the older-style red lasers used by DVDs.  What’s more, Blu-ray discs hold up to 50 gigabytes, compared to the 10 gigabytes a DVD can hold.


Aside from my own holiday shopping needs for electronics, I found the information in USA Today interesting from my point of view as a business marketer.  (In my work as a professional ghost blogger, I become part of a business’ marketing team, and I’m always on the lookout for ideas that can bring “higher definition” to blog posts.) 


Truth be told, including more “bytes” of information on any one blog post is not a good idea; blogs, by definition, should be concise and focus on one aspect of the business only (see Enuf Is Enuf In Blogs).  But one technical detail about Blu-ray explained in the article is that its video resolution is called 1080p.  The “p” stands for “progressively”, and signifies that the Blu-ray technology constantly (progressively) redraws 1,080 lines across the screen. 

Here’s how that’s highly relevant for blogs: many company blogs include information that could be covered on a traditional website.  What lends blogs their “laser focus”, though, is frequency of posting new content.  In other words, in executing a successful blog strategy, lines of information are “progressively being redrawn” – across searchers’ computer screens!


USA Today remarks that Blu-ray “faces strapped consumers worried about investing in still-pricey players”.  A blog strategy, by contrast, can be started with very little money and lots of “sweat equity”.  That allows a business to begin to attract some of those search engine “blue laser beams”!

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Ties That Tell The Truth In Blogging

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Plagiarism’s a big, bad word on college campuses.  As an Executive Career Mentor at Butler University College of Business and an English Tutor at Ivy Tech Community College, I hear a lot of talk about preventing – or punishing – plagiarism. Then, last week the Indianapolis Star carried a fascinating story about “plagiarism” of a different sort.  The St. Louis Art Museum acquired a 3,200 year old mummy mask.  Now Egypt’s antiquities authority is claiming the mask was stolen and transferred illegally to the U.S.. Our Department of Homeland Security is looking into the case. While academia and the arts wrestle with plagiarism issues, in business, protecting “intellectual property” has become a concern of monumental proportions.


Since, as a professional ghost blogger, my arena is the World Wide Web, I can’t help but be awed by the fact that the Internet has become the largest repository of information in human history.  Trillions of words are added to it daily, and literally anyone with access to a computer or cell phone can add content to the mix at any time. Blogging activity has become a rapidly growing part of this oceanic information swell.


Remember the old “Telephone” game we played as children?  Kids would be seated in a row.  The first child would be given a phrase or sentence to whisper in his neighbor’s ear.  That child, in turn, would whisper what she heard to the next child, and so on down the line.  The object of the game was to faithfully pass on the message so that the last child could repeat it exactly as the first had whispered it.  Never happened that way, did it?  By the time that message had traveled down a line of ten or twelve kids, it was unrecognizably distorted.


Blogs, as I stress in Blogs – Between Crafted and Cranked Out, are more casual and conversational than other marketing pieces.  The fact is, though, people read blogs to get information.  My college students are taught to use citations and reference pages to show where they got their information.  That way, they avoid plagiarism by properly attributing statements to their proper authors.  In your blogs, you can give credit to the sources of your information as well.  The blogging equivalent of citations is links.  So even if you’re putting your own unique twist on the topic, link to websites from which you got some of your original information or news.


On the Internet, the rewards for honesty are both psychic and practical.  Electronic links actually enhance search engine rankings for your blog by creating back-and-forth online “traffic”. And, of course, doing the right thing is always its own reward. 



 

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