Blogs Are For People Who Love People

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Amazing, how you can find great business advice in the most unlikely places!  As part of my reading to keep my Certified Financial Planner credentials current, I subscribe to all manner of journals about insurance, investments, and employee benefits. In the August 2008 issue of Employee Benefit Advisor, there was an article discussing avatars.  (This is so interesting!) Avatars are computer-generated characters, and these avatars are being integrated into employers’ communication with their employees about their benefit plans.  Avatars become virtual staff members, helping employees enroll in health benefit programs and answering employees’ questions about their benefits.
Here’s the part that is so relevant to my work as a professional ghost blogger: A study  conducted at Stanford University found that employees’ interaction with these avatars (remember, these are basically cartoon people!) was sufficiently human-like that people responded online in ways that mirror social interactions in real life.  The conclusion was that the perceived “realness” of these human interactions may lead avatars to succeed where other self-service efforts have failed.  One of the authors of the Stanford study wrote, “People naturally seek out other people rather than a manual or other resource.”
In Creating Buzz With Blogs, veteran business technology consultant Ted Demopoulos explains, “Blogs create buzz because people will feel like they know you, and people like to do business with people they know.”  Remember the avatars? They succeed because they’re like people.  Blogs represent people, people talking to people. Maybe Barbra Streisand was apparently onto something when she sang about people who love people being the luckiest people in the world. Blogging’s the business manifestation of that.
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The Blog Says, “The Best Is In The Back!”

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On my way to an appointment with one of my ghost blogging clients the other day, I heard a neat word tidbit on the radio. As a professional writer, I get special pleasure out of phrases that, in a very few words, make a big impact or that clarify a complicated concept.

 

This tidbit I was hearing on the radio was actually part of a commercial for, of all things, GM cars. The speaker was painting a scene, reminding us how, in years past, you’d go into a store to buy, say, a fine cigar or perhaps a fur coat. The proprietor, in order to make you feel you were a special customer whose business he prized, would have you wait a moment while he went to the back to get his very best merchandise.  That’s where the best stuff used to be kept, the announcer reminisced – the best was always in the back!

 

I don’t know about you – for all I know, you may be too young to remember small stores with “proprietors” who helped customers, trying to make each one feel he was getting a very special deal. Anyway, I am old enough, and that word picture really took me back in time to an era of small shops manned by their hardworking owners.

 

But, since I was on my way to a meeting to talk about a very modern form of marketing, namely blogging, I couldn’t help myself from drawing a parallel between the front and back of the cigar store described by the radio announcer and a business blog in relation to the business’  website.  In Enuf Is Enuf In Blogs, I explained that blog audiences are scanners, not readers.  A blog should offer just enough information to entice the searcher to visit your website to find out more about your products or services.  A blog needs to capture interest, yes, so that Internet browsers feel they’ve come to the right spot to get what they need, but remember –  keep your best stuff in the back!

 

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Blog, Blog, Blog! Just Don’t Ignore Lovers Or Customers Too Long

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A writer myself, I’m always interested in the doings of other writers, and I love reading pieces about the writing process itself. Since the success of business blogging is so very dependent on the sheer discipline of continually posting new content, I was especially interested in some advice for writers I found in The Autobiographer’s Handbook. Author Anthony Swofford tells writers:  “Wake up.  Drink coffee. Write.  Ignore phone, ignore email, ignore world. Write.” Then he adds (I imagine with a rueful smile born of personal experience) the part I think is so absolutely apropos for business blogging: “Ignore everything, just don’t ignore your lovers for too long.  They might not stick around.”

 

Writing allows you to create a message and communicate it.  Writing blogs allows your message to literally reach to the ends of the Internet world.  The challenge lies in “getting found”.  Very, very few searchers online will click through to Page 15 or 23 on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or other search engine, so the first goal of business blogging is to win rankings and get your blog as close to the top of Page 1 as possible.  One key factor in getting to those coveted top spots (and staying there) is frequency.  Composing blogs isn’t like working on your autobiography.  Swofford advises writers working on their book, “Ignore the world.  It’ll all be there when you are done”.  Well, with blogging, while it’s not as much work as composing an autobiography, you’re not “done”; to keep on top, you need to keep on writing!

 

Ghost blogging, as I brought out in The Don’t-Do-It-Yourself-Trend Hits Clothing And Blogging, is part of a broader trend on the part of business owners to focus their own time on making and selling products or on doing consulting with their clients.  Of necessity, the business owner delegates marketing functions, especially writing, to hired professionals. The reality is exactly as Swofford advises, except substitute “customers” for “lovers”. He says, “If you ignore them too long, they may not stick around”. Business blogging is all about attracting new customers and clients.  Ghost bloggers make it possible to do that without neglecting service to existing customers. As a professional ghost blogger, I have the satisfaction of helping my business owner clients “have their cake and eat it too”!

 

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Rankings – An Inexact Science For Business Colleges And Blogs

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In the Indianapolis Business Journal a couple of weeks ago, a small item caught my eye, “Vaunted Program Hits Turbulence”. Apparently Ball State University’s entrepreneurship program hadn’t made the list in the U.S. News & World Report 2007 rankings of graduate programs in business, while its undergraduate program was taken down a couple of ranking notches.  Meanwhile, Indiana University’s entrepreneurship undergrad program shot up to second place in the rankings, and its graduate program up to sixth.
Rod Davis, interim dean of Ball State’s Miller College of Business, had this to say about his school’s slide in U.S. News & World Report:  “Rankings in themselves are an inexact science.”  This might sound to you like a “sour grapes” sort of reaction, but I must say that remark rings all too true with me, based on my experience with a different kind of ranking.
Blogging on the Internet is all about moving up in the rankings. As a professional ghost blogger, what I’m hired to help my clients do is “win” search engine rankings.  That means that when someone is online searching for information about a topic or a product related to your business, you want your blog to be on Page One of Google, Yahoo, or MSN.  Each search engine has its own “algorithms” for judging the merits of blogs and hence how that blog is ranked.
We do know certain things about search engine rankings.  For example, we know there are four general keys to success: posting often, continuing to post, building up “equity” through cumulative posting, and providing original, relevant content. But no one knows of an exact formula that, on any given day, is guaranteed to “win search”. As Rod Davis  so aptly (and ruefully) pointed out, “Rankings in themselves are an inexact science.”
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You May Be A Finder, Binder, Minder, Or Grinder – But Are You A Writer?

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In Financial Planning Magazine, Stephanie Bogan talks to financial planners who are thinking ahead towards retirement and trying to recruit younger planners who can be trained to take over their practices.  Bogan explains that, in any business, there are four distinct roles that must be filled in order for the business to succeed.  It’s very rare, she points out, to find any one person who is comfortable and skilled in all four of the following roles:
Finders develop new business – they’re the rainmakers.
Binders have the presentation skills to consummate the relationship with the new client.
Minders are relationship managers, and they provide client service.
Grinders provide the office and administrative services that free up the professional’s time.
The point of the article is that these roles require different strengths, and not every recruit is going to be strong in all the areas.  Of Minders and Grinders, for example, Bogan remarks bluntly: “You can try to force them to become rainmakers, but it’ll be a bit like trying to teach a pig French – it won’t work and it will frustrate the pig.”
As a professional ghost blogger working with business owners, I can appreciate the truth in Bogan’s insights.  Most entrepreneurs are aware that blogging is fast becoming an indispensable part of any business tool kit. The only problem is that their efforts are devoted to being Finders and Binders (in fact, out of necessity some need to be the Minders and Grinders as well!), with no time left to compose blogs.  Since so many professionals and business owners lack the time and inclination (and sometimes, as my clients readily admit, the talent) to write, that’s where a ghost blogger enters the picture – rather, behind the picture!
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