Corporate blogs benefit greatly from a collaborative effort to produce and maintain. While it’s easy for anyone to start a personal blog in seconds, a company blog takes considerably more thought and planning to execute.

We are fortunate to have talented and engaged clients and want to highlight a couple of our most successful blog launches for The Alter Group and Bliss PR, which each benefit from multiple contributors. These projects engaged talented designers and thought leaders outside Astek who were essential to the end results. Both blogs run on custom installations of WordPress.

Astek’s focus on helping our clients produce blogs over the past few years is especially rewarding since the client has so much influence over the life of the end product, which changes nearly daily.

Case Study #1
Alter NOW and ALTER+CARE Inspire blogs featuring podcasts
Business Focus: One of the nation’s preeminent corporate real estate development firms.
Blog Focus: Corporate Real Estate, Finance, Economy, Healthcare
Approx. Combined Monthly Visitors: 4,800+
Original launch: April 10, 2008
Redesign and ALTER+CARE Inspire launch: April 6, 2009
Featured in: Alltop.com

Astek worked closely with The Alter Group team over several months to hone the voice and focus of the blog, identify and train contributors on software, design the feature set needed, and deploy a flexible platform for growth. The initial budget was low to make sure appropriate resources could be committed consistently and to prove ROI before “going big.” Once the process and message proved stable, we engaged a designer to add the finishing touches that make the blog what it is today.

Dramatic color and imagery set Alter NOW apart from other blogs:

Consistent and careful use of relevant imagery in each article pulls the reader in:

The footer of each article features a ShareThis link for easy distribution across email and other web sites (important for viral growth to reach new readers), the author photo, name, relevant categories and tags, and a link to leave a comment, which invites readers to become part of the ongoing conversation blogs present. This article also features a link to the corresponding podcast on the subject.

The sidebar features easy subscription links, quick links to the podcasts, and prioritized standard blog features such as search and recent posts:

Both blogs are featured prominently on The Alter Group home page for easy access:

Case Study #2
B2B Bliss » PR for Thought Leaders blog
Business Focus: Business-to-business strategic media relations and marketing communications
Blog Focus: B2B marketing, public relations, professional services, financial services, and healthcare

Working with BlissPR to design and launch their blog was, well, blissful! They had been planning this launch for some time so the overall strategy and content development were in good shape. BlissPR primarily needed a partner to help with design, production, and blog deployment and integration strategy.

BlissPR wanted to integrate the new blog into their existing Web site, which presented a unique set of design opportunities and challenges. The new design features a prominent masthead for the blog with subscription links and a search box. Each article on the home page is clearly delineated with a green title bar, photo of the author, and crafted abstract leading to the full story. The “Share” link has plenty of room to breathe, highlighting the importance of this word of mouth feature.

The side bar focuses on the people behind the blog to provide context to visitors. A brief description of BlissPR is immediately followed by photos linking to bios of all the authors. This is a great way to add personality to your blog. The sidebar is followed by standard blog elements like tag cloud and recent posts.

We’re very proud of our clients’ ongoing success with these publications. Please check them out and remember to leave a comment!

Alter NOW and ALTER+CARE Inspire
B2B Bliss » PR for Thought Leaders

Here’s a succinct list of five things you can do to improve your corporate blog. The three blogs featured above stand as testimony to these recommended tactics.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media, Web

The best thing a customer can do for your business is give you feedback — good or bad. The reality is that bad feedback greatly outnumbers good feedback. It’s just human nature. We love to complain when something doesn’t go right, and are often too busy to go to the effort to tell someone that something does go right. Even when complaints are justified, the business sometimes never hears them because the customer voiced his or her opinion in a private medium, such as telling a friend how awful the service in the restaurant was, and never giving the business a change to make it right. Word of mouth works for negative feedback even more powerfully than positive.

Mistakes happen. But even beyond mistakes, customers are a business owner’s objective barometer for knowing how well products and services are received. I’ve developed a mantra lately to help me remember this: you can’t argue with perception.

Social media provides unprecedented opportunities to listen in on some of those private complaints from customers that otherwise would never make it back to the business. You should make an effort to respond quickly to a complaint and do so publicly so that others reading the complaint can also benefit from your response. Think of it this way: the complaint will be out there whether or not you respond, so you’d better do something about it.

For large companies, the major cultural shift needed to effectively and genuinely reach customers through these channels may be more difficult than a small company who can do it with one or two people. The rules are the same in either case:

1. Engage people on their own turf. They’ll be impressed when you show up unexpectedly to help them solve their problem.
2. As with all customer service, keep your cool and “take the high road” whenever you can. Don’t get sucked into meaningless and unrelated tirades.
3. Remember how hard it is to control tone through text-based mediums such as email. Lean on the side of being extra nice.
4. Try to put a positive spin on the problem, so long as it’s genuine. Talk about future plans to remedy it.
5. Don’t discount suggestions, but also don’t over-commit to adding everything people request.

A few years ago Microsoft was getting a lot of public flak about its open source software initiatives. They stayed strong, responding to the comments on their blogs and others, and over a period of several months began to sway the tone of the comments. Eventually the community actually started sticking up for them. This took a lot of time and effort, but it helped to “humanize” Microsoft.

Comparing social media campaigns from Target and Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart failed so miserably that they chose to bow out not-so-gracefully in the face of hundreds of negative comments from students looking for roommates. If they’d stuck it out, I imagine they might have been able to turn it around or save face. Target got their campaign right from the start, creating a “party” for discussing dorm survival, which speaks to the culture and brand perception of the companies going into the campaigns.

The bottom line is to be true to your brand, your service, your customers, and your mistakes. The customer is not always right, but they always have the right to complain. Listening and responding will save you a lot of trouble down the road and probably lead to more business in the short term.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media, Web

I’m typically skeptical of new whiz-bang Web sites, tools, and features that set out to “change the way we work” until I’ve actually seen the benefit. Google Wave seeks to do just that. Rather than piling on one more piece of technology or layer of abstraction, they cleared the slate by asking, “How should all of this work?” rather than, “How could what exists be better?”

I’m intrigued because I’ve been having a lot of the same thoughts and discussions lately. Email has existed more or less the same way for well over a decade. People have built new interfaces, ways to tie conversation threads together, and new free services, but fundamentally the idea of sending messages with attachments back and forth in a time-shifted manner is the same.

Google Wave seeks to reinvent real-time interaction and collaboration by treating these interactions in a centralized, consistent manner. This makes sense to me. The more applications we layer on and rave about being “the new thing” (Twitter comes to mind), the more fragmented our communication becomes.

Google Wave may or may not be the answer, or it may just be a step in the right direction. At a glance it seems to be trying to solve something that’s been nagging me for awhile. We are so focused on the tools, we often lose sight of what we are trying to communicate and the value contained therein. At the end of the day, what matters is that we want to share ideas and messages with people who will find them relevant in the most efficient manner possible, no matter when or where they happen. If we’re developing a global hive mentality through our communication technology, it will depend on messages seamlessly interacting across mediums, languages, locations, and context. This is a lofty goal, but it’s one worth shooting for.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Social Media, Technology, Web

I recently got a message on Facebook from a friend letting her friends know she was leaving Facebook:

Subject: Goodbye Facebook

Hello Friends,
It is time to say goodbye to Facebook. (I have the song from “Spelling Bee” going through my head.) I gave it a try but it is not my cup of tea. Please stay in touch. I am including my contact information below. If you could be so kind as to send me your info, I will put it in my address book. Until then…

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye,

——

I’m not 100% of her reasons, but my guess is that it just consumes too much time compared with the value she gets. Call it personal return on investment, if you will.

What’s alarming is that it wasn’t enough just to stop using the service or ignore it. She had to shut it out of her life completely and provide friends with alternate (traditional) contact info. Is Facebook really so insidious and distracting that we are going to start seeing people tipping off the other way now? Wait and see.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Social Media, Web

We get this question regularly enough that I wanted to share a few quick talking points you can use to convince your boss that engaging with social media is not optional. The longer you wait, the more you’ll miss. A common reaction to social media is that companies don’t want to use another marketing channel, or they don’t have time to join yet another social networking site. Well, it’s time to make time. The good news is you can control how much you get involved — just be sure to get involved.

1. Low cost of entry

The key thing to realize with social media is that it costs very little to get started. Free tools like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are available to connect directly to people and get your message out. Free services like Google Alerts give you a glimpse into what people are saying about your company. Free blog hosting makes getting started easier, though we usually recommend spending a nominal amount on some custom branding and consulting so that your blog stands out and is found on search engines.

Rather than money, what social media requires most from you is time: time to participate, time to contribute, time to engage. If you are fighting an uphill battle in the office, then you may have to consider investing your own time off the clock to get the ball rolling and produce some tangible results. Try one or two services at a time until you become comfortable with the medium. You are better off fully engaging with one or two social media tools than signing up for all of them at once.

2. The conversation is happening. All you can do is join.

Social media is less about delivering a one-way message and more about engaging with your clients. The fact is that people are out there having public conversations about your company or products. Social media is your opportunity to meet them on their own turf to talk about their experiences, complements, and complaints. Think of it as an opportunity to gain insight into the mind of your clients rather than a burden.

It’s important to listen before you join a conversation, as you would at a party. Make sure you understand the conversation and represent yourself honestly and transparently. Be sure to disclose your relationship with the company and express your genuine opinion, update, or concern. People will often tell other people about the interaction just because you bothered to reach out. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing.

3. Demonstrate credibility

You are good at what you do. Your boss is even better. Your clients know that, but bringing in new business requires convincing new people that you have what they need. Starting a company blog and/or podcast, commenting on other sites such as forums and wikis, contributing to the body of social expertise that is being constantly updating and expanded are all ways to show people who you are and how you think. And chances are you offer services with which even long-standing clients aren’t familiar, which could lead to more business when they see what you publish.

What results can you expect?

People respond positively to increased customer service with responses to comments wherever they are, access to real representatives from a company not hiding behind phone banks, and direct timely expertise in the form of blogs and commentary. These are all tools that work together to deliver leads and expanded trusted networks.

As long as you consistently represent your brand and exercise full disclosure, people will remember where the information came from. It won’t happen overnight, but over time you will see benefits as people become more deeply aware of what you offer, whether or not you’ve done business yet. If you combine social media with traditional relationship building, you’ll increase the chances of earning their business.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

As much as I’m enamored by the potential of all the new social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, it’s important to reflect on the one technology that still ties many of these others together. Email, or electronic messaging, has been around in some form for decades, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that standards began to tie together the various systems that had evolved. The 90s saw a sharp increase in usage with ISP’s like AOL getting into the game. Universities have always led the effort as well.

We take it for granted most of the time. Everyone has an email account these days, or at least everyone with an Internet connection, but we’ll talk digital divide another time. The point is that I don’t see email going away anytime soon. Even as new social media sites pop up, I still generally use my email accounts to keep track of all the updates and messages. Nothing compares to email in terms of being able to ignite a word of mouth campaign and empower someone to send direct trusted messages to their network.

In terms of generating a message that resonates with people, we can all take a cue from the Obama team, which managed to keep 13 million subscribers even after the campaign was over. It’s a delicate balance of appropriate messaging and respect for people’s cluttered inboxes and busy lives.

Is it safe? Generally, yes. But it’s important to remember that email is unencrypted and therefore anyone who intercepts it (or has access to one of the many servers your message passes through) could read your mail. There are tools that help you protect your email, but until everyone adopts a new system, we won’t be able to reliably call email “safe.” For now, it’s best just not to send anything through email that’s sensitive. If you must, create a password-protected PDF for the information and attach it to an email.

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Andy Swindler Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

If you’re curious about journalism entering the virtual age, this is worth a watch:

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Social Media, Technology, Web

There has been a lot of discussion recently about URL shorteners, which have exploded in popularity due to the limited character count in Twitter (140 characters). Rather than wasting precious message space sharing a long URL, turn it into a small one that redirects people to the proper place.

TinyURL was the most prominent one initially, but many have sprung up, each offering various services and features. The allure is being able to track the specific URL that you created, which means that you can track your social influence by seeing who passes on your version of the particular link.

Bit.ly is one that does a good job of providing metrics and analysis to help you figure out where your link has travelled, but Digg.com is getting into the game. They have devised an elegant approach where you simply put a URL after “http://digg.com/” and it automatically turns it into a shortened URL, displays the site you linked, and a toolbar across the top with more options. Try it out:

http://digg.com/astekblog.com

URL shortening doesn’t come without implications for the structure of hyperlinks, which still rule the Web roost. Adding one more layer of interpretation has the potential to slow things down, cause more errors, or just complicate the system. Additionally, you should be aware that search engines place a substantial amount of weight on the keywords that you have in your URL, so if you are relying on inbound links (and who doesn’t?), it’s worth considering that search engines will not count these shortened URL’s in the same way as the permalinks you’ve worked so hard to optimize. For example, notice the category and title keywords in the URL for this blog:

http://www.astekblog.com/index.php/marketing/try-diggcom-for-url-shortening/

I see URL status moving in two directions, which should each be considered and used appropriately. 1) Permalinks (links that search engines see and won’t change like the one above) will continue to be essential in creating and classifying content on web sites. We will use search engines to reach these links. 2) In the social sharing world, shortened URL’s will gain more popularity as people start tracking their individual influence. It’s natural for Digg to get on this bandwagon since the entire point of Digg was to give people credit for “digging” URL’s, sharing them and gaining notoriety for finding cool things. Perhaps one or the other will win out. If it’s the latter, then sites will need to start building this social tracking capability directly into the permalinks themselves, which must be short enough to share.

It’s not going to take long for monetization to enter this game, where people receive more than social currency for initiating a link chain. One’s social network will become an even more valuable tool as advertisers begin to see the value of tracking recommendations amongst individual people. These recommendations will be more directly attributed to sales, which gives companies incentives to offer cash compensation or commissions to people who did the referring.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

I’m seeing more “free” offers come through friends feeds, such as on Twitter. I even participated in one, as an experiment. As always I encourage people to do whatever they want with Twitter, but we must consider the value of the collective attention spans we attract. The more people we reach see ads from you, the less they will value what you have to say. The number of ads you present is inversely proportional to the likelihood they will choose to continue hearing what you have to say.

We all now have the power to control what we hear and when we hear it, and that’s what’s new.

Now, the ads I’m seeing in particular on Twitter are for Macheist: I bought the @MacHeist 3 Bundle. 12 Top Mac apps worth $900+ for just $39 AND I just got Delicious Library 2 FREE! http://mhtweet.com/uQ1gyd

I happen to be someone who would be interested in this ad, as Macheist is a great program, but I’m torn. I know that many of the people who follow me wouldn’t be interested and would therefore just read it as a message I was passing on, however even less personal and constructive than a retweet. The social stream starts to feel more like a traditional ad campaign or SPAM in this context. Only now I have to weigh other factors such as personal trust. I know that the people I know will keep it to a minimum, and if they don’t, I (and others) will decide whether or not to keep listening.

In a world where the consumer gets to create and control his media, products and services must simply be good to survive. What’s interesting is that as more of my friends participate in promotions like the one above (three so far), the more compelled I feel to participate. This is for two reasons. One, I know that I won’t annoy them by sending it back, and in fact will reinforce their decisions to post. Two, some of this just boils down to basic peer pressure. If ten of my friends get something for free that I want, do I really want to be left out?

Having said that, I’m a huge believer in the power of word of mouth marketing, and this certainly falls into that category. It’s just a little more blatant than someone sharing that they enjoyed using a product. In this case, I’m not even sure my friends have used the product yet at all, which is why it feels less credible. I do appreciate the transparency of the message. It’s very clear where it came from, why it came to me, and what I could get out of it, which makes for a quicker assessment of value.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Technology

I think it surprises most people to learn that Twitter (and Facebook for that matter) are not profitable enterprises. It takes more than extreme growth and steady usage to make money, as explained in this post urging us not to forget lessons learned from the dot-com bubble bursting. Personally I feel that there are opportunities to monetize Twitter than haven’t been full explored. There is money to be made in the spin-off apps such as Twitterrific, which syndicates ads from The Deck in order to provide a free version.

The problem is an antiquated method of procuring profit from eyeballs. Many of the tactics that used to work simply don’t fly in the social media world. I’m not against making money, trust me, but we need to get more creative about it. Word of mouth marketing exists on Twitter. I have purchased a few items that I can trace to friendly tweets. But no one from those companies knows it.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Web