Technorati: Blogs are mainstream

Last week it felt like 2006 all over again, as Technorati issued a massive State of the Blogosphere update. While this is the first update on the state of the blogosphere from TRati in what seems like a couple of years, it had a ton of interesting stats and conclusions.

One of the first assertions TRati makes is that blogs are now mainstream. And I can't argue with them.

TRati cites several sources on blogging and blog readership, including a recent eMarketer study that claims that monthly blog readership among the US internet population reached 50% last year. I referenced this same study in my Blogging for Business session at last week's SBMU, and eMarketer went on to predict that monthly blog readership would hit 67% of the US internet pop by 2012. If eMarketer is correct, right NOW over half the people in the United States that are on the internet, are reading blogs on a regularly basis, and by 2012, two out of every three people will be.

As far as demographics, TRati's findings seem to be more or less in line with what I've seen from other sources. The majority of bloggers are male, are affluent, and a much higher percentage of Millenials and Gen Xers are reading and writing blogs, than other age groups.

Other key findings:

• 51% of blogs receive at least 1,000 unique monthly visitors. 18% receive at least 10K unique monthly visitors
• 54% of bloggers have some form of advertising on their blogs
• Avg annual revenue from blog advertising for US bloggers was $5,060
• 82% of bloggers post product/brand reviews
• 51% of respondents believe that more people will get their news and information from blogs versus traditional media, in the next 5 years

But for companies, I think the case for investigating a move into the blogosphere becomes increasingly compelling. Blog readership and growth are BOTH slated to grow by 33% over the next 5 years, and as the above findings show, the vast majority of bloggers are already using blogs as a channel to discuss companies and brands.

Customers are increasingly moving to blogs to create and participate in conversations about companies and brands. Why wouldn't these companies and brands want to become an active participant in these conversations?

Blogger Campaign Case Study: HP's 31 Days of the Dragon

I'm really surprised that this has gotten more attention, but Hewlitt-Packard recently published some incredible results for its recent '31 Days of the Dragon' blogger promotion for its HDX Dragon laptop. Here's the claimed results:

• Sales of the HDX Dragon increasing by 84%
• Overall 10% increase in PC sales
• 14% increase in traffic to HP's hpshopping.com site

What HP did was give an HDX Dragon laptop to 31 bloggers, letting each one give away the laptop to its readers, in a week-long contest. Each day, a new blog started a new week-long contest. HP's PR firm contacted me about the program's results just as I was leaving for SBMU, so I didn't have time to get much info from them about the promotion, but they did answer a couple of questions for me:

Q - How did you determine which bloggers to reach out to? Did you go by perceived traffic or a certain niche, etc?

A - The 31 bloggers that were selected to participate in the program are widely known as influencers of the online community. By teaming with Buzz Corps, an Austin-based influencer marketing agency, we were able to interact with these selected bloggers on a level that surpassed a superficial business relationship. Buzz Corps’ established relationships were able to provide us with the opportunity to engage the bloggers on a more intimate level.

We worked with Buzz Corps to choose sites or blogs of all sizes– some with several million readers and others with a narrow, more focused approach. All of the bloggers we worked with had great content and were written by influential people. In fact, key considerations for Buzz Corps in identifying these influencers included that they kept up with several hundred products and services a year, had huge followings, and their readers trust their posts, reviews and recommendations.

Working with Buzz Corps allowed us to leverage their existing relationships to introduce bloggers and their communities to HP and the HDX Dragon system and, ultimately, initiate a conversation around the Dragon system. We were pleased with how successfully we were able to engage the online community and enter the social media space through conversation and getting the online community directly involved with all aspects of the product and campaign.


Q - Love the fact that you have numbers to back up the campaign's success, as this is what my readers are telling me they want, case studies where ROI can be quantified. But how did you measure an 84% increase in sales, and 10% overall? Specifically, how does this track back as being a direct result of your campaign to target influential bloggers? Also, how did you measure the 14% increase in site traffic?

A - Our number one means of tracking results came in sales and we reported the sales and site traffic numbers through month-over-month data from hpshopping.com. We set out to sell the HDX Dragon, a flagship product that wasn’t selling 9 months after it’s launch. This campaign drove people to hpshopping.com to look at the HDX Dragon more closely. Another interesting result that came from the campaign was the lasting traction that we garnered-- not only did these results break sales records, but participating sites saw a steady increase in traffic as much as 5x following the 2 months after the "31 Days of the Dragon" contest ended.

Additionally, we tracked well over 380,000 links on Google using the exact phrase “31 Days of the Dragon” with no media spend and the estimated collective reach is well in excess of 49 million from the 31 participating sites, reciprocal links and other sites covering/mentioning the giveaway since its inception. By taking these numbers to the lowest common denominator, we’re able to provide good, hard, honest numbers.

Apparently, none of the bloggers were paid to participate in this promotion, but due to the high retail price of the laptop ($4,500-5,000), Buzz Corps did make a payment to the winners to help them offset the taxes they will have to pay for receiving the laptop.

Overall, the results are very impressive, but not shocking to those of us that are active in this space. What I would like to see HP do next is use the success of the '31 Days of the Dragon' promotion as incentive to develop stronger ties with bloggers, especially the company's blogging evangelists. It's great to boost awareness/sales by giving stuff away, but simply taking the time to create and cultivate relationships with bloggers and blogging customers can work wonders as well.

Congrats to HP on a very successful blogger promotion. Let's hope this success leads to blogger outreach initiatives from here.

I am a social media consultant that helps companies utilize blogs and social media as a way to connect with their customers, and grow their businesses. If you would like to learn more about how I can help you do the same, click here for an overview of the services I provide, click here for my bio, and if you have any questions, feel free to email me.

SBMU promises big, delivers bigger

After being lucky enough to have gotten to attend and speak at both Small Business Marketing Unleashed conferences, I can give three reasons why this conference is so amazing:

1 - A wonderful learning environment

2 - A ton of fun activities

3 - Zero egos

As with the first SBMU earlier this year in Houston, SBMU-Columbus was a complete blast. For two days, we covered the marketing spectrum, from email marketing, SEM/SEO, branding, viral marketing, and blogging/social media. What I really love is that we had every level of expertise as well, from experts to novices. So everyone learned something. Personally what I loved is that this wasn't like many conferences where you had social media/marketing 'experts' pontificating to each other, you got the chance to talk to business owners that are actually USING these tools. It's great to talk theory, but I love connecting with people that are using social media RIGHT NOW to grow their company.

And from a social media/blogging point of view, I was interested in seeing how the attitudes of the SBMU attendees to this one differed from the ones in Houston back in April. In Houston, I was honestly a bit surprised to find that everyone was curious about blogging. In Columbus, my Blogging for Business session was practically SRO. And the questions showed that the curiosity was moving toward 'how can I make this work for my business?' David Wallace has an excellent recap of my session at Search Engine Guide. In April it seemed that many knew that blogging was important, but not sure why. The attendees in Columbus were starting to figure out that blogs were important, and many had already launched their blogs and were starting to see results. Great signs indeed. Also another interesting tidbit; Jennifer Laycock said that roughly 40% of the attendees at SBMU, came from Twitter. And the conference seemed to be about twice as big as the first SBMU. I would suspect that the next SBMU in Spring of 2009 will sellout, based on how well-received this one seemed to be by attendees. Sidenote: At one time on Monday, the term 'SBMU' was the second most-popular term on Twitter.

As for the conference itself, Day One was organized around sessions that explained 'why this stuff is important', while Day Two was organized around workshops that explained 'here's how you get started using what we talked about on Day One'. And what I love about SBMU is that all the speakers attend each other's sessions/workshops. So I am doing a session on Blogging for Business, designed to help small businesses understand how blogs could benefit their business. So I am speaking to people that are new to these tools, but I also have bloggers such as CK, AmberCadabra, Jennifer Laycock, and BethHarte in attendance. So they help contribute to the content of the session as well.

And Robert and Jennifer, when organizing the event, put in plenty of chances for the attendees to network, and have fun. There were networking lunches both days, as well as a dinner on Day One. They also added a special Speed Networking event at the nearby COSI that wasn't officially part of SBMU, but many speakers and attendees were there, and proceeds benefited COSI. Of course, Monday night's dinner was a blast, with good food, good conversation, and an Aussie losing at Jenga! Bottom line is that SEG did a great job of creating an atmosphere that was fun for the attendees, and this just makes it that much easier for us to connect with each other, and that means we learn more.

Seriously guys, I keep going on and on (and on) about SBMU because it really is a wonderful event and I want to meet you at the next one, which is tentatively set for next Spring in Houston. For the price, it is an absolute steal. Everything about the event is positioned with small businesses in mind. It's inexpensive, it stresses learning and how-to, over speeches. Everyone is accessible, in fact all the speakers go out of their way to tell you to let them know if they can help you with anything. In fact, the reason why I haven't gotten this post up quicker, was because I have been furiously attempting to answer email questions from SBMU attendees. And I love doing it! The gang at Search Engine Guide did a stellar job with SBMU-Columbus, and I cannot wait for the next one! Those of you that I met this week, it was so glad to see you, and those of you that couldn't make it, go ahead and start planning on making the next one, trust me, it will be SUCH a huge benefit for your business!

BTW a huge pat on the back to Jason Falls, who spent last weekend at Blog World Expo, and couldn't attend SBMU. Finally, after seeing Beth Harte, AmberCadabra and myself constantly yammerin' on about how amazing SBMU would be, told us that if we would get a gang together and meet him for dinner, that he'd DRIVE from Louisville to Columbus to meet us on Tuesday night. So that's what he did, and we had a freakin' blast. Jason, David Alston, Amber, Beth, Sage Lewis, Wayne Smalls, CK and myself capped a wonderful 2 days by having an impromptu Tweetup in Columbus. And thanks to David for taking some great pics, here's his set for the Tweetup.

To everyone I met at SBMU, to Vicki, Robert, Rachel and Jennifer for organizing SBMU, and to Jason for driving freakin' 6 hours in one day to meet for our Tweetup, thank you. All of you made this week a truly great one for me. Let's do it all over again in April!



Flickr pics via DavidAlston, Sage Lewis, SmallBusinessSEM.com and jackiebaker330.

Blogging Workshop links

Hello Columbus! I'll be mentioning several blogs, tools and sites in my Blogging Workshop on Tuesday, and here are the links so that you can check them out for yourself!

Monitoring Tools:

Google Blog Search

Technorati (add your blog/site's URL minus http:// to track links to your blog/site, ex: http://www.technorati.com/blogs/YOURSITEURLHERE)

Twitter Search

Bloglines


Examples of blogging platforms:

MasiGuy's blog

LinkedIn's blog

HomeGoods' OpenHouse Blog

Starwood Hotels' The Lobby


Examples of blogs with great content:

NewCastle Square Realty blog

Patagonia's The Cleanest Line blog

Innocent Drinks' Daily Thoughts blog


Examples of blogs that do a good job with comments:

Life of a Farm blog

Turkey Hills' Ice Cream Journal blog


Examples of blogs that have strong posting schedules:

Kodak's A Thousand Words blog

The Fiskateers Blog

Graco's Blog


Examples of blogs with good sidebar elements

Corner Violin Shop

Wal-Mart's Checkout Blog


Tracking blog traffic/subscribers

SiteMeter

FeedBurner


Sites you can use to grow your blog traffic

Twitter

Twitter Packs

Twitter Local

Twellow

Plurk

Plurk about asking Plurk members if there are small business uses for Plurk

LinkedIn's Q&A section

Friendfeed

Blogging for Business session links

Hello Columbus! I'll be mentioning several blogs, tools and sites in my Blogging for Businss session on Monday, and here are the links so that you can check them out for yourself!

Stats on current and projected blog readership and creation from 2007-2012.

Breakdown of which age groups are reading blogs and blogging on a weekly basis.

Information on Graco's blogging strategy and the results they have seen. Graco's blog.

Newcastle Square Realty's blog.

Avis' UK Blog.

Dell's Direct2Dell blog.

MasiGuy's blog.

Tim's Plurkshop on how companies can use social media to connect with their customers.

Toby Bloomberg's profile of Tim's social media/blogging efforts with Masi.

MediaHunter's interview with Tim about Masi's marketing efforts.

Link to recent case study I did with the ROI for Tim's social media marketing efforts for Masi.

The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs - 122

Here's the standings for Week 122:

1 - Duct Tape Marketing - 225,000 (+2,000)(LW - 1)
2 - Church of the Customer - 214,000 (+2,000)(LW - 2)
3 - CopyBlogger - 42,648 (+2,576)(LW - 3)
4 - Search Engine Guide - 12,237 (-63)LW - 4)
5 - Chris Brogan - 8,749 (+244)(LW - 5)
6 - Influential Marketing - 7,031 (+344)(LW - 6)
7 - Daily Fix - 6,053 (+4,959)(LW - 23)
8 - Jaffe Juice - 5,047 (LW - UR)
9 - Logic + Emotion - 3,569 (+2)(LW - 7)
10 - Drew's Marketing Minute - 3,233 (+14)(LW - 8)
11 - Converstations - 3,148 (+62)(LW - 10)
12 - The Viral Garden - 3,080 (-6)(LW - 10)
13 - What's Next - 3,047 (-82)(LW - 9)
14 - Experience Curve - 2,823 (+15)(LW - 12)
15 - Conversation Agent - 2,756 (-11)(LW - 13)
16 - Techipedia - 2,297 (-25)(LW - 14)
17 - The Social Media Marketing Blog - 2,088 (No Change)(LW - 15)
18 - Emergence Marketing - 1,821 (No Change)(LW - 16)
19 - The Social Customer Manifesto - 1,695 (+55)(LW - 17)
20 - Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog - 1,612 (+8)(LW - 18)
21 - Techno Marketer - 1,410 (+23)(LW - 19)
22 - Social Media Explorer - 1,349 (+30)(LW - 20)
23 - Spare Change - 1,274 (No Change)(LW - 21)
24 - Movie Marketing Madness - 1,267 (-1)(LW - 22)
25 - Customers Rock! - 797 (-50)(LW - 24)


The Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs are ranked according to the number of subscribers, according to FeedBurner. The number you see after the blog name is how many subscribers accessed the blog's feed, according to FeedBurner. FeedBurner (and I had to look it up to make sure) tracks the number of times your blog's feed is accessed, and matches it against the IP address of the computer making the request, to approximate the number of subscribers that access your feed, and report this as the number used in the Top 25. After that number is a positive or negative number, and this represents how many readers the blog gained or lost from last week's Top 25. The final stat tells you what position the blog held in the Top 25 Last Week (LW). If you see this; (LW - UR), it means the blog wasn't ranked last week.

Fourteen blogs up this week with 7 down. Compared to last week's 13 up and 8 down, that's a good sign. Also strength at the top, as only one blog in the Top 10 was down. It seems that the Top 8 positions are pretty much locked down for the near future, but #9-15 could see plenty of shuffling in the coming weeks.

Jaffe Juice cannonballs back into the Top 25 this week at #8, making Joseph the lone new entry. Shotgun Marketing, Biz Solutions Plus and Every Dot Connects just missed the cut. Remember if you want to have your blog be considered for inclusion in the Top 25, make sure you add the Feedburner feed count chicklet to your blog.

BTW posting here will be very lax the rest of this week, and next week. I'm knee-deep in preparing for SBMU, so that and client work is making Mack a very busy boy right now. But I will get back in the swing when I get back from SBMU, which of course will be amazing, and I hope I can meet some of you there!




Next update is next Wednesday.

Sitemeter does bad, then good with site redesign

Sunday morning I woke up to discover that I couldn't log-in to my SiteMeter account. The site wouldn't accept my password, and said it had no record of my username, email address, or password. I also noticed that the 'look' of the site was different.

Something was definitely up. So I decided to go to Twitter and see if anyone else was having a problem logging in. I went to Twitter search and put in 'SiteMeter' to see what the Twitter community had to say about SiteMeter.

And they had a BUNCH to say!

Apparently, SiteMeter sometime late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, rolled out a 'redesigned' version of their site. And Twitter users were NOT happy. Screen after screen of search results greeted me from Twitter users reporting also having difficulties logging in. Those that could, were horrified at the changes that SiteMeter had made. Many were stating that they either were going to dump SiteMeter, or had already. I tried for almost two hours to log-in to my SiteMeter to view the trainwreck for myself, before finally giving up.

But later that afternoon, I decided to try SiteMeter again. I was greeted by a message stating that the site was down because it was in the process of rolling back to the PREVIOUS version. Apparently, SiteMeter had heard the same sea of complaints about the 'new' version that everyone else had. Then on their blog, they issued an apology that stated that:

Our intention is and has always been to offer you, our customer’s better tools and more accurate data. Obviously we fell short of this. The first thing we need to do, moving forward, is to roll out new product releases in parallel to our current platform. This will give everyone a chance to try out, evaluate, and comment on our new concepts.

We would also like to take this opportunity to ask those of you who had issues or concerns with the new site to participate in future beta testing. We had originally asked for Beta Tester in two of our newsletters sent earlier this year so we’re eager to build our beta group even larger. If you’re interested in participating please send us an email using our support ticketing system with BETA TESTER in the subject line of your email.

In the near term we’ll be evaluating the performance issues and feedback from our community. If you have additional input that would help us build you a better product we’d like to hear from you.

We apologize for the botched rollout and will do our best to make sure the next time we do this it has your full support and blessing.

And as you can see here, the tone became decidedly more positive after users began to realize that SiteMeter had not only rolled back to the previous version, but had apologized.


Also, it appears that SiteMeter began using a Twitter account during this turmoil, another good sign. Which again points to how vitally important it is for companies to monitor what is being said about them online. If SiteMeter was monitoring Twitter when the site redesign rolled out, and it appears they were, then they could instantly get a feel for the feedback coming from users that were getting their first look at the new site. And they could immediately see that the response was overwhelmingly negative. They could see users announcing that they were leaving.

Interesting sidenote; I've been finalizing the content for my Blogging Workshop at SBMU, and I decided that I wanted to give attendees a quick overview of a few tools such as SiteMeter, for tracking blog traffic. But if the redesign had stayed, it meant I would have had to change my workshop to expose the attendees to another stat-tracking site besides SiteMeter, due to their changing their site and the information they track. But since SiteMeter rolled back, I can now show attendees how to use the site, and I feel more comfortable evangelizing it to attendees, based on how they listened to, and responded to their users.

This is why I keep telling companies that negative feedback left about your company is an opportunity! SiteMeter's users were telling the site that they had better do something fast, or they were going to lose them. If SiteMeter had ignored their users, today their userbase would likely be significantly smaller, with many of those users likely going to a competitor such as StatCounter. But since they listened and ACTED on the feedback from their users, they likely won most if not all of them back, and they look better for listening.

Well done SiteMeter, good job of salvaging what could have been a very bad situation.

Company Blog Checkup: Starwood Hotels

The first thing that you notice when you arrive at Starwood's The Lobby blog is how absolutely gorgeous it is. And I think they have done an excellent job of capturing the 'blogsite' look that seems to be popular now. Just stunning.

Ok now that I've calmed down from my gushing, The Lobby is a blog devoted to Starwood Hotel's Preferred Guest loyalty program. As always, two ways to focus the blog's content; on the program itself, or on the customers that the program is aimed at. The Lobby does the latter, by serving as a travel resource for visitors. The blog offers posts on local attractions for locales all across the globe. It also gives us advice on dining, as well as 'offbeat' attractions. There is some promotion involved as the blog occasionally talks about specials running at certain hotels that it operates, but I think that would be content that visitors to The Lobby would be interested in, and could aid them in planning their next trip.

I think as a whole, the content of The Lobby is pretty solid. It seems to be devoted mainly to the places that customers would be traveling to, which is fine. However, I would like to see a few more 'how-tos' and 'tips' type posts. Like stuff that you need to pack for an overseas trip, or preparations you need to make before traveling to Australia (or China, or Egypt, or...). There may be some of these posts on the blog, but I would like to see them spotlighted with their own tab at the top of the blog, as the other categories are.



Now, let's move to the comments. Almost no posts have any. This is always curious when you have a blog that's producing solid content, but has no comments. My guess is that the writers are spending little, if any, time on other social sites interacting with their visitors. It appears that Starwood is not on Twitter, that would be a good place to start. For the writers of The Lobby blog, I would make a list of the places where you think your customers might be spending their time (Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, message boards), and start interacting with them there. That will make it easier for them to find you, and my guess is you'll start to see more readers leaving comments, as a result. As always, the best way to grow your blog, is to leave it.

Now let's move to the posting schedule, and I also think we get a better idea of why many posts aren't getting comments. There's just too damned many posts! It appears that The Lobby is organized around 4-5 main 'topics', and is attempting to post a new post about EACH topic EACH weekday! The result is having 3-5 new posts up every weekday! Yowza! It's great to have new content constantly posting to the blog, but what happens is that each post is only 'new' on the blog for an hour or two, then it's bumped down the blog by the latest entry. So that means that it doesn't have as much of a chance to be noticed by readers.

For example, as I'm writing this post, I've left just 3 posts on here in the last 7 days. But each post has at least 15 comments, and they average 23 per. Part of the reason why, is because each post appeared at the top of my blog for at least 24 hours. It gave them more time to be noticed and commented on by readers. My advice to Starwood would be to cut back to 1 new post each weekday (which is still a LOT of posts for a company blog!), and have your writers spend that extra time on other social sites interacting with your customers. My guess is that your traffic would increase, as would your links, and you'd see that suddenly you'd start getting comments on almost every post. Try it and see what happens, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at the results!

Finally, let's move to the sidebars. First, I have to say that I am in love with what The Lobby has done with its header. Notice that under the gorgeous header image, it has taken its main categories, and put them as tabs that you cannot miss if you tried. Such as 'Explore', 'Savor', 'Inside', 'Celebrate'. I *love* this because it helps organize the content for the reader. Almost all blogs have categories, but Starwood has put them up where they are most accessible to the visitor. Gold.

As we all know, I am a stickler for companies having pictures of their writers on their blog, and at least a link to their bios. The Lobby does this, sorta. First, they have a small picture of the writer of each post at the bottom of that post, with a link to their bio. And on the sidebar, they have a 'Meet the Experts' section that rotates, showing the pic and quickie bio for one writer at a time. If you click on it, you can see them all. I wish the Meet the Experts section was higher on the sidebar (or at the top), as it's pretty buried now.

Also, when you click on the 'More Info' tab at the top, then you suddenly have several options that should be default, IMO. Such as Archives (which only seems to link to posts in June?!?), several options for sorting posts (similar to categories), 'recommended articles' and 'recommended links'. In particular, I would like to see the 'recommended links' move to the blog's main page/tab, and be called a 'blogroll'. I would also like to see more travel-oriented and non-Starwood sites on there.

Overall, I think The Lobby is a better than average effort that does many things well, and misses the mark occasionally.

And now let's break down the scoring for the blog:

Content: 28 (Out of a possible 35) - Love how the content is focused on travel, but would like a few more 'how-to' posts, and more thoughts from travelers/customers.

Comments: 4 (Out of a possible 35) - Solid content, but almost no interaction in the comments section. Suggest writers spend more time OFF the blog, in order to build its awareness.

Posting Schedule: 10 (Out of a possible 15) - Actually a case where less would be more. If the volume of posts were cut back to one every weekday, it would be perfection.

Sidebars: 11 (Out of a possible 15) - Pretty solid, although a beefier blogroll and writer pics up top would help a bit.

Total Score: 53 (Out of a possible 100)


If anyone from Starwood Hotels wants to discuss this Company Blog Checkup with me, feel free to leave a comment here, or email me. If your company would like to hire me to do an extensive checkup of your blog, or if you want to launch your own blog, you can click here for more information on my blogging and social media consulting services.

Next week I'll profile another blogging company, and if anyone can think of a company blog that they want me to do a checkup on, feel free to email me! For a list of all the blog that have been profiled so far in the Company Blog Checkup series, click here.

The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs - Week 121

Here's the standings for Week 121:

1 - Duct Tape Marketing - 223,000 (+3,000)(LW - 1)
2 - Church of the Customer - 212,000 (+3,000)(LW - 2)
3 - CopyBlogger - 40,072 (-2,708)(LW - 3)
4 - Search Engine Guide - 12,300 (+127)(LW - 4)
5 - Chris Brogan - 8,505 (+186)(LW - 5)
6 - Influential Marketing - 6,687 (-298)(LW - 6)
7 - Logic + Emotion - 3,567 (+3)(LW - 7)
8 - Drew's Marketing Minute - 3,219 (+16)(LW - 9)
9 - What's Next - 3,129 (LW - UR)
10 - Converstations - 3,086 (-133)(LW - 8)
10 - The Viral Garden - 3,086 (+23)(LW - 10)
12 - Experience Curve - 2,808 (+33)(LW - 11)
13 - Conversation Agent - 2,767 (+54)(LW - 12)
14 - Techipedia - 2,322 (+22)(LW - 13)
15 - The Social Media Marketing Blog - 2,088 (+9)(LW - 14)
16 - Emergence Marketing - 1,821 (-8)(LW - 15)
17 - The Social Customer Manifesto - 1,640 (-32)(LW - 16)
18 - Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog - 1,604 (LW - UR)
19 - Techno Marketer - 1,387 (+20)(LW - 17)
20 - Social Media Explorer - 1,319 (-13)(LW - 18)
21 - Spare Change - 1,274 (LW - UR)
22 - Movie Marketing Madness - 1,268 (+27)(LW - 19)
23 - Daily Fix - 1,094 (-17)(LW - 20)
24 - Customers Rock! - 847 (-2)(LW - 21)
25 - Shotgun Marketing - 754 (+33)(LW - 22)


The Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs are ranked according to the number of subscribers, according to FeedBurner. The number you see after the blog name is how many subscribers accessed the blog's feed, according to FeedBurner. FeedBurner (and I had to look it up to make sure) tracks the number of times your blog's feed is accessed, and matches it against the IP address of the computer making the request, to approximate the number of subscribers that access your feed, and report this as the number used in the Top 25. After that number is a positive or negative number, and this represents how many readers the blog gained or lost from last week's Top 25. The final stat tells you what position the blog held in the Top 25 Last Week (LW). If you see this; (LW - UR), it means the blog wasn't ranked last week.

Thirteen blogs were up this week, with eight seeing their subscriber counts fall. This is in contrast to how Technorati had been tracking falling link counts for the last several months. I think this validates the assumption that linking between blogs is falling, while blog readership as a whole, is still growing. The linking behavior is simply moving away from blogs, to other social sites, which is fueling a growth in readership, as new audiences are being exposed to these blogs. So perhaps the blogosphere isn't imploding after all. We'll have to keep an eye on how readerships track moving forward, but my guess is that we'll see most blogs continue to add subscribers.

What's Next, Spare Change and Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog are new additions to the Top 25 this week, with Biz Solutions Plus and Every Dot Connects just missing the cut. Remember if you want to have your blog be considered for inclusion in the Top 25, make sure you add the Feedburner feed count chicklet to your blog.




Next update is next Wednesday.

Attention Heart: Be careful, you're about to blow it!

As the Republican National Convention came to a close on Thursday night, thousands of balloons fell from the ceiling, and Heart's song Barracuda began to fill the arena. The song was a nod to a nickname that VP candidate Sarah Palin earned earlier in her political career.

But Heart was NOT amused, and Universal Music Publishing along with Sony BMG quickly fired off a 'cease and desist' letter to Republicans, over their use of the song to end the RNC.

Now, assuming that the Wilson sisters are Obama supporters (or simply don't like McCain and/or Palin), I can understand why they wouldn't be thrilled with the RNC using their song. But thanks to the RNC, a completely new generation of music fans are likely 'discovering' the song, and Heart's music as well. Why would the band want to kill buzz that's literally fell into their lap?

First, the Wilson sisters should have THANKED the McCain campaign for being fans of their song, and promoting their music. Because that's exactly what just happened.

Second, since they do now have a lot of sudden interest in their music, how can they use this interest as a tool to leverage support for Obama (again, asssuming they are Obama supporters)? This is a lesson that 'big label' music has always struggled with, but you don't attempt to control how your fans purchase your music, you accept their behavior, and make it as EASY as possible to engage in their current activities. Right now people are buying Heart's music, so we need to ENCOURAGE that activity, not stifle it.

Third, announce that while the Repubs might like the song Barracuda for McCain/Palin, that Heart thinks of Obama as more of a 'Magic Man', an obvious nod to their hit of the same name.

And here's the kicker: Heart should set up a contest on their website between Republicans and Democrats. Offer both singles, Barracuda (Republicans) and Magic Man (Democrats) for sale on the site. Add that a set amount of proceeds will go to charity. Add a ticker that shows which side Repubs or Dems are selling more songs, and thus 'winning'.

Now if Heart was REALLY smart, they would be engaged in social media and have buttons available that could let fans show their support for either McCain/Palin (Barracuda) or Obama/Biden (Magic Man). These buttons could be added to their blogs or other social profiles, and link back to Heart's site where they could purchase the song of their choice.

End result for Heart? Sales of both songs go through the roof. The band is exposed to a completely new generation of fans. A lot of money is raised for charity, which further benefits the band in the form of even more buzz.

Or maybe the band should issue a C&D and attempt to kill the first meaningful buzz Heart has had in 2 decades.

BONUS: Ike comes up with the perfect name for this promotion: I HEART DEMOCRACY! Gold.




Pic via HeartTribute

The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs - Week 120

Here's the standings for Week 120:

1 - Duct Tape Marketing - 220,000 (LW - 6)
2 - Church of the Customer - 209,000 (LW - 8)
3 - CopyBlogger - 42,780 (LW - 2)
4 - Search Engine Guide - 12,173 (LW - 4)
5 - Chris Brogan - 8,319 (LW - 3)
6 - Influential Marketing - 6,985 (+12)(LW - 7)
7 - Logic + Emotion - 3,564 (LW - 5)
8 - Converstations - 3,219 (LW - 20)
9 - Drew's Marketing Minute - 3,203 (LW - 15)
10 - The Viral Garden - 3,063 (LW - 25)
11 - Experience Curve - 2,775 (LW - UR)
12 - Conversation Agent - 2,713 (LW - 12)
13 - Techipedia - 2,300 (LW - 13)
14 - The Social Media Marketing Blog - 2,079 (LW - 19)
15 - Emergence Marketing - 1,829 (LW - UR)
16 - The Social Customer Manifesto - 1,672 (LW - UR)
17 - Techno Marketer - 1,367 (LW - 23)
18 - Social Media Explorer - 1,332 (LW - 18)
19 - Movie Marketing Madness - 1,231 (LW - UR)
20 - Daily Fix - 1,111 (LW - 10)
21 - Customers Rock! - 849 (LW - UR)
22 - Shotgun Marketing - 721 (LW - UR)
23 - Biz Solutions Plus - 541 (LW - UR)
24 - Resonance Partnership Blog - 301 (LW - UR)
25 - MediaPhyter - 116 (LW - UR)


The Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs are ranked according to the number of subscribers, according to FeedBurner. The number you see after the blog name is how many subscribers accessed the blog's feed, according to FeedBurner. FeedBurner (and I had to look it up to make sure) tracks the number of times your blog's feed is accessed, and matches it against the IP address of the computer making the request, to approximate the number of subscribers that access your feed, and report this as the number used in the Top 25. After that number is a positive or negative number, and this represents how many readers the blog gained or lost from last week's Top 25. The final stat tells you what position the blog held in the Top 25 Last Week (LW). If you see this; (LW - UR), it means the blog wasn't ranked last week.

As of this week, the Top 25 Marketing and Social Media blogs are now being measured according to FeedBurner's count of daily subscribers. FeedBurner tracks the number of times your blog's feed is accessed on a daily basis by subscribers, and blogs can post this number on their blogs. The ones that do, are considered for inclusion in the Top 25.

As when the Top 25 moved from Alexa to Technorati as its measuring stick, this week's countdown sees a LOT of shuffling. First, several blogs were dropped from the Top 25 because they don't report their FeedBurner subscriber number on their blog. This included Seth's Blog, Six Pixels of Separation, Brand Autopsy, Jaffe Juice, Damn! I Wish..., Diva Marketing, Every Dot Connects, What's Next, and Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog. I'm pretty sure that many if not all of these blogs would make the Top 25 ranked on Feedburner subscribers, so if any of you add the FB chicklet to your blog, let me know either via a comment here, or shoot me an email, and I'll be happy to add your blog back to the list. If you want to do this, from the dashboard of your Feedburner account, click Publicize, then Feed Count.

So this also means that there's several new faces on the board. These include Experience Curve, Emergence Marketing, The Social Customer Manifesto, Movie Marketing Madness, Customers Rock!, Shotgun Marketing, Biz Solutions Plus, Resonance Partnership Blog, and MediaPhyter.

Remember if you want to have your blog be considered for inclusion in the Top 25, make sure you add the Feedburner feed count chicklet to your blog.




Next update is next Wednesday.

Twitter = Speaking in Public

Last week, for a day or so, I broke one of my key rules for participating on blogs and social media sites:

Don't discuss politics or religion.

But in spending some time on Twitter last week, I was shocked at some of the political 'talk' I saw. I was stunned to see very intelligent people throwing around generalizations and insults as if they were candy. Others have seen the same thing, I'm encountering more and more people that say that they are either spending less time on Twitter now, or have stopped going there at all, now that we are in the height of the political season.

Still, the experience reminded me how much passion that people have invested in some topics. And it drives home the point that when you are participating on social sites, you are speaking in public. I'm amazed at how many smart people that REALLY get social media, forget this. Many of us are dealing with companies and teaching them about how 'Google never forgets', but we seem to be ignoring the very lessons we are trying to teach.

And it's not just political talk, I've been noticing people blurting out distasteful comments that I can't see them ever saying in public. Even companies are getting in on the act.

So I think we all need to step back and remember that when we get on Twitter, our personal brand comes with us.

BONUS: Beth Harte has a wonderful post on twitter and your branding. She raises many of the same points I do here, but does a better job with them.

Company Blog Checkup: Rupp Arena

I have to say up front that I am not a fan of company blogs with the type of layout that Rupp Arena's blog has, which I think of as a 'blogsite'. I get that Rupp Arena wants to position its blog as having the look and feel of an 'entertainment website', because many of the events it will promote are concerts and sporting/entertainment events. But I just think there's too much happening for any one particular area to get the focus it deserves. With a company blog, the focus has to be on the content, and that's pretty tough to do with a blog format such as this one. Rupp Arena appears to be using a WordPress 3-column theme(AmberCadabra says its the Revolution theme), with each column (including the column where posts appear), being the same width.

Which means that the content is pretty cramped. To make matters worse, the posts are truncated. Each post seems to have a roughly 4 inch by 4 inch block on the screen, and about 66% of that real-estate is dominated by a picture. But here's the interesting part; when you click on a post to read it, you are switched to a 2-column layout, with the post being given about 66% of the space. This looks MUCH better than the blog's 'frontpage' layout.

The content appears to be a stream of 'announcements' about the upcoming events. Again, it looks like Rupp Arena wanted a blog that has the look and feel of an entertainment website. And websites are usually focused on announcements, not interactions, which are what a good blog focuses on. I think there is a great chance for the blog to significantly improve its content by focusing less on announcements, and more on the fans that attend, and giving them a 'behind the scenes' look at these events. That's interesting, broadcasting an events calendar is not.



Given the positioning of the content, it should come as no surprise that most of the posts don't receive comments. This is why content is so vitally important for a company blog, because if the content isn't effective, the rest of the blog is in trouble. Compelling content sparks conversation, and content that doesn't resonate with blog readers, won't receive comments. And without comments, the blog's writers don't have an opportunity to respond and help create a conversation in the comments.

Now let's move to posting schedule. On the front page of the blog, there's four posts, all with the same format of about a 4 inch by 4 inch block, with most of that dominated by a 3 inch by 4 inch pic. But if you click on the Archives section, you see that several other 'posts' show up, all including very large pictures. My guess is that these posts aren't showing up on the front page because their pictures are too large? Not sure, but if you'll notice, according to the Archives, this post was left on Aug 19th, but as the screenshot above (taken on the same day) shows, it's not on the frontpage. So I'm assuming that 2 or so new posts show up on the blog's frontpage per week. Decent, not great, but decent.

Finally, let's move to the sidebars. With this blog, you basically have three columns of the same width, with the posts appearing in the left column, other information in the two columns on the right. The blog does a good job of promoting upcoming events for the arena, and gives you several ways to receive updates. But there's no blogroll, and no sign of information about who the writers are. If you click on a post, it gives you a link for the author, but clicking on that only gives you a list of their posts. As with the rest of the blog, the focus here is on promotion.

The botton line is that the Rupp Arena blog comes off as a broadcast tool, instead of being an attempt by the arena to get more interaction with its readers and customers. My guess is the readers can easily see the disconnect, and aren't responding to the content, as a result.

And now let's break down the scoring for the blog:

Content: 16 (Out of a possible 35) - Right idea, horrible positioning. The blog is right to focus on the events/performers that will be appearing at the arena, but it's totally self-promotional. The content needs to be repositioned so the fans/attendees play a MUCH greater role. Cramped area for content and truncated posts only make matters worse.

Comments: 5 (Out of a possible 35) - Lack of solid content apparently isn't giving the readers much of a reason to comment.

Posting Schedule: 9 (Out of a possible 15) - Decent but not great.

Sidebars: 5 (Out of a possible 15) - No blogroll, no writer pics/bios, no kidding. All self-promotional.

Total Score: 35 (Out of a possible 100)


If anyone from Rupp Arena wants to discuss this Company Blog Checkup with me, feel free to leave a comment here, or email me. If your a company would like to hire me to do an extensive checkup of your blog, you can click here for more information on my blogging and social media consulting services.

Next week I'll profile another blogging company, and if anyone can think of a company blog that they want me to do a checkup on, feel free to email me! For a list of all the blog that have been profiled so far in the Company Blog Checkup series, click here.

Conferences, conferences everywhere!

My conference attendance has been pretty non-existent since last Spring, but that's about to change dramatically. I've been invited to speak at several wonderful events in the coming months, and here's a quick rundown of where I will be:

September 22nd and 23rd, Columbus, Ohio - Small Business Marketing Unleashed

I attended the inaugural SBMU this year in April, and as you can tell from this post, I had an absolute blast. As did the attendees, who gushed so much about the experience that Jennifer and Robert decided to add this second SBMU. The original plan was that the first SBMU would do well enough to warrant having another one next April in Houston. Instead, the overwhelmingly positive reaction from attendees prompted them to add this second conf set for next month. And the speaker lineup is once again stellar, adding my dear friend CK to an already top-notch speaker lineup from the Spring SBMU. We'll show you all you need to know about blogging, social media, viral marketing, SEO, SEM, and so much more.

And the best part of all is, there's a special early-bird rate on pricing. Till this Friday, you can attend SBMU for only $750. After Friday, the rate goes up to $975. If you are a small business, this may be the best $750 you will ever spend. Seriously guys, you will have an absolute blast, we will see to it. You'll learn how to succeed in every area of social media and online marketing, and you'll have a blast doing it. If you are considering going, I really hope you do, because if you don't attend, I *know* you are going to regret not going once you begin to see the feedback from the people that did. And if you are planning on attending, please leave a comment so we can connect before the event!


October 22nd and 23rd, Scottsdale, Arizona, Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Mixer

Wow. My friend Ann Handley has seriously outdone herself in putting together the speaking lineup for this event. See if you've heard of any of these people: Rohit Bhargava, Chris Brogan, Becky Carroll, CC Chapman, KD Paine, Frank Eliason (Comcastcares on Twitter), Scott Monty, Connie Reece. Yeah. And that's just the social media track, there's also search and email marketing tracks as well. Oh and you might have heard of the keynotes as well, Gary Vee and Arianna Huffington.

On the second day, I'll be conducting a special lab on successful blogging. I'll look at three company blogs submitted by attendees, and we'll discuss what they are doing right, and what they are doing wrong, in a format similar to what I do here with the Company Blog Checkup series. If you plan on attending the Digital Marketing Mixer and want your company blog to be considered for review during my session, please email Marketing Profs.


November 7th, Kennewick, WA, Learn About Web Conference

This is a great conference aimed at getting small businesses up to speed on social media and online marketing. It will feature a great lineup of speakers, including Jennifer Laycock, Stoney deGeyter, Debra Mastaler, Matt McGee, myself, and several others. I'll be presenting on Blogging for Business, and the event is being put on by Craig Sutton and the fine people at BrightWeb Marketing, who I met at the first SBMU last Spring. Here's where you can find more information on the event, and register!


In addition, I am hoping I'll be able to attend the upcoming SWOMFest that the ever-amazing Ben and Jackie are holding in Austin, Texas at the end of October. And look at the attendee list! Good grief that's a prime speaking list for most conferences! I'm hoping I can get this worked into my schedule in the next couple of weeks as it looks like a can't-miss event!


And speaking of Jackie, please if you haven't already, vote for our suggested panel for next year's SXSW, Co-Created Marketing: Embracing Your Customer Evangelists Online. Voting ends this Friday, and the panel will consist of Jackie Huba, LinkedIn's Community Evangelist Mario Sundar, and Ogilvy PR's Virginia Miracle, with myself moderating.

And while you are on the site, here's some other great SXSW panel/session ideas:

Your Brand is Not My Friend (Alan Wolk, CK, Cam Beck, Brian Morrissey)
Micro Interactions - David Armano
Sports 2.0: Engaging the Long-Tail Fanbase - Pat Coyle
Twitter for Marketers: Is it Still Social Media? - Ricardo Guerrero
Posse Blogging: Never Blog Alone - Becky Carroll
Curiosity Marketing: Using Secrets to Create Engagement - Rohit Bhargava
Measure This! Practical Ways to Quantify Social Media Results - Kami Huyse

And remember, voting on the SXSW panels ends on Friday night, so please vote for the above panels if you can! Also, if you need a speaker for your social media/marketing conference, or want more information on my social media training services, click here.

The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs - Week 119

Here's the standings for Week 119:

1 - Seth's Blog - 8,344 (-136)(LW - 1)
2 - CopyBlogger - 5,206 (-357)(LW - 2)
3 - Chris Brogan - 2,646 (+226)(LW - 3)
4 - Logic + Emotion - 1,160 (-9)(LW - 5)
5 - Search Engine Guide - 1,085 (-103)(LW - 4)
6 - Influential Marketing - 830 (+12)(LW - 7)
7 - Duct Tape Marketing - 811 (-25)(LW - 6)
8 - Church of the Customer - 661 (No Change)(LW - 8)
9 - Six Pixels of Separation - 630 (+4)(LW - 9)
10 - Daily Fix - 591 (-27)(LW - 10)
11 - Brand Autopsy - 589 (+1)(LW - 11)
12 - Conversation Agent - 546 (-2)(LW - 12)
13 - Techipedia - 495 (-24)(LW - 13)
14 - Jaffe Juice - 473 (-13)(LW - 14)
15 - Drew's Marketing Minute - 461 (-5)(LW - 15)
16 - Damn! I Wish I'd Thought of That! - 435 (-9)(LW - 16)
17 - Diva Marketing - 417 (-2)(LW - 17)
18 - Social Media Explorer - 415 (+7)(LW - 18)
19 - The Social Media Marketing Blog - 388 (-11)(LW - 19)
19 - Converstations - 388 (+2)(LW - 20)
21 - Every Dot Connects - 367 (-13)(LW - 21)
22 - Techno Marketer - 366 (+1)(LW - 23)
23 - What's Next - 361 (-3)(LW - 24)
24 - Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog - 354 (-13)(LW - 22)
25 - The Viral Garden - 353 (+8)(LW - 25)


A reminder that the Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs are ranked according to the number of sites/blogs linking to each, according to Technorati. The number you see after the blog name is how many sites/blogs Technorati claims have linked to the blog in the last 6 months. After that number is a positive or negative number, and this represents how many links the blog gained or lost from last week's Top 25. The final stat tells you what position the blog held in the Top 25 Last Week (LW). If you see this; (LW - UR), it means the blog wasn't ranked last week.

Eight blogs were up this week, with sixteen down. Which is actually a 'good' week for the Top 25, given recent performance. I started to make this move last week, but as of next week, the Top 25 will begin using Feedburner subscriber counts as its metric of choice. I believe 17 of the current Top 25 blogs have their subscriber numbers clearly posted on their blog. If your blog is one of the eight that doesn't, all you need to do is add the Feedburner subscriber chicklet to your blog to be considered.

The main reason for wanting to move away from using Technorati to rank the blogs is that increasingly, linking behavior is moving away from blogs, and onto other social sites such as Twitter and Plurk. But unfortunately, Technorati doesn't include these links, and only counts links from one blog to another. Which means the link count for each blog is becoming increasingly inaccurate. Hopefully, moving to Feedburner's subscriber counts will give us a more accurate snapshot of the top marketing and social media blogs.

Otherwise, there are new blogs this week, and the next update is next Wednesday.





Next update is next Wednesday.

Companies: Put social media in the hands of your connectors

As most of you know, I am a big fan of how MasiGuy is using social media to connect with customers and broaden the awareness of the brand he manages. Over time, I pretty much painted a picture from reading Tim's blog and thoughts on other social sites that:

• Masi had very little marketing budget
• Masi had increasing sales
• Tim had a very small staff

This, added with the community Tim seemed to build on any social site where he was active, suggested that he was doing a fabulous job of leveraging social media to help build awareness for the Masi brand. But then I saw this quote from Tim during an interview with MediaHunter:

"So really, I’m the only full time Masi employee."

Timeout. So ONE guy is doing all this?!? That's it, I had to learn more. I called up Tim last week and he was nice enough to spend about an hour with me. Here's what I learned:

• Tim took over as Brand Manager for Masi in 2004
• In 2005, Tim read an article about how blogging was going to impact business, and possibly even the biking industry. He went home that night and launched his MasiGuy blog.
• By 2006, Masi's sales had doubled from the time he took over as Brand Manager, and his blog's readership was at around 200-300 people a day
• From 2006-to now, sales have almost doubled again, and the daily readership for Tim's blog has grown to 500-1,100 a day.
  
• Tim estimates that about 75% of his marketing time is spent with social media, and sees that load increasing moving forward. He still sees traditional marketing as being very important, and sees print advertising going up as well.

I don't think it's too hard to connect the dots between Tim's blog growing, and Masi's sales growing. But does that mean that social media is the silver bullet?

I don't think so. I think the key takeaway here is that social media can HUGELY impact your business IF it's put in the hands of your employees that love connecting with people. Social media allows Tim to more effectively do what he was already doing. Tim was already connecting with suppliers and dealers and retailers and customers in-person and at trade shows/industry events. Blogging and social media simply gave him another way to do this, and reach many more people at the same time. I've said this time and time again, but if you launch a social media strategy, it has to work with your EXISTING business strategy. Social media does that for Tim, which is a big reason why it's working so well for him.

Companies, find your employees that are already passionate about connecting with and helping your customers, and empower them to use social media to do so. It works, just ask Tim.

Company Blog Checkup: Graco

Graco is a company that makes a wide variety of products for infants and toddlers, and late last year, they launched a company blog. Let's see what it looks like.

First, the blog has a very nice About section right at the top. This helps explain the purpose of the blog to readers, as well as gives them a roadmap of what they can expect from the blog. This is always a nice touch.

As always with a company blog's content, there's two ways you can go. You can focus on the company and its products/services, or you can focus on broader content that's relevant to the customers. Graco does this by focusing its blog's content on parenthood. Nice touch because it's a very 'hands-off' way to promote Graco's products and how they relate to parents taking care of their infants and toddlers. Perfect example is this post where one of the bloggers relates her decision-process when deciding to send her child to daycare, a scenario that no doubt many of the blog's readers can relate to. The post really doesn't directly promote Graco or its products, but what is DOES do is help the readers more easily connect with the blogger, because they can sympathize with their situation. Remember, don't focus on the tools, focus on the connections that the tools help facilitate.

The content for Graco's blog is solid, so let's take a gander at the comments. In many cases, the activity in the comments section of a company blog is greatly dependent on how the blog positions its content. The content leads to the comments, and in this case, we see that most posts on the Graco blog have comments. And in most cases, the Graco bloggers are doing a fine job of responding. This is another important area to remember; readers that comment WANT you to reply. They want to know that someone is going to pay attention to their feedback, and add their own. The Graco bloggers do a nice job of commenting and referring to the reader's by name. Very nice.



Now let's move to the posting schedule. The blog seems to follow a strict schedule of one post a day, every weekday. Love it. Honestly, a post a day during the week is really all you need from a company blog. Sure, there might be breaking news or such that warrants multiple posts in one day, but if a company blog has 5 new posts a week, one each weekday, that's all you can ask for.

Finally, let's tackle the sidebars. As anyone that has read this series knows, I am huge on a company blog having pics of its writers on the blog, and at least a link to their bios. Graco has this information, but it's buried on their About page. There you see links to a bio and pic for each blogger. Good stuff, but it's put in a place where it's difficult to find. The pics of the bloggers need to be on the sidebar, and have it set up so there's a link to their bio, when you click on their name. That's a very simple fix to make, and given how well the bloggers interact with readers in the comments section, the readers will appreciate 'seeing' who they are connecting with.

Besides the About section, the header also contains detailed information on the blog's comment policy, and a walkthrough for how readers can subscribe to the blog. Great stuff. Moving down, we see the greatest hits such as archives and categories. But there's also a very nice blogroll of NON-Graco blogs. And in reading some of the comments, I noticed that some of the commenters have their blogs on the Graco blogroll. Absolutely perfect. If your company is blogging and you aren't sure what blogs to add to your blogroll, start with the blogs that your readers and commenters write. This seems to be exactly what Graco has done.

Overall, the Graco Blog is a very solid effort, with no serious weaknesses.

And now let's break down the scoring for the blog:

Content: 31 (Out of a possible 35) - Content is focused on parenting, which is the perfect positioning for this blog. Love the Weds posts about customers/employees.

Comments: 28 (Out of a possible 35) - Most posts have comments, and the writers do a good job of replying to comments that readers leave.

Posting Schedule: 14 (Out of a possible 15) - Very nice. Almost a perfect schedule of one new post, every weekday.

Sidebars: 10 (Out of a possible 15) - Still need the writers' pics/bios on the front page of the blog.

Total Score: 83 (Out of a possible 100)

An excellent score that makes the Graco Blog the #5 blog among the Top 10 highest scoring blogs ever reviewed in the Company Blog Checkup series! Congrats!


If anyone from Graco wants to discuss this Company Blog Checkup with me, feel free to leave a comment here, or email me. If your a company would like to hire me to do an extensive checkup of your blog, you can click here for more information on my blogging and social media consulting services.

Next week I'll profile another blogging company, and if anyone can think of a company blog that they want me to do a checkup on, feel free to email me! For a list of all the blog that have been profiled so far in the Company Blog Checkup series, click here.

If your company really doesn't 'get' why social media is all the rage...

....watch this video of Michael Wesch's speech at the library of congress entitled An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. The video focuses on YouTube and its community of users, but many of the dynamics at work there can be applied to every area of social media and content.

As you watch this video, ask yourself these questions:

1 - Why are the ideas in these videos spreading? Do ideas have more credibility to the YouTube community if they think they are coming from 'real' people?

2 - Why do so many people create videos and address them to 'YouTubers'? (Note: I often do the same thing, leaving a message on Plurk as 'Hello Plurkistan!' or 'Hello fellow Plurkers!', and I often tweet 'Hello Twitter!').

3 - Why would someone want to create and share this content? What are they seeking?

4 - Why are so many videos created in response to someone else's video?

If you are a company that wants to better understand social media and why people use these tools, consider these questions as you watch this video. Also consider if the ultimate success of your social media initiatives hinges more on your ability to make these people better understand you, or if it's more important for YOU to better understand how and why these people are using these tools?

Hat tips to Paul, Sean and Gavin.

'Help Send Mack to Austin for SXSW!' (2009 Edition)

One of the highlights of my year was being able to moderate The Future of Corporate Blogging panel at SXSW. Mario Sundar, who was one of the panelists, asked me if I wanted to moderate a panel for him at next year's SXSW. Of course I said yes, and after some brainstorming, we decided on the panel concept.

The panel is titled 'Co-Created Marketing: Embracing Your Customer Evangelists Online'. This panel will focus on who customer evangelists are, why companies should want to embrace and empower them, and HOW they can do this via online tools such as social media. I really think this is an area of marketing that offers huge potential for companies if they can get past their 'OMG! We can't share control of our marketing with our customers!!!' fears. It's happening anyway, and the SMART companies are the ones that are identifying their most passionate customers, and empowering them to promote them.

Ok now we had a kickass topic to discuss, and had one great panelist set as Mario being LinkedIn's first-ever Community Evangelist put him in the perfect place to speak about how companies can better find and embrace their evangelists.

But we needed two more panelists. We started making a list of the people that we wanted on this panel, and two names were our clear favorites. And thankfully, they BOTH have agreed to join us! And they are......


Jackie Huba: The person that literally co-wrote the book on customer evangelism, along with partner Ben McConnell. Jackie also blogs at one of the most popular marketing/business blogs on the planet, The Church of the Customer. The label 'expert' probably gets used too much in this space, but Jackie is a true customer evangelism expert.


Virginia Miracle: Virginia is the current SVP of Digital Strategy at Ogilvy PR’s 360° Digital Influence group. Before that, she shepherded the award-winning Fiskateers crafting ambassador movement, while she was with Brains on Fire. Earlier this week I scored The Fiskateers blog as the highest one I've graded so far in the Company Blog Checkup Series, and the movement is one of the best examples you'll find of a company finding and embracing its customer evangelists.


Mario Sundar, Virginia Miracle, and Jackie Huba. Yeah, now you see why being asked to moderate a panel with these people has me I'm feeling like a kid on Christmas morning! But unfortunately, we still need to get the panel picked. Which is where you can help make that happen. For the next two weeks (ending on Aug 29th), you can vote for this panel at this link. Also, if you can leave a comment on the site, we would GREATLY appreciate that, as SXSW goes by voting and interest in the comments section to help them decide which panel ideas are resonating with potential attendees. Thanks so much!