My name is Chris Baggott & I'm CEO of Compendium Blogware. According to new rules unanimously passed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, at its meeting here, any company, organization or country will soon be able to apply for a new Web address extension, called a top-level domain.
That could smooth the way for Web addresses that end in city names, brands and generic words. It could also sow confusion in the minds of Web users, create a host of new ways to exploit the Web addressing system and start a wave of legal skirmishes over applications to register trademarks — .coke, for example.
Uggh! What a mess this makes for normal businesses & organizations. People are already having a tough time keeping track of your web address. By adding basically an unlimited number of .anything branding by domain becomes just about impossible.
If anything is going to drive people even more into the arms of the search engines, it's going to be this.
I recognize that not many people have seen "You, Me & Dupree", but I believe it's a movie destined for cult-like status in the future.
I am pleased to announce that we were quickly oversubscribed on our most recent funding round. Uggh! Every time I hear the term "Brand" I cringe...
If social media is telling us anything, it's telling us that people are tired of 'brands', we are tired of institutions, we are tired of being treated like a mass of consumers instead of individuals, We are DONE with reach & frequency advertising.
What we want is to deal with people...real human beings that like what they are doing, like the customer, believe in their products & services and think that they have something of value to offer.
The way we find these real humans is through search.
The job of the marketer is no longer to shout and interrupt...fighting to create a brand message. The job of the marketer is now to listen. The prospect will tell us when they have a need (by typing that need into a search engine) Marketers need to listen...stand up respectfully, raise their hand and say...."hey, we can help you".
This is the real power of corporate blogging. Empower the humans involved in your business..your employees to create content, offer that content and get found when people search. The searcher lands on content that reflects their search intent, written by a real person who honestly deserves consideration....
This is how social media like blogging successfully fits into the modern marketing mix.
Sorry for the rant... :-)
Best,
Chris Baggott
Ok....I didn't do any business blogging from Africa. But I could have...."Relevance means keeping to a topic, helping the search engine understand what your site is about and, ideally, about one thing in particular."The idea behind a Compendium is to collect all the writing (blog posts) within a company and 'Compend' or assign that content to specific keywords or topics... The net result is many more blog pages that are just what Vanessa is calling for...focused blogs talking about only one thing.
the searcher happy all lead to a win-win relationship.
The issue is that big brands are angry because of a practice called 'Piggybacking" where smaller competitors or resellers use the brands trademarked names, slogans or catch phrases to compete for display ad or pay per click traffic. The example on the right show's the ads the display when someone does a search for Holiday Inn Orlando."..Another big challenge is the misperception of how to blog. It’s not lengthy white papers, stilted memorandums, and corporate speak, but needs to be more akin to engaging coffee house/cocktail party conversation The savvy corporations tap people who are great minglers and conversationalists, who can host a great conversation as well as partake in the other conversations out there (i.e. visiting and posting on other blogs)."
"Recently I have started chatting to an engineer at Automattic, the mob which employs most of the lead programmers on Wordpress. They also run the Wordpress.com service, which is a big job — millions of blogs, tens of millions of monthly visits."
"I complained to him that one of my annoyances in life is how complex Wordpress actually is. Why? Because you don’t just have to configure Wordpress to get anywhere. To get it to perform acceptably you can either throw powerful hardware at the problem (which is how Club Troppo has done it since our donation drive last year) or you can implement a whole rogue’s gallery of tweaks and adaptations."
"Lizan from Greenfield Liquors called this morning and she shared a great story with me. This past weekend she had a customer from out of town stop by the store. He was from Toledo OH and was in town for the 500. He specifically wanted Absinthe – he found out that Lizan had the product at Greenfield Liquors because of her last blog post. Her blog post: http://greenfieldliquors.compendiumblog.com/blog/owners-corner/0/0/lucid-absinthe-is-at-greenfield-liquors I believe she said that it is $60 a bottle and he wanted 3 of them. Unfortunately she only had one in stock. I think next time she will stock up on a product before she writes a post about it!"
weekend
thinking about Stephen Baker (pictured) & Heather Green of
Business Week regarding his latest cover story: Beyond Blogs (sub
context…social media will change your business), a follow up to his
fantastic 2005 article; Blogging Will Change Your Business.
This
weekend I also read “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch. I’m sure
most of you have heard by now about this book highlighting a final CMU
lecture by a dying college professor. Here is the video….1. Chasing the newest thing. There is a lot changing in social media. But the big story for business isn’t Twitter or Facebook, it’s new and more effective ways to use the basics: Email and Corporate Blogging. Randy talks about his early youth football days. How a coach made them practice with no balls because, like Vince Lombardi says, this game is about fundamentals. In Randy’s talk a kid asks why they have no footballs. Coach answers: “how many people on the field don’t have the ball?” Answer: “21”. Right says the coach: “We are going to focus on what those 21 people are doing.”
What happens with getting hung up on the newest widget or Twitter is it distracts from what the vast majority of people are doing online…..email and Search. There are amazing strides being made in data driven email dialog and blogging is revolutionizing Search Engine Optimization and engagement.According to the Pew Interent and American Life research, (see graph) this is where the people are. This is where business needs to be focused. Yes, keep an eye on new things, but focus energy on perfecting what is working today. Search and Email are the biggest parts of the Social Media mix and present the largest opportunities for business.
2. Celebrity. So many journalist covering Social Media focus on Celebrities and celebrity bloggers. There are 20,000,000 businesses in the United States…and this doesn’t count non-profits. Hearing stories about Jimmy Wales, Michael Arrington, Kerry Miller or Jonathan Schwartz is great if you’re People Magazine, but this is Business Week. Tell me about real businesses using these tools. The story at Sun Microsystems isn’t the story of a CEO/Celebrity blogger (Jonathan's Blog), the story is the thousands of normal everyday Sun employees that blog. Who are they? What are the benefits to the organization? (hint…it’s not touchy-feely....the ROI is found in winning searches and converting those visitors to prospects….)
There was a great quote from Richard Edelman in the Dallas Morning News the other day:
“It’s clear that when it comes to traditional authority figures – whether they’re chief executives or heads of state – people trust them less,” says Mr. Edelman. “Employees are the new credible source of information. We have data that shows an employee blog is five times more credible than a CEO blog – and I say this as a CEO blogger.”
This is the big story in Social Media as it relates to Business.
Fundamentals are about focusing most of your effort on the things that are most important…with Social Media as it relates to business, that is the amazing strides being made with Email driving engagement through data and Search made through widespread employee blogging.
3. Journalism. Journalists can be forgiven for sticking close to home when considering Blogging and Social Media. A quote like this is typical:“According to a recent study by Forrester Research, only a quarter of the U.S. adult population even bothers to read a blog once a month."
Journalists think in terms of circulation…. of a fan base that is going to be loyal to a given author. This doesn’t work in business. More importantly it’s shouldn’t even remotely be a measure of success for business. Again, this makes people like Kerry Miller or Arianna Huffington interesting to Journalists but not really relevant to the other 19.9M organizations that are not involved in publishing.
Businesses measure success based on metrics like traffic, engagement, conversion, leads, sales…that sort of thing. How is social media being successfully executed against those metrics…..now that’s a story.
".....it would seem that long, unwieldy URLs will become even more cumbersome on devices with limited screen size. That makes search even more important, and driving consumers to your product via search seems like a safe bet."
I wanted to share some good Corporate Blogging press with you. I know it probably seems self-serving...but hey...it's my business :-)
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