Chris Baggott's Guide to Blogging

There has been a lot of talk about the Forrester report highlighting the horrific lack of trust in Corporate blogs. To me, the key strategy for success outlined by the author Josh Bernoff was the use of employee bloggers....and lot's of them.

My case today focuses on an experience just two days ago skiing with the family in Colorado. This was a spontaneous road trip based on access to a free house and the fact that Jimmo's (with beard) son and daughter were out there this winter. (I am actually blogging as we drive home through Kansas)

The weather was great and the snow was perfect. Sunny and around 28 during the day. But what made the difference between this being a really good trip and a fantastic experience was Alex.

Alex here is a friend of Jimmo's son and happens to work as a Host at one of the big resorts. Talk about your dream job...ski around all day and make sure everyone is safe and most importantly having a good time.   There are maybe hundreds of these folks in Summit County.   And this is just one position. Vail by itself employees over 3500 people.

Through our hookup, we were able to ski all day with Alex on his day off.   Alex is smart, he's 24 and a graduate of a good school. He's doing this because he loves it.   He loves the customers and he loves the resort. He was able to show us places that were appropriate for the skill variances of our entire group...nooks and cranny's we never would have found on our own...He even took my 8 year old off for a while. Why? Because I TRUSTED him.

Vail blogs just like any other Corporation (at least Heavenly does)....self promoting PR.   Why not offer up the opportunity for all 3500 employees to get on multi user blog software and tell their stories?

That's how Corporate Blogging will gain trust...telling real stories from real people who love what they do.

There are over 10,000,000 monthly searches this time of year that Vail would want to rank highly on. Post a couple hundred times a week with a variety of relevant stories and watch how many of those start coming their way...

And don't tell me Vail is different than your plumbing supply business or whatever. Most all company employees are smart, they like their jobs and care about the customer.   Let them help you build trust.

P.S. While you're at it, Vail has a great database. They have my email and know exactly when and where I skiied.   What's stopping them from triggering an email to me next week asking me to tell them about my trip....maybe submit a picture or two...wouldn't that be trusted content? You bet it would. Vail skiis about 25,000 people a day.   That's 175,000 emails a week that could be triggered telling your customer you appreciate them...Does anyone doubt that Vail would get at least a couple of hundred usable stories a week to fill their blogs? Imagine the benefit.

Comments for Employee Bloggers and Trust: A Ski Vacation Story

Wednesday, January 7, 2009 by Ezra:: This would be a good vail ski story for somebody to write about. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/06/vail-chairlift-accident-l_n_155578.html
Wednesday, January 7, 2009 by Chris Baggott:: Great catch and you are exactly right. This is the key to social media participation. The realization that the conversation is taking place whether you are participating or not. A comprehensive blogging strategy would have caught this story first, probably with an angle of their rapid response, no injury, excellent training for emergencies and a reminder of the benefits of using the safety bar. Thanks
Friday, January 9, 2009 by Eric Hoffman:: As a ski resort marketing person (and not for a Vail resort) I say with confidence that a resort such as Vail is killing it in organic and PPC searches. So, the value for social media (in my mind), while still nice, is not so much in search, but much more in being part of the conversation. I do agree with you that there are a ton of unique stories out there waiting to be told and shared about a resort such as Vail and their employees are just one great resource to help fulfill that - think about all the amazing people that live in a resort town! Great food for though, thanks for posting it and look forward to reading more in the future.
Friday, January 9, 2009 by Chris Baggott:: Don't be too Confident Eric :-) Most organic ski trip related searches are dominated by directories. Try it yourself. There are almost 2.8mm monthly searches on Ski Vacations (another 60,000 on ski vacation) There are 9mm monthly searches on ski and a million more between the two phrases ski resort and ski resorts 301,000 searches on ski resorts, 823,000 searches on ski resort, mountain resort gets 386,000. A quick scan and one can identify over 10mm searches a month that vail (or any other ski resort) would want to be ranking highly on, but don't. Nearly all of these searches are dominated by some kind of directory (ski.com, goski.com, skivacation.com, etc...) Why cede these spots to middlemen? My big point is that for all businesses, it's critical to compete in every opportunity. Remember, what's magic about search is that you have clear buyer intent. When someone searches for ski resorts it's because they want to find a ski resort....instead, they find a directory that forces them to do another search. This is frustrating for the searcher and counter productive for the resort..even the search engines don't like it. The want the quickest path to the searcher and the resort because they want happy searchers. The main point of the above post is it is not only possible, but relatively easy to rank highly on tons of organic keywords through employee blogging. It generates great content volume targeting the right keywords, it's frequent and best of all, it's honest....the searcher is happy when they land on content that not only matches their search terms, but is created by real people who know exactly what they are talking about...the net result? High conversions.
Sunday, January 11, 2009 by Eric Hoffman:: Chris, I see your point, and while I concur for the most part, I think that it's important for the content that is posted to be of value and not simply there to be search engine food. In this regard,I don't think that simple volume of content is necessarily a good thing, as I think it will continue to 'frustrate' your searcher. I think the challenge is to create content that is targeted to specific buyer personas and this is a direction that we are currently exploring and taking action on.
Monday, January 12, 2009 by Chris Baggott:: I wish you would give me an hour to review our data. Compendium has hundreds of clients driving millions of page views using this strategy. On average we see significantly higher engagement using the metrics of bounce rates, read times, and obviously click through rates. What you are shooting for with persona's is exactly right. When the Eisenbergs introduced personas in 2003, it was a brilliant insight. Try to talk to people in their own language. Identify broad segments along with the unique needs of their segment, and develop web copy that they can identify with. As Mark Penn points out in last year's MicroTrends, there are lots and lots of segments. Penn identifies 75 broad persona's in his book. Your implication above is that high content volume implies spam. We argue, that high volume content increases the chance to be relevant. Employees are trustworthy and enthusiastic story tellers. If creating personas get you to 5 or 7 segments, telling real stories, and hundreds a month you now have basically unlimited personas. Think of these blogs as organic landing pages....no matter what I'm searching, the more content, the more stories, the more likely I am to land on something that exactly matches my search intent. As I said the other day...in PPC you might identify thousands of terms you want to target. The problem is that 85% of the clicks are going to happen in the organic results. Targeting these terms organically seems impossible, (at least to do it legitimately) but it's really quite simple with the right tools: Create individual pages with the right titles populate those pages with fresh and relevant content constantly test and upgrade your CTA's drive business. Just like my first post...If Alex blogged about his day with us, I would find the content relevant, trustworthy, engaging and most importantly...I'd be an enthusiastic supporter of the organization that chose to communicate to me this way.