NewsBusiness

We are talking here of course about blogging*. Unfortunately there is no cast iron rule and it also depends on why you are blogging and who your intended readership/audience is.

If you are ‘blogging for profit’ ie making money from your blog itself, then clearly the more blog posts the better and the more frequently you post the better.

If however you are blogging as a way of showcasing your business or your business experience/expertise, then how often you should post a blog will be a function of how often you need or want to be in front of your audience.

At NewsBusiness we have found that the more often you email your list, the lower the ‘open rate’ – ie more people open an occasional email than open a weekly email. You also have to be careful that your communications – whether blog posts or email newsletter items – do not suffer in terms of quality because you feel you ‘have to’ put something out.

The other part of the discussion concerns the profile of your blog on the web, as Google and other search engines favour more frequent output over occasional output. Also if you want to build a body of work on the web – and Google again favours more over less (how discerning it is about quality is a moot point) – clearly the more frequently you post, the quicker you’ll have more content on your blog.

Bloggers who have moved from monthly to weekly to daily posts have invariably reported a sizeable increase in their readership from the web alone, but this can put a strain on your ability to do this if you need to do other (sometimes referred to as ‘real’) work as well!

Our advice
If you have decided to embrace a newsletter or blog approach to engaging your customers, prospects (and other interested parties) – which of course we wholeheartedly endorse – we strongly recommend you post or send something at least monthly.

When you are comfortable with monthly, look to move to fortnightly before making the leap to weekly. Remember that each post does not have to be a full length feature article, it can be a tip or topical observation, so writing workload does not necessarily have to increase.

And at the same time monitor open rates, subscriber rates and click through rates to test and measure the correct interval for you and your business.

*this applies to email newsletters as well – in our opinion it’s all content!

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NewsBusiness helps you find the news in your business and offers a complete creative and technology service to make sure you get your monthly (or more frequent) communications out on time every time. It’s a lot better than a generic newsletter service – it’s your news and your expertise. It’s just that we write it – so you don’t have to.

This is an interesting clip from author of ‘Here Comes Everybody’ Clay Shirky, who explains what he means by ‘cognitive surplus’ – it’s the extra time you get to do things when you’re not watching TV. It’s a 17 minute video, so not short. So just pick a TV show you don’t want to watch and watch this instead.

I originally saw this on Laughing Squid, following a link from one of Seth Godin’s emails.

If you’re not one of the 7.9 million people that have seen this video of an iPhone being ‘blended’, here it is. Google ‘Will It Blend’ to find out how this video infomercial went viral and helped put Blendtec and its founder, Tom Dickson, on the map.

As people continue to debate the usefulness of Twitter from a business perspective, and as Twitter continues to think about what it can do to help businesses and in the process make money from the application, we can only speak from our own experience here at NewsBusiness.

Here are a few things we have been using Twitter for:

Looking for business

Over the past month or so, every week we have been typing into the search box “PR Brisbane” to see what comes up. Most of what appears is not relevant (unless we wanted a job in PR), but we have come across two Twitter users who tweeted that they needed a PR firm. So we replied. So far neither has actually turned into a client, but its early days yet!

In fact the other evening at a PR/marketing network event I was speaking with someone in web design who said that their firm had had around 4 new contracts through Twitter. Interestingly, the contacts had come through individuals who worked at the firm on their personal Twitter accounts, not from a corporate Twitter account.

When we get our first client over the line from Twitter, we’ll certainly let you know.

Brand monitoring

Want to know if anyone is talking about your business on Twitter? As above, just type your business name into the search box and see what comes up. I did this recently for a large multinational brand and came across some comments made by someone in Brisbane directly of interest to a colleague who works with that company. If you know what’s being said, particularly if it’s not complimentary, you can do something about it (see our previous post).

Meeting gurus

The other day I was sitting at my desk working when the Tweetdeck application I have in the background chirped and I checked my “Tweets”. A digital media guru I follow (@cameronreilly) was in a cafe about 100m away and had just complained about the coffee. I nipped down to say hi and he ended up buying me a beer (it was a Friday) and we had a very interesting conversation. If the cafe had been on Twitter (or perhaps their PR/marketing people) they might have been able to respond to a complaint that (in theory) could have been read by all of Cameron’s 9,653 followers.

By the way…

You don’t actually have to be registered with Twitter to search messages – you can do this straight from the Twitter home page. So, unless you want to be able to respond to people from within Twitter, you can do most of the things above without signing up or being an active participant in the system.

Groundswell – winning in a world transformed by social technologies

This book, written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, analysts at Forrester Research in the US, is essentially a series of case studies of how companies have used social technologies such as blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter etc to engage with their customers.

The main premise of the book is that people – that is people who could well be (or who are already) your customers – are engaging in discussions and conversations online about your products and your company, whether you like it or not.

Your company can do very little about this, so the message is that companies need to enter this realm and engage these people. The authors admit this is a scary thought for many businesses, as it involves moving away from traditional marketing, based on one-way communication, to a more immediate ‘conversational’ and informal style.

Although some case studies in the book are of large, predominantly US-based IT businesses, such as Salesforce and Dell, there are also studies from non IT sectors (Lego, Del Monte) and smaller businesses like a South African winery and an online luggage store.

The many examples cited in the book range from Lego using the ‘groundswell’ to engage the AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego – who account for 5-10% of Lego’s entire business), to Dell dealing with a growing reputation problem (think “Dell Hell” and laptop batteries catching fire). Dell did this by talking directly to customers through blogs and forums. This last move – cleverly – allows knowledgeable customers to answer new owners’ tech questions about their computers, thus saving Dell a fortune in customer service costs.

Even if you’re not a big player like Dell, you can’t ignore the growing chatter online. If you’re in it you at least have a chance to engage with your present and potential customers, and you can even turn around negative sentiment with the right approach.

And remember – if you’re not there you can bet some of your competitors soon will be. If they’re not there already, that is.

Jump on Google and tap in this question and you’ll see you’re not alone if you’re wondering what Twitter is all about. I took a look at it about six months ago but only really got to grips with it over the Christmas break.

Twitter itself started in 2006 (see this Wikipedia entry) but it only reached its ‘tipping point’ in the last few months, with a current estimated 6 million users worldwide.

How Does It Work?
Basically, Twitter allows you to send short messages (a maximum of 140 characters) out to the Twitter network. Originally used by friends, family members and co-workers to keep in touch – much like an internet equivalent of SMS – Twitter has evolved into something much more useful from a business perspective, if only due to the huge increase in the number of users.

Twitter allows you to ‘follow’ people ie read their messages (called ‘tweets’) and in the same way people can follow you as well.

When I started off I decided to follow Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull just to see what they had to say, and then slowly added people I knew – business and personal contacts – as well as people whose newsletters I subscribe to, or authors of business books I have read recently. What I found was that as I followed other people, they would often follow me back, so my list of ‘followers’ has grown as quickly as the list of people I follow.

You can search Twitter for people, but it’s also easy to search the overall Twitter conversation by topic, or geographic area (eg ‘Brisbane’).

So – how does Twitter help my business?
Much like a blog (see our previous post on blogs) – in fact Twitter is sometimes referred to as a ‘microblogging’ site – Twitter is a way of talking regularly to your ‘fan base’, for want of a better analogy.

You can use it to notify people of your business news – for example if you have added a new blog entry, or you have written a new report or whitepaper, or if you are speaking at an event. Twitterers also use the service very effectively to ask questions and during the recent terrorist attack in Mumbai, Twitter users were the first to know what was going on – ahead of the media – as people who were caught up in the attack updated their friends on what was happening using Twitter on their mobile phones.

So Twitter may be a marketing tool you can add to your armoury if you want to get information out to the world. But not everyone is a fan of Twitter, as you can see from these recent forum posts I found here when I Googled “Can somebody please explain Twitter?”.