- Jan 09
- 29
Strike While the Iron is Hot with Social Media Marketing
- Posted by Megan Weintraub
- Published in Social Media Marketing
Although the economic ground beneath our feet is squishy at best, we’re standing in a particularly sweet spot in the world of social media marketing. As more marketers turn to blogging, microblogging and social networks to build brand loyalty, the social media services themselves continue to wrestle with how to make a profit off all of our online activity.
Twitter has finally hired its first business development executive as it continues to look into pay-per-tweet and advertising revenue streams while Facebook has implemented a fairly lucrative advertising model and even manages to convince some of us to purchase digital “gifts” for our online “friends.” MySpace has found currency, both literally and figuratively, in the music world, as it offers bands a forum to reach new audiences and build their online following.
While these social networks flesh out their budget plans, marketers continue to search for the best way to retain customers and find cost-efficient strategies to communicate with them. As the economic forecast calls for more gloom in the coming months, those marketers who have managed to hold onto their jobs need to find a way to keep their brands in front of their customers without depleting their company’s remaining funds. Now is the time to shed your misgivings about social media marketing. Until these services start charging a registration and usage fee, it’s too costly to your own business objectives NOT to try them out.
With that said, remember that the only solid social media strategy for your business is the one that works. There is no one, perfect way to maximize the reach and scope of Facebook or Ning or Digg. If you create a space in which you can continually offer compelling content and value to your customers and prospects, then they will return. Simply put, the old excuses for why your business can avoid dipping its toe in the social media marketing pool no longer work.
Social media marketing takes too much time to set up and monitor
In the time it took you to read the opening paragraph of this post, you could have signed up for a new Twitter account, written the topic sentence of your next blog post, or invited twenty people to become fans of your business on Facebook. While it’s true that social media marketing requires attention and upkeep, you will get the hang of it with enough practice. Over time, you’ll develop your own voice and get a sense of the type of communication your customers and prospects react to the best.
Social media marketing can’t possibly bring value to my business
According to a 2008 study by Cone, 59 percent of Americans regularly use social media, and of those, 56 percent find a stronger connection with brands that have established some sort of interactive social media environment. While the ROI of social media marketing can be difficult to calculate, social media’s intangible bang-for-your-buck is as a lead-nurturing tool. You might not make a direct sale through Twitter marketing (although Dell certainly has), but you will help your business to stay in front of its future customers, so that once the economic ground grows more solid, you’ll be in the right position to move forward.
In other words, social media marketing has grown from a fringe service into a viable marketing strategy for companies of all sizes. As Americans spend more time in online environments, it’s more important than ever before to solicit feedback and generate forums where you can demonstrate your company’s expertise. And while Twitter twiddles its thumbs over how to make money off of 140-character tweets, marketers can test a rich array of free services to communicate with their customer base and wait out the storm.
This is a guest post from Megan. Subscribe to our feed if you’d like to hear more of her thoughts in the near future.
No Comments- Jan 09
- 27
Political Relevance and Social Networks
- Posted by Brennan White
- Published in Social Networks
or “Now that social networks have become politically and legally relevant, where the hell are you?”
The American Idol/Social Network Generation knows no world without the internet. Online video and other bandwidth-heavy experiences, to many of this generation, are as reliable as gravity. Be they fresh out of college or still bushwacking through the various levels of school, the people of this generation are known for rejecting traditional ways of consuming news such as print and television, and embracing newer, instantaneous ways such as websites, Twitter and now Facebook. Traditional ways of consuming information are increasingly coming up short as the definition of “news” becomes more literal every day and this generation is spearheading the change-over.
Over the past few years, social networks, once single-purpose tools for students trying to keeping in touch, have integrated themselves ever more fully into the fabric of the larger global society. After the college crowd, Facebook and other social networking sites expanded into the professional realm as a centralized tool to meet and keep in touch with professional contacts. After a more diverse cross section of people (and corporations) began to spend significant portions of their time on social networks, people began looking for social network-based outlets for information like news and politics.
The most recent, and possibly the most powerful, of these groups are the multitude of groups devoted to sharing photos from the recent Gaza conflict. Using photos of mangled and murdered children (be warned: very disturbing images), the groups are effectively presenting an unheard version of truth about a conflict that is a world away and making it hard for any user of social networking sites to ignore.
Recently, people have been using the groups and apps built into these sites as ways to even challenge and protest legal rulings. While many of these movements are largely symbolic, check out the millions of dollars possibly lost by Cinemark (to the tune of 4%+ of Sales) due to unpopular campaign donations by the CEO. With social networks taking such a large role in many aspects of society and people using social networks as a place to share their deepest concerns with the larger world, companies who resist social networks in favor of more traditional advertising need to ask themselves if their reasons for avoiding social network advertising are out of prudence, or out of fear.
Even if you fear these new locations as places to engage in marketing, in this recession, might it make sense to lay a foundation on these networks so that you have them as outlets for your message during the coming boom times? The financial and PR risk are significantly lower than other types of marketing, so what’s stopping you from reading some Chris Brogan or calling a successful social network marketing company? Ignore social networks, their communities and the marketing and messaging opportunities they offer at your peril.
3 Comments- Jan 09
- 22
President Obama Makes the Internet Work For Him
- Posted by Matt Peters
- Published in Social Media Marketing
At 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time on January 20, 2009 Barrack Obama became the 44th President of the United States of America. At exactly the same time, and with considerably less ceremony, the official White House website transformed. It is undoubtedly a sign of the times that the “peaceful transfer of power” includes a website roll over. That alone could be the topic of a dissertation.
It is a much discussed fact that President Obama used the power of the web and of new media more during his campaign than any other candidate in the history of this country. What I find particularly interesting, however, is that this masterful use of new media marketing did not stop when he placed his hand on the Lincoln Bible. Quite the contrary, it appears that they Obama political machine plans to use the internet and new media tools as much for governing as it did for campaigning.
Upon first landing on WhiteHouse.gov, I am struck first by the slick, modern, elegant feel – something I have come to expect from the Obama camp. (For an intersting comparison to the previous White House website, check out this Gizmodo post). My primary concern, however, is not the look, but the integration of new, social, and dynamic web elements.
For fun, I pulled up the page source and glanced at the code and was surprised to see six auto-discovery RSS feeds:
- Agenda Articles Feed
- Press Office Feed
- OMB News Article Feed
- Blog Feed
- Photo Gallery Feed
- Video Feed
Oddly enough, it appears that the blog feed is the only one that is currently active. Nevertheless, excuse the somewhat juvenile excitement here, but how cool is it that the leader of the free world has blog, photo, and video feeds. (Please note that I am fully aware that President Obama is neither blogging nor running this website, but it is no less exciting that the office of the President has undertaken these things.)
The official blog of the new White House is prominently featured on the front page, and I cannot help but think that this is my new ammunition against the crusty old executive who asks, “why the hell do we need a blog?”
The blog itself isn’t much yet, but if you go to the front page of the blog, you can see that the first five posts were all published at 12:01 PM. Looking at the front page right on innauguration day, I could not help but notice that the very nature of this blog reinforces a sense of rebirth…it simply starts at 12:01 PM as if there was nothing before it.
Further exploration of the Obama Administration’s new website reveals an as-yet-empty section for President Obama’s weekly video address. There are no videos yet, but I would bet $20 that the video players have full shareabilty functions like one click embedding.
I finish my tour of the new White House website by visiting the contact page where I read “President Obama is committed to creating the most open and accessible administration in American history.” I’m generally too cynical to put stock in such statements, but compared to the previous White House website, this site is already taking huge steps toward being open and accessible.
Senator Obama showed the incredible power of new media marketing during his campaign, and it appears that President Obama will continue to leverage that power as he governs this nation. I will be following the evolution of the White House website in order to see if its promise of social connection is truly realized. I’m sure it will take a few months to get everything together, but make sure to check back in for my update of the reality of this new website.
2 Comments- Jan 09
- 20
Don’t Dismiss Twitter Marketing
- Posted by Clint Fralick
- Published in Advice and Tips, Online Reputation Management, Social Media Marketing
Just before Christmas, the venerable Seth Godin proclaimed that brands have little to gain from being on Twitter because they cause “the clutter of the impersonal.” Once again reminding us that traditional interruption advertising is selfish, he calls out Dell, P & B, and Dunkin’ Donuts for asking the medium to do something for them instead of doing something for the medium.
While you need only be on Twitter for a day or two to see that there’s a great deal of spam and bad corporate Twitter marketing (the exact sort of impersonality that Godin dislikes) there are also a number of
companies doing it right. Their Twitter voice–which, importantly, is not a corporate voice but the voice of a real person with a name–is entirely personal. Their updates constitute a very real and genuine conversation. Is there some corporate promotional material mixed in there? Sure, but to no greater degree than in the feeds of the oft-tedious Twitterati or countless entrepreneurs and marketers who pump their blogs and trade links while they complain about their commutes and talk about their weekend skiing trips. That many companies can’t break away from their suited monotone doesn’t mean that ALL companies can’t.
Take Starbucks–or, as I should say, Brad from Starbucks. Considering that over 30,000 people follow Brad, he does an excellent job answering questions and talking to people. His tweets aren’t overly clever or exceptionally charming. But then again, neither are Barack Obama’s, and quite a few people seem to think he’s fantastic at Twitter.
Or take Dunkin’ Donuts. (Full disclosure: We’ve consulted with Dunkin’ Donuts on their Twitter marketing strategy.) Dave over at Dunkin’ Donuts was tweeting about the sub-zero temperatures in Chicago a few days ago, and he even had time to give someone a little ribbing about her math. Again, does he post some promotional information and some business content? Of course. But, as a native Bostonian I can tell you that, while I may not really care to see every link that Chris Brogan thinks is cool or know when ijustine is going running or watching CNN, I definitely want to know if Dunkin’ Donuts is giving away free coffee or opening up a new shop near me.
Godin, who recently treated print journalism on his blog with a similarly dismissive wave of his hand, wants to know why someone is “going to spend time with Dunkin’ Donuts unless there is something in it for you?” With all due respect to his larger point, it doesn’t seem to follow, logically, that anyone on Twitter (or on Social Networks, for that matter) could spend time with someone they get nothing from. The beauty of Twitter is that you can opt-in and opt-out whenever you want. 30,000 people follow Starbucks. Clearly, they see value. More than that follow Chris Brogan and iJustine (even though I don’t). They wouldn’t if they didn’t see value.
While Twitter marketing may not in itself be a direct line to sales, it is a direct line to increased brand loyalty. And when you consider that the cost of creating, designing, and maintaining an interesting Twitter profile is very low, it’s unwise to be as dismissive of the idea as Godin appears to be.
7 Comments- Jan 09
- 15
Digital PR Etiquette and Your Social Marketing Plan
- Posted by Clint Fralick
- Published in Advice and Tips, Blogging, Social Media Marketing
The last thing any of us needs is more useless e-mail. If you’re like me, you spend the first few minutes of your day riffling through your inbox to filter out the detritus. You sort quickly: internal business, clients, friends, mailing lists. Mixed in there, as always, are the emails from marketers touting some new service, some revolutionary project, or some website I “might be interested in”. Let’s be honest: It’s not as if I think people shouldn’t be sending these introductions. On the contrary, networking with other bloggers and seeing if they’re interested in what you do is part of any social marketing plan. But you need to do your research before you reach out, and you need to have some genuine interest in the blogs and bloggers you contact. A canned, formulaic e-mail that you send to me and hundreds of other people is going right in our collective garbage cans.
Take this e-mail we received as an example of how not to reach out to a blogger or business online (please note that I altered the company URL for confidentiality):
Dear webmaster, We want to inform you that recently we have launched a website called www.failrail.com. FailRail.com is a website that allows visitors to view, create and compare timelines. These timelines can be illustrated with pictures, text, YouTube movies and MP3. On our website, you will find timelines about music, movies, history, politics, art et cetera. The website is very educational, so our site is very popular among teachers and students.We noticed that your blog is focused on internet. We would be grateful if you could post an article about Failrail.com on your blog.
This company could be interesting, and their service could be fantastic. I’ll still never write about them because of their impersonal social marketing. They turned me off with “Dear Webmaster” (I’d much rather get a simple, human-style “Hey there” or “Hello”) and they lost all hope with “We noticed that your blog is focused on internet.” Hack work like this shows only 2 things: you’re not taking your product seriously, and you’re not taking your audience seriously. The PR component of a good social marketing plan has to begin with your genuine interest. Whether you’re a blogger looking to network or a business looking to get some buzz, put all that business about traffic and clicks aside for a moment and invest yourself in the bloggers and sites that you’d like to network with. If you can’t find anything that interests you or that you’d like to comment on, save yourself and the blogger time and move on to someone else.
The dangers of spamming bloggers with canned e-mails are extreme. The best-case scenario? Your e-mail will get ignored and your web site or company will go on that blogger’s mental blacklist. You may forget—indeed, you never really cared to begin with—but the blogger will not forget. The worst-case scenario, of course, is that your careless e-mail will appear in a post like this, exposing your misstep to a fairly large audience. (We were nice enough to change the name of the company, but not all bloggers are as kind.) Regardless of the reaction you get, your social marketing plan isn’t going to be effective if you’re alienating nearly 9 out of 10 people you contact.
For the digital PR component of every social marketing plan I work on, I probably spend about 75% of my time doing research. I would much rather send out 5 e-mails to interesting writers who I would read even if I wasn’t in the business of doing digital PR than send out 50 or 100 e-mails to whoever happens to be at the top of the Blogged.com or Technorati search results. I’m interested in bloggers that write innovative, engaging content. Those writers, those few, are the people I want to help me generate buzz.
Further, when I do write to a blogger for the first time, I almost never “pitch” them. I talk to them about the articles that I like or tell them why I enjoy the blog overall. Quite often I’ll say how I ended up reading the blog because I’m always interested in how people find the blogs I write for, and I tend to think other bloggers feel the same way. My goal, simply, is to get a conversation going and see if there’s a potential fit. One of the biggest mistakes people and companies who are new to social marketing make is viewing the first contact as a selling opportunity. This isn’t traditional business, and this isn’t traditional selling. Even those who blog for a living are still doing it primarily to share their voice and their ideas; helping you share your ideas or make money isn’t their priority.
Then again, most of the digital PR e-mails we receive reveal that most people aren’t even ready to think about the sell/non-sell question. They’re still struggling with the fundamental element I talked about earlier: Actually reading and being genuinely interested in the bloggers they decide to contact. In this e-mail pitch we received, the writer assumes that we’re going to be just overcome with enthusiasm for her company’s SEO quiz:
Dear Search Blogger, I wanted to let you know about a really cool contest we launched earlier this month at www.nondescriptlink.com. The Contest will identify the Biggest Search Geek in the SEM industry. Please take a look and test your SEM smarts! So far over 800 people have taken the test, and the top score is only a 71.25%, so the test is really quite difficult. See if you can beat the current Search Geek.Try the test today: www.nondescriptlink.com, or post about it on your blog!
Like the first e-mail, this one commits the mistake of openly asking me to write about their contest. There’s no need to ask. I know why you’re writing. Spend that valuable space getting me more intrigued, and we can talk about how interested I am in posting an article about it later on. Or use that space to make your case that my readers would like to hear about your contest. This e-mail also commits an even larger error: the salutation tells me the writer has never even riffled through the post titles on PandemicBlog. “Dear Search Blogger”? As much as I dislike “Dear Webmaster,” I’d rather be addressed with a vanilla catch-all term than with something I am fundamentally not. “Dear Webmaster” is like meeting your friend’s dog Rusty for the first time and saying “Hello Animal.” “Dear Search Blogger” is like saying “Hello Anteater.”
If I’m seem overly vitriolic about this, it’s because the etiquette of digital PR—indeed, of social marketing in general—isn’t difficult to understand, provided you can separate yourself from the formality and hard-sell habits of traditional business. Much of it is common sense. Do like the bloggers you choose to contact. Spend most of your digital PR time with reading and research. Don’t go in with a selling attitude, but instead think of it as one student talking to another, one thinker talking to another, and one writer talking to another. Never send an e-mail to a blog if you can’t give an impromptu summary of what it’s about and why it’s interesting. And, above all else, don’t confuse dogs and anteaters. This is, after all, social marketing. It behooves you to at least get names right.
19 CommentsOr “How NOT to alienate your core fans by marketing media”
Imagine you’re a marketing and media manager of a popular television show with a loyal (dare I say ‘fanatical’) following. The fans of this show eagerly await each new piece of media you deign to drop their way the way a pack of hungry dogs awaits a dangling morsel. These are the fans that you see posting thousands of posts on the show’s official boards and traveling thousands of miles to score a single autograph: saying they’re “engaged” doesn’t even begin to capture the level of loyalty they possess that is just waiting for confirmation and recognition.
Imagine now all of the amazing things you, as a savvy marketer, could accomplish with these loyal fans on your side. Whether you create a detailed, crowd-sourced, social network that persists between seasons; an army of user-generated videos on sites like YouTube, Metacafe and Break.com; or a word of mouth marketing effort to spread the show’s message virally, the options for marketing media powerfully over the long term are endless when you have such an congregation ready to preach the show’s evangel.
Now imagine one final scenario: you’re the person in charge of marketing with media’s most loyal fans. Imagine that, due to a shortsighted outlook, hasty decision or pressure from your superiors, you made a decision that backfired. A decision that, no matter how much you tried reverse, spin or explain, alienated a significant portion of these perfect evangelists. More specifically, imagine that you put a lot of investment and effort into giving your fans high quality, exclusive media to enjoy between seasons and something you did in the process not only turned away some of your fans, but also made it hard for the rest of your fans to access and experience this exclusive media.
This would be a terrible use of these loyal fans by our imaginary media marketing manager, no? If I were that manager, I would call up Monster.com and begin marketing my resume the very next day.
The reason I’ve taken you down this imagination rabbit hole for so long is to remove branding associations and other distractions from a very recent, real-life scenario from which I derived the above story. As an open and unrepentant (dare I say “fanatical”) Battlestar Galactica fan, it is particularly disappointing for me to say that this egregious error of marketing media was committed against me and my fellow BSG fans by the Sci-fi Channel.
After taking almost a year off in the middle of the final season of the show, the Sci-fi Channel released 20 BSG webisodes titled “The Face of the Enemy” designed to satiate the hunger for more BSG media and to combat the negative effect they had already caused with the needless hiatus (10 webisodes and 10 “enhanced” versions of the webisodes with writer commentary).
The webisodes clearly required a lot of care and investment as they are as intricate, emotional and CG-heavy as the series that spawned them. Totaling approximately 60 minutes of perfectly-crafted content, the webisodes were pitched as “a series of revelations you won’t see on the show”. This is the kind of content that makes a fan like myself go crazy and immediately begin the armchair quarterbacking that often goes with being a disciple of such a mysterious and multi-faceted show. In short, I’m the target audience for this type of content.
Enter the marketing error so egregious that it has spawned it’s own ‘media marketing fail’ blog post: marketing other media, before the desired media with pre-roll advertising. Nothing makes a loyal fan feel less important than having to watch the same 30-second trailer before each of the 20 four-minute webisodes. To remove the math from your day, that means watching 10 minutes worth of the same commercial in an hour. That’s watching the same commercial every four minutes for 20 iterations.
To put it another way: Would you have an anniversary ring made specifically for your wife/husband and require that they sang 30 seconds of the Barney the Dinosaur theme song before they put the ring on each day? If you’re answering ‘no’ (and for your spouse’s sake I hope you are), why would you create expensive, specialized, micro-targeted content, then impede the exact group you spent such care catering to from enjoying that content 110%?
Is the Sci-fi channel so in need of dollars that they can risk alienating the best fans of one of their two successful shows? Can anyone in any creative or marketing position justify taking that risk?
This is indicative of a larger issue that I touched last year at the bottom of a post with a seemingly irrelevant title: Viral Marketing in the Fabric Industry? Then, the idea was crystalized as “pre-roll ads are dead”. Now I’m expanding the conclusion to “marketing media by interrupting other (desired) media is dying.” It’s not elegant, but it’s a point that needs to be made.
In an on-demand platform (the internet), if I’m trying to watch something specific and have to sit through other media first (irrelevant media of your choosing), you’ve already lost me. If you have the audacity to make me watch the same piece of media over and over before the media I’m looking for, I don’t care how awesome your content is purported to be, I’ll pass or wait and find that content elsewhere.
Not only is this marketing tactic offensive to your best customers, it’s lazy. “Cram more advertisements in” shouldn’t pass the wise marketing decision bar anymore. The internet has evolved passed its first iteration and now has sufficient variability to allow for brain cells to be expended in the form of creativity when attempting to win the business of your fans.
Or as Seth Godin puts it to Verizon in regards to Verizon’s mobile advertising strategy in late 2006, “Do you really want to alienate millions of users [fans] by giving us something we don’t need and don’t want?”
While nothing short of force majeure will stop me from watching the final episodes of BSG starting 1/16/09, nothing will get me to sit in front of Sci-fi’s botched effort to make a few extra bucks at the expense of their best fans. The sooner companies abandon this half-baked strategy of marketing media, the sooner they will be able to fully leverage their evangelists and completely monetize their content.
2 Comments- Jan 09
- 9
Walking the Blog Marketing Walk
- Posted by Matt Peters
- Published in Blogging, Social Media Marketing
It has been a long time since we posted on this blog. It’s no secret, we’re not trying to hide that we completely dropped the blogging ball for almost a full six months. The explanation for why we fell of the face of the blogosphere is as simple as it is inadequate: we got very busy. The last half of 2008 was a fantastic time for Pandemic Labs, the company that runs this blog, and unfortunately, when we had to start pruning tasks off of our 20 hours days, writing blog posts was one of the first things to go.
The blogorati will tell you that we have committed one of the cardinal blog marketing sins, and for the past half year we were frequently hit with pangs of new media guilt. Would our readers still be there when we got back? Would they every forgive us? Would we have to start over?
The purpose of this post, however, is not to atone for our absence, but to share some interesting things we learned about the effects (and the lack of affects) of such an interruption in a blog marketing strategy.
The Negatives
I seem to have misplaced my traffic: The most noticeable effect of our sojourn off the shores of blogland was the decrease in traffic to our site. This point is almost so basic that it need not be mentioned. New blog posts bring new traffic, therefore no new posts means no new traffic. Our site, of course, has many other sources of traffic, but the lack of traffic from fresh blog posts was certainly noticeable.
This screenshot is from our Google Analytics. The blue line is traffic from a period of time during the second half of 2008 when we weren’t blogging; the green line is traffic during an equal amount of time when we were blogging. You can clearly see the type of traffic spikes we received when new blog posts were published.
Forget me not, thou rankers of blogs: There are hundreds, if not thousands, of sites that rank blogs (Technorati, AdAge Power 150, The Big List, just to name a few.) You do not have to be blogging for long (especially if you are using your blog for marketing purposes) to develop an addiction to appearance on and upward movement in these rankings. PandemicBlog was doing well in more than a few rankings, but we have taken a hit in all of them. Examples:
- In August 2008, PandemicBlog was ranked 38th on the Junta42 Top Blogs list. Today, we are 111th. Yikes!
- In August 2008, PandemicBlog was ranked in the mid 300’s on the AdAge Power 150. Today, we are #640. Double yikes!
- In August 2008, Pandemic Blog had a Technorati Authority over 100. Today it is 44. Ouch!
The conclusion here is clear. You can’t stay ranked if you don’t post. We knew that was a danger, but we had to put immediate client business first.
Oh Pandemic Labs, you have disappointed me so: The final negative was not so much noticed as felt. As a new media marketing agency, we were keenly aware of the hypocritical message that could be interpreted by our failure to blog. As we set up blogs for clients, I couldn’t help feel a deep parental voice nagging, “Do what I say, not what I do.” On more than one occasion at various social media events around Boston, I was called out on the irony of running a social media company that couldn’t even find the time to blog. Depending on my mood, I would either docilely accept the rebuke, or respond with a point about how having so many clients that there was just too much work to do was a viable excuse for not blogging.
The Not Negatives
Notice that this section is called the “not negatives.” There are no positives to not blogging for six months…other than the added time you get in your work week.
Oldies but Goodies: As noted in point 1 above, the lack of new
blog posts during the second half of 2008 resulted in decreased site traffic. What I find most interesting is that the traffic hit was not as severe as I would have thought. The reason for this is because of the quality of the posts we already had. I am a huge proponent of the fact that “the internet never forgets.” A great post does not cease being a great post as time elapses. If you write high quality material, it will still be high quality next year, and the year after, and the year after. If you don’t believe me, pay attention to the publish dates of the posts you find in your next weeks worth of Google searches. I bet dollars to donuts that you find a bunch from 2006. PandemicBlog has a few such posts:
- Why You Shouldn’t Stumble Yourself
- The Paradox of Self-Promotion with Social Media
- Viral Marketing to Generation Why
These posts are like blue chip stocks that you buy and just hold for decades. It doesn’t matter how old these posts are, they bring in consistent, high-quality traffic every day. These posts kept our blog marketing strategy not just alive, but thriving. Throughout our five month blogging absence our blog still brought in leads and good discussion and I credit power posts like those above.
Absence makes the feed grow stronger: Ok, I admit it, that statement is not entirely accurate. But, “Absence does not necessarily make the feed lose subscribers” would have been a terrible intro line for this paragraph. The fact of the matter is that in our five months off the blog marketing wagon, we have seen no discernible drop in subscriber count. I take this as further proof of a theory I have long held and was partially influenced by the writings of DoshDosh. This theory holds that most RSS subscribers will not unsubscribe from your feed for not publishing. It may seem strange. If you subscribe to the New York Times and they stop delivering to your house, you would probably complain or cancel. But if a blogger doesn’t post for a month, I may not even notice. The absence of their feed in the mess that is my feed reader will likely pass unnoticed. I think the main reasons people unsubscribe to feeds are as follows (in this order):
- Bad Content – if you publish crap, people will stop subscribing
- Too Much Content – If you monopolize someone’s feed reader by posting 20 times per day, you might lose them.
- No Content – Every once in a while, we all do feed reader cleaning. These are the times when those “dead” feeds are likely to get weeded out.
The Conclusion
If you, like many of our clients, are undertaking a blog marketing strategy, taking large chunks of time between posts is bad. It is important to have a schedule and stick to it. It is even more important to produce quality content, not just dribble. Perhaps most important, and the reason I have written this post, is to realize that if your blog marketing strategy works, it will bring you business. That business will make your company busier. Amid the shuffle and the long days and the deadlines, please take a step back and remember that it was partly your blog that brought you to this busy-yet-awesome business state. Don’t push it into the broom closet. Here at Pandemic Labs, we are taking a bit of our medicine and charging into 2009 with our keyboards blazing. Blogging is fundamental to who we are, and we’re back.
4 Comments