Blogs on the Inside

Blogs can be every bit as powerful inside the organization as they can outside, and in many instances even more so. Mounted on an intranet and made available to employees, blogs can serve as one of the most effective knowledge-sharing tools a company can implement.

• - Intranet is similar to the Internet captured within an organization

• - Intranets can be comprised of e-mail and transfer

The One Requirement: Employees as Publishers

• Biggest obstacle faced by organizations when tapping into blogs is the resistance to the idea that any employee can publish their ideas and thoughts
• Presents a new avenue for knowledge transfer
• Distinct from message boards in that they are built for conversation and not soley free-wheeling discussions. There is an element of control with blogs.
• Categories of blogs:
• Project Blogs - project journals and project tem blogs
• News Blogs - social networking, more informal
• Customer and Competitor Blogs - knowing the customer and competitors
• Cross-Functional Team Blogs - Web Developers, Subject matter experts, Ad hoc teams and Standing teams.
• Individual Employee Blogs - unstructured and informal
• Department Blogs - community generated and/or authored by department manager
• CEO Blogs - can replace company magazines or newsletters as quick thoughts
  
• Business Unit Leader Blogs - from business leaders to workers within their departments.

How to Make Money with Blog

Most business blogs have a role in supporting a pre-existing venture. It is important to remember the prime role of a blog in an organization. Blogs can be used to eandorse and earn money from sales of complementary products.

Two methods can be used to make money from blogs: Explicit and Implicit.

• Explicit - obvious and something done specifically for remuneration. Not subtle, but expressly asks for donations and/or runs advertisements.
• Implicit - subtle and only may highlight products or services. May subtlety endorse a link to a complimentary blog or website.

Advertisements

• All about promotion of ideas and products. Be careful about your market and what you choose to advertise. Some ads may cause people to steer away from your blog while some may attract readers

• Advertiser Payment Plans
• Pay per Impression
• Pay per Click
• Pay per Sale
• Pay per Placement

• Why Not Advertise on Your Blog?
• May cheapen your blog
• May make it seem more trusted (if the right adds appear and add class or trust to your blog) - in other words - not out of place adds on your blog.

• Google AdSense
• Can place context-sensitive advertisements on any blog or Web page. Very little control as to the adds displayed

Affiliate Programs

• Defined as a practice of paying a finder's fee for introducing new business.
  

Donations

• Blogs can ask for donations (may utilize PayPal)
  
• Two Reasons:
• the reader likes the blog and wants to support it (many can be charitable organizations or other non-profits)
  
• the blog is a noncommercial or very small business blog that provides useful information or entertainment

How to Make Money with Blog
Many promotion techniques can be used. Three main categories of promotion: Self-promotion, Listings and Social Networking.

Self-Promotion

• Tell Everyone - put the word out on your blog and make it easy to navigate
  
• Write Great Content - make your point clear. What is the mission of your blog? Who is your target audience? Done "get off" topic or your market will be compromised.
  
• Enhance Subscription Possibilities - take advantage of webhost services by tapping into feeds
• Talk Up the Blog - this goes along with the "Tell Everyone" heading - utilize business cards, e-mail signatures, presentations, advertising, press releases and trades how materials.
• Enhance Your Blog's Searchability - make sure your blog is found. Give it a name that references its theme, tag posts and assign each post to a category
• Include a Blogroll - links to other relevant blogs to drive traffic to your own blog
• Encourage Return Traffic to Your Blog - get visitors to return, make sure your blog is easy to read and says on point as far as relevancy to meet your target audiences' needs, however, you can give your readers options.
  
• Give your blog and easy to remember name
• Implement an e-mail interface
• Make it easy to subscribe using popular feedreaders

• Give Away Research and Reports

Listings

• Syndication
• Manual Listings

Social Networking

• Participate in Blogging Communities - build your presence on the web and relationships with other bloggers, this helps you stay up-to-date with the blogosphere and your audience
• Comment on Other Blogs - this is integral to blogging and offer helpful and constructive insights to other blogs
• Link to Other Blog Posts - use references to other bloggers and your own material previously posted

Other Promotional Techniques

• Blog Traffic Exchanges - send visitors to your blog in exchange for you visiting other blogs
• Ping-o-Matic - www.pingomatic.com is a free service that automatically lets many services know when you've updated your blog.
  
• Too-Good-to-Be-True Traffic Building Techniques - some offers to build traffic are simply too good to be true. These use short term tricks to fool search engines and my eventually ban your result in a search engine.
  

Promoting An Intranet Blog

• Target audience is employees and is for internal use only
• Use on relevant internal pages and promote for use in projects
• Create and email list (web feed) for blog updates
• Create a blog message board, issues/questions page. This adds to community
  

Measuring the results of your blog - Chapter 12

The book points out how important it is to somehow measure how blogging efforts are performing based on your goals. There are several services available to obtain metrics. WebTrends will tell you how many people are looking at your blog. MyStatCounter provides a variety of stats including the paths your visitors have followed, a keyword a visitor used to find your blog and the most popular pages visited.

The book also instructs blog creators how they can use polls and surveys to capture necessary data to determine the effectiveness of their blog. The authors are clear about one message: "Having a blog is great, but unless you can measure its effectiveness, you may not be reaping its full benefits"

Pulling in the Reader

How do you get people to visit your blog? This seems to be the biggest challenge of blogging. One can always ensure that their content is informative, valid, and credible...but if no one comes to read it, what good is it?

The Blogging for Business book does a good job of informing its reader of how a person could attract blog readers. It stresses the importance of being active in the "blogosphere" and providing links to your blog from other blogs. This activity in the blogosphere is more important than one may think. In order to have people interested in your blog, you must first show interest in other's blogs.

Creating a Blog

It seems relatively easy to create a blog. This one was set up in no time! I did not realize how many different blogging softwares existed. I was familar with this one, hence the reason I used it for this blog. Businesses may want to evaluate a hosted solution, but must be willing to accept some of the risks associated with that (less flexible, company may go out of business or stop hosting blogs). The other option is to have a nonhosted solution, in which case the company is responsible for securing the blog, backing it up and which type of hardware is used to host the blog.

After creating the blog, it is important that a company publish well edited and reviewed posts on a consistent basis. Blogs can also present a profile of the authors, generate revenue (through advertising) and be set up to feed new posts to subscribed readers.

Adding to the Blog Roll

I have been adding links to other blogs to the blog roll as I read the book. Reason being...the book actually references many other blogs that seem interesting and are affliated with the topic at hand.
The blog roll helps to monitor blogs of interest. In addition, a company's blogroll can be used to link to other organizations as well as blogs of 'fans' of the organization.

I am enjoying the book

I am enjoying reading this book. It is actually a pretty easy read. Most of what I read seems logical and the theories are understandable. Probably because I am somewhat familar with the use of blogs. I just finished reading Chapters 4 through 6 today. I found it interesting that there are companies and independants that instead of creating their own blog they piggy back on someone elses, or have bloggers write for them. This practice reminds me of when an author "ghost writes" (i.e. Stephen King wrote under the name Richard Bachman). It seems to work though.

The Advertising aspect to blogging is interesting too. Some of it seems like a pyramid scheme (multilayer progams where the blogger gets revenue for the first-level person who joins an affliate program as well as anyone else who joins as a result of the first-level person).

Chapter 4 Notes

Chapter 4: Monitoring the Blogosphere

• Organizations care about what the media says about them
• Monitoring media is important, and today that means monitoring blog
• Often bloggers are the first to right about new information
  o Monitoring blogs allows you to know what others are saying about you
  o Monitoring blogs can assess buzz around an organization
  o Monitoring blogs allows an organization to know when it should contact someone directly

Respond to negative statements, inaccuracies, misinformation, and attacks

• Honesty is a must on a blog…if not, you will be corrected
• Blog swarm – many blogs, start posting negative material on a subject and feed off of each other’s energy
• In response to negative comments, it is important to choose the right form of response
• If your company has a blog, use it to address an attack
• If the initial attack is malicious in nature, you always have legal to turn to

Other will monitor your blogs

• Most blogs are extremely public
• It is possible to have a private blog (firewall or other limited access)
• Sometimes, when it comes to blogs, slips are made:
  Inappropriate company information is released
  Inappropriate personal topics are discussed
• Company specific mistake – a blogger releases information that is not supposed to be public information
• Many bloggers have been fired for releasing inappropriate personal information on a blog
  Because of the nature of blogs, many bloggers feel more comfortable behaving inappropriately on a blog

Search engines

• Search engines are very popular for monitoring blogs, several types exist like general purpose search engines, blog specific search engines, and RSS search engines.
• General purpose search engines – for example Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. These engines to show Blog results but are not optimized to search blogs. It’s important to know the difference in paid placement and organic results. Paid placements – usually show at the top of a results list or on the far right of the results screen. Organic – natural results driven by search. Two specialized search engines for checking on the blogosphere are Technorati and Daypop. Along with the two listed above, other general purpose search engines are described as examples.
• RSS search engines – search for information in RSS feeds. Examples are Google Blog Search, Feedster, 2RSS.com, and Blogdigger. Most blogs implement feeds.

Monitoring specific blogs

• Sometimes bloggers don’t want to search but rather read specific periodicals, newspapers, and books.
• There are many differences in traditional print media and blogs:
  There are a lot more blogs compared to other media types, this problem is often solved by bloggers using “feedreaders” or “newsreaders”

Summary

• Because competitors are doing it, it is very important to be blog monitoring

Ideas from this chapter for our presentation

• I liked his many examples of companies and how they have passed / failed in their use of blogsSometimes what he is saying seems very common sense to me, like “it is important to monitor blogs to understand what people are saying about your company”.