MackCollier.com

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So how big is #Blogchat? Here’s the stats…

As those of you that follow #Blogchat and other Twitter chats know, recent changes to Twitter’s Terms of Service have made it more difficult for 3rd party sites/apps to provide the chat transcripts that so many of us rely on.  WTHashtag, a popular site many of us used to create our own transcripts for Twitter chats, was shut down by the move.

So I was looking for a replacement to WTHashtag, and the good people at Hash Tracking reached out to me to let me look at the transcript and statistics service they offer.  What I love about their service is that first, I now have a way to provide transcripts for everyone that follows #Blogchat!  But in addition to offering a transcript, Hash Tracking also gives me some decent stats behind #Blogchat, which is something that I really didn’t get from WTHashtag (other than volume of tweets).

Here’s a screenshot of what the dashboard from last night’s report looks like:

If you’d like to view the report for yourself, you can find it here.

Now if you can’t see that picture clearly, it shows that last night’s #Blogchat had over 3,300 tweets, generated a staggering 15.9 MILLION impressions, had 445 contributors, and reached 1.7 MILLION people.  What I also love about the interface is that it gives me the ability to break down the stats and see who was tweeting the most, who was generating the most impressions, etc. And in case you were wondering, those numbers are actually down a bit from recent weeks.  For example, on May the 29th, the #Blogchat that night generated almost 20 million impressions.  I was able to break down the stats and see that several million impressions were generated by @JessicaNorthey and @ProsperityGal.  The interface also lets me see which users are the most active, so I know I need to make special effort to connect with them and thank them for participating.

Now think about what a company would have to pay to get 16 million online impressions.  Even if we assume a CPM of only one dollar, that would still cost a company $16,000 to buy as many impressions as #Blogchat generated last night.

This is one reason why I am such a big proponent of Twitter chats for companies.  If done correctly, a company could create a robust community that will help them extend and expand its brand awareness.  Just doing some quick math, if a company had a weekly Twitter chat that averaged 10 million impressions a week, that would generate  520 million impressions a year, and again assuming a CPM of $1.00, would save the company $520,000 in online advertising costs!

Something to think about, and if you or your company want to start your own Twitter chat, here’s how you can get started.

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The Importance of Creating Your Own Blogging Path

It seems that a lot of people are wanting to copy the efforts of popular bloggers.  They want to figure out how to be the next Chris Brogan or Mashable or Jessica Northey.  I wanted to talk about why I think that’s wrong, but first I wanted to tell you about a couple of my favorite bloggers (and people).

The first is Gini Dietrich.  I’m sure most of you know and love Gini and her blog, Spin Sucks.  Gini is sharp as a tack, but what I love about her writing is that its business-oriented, but personal at the same time.  Even when she is talking business, she still writes in a way that makes you think you are listening to your best friend tell you how their weekend was.  Everyone loves her writing and her style, which is exactly why she has such a passionate community of readers.  She posts almost every day, usually TWICE a day if you count guest posts on Spin Sucks, and she averages dozens of comments on her posts.  Gini’s readers love her, and as she clarified in a post here, her readers are driving business to her.

The other person I wanted to point you toward is CK.  In contrast to Gini’s 2 days a day and dozens of comments a post, CK posts about twice a month, and gets about 1-2 comments per post.  But what CK also does is have a laser-sharp focus with the content she creates via her blog, and elsewhere.  Don’t believe me?  Google ‘B2B Mobile Marketing’ and see how many of the results on the 1st page are content that CK has created.

The point here is, both Gini and CK (and you both should know each other, BTW, consider this an introduction!) have created a content strategy that works for them.  Too many of us try to replicate what is already working for someone else.  That’s THEIR strategy.  We all need to come up with our own path and our own voice.  Look at Gini, she has created a wonderful community on her blog, and that community is helping to drive business for her.  On the flipside, CK is breaking one of the biggest ‘rules’ of successful business blogging: She’s only posting once or twice a month.  But it works for her because every post is optimized and helps her expand her online footprint in the B2B marketing space.

Think about this especially if you are a solopreneur.  You are completely responsible for your blogging strategy, so you have to consider what works for YOU more than what works for anyone else.  You can and SHOULD draw inspiration from other bloggers, and you should be aware of what’s working for them.  But you should NEVER attempt to copy someone else’s strategy and approach if it’s not right for you.

Here’s a personal example:  When I started blogging in 2005, everything I read about successful blogging said to blog like Seth Godin does.  Short, quick, to the point.  Write your post as if it’s an executive summary, because no one has the patience or attention span to read more than that.

I want to tell y’all, it took me FOUR DAYS to write my very first blog post.  Because I agonized over that post for 3 days and 23 hours and 30 mins because I had no idea how in the hell I was going to condense my first blog post down to 3 paragraphs.  Finally, I said ‘screw it!’ and wrote the post *I* wanted to write, in 30 mins.  As soon as I accepted that the ‘blogging rule’ about proper post length didn’t work for me, I wrote the post I wanted to write.

And that’s made all the difference.  The beauty of blogging is that it gives us all a way to share our voice.  I told my friends at the Live #Blogchat at the B2B Forum this, but I honestly believe that most people are smarter than they give themselves credit for.  I fear that too many bloggers feel that their posts will only be popular or ‘work’ if they mimic the way a particular blogger writes.  Five years ago when I started blogging there was no David Armano or Beth Harte or Shannon Paul that I could learn from.  And no doubt they were inspired by other bloggers, but they also found their own voice and their own blogging path.

If you are losing your passion and excitement for blogging, if could simply be because you are trying to walk someone else’s path, instead of your own.

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5 Steps to Giving Your Blog Clarity and Focus

One of the most common complaints that struggling bloggers have is ‘I don’t know what the blog’s focus is’.  This is a BIG problem for a lot of bloggers, but it’s one you need to overcome if you want to truly have a successful blog.  Here’s 5 steps to getting you past this roadblock:

1 – Figure out who you are writing for.  It all starts here.  Once you figure out who you are writing for, then your content strategy to reach that audience will fall into place.  For example, I am writing this blog for companies that want to learn more about how they can successfully use social media to connect with their customers.  That’s my primary audience.

Your primary audience could be potential employers, potential clients, or your friends and family.  But whoever it is, YOU need to figure it out, because if you don’t know who you are writing for, you can best bet that your readers won’t.  And you need to pick something more concrete than ‘people that want to read my stuff’.

2 – Pick your title and tagline.  After you’ve decided who you are writing for, then look at your blog’s title and tagline.  You might not be able to do much with the title, but your tagline should explain exactly what your blog is about.  Note that mine is ‘What are you doing?  Helping companies understand the ‘social’ part of social media.’  That tells them exactly what they are getting into.

3 – Use the 3-second rule.  If someone that doesn’t know you arrives on your blog, how long will it take them to figure out what the blog is about?  If it takes longer than 3 seconds, assume they will leave.  This again, is where the tagline can really help you, because when we arrive at a new blog, we immediately look for the blog’s title/tagline, and then any pictures.  If we are confused by the title/tagline, and don’t see any pictures of the blogger, we will probably leave.

4 – Keep your sidebars clean. On a lot of blogs the sidebars are a hot mess.  In fact on some, the fancy widgets etc are actually throwing off the formatting of the entire blog.

When it comes to the sidebars, think about how the content/information/widgets you put there will help you reach your blog’s goals.  You will have a TON of options for adding stuff to the sidebar(s), but that doesn’t mean you should.  Less is often more when it comes to sidebars.  Remember, the content is the star of the blog, don’t make it take a backseat to flashy widgets and such on the sidebar.

5 – Be careful with ads on your blog.  A lot of bloggers think that they aren’t a ‘pro’ blogger until they have ads on their blog.  Or that they won’t be viewed as being a ‘serious’ blogger without ads.  Horse-hockey, ads take up space that could be given to content that could help your readers.  Period, so don’t make that tradeoff unless those ads are worth your time, and that of your readers.  Remember, the purpose of ads on a blog is to ultimately ENHANCE the experience of the blogger AND the reader.  If the ads aren’t making you any money, and aren’t relevant to the reader, then they are a total waste of time.  I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have ads on your blog, but I am saying you should only keep them if they make sense for both you and your readers.

So there are 5 quick tips for bringing clarity and focus to your blogging efforts.  If you only follow one, PLEASE pay attention to #1 and decide who you are blogging for.  Everything else will flow from that.

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Turning failure into success

I was standing behind my podium, and I began our presentation.  A minute or two into introductions and laying out the reason for our talk, I lost my train of thought.  A second or two suddenly grew into a very noticeable and pregnant pause.  I glanced across the room at my co-presenter, who was standing behind another podium, hoping he would bail me out.  The look on his face told me I was on my own.  I glanced up at the audience, and the face of my instructor in the back row of the room.  She was looking over her glasses at me with a frown that screamed ‘you aren’t prepared, are you?’

I wasn’t.  I didn’t review my notes prior to the class, thinking it would go better if I ‘just winged it’.

In reality I stopped talking about 2.3 seconds ago, but it felt as if we were in Day Three of Mack’s Great Silence.  I glanced back down at my notes, and for a brief second I seriously considered running from the classroom, even giving the door a few feet from my podium a sideways glance.

Thankfully, I found enough composure to finish the presentation, and I believe I ended up with a B in the Business Communications course.  But I just wanted out of there and left knowing that if I never had to give another presentation in my life, I would be a happy camper.

Fast forward almost exactly 9 years to last week in Boston at the B2B Forum.  As I was talking to other attendees and we were discussing our favorite sessions and especially how good the keynotes were, I caught myself thinking ‘I really wish I was presenting here’.

The lesson I’ve learned from this is that your failures can lead to successes.  I used to hate public speaking, as most introverts do.  Now I love it, because I found a way to learn from my past failures, instead of letting them define my ability to speak in public.  I learned from that horrible experience in undergrad, and now prepare meticulously for every presentation.  I always know the material well enough that I can ‘just talk about it’, and that greatly improves the quality of my presentations.

Nine years ago I was so nervous in front of a room of undergrads that I seriously considered running from the room, now I love speaking, and get paid to do so.  Life can be funny sometimes.

What failures have you used to shape your current successes?

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Congrats to the 3 blogs we’ll be reviewing at #Blogchat

If you remember last month we reviewed 4 blogs during one of our #Blogchats, a new one every 15 mins.  That #Blogchat was very popular with y’all, so I decided to make it a monthly feature!  The 3rd Sunday of every month we will review 3 blogs from #Blogchat participants.  This is a VERY small way I can hopefully repaid you guys for helping to make #Blogchat so successful.  I really do appreciate every one of you!

Now, for how we will handle tonight’s #Blogchat:  Every 20 mins starting at 8:00pm Central, we will review one of the 3 blogs listed below (they will go in the order listed).  Each blogger has given us some feedback on the areas they want us to pay close attention to, but if you see something else that catches your eye, make note of that.  And feel free to be critical of the blogs (we are trying to help each other) but please also offer suggestions for improvement.  For example, if you tell a blogger that ‘your left sidebar is really weak’, explain to them how they can make it stronger.  Just try to make sure that every time you point out that something is broken, you follow up with ‘here’s how you can fix it…’

And without further adieu,  the winnahs are…

Todd Jordan’s The Broad Brush.

Here’s Todd’s feedback for us:

1) Sidebar -> is it relevant/interesting to my blog’s focus

2) Landing pages -> serious help needed here. What can I change/add/delete- HELP!

3) Contact page specifically.

 

The Nerd Connection.

Here is Allison’s feedback for us –

I’d love to have The Nerd Connection [http://allisondduncan.com] looked at for readability. I feel like the sidebar may be too cluttered and the articles may be too indepth to garner much readership.  I’m trying to reach bloggers in general, Nerds/techies as a niche, and wordpress users as a whole.

 

Senior Care Corner.

Here is the feedback Barry gave us (BTW Barry gave INCREDIBLE feedback, if you want to get your blog chosen for one of the future Blog Review #Blogchats, give as much information as Barry did here).

Our blog is written primarily for adults who have elderly family members for whom they are caring and/or about whom they care, often while living some distance apart. The blog is first an outlet for sharing information to help both the family members and the seniors about whom they care, which is an interest of ours from both personal experience and work. We would like to earn revenue by providing attractive products/services that solve problems faced by our audience but realize we need a larger regular audience to make it meaningful financially.

We value the #BlogChat community’s suggestions regarding design changes or feature we should consider to get more repeat visitors. From our stats, the overwhelming majority of our visitors are first-timers and we would like to get more of them to return or at least to follow our content through some means. Are we making it easy enough to get our information? Does the overall visual effect of our site turn off visitors or negatively impact their perception of the information we provide?

Many #BlogChat participants are either part of our target audience or will be at some point so the feedback would be valuable from that standpoint as well as their experience with successful blogs.

 

So those are our 3 blogs that we will be reviewing tonight! Thanks to everyone that submitted their blogs, if yours wasn’t picked, please resubmit it next month!  Please visit these blogs today and make some quick notes on what you would improve about each one, paying close attention to the areas that the bloggers asked for feedback on.  This will be a lot of fun and even if your blog isn’t being reviewed, you can still learn a ton from what others have to share!  See you tonight!

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How to grow your blog by leaving it

Beau wrote me an email asking the following: “Some time ago, you wrote a post called “40 Dead Simple Ways to Get More Comments on Your Blog.” This is a great post, and #27 in particular intrigues me: “Leave comments on other blogs.” You state: “The best way to grow your blog is to leave it.”

Could you share with me briefly just how this works? How is it that commenting on other blogs brings traffic back to one’s own blog? I suppose I could always leave my blog URL in a comment on someone else’s blog, but at a certain point this seems like spamming to me. My sense is that “URL-dropping” is not exactly what you had in mind here.”

Beau thanks for the question, and here is Beau’s blog.

Let me give you an example of this idea from 2005 when I started blogging. I was completely new to blogging, and I was writing on a group advertising blog Beyond Madison Avenue. Personally, I was hoping the blog could be a tool I could use to help me land a job. So I had a very vested interest in seeing it succeed.

Now I had no idea what blogging was about, but I knew I need a lot of visitors and a lot of comments. And BMA had neither. So I started reading all the supposed ‘best’ blogs, with the thinking being that I could learn from these other bloggers what the ‘secret’ to blogging success was, and then copy it for BMA.  So for the next few weeks, I started reading and studying the top blogs religiously. At the same time, I was writing every day for BMA, sometimes as many as 4 posts a day.  Nothing was happening.  No traffic, no comments, virtual tumbleweeds were rolling by and taunting me.

And I really wasn’t learning anything from the blogs I was reading, either. But as I was reading I was discovering new blogs that were interesting, and once in a while I’d even leave a comment on a post if I thought it was interesting. Over the next couple of weeks, I discovered more blogs, and left more comments on blog posts.

Then suddenly one day, BMA started getting comments.  At first it was only a couple, then every new post we wrote would start getting comments within an hour or two.  In a week we’d gone from a blog with zero comments from readers, to one where every new post was getting 5-10 comments!

Which was amazing, but I still had no idea what had prompted the change.  Then one day a reader left a comment and said that they were thanking me for the comment I had left on their blog, and wanted to come leave a comment on my blog.  That’s when it hit me: All these comments were coming from bloggers who wrote blogs that I had already commented on!  They had followed the link back in my comment to come check out my blog!

Beau thats when I learned one of the most fundamental truths of building engagement via social media: The more you participate, the more participation you get.  The more comments I left on other blogs, the more comments I got back on my blog. And it doesn’t work just for blogs, the more active I am on Twitter, the more tweets I get as well as followers.  And I don’t mean simply ‘name-dropping’ but actually participating in conversations and trying to build the discussion.

When you participate via social media, it raises your awareness.  It’s a way of getting your name out there, and getting people to notice you.

Now for increasing comments on your blog by leaving it, here would be my tips:

1 – Watch your referral traffic. If you don’t have a way to track your blog’s stats, there are many free options available. I use both SiteMeter and Google Analytics here.  But tracking your referral traffic will show you who is linking to your blog.  If you see from your referral traffic that another blogger has linked to your blog, go back to their blog and thank them.  Or even write them an email thanking them.  That simply encourages them to link to your blog again, plus comment on your blog.

2 – Leave comments on the blogs of readers that comment on your blog.  Same as above, this simply encourages them to leave more comments on your blog, because you are doing the same for them. It’s all about rewarding the type of behavior that you want to encourage.  This is one that I honestly don’t do as much as I should.

3 – Leave comments on blogs that are influential to your readers.  Think about where your readers are going now to get their information and connect with each other, and go there. By connecting with them there, leaving comments on posts, etc, you will get on their radars.  By participating in their space, that will encourage them to come check you out on your blog.

 

So those are some ideas on growing interaction on your blog, by leaving it. Again, the key to building interaction via social media is to participate. Great content will only help you if people know it exists, and that’s where interacting with others in THEIR space helps you build your own awareness.

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Review: 2011 B2B Forum in Boston

 

I’ve been going to Marketing Profs events for 3 years now, and they remain my favorite marketing-oriented conferences.  Even when I started writing articles for Marketing Profs 4 years ago, Ann stressed to me constantly to ‘give the readers a plan of action, something they can implement immediately’.  That really is the cornerstone of all content Marketing Profs’ creates, and the conferences are no different.  The sessions are designed so that you can take what you have learned back to your team in the office the next day and immediately get started improving your marketing efforts.

I wanted to share with you some of the things I learned from a few of the sessions I was able to attend:

Developing Enterprise Social Media Strategies led by David B Thomas and Mike Barlow

Some of the key points shared and discussed:

  • David talked about how at SAS they built a Marketing 2.0 council that gathered internal stakeholders and educated them on social media and new media tools.  David stressed that it is good to get legal and HR involved in the process, as legal is there to ‘identify risks and communicate them’.  Sam Fiorella added that his company has what it calls a Social Enablement Policy and that the policy spells out the ‘dos and donts’ of social media.
  • Social media needs to be spread throughout the organization, don’t leave it in the hands of the evangelists and proponents.  Mike added that you should build 3 quick stories that you can use to help sell social media to your organization or company.  It could be a success story that your company/org has had, or maybe something a competitor did that worked.  Or an opportunity lost.
  • One of the attendees (I apologize for not remembering who) said their company created a Social Media Marketing Cookbook, which took experiences of field marketers and then explained how social media could have helped them in this instances.  For example, dealing with customers directly, in a retail setting, etc.  How could social media have made their jobs easier?
  • Eloqua created a Social Media Playbook and encouraged others to ‘steal out Social Media Playbook’.  Good example of creating content that spreads.
  • David clarified that it took about a year and a half for the Social Media Council to gain some real internal traction at SAS, and that the biggest obstacle was ‘big company inertia’.  David said they overcame this by having a champion in the C-Suite and by ‘waiting it out’.  Persistence is key.
  • Help the C-Suite see the value of social media, show them what competitors are doing and show how they are gaining a competitive advantage.
  • Look at how each department is tracking engagement and measuring, then make the case for how social media could improve those engagement efforts.
  • Tim Washer had a wonderful point about experimentation.  He said executives will always ask for metrics and the ROI of social media, but that you should experiment.  Create content and promote it in different ways.  He said while he was at IBM, that they had workers create ‘This is where I work’ videos.  Tim added that workers were given ‘brand guidelines’, but also the freedom to otherwise be creative in creating their videos.  These were meant to be shared internally, but the best ones were taken and shared externally.  Fabulous example of using video to humanize a brand, and Tim led a session on that very topic.
  • A lot of B2B attendees mentioned having difficulty getting engineers involved in blogging.  Someone (I think it was Michael Brenner?) made the point to make sure that engineers understand that blogging gives them a way to connect directing with their customers on a one-to-one basis.

Next up was CK’s session on The Mobile Revolution and B2B.  What I love is that CK immediately grabbed the audience’s attention with a couple of OMG! stats:

  • 6.7 Billion people on earth, and there are 5 billion mobile subscriptions
  • 95% of text messages are read, and most within 5 mins

Here’s some other (action) points from her session:

  • Optimize your current website for mobile
  • Add a ‘mobile-friendly’ link at the top of every email you send
  • Make sure the online experience you are giving customers is optimized for mobile, and the content you create should be as well.
  • Think about how your customers are using mobile, think graphically, make sure mobile content maps to mobile needs
  • Conduct a full audit of all marketing programs and note how implementing a mobile aspect could increase efficiencies.  For example, at a trade show, have QR codes so attendees can get content and information without asking them to lug around papers they may throw away later.
  • Mobile doesn’t replace social media, it amplifies it’s effectiveness.  Think of all the sharing we do via social media, when we have a mobile device, we can do that on the go.

This is probably my favorite slide of the event, and it comes from the Beyond Blogs and White Papers session with Ann Handley, Pawan Deshpande, Joe Chernov and Becki Dilworth.  Here’s a few of the points they raised:

  • The ‘old way’ that companies spoke to customers was only when it had news to share, ie the Press Release
  • Ann made the point that ‘Your content is your sales staff’.
  • Becki told about how Bridgeline decided to sponsor a speaking tour for Ann across 9 cities.  She said the events had little to no promotion of Bridgeline, it was all about letting Ann create content that was beneficial to potential Bridgeline clients.  Becki said the Content Revolution Tour cost Bridgeline $150,000, but generated over 1,500 qualified leads for the software company.
  • Don’t repurpose or recycle existing content, re-imagine it.  The point is to look at how you can change existing content, such as taking a White Paper and making it into a podcast, or a video.  You could even take the FAQ on your website and expand some of those into individual blog posts.  For example, I created a lot of content during the B2B Forum.  I took a ton of pictures and live-tweeted the event as much as possible.  I then took the pictures and put them on Flickr, but now I am using them in my blog posts as well.  All those tweets I left resulted in my getting some new followers, but I also used them as a note-taking mechanism, and am now using them to help write this post.
  • Slideshare is a very under-utilized ‘social media outpost’.

 

And now…a word about Marketing Profs’ keynotes.

Marketing Profs is one of the few event organizers/planners that understand the purpose of a keynote session.  It is supposed to be amazing.  It is supposed to inspire you and make you look at the world differently.  Marketing Profs always has amazing keynotes, and the B2B Forum certainly did not disappoint.  If you are planning a conference, make sure you follow the Marketing Profs example here.  All their sessions are informative and valuable, but the keynotes are truly special.  As they should be.

Day One’s keynote was Guy Winch talking about How Your Unhappiest Customers Can (Paradoxically!) Help You Foster Fans.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

  • 95% of us will not complain when we have a bad customer experience, but we will in turn tell an average of 16 people about the bad experience!  And as Guy pointed out, as we keep retelling the story, we keep getting re-aggravated about the experience, and I am sure the telling of the story changes a bit after 16 times 😉  But that also helps cement our anger toward the brand.  The paradox here is that we voice our displeasure to everyone EXCEPT the people who could fix our problem.
  • In general, doctors aren’t sued due to mistakes they make, but because the patient thinks they don’t care about them.  Listening is key, but so is HEARING and showing empathy with what the customer is going through.
  • A sudden change in engagement levels is a hint that a customer may have a complaint that they aren’t telling you about.
  • Make it easy for your customers to complain to you, so they won’t complain to friends and other customers.  You WANT them to complain to YOU, because then you can do something about it.
  • To repair a damaged customer relationship, give an effective apology, open communication about the resolution process, and have a great follow-up to see if the customer is satisfied.
  • An effective apology must include an emotional validation. You have to communicate to the customer that you understand and sympathize with their point of view.  You should also match the emotional tone of your customer.  Your concern should reflect their level of distress.  And realize that validating feelings is NOT admitting fault!
  • To rebuild trust with a customer, first promise, then deliver.  Repeatedly.

 


Day Two Keynote: Nancy Duarte discussing Resonate: Presenting Ideas That Inspire Change

This session was going to show us how to create amazing presentations, so I was really looking forward to hearing Nancy, and she didn’t disappoint.  I thought she made one of the best points of the entire event when she said that took many speakers treat their presentations as if THEY are the hero.  The speaker is never the hero, it’s always the audience.  If you look at the above photo (any presentation with a Star Wars reference has to be amazing), the hero is Luke, who is the audience.  The speaker’s role is that of Yoda, or the mentor.  The speaker’s job is to move the audience to a better place via their presentation.

I have to apologize, because I didn’t take a lot of notes on this session, simply because Nancy had me mesmerized.  She did talk about the structure of an amazing presentation.  It alternates between What Is and What Could Be.  The idea is to re-enforce to the audience that the What Is is now, but if we change our mindset, or change our actions, or buy a product, that we could achieve What Could Be.  Here is a picture of the diagram:

She then pointed out how two different speeches followed this exact formula, she first looked at Steve Jobs’ iPhone announcement in 2007, and then Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I Have a Dream…’ speech.  Embedded here is her TEDx East talk where she covered both of these examples, so please do watch it:

 

All in all, this was another amazing Marketing Profs event.  You should definitely consider attending one of their events, they are a bit more expensive than other events, but you are getting what you pay for.  BTW if you’d like to read my review of the LIVE #Blogchat at B2B Forum click here.

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Review: #Blogchat LIVE at the B2B Forum

“So how does a Live #Blogchat work?”

I bet I heard that question fifty times this week, and my answer was always the same, “The same way #Blogchat works on Twitter”.

And it did. About 60 people showed up to Live #Blogchat, and we capped that number in order to have a smaller and more connected coversation.  What happened was a smart room full of people had a wonderful conversation and bounced ideas off each other and built on the ideas that others was sharing. It really was a perfect mirror to the online #Blogchat experience.  It even got to the point where smaller sub-conversations were developing (just like they do on Twitter), as people were going back to points someone else had made earlier to build on them.

To me, this represents among the best learning that can happen at conferences, when the attendees can connect with each other. As I said at the start of the #Blogchat, I think most people are smarter than they give themselves credit for, and I love that the Live #Blogchat was able to help facilitate these people to share their #smartitude.

And when it ended, I had several attendees tell me “You were right, it was just like it is on Twitter!”  Which was a very good thing 😉

Some of the main points we covered included:

  • Michael Brenner brought up a great point about content strategy in an enterprise environment. Should that strategy extend to govern how content is created no matter the tool?  Or should their be separate ‘rules’ governing content creation via different tools, such as a blog vs trade-show brochures? (Michael please chime in if you want to add to or clarify this point).
  • Bob Knorpp made the point that there is no ‘one size fits all’ rule when it comes to blogging.  He added that he is thinking of stopping his blog because he gets more traction on iTunes for his podcast.  Lou Imbriano countered that he thought every company should have a blog, and he talked about the impact his blog has made on his personal and professional life.
  • Matt Grant talked about how it can be hard to even determine exactly what a blog is, and how the tool is evolving over time.  He’s right, the line between a website and blog is getting blurry, and many people don’t consider it a blog if comments aren’t allowed.  I thought this point tied into Bob’s point about there not being a one-size-fits-all approach to blogging.

I definitely want to thank Marketing Profs for bringing the Live #Blogchat to the B2B Forum, and for Sensei Marketing and The Cooper Group for sponsoring the event.  Also, thanks to Sam Fiorella for co-hosting the Live #Blogchat, and for Brandie McCallum for live-tweeting the Live #Blogchat.  Click here to see the tweets from last night’s Live #Blogchat.  Thanks to everyone that attended the Live #Blogchat, and I wanted to share some of my favorite pictures below.  You can see all the pics in the set here.

 

How cool is this setup?
Meet and Greet before the smartitude starts!

 

Almost ready to get started!
A scholar and a gentleman, Lou Imbriano
It would not be a Marketing Profs event without CB Whittemore and Matt Grant

Seriously thanks to everyone that came, I love you guys!

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What impacts search traffic more, keywords in posts or post frequency?

So a couple of weeks ago I was blogging about how my search traffic seemed to be flat over the last few weeks.  I decided to do a 2-week experiment to try to see if posting frequency or posts with targeted keywords would have a bigger impact on increasing search traffic.  For the week 2 weeks ago, I posted 5 new posts during the week, but didn’t worry about targeting keywords in the post title or in the post itself.  Last week, I only posted 4 new posts, but I made more effort to target keywords and phrases in the post titles and the posts themselves.  Here’s a graph of search traffic over the life of this blog:

BTW, I promise my writing isn’t as terrible as it looks in this graph 😉  As you can see, there’s been a nice steady increase in traffic till the middle of April, and has been fairly flat since then.  The last two weeks at the end are with the red lines under the graph.

So two weeks ago I posted 5 times and didn’t worry about targeting keywords or phrases. I had 767 visitors from search the week before, and it fell to 705 2 weeks ago.  Now since 2 weeks ago included Memorial Day, that affected the search traffic a bit, but didn’t account for all of the drop.

Last week, search traffic rebounded nicely, up to 804 visitors from search, which was the 4th best week here ever for search traffic. And that was with only 4 new posts, but I made an effort in each post to target keywords and phrases in the title and post.

So what can we learn from this incredibly unscientific experiment? It seems that targeted keywords and phrases do a better job of increasing search traffic than simply posting more does.  BTW in case you were wondering, overall traffic last week was up over 50% over the previous week.  So the fewer posts with targeted keywords and phrases resulted in more overall traffic as well.

Writing this from the Huntsville Airport, so I hope to see some of you at the B2B Forum this week!

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Get your blog reviewed during #Blogchat – June

It’s baaaaaaaack! Last month on a whim, I decided to have a #Blogchat where we all reviewed 3 blogs submitted by #Blogchat regulars. It ended up being a HUGE hit with all of you, so we’re going to make it a monthly feature on the 3rd Sunday of every month!

So if you want to submit your blog to be reviewed this coming Sunday (the 19th), please leave a comment to this post with the URL of your blog and exactly what areas you want us to look at.  If you want to know what everyone thinks of the information on your sidebars, let us know that.  If you want to know what you should be writing about, tell us who you are trying to connect with.  If you want feedback on your post titles, let us know.  Please be as specific as possible, if you leave a comment and all you say is ‘I would love to have my blog reviewed, thanks!’, then we have nothing to go on.  The more specific you can be, the better the chance you have of getting your blog picked.

I’ll pick three blogs to be reviewed, and those will be announced on Saturday.  We’ll spend the first 20 mins of the next #Blogchat reviewing one blog, the second 20 mins on the second blog, and the final 20 mins on the third blog.

To give you an idea of what type of information you should include in your comment, here’s the blogs that were chosen last month to be reviewed.  Good luck!