By Matt Griffin, Alan Rimm-Kaufman
and Joe Dysart
There's never a lack of new ideas in online selling. The trick is finding those approaches that work for your business and implementing them properly.
Everyone's looking for the next big thing in online marketing — namely, a tactic that will allow marketers to connect with their online customers in hitherto unparalleled ways.
And while you're searching for that singular method to drive customers straight to your checkout page, this special report is designed to expose you to a few tactics you may not have considered. Or, if you've considered some or all of these ideas, you'll come away with a clearer idea of how to implement them.
In this Special Report, you'll learn how blogs can provide you with an additional means of communicating with your customers, and how you can use this channel to shape perceptions about your brand, respond quickly to customer complaints, and drive more organic search traffic to your site.
You'll also discover how downloadable audio programs, or podcasts, can add value to your site and how to quickly create podcasts for testing.
Plus, you'll meet two of your colleagues at O'Reilly Media, a publisher and multichannel merchant of technology books, and discover how they decided to use blogs, really simple syndication and other tactics to reach customers on the Internet.
Lastly, you'll read how multichannel business-to-business merchant Display Supply & Lighting increased sales on its site by adding an online, interactive 3-D catalog.
—Matt Griffin, associate editor
Blog for Increased Customer Response
By Alan Rimm-Kaufman
While a handful of catalogers have blogs today, many more will begin blogging in the coming months. In this column, I'll discuss the advantages of this new communication channel and offer some basic tips to keep in mind as you grow and improve your blog.
Why Blog?
A blog, short for Web log, offers marketers several marketing advantages, including the following:
Blogs provide a personal voice for your brand. As the marketplace becomes more crowded, a personal voice that cuts through the clutter is essential. Executed thoughtfully, blogs can create meaningful conversations with current and future customers.
Blogs provide relevant extensions of your core message. Content on your core business site keeps a tight focus on conversion and your essential selling proposition. And while your blog always should link to your core e-commerce site, it allows you to cover a broader range of brand-relevant topics. It lets you participate in key conversations that occur higher in the conversion funnel.
Blogs offer low-entry barriers and low-maintenance costs. With numerous blog software packages available, entering the blogosphere is relatively easy (See sidebar, below). While your corporate Web site depends on ongoing support from internal IT and design resources, blogs allow — and require — you to be far more nimble.
Blogs are good for public relations. Journalists often mine the blogosphere for new content and leads.
Blogs can help natural search rankings. They provide bait for natural search spiders.
Let's take a closer look at these advantages and some pitfalls to avoid as you consider adding blogs to your overall marketing mix.
Blogs and Your Brand
Blogs, employee blogs in particular, shape the perception of your brand. This small fact is revolutionary, and the best book on this revolution was written way back in 2000.
Six years ago, four Web writers turned their online idea swaps about Web communication into "The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual" (Perseus Books, $14).
The book's authors argue that marketplaces are conversations. Historically, people have gathered in marketplaces to swap stories and goods. This perspective got lost during the rise of mass production and mass communication. The Web brings it back. Today, successful online marketing depends not only on broadcast and reach but also on word-of-mouth — the high-tech equivalent of the human conversation in a souk, bazaar or general store porch.
"Cluetrain" was written before the rise of blogs, but the blogosphere embodies the book's message: In today's world, your brand shouldn't talk to your customers; your people should speak with your customers.
Takeway Tip: Embrace two-way communication. Allow blog readers to comment on your posts.
Beyond Your Brand
Blogs don't need to be dry, impersonal corporate-speak. Interesting people with interesting opinions write interesting blogs, and readers find interesting blogs. The best blogs provide a real sense of their authors, and by reflection, of their authors' organizations.
To see how a blog can shape a company's public face, check out Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek (www.joelonsoftware.com), Matt Cutts of Google, (www.mattcutts.com/blog), Robert Scoble of Microsoft (http://scobleizer.wordpress.com) or Bob Parsons of GoDaddy (www.bobparsons.com).
Whether or not I've met these authors, when I read these blogs I feel like I get to know these people personally, and that very much personalizes their companies for me. Even when bloggers aren't the official voices for their firms, their writing plays a strong role in shaping how the firms are perceived in the marketplace.
Takeaway Tip: Let your voice come through your blog. Offer strong opinions and interesting perspectives.
Letting your voice come through on your business blog doesn't mean offhand or stream of consciousness content is appropriate.
Perhaps because of blogs' origins, some find this trap difficult to avoid. Many early blogs were public diaries, and this genre still is popular today.
According to Technorati, the blog search engine, more than 100,000 new blogs are born every day. Also, more than 1.5 million posts are made to blogs each day. Many of these are personal diaries. While of interest to their creators, outsiders often find these personal journals banal.
Perusing the Banal
To peruse this banality, visit Technorati (www.technorati.com) and search on the phrase "homework AND pimple":
You'll be rewarded with hundreds of pages of teen angst. Or visit www.fotolog.com/cypher, where you can view a photo of every meal eaten by one blogger since October 2002.
Thanks, but no thanks.
If your company is going to blog, make sure your writing reflects your brand. Just because your chief executive can share her musings about her breakfast cereal with the entire world, doesn't mean she necessarily should.
Takeaway Tip: Blogs can be more than public diaries. Determine which individuals publicly associated with your brand are blogging and how their blogs reflect on your brand. The blogosphere is crowded, so you need useful, well-written content to win relevant traffic.
Build Your Reputation
Happy customers blog. Angry customers blog louder.
It's critical to keep on top of what's being said about your brand and your products online. Because journalists in the trades and mainstream press heavily rely on the blogosphere, problems can percolate from private grumblings to the front page with surprising speed.
If you learn of legitimate problems when monitoring the blogosphere, admit your mistakes and move to remedy them. If you hear inaccurate complaints, explain your view of the situation. Responding quickly is essential.
There are reputation monitoring services available, or you can track your brand name and key product names yourself via really simple syndication searches (Technorati, IceRocket, BlogPulse, Google, Yahoo!, MSN News, etc.).
Takeaway Tip: Monitor your brand reputation online. Develop a response plan. Who in your firm will respond to inaccurate posts about your brand?
Bait With Blogs
Search engines love good blogs. Good blogs are chock full of rich, fresh content, clean semantic markup and rich interlinkages. As a result, for many searches, blog results rank higher than product detail pages on search engine organic results pages. For competitive search engine optimization (SEO) terms, excellent blog content can be a powerful tool to increase organic traffic.
"Blogging should be part of any online retailer's SEO arsenal," says Stephan Spencer, blogging expert and founder of e-marketer Netconcepts (www.netconcepts.com).
Participating in the blogosphere opens doors to links that would otherwise be inaccessible to online merchants: "hat tips" from bloggers crediting you for breaking a news story or making an insightful comment, listings in blog directories and search engines, and greater willingness of bloggers to cover your PR initiatives, Spencer says.
Spencer offers results from a Netconcepts client, science toy cataloger Steve Spangler Science (www.stevespangler.com), which attributes 13 percent of its online sales to its blog.
Pinny Gniwisch, executive vice president of marketing at jewelry merchant Ice.com, agrees blogs can be powerful SEO tools.
"We started blogging for search engine benefits. Today we have four blogs. We post three times a week, paying outside writers for enticing content."
According to Gniwisch, the most popular Ice.com blog is Sparkle Like The Stars (www.sparklelikethestars.com), which tracks jewelry worn by celebrities. The site links back to the Ice.com retail site and has large, regular readership.
"During the holiday, our blogs drove over $200,000 in sales," Gniwisch reports.
Takeaway Tip: Link your blog to your commerce site. Make your blogs search engine friendly, using appropriate tags and markup. (For more blog SEO tips, see Spencer's blog at www.stephanspencer.com.)
Conclusion
Blogs aren't going away. And because blogs fundamentally are a "pull" marketing channel, blogs will suffer fewer of the spam problems of "push" channels like e-mail, making it a powerful tool to drive customer response.
While your blog likely won't make it into the top 100 or even top 1,000 list, a blog can help connect with the most important niche of individuals on the Web: your current and prospective customers.
Alan Rimm-Kaufman leads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online marketing firm specializing in paid search marketing and Web usability consulting. A recent blog convert, Rimm-Kaufman writes online at www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog. He can be reached via his Web site: www.rimmkaufman.com.
Podcasts 101: How Podcasts Add Value to Your Site
By Joe Dysart
If you're the parent of a young adult, you probably know that podcasts — short audio programs downloaded from the Web and played on digital audio players and desktop computers — are all the rage with the ages 18 to 29 demographic.
While these early adopters love the technology for many reasons, one of the most compelling is the fact that iPods, digital audio players and computers can be programmed to automatically download podcasts for listening at another time — a concept known as time-shifting.
As a consequence, increasing numbers of consumers and business people of all ages are catching the podcasting bug. "It gives them the freedom to choose when, where and how they listen to it," says David A. Fish, chief executive of I Make News (www.imninc.com), an e-communications service provider that has seen a rapid rise in the number of firms seeking to reach out to clients and customers with podcasts.
"They can play a podcast in the background while they do other work on their computers," Fish says. "Or they can download the podcast to a portable MP3 player and listen to it at their convenience — on the commuter train, at the gym or at home."
Not surprisingly, a number of catalog and online merchants have noted podcasts' promotional power, and have begun offering such programs as a way to increase traffic to their sites. For example, Rough Guides (http://roughguides.com), a travel guides merchant, offers several free, travel-related podcasts to get more Web cruisers to click its way. Great Relaxation Music (www.greatrelaxationmusic.com) regularly posts free podcasts to showcase some of the music in the collections it sells. And Texas Music Round-Up (www.texasmusicroundup.com), a cataloger of discount music from Texas, also offers free podcasts featuring selections in its inventory as a way to entice cruisers to take a listen.
In addition, many of the world's major communications companies also are aware of podcasts' growing popularity, and quickly have embraced the medium as a viable communications format.
Besides taking major media by storm and spicing up company Web sites, podcasts also are cropping up as add-ons to company e-newsletters and marketing e-mails. The reason, e-marketers say, is that adding a podcast involves little more than pasting in a hotlink to the podcast.
Fish with I Make News says one of the more popular formats of such podcasts are simple question and answer interviews. With such communications, a company PR person or similar staff member plays the role of a reporter, and a top official at the company — or someone with exciting, inside information about a forthcoming product — plays the role of the interviewee.
"Podcasting lets you convey information in a friendly, relaxed and inviting way," Fish says. "It gives you the opportunity to let the presenter's personality shine through, draw in the audience and lay the groundwork for future interactions."
Fish conducted his own, informal test of the benefit of adding a podcast to an e-newsletter last fall, with very encouraging results. Specifically, he included a podcast version of a text article featured in his company's October 2005 e-newsletter, and found that the article and podcast together reached twice as many people as any other text-based article in the e-newsletter.
"Podcasts work well in conjunction with blogs, too," he adds. "You can have your podcast direct customers and prospects to blogs to encourage ongoing dialogue with your company."
There are also ancillary benefits to the medium. For example, every time your company posts a podcast on your Web site, search engines like Google make note of the fact that your site has been updated, and tend to propel your company's Web site ranking a bit higher. (As most e-marketers know, search engines love sites that add new, useful content to the Web.)
The same holds true for blog-tracking sites like Technorati (www.technorati.com), which tracks more than 30 million blogs. Every time you post a new podcast link on your Technorati-tracked blog, the blog search engine makes a note of it, and the visibility of your company's blog increases.
If you're thinking of experimenting with podcasting on your own Web site, or within your company e-newsletter or marketing e-mails, here's a blueprint for getting started, courtesy of Fish and other podcast marketing gurus:
Experiment with the medium first. Gabcast.com is a good place to start. There, you can record a podcast by calling an 800 number, and the podcast subsequently is posted to Gabcast's site. The company provides you with a URL unique to your podcast that you can place on your own site. If you want to practice your spiel a few times before announcing yourself to the world, there's little worry. Right now, Gabcast.com's podcast creation service is free.
Search out podcast-creation software that's right for you.Once you've gotten the feel for how podcasts work, you may want to bring the software in house. Some popular podcast-creation packages and online services include Podblaze.com (www.podblaze.com) and Transistr, formerly iPodderX, (http://transistr.com). An exhaustive list of podcast-creation software is available at Podcasting News' directory (www.podcastingnews.com/topics/podcasting_software.html).
Keep it short and sweet.Company podcasts of 15 to 30 minutes likely will get the most play, Fish says. He also believes your podcast should have an unscripted feel.
Relentlessly promote your podcast.Besides posting your podcast on your Web site, and including a link in your company's e-newsletter and marketing e-mails, there are plenty of podcast directories on the Web interested in listing your podcast. Those include Podcast Alley (www.podcastalley.com); FreshPodcasts.com; Podcast.net; Apple Podcasts (www.apple.com/podcasting); iPodder.org; Odeo.com; and Digital Podcast (www.digitalpodcast.com).
Track popularity."If your e-newsletter service provider has the right tools in place, podcasting is trackable, just like all subscriber activity," Fish says. "You can monitor which subscribers listened to your podcast, and even identify which ones passed it along to others. By tracking podcast listenership, you gain valuable insight into subscribers' interest. This enables you to customize future marketing activities in order to give each audience segment more of the content they like."
Stay current on the industry and its technology.Podcasting News (www.podcastingnews.com) is a good source of information for all podcast-related things. The site collects any type of company press release related to podcasting, and also features a podcast directory, forum and links to podcasting gear and manufacturers. This is stop No. 1 for any hungry mind looking for the latest on the industry.
Check out these other helpful resources:
Podcasting Marketing Blog (http://blog.rssapplied.com/public/blog/90739);
"Podcasting: Do It Yourself Guide," by Tom Cochrane (Wiley, $19.99); and
"Podcasting For Dummies," by Tee Morris, Evo Terra, Dawn Miceli and Drew Domkus (For Dummies, $21.99).
Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He can be reached at (805) 379-3673, joe@joedysart.com or via his site, www.joedysart.com.
15-minute Interview
O'Reilly Media Reaches Customers With High-tech Marketing Tactics
Blogs, podcasts and other cutting-edge marketing tactics may seem like strange and far-off initiatives to many catalogers, but there are some merchants that use these programs to great effect. Multichannel merchant and publisher O'Reilly Media stays at the forefront of these technologies to reach out to its high-tech customer base.
Allen Noren, director of e-commerce, and Sara Winge, vice president, corporate communication at O'Reilly Media, shared with Catalog Success Associate Editor Matt Griffin their experiences developing and managing these new tactics in Web marketing.
Catalog Success: Why have you stayed at the forefront of a lot of Web innovations, such as blogs, podcasts and really simple syndication (RSS)?
Allen Noren: As a technology company, it was a natural thing to do. It's because we were exposed to this stuff early and through that we were able to see the opportunity. Plus, our audience communicates in advanced ways as well. We would probably like to congratulate ourselves on some of our intuition, but it's also just recognizing where our audience is. Because we write about technology, we're a couple of years ahead of other market sectors.
CS: You make a lot of your content and products available via RSS. Why?
Sara Winge: At O'Reilly, we say our core mission is spreading the knowledge of alpha geeks — people just like us. People who are ahead of the curve, doing things that boggle the minds of ordinary citizens right now, until mass adoption happens a few years down the road. Some of these things, like blogs and RSS, might not be used by your typical home improvement catalog, but the principle behind what we do is universal. We're really trying to meet people where they are. By putting everything we have into RSS, our customers can have it the way they want it.
Noren: That's really the most important message. Increasingly, people don't have time to go to separate Web pages that companies spend massive amounts of money and time to dress up and optimize. You have to meet your customers where they are. And RSS is a very effective and lightweight process of doing that.
Winge: It represents a real shift from thinking, "I'll do things on my Web page so people will come back." In reality, they may not come back. People don't have the time to check back frequently. The way that people consume information is changing.
CS: What advice would you offer to catalogers who are thinking about using blogs?
Winge: An important principle of blogs is that each piece of information you write needs to stand on its own. It needs to be compelling in a short and snappy way. One of the ways to do that is having a voice that your customers relate to and like. One of the things we did early was give people access to the information behind the scenes or the experts who create that information.
Blogs and podcasts are a great way to do that. You get interesting people together, get them talking, and people who are interested in that topic or those people will want to know about it. Also there's a lot of blogs that don't see much action, that is, they're not updated as often as they should be. One of the ways we've dealt with that, for example, is we have a blog called O'Reilly Radar, and we have five people, some within our company and some who are just associated with us in some way or another, who post to that. Even though the volume there is lower than it should be, it still has a lot of people subscribing to its RSS feed because it's really interesting people with interesting perspectives.
CS: Do you have a sense for how much of your audience is accessing the blogs or the podcasts?
Noren: Our audience is really on the cutting edge and is much more comfortable with RSS and blogs than a lot of consumers. So there's a certain amount of necessary education that needs to go into any program involving RSS and blogs. You have to tell your customers what RSS is, what an RSS reader is and how to use it, and you need to suggest some RSS readers, because some are free and some aren't. You've got to let your customers know what it is, because a lot of people, especially a consumer audience, really don't have any idea. Or if they do have an idea, they don't know how to start using it.
CS: How have you approached the concept of blog posts; that is, letting your customers talk back and respond to what you've put on your site?
Winge: You take a risk when letting your customers speak. If you have a blog, you have to decide whether or not to keep comments turned on. Having forums is a great way to let customers create some of the buzz for your products themselves. The risk is that sometimes people are going to be unhappy. So as a company, you have to decide if you're going to let them express their unhappiness and how you're going to react when they do. We've found that actually serves us well, but that idea freaks a lot of people out.
Noren: You really need to think differently when you open the doors on this stuff. We fortunately have really good products, but there are times when a customer has been dissatisfied. But I can't think of one time that we haven't been able to turn a situation around by opening the door. By opening the door to your company, it's like opening up to your friends. It can be very rewarding.
CS: Do you edit comments made on your site?
Noren: If there's spam, we go after those comments, but for more than 10 years, we've had readers' comments on our book pages. And we allow bad reviews and good reviews. It's that kind of openness and transparency that is really difficult for people to get. When we tell people or when they realize we allow unfriendly or critical comments on our catalog pages, they ask why we'd let that happen. And I say why wouldn't we? It gives us so much credibility. And if we do have a legitimately bad book, then we need to know that. On our comments field, we can allow our editors or authors to give feedback, to admit or correct mistakes.
Sometimes a product just doesn't hit the mark with a customer, so they'll post a bad review. But most of the time if the product is still good, there's what I call a self-correcting process. Another customer will come along and say, "Hey, you read that wrong or didn't use it properly. This product isn't for you." The community is there to be your arbiters, to speak up for you. And that's so much more credible than if we were to do that ourselves.
Case Study: Online Catalog Increases Sales, Reduces Print Costs
By Matt Griffin
Problem: Display Supply & Lighting sought to retool its marketing plan to reinforce its position as a technology leader.
Solution: Implemented Kaon Interactive's 3D Catalog.
Results: A 3-D online catalog is now the centerpiece of the marketing plan, contributing to an 18 percent sales increase in January and February, while lowering print catalog costs.
Display Supply & Lighting implemented in December 2005 Kaon Interactive's 3D Catalog to provide its customers with an up-to-date resource for its ever-changing product line.
A business-to-business supplier of lighting fixtures and display supplies for the trade show and museum display industry, Display Supply hadn't substantially changed its marketing approach in seven years. While exploring new marketing avenues, the Itasca, Ill.-based marketer stumbled upon Kaon Interactive's 3D Catalog.
The merchant discovered Kaon's offering could form the centerpiece of a new marketing initiative, providing Display Supply's customers with an interactive design tool that was available 24/7, says Rob Cohen, the company's vice president and principal.
Under the old marketing plan, Cohen would have printed 30,000 catalogs at a time. But by the time the catalogs reached the customer, they were outdated — either a product was no longer available in a particular color, or it had been discontinued altogether. Display Supply often would insert slip sheets into its catalogs, which Cohen regarded as unprofessional.
But with the interactive online catalog, Display Supply can update product information as soon as it changes.
Here's how it works: When a customer clicks on the product catalog link on Display Supply's Web site, a Java applet opens that contains the company's complete line of more than 275 products. This is a significant increase from the 90 products Display Supply's previous Web site was able to display. Customers can drill down within product categories to learn more about specific items, change the color and zoom in on products, running a variety of 3-D product demonstrations. Customers even can create and download a 3-D PDF file that runs the demonstrations after they leave the site.
Implementation of the online catalog took about 90 days, Cohen says. He provided Kaon with two-dimensional images of Display Supply's entire product line, along with seven actual products. Kaon took these images and created 3-D models, which then were submitted back to Display Supply. "The 3-D models were 99 percent accurate," Cohen says. And the inaccuracies easily were fixed. Cohen also provided Kaon with the copy to be used alongside the models and demonstrations.
While Cohen declined to reveal exactly how much the Kaon solution costs, he did say it was less expensive than adding another sales representative.
And the results? Display Supply has seen sales increase by 18 percent in the first two months of 2006, which Cohen largely attributes to the 3D Catalog. Additionally, with Display Supply's entire product catalog online, Cohen was able to bring print catalog production in house. Display Supply now does smaller print runs as needed. He estimates that this will save the company $10,000 per year in printing costs.
The Retailer's Source for Content & Community
Special Report Web Marketing New, Usable Web Marketing Ap
By Matt Griffin, Alan Rimm-Kaufman
and Joe Dysart
There's never a lack of new ideas in online selling. The trick is finding those approaches that work for your business and implementing them properly.
Everyone's looking for the next big thing in online marketing — namely, a tactic that will allow marketers to connect with their online customers in hitherto unparalleled ways.
And while you're searching for that singular method to drive customers straight to your checkout page, this special report is designed to expose you to a few tactics you may not have considered. Or, if you've considered some or all of these ideas, you'll come away with a clearer idea of how to implement them.
In this Special Report, you'll learn how blogs can provide you with an additional means of communicating with your customers, and how you can use this channel to shape perceptions about your brand, respond quickly to customer complaints, and drive more organic search traffic to your site.
You'll also discover how downloadable audio programs, or podcasts, can add value to your site and how to quickly create podcasts for testing.
Plus, you'll meet two of your colleagues at O'Reilly Media, a publisher and multichannel merchant of technology books, and discover how they decided to use blogs, really simple syndication and other tactics to reach customers on the Internet.
Lastly, you'll read how multichannel business-to-business merchant Display Supply & Lighting increased sales on its site by adding an online, interactive 3-D catalog.
—Matt Griffin, associate editor
Blog for Increased Customer Response
By Alan Rimm-Kaufman
While a handful of catalogers have blogs today, many more will begin blogging in the coming months. In this column, I'll discuss the advantages of this new communication channel and offer some basic tips to keep in mind as you grow and improve your blog.
Why Blog?
A blog, short for Web log, offers marketers several marketing advantages, including the following:
Blogs provide a personal voice for your brand. As the marketplace becomes more crowded, a personal voice that cuts through the clutter is essential. Executed thoughtfully, blogs can create meaningful conversations with current and future customers.
Blogs provide relevant extensions of your core message. Content on your core business site keeps a tight focus on conversion and your essential selling proposition. And while your blog always should link to your core e-commerce site, it allows you to cover a broader range of brand-relevant topics. It lets you participate in key conversations that occur higher in the conversion funnel.
Blogs offer low-entry barriers and low-maintenance costs. With numerous blog software packages available, entering the blogosphere is relatively easy (See sidebar, below). While your corporate Web site depends on ongoing support from internal IT and design resources, blogs allow — and require — you to be far more nimble.
Blogs are good for public relations. Journalists often mine the blogosphere for new content and leads.
Blogs can help natural search rankings. They provide bait for natural search spiders.
Let's take a closer look at these advantages and some pitfalls to avoid as you consider adding blogs to your overall marketing mix.
Blogs and Your Brand
Blogs, employee blogs in particular, shape the perception of your brand. This small fact is revolutionary, and the best book on this revolution was written way back in 2000.
Six years ago, four Web writers turned their online idea swaps about Web communication into "The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual" (Perseus Books, $14).
The book's authors argue that marketplaces are conversations. Historically, people have gathered in marketplaces to swap stories and goods. This perspective got lost during the rise of mass production and mass communication. The Web brings it back. Today, successful online marketing depends not only on broadcast and reach but also on word-of-mouth — the high-tech equivalent of the human conversation in a souk, bazaar or general store porch.
"Cluetrain" was written before the rise of blogs, but the blogosphere embodies the book's message: In today's world, your brand shouldn't talk to your customers; your people should speak with your customers.
Takeway Tip: Embrace two-way communication. Allow blog readers to comment on your posts.
Beyond Your Brand
Blogs don't need to be dry, impersonal corporate-speak. Interesting people with interesting opinions write interesting blogs, and readers find interesting blogs. The best blogs provide a real sense of their authors, and by reflection, of their authors' organizations.
To see how a blog can shape a company's public face, check out Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek (www.joelonsoftware.com), Matt Cutts of Google, (www.mattcutts.com/blog), Robert Scoble of Microsoft (http://scobleizer.wordpress.com) or Bob Parsons of GoDaddy (www.bobparsons.com).
Whether or not I've met these authors, when I read these blogs I feel like I get to know these people personally, and that very much personalizes their companies for me. Even when bloggers aren't the official voices for their firms, their writing plays a strong role in shaping how the firms are perceived in the marketplace.
Takeaway Tip: Let your voice come through your blog. Offer strong opinions and interesting perspectives.
Letting your voice come through on your business blog doesn't mean offhand or stream of consciousness content is appropriate.
Perhaps because of blogs' origins, some find this trap difficult to avoid. Many early blogs were public diaries, and this genre still is popular today.
According to Technorati, the blog search engine, more than 100,000 new blogs are born every day. Also, more than 1.5 million posts are made to blogs each day. Many of these are personal diaries. While of interest to their creators, outsiders often find these personal journals banal.
Perusing the Banal
To peruse this banality, visit Technorati (www.technorati.com) and search on the phrase "homework AND pimple":
You'll be rewarded with hundreds of pages of teen angst. Or visit www.fotolog.com/cypher, where you can view a photo of every meal eaten by one blogger since October 2002.
Thanks, but no thanks.
If your company is going to blog, make sure your writing reflects your brand. Just because your chief executive can share her musings about her breakfast cereal with the entire world, doesn't mean she necessarily should.
Takeaway Tip: Blogs can be more than public diaries. Determine which individuals publicly associated with your brand are blogging and how their blogs reflect on your brand. The blogosphere is crowded, so you need useful, well-written content to win relevant traffic.
Build Your Reputation
Happy customers blog. Angry customers blog louder.
It's critical to keep on top of what's being said about your brand and your products online. Because journalists in the trades and mainstream press heavily rely on the blogosphere, problems can percolate from private grumblings to the front page with surprising speed.
If you learn of legitimate problems when monitoring the blogosphere, admit your mistakes and move to remedy them. If you hear inaccurate complaints, explain your view of the situation. Responding quickly is essential.
There are reputation monitoring services available, or you can track your brand name and key product names yourself via really simple syndication searches (Technorati, IceRocket, BlogPulse, Google, Yahoo!, MSN News, etc.).
Takeaway Tip: Monitor your brand reputation online. Develop a response plan. Who in your firm will respond to inaccurate posts about your brand?
Bait With Blogs
Search engines love good blogs. Good blogs are chock full of rich, fresh content, clean semantic markup and rich interlinkages. As a result, for many searches, blog results rank higher than product detail pages on search engine organic results pages. For competitive search engine optimization (SEO) terms, excellent blog content can be a powerful tool to increase organic traffic.
"Blogging should be part of any online retailer's SEO arsenal," says Stephan Spencer, blogging expert and founder of e-marketer Netconcepts (www.netconcepts.com).
Participating in the blogosphere opens doors to links that would otherwise be inaccessible to online merchants: "hat tips" from bloggers crediting you for breaking a news story or making an insightful comment, listings in blog directories and search engines, and greater willingness of bloggers to cover your PR initiatives, Spencer says.
Spencer offers results from a Netconcepts client, science toy cataloger Steve Spangler Science (www.stevespangler.com), which attributes 13 percent of its online sales to its blog.
Pinny Gniwisch, executive vice president of marketing at jewelry merchant Ice.com, agrees blogs can be powerful SEO tools.
"We started blogging for search engine benefits. Today we have four blogs. We post three times a week, paying outside writers for enticing content."
According to Gniwisch, the most popular Ice.com blog is Sparkle Like The Stars (www.sparklelikethestars.com), which tracks jewelry worn by celebrities. The site links back to the Ice.com retail site and has large, regular readership.
"During the holiday, our blogs drove over $200,000 in sales," Gniwisch reports.
Takeaway Tip: Link your blog to your commerce site. Make your blogs search engine friendly, using appropriate tags and markup. (For more blog SEO tips, see Spencer's blog at www.stephanspencer.com.)
Conclusion
Blogs aren't going away. And because blogs fundamentally are a "pull" marketing channel, blogs will suffer fewer of the spam problems of "push" channels like e-mail, making it a powerful tool to drive customer response.
While your blog likely won't make it into the top 100 or even top 1,000 list, a blog can help connect with the most important niche of individuals on the Web: your current and prospective customers.
Alan Rimm-Kaufman leads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online marketing firm specializing in paid search marketing and Web usability consulting. A recent blog convert, Rimm-Kaufman writes online at www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog. He can be reached via his Web site: www.rimmkaufman.com.
Podcasts 101: How Podcasts Add Value to Your Site
By Joe Dysart
If you're the parent of a young adult, you probably know that podcasts — short audio programs downloaded from the Web and played on digital audio players and desktop computers — are all the rage with the ages 18 to 29 demographic.
While these early adopters love the technology for many reasons, one of the most compelling is the fact that iPods, digital audio players and computers can be programmed to automatically download podcasts for listening at another time — a concept known as time-shifting.
As a consequence, increasing numbers of consumers and business people of all ages are catching the podcasting bug. "It gives them the freedom to choose when, where and how they listen to it," says David A. Fish, chief executive of I Make News (www.imninc.com), an e-communications service provider that has seen a rapid rise in the number of firms seeking to reach out to clients and customers with podcasts.
"They can play a podcast in the background while they do other work on their computers," Fish says. "Or they can download the podcast to a portable MP3 player and listen to it at their convenience — on the commuter train, at the gym or at home."
Not surprisingly, a number of catalog and online merchants have noted podcasts' promotional power, and have begun offering such programs as a way to increase traffic to their sites. For example, Rough Guides (http://roughguides.com), a travel guides merchant, offers several free, travel-related podcasts to get more Web cruisers to click its way. Great Relaxation Music (www.greatrelaxationmusic.com) regularly posts free podcasts to showcase some of the music in the collections it sells. And Texas Music Round-Up (www.texasmusicroundup.com), a cataloger of discount music from Texas, also offers free podcasts featuring selections in its inventory as a way to entice cruisers to take a listen.
In addition, many of the world's major communications companies also are aware of podcasts' growing popularity, and quickly have embraced the medium as a viable communications format.
Besides taking major media by storm and spicing up company Web sites, podcasts also are cropping up as add-ons to company e-newsletters and marketing e-mails. The reason, e-marketers say, is that adding a podcast involves little more than pasting in a hotlink to the podcast.
Fish with I Make News says one of the more popular formats of such podcasts are simple question and answer interviews. With such communications, a company PR person or similar staff member plays the role of a reporter, and a top official at the company — or someone with exciting, inside information about a forthcoming product — plays the role of the interviewee.
"Podcasting lets you convey information in a friendly, relaxed and inviting way," Fish says. "It gives you the opportunity to let the presenter's personality shine through, draw in the audience and lay the groundwork for future interactions."
Fish conducted his own, informal test of the benefit of adding a podcast to an e-newsletter last fall, with very encouraging results. Specifically, he included a podcast version of a text article featured in his company's October 2005 e-newsletter, and found that the article and podcast together reached twice as many people as any other text-based article in the e-newsletter.
"Podcasts work well in conjunction with blogs, too," he adds. "You can have your podcast direct customers and prospects to blogs to encourage ongoing dialogue with your company."
There are also ancillary benefits to the medium. For example, every time your company posts a podcast on your Web site, search engines like Google make note of the fact that your site has been updated, and tend to propel your company's Web site ranking a bit higher. (As most e-marketers know, search engines love sites that add new, useful content to the Web.)
The same holds true for blog-tracking sites like Technorati (www.technorati.com), which tracks more than 30 million blogs. Every time you post a new podcast link on your Technorati-tracked blog, the blog search engine makes a note of it, and the visibility of your company's blog increases.
If you're thinking of experimenting with podcasting on your own Web site, or within your company e-newsletter or marketing e-mails, here's a blueprint for getting started, courtesy of Fish and other podcast marketing gurus:
Experiment with the medium first. Gabcast.com is a good place to start. There, you can record a podcast by calling an 800 number, and the podcast subsequently is posted to Gabcast's site. The company provides you with a URL unique to your podcast that you can place on your own site. If you want to practice your spiel a few times before announcing yourself to the world, there's little worry. Right now, Gabcast.com's podcast creation service is free.
Search out podcast-creation software that's right for you.Once you've gotten the feel for how podcasts work, you may want to bring the software in house. Some popular podcast-creation packages and online services include Podblaze.com (www.podblaze.com) and Transistr, formerly iPodderX, (http://transistr.com). An exhaustive list of podcast-creation software is available at Podcasting News' directory (www.podcastingnews.com/topics/podcasting_software.html).
Keep it short and sweet.Company podcasts of 15 to 30 minutes likely will get the most play, Fish says. He also believes your podcast should have an unscripted feel.
Relentlessly promote your podcast.Besides posting your podcast on your Web site, and including a link in your company's e-newsletter and marketing e-mails, there are plenty of podcast directories on the Web interested in listing your podcast. Those include Podcast Alley (www.podcastalley.com); FreshPodcasts.com; Podcast.net; Apple Podcasts (www.apple.com/podcasting); iPodder.org; Odeo.com; and Digital Podcast (www.digitalpodcast.com).
Track popularity."If your e-newsletter service provider has the right tools in place, podcasting is trackable, just like all subscriber activity," Fish says. "You can monitor which subscribers listened to your podcast, and even identify which ones passed it along to others. By tracking podcast listenership, you gain valuable insight into subscribers' interest. This enables you to customize future marketing activities in order to give each audience segment more of the content they like."
Stay current on the industry and its technology.Podcasting News (www.podcastingnews.com) is a good source of information for all podcast-related things. The site collects any type of company press release related to podcasting, and also features a podcast directory, forum and links to podcasting gear and manufacturers. This is stop No. 1 for any hungry mind looking for the latest on the industry.
Check out these other helpful resources:
Podcasting Marketing Blog (http://blog.rssapplied.com/public/blog/90739);
"Podcasting: Do It Yourself Guide," by Tom Cochrane (Wiley, $19.99); and
"Podcasting For Dummies," by Tee Morris, Evo Terra, Dawn Miceli and Drew Domkus (For Dummies, $21.99).
Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He can be reached at (805) 379-3673, joe@joedysart.com or via his site, www.joedysart.com.
15-minute Interview
O'Reilly Media Reaches Customers With High-tech Marketing Tactics
Blogs, podcasts and other cutting-edge marketing tactics may seem like strange and far-off initiatives to many catalogers, but there are some merchants that use these programs to great effect. Multichannel merchant and publisher O'Reilly Media stays at the forefront of these technologies to reach out to its high-tech customer base.
Allen Noren, director of e-commerce, and Sara Winge, vice president, corporate communication at O'Reilly Media, shared with Catalog Success Associate Editor Matt Griffin their experiences developing and managing these new tactics in Web marketing.
Catalog Success: Why have you stayed at the forefront of a lot of Web innovations, such as blogs, podcasts and really simple syndication (RSS)?
Allen Noren: As a technology company, it was a natural thing to do. It's because we were exposed to this stuff early and through that we were able to see the opportunity. Plus, our audience communicates in advanced ways as well. We would probably like to congratulate ourselves on some of our intuition, but it's also just recognizing where our audience is. Because we write about technology, we're a couple of years ahead of other market sectors.
CS: You make a lot of your content and products available via RSS. Why?
Sara Winge: At O'Reilly, we say our core mission is spreading the knowledge of alpha geeks — people just like us. People who are ahead of the curve, doing things that boggle the minds of ordinary citizens right now, until mass adoption happens a few years down the road. Some of these things, like blogs and RSS, might not be used by your typical home improvement catalog, but the principle behind what we do is universal. We're really trying to meet people where they are. By putting everything we have into RSS, our customers can have it the way they want it.
Noren: That's really the most important message. Increasingly, people don't have time to go to separate Web pages that companies spend massive amounts of money and time to dress up and optimize. You have to meet your customers where they are. And RSS is a very effective and lightweight process of doing that.
Winge: It represents a real shift from thinking, "I'll do things on my Web page so people will come back." In reality, they may not come back. People don't have the time to check back frequently. The way that people consume information is changing.
CS: What advice would you offer to catalogers who are thinking about using blogs?
Winge: An important principle of blogs is that each piece of information you write needs to stand on its own. It needs to be compelling in a short and snappy way. One of the ways to do that is having a voice that your customers relate to and like. One of the things we did early was give people access to the information behind the scenes or the experts who create that information.
Blogs and podcasts are a great way to do that. You get interesting people together, get them talking, and people who are interested in that topic or those people will want to know about it. Also there's a lot of blogs that don't see much action, that is, they're not updated as often as they should be. One of the ways we've dealt with that, for example, is we have a blog called O'Reilly Radar, and we have five people, some within our company and some who are just associated with us in some way or another, who post to that. Even though the volume there is lower than it should be, it still has a lot of people subscribing to its RSS feed because it's really interesting people with interesting perspectives.
CS: Do you have a sense for how much of your audience is accessing the blogs or the podcasts?
Noren: Our audience is really on the cutting edge and is much more comfortable with RSS and blogs than a lot of consumers. So there's a certain amount of necessary education that needs to go into any program involving RSS and blogs. You have to tell your customers what RSS is, what an RSS reader is and how to use it, and you need to suggest some RSS readers, because some are free and some aren't. You've got to let your customers know what it is, because a lot of people, especially a consumer audience, really don't have any idea. Or if they do have an idea, they don't know how to start using it.
CS: How have you approached the concept of blog posts; that is, letting your customers talk back and respond to what you've put on your site?
Winge: You take a risk when letting your customers speak. If you have a blog, you have to decide whether or not to keep comments turned on. Having forums is a great way to let customers create some of the buzz for your products themselves. The risk is that sometimes people are going to be unhappy. So as a company, you have to decide if you're going to let them express their unhappiness and how you're going to react when they do. We've found that actually serves us well, but that idea freaks a lot of people out.
Noren: You really need to think differently when you open the doors on this stuff. We fortunately have really good products, but there are times when a customer has been dissatisfied. But I can't think of one time that we haven't been able to turn a situation around by opening the door. By opening the door to your company, it's like opening up to your friends. It can be very rewarding.
CS: Do you edit comments made on your site?
Noren: If there's spam, we go after those comments, but for more than 10 years, we've had readers' comments on our book pages. And we allow bad reviews and good reviews. It's that kind of openness and transparency that is really difficult for people to get. When we tell people or when they realize we allow unfriendly or critical comments on our catalog pages, they ask why we'd let that happen. And I say why wouldn't we? It gives us so much credibility. And if we do have a legitimately bad book, then we need to know that. On our comments field, we can allow our editors or authors to give feedback, to admit or correct mistakes.
Sometimes a product just doesn't hit the mark with a customer, so they'll post a bad review. But most of the time if the product is still good, there's what I call a self-correcting process. Another customer will come along and say, "Hey, you read that wrong or didn't use it properly. This product isn't for you." The community is there to be your arbiters, to speak up for you. And that's so much more credible than if we were to do that ourselves.
Case Study: Online Catalog Increases Sales, Reduces Print Costs
By Matt Griffin
Problem: Display Supply & Lighting sought to retool its marketing plan to reinforce its position as a technology leader.
Solution: Implemented Kaon Interactive's 3D Catalog.
Results: A 3-D online catalog is now the centerpiece of the marketing plan, contributing to an 18 percent sales increase in January and February, while lowering print catalog costs.
Display Supply & Lighting implemented in December 2005 Kaon Interactive's 3D Catalog to provide its customers with an up-to-date resource for its ever-changing product line.
A business-to-business supplier of lighting fixtures and display supplies for the trade show and museum display industry, Display Supply hadn't substantially changed its marketing approach in seven years. While exploring new marketing avenues, the Itasca, Ill.-based marketer stumbled upon Kaon Interactive's 3D Catalog.
The merchant discovered Kaon's offering could form the centerpiece of a new marketing initiative, providing Display Supply's customers with an interactive design tool that was available 24/7, says Rob Cohen, the company's vice president and principal.
Under the old marketing plan, Cohen would have printed 30,000 catalogs at a time. But by the time the catalogs reached the customer, they were outdated — either a product was no longer available in a particular color, or it had been discontinued altogether. Display Supply often would insert slip sheets into its catalogs, which Cohen regarded as unprofessional.
But with the interactive online catalog, Display Supply can update product information as soon as it changes.
Here's how it works: When a customer clicks on the product catalog link on Display Supply's Web site, a Java applet opens that contains the company's complete line of more than 275 products. This is a significant increase from the 90 products Display Supply's previous Web site was able to display. Customers can drill down within product categories to learn more about specific items, change the color and zoom in on products, running a variety of 3-D product demonstrations. Customers even can create and download a 3-D PDF file that runs the demonstrations after they leave the site.
Implementation of the online catalog took about 90 days, Cohen says. He provided Kaon with two-dimensional images of Display Supply's entire product line, along with seven actual products. Kaon took these images and created 3-D models, which then were submitted back to Display Supply. "The 3-D models were 99 percent accurate," Cohen says. And the inaccuracies easily were fixed. Cohen also provided Kaon with the copy to be used alongside the models and demonstrations.
While Cohen declined to reveal exactly how much the Kaon solution costs, he did say it was less expensive than adding another sales representative.
And the results? Display Supply has seen sales increase by 18 percent in the first two months of 2006, which Cohen largely attributes to the 3D Catalog. Additionally, with Display Supply's entire product catalog online, Cohen was able to bring print catalog production in house. Display Supply now does smaller print runs as needed. He estimates that this will save the company $10,000 per year in printing costs.