Setting up one’s company is a difficult task. Stephanie Stewart wrote this very honest and straightforward report of her new social media venture entitled WiseOz. I thought that this report would be very beneficial to all our readers who are thinking of creating a new business in that department and wish to know the do’s and don’ts of such an activity.

by Stephanie Stewart, Co-Founder of iThinkWorks LLC and WISEOZ.com

This story starts like any other. Girl reads book. Girl is deeply inspired by book. Girl and boy jump head first into to the super competitive social community space. Well, I’m that girl. Now, fast forward to 10 months from when I first picked up that book and my partner and I are 90 days into the launch of our first social community.

I have for you what I learned in the first 90 days of the social community space that I must be stupid enough to share. These lessons are not intended to represent the lessons of everyone in this space. They are certainly personal to my experience and, in some cases, may be entirely unique. Regardless, these are the lessons I have gained and the observations I have made 90 days into this journey. Where some may consider it stupid to divulge such lessons (and so early on), I am sharing this with anyone and everyone that has the desire to follow their dreams into the social community space or who is already deep in it.

1. Your theme song and mantra will dramatically change
Just like every other team of entrepreneurs, my partner and I had a theme song which represented our mantra. Leading up to the launch (which was exactly 13 days late due to a million other lessons that I could write a book about) and a few weeks post-launch, we rocked to Rage Against The Machine’s “Renegades of Funk” … No matter how hard you try, you can’t stop us now! Well, days go by and the struggle to find one’s audience takes its toll on the psyche. A homemade mantra, “Breakthrough before breakdown”, keeps us going these days.

2. The guy who wrote the book will just try to sell you something
The book I read (which shall remain nameless) preached all about the emerging social community space. It taught, it inspired, it encouraged, and it even invited the reader to contact the author (who happened to be an angel investor himself) with ideas. Well, we did just that and were quickly given an offer (one could easily refuse) which was more like a consulting agreement with ridiculous fees for this and that to bring our idea to investors. This lesson was indeed the most disheartening of all.

3. Operations is the most important thing you will never have time to always be doing
My partner and I happened to pick a high maintenance concept that requires a tedious amount of day to day operational activities to continuously build and manage custom games and contests. If we’re not around, the WISEOZ.com world will fail to revolve and members will get antsy. We found very early on that operations will always come well before strategy and growth. It’s an unfortunate but true reality for a self-funded venture, as we are.

4. MySpace is a viral wasteland of marketing opportunity
Albeit tedious and primitive, MySpace marketing is a strategy or ours and many others. We set up a MySpace (and Facebook and Twitter) page for WISEOZ.com at the suggestion of some of our well-informed members. Little did we know how that trolling through the millions of MySpace pages and groups to find new members is actually a marketing strategy and not such a bad one at that. You can spend hour upon hour weeding through MySpace users based on their interests, demographics, and whatever other personal information they reveal and it will cost you nothing but time. This is a tedious but addicting activity that happens to produce the occasional new member which eventually leads to more and more new members through word of mouth. Not a bad marketing strategy if you’ve got a zero dollar budget and a good stomach for bad web pages.

5. The devil is in the minutia, and by that we mean customer service
Aside from day to day operations, we have managed to distinguish ourselves for our customer service. It was likely born from new entrepreneur syndrome (similar to new mother syndrome in that you just can’t put your new baby down) but has evolved into a sort of customer-driven customer service. Over the past 90 days, we’ve gotten to know several of our members on a personal level, their dogs, their kids, their accomplishments, their struggles, and more. We listen well and respond even better. In fact, it’s not unheard of to see us in the chat room for most of the day responding real-time to member requests for this and that special feature. Keeping our existing members satisfied and engaged comes first and foremost. No matter how cool your gadgets or fancy your widgets, your social community is only as good as your least satisfied member. All in all, it’s one thing to know your demographic, it’s quite another to know your members.

6. When the going gets tough, friends and family are nowhere to be found
My partner and I don’t have a huge network of friends nor do we have large families, but we do have enough to potentially offer a vast amount of support. Unfortunately, that has not been the case in our case. We have members from Seattle to Australia that will talk the WISEOZ talk and walk the WISEOZ walk completely unsolicited but we don’t have a single family or friend that will take the time to join our community and show their support. This might be a more personal experience, and I might be struck by lightning when I walk out the front door this morning, but it is true nonetheless and may be true for others in a similar position. It’s an odd phenomenon that the people closest to you can sometimes be your worst supporters.

7. Signs do occur but you’ll never quite understand what they really mean
My partner and I were ecstatic when FairyGodMom, our first paying member arrived just 2 weeks into launch. She didn’t bring with her dancing mice or a pumpkin coach, but she arrived nonetheless. Then, just over 2 months into launch, lightning struck my home (where else do you put your data center when you’re self-funded) and took out our connection to the world. The site was down for about 20 hours, members were in a panic, and we were trying to read the signs. We are still trying to read the signs.

8. Not every click is created equal
Within the first few weeks of launch, we gave Google AdWords a freshman try. In some cases, we paid upwards of $10 for a single click. On a $10 daily budget, it’s disappointing when one click produces nothing more than a bruise to your bounce rate. Shortly after, we stopped Google AdWords and found that our bounce rate dropped from a whopping 60% down to a respectable 15%. With paid advertising out of the question, we’ve resorted to a heavy dependence on word of mouth and homegrown viral marketing techniques. It’s a slow climb but forward progress is being made every day.

9. This business of social communities is not so social at all
Call us naïve but right out the gate we went looking for a mentor. It seemed the right thing to do at the time. We learned about other sites our members frequented and pursued relationships with them. We saw synergies all around us (maybe those were stars in our eyes) and know the market is big enough and broad enough to allow for such synergies. Unfortunately, we quickly found that those with investors run the furthest and farthest, the fastest. We have yet to find a competitor that is self-confident enough to consider a mutually beneficial or mentoring relationship. This is the part of the social community space that isn’t quite so social at all. In the end, site statistics will tell you you’re small but it’s your competitors that will make you feel that much more tiny and insignificant.

My partner and I carry these lessons forward into our next 90 days in the social community space with heavy hearts, thicker skin, and blood shot eyes. For those that find themselves dealing with similar circumstances, we hope we’ve offered you some insights that may assist you on your venture or maybe in comparison you’re doing much better and my article made you finally realize that.

Stephanie Stewart is the co-founder of iThinkWorks LLC, a start-up that identifies and develops products and services focused in and around online social communities. WISEOZ.com is iThinkWorks’ first social community project. WISEOZ.com is a free contest-based and interest-oriented community where members win prizes, participate, socialize, and connect through play-as-you-please games (”WiseWits”), interest-based social networks (”Circles of Interest”), and establishment of an online identity (”My Ego”). You can e-mail her at stephs@ithinkworks.com.

Very often, I hear people say that you have to make your end-user’s lives easier to generate a marketing success. However paved with good intentions this statement may be, I did ask myself the question whether making users’ live easier is a sustainable marketing argument for the development of a business. Here are my thoughts on this subject:

First and foremost, I wondered whether revenue could be linked to user-friendliness and ease of use of the service? Very often, it is said that what made Apple’s success was the user-friendliness of its products. This explanation, however, is very debatable. What could be simple for a certain user, mainly because he is used to a certain feature or a certain way of doing things, may seem complex to another. And this is even true of such well-designed products as the Mac Intosh, or the iPOD. For instance, it happened to me many times that I advised new Apple buyers who were complaining about the lack of the contextual click on their new Mac mouse. I had to show them that they had to press the button for approximately one second in order to display that contextual menu. This simple gesture may seem very user-friendly to most Mac users, whereas having a two button mouse may seem very unusual and quirky to them. But to most Windows users (just a little reminder, this is 97% of the population) this way of working with a mouse is very quirky too. Can we easily conclude that these design particularities (which could be considered as great by some and quirky by others) are a good selling argument, which are sufficient to explain how successful the product was? I’m not really sure, due to the fact that there are a number of users who discover these design features after buying the products and not before.

Secondly, I’m wondering whether user-friendliness is a constant with time? As a matter of fact, I think that user-friendliness can be pictured on a curve (similar to the hype cycle curve by partner), which explains the evolution of a user and the user-friendliness factor in the course of the usage of the machine or software. By the time a user gets used to the features of the new software or the new hardware, including those which are very exotic, the end-user will become more and more exacting. A feature which might be unusual, or even useless when you start using a product for instance, may eventually prove very useful and even compulsory with time. For instance, when I started using my newly purchased HTC 7500 advantage, the 3-D communication capability seemed to me superfluous; but I started using it more and more, and then I started to dive into the complexity of the menus and options. Now, the 3-G capability of my PDA has really become irreplaceable. If I were to lose it, I would struggle goes straight away to shop and buy a flat fee subscription for 3G, because I really need this feature now. As a conclusion, what seemed complex and useless at the outset (menu configurations to connect, proxy parameters, etc) very shortly became an absolute necessity for me to connect my machine to the Internet and use it to the full.

Thirdly, it may happen that a feature, which seemed user-friendly, and convenient in the beginning, becomes useless and irritating with time. For instance, we could describe the T9 (so-called ‘predictive text’) feature on mobile phones as very useful when we discover it for the first time. When you don’t have a keyboard on your mobile phone or your smartphone and you want to type a text (short message, note, calendar entrey, etc) this feature may seem really great and useful. You start typing the beginning of the words, and then the system will fetch into the dictionary and will complete the entry. However, with time, this feature appears quirky, and even generates unwanted effects. As a result, the feature which was meant to simplify usage becomes cumbersome, superfluous, and it even gets on your nerves to a point where you actually de-activate it (as long as you are able to work your way through the menus to re-instate manual entry). Eventually, users and mostly youngsters prefer to use abbreviations, and even this weird phonetic SMS lingo to communicate. This is a good example of a feature which seemed useful in the beginning, and was meant to make users’ lives easier, but which at the end of the day is so complex that the users want to get rid of it.

Other pertinent examples can certainly come to your mind, but as a conclusion of these brief article, I can add that user-friendliness is probably what is the most difficult thing to achieve in this world, because it is both subjective and personal (what seems easy for one may seem difficult to others) and because it evolves with time, with the usage of the system in one way or another. At the end of the day design can be a hell paved with good intentions, where user-friendliness and simplicity is aimed at but where one generates a lot of irritation and frustration. Most importantly, because this criterion is very subjective, it would probably generate a halo effect if we were to try and measure its impact on sales and revenues, or even worse if we were to predict future revenues based on user-friendliness. Conversely, we can certainly find a very good number of products or services, which went through huge commercial success despite the fact their usability was really bad or even downright awful (one will remember. Siemens’ Gigaset telephones, which were tremendously successful from a commercial point of view a few years ago whereas their menus were absolutely useless; for instance turning on your speaker phone required that you pressed the ‘INT’ key and then press eight for what it means!?). I hope that this article however is not going to entice manufacturers to make lives even more difficult for users, because I think this is hard enough as it is.

However, and however much we regret it, we think it would be wrong to believe that user-friendliness and the quality of a user manuals is a recipe for success.

Rejoice ye visionary readers, rejoice!  The tide of marketing is turning at last.  After more than 13 years of battling against autistic — and largely inefficient — old world marketing techniques and visions, we are now witnessing a few cracks in the ice of top-down marketing strategy.  Firstly, Regis Mc Kenna and Geoffrey Moore introduced new ways of dealing with clients mainly in the IT world at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s.  The approach was no longer demographic but behavioural.  Secondly, European researchers Badot & Cova wrote their ground-breaking opus entitled “neo-marketing[Fr]” in 1992 (many were to follow) introducing so-called “societal” approaches to marketing and even suggesting we use the term “societing [En]” instead of marketing.  (Wasn’t that visionary?  Bernard Cova now teaches mostly at the prestigious Bocconi school in Milan, and I’ve also had the pleasure of becoming friends with him in the meantime).

The end of the 1990s were the founding years of — not only of the Internet but — the revision of marketing as we know it.  Seth Godin taught us that ideas are viruses — and so are products and services — hence the newer and more pervasive notions of Buzz marketing.  He also re-educated us (yes, I insist, really re-educated) in order to ask permission from our clients to do business with them.  Not only was that the early sign that e-mail marketing had to be done differently, but it also sent a clear warning sign to mass marketers that business habits had to change in view of evolving consumer behaviours.  1999 was the kick-off year for the much revered Clue-train manifesto, a source which is still quoted today as the reference for online marketing.  And more recently, Tara Hunt has developed and notion of Pinko marketing, a rather weird and politically orientated way of putting that communication power is handed over to the people. Yet, this is very effective when it comes to getting the message across.  Even more recently, François Laurent published a new book entitled marketing 2.0[Fr].  Marketing 2.0 is in fact the sequel to his influential blog: marketing is dead[Fr], but what is really striking is that François — a former marketer at European ex-consumer electronics manufacturer Thomson — is more widely known as the president of one of the two French associations of marketing, Adetem.  Lastly Alain Thys is adding to the bargain by expostulating in his excellent marketing accountability presentation that marketing is not only dead but that it committed suicide in front of its shareholders, clients and even the earth!  Nothing less.

No doubt this time, things are moving ahead, even though the proportion of UGC is still low, there is an underlying trend of change, and this is not coming back to what it was before. So as it is becoming more and more obvious to all that markets really are conversations there is this requirement for a growng number of enterprises to quickly be in sync with this evolution and gear up to community marketing

And then there is Forrester research VP and Principal Analyst Laura Ramos, with whom I had the benefit of being acquainted a few days ago, as we were exchanging on the subject.  In May 2007, Laura (see links to some of the most recent and most relevant articles) had a story entitled: “B2B marketers fail the community marketing test“.  Her conclusions are clear-cut and uncompromising.  To sum them up in a few words:

1. marketing needs to change in the light of evolving behaviour and rising power of clients (is not only consumers guys, we are talking b2b here!)
2. top-down and patronising, self-centred, at marketing messages and must be adapted to reflect these changes.  A new tone of voice must be adopted.
3. current marketers are doing a pretty bad job at tying the knot with their clients and — to put it in the words of the blue train manifesto — engaging in conversations with them.

Strangely enough, I see hope through this report of Laura’s.  After years of evangelisation I am not now feeling that there is this shared requirement — I get it from talking to managers themselves — to turn marketing practices around and better use web (even though it was her lately rebranded ‘social media’, see my other comments on Frederic Cavazza’s post here) techniques to better market.

This is why Corporate Web content policies have to change too in order to accomodate these evolutions. This was the gist of my presentation at HEC (the leading European business school) on June 20, in which I depicted my vision of the business world and how we web professionals should respond to that requirement. The title of my presentation couldn’t be anything else than ‘reinventing marketing’, and moving towards what I call ‘addictive’ web content policies.  In essence, there is nothing new with things I did even more than ten years ago. When wanting to position our new Internet Banking venture at Unisys rather than build yet another web page on our supposed capabilities — and few could believe us because we hadn’t proved our point yet — I went on building the ‘Internet Banking Barometer’ (still visible here at archive.org, the memory of the Internet) based on a comprehensive review of all British banks I had made. Since we couldn’t prove our point with declarations of our own making, we could evaluate existing initiatives instead and ensure that, through the design of pertinent content and comments, we were establishing the credibility we lacked and could engage in discussions with people who didn’t even know we existed before. Each review was carefully worded and validated not only internally but also with each of the representatives of each bank, included the then state-owned Bank of England. How encouraging that was, and how useful too in our engagements with newor existing clients. This was sufficient to prove our point that we too had something to bring in the Internet banking arena. To an extent we were only applying Seth Godin’s ideavirus principle … 5 years before it was written though.

Thus we have established the requirement for reinventing marketing, in part two we will soon investigate how the web can support community marketing.

You’ve only got 3 days left but I guess some of you may have a go at it anyway. These guys from Moonjee are offering cash prizes if you take part in their collaborative marketing experience and help him with their new venture. Take your chances and good luck!

IDEA CONTEST: How can Moonjee be launched to thousands of users as an engaging web application that transforms photos in fun and useful ways?

Win cash prizes up to $150. Contest Ends July 3, 2008.

Watch this video of Moonjee and generate ideas on the following questions:

a) How can Moonjee gain thousands of users by marketing online?
b) What are some cool or creative ways for Moonjee to earn revenues?, and
c) Which new interesting features can Moonjee create for the next generation of its website?

Additional Background:
Moonjee is a web application that allows users to have fun with photos of people. Moonjee lets you change the way people look and even do an online makeover. Think about how you might you increase awareness of Moonjee, market it in different ways, and ultimately add thousands of new users and earn revenue to support future development of the site. Your creative ideas could include online marketing strategies on specific websites, video concept ideas, search engine optimization, ad revenue sources or affiliates to use, or even specific partnership ideas with other organizations or websites. In addition to marketing, which engaging features might they add to make the site more entertaining or useful for users?

Contest Rules:
Judges will select the top 5 rated brainstormers who have provided the highest number of good ideas in response to the questions. Brainstorming will be open from June 19 to July 3. Within 30 days after the contest closes BrainReactions will email the top 5 brainstormers and arrange award payment with Paypal. Top brainstormer will receive $150, 2nd place $125, 3rd place $100, 4th place $75, and 5th place $50.

• find out more at http://brainreactions.net/brainstorms/2300

With e-commerce growth rates predicted to decline, online businesses wishing to outperform competition and gain market share, are increasingly required to invest in order to differentiate themselves, deploy richer and innovative applications and deliver more personal, compelling and engaging online user experiences.

Scene7, part of Adobe Systems, released the results of a business survey entitled “Web 2.0 Experience 2008 and beyond”, identifying and analysing how online businesses will be investing in order to enhance their customer experience. Key findings indicated that more than 50 percent plan to deploy new features and rich Internet enhancements including …

An article by Rachel Meranus: PR Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks Understanding the changing face of journalism can be the key to getting more coverage for your business is providing insight in the media revolution which is unfolding before our very eyes. As a matter of fact, it enables us to connect all the dots and understand why the overall picture is changing, and not just business or journalism in isolation. Let’s face the music, this is a whole paradigm shift, one which was announced years ago  (by Don Tapscott actually, who co-authored Wikinomics last year) and is now happening on a large scale. So, what have we learnt?

On the one hand there is “the changing face of journalism”, to put it in the words of Meranus is now a fact and no longer a threat. numerous layoffs, restructuring, new business models, advertising revenues going away.

Secondly, as journalists are more and more into temping and less and less into full time journalism, at the same time, amateurs, experts, opinion leaders now have the means of expressing themselves directly.  There are no technical barriers.

Thirdly, UGC (User-Generated Content) as a means of direct communication vs top-down communication. Advertising was teaching lessons, UGC is about showing the way. Not just a new way of writing then, but a whole new Pinko attitude related to client interaction.

Fourthly, the way that people use information is different. before, they sat down and information was sorted out and filtered out for them by papers. Now, Internet enables on demand information requests. Rss enables push.

Fifthly, Corporate managers establish that new methods are required. Golden age of Taylorism and productivity nonsense is over. One has to respect the individual, mainly at times when resources are scarce. Changing demographics are responsible for this, don’t believe that suddenly HR becomes more clever, it’s a market issue.

All this doesn’t - forcibly - mean that papers will disappear. Hopefully they won’t. The format is convenient, and you don’t have to reboot it either But it is also costly and environmentally unfriendly (paper  is a great source of pollution, if not the greatest, Wikipedia has a story on this). e-paper (in the broad sense of the term, not just the tablet gizmos) might replace journalism as we know it eventually, but there will always be a space for the press which expresses ideas and opinions and provides analyses, mainly political ones. There might be fewer and fewer people who want/can read them, but it doesn’t mean that they are the least important of readers.

All these reasons explain why UGC (User-generated content) is so important to the modern enterprise. Yet, I don’t think we should confuse users for journalists (they have other fish to fry) or vice versa (I see Corporate blogs being facilitated by journalists here and there, I’m not sure this is the right way to go).

Lastly, I believe that certain publications will go. May be not the HBR for it is well established, but lesser known management publications and expert/niche content will be pushed out of paper onto the Internet. I believed that would happen 15 years ago, and this is taking place now.

• read the article in full at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/marketing/publicrelations/prcolumnist/article193820.html

Fred Cavazza, one of our most influential Gallic web experts has an interesting story in English about the fact that the 2.0 phrase - originally coined by O’Reilly in 2004 - has been oversold and is now slowly but surely replaced by another buzz word, i.e. ‘Social Media’. Sure enough, I can hear here and there that such association is being renamed… now I understand everything.

Rest assured, the web is not bound to disappear, let alone its ability to bring people together to collaborate/cooperate. This is indeed the gist of the demonstration which is part of my lecture on collaboration,  collaboration tools and their market at the Paris Graduate School of Management. And likewise, blogs will not disappear. The buzz may thin out a little, but not the aim, and not the power of words either (I hear/read here and there that video will replace the printed word, and this is really ludicrous)

At the end of the day, one may wonder whether 2.0, 3.0 and other social media concepts are not killing Aesop’s goose which laid the gloden eggs. Can’t we just go ahead and do it and forget about  the concept machine for a while? After all, reality will catch up one day, sooner or later, and good concepts and bad concepts will be sorted out by themselves.

The Web - in its entirety - and with its tendency to reinvent itself in a cyclical fashion is here to stay and it has been collaborative from day one. Other concepts may go. But do they only matter?!

• Fred Cavazza’s article on 2.0 and Social Media

the do’s and don’ts of Internet Blog writing

Writing in a blog is not very complex, but there are a few guidelines which should be respected as much as can be.  This list of do’s and don’ts of Internet blog writing can be used as a Vademecum (literally in Latin ‘come with me’, a manual which you can take with you at all times) for expert Internet writers.  It could also be treated as a Charter describing which rules to follow, and each expert should confirm that they have read these guidelines.

• one: do not try and sell your products. Writing on the blog has to be natural and have to be closer to the spoken language. Avoid using cheap marketing arguments at all costs. Don’t even think about listing the qualities or benefits of your products. A blog, let alone an expert blog, is not made for this, but to establish expertise through examples,
• two: publish as much as you can. The more articles you will reduce and deliver, the greater your promotion on the web. A professional corporate blog which starts will only have a few articles referenced/indexed within Google, whereas an older blog or website will already have hundreds or more,
• three: avoid typos and spelling/grammar mistakes at all cost. this is a very common mistake. A lot of bloggers think that because you’re in a hurry you don’t have to worry so much about spelling or grammar. But this is a very bad habit. Mainly if you have a corporate blog and you are projecting a corporate image. The writing has to be natural, which doesn’t mean that it has to be bad. And if your articles are very pertinent and interesting but badly written, you will attract many impertinent and unpleasant comments on this. Being a corporation also helps as it should enable youto get others to proof read your text. However, I strongly recommend that you avoid rewriting expert text to give a communications flavour to it. This would be very unbecoming,
• four: layout is important. It is advised to use Microsoft Word or another word processor in order to check your spelling. However, if you copy and paste text from word into the blog, I would recommend that you start copying it into notepad first in order to clean the text from all unnecessary Microsoft word formatting. Another way of doing this, is to use Firefox and its very convenient language packs which enable you to check your spelling directly into the entry box of your blog,
• five: keep your articles brief. Blogs are not for long articles. Websites are more adapted for very lengthy articles. However, you could still post a large article on a blog and then use the “see more” function which will break up the text into different pages in order to make the reading easier. it is also possible to break up your article into several instalments, which will have the advantage of forcing your users and visitors to return to the blog,
• six: straight to the point. You had rather publish small or medium-sized articles 2 to 3 times a week than one or two large in-depth ones per month. You can also choose to publish your articles in instalments, it’s a good idea if you want to have returning visitors. Google likes it when the frequency of updates of updates on your blog is high, because it will entice its bots (technical name for the search engine indexing robots that come and index your pages) to visit your blog more often… and your visitors too!
• seven: summarise and bulletise to maximise on-screen readability. Don’t hesitate to add a downloadable pdf file for readers who wish to print out your stuff and read it,
• eight: keyword presence in titles, tags, categories and page copy. First 10 lines are most important. Use emphasis to highlight important keywords
• nine: headlines are taglines! here are some recommended titles for your posts:

• X tips and tricks to improve your corporate security, etc.
• X tips and tricks to reach 50% benefit/ROI, reap X million $, etc.
• X things you should know/do before …
• X steps/golden rules to achieve …
• Golden rules for Excellence in …
• Do’s and don’ts of this or the other
• Check-list for …
• X tools to improve your Internet/Corporate network security etc.
• …

Once more, think about your important keywords, because they should be found in your titles.

• ten: High update frequency doesn’t mean your experts should write only for the sake of it.  A list of topics has to be prepared in advance in order to ensure that quality will be maintained throughout the life of your expert corporate blog. Don’t hesitate to quarantine articles which you think are not up to scratch by leaving them in the draft list and updating them later
• eleven: propose subjects which link to other popular subjects to attract new visitors, i.e. even those who wouldn’t normally be interested in it. But avoid entering posts unrelated to your main objective or topic at all cost. Not only would that be irrelevant but it could also be damageable for your brand.
• twelve: use so-called keyword ‘fragmentation bomb’ technique by adding synonyms and varying keywords and titles. This will increase your chances of being found and read. I.e. if your subject is about security ensure that not just the security keyword is present but also others such as intrusion, Trojan, encryption, hacking, network protection, data integrity etc.
• thirteen: in order to make it easy for your experts to feed your newly created corporate blog, your experts should get themselves organised so as to produce as much content as possible on a regular basis.  To this end and recommend that you set up a wiki website for them to keep track of the list of articles that they should write, who does what, at what time, and also when it is going to be published.  As a matter of fact, if you need to deliver many an article, it is probably a good idea that you get your experts to write quite a few of them in advance in order to ensure that the source will not run dry and also to avoid putting too much pressure on the writers.  Lastly, if you have blogs in multiple languages, and if some of the content on either of these languages bears relation to the other blogs in other languages in terms of context, then I would recommend that you use translation services in order to make your teams benefit from the content that other teams have written.  Do not overestimate the usability of a particular content which is made available in a particular language for another.  As a matter of fact, translation is not sufficient, you would also need to adapt the context of the original post to make it relevant, and only experts can deliver that.  Use translation services make the first cut translation and then send the text to your experts said that they can adapt it and change it to their heart’s content.
• fourteen: create the event and bring interactivity.  You could for instance organise contests whereby you’re asking your readers to write posts and submit them to you so that you would give them an ability to be published on your blog.  You could also ask your readers to vote for some of your articles.  Contests and suchlike would generate visits an increase reader loyalty,
• fifteen: be careful about those pictures!  Don’t believe that if an image can be picked up easily from the Internet (via Google images for instance) you would be to use it freely on your blog.  This is not true, and if you’re working for a big logo you should be aware that using an image for which you haven’t got the rights would make your company liable for damages.  Conversely, I do not recommend either that you use images from the corporate standard database because they don’t give a expert look to the blog but instead make it look like advertising, and this is not consistent with the tone of voice of an expert blogging exercise.  Illustrations would do nicely, but more importantly functional and business diagrams, preferably user and expert generated, because they will add to the professionalism of the blog, its readability and the overall understanding.  Mainly if your subject is technical.  As the saying goes, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, but remember that it’s only true if image usage is right. Professional image databanks (such as Getty or Corbis for instance) are serious about that, and rightfully so.  If you want to include an image and your company doesn’t own its own image database, and you want to add professional looking illustrations to it then I would recommend that you use online image databanks like http://www.fotolia.com,
• sixteen: about bad language.  Bad language should be avoided at all cost, needless to say.  Any form of defamation, strong language, criticism, or even downright critical opinion of a competitor, partner, and/or co-worker or peer is just unthinkable.  It means that you will have to understand and practise how to deliver interesting and professional opinions without criticising others.  Be very careful about that, because writing anything on the Internet leaves traces.  And you don’t want these traces to be bad ones.  In other words, you have to be careful about the directness of your Internet writing.  It has to remain interesting and straight to the point, but not too much.  It’s a bit like walking between two walls; the left one is the boundary beyond which Internet writing becomes uninteresting and bland and there is no value.  The right one is the limit beyond which too much is said, and could be used against you too.  It is absolutely obligatory that each expert adheres to rule number 15.
• seventeen: about third party products/companies.  Following rule number fifteen, do not draw the conclusion however that you should avoid commenting on other products and any company.  Yet, you should ensure that these comments are based on facts and numbers, serious and professional. They should also be proven and undeniable, or otherwise they should open the debate in a fair and open way.  Once again, strong language against third party products and all companies should be avoided at all cost,
• eighteen: about comments, freedom of speech, openness and pragmatism.  In corporate blogging, comments, or rather the fear of receiving comments about one’s Internet writing is usually the source for paranoia.  Usually, it’s not so much the experts who are paranoiac, but their management.  To an extent, it is normal since it is difficult for management to assess the level of risk which is associated with these external comments.  However, if your subject is a niche subject that is really professional and b2b orientated, the main issue they will come across is not that related to having fierce comments, but that of having too few comments or even any at all.  Secondly you have to make freedom of speech in your comment available.  If it is not open, and it is not free, then it will show and your blog will be so bland that it will attract no visitors and no interest.  A little debate is a good thing, and you mustn’t be afraid of other experts or professionals, even ordinary readers voicing their opinion.  After all if somebody disagrees with what is said, doesn’t possibly mean that it’s true.  So don’t panic, be open and pragmatic.  At the other end, corporate blog managers should ensure that all comments are moderated.  Openness and freedom of speech don’t mean that you shouldn’t control anything.  This moderation feature would protect you and your management from trouble and it should be enabled.  However, moderation doesn’t mean censorship.  Only moderate these posts which contain strong language, if your blog content filter hasn’t catered for this already.  Delete strong language and comments which are not adding anything to the debate.  At the end of the day, having quality comments on your posts is also adding to the quality of the posts themselves, having bad quality comments is withdrawing value from your posts.

preliminary questions

First and foremost, define the purpose of your corporate blog even before you start writing the first line.  What is the objective of this blog?  Is it about awareness?  Is it intended for you to share knowledge with the community?  Is it there to show that your corporation and its experts are particularly good at something?  If you are able to answer any of these questions, then you should also know what and how to write in it. Of course, it is possible to maintain a blog just to talk about the weather.  But at the end of the day there are very few chances that this is going to benefit your corporation.  Eventually, not only  will this make your blog ineffective, you may also run the risk of losing your management support.  It is particularly advised to target your blog as if it were a standard information vehicle, through a carefully chosen niche strategy.

It is also recommended to create a blog per activity, rather than one that mixes up different subjects.  This will increase the community effect and make it a lot more efficient.  Think about starting small rather than launch upfront as many blogs as you have domains that you’re dealing with.  It is much more desirable to have two or three blogs which are successful rather than a hundred which are not.  Besides, don’t forget that blogging could be time-consuming.

How much time should be devoted to that exercise? And by whom?  This is probably the most crucial question.  If the blog depends on an individual then it can also become a mind-boggling question.  Very often, bloggers who do this for leisure, give up after a while or once they have moved to a more time-consuming job for instance and their free time vanishes or is considerably reduced.  This is one of the reasons why a lot of blogs disappear after roughly a year of activity.  When it comes to corporate blogging, things are theoretically easier because experts are plentiful and it is possible to pool expertise and form expert-teams so that experts aren’t all busy at the same time. One can therefore establish rosters for the blog to be maintained on a regular basis by different people.  Even on the open Internet, this is one of the most effectual methods which I have found in order to keep the blog alive in the long run.

Ideally, expert teams for corporate blogging should comprise six to seven bloggers, or maybe more (although it is dubious that there are going to be more than six of seven people who update the blog on a regular basis).  Should some of these experts move jobs or tire of entering posts on the blog, do not hesitate to bring in more experts and change the team.  Ideally there should be somebody in your corporation in charge of facilitating the team and helping them. A facebook and bios of the experts on the ‘about’ page can also work wonders. It increases personalisation and establishes credibiity. Besides, it addresses the point that the blog isn’t a flog (i.e. Fake blog, a blog written by some advertising agency or fake professionals/experts).

If you want to attract more than 50 visitors per day, at least three to four hours of work will be required every week.  Once again, if you’re getting yourselves organised in expert teams, the amount of time that each individual would spend every week on the blog is going to be limited, although it won’t have any impact on the quality and update of the information produced.  A minimum of one article a week has to be delivered for the blog to merely exist, but do not expect much if you can’t produce at least three to five each week.  Once again, if your team is made of six or seven high-grade experts, this should not be a real problem and should not be too time-consuming. All these people also need coordination, the corporate and marketing teams should cater for that.

Lastly, do not forget that blogging is not an end in itself, but just a means to an end.  However, if it is well-managed, it can be tremendously successful with regard to the objective which you have set at the beginning of your approach (see above).

blog post classification

Let’s classify the type of content that you can find in a blog along four main categories:

• firstly, the easiest type of posts, let’s begin with those articles which contain lists of links and resources. All you have to do is to add a link to another article, a tool or other reference material, video etc. and establish a link with your activity and add a comment. Please note that articles which do not contain a personalised comment are an absolute non-starter and should be excluded at all cost. Besides, even if it is brief, any comment should contain added value to make the post worthwhile. On average, you should reckon that this type of articles will take up 30 minutes of your time,
• Secondly, it is possible to enter articles whereby your experts will comment on news or events and even possibly seminars. In the corporate world there are a lot of these business seminars going on. My advice for this is to publish comments and notes taken during the seminars and presentations. Very often this kind of posts is very successful and brings in a lot of added-value content. Besides, other participants to the seminar event will also be using your minutes and/or linking to theirs. This is also a very practical way of enabling those people who haven’t been able to attend the event to benefit from the content which was produced at that time,
• The third type of article which you could post are those one could call reference articles, whereby you will give your expert advice and opinion. These are probably the most gratifying ones for an expert, those which would establish his/her expertise in the most transparent fashion, but they will also be more time-consuming, and despite the quality of their content they might not be the most successful ones. However, this paradox should not stop them from producing this kind of articles, on the contrary. Once again, do not attempt worldwide fame with niche expertise, it is much better to be well positioned on that niche which will make you and your corporation visible in your ecosystem,
• Lastly, there is what I would entitle best practice articles. These are the ones in which experts are going to define and describe, for instance, the 10 Golden rules for doing this or the other, the five most common traps which you should avoid etc. They might not be the most profound of articles, but they will work wonders since online visitors are keen to find them on the Internet. This kind of article is also going to bring returning visitors, and track-backs (i.e. Other blogs linking to yours).

Last but not least, it must be added that a good corporate blog should comprise a mixture of these classes of posts.  The blog in which you will have only lists of resources, or reference articles, or even Best practice articles could not be very successful in the long-term.

introduction

Once your Corporate stakeholders have understood why Web 2.0 is more than a fad and why its marketing could benefit from it (read our 12 golden rules for Web 2.0) and once they have established how their 2.0 strategy should be articulated (refer to our interactivity matrix), quite a few questions remain: how to create a professional looking blog and how to make it known?  How long does it take every day and how many visitors may I expect? Where should my blog reside, should it be hosted or should I put it on my corporate server?  What should I do so that it is well indexed by Google and other search engines?  What are the do’s and don’ts of Corporate blogging, what are the risks…  These are some of the questions that we come across most of the time with regard to corporate blogging. In this article, we will spell out the steps which can lead to proficient Corporate Blogging and we’ll try and address the above questions.

These pages can actually be used as corporate blogging guidelines for the perusal of your corporate blogging experts and your corporate blog managers.  You can even use this as a charter (namely the do’s and don’ts chapter in part three) with which you would like them in their regular blogging exercise and also get them to agree to the rules of efficient and responsible corporate blogging.  A lot of the material enclosed in this article, is drawn from the experience of experience bloggers and Internet writers including myself who have been working in and around the Internet for many years (13 years in my case).

a few facts and figures

Before you delve into the particulars of this methodology and blogging guidelines, we urge you to read the following lines which will serve as an explanation for the rest of the document.

• Maybe 90% of blogs (90 not being the actual number but a ballpark figure) attract less than 50 visitors per day. Don’t raise your expectations too high mainly if your content is not up to scratch,
• user generated content is the era of empowered users who go on to the Internet hook up to a website and create a blog for free. Because you’re a corporation doesn’t mean that you own the best experts in the world on the subject that you want to deal with. Expect a lot from other bloggers who will have already started commenting on the subject. What about starting a journey by reading what they have done?
• Blogging success is established in the long term: it can take a few years before you reach the top 10 of your category. As a consequence, forget about these people who will tell you that blogging is easy and that collaboration is effortless. This is just not true,
• Your expertise might be really good, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that your blog could attract hordes of visitors. A small crowd of enthusiasts is worth a million passive users. Besides, your subject will probably be a niche subject, which is perfectly normal for expertise,
• From experience, at least 20% of blogs close within 1 1/2 years from their inception because of a lack of content or a loss of purpose. You have to hold on tight. Once again blogging success is established in the long run. Mainly if you consider that if you have many competitors today, there could be far fewer tomorrow since many of them will certainly give up,
• Writing good articles and reviews does not suffice. Quite a lot of time must be devoted to valuing the content and promoting it. The advantage of being a large organisation is that the marketing and buzz marketing can be organised by specialised teams who can free up their experts from that burden,
• Don’t do this for money, this is not the name of the game. And don’t try to sell your products this will not work, a blog is not the right forum for this kind of things,
• The quality of a blog hinges on the quality of its content, the frequency of its updates, its usability and transparency. Don’t focus on usability in the first place. Quality of content and update frequency are the main issues when you start a new blog. Transparency however is not an option. You have to be clear about your intentions and your experts have to know about this (hence these guidelines). As a consequence one will have to establish a disclaimer whereby one explains that the opinions expressed in the blog are those of your experts and are not legally binding. A disclaimer of that kind is available at the following URL: add link to Orange business services disclaimer,
• Blog visibility is established not only through surfing but also through RSS feeds. These RSS feeds are useful for your readers who want to subscribe to your content automatically. Click here for a description and explanation of RSS feeds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format). However, RSS feeds will not do all the work for you. Bridging the gap between your website and your blog is also a good way of bringing more visits to either of those,
• If you want your blog to be visited regularly, you will have to update it on a regular basis. There is no future for blogs in which the latest post is older than a few days, a week at most,
• It is reckoned that if you want your blog to be visible you have to generate at least 10 to 15 posts per month on average. Whereas it is understood that writing so many posts on your own is a challenge, building teams of people who will feed the system with information on a regular basis is probably going to solve the problem to a large extent. While certain experts get more busy at times than others having a roster of experts at the ready can actually help you avoid going through gaps in the feeding of your system.

What’s in a blog?

Blogs are particularly interesting insofar as they are purely content orientated, they attract visitors and help build up traffic very fast, they are also easier to link to and from than a corporate website which is more geared towards selling your products, and therefore fewer people would be reluctant to link to your content if it is valuable content.  The blog will also bring dynamism, RSS, interactivity, and you may even branch into a corporate blogger programme (such as the one managed by Orange business services) which would open the doors to writers from the outside (not in the short term though).

Taken at face value, entering posts on the blog is very easy.  It looks like an online word processor which enables you to publish your articles and make them available online as well as manage a few options and features.  However, this is a lot more complex than you think.  Not necessarily from a technical point of view, but certainly from an Internet writing skills point of view.

With blogs however you do not need to be an Internet expert.  And this is certainly what makes them so successful.  Besides, Google and other search engines like bogs a lot, because they are dynamic and they produce a lot of content, therefore they are great if you want to beef up your search engine optimisation (aka natural indexing).  Lastly, blogs are more direct than Internet corporate websites, they look less institutional and less commercial.  They are ideal to start conversations.  However, they also have their limitations such as lack of flexibility over how page layout can be managed and the difficulty to fine tune the indexing for search engines (but the latter issue are less of a problem for the end-user/contributing expert).