Pubsubhubbub.

No, this blog hasn’t been hacked; nor am I typing gibberish. Pubsubhubbub, or PuSH as it also helpfully known, is a new protocol which is moving blogs into real-time.

PuSH allows services that subscribe to a blog, mainly readers like Google Reader, to get new posts almost instantly. So when you hit the publish button your post is pushed out to all your blog subscribers. Previously, RSS readers sent periodic requests to blogs, asking whether there were any updates and retrieving new posts. Inevitably this led to a lag between a post being published and subscribers reading it.

Wordpress (the leading blogging platform) has installed this protocol on all the blogs it currently hosts (some 10.5 million; these are the blogs with the wordpress.com suffix) so that new posts from these blogs are pushed to blog readers. For those who use Wordpress on self-hosted blogs (many million more), there is now a plug-in they can install to do so as well.

So now we’ve deciphered the  gibberish, what does this actually mean?

Well, it means several things; some good, some not so good.

The good

• Blogs go real-time. This is great as the lag between an event and your posted response has narrowed. You want your blog to be part of the debate before it is an obsolete trending topic on Twitter, or old hat with your colleagues, partners and clients.

• Share and share alike. Again the advantage of real-time feeds is that your readers can then go on to share a post they like within minutes on social bookmarking or networking sites, meaning your blog is central to the evolving discussion.

The not so good

• Publish and be damned! There is no going back now. If you have a Wordpress blog or install the PuSH plug-in, your post is out there as soon as you hit the button. If you’ve made mistakes, want to change it around or retract part of it there is no longer a lag which allows you to do so before others read it.

• Reputation, reputation, reputation. If RSS readers are gulping down your posts at breakneck speed,  there is less time to respond if an issue that is damaging to your reputation, or that of your business, emerges and is circulated.

As bloggers, we are often instructed to think before we post. Now, it seems, that advice is more pertinent than ever.

Joel Turner is an account director at digital PR specialist Tinderbox Media.

Image credit: dark_ghetto28

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Does social media have a part to play in business-to-business marketing?

Many observers say it doesn’t, and that social media marketing is only a useful marketing discipline for communicating with consumers. So are the naysayers right?

Are Twitter, Facebook et al useful platforms for communicating with businesses?

One of the major problems in forming a cogent argument for social media in the B2B marketing mix has been the dearth of decent case studies. There are some good resources (socialmediab2b.com is a blog that offers some great thinking and insights) but until recently there have been few examples to call on that demonstrate its value. Certainly not in the same way that Dell and Zappos have shown the power of social media in talking to consumers and generating sales.

Well maybe that’s all about to change. In recent months several B2B case studies have emerged and now the world’s biggest technology company, Microsoft, has released a short whitepaper chronicling the success that Microsoft Advertising division has had in reaching a business audience.

The first thing to recognise in highlighting this case study, and using it to champion the role of social media when marketing to businesses, is that the Microsoft Advertising team have been largely preaching to the converted. They haven’t faced a challenge in finding users online because the division’s customer-base is largely made up of digital marketers who spend most of their lives online and embrace every new social network and development.

That said you’d be hard pushed to find many people who don’t spend at least part of their time online these days, and most people experience the internet through the prism of a social network. Whether it’s an office worker logging in to Facebook at lunchtime, or a bored exec checking their Twitter feed during a meeting – increasingly people experience the internet through social networks. And the link ecosystems that social networks create guide many users through the billions of web pages out there.

Back to Microsoft Advertising though, and quite openly and honestly the division recognises that it first took interest in social media (and founded a community team) to tackle negative publicity surrounding the launch of adCenter in 2005:

At its beta launch, adCenter was met by the search engine marketing community with some consternation. It seemed that excitement at a potential rival for Google Adwords, coupled with an expectation that Microsoft would deliver a

comparable user experience right out of the gate, led some detractors to start writing on blogs and forums that Microsoft didn’t know what it was doing, that it was subversively forcing advertisers to use Internet Explorer as adCenter was not compatible with rival browsers, and that a software company could not possibly compete or react quickly enough in such a fast-changing environment, given its background in 2- to 3-year cycles of product releases.

The Microsoft Advertising community team was born out of necessity in some ways. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. They knew very early on that they weren’t just shamelessly plugging their products and that they had to enter a dialogue with users to help them understand the value of adCenter, help answer their queries and challenge any misconceptions.

So what came next? Well, let’s remember this was back in 2006. Twitter didn’t exist, Facebook was just finding its feet and likewise LinkedIn wasn’t the huge phenomenon it is now. So the team created its own platform by launching a blog:

We started our blog back in 2006 as an official voice, our calling card, if you like. If you wanted information or news from the most credible source, the adCenter blog would be where you’d find it first. It served as a tool for telling our story in a world where marketing-speak sometimes just doesn’t wash, especially if the tide of opinion is against you. It provided valuable data in the form of comments and links from other posts, which we could collate and feed back to product and marketing teams to show what the real pulse was out there in the marketplace.

A Twitter profile and Facebook page followed when the time was right as the team recognised another important social media lesson – not everyone will come to you, you have to go to them. Finding the right context for conversations with your customers is just as important as what you say.

Sitting side by side with context is ‘content.’  The mantra ‘content is king’ still holds true but there is no point in generating content if no one consumes it. And likewise there is even less point having a load of different social media profiles that are not updated. Content and context are both equally important – an observation the team picked up on:

It takes time to build a community on each and every platform, and the web is littered with stale Facebook pages and dormant Twitter accounts because a marketing department saw social media as a quick win, a viral excuse for hard graft in engaging customers in an authentic and timely fashion. If you’re taking your message off-site, you have to budget for some extra time, education and execution to keep that conversation alive and ongoing.

Another important point to draw from this excerpt is that social media is not a ‘quick win.’ There is a tendency to equate the real-time nature of social media with immediate results.

The community team saw this was not the case. But despite the indulgence of a multinational corporation (the whitepaper says that before the explosion of social media ‘our team was seen as a support function, very much a “nice to have”.’) and all the time and resources you could ask for, the team did think hard about measurement.

And in thinking about how to measure social media engagement they derived  two very interesting conclusions; that time spent answering customer queries online is cheaper the alternative, and that online activity is ‘earned’ and therefore a lot cheaper than conventional advertising:

We track and monitor all clicks on links in our Twitter feed, learning what is most popular for future reference, and multiply their number by our call centre costs. Add incremental revenue to that number and you have significant cost savings.

Tallying up how often our content is shared and putting a realistic monetary value to how much that exposure would cost in the press is one way of demonstrating the value. Our Twitter following is more than 8,000, but regularly our reach grows to more than 50,000 internet marketers when our followers deem something we’ve said as worthy of sharing.

I think these are the two most interesting elements of the whitepaper. Both are bold steps and give social media legitimacy as a measurable, cost-effective B2B marketing channel

Of course Microsoft is a huge corporation, and one that spends as much, if not more time talking to consumers. But how many marketing departments in companies around the world wouldn’t sit up and take notice of Microsoft Advertising’s experiences? I’m guessing very few.

By making that leap from measurement to return on investment this whitepaper joins the dots and moves the debate on a long way.

Perhaps most surprisingly it has come from Microsoft, one of the most maligned tech companies around. In many ways this illustrates the transformative powers of social media marketing – even companies with poor reputations can pick up the baton and start having open and frank conversations with their customers again.

Joel Turner is an account director at digital PR specialist Tinderbox Media.

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I plan to be writing more here in 2010 – you had better believe it, buster – and here is all the motivation I need.

Thanks Wilbur! (And thanks to Robin at We Are Social for the great spot.)

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Here are the slides from my talk, which I presented using Prezi (zooming presentation software). This is a simplified and abridged version of my talk, because I have removed a number of slides and because I’m not there talking over the top of it! However I have added some notes and my essential argument is extant. In a nutshell: you may have good reasons for having a business blog, but that doesn’t make your business blog good. I highlight some common pitfalls and propose some simple measures, considerations and ideas that should help turn those marketing theories into real-life business benefits.

If you aim to improve your company’s online visibility and/or performance, and you can make it to the next ThinkVisibility conference, I recommend the trip. Just look at the feedback for the last one.

EDIT: For some reason the Prezi isn’t showing up in some readers. Clicky to view.

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For the uninitiated: WordPress is an extremely popular blogging application, with good reason: it is free to use, easy to customise, jam-packed with great features and is at the centre of an enthusiastic and helpful  blog community.WordPress is regularly updated and the latest version, WordPress 2.8.4, went live in August 2009.

Official advice has been issued: WordPress has advised all users to upgrade to its latest version. Bloggers are posting  about ways in which hacked blogs can be identified and remedied. However if you are fairly new to blogging, or if your blog was set up for you by a third party, you may be left scratching your head. Perhaps you haven’t upgraded your WordPress before now, or perhaps you aren’t that familiar with the nuts and bolts of your web hosting control panel. MySQL? Database backups? If this is the case, this quick guide is for you. All you need is Firefox and a “can do” attitude.

What happens to your blog if it is attacked?

Two things. Firstly, your blog suddenly gains one or more new “Administrators”. These are users with powers to write, edit and publish posts, add/delete new features and change settings. For obvious reasons, you don’t want strangers to have this kind of access…

Secondly, your permalinks change. Permalinks are the URLs for your posts. For example, the permalink for the post that you are reading now is as follows:

WordPress users affected by an attack are reporting that their permalinks are altered to something like this:

http://corporateblogger.co.uk/2009/09/05/wordpress-under-attack-how-to-protect-your-blog-when-you-dont-know-mysql-from-my-little-pony/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/#comment-506929

Or something like this, when it wasn’t the permalinks structure previously:

http://corporateblogger.co.uk/2009/09/05/p=22?

A hobby blog of mine was attacked in the early hours of this morning: two mysterious new Administrators were added, and the permalinks were changed to the latter format. When site visitors tried to click through to other posts on the blog – via links to “Featured Posts” in the sidebar, for example – they were taken to blank pages. The same applied to would-be visitors who attempted to click through to the blog via links on other websites.

How can you tell if your blog has been affected?

1. What version of WordPress are you using? If you aren’t sure where to look, you will find the version noted on your WordPress blog’s dashboard. The “safe” version is 2.8.4; any previous version is considered vulnerable. However don’t presume that you are out of the woods if you have 2.8.4 already, especially if this version has been installing during the past few days.

2. The obvious one: click around on your blog and take note of the permalinks. Is all as it should be?

3. Go into your WordPress dashboard. Go to the Users page. (The link is top right on WordPress 2.5 and in the left sidebar on later versions.) The users will be listed and categorised as Subscribers, Editors, Administrators etc.,with a number in brackets next to each category at the top of the page/. The Administrators are the ones to look out for. Does the number of Administrators cited in brackets exceed the number of named Administrators on the page? If so, your blog has been attacked.

What should you do next?

There are two schools of thought here. The first is that you should upgrade to 2.8.4 before you do anything else; however, if you upgrade while your blog is affected, you aren’t going to rinse out the hack – you will simply carry it over to the new version.

So you can upgrade + rinse, or rinse + upgrade. Your call!

This is what I did with my affected hobby blog:

1. Deleted all unfamiliar Subscribers.

2. With that Users page open in Firefox, I followed the advice given in this excellent Nachotech post: I went to the View tab at the top of the page and selected Page Source, which pops up all the page’s HTML code.  If the cited number of Administrators is mysteriously high, it is because new Administrators have been added to your blog, alongside a clever piece of Javascript that ensures that the new Administrators do not show up on the Users page. You’ll be able to see them on the HTML though.

Scroll down until you find an unfamiliar username. It will appear in a block like this:

</script></div> </td>

<td><a href=’mailto:’ title=’e-mail: ‘></a></td>

<td>Administrator</td>

<td class=’num’>0</td>

</tr>

<tr id=’user-27′ class=”alternate”>

<th scope=’row’ class=’check-column’><input type=’checkbox’ name=’users[]‘ id=’user_27′ class=’administrator’ value=’27′ /></th>

<td><strong><a href=”user-edit.php?user_id=27&#038;wp_http_referer=%2Fwp-admin%2Fusers.php%3Frole%3Dadministrator“>KeithDick77</a></strong></td>

<td>…

KeithDick77? Who he?

The next step: to copy and paste the line of code that I have highlighted in bold, into a URL that begins http://wp-admin/. So in this case , with the mysterious KeithDick77, the url would be as follows:

http://wp-admin/user-edit.php?user_id=27&#038;wp_http_referer=%2Fwp-admin%2Fusers.php%3Frole%3Dadministrator

When you do this, the unwanted Administrator’s settings page will pop up. You can then change their role from Administrator to Subscriber, thus removing of their powers. Also delete the gobbledygook in the “First Name” field; this is what removed the Administrator’s name from view in the first instance.

Before saving these changes, you’ll have to enter an e-mail address and a new password; any old rubbish will do. Once this page has been saved, you’ll be taken back to the Users page. You will be able to see your new user now. Select that user, and delete the profile.

Repeat as necessary, until your numbers of Administrators tally with one another.

One last, but important point here: “wpnonce” may sound like it’s a hacker’s nickname. It’s not; leave it be.

All done. Now what?

Two further steps, as suggested in the comments section of this post by Andrew Wee, are to rename a couple of your WordPress files in the hope that these actions minimise the chances of a repeat attack.

You will be able to access your WordPress file via your site’s web hosting control panel (usually cPanel). You will need a separate username and password to get into the control panel; if you do not appear to have these and your blog was set up for you by a third party, that third party will be in possession of these details.

Once in, open up File Manager and scroll down to two entries: wp-register.php and xmlrpc.php. Rename both of these.

Okay. So this upgrading malarkey..?

The WordPress guide is here. If you are using an older version of Wordpress, you won’t have the automatic upgrade button that appears on the dashboards of newer versions. This means that you have to do a manual upgrade which, if you aren’t aren’t literate with the language of databases, backups and directories, can come across as a daunting prospect.

The solution is deliciously simple: it’s a plugin called WordPress Automatic Upgrade. Download it here. Install it on your blog.

(If you do not know how to install plugins: it’s easy if you are using WordPress 2.6 or above. An option to add plugins can be found in the sidebar. With older versions, you’ll need to install the plugins manually: here are some instructions.)

The great thing about this plugin is that it does all of the hard work for you, step by step. It makes backups of your database and files and downloads them to your hard drive. It deactivates all your plugins, and reactivates them once the newest version of WordPress has been installed.

Activate this plugin, begin the upgrade – and please note that as you go along, it will provide you with various instructions. Download this; click here – that sort of thing. Follow these instructions to the letter.

Voila! You are upgraded. I used this plugin on that hobby blog earlier today, to go from 2.5 to 2.8.4. It worked a treat, with no problems whatsoever.

You should always make backups before upgrading your WordPress. For this reason I’d recommend using this plugin even with later versions of WordPress; it does the backups and the downloads for you.

Moving on

If your site has been affected, read the Wordpress hacking FAQ and consider implementing other recommended measures.

Please note that the guidelines outlined above describe what has worked for me. They may not be complete. As further details of the attack and its solutions emerge, I may well be updating this post. If this post does not solve your blog problems, do check out some of the other posts to which I have linked; these may help. Who knows? We may not have seen the last of this one.

Don’t forget to change your permalinks back to your preferred format! You can do this via the Settings option in your dashboard.

From now on, upgradeupgradeupgrade! Always make sure that your version of WordPress is up to date; the latest version is usually the most secure.

Further reading: WordPress’ head honcho Matt has produced a detailed post about the worm and the importance of upgrading.

I hope that this post has been useful.

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Dairy Queen is the American chain of ice cream parlours. I have been reading a great case study about the company’s use of social media, over at Michael Fruchter’s Social Media Marketing Strategies blog. Michael is a digital strategist with Pierson Grant, a PR firm across the pond.

It is all too easy, when you cast your eye over these lavish descriptions of big bucks companies and their tip top achievements online, to overlook the potential “learns” and benefits for companies of all sizes. If you read this particular case study in full – and I recommend that you do - you will find plenty to pore over. You will also note that Dairy Queen, despite its size, hasn’t been “doing” social media for long. Its corporate blog, for example, is just five months old at the time of writing.

Let’s take a closer look at what Dairy Queen has been doing. Nothing here is going to blow your mind – and I mean that as a compliment! Forget the budget; forget the bells and whistles. Ultimately this is a strategy that draws upon straightforward, considered tactics to generate brand awareness, engagement – and lashings of goodwill.

1. Dairy Queen Blog.

• Launched February 2009.
• Contributors: seven Dairy Queen employees, including the company’s Chief Branding Officer.
• Aims: “to ignite conversation and have fun with a brand that has been around for more than 70 years”.
• Has already attracted more than 50,000 visitors and 560 comments, according to Michael.

I like this blog. It is easy to navigate, is regularly updated and has a personal feel – just look at the header. So many corporate blogs have the company logos stuck in the header and come off bland and dull, because they don’t have any “faces”. The content here includes podcasts and video clips – one clip features Warren Buffett in a local DQ, talking shop with girl scouts – and in general, strikes a good note. It stays on-message, without shoving that message in your face. Contributors are willing to share personal stories (with a DQ twist, of course).

I note that the seven employees are all based in Dairy Queen’s communications department. I would be interested to hear less from comms, and more from the counter and from employees in other areas such as R&D. I also notice that on average, posting takes place once per week. More frequent posting would help develop rapport between visitors and bloggers, and would also encourage Google to crawl the site more frequently (which helps to boost search engine rankings). Overall though, it looks good to me.

What is most impressive about the blog is the traffic and engagement (comments) that it has attracted in just five months. I would like to learn more about the blog marketing methods that have been put to good use here. What we are told sounds good: in addition to Dairy Queen’s Twitter account, the PR team behind this venture reached out to other bloggers by devising a creative competition. Bloggers were asked to write about the “sweet deals” they would make, in order to try the chain’s new Sweet Deals menu for free. The tasty prize: free Sweet Deals every week for a year.

2. Facebook.

• Official Dairy Queen fan page launched in May 2008.
• At the time of writing, 163,112 fans.

The Facebook page doesn’t sit there, gathering dust. In the past week the page has been updated several times. Events, initiatives and products launches are publicised, as are video clips and blog posts. Fans are encouraged to contribute their own thoughts and images. It’s an active page; no wonder that several hundred new fans join daily.

3. Twitter.

• Dairy Queen Twitter account launched in February 2009.
• 2,013 followers at the time of writing.

The Dairy Queen employee tasked with the company’s Twitter account does a good job of it, in my opinion. He tweets a few times a day, answering customer queries, conversing with customers, linking to new blog posts and publicising Dairy Queen initiatives. The follower count is relatively low, compared to the level of fandom that has saturated the blog and the Facebook page, but this Twitter account hasn’t been running at full steam for very long and does not appear to be underpinned by an aggressive, follower-grabbing strategy. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; when it comes to Twitter followers, quality trumps quantity.

3. Pending.

• Mobile. A new app has been developed, to enable iPhone and iPod users to locate their nearest Dairy Queen store. Mobile apps can swallow a significant slice of a marketing & PR budget, but this one is fairly simple and straightforward. No flashy gimmicks here! Instead it does what it says on the tin, connecting people with branches of DQ.
• FriendFeed. This is a real-time feed aggregrator; users can stream all their social media content – their tweets, their latest photos on Flickr, their latest blog posts and so on – onto one page. Users can also customise their feeds, and comment on one another’s items. Dairy Queen’s FriendFeed account has 22 followers and streams the company’s updates from the blog, Twitter and YouTube. However, Michael suggests that Dairy Queen’s presence here may be developed further. As he notes: “It’s a passionate community of users who conversate around the content. FriendFeeders are also Dairy Queen customers, so it’s only fitting that Dairy Queen joins the conversation.”

That Dairy Queen has made such strides, within a relatively short space of time, shows how a simple social media strategy can also be a solid one, irrespective of a company’s size.

As Michael concludes: “[Dairy Queen] got off to a late start with social media, but that’s irrelevant, what’s relevant is that they recognized it, embraced it, understand it and use it.”

Image credit: geocam20000.

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From The Times:

“Thousands of bloggers who operate behind the cloak of anonymity have no right to keep their identities secret, the High Court ruled yesterday.

“In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of the NightJack blog. The officer, Richard Horton, 45, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary, had sought an injunction to stop The Times from revealing his name.”

It isn’t the first time that the newspaper has outed a popular blogger. NightJack has now been deleted in its entirety, which is a shame because it had been going for a while and it was a great blog. Its author provided an insider’s view of the police force; often eye-opening, sometimes jaw-dropping and always an interesting read. Earlier this year, NightJack won the prestigious Orwell Prize for political writing, which speaks for itself. (At the winner’s request, the prize money was donated to the Police Benevolent Fund.) It will be missed.

There is growing criticism about The Times‘ decision to track down and name Detective Constable Horton. The newspaper’s defence of its action appears to centre upon its allegation that NightJack featured details about real-life prosecutions – even though the details of these cases were changed and anonymised – and that the blogger’s exposure was in the public interest.

The judge in the case, Mr Justice Eady, isn’t new to high-profile privacy cases: last year he ruled that the News of the World’s had breached Max Mosley’s right to privacy after revealing details about Mr Mosley’s sexual predilections. This, however, is what he had to say about bloggers (from The Times):

“In the first case dealing with the privacy of internet bloggers, the judge ruled that Mr Horton had no “reasonable expectation” to anonymity because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity”.

“The judge also said that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a right to anonymity, the judge would have ruled against him on public interest grounds.

“The police officer, the judge said, had argued that he should not be exposed because it could put him at risk of disciplinary action for breaching regulations. But Mr Justice Eady criticised that argument as “unattractive to say the least”.”

The corporate blogs that I work across all promote the expertise and insights of named, bona fide individuals. But anonymous bloggers have been fair game for years: remember when there was a hysterical (and ultimately unsuccessful) race to unmask the author of Belle du Jour? (UPDATE: since outed – ah well, it was a good run.)

Now that the High Court has rubberstamped such witch hunts, it’s more important than ever to bear in mind that, if you blog under an assumed name, you should think very carefully about what you publish. The majority of bloggers (Belle du Jour is an honourable exception) can be tracked down; even if you have cloaked your WHOIS  entry, your posts may throw out small clues to your identity. Girl With A One Track Mind, who worked in the film industry, provided occasional crumbs of trivia about her jobs. She was identified after a journalist ran the accumulated information through IMDB.

Image credit: davidsonscott15.

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My day-to-day work and social media are knitted together, but even I’m surprised to find that a Google image search for social media diagram churns up 164,000 results. Together, they form a bewildering array of bubbles, boxes, circles, words, arrows, connections, colours, logos and spider charts, all criss-crossed together. The “social media mess” (above), Tom Cunniff’s mash-up of a few of these diagrams, sums this up pretty well.

As he explains:

I’m not putting down anybody for trying to make sense of social media. On the contrary, it’s important work…What I really AM saying is that when media fragments into this many teeny pieces, it’s confusing as hell.

I’d go further. I’m sure that all of these diagrams were conceived with the very best of intentions; on a practical level, however, I find many of them to be of little or limited use. Web 2.0 may be leaping onwards and upwards but right now, when I meet with clients or prospective clients to discuss social media strategies, it be the first time that they have seriously considered shifting their marketing budgets in this direction. They are busy people; brevity, keyword-rich coherence and compelling arguments are prized qualities. Many of these diagrams – especially the larger, more tangled ones – are just plain daunting, and would require a lot of explanation. If I stuck one of them up and attempted to talk around it, you would be able to feel the hearts in the room sinking, fast.

Of course, not all these diagrams are intended for “social media beginners”. However, there is one that I do draw upon. It is featured in the mash-up above, and I like it a lot.

This is the Conversation Prism, free to use and share, which was created by American PR thought leader Brian Solis some time ago. There is a newer version available, but I actually prefer this one, because of its simplicity. True, it doesn’t visualise the layers, relationships and “connectedness”  that loom large within social media, but I’ve found to be a great starting point for those who are new to social media’s possiblities. It’s clear (i.e. jargon-free), it’s concise, it’s eyecatching and it requires relatively few oodles of explanation. In short, it’s accessible.

Sometimes, the oldies are the goodies.

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A blog can benefit your business in many different ways. Here are a few of them:

1. By creating a personality for your brand. The blog will give your brand a public face (or faces), bringing your brand to life and increasing its appeal.
2. Because people prefer to do business with those they know and trust. Social media is all about dialogue, interaction and engagement. Readers will develop a rapport with you and your brand. The blog will encourage interest and increase trust in you, your products and your services.
3. By attracting prospective customers. The blog will be keyword-rich and regularly updated. Others will link to it. As a result, it will become more prominent in search engine rankings for keywords and phrases – generating an increased volume of traffic from prospective customers.
4. By positioning and promoting you as an authority in your field. The blog, with its sparkling prose and cogent observations, arguments and ideas, will sharpen your competitive edge by elevating your status as an industry expert.
5. By promoting your products and services. The blog will be a relatively low-cost and effective way of promoting your products and services to prospective customers within a specified geographical area, or across the globe.

One final point: if you are considering a business blog, or if your web company has suggested the same, spend some time trawling the web. Look at the other blogs that have a foothold in your industry; check out your competitors’ websites, to see what they are offering. Don’t be surprised if you find that many of these sites feature dull, dusty old blog pages that were tacked on with the sole aim of boosting search engine rankings.

Don’t make this mistake. A blog that is interesting to read, edited to a high standard and full of fresh ideas and observations gives you an edge and is likely to be more effective at generating new business, because you can draw upon the SEO benefits and keep your readers and prospective customers coming back for more.

At Tinderbox Media our business blogging service is increasingly popular. In future posts I’ll be exploring each of the above points in greater detail, drawing upon experiences and real-life case studies. Subscribe to the Corporate Blogger RSS feed (bottom right) to receive all the latest updates.

Image credit: websuccessdiva.

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Today, as yet another glossy pamphlet listing all the local supermarket’s latest deals came fluttering down onto the doormat, I wondered why none of the major UK chains are on Twitter yet.

Tesco: there is an account billing itself as @tescodeals, but as it has no avatar, one follower and its updates are protected (!) I’m not sure that this one is bona fide.

Sainsburys: there is an account called @sainsburys, but it has no avatar, one follower and one update from July 2007. Hmmm.

Morrisons: there is an account called @morrisons, with 23 followers. However it has no avatar – hey! I see a theme developing – and no updates.

What do you think are the chances that these are Twitter Sitter accounts? They may well have been set up by people who have no connection to these businesses, other than the idea that they can sell these account names further down the line. (Recent evidence suggests that they may be on a hiding to nothing: to date, Twitter has been fairly scrupulous when it comes to transferring account names to their rightful owners.)

Anyway, moving on:

Asda: there is an official Asda Twitter account, called @asda_official. It has 97 followers, but appears to be nothing more than a listing of February 2009 press releases from Asda’s PR people. Tweets include blurbs about profit forecasts and plans to tackle packaging waste. This may be useful for journalists but it’s a missed trick, in my opinion.

Wouldn’t it be great if every time your local supermarket announced a new special offer, promotion or BOGOF, it could ping you via Twitter? I’d jump at this one. I certainly pay more attention to my Twitter feed than I do to the (expensively produced) junk mail that comes flooding through the letterbox.

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