Bloggers, What’s Your Hook?
Whether you’re just starting out in the blogosphere or you write for an established blog, you’ll need an angle to set your blog apart from the rest. Ideally, this theme will carry through all your posts, injecting the blog with a unique style and personality (e.g. snarky, witty, professorial, egotistical to the point of humorous, […]
Whether you’re just starting out in the blogosphere or you write for an established blog, you’ll need an angle to set your blog apart from the rest. Ideally, this theme will carry through all your posts, injecting the blog with a unique style and personality (e.g. snarky, witty, professorial, egotistical to the point of humorous, self-deprecating, nihilistic, voyeuristic). Your angle could also be in the way you present your content, too. For example, you might offer video blog posts that are extreme close-ups or you might include hand-drawn illustrations with your posts.
An angle helps make your blog remarkable, which is a laudable goal for any marketer. In his book “Purple Cow,” marketing guru Seth Godin stated that being “remarkable” doesn’t mean you (or your blog) needs to be the best, it means that you need to “be worth remarking about.” Seth also said that the opposite of “remarkable” is “very good.” In other words, having a “very good” blog just doesn’t cut it — not when there are hundreds of millions of other blogs out there too.
Another way of thinking about a “hook” or an “angle” is to think about your blog as “link bait.” Link bait is content that is so funny, so interesting, and so useful that it becomes irresistible to other bloggers and site owners to link to and “remark” on. Nick Wilson revealed 5 “hooks” in his landmark post on link baiting:
- humor hook
- news hook
- contrarian hook
- resource hook, and
- attack hook
Link bait can take the form of Top 10 lists, humorous videos uploaded to YouTube, checklists, cartoons, tools, widgets and blog plugins — to name a few.
One business blog that I think really nailed this concept is Sparkle Like the Stars, a blog owned by jewelry retailer ice.com. The blog is snarky, irreverent, fun, voyeuristic, trendy and useful — all at the same time! This blog’s hook is paying off, in the form of a loyal following.
We, at Netconcepts, decided to follow in the footsteps of Sparkle Like the Stars to create a blog about shoes we affectionately named, “The Shoe Paparazzi.” The idea behind it was to fuse footwear with the “sport” of celebrity watching in order to capture and keep readers’ interest. At this point it’s still just an experiment, a pet project of Netconcepts that wasn’t commissioned by a client, but is something we hope can be used in the future to prove the case for the “celebrity watching hook” as a viable angle for online retailers.
As far as blogs go, I’m not 100% certain we’ve hit that right hook/angle yet to build that loyal following every blogger dreams of. I put it to you, my fellow bloggers, do you think our Shoe Paparazzi experiment is link-worthy? What’s your blog’s hook, and how’s that working out for you? Talk back via comments.
PRSA Digital Impact: Tracking Social Media Trends
Last week at the PRSA Digital Impact conference I met Steve Rubel, SVP Director of Insights from Edelman Digital and famous (sometimes infamous) PR blogger at Micropersuasion. He presented “2008 Digital Trends: Open Files” which talks about the framework Edelman uses (Faint Signals, Watch List and Hallucinations for tracking digital/social media trends. Read my live blogging […]
Last week at the PRSA Digital Impact conference I met Steve Rubel, SVP Director of Insights from Edelman Digital and famous (sometimes infamous) PR blogger at Micropersuasion. He presented “2008 Digital Trends: Open Files” which talks about the framework Edelman uses (Faint Signals, Watch List and Hallucinations for tracking digital/social media trends.
Read my live blogging notes below or you can view the entire presentation over at Slideshare or Rubel’s post about tracking digital trends here.
Mass vs Micro. It’s less about reach and more about impact. Mass reach is dying. Micro is blogging, Twitter, Friendfeed etc. Even if people are not producing content and media, they’re impacted by it.
Google is not just a search engine, it’s a reputation management engine and is a place for PR. People trust each other more than authority figures. PR is more about “Public Relationships”, not “Public Relations”.
“Open Files” references the way Edelman tracks digital trends. Signals, Watch list, Hallucinations (you think you see something or not)
Faint Signals:
1. The cut and paste web - the web has evolved into a place where you can take content from one location to another easily. Traffic to your web site is less relevant as traffic can be driven elsewhere. Content follows you wherever you want to put it.
You want content not only to live on a web site, but so that it can spread elsewhere. Make it easy for that content to travel and track where it goes.
Gives example of the NBA using widgets. Can place widget in Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle.
2. Attention Crash - People are inundated with electronic communications. The numer of inputs we have as individusals has exceeded what we are capable of managing. Need to chunck it down. Keep it simple and use storytelling. If they can’t understand it in 3 seconds, they’re gone.
Gives example of Blendtec (willitblend.com). Great example of simplicity.
3. Digital Curation. There’s so much content everywhere it’s difficult to distinguish the “art” from the junk. At museums there are curators to make those distinctions. Online there are curators as well: humans and also algorithms.
Every popular niche will offer opportunities for brands to become the digital curator for that niche. The challenge is to do it before others do first.
Gives example of POPURLS and how they partnered with Intel to create an Intel version of POPURLS.
4. Super Crunching. The digital space is the most addressable media and marketing platform ever. However, many marketers are not “quants” and data is largely under utilized.
Google is the operating system for marketing. Data mining and visulaizations reduce risk, make marketing more efficient .
Example: Google Trends. You can track over time if the work you’re doing has impacted news search. Helps you see if you are creating demand with your PR work for keyword concepts.
5. Collaboration - The web is a platform for action. People are working together for shared outcomes.
Rubel shows a matrix of open and controlled communication. Communicate and collaboration. Different tactics fall in different quadrants. Advertising is controlled communication. PR is lessed controlled. Viral video is far more open but less likely to result in a specific outcome. Blogs, community engagement and ideastorms are open and collaborative.
The web is not just a platform for communication but for collaboration.
Example: mystarbucksidea.com. Anyone can submit ideas and the community can vote on them. Starbucks evaluates the best ideas. Open and collaborative.
Watch List - areas of experimentation
1. Living Room 2.0. The internet is coming to the living room in a big way. Shares that he has an apple TV and Xbox 360 connected to his LCD and also to the internet. Streams itunes and friends Flickr images.
We’re entering a new Golden age of TV via the internet. It’s still very early days though. Buy an apple TV and experiment with it so when the trend grows, you’ll be familiar with the experience.
2. Geek Marketers. There are people at companies tasked with staying on top of things. If you’re in PR find out who those people are at companies. If you’re at a company, hire one of these people to stay on top.
Hallucinations
1. Digital Nomads. Increasing numbers of people who are virtual workers or indpendent consultants. Small number but an interesting trends. They are using web based collaboration tools and lot.Ex
Examples/resources: anywired.com and Tim Ferriss’s 4 hour work week
It’s concievable that companies will become more virtual and distributed.
2. Data Leaking. Information is seeping out of institutions. Technology outside the enterprise innovates far faster than what companies are able to do inside. Gen Y workers expect the same tools in the office that they easily have at home. Work and corporate information is migrating to social networks and other online platforms. Be aware of this trend and be involved.
Traffic is something that can happen elsewhere, not just on your site. It’s important to enable content to travel. Digitial curation is a big opportunity. Find high demand niches and “become the curator”.
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The PRSA Digital Impact conference was seriously information rich and I heard sentiments from many of the attendees as such. Hopefully PRSA can make them a regular event and in different cities.
Sponsored By: TopRank Online Marketing Holistic Marketing: SEO, PPC, PR, Social, Email
Podcasting Gives Job Seekers an Edge
Straight Up Search has a great post about how listening to recorded messages (think podcasts) from job candidates can help employers better understand a candidate’s true personality. What a great idea! I can think of several times that I have been quite excited to meet a certain applicant, only to find out later in a […] Continue to read more…
How To Name Your Business Blog
One of the questions I often get asked is how to name your business blog or name your business. Many people call their business blog by their own name which is great especially if you are in the area of professional services and want to be known online by your name, therefore building your personal brand […]
One of the questions I often get asked is how to name your business blog or name your business.
Many people call their business blog by their own name which is great especially if you are in the area of professional services and want to be known online by your name, therefore building your personal brand online.
In fact I always recommend that you purchase your own name as a domain name whether you are ready to start business blogging or buiding your personal brand online.
However I always consider whether the name of your business blog will be easy for people to understand if you speak it outloud on a teleseminar, at a speaking event, on a podcast, at a networking meeting, at a speaking gig or when on the radio.
My name is difficult for many people to understand and also difficult for many people to spell - in fact other than my family, I do not know anyone who has ever correctly spelt my surname when first meeting me - you pronounce it ‘Day’ but you spell it ‘De’.
That’s one of the reasons I chose a name for my main business blog ‘Biz Growth News’ - it’s relatively easy to understand when you say it outloud and it does what it says on the tin - I share strategies and insights about growing your business.
My business blog sits on my portal site represnting me online and after naming my business blog, I purchased a domain name for ‘Biz Growth News’ which points across to the blog.
I recently came across a great business blog by Paul Stamatiou. Paul as obviously recognised that his surname is difficult to pronounce and spell correctly. You see, at the bottom of his business blog is a note that says
Can’t spell my name - use pstam.com
What a great idea. Paul has purchased a domain name that is a shortened version of his name and one that most people will be able to understand and spell.
So if you have a business blog consider how easy is it for people to find it online when they hear you speak out the name of your blog.
If you are not starting a blog from the get go and don’t wish to re-name your blog, consider if you could purchase a domain name that you could re-direct to your blog so that you don’t lose that all important blog traffic because people can’t understand your business blogs name when you speak it out loud.
Business Blogs Can Bring You Killer PR
When talking to people about the benefits of business blogs I often mention “establishing your credibility.” This goes hand-in-hand with “getting killer PR.” Let’s face it, journalists are having to do more with less, so they’re more and more likely to turn to Google and other search engines to track down “experts” in a given field. As […]
When talking to people about the benefits of business blogs I often mention “establishing your credibility.” This goes hand-in-hand with “getting killer PR.”
Let’s face it, journalists are having to do more with less, so they’re more and more likely to turn to Google and other search engines to track down “experts” in a given field.
As you continue to build your blog over time, creating great content in a specific niche, Google’s more likely to return your blog as a result when a journalist starts researching a column or article. I’ve never hired a PR firm, and I work out of the top right corner of the US us locals call “Maine”, but I’ve gotten quotes in Inc., BusinessWeek Small Biz, and other periodicals and the local evening news because of our Web marketing blog.
In the Independent Street blog over at WSJ.com, Kelly Spors writes on How to Get Killer PR and gives five important tips. Just add “Write a Business Blog” as number six and you’re well on your way.
Bloggers, What’s Your Hook?
Whether you’re just starting out in the blogosphere or you write for an established blog, you’ll need an angle to set your blog apart from the rest. Ideally, this theme will carry through all your posts, injecting the blog with a unique style and personality (e.g. snarky, witty, professorial, egotistical to the point of humorous, […]
Whether you’re just starting out in the blogosphere or you write for an established blog, you’ll need an angle to set your blog apart from the rest. Ideally, this theme will carry through all your posts, injecting the blog with a unique style and personality (e.g. snarky, witty, professorial, egotistical to the point of humorous, self-deprecating, nihilistic, voyeuristic). Your angle could also be in the way you present your content, too. For example, you might offer video blog posts that are extreme close-ups or you might include hand-drawn illustrations with your posts.
An angle helps make your blog remarkable, which is a laudable goal for any marketer. In his book “Purple Cow,” marketing guru Seth Godin stated that being “remarkable” doesn’t mean you (or your blog) needs to be the best, it means that you need to “be worth remarking about.” Seth also said that the opposite of “remarkable” is “very good.” In other words, having a “very good” blog just doesn’t cut it — not when there are hundreds of millions of other blogs out there too.
Another way of thinking about a “hook” or an “angle” is to think about your blog as “link bait.” Link bait is content that is so funny, so interesting, and so useful that it becomes irresistible to other bloggers and site owners to link to and “remark” on. Nick Wilson revealed 5 “hooks” in his landmark post on link baiting:
- humor hook
- news hook
- contrarian hook
- resource hook, and
- attack hook
Link bait can take the form of Top 10 lists, humorous videos uploaded to YouTube, checklists, cartoons, tools, widgets and blog plugins — to name a few.
One business blog that I think really nailed this concept is Sparkle Like the Stars, a blog owned by jewelry retailer ice.com. The blog is snarky, irreverent, fun, voyeuristic, trendy and useful — all at the same time! This blog’s hook is paying off, in the form of a loyal following.
We, at Netconcepts, decided to follow in the footsteps of Sparkle Like the Stars to create a blog about shoes we affectionately named, “The Shoe Paparazzi.” The idea behind it was to fuse footwear with the “sport” of celebrity watching in order to capture and keep readers’ interest. At this point it’s still just an experiment, a pet project of Netconcepts that wasn’t commissioned by a client, but is something we hope can be used in the future to prove the case for the “celebrity watching hook” as a viable angle for online retailers.
As far as blogs go, I’m not 100% certain we’ve hit that right hook/angle yet to build that loyal following every blogger dreams of. I put it to you, my fellow bloggers, do you think our Shoe Paparazzi experiment is link-worthy? What’s your blog’s hook, and how’s that working out for you? Talk back via comments.
The Dangers of Anonymous Blogging
BusinessWeek reports on anonymous blogging gone bad in a recent article Busting a Rogue Blogger. Yes, there’s controversy in the sexy world of patent litigation, as Troll Tracker–formerly anonymous, now outed as Rick Frenkel–a blogger who writes on patent trolling, was outed as a Cisco employee. Why is this relevant? Because Frenkel was blogging about the […]
BusinessWeek reports on anonymous blogging gone bad in a recent article Busting a Rogue Blogger.
Yes, there’s controversy in the sexy world of patent litigation, as Troll Tracker–formerly anonymous, now outed as Rick Frenkel–a blogger who writes on patent trolling, was outed as a Cisco employee. Why is this relevant? Because Frenkel was blogging about the very issues that Cisco was in court over.
Apparently Cisco didn’t know that they employed the Troll Tracker, but Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler cited the blog as an “independent source of information” while lobbying for changes in patent laws that would be beneficial to Cisco.
Death threats, bounties on the Troll Tracker’s identity, and litigation followed.
Cisco has since established some blogging policies, but they probably won’t help them in court. Even if these policies had been in place before Frankel started blogging anonymously, they probably wouldn’t save them from litigation.
Perhaps it’s time to start to develop your own business blogging policies for employees? What policies do you currently have in place?
Plurk: Is This for Business?
With all the recent outages and downtime over at Twitter (no doubt stirred up because of my recent article on How to Use Twitter for Business), many people have been checking out Plurk, a similar but different approach with the same 140 character message limit. Plurk has some nice add-ons that separates from Twitter. There’s an […]
With all the recent outages and downtime over at Twitter (no doubt stirred up because of my recent article on How to Use Twitter for Business), many people have been checking out Plurk, a similar but different approach with the same 140 character message limit.
Plurk has some nice add-ons that separates from Twitter. There’s an interactive timeline that shows threads and makes it easier to follow a conversation. There’s karma points for signing up people. You can create “cliques” to better organize friends. It doesn’t constantly crash (so far.)
Is this a business tool? Who the hell knows. I doubt the telephone appeared like a good business tool out of the gate. Is it fun to use? Definitely.
There are game-like features to it that make you want to invite more friends, post/plurk more often and get more involved. I’m not giving up my twitter account, dropping Facebook or giving up my blog for plurk, but like an 80’s arcade video game, I’m sure it’s going to get a few more of my quarters.
If you’d like an intelligent, detailed explanation of everything Plurk check out Frank Martin’s post on The Question of Plurk.
And, if you’d like to play around in Plurk, click on this invite or come visit my page on Plurk.
Pre-Launch Blogs
When preparing to launch a website in the future an organization/individual has two likely choices. They might decide to not put anything up on the domain they plan on launching and only announce the site once their is an actual site to show. On the other hand they could put a placeholder page (splash page) […]
When preparing to launch a website in the future an organization/individual has two likely choices. They might decide to not put anything up on the domain they plan on launching and only announce the site once their is an actual site to show. On the other hand they could put a placeholder page (splash page) up on the domain and whoever visits the site will place it in the back of their mind like the other million sites that people forget to go back and check on.
However, now there is a third option that shouldn’t be ignored. With today’s technology organizations are capable of putting up pre-launch blogs to help maintain the visitors that come to their site.
Most recently I visited the website of my favorite magazine, Play, to find that they had a more sophisticated splash page then one may think. However, I also found that they are missing a great opportunity to improve their image and traffic while also saving a lot of time when their official site launches.
Their target audience consists of people who enjoy video games and technology and the number of people who visit their site is not known, but seeing how this crowd uses the web extensively you could imagine the loss of people their site experiences daily. What they could do is setup a little blog that has frequent updates so that people have a reason to return to the site.
They already have a basic layout on their site and they could fit a blog in there and start writing industry newsbits or keeping everyone updated to the inner workings of the magazine. They may plan on doing this already with their official site, but why not begin that process now?
The Benefits
What this does is help keep people interested in your company. More and more companies are going the route of releasing beta products, software, and websites and a pre-launch blog could be looked at in the same way. You could find out what type of features users want and what they expect to see or you could choose just to write small entries/articles for your readers to enjoy.
More importantly you get your site in search engines immediately. If you type in “play magazine” into Google you won’t even find their website in the first 50 results returned. Obviously, search engine traffic is something that cannot be overlooked, but this is exactly what they are doing. They spent the time to put together a basic website and by the time the real one launches, they will have to invest even more time in getting it established in the search engines.
If you put up a website like they have and then spend 5 months finishing the real one and assuming it takes 2 months to get your site thoroughly established in the search engines, you find that your company has lost 7 months of traffic. However, if you did the basic site with the blog, not only will you get in the search engines, but assuming quality content you will also find your site linked to by other sites. Once the official site launches your website is already moving in full-force with an established customerbase and all it took was a small blog.
If you were to use a hosted service such as Squarespace, you could easily setup a blog that provides interesting content and helps to maintain and grow a customer base before your official site even launches. Even though your site may not be done, it doesn’t mean your ability to win an audience can’t begin now.