Don’t create great content and then just hope the viewers will come. Find the greatest possible viewership with these strategic steps.

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Creating a positive customer experience and translating it into a solid optimization strategy is more attainable than ever — if you have an open mind and a forward-looking strategy on hand.

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As more sites and services emerge, retaining your brand identity in the Web 2.0 space is bound to get more complex. Get some helpful tips for sites and strategies that will make you stand out in the clutter.

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Lean times mean you want to get the most out of your campaigns while spending the least. Here’s how to easily monitor what isn’t working and trim the fat accordingly.

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The internet is a “cesspool” where falsehoods reverberate in increasingly louder waves, says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. But the answer won’t come by keeping brands from the space; instead,…

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One expert in customer engagement and social media shares his thoughts on the essence behind delivering a top notch online community.

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The way audiences use media has changed, but agencies’ planning processes have not. Here’s how marketers need to adapt for the platform-independent future of media consumption.

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Belated thanks to all involved in the London Bloggers Meetup last week which was an excellent evening, beautifully organised by Andy Bargery of Marketing Blagger with lots of hard work from a “supporting cast” which included Rax Lakhani, the team at Splendid Communications and from Diageo who sponsored the whole event.

Not only did Diageo kindly provide the venue at their London head office and a regular supply of Moscow Mules (Smirnoff Vodka, Ginger Ale and Lime) but also they had taken the time to create a special cocktail tailored for each blogger based on the content on their blog which their mixologist put together. My own turned out to be a Better Business Blogging Moscow Mule – loved the raspberry in it! When it comes to Blogger Relations then Diageo and Splendid certainly know how to impress.

Being my first time at one of these events (which, by the way, happens monthly on the last Tuesday of the month), I wish that I’d had time to talk to more people – there were, as you might imagine, lots of people to talk to. Of those that I chatted to, in addition to Andy and Lax, a big thank you to Julius Solaris who introduced me to his own Events Blog and pointed me in the direction of two must attend groups – Social Media Club in London (Aka Tuttle) and the Open Coffee Club. I also spoke to Mehrdad from London Media Design and Krista at Londonelicious and Zoe at Shaman UK amongst others.

Following up on Twitter after the event I see there were others that I missed at the time so I feel a quick name check is in order:

• Melinda Seckington
• Gary Andrews
• Annie Mole
• Cristiano Betta
• Robin Grant
• Tom Phillips

Here’s hoping that I get to chat to you at the next event and in the meantime your blogs are there to get me up to speed! And anyone else interested in meeting up, the place to keep your eyes on is the London Bloggers Meet up Group where you’ll get all the details of the future monthly events. See you there!

Tags: London Bloggers Event, Andy Bargery, Smirnoff, Moscow Mule, Diageo, London Bloggers

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Google Blog Search has just had a bit of a facelift, though it’s not so much of a ‘new look’ as a ‘news look’ given that they have essentially taken the format that they use for Google News and applied it here.

In many respects though, that’s a very sensible route to take. Blogs do tend to fulfil a dual role of providing the latest news on topics where timing is critical as well as being a type of interactive website where good information is always in demand no matter when it was posted. In the case of Google Blog Search, their results are skewed massively towards the most recent information posted – even when sorted in terms of relevance rather than date. Probably better this way or we would simply be looking largely at a rehash of Google’s main index and that’s not what we are after here.

So what Google Blog Search is good at is letting you find the latest information appearing in blogs – does very much what is says on the tin, so to speak – and so the redesign is clearly playing to its strengths. It also benefits from Google’s general uncluttered approach which I sometimes think that Technorati might like to be mindful of again. So check it out and don’t forget to use the RSS feature – will save you masses of time!

A quick run through

So what do you get for your beta now and how can you use it. Well, on the homepage, you now get a pre selected set of blog posts in the main results area and, in the lefthand sidebar, you can select one of 11 other pre-ordained categories to look at. Alternatively you can of course head straight for the search box at the top.

Once you’ve searched on a term, you’ve got the chance to do some filtering, essentially on how recent you want the results to be – you can also sort the results either by relevancy or time, though this makes less difference than you might think. From a business perspective, a really important function sits rather inconspicuously at the bottom of the lefthand sidebar where you can quickly set up either a Google Alert or an RSS Feed for the search terms you’ve just used. Can save you loads of time and keep you up to date!

So overall, it’s a change but not a revolutionary one by any means – more a shuffle forward and to the side rather than a giant leap. I do, however, find myself using it more than Technorati now for general searches, although to track links etc I still return to the Big T.

As an aside, at this time of intense political as well as economic debate over in the US, I like the fact that Google chooses to re-iterate at the bottom of the homepage “The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program”. So that’s all okay then …

Tags: Google Blog Search, RSS Feeds, Google Alerts, Technorati, Business Blogging, Corporate Blogging

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One of the key concerns I get asked about by people writing their business blog is what they can do when they are looking for topics to write about. Don’t worry! I can guarantee that this will really not be a problem unless you let it be one. You know your subject inside out (or else you wouldn’t be writing about it) and you have a huge resource of information that will be useful to them – it’s really a question of picking the right topics for your readers.

For me, there are two main sources of ideas: you and everyone else.

Blog Post Ideas

– You’ll want to make sure that you don’t forget any of the ideas that come to you during the day and personally I use a nice and easy solution for this: quite simply, I keep a notebook with me at all times. Why? So I can jot down ideas that occur to me – and, let’s face it, they can come at the weirdest moments. Anything could trigger them – something I see which sparks a connection or perhaps a comment that somebody makes to me. I note down the idea and any other thoughts that crop up at the time which I can go back to, review and use as and when I need to.

Blog Post Ideas – Everyone Else

When it comes to “everyone else”, the best people to take ideas from are your customers, your prospects and your partners – these are all the sorts of people who are likely to ask those questions which others would benefit from as well, so can be a great source of inspiration.

So, make a note of the main ones and make a point of talking about them on your blog. Treat it in the same way as you would when you take questions from the audience during a presentation – that’s to say, repeat the question that has been asked so that the rest of the audience can hear and then go ahead and answer it.

Do the same in your blog – you will be providing information which will answer relevant and real questions that should help your customers use your product better and help your prospects to understand its potential better.

So that you have this resource developing on an ongoing basis, I suggest that:

• you keep a folder in your email system and make a copy of both the question you receive and the response you send back – this will in itself form the basis of your business blog post;
• after meetings with clients, prospects or suppliers, note down some of the key questions that they asked and which were clearly on interest to them;
• at Conferences and Exhibitions, keep a record of the questions or the areas that visitors to your stand keep asking about and are showing most interest in.

You’ll soon find that you have topics for your posts planned out well in advance and as you write the posts, you will hopefully also start to receive comments which will start to take the discussions and questions in other directions as well.

In the meantime, here are some of the ones that I tend to use.

Write about current events

Something that you probably do on an ongoing basis is keeping an eye on what is being written about your industry, perhaps through various news media and ideally with the help of RSS feeds which of course saves you a load of time and gets you the news in double quick time. So just choose an event or piece of information which is of interest to you and your readers and give your comments on it and perhaps its implications. Don’t forget to reference the article and the site where appropriate though.

Read other blogs

Keep an eye on other blogs and what they are talking about – you will probably find subjects that you wish to develop further, ones that you wish to comment on in your own blog (don’t forget to use a trackback!) or ones that simply spark new ideas that you can write about. Other blogs are great sources of current thinking and new potential ideas.

Write a Series

Select a topic and write a set of posts around the theme you have selected. Try to plan the series out in advance (at least the titles) and then write them as you need them. Alternatively, once you get into the series, you may find that you write a number of them all at once. That’s great! But don’t get carried away and post them all together, instead postdate them (in WordPress, just change the “Post Timestamp”) so that they publish automatically a few days apart.

Revisit old posts you have written

Check back over some of your old posts and see if there are ones that could be developed more fully. You may feel that there are now updates or new information that you would like to add to them, so do so in a new post which references back to the original one and develops the ideas further.

Answer Questions from Comments on Posts

Use contacts from people who have asked for information or have asked questions which have developed on your original post and opened up in turn new areas or topics. Take these questions or the points that they raise and develop the answers into new posts.

Get a guest blogger in

You do not need to write all of the posts yourself, many Business Blogs will in fact have two or even more people working on them. However, if you don’t have people who post regularly, you can still have a “guest blogger” who might come in to post on a particular subject where they have a specialist knowledge.

There is of course a final option – simply take a break from posting for a few days. There’s no issue with that – just let your readers know and they’ll be waiting for your return with bated breath.

Tags: Business blogging, Corporate Blogging, Writing your blog, Idea generation

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