John Cass at ideaLaunch “Marketing with Corp blogs: Customers are willing to talk if you’re willing to listen” Part 2 at New England EXPO for Business

John Cass director of Marketing at ideaLaunch at New England EXPO for Business

Blogging not just about search, but also about social search.

Need to engage people and get them interested in your company

What does it take to engage: Blogging infrastructure

Build a blogging plan

• Understand goals: sales, SEO, customer support, awareness
• This is starting point for strategy
• Who will write the blog, build editorial calendar, how often,
• Who can engage people

Measurements

• Uniques, page views, conversions
• Time spent on blogging and ROI with rankings, traffic, calls to action

Blogging assessments

• Keywords for SEO and keywords for blog may be different
• Bloggers are writing about cutting-edge stuff

Build a list of blogs

• Who industry leaders are
• Who linked to
• Who are thought leaders are they engaging

Tools for research and monitoring

• Google Analytics
• What’s being said about brand and industry
• What’s most prevalent trends in industry: similar to PR

How much time to spend, how often to write

• Depends on how active community is and what you want your impact to be
• Look at keywords, look at volume of posts

Content strategy

• Who engaging with
• When writing: interview others, quote them, write about them
• Comment on controversial issue, build a relationship, become thought-leader

Understand company capabilities

• It’s more community management
• Be open
• Be transparent
• Have good writer
• Have time to write
• Are there people who to help monitor, help find posts should comment on?

Final thoughts

• Blogger relations, not media relations
• Sustain the evangelists, sustain the community
• Blog allows access to other social media tools: twitter, etc. engage/bring them back to the blog
• Listen to put your company in context