You’ve decided to add blogging to your online marketing mix. Now what?
The basic rule to blogging is that any new addition to the blogosphere has to be cognizant that there is a community already established. There are no ‘rules’ per se, but there are underlying guidelines that will make or break your acceptance into the overall community. If you want to run a successful blog that is well-read and well-received, it is important to remember these general guidelines.
h2. Be authentic
There are many examples of companies who have failed when introducing ‘fake’ blogs – either through fictional characters (a.k.a. Character Blogs like “Captain Morgan”:http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/2005/03/argh_captain_mo.html and “Uri Planet”:http://www.uriplanet.com) or the fabrication of ‘real’ people (a.k.a. Flogs “Vichy”:http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2005/06/case_study_the_.html and “Sparkle Body Spray”:http://utopianhell.com/blog/fake-blog-fake-bloggers). These companies ventured into the blogosphere assuming that either people that read blogs would be amused or they would be fooled. These blogs achieved neither outcome. These blogs did get a great deal of airtime on other blogs, but the result was not positive for the brands being promoted.
h2. Be interesting
Everyone is interested in different information. You don’t have to produce lengthy articles and personal anecdotes if doing so is laborious (in fact, you shouldn’t – you run the risk of being inauthentic). You can post product modifications and releases, news on upcoming events and demos, answers to frequently asked questions, customer feedback (both positive and negative), job postings, links to mentions in the press and any other information that may be interesting to a reader. The more you post, the easier it becomes. You’ll find yourself in a meeting one day thinking, “I should blog this” and you’ll know that you are a full-fledged ‘blogger’.
Month: July 2005
A recent Associated Press story on Yahoo! uncovers a new solution for recipients of spam to fight back…and beat spammers at their own game.
Blue Security has a solution called Blue Frog that works by using a “do-not-spam” list they call “Do Not Intrude”.
Here’s a quick overview of how it works:
# Users add e-mail addresses to a “do-not-spam” list and Blue Security creates new addresses (“honeypots”) designed to attract and catch spam
# When a honeypot address gets spam Blue Security tries to contact the spammer and then triggers the Blue Frog software on the user’s computer to send a complaint
# If enough people complain it will knock out the spammer’s website and hopefully encourage them to stop sending emails to the “do-not-spam” list.
Simple enough! But fundamentally flawed, I think.