Tracksuit CEO

by Daniel Hope ( daniel@tracksuitceo.com )

Thank you to everyone who came to my talk at SXSW Interactive this year! The room was packed as was pointed out quite eloquently by Mark via Twitter:

The Blog is the New Website:

This is my new media mantra and this is the way I started off the talk. My point in saying this is to get people to stop thinking of blogs as online diaries and start thinking of them as the powerful dynamic online platform they really are. If your company doesn’t already have a website, ask yourself if your online needs could be better addressed with a blog. I teach a course on this and I have seen very few website ideas where a blog is not the ideal solution.

Why a Blog?:

SEO - How many companies have a website homepage that they update daily or even weekly?  The answer is very few but with a blog, every time you write a new post your homepage is full of new content for the search engines to index.  They love sites with regularly updated content

Budget - A blog is the cheapest kind of website around.  WordPress is free, there are tons of free themes and the interface to update is as easy to navigate as your webmail.  Instead of paying an hourly contractor to update your website why not do it yourself for free?

Conversation - Web 2.0 is all about facilitating online conversations and the structure of the blog lends itself perfectly to conversation.  When you write a post people can immediately comment, then you can comment on their comments, and so on.

They know they need it:

Many of the folks at this talk are trying to convince their bosses that the company needs a blog.  The good thing is your boss already knows it.  Even if your boss doesn’t know what a blog is, they know they need it.  And they want it!  They may have some fears about technology or transparency or accessibility – but if you can put their fears at ease then the rest should be easy.

Who should write it?:

Some of the questions were about authorship/ownership.  Here is an example of a conversation I’ve had with a client:

Client: “You want me to speak using ‘I’ instead of ‘We’?”

Tracksuit CEO: “Yes, I really do.”

Client: “But how? How can I say, ‘We at ________, Inc.‘ without using the royal we?”

Tracksuit CEO: “You don’t have to say, ‘We at ________,Inc.’ You just speak conversationally, be yourself. Come on, I know you’ve had a conversation before!”…

And how do you solve the problem of whose voice the blog should be in?:

Consider creating different authors.

The great thing about a blog is that you can have as many authors as you like.  This way people don’t think it’s the CEO writing when it really isn’t.  Set up an author, give them a ‘by’ line, link their name to a short bio page and your authorship problem is solved.

How pretty should it be?

This is a fantastic question and something that I run into all the time.  Some people feel like they should make their blog look nothing like a blog and go crazy on the design.

The problem with this approach is you lose some of the benefit of the blog.  People read blogs because they know, to a certain extent, what to expect from them.  They expect them to be a little more personal (and therefore a little more trustworthy) than a typical website.  They also expect a certain look and feel.  So you don’t want it to look like the standard WordPress template and you don’t want it to look like a Flash Intro either, you want to find a good middle ground there.

A good example of a well-designed blog that still looks like a blog is Chris Pearson’s blog.  Pearson is also the creator of the best WordPress theme out there: Thesis!

RSS is the new Listserv:

When you create your blog you automatically have an RSS feed that people can subscribe to.  One complaint I hear is that when people subscribe to your RSS feed you don’t get their email address.  And to this I say “so what?“, if you can let go of a little of that Web 1.0 control then you can use the RSS feed to it’s full extent.

Every time you publish a post it is automatically sent to everyone who subscribes to your blog’s feed and people are more likely to sign up a for an RSS feed for the very fact that they don’t have to provide their email address.

What is a proper blog post?

A blog post can be any number of things and can vary in length.  I teach my clients a thing called the 2 Minute Blog Post using a tool called Diigo.  These posts are little more than a short quote from what they are reading on the Internet with an even shorter comment from them.  These are not in-depth info sessions but they keep the blog alive, they give you a chance to share what you are finding on the web and they ultimately add value to your blog and the article you are linking to.

The 80/20 rule:

You should use this rule when creating blog content.  The 80/20 rule states that 80% of your content should be relevant to the over-arching theme of your blog or to your business industry.  The other 20% can be anything else, like What does Chocolate Rain mean?

How do I know if I’m doing good?

Ultimately you should judge your blog against the goals you have set for it.  What have you set out to accomplish with your blog?  Does it sell your product?  Does it communicate your idea?  Does it bring traffic to a target website?

If you’re looking for numbers and stats you can always look at your traffic stats using tools like Statcounter.

You can also evaluate your blog using Technorati. Two things to look at on Technorati are Authority and Rank.

Rank shows you how you rank against all of the other millions of blogs that Technorati indexes.

Authority shows the number of blogs that Technorati can see are linking to you recently.

Don’t put a great deal of importance on either of these, it’s easy to become obsessed with them.  They should be used mainly as a baseline and a way to compare your blog to other blogs.

How do I get comments?

Ask for them!

Something I mentioned is how Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz asks specifically for responses in his comments section.  Here’s a selection:

On my earlier blog posts when I wanted comments I would put an “In the comments” section at the bottom of my posts.  All you have to do is ask for it and your community will respond.

And we had a brief word from author Debbie Weil who wrote The Corporate Blogging Book who answers questions your boss may be asking like:

• What to write about?
• How much time will it take?
• How to handle critical feedback?
• What is the ROI?

If you didn’t get a chance to buy one you should definitely check it out.

Links and Tools:

Google Reader: This is a basic tool of the blog reader/writer.  Subscribing to all of my favorite blogs in one place allows me to scan through hundreds of posts in a fraction of the time it would take if I was going to each blog separately.  You can find pages of blog fodder this way (Thanks, Tom!).

ScribeFire: Is what I’m writing this post in.  It’s a firefox addon that allows me to blog from a panel at the bottom of my browser while using the top part of my browser to call up sites to link to and quote.

Technorati: I mentioned above for evaluating how your site is doing.

WordPress: The absolute best platform for your company’s blog

WordPress MultiUser:  WPMU allows you to create multiple blogs within your company while letting you (or your boss) retain full administrative control.

TimeTracker: This is a great tool for keeping track of how much time you are spending on blogging.  This is another one of those Firefox add-ons.  I keep a separate browser open for blogging and every time I use it the timer starts up again.  This tool helps me use my time much more efficiently.

IN THE COMMENTS:

Thank you to everyone who has contacted me with feedback/questions!  I would like to know what everyone thought about the session.  Do you have any tools or advice you can share?