BloggingTips

n Small Businesses and Blogging, customer evangelists Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba give seven reasons for starting a weblog and five good tips.
	Marnie Webb of CompuMentor has her own 10 Reasons You Should Start a Weblog Right Now. She has covered all the good ones: (1) Updating is easy. (2) Links are valuable to your readers. (3) You can become a trusted information source. (4) A Weblog gives readers a reason to visit your Web site regularly. (5) Weblogs provide a more personal communication vehicle. (6) Google loves weblogs. (7) Reverse chronological order is wonderful. (8) It's easy to be topical. (9) You can use a variety of media. (10) The sum is more than the parts.
Full articles below
Church of the Customer
   How to live in customer heaven or rot in customer hell. 
� Small businesses and blogging | Main | In search of: marketing intern � 
August 03, 2004
http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2004/08/small_businesse.html
Small businesses and blogging
Update: For our August newsletter, we wrote a new and improved version of this original post. The improved version is below.
Blog enthusiasts are excellent evangelist candidates. They�re early adopters. Often, they�re serial buzz spreaders, and they can funnel waves of others just like them toward your blog and your organization, especially if it�s a small business. 
B-to-C or B-to-B? 
Doesn�t matter. Blogs may provide companies that primarily sell to other companies better benefits because they easily bridge the feedback loop between end customers and channels. That bridge is often missing or difficult to create using existing tools. Like focus groups. Or the telephone.
For any organization, a blog is part of a long-term customer evangelism strategy. Since blogs are easy to set up and pay for (some are free), launching a blog should be at the top of your to-do list.
Why?
Among dozens of reasons, here are seven:
1. They fan the flames of customer evangelism. Their personal nature helps humanize you and your organization.
2. They function as an instant-feedback mechanism. Most blogs allow readers to respond to your posts or link to them on their own blogs. These features provide almost real-time feedback on ideas and issues that strike a chord, or highlight new or existing problems. A blog can help reveal a little problem before it becomes a big one.
3. They compel you to Napsterize more of your knowledge more often. A blog is about sharing what you know, think and believe; search engines index your ongoing knowledge-sharing, making it easier for customers and prospects to find you. Attraction is always easier than hunting.
4. They facilitate the spread of buzz. Honest, informative or thought-provoking posts about issues important to customers and prospects tend to be spread more often.
5. They allow you to have more simultaneous conversations. It's more than you could ever do in person.
6. Most blog service providers offer good-looking templates to use if your existing website design is embarrassing or non-existent.
7. They help position you as a knowledgeable expert in your industry.
Once you start blogging, here are five blogging don'ts:
1. Do not have someone else write your blog. Write it yourself.
2. Blogs should not be managed by the PR department or ad agency. Blogs are best when they�re authentic, which may include run-on sentences, detailed analysis or critical opinions. Typically, those qualities run counter to the sensibilities of traditional public relations.
3. Do not have a thin skin. Comments to your posts may bite or sting, especially while other people watch. But a strong benefit of blogs: unwarranted criticism often causes other customers often to spring to your defense. Trust-based relationships emanate from taking the bad with the good.
4. Do not let your blog go unattended for weeks at a time. Focus on several posts per week, even if they�re just a few paragraphs.
5. Do not make your blog a branding exercise of self- centeredness. If you endlessly promote yourself and your services, no one will care.
There are multiple blog service providers, but here are two of the best:
* www.TypePad.com. Starts at $4.95 per month.
* www.Blogger.com. Free.
While not nearly representative of the tens of thousands of small-business blogs out there, here are a few models to explore:
Stonyfield Farm
This 215-person New Hampshire dairy maintains five excellent blogs about the company's products and the organic lifestyle.
Douglas Berman
Berman is a law professor at Ohio State University. His widely read blog has helped him become the pre-eminent expert on sentencing law. His blog was also the basis for a favorable write-up in the Wall Street Journal. 
Z-Coil dealer blog 
The blog of Carolyn Linzner, who operates her own shoe store in Sonoma County. Her blog features lots of customer testimonials and photos. 
Postlapsaria Fashions
Keiko Groves, a 19-year-old Florida college student, has marketed her successful Internet-based clothing business entirely via her blog. 
Posted by Ben McConnell at 08:06 AM | Permalink 
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Comments
I LOVE it when I am validated. I am a huge fan of typepad and always recommend the above two options when talking to contacts and clients. This is a great post to share. Thanks
Posted by: Anne Stanton at August 3, 2004 05:30 PM
Thanks, Anne! If you (or anyone else) have additional reasons to blog or tips, please post them.
Posted by: Ben McConnell at August 19, 2004 03:18 PM
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Weblogs and the Nonprofit Sector 
An Introduction to Weblogs 
Weblogs: The Promise for Nonprofit Organizations 
A weblog could be an excellent addition to your organization's online presence 
August 11, 2004 
http://www.techsoup.org/howto/articlepage.cfm?ArticleId=556
Author: Marnie Webb, Director of Consulting Services at CompuMentor
Source: TechSoup.org 
Hello, my name is Marnie, and I'm a blogger. I've been running a personal weblog for four years. I maintain a link blog using the social bookmarking tool, del.icio.us, and I've finally started a work-related weblog. 
(If I've lost you here, read Sarah Hawkin's excellent article, "An Introduction to Weblogs.") 
While the mantra at TechSoup -- and for all of CompuMentor's programs -- is about emphasizing appropriate technology and not technology evangelism, I'm going to evangelize in this article. I'm going to advocate that you (most of you, anyway) start a weblog. 
It's easy to do. You can set up a weblog in fifteen minutes. Really. Search for "weblog" on Google. Spend some time looking around, and then come back to this article. 
10 Reasons You Should Start a Weblog Right Now
1. Updating is easy. It can be difficult to organize information on your Web site. The better weblog tools (such as Movable Type's TypePad, WordPress and Blogger) have already thought through those issues and deliver templates that give you a functional site at the click of a button. Those same tools give you easy ways -- a bookmark on your browser's personal link bar, the ability to send e-mail to your weblog -- to regularly update your weblog. 
Think about the biggest thing standing between you and a regularly refreshed Web site. Chances are it has to do with the difficulty of formatting and publishing the content. Easy posting means it is easy to create small site updates that provide timely information of interest to your constituency. 
2. Links are valuable to your readers. Most weblogs are made up of separate posts that consist of a link with some commentary. These links to other sources of information give readers a reason to visit your site. Your organization's blog can serve as a clipping editor on a particular topic, pointing your readers to the best sources of information so they don't have to do all the sifting themselves. 
3. You can become a trusted information source. The more you add useful links to your weblog, the more you become a trusted source for information. For example, Oceana's weblog provides useful and regular information from experts pointing to studies, projects, and other information that I would not be able to find on my own. I therefore see the organization as credible, and that credibility transfers to its other efforts, including fundraising. 
4. A Weblog gives readers a reason to visit your Web site regularly. The useful information you post gives visitors a reason to come back regularly. Frequent visitors are more likely to engage with your organization's efforts online and off-line. 
5. Weblogs provide a more personal communication vehicle. Writing a formal Web site takes a lot of work writing a polished presentation of your organization, your projects, and your fundraising efforts. The nature of the weblog medium, with its quick and frequent updates, promotes a personal voice that can engage users on a more human level. For example, Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth is a personal, but nonprofit-related site. Andy's voice comes across. Because of this, you feel like you can call Andy by his first name, you can connect to him. 
6. Google loves weblogs. Google ranks frequently updated sites with many links (and many links to it from other pages on the Web) as more valuable than those with fewer links. This means that weblogs often turn up very high in search results. If your weblog comes in high, so will your organization's Web site, issues, and viewpoint. 
7. Reverse chronological order is wonderful. The vast majority of weblogs display information in reverse chronological order, so that the newest information is automatically on the top of the page. This makes it very easy for your readers to find and follow what is fresh and topical. 
8. It's easy to be topical. With the newest information at the top, lots of links, and easy content formatting and publishing, weblogs give you tools that make it very easy to be topical, pointing your readers to the most recent relevant issues and news. Again, this means that you are more useful to your constituency. 
9. You can use a variety of media. Look at Andy Carvin's weblog again, and be sure to check out the column on the left. There you will find an audio blog with posts that provide, for example, a narrative of what was going on outside of Fleet Center during the 2004 Democratic National Convention. You'll also find Andy's MobilePhlog, a weblog of shots taken by Andy's camera-phone. By using other media in this way, you have other ways to engage with your users. And the blog tools make it easy. 
10. The sum is more than the parts. The nine reasons cited so far work together to help you create a valuable, credible resource that points to outside sources, publishes a variety of media, and uses your own voice to engage your constituency in an ongoing conversation about the issues to which your organization is dedicated. Read more in Zafir S. Shah's "What�s a Blog, And Why Should Nonprofits Care?"
Okay, So Blogs Aren't Really for Everyone 
The success of a Weblog depends on the strength of your message and your sense of audience. For this, you need people who regularly search for valuable information, relate it to your organization and audience, and post it. Easy content formatting aside, this still takes work, time, and commitment. A weblog that was last updated six months ago does not build credibility, it begins to destroy it. 
Not everyone enjoys reading them, either. In this TechSoup Community thread, you'll see that some people don't like having to follow links to follow a conversation. Sometimes links can even lead you in a circle, without a feeling that you've actually found any new information. Research indicates that weblogs are read by 17 percent of Internet users. That's around 4.76 million users. And some of them could be visiting your site. 
(Read part two of this series, "Weblogs and the Nonprofit Sector.")