Blogging is one of the most powerful ways to engage with customers and keep your business present in their everyday life. It also establishes a steady voice for your brand. Like every other form of business promotion, blogging takes time, planning and expertise. This means knowing what content to share and how to present it in a way that people can relate to. When you accomplish this, you can connect with your target customers and make the largest impact. (more…)
Writing a great blog is like penning a Top 40 hit. Whether you’re into Brad Paisley, Ani DiFranco, Romeo Santos or Paul McCartney, you know a great song when you hear one. There’s truth in a great song — be it emotional or comedic gravitas — and a perfect blend of lyrics and melody. A hit song has a great title, a catchy chorus, a revealing bridge and that extra something that makes you want to play it again.
The same is true with blog writing. Just as songs are really poems set to music, blogs are essays posted to a specific place on the Interwebs. Both require a unique take on a central theme, whether that’s love or marketing. They have to reach their audience with a message that feels like it’s crafted just for them.
As blog writers, our goal is to spark a feeling with your blog. In songwriting, that’s known as the hook. Just like the way hearing a heartbreak song makes you think of your long lost first love, we strive to write something that inspires your audience to connect emotionally with you and your business. Say you’re an accountant. That can be dry stuff, accounting. How do we make a hit out of that subject matter?
Well, the main job of any blog is to establish you or your business as a trusted source of a product or service. When I’m choosing an accountant, I want to know that he or she is informed, personable and easy to work with. Your blog can show these things directly (“New State Rules Go Into Effect July 1”) as well as by using accounting and money issues as a springboard (“Family Saves $437 on Disney Trip with This Simple Tip”). Let’s say I’m a busy marketing professional and mother of four. Which one am I going to click on? There’s your hook.
And if they end up wanting to “play it again,” they share the blog via social media and suddenly you’ve got a revolution on your hands.
If you like what you’re hearing, book us for your wedding contact us today to learn more about how Brandsplat ghost(song)writers can help make you a hit.
There are a few negative things one could say about Al Gore — that he isn’t an engaging speaker (or even that he sounds like your most boring science teacher from middle school), that as a politician he didn’t have enough fight in him to really make an impact while he was in office or that he promotes just one side of the climate change story. But you can’t accuse the man of not knowing how to market himself and his pet projects.
Gore has long used the Internet to champion his cause of climate change awareness. For a decade, the former vice president has kept up with technology and like any brilliant marketer, using every new innovation to his advantage. His latest endeavor, which we stumbled upon thanks to Mashable.com, is no exception. Long exhausted from accusations which claim climate change isn’t real, Gore was inspired to create The Climate Reality Project. The project hopes to re-open an honest and unbiased conservation about the realities of climate change.
On September 14, 2011, “24 Hours of Reality” will be unleashed on the world. This global event will feature 24 climate change speakers and presenters from around the world. Partnering with Ustream means the messages can be seen from anywhere without interruption. The call to action also features a social element to help spread the word and ways for everyone to take action.
We’ve seen Ustream channels take viral video into the next phase: branded, independently-broadcasted programming. The ease and quality of Ustream means anybody with a cause or company can broadcast in ways YouTube never even dreamed about. Seeing as we’re in the blogging and marketing and social media biz, we’ll stay out of the climate change debate — but we do love the way good old Al is bringing attention to his cause.
I spent the better part of my Saturday wrestling with the assembly of an IKEA bunk bed for my niece and nephew. Transporting a baby humpback whale cross-country in a pickup truck and figuring out how to make my own soy sauce using household items are probably easier tasks than putting together furniture from the popular Swedish home furnishings factory. In fact, just the sight of anything blue and yellow after my day of bunk bedding has given me a mild form of PTSD. Nevertheless, I just can’t hate the loveable Swedish brand — and it turns out I’m not alone.
Two advertising students from Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam came up with a way to innovate social shopping with IKEA’s signature showrooms. The result is a genius little video that hopes to make IKEA the world’s most Liked showroom on Facebook. This simple idea puts Facebook Like buttons on the company’s website, allowing logged-in Facebook visitors to show their friends what they love from the company. The most popular items are then displayed in a special Most Liked Showroom and shoppers are given discounts for shopping socially. It’s brilliant stuff… and clearly IKEA always knows what it’s doing when it comes to inspiring fans to shower them with love.
To keep the conversation going with IKEA junkies, the company just launched The Share Space where users can share photos of their homes with other customers. The site hopes to use photo sharing to excite IKEAns about designing and decorating by swapping their ideas. IKEA items found and coveted in photos can be added to a wish list that (naturally) leads them back to IKEA’s homepage, complete with product information. For shoppers looking for more expert ideas and information, The Share Space features a brand new blog, Design by IKEA. The blog promises to dish out interior decorating solutions and help with IKEA products, which I totally could have used last weekend.
Quirks and complaints aside, IKEA is just one of those brands that nails digital engagement and social media and online branding so well, all is forgiven.
So, dear readers, who makes your most-loved brands list? And IKEA: yay or nay? (Or Ja och Nej as they say in Stockholm…) Let us have it in the comments section below!
As we read this Gizmodo and iPhone story last week, we wondered if bloggers aren’t held to the same types of moral codes and responsibilities that other media professionals are. Gizomdo, in case you didn’t hear, got off scot-free for somehow ending up with an iPhone 4 prototype and then blogging about it. When the story broke last spring, it seemed like the authorities who thoroughly searched editor Jason Chen’s home were being a bit harsh on the tech writer who was, in fact, just giving his readers what they wanted. While we still think the whole hubbub was overblown (it’s just a phone, people) we’re starting to wonder if in this post-Assange era of blogger responsibility actually exists.
Since the early days of blogging, the questions of moral codes and ethics have swirled around the medium. How can we hold people who write blogs in their bathrobes to these kind of high-falutin’ ideals? The answer is that we can’t — nor should we want to. Good writing, good values and good taste, however, shouldn’t be out of the equation. We would like to think that bloggers would be naturally inclined to write only the truth or write things that aren’t intentionally hurtful. And sure, bloggers should be personally responsible for the content they put out into the blogosphere, but all of that is totally unrealistic. The best any blog can do is speak the truth of the blogger or organization behind it. This is doubly true when it comes to business and company blogs. While the biggest crime most company blogs commit is murder by boredom, there is a responsibility to create content that doesn’t muck up the Internet with crappy quality. Our blogging output, while not expected to be an example of moral excellence, should at the very least add something to someone’s day.
But let’s turn this heady moral discussion over to you, readers. Does blogger responsibility exist? And if so, what is it? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below!
Need a little spring in your step? Dying to name drop the latest, hippest stories in social media marketing, blogging and digital branding? Then our 5 Things You Might Have Missed list is just for you! And if not, you can’t blame for us trying, right?
1.) 5 Google+ Hangouts You Might Have Missed: Google’s serious social media contender has a standout feature you might be missing: Hangouts. Hangouts are cool virtual spaces where you and your Google+ homies can do things like learn to cook, start a book club or have a family reunion. You heard it from us first: Hangouts have serious branding and marketing possibilities, meaning we’ve only seen the tip of this social media iceberg.
2.) Creepy German Bowling Balls: This spooky ad for a German horror network has been getting serious YouTube play for doing the impossible: turning bowling into something terrifying. It’s cool, scary fun that reminds us fall is right around the corner.
3.) And Speaking of Spooky: Rob Lowe plus Butterfinger shouldn’t equal a truly scary ad campaign. But it does — and it achieves a whole lot more too. Butterfinger the 13th isn’t just scary, it’s funny, tongue-in-cheek goodness from a Facebook and viral candy campaign we can’t wait to see more of.
4.) A Little Bit More: Bit Rebels is straight up a geeky, gorgeous and great-to-read blog that inspires us to be better bloggers (while simultaneously teaching us how to make Pac-Man toast or show us brightly-colored photos of evil people holding Jell-O). In other words, it’s awesome.
5.) Going for a Digital Jog: Nike’s visual digital visualization project through Nike+run allows New York runners to make art while showing where they’ve been in incredible graphics. It’s a visual feast from a brand who continues to run ahead of the digital pack.
“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. — John Lydgate, Abraham Lincoln and, I’m sure at some point, your mom
Great minds have uttered the above words on endless occasions throughout the ages and it is good advice — especially when it comes to blogging. Trying to blog all things for all people is an exhausting endeavor. More often than not, when blogs bite off more than they can chew and start covering too many topics, the blog begins to sound scattered and the content suffers (look at the post-AOL version of Huffington Post for evidence of this). Therefore, we are always delighted to see niche blogs take flight and find big audiences despite not having a big parent company.
For niche blogging done right, look no further than the worlds of fashion, food and sports. These three topics, along with film, inspire big conversations and huge readerships. Chictopia.com is one such site. In 2008, three fashion lovers launched Chictopia.com and it has become a one-stop-resource for all kinds of great fashion blogs. In fact, Chictopia, with its 100,000-some members, has transcended blog territory by becoming a blogging community. Again, there isn’t a Conde Nast or New York Times running this operation, just some bloggers who wanted the right people to read their fashion blog. Chictopia isn’t terribly concerned with appealing to non-fashion types. And it shouldn’t be. Clearly the folks they want to read and participate in their online fashion tete a tete are responding — and so is the traditional media. The site has been featured in all the big magazines while establishing itself as a creative and independent voice in the crowded fashion world.
Chictopia is a fabulous example of how staying true to your audience while avoiding chronic people pleasing can truly pay off.
Much like Bert & Ernie, Paris & Nicole, Laverne & Shirley and Scooby & Shaggy, your blog and your Twitter account should be inseparable besties. There’s no reason your blogging efforts and tweets shouldn’t work together. So how do get our tweets and blogs to be the happy couple they were destined to be?
The easy answer is that each time we write a new blog, we send a new Tweet complete with a link to said genius blog. Sure, we all love spending time on Twitter telling the world about the life-changing butternut squash soup we just slurped down and we should continue to share these revelations. But in between these earth-shattering discoveries, why not infuse our tweets with links to get folks to come and check out our blog?
An elementary place to start with is teasing the title of your blog in your tweets. Simple stuff, right? Soon you can develop a pretty standard routine of updating your blog followed by a series of “hey, check this out!” tweets. But it doesn’t stop there. After you’ve tweeted about the latest news in your industry, you’ve essentially set yourself up with topics for your next round of blogs.
Twitter is a great friend for your blog to have for several reasons; the biggest is increasing your audience. Twitter daily opens the doors to blogs and websites that would have never been previously discovered. Through tweeting for clients and for ourselves, we’re constantly surprised at the amazing blogs and resources that can be found. Sure there are a billion “acai super diets” and “make a million dollars from your bathroom” links but there’s a great deal of legitimate bloggers with well-written blogs to be found, too. We recently heard the word “curating” applied in reference to blogs and social media and we like that. Think of the content on both your blog and Twitter account to be part of an exhibit of your brand and your story. With thoughtful curating and updating, your blog and tweets could have a beautiful friendship.