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Do You Have a Blogging Strategy?

thinkinghiimhmichealMany businesses have blogs.  Many businesses feel they should start blogs.  Why?  Because everyone else is doing it. This isn’t a really strong reason to do anything in business – unless you want to be just like everyone else.

If you have a business blog or are thinking of starting one, take a few minutes to ponder why you are blogging.  Hopefully your reasons involve helping and connecting with your customers, which should increase revenue and savings.  Using these reasons as goals to form a blogging strategy can really help direct your efforts and produce better results.

Once you have an endpoint (your goals), it will be much easier to work backwards to figure out how to achieve your goals.  What will you write about?  Who in your company will be blogging?  What will you incorporate into the design of your blog?  How will you connect with your customers?  Where will you syndicate your blog content?  Will you use social media to increase awareness of your blog?

Do you have a business blog?  What is your blogging strategy?

(photo by hi I’m h micheal @ Flickr CC)

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Moving to WordPress.com – What to Consider

wordpressOver the break we moved Sazbean.com and some of our other blogs over to WordPress.com from self-hosting WordPress on our own server.  Most of the process was relatively easy and overall we’re pleased with the results.  We made the decision to move for a few reasons: saving time and effort from updates and support, saving hosting costs (much cheaper), and additional syndication across WordPress’ network.

If you’re thinking of moving to WordPress.com or using them as your blogging platform, here’s what you should consider:

Advantages

  • WordPress.com takes care of all the updates and support
  • Cheap – you can have a blog hosted for free, but their low cost upgrades for control over CSS and domain name are worth it
  • Additional syndication of your content throughout the WordPress network – we’ve already seen a jump in traffic from this effect
  • Good selection of widgets to add functionality to your site – no need to worry about getting them working properly
  • Integrated dashboard – makes it easy to work with multiple blogs and the interface is very easy to use

Disadvantages

  • Limited control over the design and functionality of your blog (you have full CSS control with a paid upgrade)
  • No javascript allowed – which limits your ability to use custom widgets and other services that require a script tag
  • No outside site analytics – WordPress.com provides integrated statistics, but you won’t be able to use any outside analytics services since you cannot add any script tags to your blog
  • Limited control over your domain name – unless you have control over your name server, you have to point your blog domain to wordpress.com so you’ll lose the ability to add any subdomains.  They have allowed some ability to host your own email or use Gmail. Hosting multiple blogs from the same domain is also limited.
  • Limited control over files you can add to your blog (only images unless you purchase an upgrade – and then only movie files) – not too much of a problem with the various types of web services available to link to

Summary

After we moved to WordPress.com there have been some things that we could no longer do on our blog (in design and some in functionality).  But, overall, the tradeoff in terms of cost and time savings as well as additional exposure has already been worth it.  We’ll update you on our thoughts again after we’ve been here for awhile.

We want to hear from you – Do you use WordPress.com?  What are your thoughts?  If you have a self-hosted blog, why did you make that decision?

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What is Social Media?

crowdvictoriapeckhamI had an interesting conversation recently about social media.  It seems that a lot of business owners kind of know what it means.  If you ask them about it they’ll say “oh is that like facebook or something?” or “it’s media that’s social”.  But if you try to dig deeper into what that actually means you’ll get a mixture of answers.

Social media is media that is social.  But it goes beyond Facebook or MySpace.  Social media is any type of media in which there is, at least, a two-way conversation – usually a multi-way conversation.  Social media is about engaging the audience and having them respond to you and to each other.

Social media is also about a philosophy of listening (instead of shouting).  Just using media that is social does not make it that way.  If you have a blog but never reach out to your readers and never respond to what they are saying, you’re not being very social.  Even if you don’t have a blog, you can listen to what your customers are saying on their blogs and respond to their concerns.

Social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences. – Wikipedia – Social Media

Let me highlight the most important aspect of this definition:

“building” of shared meaning among communities

Social media is not just about your story or your company’s story.  It’s about the shared meaning you create with your customers as you interact with them and they with each other.

What story are you building with your customers?

(photo by victoriapeckham @ Flickr CC)

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