CT Biz Blogs

If you’re looking for more information on why your business should have a blog, if you want to understand how to do it better, or if you just want to learn how other companies are blogging, this online study is for you.

The Blogging Success Study was conducted by Northwestern University and Backbone Media, and it has a ton of good information and food for thought.

If nothing else, read the executive summary:

After careful review, the research team identified five factors for success. The majority of the twenty participant bloggers pointed to these factors as important to the success of their blog. We focus in on these factors in Section Three.

The five factors identified by the participants were:

1. Culture
2. Transparency
3. Time
4. Dialogue
5. Entertaining Writing Style and Personalization

A company should carefully consider all of these factors before making a decision to blog…

Heck, even reading the table of contents will give you some ideas! And there’s a glossary, explaining terms such as trackback and RSS feed, two of the trickiest concepts in the blogosphere.

An informal term for describing the whole community of bloggers on the web, the term is also used to define a particular community such as the PR community of bloggers or PR Blogosphere.

If you don’t like to read online, download and print out the PDF.

Do you think I’m crazy for mentioning a study co-written by a company also in the blog consulting business? Hey, if it helps you learn about blogging, then it’s a good thing.

That’s just the kind of gal I am.

While attendng a women’s lecture luncheon yesterday, I mentioned “weblogs” to a few people in the pre-lecture chatting time. At functions where I think there are less internet-savvy folks, I use “blogs” and “weblogs” interchangeably. I usually get “What are weblogs/blogs?” and I go into my elevator speech about blogs. It’s scary how much I can blather about them if given half a chance, although I try to start with just a quick sentence or two.

Well yesterday I got the usual “What are weblogs?” But in both cases, the person went on to ask, “Is that like a blog?”

Woo-hoo!

Twice people said that they’d heard about blogs, although both weren’t 100% sure of what they were. One woman had looked at a few, and read the blog of a sales coach who had recently added a blog to her site.

The other, a woman maybe in her late 20’s, early 30’s started telling me about this band she was following, and how a blog sounded sort of like what the band had.

I asked if the site was on MySpace.

She said she knew about MySpace, but the band’s site wasn’t there, and that the conversation on the site was called a “vine.”

I’ve never heard of that term before. I’m going to email her and ask her for more information. The lecture was starting so I didn’t have a change to continue the conversation.

I’m encouraged that the term is slowly filtering through to more people (Realtors and mortgage lenders, in this case). And it reminds me that people care less about what things are called and more about what they can do for them — help them communicate with a band and fellow fans, or read articles by a sales coach.

It finally happened — the attempted spam comments to this blog outnumbered my actual readers yesterday. But instead of getting me depressed, it made me even more grateful to Dr. Dave and Spam Karma. Not much gets through with Spam Karma’s vigilance.

Of course, I upgraded my settings a while ago — now I feel like Zena, warrior princess:

My top two tips for keeping spam under control are:

1. Get help.
   Even Zena had a sidekick. If you’ve got WordPress, you have the option of adding some tough spam busters, such as Spam Karma, Bad Behavior and Akismet. There’s great information on the WordPress Codex site about combating comment spam. And here are links to a list of anti-spam plugins for Typepad users, and a comprehensive Six Apart article on comment spam.
2. Close off comments for older posts.
   I finally realized that 90% of the attempted spam was targeting one post from April on Judy’s Book. I have no idea why that one. So I’ve finally closed it off. None of the comment spam for that post has ever made it past Spam Karma, because one factor SK considers in determining if a comment is spam is the age of the post. But maybe now they’ll stop trying on that post, at least.
3. Bonus suggestion: tweak your settings.
   If spam is getting through your spam filters, check out what the default settings are, and experiment. Make them tougher, and see if that helps. Remember to closely monitor your caught spam for a while, to make sure you’re not being too tough and missing legitimate comments. It’s worth being a “total beeeatch” sometimes.

For a project, I had to find some blogs in the retail space — those supporting stores, as opposed to supporting services.

I’d put blogs such as The Orthodontic Center and Andrew Ewalt’s Law Blog in the supporting services area.

I’d consider Signs Never Sleep, Lincoln Sign Co’s blog, in a middle area. The blog is certainly about a product — signs — but they’re made-to-order. I’d put English Cut in this space, too. Not sure what to call this area, though.

In the retail area, besides Aldo Coffee, and Heather at Eie Flud, who are some of the ground-breakers in this area, I found a few more.

• eHobbies
• Ice Blog, a jewelry retailer, who has some associated blogs:

• Sparkle Like the Stars
• Just Ask Leslie

And also,

• Tonic Gifts

I found eHobbies and Ice Blog through an article in DM News: Blogs and Bling Bling: Companies See More Sales, Improve Search Position

Here’s what they had to say about eHobbies:

Since adding blogging to its site in May, 5 percent of the company’s overall traffic comes from its main blog destination, www.ehobbies.blogs.com. In addition, 5 percent of all orders have recently tracked to a blog-based coupon.

The eHobbies blog looks good, but I’m not so sure the Ice blogs are “legit.”  On the Sparkle like the Stars blog, the bloggers names are totally made up, and one is a blatant imitatation of Manolo, on the Shoe Blog.  He may be fake, too, but at least he was first.

And, even though no connection to Ice, the jewerlry site, is mentioned on Ask Leslie blog, every answered question seems to end in a recommendation for a diamond pendant, earrings, or some other accessory from Ice.

Is it a black or gray kind of search engine optimization going on here?  I can’t decide. But I do think it’s tacky.