Surely the blog is getting recognised (by some) as a valuable eMarketing tool. I do know that many still dispute this or haven’t quite figured out how exactly to make the blog work for business.
For those that have, the question that still begs to be answered is how to market your blog, that will in turn market your business.
In the early days we were told that web surfers will find your blog via search or hearing about it from others and that it ain’t cool to market your blog.
How has that changed and how can you market your blog?
Surely with the often quoted figure of 80 000 new blogs being launched daily, you can’t expect some-one to just “find” your blog.
So, does this mean that you have to put a marketing plan together to tell people about your blog, the non-profit generating part of your business?
I certainly won’t consider going that route if I had a business blog.
Some things I would consider doing however include:

1. adding a blog url to your email signature
2. linking your blog from your web site
3. posting comments on other blogs with links back to your blog
4. attempting to get permanent links on other similar blogs
5. link baiting: writing an article or post that would make other bloggers want to link to your blog
6. adding your blog url to your skype or msn profile
7. entering the SA Blog awards
8. telling friends, family and associates about your blog.

There must be plenty other ideas of how to market a blog short of taking out newspaper ads or TV commercials.
Ideas…?

Okay, so he isn’t quite the Messiah or Immanuel, but business, individuals and parties at both ends of the political spectrum seem to have liked his budget speech yesterday.
What does it mean for IT, the internet and eMarketing specifically though? Well, reading through the entire report in Business Day, I can safely say that the word eMarketing was not mentioned once…ai!
However, technology was mentioned plenty times.
In the allocations for Home Affairs, Education, Science and Technology ( no less..) and police, telecoms, etc.
What was mentioned many times over though was the lack of skills in that field and how it is impacting on our great nation’s development. Even where funding for projects have been made available, there ain’t no-one to do the job!
IT colleges, universities and recruitment companies: take note.

The only reference to the internet is the allocation of R 622m towards InfraCo to improve the roll out of their national broadband backbone. This company is built on the infrastructure of Eskom and Transnet and entrenches government’s involvement in telecoms, something we were hoping to see the end of.
Interesting is the fact that InfraCo is 26% owned by VSNL, the largest shareholder of Neotel. They will of course use this network for their own broadband.
ISP’s were keen to hear how they can benefit from using Neotel in order to escape Telkom’s stranglehold but there does not seem to be news on that yet.
Interesting also to note ( on AllAfrica.com ) yesterday that Telkom is buying Kenya’s Africa Online.
The other government broadband provider Sentech says that it is launching new business and consumer services next week. They also have their job cut out for them to convert local TV channels to digital by 2010.
Let the games begin!

Photo of TM courtesy of BD

Still on my quest, yeah, I know…

So, surfing between 11h00 tea and lunch this morning, I found the blog of Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director at Garage Technology Ventures, http://blog.guykawasaki.com
where he lists his reasons for blogging:

• To increase the likelihood that “two guys/gals in garage” with “the next Google” will come to Garage for funding.
• To help companies and people that I (a) like, (b) have sometimes invested in, (c) am sometimes advising publicize their products and services. This is also known as “alignment of interest” as opposed to “conflict of interest.”
• To be able to tell Web 2.0 entrepreneurs how full of shiitake they are if they think that advertising is a slam-dunk business model. Essentially, a Web 2.0 company would have to be 10,000 times better at selling advertising than me before it gets interesting.
• To test ideas with ” reality checks” . How many guys have 30,000-person focus groups?
• To tap the “wisdom of the crowd.” For example, ideas for my next book. How many guys have 30,000 people providing new-product ideas?
• To make meaning and fulfill my mantra of “empowering people.”

Okay, some pretty rich reasons. Well, as for now I don’t have 30 000 readers but I would still like to think that:

• The odd person may actually buy my book, the e of marketing after having read some of my blog posts.
• some of my posts benefit some individual somewhere
• that maybe some-one will actually ask me to advise them on eMarketing and in the process make some small contribution to my adsl account.
• I may learn a lot! That’s really why I am doing it. The more I write the more I learn. The more comments I get, the more I can learn from others as well.

Do you blog?

W H Y ?

What on earth can the national budget, to be announced tomorrow, have in common with the internet, online business or even eMarketing?
The answer: I just dont know.
The fact is however that the budget affects every individual and business in some way, so surely it must have an impact on those doing business via the internet as well as those making their living from the internet.
We have all heard the facts:

• a R 30 Billion budget over run
• Money allocated to major infrastructure projects has not been spent: shortage of skills and natural resources
• Increases in housing, education, policing, etc.

So, where does it leave us: the people that make our living from the internet or use the internet as a marketing or sales tool or as a major sales channel?
One thing that is true is that the government is taking e-learning, e-government and collecting taxes via the internet seriously.
That could mean more work for internet companies, a greater understanding of the medium by all and maybe a greater commitment of the government to roll out internet to those people is small towns, rural areas, schools and generally less privileged people.
Let’s hope…!

Still on my quest to find out why people blog and whether it is worth for companies to blog, some-one referred me to this article from Yahoo!News

General Motors’ auto business hasn’t been great of late, but its blogging strategy is paying off handsomely.

In 2006, the company’s FastLane blog delivered an estimated $410,470 worth of customer insight and marketing at an approximate cost of $255,675 — a return on investment of 67% — according to a newly released report from Forrester Research.

Compare that to 2005, when GM’s blog generated an estimated $578,374 worth of information and publicity at an approximate cost of $291,196. That’s a 99% return on investment.

Forrester analysts Charlene Li and Chloe Stromberg chose GM as the subject of their case study to demonstrate that companies can and should measure the ROI of blogging.

“As blogging becomes more visible — and expensive in terms of both time and money — supporting blogging with informal budgets and borrowed resources just won’t cut it,” their report says. “Instead, marketers need to understand how and why blogging will affect their particular businesses, and calculating the ROI of blogging is the process by which marketers can obtain this understanding.”

Li and Stromberg concede that it’s difficult to calculate the ROI of blogging accurately, noting that indirect benefits can be hard to measure. “How do you assign a dollar value to the ideas sparked by a Web dialogue between an executive and a company’s customers?” they ask.

And when you do assign a dollar value, as Forrester did in the case of GM, it’s difficult to be sure the value is fair. Take the imputed value of the FastLane blog, which is based largely on the assumption that press coverage of the blog is worth what it would cost to buy an ad in the publication where the article appeared. That may be an inflated estimate if, as research firms such as Outsell have suggested, print ads are overvalued compared to online ads today.

Moreover, given that Forrester’s estimate of GM’s 2007 blog ROI will drop to 39% in 2007 — mainly the result of diminishing novelty and press interest — there’s an argument to be made that companies should leave blogging to those employees who do it out of passion and off the books, rather than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on enterprise blogging tools.

But for companies committed to blogging, it may be comforting to know that ROI is a real possibility rather than a pipe dream.

So, where does this leave us? Still more to ask, question and debate I guess!

As long as spam is out there, email marketing, as good a tool as it is, will struggle to come to its full right as a genuine marketing tool.
The more the anti-spamming software developers up their game, the more the spammers try to outdo them.
One of the emails I got today had the subject line of:
However, they will consider eating whole-grain foods and may “go back to grains through the whole-grains group,” she added.

In the body it had a scanned image of the junk they were trying to promote, followed by a 25 line paragraph about the diet of the average American.
Now, how on earth would my spam blocker have picked up on that?
It is really irritating how they still get away with it. The thing that annoys me more than the spam mail however is the fact that they wont be doing this unless they are actually seeing results. That means people out there respond to these messages and buy the junk…

I can’t believe…!

Having pondered on the what and the why of blogging, I see that the SA Blog Awards for 2007 are now taking nominations.
According to their web site, these are the categories one can nominate a web site for:

Blogs can compete for the top honours in the following categories:

• South African weblog of the year - The best of the best from SA
• Best SA entertainment blog - Weblogs about movies, television, celebrities, theater and topical issues with entertainment value.
• Most humourous South African blog - witty, comical and written to induce uncontrollable laughter.
• Best post on a South African blog - The one post which stood out in 2006.
• Best overseas South African blog - Best blog written by a South African in any foreign country
• Best writing on a South African blog - composition, attention to detail, advanced levels of subject investigation.
• Best SA blog about politics - The best SA blog featuring mainly a political theme.
• Best SA photographic blog - The best SA blog featuring original photographic content.
• Best new blog - Best blog which was started during the year of 2006
• Best SA blog about food - The best blog written primarily about food or drink
• Best SA blog about tech / computers / web development - Best South African technology focused weblog
• Best SA Music blog - Best weblog about news of a musical nature.
• Best GLBT blog - Best SA gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered blog.
• Best designed SA blog - Best overall design and layout of a weblog page.
• Best SA podcast - The best independently produced video or audio podcast in SA.

So, once the results are out I may getting a better handle of who these people are and why they do what they do.
In the mean time I am still looking, listening and asking why?

Okay here I am, 10pm on a Tuesday evening doing a blog post.
It made me think and then ask myself this question: Who are bloggers and why do they blog?
Are they people with big ego’s and would like the world to hear their story?
Are they bored weirdo’s who can’t afford DSTV?
Are they married people who would rather sit on their pc than spend time with their spouses?
Are they corporate lackeys that get told to blog to keep the company looking good?

Surely personal blogging is just an expression of an opinion. Is corporate blogging therefore corporate opinion or just PR?

No, I don’t have the answers but I will attempt do dig them up. Sure, maybe I should’ve thought of this before starting my 2 blogs for which I attempt to do daily posts.
It’s just that whenever I speak to a normal person ( non-blogger, non-internet type) that they either have never heard of a blog and if they have, they just cannot understand why people have them.

I thought I did…

If like me, you need to be send and receives mails and log onto the net, it is very important to be connected when traveling. Sure, I have 3G card and in most places there seem to be a fair to good network.
If, however I have to decide on a hotel or guest house to stay over at, I will always go for the one where there is a good wi-fi connection, free or not. Of course the free option will be my first choice. There are not many places out there that offer that service though.
In Johannesburg I have stayed at Southern Sun hotels, City Lodges and Protea Hotels and most of them now offer some type of wireless connection. Not always in the rooms though! Sometimes you have to be in the lobby to get the connection. Never though, has it been free at any of those hotels. The rate various from R 50 to R 150 per hour!
I have found one guest house, Lourie Lodge in Fourways that offer free connection.

This is surely a service that will allow a hotel or group to differentiate itself. I understand that the bandwidth is expensive in SA to start with and even though a hotel may negotiate a good rate, it will still cost.
In the USA, Best Western is going this route. Even there, most hotels charge for connectivity.
They are also gearing up their overall technology offering to their guests. According to today’s AZCentral.com, this is what they are up to:

The first step is raising standards. Last year, all 2,400 North American Best Westerns started offering free high-speed Internet in every guest room. Most hotels charge for the service.

All new Best Westerns, plus some old ones, will be outfitted with flat-screen TVs and alarm clocks with iPod adaptors.

“It’s basically about tech-ing out the rooms,” said Scott Wilson, director of worldwide sales. “We continue to move like everyone else to the Gen X’er.”

So, MD’s and marketing directors of SA hotel groups: take note!

One of my biggest fears has always been that I will fall behind the times and not being able to determine future trends.
Whenever I see major changes in business and technology I think of the Olivetti typewriter my mother used when I was a child. I can’t remember when last I’ve seen a type writer and didn’t know whether Olivetti is even still around.
Well, a quick search lead my to their web site. Nowhere on their site do they actually state the nature of their business. They do have links though to their products: printers, calculators, faxes etc.
Funny thing: in the search box on their site, I keyed in: type writer and there were no results. Okay, so they have seen the future and moved with the times.

Not so it seems for Kodak. According to the NYTimes.com of today, they are to lay off another 3000 employees this year in addition to the 27 000 they were already planning to lay off.
In 1988 they employed 145 000 and by the end of this year it will be 30 000.
Sure technology allows companies to exist and of course grow well without having so many people on board.
The fact though is that Kodak was caught with their batteries flat at the dawn of the digital photo era. No more traditional camera sales and rapidly declining film sales has meant that there bread and butter products were no longer wanted. Of course they are trying hard to establish themselves in the digital arena but they are no longer the leaders.

We need to make sure in our businesses that technology don’t pass us by. Be it our product offering or they way we promote, advertise or market our businesses!

Try not to be just with it, but to be ahead of the pack.