The thing about making marketing on the internet more effective, this is from the point of view of a consumer, is that the information needs to be interesting and not boring.  It may seem as though I am repeating myself but there is a huge difference.  For example, I was reading an article a while back about the growth of the internet and how it has become a part life. To me it was a very interesting topic and it was well brought across.   The article was interesting and the point of the article was clear, but the thing is that it carried on for far too long. After a bit of reading it was almost as if I was reading the same thing over and over and that was where the whole thing became boring and lost my attention.

As a consumer you want to know what you want and if you don’t, you want to have clear indicators to lead you in the right direction.  The thing is that there are so many confusing sites and though we ‘navigate’ them we are just playing around hoping that we find what we are looking for.  A site that is direct and clear makes one feel that you are in control and you feel good about using the internet even though you know that the whole thing has nothing to do with how you did what you did.

So back to my point, people use the internet because it is easy and convenient not because they feel like reading and the library is doing stock take.  You get what you need and the rest is left for the next person to come along.  Reading a blog is to get away from the conformity of the news and the media, getting things from a different point of view and to make things a bit more interesting, people just tend to get too carried away with the whole thing.

The whole era of the internet is make things work and that is the long and short of it.

Here I am trying to compare the virtues of blogger, typepad, wordpress and drupal.

Any thoughts?

In case you have not yet read this report on the Committee to Project Journalists’ web site, www.cpj.org below is the list of the top 10 worst countries to be blogging from.  A no, it is not so due to slow connectivity but actual government harassment of bloggers.

According to CPJ, in these countries, relying on a mix of detentions, regulations, and intimidation, authorities in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Egypt have emerged as the leading online oppressors in the Middle East and North Africa. China and Vietnam, where burgeoning blogging cultures have encountered extensive monitoring and restriction, are among Asia’s worst blogging nations. Cuba and Turkmenistan, nations where Internet access is heavily restricted, round out the dishonor roll.

1. Burma
2. Iran
3. Syria
4. Cuba
5. Saudi Arabia
6. Vietnam
7. Tunisia
8. China
9. Turkmenistan
10. Egypt

So, if you dont reside in one of these countries and you’re a blogger, count your lucky stars and find a way of supporting those that aren’t as fortunate.

I must admit that I’m one of those people who’ve been fascinated by the whole National Democratic Convention “circus” in the USA this week.

Read the rest of this entry »

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…?

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 ?

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!

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…