Business Blogging Ideas (tm) Flier

How do you start using our service? Why do you need a blog? Blogging can start out as a simple tool. Your blog can also become a popular channel of communication. Look at popular blogs and notice the way they are written (content), how they are formatted (design), how they are publicized in indexes and search engines (promoted). Start with simple options, this way you can tell us what you need. As an introduction to the work we do take a look at this flier.

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Introduction flier to business blogging

Benefits of blogging: starting out is useful as a way of getting a message out in a blog format.

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You can also download the full image .JPG on flicker

Blogging for a Real Business: Three Strategy Elements (getting started)

A blog can be a high volume magazine (i.e. Huffington post) all the way to one page teaser for a book (Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters). It can also be marketing and promotion content in support of businesses. Technologists use blogs to inform and influence (google, Facebook, YouTube, Craig's list see also Bill Marriott).

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Google main blog: simple and professional image - general interest topics

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There was a trend of CEO blogs where company chiefs delivered a message as the image of the company. The trend ended because keeping up with a blog, making it interesting and relevant is harder than first imagined. It takes dedication and skill to write on a regular basis and produce a flow of interesting articles (specially in one specific topic). [yet US president Obama has an active blog] Once you can write a steady stream of articles you have a tool to deliver a message and shape an image. Image shaping blogs need a clear direction: what, how and when to deliver your message, so a coherent message is clear. Take the opportunity to develop a message strategy. Than develop blog message tactics. If you are new at this don't be affraid to experiment, make changes until you are satisfied. Technology companies produce a huge volume of information but little is in a coherent form, a blog can help here. A blog's linear format helps in keeping the message focused to one topic. The single thread format helps in keeping readers on track with the strategy without being obvious. Even a small loyal readership and casual visitors are a valuable return for most blogs. If you have a clearl message they will come back and stay around.

Print media strategies do not always work for a blog. In the past strategies needed to fit print media limitations (narrow channel / cast) and P/R firm expenses (usually very high). Blogs are much more available to readers but they also compete with a huge amount of other messages on the Internet. This may mean that your first strategy and tactics will change as you experiment. Remember to give your blog strategy a real value. This will help you get over the initial push, to most bloggers starting is the hardest part. If you need to compare a blog to a P/R firm or traditional media you need to be creative. Blogs deliver your messaged differently, they sustain the reader longer and are readily available to anyone. Press releases and regular print articles have much shorter life span, they are not available to anyone. Develop a strategy that will fit the blog format. Focus on the key component of a message: simple image, core message and continuous awareness. Let's look at these intangible aspect and see if a blog can clarify them:

• Simple image promotion with a blog: Image is the first impression you make on someone. It is also the overall "feeling" someone has about your company and product. A clear statement of what your image should be is helpful in guiding the writing and editing in the long term. Google's official blog has simple design. It covers many topics and has a light but professional image. The articles discuss general topics which affect most users and developers. For more in-depth topics there are other places (technical or business) to find information.

• Core message clarification and promotion with a blog: Blogs are excellent tools to clarify a message. Blog content can be short or long, it can cover any topic and readers come in all type from the serious to the curious. Messages are crucial for a business image. Without your own message people get other messages which are usually wrong. Shaping your message is how a company tells its point of view. Marketers and P/R professionals have been shaping images for a long time. Blogs simply make the process easier. Also, at least for now, blogs are more accepted authorities than other forms of media. (this will change)

• Continuous awareness with a blog: Continuous awareness of readers is the best attribute of a blog format. The format gives the reader fresh information in a focused package all the time. Until now only the best run and biggest organizations have been able to deliver a continuous message in a clearly defined format. Now the game has changed, anyone can spend the resources and have his message read. Today we can do the same with one big difference, our information can be tied to many other pieces of information: people like to a big picture and they like when we help them with see how things are connected.

These are basic concepts you can use for defining your blog strategy. Use this and other concepts to think and explain your approach. Also use these ideas to develop your own ideas for article topics, overall blog direction, the approach to get information, all will help in starting with a clear vision on how to proceed. If anyone out there has a blog design plan or want to develop one with me, let me know.

This article topic came from a question the umpteenth time: "why some bloggers are effective while others dribble on?" . Effectiveness in blogging is measured as a wide range of results. In general it means a continuous operation and improvement with time. People who write well and do it for a long period of time are not only good life observers and sharp thinkers, they also write so people want to read more. This means they thought and planned their writing. Sometimes they think about writing more than they actually write. If you approach a blog as serious work you need to develop strategies and tactics. So take time to think and plan. Be clear to others what your writing is saying. Write well and on topic. Change strategies if it makes sense.

Simplified Traditional Technical Marketing - a base to build on

Apple's iPod used dancing silhouettes which is a big campaign. This is a product that needs marketing as much as any consumer product. ICS and enterprise software do not use consumer product marketing techniques.

Learning a bit of traditional marketing is useful for Web2.0 technologists. A technologist has an outsider's view of marketing and it's not always clear what marketing is all about. Marketing is usually defined as the 'three P's':

"definition and management of the Price, Place, and Promotion of a product".

In the technical world this also means defining the product (essentially specifying to engineering what the "package" will contain). It also means defining the three P's by understanding the market and the competition. This is true with more traditional consumer products but in the technology world it turns out a little different and crucial to understand.

This sounds simple enough but as a famous advertising executive once said: "learning marketing takes a year, practicing marketing takes a lifetime". This is because our work is highly competitive and the market conditions shift daily. The most important function of practicing technology marketing is bridging between the internal world of the technologist and the external world of the consumer (or market). This is more of a role and an attitude than just skills and experience. Marketers need to play the "devil's advocate" in front of the technologist when making a case for a more user friendly design. Reducing the complexity and price of a product. Enabling easier channel support. In front of a customer the marketer plays the "technologist" pushing them to try harder to make use of a technically complicated design. In convincing them to pay more for features they may never use. This puts the technical marketer in the middle ground and he/she needs to know both worlds well enough to influence them both. A big part of the work is translating from the "use model" to the "technical model". Use model is the final consumer's point of view. Technical model is the feature specification.

Technical marketing can be viewed as a "story telling" about a product. To tell a story about how a product works means building a model of some sort. It also means knowing who will hear the story (customers) and what other stories the customer hears at the same time (from competitors or other users). I use the "story telling" analogy to illustrate the more abstract concept of translating ideas of an abstract product quickly into usable concrete terms anyone can understand. The story is actually called a few different names (use model, features and benefits, package) and the name changes as the marketing "process" moves from before a product is designed all the way to final customer's hands.

The first phase in product marketing "story telling" is planning and definition. Here a marketer defines the product in enough detail for engineering to design and manufacture a product. Basic product definition starts out with the description from a user perspective then engineers add their story telling which explain how they will design and build the product (i.e. core technology, functions, features, components, elements). These would be algorithms, data structures, package, look & feel, physical components (such as hardware components, circuit elements, etc.) At this point of a product definition the exact customer and how he will use the product and competing products are still a little vague (that's OK for now). Once the basic product definition is done and engineers buy into the product a marketing team starts a customer and competitive work. A product idea needs to be seen by many people who will use this product.

The definition bridges the core technical specification with the main uses of the product. One of the best ways to define a product is by using "mock ups" or "demos" in front of perspective customers. Software products start out as screen shots (demo screens). It is very hard to demonstrate a software product's functionality, but sometimes it may be useful to do some engineering and get a "dummy mock up" which actually shows some functions and helps explain general uses. Hardware products like ICs (Integrated Circuits) are tested in front of customers mostly through preliminary specifications. A customer that sees a specification of the "next product version (the next big thing)" will usually give good feedback about how he/she could use the product. This also includes the drawbacks and missing functions which will make the product unusable as it comes out the first time. Without preliminary specifications or mock-up screen shots most potential uses will not have much to say about a product.

Blackberry personal communicator is marketed mostly through "channels", these are the carriers which provide the phone service.
Once the product is well designed and tested in front of customers the engineers can get to work. At this point the marketer needs to start preparing the "channels" and the "market" for the product's introduction. Channels are a sales term for the distributors, Representative firms and direct sales Representatives. I will talk more about the sales process in another article. So far, the launch preparation was a combination of the "promotion" and "price" aspect of the marketing mix. Most technology products are not promoted with advertising and public display the way consumer products are marketed. They use channels of distribution to promote products. New products usually need extensive support and training to get users started. This is the role of the channel. Sometimes technology marketers will have technical people who are called "application engineers". These technical marketers develop demos and training material to help early adopters start out.

The final part of this article is an introduction to a product launch. In the "marketing mix: price, place, and promotion" an introduction of the product to the market is a combination of all the pieces and has to be ready in time. The price is usually set by a competing product's price, the ability of the market to sustain a price over time, and the need to recoup the development cost. The place is usually the combination of the channels and the end market itself, where the customers sitting? Usually in companies which consume the technology, ICs are used by system companies building cell phones, computers and consumer products.

When the place is the "channels" it means using intermediate companies to deliver the product to the end customer. Sometimes in consumer marketing a place is the most crucial part of the marketing mix. If a product is on a shelf and people see it they will buy it. In technology companies that usually means who can get to the end targeted consumer. For example, Intuit the producer of Quicken (a personal accounting package) marketed their product heavily to stock brokers in the early stage of their promotion (1980's in the USA). The idea was to hook them and use them as a "reference" to get to the end consumer (average check book balancing user). Stock brokers were a relatively small market, but highly influential with their customers. Once the stock brokers started keeping their client's accounting on Quicken they could influence their customers to use the application as well.

Finally the promotion is how a new product will be introduced to the consumer. When you buy a new computer from HP or Dell you will get a bunch of "free trial" programs like virus protection, Quicken (personal accounting), and maybe a trial to Microsoft Office or a graphic processing program for your photos (Photoshop by Adobe). This is one form of promotion which is relatively low cost, is distributed to a wide market and even has the feel of a reference, it seems like HP and Dell are endorsing the software. The only cost to the marketer is the management of a relationship with Dell and HP. Microsoft does this with their higher end Office suites. When you buy a low end package they let you try more applications (like Access database and Visio charting).

This article used the traditional "marketing mix" model. For the most part, technology companies use this model initially to get started. Once I explore the other functions of the marketing "process" (I will also refer to this at the "marketing flow" ), we will go into more into specific areas of technical marketing which are unique to the field. But it's always good to know the very basic traditional techniques.

How, Why, and What about bringing old sk00l to blogging

One of the questions that I hear all the time is how to "educate" or "convert" an old marketer into a Web2.0 model (as if people were cars or computers). It is similar to the question of "when is business going to get back to the good old days when technology ruled high and every company was growing? (i.e. making money)". To me it seems that these questions avoid the simple observation that things change. They change all the time and not always for the better (i.e. for everyone). Blogging platforms like blogger and WordPress were suppose to make writing content on the web easier and reading it much much easier. Well it did and it DID NOT! Which is what happens with every technology change. (I did not say "technology innovation" or "improvement" on purpose)

The idea behind blogging was: just find a blog platform you like and start publishing what you want. You got freedom from the traditional publishers, no cost of publishing and distribution, no censorship... hey this is great!!! As an isolated vague idea in space (before we actually had massive amount of blogs) this sounded too good to be true. (so did nuclear power - free energy for everyone) But this is not exactly what happened, not because people didn't know how to write, edit, research, promote... not because people didn't have something to say, opinion to voice, ideas to float... all the things that newspapers and trade magazines do very well. Whatever your profession, from technologist to business, from scientist to retailer, from car mechanic to pen collector, you may know how to do your work but you usually don't know how to explain it. Most professionals also do not have the experience to write well, write consistently and to do it week after week, year after year. Most professionals are not interested in writing that much or in that much detail. So for the most part, even though we have the "technology" for blogging, that is just one aspect of a blog that makes it useful. Blogging and wikis can be just about the writing. Essentially if you write well and have something important to say people will eventually read it. But all the functions which publishers of newspapers have invented, from soliciting good writing, editing, design, and eventual promotion and advertising; end up to be just as crucial for bloggers and wikis. So in the end a good writer with something to say still needs help editing, still need motivation to get out the articles in a steady flow, still has to have a decent design... all these things. Even promotion and advertising and "distribution" (RSS, index sites) is crucial.

The other technologies of what O'Reilly observed as Web2.0 are even more foreign and remote to people (just today, this will change and quickly). While Wikipedia has revolutionized organization and gathering of information on a large scale, wikis are very hard to run well and even harder to edit and attract content. This is what has made encyclopedias of the past so expensive and fairly rare in people's homes. Encyclopedia is something libraries pride themselves of having. If you look carefully at encyclopedias of the past notice that they actually are not too prolific. While they gather a great deal of information they are hard to publish, took a very long time, and in the end did not catch as a popular format. Let's not forget their cost, when the format did not "catch" they essentially became expensive. I think this will be true for the web as well. That does not mean that wikis are immediately limited in use. Actually, just like other forms of digital technology wikis will probably become more popular in other forms not necessarily encyclopedias.

New Internet technologies make certain things very easy "technically". This is essentially true with all technologies. This is what many business executives see immediately, the "new way to make money". But the next step in the use of a new technology is the real life application. Technologists know this very well. A base technology without applications and users which benefit from them is not going to be profitable. Business people do not always build in the cost of developing applications or managing outside companies to build them. These two factors: slow momentum of usage and ideas for new uses of a technology are both "good and bad". The good side is opportunities which blogging, wikis, and social networking has given us. The bad side is the people left behind. Essentially we can not change these qualities. The interesting observation which a few of us asking that question AGAIN and AGAIN and... "when are people going to upgrade themselves to Web2.0" and again avoids the change factor.

But what do some of us see that the others don't? After all, some "older folks" blog and some "young guns" still design brochures to be distributed by the old mail system? Besides the ability to "imagine the future" here are a few observations of what make some people understand Web2.0 and some don't:

• Seeing the full picture of how an interactive site works, either over time or over a series of articles not in time.


• Seeing good examples of content, design, subject matter, or organization (editing, arrangement) - essentially anything that is complete and already been used by people.


• Seeing examples that are understood and clearly relevant. If you are a business professional only new business blogs will help you understand how this could help YOU.


• Direct involvement in a blog site, writing, editing, use, definition, review, specification for a project.


• Pressure, explanation, challenge, need or anything that will make you think and imagine a blog (this usually comes from peer pressure, a friend or respected personality, competitive examples).

Think carefully on what made you use the first computer, the first real professional tool, the first time you ordered a book or a gift on the Internet. These seem small but changes in people specially when it comes to something that will change beliefs and understanding comes small steps. So I do not ask any more "how are people going to be upgraded to Web2.0" and I usually don't answer it... now I will just send them to this article... uuuffff... one step forward... :-)

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Tech blogs not just talk? a technology marketers' worry

Abbot Laboratory's Omnilink Biliari Stent, does it belong in a blog?

A technology marketer in a medical device start-up just gave me his opinion about blogs: "they are just talk, and if you are going to talk, you need someone really good to do it." He gets about an offer every two weeks to get a blog started. But his company does not see potential for professionally written articles from a 23 year old blogger that cut his teeth on commenting in political or Internet gambling blogs. His web design and SEO provider has made a pitch for blogging, the result was disappointing at best. The image of the blogger simply does not fit the serious business of selling medical devices to doctors. In his words "doctors over the age of 50 do not read blogs". I wanted to say: "executives in fortune 500 do read Clayton Christensen's and Jakob Nielsen's blogs" and they take them seriously. Imitating Bill Clinton's famous political election slogan: "it's the economy stupid" was on my lips. But I didn't say it. I wanted to go back to my office and gather examples to "prove him wrong".

Once I started gathering lists of "serious blogs" I realized that it's not going to be useful, not to me or to him. Not only to this potential client, but also to anyone in his company. There are two ways of looking at communication. These are more basic than marketing communication as a whole. The failure in the image of blogs falls into these two categories:

• The media itself: contextual association in what the medium itself represents. This is what Marshal McLuhan defined as: "the medium is the massage". TV is for entertainment, you didn't put medical ads on TV in the US in the 1950's, you didn't do it even in the 1970's. You don't put serious professional communication on blogs, it's a waste of time.
• The content: what Bill Clinton's campaign adviser James Carville coined "it's the economy stupid". You focus on what you want to say not where the message runs. On TV for Americans presidents never talked about serious subjects, but Carville made Clinton do it!

Who is "right"? If you are a start-up medical company you worry about your effectiveness. If you don't get it "right" the company will suffer, maybe even get hit so hard that you will not be able to recover. But why focus on small medical start-ups? This issue is global. Big medical companies, technology companies, consumer companies, they all have to worry about their communication effort. What about independent consultants, with even more at stake, much smaller budget?

Marshal McLuhan still echo after all the years, history of medium repeats?

If you are going to communicate and market effectively you need BOTH! YES BOTH! The medium has to be right to be effective at all, this is what everyone who starts out thinks. The medium is definitely stereotyped, which is what Marshal McLuhan observed in the 1960's. Does this put blogs in the world of "just talk"? Just political commenting and deep technical conversations? This seems to be the case in the mind of traditional corporate marketers*. But if it's just talk, why do serious thinkers use such trivial medium? Well, here comes Carville's observation in the serious political arena of presidential elections: the message itself is MORE important.

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