Rileybiz

By John Riley

The thrill of participation, the engagement with others and the reward when one of your articles sparks a positive reaction to your product, your company or your blog, that’s what motivates today’s enterprising bloggers.  It’s what most of them will tell you. Bloggers relish their freedom to comment on the issues of the day, or for that matter, any subject at any time, to the Internet world and beyond. And they do. Politics, gardening, praise and criticism of products, companies, education, sex, etc. Nothing is off limits.

 Blogs have become part of the social media sweeping the country. This community of teenagers, Gen X and Y, boomers and seniors have evolved into what is now referred to as the blogosphere and it grows by the day. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter and other such vehicles for building online relationships interface regularly with blogs. Companies have found blogs are an excellent way to promote and sell their products, reduce their cost of selling, and strengthen their customer relationship management efforts. Additionally, companies can monitor customer’s  reactions to their products and services and provide early detection of customer or government issues that could adversely affect their business. 

 After belatedly accepting this phenomenon, Rileybiz.com, now .org, entered the blogosphere a few months ago.

Blog History

 While browsing in the Barnes and Noble bookstore one summer day in 2006, I came across a book entitled, “Blog” by Hugh Hewitt. Intrigued with the prologue on the flyleaf touting the success of his blog that had attracted over ten million visitors in four years, I bought the book.

I had to find out if this Internet phenomenon had any serious applications for business.

 As I read the book, I learned the first blog appeared in 1999 and by 2004, there were over 4 million sites. According to Hewitt, the key to attracting visitors was content… the better the content the more visitors you could expect. The power to interact with the Internet world was heady stuff and it was easy to understand it’s appeal. That day in 2006, I concluded blogging definitely had potential as a business tool, but it would take several years to mature. Needless to say, my timing was way off.

 Currently, eMarketer says there are 27.9 million blogs in the United States. The decline in newspaper readership and television viewing is evidence of the impact of blogs and the Internet.

 “Blogs are now mainstream media”, says Richard Jalichandra, CEO of Technorati, an Internet search engine for blogs.  “You’re also seeing media coming in the other direction by adding media content.” There’s a good reason. eMarketer estimates that in 2009, U.S. Internet users will read a blog at least once a month. By 2013, the estimate is 128.2 million people, or 58% of all U.S. users will do the same.

Want to Start Blogging? Here’s how

 Blog platforms are ‘lost leaders’. A number of Internet organizations offer free blogs in the hope you will want to later upgrade your blog or add more functions to expand its capabilities.

 1)     Blogger.com, WordPress.com and Blog.com are three good operators. After you sign up for the free blog, you receive a ‘turn key’ operation…a robust blog with excellent functional capabilities.

 2)     You can then use your host assigned URL, WordPress in my case, or go to GoDaddy.com and buy a domain name. The name of your blog can be your URL/domain name or  something different. Next, develop a clear idea of the subject you want to focus on. It can be politics, marketing, gardening, orchids, food, movies, nursing, whatever.

 3)     When your blog is in operation, your primary task will always be preparing content. That is what attracts visitors, but it needs to be refreshed regularly. I try to post two new articles each week and occasionally include guest authors. While content attracts visitors, there are other traffic building techniques you can also employ.

 4)     From there  it’s simply a matter of becoming more familiar with how the blog operates. Its not complicated. The best documentation I have found is, “Wordpress for Dummies” by Lisa Sabin-Wilson, but you can Google articles on the Internet that can also provide information.   

 After gaining experience with your basic blog, you may decide to upgrade to a more robust blog. That’s more challenging and will be the subject of my next article.

The upshot: the four most important future skills – leading people, strategic planning, inspiring commitment and managing change – are weak points among today’s leaders. There exists, in other words, a glaring gap between the skills leaders have now and the ones they will need in just a few short years. At CCL, we call it the “leadership gap.”

In a world of increasingly complex challenges that demand leadership traits many of us do not yet fully have, there’s no time to waste in developing ourselves and the men and women in our organizations. Based on CCL’s research and practical experience over the past 40 years, we believe the leadership gap can be closed by focusing on these five areas:

Teamwork and collaboration
Managing change
Communication
Learning agility/growth mindset
Judgment

Printed with permission: Center for Creative Leadership

November 11, 2009

Gaining visibility as thought leaders

eMarketer estimates nearly 28 million US Internet users write a blog in 2009, and those bloggers run the gamut from hobbyists and part-timers to self-employed and corporate bloggers.

According to a Technorati survey of bloggers worldwide, most are men, ages 18 to 44, affluent and well-educated. About one-quarter work for a traditional media outlet in addition to blogging, and most still don’t make any money from their self-publishing activities. But there are other ways to create value.

Fully 70% of bloggers polled by Technorati said they talked about products or brands on their blog. The most common activity was to post about brands they loved—or hated—as well as to write reviews or post about experiences with stores or customer service.

Bloggers who post about products and services may get some attention from brands in the form of free items and other perks—enough to attract the notice of the US Federal Trade Commission, at least—but the visibility they gain through publishing their thoughts also helps them in less-tangible ways.

Nearly six in 10 of all the bloggers surveyed said they were better known in their industry because of their blog, and one-quarter had used their blog as a resume or sent it to potential employers.

Further, bloggers who post for a business reported even higher levels of success: 71% had increased visibility for their company, 63% had converted prospects into purchasers through their blog, and 56% have seen their blog bring their company recognition as a thought leader in the industry.

Negative personal consequences, such as losing focus on work or getting in trouble on the job, were far less common than gaining visibility or even changing professions entirely based on blogging activity.

Printed with permission of emarketer.com

November 11, 2009

Generation Y females have refined the idea of “peer group” to encompass online friends, bloggers and anonymous reviewers, according to the “Why Y Women?” report from PopSugar and Radar Research.

Looking to this expansive group of peers, rather than experts or celebrities, Gen Y women are particularly influenced by social media.

Women Move to Social Media

Younger women are nearly twice as likely as their Gen X counterparts to say they had discovered a new brand or product when a friend mentioned it in an online status update. They are also significantly more influenced by blogs, by both professionals and especially by “someone like me.”

Telling friends in person or on the phone is still by far the most common way for Gen Y women to spread the word about products or brands they love. But they post about products and brands on social networking sites or online forums nearly twice as much as older women. Gen X women, on the other hand, are more likely than younger females to share information via e-mail.

Further, with even two-thirds of Gen X women considering their younger counterparts trendsetters, according to the survey, the potential pop culture influence of social marketing is multiplied.

Mr Youth, which has studied “millennial moms”—mothers around the same age as PopSugar’s Gen Y women—has also found the peer group an important influencer.

“With moms it is even a stronger source, as moms have always found it important to ask other moms before making important decisions that affect their families and kids,” Brandon Evans, managing partner and chief strategy officer at Mr Youth, told Media Life magazine. “With social media, it became much easier for them to seek out advice on a variety of topics from a wider net of people, so it quickly gained in influence.”

Printed from emarketer newsletter with permission of emarketer.com.