Blogging

Alright, so you know you want a company blog. You want content to get indexed quickly, you want to cultivate a following for your business, you want to portray your authority on your industry, you want all the link juice that comes with a blog. But do you build it as part of your company website or as a new domain?

Listen to our top internet marketing experts duke it out in a showdown on this less-than-concrete question.

SEO Audio Episode 20

Search Engine Land featured a great article this week “Building a Company with Social Media” discussing the ways Senior Level Executives, Marketing, Public Relations, and HR Personnel can use social media to meet their professional objectives. Here’s a quick recap:

Senior Level - Top executives tend to be thought leaders. Utilizing a blog to promote those thoughts can be a very powerful tool in several respects. Not only does a blog run by a top exec bring insider knowledge to the common folk, but it also brings a human element to a company. Randy Baseler, VP of Marketing at Boeing Airline has a public blog where he writes about everything from Aviation news, safety to his european vacation.

Marketing - Marketing executives are hired to get the word out. In the last 10 years, marketing has seen a huge shift from print publications to online marketing. Through the use of social new sharing sites such as Digg, Reddit, and Propeller, marketers are able to get new content out to the public immediately and have it devoured by the tens of thousands of news seekers using these social news sharing sites.

Public Relations - Online Reputation management is a means of monitoring what customers, past clients and prospective clients are saying about a company or brand online. With the  help of online search tools like Google Blog Search and Technorati, PR execs are able to search for online references, good and bad about their product and be proactive about the negative comments

HR -  Human Resources professionals using social media sites, like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, are able to tap into their extended network of friends, co-workers and business associates to find qualified job candidates. The best part about this type of contact, it comes with a built in referral from someone you know and trust.

Whether you are a small business or belong to a large corporation, using social media to expand your business, your brand, and your authority is a cost effective way to make a mark for yourself.

We recently had a client approach us with a request, he was looking for an application or widget that would enable him to create a survey on his blog. The client was interested in learning which aspects of his business and website that his readers were actually interested in. What better way to find out than to ask them, right?

While there are numerous third party applications available, we decided to install the Wordpress Plugin “Democracy”. The Democracy AJAX poll is a Wordpress plugin that allows the blog owner to add a poll to a website’s sidebar or within the blog posts. Since our client’s blog is built on the Wordpress platform, it provided the most seamless integration.

The creation of the poll is simple. Once the plugin is uploaded and activated in your plugins folder. The polling console appears in the Wordpress Dashboard. The nice thing about the Democracy poll is that it is highly configureable to your specific question. The plugin allows you to enter a question and input as many answer options as necessary.

Once the poll is created and activated it is automatically generated to the sidebar or within your blog posts, depending on the code configuration. Each time a reader votes on the poll, their answer is logged, IP is tracked (eliminates vote stuffing) and the results are shown in a bar graph.

Not only is the poll an added benefit for you, allowing you to get reader feedback, but it also allows your readers to be interactive with the site. Providing a venue for your readers to share their opinion and build a sense of community should always be a goal of your blog. Afterall, it is this sense of community that encourages readers to return.

If you are intersted in learning more about the Democracy WP-Plugin and how it can benefit your blog, feel free to contact me and I would be happy to guide you through it.

Every day I read hundreds of blog posts. Between work, hobbies, and the daily ‘must reads’ my Bloglines reader is always chock full. As I rule, I bookmark articles and blog posts that I find interesting. I also tend to jot down new websites and ideas into a black notebook, my ‘internet black book‘. This week, I thought I would bust out my notebook and share with you the sites which have picqued my interest.

Picnik: A free and easy online photo-editing tool. Picnik allows you to upload and edit photos from your desktop and Flickr & Photobucket accounts. With Picnik you can crop, touch up, resize, and eliminate red eye, all from the same easy console.

TubeMogul: This one is cool, especially if you are into making and sharing videos online. TubeMogul enables you to upload your video and distribute it to the top video sites, including You Tube, Google Videos, and MySpace, simultaneously. If you’ve tried uploading a video to more than one video sharing site before you know how long it can take. TubeMogul allows you to upload the video just once, yet distribute it to all of the major video sites without having to upload it multiple times.

ScribeFire: (Thanks Matt!) This is an amazing time saving tool for those of you who contribute to multiple blogs. ScribeFire is a free Firefox Plugin which allows you to blog from one main console and then have it published to one, two or all of the blogs on your blogging list. Once installed, the ScribeFire icon will appear at the bottom right hand side of your screen. Anytime you come across a story or photo you want to blog about, click on the icon and it will open the ScribeFire console on the bottom half of that very same screen. NO more going back and forth between pages!

Now that I’ve shared my list, I encourage you to introduce me to other sites that YOU think are cool or innovative. Leave a comment!