David Sifry’s been keeping up with blog growth for quite a while, and he’s become the resident expert on the topic, garnering much attention when he releases his latest ‘state of the blogosphere‘. Here is a summary of his findings:

• Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

With all of these new blogs being started how is it possible for a new entrant to even have their voice heard? Does it still make sense for a small to medium sized enterprise to even start a blog? I believe the answer is yes because search/filter (Technorati) and aggregation services (Newsgator, Bloglines) will continue to improve thus continuing to increase the signal vs noise ratio. Here are a few tips to ensure your voice will be heard.

1. Develop strategy and set goals before you begin blogging.
2. Be persistent. In most cases, you will not see significant results for at least 6 months.
3. Be an active blogger. You must blog at least once a week.
4. Blog with passion and focus. Make sure your topics are focused on the categories that you developed in the strategy phase. To ensure higher search engine placement you should also include the key words you identified in the strategy phase.
5. Network with bloggers that are focused on similar topics. Exchange links and post meaningful comments in their blogs.

If you are new to blogging or not getting the results you would like from your blog, please feel free to contact me.

I have decided that once a week I will highlight a small business blog that does an exemplary job of blogging. This week’s site is the Artsy Asylum run by Susan Reynolds. Susan is clearly passionate about art and weaves some really fun and interesting stories around all topics art. Susan is clearly a seasoned blogger and has done a great job of setting up her blog. The one criticism I have is that she has a lot going on in her side bars, which gives it a cluttered look. Check it out and see what you think.

When I started blogging I just jumped in with both feet. It was great fun but I do have a few scars from mistakes I could have avoided. So before you start shooting from the hip like I did, I’d like to offer the following suggestion to ensure that you get started off on the right foot

Develop your blog strategy before you do anything else.

Launching a corporate blog is a lot like launching a new product or service, without a proper strategy in place it is doubtful that your blog will achieve much success. If your company has an up to date marketing plan then answering the questions below should be relatively easy. If you do not have a current marketing plan, then maybe this will be the impetus needed to develop one. Shadowbox Studios has developed a series of questions that, when answered, help you define the overall strategy and direction for your corporate blog.

A) Developing your blogging goals and objectives

Why is it that you are starting a blog and what are the results you expect to receive? Setting goals and objectives is critical for any business process and blogging is no different. Without realistic goals and objectives, your blog WILL NOT succeed. Please keep in mind that the goal is where we want to be. The objectives are the steps needed to get there. Successful goals and objectives are SMART: Specific – Measurable – Attainable – Relevant – Timely.

Sample Goals (not limited to 5)

1. Improve my company’s online visibility.
2. Acquire 10 clients after 6 months of blogging.
3. Position myself as an expert in conversational copywriting.
4. Network with other online copywriters.
5. Produce an example of how a blog can extend a company’s message.

Sample Objectives

1. Identify 5 competitor blogs.
2. Read every new post in the above mentioned competitor blogs.
3. Make at least three comments per week in the above mentioned competitor blogs.
4. Have 10 reciprocal blogroll links with similarly focused blogs.
5. Target ten keywords or phrases (we’ll discuss these on the next post) and get in the top 20 results.
6. Be able to identify key topics by reader comments and trackbacks.
7. Produce at least 3 blog posts per week.
8. Assess the effectiveness of blog effort by analyzing subscriber data (RSS and mailing lists)

B) Identifying your target audience and defining your blog focus

1. What is the vertical market or cross functional specialty on which your blog will be targeted.
2. Who is your intended target audience?
3. What are the topics of your blog going to be?
4. Please list 5-10 key words that are associated with your topic?

C) Identifying and understanding your competitors

The best way to find out you your competitors are that are blogging is to input the keywords that you listed above into a blog search engine. Although I recommend Technorati , there are other very good blog search engines such as Feedster, PubSub.com), IceRocket) and Google’s Blog Search). Technorati has a feature called “authority” that makes it easy to determine who your main competitors are. When you conduct a search on Technorati you can choose whether you would like to see only the results that have authority – Technorati calculates a blog’s authority by how many people link to it. We assume that the bloggers in your industry with the most “authority” are your main competitors. When conducting your search try different combinations of your key words. Try putting two or more key words in quotation marks (“corporate blogging”).

Once you have identified who are the main players in your industry, we strongly suggest that you start following these blogs. Reading what other corporate bloggers are writing can provide you with basic corporate blogging guidelines and spur ideas for future blogging topics. Lastly, another great way to find quality blogs is to check out the “blog rolls” of the competitor sites you have already identified.

1. Please name the URLs of the top 5 competitor blogs.
2. What are the blog categories of these 5 competitors?
3. How long have these blogs been in existence? You can determine this by looking in the archives section of these blogs.
4. On average, how many posts per week do these blogs publish?

Once you have completed this strategy exercise you will be on the right path to successful blogging.

My wife is just finishing her first year of a four year PhD program at a well known university in England. She recently met with the Associate Dean of the business school and was offhandedly asked what I was doing to keep busy. One thing led to another and the associate dean reviewed my resume and asked for me to come in for an informal interview. It all started with her asking me about my background and what I thought I might be able to contribute to the business school. I think I came at her from a different direction than she had expected.

The following is a summary of the thoughts I presented her.

I am passionate about creating cost-effective, competitive and sustainable corporate communications solutions for small to medium-sized enterprises by combining web application expertise with informed communications experience. I believe that most marketing solutions lie in the empowerment of the masses. I rely on agility and collaboration. My solutions and methodology are not for companies with a top down, traditionally conservative, command and control approach to business.

Having said that, the Business School has two fundamental problems that immediately jump out at me. The first is that it is difficult to differentiate a commoditized service and generate any excitement or awareness in the market. The second is that you have not harnessed the power of your alumni network to sell your service to prospective students and employers. With that in mind, the following are simply suggestions that will need to be fleshed out to obtain a workable solution.

Tackling the first issue – I believe that all of your professors should be blogging. Their blogs should be commentary on current news events and how those events relate to the subjects they teach. These blogs should be seen as “Alumini case studies” that encourage discussion from current students, alumni and prospective students. While there are many university professors that blog, there are no universities (to my knowledge) that sponsor and endorse such activities by providing the tools, training and space under their university website umbrella to ensure effective blogging.

Taking this idea a bit further, I also believe that all class lectures and accompanying material (PowerPoint presentations and notes) in the business school should be available to the public. This would be a great service to students saving them the trouble of taping and archiving all of the lectures. It would give your alumni a chance to refresh their knowledge and it would give prospective students an opportunity to hear what real lectures are like at a top ranked B School. If you then provided these people the tools to discuss and collaborate on what was presented, you would find more conversations centred on the University Business School than in any other time in recent memory. And markets are conversations.

Lastly, your alumni network is one of the most potentially valuable assets that the school has, but in order to realize this potential you must empower your alumni network. Give them the tools to effectively network and collaborate online and stay informed. There is some great portal/CMS software out there that has these tools built in. You need to plant the seed and then let your alumni network do the marketing for you.

I understand that these suggestions sound risky to you, but not taking risks often ends up being more risky.

The Associate Dean seemed receptive to my ideas and passed on my contact information to their internal marketing department. I’ll keep you posted.

One of the biggest benefits of blogging is the contacts you make. It starts with you exchanging comments in one another’s blogs and then you begin to exchange emails, connect on LinkedIn and really start to exchange ideas. One such contact I have made is Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah runs a blog about how web tools enable companies to delight customers. Jeremiah knows his technology. More importantly however, he is probably the most passionate, genuine blogger I know. If you’re looking for a great example of how to run a blog, you need look no further than Jeremiah’s blog.

The guys at Emerson Process Experts have created a must read RSS Starter Kit. RSS is a life changing technology people. Get on the bandwagon.

What is RSS?

RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, lets you receive instant information updates. With RSS webfeeds you are in control — you decide what you want to read and when you want to read it. A simple news reader makes this possible.

Once you subscribe to a site’s RSS webfeed or even a search engine feed, your news reader goes out and grabs the updated information saving you the time it takes to visit each site. The latest information as soon as it is published comes to your news reader.

Major news sites, blogs, and a growing number of corporate websites publish their content as RSS webfeeds. Millions of sites such as BBC World News, The New York Times, and EasyDeltaV.com use RSS to deliver headlines and summaries.

Some browsers like Firefox automatically check for webfeeds when you visit a website, and display this icon when it finds one. This auto discovery will be in the next Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office releases.

Why use RSS?

One of the blogs that I follow on a regular basis is Dave Winer’s. The man is a blogging legend.¬? Dave recently had a blog post that so succinctly stated why Corporate Blogging is so important.

I’ve been following the mixup over Scoble’s meeting at Amazon, from a distance. The guy from Amazon apparently asked Scoble to cut the bullshit and tell him why he should be interested in blogs. If I had been there I would have said that blogging is now an expected channel of communication with at least some customers, with developers and the press. Amazon has customers, and presumably wants more. And they have a developer pitch too, and they have stories they want to communicate to the press. So if some of the people you want to reach like to receive information via RSS and blogs, why would you not want to provide it? To me, asking why you should use blogs is like asking why you should answer the phone. It might be a customer, a developer who wants to use your services, or a reporter who wants to write about the company. Your competitors answer the phone, so you should too.

Miss Rogue has quite an idea brewing over at her blog. It ties in nicely with the idea I have been mulling over recently – developing a formal agile marketing methodology. Check out her blog and her wiki and let me know if you think her idea has merit.

These are my thoughts on Pinko Marketing:

I truly believe that this is an important message that needs to be heard. Unfortunately, I believe the majority of people will tune out the message because of the negative connotations most people have to the word “pinko”. What a shame that would be!

More importantly, all that she has done thus far is provided a very glossed over utopian view of how the masses will control the marketing message. Don?Äôt get me wrong, this is a good start, but unless she backs it up with methodology, practical applications and real world examples I don?Äôt think her idea will gain much traction. When I read the Pinko manifesto I recently thought of two recent blog posts I had read on “agile marketing” – here and here. IMHO I think the ideal scenario would be to develop an agile marketing methodology designed to engage and empower the market.

I came accross a blog today that is worth checking out if your in the business of producing ezines and/or blog writing.¬? It has loads of tips for writing great ezines, blogs and online copy! They are targeting coaches, consultants, speakers, authors and publishers who want to hone their skills and improve their communications.

Nick Carr recently posted seven rules for corporate blogging on his blog in response to Scoble having cracked (his opinion, not mine).¬? I think some of his rules certainly have merit, while others are just too over the top.¬? The following are his seven rules with my comments interspersed.

1) Don’t do it. If you have no compelling business reason to get involved in the blogosphere, then don’t. While there’s no evidence, beyond a few anecdotes, that corporate blogging leads to better business results, there are clearly risks. If you give bloggers too much freedom, they may “go native” and tarnish your reputation by writing something stupid. If you try to rein them in, you’ll be attacked for being a dinosaur. That’s a lose-lose situation – the kind companies should avoid if at all possible. And don’t buy that nonsense about needing to have “conversations” with the marketplace. That’s an ideology, not a strategy.

I agree wholeheartedly with Nick’s statement -¬? If you have no compelling business reason to get involved in the blogosphere, then don’t.¬?¬? I think that this also ties into another one of my beliefs on corporate blogging which is that not all businesses need to have a blog. The important thing to remember is that you should clearly define your blogging objectives and strategy before you start writing.

¬?I somewhat agree with Nick’s statement – If you give bloggers too much freedom, they may “go native” and tarnish your reputation by writing something stupid. This is easily preventable by setting corporate blogging guidelines at the outset. Hill and Knowlton, a PR/Advertising company, has some of the best guidelines that I have come across.

I completely disagree with Nick’s statement – And don’t buy that nonsense about needing to have “conversations” with the marketplace. That’s an ideology, not a strategy. I’m sorry Nick, but Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to satisfy customers and the only way you can effectively do this is by talking to people in your market(s) and a corporate blog is one of the corporate communications tools that facilitates conversations.

2) Use blogs to advance your business interests. OK, you’ve decided to ignore my first rule. Fine. But don’t get carried away. For companies, blogging should be treated as another channel for corporate communications, with its own strengths and weaknesses. You should use that channel to get your message out, not to give employees a sand pile for self-expression. Yes, corporate bloggers should write with honesty and personality, but they should never forget – nor let their readers forget – that they’re speaking on behalf of their employer. If a corporate blogger is embarrassed to be promoting his company’s interests in public, he shouldn’t be a corporate blogger.

I think rule 2 is rather sensible.¬? It also reinforces the need for well defined corporate blogging guidelines.

3) Stick to your goals. Maybe the goal of your blogging program is to help customers use your products more effectively. Maybe it’s to make your company more attractive to potential recruits. Maybe it’s to influence the public or lawmakers. The important thing is to be clear about your objectives, to stick to them and, as with any corporate program, to routinely evaluate how well you’re meeting them. If blogging isn’t working, then change what you’re doing (or who’s doing it). If it still isn’t working, then stop it.

I agree 100%.¬? This goes back to having clearly defined objectives and strategy before starting your blog.¬?

4) Choose your bloggers wisely. Blogging is a hot medium. The people who blog for your company should be ones who can keep their cool – and who aren’t likely to fall in love with their own words. Often, the people who most want to be allowed to blog are precisely the ones who shouldn’t be allowed to blog.

I also agree with this.¬? Blogging, as you will find out once you get rolling, requires thick skin and a level head.¬? As Scoble has shown, even the best of them lose it on occasion. A blogger on tilt can quickly negate all hard won goodwill that your blog may have garnered.

5) Assign blogging buddies. You need to trust your bloggers, not censor them. On the other hand, blogging makes publishing so simple that having some kind of circuit breaker can make a lot of sense. Think about requiring each of your corporate bloggers to have a blogging buddy – a colleague who reads each post before it’s published. All boggers have had the experience of hitting the “publish” button too soon – and then regretting it. A second set of eyes will solve most problems before they even happen. And your bloggers will thank you for that (after, perhaps, some initial whining).

I really like this suggestion!¬? We have all pushed the send button and then instantly regretted it.¬? Pushing the “publish” button on a blog can actually be worse as the number of subscribers can be significantly larger than the recipient list in your email.

6) Be wary of allowing comments. Most people who comment on other people’s blogs are smart and insightful. But “most” isn’t “all.” In addition to being a spam-magnet, blog comments can be nasty, obscene, and offensive. This can lead to another lose-lose situation: If you don’t censor comments, you’ll end up with stuff that can embarrass your company. If you do censor them, you’ll be accused of, well, censorship. In most cases, it’s best just to turn off the comment feature from the get-go. That may annoy the true believers, but they’re a tiny minority anyway.

I completely disagree with this rule. Blogging only becomes a two way communication medium when the comments and trackback features are turned on.¬? If you don?Äôt have them turned on then you are essentially giving your the people in your market(s) the middle finger – your voice is not important to me.¬? The whole point of blogging is to engage in conversations and you can?Äôt do that effectively with the comments and trackback features turned off. Lastly, if it is spam you are worried about then make sure your blog software supports the Akismet plug-in.

7) Call in the lawyers. I hate to say it, but if you’re allowing your employees to blog on your dime, you’re liable for what they write. Better safe than sued.

I disagree with this 100%.¬? As one person commented on Nick’s blog, “‘Calling in the lawyers’ would kill any chance of a blog getting off the ground. Set good blogging guidelines and leave the lawyers out of it.