08 October 2008

The Blogosphere According to Bloggers


I know I'm a little slow in reacting to the Technorati State of the Blogosphere report, but I kept coming back to something I couldn't quite shake. More on that in a minute. First, let's talk about a few of the interesting tidbits about brands and blogging.

"Whether or not a brand has launched a social media strategy, more likely than not, it’s already present in the Blogosphere. Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently. 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate)."




Yep, folks. People are talking about you, whether you like it or not. More importantly, people are looking for information online, and when they find it, they may not realize they're on a blog. It's just a link they clicked from their Google search.

Social media users tend to label our tools and put them in buckets - blogging, microblogging, crowdsourcing, whatever. But the people that FIND information on the web aren't classifying things the same way we are. They just want to know what people are saying about the laptop they're thinking of buying, or the hotel they're thinking of staying at. When they click on a link, it may not register with them that it's a blog or a forum post or a mainstream news article online, but it's the information they're after. But they ARE looking for it, so we ought to be putting it in places they can find it and - perhaps more importantly - interact and react to it.

"Company information or gossip and everyday retail experiences are fodder for the majority of bloggers."


Which means people want to talk about you, and given no other choice, will use the information they find to make judgments about your business. It's ever more important that you as the brand are contributing your voice and perspective to the conversation, and showing that other people's viewpoints matter to you, too.

But here's my word of caution. The report is decidedly slanted - Technorati (fittingly) only surveyed bloggers for this report. I understand that they're trying to take the pulse of THEIR community - the bloggers - and understand how and why they do what they do.

But if you're a consultant or company looking at this information, be careful not to overinflate some of the findings, and recognize that they're from a plugged-in audience. Of course they're going to predict the continued growth of blogs and the demise of print - that's the world they live in. Of course they're going to believe that blogs' influence will get ever greater in the grand communications highway - it's part of the sea change that they're creating.

I believe these things - I do. I work with lots of people to understand and tap the potential of marketing through social media - blogging included - and I think blogging is a powerful, accessible medium that really has changed the face of media. But the fishbowl can make you see things through curved glass.

So I'll end by saying that once again, we all need to be mindful of the individual business value of these tools, the important factors for consideration, and how they integrate into the larger landscape. Traditional methods of communication can still be very viable, and even more powerful when enhanced with carefully selected social media tools to transform a message into a dialogue.

And the conversation is only as good as the quality of its participants. More on that later this week...



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07 October 2008

Your Brand, In Plain English

I'm not a big fan of buzzwords. Why? They dilute brands more effectively than almost anything else. And I promise, these have all come from real corporate documents, though names have been withheld to protect the offenders.

The Compound Buzzword
This is what you get when you take a perfectly good normal word - like "organic" - and cram it into some business-related context because it sounds cool, often smashing it together with some other buzzword. Something like:

We create organic solution stacks to solve our clients' infrastructure issues.

You've now compounded the confusion by making up collections of words that independently may (or may not) mean something to your customer, but have lost all context.

The Noun-Into-A-Verb
Ever heard this one?

We've tasked our customer service team to meet your every need.

Beside the fact that this violates every grammar rule because it's just a made-up word, it sounds self-important. As if you're too good to just have customer service teams that are dedicated to meeting needs. They have to be "tasked" to do so. Ergh.

The Tech Upgrade
This practice uses technically-related terms and applies them to non-technical subjects.

Our mission statement outlines our read-only values: integrity, creativity, and collaboration.

In essence you're trying to say that those values can't or won't be compromised. So why not use a word designed for that purpose? Like, say, uncompromising?

The Mashup
It can be tempting to create a whole new word, hoping that someday, someone will know you coined that term. Most of the time, you just sound like you're trying too hard:

We keep our client meetings centergistic and focused on outcomes.

What do you think? Does this make you want to hire them, or does it make you wonder if their meetings will be equally difficult to interpret?

The Misnomer
Here we've got words that are either oxymorons - meaning that that by definition the two words are opposites - or words that are completely redundant and unnecessary. My favorite example of late:

We form collaborative partnerships to help you meet your goals.

I don't know about you, but I haven't met a partnership that wasn't - at least by the pure definition of "working together" - collaborative.

Ok, Amber....What's your point?
Ok. The above are kind of fun, and you may have gotten a chuckle out of it. (For even more laughs on the buzzword front, check out BuzzWhack.) But the truth is these kinds of offenses are rampant in the world of marketing, and even more so now in social media.

Everyone wants to be different, innovative, the first to the finish line. And in the process, we've left behind some very simple words to describe what we do.

A brand isn't about 20 point Scrabulous words (or Scrabble, for you analog folk). It's about clearly defining your brand in words that make it easy for your customers to explain it to someone else.

So next time you're writing copy for your website or putting together your pitch for a new client, skip the lingo, and don't try to be a hero. Use real words that real people use and understand, and they'll be much more likely to talk about you. If you have trouble explaining your brand in a sentence, you ought to spend some time distilling it down until you can.


Sometimes, simple really is better.


Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

08 October 2008

The Blogosphere According to Bloggers


I know I'm a little slow in reacting to the Technorati State of the Blogosphere report, but I kept coming back to something I couldn't quite shake. More on that in a minute. First, let's talk about a few of the interesting tidbits about brands and blogging.

"Whether or not a brand has launched a social media strategy, more likely than not, it’s already present in the Blogosphere. Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently. 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate)."




Yep, folks. People are talking about you, whether you like it or not. More importantly, people are looking for information online, and when they find it, they may not realize they're on a blog. It's just a link they clicked from their Google search.

Social media users tend to label our tools and put them in buckets - blogging, microblogging, crowdsourcing, whatever. But the people that FIND information on the web aren't classifying things the same way we are. They just want to know what people are saying about the laptop they're thinking of buying, or the hotel they're thinking of staying at. When they click on a link, it may not register with them that it's a blog or a forum post or a mainstream news article online, but it's the information they're after. But they ARE looking for it, so we ought to be putting it in places they can find it and - perhaps more importantly - interact and react to it.

"Company information or gossip and everyday retail experiences are fodder for the majority of bloggers."


Which means people want to talk about you, and given no other choice, will use the information they find to make judgments about your business. It's ever more important that you as the brand are contributing your voice and perspective to the conversation, and showing that other people's viewpoints matter to you, too.

But here's my word of caution. The report is decidedly slanted - Technorati (fittingly) only surveyed bloggers for this report. I understand that they're trying to take the pulse of THEIR community - the bloggers - and understand how and why they do what they do.

But if you're a consultant or company looking at this information, be careful not to overinflate some of the findings, and recognize that they're from a plugged-in audience. Of course they're going to predict the continued growth of blogs and the demise of print - that's the world they live in. Of course they're going to believe that blogs' influence will get ever greater in the grand communications highway - it's part of the sea change that they're creating.

I believe these things - I do. I work with lots of people to understand and tap the potential of marketing through social media - blogging included - and I think blogging is a powerful, accessible medium that really has changed the face of media. But the fishbowl can make you see things through curved glass.

So I'll end by saying that once again, we all need to be mindful of the individual business value of these tools, the important factors for consideration, and how they integrate into the larger landscape. Traditional methods of communication can still be very viable, and even more powerful when enhanced with carefully selected social media tools to transform a message into a dialogue.

And the conversation is only as good as the quality of its participants. More on that later this week...



Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

07 October 2008

Your Brand, In Plain English

I'm not a big fan of buzzwords. Why? They dilute brands more effectively than almost anything else. And I promise, these have all come from real corporate documents, though names have been withheld to protect the offenders.

The Compound Buzzword
This is what you get when you take a perfectly good normal word - like "organic" - and cram it into some business-related context because it sounds cool, often smashing it together with some other buzzword. Something like:

We create organic solution stacks to solve our clients' infrastructure issues.

You've now compounded the confusion by making up collections of words that independently may (or may not) mean something to your customer, but have lost all context.

The Noun-Into-A-Verb
Ever heard this one?

We've tasked our customer service team to meet your every need.

Beside the fact that this violates every grammar rule because it's just a made-up word, it sounds self-important. As if you're too good to just have customer service teams that are dedicated to meeting needs. They have to be "tasked" to do so. Ergh.

The Tech Upgrade
This practice uses technically-related terms and applies them to non-technical subjects.

Our mission statement outlines our read-only values: integrity, creativity, and collaboration.

In essence you're trying to say that those values can't or won't be compromised. So why not use a word designed for that purpose? Like, say, uncompromising?

The Mashup
It can be tempting to create a whole new word, hoping that someday, someone will know you coined that term. Most of the time, you just sound like you're trying too hard:

We keep our client meetings centergistic and focused on outcomes.

What do you think? Does this make you want to hire them, or does it make you wonder if their meetings will be equally difficult to interpret?

The Misnomer
Here we've got words that are either oxymorons - meaning that that by definition the two words are opposites - or words that are completely redundant and unnecessary. My favorite example of late:

We form collaborative partnerships to help you meet your goals.

I don't know about you, but I haven't met a partnership that wasn't - at least by the pure definition of "working together" - collaborative.

Ok, Amber....What's your point?
Ok. The above are kind of fun, and you may have gotten a chuckle out of it. (For even more laughs on the buzzword front, check out BuzzWhack.) But the truth is these kinds of offenses are rampant in the world of marketing, and even more so now in social media.

Everyone wants to be different, innovative, the first to the finish line. And in the process, we've left behind some very simple words to describe what we do.

A brand isn't about 20 point Scrabulous words (or Scrabble, for you analog folk). It's about clearly defining your brand in words that make it easy for your customers to explain it to someone else.

So next time you're writing copy for your website or putting together your pitch for a new client, skip the lingo, and don't try to be a hero. Use real words that real people use and understand, and they'll be much more likely to talk about you. If you have trouble explaining your brand in a sentence, you ought to spend some time distilling it down until you can.


Sometimes, simple really is better.


Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

08 October 2008

The Blogosphere According to Bloggers


I know I'm a little slow in reacting to the Technorati State of the Blogosphere report, but I kept coming back to something I couldn't quite shake. More on that in a minute. First, let's talk about a few of the interesting tidbits about brands and blogging.

"Whether or not a brand has launched a social media strategy, more likely than not, it’s already present in the Blogosphere. Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently. 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate)."




Yep, folks. People are talking about you, whether you like it or not. More importantly, people are looking for information online, and when they find it, they may not realize they're on a blog. It's just a link they clicked from their Google search.

Social media users tend to label our tools and put them in buckets - blogging, microblogging, crowdsourcing, whatever. But the people that FIND information on the web aren't classifying things the same way we are. They just want to know what people are saying about the laptop they're thinking of buying, or the hotel they're thinking of staying at. When they click on a link, it may not register with them that it's a blog or a forum post or a mainstream news article online, but it's the information they're after. But they ARE looking for it, so we ought to be putting it in places they can find it and - perhaps more importantly - interact and react to it.

"Company information or gossip and everyday retail experiences are fodder for the majority of bloggers."


Which means people want to talk about you, and given no other choice, will use the information they find to make judgments about your business. It's ever more important that you as the brand are contributing your voice and perspective to the conversation, and showing that other people's viewpoints matter to you, too.

But here's my word of caution. The report is decidedly slanted - Technorati (fittingly) only surveyed bloggers for this report. I understand that they're trying to take the pulse of THEIR community - the bloggers - and understand how and why they do what they do.

But if you're a consultant or company looking at this information, be careful not to overinflate some of the findings, and recognize that they're from a plugged-in audience. Of course they're going to predict the continued growth of blogs and the demise of print - that's the world they live in. Of course they're going to believe that blogs' influence will get ever greater in the grand communications highway - it's part of the sea change that they're creating.

I believe these things - I do. I work with lots of people to understand and tap the potential of marketing through social media - blogging included - and I think blogging is a powerful, accessible medium that really has changed the face of media. But the fishbowl can make you see things through curved glass.

So I'll end by saying that once again, we all need to be mindful of the individual business value of these tools, the important factors for consideration, and how they integrate into the larger landscape. Traditional methods of communication can still be very viable, and even more powerful when enhanced with carefully selected social media tools to transform a message into a dialogue.

And the conversation is only as good as the quality of its participants. More on that later this week...



Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

07 October 2008

Your Brand, In Plain English

I'm not a big fan of buzzwords. Why? They dilute brands more effectively than almost anything else. And I promise, these have all come from real corporate documents, though names have been withheld to protect the offenders.

The Compound Buzzword
This is what you get when you take a perfectly good normal word - like "organic" - and cram it into some business-related context because it sounds cool, often smashing it together with some other buzzword. Something like:

We create organic solution stacks to solve our clients' infrastructure issues.

You've now compounded the confusion by making up collections of words that independently may (or may not) mean something to your customer, but have lost all context.

The Noun-Into-A-Verb
Ever heard this one?

We've tasked our customer service team to meet your every need.

Beside the fact that this violates every grammar rule because it's just a made-up word, it sounds self-important. As if you're too good to just have customer service teams that are dedicated to meeting needs. They have to be "tasked" to do so. Ergh.

The Tech Upgrade
This practice uses technically-related terms and applies them to non-technical subjects.

Our mission statement outlines our read-only values: integrity, creativity, and collaboration.

In essence you're trying to say that those values can't or won't be compromised. So why not use a word designed for that purpose? Like, say, uncompromising?

The Mashup
It can be tempting to create a whole new word, hoping that someday, someone will know you coined that term. Most of the time, you just sound like you're trying too hard:

We keep our client meetings centergistic and focused on outcomes.

What do you think? Does this make you want to hire them, or does it make you wonder if their meetings will be equally difficult to interpret?

The Misnomer
Here we've got words that are either oxymorons - meaning that that by definition the two words are opposites - or words that are completely redundant and unnecessary. My favorite example of late:

We form collaborative partnerships to help you meet your goals.

I don't know about you, but I haven't met a partnership that wasn't - at least by the pure definition of "working together" - collaborative.

Ok, Amber....What's your point?
Ok. The above are kind of fun, and you may have gotten a chuckle out of it. (For even more laughs on the buzzword front, check out BuzzWhack.) But the truth is these kinds of offenses are rampant in the world of marketing, and even more so now in social media.

Everyone wants to be different, innovative, the first to the finish line. And in the process, we've left behind some very simple words to describe what we do.

A brand isn't about 20 point Scrabulous words (or Scrabble, for you analog folk). It's about clearly defining your brand in words that make it easy for your customers to explain it to someone else.

So next time you're writing copy for your website or putting together your pitch for a new client, skip the lingo, and don't try to be a hero. Use real words that real people use and understand, and they'll be much more likely to talk about you. If you have trouble explaining your brand in a sentence, you ought to spend some time distilling it down until you can.


Sometimes, simple really is better.


Reblog this post [with Zemanta]