Blogging

Let’s forget about all the teen-based online attractions for a minute and take notice of the latest thing making waves on the web, yes it’s the mummy bloggers.

Ok, so if you’re not a mother, it’s probably unlikely you have come across these, but put ‘mummy blog’ into Google and see how many you are faced with: metropolitanmum.co.uk, potty-diaries.blogspot.com and littlemummy.com to name but a few.

Starting in America, like most things, mummy, or ‘mommy’ blogging as they like to call it, is a big deal. And as with most things that are a big, companies realise that this means money and will find some way for them to get in on the act.

But what exactly is this ‘mummy blogging’? It’s basically a mum, or sometimes a dad, talking about their experiences of parenting. It’s the ins and outs of what is like to have a child, covering everything from nappies – which are good to use? Recipes – what work well with children? And great days out – where to go? Can you see a theme here?

Recommendation is the common theme running throughout these blogs. Women are one of the most influential consumer groups and it is thought that typically they are the ones who buy products for their children and make decisions on the big household items to buy. So, if a woman sees that another woman liked a product or a place they will be more likely to use it or go there.

How can you use the mummy bloggers? If you have a product that you think could be useful in any way at all to mums, families, couples, then target them. Ask them to write a blog about it. Even the big shot companies are doing it.

This year Universal Pictures contacted the most well-known mummy bloggers in the USA at the time of the release of their movie Despicable Me. One mum Jennifer Donovan, who has been blogging for six years, was flown to the LA, put up in a luxury hotel and met all the stars of the film. Of course, she then blogged about it and openly admits a little more time was devoted to it, than perhaps if they hadn’t given her the trip.

The head of digital, online and mobile marketing at Universal, Doug Neil said: “We believe that the parents can be big influencers for us, and helping to sell the film and get their interest in promoting the film to their audience, as a stamp of approval for being a good wholesome safe film for families.”

In the UK, things are on a smaller scale, but advertisers and PR agencies are still keen to get their products out there and they know that mummy bloggers are a great way to do this.

As a business, it is an affordable and effective way to get your product seen and talked about. Elisa Camahort Page, the chief operations officer of BlogHer.com , a leading US-based community for women bloggers, said: “Blogs also act not only as a loud speaker for the person writing but as entertainment for those reading.

“People are twice as likely to report turning to blogs for anything about information-sharing,” she says, citing the results of a recent BlogHer survey that compared blogs to other social media. The BlogHer directory lists almost 22,000 blogs and about 28 per cent of those are about parenting, she says, with fresh voices joining the blogosphere all the time.

So, particularly if you are small business, it is clearly worth targeting bloggers is an ideal opportunity. The mummy bloggers are often looking for ways to make a little money or to get freebies, so will be more than happy to try out your product.

Remember they are mummies and they write these blogs because they genuinely love their child and are devoted to giving them the best things in life (well, we hope so anyway). Without wanting to stereotype, women do enjoying sharing ideas and discussing things that work well, especially when it comes to children. So, writing a blog is just an extension of that. It’s creating that word-of-mouth buzz that would normally cost big bucks. And if the blogger doesn’t actually like your product, it really isn’t the end of the world, because online any news generated really is good news.

Every business, every person, has one specific thing about them that can’t be replicated or improved on. Most businesses don’t see offering contracts by recorded mail as a USP, but it can be, and everything about you and your business that’s unique must be capitalised on as soon as possible.

I’ll give you an example – one man found that several CEOs had no featured results in Google when searching their names. So he placed a few adverts, and voilà, he was offered a job by two of them within a couple of months. The total cost? $6 dollars. That’s right – it cost him the price of a decent meal at MacDonald’s to gain a senior copywriting job at one of the biggest firms in America, dealing with clients such as the BBC, Sears, Cadbury’s and other brand giants.

This is something you could potentially be putting to work, but chances are you’re not. Search yourself, search your company, and see what comes up. If the top results aren’t linking back to you, you’re not doing it properly. Set your SEO goal for the year to outrank Wikipedia’s entry on your CEO, and if, by the time New Year’s Eve rolls around, the Google result for CEO Joe Bloggs of BlueCorp’s links back to BlueCorp.com before anything else, then you’re doing well.

The problem with Wikipedia and other online community sources of information is that they’re taking away chances for you to speak about what you do, both as an individual and as a business. By letting Wikipedia talk about your USP, you’re not selling yourself properly. If you’re the only packing and distribution company putting a GPS tracker in every shipment, then make sure that all 500 searches that could lead someone to that site propel you to the top of the list.

However, Wikipedia does have its business uses. When talking about your philanthropy, tooting your own horn is a bad idea, both from an individual and a business perspective. Bill Gates has never once directly said how amazingly generous he is on Microsoft.com, but the Gates Foundation is everywhere. It’s not doing wonders for Microsoft’s reputation as a monopolistic entity, but some people (usually the ones at the top of other companies) have to respect the fact that, at least in the public eye, Gates is a stand-down former CEO who put all the cash to good use. That’s more than can be said for many London bankers.

Interestingly, London bankers were missing one key weapon against the massive press-onslaught against them during last year, and that was anti-press statements. Most people think the fact a banker earns £400k a year is disgusting. It’s easy to point out that it’s ridiculous that they’re earning more than the President of the United States. However, when speaking with one of their representatives at a financial journalism seminar late last year, I realised something; footballers and film stars are no different.

It might have done bankers a world of good had they put money into PPC to pick up searches for “dodgy bankers” and then sent users to a site exonerating bankers – saying they earn a lot of money, but in ways that are no more, if not less ridiculous than sports and entertainment icons. The point is this: your page rank on Google decides whether someone reads your positives and your USPs, or your negatives and your generic aspects first. Work on it, and you’ll find that the first words into any curious net-user’s head are always words that will make them invest, rather than criticise.

It seems like such a ridiculous goal, doesn’t it? To make an incredible amount of money from something as simple as a blog about, say, writing white papers, or about social media. But there are a few who blog and rake in an impressive revenue each year, and one of those few is Michael Stelzner.

Reading the incredible account of his meteoric rise to internet fame and economical success via the blogging medium, it got me thinking. Why aren’t we all doing this? I’m a copy-writer, and I’ve written millions of words relating to every subject you can think of over the few years during and after university.

But it takes social media knowledge to drive traffic in. People aren’t going to bother visiting a site unless one or both of the following two conditions are met: a word-of-mouth recommendation, or a larger online social media campaign. But how do we achieve these two goals? Social media, social media and social media.

Firstly, if you’re aiming to grow your fan-base with a loyal cult following, then the foremost thing to consider when attempting to start it off in the first place is your network of colleagues and friends. Everyone knows that when a colleague or a friend makes a new website, you’ll all visit, have a poke around. Some will even return regularly, provided it’s interesting and updated often.

However, that’s only a few, and you’re going to have to work hard. No one enjoys having a friend push their blog at them purely for the sake of the site’s hit-counter. But people do like the odd nudge in the right online direction by someone who knows someone who’s writing some really funny, smart stuff on a daily basis.

However, if you’d like to take the more formal route, or you’re a solitary warrior writhing in existential agony and feeling like you’re one of the army of unread bloggers , then you’re going to have to consider social media as your best, and only option. In this day and age, newsletters are not read like they used to be, and we’re probably not going to visit another news site by seeing an advert for it on the one we’re already reading.

However, we might just have a quick peek if the site turns up on somebody’s Twitter account, or regularly forms a part of someone’s Facebook profile. Of course, when they visit and enjoy your content, there’s the small chance of the gold-dust re-tweet, and once that happens it tends to spread like wildfire through people with similar interests.

Take last week, for example – I had someone spontaneously find this article, read it, and tweet about it. I don’t know them personally, and two of their followers re-tweeted the link to this article. There was no prompting, no request at the end of my blog asking those who enjoyed my work to talk about it: it was free advertising for writing someone enjoyed.

These kinds of digital thumbs-ups are important, because eventually you’ll find your way onto the “must read” list of someone big, and that list often now finds its way onto the web. When I first started to write for a publication called Resolution Magazine, I wrote a long screed about the simulation of cultural identity. It was something I’m proud of to this day, but not half as proud of that as what happened to it.

Kieron Gillen, founder of New Games Journalism and arguably one of the best in his field, included it in his Sunday Papers post that listed his favourite bits of writing during the week. To be endorsed by such a major face had a serious impact on my confidence and the success of the article, and the fact that we got a fair amount of traffic simply by repeatedly turning up in his list.

It’s not impossible to become the blog to end all blogs – you’ve just got to utilise the same method that started political revolutions, the Renaissance, and Twitter – word of mouth. If one person says your site is fantastic to a room of ten people, and they in turn do the same, in a day’s time you’ll have 100 more unique visits. Things multiply if you keep the quality up, so do so, and thrive.

Skimming along the waves of the world wide web a wee while back, I chanced across a rather disturbing idea, for anyone who’s ever watched Terminator: robot news. By this I don’t mean a live blog of R2-D2’s address to the American people – I’m talking about using StatsMonkey; an automated bit of software made by Intelligent Information Laboratory to create journalism from baseball statistics.

For me, this hits uncomfortably close to home. I’ve been working in journalism since I was seventeen, beavering away on subs at the Financial Times. It was hard graft there, and even more so when you were on the phone to Dow Jones, hoping they took you seriously with a high-pitched, quivering voice. But the experience was solid, and it helped me further my interest in bringing the news to the people.

However, if I was to suggest that financial journalism, the most statistic-laden, number-driven form of documenting current events, was to be automated, they’d have laughed me out of the office. “You can’t document the world of finance with a bit of code,” they’d claim. “You need real people, with real experience and talent.”

But how talented are we, really? I’ve seen robots play the piano, and though many claim it sounds lacklustre, without knowing better they’d think it was Mozart himself. There are many programs that can actually converse with you, they respond to what you’ve said with pre-programmed syntax strings and match your concepts to their comments.

So what makes these cocky programmers think they can master the craft of the written word with numbers and bits of fiddly code? Well, being a journalist, I went and had a dig around, as getting hold of these mad journo-scientists seems to be harder than curing the common cold (not that I’d know where to start, bar recommending ice cream, movies and a few days of rest).

The first piece I saw was Wired. Honestly? I thought they’d be massively against it. Surely using sports data to compile a story is no more difficult than doing the same with new technology? Cross-referencing previous scores/specifications, talking about other teams/brands, and comparing them to the  matches/devices of legend.

But I was wrong – they embraced the idea and openly stated it would be cheaper. There was more talk of software writing a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, but let’s stay out of science fiction predictions for now. The realistic side to this development is this – journalists, and especially news journalists, are simply regurgitating facts in a certain format.

This is highlighted by National Public Radio’s interview with one Kristian Hammond, co-director of Intelligent Information Laboratory. When asked about documenting Little League games, he responded:

“We could literally write a game story for every single Little League game that is played in this country. That means every kid, every dad, every family, every grandma would see the story of what their kid is doing.”

The potential of this technology is huge. The ability to document every sports game, every bit of company progress – essentially, anything involving data, is mind-blowing. I’ve had instant-message chats with a computer, and it works to a point. But news? News is formulaic.

You can call me on it all you want, I’ve done my time in journalism – news with nothing but facts is news. News with opinion is a column. News with StatsMonkey, however, might be the reason none of us have a job in ten years. Medical degrees, anyone?

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last week, you are sure to have heard about the Raoul Moat vs the police story that has dominated the news.

As one of Britain’s biggest ever manhunts, the story was of course going get a lot of press time. When the situation came to a close on Saturday and Moat turned the gun on himself, what nobody expected was the subsequent public reaction.

What emerged was a Facebook fan page called “RIP Raoul Moat, You Legend”, which sent shock waves through the media, caused disgust from the public and finally being discussed by the PM in Parliament.

David Cameron speaking at the House of Commons on Wednesday said: “It is absolutely clear that Raoul Moat was a callous murderer, full stop, end of story. I cannot understand any wave, however small, of public sympathy for this man.”

Unfortunately Mr Prime Minister, although this may be your opinion and that of the Daily Mail, it is not that of the 36,000 members who joined the group or indeed the opinion of Facebook.

A statement was released by Facebook saying: “We have 26-million people on Facebook in the UK, each of which has their own opinion, and they are entitled to express their views on Facebook as long as their comments do not violate our terms.”

However, according to the Conservative lawmaker Chris Heaton-Harris, it does violate their terms:
“We don’t want to set laws on Facebook at all, but we do want people who are hosting these sites and other pages to have some responsibility,” Heaton-Harris told BBC radio.

“What I would say to Facebook is that within its terms and conditions on this site, that its incitement goes against its terms and conditions.”

The reaction against the Facebook group has been fierce with a number of groups being set up asking for the page to be removed.

Today when searching for the group, it appears that it no longer exists. However there is a R.I.P Raoul Moat! group, which currently has 9,371 people who ‘like’ it.

The group says: R.I.P Raoul Moat! You were a loving father and an all round canny lad and No haters or you get removed from group. There is also a link to a website www.raoulmoat.com

What is interesting about the Wall of comments, is that probably more than half of them are against the group. And if you look at the other comments, a lot are idiotic such as “How can a ginger be a leg-end?”, others are from those who are expressing dissatisfaction at the police and the government. But a large number of them are saying that they understand what he did in the last week was wrong, but they feel sorry for him for one reason or another, including that he was let down by society, the mental health system, his family etc.

It’s not just the people leaving comments on the group who feel sympathy for him, in a Guardian blog Michael White admits to feeling ” have a twinge of sympathy for Raoul Moat the other day. Two, actually, though I didn’t post them on Facebook.”

He went on to say: “Clearly Moat was dangerous and had to be captured – one murder and two life-threatening attacks, one of which cost PC David Rathband his sight – but the scale and media-frenzied tone of the police hunt made me uncomfortable.

Then there was that 47-page letter he wrote, the one the newspapers printed at length. No father that he knew of, at odds with his mother, estranged from his kids and the girlfriend he had abused but decided was the one for him, it was a mess.”

The point that Michael White may be making is that it is OK to feel sympathy for Moat, but it is an entirely different matter to talk about it so openly.

This message appeared today from the admin of the group R.I.P Raoul Moat:
“A MESSAGE TO ALL HATERS AND ALL OTHERS WHO DO NOT LIKE THE IDEA OF THIS PAGE, INCLUDING THE GOVERNMENT. WE WILL NOT BE CLOSING THIS PAGE DOWN AS IT IS THE INTENTIONS OF THE ADMIN TO LET PEOPLE PAY THEIR RESPECTS. WE DO NOT CONDONE WHAT RAOUL DID ON THAT WEEK BUT YOU HAVE TO REMEMBER HE HAD A LIFE BEFORE THIS AND THAT IS WHY PEOPLE ARE PEACEFULLLY TRYING TO PAY THEIR RESPECTS…”

As Facebook themselves say, people should be able to express themselves, but realistically how far can this go? Would it be acceptable for a ‘Hitler – You Legend’ page? Clearly the crimes of Moat are not comparable to Hitler, but murder is murder and the glorification of it is surely unacceptable in our society?

Although the page now appears to have disappeared, the issue has divide the country, the story has become a vehicle for a variety of grievances felt by government and police haters and on the flip side a lever by those after tighter Facebook rules.

Where do you think Facebook should draw the line?

When it was announced that BBC 6 Music was to be axed, a resounding cry echoed through the land (or more correctly, ‘through the social media’): ‘How can they do this?’ ‘We are the ones paying, so we should have our say!’ Along with loads of indignation and brouhaha like it.

This is all very well, but I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone talk about the station before the closure was announced, except perhaps my geeky brother and brainy co- worker. Let’s remember it was a digital station (only 32.1% of households own a DAB set) with only had an audience of 70,000. So, what was it that made the public get together and start an almighty social media campaign to Save 6 Music (not to mention helpsave6music. and love6music)?

John Morter, the man behind the Rage Against the Machine Christmas Number One campaign, immediately set up a new Facebook campaign on hearing news of the cuts.

Judging by Morter’s previous successful campaign, the BBC brass were probably quaking in their boots at the campaign. Probably more so by this outbreak of online fury, than by the discussion of the matter in parliament.

Anyway, as you have probably heard, it was announced yesterday that BBC 6 Music, would not be closed, but whether this is due to the social media campaigns or other powers we will never know (unless they tell us).

As Guardian blogger Steve Bushfield, pointed out, in the past a few letters would have been sent, which could easily be ignored. Today however 180,00 people joined the Save 6 Music campaigns and millions of tweets were hash-tagged #save6music. There was still a few old fashioned letters, 250 to be precise, but at the same time there were over 25,000 emails.

On the digital space people can react very easily to things they don’t like, they can just retweet things or ‘like’ something with very little effort. They don’t need to sit down and write a letter. Could it be that the support for 6 Music had actually very little to do with the station itself, but more to do with people climbing on board the latest trending topic?

This ties in with the idea that people are more likely to buy something if they see their friends like it, so if they see them tweet about 6 Music, will it make them want to be part of the action as well? Think about the Rage Against The Machine campaign, did all those who bought the single really like them, or was it more to do with getting one up on ‘the man’? And in this case is ‘the man’ the BBC? Even if people haven’t listened to BBC 6 before, many may not like the idea that they have no say over something which they pay money towards. Figures show that twice as many people listen to 6 Music now as did prior to the campaign.

Social media may not have played the whole part in this, but we know from previous campaigns that social media can be successful.

Take the election of Obama aka the ‘First Social Media President’ for example. During his campaign his team posted 1,800 videos to YouTube, which if you think in comparison to Gordon Brown’s campaign is an extraordinary number. He also used Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and various blogs as a way to connect with people and communicate with them.

Then there was the Compare the Meerkat campaign. They took the meerkat from their TV adverts, Aleksandr Orlov, gave him a twitter account with witty tweets, a Facebook fanpage and ’simples’, you have a phenomenon.

6 Music, in many people’s minds is a very good station, but perhaps it just hadn’t been publicised well enough to get the amount of listeners it needed to look like a money making station to the BBC. After this ‘will they, won’t they axe the show’ hoo haa, it looks like it now has the audience it deserves.

Now what remains to be seen is if the product is as good as the marketing campaign, even if it is a very modern social media marketing campaign.

A while ago, I was searching for a way to make some money with an older domain of mine. There were a ton of options, and all of them seemed good as money or traffic generators. Some stood out – everyone who’s ever looked at the online side of their business and thought “I could make this work for me” has looked into Google AdSense or affiliate programs. More recently, we’ve delved into an even better way to make your site the best possible one-stop-shop for visitors. These would be the Batman utility-belt of the consumer-savvy web-designer: the widget.

It does what?

Widgets are ingenious little fellows that you settle into the sidebar or various other digital playpens of your web-pages. They do all sorts of things, from providing lists of useful links and recent posts, to offering you DVDs based on the article you’re reading and allowing you to Tweet what you’ve just read. It’s a fascinating wealth of opportunity – do you offer Twitter functionality on the homepage, or on press-release pages? Do you allow users to add your CEO on Facebook? Do you need a meta/login widget? The choices are endless, and it’s all too tempting to get so many  that your website begins to look less like a coherent online representation of your products and services, and more like a scrapbook.

If you’re running your site through another site-building engine and built-in CMS, like WordPress and their .com and .org solutions, then you’re in luck – many widgets come as standard for .com. If you’ve opted for the self/externally-hosted .org option, there are countless communities across the web who make and upload their own, mostly for free. It’s as simple as installing a small bit of software on your computer – plug in the plug-in, and in no time at all you’ll have additional functions for new users.

It’s important to make sure you’re choosing the right ones – I know it’s tempting to get loads of widgets that let users do just about everything, but there’s a fine line between using a sharing plugin (digg and reddit, for example) and allowing users see which of their cousins are on Facebook right now. If you’re a social media company, the latter is fine, but if you’re an Independent Financial Advisor (IFA) with 30 years of industry experience, then this may not be the ideal representation of your attitude to online business presence. The widgets you use are as representative of the company’s tone and style as your choice of t-shirts vs. suits for big global conferences, and the wrong choice can make your business’ web design look slack or uncaring.

Let’s take an example – if you’re a site that does custom kitchen design, then there are a fair few ideal widgets that would come in handy. First, you could offer them a widget that displays the latest galleries you’ve uploaded to Flickr, as a means of offering them a “recent work” section that retains better functionality than an in-built gallery. They know Flickr, they may even use Flickr, and by applying the same brand name to your site as they do to their own lives, then you’re putting the business on a level that makes it seem more human and more appealing – key to ensuring your business spreads and evolves via word-of-mouth, if anything.

Tactical widget deployment

You’ve also got the option of placing them everywhere, and if not placing them in the correct sidebar, then why not taking it a step further, and creating your own? Of course, it requires programming, time, money, and a hundred other considerations – but then again, what doesn’t? It’s no more difficult than organising the business’ tax declarations when April rolls around, as you can contract it out to a programmer and designer in much the same way as Barry the accountant is contracted out to you to sort through the endless restaurant-based “team-building meetings” receipts on your expenses list for the year.

Of course, then there’s the various options that go with that – do you make a WordPress widget? One for all websites? One for the iPhone (an App, strictly speaking, but we’ll discuss those next week) or the Mac’s widget overlay? It’s a tough choice, but I’d again state that it depends on your business. Personally, if I ran an investment firm, I’d want an iPhone-compatible website that ran widgets allowing people to connect via LinkedIn, and possibly even one tracking the stock market and another crawling finance feeds from global papers and displaying them for people to scroll through as they explore the site. All of this would be free, easy to install and afterwards make the site, its design, and therefore the business look clued-in and web-savvy enough for the visitors to have faith in them as they make big investments in a new, scary, more-digital-than-ever environment.

It’s also worth considering their source. If you’re not aiming for commercialisation and want to remain professional, ensure the widgets are for functionality only, and have no secondary agenda. This rules out the Amazon Associates widgets, for one, which may be a slight dent in your plans for monetising a site. However, it also means that you’re not associating yourself needlessly with a vendor of goods that is world-renown, as any poor performance on their part is therefore tied to you – though only if you’re working in a private-sector, b2b environment. If you’re a big, outrageous blog about celebrities and big hair, then by all means, ensure Amazon’s recommendations widget has Hair: The Musical’s DVD release displayed proudly on the sidebar. If you’re not, stick to news.

My personal pet hate is the ridiculous amounts of sharing widgets on the bottom of each page, as I feel most of them are so seldom used that their existence on the page is, for all intents and purposes, pointless. But that’s just me – everyone’s got their own tastes, and it’s easy to appreciate why they’re on the page when they’re well-chosen and well-placed. So if you’re appealing to your resident widget-fidgets, then go in guns blazing, and allow them to log how many bullets you’ve fired in that little box on the right-hand side of your site at the same time.