Dan Soschin

The Single Most Important Question to Ask Before Blogging
I give a number of presentations about how to blog, how easy it is to get started, the tools you need, and how much time you should allocate to such activities… and so on and so forth… It all comes down to first addressing the single most important question when it comes to blogging: your objective.

What is your objective?
1. Generate buzz?
2. Engage your customers?
3. Evangelize?
4. Journal?
5. Feedback?
6. Commentary/editorial?
7. Generate business?
8. Scientific?
9. Reporting?
10. Entertainment?
You must first answer this question to be able to proceed and actually start a blog. Once I address this question for my audience (if giving a lecture/training session), or for my client if consulting, I can then identify the proper tools, time and resources that they will need.

I often encounter clients who are intimidated by blogging. They think it is too time consuming, and that they’ll have to post articles that are 1,000’s of words long with deep primary-source based references.

On the contrary!

There are so many methods for creating a successful blog, and they all go back to identifying your objectives before you start.

So, have you stopped to identify your objective? If not, then read no further. Once you have an objective, only then can you get started with all the rest…

And if you already started to blog and you wonder why it’s not going well, here’s more support for my hypothesis from an article by Mark Ivey for MarketingProfs, entitled, “7 Reasons Your Blog Sucks (and What to Do About It).”
What are the benefits of social media for B2B?
We’ve all heard many arguments for why consumer-driven businesses, especially retail, should be knee-deep into social media by now. Simply put, consumers use social media at all stages of their buying processes:
- Passively surfing the web and observing their friend’s behaviors
- Actively researching products and reading reviews, watching videos and soliciting feedback
- Evangelizing products they love (and those why they dislike the others)
But when it comes to social media for B2B, many folks stop and ask, “does it really work?”

I believe it does, and here’s why.

Business decision makers are still, by nature consumers. They are inherently influenced by many of the same things that influence smaller decisions throughout their daily routine. When faced with a difficult challenge, such as selecting a new long distance plan for a 1,000-person call center, or a new piece of hardware such as a network switch, they start with what they know – the search. The search reveals product reviews and those populate their decision set. Decision makers then look to peers for advice and slowly narrow down their result set. This is a social process.

Everything from product reviews, videos on blog sites, negative posts in forums, comments made by their peers, and so on, combine to influence the business decision maker.

Therefore, if your business is not present in these channels, and most importantly, not listening and participating in the conversations that are invariably taking place, you are missing out on opportunities. And, possibly, you are missing out on reputation management.

Here’s a great article for more insight on this topic by Glenn Gow for MarketingProfs.
How to use Google Analytics’ Intelligence Feature
A very powerful, yet often overlooked feature of Google Analytics is the “Intelligence” set of features. These are pre-packaged and customizable alerts that enable you to actively monitor virtually any type of situation on your web site. Here are a few examples:
1. Alert when traffic falls more than 25% in a day
2. Alert when goals drop too much
3. Alert when time on site increases for a particular page
4. Alert when traffic from a certain area increases
5. And thousands more…
If you want to get started with alerts, one of the easiest things to do is click over to that tab and review the pre-packaged alerts. Those will give you a good understanding of what the Google experts think should be important too you. Your next step would be to customize those alerts and add your own. Don’t forget you can send alerts to multiple mailboxes if need be.

And finally, for more inspiration, there are many great resources on search analytics blogs (including the Google Analytics blog). Here’s a great post by Abby for PPCHero that can get you started too.
Top 50 Most Trafficked Sites for April 2011

MarketingProfs just reported April 2011’s numbers for most trafficked websites. You can check it out here:

http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2011/5105/top-50-websites-careerbuilder-joins-ranking-netflix-surges?adref=nlt052411
What is Social Search?

Yesterday I wrote a snippet about Bing’s new social search feature. In doing so, I came across an article written by Ryan DeShazer explaining social search in more detail and its potential significance. It’s a nice read, so if you are interested in learning more about how search will evolve over the next several months, check it out.
Social Search – How it Will Change the Landscape of your Decisions
Social Search, or stated differently, “the incorporation of social media elements into the search algorithm” have been experimentally evolving at a rapid pace over the past year.

One new feature, announced recently by the team at Bing, revolves around the idea that when you conduct research such as:
- What hotel should at stay at in Maui?
- What HD TV should I purchase?
- Is the movie Harry Potter 8 worth seeing?
…you are heavily influenced by your friends, and secondarily by the opinions of people you don’t know… this is more so than commercial sites or blog sites of people who professional review products… Of course not always, but in most cases you are unknowingly swayed by your friends.

So, in the search results, Bing will show you links that are endorsed (liked on Facebook, etc.) by your friends; as well as articles/pages that are like by people you don’t know (it will show you the number of times and who liked them).

Google, similarly, launched “+1” (plus one). Which enables you to perform similar tasks.

These two search engines are trying to rapidly deploy social search features to remain competitive and grow their market share. The results will be some interesting behaviors… the opinions of people you know will be more public and accessible… will that make you more or less likely to share your opinion?
How to Get Started with Email Nurturing

I conduct a lot of training and education helping companies learn how to perform basic email nurture marketing. If you are using email and not performing nurturing as your email list members “digitally age”, then your campaign is outdated.

Amanda Gagnon penned a great article on the basics for getting started, along with some easy-to-follow advice and tips.

Bottom line: you should send different messages/offers/content to different segments of your customer list. Segment your list by type of customer, past behaviors (purchases, etc.) or length of time on your list. These are easy segmentations. You don’t even need special software to get started if your lists are small enough and don’t change that frequently (beyond adding new members and unsubscribing others).

When you’re really ready to get things going, you’ll want to invest in bulk emailing solution (such as MadMimi, Constant Contact, Exact Target, Vertical Response, and so on)… and then when you are REALLY ready to perform behavioral-based nurturing, you’ll want something like Eloqua or Marketo.
Confirming Unsubscribe Requests

Don't make your customers more angry.

Wendy Davis reports via Online Media Daily, that “Twitter, Facebook, MySpace Sued For Confirming SMS Opt-Outs“.

I believe that these lawsuits will be dropped, as it will be difficult for plaintiffs to demonstrate damages. Even on the most outrageous texting plans, an extra test wouldn’t cost more than about 25 cents or so.

While the case might drive legislation to prohibit sending a confirmation email or text after someone unsubscribes, I ask the question, “why bother?”

Do you really think people are maliciously unsubscribing other users or unsubscribing themselves accidentally?

Don’t waste your time programming these types of confirmations into your text, email or other campaigns. Instead, focus on retention and nurturing.

When you unsubscribed last from a service, did you really want another email or text? NO! So why would you build these services into your companies campaigns?
Google Webmaster Tools – Hidden Gem “Rich Snippets”

If you don’t know what a rich snippet is, you are not along. Rich snippets enable you to package content on your website so that it shows up with additional information on Google’s search page. This includes things like product reviews, ratings, prices, etc.

Here’s an example:

Google Rich Snippets in Action

To learn more about this feature, check out Google’s Webmaster’s Tools, they are free!
How to Respond to a Negative Post

I have been presenting quite a bit on the topic of whether or not (and how) an organization should handle negative posts on forums, blogs and social media sites such as Facebook. I recently discussed this topic at Radian6’s “Social 2011” conference in Boston and folks were really interested in how to triage/escalate certain types of issues. So, today in this post, I’d like to provide ~~one of the best~~ the best visual representation of a triage process I have come across. It is one I use (in adapted format) when training others and presenting.

Here it is:

Air Force Social Media Flow Chart