Succeeding in the Blogosphere

There are a number of recent reports that shed light on what’s going on in the blogosphere and how to succeed there, especially for business bloggers. Time to take a look and try to bring some of them together.

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 surveyed bloggers themselves as well as analyzing its own stats. The stats on the number of blogs make it clear that the blogosphere is huge and active. A lot of blogging is personal, but business blogs are quickly assuming a prominent role in the communications strategies of companies large and small. This chart shows some of the downsides for the business blogger, but the outcomes are generally positive and include industry and enterprise visibility. That should encourage employees to blog.

The report also makes it clear that products and brands are important subjects of posts for both personal and business bloggers. The degree to which bloggers consider blogs an important and valid source of information is striking. Ok, they are biased, and you do have to consider the source of your information before deciding to trust it. People are, for better or for worse, placing considerable trust in the information they acquire. More about that tomorrow. The report has a lot of information; it’s worth a read.

How do businesses make the blogosphere work for them? Two recent studies from Compendium Blogware provide strong recommendations.

The first is a whitepaper about blogging for search. The rules for making your blog posts visible in search results (organic results are the most effective, good news for those who can’t afford a lot of PPC) are the same as they are for web sites. You just have more control over how you do it on a blog. The basic rules are to use keywords in post titles and content. Links can be helpful. Keeping content current, while not eliminating the old, is an advantage of blogs over websites. Blogs need to be active and they need clear focus. I’d add that tagging can be very useful in bringing in traffic through search.

Why is that traffic so important? It’s the best acquisition method, bar none. It brings unique new visitors to the blog and site. The other whitepaper uses Marketing Sherpa data to look at the critical relationship between blogging—to acquire new potential customer contacts—and email for ROI—read that conversion. That relationship alone is enough to encourage corporate blogs, although it’s important to note that acquisition of potential customer contact information doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be carefully designed into the overall communications program. The report points out that there’s also a benefit in terms of content. The business has to produce a lot of content for its blog. Using content wisely between blogs, email, and dynamic site content can leverage the value of that content.

The value and credibility of traditional advertising approaches seems to be on an irreversible downward slide. The value, credibility and consumption of user or employer-generated content are all on the rise. What marketer doesn’t want to take advantage of a more cost-effective channel of communications that has greater credibility with the target audience? That’s the value of business blogging in a nutshell.

Testing for Marketing ROI

Today seems to be testing day in marketing newsletters. I read an article in today’s SearchBuzz newsletter about multivariate tests and thought I should check out the tools. When I wrote about testing earlier I emphasized A/B splits (bivariate) because I think that’s an easier way to start. While I was working on that, along came this week’s chart from Marketing Sherpa that does a nice job of summarizing some of the strategy issues. But do you need a big budget to test?

In the earlier post I mentioned Offermatica (recently acquired by Omniture) as a testing tool. I really like their demos of both A/B splits and multivariate tests. They’re just a bit harder to find now. You have to look on Omniture’s product tours page and select Test & Target. But this is a hosted service, not DIY.

But the tools I wanted to take a look at are Google Website Optimizer and Widemile's Page Optimizer. Google’s is free. Google, of course, has a video.

Widemile’s business model is to provide technology to agencies and marketing services firms so they can offer testing services to their clients. They have a simple summary that describes the efficiency of A/B split testing against multivariate testing. You can test many variables at once when you use experimental designs (what we refer to as multivariate testing). That seems like stating the obvious. However, what may not be so obvious is that multivariate tests are much harder to “read.” The real question is, “Are these small differences statistically significant?” As the conceptual examples in my earlier post showed, that takes you right back to your statistics courses. And if you’re like me, you absorbed the fundamentals represented in the text box that starts “Choose the variables to be tested.” But you may share my reluctance to base serious marketing decisions on my personal statistical skills and my concern that the automated tools won't produce the right answers. Automated testing products need to take into account necessary sample sizes for statistical significance. They don’t want to burden users with that type of statistical detail (yes, I understand, it’s a bit scary), so you need to ask questions about statistical significance and confidence levels, even if it means you have to drag out an old stats textbook.

Since Google’s tool is DIY—and they don’t particularly want to talk about the significance issue either—I wondered how it was dealt with, if at all. They have a good blog that is well written and may help with some of your concerns. One of the entries I found was for a sample size estimation tool from one of their partners, a site called WebShare. If you followed my advice in the earlier post and read Paul Berger’s chapter on testing in our (free download) direct marketing text, you’ll find it follows the basic steps, although there are still issues. Specifically, it’s a one-tailed test; see the Improvement call-out on the tool page. It’s only looking for better results; not whether the results are either better or worse. That’s probably realistic for most marketing tests. They give you a nice comparison chart—various % improvement, various significance levels. Try it for yourself!

Most of us have a lot of questions about what will work best in our marketing programs. A/B splits will answer a few of these questions for us. Multivariate tests will answer many more questions in the same time period. Whether you are using marketing services of one kind or another, or whether you’re going to try it DIY, do it with care. I am reminded of the Mark Twain quote:

“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

Don’t accept insignificant results. And remember the old direct marketing rule to keep testing. If it’s an important marketing decision one test, especially one with a small sample size, is just not enough.