Product launch
If you launch a new product or service the conventional way using press releases, advertising and even post it on Twitter and Facebook your product will hardly get noticed as there are so many contenders in the attention competition. There is nothing to write about: your product just does what it promised to do in your launch campaign.
- A new faultless product or service is boring to write about.
Moreover praising a product or service feels like bribery from the masters of the blogging sphere.

Launching with bugs for attention
The better approach is to launch your product with several obvious bugs or problems using the conventional launch methods and present it to bloggers and reviewers.
These bugs or problems will give the social media masters something to write about together with the basic explication and benefits of your service.
- A buggy product or service is great to write about.
People prefer to complain over praising.

All this content, even negative content, created about your product or service generates interest and branding. It will spread the message about your solution with a greater reach than any of your press releases or advertisements.
If many blog posts are written, chances are people start discussing about the use or benefits.

Google applied this method for Buzz as we cannot imagine Google released such an under performing web service. In any case it grabbed the attention on the blogs and social media websites.

The updated version to leverage social media
The trick is to release an updated version as soon as possible or when the media interest starts to decrease. This second version should be ready at the moment of the first release.

Admit your mistake publicly
Just make sure this second version is bug free and that it will get positive reviews.
Of course you will need Press releases and advertising admitting the mistake you have made, but with the advantage the brand name is already branded in the minds of the potential customers.

Benefits of buggy product launches:
- Branding (just make sure the bugs are not major)
- Reach
- Linking brand name with the functionality
- Benefits of the solution
- Explication of the service or product to the public
- Admitting your mistake is a sign of being humble making you popular
- Low cost campaign compared to the number of Internet mentions

How successful was your last product launch ?

SEO
If you want to increase the SEO of your website – start a blog and keep blogging.
The hard work.
Eventually you might get loads of traffic and reach far.

Ideation
If you want ideas from your visitors and users – set-up a forum and moderate it.
That’s less work.
Eventually the posts on the forum can generate interest to many people.

Blogs
Blogs are for people who have the ability to create content and present their ideas and concepts in an interesting manner.
This generates interest.
Blogs will draw in people who want to learn and listen to your advice. Maybe some will comment.
You control completely the amount and the quality of the content in your blog.

If only a few people read your blog it is a waste of time, but nobody will know.
The main problem is to get people reading your blog, appreciating the content and tell their friends or colleagues about your blog.
RSS Feeds can help to spread your blog posts.

If your blog generates interest and thus traffic, it can have your brand or product reaching far at little cost.
Still it will only occasionally start a conversation.

Forums
Forums are for people not good in creating content but are eager to get ideas about where the product should go or do in the future.
Forums can draw in people who want to present and share ideas.
You don’t control the amount and the quality of the content on your forum.

If only a few people (or none) post on your forum it is a problem as empty forums are a sign of failure.
The main problem is getting people on your forum and getting them to post.
You need good engaging subjects.

If your forum gets posts you will engage many people, get ideas and start conversations.

Of course you can have both on your website as the people are probably different.

Solutions for blog or forum
Blog: Free: Wordpress – Blogger – and many others.

Forum: Free: Tal.ki – Freeforums (with ads) – and several others.

Do you have a blog on your website?
Do you have a forum on your website ?

If a business is emerging the complete service is supplied by one company.
From conception, design, development, production, marketing, selling, invoicing and support.

Once the business becomes mature the functions are segregated and performed by different companies:
- The imaginators: define the products or services – conception
- The designers: give the looks, functionality of products
- The developers: create the products
- The industrializors: take a product into production
- The manufacturers: producing the products
- The marketers: bringing a product to the market and let the market know
- The lead generators: call centers or email marketing services generating leads
- The sales: selling and closing deals
- The after sales: the after sales service

The company defines and creates the new products.
The manufacturing is done by a subcontractor in Asia.
The company promotes the products using marketing.
Distributors import the products into their country.
Resellers sell the products to shops, who on their term sell it to end-users.

Sales is split up between those who sell from one business to another (B2B) and those who actually sell to the end-users (B2C or B2B).
Hence the change of nature of sales: from really selling to customer over to partnerships and business development. This also changes the nature of the negotiations.

Blogging from cottage industry to real business

For example the business of blogging is still not mature as one man will still imagine and write the blog posts, edit it, then market and distribute it in order to collect money in the end (online advertising or generate interest for their business)

The first signs of evolution are present as major blog sites (Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Mashable!, Endgadget) are appearing who employ several writers and editors, but also marketers and people selling advertising.

Just like newspapers the blogs are becoming content companies having writers under contract. History repeats itself.

Signs of very matured business

In all business specialization comes into existence once the business matures.

Only if the market is very matured and the products have become almost a commodity, then the top 3-5 large brands start to skip intermediate steps of distribution and reselling as they:
- Use local self-employed representatives as a first step
- Open local offices for distributing to resellers or customers
- Open shops in the main streets (like Apple, Nokia, Zara, H&M).

in this case the big brand name are facing the end-users again giving them the benefit of direct customer contact and feedback.
But also all the hassle of going local (employees) and the problems of logistics.

The joy in emerging business

If you are in an emerging business, you still can have the joy and all the problems of:
- Direct customer contact
- Complete control over the total chain of design , production to distribution and sales.

How mature is your business?
Have the big brands already local presence?

If you want to score quickly using social media in B2B or B2C, forget about it. It won’t happen!

In social media marketing blogging is the most used channel.
In the past people just started a blog and hoped to get readers and subscribers.
However social media like blogging, micro blogging or even just posting comments is almost like creating a complete product that requires market research, then it needs to be designed, developed, marketed, deployed and “sold”.

The goal:
Before starting anything the goal(s) need to be set and defined.

The market research:
The market research: what do your customers or leads want to read?
What is your market target? Market segment?

The design:
The concept: what are the subjects or topics?
The format: blogging, micro blogging or posting comments

The development:
The packaging: the layout, colors and fonts used
The type of illustrations or images to be used.
The setup of the RSS feed.

The production:
The daily content generation.
This is the real operational work.

The marketing:
Without any marketing the blog or micro blog will not be read.
- You need to submit your RSS-feed to all possible feed websites.
- Advertising
- Emailing
- Commenting on other blogs
- Getting links for your posts from other blogs
- Writing guest blog posts
- Getting other people to write on your blog

The goal is to build a group of followers or a community that follows your blog or micro blog.

The sales:
This is the final goal: generating traffic that brings interest for the advertising on your blog (page views and clicks) or your product (selling).

A blog is not just something you start and hope it becomes successful. As with any other product or service it needs to be designed, conceived and created with the end goal in mind.
Blogging into the wild will not lead to your goal.

How is your blogging going?

The trend spotters and the marketing guru’s promised the social media marketing revolution.
As a result every brand:
- Needed to have a Facebook page (or a MySpace page in 2006)
- Was editing and publishing a blog about their brand (that nobody interested)
- Was posting Tweets on Twitter like a spammer (amongst all the automated spam)
- Was writing comments on blog posts like a parasite.

Probably the contrarian is true: the social media marketing revolution has become an evolution instead.

The change in social media

- People have moved from MySpace to FaceBook, probably in order to move to the next online space soon.
- The explosive growth of Twitter is slowing down as the marketing impact of Oprah has weaned off.
   See Sysomos study: More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, other than Twitter.com
- More and more blog are no longer updated.
- Many blogs contain the content of another blog and are just redistributing.

A blog post is a lot of work and posting frequently then a blog becomes real work.
A micro blog post is fast and short, still it doesn’t catch on: hardly anybody on Twitter tweets.
Some people do comment on blogs, but these are a minority and mostly the same people.
Maybe the reason for this is because creating content requires inspiration, effort and creativity.

Rapster Miley Cyrus says Goodbye to Twitter because she started ‘living for moments’ and wanted to start ‘living for people’ instead:

Passive people instead of participation in social media

Ever more people watch YouTube, however passively.
That’s not social media as social media requires interaction and participation: YouTube, Seesmic, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Viddler all have become a broadcast system like TV has been since ever.

Content is probably still king, but the number of successful or influential sources will become limited.

Instead of creating new content, people are lazy and just share content (Bookmark or ReTweet) by clicking a button next to the original content. The lesser the effort required, the higher the likelihood of getting propagated over the Internet.

Social media will continue to exist especially for specific interest groups but instead of an explosive revolution that changes the world overnight, there will be a slow evolution.

It will take several decennia before social media will be used throughout all layers of the industrialized world.

Social media killed the journalist

Journalism and news media will never be the same again as anyone from anywhere in the world can get attention using the Internet: the decline of newspapers and magazines.

Isn’t it strange that gossip magazines seem to survive over all the serious information sources? Is this related to the type of people reading these gossip magazines?

However as many are shouting or crying for your attention, they will need to be shouting the right keywords on the right moment. As many are shouting every now and then a few some will get the demanded attention.

What is the chance the message from your company will be ever heard amongst all the shouting?

Interruptive advertising is dying

If social media has achieved one thing, it is the interruptive advertising marketing has become an unsustainable model. People will turn away from the online advertising just like nearly everybody zaps away during TV-commercials.
Interruptive advertising is dying a sure death.

This causes a new problem as good old advertising has become hardly effective.
What should businesses use in order to announce products and solutions?
How should they get any attention?

There is no evolution without revolution

Probably we are currently seeing the typical hype curve where we just passed the hype and are now descending before the masses start to pick up the trend.

As the hype cycle is over the top, social media is here to stay and to grow by more general adaptation by most layers of the population.
Still irrevocable damage has been done to journalism, newspapers and magazines together to the interruption advertising which has ruled for so many years.

Slowly brands will adapt to the evolution that social media marketing has to offer with new rules:
As the rules of the game are known, the windows of opportunity have log been closed.

How is your company using Social media effectively?
What has been cancelled or is no longer being updated? The company blog, the Facebook page, Twitter ?
What is being used? Advertising or Social media?
How does your company achieve to be heard by potential customers?

Do click on the ReTweet button (at the top) or share this by bookmarking (below) – Thanks in advance

Some or all of your competitors can be more popular, have a better known brand name, have a bigger PR budget or have a larger funding. As a result they are being mentioned or reviews being written more frequently than about your company or service:
- in blogs
- in micro-posts: tweets (Twitter)
- on Facebook
- in comments
- and on other social media.
You cannot just let this happen, but you need to fight for the attention.

In order to:
- Keep track of your competitors
- Stay up to date
- Act in order to get some of the attention
- Correct incorrect statements
- Raise a different voice and opinion
- Control the damage
You need to search on the social media on the Internet and act.

Instead of using a generic search engine like Google and Bing that retrieves all kinds on Internet information you need to use specific search engines, which provide you all social content preferably in real-time.

Social search engines

Several social search web services are available:
- SocialMention searching Technorati, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Youare, Rejaw, Friendfeed, Jaiku, Brightkite, Diigo, Clipmarks, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Mixx.
- Whostalkin searching Facebook, Friendster, Last.FM, MySpace, Linkedin, Netblog, Ning, bebo, Xanga, hi5, Delicious, Blinklist, Reddit, Metafilter, MyWeb and more.
- Spy searching Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, BackType
- SamePoint searching FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, Twitter, Blogger, Wordpress.com, Diigo, Digg and more.
-VeryRecent searching Twitter, Ask.com Big News, Blog Pulse, Google News, Flickr, Wikio, YouTube, Digg,
Bloglines.
- Yauba This is a generic search engine that allows to specify the media: Real-Time, Blogs, Social Networks, …

We prefer and use SocialMention and Whostalkin.

Using social search for your own benefit

In order to use just enter the name of the company, the service or the product of your competitor or your product and press search.

Blog posts
If you notice a blog post mentioning your competitor, you can post a comment related to the post:
- Indicating an additional benefit or feature of your service.
- Mentioning your service as an alternative.
- Commenting positively or adding interesting information and having the link to your website in your name.

Micro-posts (Tweets on Twitter)
If you notice a Tweet you can reply to the writer in order to draw interest for your service by sending useful information, a benefit or an advantage.

Other media
If you cannot use the same medium to communicate with the author, then send an email to the author in order to draw interest for your service by sending useful information, a benefit or an advantage.

Rules for social reactions

- Don’t claim your service being far better than the service of your competitor.
- Don’t start a negative discussion – stay positive.
- Don’t make any bold claims you cannot realize.
- Don’t post more than once as a reply on the subject – except if someone asks you to reply.
- Stay social.

The main goal is to have your service or your company being mentioned on the same page as your competitor and leaves a positive impression behind.

Do you use social search for getting some of the generated attention?

The blog visit problem: the bouncers

The blog drives most of the traffic of the LEADSExplorer website. The problem is that most people just read one or two blog posts and then leave again. A large number of them read just only one post.
The blog posts are addressing the target market as we receive a relatively high amount of B2B companies visiting the blog posts.
However the main goal of promoting the lead generation and customer retention web service is not achieved as the connections with the main website are being ignored or overlooked.
The blog doesn’t drive traffic to the main website.

The solutions:

Text links
Several months ago, as a first trial we have inserted changing texts that link to the main website in-between two blog posts.
Only a very small amount of people have clicked on them to switch to the main web service website.
Maybe these texts are:
- Not apparent enough
- Resemble too much text-link ads or Google Adsense: due to ‘advertisement blindness’.
- Not interesting enough: If you know how to explain what our service does in just a few words and without sounding boring: let us know!

Whatever they are hardy getting clicked upon as if people are blind to them.
Maybe we made them look too much like advertising as found by this Nielsen study.

Buttons in flashy colors
The Free 30-Day Trial button on the main website gets clicked quite often.
Hence in order to draw more attention we decided inserting 2 buttons in flashy colors:
- Introducing the web service.
- The 30-day Free Trial teaser.
They are sure more apparent than the ‘quiet’ text lines which we have kept in place as they support the buttons by explaining the goal of the web service.

The buttons are below the blog post, thus we added the introduction button for the website also in the right hand column for those who don’t scroll completely down: The fast bouncers.
Maybe this one is overkill. We don’t know – but we’ll let you know when the results start rolling in.

Post exit pop-up for lost visitors
It is widely know that people hate pop-up buttons, probably even more post exit windows that pop-up when the visitor leaves the website.
As we consider the visitors who just read one blog post as lost, we would like to test if we can generate interest from a part of this population for our service using such a pop-up.
The pop-up will only be triggered on the blog for the first time visitors or when returning after several months.
The challenge will be finding the most appropriate text to convince the bouncers to look into our web service.

Success?

If these systems can persuade just a minority of the blog readers to visit the website, these actions can already be considered as successful.

We will let you know:
- What was effective or not.
- If we got complaints about the first time pop-up.
- How much more visiting companies did convert to sign-up for a free trial.

How about your website traffic?
How does it compare to the blog traffic (if you have a blog)?

There are many blogs and even more comments on these blogs.
It takes time to read blogs, to formulate a comment and to write it.
Still many people do comment on blogs.

Why commenting? Spam?

The original idea of allowing comments on a blog post was to start a conversation with the readers. Engaging your audience with the goal to have more content on your blog for free.

However everybody who comments on a blog post has an agenda: a reason to comment.
This can be a hidden agenda or a very obvious reason.
Maybe all comments are spam?

Two main reasons for commenting:
1) Generating clicks: To attract visitors to the website as writing comments requires much less effort than blogging on a regular basis and no need to build an audience as you steal the audience.

2) SEO: To increase SEO by more links to the website and the brand name.
Some blogs implement a ‘NoFollow‘ for the link in the comments in order to make it less interesting for spammers, although Google does count the “NoFollow” links.
Additionally automated spam is rejected by the Captcha functionality or similar by using questions.
Still many blogs have a “DoFollow” policy.

What works to get clicks?

The earlier the comment is posted the higher it appears in the list of comments.
As the popular blogs have many posts, your post needs to be remarked and preferably be remarkable:
a) A controversial comment on the post: so controversial that people want to know the originator.
b) Straightforward advertising comment that relates to the blog post.
c) A well constructed sales pitch directly related to the blog post.
d) Funny comment that contains some truth and is related to the blog post.

Both the advertising and the sales pitch can be considered as spam, but in many cases they are published after verification by the blog owner.
In order to have a higher chance to get a spam comment published, only mention the name of the company or the solution and no link in the comment text as you can have the link underneath your name.

What gets real leads?

Any of the 4 comment types mentioned can bring visitors that can become leads.
However the advertising and the sales pitch will have the best results as it drives the most interested visitors to your website.

Why do you post comments on a blog?
What are your most successful comments?

When you think of it:
A blog has many similarities with a TV talk show as both address to an audience:
- The host needs to perform everyday
- The blogger needs to write interesting content everyday.

Similarities:
- The TV show hosts and the bloggers need to perform every day in order to please their audience.
- They will bring news enhanced with their own vision.
- They need to entertain or bring entertainment.
- Both are being paid by advertising (in case not being a corporate blogger)
- A regular audience can be obtained over time through hard work and originality.
- Both have a reach that is far beyond their habitat.
- Some have reached stardom:
    Oprah, Dr Phil, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, …
    Perez Hilton, Jason Kottke, Michael Arrington, Seth Godin, …

The big differences are:
Guests vs no guests:
- TV show hosts use their guests to make their show interesting as it is the guest responding to the questions of the host that brings the content.
- The blogger can only rely upon himself without the help of a celebrity or second person.

Visual/verbal vs written:
- Talk show hosts are thus needing to act and to respond.
- Bloggers can hide away behind their screen and keyboard

Life vs remote:
- Talk show hosts need to perform before a live audience.
- Blogger can hide away behind their screen and keyboard, taking time to respond.

Staff vs sole:
- The staff supporting the talk show.
- The blogger working solely – although the big blogs are a teamwork.

One time vs long lasting:
- Once a TV talk show has been broadcasted the content is evaporating: value is short lived.
- Any blog post will last ‘forever’ – long lasting value.

The broadcast medium:
- TV shows use an expensive medium: television
- Bloggers use an almost free medium with possibly free or low cost tools: Internet

Consumers in generic vs market segment or B2B:
- Most TV shows address the consumer in generic.
- Many blogs address a consumer market segment or business matters.

Marketing:
- The TV Talk Show is promoted using advertising over the same broadcast medium.
- The blog is mainly promoted by links over the Internet or word of mouth.

Pay:
- TV hosts are paid high wages as the reach of a TV show is nationwide.
- Bloggers depend on their significantly lower advertising revenue – although their reach can stretch far beyond their country.

Conclusion:
The goal of both is to inform and bring entertainment, but the media used to broadcast are quite different and come at a different cost to enter and to operate.
Still both have the challenge to bring content.
Are bloggers relatively underpaid due to the low cost to enter even if they can produce long lasting content value?

Are bloggers underpaid or not?

Content ad versus comments

It appears that Search advertising is less effective than online content advertising.
However we wonder what is the most effective:
- Content ads on blogs
- Comments on blogs

Content ads are simple and quick to deploy as they only require:
- To write the catchy advertising text for drawing attention and interest.
- To define the keyword for triggering the ad.
- To decide on the amount of money to spend (the more the better)

Comments are hard work as they require:
- To find on a regular basis the blogs to comment on using a specific search engine.
- To write the comment as early as possible after the post has been published: the more likelihood to be read.
- To write a different interesting comment related to every blog post.
- Work time on a regular basis.
 
The benefits of commenting are:
- The longevity of comments on blog posts: an ad last as long as the money spend.
- The possibility to get indexed by search engines: ads don’t get indexed.
- The link to your website if the blog owner hasn’t implemented ‘NoFollow‘. No link value in ads.
- The possibility to engage in a conversation: both positive or negative replies to your comments are good.

Counting clicks trial

To only way to find out is to set up a trial using the same keyword to trigger an online ad as to find blog posts.
The easiest is to use the name of a competitor.

Thus you could:
- Setup an online advertising triggered by the name of your competitor.
- Write comments on blog posts mentioning your competitor.
Then sit back and count the clicks to your website.

Not just counting all clicks, but especially the non-bounce clicks: counting those visitors that vist your website. And if possible the non-bounce clicks from employees of companies.

If commenting on blog posts instead of paying for advertising links on the same blog posts is more effective then the advertising business model for bloggers should be questioned.
This would mean an even less interesting business model for bloggers, this would decrease the number of blogs to post comments on.

What are your experiences with online ads?
What are your experiences with comments on blog posts?
What was the most effective?