PR Communications

How To Write A Blog Post: Long Vs. Short Articles

I've been preparing a presentation on how to write a blog post and as a result I once again reviewed Jacob Nielsen's great post, Long vs. short articles as content strategy.

Jacob provides some research and an explanation that your length of post should be determined by your goals.

Goal: If you have many readers, focus on short  and scannable content. This is a good strategy for advertising-driven sites or sites that sell impulse buys.

Goal: If your customers really need a solution. Focus on comprehensive coverage. That's a good strategy if you sell highly targeted solutions to complicated problems.

Lastly, I believe that even if a post is long you should consider the following factors in writing a blog post:

• Language needs to be conversational
• Structure posts, shorter paragraphs with headings
• Use bullet points to break up the text
• Consider splitting up a long article into a series of posts
• Write for the RSS feed

#GSO3 Tweet Up Features Michael Grossman From New & Record

The 3rd #GSO event features Micheal Grossman from the News and Record, he hosts three Twitter accounts and manages new media for the paper. Mike will describe how the News and Record uses social media here in the Triad.

Once again, we are hosting #GSO3 at the Rioja on Battleground, the event is on Thursday, May 20th at 6:00pm.

Once again thanks to Rebecca Cochran for helping to organize the #GSO event, and hopefully once again she will have a special pie treat for all of the attendees.

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How Do People Consume Media Online?

If you are going to build a successful vehicle to communicate to your audiences online you really have to understand how your audience consumes media digitally.

A new International Center for Media & the Public Agenda study, "24 Hours: Unplugged," sought to discover American college students reaction to being unplugged for 24 hours, and as a consequence learn from the student's personal stories about their experience how online media consumption is important to them.

The study concluded that many of students felt addicted to online media, but was interesting was the reason why, without the connection to the internet, people felt alone and disconnected from their friends and family.

One student said, "Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. "When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable."

News for the students typically came not from branded media outlets but via other channels such as word of mouth, email, texting, Facebook and Twitter.

"Even news events that students cared about were often accessed via their personal interactions. To learn about the Maryland vs. Virginia Tech basketball game, for example, one student told of "listening to someone narrate the game from a conversation they were having on their own phone" (although he would have preferred watching it on TV) and another student told of calling her father to learn more about the earthquake in Chile."

3 Tips For Social Media Monitoring Analysis

I talk about social media monitoring quite a bit on this blog, but one aspect I don't always discuss is how you analyze individual blog posts. When I was Director of Blogging Strategies at Backbone Media we developed a service for monitoring, triaging, and responding to blog mentions of brands and companies.

We did not write the response, but we did provide insights into what a customer should do next.

1. Find brand and product mentions in social media. Use free or more sophisticated tools for social media monitoring to find incidents. 
2. Triage blog posts. Determine if the blog post is relevant to your company goals. Is the mention a customer service issue, or a product suggestion or perhaps a thought leadership post about your industry? If you are conducting a thought leadership campaign, find relevant posts, and understand the value of the post.
3. Share your social media insights. Once you've found a post that's relevant give your subject matter expert advice on what they need to do next to engage the blogger. You might advise them to comment on the post, write a post featuring them in blog post, or share with their community. Think about how the subject matter expert builds relationships within their industry, and helps to support the company’s thought leadership efforts.

Ning Posts Comments From CEO's Blog Post

Ning has finally posted the comments attached to its CEO's blog post explaining the change in business strategy from last week. Over 250 comments have appeared.

Lessons from this communications crisis are:

1. Be quick. Response and allow conversation on your own website, otherwise the conversation will take place on other websites.

2. Respond. Even if you don't have a plan, or all the details in hand, make sure you respond to your audience and journalist community. Scott Monty from Ford has the rather famous case study of checking in with his community once a communications crisis erupted over a cease and desist from Ford lawyers to a Ford products website. He quickly told the audience, hey, let me find out what's going on and get back to you. Ning was caught out because their internal memo was released. But the ensuing silence for a day or two helped to fan the flames of frustration with the company. Ning's blog post helped in the sense there was some information, but he wrote that he would not be talking again for several weeks. As Ning is a social media company many customers and social media experts will expect Ning to respond more quickly than they have.

4/20/10: 9:41pm Seems as if I spoke too soon, my apologies to the folks at Ning, it looks as if they have been more active in getting the word out about their news on dropping the free service on Ning. Dan York points to the Ning Creators network, where a Ning employee posted an updated on April 15th.

Mashable's Ning Perspective Misses Social Networking Business Fundamentals

I believe Jolie O'Dell is missing something in her story on the Ning lessons and failures, I believe the article fails to recognize Ning is a social network more like Facebook and MySpace.

She suggests that we all have to be realistic about making money, and charging for the Ning service.

"we do know is that the dotcom-era free-for-all of apps, services and content for end users is not-so-gradually coming to a halt. In the light of economic reality, nothing is free."

and,

"it’s about time we suck it up as consumers and start paying for the bandwidth we use, from web hosting to online storage to site creation and maintenance. As we all know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch."

I can certainly accept economic reality, if a business cannot cover its costs and needs to increase prices and offer new pricing, then the business should do so. But in the case of Ning there's a difference between increasing revenue and chopping off the hand that helped Ning grow through word of mouth by stopping free services.

Ning grew its business by offering network subscribers free access and community managers free hosting for their unique social networks. We have to remember Ning competes with MySpace and Facebook and numerous other social networks. Yet despite that competition Ning has succeeded in growing a large number of social networks. If those free social networks had a big hand in building brand presence and recognition, removing the free option will remove the support of the people who helped Ning to become successful, and unfortunately I don't think those people are going to be entirely happy with Ning's decision. So while it may be a business decision to stop free networks on the Ning platform, to me that decision will adversely affect the company's reputation, goodwill and business.

Jolie went on to suggest, "If you and your community can’t find a way to pay a modest monthly fee for the goods and services you use in your network, you might have one of two problems: You’re not passionate enough to moderate a community on your topic, or your topic isn’t inspiring your network to keep it afloat."

I don't think Mashable would critique Facebook or MySpace in the same way, after all both companies offer access to free communities within their social networks. Now I agree, Ning is different from Facebook and MySpace, Ning gives you the option to create a unique social network. But Ning, like Facebook and MySpace was built on giving access to free hosting of communities. In return for tools and hosting, Facebook and MySpace wanted numbers, lots and lots of people to join their communities so that Facebook and MySpace could in turn monetize their social networks. Both Facebook and MySpace have been savvy about building their networks and developing a business model to turn a profit. Ning however has not. I'd suggest to naysayers of the original Ning concept, that the problem was not with the freemium model, but rather that there wasn't enough attention to growing their premium business. Ironic, I'm agreeing with the CEO's analysis of their business, but I reach different conclusions about what the company needs to do next to turn a profit. Yes, support the premium customers, but don't stop support of their existing free hosted customers as I believe Ning will lose too much goodwill and one of the main pillars of a successful social network, the ability for its members to build community.

I think Mashable has Ning all wrong; Ning is not a social network management system first, but a social network. Consumers join once, and can join many communities within the social network easily with the same registration information, those communities can have unique branding, but all who join each community understand they are joining each unique community as part of the Ning network. The larger social network reduces the barriers to joining each unique social network within Ning. Members join, see the value of Ning, understand they can build their own community, do so for free, and then turn from a free community to a premium community. By cutting free communities I believe Ning maybe reducing its principal source of premium leads, the free social network managers, and instead will have to develop alternative methods to attract customers, which may cost more money to promote.

If we criticize Ning for offering free access to a social network, and free hosting for a community we might as well criticize Facebook and MySpace for providing the same services. Free has worked for Facebook and MySpace, and I believe Freemium can work for Ning, if the company can speed the process of network managers turning to the premium service, but abandoning the free hosting model removes one of Ning's competitive advantages for Premium lead generation. Instead of pushing free customer out of the network, grandfather them into their accounts, and reduce services for new accounts. Give lots of incentives to free network managers to charge for services. And ask each free community for donations to support their access to a community.

4/20/10: 9:41pm Seems as if I spoke too soon, my apologies to the folks at Ning, it looks as if they have been more active in getting the word out about their news on dropping free on Ning. Dan York points to the Ning Creators network, where a Ning employee posted an updated on April 15th.

Ning Removes Free Community Support, Fumbles Over PR Communications Strategy

Ning is removing free community support for their social networks, and cutting staff from 167 to 98, CNET reports.

The company had the story leaked from an internal memo, but as of 10am EST nothing about the news on their blog.

This is a PR disaster for Ning. I think we all understand the economic realities of the current recession. But when you run an online social community platform, and are not prepared to release information on your website shortly after chatting with your employees, be prepared for the consequences.

I'm sure a lot of Network managers will understand the issues with the company, but I really think Ning could have approached the delivery of news in a more coordinated way.

I helped set up the Ning social media community strategy for the Boston Chapter of the American Marketing Association.

4/16/10 Update: Shel Holtz has written a great post about the Ning PR disaster. His comments regarding the super non-profit social networks are well taken. He suggests the removal of the free option, and intention to drop support for existing networks is a betrayal of trust with customers. I think he is right. Though my complaint is more about how the situation was handled I actually believe it would be possible for Ning to remove free support, but they should grandfather any existing free accounts, and give them a lot of incentives to move to the premium model. I also think Ning should be open about the situation and using their blog and twitter to talk to people. Otherwise the company will continue to lose credibility from its communications fumble.

4/16/10: 2:00pm Posterous commits to providing support to Ning network managers and transfer accounts over to their service.

4/16/10: 2:49pm Manny Hernandez, author of Ning for Dummies, writes an open letter to Jason Rosenthal, CEO of Ning.

4/16/10: 3:40pm Joseph Porcelli recommends network members contribute small amounts to cover the cost of Ning. I like this idea. Currently I'm a member of another non-profit site, and someone in the group typically gives money to cover the yearly expense. Again by working and talking with the community, Ning could be solving its financial issues and building a good communications strategy.

4/16/10: 9:01pm Jason Rosenthal, CEO of Ning, writes about the news his company is removing the free service. Not much in the statement, and he ends by saying "We look forward to talking to you further on May 4th." When Ning will reveal more details. Not much damage control, though at the very least the company actually has something on their website. I expect given this response, Ning wasn't going to say anything until May 4th.

4/17/10: 8:09am A campaign has started on change.org to keep Ning free for non-profits. I actually don't have a problem with the change in business model for organizations. Though I think to keep their brand promise Ning should Grandfather existing free accounts, and find incentives to move orgs to premium. I'd encourage Ning to reach out to their community, explain their situation, and ask for advice on how they can solve their business model problem. From all of the ideas I've seen in the last day or so, I believe Ning could resolve its PR crisis and help themselves on the road to profitability.

4/17/10: 8:15am BuddyPress provides resources for transferring your Ning account over to their system.

4/17/10: 8:18am Mark Hathaway's post about his software church is Social and why Free is important for a social network provider, but how his company still needs to make a profit.

4/18/10: 8:14pm Doug Haslam writes a great round-up of the Ning PR crisis, and provides some additional links to community conversation about the reaction to the event.

4/18/10: 8:21pm Jon Dale believes Ning's reversal of the Freeimum model is a great idea, especially because he runs a premium account and wants better support. To me the Ning story is one of how by being free, the company helped to build its business. I know I regularly promoted the company's services over the last few years because it gave some good options for companies, and access to a large network of existing subscribers. Ning's success was intrinsically tied to its free model, people set up networks because Ning was free and helped promote the social networking system to their members and customers. Who in turn joined that network, and so had access to all of the other networks, including premium networks on the Ning model. I personally thought that Ning was not the best social network when I recommended it to the Boston Chapter of the American Marketing Association, but one compelling reason for my recommendation was because with so many existing community members who already had membership in the site, that would make it easier to get other marketers to sign up to the AMA's site. The issue of social network compatibility is not such an issue today in 2010, with Facebook Connect, Twitter and OpenSocial Id. But having a large group of users familiar with a social networking technology is an incentive for people to develop applications and build communities. The more I think about this move on Ning's part, the more I believe its a strategic blunder, precisely because it removes less chance for WOM to work, so I suggest it hurts premium users.  As for Jon Dale's point about support, this is a case of Ning focusing on its premium members. I don't think any free Ning community manager would expect to get very much support. And Ning as the opportunity to sell support packages. To me its more a matter of pricing and product innovation.

4/20/10: 8:25pm Chris O'Brien, Tech writer at the San Jose Mercury News and Ning administer of the Next Newsroom Project writes a post about his concerns regarding the Ning announcement and his assessment of the developer community's opinion about Ning and open source software.

4/20/10: 9:41pm Seems as if I spoke too soon, my apologies to the folks at Ning, it looks as if they have been more active in getting the word out about their news on dropping free on Ning. Dan York points to the Ning Creators network, where a Ning employee posted an updated on April 15th.

5/1/10: 3:00pm Looks as if Ning is continuing to talk with its community and exploring some alternatives to just switching off all of the free networks, as least in the education sector.

John McDonald of Ning writes "Mythbusters: Three Things We Aren’t Doing on May 4," where he explains that Ning networks will not shut down on May 4th, but continue for 10 weeks, he attempts to allay some concerns about the new pricing models for commercial sites and non-profits.

Cheryl Oakes writes about her concerns about her Ning network for students and educators.

Bone Head SEO provides an extensive list of Ning alternatives.

Network vendor Third Note, supports Ning transfers.

Tim at the Technology in Education blog regrets the loss of Ning for free.

One Ning Administrator switches from Ning to Grou.ps, and in the process reveals how easy it is for a web brand to lose its lead within a category.

Kru suggests thousands of patient run Ning communities are threatened by the announcement that Ning will no longer offer a free solution.

Save My Ning.com is a service that allows you to back up your Ning site.

Steve Hargadon discusses the survey distributed by John McDonald, VP of Advocacy of Ning, in Ning exploration of the education market.

Agile Publishing

The reality today is that what's most current gains more currency in online communities. Organizations, corporations and news publishers have to work within that new reality.

Publish quickly, both to gain the advantage in breaking news, but also to test what stories work and do not work.

When publishing content on the web, think about publishing as quickly as possible, if you have several stories, do what Amazon.com does with its marketing strategy. Try everything, and see what resonates with the community, by reviewing how they engage with your content.

More WordPress Blogs In The Fortune 500

Continuing my series on a review of Fortune 500 companies with blogs, and where those blogs are placed on a company's main domain, sub-domain or folder. Plus, what the type of blogging platform is used by the company; I review Johnson Controls, FedEx, Walt Disney, Intel and Sprint.

Johnson Controls blog    | Separate domain | WordPress

FedEx Citizenship Blog    | Subdomain | 

Walt Disney Park Blog    | Folder of a subdomain | WordPress 2.8.4

Blogs at Intel    | Subdomain | Movable Type 4.21

Sprint Blogs     | Folder of a subdomain |

Five More Fortune 500 Blogging System Reviews

My next review of the Fortune 500 companies with blogs includes; Catapiller, Pfizer, Safeway, Best Buy and Cisco. And this time I see a lot of blogs provided by the community platform vendor Lithium. 

On the Lithium website I saw a great case ROI case study on social media. Best Buy gives us their numbers and states they have produced $5 million worth of revenue from their blogging and community efforts. I'd like to know what the costs were, and I'm also wondering about their projections for 2010?

Catapiller SOS Services Oil Analysis  | Subdomain on blog vendor's domain | Lithium

Pfizer Science Now Blog | Folder on a subdomain | WordPress 2.9.1

SafeWay Blog | Folder on a subdomain | Lithium

Best Buy Remix Blog  | Subdomain | Lithium

Cisco High Tech Policy  | Subfolder of a subdomain | WordPress