TRACKING BLOG ACTIVITY

You can hire a million data entry specialists to transcribe all the information you gather from blogs, or you can use one of the many blog tracking services available today.

For now, let’s take a look at a few of the ways you can track what is happening on your blog: • Blog tracking systems

• Feed tracking systems

• Trending systems Blog tracking systems, such as Technorati, typically monitor how often blogs link to each other. This gives both the blogger and the blog reader a clearer sense of their blog traffic. More links mean not only more readers, but more credibility.

Feed tracking systems are similar but rely on the feeds that most blogs publish. Computer programs, like feed tracking systems and feed readers, use feeds to determine what’s new on a blog; feed tracking systems can therefore tell you all the blogs who have linked to you on a daily basis or return a list of blogs that mention specific terms.

The largest of these are PubSub (www.pubsub .com), which allows you to have search results returned to you as feeds on a daily basis so that you don’t need to search for new results every day, and Feedster (www.feedster .com), which allows you to search the millions of feeds available in a Google-like manner. Thanks to tools such as Technorati (www.technorati.com ) and PubSub (www.pubsub.com ), bloggers can see who links to their sites within minutes of the link being created, as shown for the Tinbasher blog. Trending systems, such as BlogPulse (www.blogpulse.com ), track conversations from their origins to their endpoints, so you can see how a conversation grows; they also track specific terms across a period of time, allowing you to compare that graph to other important terms. You could use a trending system to monitor how many times your company is mentioned versus how many times your competitors are mentioned, track how specific company news spreads across blogs, and track how bloggers respond to that news.

The great thing about these services is that they are all free. That isn’t to say that you can’t pay for higher end services or pay consulting companies to produce daily, weekly, or monthly reports.

BRANDING AND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Far too many companies think of their brands in terms of the concrete: a product, a logo, a trademark. But your brand is larger than that. Your brand is the impression you leave on your customers. Sure, your logo and corporate imagery, as well as advertising, are a part of that. But they don’t leave the most lasting impression of your brand. Experiences, relationships, and trust all intangible assets are the single largest source of value for your business brand. Your brand lives in the experiences your customers have with your company, your products, and your frontline teams. Your brand lies in the minds of your customers, and like a wildfire, each of your customers can spread your brand message (the way they perceive it) to others and they often will, either because of a positive or, more important, a negative experience. In fact, as described in various marketing articles, such as 2002’s The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, even very small changes in the way customers perceive your company can have radical effects on your bottom line. Treat your customers with the respect they deserve, and they’ll respect your brand, too.

WRAPPING IT UP

In this article, we have looked at the ways that you can get into the blogging mindset, some of the benefits of blogging, as well as how to start participating in the conversation. In Article 3, we’ll explore the power of blogs for your business, including how blogs can be used to generate new ideas, build teams, and bring in customers and affect mindshare.

THE POWER OF BLOGS FOR BUSINESS

Now that you are familiar with how blogs have added a new dimension to corporate communications and how engaging in the conversation is absolutely essential for your business’s success in the blogosphere, you are ready to begin looking at the powerful possibilities blogging offers your business. You’ve likely been asking yourself such questions as “How can blogging benefit my company?” and “What would my successful blog look like?” since you started reading this article. This article covers the practicalities of business blogging and what it means for you, including how it can impact your bottom line and how it will bring in customers and affect mindshare. It also examines several companies from a variety of industries that are succeeding at blogging; these early bloggers have paved the way for later blogging luminaries like you.