We told our Public Relations Specialists to take baby steps. That’s how we felt about our first blog. After all, wasn’t a blog just a single person droning on about something like they would in a personal diary? Even the word blog was blah. We thought we could disguise our blog by calling it something else, maybe the “Meeting Place”, the “Forum” anything but “blog.” But being good public relations and marketing stewards for our clients we knew we had to learn about it, discover its strengths and weaknesses along with its potential benefit for our clients, whatever it was called.

After hundreds of hours of investigation, our Public Relations and Marketing Specialists were rather excited about creating blogs for our clients. After all, it was far more affordable than most other marketing and advertising options and the people (those “warm” prospects, customers and friends) who wanted to know what you thought, or said or did, would be reading it. And, a blog is actually on an RSS Feed... syndicated... naked... for everyone to see People could comment about our clients articles, and other people’s comments; our clients could review the comments before they were posted, pictures and videos could be added. Our blogs weren’t going to be blah

It wasn’t an easy sell – too new... what results can we expect... what’s our ROI going to be? Evaluation metrics for blogs are entirely different than they are for traditional marketing mediums. You can measure the number of visitors, the number of unique visitors, the number of people commenting, the number of articles being read, the number of people responding to the “free” things you offer. In short, it’s a long-term strategy.

Blog rules are pretty strict, especially if you are using it for business. One of the best examples of how to evaluate if something should be said on your blog is to decide if you would say something in a social setting. Blogs must be polite, interesting, entertaining, even informative. Of course, if you don’t want to be invited back to our imaginary social scene, try being loud, self-serving and making it “all about you.”

Want to learn how to create your own blog? There are plenty of good platforms to use to build your blog, we like Word Press (www.wordpress.com). Plus, there is a WordPress for Dummies manual that we find most helpful. Blogging really is great for our clients and don’t tell them, but it’s also fun. We don’t even mind the name anymore

To see an animated YouTube training video from Common Craft that our Public Relations Specialists love to show clients to explain blogs, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI 

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