Michael O’Connor Clarke moderated this panel of Nathan Rudyk, Sarah Spence and David Carter.
Highlights:
Nathan Rudyk
- “For a small business, you can blog and blog effectively. Use targeted keywords.”
Sarah Spence
- “First, you need to know what’s happening in your space. Who’s in your space? Who are your competitors? Who’s offering similar services? … Talk not just about you. Talk about your industry. Get engaged in the conversation that’s already going on. Then, develop your own voice.”
- David Carter
- “The power of blogs is that a blog equals a person.” Have multiple blogs for multiple groups of employees and multiple interests.
Nathan Rudyk
- “Small to mid-size company: Who’s going to blog? … In a small company, it’s hard to convince senior executives to blog. … In one company, we identified ten people with customer contact. … You can harness those people. … Team blogs. It’s absolutely a way to go. Harness people with passion and put them in a team context.”
Sarah Spence
- “We’re still figuring out how to enage bloggers. … When I was at Orange, we launched a Microsoft SmartPhone. When we launched what we found were that there were a lot of people out there who were writing about the phone. … One of the PR people realized that there were all kinds of people writing about the phone. … We just started to talk to people. We were transparent about it. … We brought them into our product launches. We gave them products ahead of time so that they could review them.”
David Carter
- “The conversation is going on without you. And if you don’t get into the conversation, people will talk about you and you won’t have a voice. … To engage these people, first of all you acknowledge them. Thank them and respond to their comments.”
Nathan Rudyk
- “Om Malik talked about the death of trade press to blogging. … For our clients, we are engaging the bloggers who are becoming, in fact, the new trade press.”
David Carter
- “To make the case for blogging, I ask clients how much time they spend on emails. And I suggest that they put in an equal amount of time on engaging bloggers.”
Sarah Spence
- “You can measure conversations, hit rates and comment trackbacks. … A lot of it is about moving organizations to appreciate the accessibility of blogs.”
David Carter
- The one thing to convince executives to blog: “The conversation is happening without you anyway.”
Nathan Rudyk
- “Start internally with an internal blog or Wiki.”
Sarah Spence
- “At Orange, we found our employees were doing it anyway. And you can either harness that or try to ignore it. But you can’t shut it down.”
Sarah Spence
- “We are just at the point of getting our clients there. And a lot of our clients aren’t ready.”
- “In pitching bloggers, there’s a difference between the enthusiasts who are already out there discussing a topic and those people you are trying to start a conversation with.”