gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

I don't have any questions to add just now. Just wanted to say that your new stuff is really hitting! I wonder if drawing with the tablet has disrupted the market in your creativity or what?
:-) Anyway, nice work!

4) What is the difference between marketing by blogs for small business, and large corporate b-blogs?

Small businesses are forced to use creativity and intelligence to gain attention via blogging, and large corporations have money. :)

I'll have a shot at No. 6)

Blog entries don't become obsolete within hours; they simply change direction. They move from Home Pages, Feed Readers, and Site Aggregators, into archives and Search Engine results. There is a Long Tail. And they're constantly reborn and breathed life by links from new posts, and at any stage social bookmarking. Marketing by blogging is as sustainable as blogging itself is.

1) RTFM

2) RTFM

3) RTFM

4) RTFM

5) RTFM

6) RTFM

7) RTFM

8) RTFM

1. ummm - not telling
2 - 4 - try a site search here
5. read Steve Gillmor
6. See Hugh's big head/long tail cartoon
7. walk down Madison Avenue and look for the big smiles - then come back here
8. Do I really have to answer that - I'm bored but OK - see English Cut and how they're scaling back the core business, hop over to BL Ochman - look for the Budget story. Unsuccessful - started out as l'Oreal.

I think drew at http://toothpastefordinner.com is a success story....

Make that www ...

Sorry if it is off topic a bit, but I think I just saw the phrase "global microbrand" one too many times. Going on and on about "global microbrand" seems to discount the "local microbrand" that is one of the better parts of blogging.

For example one blog I read frequently
http://epicureandebauchery.blogspot.com/ is compelling to me because the restaurants and places she writes about are just down the street.

In fact, a key part of English Cut seems to be the frequent roadshows and the Stormhoek thing is made possible by long journeys made by various bottles of vino. Even though it says "global" the physical presence is still a key part of making the sale.

Another detail to add to number 8.

A single blog post should take no more than an hour to craft, probably a lot less. One post a day is all you need to keep a site vital. Though three or four really short posts seem to work as well. And the shorter posts can take as little as a minute. But call it an hour a day, budget.

Say you put your marketting director on the job of maintaining the blog. His hour is probably worth somewhere between $40 and $150 depending on the size of your company, or $10 if you're an award winning brewery nestled in a top 10 retirement/college town in the pacific northwest... Chances are, that hour a day is a lot cheaper than any one significant ad you do, a tiny fraction of your whole advertising budget.

With the long tail mentioned above, it because expensive not to maintain a blog. In theory.

"becomes"

That was supposed to be "becomes"...

Also a "here-here!" for Jack Dahlgren. Although I'm not bored of the "Global Microbrand" phrase, I'm personally in the middle of a community with two businesses that benefit locally from blogging directly, and a fair number that do so indirectly. Mine, The Black Drop, and every place in between that I frequent. ;)

Actually, it's "Hear! Hear!"

Yes, but "Global" is much sexier, Dahling!

1) I'll let Hugh tackle this one.

2) It's smaller (i.e. bigger is not necessarily better). It's global (i.e. some aspect is virtual).

3) Either be or want to be ridiculously good at something. Start a blog to cover your "quest to be the best" and serve your customers well. Talk with your real voice. Be open, honest and genuine. (It doesn't hurt to draw good cartoons.) Obsess. Obsess. Obsess.

4) For the most part external large corporate b-blogs don't exist (only 4% of the Fortune 500 have them). And if they do, they're usually not part of the conversation instead they're just another one-way channel for delivering a message to the customer.

5) The audience you care about is your customers. You can use your storefront, website, customer database, the message on your answering machine, your business cards, every email you send, every phone conversation you have, etc., to promote your blog. In terms of reaching a larger audience, optimize for SEO, tag everything, use pingoat.com, write well, share the link love, and OBSESS.

6) There is an element of timeliness about marketing via blogs. It is helpful to constantly participate. That said, I still get traffic to posts that I wrote months ago because they had a good SEO optimized title.

7) Blogging is making marketing more bi-directional. My blog makes my opinions just as powerful as the companies (relatively speaking). Before I could tell a handful of friends when I had a good/bad experience, now I can tell millions.

8) I think that as large companies go, the only ones that are starting to "get it" are the tech companies. Check out Sun, HP, and Microsoft for their blogging activities.

Hope this helps.

Eric Mattson
MarketingMonger.com

This cartoon shows more of the flavour of the ink stuff, Hugh. I think you’re mastering the tablet.

Hugh,

"Hear Hear" is for global microbranders. "Here Here" is for "local" microbranders. I both appreciate and deplore the pun.

-Jack

Blogging will get much more *local* in the next few years, in my opinion, in a range of interesting ways, and then one of the questions will be how to get blobal microbrands to become more effective and responsive on the local level and in local ways.

This issue may become, for blogging, the equivalent of the *centralization / decentralization* pendulum swing issue that larger organizations continually re-visit as their markets or the org's capabilities change.

Watch for geo-localization of tags.

I probably don't know what I am talking about.