thinks

Mike Moran started a great dialogue about corporate blogging and made a compelling argument in favor of “corporate” blogs that’s worth a closer look. First off, I think many corporations need to have blogs. Not all, but many. Your company can prepare itself for what it will take to blog and benefit from creating a conversation with your customers.

The question I have is: what happens when your blogger’s brand becomes bigger than your company’s?

For instance, look at what happened when Danny Sullivan left Search Engine Watch and started Search Engine Land last year:

To be fair, the Microsoft.com/scobleizer.com comparison isn’t as compelling an argument :

Frankly, you should be so lucky as to have a company blogger whose brand grows as large as these two have. What’s important isn’t whether or not they eventually leave - they will. What is important is how you respond. And that needs to be part of your preparation, too.

David Armano thinks 2008 will be the year of the mobile internet. I completely agree. The way consumers interact with the web is changing dramatically, even though most customers don’t realize it themselves. Worse, most businesses don’t either. The mobile web looks like the PC-based web did in 1998-1999, with business and consumer benefits set to explode. Improved devices and networks (iPhone/Android), increased options and flexibility (Verizon’s bring your own device), interesting applications and interactions (Twitter/Pownce/Safari). All very cool.

So how do marketers get onboard?

1. Understand that your customers have mobile devices and are starting to use them
2. Learn what mobile services matter to your customers - primarily search, email, voice
3. Cover the basics - make sure your site can be found, browsed and contacted via mobile. It doesn’t require huge IT investment to make sure your site scans on mobile devices.
4. Explore the fringes - Set up a twitter account and encourage your customers to follow you or offer SMS contacts

This “core and explore” method is the best way to ensure that once your customers go mobile, you can find them, reach them, and help them without driving yourself crazy.

GoodURLBadURL.com - thanks to Seth Godin for pointing it out - offers a list of rules for how to present URL’s in print and other media. Check out the tips. They’re useful.

BUT…

I disagree with certain points. To wit:

1. Use YourSlogan.com when running an integrated media campaign - Nope. Work to build the value of your domain. While integrated media campaigns with YourSlogan.com makes for “cool” media, why would you want to direct traffic away from your core domain? Why mess with 301 redirects? Why have to deal with yet another domain for years? It’s a good idea to buy them, but don’t feel you should direct traffic to a different domain for every campaign you run. It’s wasteful and short-sighted.
2. Use subdomains when driving people deeper than your homepage - e.g. Product.YourBrandName.com - Ummm, I don’t think so. First, too many consumers still don’t get the subdomain thing. Second, managing subdomains is, to use a technical term, icky (Matt Cutts thinks so, too). But the customer issue is the one I’d pay the most attention to.

Other than that, though, I do think GoodURLBadURL.com provides a bunch of useful tips.

And remember, if you think you can’t find anything good for a domain, Squidoo, Yahoo, and Google were once weird sounding names and they turned out just fine.

Heidi Cohen over at Clickz offers “Five Ways to Tap into Social Shopping” that I’d highly encourage you to read. Heidi’s tips make total sense to me. But her “Five Social Shopping Caveats” are the most important part of the article (scroll down on her page to read them). As Jeff Jarvis, Ars Technica and yours truly pointed out over the last couple of days, even well-intentioned groups can easily mess up entry into the social space if they don’t understand the spirit as well as the practice of social sites. Make sure you’re willing to play the game by the rules if you choose to play at all. The benefits are more than worth it. The key is doing it well.

The numbers projected for mobile search - critical to local marketers - are staggering. One estimate projects local companies will spend $5 billion (US) in 2008, while another estimates 55 million local search users by 2011. In either case, the implications are clear for local marketers. Consumers are making use of this technology to find what they need, regardless of device or location. When you consider the low conversion rates for most websites, despite years of best practice research, companies need to think both about their customers who will purchase online and those that won’t. How effective is your business at driving sales online and offline? And how much are you thinking about it?

The Blog Council sounds like a great idea, in theory. But aren’t blogs, almost by definition, personal? I’d love to hear thoughts on this.