The Science of Marketing

Not many would disagree that blogs are fast becoming an important vehicle for garnering awareness and influencing opinion. Despite the growing popularity of blogs, many high tech marketers have yet to enter the blogosphere for a variety of reasons. There may be the perception that you actually have to write blogs daily to participate or that the blogosphere is too complex. Or, they just don’t know where to start. Follow these four simple steps to join the blogosphere without staying up until three every morning agonizing over your next entry.

1. Discover who’s discussing what’s important to you.Start with Technorati, which tracks over 100M blogs in real time. Technorati allows you to whittle down the vast blogosphere to focus on the issues, products, services and companies that are relevant and important. Through its keyword-based "watchlists", Technorati creates a custom list of blog entries that match your unique criteria, alerting you to new entries of interest. Technorati is the quickest way to discover what’s being discussed and who’s discussing it in the areas that matter to you.
2. Check their juice.With millions of blogs in existence and thousands joining the fold everyday, it is crucial to cut through the noise and identify the blogs with the largest and most active audiences. To get an idea of the popularity of a blog, use the Blog Juice Calculator, which aggregates four important metrics – Bloglines subscribers, Alexa and Technorati rankings and the number of inbound links. The Blog Juice Calculator then ranks blogs on a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the "juiciest" and, therefore, most worthy of your attention.
3. Track blogs.Once you’ve found juicy blogs that are discussing important issues, you can automate the delivery of new blog entries with an RSS reader. Consider an RSS reader your window to the blogosphere, enabling you to aggregate all of the blogs that are important to you, organize them around your priorities and see new posts in real time. Most portals, including MyYahoo!, MSN and AOL, offer a simple-to-use RSS reader that you can add to your homepage. In addition, there are several stand alone readers that offer advanced functionality. RSS readers make tracking important blogs a snap, giving you more time to jump into conversations when appropriate.
4. Converse.The easiest way to begin participating in the online conversation is to respond to a blog entry where you or a company representative can add value. When the moment arises, follow these guidelines to establish credibility and help your company’s voice shine through.
   • Identify yourself – don’t stick and move with anonymous postings
   • Be personable – if your entry reads like a corporate web page, it won’t be read
   • Stay on track – don’t stray from the conversation just to get your message across
   • Move quickly – respond before the conversation changes course
   • Be provocative – don’t simply share information, establish a leadership position

Don’t let setting up a blog and blogging the night away get in the way of participating in the online conversation. You can gain a lot of value by using the right tools, doing a little research, listening and adding value to the conversation when you can.

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