You may well ask, with the saturation of blogs out there – enough to require the creation of a new term to encompass them all (blogosphere) – why do we need to add yet another?

Great question!  Blogging has literally exploded on the scene in the past few years, evolving from virtual personal journals to powerful players in such areas as news reporting (especially political news reporting) and information exchange.  In the past year or so, blogging has steadily crept its way into mainstream business operations, adding an exciting new component to the way companies interact with their customers, and the public at large.

As with many new technologies, successful employment of blogging has been spotty.  For every interesting or useful blog, there are a plethora of useless ones.  As people begin to experiment, use and then rely upon technology, lessons are learned (hopefully!) and best practices are developed. We’ll attempt to demystify some of the terminology and help you make sound decisions, with posts such as our “5 Rules to Live By in the Blogosphere“.

Everyone here at Monkee-Boy participates in some sort of blog, whether as author, contributor or just subscriber, and the range of subjects is large and varied.  We’ve logged enough hours in these endeavors to formulate some fairly basic “rules of thumb” to consider when trying to decide if blogging can truly add value to your web operations, and your business success overall.

So why a Monkee-Boy blog?  We’re jumping into the fray to offer our customers and friends a resource to help them navigate the tricky waters of Web 2.0.  We know you trust us to build engaging and effective web sites, to develop sound, measurable marketing programs, and now we’d like to make sure that we offer you the opportunity to discuss with us whatever is on your mind.  We hope you’ll find our blog a useful resource for information and exchange of ideas, and that you’ll comment frequently. Don’t hold back! We want to hear what you’re thinking.

We’ll also publish articles about our work in the community, as it’s very important to us, and we think it helps define us as a company. We’ll also post about interesting things we see or experience related to our core competencies, such as web development and design, marketing and social media, intending to make sure our customers are kept aware of not only the most recent developments in these constantly-evolving fields, but also have access to our opinions about how best to employ them, if at all.

We hope that The Right Click becomes a part of your regular readership, and that you engage us with your comments and questions regularly.  We’re encouraging you to speak to us and our readers in order to gain the most information you can as you look to employ your online resources to the best of their abilities.

So what are you waiting for?

You’ve decided your business needs a blog, your customers expect it and you want to exhaust every channel possible to get your message, and your brand, out to both existing customers and potential new customers. So now what?

We’ve seen a lot of blogs, and frankly, most don’t offer the kind of value necessary to make a business decision worthy of the investment of time and resources. As a way of helping you make the right choice, we’ve put together a short set of five “rules” to govern your life in the blogosphere. Read through them, let us know what you think by commenting, and together let’s make sure that your efforts return maximum value.

1. Have Something Interesting To Say: Seems basic enough, yes? But you may be surprised at how little truly interesting, or unique, things are being published in blogs today. The “signal to noise” ratio of blogs is heavily weighted towards the “noise”, unfortunately. This is understandable given the fact that blogging by nature makes it easy for just about anyone to publish their thoughts quickly, and make them available to a world wide audience cost-effectively. The key to making your blog successful is to offer something of value or unique. Do you possess thought leadership in a space which you can share on a regular basis? Can you offer information which provides value to your readers, especially information which may be hard to obtain elsewhere? These are good questions to ask yourself before committing to publishing a blog.

2. Prepare to Engage: By nature, blogging and Web 2.0 implementation requires interaction. The intent of your blog should not be to just have you publishing your thoughts, but to engage responses from subscribers. Truly successful blogs not only generate responses to the original posts, but often spawn new discussion topics based on the back and forth found in the comments. The authors of blog posts need to understand their role in staying involved with their posts, to respond to comments, clarify positions, and deflect incorrect responses – albeit in a calm, professional manner which reflects well on the business.

3. Be Committed To It: An often overlooked aspect of jumping into the world of online publication is the need to have regular content flowing. You can start out of the gate with some intersting, valuable things which excite readers and compel them to subscribe and respond, but they won’t stay with you if you don’t have new content to offer on a regular basis. A good rule of thumb is to have several cycles worth of content ready before you publish for the first time, and create an editorial calendar which identifies topics and authors for a period of time in advance which makes sense. As an example, let’s say you plan on publishing a blog entry every two weeks. We’d recommend that you have four entries close to finalized before you publish your first, and have a calendar showing 22 cycles (the remaining two week cycles for one year) of topics, with authors identified. There’s no requirement that you actually have to adhere strictly to that calendar of topics – you can adjust as you watch market forces change – but it helps you plan your time and provides confidence that you don’t have to sweat thinking of new things every two weeks.

4. Define What Success Means: This is the least understood aspect of blogging, and Web 2.0 in general, for businesses. It easy enough for a political writer to gauge success for their blog – people read and comment, they get quoted by pundits, and eventually become pundits themselves (see Drudge, Matt). For a person blogging about food, they can measure success by the number of subscribers and the contributions of content (photos, recipes, etc.) by contributors. So how exactly should a business define success for their blogging efforts?

Let’s start by saying right off that one way to ensure that you will NOT be successful is by applying traditional, sales-based metrics to define success. The intent of your blogging may well be to drive traffic to your site, and eventually sales, but you’ll end up doing headstands to try and directly tie blogging to such direct sales.

Each business will need to define success in their own way, but in general, the end game of blogging is to be seen as an expert, a ‘go to’ resource for information and advice in a certain field. As we discussed earlier, being a thought leader in a particular space can provide immense value to a business, if only due to people thinking the company is a source of reliable information about that space. Hopefully, as those propsective customers get closer to the point of purchase, they’ve already legitimized your business as a reliable source of the product or service, giving you a ‘leg up’ on your competition.

In searching for hard metrics, the only empirical data of value would be fairly obvious – number of comments, rate of comments, number of subscribers, etc.

5. Be Patient: It takes time to build an audience, whether you’re talking about blogging, television shows, writing a book – really anything. Remember the television show “Seinfeld”? Its hard to remember that such a powerhouse show, now revered as one of the greatest shows of all time, was almost cancelled its first season, as the audience figured out the unique brand of humor they offered (“Its a show about nothing.”) It’s rare than any business will instantly see a flood of comments and subscribers, the key is to keep publishing, try to find other online outlets to link to your blog, and gain readership and participation slowing but steadily. Again, each business will need to decide for itself what the minimum commitment of time and resources will be for their blog, but if you’ll take the steps we outlined in point number 3, we think you’ll find the effort worth it, and give yourself enough time to let your blog have every chance of success.

As many of you know, we at Monkee-Boy feel strongly that community service is an integral part of our business model.  Our employees are encouraged to volunteer their time to whichever organization they wish, and most do so gladly.

Our Marketing Director has delivered Meals on Wheels for a decade now.  Our Trees Initiative has resulted in the planting of over 2,700 trees so far, helping offest the carbon footprints of the sites we launch.

The Miracle League at Town & Country has been an organization we’ve supported since their inception some four years ago.

A member of the Monkee-Boy team sits on their board of directors, and the company provides web, video and photography services which have greatly enhanced their ability to get the word out about their wonderful organization providing fun and safe sports to the special needs children of the Austin metro area.

We’re proud of our involvement with the Miracle League, and continue to contribute whatever is asked of us, whether it be donated services, or sponsorship of holes for their annual golf tournament fundraiser, or financial contribution to their scholarship fund for the high school-aged “Buddies” who pair up with the players to ensure that games are both safe and fun.  We’re especially thankful when we hear from parents how much the Miracle League means to their families, and how much they appreciate the efforts which go into making sure games happen. We hope you agree that the time and effort we expend on behalf of these wonderful kids and their families is time well spent.

By the way, if you’d like to help the Miracle League, or get involved, they are always seeking donations and volunteers.  Just visit their website at http://miracle.tandcsports.org/ to find donation and contact information.  Their motto is “Every Child Deserves a Chance to Play Baseball”, and if you ever get an opportunity to visit the field and watch a game, you’ll see an endless sea of smiles which is sure to warm your heart.

You’d have to be living under a rock if you haven’t at least heard of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.  And whether you’re aware of it or not, social networking has crept into your online shopping experience with the explosion of user reviews now resident on many retailer web sites.  The phenomenon of connecting people for the betterment of all is firmly entrenched, and now its time for you to decide what and if you should explore it for your business.

Like many new concepts, social media is widely misunderstood and used in ways which bring little to no value to its users.  Twitter is the latest social networking darling, with exponential growth in users quarter over quarter, culminating with “Servers are Overloaded” messages occasionally popping up, a tribute to the fact that the owners of Twitter did not predict its rapid ascent.

For every valuable “tweet” I see, there are probably 10 of dubious value, including ones providing information about the poster’s dinner, or what kind of day they had or similar nonsense.  People seem to be confusing Twitter with Facebook, which actually encourages such trivial status updates in order to generate online conversations between friends, and in fact Facebook is quite successful with this.  There is little value, however, for businesses to know what kind of day you had.

But this is the internet after all, and that means there is a wealth of valuable knowledge out there on how best to engage social media for your business – the trick is to separate the wheat from the chaff.  A successful social media strategy will involve some forward-thinking approaches for businesses, including non-traditional ways of measuring success.  One of the most common pitfalls for businesses is to try and force traditional success metrics onto social media efforts, ensuring dissatisfaction.

We’ve spent some time and effort to learn about the emerging social media market, filtered with an eye towards how we could leverage it successfully for our clients.  We’ve attended conferences such as South By Southwest Interactive to hear thought leaders talk about the successes and failures, we’ve participated in panel discussions with other social marketers and business leaders, and we’ve compiled a list of trusted resources to help us understand the best paths to success.

Here are some links to information sources we feel will help you understand social media marketing, in plain English and without the heavy use of newly-emerged buzzwords.

Mashable: Social Media and SEO:  5 Essential Steps To Success – a concise article providing some common sense steps to begin a successful social media journey.

Social Media 404: Social Media Best Practices – a PDF presentation about their propriety metholodology called OASIS, but chock full of best practice information for anyone considering a social media plan.

Social Media Explorer: How To Embrace The Process Of Social Media – a good article on a very informative web site, giving you basic concepts to embrace once you decide to expend effort in social media marketing.

There are countless other social media marketing information sites on the internet, and we’ll keep looking and reading to decide which provide the best information – concise, actionable, up to the minute – and keep honing our skills.  Social media marketing is not suited for every business, and requires investment in time, capital and perhaps most importantly, thinking differently.

We know that you rely upon us to help you maximize the effectiveness of your online presence – through the design and development of an attractive and user-friendly web site, SEO and SEM efforts, online marketing campaigns and more.  Employing an effective social media marketing effort may be the right answer for your business, too, but it helps to have a partner who understands the landscape upon which you’ll be traversing, and stays with you every step of the way.