Create a Great Lead

Blog posts must get right to the point. Study some of the most influential blogs, such as the Huffington Post[1] or Gawker.[2] Watch how they hook the reader in. Here’s an example of a recent HuffPost article lead:

For all his retro failings and inability to open up, Don Draper has always been intrigued, even turned on, by women who are willing to stand up to him and are smart enough to argue with him.

Who’s that lead targeted to? Yup. Women.

How about this lead from Gawker:

There’s a melodramatic “war” brewing between Facebook and Google, and Facebook’s CEO is seizing the opportunity to squeeze more work from his engineers, declaring a “lockdown,” keeping the office open on weekends, and putting a neon sign on his door.

Target audience? People like you, who read blogs about social media!

Write and rewrite your lead so that it communicates the promise of the post and entices the reader to continue.

Add Pictures

Remember when you were thumbing through the magazine in your imagination in the previous post? You were scanning titles, but you were also looking at the pictures. Since many of your audience members will belong to the post-literate generations, consider including at least one grabber of a picture in each blog post.

Use Pull Quotes

Also known as a lift-out quote or a call-out, a pull quote is a quotation or edited excerpt from a post placed in a larger typeface and embedded in a text box to entice readers and to highlight a key topic. You’ve probably seen them on the professional news sites and blogs. It’s a great way to provide more cues to your readers about what your post is about.

Next up: Create a Great Lead for Your Blog Part 2

One of the most important things to keep in mind when writing a blog is: You have seconds to capture the reader, and it’s very easy to lose them after the first paragraph.

Create a Great Title

Your blog needs a great title, and so do your blog posts. Whether it’s short and to the point, or long and quirky, your title has to grab the reader. Research shows that people’s decision to read an article is heavily dependent on the title of the article.[1] If you’ve read a newspaper or magazine lately (work with us here, GenY), you’re familiar with the concept. Chances are good you thumb through the periodical scanning the titles and headlines (and pictures — we’ll get to them later) until something looks good. Then you read the first paragraph and decide if you want to read more. If the article isn’t delivering what you want, you move on.

On the Web this process is multiplied a thousand-fold. If you’re lucky enough for your blog post to make it onto the front page of Google, its title must jump out as the prospective reader rapidly scans the search results. Remember: On the Web, every click is a commitment. You’re leaving the familiar comfort of the page you’re on to venture into the unknown, in the optimistic hope of finding something useful, entertaining, or informative. And if the article doesn’t deliver on the promise of the title, your reader is off to the next adventure.

Here are some title examples drawn from our own blogs. Which blog post title would you be more likely to read?

We hope you prefer the titles in the right hand column.

[1] Jack B. Haskins’ paper Title-Rating: A Method for Measuring Reading Interests and Predicting Readership: bit.ly/cfGcZl

It’s very easy, and free, to start a blog. It’s harder to create a blog that will amass a following, or make a difference. Like all the social media sites we discuss in this blog, you should start with a plan that includes your goals, the audience you are trying to reach, the tone of the blog, the name and branding of the blog, your marketing plan, and a publishing schedule. Review the post Elements of an Engagement Plan before starting your blog.

There are all kinds of blog platforms available that will host your blog. The most popular are WordPress, Typepad, Blogsmith, Blogger and Movable Type. Here’s a short list of sites to consider when choosing a hosted blog platform:[1]

• Blogger.com — free, by Google
• Blogspot.com — free Blogger hosting
• LiveJournal.com — free, by SixApart
• MovableType.com — paid, by SixApart
• Typepad.com — paid, by SixApart
• WordPress.com — free

If you’re ready to take on the responsibility of hosting your blog yourself, there are several blogging platforms to choose from, some free, some you need to buy:

• WordPress.org — A free, installable version of WordPress.com software
• Movable Type — Charges for a license for the platform based on number of blogs and whether they are for commercial, personal, educational or not-for-profit use. Also has a free version.
• LiveJournal — Open source software that enables you to create a virtual community. LiveJournal goes beyond blogging by allowing you to create self-contained communities and add social networking features.
• Textpattern — More than a blogging platform, Textpattern is an open source general-purpose content management system
• Drupal, Joomla, and other Web content management systems also have blogging features, although they are primarily designed to run your whole site.

One advantage of self-hosting: You can use your own domain name — blog.yourorg.com. A major disadvantage is that if you don’t have a technical staff, the upkeep and maintenance of a blog hosting platform can be baffling and time-consuming.

Before we get too far, let’s take a look at some blog lingo.

• Post — a blog entry; also verb, to create a blog entry
• Blogging — the act of posting
• Blogger — a person who blogs
• Blogosphere — the blogging community
• RSS Feed — short for Real Simple Syndication, it’s a way for others to sign up (called subscribing; see below) to get updates from your blog without having to visit it
• Atom — a feed format that is an alternative to RSS
• Blog Client — software installed on your computer that you can use to manage (post, edit) blogs with no need to launch a web browser
• Blogroll — a list of other blogs that a blogger recommends by providing links to them
• Comment Spam — similar to e-mail spam, unwanted comments posted by robot “spambots”
• Mommy bloggers — a particularly cohesive and active group of blogging mothers — see the discussion of the Motrin mommy blogger revolt in the Social Media Hall of Shame
• Permalink — a permanent, unchanging link to a single post that can be used when you want to link to a post from elsewhere
• Podcasting — originally a contraction of “iPod” and “broadcasting,” podcasting means posting audio or video material on a blog and its RSS feed, for digital players (not just iPods).
• Subscribe — signing up to be alerted to changes in a blog, or signing up to receive an RSS feed
• Templates — the organization structure of a blog page often including content placement, design, graphics, and interactive features; you can find free templates, commercial templates, or have your own designed
• Theme — a particular look that can be applied to a blog template, changing the visual elements
• Trackback or Pingback — a ping that a blog sends to another blog to notify that their article has been mentioned
• Tag cloud — Displaying lists of keywords or tags in a blog as a cloud of words
• Plug-ins — bits of interactivity that can add improved functionality and new features to your blog
• Jump — the continuation of a story on another page

Blogs can be plain or they can be fancy. But most blogs have one or more of the following components:

• Index page — The front page, which may contain teasers to other posts
• Header — The topmost part of the blog
• Footer — The bottom part of the blog
• Sidebar — Columns along one or both sides of the blog’s main page
• Categories — A collection of topic-specific posts
• Comments — A section, generally at the bottom, where readers can leave remarks
• CAPTCHA — Those squiggly words often seen in a Comments section to prevent automated commenting, it stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart
• Tagging — Allows readers or bloggers to attach keywords to make it easier to search or collect similar posts
• BlogThis — An interactive feature that allows a visiting blogger to blog on their own blog about the entry they are reading
• Plug-ins — Interactive features that add improved functionality and new features. Some top plug-ins for the popular blogging platform WordPress include: Subscribe To Comments, Show Top Commentators, Get Recent Comments, Popularity Contest, and Share This.[1]

At its root, a blog is nothing more than an easy way to publish content on the Web. You could argue that blogs are the original social media application. When blogs arose at the tail end of the 90s, they represented freedom for the average person from the tyranny of the techies. No longer did regular folks need to run the gauntlet of people who had to be involved in putting content on the Web, from the Web designers to the developers to the Webmasters. Anyone could easily start a blog and publish their thoughts on the Internet. It was amazing.

Today, in the midst of hundreds of social networking sites, the blog remains the choice for a personal soapbox. As much as you can rant on Facebook, for example, there’s nothing as intimate as your own space to blog. And there is nothing more popular on the Web, with 77 percent of active Internet users reading blogs.[1] According to Nielsen, blogging on mobile phones doubled in 2012.[2]

Even today, the modern blog still resembles the diary-oriented Weblogs of old. Simply put, it’s a log of your thoughts, ideas, links, photos, videos, or news in a series of posts arranged in chronological order. Because of its power and flexibility, the blog can be the cornerstone of your social computing strategy, second in importance only to your main Website.

In fact, we recommend making a blog the centerpiece of your social media strategy. Whether the blog is on your existing site or on one of the blog hosting platforms we detail later, of all the types of social media, the blog offers you an opportunity to state your case with the fewest restrictions. You’re not limited by Twitter’s 140 characters or by the length of a Facebook or LinkedIn status update. While it’s not a good idea to routinely go on at great length, with a blog you have the opportunity to develop a theme or an argument that other venues rarely provide.

So do your work here, in your blog. And link to your blog from everywhere, as we discussed in the Triangulate Your Social Media Presence post. Don’t be discouraged by the tens of millions of competitive blogs out there. Make your blog the place you state your case, and most intimately engage with your community. If you offer value — resources, insights, encouragement — and effectively engage your community, your blog can be a hit.

Setting Up Blogging

“Blog policy at Microsoft is just two words: Blog Smart.”

Lawrence Liu, director of platform strategy for Telligent

Blog is short for Weblog, an old-fashioned term from the turn of the century for a kind of online diary. The original Weblogs were not initially a hit. In 1999 well-known usability guru Jesse James Garrett collected a list[1] of all the known Weblogs — all 23 of them. A year later, his list had grown to almost 300.[2] Peter Merholz, Creative Director at Epinions.com, decided for some reason that the word should be pronounced “wee-blog” which he proposed be shortened to blog, and the rest is history.

As we reported in an earlier post, today there are more than 240 million blogs with more than 120,000 new ones launching every day.[3] Websites such as Technorati[4] exist solely to catalog and classify blogs, delivering a sampling of the best and most-influential blogs. Big money is made by blogs such as Mashable,[5] Perez Hilton,[6] I Can Has Cheezburger,[7] and Techcrunch[8] which staked out claims in niche markets (social media, celebrity gossip, cute (?) cat pictures, tech gadgets) and drawing large viewership.

Along the way, the blog has morphed from a text-only medium to a multimedia extravaganza, featuring audio, video, animations, and games. Technical innovations such as Real Simple Syndication (RSS)[9] en­abled blogs to connect to one another, and made keeping up to date on many blogs at once a simple matter of starting a Google Reader account.

Other social networking sites have made it easy to connect blogs to their services:

• You can automatically tweet a synopsis of your new blog post to Twitter and Facebook using TwitterFeed[10]
• You can add your blog to LinkedIn (use the BlogLink app or Ping.fm[11]) and to Facebook (add to the Notes section)
• You can add your blog to your YouTube channel
  

As you can see, your blog could be the center of your social media universe, powering a series of satellite sites fed by a single blog post.

So what is this powerful force?

You may have various goals for using videos on YouTube. You may want to spread awareness for your products or your enterprise. You may want to counter others who have a different perspective than you on an issue. But one of the most important objectives you may have is to gain prospects, supporters, and evangelists for your organization.

For these and other reasons you’ll want to be sure to include a strong call to action in your videos. The results can be amazing.

Here’s an example of the power of video to create action. Lynn Rogers, with the Wildlife Research Institute, and the North American Bear Center near Ely, Minnesota, gained an international reputation over 40 years of working in the field with black bears. But Rogers gained international fame by the simple act of broadcasting live on the Web the birth of a black bear named Hope in January, 2010.

The “den cam” video was in black and white and a bit murky, and a mere 25,000 viewers watched it live.[1] Within a couple of days, after becoming the #1 Yahoo.com featured story, the birth video was the #1 most-viewed YouTube video on January 24, 2010 and by late 2010 it garnered more than 800,000 views. The subsequent story of Hope and her mother, Lily, included Hope getting lost for a few days in May, 2010, and again in June.[2] The bear drama spawned almost 300 videos on YouTube, covering the two bears as if they were the latest Hollywood “it” girls.

But all this interest didn’t just happen all by itself. The creators of the “den cam,” PixController Wildlife Webcam, used social media to help the phenomenon along. According to company CEO Bill Powers, “The day it (the video feed) went up … it just went berserk at that point. It was the first time anybody had actually seen a bear den. When the bear cub was born, it was kind of neat. That’s when we started to use a lot of the social tools like Facebook and those kind of things to get the word out quick, and it just went viral at that point.”[3]

The social media efforts included a “Lily the Black Bear” Facebook page[4] with more than 115,000 fans, whose comments on Facebook generated more than 6,000 links.

Hundreds of thousands of viewers were fascinated by the experience, and their interest turned into donations totaling $400,000 to the non-profit organizations Rogers heads, Wildlife Research Institute, and the North American Bear Center.[5] In addition, the bear center received a $100,000 grant from Chase Community Giving on Facebook, a program sponsored by JPMorgan Chase in which Facebook users vote on how the charity distributes $5 million. The center received almost 18,000 votes among more than 2.5 million Facebook users who participated.

Demonstrating our recommendation that an organization’s main Website must be modified to support social media efforts, Rogers’ Website, bear.org, posts blow-by-blow accounts of Lily and Hope, and features a prominent donation button with a funds thermometer.[6] The main page of the Website features various live Webcam feeds, a recent donor honor roll, and the opportunity to buy bear paraphernalia.

What can you learn from the Lily and Hope phenomenon? It’s clear that an engaging story supported by video and combined with other social media efforts can deliver for your organization in a big way. Think of the human (or non-human) stories your organization can tell, and how video can help you tell them. It doesn’t matter if you have slick production values — look at what was achieved with a low-resolution black and white video. What counts is telling the story, and connecting with your viewers.

For more video tips, Teach to Fish Digital has a free YouTube tutorial.[7]

Optimize Your YouTube Videos

Like everything else on the Web, your videos are no good if nobody can find them. In addition to maximizing the effect of your social presence on YouTube, as we discussed in the last section, you need to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your YouTube channel. The following recommendations are for YouTube and Google. Optimizing for other search engines will likely be slightly different.

You Tube’s search algorithm considers the following attributes of videos when determining ranking, whether they are embedded on your site or on YouTube:

• Title — If you’ve embedded your YouTube video in a page on your site, make sure the title of the page matches the title of the video. You’ll do better in search rankings if it does.
• Description — Optimize the first 27 characters, which is what displays before truncation in listings. Include a shortened clickable URL (see the Shrinking Long URLs post for more information). The video’s description is shown in the search results on Google.
• Tags — Include relevant keywords that describe the video. Make these keywords consistent with those you use in the title and description fields. YouTube has a keyword tool[1] you can use to get suggested keywords. There’s even a beta capability to get keywords by demographic group.
• Number of Views — You want to focus on getting more views, naturally, so share your videos appropriately using YouTube’s social media tools and commenting as well as other social networks. You also want to show up in the list of related videos that appear over a video that’s finished playing, and to the right of the video Try to get your videos into this area. People tend to watch videos in batches. The average YouTube viewer views more than 100 videos per month.[2] Try to keep your most important videos in the Recent Activity listing[3] on your channel by periodically tweaking the annotation (a text field that pops up over the video) or other text fields of the video. Videos in Recent Activity perform the best on searches.The Recent Activity box has a lot of other functionality. Adding new favorites to your channel shows up in the box, as well as new ratings and comments on others’ videos. You can broadcast bulletins directly to your channel subscribers, and these show up in your Recent Activity box as well. When you post a bulletin, it will also appear on your subscribers’ Recent Activity boxes.
• Rating — The rating[4] of your video is similar to the Motion Picture Association of America’s movie content ratings. You can rate your video on five categories: Language, Nudity, Sexual Situations, Violence and Drug Use.
• View counts — You can only influence this indirectly, obviously.
• Playlist Additions — Viewers can add your video to their video playlists. You might consider asking users to add the video to their playlists in your video description or the video itself, since many viewers may not be familiar with this feature.
• Thumbs Up/Down — Viewers can rate your video by indicating thumbs up or thumbs down. This type of rating, representing how much viewers like the video, is different from the content ratings mentioned earlier in this list. Consider encouraging thumbs up ratings in your video description or the video.

 Figure 1 — Thumbs Up Ratings on YouTube

• Shares/Embeds — YouTube viewers can share videos they find interesting with their friends. They also can embed your video in their own sites. This social networking capability can be a key to your video’s success, so don’t be afraid to encourage those who comment positively on the video to share it with their networks. There is a bit of controversy among experts over whether third party embeds are more important than those on your own Website.
• Favorites — Viewers can add your video to their list of favorites, which can be seen by visitors to their channels. Encourage this behavior as well.
• Comments — It is unclear at this time whether YouTube is evaluating comments for what is known as sentiment — whether the comment is negative or positive. You obviously want positive comments. Your strategy should specify how you will respond to negative comments.
• Complete Views — YouTube apparently weights whether the viewer watched your video to completion and factors that into its search algorithm. There’s little you can do about this, of course, except create compelling videos.
• Channel Views — Another variable you can’t really control, channel views is the number of visitors who have viewed your channel page. It is not a summary of all video views, since videos can be viewed via search results and embeds.
• Authority of Your Channel — Authority is a complicated concept similar to Google’s Page Rank. It basically is an assessment of your channel’s influence. A good way to increase your authority score is to leave comments on channels that have a high authority score.
• Annotations — Text in the annotations on your video can also influence search results.
• Flagging — If your video gets flagged by users for offensiveness, that will negatively affect your search ranking.
• OneBox Results — Google often includes a “OneBox” at the bottom of the first page of its results containing a selection of similar sites. If your video appears in OneBoxes, that’s likely to increase its search ranking.

Figure 2 — YouTube Video in Google OneBox

• Number of Subscribers — Not surprisingly, the more subscribers you have to a video, the higher it will rank.

YouTube gives some guidance regarding search results in its GoogleWebmasterHelp channel.[5]

As noted in the previous list, one way that YouTube (and, Google, which owns YouTube) finds videos is by looking for keywords in the title, description, and tags fields. So you definitely want to determine the important keywords and ensure that you enter them in those fields.

However, make sure that the keywords are appropriate to the subject of the video, and that you don’t jam lots of unrelated keywords into the tags field. The reason: YouTube/Google will penalize videos for using a technique called keyword stuffing — placing lots of irrelevant tags in an item in an attempt to get more traffic. If they determine that you are keyword stuffing, both search engines will penalize your video. So make sure you use consistent keywords in the title, description, and tags fields and that they are appropriate for the actual video they describe.

While you should definitely pay attention to these techniques we’ve just listed, keep in mind that using the social networking aspects of YouTube will probably be even more powerful in not only getting you more viewers, but more-appropriate viewers. To develop a robust YouTube community for your business, follow our general community-building recommendations elsewhere in this book.

[1] YouTube keyword tool: bit.ly/aFQNft

[2] comScore press release comScore Releases May 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings: bit.ly/9Y9D3m

[3] YouTube Getting Started: Recent Activity privacy settings: bit.ly/9qdBLs

[4] YouTube Learn More: YouTube Content Ratings: bit.ly/c16tqH

[5] GoogleWebmasterHelp: What factors influence video results in Universal Search?: bit.ly/91Fb15