Remarkable Reading #37: BORN TO BLOG: Building Your Blog for Personal and Business Success One Post at a Time by Mark W. Schaefer and Stanford Smith and GOING SOCIAL: Excite Customers, Generate Buzz, and Energize Your Brand with the Power of Social Media by Jeremy Goldman

The aim of this section Remarkable Reading is pay a tribute to the books that taught, share trends & insights into where our world in the 21st century is heading in a technology enabled world, and ask the right questions.

Bolded and italics quotes and references do not belong to myself  and belong directly to the author.  The focus is to share valuable insights and teachings from the book to win business for the authors.

Two Trends we will be touching upon are:

• Further benefits of personal & especially business blogging
• Trends in the business & commerce world due to advances and sophistication in smart devices & social technologies

BORN TO BLOG: Building Your Blog for Personal and Business Success One Post at a Time by Mark W. Schaefer and Stanford Smith is a comprehensive and practical book about how to start a blog, what the requirements are, what sort of time it will take, and what the core benefits to your business are.

Beauty of BORN TO BLOG: Building Your Blog for Personal and Business Success One Post at a Time  is both the writer's ability to help us understand the world of personal and business blogging by detailing the finer intricacies of why we should blog, what the benefits are, and also what one needs to do in order to create a powerful & winning business blog.

I’ve written plenty about business blogging, and as an avid & passionate blogger of 20 years, the benefits of blogging, not only for business use, but also for personal reasons (ability to read, write, publish, share and connect) is one that not only has therapeutic value, but also immense value in terms of feeling content and full.  It is extremely nice and comforting to read a book about blogging that affirm everything that you’ve always believed in, and also manages to teach, educate, inform, entertain and inspire.

Mark W.Schaefer and Stanford Smith are both extremely gifted and talented writers with a fluid and seamless writing style.  They have a straightforward, uncomplicate and elementary (my Dear Watson) style of  mastering and comprehending the blogging world and blogosphere. At the same time, Mark W.Schaefer and Stanford Smith realize how such an incrementally small & simple function of social media can lead to spectacular & surreal results.  

BORN TO BLOG: Building Your Blog for Personal and Business Success One Post at a Time  was written over 5 years ago, however it has refined like fine wine.  If there was ever a time to introduce a business focused blog (customized & personalized) to your business, it is now (and moving forward in to 2018).  Not for Social Media, but specifically for blogging & business blogging I would recommend BORN TO BLOG: Building Your Blog for Personal and Business Success One Post at a Time  as one of the supreme and unrivalled books about blogging.  Unpretentious and unfussy, this is a no-nonsense approach to blogging (and the integration with the wider Social Media space) as it thoroughly explains to you the tools to start a blog, but also gets you in the right mood to blog reminding you of why you should blog, and what advantages and satisfaction it delivers. A practical book to refer back to many a times if and when you are unsure about blogging.

Top take-out’s include:

Page 5 - “Through blogs, we’ve gained the capability to express out thoughts while benefiting from the collective experience of readers.  Along the way, we’ve discovered that blogging isn’t just a publishing tool, it’s a stage for our beliefs, values and dreams.  It’s a place to establish our personal power and help our companies stand out”

Page 12 - “It takes time to find your blogging ‘voice’.  Authentic helpfulness and reciprocity go a long way.  It wasn’t easy, but today my blog is a run and central part of my business”

Page 13 - “You can't buy a blog following.  Your community has to be built patiently, one person at a time”

Page 19 - “Blog readers usually are mixing business and pleasure when they visit a blog.  On the business side, they are often hunting for new information.  They have a problem to solve, and they may have followed a result from a search they trust has linked to your site”

Page 27 - “We learned that blogging isn’t an elite marketing strategy reserved for highly trained authors, journalists, and creative savants.  It’s a natural form of communication with skills preprogrammed into us all.  You practice these skills every day.  You just need to know how to summon them and put them to work”

Page 29 - “Assembling and organizing information is a skill that is hardwired.  Your brain make sense of the world by labeling and categorizing everything.  Sometimes you have a specific interest in curating a certain object and your interest turns into a hobby.  Many bloggers have learned how to turn their natural need to curate their world into popular and influential blogs”

Page 37 - “You don’t have to be an accomplished playwright or understand the nuances of a riveting screenplay.  The only prerequisite for blogging is the willingness to share your thoughts and opinions”

Page 48 - “By February 2008, Obama’s blog, social media outreach and savvy online and spending pushed him past Clinton”

Page 49 - “A rule of thumb is that only about 2 percent of your readers leave comments.  That’s a generalization that I have found holds up across many types of blogs.  Readers maybe too busy, too shy, or just not interested enough to comment”

Page 55 - “Some of the best bloggers have a natural bias for teaching.  They feel comfortable whipping out how-to posts and publishing checklists.  As natural partners, we tend to flock to these blogs because they promise preorganized information that we can quickly process and evaluate”

Page 59 - “Of all the natural blogging skills, curation may be the hardest to recognize.  Many times curation works alongside teaching, with teaching taking the prominent role”

Page 72 - “If you set up a blog, you don’t want to be the obnoxious one trying to dominate the conversation with sales pitches”

Page 83 - “Many of these blogs buckle under the download.  

That’s a shame because blogging is simple - at least the formula for building and growing a blog is simple. The most effective blogs are managed using minimal guidelines and straightforward objectives.  They evolve rapidly and quickly gather a community of contributors.  Blog posts are consistent and compelling.”

Page 93 - “It’s true.  Content is king on the social web.  It is the catalyst that makes things happen and ultimately creates business benefits.  Your blog requires a steady supply of excellent content to thrive and survive.  This can become a burden if you don't have a game plan for creating the right blend of content for your business blog.  Your content should attract new visitors, establish rapport with your readers, educare readers on your approach, and establish your expertise and leadership”

Page 94 - “Your blog will need a full toolbox of evergreen content.  This content will get ranked by the search engines and bring in new visitors.  Consistently adding new content will broaden the number of search engine terms you cnss target.  Well-written evergreen content has a greater chance of achieving and retaining a first-page search ranking because of its relevance and comprehensive review of the subject”

Page 105 - “Prospects are attracted to my blog because I demonstrated my knowledge, my philosophy, and my trustworthiness with every post I write”

Page 143 - “In the end, your personal blog should make you feel happy, fulfilled, powerful, and connected to a larger community.  Let’s make sure that you experience those benefits.  Before you sign up for a blog profile or write your first post, write down what you believe is your mission statement for the blog”

Page 160 - “Blogging is lonely.  It’s just you huddled over a keyboard tapping out your inner thoughts.  In the beginning, you might publish dozens of posts before you receive a comment. There will be few retweets or Facebook likes.  You will feel that no one is listening or even cares.  Plan for the lonely times from the beginning.  Look for opportunities to talk with other people in the “real world” about your blog and the process of writing.”

Witty humour, practical & pragmatic examples, as well as a surfeit of experience, GOING SOCIAL: Excite Customers, Generate Buzz, and Energize Your Brand with the Power of Social Media by Jeremy Goldman is a captivating & charming book about the benefits of Going Socal, and the impact it has on your business.

While Mark W.Schaefer and Stanford Smith’s BORN TO BLOG: Building Your Blog for Personal and Business Success One Post at a Time is focused specifically on blogging while  Jeremy Goldman’s GOING SOCIAL: Excite Customers, Generate Buzz, and Energize Your Brand with the Power of Social Media attempts to understand and explain multiple facets of Social Media including: creating engaging content for social media, formulate strategies with a ROI focus, tackle & absorb where your audience congregate online, how to avoid pitfalls, and how to get really good at listening and analytics.

Jeremy Goldman is a distinctive, quirky and quirky writer who exudes the right amount of energy as a writer, and despite his more light-hearted tone and manner, still manages to retain his focus & vision on what matters in business in today’s world of marketing.  His overall technology trends age well in 5 years, and are more relevant now with further upcoming changes in the world of consumer electronics, the Internet of Things & Smart Technologies (including Smart Homes & Smart Cities) mature. It’s wonderful to be able to reflect on the predictions and changes that have been made in this book in connection to overall mobile & social trends in today’s 21st century modern technology & big data enabled marketing and economic age.

The basic understanding of how communication between brand, companies & consumers has changed drastically and dramatically since advances in social networks & mobile devices is conveyed with repose.  

The mix of mediums and utilities, as well as their specific functionality to understand including photo and video sharing (Facebook and YouTube),  status updating (Twitter & Facebook), Image and photo sharing Flickr and Facebook), as well as blogging and location-based services is commercially invigorating.  Goldman’s early insights into GPS, geotrigger and geofencing combined with push notifications is accurate, and he has extensive appreciation for the topic of social media marketing.

The examples used by Jeremy Goldman are extremely constructive and useful.  Combining facts with real life scenario’s, GOING SOCIAL: Excite Customers, Generate Buzz, and Energize Your Brand with the Power of Social Media  is a wonderful reflection as it’s been 5 years since.

Few top take-out’s include:

Page 7 - In many cases, rather than beginning a web-browsing session with the static old media properties like The New York Times, people are using social networks as an entry point of sorts to the Internet”

Page 13 - “For example, 2010 was the year of the location-based check-in, thank for fast-growing services such as Foursquare, Yelp, Google Places, and many others.  Consumers use these services to publicly broadcast the businesses they;ve visited, often syndicating check-ins to their Facebook and Twitter feeds”

Page 22 - “Social marketing has to be embedded into your company and integrated into your processes.  It should not be in a silo, cut off from everything else you’re doing.  If your company treats its social marketing strategy as a disconnected and unimportant part of the organization, you are not going to get far in building relationships with your customers and improving the bottom line”

Page 59 - “Most experts will tell you that using social media us all about content.  Although there’s a good deal of truth in that, that’s not the whole story.  It's kind of like the old philosophical question:  If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Page 61 - “If you’re looking to increase engagement, I’d recommend encouraging your audience to comment on your brand content rather than to simply like it.  Most people view the act of hitting the like button as an easy way to say they enjoyed a piece of content.  After all, louis society is so fast paced that saving the four seconds it takes to write “Nice post!” is worth something to the average consumer”

Page 87 - “Although curating  the content of others can gain you a following, it’s simply not the same thing as creating your own brand content.  Curation tends to take less time than creating your own content, but it tends to be lower risk, lower reward”

Page 89 - “Although content is king when it comes to engagement, it’s the king of a pretty small kingdom unless you marry it with caring about your customers and making their happiness your focal point”

Page 100 - “Listening is one of the most important things a brand can do online.  If your brand is just broadcasting its own agenda, it isn’t passive listening and active listening.  Passive listening involves allowing your customers to speak without interruption”

Page 114 - “Traditional new product development consists of market research, trend analytics, and focus groups.  Kodak realized that its social platforms could be of major assistance in its product development efforts, helping the camera maker deliver better products with a great insight into demand”

Page 138 -”There is  a fine line between being too passionate about the brand and just passionate enough to be able to compromise.  The ideal community manager should, of course, be closer to the latter”

Page 139 - “When you’re hiring someone to be in command of your social media presence, make sure you’re looking for the right qualities in candidates.  Passion is arguably the most important quality to look for in a people-facing role such as customer service or community management.  If someone isn’t passionate in the role, most people the manager speaks to on behalf of your brand will realize that passion is missing.  Moreover, enthusiasm is contagious: if you have passionate, excited people managing your social marketing, that passion will spread to your followers.  In turn, they will feel energized by the product and the vision behind it, rather than just feeling that they’re being sold to”

Page 143 - “Not long ago, marketers had the pleasure of actually leaving work and “turning off” until the next work day, but this has changed, with many companies giving their staffers smartphones so that they can be reacted at all hours.  Our customers, too are online and engaging all the time.  If you want credibility as a brand, you have to be ready to respond as soon as humanly possible”

Page 144 - “Brandie Feuer. Director of Marketing for Las Vegas Tropicana Hotel makes a terrific point: If customers tweet at your brand, they are expecting a response from the moment they send it to you. This is a large contrast to the older paradigm: When customers wrote to your brand via postal mail, they didn’t reasonably expect an answer for a few weeks”

Page 148 - “When it comes to content ideation, it’s a good idea to have a good group brainstorming session to determine the type of content.  Try to bring a diverse group of people together.  Your community manager, head of product development, event coordinator, head of marketing, and PR team are all good people to include”

Page 201 - “Given the rising importance of bloggers, your relationship with them should not be treated as a tacked-on part of your PR strategy to get some last-second buzz in case all your national print pitches fall through:  they should be a meaningful part of your strategy.  Afte rallk, your social marketing channels provide a great opportunity to further engage with and promote members of the press”

Page 215 - “Bloggers are real people who have morphed into experts - some more credible than others, but experts nonetheless.  I think that it is up to brand sto do that they can to make certain their ambassadors and representatives are worthy of that title”

Page 232 - “One of the highest-return developments in corporate America’s recent history is the rise of smartphones in the workplace.  Suddenly, key personnel became tethered to the office even when they were off the clock”

You can purchase a copy of BORN TO BLOG: Building Your Blog for Personal and Business Success One Post at a Time here, follow author Mark W. Schaefer on Twitter here, visit Mark's website BusinessesGROW here, connect with Mark W.Schaefer on LinkedIN here.

You can follow Stanford Smith on Twitter here, visit his website Pushing Social here, and connect with him on LinkedIN here.

You can purchase a copy of  GOING SOCIAL: Excite Customers, Generate Buzz, and Energize Your Brand with the Power of Social Media here, follow Jeremy Goldman on Twitter here, and visit his website here.

Thank you,

Praz aka Prashant

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