Blogging, SEO, web trends, google keywords and other geeky stuff.

Corporate Blogs Aren’t Trusted: Forrester Research

Posted: December 31st, 2008 | Author: Agitationist | Filed under: blogging | Tags: , , , | 8 Comments »

Do you hear that? It’s the sound of a crowd of marketers, strategists, consultants, PR flacks and “social media gurus” scrambling for cover.

December 10th report from Forrester Research is making some people very uncomfortable. And it confirms everything I learned about corporate blogs as a media strategist.

(click to view)

(click for full size)

According to the report, only 16% of consumers who have read corporate blogs consider them trustworthy. That puts them below all other information sources, including wikis, online classifieds, message boards, even direct mail.

Dead last. More people would trust a random stranger to do an appendectomy than take advice from a corporate blog, no matter how cute or clever.

But of course, as Josh Bernhoff from Forrester notes, Everybody thinks their blog is an exception.”

To which might be added, “everyone thinks they are of above-average intelligence”.

So what advice are the pros giving?

Debbie Weil, the author of The Corporate Blogging Book, takes the “I’ve been telling you this all along” approach, stating:

I wish more corporate types wading into social media would read my book ($6.49 on Amazon). Especially Chapter 7 on how to write an effective corporate blog.

Keep making lemons, Debbie. Keep making lemons.

Meanwhile, the Blog Council - there’s a Blog Council? – exercises their irony muscles (emphasis added):

What’s clear is that while there is a lot of work still to do, corporate blogs do work. The report specifically highlighted some examples of corporate blogs that are trustworthy — DellRubbermaid, and Microsoft (all Blog Council members, by the way) — because they put their customer first and exist to help solve their problems.

The Blog Council: building trust in their own blog by shilling for their members. Well done.

Max Kalehoff, marketing VP at Clickable, states Forrester “gets it wrong”, because:

While the data selected to base the report are great for generating a headline, they’re mostly irrelevant. Blogs are a both a communications channel AND a medium.

[...]

Here’s an analogy: Do you trust telephones? No. But you may eventually build trust with the people with whom you talk and do business with via the telephone.

You’re right, Max: people don’t trust telephones. That’s why they invented Caller ID.  So we could screen out untrusted sources…like, say, your clients.

So basically the responses have been: “it’s the wrong question” or “it’s a flawed study” or “that’s not us”.

That’s fine for an academic circle-jerk debate amongst marketers and strategists. But in this economy, this report could actually cost some people their livelihoods. As such, it should be taken seriously.

So what’s a corporate blog/social media team to do?

Well, for a start:

  • Don’t force (or allow) your writers to recycle press releases. Let the people you hired to be creative be creative.
  • Start offering something anything of value. 
  • Question why you’ve got a blog in the first place, and if the answer is “because we have to”, put someone else in charge. 
  • Have enough guts to tell the Chief X Officer that they just don’t get this stuff
  • Explain that always being in sales mode doesn’t work in this medium. The company is not paying by the inch or the minute.
  • Challenge corporate insularity. Solicit contributions and feedback (positive and negative) from real people, and value it when you get it.
  • Explain the concept of institutional mistrust to the hand that feeds you.

If you get fired for it, start a blog, tell your story, publish your cease-and-desist letters, get a publicist, and start a consulting firm.

Either way, you win.

Bookmark and Share

1100 Free WordPress Themes

Posted: December 30th, 2008 | Author: Agitationist | Filed under: blogging, tools | Tags: , , , , | No Comments »

In my efforts to find just the right design for this site, I’ve spotted quite a few excellent sources of free WordPress themes. Here are 1100 of them. 

Well, actually 1103, but 1100 just sounds better.

A quick note before diving in: it’s always good practice to seek out the original developer of a theme and download from them, rather than a third-party site. Unscrupulous scumbags have been known to insert malicious code and repackage WordPress themes for download. Buyer (or in this case downloader) beware.

Developers:

  • Upstart Blogger has a real love for minimalist design, and an admirable knack for blending experimentation with usability. The site also contains some great blogging tips and resources, especially with regards to increasing traffic. 7 great themes here.
  • 5thirtyone.com presents two very modern, clean, spacious themes. Take a look at the bottom of the page and mouse-over “Select Project” for full info and live demos.
  • Plaintxt.org has created Sandbox, which can function as a plain vanilla theme, but is more powerful as a framework on which other themes can be built. Its underlying code is built with a focus on semantic markup, making it truly adaptable if you know a bit of CSS. Their live demo of 6 Sandbox themes lives here. Last year’s Sandbox Designs Competition resulted in these 46 themes.
  • Performancing gives us 10 themes it calls the “world’s best”. I don’t know that I’d go that far, but they are nice. Live preview with theme switcher available.
  • Devlounge has created five clean, customizable themes with plenty of whitespace; very nice work.

Directories:

  • WordPress Theme Directory, WordPress.org’s own repository of themes, launched in mid-2008. The site could use better categorization and search of their 532 free themes (and counting), but all provide live demos.
  • Smashing Magazine presents four galleries, totaling 234 themes in all styles and categories. Under “all posts”, scroll down to “WordPress Themes 1, 2, 3, 4″. At the very least you should find some inspiration here, as well as great articles on design, CSS, Photoshop, fonts, and more.
  • Speckyboy gives us this post of 43 “Advanced, Groundbreaking” themes, which he has helpfully categorized and labeled two-column, three-column, magazine, etc., with links to original developers.
  • If you still haven’t what you need, stop by Top WP Themes for 210 more choices. This site is well organized and categorized, so if you know you need two-column, widget-ready, magazine style with left sidebar, you can jump right to it. Live previews are included.

Your turn: if you have any favorites of your own, either directories or developers (including yourself), please add links in the comments.

Bookmark and Share

1500 More Reasons Twitter Must Die

Posted: December 29th, 2008 | Author: Agitationist | Filed under: buzzwords, tools | Tags: , , , , , , | 10 Comments »

In a previous post titles “15 Reasons Twitter Must Die“, I accused Twitter users of oversharing the petty, mundane details of their sad, pointless lives. 

Incensed Twitterers jumped to its defense. Twitter was a useful tool, they said, and wasn’t just reducing conversation to idle noise. It could be used for sharing ideas, networking, and gauging the zeitgeist.

Thinking I might have been a bit hard on the Twittersphere, I thought I’d revisit the issue. Using the much-celebrated (though hardly revolutionary) search technology recently added to Twitter, I set out to see just how illuminating the average Tweet was.

The idea that Twitter seemed to frequently be a report on what the user was having for lunch seemed to particularly gall the Twitterers who wrote in. So let’s see how many tweets in the last 24 hours concerned the topic of “lunch”.

Off we go.

Well it appears we’ve found the limit of Twitter search: 1500 results. And in the time it took to write that sentence, 16 more results were added.

Keep in mind that as I write this, it is 8:00 am Central Time, which means that unless Greenland is taking an early break, it is not lunch hour in any populated area on Earth. 

Just a few sample results:

technobohemiaPlaying WOW, but craving Chinese food…when will it be lunchtime?
half a minute ago
SamShepherdwent to M&S to get lunch and came back with sushi. I’ve never eaten sushi. don’t know what inspired that
1 minute ago
dihsjpwaiting for lunch
2 minutes ago
qwghlmRight, feeling vaguely progressive and have tidied the living room. Now for lunch
2 minutes ago
Rebecca_Agralunch
4 minutes ago
einerleiback to library…finally, after having a nice lunch with a friend
4 minutes ago
WehtamBack home in sunny Manchester. Off to cash checks after lunch.
4 minutes ago
mauricio_kimuraHungry and ready to go for lunch !!!
5 minutes ago
timwastedhaving some lunch and watching bad tv – but at least its warm inside
6 minutes ago
Jedbeck2 hours til lunch with my girls
6 minutes ago
Knickiis going to skin some potatos for lunch.
8 minutes ago
eburgosgarciaback from lunch & hairdresser..
9 minutes ago
[Incidentally, that last one was a gentleman. Do men generally refer to their "hairdresser" where you come from?]

The disturbing tendency here is toward externalizing what should remain, in a reasonably civilized society, the inner monologue. This is partly the medium’s fault for restricting itself to 140 characters. Even Oscar Wilde would have a hard time coming up with 20 pithy quips a day under those conditions.

Now, to make this experiment somewhat scientific, we need a control phrase.  If “lunch” brings up a list of 1500 mundane tweets that no one needs to see, what word or phrase will reveal the intelligent, illuminating, useful tweets I keep hearing about?

This where you come in. Please make your suggestions in the comments, and if I don’t hear from you, have a great lunch.

Bookmark and Share