This week I’ve had some interesting conversations with clients about their social media strategy.

During a discussion on  blogging, one of our clients pointed out that everything they see on blogs is BORING, longwinded, and is more like stream of consciousness thoughts vs. useful information.

If you Google “Why Blogs Fail”, you will get more than 89 million links to articles, many of them blog posts to this very topic.  The reason blogs fail is not a secret, and some statistics claim  that 95% of them do.

• Blogs fail because the organization has not made a real commitment to resources
• Blogs fail because there is no clear content strategy
• Blogs fail because the author doesn’t know if anyone is listening

What is considered blog success?
If your blog

• contributes something of value and demonstrates your expertise regularly (at least once per week)
• set you apart from your competition
• has visitors who read your content (how many depends on what share of the audience you want)
• gets comments and starts conversations

you can feel pretty good that your blog is going in the right direction.

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In the new book, The Yahoo! Style Guide, bloggers are advised to “write for the world.” We’re reminded that the web is a worldwide medium and “site visitors probably come from more than one country and more than one culture. Collectively, they probably speak several languages.”

I review the analytics for this site on a regular basis and am often intrigued to see the far-reaching range that posts can have. This past month visits came from 47 countries/territories and 23 languages. (Drilling down a little further I could even see that one recent post was picked up and cited on a blog in Brazil and then viewed most heavily in Sao Paulo.)

So what’s a blogger to do?

• You can start by following five best practices from the style guide: 1) Keep the sentence structure simple, 2) Include “signposts”: words that help readers see how the parts of a sentence relate, 3) Eliminate ambiguity, 4) Avoid uncommon words and non-literal usages, and 5) Rewrite text that doesn’t translate literally.

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In a new post by Denise Wakeman she suggests repurposing your blog posts into different formats to “get more exposure and more value from the time you’ve initially invested in creating the content. Not to mention that you can drive more traffic back to your home base.”

What can you do with the post once its been published on your site? Denise suggests turning the content into different formats such as “reports, white papers, articles, slide shows, videos, podcasts, teleseminars, ebooks, etc.”

One place where you can repurpose your content is in your email newsletter by including a few lines in a short piece and linking back to your blog. That way you’ve not only repurposed the content but possibly have taken your non-blog reading client to your posts and demonstrated to them what they’ve been missing. Include too, a call to action to to sign-up to receive updates about your posts via rss feed or by email subscription.

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Social media can have an impact on health care organizations, whether the organization has proactive programs or passively chooses to ignore it. By doing nothing, hospitals are at more legal risk because no clear guidelines articulate how staff should participate in social communities, how doctors share medical advice on blogs and where patients get medical information.

Andrew Cohen of Forum One, recently wrote about the session he attended at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference, which identified legal issues as the top concerns of hospital administrators. Second to this is “lack of comfort with social media by administrators as well as staff…”

With patients helping themselves to information on websites that may or may not be good information, hospitals and other healthcare organizations like lifecare facilities have an opportunity to help guide patients and their families to good information and support.

In fact, every department needs to consider how social media effects them including human resources, legal, marketing, IT, patient services, and each and every medical specialty.   In 2009, we met with many of the SVPs  at a major teaching hospital north of Boston, Lahey Clinic, to give them a sense of what they need to think about.

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Here’s the dilemma: all blog content isn’t created equal. On the one hand we’re told people should write in a casual manner, be transparent, say what’s on their mind. But when does sharing become oversharing?  Take the case of conductor Leonard Slatkin who was “pelted by brutal reviews” and bowed out of the production in humiliation after he blogged that not only was he new to “La Traviata,” but that he was”somewhat naïve in this repertoire.”

A few years back, Curt Schilling started blogging on 38Pitches.com about every pitch and what was going through his mind.  Managers told him point-blank—stop.  Give away the mechanics and you risk losing the awe of your fans.

In business, it’s not a company’s mission to tell customers the most inner workings of their organization; product development secrets, what regions they’re thinking about expanding into. Companies keep those cards close to their chest and divulge the information when and if it’s time.

If the conductor or the baseball player’s blog had been treated like any other media outlet, the organization could have nipped those blog posts in the bud. Ideally they would have had a content strategy and coached the writer on what’s acceptable and appropriate to write about. And more importantly, what’s not. They wouldn’t have been forced to censor.

Transparent, authentic voices—yes. But within guidelines.

There’s been a lot of interest in Gretchen Rubin’s book, The Happiness Project which was published in late 2009 and became a #1 New York Times Bestseller. The book is a memoir of the year Gretchen spent “test-driving the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from the popular culture about how to be happy–from Aristotle to Martin Seligman to Thoreau to Oprah.”

As a blogger, and someone who derives a great deal of pleasure and happiness from blogging, I loved the part of the book where Gretchen describes launching her blog.

While my blog posts usually have more of a business focus on topics such as social media marketing, I wanted to take this opportunity to share Gretchen’s perspectives on blogging—mostly because I identify. And, because I often talk with people who are contemplating starting a blog and wondering how it will be for them. These passages describe my experiences so perfectly. I believe that if you want to blog, once you get through the initial steps,  you too will reap the benefits which come from blogging.

In Gretchen Rubin’s words from The Happiness Project:

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If you’ve thought that having a working knowledge of YouTube covered your video bases, you’ll be in for a wonderful treat by reading Steve Garfield’s new book, Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business—which lets you in on some of the best kept secrets out there.

I was completely engrossed in Steve’s book which I read in one day, only stopping to try out many of the things he references. Within a short period of time,  I found myself streaming video from my iPhone on qik, creating blog posts on posterous, developing unique videos on animoto, researching mics for iPhones, checking-out vimeo, blip.tv, how to create a playlist of our videos on youtube, making a screencast on jing.

By half-way through the book I was convinced how no social media marketing campaign will be complete without video.

While high-end video cameras and experienced videographers are certainly one way to go, Steve demonstrates how by having an interest in shooting video and a wide range of tools to choose from, video is within every business’ reach regardless of your budget. Above all, Steve demonstrates how interest and passion will be your ticket.

Steve is right here to tell you about his book himself (in his video, of course!) And after viewing, keep reading our exclusive interview.

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New Year’s Eve is always a time to reflect back on the past year, and this year we have the added bonus of being able to look back on the past decade.

The years 2000-2009 have been amass with great changes in our technological landscape. Today I went searching for timelines and found an excellent one on PoynterOnline where David Shedden has been keeping track of the history of new media and online journalism from 1969 to 2009. If you have the time to read through the entire timeline you’ll be amazed by where we’ve come in 40 years. It’s striking to see what changes have evolved in this past decade, and even within the past 3-4 years. The growth and changes are truly remarkable.

Timeline: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009

I don’t think anyone could have accurately predicted in December of 1999 where this past decade would have taken us technologically. I won’t even venture to guess what changes we’ll see in the years ahead, and I have no doubt that they will be awe-inspiring and continue to change the way we communicate.

Best Wishes for a Happy & Healthy New Year, and here’s to looking ahead for a new decade filled with new and exciting technological advances!

MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Social Marketing Benchmark Report due out in January will no doubt be a valuable resource in shedding light on the future of of social marketing. I’m looking forward to reading it in its entirety.

From the chart published on their website and the downloadable executive summary, I was intrigued to read how even though blogging is described as a more effective social marketing tactic, it’s used by fewer organizations than other less effective tactics because of the “effort required.” This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this argument, and while some will defend the decision to using “fast and easy” 140 character tweets in place of taking the time to write a more substantial 350-500 word blog post, I think it’s time to demystify that blogging is too time consuming and effortful.

With proper planning blogging as part of your business’ social media strategy will become second nature and require less effort. What steps and processes will make for a successful blog strategy?

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Three social media tips which may seem obvious on the surface, but can easily be overlooked.

Tip #1: Our Minds aren’t Computers or Smartphones
Like great writers of all times, carry a notebook with you wherever you go. 
When an idea or a line comes to you, write it down, otherwise you may lose the pearls of wisdom you had been writing in your head. 

My favorite notebooks are moleskin. I have them in lots of different colors and sizes. If you’re not familiar with moleskin their claim to fame is how for two centuries they’ve been “the legendary notebook of artists, writers, intellectuals and travelers.” I keep a small one inside my bag with a mini pilot G-2 pen. I’m always pulling the journal out and making a notation. Recently I’ve started using my iphone for quick notes too, but sometimes there’s nothing like a quick scribble in my moleskin. For some inspirational uses of moleskin journals check out these stories.

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