Weblogs As A Game – Musings On The Levers (Long Post)

I blogged previously about Michigan Business School’ s foray into corporate blogging by having MBA students help a small enterprise. Real kudos to Bud Gibson and the others involved in this bootcamp effort.

Bud’s post made me pause to think about and write down what I have learned about corporate blogging, building blog traffic, getting cited by opinion leaders, etc. My thoughts are based on personal experience, analysis of best practices in other blogs, some loose benchmarking, and search for cases which defy what most people think of as best practices. My thoughts are a work in progress (it is hard to do this kind of research "as a side effort"). I have tried conducting some controlled experiments to see what factors result in different "outcomes". I use the word "outcomes" because blind recommendations don’t work in blogging – not everyone has the same goals in what they want for their blog. People should just be aware of how different levers work and then experiment and apply what works for them.

Here are some thoughts (I reserve the right to change my mind!):

1. Some people say write original content:  If one wants traffic, then perhaps the statement is mostly true, but then I would qualify this to say that one needs to write original content from time to time. I have found that I can get away with this on my blog. I have seen more successful bloggers (if there is even such a measure of any blog being better than another) do it too.
2. Some people say post frequently: I don’t think this is a necessary condition, but posting semi-annually is probably too infrequent. There are bloggers like Ed Sim (venture capitalist) that are reputed for having quality, thoughtful posts on a less frequent basis.
3. Anecdotal experience on getting cited by experts or uber bloggers: Offline networking works best for me. My wife and I met Virgina Postrel a couple months back (her husband is a business school professor with my wife). When Virginia cited my blog a couple of times in the past, there were thousands of hits to the blog posts.
4. Some people say quality of writing matters: Poor writing style doesn’t help, but I suspect good writing style may not be as important as some people think. I have seen people write way better than I do (not hard to find I might add) and have less traffic. I have also seen myself write great posts (or similar posts on another platform) that get little traffic compared to poor posts I have written that fit into the blogosphere better. What I have found is that contributing to dialogue matters more (in the way of using trackbacks, writing something about things currently on people’s minds in the news, having an angle, having a different takeaway, etc.).
5. Some people say commenting on other people’s blogs helps: I have found that trackbacks tend to work better by 2X or so. My writing style was largely the same on my old Tripod blog (ignore the ads that weren’t there previously), but that blog didn’t support inbound or outbound trackback. When I shifted to my new blog on Typepad (well writing efficiency went up), I found that traffic and commenting went up very measurably in about 1/4 of the time.
6. Some people say having commenting capabilities on one’s blog helps a lot: Not sure on this one although intuitively I would like this to be true because I like to respond to people (whether by email or response post). People like the concept of intimacy. While I feel having commenting can’t hurt you if you know how to respond to it effectively (see Bob Lutz’s blog at GM), it may be sensitive to how much clout one already holds (by way of what position you hold, what company you work for, what name you’ve established prior to blogging, how much traffic you already have). Seth Godin is a perfect example of someone that does not have commenting on his blog (yet he supports inbound trackback), and he has something like 2%+ of all Typepad traffic on the Internet (as reported by Alexa).
7. Some people say use blog "electrification programs" like Carnival of the Capitalists: There is a good account of how traffic peaks for the host (I couldn’t locate it offhand – was done earlier this year). There are also sites that report increases in temporary blog traffic as the linked-to blogs. How sticky the readers are after the click-through, and how many of those readers become continued blog readers varies.
8. Some people say don’t use blog magnet or traffic explosion programs: Here you get readers that aren’t sticky. Likely true. But if your model isn’t based on stickiness (e.g., impulse buy), then heck, it’s another tool to be aware of. The tool is not my style for this endeavor.
9. Be aware of the mechanics around "The Tipping Point": If the goal is to get word around virally, here’s a great post on how a blog post got diffused through the net.
10. Some people like Robert Scoble say use granular posts so that word can spread around: Conceptually, his idea sounds good to me having been an engineer (breaking things down into components and thinking about the concepts of ideaviruses also make sense). However, to be frank, I have not researched whether this is statistically true and borne out in actual data. Requiring granularity strikes me as a little weird though because political blogs are some of the most popular blogs, and these can be the wordiest/most packed blogs out there at times. That said, if one recounts how blogs became legitimized in the political area (e.g., in Hugh Hewitt’s book on Blogs), there does seem to be a role for distributing concise fragments of blog ideas.
11. Some people say write a manifesto that can be passed around: Robert Scoble’s manifesto and Seth Godin’s free pdf book on unleashing the ideavirus come to mind. Need I say more here. Manifestos can really work if you can invest the time and find an angle from which to write.
12. Learn about how things like search engines and the folksonomy software interact with blog traffic: This is probably a moving target given how rapidly blogs and search software are evolving. My current anecdotal experience is that this works better than commenting and about the same as trackbacks (in some cases much better than trackbacks). How sticky the traffic is … well, my impression is that trackback methods are stickier, but then I don’t have good sources I can cite to back this up. A little bit gut feel. Not a real strong gut feel yet.
13. Link policy: No conclusions here, but it does have an impact. Need to think about this one. I posted my policy here. Jennifer Rice has some good thoughts on her site (see link to her link via my post).
14. Placement of sideboard items: No conclusions here. Stickiness seems to be influenced by how the blog is laid out, and prior concepts about websites do not necessarily seem to carry over to the blogging world. On a somewhat related subject related to layout, consider Seth Godin’s post on having a sticky top line post.
15. Hosted blogging platforms need to make advances to support corporate users: YES! Please do. RSS integration needs to be easier (e.g., adding Feedburner). Being able to track what people click (as opposed to having to add some funky php code) needs to be easier. Being able to add things like "email this post to a friend" should be there. Being able to automatically suggest other posts should be available. Being able to subscribe to commenting updates should be available to readers. Being able to interface with email updates (e.g., via Bloglet) should be there. Adding search engine capability … the list goes on and on. Without going into agonizing detail on this, there are improvements that seem like they can be made to improve viral spread and ability of bloggers to create stickiness. Unfortunately for the end user, hosted blogging platform R&D doesn’t look like it’s going into this area yet. Bloggers currently need computer science degrees and versions of HTML babblefish decoder rings to add these features in the aftermarket.

I have many more thoughts on this subject, but I just wanted to bang out some of the blogging levers that immediately popped into my mind. I guess my main thoughts are that depending on the game or business model one wants to create, then there are levers that are consistent or inconsistent with those goals. There’s no one way to skin a cat.

Hope this helps some future Michigan MBA students get some additional ideas.

Steve Shu

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