Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Corporate blogging is not an either-or dilemma. There’s a way to have your cake and eat it too: you can write your own blog yet not have to spend hours or days on it...

... You’re a busy CEO wearing many hats and with not enough hours in the day. As the founder of a small business startup, you know that writing your own thought-leadership blog will bring fresh content, a leadership perspective, greater transparency and more customers to your door.

But, as with most decisions you make, you have to decide whether to write your own blog or to outsource it. Writing it yourself requires massive amounts of time – time that you can better spend working on your core talents to move the business forward. Outsourcing your blog to a ghost writer may result in loss of authenticity – how would your customers feel when they find out you don’t write your own blog?...

Represented by the Inc 500, the highest growth small businesses get content marketing as a means to expand their reach and increase profitable sales when compared to their larger, more established Fortune 500 counterparts.

These small business (SMB) organizations must be leaner and more effective at maximizing each aspect of their marketing mix to compete with larger, more complex firms. Content marketing helps them build trust by offering the type of promotion-free information their customers actively seek during the purchase process.

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth research, entitled "2012 Inc 500 Social Media Settles In" reveals that Inc 500 companies continue to blog at greater rates than their Fortune 500 peers. In 2012, 44% of the Inc 500 had a corporate blog, an increase of 7% from 2011. By contrast, 28% of the Fortune 500 had a blog in 2012. While this is an increase of 5% from 2011, the Fortune 500’s blogging rate still lags that of the Inc 500....

Blogs are more influential than social networks in shaping consumers’ opinions and purchase decisions, according to Technorati’s 2013 Digital Influence Report. Even so, brands seem to be investing more on other social channels, particularly Facebook, than on blogging.

Below, additional findings from the 2013 Digital Influence Report, based on surveys conducted among 1,200 consumers, 150 top brand marketers, and 6,000 digital influencers. When making decisions about what to buy, consumers rank blogs as the third most influential digital resource (31.1%), behind retail sites (56%) and brand sites (34%)....

It’s been nearly a month since Bloggers to Watch in 2013 was published. We had a fantastic response, including some compelling recommendations via the comments section and around the web.

This post presents all the bloggers that people have highlighted over the past few weeks....

There are two kind of writers: planners and pantsers.

Planners (or, sometimes, plotters, if you’re talking about fiction) already know everything they’re going to say, at least to some extent. They know in advance what their topics are going to be. They’ve already written at least a few test headlines. They may have even jotted down some notes or subheads for the post. They already know what keywords they’re gunning for and they already know what sort of call to action they want at the end. They do this because generally a good blog post contains these elements.

Pantser is shorthand for the phrase flying by the seat of your pants, which (for my ESL friends) is an English idiom for improvisation. So if you fly by the seat of your pants, then you’re a pantser, see?

Neither way of writing is better than the other when the end result is good. However, if the end result is not as good as it should be (no, you’re not a special exception, I’m talking about you), however, pantsing is more likely to blame than planning, in my opinion....