In-Your-Neck-of-the-Woods Blogging for Business

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Listening to the morning weather report on TV, I often hear Al Roker say, “That’s what’s going on around the country. Here’s what’s happening in your neck of the woods”.

In blogging for business, that Roker model is a good one to follow, we teach at Say It For You. Your blog is a way to educate leads and customers by helping them stay generally informed on industry trends and developments, Hubspot explains. Once you are perceived as an expert or “thought leader” in that industry or profession, you can then go on to explain your own products and services, and your very own “neck of the woods” approach.

Hubspot offers examples of blogs that describe the general industry climate before bringing matters down to a local level:

Manufacturing
Manufacturing blogs are used to inform readers about best practices news, and trends in manufacturing, supply chain distribution, and logistics. The Marlin Steel blog, for example, talks about what robotics and automation mean for US manufacturing jobs (national picture), but also provides information on how to use specific steel tools.

Healthcare
In Six Month Smiles’ Chair Time blog, industry experts, doctors, and hygienists write about developments in their field. Potential customers can learn about specific services they may be interested in paying for on a local level.

Ecommerce
The M.M. LaFleur blog discusses general issues of women in the workplace, but then narrows down to specific advice about what to wear to different business occasions.

In fact, the function of “news” in blogs is to inform readers of “what’s-going-on-and-how-do-we-fit-in”. In a blog post, you might cite material from the news story, relating it to new developments in your own industry or field. The idea is not to regurgitate what’s already been said, but to showcase your own expertise and experience, offering a new perspective on that topic.

According to strategist Neen James in Speaker Magazine, a Subject Matter Expert or SME (pronounced “smee”) knows something. A thought leader, by contrast, is known for something. In their blog content, business owners and professional practitioners can first bring their audiences up to speed on general industry issues and developments. Through “in-your-neck-of-the-woods blogging for business,” they then become known for translating that knowledge into usable, actionable steps their readers can follow.

 

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NASA Isn’t Looking for Astronauts

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As a speaking agent, James Marshall Reilly explains in the book One Great Speech, his biggest challenge is locating and identifying “experts” in varying fields, based on the requests of buyers and event sponsors. Reilly is looking for people as yet unknown in the speaking world. But don’t be confused, he cautions – when Bank of America wants to pay for a speaker, they’re not looking for a banker or financial services expert. The State Department isn’t looking for a diplomat, and NASA isn’t seeking a speaker who’s an astronaut. These organizations have plenty of their own in-house experts.

So what are these mega-company meeting planners seeking?’ Reilly says it’s someone with:

  • a unique perspective
  • a new idea
  • new information
  • passion
  • a story that resonates

Reilly’s insights sure resonated with me. As blog content writers, those are the very qualities we’re aiming for in helping our clients’ stories resonate with their target audiences.

Unique perspective
The typical website explains what products and services the company offers, who the “players” are and in what geographical area they operate. The better websites give at least a taste of the corporate culture and some of the owners’ core beliefs.  It’s left to the continuously renewed business blog writing, though, to “flesh out” the intangibles, those things that make a company stand out from its peers. In other words, it’s the blog that gives readers context within which to process the information.

But, from whose perspective? We can use blogging to offer searchers the relevant, up to date information they came to find, giving it to them in short paragraphs and in conversational style, then leading them to take action. But it’s crucial to present information from the customer’s perspective, not ours. Where we are is never the starting point!

Passion resonates
When online readers find a blog, one question they need answered is “Who lives here?” In terms of achieving Influencer status – it takes passion, and it takes opinion, we’ve learned at Say It For You. Sharing the obvious slant may be vociferous, but if it’s not passionate, it won’t resonate with readers.

Information
Very much like the folks most likely to be in attendance at a Bank of America or NASA conference, blog site visitors are already interested in the subject at hand and may already know quite a bit of information on that subject. While there’s very little likelihood that the “startling statistics” you offer to capture readers’ attention will be “new news”, facts and statistics need to be “unpackaged” and put into perspective.

No, Bank of America may not be looking for a speaker with a finance degree, and NASA may not hire an astronaut for the keynoter at their conference. But if you can turn information into stories that resonate in your blog posts, online readers may just “hire” -YOU!

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In Blogging for Business, Data is a Commodity, But Insight is Gold

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Writing in the Indianapolis Business Journal, Samantha Julka recalls a professor telling her that “Data is a commodity; it’s the insight that’s gold.” Anyone can create a survey and a pivot table, Julka observes…but real researchers pull insights! When numbers are tossed around, people generally view it as vital information, she says, but people may not know what to do with that information. As a consumer, Julka points out, I don’t want to read raw data; I want someone to tell me what the data means. The really juicy stuff, she says, makes people think and helps them make decisions.

Oh, so true, as I’ve been teaching at Say It For You. Citing statistics and other data is certainly one tactic I teach Indianapolis blog content writers to use as a way to capture readers’ attention. But my own experience as a business blogger has shown me that statistics, even the startling sort, aren’t enough to create positive results for any marketing blog.

In fact, the ultimate success of any blog marketing effort depends on readers taking action. In that realm, blogging has one enormous advantage over traditional “push marketing” tactics, in that it delivers information to visitors who are already interested in a particular product or service. Still, that’s not enough.

The blog content needs to address the “So what?” within the data, so that the statistics and facts not only are true, but feel true to your online visitors. In a way, I realize in retrospect, my own years of experience crafting messages for different businesses and professional practices might very well fall under the job descriptor “translator/interpreter”.

Whether it’s business-to-business blog writing or business-to-consumer blog writing, the blog content itself needs to use opinion to clarify what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers. In other words, blog posts will go from information-dispensing to offering the business owner’s (or the professional’s, or the organizational executive’s) unique perspective on issues related to the search topic.

Several years ago, I read about a study performed at the University of Pennsylvania, in which participants were divided into three groups. Each individual was given $5 which they could choose to donate to a certain charitable organization after they learned more about it. A presentation was made to each group. Group A was given all kinds of statistics about the charity – size, budget, staff, funding sources, etc. Group B heard a story about a young girl who was helped by that organization. Group C was given both data and the story. Which group ended up donating the largest amount? You guessed it – the one that had heard the story, because the story gave meaning and insight into the data.

In blogging for business, data is a commodity, but insight – well, that’s gold!

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Blog Posts and Bradford Hill Criteria

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blog metrics

Back in 1965, Sir Austin Bradford Hill published a paper about the dose-response relationship. If X causes Y, the more of X you have, the more Y will result, is the concept.. While Bradford Hill’s original work related to disease causation, his methods are often used to evaluate cause/effect links in other fields.

Why is causation such an important research activity? “Causation influences decisions related to prognosis, diagnosis and treatment,” researchers found, and “findings also teach us about the functioning of healthy systems”. The authors point out that even though a condition may be found to respond to a certain treatment, that does not necessarily uncover the cause. Of that your headache!)

At Say It For You, our blog content writers know that consistently posting content that is accurate, dependable, and actionable attracts new customers and clients and keeps them coming back. But knowing whether, and how well, your tactics are doing in terms of accomplishing these goals involves verifying the “dose-response relationship” between the content and the results.

Three of the nine criteria Sir Bradford Hill proposed are:

1. Strength (effect size).
2. Consistency (reproducibility)
3. Specificity: (Causation is likely if there is a very specific population at a specific site)

Sometimes, Chief Marketing Officers forget to use the techniques they rely on with other forms of marketing when it comes to blogs, Heidi Cohen of the Content Marketing Institute observes. Metrics are needed to determine whether you’ve achieved your goals. Things worth “counting” include:

  • Visitors (where do they come from? Where specifically do they go on your site?)
  • Page views (where do visitors click to and where do they leave?)
  • Time on site (shows how engaged they are)
  • Signups for an RSS feed or newsletter

Different topics and different blog formats (even days of the week for publishing your blog) can then be tested Bradford Hill-style for strength, consistency and specificity.

To what extent, exactly, is your marketing blog “causing” marketing results? Bradford Hill can help you be in the know!

 

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For Humor and Allusions in Blogs, Make Sure Readers Don’t “Huh?”

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“Know your audience. Not everyone will think every joke is funny,” advises Michael Strecker in the book Young Comic’s Guide to Telling Jokes. Strecker’s advice applies to blog content writing, as we’ve learned through experience at Say it For You.

One reason certain jokes fall flat with certain audiences, I’m convinced, is not that those jokes are offensive or unfunny. It’s that many jokes are based on a cultural allusion that is simply not familiar to that audience.

A cultural allusion is an indirect reference to a person, place, or idea that is not directly described. Here are a few of Strecker’s jokes that will be funny to you only if you happen to recognize the allusion to history, literature, mathematics, geology, or the Bible…….

  • What was the sea creatures’ strike called? Octopi Wall Street.
    (The allusion is to the protest movement against economic inequality that started in New York City and which was named Occupy Wall Street.)
  • Who invented the ball point pen? The Incas.
    (The allusion is to the ancient Incan empire in the country of Peru.)
  • Why was the precious metal so silly? It was fool’s gold.
    (The allusion is to the metal pyrite, which has no value, but which resembles gold in its appearance. Many treasure-seekers foolishly mistook pyrite for gold.)
  • How did the dentist pay for his vision exam? An eye for a tooth.
    (The allusion is to a passage from the Bible about punishing a man who injures another – “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth…)
  • What do you do at a math party? East pi and square dance.
    (The allusion is to pi, which is the ration of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, approximately 3.14.)
  • What do you call a street where Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, and James Patterson live? Writer’s Block.
    (The allusion is to three famous writers and to a psychological “block” in which a person represses painful thoughts of memories.)

In blog marketing, we might choose to use an allusion to get a point across without going into a lengthy explanation. Or, we might want to get readers thinking about our subject in a new way. We might even use allusions to cement a bond between our client and the blog readers, showing the business owner or practitioner has experienced some of the same problems and obstacles as their customers now face.

There’s only one problem – an allusion does not describe in detail the person or thing to which it’s referring – readers have to recognize the allusion. As content writers, we need to gauge our readers’ areas of interest and even their level of education. If they simply don’t know the underlying story, literary tale or other reference point, we could be leaving them scratching their heads, and asking “Huh?”

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