Nathan Snell :: The Technopian

How to do a competitive blog analysis

I’m going to write a few posts on internet marketing. I generally like to avoid writing so directly on a topic, because it often comes off like a text book (and I was never a fan of school, so not being a fan of my own content doesn’t mesh to well with me). To be honest, with some of the information I want to share, I’m not quite sure how else to share it. I’ll make my attempt, though, and hopefully it will be valuable to you and something you can actually get through reading.

All of this, for the record, is sparked by the fact that I’ve found it incredibly difficult to find an internet marketer who is actually worth their weight. We need one here at National Speed, but half the time when I speak with consultants they go through a checklist of crap, often times asking me if I’ve done stuff that frankly either doesn’t work effectively enough for me to merit paying them tons an hour to set it up (which takes all of maybe 20 minutes if you are nice and assume they do their research). It’s also sparked by a few examples of research I received which, I’m sorry, were utter crap.

How to do a competitive blog analysis

Well start off with blogs. Before you even begin your blog, it’s important to analyze the competitive landscape for blogs in your industry. I think this as a first step trumps deciding on your target audience and deciding the purpose of your blog. The reason behind it is that by doing a competitive analysis, you will be able to better understand both the audience even is and the blogs currently satisfying them (and how). This allows you to find the gap that your blog can fill in your industry rather than just doing what you feel like.

When it comes to your competitive analysis, both in business and in blogs, you want to be as thorough as you possibly can. This helps you avoid being blind sided in business, and when it comes to blogs it will feed into your marketing plan. In the unique setting of blogs, your “competition” are actually your friends. They’ll be part of what organically gets you noticed.

Below are the steps I go through when doing a competitive blog analysis. As I go through each step, I add them to a master list for that industry. When I create a master list, my list includes the blog title, blog url, contact information (name and email), a comment rating, an activity rating, the number of subscribers to the blog, and whether the blog runs ads.

Finding blogs in your industry using Google Blog Search and Google Suggest
The first and most simple method is to use Google Blog Search to search for key words in your industry. For example, our company National Speed is in the automotive performance industry. So the first thing I did was a search for “automotive performance blogs”. From there, I did a number of other, similar searches such as “car performance blogs”, “autocross blogs”, and so forth. I also then took it one step further and used Google Suggest with the terms I just described to find other terms that people are using that I hadn’t thought of.

Finding blogs using tags on Technorati
Let’s face it. Technorati is not at all what it used to be. To be honest, soon this probably won’t even be in the equation. But in the meantime it still indexes blogs to a degree, and has still found me a few blogs I hadn’t found in my Google Blog Search run. Using Technorati to find blogs in your industry is different from a Google Blog Search because you’re using tags that relate to your industry rather than keywords. Think of tags like categories such as “cars”, “automotive”, “autocross”, “performance cars”, etc. In this case, you’re going to find blogs that wrote a post in respect to these categories. This is where the “second level” of technorati comes in to play.

Once you find a blog with a tag you were looking for, you’ve got your first piece of information: a blog in your industry (or that at least wrote one post that pertains to your industry). The second level of this post (or blog) is following the conversation. All blogs on technorati have a number of responses (people linking back to your post). When you find a blog that is in your industry that has responses, you also want to look at the blogs that wrote the responses. This allows you to dig down to a second level of conversational depth, allowing you to see a bit beyond what Google Blog Search allows (directly anyway) and find some potentially more niche but still valuable blogs. Each time you find a blog, add them to your list and include the number of responses they have (this will help you later in determining which blogs you want to look to as a source and for marketing purposes).

A quick side bit of information regarding responses: some blogs will have no responses, others will have a lot of responses. To give you an idea, if a blog has around 50 responses, they’re probably smaller in popularity. If they have 100-200 responses, they’re probably around medium sized in popularity. Around 500 is a pretty good sized blog in terms of popularity. It’s also based on the industry, however (tech blogs, for example, are usually larger thanks to the echo chamber).

Finding blogs using tags on Digg and Delicious

While Digg and Delicious don’t have the conversation option that Technorati does, they are still valuable sources for finding blogs through tags/categories. For example, Digg has an “auto” section which we follow at National Speed. The auto section lets us see what’s popular for the day (or several days since the auto section is a little slow on digg compared to some of the others). While I will cover marketing more in a different post, I would suggest that at the same time you start looking scanning for other blogs in your industry on digg, you also create an account and start using digg in relevance to your industry.

Note: by using I do not mean submitting your posts. I mean digging and commenting on what others have submitted. If you find something that you haven’t written, then submit it. Otherwise I would say hold off for a little bit before submitting your own content to be dugg.

Now, delicious is a bit of a different beast than digg. Where digg is broad categories, Delicious has a very long tail of tags that can pertain to your industry. In the case of delicious, it will be a lot like Technorati where you’re searching for tags that people may be using to save content that pertains to your industry. Delicious, like Digg, can also be used to spot the trends of what people are bookmarking/digging/searching for over the next few days. Using these sites to help you push out relative (and quality) content in reference to these trends will be part of your marketing plan and will help drive both organic search traffic and social media traffic to your site.

Backing into the blogs
Another method to finding the blogs in your industry (and especially those that have more “power”) is using a backlink checker to see what sites are linking to them. In this case, the process is very simple. Based on your list thus far, take some of the top blogs you’ve found in your industry thus far, and use the backlink checker to see just who is linking back to them. Realistically, this method is a less pretty but more thorough Technorati approach.

What’s next?
Once you’ve built your list of blogs (and forums if you find a few), the next step is to begin deciphering the value of each blog on your list. Ideally you’ve added enough information to your list as you’ve been doing your analysis so you don’t have to go back to each individual blog for evaluation. Really what your end goal of deciding the value of a blog is two fold: finding the blogs that your comments will have the most impact on (impact being the most exposure and social capital generation), and finding those blogs that you may want to build a relationship with or pitch in the future.

I’ll get more into the “What’s next” of deciding a value of a blog in a later post, as this one is already long enoug has it is. As you can tell, there’s no particular “magic” to it all. It’s really just being willing to put in the time, and really knowing how to use the tools to scour the internet in a more crawler kind of way. Also, if you happen to do something for your competitive blog research that works well for you and isn’t on my steps above, let me know. I’m always looking to strengthen my analysis : )

Update: Corrected blacklink checker link.

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Does your social network define you?

Social networks are pretty well main stream now. Everyone has heard of MySpace and knows what it is, and even my teachers from high school or earlier are adding me on Facebook (I’m still not sure if them remembering me is a good thing or not). Every now and then I even have a few students from UNCW request to join my network on LinkedIn. Even less occassionaly, I get a twitter invite from someone locally. I would estimate 95% of the people I meet are on a social network (yes, I realize this is skewed based on my profession, etc). I’m just not sure people are choosing the right social network to be a part of.

See, there was this girl who we’ll call Jane. She was smart, had exuberant energy, and was really passionate about what she did. We’ll say she did pottery. Now, Jane was looking for a job, and I like being able to connect talented individuals who need employment with worthwhile employees. It just gives me that little tickle of joy, you know, the kind when you get to sit down and watch your favorite tv show, or when you get a tinge of success (or something). The problem was I didn’t really know Jane that well, so I wanted to see some of her work. That was no problem for Jane! While she didn’t have a website (she should have a website) she did have examples of her work online. But it was on her MySpace.

Ok. Jane is a Gen Yer, so the fact that she had her work on a social network wasn’t what got me. What got me was that she had it on MySpace. That’s kind of like building a mansion in the crappiest part of town. Sure, the mansion looks nice, what with its gated entrance, indoor theater, triple crown moldings, mohagony floors, and river front view, but the value of the place is automatically horrible by association with the area.

This really made it hard. As much as I wanted to start looking at Jane’s work in an unbiased way, I couldn’t. If she had it on Facebook, even though she should still have a nicely designed resume flaunting her pottery skills, I would have accepted it. It would have been the right neighborhood at least. But no. Her work was on MySpace.

Thinking about that, I’ve noticed I think along similar lines when I meet new people. Depending on the conversation, if you’re not on Twitter, you’re docked geeknick tech points. If you’re on Facebook, that’s somewhat redeemable. At least we can be friends. But if you’re only on MySpace, regardless of how awesome you are, friendship simply will never be- online anyway. I can easily see this becoming a more prominent step in branding. Questions like Digg or Sphinn. For the average person it doesn’t matter but for the SEO specialist it may make all the difference.

But what do you think? Does someone’s social network define them to you? Does your social network define you?

Update:
There were a number of comments left over on Brazen Careerist where this post was also at. In addition to that, Rebecca of Modite mentioned an interesting article written about the social class differences between Facebook and MySpace. If you’re interested in more of the theory or principles behind social networks, it’s a interesting read.

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When you care and when you don’t.

Your current and potential customers can tell.

I never realized “7ish” was a time. Mainly because you don’t know if the “ish” means it closes before 7 (which it did) or after 7.

Taken while I’ve been on vacation in California.

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All part of the job - Porsche

I drive a 2002 KIA Sportage. The mileage is great (~30mpg) but I’m waiting till Christmas to get myself a new car that doesn’t make me look silly driving into the parking lot at work matches my personality better. Whether I’m walking around outside our shop or inside our shop, these are the kinds of cars I get to see. Ahh… the advantages and disadvantages of working at an automotive performance shop.

By the way, anyone else happen to watch Top Gear on BBC? That show is so awesome (minus this last episode with the grannies).

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Social Media Is Old News, Right?

If you’re planning to jump on the “social media” band wagon (the wagon that pulls the idea of using social networks like MySpace or Facebook to promote your company or gain new clients, and that also has blogs, social bookmarking sites, lifestreaming, and so forth along for the ride) you’re a little late to the game. Social media is old news.

I’ve been thinking this for a while, but it was made evident to me the other day when I met with a friend of mine who runs a small business. He’s a great guy, but not the most risky of people. What I mean is, if you were to tell him about Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow” concept- making a product remarkable - which means being innovative (which is risky), he probably wouldn’t be for it. He was very much for social media, though. Which means he doesn’t feel he’s risking anything by using social media.

I think there comes a point in any market where the “cutting edge” becomes riskless, or pretty darn close to it. At that point, as you may have guessed, the “cutting edge” is no longer the cutting edge. It’s mainstream, or in the process of becoming mainstream. When you see this starting to happen, you know it’s time to start either innovating, or looking to see what the new edge is… or, well, die.

Some people have difficulty seeing when the edge has shifted, especially if the industry they’re trying to follow isn’t the one they’re in (for example: following new tech based marketing trends as the CEO in the pharma industry). For those people, here are 5 ways you can tell something is no longer at “the edge” and that you need to start innovating (or looking for the new trends).

1. The number of times “the edge” shows up in the New York Times over the past 3-6 months.
2. Smaller, local magazines start covering the technology or type of marketing (business magazine or not).
3. When particular people I know sign up. We’ve all got these people. You know you’ve got one. That person who knows next to nothing about this stuff but somehow pops up on your friend request/follow screen.
4. When small business owners who have been content with their current marketing methods for a while now suddenly become interested in this “new” framework.
5. When the “fear of the unknown” or the “fear of repercussions” is no longer present for a mass number of individuals.

Obviously, social media qualifies for all five of those. That’s because it’s old news. But that doesn’t make it worthless. Not at all. It just means that social media is now in a self-contained innovation cycle. You can’t just do a “blogger program” where you lease your newest camera to prominent bloggers for them to use because Nikon already did that. Likewise, you can’t just put out a video with the intent of it becoming viral without some serious planning, because everyone almost everyone has already tried that. You can absolutely use social media effectively. You just need to innovate within it. But you can also stay ahead of the game and innovate or look to see what the new, risk-filled trends are.

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Notes of a Millennial Manager - Overview

Being a young, millennial manager I’ve been encouraged by a number of people to take notes on how I manage my team here at National Speed. This is something people usually tell me after hearing my stories about my team (who make it easy), which leads to the subsequent proclamation of their undying love for how I manage and their subsequent desire to have my babies. Except not really. But they do usually say they want to come work for me (or at least while I’m at National Speed, since some other places might not let me do the stuff I do).

I figured I could do them justice in the notes department. Except notes to me are so stale. Plus I have to write in a notepad for official notes, and that lends itself to interpretation of what was written more then comprehension of what was written. So I figured instead of taking notes, I’ll blog it.

The idea behind blogging my principles as a manager and what I do is two fold.

1. To keep a log of what I’m doing so I can come back later to evaluate its success, or lack thereof.
2. To open the floor to you all to give input on what else I can do, or what I may have missed, as well as other methods I can try.

I must admit I am a bit skeptical about doing it. I know there are a number of individuals from National Speed who read my blog, like, say, the CEO (hi George). So, in a way, at the same time I share my methods of management, I am helping George prepare for to review me.

With the posts that will follow this on how I go about managing gen y, keep in mind that I do work at a startup. While that doesn’t negate some of the ways I go about managing, it may certainly have an effect if you were to try to apply them in a corporation. I would venture to say that it’s almost a chicken and the egg situation. The culture of the company partially dictates how you manage, and how you manage can be used to change the culture of the company.

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Social Browse, the collision of delicious and stumble upon

I’ve been chugging away at preparing the lists, a/b split, and quantification for this months e-mail newsletter. I’m a little tired, and have been enjoying a nifty utility called SocialBrowse out of Y-Combinator for a week or two now. I figured I’d do a little sharing about it.

Social Browse is a Firefox Add-on. It sits comfortably on the left side of my browser. You can show and hide it much like your web history. Social Browse is what you would get if you were to take StumbleUpon and Delicious, run them into each other at high speeds, and then make it easier to share/use.

What I mean is, Social Browse let’s you share (bookmark) pages, but doesn’t use tags. I’ve been a religious user of Delicious, but frankly, trying to think of tags all the time is pretty taxing (advanced taxonomy or not). I’d much rather have a service where I say “this is a page I am going to come back to again, now share it with the people who like what I like via RSS, and then give me a great search algorithm that will let me find this page later on.“ And that’s kind of what social browse says. Except some of that stuff like search and RSS (my bad, it does rss) aren’t implemented yet, but social browse is still in its early stages, so I’m not complaining.

Where the whole StumbleUpon similarity comes in is social browse takes all the information from the people you’re following and integrates it with your surfing experience. What that translates to is if you come across a site that someone you’re following shared or made a comment on in social browse, it shows up in a clean way on the page. This adds some nice context to the web.

Of course, being in its early stages lends itself to social browse having some bugs. I’m a bit irritated because I switched computers and thus lost my profile. I went through their help which sort of arbitrarily explains what to do to get it back but doesn’t really. At least I don’t think. Does Social Browse serve any sort of business purposes at this point? Not really… not yet. Never the less, it’s a neat Firefox Add-on worth checking out and I’ve got 9 invites to bestow.

P.S. If you’re wondering what the heck Cuil is, don’t bother going to the site. Instead go read thegirlriots thoughts. She states my sentiments exactly, except in a much wittier and sarcastic way, so my sentiments + 1.

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How I came to work 65 hours a week and love it

I got a new job which is why I haven’t been writing. Actually, I lied. About both. The job is a few weeks old, so it’s only sort of “new” and I haven’t been writing because I wasn’t feeling it. I had writers block. Then I talked to Penelope about having writers block and she said I was just whining. So I got over it. As to the new job- it’s amazing. I’m the Vice President of Web Development for a startup called National Speed.

I must say, startups are a blast to work for. National Speed is no exception, except maybe being even more of a blast to work for because our team is amazing and our plan is great and we’re going to succeed. No, I don’t think that’s what everyone who works at a startup says.

Part of what makes a startup such a blast is that you define the company, its culture, its brand, and ultimately its success. Being that you’re a startup, you’re also usually doing all this business stuff without the amount of resources you realisticaly need to do the job, so it’s hard as hell. It means you’re constantly building the company. Constantly. As it is now, I love every minute of it… but to be honest, I wasn’t sure I would.

I always knew believed told myself I was the entrepreneurial, startup type. After I graduated, however, I wasn’t so sure. Having put so many hours into college, the thought of a 9-5 job where the time after work was my own sounded appealing. OK, so I really didn’t put that many hours into college. I spent most of my time working on side projects. But I put in a lot of hours during those 4 years one way or another, and the visions I had of doing whatever I felt like after work looked nice.

The only thing about most 9-5 jobs is they tend to be dull. Or maybe I got unlucky and a lot of other people got unlucky, too. But all the 9-5’s I’ve worked at in the past left more bored, having finished everything I needed to do earlier that morning. This usually left waiting for an exciting moment at work like a school girl waiting for a boy to tell her he likes her (an odd circumstance since I have no idea what it’s like to be a school girl.). It’s there I told myself I would rather work 65 hours a week, having more to do than I could shake not just a stick at, but an entire tree at.

See, instead of wasting time attempting to prevent my inevitable insanity by figuring out how to stretch 20 hours of work into 40 hours of “something to do” for the week, I could just have 2 years of work to do in a week (I realize that’s not possible). A completely practical argument.

That, to me, meant it really came down to either becoming OK with being mediocre, or taking the step and manning up to the task of building a company. A much more practical and convincing argument.

I chose the latter, as the title so kindly indicates, and I have yet to regret it. Except for maybe that one night a week where I wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming about how the company failed and it’s all my fault. But really, I dared to follow my passion for a startup life, and I will never regret it even if it means working 65+ hours. That doesn’t mean it’s for everyone, but if at the very least you’re debating taking the dive into a job with long hours but that you know you’ll love- I’ll tell you the plunge is worth it.

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Social Media Marketing from a Pendulum

Think about a pendulum in business terms for a moment. One side (2 balls) is marketing and the other side (2 balls) is your target audience.

Like a pendulum, your target audience can experience the effects of your marketing without ever having been directly in contact with it. Our side moves, and our customer’s side moves, but the center ball doesn’t move. The real question is what is the center ball?

It’s important to remember that not as many people use the same tools as us. The average person just hops onto their iGoogle or email account, does their thing, and then they’re done. That doesn’t make the tools at our disposal worthless for businesses. It means that we need to figure out how to use these sites and services in such a way as to effect the things that the majority of the population does use or does interact with. We need to find that center ball.

Wow. Enough Zen posting from me. I almost didn’t post this. Hope you enjoy a more abstract one I let slip by :)

*Photo by Mazz

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The Two Sides of Social Media

I’ve frequently heard complications come up as to whether PR should handle or be involved in social media or if marketing should primarily be involved in managing a company’s social media efforts. The truth is what you commonly hear: both should. I want to make it simpler, though.

There are two sides to social media: reputation management and promotional efforts.

Reputation management is really PR’s area, and involves a company’s presence online, commonly referred to as their web presence. Web presence for companies is nothing new. If they have a website, then they’ve got a presence, or so the thinking was 5 years ago. Web presence is different today. It goes beyond just your company’s little corner of the internet (your website). Your company’s web presence now spans to anywhere a literal conversation is being had about your company or product online, and your reputation depends on how you engage in that conversation. Dell is a great example of how reputation management can be done well.

The promotional, marketing components of social media, which make up the second side of social media, gets more into the nitty-gritty aspects of social media. The promotional side of social media deals a lot more in the current tools, communities, and medium’s of communication currently available.

Fundamentally, however, promoting content online is much different than the Promotion from the 4P’s has been. It’s not about blasting as many people as possible with a message. It’s about engaging an individual, even if it’s just one. It’s about forging a relationship with an individual, and then doing it many more times, with many other individuals. Is that a scalable promotional strategy? Hardly.

The point here is if the mental framework is instilled into those relationships you first forged, then the community you’ve grown will handle the scale. It’s then your job to simply continue to uphold the framework and engage your customers in a meaningful way. Nikon is a good example of the promotion side when it comes to the latter part. Seesmic is a good example when it comes to everything I’ve described on the promotional side.

The difference between the two sides that I want to make clear is that the promotional marketing side of social media deals with actively promoting (and engaging) your company to its audience, where the reputation management (PR) side deals in more of a passive mode, listening to the conversations while responding when appropriate (or outright necessary). Really, what should occur is your promotion will drive your reputation management, and that’s a correlation that should be seen.

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