How to blog and blog well.

First things first, make sure your blog has an overall theme and strategy. If you’re trying to gain readership, you’ll have to show your readers you know what you’re talking about and that the information is for them. When writing, always keep in mind your target group and determine an appropriate voice.

For each new post, establish a specific post topic. Content must be compelling, informative and relevant. Offer an analysis, new tips and/or tricks. Vary in length. Don’t be afraid to be brief (150-200 words).

Use keywords to optimize your post. Make sure your post titles and posts contain keywords that your readers will search. Use bullets, italics and bold font for quick and easy reading/skimming.

Include keywords in the at least several if not all of the following ways:

• The post title
• URL of page
• Heading tags (learn more about heading tags)
• Hyperlinks pointing to older posts or specific company web pages in the post body
• Tags used to describe the post subject matter
• “Alternative Text” options for images

Include a relevant image at all costs and include reference materials if appropriate. Make sure to hyperlink images and articles to their source. Crediting sources will help your blog’s SEO and well, make your post more credible.

Tag posts accurately. It’s a good idea to have set guidelines for what posts should be tagged as in the beginning. This will help future searches and your sanity. It’s easy for 3 different blog writers on one blog to tag the same post as 3 different tags (ie. Brad and Angelina, Brangelina, and baby collectors).

Post on a regular schedule. This will help avoid the loss of readership due to inconsistency.  If necessary, follow an editorial calendar. Try to remain at least one post ahead.

Lastly, I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that you actually want people to read your blog. The easiest way to spread the word of your blog post is to link your blog and posts to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as well as setting inbound links from high traffic pages. Engage your readers by asking for comments, questions and suggestions.

What better way to market your product than to have your target group do it for you? Crowdsourcing is a form of outsourcing tasks to an undefined group or “crowd.”

Tasks outsourced can range anything from marketing to product creation. Web 2.0 is a prominent type of crowdsourcing that enables users to interact and collaborate information in a virtual community. Yelp. Wikipedia. Yahoo Answers. These all use public input to drive content and information. In 2010, vitaminwater launched a new flavor created on a “Flavor Creator” app on Facebook. Kiva facilitates loans between individuals around the world to alleviate poverty. These organizations utilize the power of the crowd to give back through many different methods.

So here it is, the good the bad and the ugly of crowdsourcing.

The Good

When you crowdsource a task, you essentially get a free  and limitless staff. This can vary anywhere from a think tank to a production crew to sales agents. The wisdom of crowds states that a group’s information is often better than that of an individual. Two heads are simply better than one.

The Bad

Crowdsourcing projects can often require more work by the implementers than expected. Since projects are directed to an undefined group, direction must be very simple and clear. Motivation for participants must be appealing enough but still profitable for the implementers. Lastly, monitoring and management of results are often more taxing than one would hope.

The Ugly

Unfiltered feedback. No contracts or agreements. Red flag. Quality control is nearly impossible with so much input. Wikipedia is infamous for this problem.  Users can go in and change information as they please. According to Wikipedia,  David Beckham was a Chinese goalkeeper in the 18^th century, Conan O’Brien assaults sea turtles while canoeing, and Sinbad is dead. Wrong. Corrections have since been made. Don’t worry, Sinbad is not dead.

 If you were an [animal, car, fruit, fill in the blank] what would you be? Perhaps you played this game when you were little.  It was amusing to think of yourself in new terms—a cheetah, Ferrari, Kiwi. 

But just as you were thinking outside the box to describe yourself as an object or animal, it should not be far fetched for executives to think of their organizations outside of the brick and mortar of their businesses.

“Corporations are people too.” This was a statement recently made by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney earlier this month.  Though he took a lot of flack for it (you can order a T-shirt with the saying for $24.99), Romney was right on.

What Romney meant is that the company is more than just a factory, an assembly line, an office.  The company is a living, breathing entity that encompasses all of the people, processes, and communication of the organization. The company is the face of the business, the personality.  It is further branded by its responses to situations and actions.

Why should marketing execs care about Romney’s statement? And why are the human aspects of being in business more important now than ever?

First, the statement, “people buy from people” remains true. People buy based on emotion.  They want to feel understood. They want the company, person selling to them, to directly relate to their desires, insecurities, and needs with a “solution”—a product or service that addresses them.  Customers can more directly relate to a company that shows its human side and that understands their needs. Tie the personality of the company to the greater human good—via genuine philanthropic efforts—and companies can forge even deeper bonds with customers and prospect that share their concerns.

Second, throughout the organization, employees must know WHO the company is to accurately represent it.  WHO you are affects everything from how you greet people, respond to them, address employees, make management decision, the list goes on.  The definition of WHO your company is is so fundamental that it influences virtually every aspect of business.

Add to that the fact that social channels have given us even more ways to interact with customers on a personal level—blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, to name just a few. Today’s marketing landscape offers more ways to interact more deeply and directly with consumers.  Businesses need to define who they are and what they represent.  When employees know WHO the company is, they can reach out and respond in an appropriate and consistent manner to make the organization’s personality and objectives resound.

So who is your company?  Is it embodied in the image of a particular celebrity or spokesperson, a company CEO? Is it fun, laid back, energetic, serious, nurturing? What do you represent?

Post Author: hilary.mccarthy.

What if we could change the world?

At Zenzi, one of our core values is giving back and making a positive impact on communities in need. We have always been big believers in the power of cause marketing, and we encourage our clients & team to do the same. Now, it’s one thing to strategize on ways to help out from the comfort of our office…and quite another to get to the heart of the problem on a grassroots level. Which is exactly what I did last month when I joined Give Clean Water on a mission to provide clean drinking water to the people of Fiji.

So why should you care? According to the World Health Organization, 1.8 million people die every year from diarrhea diseases, and Fiji is particularly hard hit. Globally, it is the leading cause of illness and death.

Give Clean Water provides and installs clean water filters in people’s homes, so no matter what type of water they have access to, these families will always have clean water to drink. Through local partnerships, they identify families in need of clean water filters, gather biographical and demographic information, take photos and mark each house with a GPS address. On installation day, volunteers visit homes, install filters and spend time educating the family on proper use and maintenance the filter and the importance of drinking and cooking exclusively with clean water.

I was unsure what to expect upon arriving in Fiji and traveling the bumpy road to Rakiraki. Upon reaching one of the small villages, we received a warm welcome, experienced a traditional kava ceremony (quite a sight to see!), then broke into teams and got down to business. Using GPS coordinates, we visited homes, kneeling together on woven mats. One by one, we showed families how to use the buckets and filters, laughing and making new friends along the way.

The highlight of the day was visiting the village elementary school, where students sang and danced for our group, gleefully pouring brown water out of filthy water bottles and filling them back up with clean, safe filtered water. It was easy to feel inspired, seeing their future get brighter in an instant.

On this trip, Give Clean Water installed filters at 311 homes and three schools, providing clean water to an estimated 2,000 people. So, what if we could change the world? I came back from Fiji believing that it’s possible…one filter, one family at a time.

See more photos of my trip here.

Someone I know once defined infinity as: “There are six videos uploaded to YouTube every second. If that’s not infinity, I don’t know what is.” YouTube is inarguably the most used video-sharing website. It is now even considered a top search engine next to Google, Yahoo and Bing.

YouTube is not only videos of cute animals and online personalities. It is a great alternative to traditional online search engines for education and information. If you’re a visual learner like I am, YouTube’s endless “how-to” videos are the next best thing to learning from a professional in person.

Think about your SEO strategy, does it include YouTube? It should. By ranking higher on YouTube, your videos will be the go-to source for information on your topic. Check out this in depth article for more information on how to SEO optimize your YouTube video and channel.

The next time you are looking to Google some information or post new content online, think to maybe YouTube it instead. You will probably get some interesting results!

Usually, my commute to work is pretty uneventful. I gaze at the beautiful stretches of sand and blue water, I take deep breaths of the sea air, and I get ready for the day to come. Last week, I was confronted by a surprise of prehistoric proportion when I looked out my window while waiting at a stop light in Cardiff. As luck would have it, I had my iPhone ready and captured the scene with Instagram.

While I puzzled over the appearance of Pterodactyl eggs, a clue appeared that provided a much bigger perspective on an eye-opening grassroots marketing stunt.

Get a behind the scenes look at the Cardiff Kook Dinosaur attack in this video, or read all about it in the UT article.

QR (quick response) codes are becoming all the craze in businesses across America. These square barcodes are most commonly read by smartphones for a variety of uses covering both commercial tracking and consumer oriented purposes.

All you have to do to scan a QR code is open a image recognition application on your smartphone (such as Google Goggles or QRReader) and take a picture of the QR code. This will send the barcode image to the web and direct you accordingly. You can lead people to twitter pages for quick follows, a promotional webpage, or even make phone calls or send text messages.

Businesses are starting to take full advantage of the ease of QR codes and are implementing them for marketing purposes. Here are some interesting uses of QR codes:

1. Business cards – Put a QR codes on your business card so that recipients only have to scan the code and the information will store straight to their phone. No manual input necessary!
2. Check-ins – Scan QR codes to check in to businesses such as restaurants in order to receive giveaways or discounts.
3. Promotions, discounts and giveaways – Scan QR codes on products or in stores to enter to win contests.
4. Stickers, signs and ads – Post a QR code in public with an ambiguous description or even no description at all. The mystery itself will entice people to scan your code.
5. Telemarketing – You can direct a QR code to dial a number or text a specific message upon scanning.
6. Tattoos – TATTOOS? Check out the first ever animated tattoo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3qv2dSXQXk

While the summer may be a good time to kick back and relax, especially with last week’s record temps, it has also been a busy one for Zenzi clients. No R&R for these company execs.

Speaker, trainer and business strategist, AmyK Hutchens, asks this provoking question of women executives: Only One Seat at the Table? in her article in Pink Magazine.  We say “No”!

Zenzi Client EarthRisk was featured in Fast Company this week and CNET for its exciting new technology that can detect extreme heat waves up to 40 days in advance to better determine, and plan for energy consumption.

Zenzi client, BeneTrac, talks about how tools for managing employee benefits have evolved in the July issue of HR Magazine and customer Grill Concepts talks about the increased accuracy and ease-of use of the system.

Just a few articles Zenzi helped to facilitate most recently.  Expect more sizzling coverage to come!

Happy 5^th Birthday to our partner and friend, Tech Cocktail!

Tech Cocktail began as a simple blog and community event by former AOL product strategist and avid tech blogger, Frank Gruber. Five short years later, Tech Cocktail has 6,500+ fans on Facebook, thousands more unaccounted for, and is traveling the nation hosting mixers, breakfasts, conferences, festivals and many other events. Everything a tech person needs to know about emerging technology, news, people, startups, products and innovation can be found at www.techcocktail.com.

If you are in the Chicago area, make sure to drop by their 5^th Anniversary Birthday Bash tomorrow evening at John Barleycorn Wrigleyville where they will showcase promising local tech startups!  RSVP here: http://tcchicago2.eventbrite.com

On behalf of everyone at Zenzi Communications, congratulations and happy birthday Tech Cocktail! We’re excited to continue watching you grow!

Google+’s (g+) new social networking platform is so simple that it’s complicated. What?  Here, I’m going to try to break down g+ to help counter the counterintuitive social platform. It might help if you first go play with g+ and realize you’re a little confused or lost.

From what I have gathered, there are 4 features that g+ currently offer:  Stream, Hangouts, Sparks and Huddle.

g+ Circles: I don’t consider g+’s “circles” an actual feature. It’s more a way of organizing people you are connected to on g+, kind of your choosing who your separate audiences will be. The first thing you should do when joining g+ is add users to circles. When adding a new friend in the future, you will do the same thing by simply dragging them into an appropriate circle. Note: when adding people to circles, they will see that you have added them but they will not be able to see the name of the circle you put them in. Go ahead, put that status-update obsessive friend in your “annoying” circle. Now to move on to actual features.

g+ Stream: Very much like your Facebook newsfeed, your Stream is the main source of activity on g+. First, attach what you want to post (text, pictures, link, video, or location) and right underneath, you choose who you publish to. This chart gives you an idea of who you will publish to for what purpose:

g+ Hangout: Group video chatting via Google. It’s about time! You can even share/watch Youtube videos together. If you start a hangout with an entire circle, if they see it on their stream, they can join at any time. Of course you can also just hang out with one or two people and the rest of the g+ world will not know it is happening. I hope Google updates g+ soon so we can view multiple screens at a large size (currently you have to choose the best looking person in your group chat to view larger and the rest are thumbnail sized).

g+ Sparks: I’ll get back to you on that one. So far it looks like a chat room set up to me, have yet to explore it.

g+ Huddle: Possibly my favorite g+ feature, only available on the g+ mobile app. Group text messaging! First thing I thought was: planning excursions with large groups just got so much more efficient! I don’t need to blast out a text to my group of 20 friends that I want to invite to my BBQ anymore. Add them all to the huddle (assuming they have the mobile app) and shoot out one text that reaches them all and have a conversation that keeps everyone in the loop without sending 20 identical messages to each person.

And the last thing I’ll talk about is privacy. Privacy is a big deal when it comes to anything online. My friend was telling me she was trying to figure out how to make her posts private on g+ and I thought about it – by nature of the way g+ is set up, everything is private until you choose to publish to a circle, individual or public. Of course if you accidently publish it to the wrong circle, you might be in big doo doo, but that’s entirely on you. For your profile, you can set each section’s (employment, education, etc.) privacy settings.