MBA Blog Campers Versus Client Website
Here's a post from Bud Gibson of TheCommunityEngine.com that discusses
Blogs for Business versus traditional business web sites:
http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/08/mba_bootcamp_ch.html
The bootcamp results demonstrate that with moderate but systematic effort bloggers can achieve search visibility that outperforms established local players for relevant searches. The typical bootcamp blog post took under an hour to write, so the total bootcamp blogging effort represents on the order of 150 hours of effort. This effort could easily be parceled out across an industry consortium of cooperative companies so that no one company was spending more than five hours per week.
The investment is justified by the following factors:
Description of the Experimental Blogs Workshop
MBA Bootcamp Changes Local Web Search Landscape
Over seventy percent of households in the U.S. use Internet search to find local products and services. We ran a bootcamp where Michigan MBAs used “Web 2.0” technologies to compete with a prominent local business for searches on its targeted keywords. Bootcamp sites beat the local company in just under half of the searches and placed on the first page of search results over half the time.
From May 10 through June 23, 2005, we ran the first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp for 33 MBAs at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our client for the bootcamp, Coach's, served the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan market for disaster cleaning and restoration services. Recent surveys indicate that over seventy percent of households search the web when shopping locally for services such as Coach's. We wanted the bootcamp to demonstrate how Web 2.0 technologies like weblogs and RSS could help better establish a company's search presence to take advantage of this channel. To really push the idea, we informally set a goal that bootcamp participants' team weblogs outperform Coach's site on searches for its own keywords.
How the Bootcamp Worked
Over the six weeks of the bootcamp, we met three times with the following agenda:
An initial four hour Saturday session where participants were introduced to the technologies behind Web 2.0.
We provided illustrations of how these technologies were already affecting the business practices of early adopters like General Motors.
Participants then learned how to blog. They also learned how to use technorati and pubsub to track real-time industry news and mentions of their own sites.
Finally, participants were given their blogging assignment with the stated objective of achieving a strong search presence in the local cleaning and restoration industry for their team blog sites. Participants were to write a minimum of five posts per week for at least 30 posts by the end of the bootcamp.
A follow-up one hour session one week later where we reviewed student blogging progress in terms of style and substance.
A final four hour session at the end of Week 4. In the first two hours, we reviewed the web's current architecture and its implications for businesses including the role of search engines. In the second two hours, we reviewed student search performance relative to established industry players and discussed what they needed to do to better compete.
One issue with how we structured the bootcamp was that it only went on for six weeks, while achieving good search results typically takes much longer. Therefore, our feedback focused on encouraging practices that would, over time, lead to better search visibility. Two weeks into the bootcamp, two well-known blogging experts, Jeremy Wright of InsideBlogging and Susie Gardner of Buzz Marketing with Blogs were kind enough to provide detailed reviews of participant sites focusing on how well they were communicating, a first prerequisite for search visibility (link to Jeremy's reviews, link to Susie's reviews). To track how well the teams were connecting with their own and others' sites, another prerequisite for search visibility, we used pubsub and technorati to generate weekly summaries of the number links to and from bootcamp sites.
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Blogs for Business versus traditional business web sites:
http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/08/mba_bootcamp_ch.html
The bootcamp results demonstrate that with moderate but systematic effort bloggers can achieve search visibility that outperforms established local players for relevant searches. The typical bootcamp blog post took under an hour to write, so the total bootcamp blogging effort represents on the order of 150 hours of effort. This effort could easily be parceled out across an industry consortium of cooperative companies so that no one company was spending more than five hours per week.
The investment is justified by the following factors:
- Consumers tend to click on “natural” results like those produced by blogging eight times more often than they click on paid search results.
- Easily updated blogs allow companies to adapt to changing market conditions.
- Blogs allow opportunities for customer service and interaction that do not exist with static web sites.
References
We began planning the bootcamp in late March. Several people provided substantive suggestions that we incorporated into the bootcamp or affirmed some of our assumptions. Andy Seidl and Bill French, creators of Blogsite, provided advice on strategy and advertising support. Shel Holtz recommended that we focus on major search engine results in addition to our initial focus on technorati. Jason Calacanis was one of the first to recommend that we use outside judges like Susie Gardner and Jeremy Wright. Steve Shu provided a recent MBA's perspective on the value of the bootcamp, and Richard MacManus reinforced the need to bridge the gap between technical and business professionals. James Robertson offered his experiences developing Bottom Feeder. Several people, including Tantek Çelik, Mike McClatchey of Hass MS&L, and Mike Lombardi of NewsGator confirmed the soundness of specific bootcamp activities.
Description of the Experimental Blogs Workshop
MBA Bootcamp Changes Local Web Search Landscape
Over seventy percent of households in the U.S. use Internet search to find local products and services. We ran a bootcamp where Michigan MBAs used “Web 2.0” technologies to compete with a prominent local business for searches on its targeted keywords. Bootcamp sites beat the local company in just under half of the searches and placed on the first page of search results over half the time.
From May 10 through June 23, 2005, we ran the first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp for 33 MBAs at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our client for the bootcamp, Coach's, served the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan market for disaster cleaning and restoration services. Recent surveys indicate that over seventy percent of households search the web when shopping locally for services such as Coach's. We wanted the bootcamp to demonstrate how Web 2.0 technologies like weblogs and RSS could help better establish a company's search presence to take advantage of this channel. To really push the idea, we informally set a goal that bootcamp participants' team weblogs outperform Coach's site on searches for its own keywords.
How the Bootcamp Worked
Over the six weeks of the bootcamp, we met three times with the following agenda:
An initial four hour Saturday session where participants were introduced to the technologies behind Web 2.0.
We provided illustrations of how these technologies were already affecting the business practices of early adopters like General Motors.
Participants then learned how to blog. They also learned how to use technorati and pubsub to track real-time industry news and mentions of their own sites.
Finally, participants were given their blogging assignment with the stated objective of achieving a strong search presence in the local cleaning and restoration industry for their team blog sites. Participants were to write a minimum of five posts per week for at least 30 posts by the end of the bootcamp.
A follow-up one hour session one week later where we reviewed student blogging progress in terms of style and substance.
A final four hour session at the end of Week 4. In the first two hours, we reviewed the web's current architecture and its implications for businesses including the role of search engines. In the second two hours, we reviewed student search performance relative to established industry players and discussed what they needed to do to better compete.
One issue with how we structured the bootcamp was that it only went on for six weeks, while achieving good search results typically takes much longer. Therefore, our feedback focused on encouraging practices that would, over time, lead to better search visibility. Two weeks into the bootcamp, two well-known blogging experts, Jeremy Wright of InsideBlogging and Susie Gardner of Buzz Marketing with Blogs were kind enough to provide detailed reviews of participant sites focusing on how well they were communicating, a first prerequisite for search visibility (link to Jeremy's reviews, link to Susie's reviews). To track how well the teams were connecting with their own and others' sites, another prerequisite for search visibility, we used pubsub and technorati to generate weekly summaries of the number links to and from bootcamp sites.
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