Ted Demopoulos (public speaker, consultant, blogger and co-author – with Shel Holtz – of the book, “Blogging for Business” ), guest posting on Business BlogWire, writes about the four types of business blogs…

1) Internal blogs: Internal blogs are used for internal company or project communications, and are not available on the Internet.

2) Problogs: I call blogs started primarily to make money, for example through advertising and affiliate programs, problogs.

3) Company Blogs: These are blogs started to help support an existing company or product.

4) Independent professional blogs: These are similar to company blogs, but are written – and owned – by individuals.

About the latter type, Ted cites two examples of independent professional blogs, Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion and my blog, A New Marketing Commentator. And I must say that I’m flattered just to be mentioned in the article, never mind in the same sentence with one of the most illustrious among us here in the blogosphere.

Tags: blog blogs blogging Bob Cargill Steve Rubel Ted Demopoulos business blogs blogosphere

Writing in the March 27 issue of Sports Illustrated, Chris Ballard notches a refreshingly candid, thoroughly modern story about his online brethren: the journalists, columnists, reporters and, yes, just plain bloggers who cover sports on the Web. From the lead-in…

The Internet is changing sports coverage. Columnists who seldom leave their couches hold forth. Athletes break their own “news” on their personal websites. Rumormongering is rampant. Don’t like it? Get rowdy. Start your own blog.

An insightful overview of how sportswriting has evolved over the years, this article is worthy of high praise and much attention not as much because – ironically – it’s published offline, in a magazine (what the snarkiest and most cynical among us might refer to as a dead-tree medium), but because so much of what its author has to say is relevant well beyond the realm of sports coverage.

Read it yourself and tell me if you don’t think it’s further validation that corporate America has taken notice of the blogosphere and the changes it’s already wrought on the way people like to receive their news and information.

On a personal note, I was delighted to see Ballard cite my idol and inspiration, ESPN’s Bill Simmons, as “a pioneer in the online sports community.” In the late ‘90s, when Simmons wrote for AOL’s Digital City Boston under the moniker, Boston Sports Guy, I read him religiously, and to this day I credit him as my motivation – indirectly, of course, and certainly from afar – to enter the blogosphere.

To read this article (”Writing Up a Storm” by Chris Ballard, Sports Illustrated, March 27, 2006), click here (free access to the complete story for magazine subscribers only).

Tags: blog blogs blogging blogosphere Chris Ballard Sports Illustrated Bill Simmons online journalism

A little more than five months ago, I wrote right here about Union Square Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm that had shed its Web site entirely and instead staked a claim in the blogosphere.

That was them. This is Hill Holliday we’re talking about now. Yes, not just one of the best known, but one of the best — period — ad agencies in the country has apparently gone the “all-blog format,” which is how Adrants’ Steve Hall recently characterized HH’s exciting, new Web presence, adding…

The beauty of this approach, what many agencies still need to discover, will catapult Hill Holliday into the “conversation” about advertising. The site will get natural Google love, Technorati love and proliferation throughout the blogosphere’s link-fest, something a static agency site can never achieve. And, most importantly, potential clients will get to know how HH thinks rather than how well they write website copy.

To view the new Hill Holliday Web site, er, I mean blog, click here.

Tags: blog blogs blogging Hill Holliday advertising direct marketing marketing

In case you missed it, the Web Marketing Association (WMA) recently released its Internet Standards Assessment Report (ISAR), which “provides industry benchmarks for Web site development and is based on data collected from 9,748 Web site evaluations since 1997.”

You can sign up to get your own free copy of this report here.

In his summary of the report, Adrants’ Steve Hall said “public relations sites ranked low across all categories,” a finding that prompted the following comment from another Steve in my blogroll, Micro Persuasion’s Steve Rubel…

When I read this my gut says that the adoption of blogging and other social media technologies on agency sites will separate the men from the boys, the ladies from the girls. As agencies begin to blog (or not), their writing skills will become more transparent, warts and all. Writing skills are not becoming less important. In fact, they’re more relevant than ever in this conversational world. We need to be able to communicate ideas informally in a human voice. Start practicing now before it’s too late. Get blogging.

You can say that again, Steve. I agree with you wholeheartedly.

As a copywriter who — like a broken record — has been talking up the benefits of blogging for the last two years to anyone who will listen, I couldn’t feel more strongly that the time for agencies to enter the blogosphere — if they haven’t already — is long overdue.

Tags: blog blogs blogging PR social software public relations advertising direct marketing marketing

If you’ve been reading A New Marketing Commentator over the course of the last few months, you know that in less than five weeks, I’ll be running the Boston Marathon once again for one of the best pediatric hospitals in the country, Children’s Hospital Boston.

This year I have pledged to raise a minimum of $3,500 for Children’s, and I still have a little way to go. So if you would like to contribute to this cause, I certainly would appreciate it. To make a secure, online donation, simply click here or write a check – payable to Children’s Hospital Boston – and return it to my attention at 33 Oakwood Avenue, Sudbury, MA 01776.

To be honest with you, I thought I was conducting a fairly ambitious fundraising campaign until I heard yesterday from another runner – David Paterson, Ph.D (see photo below) – on the Children’s Hospital Miles for Miracles Team Boston, announcing that he was auctioning himself off on eBay in hopes of raising $8,000 for the hospital.

Now that’s what I call going the extra mile.

David Paterson, Ph.D

If you visit his auction page on eBay, the description of the “item” (a dinner date with Dave) up for bid reads, “Dave is 33, single, smart, shy, sensitive, incredibly sexy and Scottish. He grew up in Stirling, the home of Braveheart’s William Wallace and he’s a bit of a Mel Gibson himself. He is an instructor at Harvard with a PHD in Neurology, and works as a medical research scientist in the Dept. of Pathology at Children’s Hospital Boston. He lives in Fenway in Boston now but has lived in Scotland and in Sweden too. He’s a skier as well as a runner and so basically he’s as fit as a butcher’s dog!”

Here’s betting that David will easily reach his fundraising goal, a credit to, well, his brave heart. I haven’t met him yet, but I’ll be looking for him on April 17 at the starting line in Hopkinton to congratulate him on the inventiveness of his campaign.

Boston Marathon Runner David Paterson’s eBay Auction Page for Children’s Hospital Boston

Note from Bob Cargill: To read more about my current fundraising campaign on behalf of Children’s Hospital Boston, click here and here. To read about the other four times I’ve run the Boston Marathon for charity, click here, here, here, here and here.

Tags: fundraising pledge-based fundraising
Boston Marathon eBay Children’s Hospital Boston Miles for Miracles running marathon David Paterson Bob Cargill

In a conversation with Allan Hoffman on Monster, Scott Allen and David Teten, authors of “The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online” (a book I’ve written about before in this space and which my neighbor to the north, Ted Demopoulos, just reviewed on his blog), explain how to use social software – including, of course, blogs – to advance your career…

Monster: Your book views blogs as powerful tools. Should everyone be blogging?

SA: A blog may become as important, if not more important, than your resume. The resume may get you onto the long list, but the blog is definitely a tool to get onto the short list. If you’re trying to position yourself as an expert, then you should be blogging about your topic and building relationships with other people in your industry who are thinking about and talking about the same topic. And when I say you want to position yourself as an expert, I’m not talking about being a professional info-guru. If your business value is centered around your expertise on a particular topic, then you should be writing about it.

Elsewhere in this article, David Teten speaks about what it means to “connect ‘up’ virtually,” saying that “you want to build relationships with people who are a notch above you” and that “blogs are a great way to access people.”

Exactly. Right now my blog is ranked 63,009 out of some 30 million sites being tracked by Technorati, but in December of 2004 an article I posted entitled “Why Advertising, Marketing and PR Pros Should Blog (Parts One, Two and Three)” was cited by one of the most influential bloggers in the world, Steve Rubel, on his blog, Micro Persuasion, which is currently ranked 71.

Now that’s a good example of connecting up, if ever there was one, no?

To read the article, Social Software and Your Career: A Conversation with the Authors of The Virtual Handshake by Allan Hoffman, Monster Tech Jobs Expert, click here.

Tags: blogs blogging The Virtual Handshake blog social software careers Monster jobs employment

If you’ve ever been between jobs, you know how much of a challenge it is to stand out in a crowd of those who are ambitiously jockeying for the same gig.

After all, chances are you’re just one of dozens, if not hundreds, with relatively similar credentials in line for that one plum position.

And unless you know someone in a corner office who can grant you the inside track, the odds of your resume getting past the gatekeepers and in the hands of the top dog are slim to none, never mind getting your foot in the door for an interview.

With that said, in addition to going about my new job search in all the usual ways – posting my resume on online job boards such as Monster and Talent Zoo, mining Craigslist for that rare golden opportunity, speaking to a slew of professional recruiters and touching base with practically everyone I know in the business – I thought I would do for myself what I’ve been doing for clients for so long and put together my own little direct mail campaign, asking for a meeting with those whom I would like to work for in the worst way.

Of course, a simple letter alone just wasn’t going to cut it. A prospective employer wouldn’t stand for anything less than a solicitation out of the ordinary from a creative guy like me. Not only did I need to come up with a compelling offer, but I also needed to present it in a refreshingly different way.

A Cup of Coffee to Wake up My Audience

Given my desire to have a face-to-face meeting with each of my prospects, I settled on a Starbucks Card as a means of coaxing them into sitting down for a cup of coffee with me.

But the strategy for commanding my audience’s attention didn’t stop there. I wanted to speak to those on the receiving end of this unique, self-promotional campaign at a level they would appreciate — not just as some guy looking for a job, but as a knowledgeable industry peer. My appeal needed to be relevant to the reader, not simply self-serving. The last thing I wanted was for the Starbucks Card to be perceived as just another gratuitous come-on from an overzealous stranger.

Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”

Well, coincidentally I recently finished reading “Blink” (the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell, author of the landmark bestseller, “The Tipping Point”), which is all about making choices based on instinct, “in the blink of an eye.” At some point in the book, Gladwell even goes so far as to suggest that job interviews would be conducted differently if people were to rely more on their gut feelings.

Writing to my audience about “Blink” would be as much of interest to them as helpful to me in getting my message across.

Now all I had to worry about was the execution. As much fun as I wanted to have with this campaign, I still wanted to keep it simple, and printing the following message on a Starbucks napkin (as though I had written it — impromptu — over a cup of coffee) helped me achieve both of these objectives…

If you’ve read Blink, the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point), you know that some of the best decisions are made in an instant – in the blink of an eye. I hope this is one of them. I hope you decide – without hesitation – to sit down with me for a cup of coffee. I would like to show you my portfolio and talk about how I might be able to contribute to the success of Company Name as a creative director, copywriter, blogger and strategic marketing consultant. Please – take your instincts seriously and let’s get together soon. Thanks.

Tucked inside the napkin were both the Starbucks Card and a small piece of card stock featuring this short excerpt from “Blink”…

“There are lots of books that tackle broad themes, that analyze the world from great remove. This is not one of them. Blink is concerned with the very smallest components of our everyday lives – the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that spontaneously arise whenever we meet a new person or confront a complex situation or have to make a decision under conditions of stress. When it comes to the task of understanding ourselves and our world, I think we pay too much attention to those grand themes and too little to the particulars of those fleeting moments. But what would happen if we took our instincts seriously? What if we stopped scanning the horizon with our binoculars and began instead examining our own decision making and behavior through the most powerful of microscopes? I think that would change the way wars are fought, the kinds of products we see on our shelves, the kinds of movies that get made, the way police officers are trained, the way couples are counseled, the way job interviews are conducted, and on and on. And if we were to combine all those little changes, we would end up with a different and better world. I believe – and I hope that by the end of this book you will believe it as well – that the task of making sense of ourselves and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.”*

*Excerpted from “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” (pp. 16-17), by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown and Company)

Needless to say, I couldn’t help but highlight in yellow the line about job interviews – this was no time for subtlety.

All of the above – the paper napkin, the Starbucks Card and the book excerpt – were mailed in a handsome, cream white A-7 (7” X 5-1/4”) envelope that I bought over the counter at The Paper Store. And on the envelope itself, not only did I print the word B-L-I-N-K in big, block letters, but I also added a ring-like, dried coffee stain, introducing the two creative concepts that were the foundation of a campaign that will hopefully land me a new job as a creative director, copywriter, blogger and strategic marketing consultant.

Time will tell how well this campaign will fare. I mailed the first round of letters just a few days ago. But whether or not anyone responds affirmatively to my request for an interview, I’ll at least be able to rest assured knowing I’ve shown those who are calling the shots not only how much I care about my work, but also how strongly I feel about working for them.

Bob’s Work History

Bob’s Public Speaking History

Tags: direct mail direct marketing copywriter Bob Cargill marketing Malcolm Gladwell Blink Starbucks creative director careers jobs employment

As you may recall, I announced here in January that the New England Direct Marketing Association had launched a blog to help promote its upcoming conference, NEDMA ’06, It’s a Brave New World.

I also told you that, in addition to my position as co-chair of this conference, I couldn’t be more excited to be taking on the responsibilities of moderating this new blog.

“Yes, like any blog, it’ll be a labor of love for all involved, but the truth is that using a blog as an online propagation tool should almost be a requirement for anyone staging a major conference amidst today’s new marketing landscape,” I wrote in this space some six weeks ago.

Well, so far, so good. If I do say myself, I believe we have a pretty awesome blog up and running on behalf of NEDMA ’06, and what I posted on it today will hopefully attract a slew of new subscribers who will feel the same way.

“As a subscriber, you’ll know whenever the blog has been updated with new information without ever having to actually go to it. It’ll come to you,” I wrote just a couple of hours ago, thinking it would make sense to explain to our readers the benefits of subscribing to the blog, as opposed to simply reading it.

I also took the time to define RSS, or Really Simple Syndication:

“This is a way for you to subscribe to this blog – and as many others as you like – through an instantaneous feed brought to you by a feed reader (or aggregator) such as Bloglines.

“At first, RSS may sound confusing, but it’s really not. And many online marketing experts say it’s the wave of the future, so it makes a lot of sense to at least become familiar with it.

“RSS means both the sender and receiver don’t have to worry about the filters that can inadvertently block legitimate emails from reaching their destination.

“RSS makes it possible for you to receive all – and only – the content you want, when you want it, where you want it.”

Finally, I told our audience about a special Starbucks Card giveaway:

“As an incentive for you to become a subscriber to this blog sooner rather than later, we’re going to give away two $10 Starbucks Cards – one to a reader who subscribes through FeedBlitz and the other to someone who subscribes through Bloglines between the time of this post and 5 PM EST on Monday, March 6.

“To qualify for this drawing, however, you must let us know before the deadline that you’ve subscribed for the first time by sending an email to Cargill123@aol.com that includes the day and time you became a subscriber and whether you used FeedBlitz or Bloglines as well as your name, company name, mailing address and phone number. We’ll announce the two winners here next week. Good luck!”

If you’d like to read – or better yet, subscribe to – the NEDMA ’06, It’s a Brave New World Conference Blog, and be entered into our drawing for a Starbucks Card, click here.

In an article published recently in his firm’s newsletter, David Baker, Principal of ReCourses, Inc., a management consulting firm that works exclusively with public relations, advertising, and design firms, makes the rather startling claim that “your clients care more about how the work is managed and delivered than the work itself.”

At first, that notion may seem preposterous to many of us agency folks, especially those of us who toil away in the creative department day in and day out. After all, why would our clients care how we get it done, as long we get it done well?

However, having had the opportunity to have met David before and to have been on the receiving end of his professional advice, I’m inclined to defer to his experience and expertise on the matter (especially after reading his thesis below)…

What Staffing Decisions Have the Greatest Impact on Clients?
By David Baker, Principal, ReCourses

Your clients care more about how the work is managed and delivered than the work itself.

Many of you are going to disagree with that statement, and I’m fine with that, but I wanted to put it in a separate paragraph just to be very clear about what I’ve noticed when listening to hundreds of your clients over the years. Yes, I can’t count how many times they’ve told me that they place great value on an agency that “gets it” in their ability to listen, push the envelope appropriately, and consistently hit home runs out of the park. But the work itself just needs to be good enough (that is not a negative in spite of the way it sounds), while the management and delivery of that work needs to be remarkable.

Here are some of the forces that are working against that premise.

1) First, your employees care about the work they do. So much, in fact, that they find it very difficult to apply a measured effort to each project, instead lavishing great amounts of attention on everything, whether the client is paying for it or not. Their work is informed by their own very high standard rather than what the client would find acceptable. If any particular client isn’t willing to pay for what the employee wants to do, the actual target becomes “the book” or the “body of work” that will be used to snag deserving clients later. This is a good problem to have, but it can be difficult to make money in this environment, and those who are managing and delivering the work will have a real challenge in hitting budgets and deadlines.

2) Second, your industry doesn’t give out awards for great traffic or great account service. They should, but they don’t. Nearly every award is centered around the admiration of peers instead of the admiration of clients.

3) Third, hardly anybody starts a firm like yours as an expert in traffic, production management, or account service. Instead, you started as an expert technician in something, whether public relations, advertising, design, account planning, copywriting, media planning, or whatever. So from the very beginning you set out to sell THAT. This thing you did was the core competency and all the rest was fluff. Chances are you didn’t even feel comfortable charging (or charging enough) for the services that were wrapped around that core competency, and perhaps you even hid them in estimates and invoices.

Sometimes the people who allow you to do great work need a lot more attention than the people who do the work that you sell. These folks are the offensive line who allow the quarterback and running back to move the ball down the field. It’s a thankless job to help other people succeed, but a great offensive line can make even a mediocre quarterback look pretty good. Yet a great quarterback is nothing without a strong offensive line.

You know what else? Nearly every mistake you’ll make in structuring roles at your firm will relate in some way to how you handle the coordinating of the work you do and the interfacing between the firm and your client. These employees are the core of what clients value and notice.

Your clients care more about how the work is managed and delivered than the work itself. Do your staffing decisions take this into account?

Recourses offers a free email subscription service that provides its constituents with business advice on managing a small communications firm. To learn more about David Baker and Recourses, and to sign up for this free service, click here.