Blog Link for LinkedIn: Great idea, but suffers from a major problem

If you write a blog and you use LinkedIn, finally there's a way for you to connect these two major components of your professional identity.  Sure, you've always been able to put a LinkedIn button on your blog, and you could put a link to your blog on your LinkedIn profile.  But the two have never been able to seamlessly come together...until now.

Blog Link, a widget for LinkedIn (one of the new LinkedIn Apps), allows you to display your most recent blog entries on your LinkedIn profile.  Additionally, it lets you keep up-to-date on your connections' blogs.  From the TypePad website:

Now you can extend your personal brand even further by sharing the thoughts and insights on your blog with your professional network on LinkedIn.

Blog Link automatically pulls in the latest blog posts from around your network so that you can stay up to date on the issues that matter to you from the sources you trust.

Even though it's built by TypePad, they claim it works with all major blogging platforms.  I don't doubt that, because basically all it looks like they're doing is grabbing an RSS feed and displaying it on your LinkedIn page.  Nothing horribly complex here -- Facebook has been doing this kind of stuff for years.  Don't get me wrong, it's still a great idea.  For LinkedIn, which tends to be a pretty locked-down sort of social network, these types of applications are a step in the right direction.

BUT...

It doesn't work as well as it should.  Now maybe I'm doing something wrong, or I'm overlooking some sort of setting here.  I hope that's the case (and if it is, somebody please correct me!).  But I watched the explanatory video about the application, and I also checked out their FAQ...and there's no mention of this.

The problem: Blog Link seems to think too many things are blogs.  As a result, on my profile it's displaying articles from my company's website that I didn't write, in addition to my blog entries.  When I go to view my connections' blogs through Blog Link, it does the same thing -- it shows articles and blogs that my connections didn't write.

What I think is happening is that BlogLink goes into the "Websites" field in your LinkedIn profile, and it looks at those sites for RSS feeds.  If it finds an RSS feed, it assumes it's a blog and treats it as a blog.  The only problem with that?  Lots of sites people put in the "Websites" field aren't their personal blogs.  Many people put their company's URL there.  So if their company's website has an RSS feed, it shows up as that connection's personal blog within Blog Link.

Here's a screenshot from my LinkedIn profile.  The first few it picks up are good, because it's pulling those from the link to my blog.  But then it starts picking up my company's site's RSS feed.



I hope this is a problem they're able to iron out, because otherwise BlogLink seems like a pretty nice application.

Red ink is good for you!

How many times have you had your marketing copy ripped to shreds by a boss or colleague?  You get the paper back and it's covered in red ink, or you get the Word document back and every single sentence is redlined.  It doesn't even vaguely resemble what you started with.  This has happened to me countless times, thanks to a former boss's passion for getting every word just right exactly perfect.  It can be a humbling experience.

On the first round of changes, you suck it up and make the corrections.  But when your text has gone through three or four sets of revisions and they're still applying a liberal dose of red ink to your page each time, it's frustrating.  That's when you might think your boss is purposely trying to upset you, or that he or she doesn't trust your writing at all.  I mean, what difference does it make which of these words you use?  They mean the exact same thing!

Be grateful for those experiences.  Having someone review your text numerous times -- that's good stuff.

Closely scrutinizing marketing copy is something we often skip nowadays.  We're often making a frantic dash to the finish line to get a project done five minutes before it's due.  Or we don't want to bother a boss or colleague (who is equally busy as we are) to look over our writing and offer suggestions.  If the grammar and punctuation is correct, that's good enough for us.  Just get it done and move to the next project!  Who has time to think about every single word on the page, let alone get in a 15 minute debate about the nuances of a word?

But we should take that extra time, because something so subtle as a single word can be the difference between success and failure.

Here's an example.  Earlier this year, most Americans received a tax rebate that was meant to stimulate consumer spending.  But behavioral scientists adamantly believe it shouldn't have been called a "tax rebate" -- it should have been a "tax bonus" or something similar.  Here's a fascinating New York Times article that describes the huge difference in consumers' spending behavior, despite what seems like an insignificant difference in wording.  People who got a "rebate" spent less than half as much as those who got a "bonus"!

Especially with the Web and the immediacy of being able to distribute content, too many companies aren't thinking about their words carefully enough.  It only takes a few minutes for marketing copy to be posted on a website -- so we wait until the last minute, then send the text to the person responsible for posting it (or even worse, we post it ourselves if we have access...so not even one other person reads it before it goes up), and it's done.  Have you chosen the right words?  Who knows, because once it's posted and the project is off your plate, the small details in the text are almost always forgotten.

Entire buildings could be filled with books on how to write effective copy.  I have one sitting on my desk right now, "On the Art of Writing Copy" by Herschell Gordon Lewis.  But I admit I don't crack this book open often enough, especially if I'm in the middle of a project and trying to get text written quickly.

Do yourself a favor.  Next time, slow down.  Have someone else review what you've written and suggest changes.  Maybe even take it to a second person, or at least have the first person re-read it once you've made the initial changes.  It might take longer, but I bet the final product will be much better.

Layers of a B2B digital marketing plan

My friend Tom Pick did a wonderful job of laying out the basic vehicles of a B2B digital marketing plan in his recent blog post.  For anyone who is new to online marketing in the business-to-business realm, his 8-layer model is a great guidepost -- and it's good as a reminder for some of us who have been in the business for a while too.  Click here to read it and view the pretty picture!

Although Tom did a great job of summarizing what a digital marketing program could look like and the basic use of each tactic, remember this is a simple model that is meant to span the hundreds of segments and sub-segments that make up the B2B world.  So you need to explore your specific market and determine whether all these rings fall in the same place for your particular vertical.  For example, the decision-makers in your vertical industry or niche might not use white papers as much, so you would put a greater emphasis on other vehicles -- perhaps webcasts/webinars, or maybe e-newsletter ads.

To take Tom's model one step further, B2B digital marketers need to keep their goals in mind.  The basic goal is often to generate interest or a lead, the intermediate goal might be for a product demo or a sales presentation, but the ultimate goal is driving a purchase.  Even though the sale is often outside the direct control of the marketer (that's a whole different blog post for another day!), marketers still need to do their best to give their company the best chance of making a sale.  To that end, marketers need to measure the effectiveness of each "layer" in the model, deciding what's providing the best investment, and optimizing their marketing efforts based on their findings.

For example, let's look at some of the inner rings such as SEO and search marketing.  They are a great place to begin if you're starting a B2B marketing plan from scratch.  But to truly measure their effectiveness, you need to look at more than just cost per click or cost per lead.  The value of each potential customer should be quantified as best as possible -- not just as a cost per lead, but also as a cost per demo/sales appointment, and finally as a cost per purchase.  (And yes, it's easier to measure these metrics on some marketing tactics than on others...yet another blog post for another day!)

In other words, all leads aren't created the same.  A lead generated from search marketing might not be as qualified as a lead from an e-newsletter ad, which might not be as qualified as a webcast attendee.  So even though you're only paying $1 for the search marketing lead, versus $15 for the e-newsletter lead or $50 for the webcast attendee lead, the total cost for the webcast leads might actually be less when you're measuring the cost per sales appointment, or the cost per new customer.  These figures will vary from industry to industry, they'll vary from company to company, and even from product to product or campaign to campaign.

Also, this model isn't meant to be like school, where you have to master 1st grade to get into 2nd grade.  You can't take the position of, "We haven't mastered search marketing yet, so we're not ready to step out to the next ring in the circle."  Nobody ever truly masters any of these tactics!  It's about continuous improvement, always getting better, but always being ready for the next challenge too.  Whenever possible, you need to be trying a combination of all these tactics, and choose the ones that work best for your market and product.

Using metadata in PDFs that are posted online

One often overlooked search engine optimization (SEO) tactic is metadata in PDF files.  Metadata is the additional information inside a file that is meant to assist with the file's use -- either keywords for searching, the file size, authors, or additional properties.

Metadata can be especially helpful if your company produces a large number of PDFs that are posted on your website, to help users find them through Google, but especially through your site's internal search.  But even for the occasional PDF you post, you should spend a minute or two thinking about metadata for each document, just like you think about the titles of your web pages to ensure they're optimized for search engines.

You'll find metadata in the Properties area of Adobe Acrobat.  The exact location might vary for different versions, but in the one I use -- Acrobat 8 Professional -- it can be found in File>Properties, on the Description tab.  You'll see some basic metadata such as the title and author on that page, but if you click the Additional Metadata button, there are even more options, as illustrated in the screenshot.

Make sure you're including the title, a description of your document, and some keywords at a minimum.  These will boost the search friendliness of your file.

A few words of warning about metadata in PDF files (and really any other type of file that generates it).  Metadata can be great for improving people's ability to find your document, but it can also come back to haunt you.  You see, some programs generate their own metadata based on the filename you assign to the file.  Sometimes that metadata doesn't disappear, even when you change the filename.  One of my former colleagues found this out the hard way.

I don't remember the exact details because it was some time ago, but she was creating a brochure in either Quark or InDesign (we used to use Quark for page layout, but made the move to InDesign about a year ago).  This was a difficult assignment that was taking a long time, and she wasn't happy with her progress.  At one point as a joke, she named the file "Brochure From Hell."  I'm sure you see where this is going...

When she finished the project, she converted the file into a PDF.  Of course she changed the filename of the PDF once it was created.  But she either 1) didn't know or 2) forgot that when she created a PDF from her page layout program, Adobe Acrobat grabs the name of the file and inserts it as metadata in the Document Title field.  So even though she had changed the actual filename of the PDF, the old "Brochure From Hell" name still existed in the metadata.

The file -- metadata and all -- got posted to one of our websites.  We didn't realize what had happened until the beginning of the next month, when the web stats were being compiled.  In the referring keywords from search engines, our stats package was telling us some people had come to our site by doing a search on the words "Brochure From Hell."  A quick Google search turned up this page:

(I blurred the description to protect the innocent, but basically it had a little more metadata, and the first line of the brochure's text.)

Metadata can be your best friend for making documents easier to find, but it can also be your worst enemy if you don't realize it's there!

Related links:
Here's an excellent article about metadata in PDFs that makes recommendations about managing your metadata.