Honest and engaging corporate blogs (Part 2)

(See part one of this article)

Blogs are one of those “simple, yet so complex” online marketing tools. On one hand, if you can talk clearly and captivatingly with your customers about issues they care about, blogs can go a long way toward making long-lasting connections that build your business. You don’t need an outline, nor a proposal. Just write and make it real.

On the other hand, you can really screw up a blog fast if you aren’t methodical about when you post, how you promote it, and how you handle the interactive element. As we wrote in the previous post: don’t take your blog lightly. Successful blogs need a strategy, and they need to be on topic, credible, interactive, and written by someone with an engaging online personality. By conducting one-on-one interviews with people reacting to corporate blogs, we discovered some golden nuggets for success.

In this post we focus on how to foster valuable discussions and gain critical mass. In essence: how do you write a blog that has regular, active participation from your target audience?

Consistency is everything. Yes, you’ve heard it before, but for corporate-sponsored blogs it’s critical to establish a schedule for posting and stick to it. Weekly posting is a typical schedule that seems to be manageable for most companies beyond startup size; participants in our study told us that occasional posting, such as less than once per month, seems uncommitted. We’ve seen some blogs hosted by big corporations that haven’t been active for a couple of years yet are still live on the company site. If you have decided that blogging is not your thing, please, take down the page or leave it up in archive form if other people are linking to your entries.

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Winning the battle of 140,000+ apps

There you are, putting the final touches on an amazing iPhone application. It’s useful, straightforward, and appealing - and a dead-on match for the magical confluence of your business goals and your users’ wants, needs, and desires. And then you submit it to the iTunes app store, where it disappears into the void among the thousands of IQ tests, flashlights, and fart apps.

So how can you make your app visible among 140,000+ others? We headed up to San Francisco last night to the Mobile Monday Developer Secrets - Increasing App Store Sales meetup to hear the latest from TripIt, AdMob, Flixter, Flurry, and Booyah. Here’s a recap combined with some thoughts from our own customer research:

Problems

• There are over 140,000 apps in the app store, and most people discover apps by browsing the Top 25 or Top 100 on their iPhone
• 90% of people are finding iPhone apps through the App Store on their phone, rather than on the desktop or via other websites

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