When Jerod came to me as a new employee with the idea of creating a sports blog so that he could have a testing ground for his passions around both social media and SEO, I said, sure.  What is amazing is that this blog has grown from an experimental project to a heard voice in online sports.  18 months later, the site has accomplished more than either of us would have imagined in our wildest dreams.  With Jerod’s leadership, this sports blog dedicated to Midwest sports has reached the 2 million page view mark, has over 16,000 total pages and 3,614 hand written posts, was in the Top 100 most popular sites on Digg.Com for February of 2010, has been featured on ESPN, referenced by hundreds of newspapers, featured on the front page of The Huffington Post, and has more front page appearances on Digg for this month than Yahoo Sports, CNN, and ESPN.  In 2009 it broke the Top 50 sports blog list.

MidwestSportsFans.Com has been hitting on all eight cylinders ever since the Spring of last year.  With only 6 months of traction as a blog on the Internet, Midwest Sports Fans was a prominent source of Internet information for March Madness 2009.  The single highest source of page views on the blog was last year’s March Madness preview post having over 60,000 page views.  This weekend, Jerod set out to break records as he posted the March Madness 2010 preview post on MidwestSportsFans.Com.

March Madness is always a crazy time of year and it is evident from the search and interactivity online.  I’m excited about our preview coverage on MidwestSportsFans.Com and am looking forward to keep with the content that Jerod creates!

Jerod congrats on your accomplishments with Midwest Sports Fans and at Orangecast!

(Oh, and did I mention that in 18 months he went from “employee” status to having an equity stake in the business?  The power of blogging. . . .)

What is Microblogging?

Microblogging is a form of blogging, used to create brief text based updates. Most specifically, microblogging, allows for brief text updates submitted via the web, instant messaging, e-mail, text messaging and MP3.

Launched in 2006, Twitter is the most popular example of microblogging on the web today. However, there are recently new services with the same micro-blogging features available. Digg developer Kevin Rose has also integrated micro-blogging features in Pownce, which he created with three other developers.

Micro-blogging has also been incorporated with online social networking sites, as seen in the ‘status update’ features seen in MySpace and Facebook.

How Can Microblogging Promote My Business?

With any marketing or sales campaign, the ultimate goal is to stay ‘top of mind’ with your client base. As is obvious within any competitive market – this does not always prove an easy task. Whether your push is to sell your goods, or promote a service – being not good, not better, but BEST is the key to success.

A convenient and simple way to stay ‘top of mind’ is through adapting microblogging features. Much like social media networks like Myspace and Facebook – microblogging acts much like a ‘status update’, informing the viewing public what you or your company are up to. The value add of continually updating your status, not only promotes your activities (or in this case, corporate happenings, events or promotions) but also updates your current and prospective client.

Let’s look at a couple examples. Let’s suppose that you are sponsoring a booth at a major industry event. Your attendees at the event can use a Microblog account setup for the event to give the “play by play” covering everything from keynote speech take aways to what’s happening on the vendor display floor. In doing so, you can not only communicate with customers and potential customers at the event but you can include potential customers that could not attend the event. This can then be circulated and shared across the Internet.

In evaluating Social Media’s potential for your marketing efforts, I think it is important that a marketer understand the overall power that social media possesses. Once something gains momentum in the world of social media, it can be unstoppable. As a marketer you want to be on the proactive side of that equation versus trying to reactively fight your way out of mess. I’ll use two separate topics in this post to highlight the topic of social media and power: consumer vigilantes and communism.

Consumer Vigilantes

We have all been on the phone, frustrated and tired, with the customer support divisions of large companies. Whether trying to get the power turned back on or cable TV installed to correcting an error in our mortgage escrow account, the maze of phone menus, overseas based customer service gaps, and general lack of flexibility from big companies can leave you can feeling angry and helpless.

In the March 3rd 2008 edition of Business Week, they published an article titled “Consumer Vigilantes“. It highlighted several stories of customer service frustration including the infamous one where a 76 year old woman returned to a Comcast office after waiting for 2 1/2 hours to speak to a manager and used a hammer to smash the computer keyboard of an employee. In addition to being arrested, the incident earned the retiree notoriety as Mona “The Hammer” Shaw.

In my opinion as a consumer, the hammer incident itself generated a very poor result in terms of what Mona Shaw intended to do which was get attention from the cable giant and get results for her issue. As a marketer, I will admit that the media attention did promote her story to phenomenal levels. Still, was media distribution really worth going to jail for? In comparison to the approach that Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield took which was to bring up a blog dedicated to customer service issues with Comcast, I’d have to say NO–it wasn’t worth going to jail for. Needless to say, Bob’s blog has has taken off to the point of where it has marked a place in blogosphere history. It’s name? Simple. . .ComCast Must Die!

Others are taking different approaches. One is simply recording these 2, 3, 4, or more customer service calls where you get the same run around with nothing getting solved and uploading it to YouTube for all the world to hear!

The bottom line is that when something takes off in the world of social media, it hits the Internet with force and companies are taking note. As a marketer, you want to be in front of that curve. Likely you want to be proactive and engaged with the Internet at all times. This can range from setting up Google Alerts to simply working with Bloggers. Starbucks does this with the site Starbucks Gossip.

Communism and Bloggers

Whether it be progress in Cuba or China’s stance on Tibetan Monks, blogs are presenting a major challenge for communist governments. CBS News published a story on the uprising of bloggers in Cuba. I definitely don’t want to go into a debate on specific issues in the communist world on this post but I will ask you to compare the return on investment potential of blogging coming out of Cuba coupled with those targeted to reach Cuban audiences when compared to strategies such as TV Marti where the U.S. government has invested 1/2 of a billion dollars in media that is estimated to only reach 1/3 of one percent of the Cuban population.

Conclusion

Social Media is power and the potential is growing. This blog is dedicated to information and thinking that can help marketers to be successful versus scrambling to deal with the Internet. How would you like to go in front of the US Senate to discuss your TV Marti results and not have a social media strategy in place?

Derick Schaefer

Blogging is a writing and publishing your personal thought in the form of an online journal. Moreover, technology has taken blogging one step further, and introduced mobile blogging, or moblogging. Mobile blogging is a type of blogging that occurs over a mobile device, and allows the user to upload pictures and video clips as an entry on a website, or as new content to a Web server. Mobile blogging added to the already convenient nature of blogging, in that all it requires is a mobile device with Internet access, and there you go! Just moblog away!