Blogging Guidelines

Timing:
Required one minimum per business day, plus any contributed blog entries.

Blog when you have something to blog. Dash it off fairly quickly. Don’t spend hours (or even half hours) polishing. It’s like writing a quick email to a colleague. You’re posting something you thought they might find interesting. But you both have jobs to do and you’d better get back now to doing them.

Sometimes blogging can be a great way to ‘warm up” your writing if you have a big assignment that day and can’t get started. Sometimes it’s a good way to fill up those last 15 minutes left in the day or before a meeting.

Blog Goals
#1. Gain Traffic – from search engines, other bloggers, Twitter mentions, various links. So your postings should be:
- Loaded with keywords
- Include links to other people’s sites and blogs
- “Twitterable”

#2. Grow your free email list
We need as many people as possible to sign up to get the headlines from the blog each week. So the content has to sign-up worthy -- fun, easy, quick, interesting, chewy tidbits. Not boring, not work, no reading, not institutional. Not "articles". No long prose.

#3. Schmooze the proprietor, vendor and supplier community
We want to be everyone’s best friend, without being too overtly slutty about it.
- If someone in the community (even vendors, consultants, bloggers, and other publishers) has published or said something interesting, then give some blog link love.
- If you interview someone but can’t use some part (or all) of the interview in the actual story, put quotes that have merit on the blog instead. Cutting room floor is a great place to find stuff for a blog.

#4. Plant content that doesn’t fit other places –
- news -- as we are not a news organization otherwise.
- Notes about where you’ll be appearing or speaking next.
- Photos from an event you’re at (doesn’t have to be ours, can be of other people)
- Tidbits of info too small to blow-out to full feature story length
- Slightly informal info, quote, gossip, that doesn’t belong elsewhere
- Behind-the-scenes notes from an event

Writing Style:

First person. Slightly informal. You should write in your own voice, but stick to topical guidelines.

o Include text-links in the body of the blog (not just at the end of a post) to other third party sites, bloggers and content. Links are encouraged.

o Brief -- a post of one paragraph is entirely acceptable. Anything shorter may be a Tweet (we’ll look into adding a Tweet Feed to the blog later) Anything longer than 450 words is getting way too long probably.

o Graphics: use pics you've taken or from press releases. Do not not images for which we do not have copyright permission. Financial charts are always sexy.

o Written in a expert - but not pompous- tone. Assume the reader is a 30-45-year old fellow industry professional - but they probably don't have an expensive business background yet.

o Can include jokes -- carefully.

Do NOTs:

o Post anything that could be construed as too overtly promotional or salesly in nature for ourselves or anyone else.

o Make negative comments about a particular brand, dispensary, or vendor, unless it’s a direct, authorized quote from a rep from the brand in question. You may be dissing a potential customer, marketing partner, or interview source.

o Mention DI, AHV, SSI, WTW or another AHV-owned company without noting that it is our parent company or it is our sister site.

o Quote someone by name without asking first to determine if it’s ok to quote them in public. Only exceptions - people such as bloggers, speakers, published writers who have already made these particular quotes in a public forum.

o Write posts that are nothing more than “me too” observations or duplicative summaries linking to another article or post. You can and should cite other sources BUT when you do so you must bring something new, exclusive, or insightful to the post you write -- something uniquely DBN and uniquely you.

Topics and Stories Great for Blogging:

o The cutting room floor

You did an hour-long interview for a story, and inevitably some tidbit of information that was useful, won’t fit in the story format or flow. Pop it into your “cutting room floor” folder and use it as a blog the same week that the story comes out. Include a hotlink to the story on the site.

o Duplicative stories

Someone’s pitching you on a story idea. The brand name is pretty cool/big and or the data or creative samples rock. But, DBN’s already done a story on this same topic so the topic it’s not exclusive or unique enough to write up for a feature article. Instead, write a brief blog post including the new info and creative samples and hotlink to the past (evergreen) story, calling it a “trend” or “great reminder of what works” or whatever.

o New research

Anyone on the planet has announced new research data that you think is neat or interesting and you have some perspective, analysis or a unique perspective of your own to add to it to make the info more useful for our readers. Pop it into the blog and link directly to the original research organization. Do NOT link to a third party publication which in turn reports on the research.

o Event notes

Can be anyone’s event. Can be virtual, a webinar, a user conference, a local association luncheon, a huge trade show, whatever. You do not need to be at the event yourself as long as you can get notes from someone trustworthy (or a good gossip) who was or is there.

Notes should be published during and immediately after events... don’t wait too long, this info gets cold. If the show is heavily reported by trade press, don’t bother reporting on what the keynotes said, etc. That info is already out there. Instead, report on what an under-covered speaker said, or gossip and mood from the floor itself. If it’s a new show, report on how many people are there, how many exhibitors, because some will read your post to decide if they should attend next year.

You may quote attendees without using their names if that will get you permission to reveal the really cool insider nuggets that everyone wants to read but no one wants attributed to them. Example: “The CMO of an major dating site site told me his company never looks at Web analytics reports because there isn’t enough time. Yeah, he knows that’s idiotic and probably hurting sales, but being under-staffed is the ugly reality of sub sites these days....”

o Exclusive cool people quotes (especially other bloggers)

Also, quoting people is a great way to get SEO (for that person’s name), traffic (from that person who then passes your post to all his or her friends), friends (being quoted is an ego boost), and exclusive content with an “insider” appeal without a lot of work. Lastly, it’s a way for you to cover News, even though SSI is not normally a news organization.

Get quotes by pinging sources with quick interesting questions - the email subject line “Can I quote you in DBN?” gets a great response. If you don’t know the person personally, often a PR person on their end will work to get a quick quote for you. Questions can be:

- their analysis of hot news (legislation, M&As, store launches,etc)
- their feedback on results from an innovative campaign or tactic they did themselves
- how they survived office politics; tip for budget getting budget approved; etc.
- hardest thing they did in the past 12 months, etc.

Try to never quote the same vendor too many times (competitors get jealous and you look biased).

You may cut quotes and edit for spelling. If you make big changes, email the person back and say, ‘Is it OK if I quote you saying this?”

You may also quote phone conversations - in fact often the quotes are better because they sound off the cuff and human -- but you MUST get permission verbally and triple check the spelling of the person’s name and company.

If you see a fantastic blog post elsewhere and you really want to do one of those “look at this great post” hotlink posts, but you’re not allowed because we don’t allow purely summary + directional posts without unique content ... turn it into a DBN Exclusive by contacting the blogger (or author) in question and asking a follow-up question or two. Then cite their quote as your blog and hotlink to their blog as a follow-up hotlink.

o Gossip, what’s going on, trends

Have five research reports come out in the last year on the same topic? Group them into one blog and call it a quick trend piece.

Vendor M&As, government legislation, lawsuits, people changing jobs, etc, etc. Anything that’s fascinating to insiders can be reported on. BUT you can’t rewrite the press release. You have to give it a seriously insider spin. Luckily that’s not hard.

Keywords
Add them to your headlines and your body copy. No headlines without a keyword!!!