A free webinar for corporate bloggers on March 11, 2010.

Learn the newest techniques to attract and engage your readers, customers and leads. Get ideas, see examples and gain valuable insights on how social media benchmarking and actionable metrics can deliver highly qualified leads to your sales department.

In this webinar you will learn the newest techniques for effective blogging and nurturing engagement with both clients and casual readers. You will hear ideas, see examples and get valuable insight into how a benchmarking program can deliver highly qualified content to increase your customer engagement levels.

On March 11, 2010 at 10:30 CET (07:30 Rio de Janeiro / 09:30 London / 11:30 Cairo / 12:30 Moscow / 17:30 Singapore) ends 12:00 CET, you are invited to see how successful corporate bloggers attract, nurture and foster better engagement. Social media expert and speaker Urs E. Gattiker will show you how easy it is to improve your blogging and communication strategies, processes and practices by using the newest blogging and benchmarking techniques to increase your company’s impact on the web.

No matter what size your company, or your industry, this webinar will teach you important and highly effective blogging and social media marketing techniques and will inspire you to create a number of new social media strategies.

Blogging, Facebook, and Twitter are about capturing social media analytics and interpreting them wisely and in context. This webinar reveals the latest trends to gain valuable insight.

Attend this webinar to:
- understand benchmarking and why actionable metrics are important to improving performance
- learn how to develop an analytics program that delivers insight, not hindsight
- learn what you should effectively measure to make strategic decisions
- see how you can effectively leverage ‘push’ and ‘pull’ marketing with your blog
- know which analytics to measure and which ones to put aside
- learn from mini cases of blogs included in the FT ComMetrics Blog Index
- understand why social media and corporate blogging are effective and necessary
- learn how to get started and avoid common beginner’s mistakes

Speaker:
Urs E. Gattiker, Ph.D., is a highly experienced social media enthusiast, author and blogger. He is both a founder and Chief Executive Officer of CyTRAP Labs GmbH. CyTRAP Labs provides corporate governance and social media services to organizations worldwide and its ComMetrics division is a trail blazer in social media analytics (e.g., developing the FT ComMetrics Blog Index – the industry standard for ranking corporate blogs of FT Global 500 and Fortune 500 companies).

To get your free access to this webinar, please register now:
==>  FREE webinar registration: Benchmark your blog – improve performance => March 11, 2010 at 10:30 CET

Download this document: http://commetrics.com/download/19/

Your advantage
You will receive a benchmarking guide (out of the ComMetrics eBook Series) that will help you develop actionable metrics for your corporate blog and, as importantly, empower you to successfully communicate results based on five Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your blog.

Your bonus
Free subscription to the My.ComMetrics.com Benchmarking Tool – measure and compare blog performance against competitors.

P.S. - Visit My.ComMetrics (register yourself – benchmark your blog(s) => improve performance). You can get updates for this blog on Twitter by following @ComMetrics or get a free subscription by RSS, or get new posts via email:

According to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wisdom, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will make a beaten path to your door.”

A good and insightful saying, to be sure, and the modern equivalent would have to be convincing the boss or a sceptic of the value of social media or blogging.

While blogging may be an effective way to reach many of the company’s customers and suppliers, and reduce customer calls if the help or FAQ section delivers, that may not be enough to convince a boss who neither reads nor writes a blog.

Hence, one needs to demonstrate that current and potential clients are making use of these technologies. Finding competitors or industry leaders that blog will also help convince a budget committee to assign a project manager and get started.

The  2009 FT ComMetrics Blog Index rankings can help you build a case for using social media in your organization (see the statistics at a glance at FTindex results). It illustrates how the largest companies are doing in comparison to their competitors and other large companies around the globe. It provides a tool for tracking success through hard numbers: how big is your company’s social media footprint? In particular, how does it stack up against your competitors’ ComMetrics Footprint and so forth.

Accordingly, deriving value from non revenue-generating activities means demonstrating the sometimes hidden values of blogging and social media activities. This is what the FTindex results can help you with. Findings indicate how blogs are being used to improve consumer relations, recruiting efforts and handling a takeover without ruffling too many feathers.

Download white paper (expanded version of 2004-05-14 FT article)

You can also get a complete report with the results as a free download (just register, and voilà):

Log in ➡ Download the 2009 FT ComMetrics Blog Index report

Additional posts and download of additional materials provided as PDF files:

Download press release
Download Financial Times case study
FT ComMetrics Blog Index published
Financial Times May 14 – by Urs E. Gattiker – Corporate blogs: New way to engage with stakeholders

Relevant blog metrics for diary, personal and business blogs
Please subscribe now so you can claim your personal and/or corporate blog AND trace those that you want to compare yourself to.
For Twitter, please use #hashtag ➡ #FTCBI

Five steps to turn buzz into sales
Which FT Global 500 and Fortune 500 blogs made the FT ComMetrics Blog Index
Financial Times – is blogging good value?

What is the FT ComMetrics Index?
ComMetrics has developed a detailed methodology to benchmark corporate blogs. The FT ComMetrics Blog Index uses the same methodology, but a less-detailed version.

Why create such an index?
We thought creating this index this would help promote good practice as far as corporate blogging is concerned.

If you want to find actionable insights, you need to segment your benchmarking data: pinpoint the various sources, user behavior and outcomes. The FT ComMetrics Blog Index helps corporate bloggers achieve this objective.
More issues below.
Who is included?
Companies included in the Index are taken from the FT Global 500 2008, ranked by market capitalisation. Where possible we have indexed the top 25 from the following categories: the US, Europe and the rest of the world. In some cases we were unable to find a corporate blog. In other instances, the blog may be owned by a subsidiary.

This is the case with Berkshire Hathaway: its subsidiary Business Wired has a successful blog that we included in the list. A similar case is EON: its UK division has a blog, but we found no active corporate blog published by its German headquarters (see also Social Media Marketing in Deutschland).

The 2009 FT ComMetrics Blog Index will appear in the Financial Times newspaper’s regular Digital Business supplement and its webpage (www.ft.com/digitalbusiness) on Wednesday, May 13.
Please subscribe now so you can claim your corporate and/or personal blog AND trace those that you want to compare yourself to.
For Twitter, please use #hashtag ➡ #FTCBI

Our next stop was the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. It has a few blogs that qualify using the criteria we developed for identifying corporate blogs. Really great job these people did in collecting all this important information, have a look.

Another big help was Peter Kim, who put together A List of Social Media Marketing Examples, (Bernhard Warner also recommended this list). Kim has an impressive list of a vast number of social media marketing examples. Sometimes it mentions brands (not necessarily the corporate owner of the brand) and other times, as in the case of IKEA, customer blogs are listed. This is no obstacle, however, and the list is just plain impressive. By the way, another blog that you have to read, his other stuff is impressive too.

The next step was a tweet to Twitter followers, which garnered a nice response from Michael E. Rubin. He suggested Alltop – all the corporate blogs and Feeds of the Blog Council. Of course, this should have been done earlier, since we ourselves are a member of the Alltop Social Media blog crowd.

We also found a ‘white paper’ (five pages but not much detail) and some presentation slides of a survey that included 132 Nordic companies, all with a market capitalization of more than 1 billion euro. There were a few only that had blogs, most we had included already. Check out Corporate blogging amongst listed Nordic companies, it is interesting reading.

Are we still looking for more blogs?
Yes, we are. Please tell us about yours. Companies often have several blogs listed in our database. For instance, all of Hewlett Packard’s numerous blogs are being tracked; naturally, the best one will be included in the Index.

If you want to check out who is already included, visit the
FT ComMetrics Blog Index

If you have a blog that we should track for the Index, tell us about it by leaving a comment below with the blog URL(s).

If you want to see how you compare to others, check out FTindex.ComMetrics.com (you must be registered to view data/statistics).

When will it be published?
The 2009 index will appear in the Financial Times newspaper’s regular supplement on Digital Business and its webpage (www.ft.com/digitalbusiness) on Wednesday, May 13.

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More resources:
FT/ComMetrics Blog Index