SolveYourProblem
eLearning Series:
Free Bloggers Guide
20 Pages
The
Case Studies
Case Study
1: Existing Blog – Weblog As A Marketing Tool
Businesspeople
have discovered Web logs to be an online and interactive
marketing tool. A good example is SherpaBlog, just launched
by MarketingSherpa publisher Anne Holland.
MarketingSherpa's
Anne Holland has been amazed at the reaction to her blog.
She receives around 20 emails in a day in response to her
blog.
Anne Holland regards
her blog as a marketing tool, because she feels it lets readers
feel like they can reach out to the writer of a blog. The
blog enables her to touch the readers in a way that none
of formal e-newsletters can. She writes in an off-the-cuff,
casual style, and a typo or two doesn’t actually matters.
Many of Anne's blog readers are her newsletter subscribers. And while she is
careful not to promote her newsletters or other information products, she is
finding that those who respond to her blogging are 10 times more likely to
buy from her. This is because people who feel a personal connection to a company
are more likely to become a customer.
She promotes her
blog in every one of her e-newsletters, simply by adding
a prominently placed link.
Case Study 2: Existing Blog - The
Power of Weblog
Matt Haughey is
the founder of community weblog MetaFilter. One day he got
a telemarketer call while he was sitting at home. The cold
callers were Critical IP, who had gotten his home phone number
from the central database of domain name owners. He posted
his outrage on his own weblog:
The gang at Critical
IP feel the whois database is a virtual goldmine worth cold-calling
and bothering you at home (when I asked them if they got
my number from the whois database, they admitted that yes,
that was how they obtained it). ...
Matt then asked
other bloggers to spread the word that Critical IP was cold
calling people while they were eating supper:
If you feel like
sharing this message with anyone else, just copy this HTML
and post on your site: Critical IP sucks.
The result: over
the next few days, it was noticed that dozens of blogs had
linked to Matt's post, all with the same message: "Critical
IP sucks". Even today, you may find over two-dozen weblogs
linking to Matt's post.
The thought here
was that the collective linking of the weblog community can
achieve a sort of mob justice, with Google searchers finding
the message "Critical IP sucks" whenever they searched
for Critical IP.
As collective
votes of the weblog community determine what sites you see
on Google, Matt's personal site soon became the #1 search
result for google searches of "Critical IP".
Its worth noting
how frighteningly powerful weblogs are. There's even a name
in the weblog community for this phenomenon: Google Bombing.
Whether it's done accidentally or more purposefully, the
very existence of this phenomenon points to the power of
Weblogs to impact the Google search experience.
Case Study 3: Existing Blog – Weblog
As A Educational Tool
The Nuffield Foundation
started a weblog looking for ideas to support students taking
their chemistry courses and raise the participation level
of online students. Creating a www.chemistry-react.org was
their first experiment with blogs.
www.chemistry-react.org
proved to be an incredibly popular online genre. Soon they
realized that how easy was it to use - no user names to remember
and no complicated tools to learn how to use etc. Chemistry-react
like all the best blogs became a web page packed with great
links and useful annotations.
Often blogs are
used as a topical focal point for online communities, proving
to be a success where discussion boards or forums have failed.
Because the content is news oriented, it means there is always
a reason to return to the site. Because the content is time
oriented, it is very easy to catch up with what has happened
since your last visit.
A blog was good
fit for the students taking the chemistry courses too. Taking
a course is something that happens over time. As a student,
one week you are looking at polymers, the next at acids.
All the students around the world will pretty much be experiencing
the same challenges at the same time. The blog could support
this process.
Though the blog content created became popular with the students, blog owners
realized that the commenting feature wasn’t used as much as we all expected.
The story would
have ended there, except for the fact that a Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQ) section was added to the blog and it was
massively successful. Students ask intelligent questions
and that in turn became useful content which brought the
students back for more. Interestingly, the blog has evolved
into a news delivering part of a FAQ site.
Nuffield hit upon
a format that is popular, productive and participative. They
are now developing tools to help the blog team be more effective
at answering questions and improving the usability of the
FAQ’s themselves, by letting the system “learn” about chemistry
questions and answers.
Case Study 4 Of Existing Blog –
Starting A Weblog
The Washington
State Drowning Prevention Network website was lately launched.
The majority site is built using XHTML for structure and
CSS for presentation, with a table-free layout. Most of the
pages validate XHTML 1.0 Transitional and the site is a great
success, as the owner chose to use practical Web standards.
The following case study shows how was he able to achieve
all the goals laid out for the site with limited time and
limited resources.
The
Problem
The Drowning Prevention
site has been around since around 1998 and it's not been
touched, with the exception of yearly content updates, since
then. The owner of the site did these updates before and
found them particularly time consuming for a number of reasons.
The site had originally be built with FrontPage and as the
years past had gone through several different iterations,
whenever he would update it something would break or he would
have to rebuild an entire page just to add a few links.
The site was in
much need of an overhaul, both visually and structurally.
So, a designer sat down with him and the stakeholders and
began to talk about the goals for this site. He asked for
ideas about how we wanted it laid out, what kind of visual
feel and how we wanted to reorganize the content. It was
all fairly straightforward and need to be done quickly because
of the time sensitive nature of the content.
 
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