As an internet marketing firm, it’s easy to stress to clients the importance of a regularly updated blog. The tough part comes in taking your own advice. It’s easy to get so wrapped up in client work that internal work can fall to the wayside…and I wouldn’t be surprised if most internet marketing agencies run into this problem occasionally.

So when it comes time for me to blog and I have a ton of other work to get done, my biggest stress is coming up with decent ideas for blogging.

Good Blogging Ideas…A Dime A Dozen?

Since I was strapped for time, I figured I’d do a quick blog about this awesome whitepaper I found over at Small Biz Trends called “137 Small Business Twitter Tips” (seriously, check it out). But…it kinda felt like cheating to me. I mean, I could do that for every blog post really if I wanted to, since there’s no lack of awesome resources on the web.

That would certainly take care of the stress of coming up with good blogging ideas anyway….

Ideas for Blogging…In the Eyes of the Beholder

But then I had my “ah-hah” moment, and my blog post involved into one main lesson: the value of a blog post is really in the eyes of the reader! A blog post I felt like I was “cheating on” may be exactly what a particular reader needed!

So basically what I’m saying is this: don’t pull out your hair trying to come up with “amazing” blogging ideas…creativity just doesn’t work that way! Next time you don’t come up with a great idea right away, check out some of your resources, share a helpful story, relay a funny work story, whatever.

The whole point of a blog is to connect with your audience…every post you write doesn’t have to win a “Most Resourceful/Amazing/Remarkable Blog Post Of The Year” award (though some certainly should!). Great ideas for blogging will come…you just gotta let it flow sometimes.

So, today the boys had a “Jammie Day”. These are days when my wife, Jodi let’s the boys stay in their jammies all day while they play games and stuff. They had a pretty healthy lunch and Jodi was away for dinner.

Well, my boys are rather picky and they weren’t in the mood for anything for dinner. So, I decided to get their attention and tell them that we were going to make the best sandwich EVER.

They got all excited about what it was going to be and will remember it forever. Here’s the video.

The “Toasted Triple Decker Peanut Butter, Jelly and Fruitloop Sandwich” is a remarkable thing for my boys.

What are you going to do with your website that’s remarkable enough to get your potential customers and/or link partners excited about what you have to offer and remember it forever?

If you’re even minimally involved in marketing, you know that advertising and mass marketing are undergoing major changes. Have been for some time. We have become so inundated with constant marketing messages that we have become quite efficient at tuning them out. Not only is there too much noise, but mass marketing interrupts us, generally at the most inconvenient times – think TV commercials.

The worst part about this mass of advertising? A high percentage of it is simply irrelevant. The person hearing/seeing the message is not the target market. So we have lots of noisy messages that interrupt us with irrelevant messages.

It’s easy to see why changes are in order. As a way to make sure messages are more effectively delivered, companies are frequently turning to new marketing formats (like internet marketing) and engaging with customers in a more natural, transparent way.

Why Transparency In Business Is Good Business

One of the trends we’re also seeing is businesses moving toward greater transparency in everything – from pricing, to quality, to a company’s corporate responsibility policies. Previously, most companies were able to hide behind the curtain of mass media and carefully control the messages sent out to customers. That’s increasingly difficult because customers are able to get far more insight into a company and its products than ever before.

One of the developments that is driving the transparency trend is online customer reviews and recommendations from personal acquaintances, usually gathered online. The Nielsen Global Online Customer Survey recently found that “recommendations by personal acquaintances and opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising globally.” So not only do people place higher trust in online reviews and personal recommendations, but it is becoming increasingly easy and convenient for people to write reviews online.

This is good news for consumers: more transparency means a greater ability to make informed purchasing decisions. This is also good news for well-run, ethical companies who offer a valuable product or service. I would expect the cream to rise to the top, in this case.

In many cases, though, transparency alone isn’t enough. Because of the power of social media/networking, companies must invest in engaging with current and potential customers online as well as actively managing their online reputations. Companies that do these things well provide distinct differentiation versus their competition that will simply drive bottom line business results.

Because the site’s 122 million+ monthly visitors (according to July ‘09 Compete stats) needed one more reason to use the social network, Facebook can now help its users in the fight to manage their online reputation.

Unlike its competitors who always seem to fail at adapting their service offerings quickly enough to match the constantly evolving landscape of social media/networking, Facebook has now added the ability to tag friends in status updates.

The ability to tag friends in updates isn’t particularly fascinating, especially for those who “tweet” regularly. But Twitter-tagging is limited in terms of effectiveness for online reputation management (ORM).

Why? Because anyone who has a unique username (“unique” = not the same name as your birth name) in Twitter loses out on ORM-benefit because the link text is irrelevant. When I have a Twitter conversation with “@bhawk988″ (known to his friends and family as Kevin Doory), the link at the beginning of my Twitter message to him doesn’t help his profile rank for the search “Kevin Doory” in Google.

However, when tagging a friend in a Facebook status message, placing the “@” symbol in front of the person’s name creates an anchor texted, SEO-friendly link from your profile to your friend’s profile. It also creates a similar internal link to your Facebook page on your own Facebook wall. Check out these images below for an example of this concept at play:

How Facebook Tagging Can Help Protect Your Online Reputation

There is plenty of documentation out there stressing the importance of managing online reputation. Facebook tagging helps manage online reputation because a user profile earns a quality, authoritative, internal link with each tag in a Facebook status.

Anyone who was part of the Facebook username rush back in June and managed to secure their own name is likely concerned with their online reputation. Getting these internal links from across the Facebook universe to a Facebook profile naturally increases the authority of that profile. Those same links also improve the chances that a Facebook profile indexes in the Google search results for a related search term (like my Facebook profile for my name, for example).

Facebook tagging is likely to create a classic case of “he who has the most links wins” in search engine results for people and company names.

The implications of Facebook tagging don’t just end with the Google search results benefits, either. I don’t have confirmation on this, but look for Facebook tagging to begin to have an impact on internal searches within Facebook. If a searcher is looking for a certain “Jonathan Bentz” in Facebook, for example, the fact that I am tagged in more status messages than my co-Jonathan Bentz’s will likely cause me to rank higher than the others.

The telephone had no practical application and would fail…

Email wasn’t “personal” and would never replace a letter…

Now, you (business owner) don’t think there’s a place for social media in your business? Really? Watch this.

A full list of the statistics from this video can be printed from here.