Alison Bolen is an editor at SAS, where she writes and edits content about analytics and emerging topics. Since starting at SAS in 1999, Alison has edited print publications, Web sites, e-newsletters, customer success stories and blogs. She has a bachelor’s degree in magazine journalism from Ohio University and a master’s degree in technical writing from North Carolina State University.
Let's start with a true/false quiz: True or False: Nobody comments on B2B blog posts. True or False: Quality blog posts will always generate comments on their own without promotion. True or False: Using your personal contact list to draw commenters to your blog is cheating. True or False: The only
Most bloggers start thinking about blog editorial calendars from a planning perspective. You want to make sure you have enough content to keep the blog updated somewhat regularly, and you want to make sure you are publishing content that your audience needs, without overlooking any of your prioritized topic areas
Before I can even talk about blog strategy, I have to admit that I am not naturally a strategic thinker. I am rumored to be organized and slightly more analytical than your average writer, but I am first and foremost a creative, right-brained thinker. This means my immediate reaction when
At the end of Todd Wheatland's presentation, "Transforming a large organization into a content machine," at Content Marketing World, he offered a top ten list of tips for creating corporate content. I've pulled a few tips from his list and added in others from earlier in his talk that resonated
Our friend Martha Rogers recently blogged about her trip to Arkansas for a Walmart Analytics Day. She says, "I can tell you that up close, the folks here believe the customer is number one. It's even part of the 'cheer' that the hundreds of people here did. Loudly." You should
The moment you (the expert) start to think a topic is boring is the moment when the average person is just starting to become aware of that topic. As soon as I'm bored with a topic, I know it's time to write about it at least five more times. It's
Is there even such a thing as a typical day anymore? We travel. We write. We tweet. We meet. We code. We coach. We manage. We lead. We all go in so many different directions, that it's hard to really picture a normal day the way you might quaintly envision
I've blogged before about how to leave comments, why to leave comments and when to leave comments. I've challenged readers to leave one comment a day, to contribute substantively to online conversations and to answer questions or solve problems when commenting on blogs and discussion forums. But there's a different
One of the first things many of us do in the "monitoring and listening" phase of social media engagement is to sign up for Google Alerts. After you sign up for those alerts, one of the things to watch out for are scraper blogs. These sites copy and paste (or
Seth Godin, bald. Mitch Joel, bald. Greg Verdino, bald. Stacey Alexander, bald. Yes, you heard that right. Former SAS intern, Stacey Alexander, who blogged here frequently last summer, is shaving her head. But no, she's not really doing it to join the bald social media guru club. Instead, she's doing
