Here’s a list of 25 top marketing and social media blogs. It comes from a guy called Mack who makes lists of blogs every now and then based on how many people subscribe to them. It’s by no means definitive, but there are some gems in here. Have a browse if you’re bored or looking for inspiration.

1. Duct Tape Marketing
2. Church of the Customer
3. CopyBlogger
4. Search Engine Guide
5. Chris Brogan
6. Influential Marketing
7. Logic + Emotion
8. Converstations
9. Drew’s Marketing Minute
10. The Viral Garden
11. Experience Curve
12. Conversation Agent
13. Techipedia
14. The Social Media Marketing Blog
15. Emergence Marketing
16. The Social Customer Manifesto
17. Techno Marketer
18. Social Media Explorer
19. Movie Marketing Madness
20. Daily Fix
21. Customers Rock!
22. Shotgun Marketing
23. Biz Solutions Plus
24. Resonance Partnership Blog
25. MediaPhyter

If you’re interested in marketing or economics (or blogging) and you haven’t read Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, do it as soon as you can. It’s a brilliant book which explains that although a few market leaders account for the majority of sales in pretty much any industry, in any sales graph there is a ‘long tail’ of less popular items which don’t sell anywhere near as many as the most popular, but when you add them all up together, it still makes up for a lot of sales. For example, in the music business the number one album of the week might sell 100,000 copies, whilst ‘Pipe Organ Classics’ and 100,000 other obscure albums might only sell 1 copy each. If you have a store in a shopping mall (or even a warehouse near an airport) you don’t have enough space to stock 100,000 albums, but if your retail space is a website, you can afford to do that because there are no restrictions on what you can put on the shelves.

A typical ‘long tail’ sales graph might look something like this:

I could have grabbed that graphic from any number of websites which discuss long-tail theory, but I didn’t need to, because it’s actually the graph of popularity of articles in this blog. The most-popular one is about how mobile phone networks powered by Australian telecommunications provider Optus went down for a day. It racked-up a huge amound of hits on that particular day and has been largely ignored since (much like a cheesy hit song: think Crazy Frog Ringtone, if you even remember what that is). The least-popular article is a little thought-piece I wrote last week about imagining if every product you bought came with a photo of the factory worker who made it. I really like that piece, but nobody else seemed to (think art-school poetry, if you’ve ever read any).

But the major hits and the massive misses aren’t the key to success or failure in any business (or any blog). Scoring one big hit is down to a lot of luck and even in pop music, there’s no longer any tried and true recipe to make it happen. The most popular articles (and products) over time are ones your core audience connects with, blogs about and tells their friends about. Here at Zakazukha Zoo, the most popular articles over time are a post about how to promote your company in Wikipedia, and a couple of different case-studies with practical examples of real-life applications of online marketing strategy.

Whilst it’s fun to write little thought pieces, and it’s tempting to jump on the band wagon and yap about the most popular topic of the day, neither of those is the best strategy for building long-term relationships with readers. If you’re trying to decide what to blog about, follow these rules:

1. Have a list somewhere of things you want to blog about, don’t rely on just coming up with something insightful every day. Unless you’re The Buddha, you won’t.
2. Ask your audience what they want to read about.
3. Keep an eye on your most popular articles and follow suit.
4. Don’t just follow the bandwagon, if you want respect (and readers), be a leader.
5. Whinging can be fun and it’s good to get things off your chest, but before you hit the publish button, ask yourself whether your motivation is really to make the blog world a better place.
6. If you treat your blog like a soapbox, your readers will expect suds.
7. Before you write anything, ask yourself ‘would I still write this even if I knew no-one was listening?’
8. If you wouldn’t be proud of it in ten years time, don’t write it.
9. If you don’t want your grandchildren to read it, don’t write it.
10. If you don’t want your mother to read it, don’t write it.
11. Check you’re speling and grammar if you want people to take you seriously.
12. Don’t blog when you’re angry.
13. Every blog post is a job interview.
14. Think about what people who disagree with your point of view will say, because they will.
15. Anything you say will end up somewhere on that long tail graph, but aim for the left.
16. You don’t have to blog.

Two digital music stations and the viral power of blogs.

David Gillespie told me how stupid and crap Stripe is. It is. It’s crap and it won’t work and it’s stupid. I’m telling you now.

Iain Tait told me how f**king good Blip.fm is. It is. It’s brilliant and I’m listening to it now and I’m going to keep listening to it. And now I’m telling you. Go and listen. It’s f**king brilliant.

This is how blogs work. This is what they do. People whispering across the world.

I wrote yesterday about how smart corporations should be engaging bloggers in dialogue. Not just idly watching with Google alerts, but actively reaching out and befriending those who are talking about their products and services. They know that bloggers are as powerful, if not more so, than the radio shock jocks of yesteryear. Adding mildy relevant comments only when it suits just isn’t good enough, if you want people to blog about your product you need to have started cultivating relationships well before your latest campaign rolls out. It’s public relations 101 (well, public relations 2.0 perhaps).

No matter how small, or seemingly unpopular you think a blog is, I can guarantee you that more than one person is reading it. If that blogger mentions your product favourably to one person who is actively listening it’s worth more than 100 random poster impressions from people waiting for the bus. In fact, if you’re a disgruntled customer, one little blog post could be enough to make you switch banks.

Case in point: yesterday one of the other partners here at e-CBD read my blog post about NAB’s new electronic statement facility. She was helping her father-in-law with his tax and his bank didn’t provide more than three months worth of statements online. He’d lost a bunch of the paper versions and didn’t keep his receipts, so it was causing her all sorts of grief. She didn’t even know that banks were providing this new service for free and while it was a bit too much hassle to try and make her father in-law switch banks (he’s 80-years-old and he would rather change his left nostril than go through the paperwork of changing banks), if it had been her, she would have seriously considered becoming a NAB customer on the spot. And that’s just one person. If anyone else had been hit with some hefty random account-keeping fee by their bank, or had to wait too long in line at their local branch, or been given the run-around by a ‘customer service’ phone system, or been denied a credit card and then read that blog post, it could well have been enough to tip them over the edge too.

Don’t underestimate the power of one little blog post. Every time a blogger hits publish it creates another piece of the long tail that will more than likely live forever.

NAB (the National Australia Bank) made a profit of more than $4 billion last year, so they’ve been spending some of their cash experimenting with blogs. They know that blogs are important social media outlets and that the powerful ones have as much (if not more) influence and audience reach as traditional media. They are the modern equivalent of the newspaper opinion column (except they’re widely read). They know that if you can get people to blog about your product it’s a really cheap and effective form of promotion. NAB has been trying to figure out how to use blogs as a marketing tool.

Bludgeoning their way through the back door and spamming unsuspecting football forums with promotional messages backfired on them fantastically and earned the bank the wrath of the very people they were trying to get on side. They were hardly apologetic, but at least they admitted in an interview that they’d learned some lessons. Social networking blogger Julian Cole showed them that simply turning up, uninvited, on someone’s doorstep is not an effective way of getting your message across.

So, if espionage is out, how then, exactly, DO you get people to blog about your product? Actually, you might be surprised to learn that it’s relatively simple. In fact, I’m about to do it now.

I’m a NAB customer. I was preparing my tax return last night the way I usually do, that is, by going through piles of paper and manually entering data into a spreadsheet. It’s time-consuming and annoying. I had all my bank and credit card statements in front of me (the ones I had remembered to keep at least) and Excel fired up on the screen. It was taking ages. I remembered that last year I had tried to export data from NAB’s online banking system but it would only let me spit out the last couple of months worth of transactions, which wasn’t particularly handy. I went back in to have a poke around and saw a link that said ‘View Statements’. It turns out that there’s now an option to sign up for electronic statements, which means I can see the last seven years worth of transactions online and they won’t send me paper letters anymore. This was going to save me hours and hours of work, not to mention a couple of trees: brilliant! But why hadn’t they told me about this? They knew it was tax time and that people would find that feature useful, couldn’t they have popped a little message up in their system with a little tip saying something along the lines of “Access your statements online at the click of a button’. Click here to find out how.”

Well, *cough*, oops, it turns out that’s exactly what they’d been doing. I just hadn’t been paying attention. Right there, before my eyes, above my account balance in the online banking system was an inoffensive, appropriately-placed, subtle and concise message saying exactly that.

Why hadn’t I seen it?

Because it looked like an ad.

Research shows that people ignore online banner ads.

Whilst that’s still relevant and interesting, it’s a whole other point to the one I’m making. What I’m getting at is that I was so overjoyed with NAB’s efforts to help me view my statements and generally make my life easier, my first reaction was ‘I’m going to blog about that’. If NAB spent more time making my life easier, and found more effective ways of telling me about it, I’d be happy to broadcast their brilliance here at Zakazukha Zoo.

If they were really smart, they’d be paying attention to people who are blogging about them and they’d dive right in and start a direct dialogue. Just like The Body Shop and Vodafone UK are doing (read the comments sections of those blogs). Smart corporations have PR people who know the importance of cultivating relationships with journalists, if they want to get the blogosphere on side, smart corporations should spend more time on the right side of the coal face. We know you’re listening NAB. Come and join us…

Olive Riley loved the Internet and had hundreds of friends all over the world, but she didn’t have a Facebook account. She didn’t have a MySpace either. In fact, it was impossible for Olive Riley to have a Facebook account because she was born in 1899 and Facebook’s sign-up process only accepts people born after the year 1900, MySpace won’t let anyone over 100 join. Olive did, however, have a blog, and a YouTube account. Her tragic death over the weekend will probably lower the average age of social media users, but not by as much as you think.

A recent survey by Deloitte & Touche found that 43% of Internet users over 61 spent time sharing photographs with people. 36% watched and read personal content created by others. The average blogger is a white, 37-year-old male. 38% of Facebook users are over 35. More than 67% of MySpace users are 26 or over.

Don’t let anyone tell you social media is a youth phenomenon. Everyone is paying attention.

NineMSN are giving away prizes if you use their search instead of Google’s. The concept is simple: for a few weeks you can go to their secret search page, (which is different from their normal search page) enter some words into the search field, hit the search button and as your results are displayed, some little poker machine-style spinny things show you if you’ve won a prize. This happens every time you search. You get more chances at winning if you make it your homepage and more still if change your default browser search to theirs. It’s a great campaign and very nicely done, I like what they’re trying to achieve (ie. after using their search for a few weeks you’ll realise it’s pretty good, so you won’t bother going back to Google). It’s well-executed, clever and ticks lots of boxes. It won’t work for me because I realise my chances of winning a prize I actually want are dismal, I love the search results I get from Google and I hate the advertising on NineMSN, but that’s not the point.

The point is how I heard about this campaign.

It was here.

Not from NineMSN, not from a media release, not from a banner ad, not from a promo in Internet Explorer, not from a news article, not from a popup window. It was from a cool blog by an 18-year-old university marketing student. That’s the real power of social media. This is the core. This is the buzz. If your brand is interesting, people like Zac Martin will start talking about it, and people like me will start listening. Not because the message is forced upon me, not because anyone got paid to do anything, just because it was interesting.

Be interesting.

• Seth Godin — He often gets referred to as a marketing guru, and it could just be the haircut, but Seth comes up with a nuggety bit of original marketing gold pretty much every single day. It’s worth reading because it’s always fresh and it is guaranteed to shift your perspective.
• Creative is not a Department — Marketing and branding observations with a freshly Australian perspective.
• Marketing Vox — News, news and more online marketing news. If you like to digest a digest, Marketing Vox is the place.
• Shoe String Branding — A useful, insightful blog on marketing for independent professionals
• Google Webmaster Blog - If you’re not getting found in Google you’ve got a serious problem. This is their dialogue with the world and I’d consider it essential reading for any webmaster or mistress.
• Duct Tape Marketing — John Jantsch has been called the world’s most practical small business expert for consistently delivering real-world, proven small business marketing ideas and strategies. And he’s not afraid to tell you so either.
• Ypulse — Research and articles about reaching the Y Generation.
• Adspace Pioneers — Julian Cole’s perspective on social media; a refreshing blog from someone who ‘gets’ it.

What have I missed?