Running Head: BLOG REPORT
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Assignment #6: Blog Report
David Greenbaum
Johns Hopkins University
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Introduction
Technology refers to the collection of tools that make it easier to use, create, manage and
exchange information. Originating from the Greek work ‘technologia’, technology also refers to the use
of machines which make our daily lives simpler and more organized (Duane, 199). Technological
innovation has vastly altered the means by which consumers purchase goods and services, businesses
advertise, employees interact with one another, and citizens acquire news and has stimulated economic
development and advancements in healthcare, among many other areas. My blog Afore the Herd:
Musings on Technology and Innovation (http://aforetheherd.com/) focuses on various technological
trends such as bitcoin, programmatic buying, and live streaming and emphasizes investing and
leadership techniques that make certain firms more successful than others. The title symbolizes being
ahead of others in technology trends and investing techniques. As an avid reader of many technology
blogs, my goal is to establish a blog that covers every technology vertical and applies my interests in
sports and music to approach key technology and leadership principles from a unique perspective.
Analysis
Target Audience
Through my academic and internship experiences, I am particularly passionate about the
intersection of high-tech innovation, entrepreneurship, and finance. I have pursued this interest through
roles in investment banking, growth equity, and equity research within a variety of sectors
including software-as-a-service (SaaS), consumer internet, eCommerce, enterprise software, and
healthcare IT. Most recently, I worked as a summer analyst in Morgan Stanley’s Technology Investment
Banking Group and will return full-time upon graduation. Prior to Morgan Stanley, I completed
internships in internet and digital media equity research at Stifel Financial and technology growth equity
at JMI Equity. Post-graduation this month, my goal is to gain a solid financial modeling foundation
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during my two-year analyst program at Morgan Stanley in order to pursue a long-term career in venture
capital. Venture capital is money provided by investors to startup firms with perceived high growth
potential. This is a very crucial source of funding for early-stage businesses that do not have access to
capital markets. While venture capital typically entails high risk for the investor, it has the potential for
above-average returns. With my long-term career goal in mind and knowledge that top venture capital
firms require potential candidates to submit a link to their blog in order to gain an understanding about
how they think about specific technology trends and investing techniques, my core target audience is
venture capitalists. In addition, I want to have a proper balance between technical yet understandable
content in order to target both entrepreneurs with extensive industry experience and technology
enthusiasts that may not have proficiency in specific technical areas.
Pages
In addition to creating a dynamic homepage that utilizes a technology theme and adheres to a red
and grey color scheme, a detailed about page is particularly crucial in order to convey to my target
audience why my content is valuable even though I am still an undergraduate. I detail my breadth and
depth of internship experiences and discuss my long-term goals and interests. Further, there are tons of
books and blogs I read to gain additional knowledge on the sector, and I believe it is crucial to share
such resources with my viewers. My goal for Afore the Herd is to create a useful site for my audience
and convey my knowledge and interest in technology; by including additional pages on ‘What I Read’,
‘Blog Roll’, and ‘Papers’, as shown on the top of the next page, I am able to accomplish this. In order to
properly organize my ‘What I Read’ page by book topics, I divide my content into nine sections: venture
capital, startups, software, internet, financial technology, healthcare IT, value investing, valuation, and
leadership. This is a key differentiator from other technology blogs I read as almost all of them contain
links to books that focus on one or two topics. By listing books that cover essentially every technology
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vertical and valuation
principle, I am able to appeal
to a wider target audience
and show readers the sources
of key information I use in
my blog posts. Similarly, my
‘Blog Roll’ and ‘Papers’
pages contain links to
sources that cover topics
such as venture capital,
entrepreneurship, software,
and valuation, which further
appeals to a broad range of
viewers. I have found
technology blogs and
white papers to be
among the best
resources for expert
opinion from top
technology venture
capitalists and
entrepreneurs, and I
firmly believe my
viewers too will significantly benefit from direct access to such content.
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Posts
Listed below are the eleven posts (in descending order from oldest to most recent) I wrote
throughout this semester:
1) Box vs. Dropbox: Battle within the Cloud Storage Market – February 15
2) Jeff Bezos & the ‘Everything Store’ – February 22
3) Parallels Between Experiences in Entrepreneurship, VC & the Music Industry – March 1
4) What I’ve Learned From LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner – March 8
5) Debunking Programmatic Buying – March 15
6) Will AdTech Be a Profitable Investment? – March 22
7) Leadership Lessons from ‘Outliers’ – March 29
8) Meerkat vs. Periscope: Analyzing Core Players in Live Streaming Market – April 5
9) Leadership Lessons from ESPN’s 30 for 30: I Hate Christian Laettner – April 12
10) Applying Porter’s Five Forces to the Marijuana Market – April 19
11) Debunking Bitcoin – The Digital Currency’s History and How it Works – April 26
As shown above, my posts cover a wide range of technology verticals and utilize anecdotes from leaders
such as former basketball star Christian Laettner and rapper Chamillionaire to elucidate how successful
organizations are created. In order to better organize my posts for readers, I divide
my blog posts into four key categories – entrepreneurship, internet, leadership, and
software – which is shown in the image to the right. Further, my posts are organized
by month published so readers can pick and choose which posts they may not have
yet viewed if they are new subscribers. Both the categories and archives widgets are featured on the
sidebar of each page and post as well as at the bottom of my homepage. This organization technique has
led to patterns in peoples’ views as those who view one blog post in a specific category often click on
other previous posts in that category. Additionally, my five most recent posts are
listed on the sidebar of each page and post. Similar to the patterns from individual
categories, many users that read one recent post subsequently view multiple recent
posts. Both patterns emphasize that the viewer finds my content useful and wants
to know more about the specific topic being analyzed, which is why I display a
subscribe widget right below recent posts to establish a loyal follower base.
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Views / Open & Click Rates
As shown in the top graph below that captures my blog’s weekly views history, each month had
a fairly similar amount of views with March being particularly successful due to a viral retweet of one of
my posts, which I will soon discuss. I have a total of 920 views and 10 comments for the semester as
well as an email newsletter open rate of roughly 50%, well above the industry average open rate of 20%.
Overall, I am quite pleased with the results I obtained in such a small time frame and will continue to
experiment and further develop the buzz building strategies I cover in the following section.
Buzz Building Strategies
Stokes explains that email marketing is a core tool for customer relationship management (CRM)
that, when used effectively as an extension of permission-based marketing, can deliver one of the
highest returns on investment (ROI) of any digital marketing activity (Stokes, 432). I greatly benefited
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from a weekly newsletter email blast as my target audience consists primarily of entrepreneurs,
investors, and technology enthusiasts, most of whom constantly check their emails. Further, email
marketing is extremely cost effective, highly targeted, customizable on a mass scale, and measurable
(Stokes, 433). The key performance indicator (KPI) for my email blast is the open rate of each
newsletter. As Stokes argues, since the newsletter focuses on the longer-term goal of creating and
retaining relationships with subscribers by providing useful content, tracking the number of opens is
crucial to determine how to further bolster audience engagement in the future (Stokes, 435). While
growth in newsletter subscribers is pivotal, the open rate is a key determiner in whether subscribers
actually value, use, and share the information the firm provides. Seth Godin states in Unleashing the
Ideavirus,
“Marketing by interrupting people isn’t cost-effective anymore. You can’t afford to seek out
people and send them unwanted marketing messages, in large groups, and hope that some will
send you money. Instead, the future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process
where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumer networks and then get out of
the way and let them talk.” (Godin, 6)
By establishing a following of loyal subscribers who can gain
valuable insights on key industry trends with accompanying anecdotes
from my personal advisory and investing experiences, I will be able to
gain further recognition as a technology thought leader. My goal is
that publishing useful content on a weekly basis will result in
contagious power and virality of my content, leading to entrepreneurs
and investors alike eager to know more about my background.
In order to stimulate open rate and clickthrough rate growth, I
created the email blast shown to the right for my weekly Afore the
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Herd newsletter. I personally use the MailChimp
campaign displayed to the right in order to automatically
send out each new post to subscribers at 9pm every
Sunday night. I enjoy being able to visually see which
subscribers open the post each week, and it helps me
tailor my email marketing tactics going forward in order to further increase open rates. My KPI has
benefited from mediums such as MailChimp in order to measure not only how many people are signing
up for the newsletter, but also track the open rate of each post and clickthrough rate of each link.
In addition to utilizing MailChimp to gain and track viewers, social media was the single most
important buzz strategy to promote Afore the Herd. Stokes states, “social media epitomises what the
web is about: collaborating and sharing content, ideas and information” (364). Thus, social media is
crucial to expand viewers and gain virality. As shown to the right, I
feature social sharing buttons at the bottom and top of each post where
viewers can easily share my post on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and email.
This enables followers to easily spread my content to friends and family that have similar interests,
which, in turn, leads to more viewers and subscribers. As shown below, Erik Lim, a close friend of mine
who is currently taking Social Media & Marketing,
utilized the share buttons and shared my “Meerkat
vs. Periscope: Analyzing Core Players in Live
Streaming Market” post on Twitter. This resulted
in a spike in viewers and four comments on my post that same day.
In addition to offering social sharing buttons, I cross post all new content on Twitter as Twitter is
the social media platform where a majority of technology enthusiasts share key news and opinions on
various topics. Further, I make sure to direct all my tweets to the individual or firm I discuss in the post,
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which has been a very successful tactic. For instance, in my “Parallels Between Experiences in
Entrepreneurship, VC & the Music Industry” post, I reflect on an hour long video where renowned
venture capitalist Mark Suster interviews rapper Chamillionaire on his recent appointment as a Venture
Partner at Suster’s venture capital firm Upfront Ventures. As shown below, I directed my post to both
Chamillionaire and Mark Suster’s Twitter handle, which resulted in a retweet from both
Chamillionaire and his agent. Chamillionaire has close to 900K followers on Twitter and, as a result,
his retweet resulted in a best ever 128 views that day and 9 retweets and 14 favorites on my tweet,
emphasizing the power and effectiveness of social media.
`
I am also the Co-President of the Marshal Salant Investment Team, Johns Hopkins’ sole student-run
investment fund, and manage the team’s Twitter account. Since the team is one of the nation’s most
successful university investment teams
and has a substantial Twitter
following, I often cross posted my
blog posts on the JHU Investment
Team Twitter account, as shown above, which resulted in me gaining a significant spike in views and
Twitter followers throughout the semester. Utilizing relevant social media outlets, combined with
implementing 4 to 6 keywords for each blog post, has bolstered my SEO and allowed me to achieve the
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highest possible ranking on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) when searching both ‘Afore
the Herd’ and ‘Musings on Technology and Innovation’.
In addition to sharing my blog via Twitter, naturally, those most apt to view my blog,
particularly at first, were friends and family. Since I email such people quite
often, I put a link to my blog in my email signature, as shown to the right.
This was very effective as any one I email now has immediate awareness of and access to my blog. In
addition, since my long-term goal is to use my blog to market myself to top venture capital firms,
recruiters and investment professionals will be able to see my blog throughout future email discourse,
which further promotes my interest and expertise in technology and investing.
Lastly, within my blog posts, three core buzz strategies I implement include putting all linked
content in red font, creating a blog post series, and responding quickly to comments. The red font
elucidates to readers that the specific text is linked content and allows them to dig further into the
specific topic, which further enhances users’ learning experience. As shown in the image below, in
addition to linking to outside sources, I also link to my previous posts that address covered topics.
The “Will AdTech Be a
Profitable Investment” post to
the right is a follow-up post to
my previous week’s
“Debunking Programmatic
Buying” post in which I
provide a white paper I
worked on during my internship at Stifel. Since my “Will AdTech Be a Profitable Investment” post
covers the AdTech sector, specifically programmatic buying and real-time bidding, it is important for
viewers to understand exactly what programmatic buying is, how various components of real-time
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bidding interact with each other, and the disadvantages and advantages of the platform. These topics are
all covered in my white paper,
which provides a solid technical and
qualitative foundation and, in turn,
allows readers to fully understand
the AdTech sector and its
intricacies. This post-series was
quite successful and resulted in my
“Will AdTech Be a Profitable
Investment” post having the most
comments I have had on any post to
date. As shown to the right, I
replied to each comment
immediately in order to further foster a relationship and promote trust with my followers. This, in turn,
will likely lead to them sharing my content with friends and family members.
Top Tips
While my buzz building strategies were effective for my Afore the Herd blog, there are a few
core tips that are crucial for all bloggers to follow. First and foremost, it is crucial for bloggers to make
specific groups aware of their site and encourage social sharing. Whether the blogger is a student who
shares his or her blog with a university’s investment team or an executive who promotes his or her blog
to coworkers, this is the most important means to gain a loyal follower base. In order to maintain and
add to that follower base, bloggers must mix up the topics of posts while keeping their target audience in
mind. Next, bloggers must cross post all new content on relevant social media outlets and utilize widgets
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such as MailChimp and Social Sharing Buttons. Implementing such techniques allows bloggers to
promote awareness to the broader community beyond close family and friends. Lastly, in terms of the
overall blog layout and design, it is imperative that bloggers ensure their theme, background, and other
key visuals are applicable to their target audience. While it is crucial for bloggers to consider the target
audience and to continually experiment with new, innovative buzz strategies, these top tips are universal
for all to follow.
Conclusion
Today, everyone from Fortune 500 companies to mom-and-pop shops utilize blogging to
increase their digital presence and inevitably raise their bottom line. In addition to bolstering an
organization’s online popularity in an attempt to raise revenues and profits, blogging can greatly benefit
students and professionals that seek to promote their expertise and interest in a specific area for potential
jobs in their desired field. Creating Afore the Herd has allowed me to simultaneously reflect on specific
growth trends within the technology industry and vastly improve my digital presence in order to reach
my long-term goal of working at a top venture capital firm. Afore the Herd has enabled me and my
network to have a tangible website to refer to a variety of important topics and has proved to be a very
enjoyable and fulfilling experience that successfully combines my affinity for writing and technology. I
plan on blogging each Sunday for as long as I am physically able and look forward to continuing to
experiment and expand upon my buzz strategies in order to further grow my viewership.
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References
Duane, James E. Individualized Instruction Programs and Materials. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational
Technology, 1973. Print.
Godin, Seth. Unleashing the Ideavirus: Stop Marketing at People! Turn Your Ideas into Epidemics by
Helping Your Customers Do the Marketing for You. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Print.
Stokes, Rob. EMarketing: The Essential Guide to Digital Marketing. Cape Town (The Boulevard, 3rd
Floor, Cnr Searle & Pontac St. East, Woodstock, Cape Town 7925): Quirk EMarketing,
2011. Print.