You’ve Got Good Content — But How Are You Presenting It?

“Content is King” — that’s long been dogma in the publishing world, and rightly so. But the maxim also holds for any web site or blog, including b2b. Most companies have large amounts of interesting information in many formats — presentations, white papers, spreadsheets — that can make for valuable online content. However, some do a better job than others in making good content easy to find.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon famously said that for every click required you lose 50% of your potential audience. I have no idea if that is backed up with statistical research, but it’s a useful benchmark when evaluating your online properties. How easy or difficult are you making it for visitors to find information? For every click, you’re losing half your potential traffic.

This week Strategic completed two projects for clients that focused on this question. For both BT and Microsoft, we helped them present their online content in easy and intuitive ways.

For BT’s Secure Thinking blog, we broke out various types of security information into channels — compliance, services, ROI, etc. This makes is far easier for users to find exactly the type of security information they’re most interested in.

Microsoft’s Bright Side of Government (their state and local group) site went for a more portal type structure. Right off the front page they make it simple to find their YouTube channel, Twitter stream, blog, customer success stories and special resources:

Front Page Screen Capture

Some of you may be saying “jeez Chris, this isn’t rocket science, it’s common sense.” Exactly! It’s like a lot of things related to social media — 20% inspiration, and 80% perspiration. It’s carrying through to completion logical extensions of your communications tactics, keeping in mind they should always reinforce your business strategy.

Take a fresh look at your corporate site/blog — how long since its been refreshed? For a first-time visitor, how easy is it for them to find the information you think is most important?

No doubt, content still is king. You just need to put some thought into its presentation, not just its creation.

Take the Time to Talk — It’s Good for the Bottom Line

Managing social media campaigns at Strategic, I’m struck by how many times clients don’t prioritize conversations that come up as a result of their social media outreach. After all, it is called “social” media for a reason. If you’re producing quality content and presenting it in the appropriate online communities, conversation will ensue.

Yet account teams often have to chase clients to respond to interesting comments or suggestions online. Part of that may be finding the right internal subject matter expert (SME) to respond to the comment. But another part of it I think is the inability to quantify where the conversation will go.

There is an element of serendipity in social media that bothers some clients. Blog traffic, downloads, sales leads — these can be precisely monitored. You can’t guarantee where a conversation may lead, exactly what it will result in. But they often do result in very quantifiable benefits for the business – I see this happen all the time.

My client Neustar made a major announcement in June related to Internet security — read all about it here on CircleID. We posted the news to the DNS and DHCP Group on LinkedIn, and got into a conversation with a System Engineering Manager at Colt Telecom, out of the UK. This conversation grew into a qualified lead and may result in a major new customer win.

For BroadSoft, the conversation started in the Telecom Executive Business Network on LinkedIn, where a IEEE committee member became well acquainted with the types of VoIP powered applications BroadSoft provides to over 450 carriers around the world. For BroadSoft, this conversation is leading to a very thorough understanding of IEEE standards, making it easier to integrate their VoIP application server into carrier networks.

BT’s CSR Perspective blog was designed specifically to deepen the understanding of the CSR goals of BT’s largest clients, as well as share information with a broader audience. The audience and influence of the blog has grown to the point that Xerox asked to contribute a guest post. When you’re working this closely with clients, guess how strong the relationship remains?

When Mike Zaramba took over as president two years ago at Altron, he turned to Strategic to help launch an executive blog designed for external influencers. But he found as he traveled to various company locations that  employees were also actively following his blog posts. His knowledge of the industry, and comfort with new communication channels were putting people at ease about the new president. So quite by accident, the blog became an effective internal communications channel.

For those reasons and more, my client counsel is always to get involved in the online conversations you initiate. It’s only good manners, and good business.

Quality Blogging — It Aint Easy

At my firm Strategic Communications Group more and more of our client work is in the social media arena. Usually a piece of the strategy involves helping the client launch a company blog. This can be a very valuable tool for thought leadership, spurring conversation and awareness and eventually for producing leads that support revenue generation. My colleague and Strategic founder Marc Hausman wrote recently about what he calls the three stages of social media maturation here: http://tinyurl.com/cmg4xf

Over the past 12-18 months we’ve stood up blogs for clients such as BT, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Inmarsat and GovDelivery. These implementations have led to a short list of best practices and issues to address prior to launch. The technology platform is the simple part. There are more fundamental questions to answer before launching a corporate blog — you can’t just  “throw it up” and hope for the best.

Here are the issues most of our clients have grappled with (successfully) as they launched their corporate blogs.

• Are you willing to take a stance? Many companies tend to be very careful with public statements, which is often a smart course. But middle of the road, consensus driven content doesn’t attract a strong readership. A company needs to be ready to take a clear position and welcome differing opinions.
• Response time needs to be swift. Responding to breaking news can be a very productive source of timely blog content. But if the marketing content must track down a subject matter expert, who then has to get his or her comment cleared, that’s not going to happen fast enough. Companies need to designate approved commentators, and they need to be accessible.
• Is everyone internally on the same page? Sometimes ownership of the corporate blog becomes a bone of contention between the IT department and the marketing/communications staff. Lines of responsibility need to be clear and agreed to prior to launch.
• Reasonable and clear metrics of success.  These can vary greatly depending on the nature of the content and the audiences targeted. Consistent growth in traffic is usually the best indicator. Sometimes clients focus on the  number of comments, which are harder to garner due to the increased effort required of readers.
• Finally, respect the time investment. At Strategic we have weekly calls with clients totally devoted the blog editorial calendar, and direct access the senior executive contributors as needed. If a company isn’t ready to dedicate the time and access required for quality content, they should reconsider launching a blog.

Here’s an interesting graphic courtesy of Matt Dickman at Technomarketer that illustrates some of these points well:

Blog Decision Tree

As communication professionals it is our responsibility to bring these issues to our clients early on and make sure they are successfully addressed. Companies that truly make the culture shift consider themselves as publishers, and bring that sort of serious consideration to their content.

With the decline of the technology trade media, quality corporate blogs can fill an important vacancy in technology coverage and become a trusted source of information in their specific market.

Got a story about a great company blog, or want to add to the list above? Please drop a comment or contact me directly.