Posts Tagged social media
Promote it, and they will come
As I wrote about recently, my firm Strategic Communications Group has helped a lot of clients implement their social media strategies. Many times, this includes the launch of a company blog. But for a blog to contribute to the business goals of the company, it needs to build up traffic fairly rapidly. “Build it and they will come” is not a workable strategy.
You need to promote your new blog in the right places to get the right kind of readership. This kind of promotion can’t be automated — it has to be done by hand, and needs to understand the norms and interests of the online communities to be successful.
Where are these right places? Many of them have already been identified before the blog has launched. For every client Strategic regularly identifies communities of interest around the product or service the client provides — LinkedIn, Facebook, specialized Ning communities. So those are natural areas that will be interested in a blog discussing their particular niche.
Social bookmarking sites are also effective for promoting blog content. Blog, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz and StumbleUpon are great ways to republish content and expose it to large numbers of potential visitors. Provided the content is appropriate, Twitter can be a potent way to promote new blog content. And by using the site www.bit.ly, you can track the number of clicks on your tweet. Depending on the number of followers and factors like retweets, large numbers of visitors can be delivered via the Twitter channel.
Good blog content can also be repurposed on user generated sites in publications that serve the client’s target audience. For example, Business Week and CIO Magazine have online communities that accept quality user generated content. Editing the blog content for these audiences and promoting the existence of the company blog can be very effective for traffic generation.
It’s tempting to celebrate when a company blog is launched. But the launch is the beginning of a new phase of the campaign, not a conclusion.
Add comment June 14, 2009
News from the Front Lines — Government 2.0 Success Stories
The Social Media Club of DC had a meeting dedicated to Government 2.0 Wednesday night. Unfortunately I was unable to attend, but my Strategic Communications Group colleague Bill Murray was there. Bill wrote up his thoughts, and I’m happy to post them here.
Bill is very experienced in the b2g field, having formerly worked as a reporter for Federal Computer Week, Government Computer News and Washington Technology. His Twitter stream is wamurray, and his report is below.
I attended last night’s Social Media Club DC meeting on Gov 2.0 at Ogilvy 360 on 19th Street. John Bell, head of Ogilvy’s 360 social media practice, served as the host, and Larissa Fair of Livingston Communications was the Social Media Club officer who introduced John. Mark Drapeau (cheeky_geeky on Twitter) was there, and I had a chance to speak with him for a few minutes about how a biological scientist came to write about social media for Mashable.com.
There were four speakers — Miguel Gomez of HHS’ Aids.com, Joanne McGovern of GSA’s USA.gov, contractor Tracy Johnson from SBA’s Business.com and Mike Panetta of Grassroots Enterprises, who is DC’s shadow representative to Congress. Some of the best practices they described are very similar to the work we do for our clients.
Joanne, for example, wanted to put a human face on government through blogging with her team at USA.gov. To overcome any fear of what the public might say to them, they have two rules in place — comments need to be civil in tone and directly related to the topic of the blog post.
Miguel spoke about the culture clash that can happen when implementing social media inside government. He talked about the immense bureaucratic obstacles at Health & Human Services Department to his blogging and podcasting at AIDS.gov. Incredibly it took six months to get a meeting with decision makers, and an addition four months to receive approval. And the day before he was to go live, the plug nearly got pulled because he’s “not a public speaker.”
He talked about taking the role of a patient educator with his fellow public health professionals to explain how social media can help them fight AIDS. He also spoke about how important repurposing content (for example blog postings that can be made into podcasts), which can be very effective.
Tracy serves as marketing manager for SBA’s Business.gov, and showed how the site was able to increase its traffic 69 percent in six months, primarily through offering a search widget to local chambers of commerce on Business.gov material, using Google AdWords and guest blogging on two sites.
Mike spoke about how he’s using Facebook and Twitter in his public outreach to try to gain full voting rights for District of Columbia residents. Despite the challenges some described, I came away very encouraged that 2.0 technologies ARE being implemented by government agencies to improve their communication with the public.
2 comments October 23, 2008
The World of 2.0 — According to PR Newswire
On Wednesday I attended a Media 2.0 event sponsored by PR Newswire. Michael Pranikoff, PRN’s Emerging Media director gave an animated and informative presentation to a full house at the JW Marriott on Pennsylvania Avenue. In addition to solid background information on the newest 2.0 trends, Michael put a lot of focus on free online tools that can help a company take advantage of social media. So, I’ll try to do the same in this post.
Video — learn to use it. Michael used the example of a FLIP video recorder, $100 from Costco. Play around with editing software and get to the point where you can post some clips. Why should the 12 – 24 demographic have all the fun?
Understand where your company stands online — there are free tools like www.popuri.us and www.socialmeter.com to see how popular your site is, ranked by Google PageRank, del.icio.us bookmarks, number of links, Technorati rankings for blogs. Give either a try and check how you’re doing.
One tip was very interesting to me — using http://del.icio.us/ to determine what terms people are using to bookmark your site. This gives a view to how people are thinking about your site, and more importantly your product or service. This type of exercise, along with other free tools like www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com can refine your company’s keyword advertising campaigns.
Blog measurement site like www.technorati.com and www.blogpulse.com can identify who is blogging about your company. And by analyzing who they are and how many people link to them, you know who the influencers are and can focus your outreach on them. Of course you better do it well — simply sending these people PR content won’t work. You’re looking for a conversation, not just targets to add to a distribution list.
Every 5-7 months, the blogosphere doubles in size. Many of those blogs become dormant and never attract an audience. But others pull in readers in numbers larger than the mainstream media sites. Technorati reported that in Q4 2006 22 of the top 100 media sites were blogs, not media sites: http://technorati.com/weblog/2007/04/328.html
Establishing ROI for online efforts is often difficult. Michael quoted a London School of Economics study that tried to quantify the value of managing your reputation online. The study was from 2005 and focused on very large companies, but the numbers were impressive — excerpt below:
In cash terms, for the average business in our analysis, every 1 point increase in word of mouth advocacy (net-promoter score) correlated with an £8.82 million increase in sales.
• In terms of percentage growth, a 7 point increase in word of mouth advocacy (net-promoter score) correlated with a 1% increase in growth (1 point increase = .147% more growth).
• A 1% reduction in negative word of mouth would lead to £24.84m additional revenues; every 2% reduction in negative word of mouth correlated to just under 1% growth (a 1% reduction = .414% more growth).
24.84 million pounds is about $50M US! The companies researched were credit card, automotive and airline companies in the UK — drop me a comment if you’d like the full report.
Some of these tools are more immediately applicable to b2c, unlike the b2b and b2g clients that Strategic handles. In fact, some online measurement tools like www.quantcast.com don’t work for sites with traffic below 2,000 unique visitors per month. But these 2.0 tools and applications are becoming increasingly important for companies of all sizes.
3 comments March 10, 2008
