Posts tagged ‘Strategic Communications Group’
SEO — A Success Story
How to empirically measure the value of public relations is a challenge as old as the profession itself. The rise of social media offers exciting new opportunities on this front. Last week one of my clients achieved validation of our hard work over the past few months. They now show up as the #2 organic return when searching on Google.
Let me give some context. Earlier this year we helped launch and support a blog for TANDBERG Public Sector. TANDBERG is the market leader for video conferencing, particularly in the public sector. But Cisco and Polycom have better known brands. TANDBERG engaged with Strategic Communications Group to build awareness and eventually support revenue growth via social media channels.
Week in and week out, we make sure that good, fresh content is published twice a month on the blog. As any writer will tell you, this takes discipline. There are always urgent PR issues that can trump a blog calendar, but TANDBERG kept its eye on the ball and stuck to the plan. They also gave us clear instruction to tag the content with the acronym VTC for video teleconferencing, since it was best known to their customers and prospects.
So today, when you search “VTC and government” on Google, you get this result, with the TANDBERG PS blog being the second organic listing on the search engine response page (naturally, another acronym, SERP). And as important, not a sign of any competitor:
Now there are some “black hat” consultants who promise to tinker with algorithms and game the system to achieve this kind of result. In my experience, there is no substitute for old fashioned hard work. Months of quality content and consistent tagging and promotion resulted in this placement. Plus, online shoppers and researchers put more trust in the organic results as opposed to the sponsored links.
This kind of placement can be priceless. First, your content being highlighted to any online visitor who searches on the terms you’ve identified as most important to your service. Second, this kind of organic listing can remove the need for funds dedicated to sponsored Adwords. We’ve got clients who spend into the six figures on such campaigns — how much could they save with this kind of organic performance?
So what are the lessons learned? First, as with any social media campaign have a strategy that reinforces the overall objectives of the organization. Don’t confuse tools with strategy.
Second, identify the terms connected with your product or service, and produce quality content on a regular basis that is properly tagged and promoted to online audiences.
Third — STICK WITH IT! This honestly is the toughest step, especially in this age of trimmed communications budgets and departments. Don’t let the day to day imperatives distract from a approved course of action. Companies today should think of themselves as publishers on their issue of expertise, with the corresponding deadlines for copy.
Now that we’ve built a large audience and achieved this kind of SEO success, Strategic is working with TANDBERG to evolve their blog into a social portal that gives visitors more choice in how to interact with the company. Watch for an update to this post – and have a great Thanksgiving!
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.
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.
Verizon Outsources Social Marketing to Facebook
I was interested to read a few days ago that Verizon plans to discontinue its branded social community and move it over to Facebook. Their Facebook page has over 18,000 “fans”:
Of course it’s very smart of Verizon to particpate in social networks — Strategic Communications Group has its own page, and we regularly help clients identify and reach out to communities of interest on Facebook. But Facebook pages do not offer all the tools of a true social network site, and it’s a closed environment. On the other hand, the pages are easy to set up and come with a huge built-in audience.
I’ll be joining Verizon’s page to help me determine which phone I should upgrade to — it’s way past time. But until Facebook upgrades its features and opens up its walled garden, Verizon should wait to shut down their own social community located at http://community.verizon.net/index.jspa.
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