By Francis Moran
Almost exactly 10 months after publishing our very first blog post on September 14 last year, here we are celebrating post number 250! It’s been a fascinating journey of learning and experimentation, and I’d like to share some of that with you today.
If 250 posts in 10 months means we’ve written about 25 posts per month, then we have slightly bested our target of averaging one post per business day. There have been a few thin weeks along the way as client requirements dominated our time, but in the main, we have achieved what we set out to do by way of posting frequency.
Our best-practices posts, which highlight a particular part of our media relations practice, often using a client case study as illustration, are among our most consistently read posts. Such posts were a key part of our editorial strategy for the blog.
We have been less successful achieving two other parts of the editorial strategy. We have written fewer pieces that comment on what’s going on in the wider world in which our clients live, and we have had many fewer guest posts than originally hoped for. Both these targets are a function of not having a dedicated blog editor spending the kind of hours necessary to find stuff for our writers to comment on and recruiting posts from our clients and others in our network.
Our readership, after growing quite rapidly over the first two months, has averaged about 650 visitors per month, on top of our roughly 100 RSS and email subscribers. (This latter number ebbs and flows a bit but continues to grow steadily by about 10 a month.)
Our internal objective was to have more than 1,000 visitors at the one-year mark. We hit 793 site visitors last month, and topped 800 at least once, so I think we are well on our way.
More to the point, though, is what our blog has done for our organic search engine rankings. Even by month three, we were seeing extraordinary improvements, going from could-not-be-found to top-50, top-20 and, in many important areas, even top-10 results for the kinds of searches we believe prospects run when looking for a PR company. We have yet to be able to link a new piece of business directly to such a search, but we know that many prospects have read our blog and are impressed by what they see there.
We could do a much better job of building out the links that would make us a more active part of the extensive community of bloggers who write about public relations and technology marketing. Again, having an editor with more time to devote to this would improve our effectiveness.
Now, the tough part. Has it been worth the investment?
Well, I said at the outset that I would hold off on hard ROI calculations until we had a full year under our belts. I can say that it is a very expensive proposition maintaining a blog with so much original content. We are timekeepers, so I know exactly how much this costs. I’ll keep that amount under wraps for now but will say that anyone who believes Web 2.0 tactics like blogging are free or low-cost either ain’t doing it right or ain’t counting up all the costs.
Speaking just for myself, I have thoroughly enjoyed once again having an outlet (pulpit? soapbox?) for my views on certain subjects. I know many others around here have equally enjoyed being able to share their views and opinions. From that perspective, it has been very worthwhile.
Bottom line: We see value here and we intend to continue. Thank you for joining us, and keep coming back.
By Francis Moran
One of the first of what I like to call “Francis’s favourite fictions,” or “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives,” was a line from the CEO of one of the very first tech companies I pitched when I originally ventured out on my own in the early 1990s. “I want to be on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen tomorrow morning,” he said.
I was a lot younger, thinner and more intemperate in those days, so I replied, “Okay. Go home and shoot your wife tonight.”
Right answer, just not terribly delicately put. However, he got the point and I got the gig.
What I was trying to say, of course, is that media relations usually doesn’t work that way and, for some companies, it never works that way. In fact, at inmedia, our objective is never Page 1 tomorrow. Rather, we try from the very outset to build the kind of foundation for an ongoing media relations effort that will generate meaningful coverage over the long haul. In the technology B2B space, where virtually all our clients are new, small and/or completely unknown, this means we first must thoroughly educate target media about the client, its story and how it will be of interest to the journalists and their audiences now and into the future. If this process delivers immediate coverage, so much the better, but that’s not the primary intent.
This first company was also the first time I tried out what has come to be known around here as a ramp up and roll out, or the media and analyst launch of a company that builds the foundation I’m talking about. The company had recorded many newsworthy successes in its history and had a market-leading presence in its space. However, as we also like to say around here, they call it the “news” business, not the “olds” business. So most of those achievements were now just so much fishwrap as far as the media were concerned.
What I did was develop a comprehensive set of materials that told the company’s complete story, including a timeline of its growth and successes and a couple of case studies that showcased its leadership position. I then sent that package out to the media I had identified, through research, as being at the intersection of Writes-about-this-subject and Influences-my-client’s-market. I followed up with each of them, had great conversations about how my client might feauture in future coverage, and even generated some really good immediate hits. Over the long run, I generated a constant stream of coverage about the client, including, eventually, a Page 1 piece in the Ottawa Citizen.
If a client today tells me the same thing — “I wanna be on Page 1 tomorrow.” — I tell him or her much the same thing. I just use a slightly more subtle approach now.
By Linda Forrest
Is it surrealist to blog about blogging? It’s not my intention, but should this post turn into an Escher-esque experience, I’ll ask you to please bear with me.
There has been considerable media coverage in recent days about corporate blogging and blogging as it pertains to B2B marketing. Forrester, a well respected technology analyst firm, recently released a study analyzing the role of blogs in b2b marketing and survey results that indicate, “The number of business-to-business (B2B) firms that started blogging in 2007 plummeted compared with 2006 as corporate bloggers ran into roadblocks stemming from a misalignment between invested effort and expected returns. Rather than cross blogging off of the marketing communication list, B2B marketers would do better to embrace one of the four strategies prominently used by bloggers to attract readers, build conversations, and engage community members in sharing their experiences with their online peers.
Four Blog Strategies Produce Community Marketing Value
- Strategy One: Be A Conversation Starter, Not A Spoiler
- Strategy Two: Make Blog Content Entertaining, Easy To Digest And To Use
- Strategy Three: Connect The Dots Between Events And Community Involvement
- Strategy Four: Invite Thought Leaders, But Coach Them On Community Etiquette”
According to The Leading Edge, a PR technology trends blog, “infrequent and boring content” is what ails the high tech companies that responded to the survey. This blog has some interesting statistics from the study and I would encourage you to visit the link above to find out more.
The bottom line is that blogging, like any other marketing activity, should adhere to best practices. Those companies that are not deriving value from this particular communication channel are probably not meeting all of the challenges inherent with utilizing a new method of communication to reach customers, influencers and prospects. Since blogging was the “hot, new thing,” you would be hard pressed to find a company that hasn’t at least considered hopping on the bandwagon and starting its own blog. Those that are likely to be successful, though, are the ones that carefully considered the reasoning behind the blog, the objectives that the companies were hoping to accomplish by starting their blogs, and how this channel could support their full range of marketing activities.
Coming up with fresh, intelligent, conversation-starting blog posts with regularity can be challenging, to be sure, but whether the effort and potential return on investment are worthwhile is a question that each company must answer for itself before diving headlong into blogging.
By Linda Forrest
As we here at inmedia are coordinating our upcoming vacation schedules and as next week has two major holidays in North America that kick off in earnest the sorts of summer activities that Nat King Cole envisioned in the song whose title is above, we begin to hear the common summer rumblings from clients and prospects about whether media relations efforts are best left to the Fall.
There’s a common misperception that summer media consumption drops away to almost nothing and that your investment is better spent holding off until the Fall. This very topic was explored in detail last year at OCRI’s Zone5ive, by Veronica Engleberts of Vector Media, a media planning and marketing agency here in Ottawa. The presentation has really stuck with me because it provided effective proof points to support the idea that marketing needs to be a year-round activity and that those companies that go fallow as the mercury rises are losing momentum by sending their marketing efforts on summer holidays.
Consider this, from Veronica’s presentation: “If every one of your prospects took a vacation at some point in July or August, it would amount to an average of 11% of prospects in any given week. Can you afford not to advertise to the other 89%?” Excellent point. Yes, people do take holidays, but not all your customers or prospects are away for the entire season. Why miss the opportunity to make some noise when perhaps your competitors are taking the summer off from getting their messages out?
With regards to media relations in particular, which is our bailiwick, there are even more compelling reasons to carry through with your campaigns. A lot of the media outlets that we target on behalf of clients are trade publications, some of which are glossy print publications with long lead times, sometimes three months or longer. So, by ceasing the conversation with these publications in the summer, we would, in essence, be scuppering our chances at seeing some coverage in the Fall editions. Our actions now are targeting opportunities through the balance of the year and beyond. Effective media relations is a consistent effort that is cumulative; it’s important to maintain regular contact with our targets through myriad tactics as you can never be sure when the tipping point will be that will secure the most impactful coverage available with that outlet. It’s quite possible that the editors are suffering from a content famine in the summer, prior to the feast that is that Fall when everyone ramps up their efforts once again.
Does this mean that I’m advocating sending out a news release on Canada Day or on Independence Day? Of course not (unless it’s really bad news, of course, and you’re hoping to bury it…) But to take the rest of the summer off is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
