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 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
One of this morning’s newsletters directed me to a fellow blogger’s post on all of the silly reasons you don’t need PR. The post was written with the blogger’s tongue firmly in cheek and had me chuckling, but I’m sorry to report that, silly as they may seem in this context, we hear these points all too frequently as arguments against the business case for engaging with a PR company like ours.
By Leo Valiquette
LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Blogs, podcasts and discussion forums. The early adopters rave about the merits of jumping on the social media bandwagon as a marketing tool that allows a company to generate brand awareness through dialogue with customers, peers, partners and the world at large. It’s all about the warm and fuzzy feelings created when customers feel that they are being heard, that their input is important to the ongoing development of a product or service. Then there’s the celebrity that comes of being a provocative source of information and insight that attracts a following and drives traffic to your business’s website.
The possibilities are endless. And therein lies the problem — running off half-cocked with giddy excitement. But as the panelists at last night’s Social Media for Business Marketing event at TheCodeFactory emphasized, social media is a set of tools, not a strategy in and of itself. It’s a medium, and as such, is still secondary to the message.
The group included Linda Moran, manager of marketing communications at Sciemetric Instruments; Bob LeDrew, senior consultant at Thornley Fallis Communications and blogger at Flacklife; Alec Saunders, CEO and co-founder of Iotum and blogger at Saunderslog.com; Peter Childs, social media strategist; and Luc Levesque, founder and GM at TravelPod and travel blogger.
It was a group passionate about the possibilities of social media, but pragmatic as well. Here are the key points the group agreed must direct any push to use social media as a marketing tool:
1. Listen to what is being said about your company, its products and its brand in the social media universe before launching your own initiatives. What is your reputation? Are there problems you can identify and resolve? Use tools like Google alerts and blog feeds to monitor the web.
2. What are your objectives in terms of brand? Who are you trying to reach? Is this target group social-media savvy? Older age groups are far less engaged with social media than younger ones. In some industry verticals, there may be some early adopters, but the majority of the decisionmakers you want to reach may still be stuck in the ’90s trying to master their email.
3. What business problem are you trying to solve? How will the use of social media address this? Which tool is best for the job — a corporate blog, a Facebook fan page, a polished piece of video on Youtube, a coordinated combination of several?
4. What kind of business outcome do you want to achieve? Such as, is there a specific number of new clients in six months that have come to you through your social media efforts?
5. Experimentation is key. If one tool isn’t yielding the outcomes you want in the specified period of time, try something else. Keep swinging until you hit something.
6. Tying revenue directly back to social media activities is just as difficult as saying with certainty that a story about your company in a major newspaper led to new business with customers X, Y and Z. But there is plenty of research that demonstrates increased web traffic converts into increased business. The trick is figuring out how to drive that traffic.
7. Time. Commitment. Consistency: If you are going to embark on something like a blog, maintaining a steady flow of new content is critical. Alec Saunders, for example, commits to three new postings a day and his traffic is through the roof (the debate’s still open on whether he actually sleeps).
8. Quality: You have to be pushing out quality, compelling content to draw and hold you audience. It’s a dog’s breakfast out there when it comes to competing for the public’s attention. The way to rise to the top is with consistency and quality.
9. Ranking high on a site like Technorati is less important than successfully engaging in dialogue with your target audience. There’s a difference between having a big audience and the right audience.
10. And lastly, if you’re in a position where you’re trying to sell the advantages of social media to a senior executive who’s slow to catch on, speak in simple terms and avoid jargon. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot with your own enthusiasm.
