PR agencies and especially their clients are obsessed with numbers. Anyone remember AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent)? Exactly. Humans seem to need numbers to quantify validation and the best online players have exploited this brilliantly. Businesses should look at how they do this to increase the virality of their own content.

Look at Mashable, for example. Its recent redesign included just the post headline above the fold, the rest is the title and some very large social proofing, including a massive total shares number, opportunities to share and a timeline of the content’s virality (see image).

For businesses, however, “social proofing” is an incredibly powerful marketing tactic in the amplification of content. Social proofing positively exploits the reality that we are all interested in other people’s interests and includes online tactics such as star ratings for products or venues, for example, or numbers of social media shares, such as tweets, Facebook likes or Google+ plus ones.

Marketers need to think about what objectives they want to achieve when engaging in social proofing, such as generating reviews or creating brand awareness. People seeing brands multiple times from connections in their network are more likely to show an interest and increase the chances of acting on that content.

Here’s a great piece from Econsultancy on social proofing best practice and below is an excellent White Board Friday from SEOmoz on social proofing.

Business blogging works. Period. If you’ve tried and given up on business blogging, I implore you to try again. Good business blogging provides an opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership, rank highly in search engines, and generate new sales. I was in Bristol this week training on the subject of business blogging best practice.

I’ve been blogging since 2001 when I chronicled a trip around South America, if you count Geocities (remember them?) as blogging. In 2007, the marketing team I headed at Rainier PR (now Speed Communications) won “Best Business Blog” from Communicators in Business, the first time that category had been open. Blogging helped us – a small agency of 20-odd people at the time – rank consistently highly on search engines, experiment with new content, demonstrate thought leadership and share posts on the nascent Twitter channel.

The case for business blogging

Whether you’ve started a blogging for your business or are looking to amend your existing strategy, here are some stats on why you should invest in blogging for business:

-          57% of companies with a blog have acquired a customer from their blog (HubSpot)

-          77% of Internet users read blogs (Universal McCann)

-          B2B companies that blog actively generate 67% more leads per month than those that do not blog (Social Media B2B)

-          56% say that their blog has helped their company establish a positioning as a thought leader within the industry (The West Program)

HubSpot also found that companies reported blogs being the least expensive new lead generator for business, and that included social, SEO and outbound marketing such as direct mail, telemarketing and PPC.

Google’s Panda and Penguin updates have put the onus on quality, unique content with strong social signals (retweets, Facebook Likes, +1s etc.), so business blogging gives us all the chance to rank highly with quality, popular content.

Getting started with business blogging

Effective business blogging starts with the objective at the heart. Great examples of business blogging, such as Marketo’s blog (new business generation through thought leadership and SEO), or PwC’s blog (recruitment), start with a clear objective in mind.

From this you can set your key performance indicators, think about strategy and tactics, content and channels, listening and analysis, engagement, evaluation and continual improvement, or kaizen, as the Japanese call it.

Business blogging lay-out

Remember you are trying to impress both search engines and humans. This means blog posts must be long enough for Google and Bing to consider valuable (around 300 words) and not too long for humans – especially the increasing number reading from mobile and tablet devices – to glaze over, so around 500 words max. If you need to go into more detail, drive readers to deeper content, such as a report page, video or infographic.

Use subheads, bullet point lists and images to break up what would otherwise be a wall of words.

Evaluating effectiveness of your business blogging

Google Analytics is essential to measuring the success of your business blogging efforts. As the source of most of your fresh content, it is likely your blog will be the landing page for much of your traffic, so understanding the user experience after they land is critical.

Here’s a great video from SEOmoz on attribution modelling which I show in content marketing training. This helps you map where goal conversions are happening from site visitors.

What works in business blogging

Easy win tactics for business blogging include:

• Lists (e.g. Top Tips, Ten Best X)
• Controversy
• Rich content (video, infographics)
• Link out to other relevant posts
• Link internally to relevant posts
• Consider your keywords early on and optimise posts for SEO
• Make sure social sharing is clearly available at the top and the bottom of the post
• Sort your Google Authorship for content creators. Here’s a post I wrote about Google Authorship best practice recently

There are way more things to consider when building a business blogging programme. If you are in striking distance of London and are available on the morning of Friday 22 March, you might be interested in attending the Business Blogging Best Practice training session I’ll be running for Talking Heads UK where I go into greater depth. Hopefully see you there!

It’s been a while since I last posted about why companies should be on Google+, but a recent tweet exchange drove me back to the subject. Put simply, Google+ matters for a number of reasons:

SEO: Google – and Bing, for that matter – is very clear that social signals are increasingly part of its algorithm which determines where sites rank on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Authority: You know those little faces you get next to some search results when you enter a query? That’s there because the author has sorted out their Google Authorship (sometimes called rel=authorship). It’s a very simple case of inserting code from your Google+ account to the web properties you publish on. As all my sites are on WordPress, I use a free plug-in.

Where is your eye drawn when you see those searches? The text snippets or the faces steering back at you? It also cites the number of circles that author is in, making it doubly important to produce great content and engagement and increase your social circles on Google+.

Collaboration and Content Creation: If you haven’t got involved in Google+ yet then you’ve missed out on the excellent Google+ Hangouts feature. This is pretty much live videoconferencing but Hangouts can be saved and posted to YouTube. Cadbury UK and Taylor Guitars are just two great examples of brands using Google+ Hangouts.

Content Virality: As Google+ usership improves so will the visibility – and therefore the potential virality – of your content.

The social signals and their impact on SEO is particularly interesting. Google owns this stuff, so will it reward +1s more than Facebook Likes and retweets etc.? I think smart brands recognise this possibility and, while brands were drawn to Facebook because the people were already there, I believe it’s the brands that will draw the people to Google+, precisely because they want those precious +1s.

Google+ is seriously untapped, which is a shame, as it’s a really useful channel. For more on the SEO aspect and potential of Google+ I recommend this recent podcast from SiteVisibility.

Google+ is here to stay. So get on it. Now!

I know, it sounds really pretentious and I’m not going to pretend to be any reader or disciple of Chinese philosopher Confucius, but I did stumble across a quote of his once which resonates with audiences when I train on strategic social media planning, and it is pertinent for content marketing:

“When you speak, by sure your words are better than silence.”

This is really important for brands to remember in the crowded era of the Social Web. There is so much noise and look-at-me-ism at the moment in content marketing that it is tempting for brands to believe that if they shout louder they’ll enjoy more eyeballs or deeper engagement. The pressure is on to get more social proofing: more retweets, more likes, more +1s. Hurry, hurry! Overfamiliarity, as we all know, can breed contempt.

To paraphrase an old beer advert: SCHTOP! This content is not ready yet. The cream always rises to the top and to cut through the noise and mess of social media you need a really clear signal. Take your time, create great content, and keep your powder dry. Only tweet/post/comment when you have something genuine to add to the conversation you’re involved in.

Likewise with content, make sure every time you post or promote something new that it adds genuine value according to your business objectives and your customer decision journey – educate, entertain, engage.

Confucius never saw the Social Web but I’m sure he would only speak when he really had something to add.

Where do you stand on this?

Another day, another big brand social media #fail. Last week it was HMV, whose Twitter feed was briefly filled with an update on redundancies from a 21 year-old social media manager who had set the feed up in the first place as an intern two years previously (see tweets below pre-deletion).

This highlights incredible social media naivety among a prominent brand, so how wide spread is poor corporate Twittership and what is best practice in this field?

In this podcast, I debate the implications with EML Wildfire’s director of digital strategies, Danny Whatmough. It’s also worth reading Cloud Nine Recruitment’s Steve Ward’s view of the situation on his blog. I am also covering this issue in further depth for New Media Knowledge soon with some great insights from Stephen Waddington and Darika Ahrens, so look out for that.

 

Did everyone witness the BlackBerry launch this week? If not, check out the BBC Breakfast and BBC Radio Five Live interviews and prepare to cringe. Instead of talking about the BlackBerry 10 platform and its Z10 and Q10 handsets, a great deal of us are talking about the campaign around the launch.

Gimmicks with reformed “iPhone Addict” Alicia Keys aside, RIM/BlackBerry missed a massive opportunity to be transparent and honest about the unavoidable fact that it went from a position of dominance to owning just four per cent of the smartphone market – a fact that needs addressing.

BlackBerry fell behind in the smartphone market because it failed to move with the times. As the embarrassing interviews above demonstrate, the company has also failed to keep up with one of the key tenets of the era of the Social Web: openness.

You’ll have no doubt heard speakers use the turn of phrase “open the kimono” at conferences. Brands just can’t expect to get away with “deflectionism” – consumers and the media expect answers and it’s frankly rude of brands not to address them when asked and steamroller interviewers with press release buzzwords.

When pushed on why BlackBerry didn’t keep up with Apple’s iPhone or Samsung’s Galaxy products instead of steadfastly refusing to address the question the spokesperson should have said: “It’s a competitive and fast-moving market and our competitors have forced us to be even more innovative. We believe as a result we have surpassed them with our new BlackBerry 10 platform and devices” – or a variation on that theme. This semi-admission would have probably satisfied the media and would have shifted the onus back onto BlackBerry so the spokesperson could have talked aggressively about a new player in the smartphone market. Instead each interview appears like three minutes of defensive ridicule and reinforce many preconceptions about the company being out of touch.

BlackBerry – a once-popular brand which I was a big advocate for at the time – really needs the new OS and products to perform. It will be fascinating to see and I will be writing a feature on this very issue for New Media Knowledge this month.

What did you think of BlackBerry’s launch?

I was inspired to write this post by a Twitter conversation I had with Econsultancy’s senior reporter David Moth. The crux of his issue – poor targeting by PR people – is the same root of all evil as those other myriad anti-flack rants from journalists we’ve seen for years and years: junior PRs under pressure.

This is the reality at a lot of PR agencies: those conducting the media relations are usually junior PRs – the standard nomenclature is “account executives” – people who are often in their first PR role and fresh out of college. The people who are “coaching” (or more often than not, not coaching) them on how to pitch stories (again, more often than not these are non-stories) to media are account managers, themselves only two or three years removed from the coal face of pitching to media. They may still pitch, in fact, often in the same vein but tend to have more joy due to experience, accrued confidence and connections.

The people putting pressure on those account managers and therefore the account executives are the account directors. These ADs in turn are answerable to the client and their own agency’s directors. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of fear pressure: the client wants coverage as it’s under pressure to demonstrate value and improve sales, therefore a lot of unnecessary press releases surface from the client with often unrealistic expectations on the results. The agency is sustained by those client fees, thus the senior team is also invested in making the crap releases “work”; the account managers feel the heat if they don’t work and the poor old exec is the one that has to pick up the phone and make it happen. And so it goes on…

The best lesson in PR? Be a journalist

I recently posted on what skills a journalist needs to succeed in PR, but an equally valid truth is that the best lesson one can have in how to “do” PR is to spend some time as a journalist or blogger. I was a journalist many moons ago (Computing, the defunct IT Week and founder member of what became V3.co.uk) and I currently contribute to New Media Knowledge, so am still pitched to by PRs. I am also a blogger, having set up The Guest Ale (beer and pub reviews) in 2011, so receive pitches from PRs as a blogger – and, as all good PRs will know, bloggers and journalists are not the same.

Journalists complain about the massive amount of rubbish they receive on a daily basis and they’re right. This is why I really enjoyed my four years at Rainier PR (now Speed Communications) – founded by former journalists Steve Earl and Stephen Waddington – and partnering with ex-Rainier PR people in my freelance career that left with the same ethos, such as Uday Radia (CloudNine PR), Chris Measures (Measures Consulting), Paul Allen (Rise PR), Emily McDaid (Hatch PR) and Stu Campbell, founder of Fire PR. Think like a journalist and you’ll have greater success with your media outreach.

Ditch the scattergun approach to PR

I always cite Confucius in my digital media training courses: “When you speak, be sure your words are better than silence”. There’s so much noise out there, it’s key to keep your powder dry until you’ve got a genuinely strong story then hit your target media with it. And most importantly, understand that publication, its audience and your target writer. That way they’ll respect you as a PR practitioner – and trust is the key issue here – and you won’t get your email address sent straight to the spam filter. In other words, you’ll be a better PR and better results for your clients.

PRs need to be stronger and push back on clients demanding they scattergun out crap release after crap release. It’s not about the brand. It’s never about the brand. It’s all about the audience – the reader/user/customer – and the sooner those in the PR industry guilty of the above comms crime grow a pair and push back on clients – they are consultants, after all – the better it will be for everyone.

Is anybody listening?

Everyone loves an analogy. When I provide strategic social media training, I articulate online marketing as if it were a five-a-side football team going out to play a match against the customer decision making journey. Neither component can effectively work alone and are totally interdependent. Companies who continue to silo these disciplines limit their own effectiveness and potential, and thus waste budget.

So, let’s take a look at the starting line-up.

Goalkeeper: Search Engine Optimization. In sticks to catch all those relevant search terms – both paid and organic – it’s SEO. Depending on how the user found you the ‘keeper will bowl the ball to either player to build the engagement further.

Public Relations: In defence, we have PR acting as a Beckenbauer-esque libero. PR plays a dual role here: Firstly, to stop or quell any negative buzz around your brand online and secondly, to bring the ball out and create awareness, drawing people to your content, social networks or website (user experience – UX).

Social Media: The luxury player – ever so talked up and hard to make work, social media can deepen the engagement but needs to cover both defence (social CRM) and attack (content outreach and engagement).

Content: The real creator, content has developed a good relationship with SEO, PR and social media to maximise their potential on the pitch and draw people to the website.

User experience: Once the rest of the team has done its job in getting people to the brand’s website by drawing traffic in, it’s UX’s job to drive the conversion (i.e. score). So, is your site a Messi or just a Mess?

On the sub’s bench is the veteran Analytics and Measurement, helping the coach make tactical switches and coming on from time to time to improve things.

It’s a convoluted way of saying digital marketing is a team effort, so all departments should be talking to each other and pulling in the same direction – if they’re not doing so already.  On me ‘ead, son!

If your brand or agency needs help articulating its online strategy, get in touch.

Today I presented at Econsultancy’s Digital Cream Singapore conference on the rise and rise of content marketing. The main crux is that in the fragmented media world that we market in, brands must take the lead and become publishers in their own right.

We’re all social media “experts” nowadays: we’ve been running campaigns for years and we’ve learned (hopefully!) what works and what doesn’t, and amended our programmes accordingly. So, if content is king – as the cliché goes – then how can brands build content kingdoms?

Some brands have known this for years but the next step is to become content marketers. Content is all a brand has to offer: its knowledge, its personality, its unique selling point.

According to Econsultancy research out this month, 38% of brands say they have a content marketing strategy in place already, while 90% agree that content marketing will be increasingly important going forward.

The chances are many of these brands have not got a content strategy as honed and productive as ASOS or Marks & Spencer, as one could argue that having a corporate blog is a content marketing strategy in the rawest form.

Content marketing, SEO, social media and PR

Content marketing is now entrenched on the corporate roadmap, as evidenced by the massively over-subscribed inaugural Content Marketing Show last week in London, at which I ran a workshop on building diverse and authoritative inbound links through PR.The Venn diagram I drew above demonstrates that content sits at the heart of online marketing. It’s the thing that gets people engaged and sharing online, it’s the kick-ass link bait to draw in hits, social signals and great rankings on search engines. It’s that killer infographic or video that our PR teams can seed to influencers.

Below is my presentation from the event and I’d love to hear your thoughts on content marketing going forward. Long live the king!

One of the Internet’s greatest gifts is the creation of truly flexible working environments and in the UK tech media scene we’ve got some of the best examples of extreme remote working out there.

I caught up with freelance writer and editor Jessica Twentyman, and PR agency Weber Shandwick’s head of content and consumer social media for EMEA, Mark Pinsent, to find how they juggled their workload with their rural European lifestyles and added in my own experience with my new career triangle between London, Singapore and Jakarta.

Making remote working work

Remote working has been with us for years. My colleagues from my Rainier PR (now Speed Comms) days, Stephen Waddington (Northumbria) and Chris Measures (Suffolk) still split their time between their rural abodes and London while continuing to deliver great work. I briefly experimented for nine months in 2008-9 in Valencia, but Spanish Internet options were too restrictive to make it viable. I even found replying to work emails from the top of Britain’s second highest mountain easier!

From the far flung corners of the world, this is how we extreme remote workers are faring. Enjoy.

Briefly describe where you live and where you were before

[Jessica Twentyman] Before, I worked from the spare bedroom of my flat in Hackney. Now, it’s the spare room of our cottage in a small village in central Portugal. When I look out of the study window, all I can see are fields and woods on the other side of the valley.

[Mark Pinsent] I live with my wife and two kids in south-west France, about halfway between La Rochelle and Bordeaux, around 20 minutes from the Atlantic coast. Before moving to France, we were living in Berkshire, between Maidenhead and Reading.

[Chris Lee] I spend a few weeks in Asia (Singapore and Jakarta, where my girlfriend has a contract just now) and four to six weeks back in London. While out here we’re in either serviced apartments or hotels with great Internet so the set-up is great and the weather suits me.

What inspired and enabled the move?

[JT] I can do my job anywhere – it’s as simple as that. My husband and I wanted more space and some land and nice weather, but our move here had no real impact at all on my work.

[MP] Our move was simply inspired by a desire to live overseas and good timing. My wife and I had always talked about living abroad and France was an attractive destination for us on a number of levels: we love the country, my wife is a fluent French-speaker, it’s not too far from family and friends or, indeed, work and, at the time, property was good value. I’d reached a point in my career where I felt living remotely from the UK wouldn’t be too much of a hindrance to my generating an income and with our daughter a few months old and a second on the way, it felt like “now or never”.

[CL] My partner is working on a project in Asia, so I can experience the exciting, fast-growing Asian business culture at the same time as the equally compelling and fast-moving UK tech scene. With Skype and great broadband I can work for Australasian and European brands across time zones without any drop in quality.

On a practical level, what challenges did you overcome?

[JT] Internet access here is excellent; our village is promised fibre-optics in the next six months. If that fails, I’m stuck – but it never has done. The only drawback is that, living in a valley, I get no mobile signal at home. With the price of accepting calls from overseas, however, I don’t really use a mobile phone for work anymore.

[MP] There haven’t been too many practical challenges from a work perspective. Connections back to the UK and elsewhere in Europe are good from Bordeaux and France is a fairly advanced country technologically. The worst I can point to is that the stone walls in my office (an old bakehouse) are a bit thick, which can sometimes interfere with my mobile reception!

[CL] Visas can be a mission for Indonesia. Singapore is far more open for business; you don’t even need to apply for a business visa as a UK national. Just rock up at Changi Airport and you’re given 30 days’ stay.

How often do you need to be in the UK?

[JT] I write mostly for the Financial Times, for Retail Week, Personnel Today and for reports distributed in national newspapers, including The Guardian and The Times. I also have a Consulting Editor role at Imago Techmedia, where I work on editorial content around the IP Expo and Enterprise Apps Expo shows.

[MP] It really varies depending on the type and amount of work I’m doing at the time. I’m probably in London for two or three days every two or three weeks. My current role actually sees me in London less but with fairly regular trips into other European cities.

[CL] I do need to be in the UK as a great deal of my work is social media training and SEO training for PR agencies. I prefer to do these face-to-face, although I have been able to run webinar-style training over the awesome Google+ Hangout feature. I also have a mixture of work from strategic digital consultancy to content creation and social media audits. It’s a simple case of managing my time and pipeline effectively.

What does the average working day look like?

[JT] I try to start work by 9.30am, but that doesn’t always happen. Much of that depends on the weather and how long the morning dog walk lasts. I tend to do general admin work – answering emails, sending out invoices and so on – in the morning. The afternoon is generally for interviews and writing. But I tend to be pretty flexible, otherwise what would be the point of self-employment?

[MP] I’m fairly disciplined – or at least try to be – in keeping to regular working hours. I’ll see the kids off to school at 8.30am and start work shortly afterwards. This can be pretty handy when working with people in the UK as it means I’m slightly ahead of the game, given the time difference. I’ll try and spend a bit of time with the kids when they get back from school which may mean that I catch up on a few bits and bobs in the evening.

[CL] I’m six hours ahead of the UK, so that gives me a chance to go to the gym from 8-10am and do some copywriting or Australasian-based work by the time the UK logs on between 2-3pm my time and I work through until the early evening.

Any funny anecdotes from your time working remotely?

[JT] If I’ve got a really important, high-profile interview to do, you can bet that’ll be the time that a herd of goats goes past the study window.

[MP] I live in a little hamlet in the countryside. We’re well integrated into the community here but I don’t think many of our local friends have much of a clue what I do for a living! It’s unusual around here for someone ‘professional’ to work from home rather than an office and when that’s combined with regular international travel (and my being a charming, sophisticated Englishman, obviously) it’s lead to rumours that I’m some sort of secret agent. Clearly I do little to disabuse people of that notion.

[CL] I used to work from the roof terrace at the townhouse outside Valencia and the kids in the primary school at the top of the hill overlooking us thought that was ever so funny. I was regularly bombarded with shouts of “¡Oye! Mister Computer Man!” We would also get a flock of brightly painted racing pigeons fly over every evening. Pigeon racing is a big deal in Valencia. I use my travel blog Eudaimoniac.com as an outlet for my experiences on the road.

How do people in your profession view you?

[JT] I’m not sure I’m seen any differently. I have an 0207 online number from Skype, so I suspect lots of people think I’m still in London anyway!

[MP] Most people are a little envious, but in a lovely way. I very rarely meet people who find it unusual and plenty who admire it and say they’d love to do it themselves. The people who find it most confusing, funnily enough, are French people working in Paris. They can’t quite work out why an Englishman is based in rural France.

[CL] My colleagues are supportive as they know I’m a professional and I won’t let my quality suffer. Working in environment free of office distractions really helps my productivity. With Skype and social networks it’s like we’re in the same room anyway.

Would you change anything?

[JT] No I wouldn’t change anything. I’m working as much as I’ve ever done, but my costs of living are far lower. London is only a short hop away and I get back every 10-12 weeks for meetings. It’s the best of both worlds.

[MP] Nope. This is home and we love it. From a lifestyle perspective it’s pretty much everything we had hoped for.

[CL] So long as it continues to be workable I’ll keep at it. I like being in London anyway to meet clients and prospects, cool off, watch football and drink decent beer. I also have a medium-term ambition to set up a microbrewery so I make beer in my kitchen while at home in South London to experiment with flavours. By the time I’m back from a stint in Asia it’s bottle conditioned and ready to drink!