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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).

Mashable.com uses social proofing upfront in its features

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.

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Content sits at the heart of online marketing

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.

Google Authorship displays the face and Google+ Circles performance of post writers

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!

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Google Authorship displays the face and Google+ Circles performance of post writers

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!

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Confucius [image: kafka4prez via Creative Commons]

“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?

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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.

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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?

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The tweets that inspired this post

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?

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Digital Strategy is like five-a-side football. [Image: Planet Content]

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.

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Mobile ad on MRT train exit, Singapore

I recently wrote a feature for New Media Knowledge asking mobile marketing experts whether 2012 was finally the ‘Year of the Mobile’. While there was no clear agreement on that UK-centric question, one place where mobile truly leads and offers us a glimpse into the near future is Singapore.

Singapore leads the world in terms of ownership with 7.8 million mobile phones for the c.5 million-strong population – 150 per cent penetration, according to the Mobile Marketing Association of Singapore.

I have been in Singapore quite a bit recently and having widespread, powerful mobile reception on the underground – the MRT – has certainly helped to breed an always-on culture, both above and below ground. Singapore businesses have responded accordingly and this post from Cellcity’s Chris J Reed on how Singapore has taken mCommerce by the horns.

Is your website ready for mobile marketing?

Which puts a little perspective on how far we are behind in the UK – despite the recent launch of 4G services to some UK cities – given this alarmist headline: 99 out of 100 FTSE firms fail mobile business test. The brand behind the survey claims that 69 per cent of all FTSE 100 organisations are not optimised for mobile at all and the user experience lets those that are down, all bar Marks and Spencer, which probably is no great surprise given its pedigree in digital marketing.

Even taking the agenda of this study in mind, why are so many top UK firms not doing as well as they could/should be in mobile, so clearly at odds with the UK’s consuming public?

I’m sure you’ve already had the “mobile website or app” debate, but I have an interview upcoming in New Media Knowledge in which I interview tag management specialists Ensighten and – without giving too much away – the company makes some important recommendations on becoming mobile-ready. These tips include:

Mobile design: It has to be responsive and consistent. Consider what sort of experience you want for your customer and design your app accordingly.

Mobile maintenance: Changing content on a mobile app is a non-trivial process that involves resubmitting your app for approval with Apple, Google or RIM. So make sure you use tagging technology that can be changed without requiring a recompilation of the app.

Mobile measurement: On the browser side, the metrics are much like the good old Internet, but remember conversion rates and browsing times are very different and attribution in a multi-device world is not simple. Avoid “data stove-piping” and design your campaign so that mobile analytics can be easily compared with Web analytics.

Mobile integration: With the huge adoption by consumers of advanced smartphones, mobile is now a central part of any marketing campaign and a key factor in the many customer touch points of any brand. Optimise the design of your mobile-specific campaign elements and data collection so that you can accurately attribute consumer engagement and understand the return on your mobile marketing investment.

Look out for that interview in the coming weeks. But UK marketers should definitely look east for inspiration.

Make it your New Year’s resolution to get mobile ready in 2013.

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I have acute déjà vu. I have just read about a firm targeting solely social media users with Klout scores of 60 and above as potential investors. This raises the whole question of social media and online influence once again, so I think it’s time I revisited it on this blog.

I last ranted posted about Klout, PeerIndex et al in early 2011 after meeting social media writer Brian Solis and articulated my scepticism of online influence scores as reflecting reality, especially given the credence that many employers were putting on such markers at interview. I was immediately shot down in a post by a keen advocate of PeerIndex (citing a tweet of mine) that people only seem to oppose social media influence scores if theirs is not particularly high – i.e. sour grapes. This is not the case and I’ll give you a case in point as to why.

Social media influence in perspective

When I went back agency-side for a year to co-lead the worldwide roll-out of a global blue chip electronics company’s social media engagement platform my Klout score was more than 50 in the old algorithm, which was then a good score. Now 60 is apparently the equivalent benchmark.

After a year of extremely busy work not just working on agency clients and new business worldwide but also the UK side, I did not tweet as often as previously and my personal blogging dried up. My Klout score was just 33 by the time I returned to freelance content marketing in May 2012. In one metric’s eyes I was therefore not ‘influential’ online.

But wait! During that busy time when my Klout score was falling and I was working agency-side – in the real world beyond my personal Twittersphere – thousands of people worldwide were watching the videos the team had created, were liking the Facebook page, reading our posts, enjoying the apps. I was a cog in this content machine but was part of creating genuine online influence on perception and behaviour, not just gaining a number according to an algorithm because I tweeted a lot about football or something similarly irrelevant to my day job. These elements cannot be factored into online influence metrics, which rely on a user’s personal Twitter or Facebook activity.

Social media influence metrics do have some value

I’m not totally dissing social media influence metrics, they do have some value as part of the wider perspective and context, but employers should not look at a score and dismiss that individual out of hand. Had I applied for an agency job (rather than return to freelancing) with a Klout score of 33 and come across someone who deemed that a major factor in the selection process, another candidate with potentially less experience could have got the job based purely on an algorithm made by a machine, which itself can be influenced, of course.

In short, as with everything, look at the bigger picture when gauging online influence. Here’s another related post on how to measure online influence.

What do you think about online influence measurement? What should we be looking out for in 2013?

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