Archive for the 'PR & Marketing' Category

Following my post looking at the use of online multi-media by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, co-ordinated by Team Hillary, I’ve just heard that her rival Barack Obama has signed up for a Twitter account.

You can now get his hot-off-the-press tweets of his campaign trail. Well, in theory anyway: his last update at the time of my writing post said “1 day ago”. He - or his staff - are going to have to gain a bit more momentum with Twitter to have any credibility at all with the technoscenti.

In contrast another presidential candidate, John Edwards, has been on Twitter for longer and has been tweeting much more prolifically.

You may not have a blog or even a website. How can you market yourself online without these tools? A simple and effective way is to guest-blog on an existing blog run by someone else.

Here are some success stories of a number of people who were guest-blogged on my writing and culture blog over at Fusion View.

Case Study - Nicky Harman

Nicky Harman, translates books and novels from Chinese into English. She doesn’t have a website of her own for her books and translations although she is profiled briefly on her work website. I was curious to learn more about the process of translation and asked her to write a first person piece about her translation work and the Chinese author Han Dong whose book Striking Root she was working on at that time - and for which she was looking for an agent and/ or publisher. She produced the article very quickly over a weekend and I had it up on Fusion View the next week.

A few weeks later, I was contacted by a leading publisher in China who had come across the article on Fusion View, asking to make contact with Nicky. I forwarded her email and Nicky started discussions with her about publishing her book. Around the same time, a UK-based literary agent was told about Nicky’s work and Googled her. Up popped Nicky’s article on Fusion View and the agent invited her to submit her manuscript. Go Nicky!

Case Study - Pey

My cousin Pey Colborne is an aromatherapist and poet based in Bath. She doesn’t have her own website for her business. I interviewed her for a podcast on Fusion View, talking about her fusion life and how she uses her Western and Eastern experiences and interests in her poetry - and also in her aromatherapy practice, which incorporates Chinese herbal medicine as well as Western aromatherapy principles. She has gained at least one new aromatherapy client through that podcast - he specifically mentioned it as he had had a choice of therapists and decided on her after hearing more about her practice and healing principles on the podcast.

Case Study - Lucy Luck

I interviewed Lucy Luck, a UK literary agent for advice to writers hoping to find an agent in the UK - and specifically answering emailed questions from overseas writers. She talked about how to submit your work, how to write your covering letter and what agents re looking for. She also invited Fusion View readers/ listeners to submit their writing to her agency. I chatted with her last week and she told me that she has had over 30 submissions from potential new clients, mentioning the Fusion View podcast. The quality of their covering letters and submissions have been much higher than those who had not listened to the podcast, which has made the process of working through them much easier for her. She also feels that the podcast has raised her profile in the search engines, coming up just after her own literary agency website, and also generally for her business as the podcast was also featured in Mslexia, the UK journal for women writers.

Action point

So could you offer an article to a blogger you know? Here are some ideas to get you thinking:

• your article needs to be relevant to the theme of the blog you’d like to write for

• what you write about needs to be helpful, interesting or useful for the readers of that blog

• read the blog you would like to write for and read the About page

• think of the blog and its readers as a community that you’d like to be a part of

• does that blog regularly have interviews/ guestbloggers? If not, will your approach be appropriate?

• make your approach courteously

• remember that the blogger does not have to take your idea, so accept “no” gracefully

• how might you help the blogger in return, as part of his/ her community?

I am always on the lookout for interesting guestbloggers on both Fusion View and ZenGuide - please make sure you read my Guestblogger Submission Guidelines: click on that Category in the far right sidear. Email me first with an outline of what you’d like to write about, who you are and why you think the readers of Fusion View or ZenGuide would be interested in the story. If I like the idea, I can then invite you to write the full story. I may decide it’s not appropriate, in which case, I will let you know.

Pic: thanks to
www.dnrec.state.de.us

“Free blog hosts are great for getting started - but if you are thinking of using a blog for professional purposes, use the free blog to get a feel for what blogging is about but don’t get too attached to it just ‘cos it’s free.” That’s what I wrote last week in my post “Have a Go at Blogging”.

Why shouldn’t you use a free blog host for your business or professional blog? It saves costs, doesn’t it? And it’s easy to set up and link to your main website, it’s quick, it’s hassle-free - what’s the problem?

That’s all true. But consider some of the following:

1. As I mentioned last week, a free hosting site isn’t really “free”. It lumbers you with “advertising” the hosts brand and product with the same prominence as your own brand or company name by giving you a domain name that reads www.yournamehere.blogspot.com. In a business context, that’s the same as mentioning another business’s product every time you mention your own.

2. You can get around the domain name issue by buying your own domain name and pointing it to the hosted site name and visitors will not know the difference by just looking at the domain name. However, whenever your blog comes up in a Google (or other search engine) search, it will show the original site name. Again, lovely free advertising for the other business alongside yours.

3. Blogger.com allows you to re-design the look of their templates entirely by giving you access to the code that the blog is built on. A lot of people like that flexibility. But you will always retain that strip at the top of the screen that has the Blogger logo and options for your visitor to create their own blog in Blogger. The search facility in that top strip takes you to results that are displayed on the Blogger site - a nice touch of theirs to take visitors off your site into their own.

4. Wordpress.com offers free hosting as well and it isn’t as intrusive as Blogger. However, the free version gives you limited templates and restricts your ability to edit them so most free Wordpress blogs are variations on the same 10-15 free themes though some bloggers who are adept at fiddling with the template within those restrictions manage nice semi-personalised looks. Also you are limited in what multi-media elements you can incorporate into the free site.

5. On the free sites, there is no facility to back up your content. In particular, Blogger does not have an easy way to export your content should you wish to use another platform later - you will have to manually copy and paste each post and each multi-media element into your new site. Another clever way to keep you bound into their product.

It may be that as a solo professional like a writer or for a personal blog, there are good reasons to stick with the free version - cost being one. You may also like the fact that your blog isn’t too “establishment” or “corporate” and it shows you as part of the democratised, everyone is equal mix of the blogosphere. You may not care about having a unique look on your blog or about maintaining a smooth interface with your special professional image or brand. It may be that your free generic blog can give you the opportunity to show a different, more casual side of who you are compared with the carefully branded look of your main website. All these are good and valid reasons to stay with the free blog.

On the other hand, if your brand or profession is aimed at high-value clients who are used to quality service and quality products, it’s worth having a think about what impression look and feel of your blog is going to give them. If you want to stand out in the crowd so that your visitor notices that what you have to offer is different from others, you may want to look at whether your blog is giving a sense of your uniqueness. If you want to give your visitor a special and memorable experience when visiting your blog, you need to ask if the free stuff is going to be able to deliver that Wow! factor. If it is important to you to own and control the content you have invested time and resources into producing, you may not want another company over whom you have no control or influence over being the ones who control what you can and cannot do with that content.

As a business or professional person, you know the value of designing your logo just right, getting quality headed paper and business cards, commissioning a great website, making sure your office or shop or therapy clinic is projects the right welcoming image. You of course take time and care to dress well and look your best at business meetings. Your presentations are professional and you work hard to develop your reputation or brand.

A business blog needs to be an integral part of your business and image. It is powerful means of communicating with your clients and stakeholders, with a potential reach of millions. Through your blog content, you can showcase your know-how and expertise to the world - literally. Your blog represents you and your voice on the internet. So, is it worth paying for a bespoke blog design and your own hosting to commmunicate the value and quality of what your business has to offer? I don’t know about you but I’d say: Yes, definitely.

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Disclosure: we offer a bespoke website and/ or blog design service starting from £500 and a year’s hosting from £30. But you don’t have to use our design services - our consultancy is about helping you enhance your online presence not just selling web design services. So, if you want a bespoke blog, one place to start is to speak to the people who designed your main website and see what they can do for you - or if you’d like to find out more about how we can help with designing your integrated website and blog, by all means email or call me via the Contact Us link at the top of this page.

Social media and blogs are becoming acceptable communications platforms in the same way as websites - that’s what 89% of the respondents to the Euroblog 2007 Survey confirmed. The survey was published last month to investigate the use of blogs in professional communications. It was co-ordinated by the European Public Relation Education and Research Association (Euprera) and involved the Universities of Sunderland and Leipzig.

The key findings I’d like to highlight are:

• Readership of blogs has doubled since 2006

• Running of blogs has also doubled

• Blogs “offer three clearly marked opportunities: Organisations engage in
  environmental scanning, receive feedback from their audience and have the chance to
  create authentic, personal communicative relationships with their stakeholders,
  which in turn can lead to faster reaction time to issues in crisis.”

• Many PR professionals now regard blogs as part of their daily routine as acceptance and usage rises

The Edelman Trust Barometer 2007, a survey on who and what the public trust, found that “A person like me is the most trusted spokesperson across the European Union, North America, and Latin America. In Asia, it is second to physicians.” In this light, it makes sense that bloggers have become increasingly influential. The hallmark of blogs is that the authentic, personal voice of their authors, speaking directly to their audience, not as a powerful and distant authority figure but as your peer or friend.

This is revolutionising the way that messages are perceived and delivered and what it says to me is that the form and medium of the message is as important as the message itself.

Blogs and social media are identified as “disruptive communication innovation” in the Euroblog survey in that they disrupt the established order of communications. They break down barriers to communication by bypassing journalists and the informaton channels controlled by the powerful and those in authority eg TV, radio, newspapers, magazines. Anyone can create a blog and discuss the hot topics of the day. Anyone can make an audio programme and post it up as a podcast without needing to persuade BBC Radio 4 to broadcast it. Anyone can make a movie and put it on YouTube. And anyone from anywhere in the world can access that information. How unnerving is that for governments and those who traditionally have had control of the media!

I think that these two surveys taken together point to an opportunity for businesses, associations, professionals and organisations to actually get in touch with their clients and stakeholders in an authentic, meaningful way. Incorporting blogging or social media into your marketing strategy can strengthen your business or organisational objectives through constructive conversation with the people who matter and by delivering your message in a direct and transparent way. In my work with a client last week, we looked at how their blog could showcase the mission statement of their business - that mission statement would the foundation of every thing they talked about in their blog. It was as if a light went on for them - they realised that not only could they showcase their expertise around the core value of their mission statement in the blog, they could also re-invigorate their business strategy through engagement with wider networks than their current stakeholder circle.

The Euroblog survey also reveals that there are issues for PR and marketing professionals and businesses around the lack of highly-skilled personnel to work with them in developing and implementing blog and social media strategies. These strategies need to be given the same time and commitment as you would your traditional marketing strategy especially because they require transparency and authenticity. There have been some blogs that have been roundly ridiculed and criticised in the blogosphere for being condescending, false, even racist, and in some cases not really blogs at all.

The blogosphere is a whole new frontier that is exciting and full of opportunities but also can be fraught with difficulties for the unwary and dotted with pitfalls. To help you navigate through this landscape akin to the Wild West, I’ll be exploring over the next little while on ZenGuide some of the do’s and don’ts of blogging and social media and highlighting the good, the bad and yes, the sometimes ugly. If you have any particular queries you’d like me to explore, do add a comment or email me.

Photo: thanks to doctormacro.com