It's All About the Conversation

Recently, I created a blog strategy for a client that I thought was really pretty good.  Maybe a bit aggressive, but after reading Justin Kownacki’s post on “What I’ve Learned From Blogging Weekly Instead of Daily,” I thought that this strategy was pretty close to getting the sort of website traffic that I thought was needed to really make a difference.

It’s really pretty simple, as most things should be, and I know I don’t follow it myself, but as my parents told me several times, “Do as I say, not as I do.”  Let me know what you think or if you’ve created similar strategies.

Your Blog should have a purpose and strategy behind it to make sure that it works and doesn’t get blog rot.

Here are a couple questions to consider:

1. Why are we doing this?
   • because it’s fun?
   • to find business?
   • to show off our thought leadership?
   • increase customer engagement?
   • PR for media, news, social networking and other bloggers?
   • Improve search engine optimization?
   • Provide a way to disseminate information?
   • Recognize and promote employees, clients, partners, projects, etc.?
2. How will we know it’s successful. What metrics are we setting for ourselves?  Can we put numbers to this?
   • Analytics, increased traffic, time, pages, etc
   • Comments on blogs
   • Links to blog postings
   • Increased leads
   • SEO
   • Social Media mentions.

1. Purpose of the blog. The blog should show that you are a collection of experts that are not only knowledgeable in your respective fields, but excited about learning and sharing what you see, know, experience and demonstrate in your key business areas of expertise.

2. Solve a problem or identify a solved problem. This is somewhat related to number 1. Part of your strategy should be solving a problem, or another way to think about this is responding to issues from clients or to just find a way to be useful and relevant – with examples.

3. Be the Subject Matter Experts (SME). This will help determine your content strategy and help build your brand. Demonstrate what you’ve done and how it’s improved our success or our clients’ success.  Wave your own flag a bit.

4. Optimize our content for SEO. Do a bit more work to get the right titles and keywords for the post.  Find keywords that support the blog and the post.

5. Be honest, encourage 2 way conversations. Create content that is open and honest and is truly trying to offer solutions.  Give of yourselves without needing anything in return accept happy readers.

6. Monitor the world. Create searches on keyword or clients to watch what people are saying in the world.  Re-tweet, create a post about it or tell your client.  If there’s a client you’re trying to land, monitor what’s being said about them to find a way to respond. See Number 3 “Be the SME.”.

Some bullets on process:

• Address a business need
• Participate in other industry specific blogs, LinkedIn answers, business.com answers.  Guest post both ways whenever possible.
• Encourage online reviews of your work
• Be strategic not trendy
• Focus on long-term engagement, not a short term hit.
• Social media is NOT an experiment.  It is a proven, strategic, integrated part of your website.
• Test, Measure, Optimize, Repeat.
• Frequency: 1 major article per week, several supporting per week – create a schedule and trade off.
• Social connections.  Connect the blog to pre-determined set of social media outlets.  Don’t do all of them, but go deep in the ones we do.
• Take into account customers, competition, your Unique Value Proposition.

So, I know the actual birthday was October 8, but, I still wanted to create a bar code with one of the many free bar code generators out there.  So, happy belated birthday to the Bar code! (Here’s the one I used).

For a couple years now I’ve been feeling the need to not promote building traditional websites anymore, but instead to help clients be part of the conversation around their product and let that lead them to what they need to do online. Back when we started building websites more than 13 years ago, they were a very static thing. Difficult to build, modify and add on to, and yet, the thing everybody wanted and needed to help market themselves. So how’d that work out? Pretty well for a while, until 2001 when people finally realized a sock puppet couldn’t sell dog food very well.

Their motto? “Pets.com, because pets can’t drive.” Well, they can’t buy online either…

Where am I going with this? Well, today I saw a twitter feed from @LenKendall that went to a website  from DigitalBuzz.com with stats for website trends for large brands and then stats for the social media websites.  Company website stats are falling while social media stats are rising… quickly.

The author, Aden Hepburn, suggests two main reasons.  First, that people are spending all their time on social networks and getting the info they need there, and that they’re getting info via RSS feeds and from the very same social networks to which the brands are pushing information.

This doesn’t really mean that the big brands are getting less and less popular, but that they are and need to be pushing more content into Social Media to be successful.  And sure enough, many of them are.

And while the Pets.com sock puppet was funny for a while, it didn’t yet capture the social media in a way that was meaningful and profitable (according to Wikipedia, they were “selling merchandise for approximately one-third the price it paid to obtain the products.”)

So, according to DigitalBuzz.com:

The fact is, agencies and brands will need to work out how to deliver the relevant content, branding and experiences they are currently achieving on their own websites, into highly competitive social networks, feeds, apps and widgets, where every “campaign” or “offer” has to be groundbreaking just to get noticed… and then there was tracking…!

In short, It’s all about the Conversation.  Are you being part of it?

AP photo

According to today’s Advertising Age, AT&T is embroiled in some potential controversy around American Idol and how many text votes it might have encouraged Kris Allen fans to send.

According to a New York Times story citing the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, employees for AT&T distributed phones to folks at two finale parties organized by fans of Kris Allen, the Arkansas singer who was crowned this year’s “Idol” winner. The phones allowed Mr. Allen’s supporters to text their votes for their native idol, while the AT&T employees reportedly also gave free text-messaging lessons, including how to send multiple texts with the press of a single button, a practice known as power texting. (According to the show’s website: “The producers reserve the right to remove any identified ‘power dialing’ votes. Note that this applies to both toll-free and text-messaging votes.”)

Now, they’re not telling how many of the almost 100 million votes cast were for each of them, so we don’t know by how much he won.   But, what’s pretty interesting is the actual number of votes cast via text message this year.

AT&T, the No. 2 U.S. carrier, struck a sponsorship deal with “American Idol” in 2003 that allowed only users of its cellphones to cast votes via text message. Since then the volume of text votes related to the show, including sweepstakes and trivia, has jumped. This year the carrier processed 178 million “American Idol”-related text messages, vs. last year’s 78 million.

178 million text messages in 2009.  That’s 35,600,000 per month (including May), or about 1.7 million text message per day just about American Idol.  Now we know why the cell phone companies, don’t include text messaging in their “unlimited data” plans (something else that really bugs me because, after all, text messages are data).

Anyway, back to the point.  Anyone business that can drive that much text traffic, not to mention all the search and web traffic, is definitely in the “unstoppable” category and is a wave to ride.

I was listening to Jimmy Buffett Live in Hawaii in my car when I heard the news.  The only word that came to mind was “AWESOME!”

Jimmy is a brand unto himself.  So are Parrotheads.  And now, he’s taken the stadium naming rights away from Corporate America and into the social, entertainment, fun world.  Too bad this is only for one year, and that it’s supposed to end by the Superbowl, but, I expect it will live on forever and this will always be Landshark Stadium as Jimmy Buffett turns corporate branding on it’s ear.

Many of the articles say that one of the primary reasons is to get more people to football games.  I didn’t actually think that declining attendance to football games was a problem, but I bet this will work in terms of making them more fun.  You know he’ll be at many games and I expect he’ll play a lot too.  It’s the next step in the Margaritaville world.

Read one of the articles here.

See a short AP video here:

AWESOME!

Right now there’s a cool, new interactive ad for Apple staring the Mac and PC guys on CNN.com by their agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day. It’s a follow up to another interactive ad they did a while back.  If you get a chance today to see it, look fast as I bet it won’t last long.  It’s interesting, and quite obvious that they chose Tuesday to put this out there, since Tuesdays and Thursdays are the busiest days on the internet…

See the other ads below:

A couple recent articles that caught my attention recently have to do with the term “brick-and-click,” used fairly often in Advertising Age and in this recent article ( How Walmart Owns the Concept of Value Online ) from the digital issue (a really good one, btw.). And in the article from PROMO, called: The Convergence of Retail and Digital. The articles have to do with combining your retail strategy with your online strategy to make them work together better. Whatever you think about Walmart, they’re doing pretty amazing things…

It also hits upon one of my favorite theories that Mobile Marketing has more to do with where you are than what you can do…

Consumers use technology and communication infrastructures to take control of and have greater access to information and services that relieve growing time pressures and allow them to access a greater range of experiences. This opens the door for retailers to connect with shoppers in a way that doesn’t interrupt them, but instead becomes a part of their dialogue. For example, smart-phone applications can select the best product for a shopper’s individual needs, and scanned barcodes can instantly compare prices across competitors’ stores and online sites to ensure that the consumer is getting the best deal, all without lengthy research. Another example is in-store digital kiosks that use video cameras and LCD screens to virtually place products in shoppers’ hands or clothes on shoppers’ bodies, eliminating the need to try on clothing.

This seems to me to be the key…

Thanks to:
Morgan McAlenney, senior vice president and digital czar at The Integer Group.
Jack Neff – Advertising Age

I was watching Idol tonight with 100 million other people and remembered an article I read in Advertising Age about it’s brand marketing.   I have one question.

What brand is on the judge’s glasses on the table?

I’m sure you all guessed correctly that it’s Coca Cola.

From the article:

The biggest TV success in history, “American Idol,” seemed an obvious place to begin. Season after season, three brands — Coca-Cola, Ford and AT&T (formerly Cingular) — have been the proud sponsors of a show that continues to boast high ratings. The reported $26 million-a-pop sponsorships are arguably some of the most valuable in North America, which explains why the sponsors have been just as loyal as the audience.

But when Simon Cowell sips out of his Coca-Cola cup, Randy Jackson comments on the latest Ford and Paula Abdul encourages everyone to cast a vote using AT&T, does it work? Quantitative and qualitative statistics say it does, but does a couch shaped like a Coke bottle really make people consume more cola? We were able to find the answer in only one way: by understanding what really goes on in our subconscious.

~~~

Not surprisingly, Coca-Cola did well; the brand had clearly increased its equity during “American Idol.” The couch, the red room — the entire setup seemed to fit with the program and thus had a very positive effect on the brand. Cingular (now AT&T) did well too. Its results weren’t as impressive as Coca-Cola’s, yet the fact that the network provider was an integrated part of the show that allowed people to cast their votes seemed to do the job: The brand increased its equity through the sponsorship.

If you get a chance to read the rest, it’s pretty interesting to show why we all remember Coke with Idol, but not for the Olympics in China…  And why Ford wasted 26 million bucks on Idol.