Frankly not impressed

I spotted a poster in the window of a high street bank today which read “30% more time for our business customers.” Am I alone in thinking this a bit of a weak message? If you have more time for your customers, surely there are better ways of expressing it. Hell, 30% isn’t even half as much time again … it’s not even a third extra!

But it’s just a thought. I’m happy to be proved wrong on this.

Quick fixes for ailing websites

Existing website not delivering but a new one is out of the question? You can start to build content within the old architecture in the short term without significant investment. And if / when you do get the budget signed off eventually - you’ll already have a better idea of what will go into it and how it should be structured.

Keep your organisation’s communications objectives in mind and make sure a) they’re all covered off from the start and b) you’re reinforcing each on a regular basis. Also aim to create specific content for each category of client - make a list of what material is relevant and ensure a balance for all your readers.

Collect pieces of news that you are qualified to hold and opinion on - and give it your own unique slant. Make all articles informative but easy to read with plenty of links to other resources on the web. Don’t lay claim to material you haven’t written - but there’s no harm in referring customers to useful information sources that are managed by third parties.

Don’t bombard your readers with promotional information - instead seek to inform and advise them. A more subtle way is to use lots of case studies structured in a problem - solution format and add background so that they can read between the lines ‘here’s a company that understands the business we’re in.’

It’s always better that your readers arrive at that conclusion themselves rather than you blowing your own trumpet.

When your photography lets you down ...

Digital technology means that businesses now have more images for marketing purposes than they know what to do with. But how good is any of it? I’ve lost count of the number of times that my clients’ sales and marketing people have promised me ‘great shots’ only to find they’re about 50KB each. Or in PowerPoint. And they’ve junked the original files. That lack of quality will become apparent straight away.

There is a novel solution here - employ a professional photographer. There aren’t as many good specialist photographers in some areas as there once were - digital made the bottom fall out of their market - but it’s a good idea to cultivate one for important jobs. He or she will get better with each shoot, throwing in ideas that bring your marketing materials alive.

I’m convinced that good images not only have extra impact, better take-up, more mileage but they also add to your credibility. And you might have a keen amateur photographer among the staff but what’s the opportunity cost of giving them a photo assignment when they also have a ‘real’ job to do?

Digital photography might have made conventional materials obsolete, but not Adam Smith’s theories of the division of labour.

Social media not a fad (shock)

If Facebook were a country it would be the fourth largest in the world ... but China's Q Zone is even bigger.

Linkedin is used by 80% of companies to find new employees.

Wikipedia is more accurate than the Encyclopaedia Britannica! Depends what you mean by 'accurate' surely?

By next year Gen Y will outnumber baby boomers. With all that it entails for mass communication .....

Some great and surprising stats in this presentation.Thanks to my friend Rene Power for sending me the link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

Doing without the Internet

ft.com carried a podcast yesterday about a marketing exec planning to do without the internet for a week. He represents a company that "secures Web communications and accelerates business applications across the distributed enterprise," so I'm guessing it is not going to be a walk in the park for him.

Whatever next? The CEO of Nestlé goes on hunger strike? One person isn't statistically significant and this story is just nonsense. Why not look at how it has changed the lives of 'real' people? Whatever they are ...

Please take my money!

I’m into Spotify in a big way just at the moment. I’ve been using it for about a month and it intrigues and appals me in equal measure. I’m intrigued by the amount of content it gives me and appalled that I can’t listen to a song right to the end before searching for another. But I just wish I could find a reason to give them some money.

You see, since I started using it I have barely touched any of the 400 or so albums that we have in various formats: CD, LP, Minidisc, cassettes not to mention the MP3 files that lie forgotten on laptop hard drives and even a few 45s. Clearly I don’t need Spotify but it gives me something more than vast choice. It’s more convenient than hunting out the song you want, especially if you have a big collection. That said, I don’t think I’m prepared to pay for it. Maybe if it goes subscription only, I might change my mind. But at the moment I’m not bothered by the ads that come on every ten minutes or so.

No, actually I am bothered by the ads, but not in the way you might think. Instead I find myself wondering why there aren’t more of them and why they aren’t better tailored . I’ve been existing on a Spotify diet of Vaughan Williams (good for background), eighties hits (for my girlfriend) and Radiohead rarities (for me) but I still only get ads for Jay-Z and Amy Macdonald. Is that targeting ... and who is Amy Macdonald anyway?

They also run a little B2B spot that boasts how all ads are targeted on the basis of each listener’s taste. And a couple of weeks back there was an announcement that Spotify had overtaken itunes as the biggest source of income in its native Sweden - based on streamed services alone, not downloads. It’s just that nobody’s making any money out of me or any of my friends just at the moment. I suppose I should just shut up and enjoy the music.

Listen to Cape Cod Soundscapes Vol. 1. Ocean at Chatham’s Lighthouse Beach

Life after newspapers

A model is emerging in the US that shows how local journalism might work when newspapers have disappeared. Some hyperlocal bloggers - servicing audiences of around 50000 - are pulling in advertising revenues of $200K pa and with modest growth could start to employ staff.

While established (and unemployed) journalists are best placed to provide quality news content they have little experience of advertising and sales and can best exist as part of an ‘eco-system’ where diverse organisations complement each other. The size of these units will never compare to the traditional regional newspapers but would still be significant.

Check out the full report here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/14/ecosystem-hyperlocal-bloggers

Under fire

"I would rather the BBC was abolished than we started encrypting news to stop people seeing it," says Director General, Mark Thompson. Categorical in defending the delivery of free online news, he describes it as "utterly non-negotiable". "The absolute first building block keystone of the BBC is delivering impartial, unbiased news.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/14/mark-thompson-bbc-impartiality

SMPRs - give them a go

I didn’t talk about SMPRs in Tuesday’s post, so it’s worth going over now. The Social Media Press Release is deconstructed so that blogs and other automated sites can import the content and use it more easily. Think about when you imported your CV into Linkedin - it probably used most of the information in the right context but you had to perhaps tweak a few headers. Most people agree that’s pretty neat.

Of course there’s no internationally recognised standard for SMPRs but you can see an example here. Some PR practitioners might deride it as 'dumbing down' but I see it as an extra. Once you have a fully approved conventional release for your important journalist contacts, it doesn’t take a minute to deconstruct it.

Will SMPRs become a standard part of the B2B PR toolkit? Who’s to say whether Twitter will mature as a B2B tool, come to that. We don’t know the answer - but while we wait to find out, let’s keep on top of these emerging trends.

Mini website audit

Over the next few weeks I’ll be looking at what you (an entry level audience) can do to improve your website’s performance. Each time I add new tips, I’ll overwrite the previous version. We’ll kick off with keywords, links and content.

First think of a list of three keywords that are important for your organisation and jot them down on a piece of paper - then put them into Google and see where you appear in the rankings. I’m guessing you’re not at the top, but not to worry. Make a note of three competitors that rank more highly than you and visit each of the sites in turn. For each click on the view menu in your browser and select source from the drop down menu. Most of the code won’t mean much but look for the lines with the terms keywords and description in them.

Now look at the number of inbound links that each site has. You can use a free tool like http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ to do this - all you need is a Yahoo account. While keywords and description is a quick fix, a programme of link exchange has to be ongoing so you might want to involve others in the organisation in this project and meet once a month to report on progress.

The same goes for site content. Look at what your competitors - or any site that you particularly like - are doing. The trick is to be content-rich. Give as much information as you can - without, of course, divulging any trade secrets! Show visitors that you really know what you’re talking about and they’ll be more likely to contact you directly. Again, pool your resources and ask colleagues from other departments to feed information through. Most organisations have huge untapped reserves of knowledge.

Who reads this stuff anyway?

One really important point about digital press releases is that nobody reads them. But allow me to explain - the operative word is nobody. For the purposes of page ranking, getting noticed or just having your press release 'lodge' somewhere on the net, it's mechanised search engines that trawl the internet, not people. And they just don't have the same tastes as humans.

That doesn't mean you can copy and paste 1000 words of search terms without any syntax and get away with it - you need real content but there's no requirement to keep it quite so brief. These guys are so much faster and more 'patient' that it's a good idea to keep in all of those notes and background that you would have edited out for time-poor human eyes. What might have been a one page (double spaced) release becomes possibly three or four pages.

Company and author profiles, more detailed product/service specs and a nice section of relevant links - in addition to those embedded in the text - it's all grist to the mill. And when your client (if you're an agency) or you MD (if you're in-house) says 'I think we should put out a release our our investment in a new set of step ladders' or 'a change of a pantone reference in our logo,' there's no need to argue any more. Don't send it to journalists if you think it will weaken your reputation, but do issue it on a wire service. It will get picked up somewhere and together with stronger material can possibly help you deny a competitor some space on the initial pages of a Google search.

Reinventing colour

Visited the Tate in Liverpool today. Quite taken with 'Hyena Stomp'. The title from a track by the American jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton. The artist, Frank Stella was 'thinking about syncopation while working on the painting: the alternation of colours appearing to have an irregular but rhythmic pattern.' This and other works are on show at the Liverpool Tate until September 13 in the exhibition, Colour Chart - Reinventing Colour 1950 to today.

More

Radio 4's 'In Business'

Great Radio 4 broadcast, now available on BBC i player. New media ad revenues aren't matching what traditional media are losing. Where will the money come from in the future?

By the way, I liked the rebuff of James Murdoch's on attack on the BBC at The Edinburgh TV Festival. Hands off our BBC, I say!

Here's what the BBC itself says about the broadcast: The twin pincers of global recession and technology upheaval are putting traditional newspapers and broadcasters through the ringer. Peter Day asks what the shape of the new media might be once the troubles are over.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mcw5z

Corporate blogs. Say what?!

OK, so many dyed in the wool bloggers will say their work can never be corporate - at least not as they understand the term. But organisations are increasingly eager to engage with customers and stakeholders in a more dynamic way.

Caution is ever the watchword in corporate circles and companies are much more conservative about the type of content and comment that is allowed and how their ‘blog’ is administered. Encourage employees to contribute but make the editorial policy clear from the outset. Probably one person corporate communications or marketing or the MD’s PA will have editorial control - so there’s the formal ‘sign-off’ procedure vital to any PR programme.

Do you allow comments direct onto the blog? Most organisations will shy at this but if you are moderating comments, do it regularly and promptly and engage with all submissions. If a person has something bad to say about you there are worse places they could do that than on your company blog. To prove this to myself I’ve just logged onto Dell Hell again. The .net one. Take a look if you haven’t been there.

Oh, and don’t put in any overt sales messages. Ever. It’s called blowing your credibility.

Free stuff?

“Do you have to pay to get PR in foreign language media?” someone asked me last week. And we talked about it for a bit and moved on to other subjects. But the question came back to me yesterday as I was driving.

Put simply, the smaller the pool of potential advertisers, the more the media owner will feel it necessary to tie ‘editorial’ to an advertising package. Some European countries with their own language have relatively small populations - and when we drill down to a B2B audience for a specific product or service, we’re talking a pretty select group. So yes - once you’ve played the usual cards ‘no budget till next year’ ‘prove your effectiveness first’ - some spend is going to be involved.

But here we come back to issues like ‘Aren’t the aims of PR and advertising different, if complementary?’ Surely you want to do both - so what’s more important is how you choose where to invest. A media sales friend of mine - yes, these people do have friends! - stresses how important it is to view media as potential partners.

Don’t just download the pdf rate card from their website, talk to them! There’s a great deal of sector knowledge and if you brief them properly they can add a lot of value. Media packages are increasingly varied and complex. You can get your ‘free PR’ but why not look at lists for emarketing, banners and website sponsored links, print display advertising and whatever else is on offer. There are some valuable services on offer - and like someone else says, ‘It’s good to talk.’

A place called Convergence

Everybody knows content is king, but where is that content coming from? Who can you rely on to consistently provide informative, on-message and interesting material for your website? It’s interesting that I have met a number of SEO consultants recently who have found themselves quite literally dragged into PR. It’s a service that their clients clearly need, it’s just that they aren’t that sure of being qualified to offer it.

The other side of the coin is the PR consultant who finds him or herself working more and more in the digital space. We have the writing skills and everything that goes with that - the ability to collect the right information and produce engaging copy that gets the point across. But the learning curve is a steep one when technology is constantly evolving.

There’s no shame in admitting that we all have to learn new skills and there are some great training courses on offer for people who want to fill in gaps in their knowledge. What is really striking is that PR and SEO professionals often find themselves in the same sessions … filling in the gaps in each others’ knowledge. Now that’s what I call convergence.

The language of marketing

When I came back to the UK after eleven years in Italy, everyone agreed that my language skills were going to be really useful. And so it has proved ... but not always in the way I might have thought.

I've had some pleasing successes in running PR campaigns in Italian media where the process has worked in much the same way that it would in English - you pick up the phone, sell in the idea, do the research, provide the material and hey presto! you're on the web or in print. But the process of learning a new language in depth has taught me a lot about communication. And that new found knowledge can help us whichever language we are applying ourselves to.

Is your message snappy and to the point or is it full of useless marketing buzzwords? Is it too idiomatic or will it still be easily understood by an international audience? Will your favourite translation tool make short work or a meal of it? If the Google translator widget has confused you in the last sentence then I've just proved my point!

So in the end it's not about how many languages you speak - even if it's only one. It's about being smart and using tried and tested processes. It's about knowing where to bring in language professionals and where you can trust your own experience.