26
Apr 2010

Twitter eyeballs on valuable content

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My own little bi-monthly experiment…

Last year July my business partner Steve published a document on Scribd called “Business leaders and social media: a 4 step strategy framework”. It’s a useful little document for business leaders who need to direct their teams in setting social media strategy.

As a matter of habit and experiment, I retweet a link to the document to my Twitter followers every other month or so. Five minutes later I can see that the number of reads on the document has jumped up. Over the course of 15 minutes the documents gets an additional 40 reads. Now bad considering I only have about 800 followers.

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Categories: Twitter Tags: , , , , ,
06
Jan 2010

Building a website? Start with your content!

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The perks of creating a website content plan…

If you have ever been involved in the process of developing a website, you are probably familiar with terms like navigation, functionality, interaction design, css design, use cases, flow charts and so on.

No matter how well designed & executed your website or application, it’s the content in them that determines your success. It’s your content that drives people to click, download, subscribe, & buy your ideas, products or services.
So why is it that in 9 out of 10 cases, content is the last thing that is attended to when creating a website?

I dare to say: flip it! Start thinking about your content first, then start thinking about design, functionality and other technical requirements.

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Categories: Content Marketing Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
13
Oct 2009

They are talking about you. Now what?

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How to pro-actively manage your online reputation…

Recently I was talking to a rather large brand who had just been sold on an Online Reputation monitoring system. They were looking for a solution to start responding to people’s questions online.

The first word that came up in the conversation was ‘web-rep’. These are folks who go online and respond to comments on behalf of the company. But as you get more visibility, more market share of voice, it’s not economical to keep scaling up the number of web reps.

Plus, this is reactive rather than proactive. Instead of passively responding, you need to proactively manage your online reputation. This goes beyond a one-off response from a web rep.

So how can you do that?

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Categories: Online Reputation Tags: , , ,
17
Aug 2009

The value of content publishing

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How to give great content away. Without being a charity!

More and more companies are starting to see the value of publishing great content such as tutorial videos, white papers, how-to guides, case studies, trend reports or market research documents.

However, I notice that many managers and marketers are not comfortable with giving this content away for free online. Usually a lot of time and resources have gone into creating it. I therefore often hear the argument that this content is too valuable to give away for free.

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Categories: Content Marketing Tags: , ,
22
Jun 2009

Harvesting emails the social way

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Using online content to build relationships…

Want to harvest emails? Then don’t ask for people’s email address. Not just yet. Instead, try giving them some great free content first.

It’s pretty amazing to see how much valuable stuff one can obtain via the World Wide Web. I’m talking not only about valuable content you can find on websites, blogs and forums, but also downloadable documents such white papers, e-books, case studies, trend reports and market research to name but a few.

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Categories: Social Media Tags: , , , , , , , ,
01
Jun 2009

Getting your organisation on the same page

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Great primer for the new rules of marketing and PR…

In nearly all the organisations I visit, I hear people actively debating a more effective use of online communication as a means to reach business objectives.

One of the biggest challenges here is to convert the collective ‘mass communication’ headset to a headset that embraces the new communication rules of the web.

If you want to get your organisation on the same page quickly, we recommend buying a few copies of this book by David Meerman Scott.

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Categories: PR 2.0, Social Media, Social media marketing Tags: , , , , , ,
25
May 2009

Making noise or building relationships?

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The difference between online publicity and online PR…

Once upon a time marketers had two main ways of getting their product or services noticed by consumers: advertising and publicity.

The principle of advertising is based on interruption. In order to get people’s attention you need a large degree of creativity or even humour. This helps people absorb your message and makes it stick.

The principle of publicity is based on getting placement in mass media. To compete in the battle for media inches, your story needs to have good news value.

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Categories: PR 2.0 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
08
May 2009

Best job in the world at errr… which Island?

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PR should always be driven by business objectives…

The ‘Best job in the world’ story broke on January 12, 2009. As a result, more than 30.000 people posted their one-minute job application video in a bid to become caretaker of Hamilton Island, a tropical Island off the coast of Queensland, Australia.

But how many people will remember ‘Hamilton Island’ in a few months from now?

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Categories: Case studies, PR 2.0 Tags: , , , , ,
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