This diagram shows the breakdown across continents:
If you are in this minority then hopefully you’ve researched or better still, implemented a corporate blog either as a sub domain, on a separate domain or within your own spoofy content management system.
Here are 3 easy to follow essential tips for promoting your corporate blog:
Make your articles work harder
Twitterfeed - Start by adding your blogs RSS feed to Twitterfeed. This will allow you to automatically ‘tweet’ your blog article titles to your twitter and Facebook followers. There’s no cost to this and you’ll find you collect loads more ‘followers’ who are looking for content around what you are publishing.
Pro-active promotion – Set yourself a target of promoting at least one article every week or fortnight to other relevant blogs and websites in your space. Identify 20 or so relevant sites and simply email them with a brief synopsis and link, telling them why you feel it’s relevant and worth featuring on their site.
Keyword optimised titles – If you want to get found on the search engines then you need to integrate keywords and phrases into your titles and within your main article body copy. A great free tool to use to identify suitable phrases is Google’s keyword tool.
]]>This diagram shows the breakdown across continents:
1. Blogging is hard (in the sense of doing it to best effect) and hard work (in the sense of delivering good quality posts day after day).
2. In my experience many companies have set up a blog without the first clue of what they plan to use it for. Which is never a good way to go about anything.
3. Many companies that do offer regular content, completely ignore the fact that people simply won’t bother to read it (or link to it) unless the content is interesting. So corporate centric pronouncements on new management appointments are going to have very little resonance with anybody.
4. The staying power of many UK companies is incredibly limited. A well known saying in the blogging community goes along the lines of “the point at which you feel you want to give up on blogging, is always the point your blog is about to take off”. I have encountered this many times myself, with the “mid blog crisis” usually coming around the 6-12 month mark. In almost every instance I have persevered and been rewarded with traffic, links and a degree of recognition in my chosen niche.
5. Many companies do not fully understand the benefits of blogging. Ok they might think it’s possibly helpful in a nebulous SEO context - although in my experience that is still a rarity. But in terms of things like: online reputation management, internal link structure, long tail keyword targeting and improved crawling rate of search engine spiders (amongst many other things) - corporate awareness is patchy at best.
So there you go. The UK corporate community is generally pants at blogging and the above gives you some reasons why. But there is hope:
My solutions for better corporate blogging
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Many of us marketers and business owners who are already using social media are experiencing a new found love for online marketing, engaging in friendly, limitless conversations with our clients and prospects anywhere and everywhere in the World.
So what does this exciting communication revolution mean for those of us looking for investment? In essence it means that with some carefully planned activity and research seeking out relevant connections, finding that dream investor with a pot of gold has never been this accessible.
Representing and connecting over 130 of the World’s most iconic luxury brands, The Luxury Network is the most cherished luxury affinity marketing brand on the planet.
Our tasks are to develop a social media marketing strategy with the group’s founders, focussed on:
1. Seeking out and attracting potential franchisees all over the World
2. Providing ongoing support and social media knowledge to the global franchisee network
3. Assisting and representing some of the 130 global luxury brands position their brands effectively using social media
4. Managing the online reputation for the entire network
5. Promoting awareness online around the values of The Luxury Network
To say we’re excited about this opportunity is an understatement. We’ll be keeping you abreast of the developments within the group so watch this space.
It’s true, and with the rise in the trend of viral movies set to dominate the social media arena more so in the future, now is the time to start planning your movie content / virals / series to seed. This article will hopefully give you a little more insight and guidance into the various stages and pitfalls from production to successful seeding and tracking.
]]>With a history spanning over 100 years, Alfred Dunhill is THE quintessential British luxury Brand with some incredibly strong attributes and messages to get across.
The relationship has started with the promotion of a very unique piece of movie footage, which sees the cameras roll in the brand’s historical workshop. Se below:
We’ve been busy promoting to a select few of the World’s leading luxury social media sites and achieved a fantastic reach, even just after a few days.
Check out some of the coverage achieved:
Luxist (over 750k unique visitors per month)
luxuo (over 200k unique visitors per month)
Lussorian (over 150k unique visitors per month)
Pricy Spicy (over 100k unique visitors per month)
Lot’s more coming shortly!
]]>This is a great example where printed and online media differs dramatically. Paid journalists have quotas to meet to fill pages – bloggers don’t necessarily have this sort of pressure to adhere to… it’s what they want when they want – nobody pays them directly (well maybe Google for advertising).
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The ones that DO get it are often from the States… why? ...because they truly seem to want to understand and reap the benefits of this powerful medium and clearly invest more time getting to grips with tools and techniques available to do so. Obviously the PR market is no doubt more competitive there and not forgetting that they were blogging 4 years before many of us here in the UK.
Unfortunately (for the client) most PRs today are driven by tough targets for coverage set by a demanding client who also doesn’t understand digital or social, but just wants to see their brand across as much digital media as possible (“fair enough” I hear you say). For the majority of PRs, quality of online coverage doesn’t even seem important… it seems to be more about quantity and keeping the client happy with numbers. But this is entirely the wrong way to look at it.
]]>Here are our top 10 ideas for embracing social media as a hotel:
1 – The twitter concierge service. Set up a twitter page and encourage visitors to your website (through a link) to ask questions and get immediate responses through twitter. Hyatt have done this very successfully.
2 – Share your positive reviews. Post your positive reviews to your blog and set up a twitterfeed so as you also automatically disperse them through twitter and Facebook.
]]>To many, twitter is one of those fads that’s come along and will no doubt disappear as quickly as Peter Andre’s and Jordan’s divorce. I can completely see why you’d think this based on the sheer amount of widgets, gadgets and social networks that are out there… ‘what makes this one any different’ I hear you ask.
Then there’s also the time you have to dedicate to learning new marketing systems like twitter (which seem to pop up every single day), even when you don’t see the added value from the outset and no doubt you are juggling 300 other things anyway.
WELL… this article is for you. It’s our top 10 reasons to adopt twitter into your marketing strategy, but in plain simple English. Enjoy.
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Well, start by taking a look at the best virals on the web and they have a number of things in common. FACT: The best virals normally just happen and are not planned and also resonate with your target audience.
The list below highlights 8 key things that have attributed to the success of a winning viral:
1 – Get your market right. It’s obvious, but don’t go promoting a viral about politics to a youth audience. Understand their sociological and behavioural patterns and keep it to their taste!
2 – Don’t try too hard. There’s nothing worse than forced humour… it’s real ugly! Don’t try to ‘get down with the kids’ if your brand really isn’t, it could actually harm your brand. That means NO cheesy lines… just keep it clever!
3 – Plan your seeding. Do you know which blogs and sites your demographic frequent? If not, then get a grip man! It’s critically important to encourage these sites to showcase your video… bloggers especially can either make or break a viral. Remember to give 24 hr exclusives to the top 2-3 sites if possible.
]]>It has always amazed me how much PR’s have buried their heads in the sand as far as digital media is concerned. Whilst measures are being taken to correct this approach, I still have a little chuckle when I hear that a struggling PR company has opened up a digital division (with great fanfare) in a belated attempt to get on the bandwagon.
Look under the hood a little, and this either turns out to be someone (desperate to save their job) over projecting their skills within the company and being offered the digital role or it’s a spotty intern straight from school who “gets” social media - umm a recipe for disaster I think - example Habitat’s awful attempts to garner exposure on Twitter using Iran related hashtags.
There are some harsh facts here:
1. Most conventional PR’s are going to find it hard going in the digital world. Example, I was training a PR lady in digital media and she said to me “this is so complicated, how I yearn for the days of picking up the phone and getting coverage in the Times or Independent”. In my experience this is the prevailing sentiment within the PR industry.
2. Generalistion here but most PR’s aren’t technical. Fact. The brave new digital world requires an understanding of how blogs work, how social media works, how SEO works, how analytics work and how this all works together. Plus it’s a moving target with new technology changing the rules everyday. Staying on top of this for your average PR is daunting to say the least.
3. The result of this is that alot of PR companies and PR employees are doomed. The inexorable shift of PR and marketing spend online will leave many old style PR’s high and dry.
And out of the ashes a new PR industry will evolve.
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Let’s start by comparing bloggers and journalists (appreciate that this is very generalized so please forgive):
As you can see, there’s a major difference between the two… but showing you the difference between the two is not the point of the article. The point I’m trying to make is that because they are so different they need to be treated very differently when approaching for publicity.
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