We’ve been working on a number of ‘web engagement’ programs lately, where we’ve been helping clients to increase their web ‘footprint’ in order to improve their general SEO and awareness levels.

Now I’ve blogged and blabbed about this before, so I won’t go into the thinking - but if you’d like to get a sense of why social media and web engagement is so important then check out some recent posts such as ‘Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing,’ ‘Pico Branding‘ and our ‘web marketing trends for 2008‘.

This post, however, is all about the mechanics and how to do it.

In truth, it’s not hard. All you need is the following:

1. A dedication to publishing a regular stream of gold top content to your site (note: it needs to be good and valuable to the folks you’ll reach out to in #2)
2. A variety of web outlets in which to cost-effectively publish this stuff (note: per above, the idea here is not to abuse these places but to selectively publish your best stuff on them ….think sensibly about this as many of them are happy to ban content ’spammers’)

For help with #1, call us.

For #2, the mind map below gives you everything you need to do web / social media engagement by yourself. It’s easy. Just pin it on your wall and - once you’ve published a great piece of content to your site - follow the map clockwise and post it to the relevant destinations.

Let us know your thoughts (and results).

Note: your key to success here is to BE SOCIAL. Don’t just use these ‘outlets’ as a window for your own content. When you see other pages that you like, Stumbleupon/Digg/Reddit them - because this is their inherent value ….they exist to raise awareness of good, valuable web content. So, consider it your duty to promote everything that you really like, and not just the stuff you grow at home.

Here’s an experment for you to try.

Open your web stats app and check out which pieces of content are your top performers over the past month. (By top performers, I mean on key ‘attention measurements’ such as time on page - these are the things that tell you if people are really interested and engaged.)

What comes out top?

If you have a blog, or if you’re in the habit of publishing white papers or opinion pieces then my money’s on them. Am I right?

Here’s my hypothesis: for B2B web sites, the content that really matters in terms of positioning and prospecting isn’t your ‘markitecture’ pages - your product and services descriptions, corporate histories and such…. it’s your ‘thought leadership’ pages - the places where you express opinions and ideas rather than features and benefits.

More to the point, having done detailed analyses of a mass of B2B technology web sites, I can tell you that this rule holds firm for our entire industry, without exception (and, I’d hazard a guess, it does so in any information-hungry B2B market).

To give you a feel for it, here’s our top content stats for the year to date… (Note: we measure our content performance by establishing an ‘Attention Index’ - average time on page x number of page views…. and we only include those pages that have held people’s attention for more than two minutes.)

(Click to open!)

You’ll see that the most engaging pages are a bunch of white papers and blog posts.

Putting the blog aside for a moment, this is interesting because unlike most of the B2B technology industry, we make a point of giving our most interesting content away for free. Most firms take a strategic decision to lock prime content such as white papers away below a subscription line, and often within secure ‘walled gardens’ that render it almost completely inaccessible to all but the most motivated of site visitors.

The consequences are obvious. If you lock your most valuable, compelling content away beneath a subscription line, then you’re missing a proven opportunity to help your prospects select you.

The rationale for ‘content locking’ is straight forward. You hold out the promise of access to an interesting piece of content in exchange for a visitor’s personal information - usually a name and an email address. This is the concept on which ‘web-to-lead’ forms are built to support the growth of CRM ‘lead’ databases.

I think this approach is fundamentally flawed, and also detrimental to driving quality sales leads.

Why? Because if you lock your content below a subscription line, it’s not just sales prospects that you’re hiding from: you’re also hiding from Google.

Put simply, if your content is sat behind a firewall, then Google’s spiders can’t reach it. This means a big loss of SEO traction, since your ‘thought leader’ content is likely to be your most valuable in SEO terms - it’s going to be stuffed with all the key phrases and concepts that you want search engines to associate your site with. Also, if it’s sat beneath the subscription line then you’re discouraging other sites from linking to it - which is illogical from an SEO point of view (good SEO practice means helping sites to link to you).

Furthermore, what of the people that you lose along the way? To me, a commitment to form-filling is no great measurement of the quality of a sales lead. A far better tactic is to set your thought leadership content free and give people more ‘opportunities to engage‘ with who you are and what you stand for. In this way (and this is the flip side of ‘web-to-lead’ thinking) you give yourself more opportunities to convince the skeptics - the people who until this point believe in your competitors not you, or those who have chanced upon your site during some desk research. Let’s face it, most of us are commitment-phobes when it comes to the web anyway. Why not just accept this fact and move on?

Instead, we ought to be finding better, more intelligent and subtle ways of establishing leads. There are better deals to offer our prospects than ‘give me your names and I’ll give you some content’…. deals that don’t carry an SEO penalty. We can divide our content in different ways, and base a ‘lead generating’ offer on a really big ticket content item, after we’ve provided people with the opportunity to see all our other great stuff. For example, an offer for a piece of industry research can be embedded in a free white paper. Isn’t this a better place to pop the question? Wouldn’t the quality of resulting leads be better?

Whatever - my point is that a bog standard web-to-lead form slapped on as a firewall to the content that people (and Google) really care about is clumsy and negligent.

Here’s some questions to ask yourself:

• What’s your most valuable and engaging content?
• Do you make you accessible enough?
• What’s the upside of providing more opportunities to engage with it?
• What’s the downside of removing a subscription line?
• How scientific is your answer to the previous question? (Gut feeling, conventional wisdom, or based on small side-show experiment and validated by stats?)

I’d encourage you to play around with these thoughts and, if you’re not a fully paid up member of the free content brigade, to tweak the presentation of some of your content and see what it gives you…

OK, Listen Up

Your web site is not your field of dreams. Build it and most likely they will not come.

Nope, once it’s built your goal is to make it work as a sales sweat house – and this takes real effort and a bunch of web marketing smarts.

Your first order of business is to attract engaged and interested traffic to your site… with the ultimate goal of turning these people into qualified leads.

In order to do this effectively (and to filter out the tyre-kickers) you need to pull out your Web Marketing 101 Kit Bag. We’re talking SEO, social media, online PR and blogging.

Sound OK?

Don’t worry. It’s simple (and largely free to do). The key rule is ‘give to get’: you’ve just created a category-killing web site with a beautifully designed and executed value proposition…. now all you need to do is work hard to engage with the right kind of people and bring them to your door.

The idea is to increase your web ‘reach’ and improve your performance in search engines (ie, your SEO) so that you can engage with and drive high-value, motivated traffic to your web site.

Here are the techniques you need…

Step 1: Content Generation

Step 2: Backlinking

Step 3: ‘Rest of the Web’ engagement (via Social Media, Online PR and blogging)

And here’s how you can do it….

1) Content Generation

Put simply, you need to generate some content bait. Quality content is what will ultimately drive traffic to your site. You need to be publishing good content- and keyword-rich articles, papers, podcasts, and video regularly to your site. This will encourage those search spiders to return more often and, over time, it will give you a compelling body of work that you can publish off-site with the aim of steering people away from other web destinations and onto your site.

2) Backlinking

The links that are made back to your site are the number one influencing factor in Google’s PageRank algorithm. And the higher quality they are, they more influential they will be in boosting your ranking (for a full explanation of what ‘quality’ means in this respect, see our paper on SEO). To this end, you need to encourage as many of them as possible. How? By submitting your site to relevant, quality listings directories (such as the technology section in Yahoo’s business pages), creating reciprocal links with important partner sites and getting hip to…

3) ‘Rest of the Web’ enagagement via Social Media, Online PR and blogging

Here’s where you put that battery of superior content to use. You should be out there creating a variety of social media application profiles - YouTube, Squidoo, Flickr, Slideshare, etc - so that each time you create a new piece of content you can publish it on them, along with a healthy dose of linkage back to your site. Elsewhere we’ve described this effort as ‘Pico Branding’ - using top-flight content to engage with audiences elsewhere on the web with the intention of inviting everyone back to your place. It’s a fantastic way of driving interested traffic.

In addition, you should be taking a leaf out of the new book of PR and publishing all of your newsworthy content via online news distribution hubs. This is another means of backlinking - the hubs will take your content and distribute it far and wide across the web to ‘newsy’ destinations like Google and Yahoo News and others. Note - the aim here is not to convince a human being to write up your news story, but to have a web site somewhere deep in the interweb publish it, along with a link or two back to your key web pages.

Last but not least, you should start blogging your market-related ideas every time you hit on something of interest. Why? Well, we’ve already written on what we feel the value of blogging to be in B2B, but in short, blogging can be:

• Another reason for Google to pay you frequent visits
• A direct continuation of your sales discussions
• The place where your prospects head to to get a handle on the real people behind the product/service
• A great way of engaging with the fabric of the web and generating high quality backlinks

A word about measurement

Aside from all this content generation and ‘engagement’ activity, we’d also recommend that you measure what you do on a regular (monthly?) basis. Otherwise it’ll be hard to track the effectiveness of what you’re doing, and hard to convince other important people (like bosses!) that you ought to be dedicating more resources to the work.

Using a stats package like Google Analytics (which is free!), here’s a few simple yardsticks you can use to validate your work…

• Average page views per month
• Average time on site
• Average bounce rates
• Average number and cost of acquisitions per month (sign ups to newsletters, white papers, etc)

If you follow the above advice, I can guarantee you’ll soon have people beating a path to your door.

Alternatively, contact us and we can help you on your way!

Here’s our first broad brush, crystal ball prediction of the year: 2008 is the year of web engagement for B2B technology firms.

You built v2 or v3 of your site last year. You have a bunch of corporate content (about us, products, services, etc). You have some interesting content assets - white papers, case studies, etc. You have a CMS to publish stuff. But this year you really want your site to work harder – to generate leads and help speed up purchasing decisions.

To do this your site needs to become more than a calling card or brochure. You need to make it an ancillary sales person that works for you once your sales meetings are over.

(Note: this is a philosophy to be adopted. No cost.)

Here’s what you need to do:

1) Invest (heavily) in banner content

Support the sales process by becoming CONTENT RICH. This means more than just white papers. Think webinars, video, blogs, online PR, screencasting, product demos. Tell compelling stories via your site that address specific product / service / customer issues via digital media. Captivate people’s attention through moving images and audio. Words are great, but not enough.

(Note: Treat these things as ’sunk’ costs to support specific products/services or campaigns.)

2) Make your site more available to your audience

Become super RELEVANT and TARGETED. Invest (heavily) in search engine optimisation (SEO). Find out how people want to engage with you via Google and rethink your marketing messages accordingly. Use sophisticated tools to do this investigative work.

Embed this new thinking via great implementation of keywords in your web site. This is a messaging exercise (embed keywords in descriptions of who you are and what you do) and a technical exercise (embed keywords correctly at the code level). It’s also a design exercise: you need to tweak your site structure to ensure that landing pages and navigation paths are logical and get people to the content they need, fast.

Then, engage with proactively with search engines and influence the way that they index you so that the next time someone types in ‘widget for SAP optimization’ into Google you have a fighting chance of showing up on the first page of results.

(Note: this is both a philosophy to be adopted (you need to change the way you describe and present your stuff, guided by user searching trends), and a strategic investment. Not especially cheap.)

3) Once you’re content rich, relevant and targeted, you need to engage with the world

You need to become CACHE RICH.

Note: this is a new philosophy. You have a great web site, stuffed with great content in highly targeted areas and improved visibility on Google. But you can’t stop there: the ‘build it and they will come’ approach no longer works on the web.

Firstly, stop thinking of your web site as your only online destination - it’s just the ultimate one.

To engage with new prospects you have to cache your online presence across the web… by following the right crowds, capturing their attention with timely deposits of relevant content and inviting them back to your place.

How?

1. Cache the news sites via Online PR: distribute targeted, keyword-specific press releases announcing company news or the availability of your new content offers via online news hubs. Your goal is to generate automated web pages that point back to strategic points within your site, in order to boost interested traffic and SEO.
2. Cache the content networks via Pay per Click advertising: the Haiku of marketing - tightly focused, personalised and relevant ads that contain offers related to your banner content. Again, the goal is to drive interested, prospective customers, and to ask them to engage with you in some way - sign up for more content, register for an event, etc.
3. Cache your prospect’s inboxes via (permission-based) e-Mail marketing: a series of newsletters or ‘blasts’ that draw your database of contacts towards your content assets and into new sales conversations.
4. Cache the Blogsphere: using words, video and audio to showcase your thinking, your product developments and all of your news via your own blog. Your goal is to engage with key influencer communities and to position yourself within important industry level debates as a thought leader. This will drive new, interested parties to your site and into the sales funnel. At the same time, comment on other people’s blogs and drive their readership to yours.
5. Cache your key content destinations via Affiliate and Display Advertising: use traditional methods to reach new audiences in niche, cost-effective areas - eg, newsletter sponsorship, blog advertising, etc. Again, your goal is to drive engaged traffic and new leads towards your content jewels.
6. Cache your influencer networks via Social Media: engage with prospects via your LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, de.icio.us, by posting valuable content, links, alerts, opinions, etc, that lead back to your site and your (related) content assets. (Note: this needs to be handled smartly - poor content and poor engagement strategies will benefit nobody.) Your goal here is to seed compelling content and ideas into active networks where your audiences already exist, and to encourage them to pass it on.

4) Once you’re executing and engaged, you really need to measure

This is critical - you need to treat your SEO and engagement activity as a perpetual beta program. Experiment quickly and at reasonable cost, see what works, back the winners and ditch the rest. You need to establish one key metric across all your activity - cost per acquisition (of leads).

How? By using tools like Google Analytics, Technorati and other keyword and SEO measurement apps to generate regular reports that provide a clear indication of how your engagement campaigns and web sites are performing (minimum quarterly, recommended monthly).

…and that’s it.

Whilst blogs are no longer the sexiest subject on the block, the ‘why blog?’ question still rages in B2B - and nowhere more so than here at Velocity.

Like many of our clients, our marketing is not exactly rocket surgery. It involves encouraging a few firms to enter into a rather lengthy (but very interesting) discussion about their brand and their communications (as opposed to experimenting with wacky tactics to convince a zillion consumers to try out our new fizzy drink).

As such, the most effective way for us to engage with more new prospects would probably be to hire another great sales guy and get him out there walking and talking. So why not scratch the marketing efforts and stop with all the blogging?

I’ve already written about reasons to blog this elsewhere. Conclusions have been as follows: its great for your SEO; wonderful for reputation management; a good way to polish sales messages and seed marketing collateral; and a nice way of engaging people in product feedback. All good, compelling stuff. But really these are fringe benefits.

The biggest and best reason to blog in the B2B space is because - if it’s done properly - it’s a relationship winner.

Let me explain…

Stan, Doug and I had lunch on Friday and talked about our first six months as an agency proper and our first few months as an online outfit. What about the blog?

In many ways, it’s a little too random - check out the tag cloud on the blog home page. No real thread. Shouldn’t we be thinking harder about editorialising our subject matter?

For sure, this can only help to make us even more relevant and interesting, but in our discussion we needed to take a step back. Why bother in the first place?

As mentioned, our sales are generated via relationships - and through Stan mainly. Surely a better way for marketing to bolster this effort would be to provide Stan with a brochure, or perhaps divert the time and money into a telesales agency?

Well, whilst both would undoubtably help, we think this approach misses the point.

As a sales guy, what Stan needs is differentiation. There’s plenty of agencies out there vying for our prospect’s attention. And they have a wealth of brochures to throw around.

In addition, they all have equally compelling web sites - stuffed to the brim with pages that describe their services, their people, their portfolio and their history. Ours does this very well too.

They also issue a press release every time something interesting happens to them.

So, we’re dubious that throwing more resource at this kind of thing would really help Stan.

Instead, what matters for us (and 99.9% of our clients) is the relationship that our prospects have with Stan (and our client’s Stans). Once they feel happy with our brand, then people buy from him, not our brochure.

So, investing time and money in differentiating the Velocity relationship seems to us to be a more sensible exercise.

Now, of course, we encourage Stan to wear impressive shirts and wear his hair in nice ways - and of course, he’s also a bit of a looker…. But our blog can really help him too.

Because aside from Stan the man, and a few meetings with Doug and I, where else can a prospect (or a new hire, or an investor) get a feel of who we are? Where can they get a nugget or two that adds value to their relationship with Stan?

Is it in a brochure? Nope - that’s just a hygiene thing. We have to have one of those because everyone else does. (By the way, we do it differently so that it IS memorable and loveable.)

Is it via a super-cool ‘Services’ section on our site? Nope - not entirely. Again, that’s something we’re obliged to do… but do well, and better than the other guys.

No… where we can really shine is in our blog.

This is the channel where we can best communicate our thinking, our experiments, our failures and our successes …ie, describe all of the things that make us the people that you’d like to have a relationship with.

It’s obvious though, right? Where else would you put this kind of stuff? Send a press release? Create a brochure? No way. A blog is your showcase for all the brilliant thinking that’s contained in your people (as opposed to your marketing material).

In other words, a blog is an extension of a Stan - it’s the showcase for your company’s soul when he’s up and left the sales meeting.

That might sound mushy, but its true and it’s very important to your success as a B2B outfit. How else are you going to get prospects to really engage with you other than through your people and their ideas?

So, after lunch had finished we decided that we’re going to devote a lot more focus to this blog in 2008. It’s going to become tighter and it’s going to possess better content on a more regular basis.

As a result, you should expect us to talk about it more and point you to it a lot.

Because it’s the home for Velocity thinking.

It’s what will differentiate us from the rest of the pack.

And we really think you should follow our lead….

The answer of course is 57. There’s the SEO guys, the branding guys, the PR guys, the viral guys, the advertising guys, and so on…

The fact that there are simply too many agencies to manage was raised by Will McInnes at a session I chaired this week on the future of PR. Aside from Will, I was also joined by Sarah Ogden and Drew Benvie. All super smart folks who know their onions.

The event was put together by NMK as an open invite for the PR community to chat with a bunch of digerati about the future of their industry. (Note: my role was as stooge to the smart people… I tried to be as Alan Partridge as possible by asking all the dumb questions). All in all it was a good night. NMK’s Ian Delaney has written about it here, so I won’t dig on the detail.

I did, however want to pick up on Will’s account of the evening. Too many agencies can only mean one thing - industry shakeout.

The event left me with one big impression: it seems that - where the web’s concerned - the glass is half empty for PR companies. And, as Will suggests in his blog post, this is a little bit mad because they ought to be doing good things right now, rather than worrying about where their future might lie.

Here’s my thoughts on the matter…….

PR is dead. Long live woteva.

The first thing to note is that PR is, in one important way, knackered.

When I used to run PR for IBM, all I had to do was stop or start my fellow IBMers talking to the press. Sat on the 33rd floor of an office block in Paris, I was Master of the Goddam Universe, controlling, spinning and unleashing stories to small reporter types on the street. I also had some nasty fires to fight too, but this worked out OK because I always owned the source of the story - so if it was a bad one, I just turned the sources off. In short, I was a mover, shaker, and MEDIATOR.

Today, the communications process has gotten a whole lot more complex.

Someone famous once said that ‘freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.’ Well, now we all own a press. We can blog, Twitter and generally cache our most intimate feelings on Facebook. In other words, we have the ability to publish whatever we please for the world to see. And this is very radical. Yesterday, if a software developer at IBM wanted to tell the world about a new widget he was working on, he’d have to do so via me and Computer Weekly. Today, he can do what he damn well pleases. Voila. A core function of the PR agent is toast.

So, what to do?

It’s clear that the world still needs PR agents. Companies will always need help getting published in the FT. But what about all this other web-based stuff? What does it mean and how does a PR firm deal with it?

My view is that PR firms have a simple choice. They either embrace the web or they don’t. But - importantly - it’s not live or die.

It’s just a question of what business you want to be in…

How many agencies does it take to change a light bulb?

Ideally, one - a really, really smart one. One that understands the bigger picture and helps you sell stuff to customers and who helps you use every trick at your disposal to do it fast and cost-effectively.

This type of firm exists today. Ogilvy is pretty good at it. They’re stuffed with smart people who can run campaigns across multiple channels. They don’t do everything themselves, they outsource a bunch of stuff for others to implement. But this works because they are good at directing it and getting the desired results. The problem is they’re expensive, so not every firm can use them.

For non-mega budget firms, the choice is not so good. They usually end up having to manage a bunch of disparate agencies with different skill sets - which is problematic because the onus for making the right strategy choices usually falls on them. And, as many corporate marketing directors will tell you, this is no fun. The administration side sucks, and the smart ones among them know that they simply don’t have all the answers…. particularly when it comes to the web.

So what’s a corporate marketing gal to do?

Well, one agency above all the others seems to be in a good place to help. The PR firm usually sits closely to the marketing director, advising on what should be said and done. They also usually write the script. And when it comes to the web, all of these skills are important - keywords, messages and content are the crux of any successful web campaign, be it Google Adwords, blogging, SEO, woteva.

It’s crystal ball time….

This is my ‘Future of PR’ scenario number 1….

PR firms morph into fuller service agencies that do some core strategy work in-house, but subcontract much of the ‘doing’ out to trusted partners. In the process, they might stop doing traditional PR implementation, but they definitely get some web chops. They start to advise on web development, online communications and such. They do wonderful, smart and ground-breaking work. Their marketing director clients leave their spouses and run off with them into the sunset.

(Note: this is Velocity! We do a bunch of stuff, including what we call web relations.)

My ‘Future of PR’ scenario number 2 is….

PR firms focus on their knitting, stop pretending they do web stuff, and get better and better at traditional PR (after all, there’s change a plenty in the world of publishing and someone’s got to work out better ways to influence the new breed of reporter). In the process, they let other firms become type 1’s, and they focus a lot of their attention on building strong sales relationships with them. They do wonderful, smart and ground-breaking PR work. They leave their spouses and run off into the sunset with agency type 1.

(Note, this is also a GREAT business to be in!)

B.Y.O.B: Bring your own bottle (show, don’t tell)

But how to become a type 1?

Well, this type of firm has to be all things to everyone…. which is hard when it comes to the web because it moves so fast.

You can, however, succeed in making the transition. As many of the panelists this week noted, the biggest success factor lies in simply just doing it. That’s right, don’t wait for the inspiration to brand your offering or try to figure out how to apply the old rules to the new environment, JUST DO IT!

When it comes to selling web services, take a leaf out of our book. We practice this stuff ourselves, so as it evolves we can figure out the value in using it.

You see, Facebook isn’t arcane, it’s blissfully simple. It’s a smashing way of bugging your friends whilst you should be doing work. Now, there’s a tonne of great communications opportunities in there for smart consultants: things which provide value to Facebook users without abusing its conventions. But to know it you have to do it. Same with blogging and every other ‘web 2.0′ channel.

Because we use this stuff for our own communication efforts, it’s very easy for us to spot an opportunity to use it with clients and also to show them how it’s done (B.Y.O.B style). Importantly, in doing so, we always show them everything about the tools and how they’re used. Usually, this is a relief for them because deep down they know the tool set isn’t complex. (Note: this also works because they ALWAYS feel alienated when folks try to sell them a slick branded ‘productized’ service or application for something they know their teenage daughter is doing ten times better in her bedroom at home!)

When we create projects this way, we help our clients to understand where the goal posts are and we also very clearly define the value in the service itself. And this seems to me to be where the PR industry is going wrong with the web today…

It’s PR Jim, but not as we know it

What’s the point of blogging?

Here’s a stab at an answer: the point of blogging is to talk to a group of people who have an interest in you. Blogging is, after all, just an ability to publish stuff cheaply and easily and have people give you their feedback through ‘comments.’

So, what’s a good application for blogging? Well, internal departments could have one or more, to keep each other in the loop on all the cool new things that are happening. Software development firms could have one to keep their super-interested customers up to date on product planning for version 5 of their new widget.

A bad application for blogging is using one as a CEO mouth piece and cutting and pasting some PR material once a week. Yet, we often see this kind of thing happening, and I think I know why…

Many of these new styles of web publishing - blogs, Facebook, etc - ‘feel’ like the types of activity that a PR firm should be doing. They involve words and trying to influence others. This thought, however, is a mistake.

These new web apps are not the ‘new PR’ - they’re nothing to do with PR as we know it. They’re great new ways to communicate. They’re NOT great new media for channeling every possible bit of PR material that you can get your hands on. They’re different. They serve different purposes and are used in different ways.

The role of the press release is a good example of the difference between traditional PR and life on the interweb.

Traditional PR: one goal of the press releases is to help a reporter write a news story by giving him/her content to use and thoughts to consider.

Interweb: the goal of press release distribution has very little to do with generating a news story. The idea is to encourage new web pages to get generated, all with keyword-rich links back to a specific point on your web site.

Now, in order to do the first activity, I need the help of a traditional PR firm. In order to do the second, I don’t. I need either a different kind of service company to help me, or I need some extra help in-house to do it myself.

And this, essentially, is my conclusion on the whole thing… traditional PR is needed and so is the interweb stuff, but they probably shouldn’t be provided by the same service partner.

Conclusion

This rant has been circular. Forgive me if you got there ahead of time.

To summarise:

• PR is not dead, it just has a choice to make: learn to knit better or to do other (multi-disciplined) things
• The way to do ‘new media’ communications is to do it for yourself (and then do the same thing for your clients)
• Don’t treat it like rocket surgery. Don’t overcomplicate it (you’ll get found out). Just do it.
• Don’t force PR-shaped stuff into web-shaped holes. It’s dumb. Stop it.
• Either be a good traditional PR agency or be a different kind of agency. Don’t try to be a traditional PR agency that does web - I just don’t think you can pull it off…

Footnote

Web-savvy people in traditional PR firms who are currently frustrated by their lack of opportunities should probably start their own firms or join a ‘Type 1′ agency.

That’s right, FIVE reasons your company should blog. Count ‘em:

• Improved SEO - a steady flow of dynamic content published on a weekly basis to your web site. Search engine spiders will pick up on this activity, register it and re-index your site with greater frequency. Blogging also gives you the opportunity to create new web pages that are optimised with specific keywords - eg, customer experience management. These new blog pages should link through to key pages in your main site, as well as key external pages. Again, this is good for SEO, as it increases the level at which your site is associated with those terms by search engines - eg, Google’s PageRank algorythm works this way. You should also encourage partner organisations to link their blog posts to your blog posts along the same keyword optimised lines – again, this garners Google respect.

• Sales referrals and messages - blog posts can be an extremely effective way of recording key sales strategies, discussions and messages for future external reference. For example, you have x3 similar sales conversations with similar questions/objections raised in week one. The penny drops in week two as you forumlate a compelling answer to these questions - and you document your thoughts/messages via a new blog post. In week three the same queries are raised and you point x3 customers to this new blog post via a link in an email. Voila! You have a consistent story for the market!

• Seeding marketing collateral - along the lines noted above, your blogs may address market questions, issues and/or concerns. Over time you may find yourself devoting a disproportionate amount of time to writing on one theme. This tells you that it’s important and also that it may be worth some additional time and effort to create something more formal around the idea - such as a white paper or a brochure. In this way blogging can be a test bed for your marketing efforts….particularly if you collect comments on your blog posts. More comment means more interest and more scope for developing marketing material (as well as providing you with a free source of ideas!)

• Establishing authority - blogging ought to help you establish a unique voice in a (noisy) market. From an awareness point of view, this is the SEO effect described above. If you’re writing around certain keywords, then search engines will recognise this and you increase your likelihood of being discovered by new audiences. But, more than this, and particularly in crowded markets, your blog can be an important point of differentiation in a world dominated by bland market-speak. Say it differently, more intelligently and with more passion and people will listen.

• R&D Feedback - much like the marketing message loop described above, when deployed in specific areas, blogs can act as effective focus groups for sounding out new development ideas. For example, a technical software blog designed for floating new development ideas amongst your seed customers may work well - it has a very focused, trustworthy and interested audience who will respond to your writing and offer feedback because it effects their own lives/work intimately. Note - this is a prerequisite when you’re looking for feedback in a blog: your audience must be engaged and ‘in the loop.

So…what you waiting for? GO BLOG!

I’ve just read an interesting piece in this month’s Wired magazine on the subject of blogging.

I’ve written elsewhere about the various benefits of blogs as early product conversations, focus groups and general sounding boards amongst a tight knit community, but here’s another thought….reputation management.

Reputation management is a hackneyed term amongst PR folk who charge a fortune to help companies and individuals keep their noses clean after oil spills, mass redundancies, illicit affairs, and general snafus. Like Harvey Keitel as Winston Wolfe in Pulp Fiction, they arrive after the incident to clean up the mess that’s been created - usually by spinning positive stories in the media, and sometimes by getting retractions printed. That kind of thing - in any case, not very web ‘2.0′.

Now, in the case of blogging and the all new shiny Interweb, the Wired piece makes the very valid comment that blogging is a way for companies and individuals to make their reputation more solid via the simple laws of publishing on the web.

The logic goes something like this:

• …I write honestly and openly about myself/my firm in my blog
• …I do this often
• …Other people like what they read and link to it in their blogs
• …Other people’s friends like what other people have written and link to it in their blogs
• …etc
• …All paths lead back to my blog
• …My page rank gets boosted
• …When the sh*t hits the fan and I screw up, or when I do something great, my reputation is insulated by this Google effect

In other words, if you blog often and well enough, then Google should look after you….so that when others start writing dumb things about the good/bad things you’ve done, their commentary is drowned out by the ‘halo effect’ of your blog posts.

Sounds sensible, huh?

Well, it also kind of works….here’s a Google UK search for Roger Warner.

My blog posts are up there. Now, you can easily apply the same logic to your company.

If we buy this approach, there’s two things to consider:

1. This only works if what your writing is any good. To perform well in Google, people have to link to you, which means that they have to find you interesting. In short, to be a mouthpiece for your firm, you have to be a good writer.
2. This is all based on the rather scary idea that our lives are being cached, big brother style, by Google. So, if you’re going to blog, you’d better do it consistently, and you’d better be honest, open and transparent in all that you blog…. Because if you’re not, the evidence will always be there for all to see, cached.

The second Wired article in their series on blogging (on Microsoft’s noble efforts) puts these two points really elegantly. It transpires that blogging - this easy to do, throw away content form - is not so plastic fantastic after all…. From a marketing standpoint, it’s only effective if you’re as compelling as Agatha Christie….and you’d better take the time and care to be sure it’s polished and air tight because it’ll be there for all time, for all to see…..