29 Aug 2006
Awe the lines are starting to blur and I like it.
Using public relations is a critical tactic in generating awareness for many businesses, and online businesses should be no different. The irony is traditional PR tactics (media relations, ed cal tracking, by-lined articles, speaking opportunities) to drive awareness in the main stream media (MSM), are as foreign to an online business as RSS feeds and blogs are to a majority of offline businesses.
Steven Van Yoder's recent post titled "Why Online Businesses Should Embrace PR" provides excellent insights to using PR to drive traffic.
To quote Steven, "They read newspapers, magazines and listen to the radio. To reach your market niche comprehensively, you need to explore ways to reach your prospects beyond the Internet. It will help you drive traffic to your web site."
We agree. Our experience has been that offline MSM coverage drives a tremendous amount of traffic to a company's website….
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23 Aug 2006
Every blogger has faced the pressure of what to blog about. We work with our clients to create online reputation management systems to get them plugged into listening to the conversation first so they will know: What are people talking about? and How they can add a relevant voice to the conversation? We've posted recently about strategic blog commenting strategies and how to enter the online conversation.
What I want to discuss are two techniques on how you can be the online BUZZ STARTER that everyone else is commenting and creating trackbacks on.
Having completely transitioned to online communications and social media, I brought along some tried and true PR tactics that can be applied to capturing the online conversations. As a matter of fact a few basic block and tackle PR tactics are some of the most powerful ways to be the BUZZ STARTER.
#1. Editorial Calendar Tracking
As much as those of us in the social media world want…
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09 Aug 2006
I was on a virtual seminar with Seth Godin yesterday, and he was talking about big companies being successful by thinking small. You can check out his new book by going to smallis.com.
I thought he brought up some important points about business people being brought up in a way that keeps them from thinking for themselves when it comes to marketing. If you work your way up in marketing by simply doing what you are told, then when you are the boss you don't really know what to do. This is in the context of the importance of thinking small. Thinking small means thinking like a business owner.
Other interesting points he touched on related to blog traffic not being a good metric for the success of a blog. The question is how attentive are people to your blog. Does it have the potential to be viral? Is it something that others…
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31 Jul 2006
Traditional public relations yields a common problem I call the "Placement Crash," which is like a sugar crash in business. You get a brief "high" of publicity, which bottoms out fast and leaves you with no lasting benefit.
Here's how it works: Imagine that you land one big "media hit," such as a Business Week article mentioning your company. This publicity lures volumes of new visitors to your web site.
…That's great, IF your PR firm, online communications expert, or anyone in your marketing department planned ahead of time to Capture the Conversation during and after peak traffic to drive sales or solidify new business relationships.
Most companies – including yours, probably – don't do that. Therefore, much of that wonderful web traffic gets wasted.
New visitors click away if you don't engage them immediately. Every time that happens, your PR/marketing team is costing you an opportunity.
Don't blame them, however. They're just doing the job they've been trained…
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