Blogging for Business in East Lothian

Did a presentation today at East Lothian Chamber of Commerce on Blogging for Business with Taryn Willis who runs the delightfully named Phenomenoodle - a dedicated WordPress website service - www.phenomenoodle.com.

Taryn's skills allows businesses to skip over the more rigid and inflexible traditional website format for a more Google-friendly and easier-to-update blog-based website. Perfect for some of the non-techie people who were there this morning: some whom had not yet managed to get their businesses online. And her tagline emphases she's aiming at exceptionally creative people: the sort that benefit from being able to easily upload photos and video. With East Lothian's focus on attracting more creatives into the area, she is well placed to help them.

My bit of the talk covered the general PR context: why businesses need to engage with social media: can your business afford to ignore sites like Facebook whose membership is so large that, if it were a country, it would be the 3rd largest in the world? (Thanks to the inestimable Stef Thomas at No Red Braces for pointing me towards that cracking statistic at his excellent social media workshop for 4networking.biz in Edinburgh yesterday). And showed how it all linked-up: engaging with people in 1-to-1 conversations and relationship-building to create niche communities by posting and cross-posting between sites such as Twitter, Linked-In, Facebook and your blog.

Both Taryn and I are big fans of taking that cross-linking a stage further and integrating your blog and website at your own domain name. That's because blogs are easier to update and get much faster results on Google than webpages. This blog is integrated with the PHPR website to give me the best of both worlds thanks to Simon Allen at Shopfitter.com.

Taryn neatly drew an important line between likability and competence. She rightly points out that blogs are a great way to demonstrate expertise and trustworthiness online.

As we ran through the benefits and gave some examples, you could see lightbulb moments going on across the room. At the end, an accountant rushed off leaving me with the parting shot that he was off to "give it a go". Brilliant!

Snapshot puts Orange UK into the Twitter Picture

Orange UK users can send picture messages to Twitter thanks to Orange's picture message site called Snapshot.

UK's Global Cultural Impact

The UK has had an outsized cultural impact on the world. From music to sports to literature...and now-MMS with Twitter. http://ping.fm/AQGu9

40% of tweets "pointless"

A report on Twitter yesterday claimed that only 5.85% of tweets are self promotion and 3.75% spam - you could have fooled me as I'd have said self promo was the prime force behind more than that! By carefully monitoring my follows I don't get much I consider spam.

And that's the point. Everyone's personal inbox will vary according to what they, as the gatekeepers, set up. That's why Twitter works. It puts you in control. As far as I can tell, this report is an analysis of the raw Twitter stream, which I doubt anyone actually experiences.

Apparently 8.7% of posts had "pass-along" value. And 40% were "pointless babble", although I expect their close mates would find it interesting enough at the time.

It's like any media. If I set up a newsletter confined to news about my street, a handful of people on the street and their mums might be interested. At least Twitter and other online media doesn't use up good paper & ink. Find the report at: http://bit.ly/2SybV8

New-old social media

I'm indebted to Kevinghay on Twitter for pointing me towards this useful piece at the Top Rank Online Marketing blog "Let’s revisit these 16 rules for social media optimisation (SMO) and see which are still relevant" at http://short.to/m094

It's good to see that, although social media sites come and go, a lot of the best practice tips come down to attending to the basics of good communications: listening and reacting appropriately, plus good ideas, clearly presented.

There's marketing or marketing and PR!

Looking at some of the affiliate marketing schemes being pushed on Twitter or into your email inboxes, some sound quite convincing. Then you delve deeper.

The photo of the person on the Twitter account is clearly not the same person featured on the website or blog promo blurb. Either that, or they've aged 20 years and had a lot of really bad cosmetic surgery after making all that money!

Then there's the 'proof' of wealth. A badly scanned tax form with a company name not immediately obviously related to either the Tweeter or the person featured in the promo material. For all I know, it could be anyone's tax return or even a mock-up?

Then there is often a picture of a big house. Call me a cynic, but I think I could manage to take a picure of a very large house.

Plus all the other people who are sending messages that would appear to be pushing the same or a similar opportunity.

Often the pitch is a proven SEO or marketing system that runs on autopilot, so no experience is needed. At this point every fibre of my PR reputational management being is sounding a warning bell. Marketing without expertise? What sort of messages will be going out?

At some point the admittedly well-written text crunches some numbers. One I looked at suggested by reaching c2 million people, you could expect 400+ sales and take a slice of the action. And of course, the person offering you this wonderful opportunity to spam the other c1,999,550 people takes a small slice too. You run the risk of being blocked by the c1,999,550 people. OK, you can use a throw-away email address and set up a disposable Twitter account, but is that any way to run a business?

In the current economic climate, obviously quite a few people are going for it. If they are desperate, I wish them well. I hope they become rich and that these opportunities don't involve a scam.

But this numbers approach does highlight the marketing mindset taken to extremes. I think it illustrates why PR and marketing don't always see eye to eye. Marketing likes branding, and crunching the numbers and counting the sales. PR is about building influence, raising profile and safe-guarding business reputation, creating trust so that the marketing and sales efforts work well.

The truth is, sales, marketing and PR each bring a lot of advantages to the table, but by combining them you get a balanced approach and much greater long term business benefits. Not short term 'experts' with a little social media experience.

Would you rather be sending stuff to peopke who don't want it. Or walking into a pitch with well crafted marketing materials and a great company reputation backed by a clutch of on and offline cuttings from reputable sources? Plus some great metrics and feedback to inform your sales pitch? That's how PR, marketing and sales work together to build a long term business proposition that provide livlihoods for the many people who don't want to go it alone as freelancers or entrepreneurs, or spammers.

Blogging or lifestreaming for business?

There’s been a bit of a stushi over the last month with a key figure in the blogosphere, Steve Rubel, announcing he was quitting blogging for lifestreaming (posting snippets on micro media like Twitter).

I’m not ready to stop blogging, but I do love http://Twitter.com. I’ve found some of the more influential (rated by numbers of followers) tweeters on PR using http://wefollow.com and its tag search facility. You can use it to find good tweeters on any subject you want.

Interestingly, the tweeter with most followers (heading for 3 million at the time of writing) http://twitter.com/aplusk is not one of the many celebrity tweeters, but an entrepreneur. Although I guess he’s become a celebrity with that following.

By following the top PR tweeters, I’ve picked up great snippets of information with little effort as the 140 character posts are so succinct. And there’s a lot less spam on the direct messaging than my emails carry. That may change, but I can always turn direct messages off, because they give me control over the information I choose to receive.

Of course, many tweeters punctuate their nuggets of gold with trivia that only their best mate, their mum and partner would be interested in, and even that might be stretching it a bit. But you can stop following them, or hang in there for the odd nugget: the choice is yours. And the best build up a following by being interesting.

Stephen Fry’s tweets are often fascinating. But few can write like that. Or have the magnetic persona to rise above the trivial.

A persona largely forged by offline media.

It’s the interaction of the on and offline that is so powerful because we can make so much more impact by using different channels. Even when PR was largely offline, I wrote the DIY PR book (pub. Batsford 1998, now out of print but second hand copies are on Amazon if you want offline PR info) outlining 30 low cost ways to communicate, encouraging people to use a mix to meet personal information preferences.

The beauty of online media is that you can link them all up (services like tweetdeck (http://tweetdeck.com/beta/) allow you to manage posts to Twitter and Face-book and you can put your twit-stream up on your Face Book for example. Posterous (http://posterous.com/) enables you to post to all your favourite media sites in one go. Their site looks ridiculously cool and I’m starting to play with that.

I’m sure there will be lots of other interesting tools coming down the line and we’ll all be off onto the next big thing. But they are all tools allowing you to connect with people that are interested in your key topics and interests. Hopefully you are working at the things you love. That makes the publicity and communicating that passion very easy. Now you can interact with those people, if they want to, but more importantly, how they want to.

Steve Rubel is probably right in the long run. More people are accessing info via phones with relatively titchy screens so the trend is for succinct comms. Twitter is good training for that.

But meanwhile, there’s plenty of people searching on Google and landing on web sites and blogs because the extended content they carry lends itself to being searched. And most business tweets carry a link to a website of blog anyway.

I think of online media like a menu. A tweet is the starter to whet the appetite, full media sites like websites, blogs and Face Book are the main courses with lots of rich content on the plate. The proof of the pudding is the interaction you stimulate and whether you can translate that into sales for your business without putting people off with hard sell tactics.

That’s why I think PR and journalism skills will be in the online media mix long-term. Because we were trained to get stories past much fiercer gatekeepers than any online registration process. We were trained to make stories interesting enough for editors select for their audience and invest in the paper, ink, or bandwidth to carry the story. Nowadays anyone can be a publisher, but the acid test is whether they build an audience.

See you at http://twitter.com/PennyHaywood

Find Tweeters worth Following on Twitter with wefollow

It's a good idea to keep an eye out on social media when you're in PR. Quite often you can spot trends or potential problems. Early reaction to a trend can catch great media coverage. And early reaction to a problem brewing can often be enough to resolve the issue.

You don't have to spend a fortune on monitoring your business reputation online. Ferret out comment mentioning your business name or key search terms on websites, forums and in the news using Google plus their news alerts service.

But finding the most influential tweeters on Twitter was a bit of a hit or miss using apps like Twollow. Not any longer. Have just discovered wefollow on Twitter and I like it.

It is a directory and you can use it to find entrepreneurs, celebs etc.

But use it on a keyword search and it will dig out the people who are tweeting in your sector. The results come back ranking Tweeters numerically according to the number of followers they have attracted, which gives a fair indication of their influence.

And helps you see where you are in the pecking order too. You do have to register to be placed, so it's not totally comprehensive, but I suspect most people wanting to be seen as a heavyweight in a subject area will be seriously tempted to sign up once their following builds.

The Twitterati

Twitter is like Marmite. Clients and colleagues either love or loathe it. Those that hate it inevitably say something like: who cares what you had for breakfast?

And they’re right. Validating your lonely existence is not what Twitter is about. There’s plenty of rubbish on the internet, but we don’t dismiss it out of hand just because of that.

We are seeing more enquiries about how to use Twitter effectively. And no wonder clients are interested. ComScore shows Twitter has gone from under 10 million monthly unique visitors to its site world-wide in February, to 32 million in April, up from 19 million in March 2009. Even more impressively, that score only includes website visitors, not the millions who access it via phones.

But if it’s the early adopters of funky new social media you are after, or if you think Twitter is the cool place to be, think again! It’s months since I read in the ad magazine, Revolution that the super cool had already abandoned Twitter when the corporate suits moved in for a clutch of other social media platforms.

It keeps happening. Remember all the fuss about Friends Reunited and MySpace? A lot of money piled in and they’re not exactly flavour of the month now.

There are loads of new social media platforms all hoping to be the next big thing.
That doesn’t stop companies engaging with the Twitterati, as long as they do engage and don’t just sell: that goes down like a lead balloon in any social media format.
But it’s wise to stay flexible and avoid putting all the eggs in one social media basket.

There are plenty of next big things brewing.