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!

PHPRtv now up on YouTube

A couple of posts ago, I said that I would make a "PR for technology" video. I made the promise when I found there were no PR for technology videos on YouTube when I was playing with Google's Wonder Wheel.

I've finally launched PHPR's own TV channel on YouTube with the above PR for technology video. After years of clarifying messages for technology companies, I'm using the video to urge for clarity at the top end of technology communications to communicate with end users more effectively.

Like me, it's short and sweet - well, short, anyway!

How to be Interesting On-line

Seth Liss, SunSentinel.com's news community manager has some good tips for those of us who have noticed less feedback from social media activity recently. More people have piled into social media with varying levels of communications skills, muddying the waters for us all.

Time was, being on social media was novel and we all reacted to each other. Now everyone's at it, the boring get blanked out. So Seth's advice starts with the obvious: drop the minutiae of everyday living. We've all un-followed Tweeters who are obsessed by their everyday existence.

But I do agree that when you do post a newsworthy event, it's the details you bring out that make it more interesting. Every PR person and reporter knows this - and we are all occasional reporters now. As he says, 'I want to read more than: "My child took his first steps today." I want to know how it came about, where did it happen, how many steps, and how it made you feel.' Hard to do in 140 characters, I know, but whoever said good communications skills are easy?

He also reminds us to clear off to a private space if we are start engaging in a 1-2-1 conversation. I think it's a bit like talking loudly during a film in the cinema.

Seth's really nailed it when he suggests putting posts with links into context. There's no point in recommending something without giving us a clue so we can judge for ourselves whether we might agree with you. As he points out: "That approach makes it easier to agree or disagree and open the conversation up to others in your network."

Seth recruits good PR research to make a point. If you're thinking of going for the promotional jugular in your posts, you may want to consider that Edelman's Trust Barometer survey showed that "the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company has dropped from 45 percent to 25 percent since 2008." (Edelman is the world's largest PR company and their annual Trust Barometer survey is based on nearly 5,000 25-minute interviews with informed people aged 24-60 in 20 countries)

So, if being promotional and your day-to-day wanderings are a no-no: what does work? As ever in PR, sharing good information is the key to being worth reading or listened to. He counsels us to develop expertise and share learnings if we want to be valued sources of interesting material.

His next observation is harder to do, but it makes a lot of sense: timing is key. Most people dip into their social media accounts so: "Know when to post." I'm going to start noting when people I admire are posting so we're more likely to deepen the connection. That's the whole point of social media.

Finally he repeats advice given by everyone I respect in the on-line PR game: listen first, then comment. "If people know you are interested in what they have to say, they will most likely be curious about what you have to say as well."

That's why following people you're interested in often produces a reciprocal response.

I'd say it pays to listen well before you speak, then you stand to engage with the best in your field. And that further builds your on line reputation. And boosting reputation is what PR is all about on and offline.

Focus to Boost Business

(picture created in http://www.wordle.com/)

How many times have you wished you had more time to promote the business? We can always find the time, provided that promotion is the top priority. But is it just a case of prioritising? Trouble is, whenever you prioritise, something else is demoted. So how can we make more time for key tasks?

One solution I've heard suggested is to tap into that "just before holiday" frenzy.

We all work like crazy before a holiday to clear the desk - all we need is to do that every day to increase our output... And when you're tired? Just imagine someone pointing a gun at your head - if that was real, all tiredness would vanish. Well yes. That's great in the short term. But how long would most people's health last, piling on the stress like that?

We can do a prodigious amount of work when we have a powerful motivating reason - saving lives, helping charities, going on hols, turning the business around, moving office or house etc. But we know it's for a finite period.

Sure, build a bit of rush time into a week, but there is another way: work smarter. And I'm not thinking about rushing out to buy the latest gadget. I had a harsh but valuable experience that taught me to focus on the important stuff only.

Recently I lost the use of my right arm for 8 weeks - a frozen shoulder. Agony. And I'm right-handed. Painkillers and a good physio sorted it out. I now use the free program called WorkRave to enforce breaks so I don't get another frozen shoulder. But boy, did I get a really good set of lessons in how to work efficiently. I didn't have any choice.

I addressed emails twice a day. I only looked at ones from clients, friends and family. And I painstakingly typed one line answers to clients. Anything else was done by phone. Guess what? I slashed my email time by half and still had time to cancel or block a load of email that was not immediately useful, saving more time in future.

Speeches, case studies, articles and releases were handled with speech to text software (Dragon-Dictate) and took less time to write than direct keystrokes as speech is generally more concise than the written word (I'd previously trained the software to recognise my voice).

And I rigorously recycled text to ensure our online marketing remained on course by questioning everything I created - how can I use it again for maximum impact? A blog headline becomes a tweet and a Facebook posting via Tweetdeck pointing back to the blog. Or use Ping.fm to cover lots of social media and bookmarking sites with one post. And if the subject is strong enough, it could edited into a e-newsletter and pushed to your permission-based e-mailing list.

I expect you can suggest more ways to streamline your working day: let's hear them!

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.

Seeing the online PR light through training

PR people often ask me about how to get on top of online PR quickly.



I usually recommend David Meerman Scott's book: The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

I think that book is a great starting place, and they'll find that online PR and marketing are converging online, so the whole ballpark just got a lot bigger. But the truth is, one book, no matter how good, doesn't give you a licence to practice. I've also put in a major time investment in training.

My CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations) CPD Excellence log shows I've clocked up an average of 250 hours a year, each year for the last 4 years. That's currently 1,000 hours of formal training logged, not counting at least 10 times more time refining that training through practice.

They say it takes 10,000 hours to develop an expertise in a subject, and I reckon I must be getting close to that by now if you add the "putting it into practice" element.

If you count on around 240 working days a year after subtracting weekends and holidays, I'm spending over an hour a day on logged training. Not all of it is online PR and marketing. There's useful stuff about business processes and public speaking skills in there too. But I'm always picking up online PR and marketing tips while I'm working. Twitter sends me off on all sorts of interesting links and that's not logged, nor is watching the world's top experts on TED.

So why don't I feel an expert on anything? I think the explanation lies in something my tutor in the philosophy department said over 30 years ago. Bear in mind that he was a renowned professor close to retirement: he said, "The more I know, the more I discover there is to know, so now I feel I know less than I did when I started". I can relate to that!

Sometimes you just have to get comfortable with the idea that you have put in the spadework and know a lot more than most.

But logging the time spent on training puts good statistics behind you. That's quite an important professional booster, especially for smaller company owners and freelancers that are not in large organisations with structured training and development programs run by development professionals. And it's not just PR professionals. I reckon this could apply to any knowledge-led service providers.

I never thought I would say this as I struggle each year to add up my hours and file my CPD reports, but thank you CIPR CPD Excellence program and CIPR's Debbie Liddle for ensuring that, no matter how busy I am, I plan my training year in accord with my business goals and log my hours.

Google on Caffeine Tastes Even Better

Google's new search engine is called Caffeine and it's not quite ready yet. But an early version is available to web developer to provide feedback. Google claim it will deliver faster, better results, and index content faster. As usual with Google, most of the work is under the bonnet so we will notice little obvious change.

But what will it do to our carefully optimised websites? That's why they are asking for feedback from developers.

But to get an idea of how it is shaping up as far as your site and your key search engine terms, a web developer has set up a neat side-by-side comparison site at www.comparegoogle.com - no, not compare the meerkats...

I ran the search terms we've been getting onto page 1 of Google's natural search results for clients using well-written content on monitored press release sites. All of them performed slightly better on the caffeinated version, so I'm looking forward to Google with a dash of caffeine.

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.