ONLINE PR & THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

The most important thing to remember as you develop a marketing and PR plan is to put your products and services to the side for just a little while and focus your complete attention on the buyers of your products or those who will donate, subscribe, join, or apply.

In ordered to succeed on the web under the new rules of marketing and PR, you need to consider your organizational goals and then focus on your publics first.

Buyer persona is a representative type of buyer that you have identified as having a specific interest in your organization or product or having a market problem that your product or service solves. A buyer persona is a micro target.

Build a persona profile, essentially a kind of biography for each group you will target to achieve your goals.

the best way to learn about publics and develop fire persona profiles is to interview people.

A persona file is a short biography of the typical customer, not just the job description, but a person description. The buyer persona profile gives you a chance to turn truly empathize with target buyers, to step out of your role as someone who wants to promote a product and see, through your buyers prize, the circumstances that drive their decision process. The persona file includes information on the typical buyer's background, daily activities, and current solutions for their problems. Name your persona. Consider the demographics.

One of the simplest ways to build an effective website is to create great public relations programs using online content to target a specific personas that you have created. The typical website is one size fits all, with the content organized by the company's products or services, not by categories corresponding to personas and their associated problems.

Identify the best ways to reach publics and develop compelling messages that you will use in your web public relations programs.

Use the actual words buyers use. Read the publications that publics read. Learn the phrases that buyers use.

An important component of the website based on persona research is thought leadership based content.

Think about what you want each of your personas to believe about your organization.

Think like a publisher. Develop an editorial plan to reach your publics with focused content in the media that they prefer.

Many people who adhere to the old rules will fight you on this strategy. Millions of people are online right now looking for answers to their problems. When they find your organization? And if so, what will they find? Remember, on the web, you are what you publish.

Chapter 11. Online Thought Leadership to Brand Your Organization as a Trusted Resource.

An effective online and content strategy, artfully executed, drives action. Organizations that use online content well have a clearly defined goal, sell products, generate leads, secure contributions, get people to join, or deploy a content strategy that directly contributes to reaching that goal.

When using a blog, podcast, white paper, e-book, e-mail newsletter, webinar, your organization can exercise thought leadership rather than simple advertising and product promotion.

A well-crafted white paper, e-book, or webinar contributes to an organization's positive reputation by setting it apart in the marketplace of ideas.

The first thing you need to do is put away your company hat for a moment and think like one of your buyer personas.

For purposes of public-relations, provide Web content. An e-book is a PDF, formatted document that identifies a problem and supplies an answer to the problem. Scott recommends that e-books be presented in a landscape format, rather than the white papers portrait format. Well executed e-books have lots of white space, interesting graphics and images, and copy that is typically written in a lighter style than the denser white paper. In Scott's view e-books as marketing tools should be free, and Scott strongly suggests that there be no registration requirement.

E-mail newsletters are way to deliver a regular series of thought leadership content.

Webinars are online seminars that may include audio, video, or graphic images, typically in the form of PowerPoint slides, and are often used by technology companies as a tool about a specific problem that technology can solve.

Wiki's are started by an organization as thought leadership content because it wants to be seen as an important player in a distinct new marketplace.

You can use a wiki to allow your users to add their own frequently asked questions, and other people can supply answers, which helps everyone. People love being a part of the community, and they really like that a wiki gives them a way to discuss their interests.

Research and survey reports are used by many companies that conduct research projects or surveys and publish the results for free. This can be an effective approach if the research or survey is real and statistically significant and the results are interesting to your publics.

A blog is a personal website written by someone who is passionate about his subject and wants the world to know about it. Writing a blog is the easiest and simplest way to get your thought leadership ideas out and into the market.

Podcasts are an ongoing series of audio downloads available by subscription that are very popular as thought leadership content.

Video content, podcasts, and vlogs are regularly updated the videos that offer a powerful opportunity to demonstrate your thought leadership.

What should you write? Do not write about your company and your products. Thought leadership content is designed to solve by your problems or answer questions and to show that you and your organization are smart and worth doing business with. This PR technique is not a brochure or sales pitch. Thought leadership is not advertising.

Based on your goals, decide whether you want to provide the content for free and without any registration. Without registration, you will get many more people to use the content, but you won't know who they are--or you want to include some kind of registration mechanism. This will cause much lower response rates, but you build the contact list.

Think like a publisher by understanding your audience. Consider what market problems your personas are faced with and develop topics that appealed to them.

Choose a great title that grabs attention use subtitles to describe what the content will deliver.

Promote the efforts like crazy. Offer the content on your site with easy to find links. Add a link to the employees e-mail signatures, and get partners to offer links as well.

To drive the viral marketing effects, alert appropriate reporters, bloggers, and analysts that the content is available and send them a doubt the download link.

The Web and the blogosphere requires a different kind of thinking on the part of marketers. It is about being insightful. Participate in the discussions going on, not just try to shout your message over everyone else. Done well, Web content that delivers authentic thought leadership also brands and organization as one to do business with.

Your clients or buyers, and the media that cover your company, want to know what specific problems your product or services solves. They want proof that it works, in plain language. Your publics want to hear this in their own words. Every time you write, even in news releases, you have an opportunity to communicate.

Sometimes PR professionals do not understand their publics, their problems, or how their services or product help solve these problems. That's where the gobbledygook happens.

Your PR is meant to be the beginning of a relationship with publics, buyers, and journalists.

be careful to avoid corporate jargon, but you don't want to sound like you're trying too hard either,. That always comes across as phony. Talk to your audience as you might talk to her relative you do not see too often. Be friendly and familiar, but also respectful.

Readers of Scott's blog and others suggested some gobbledygook words and phrases to be avoided, such as best practices, proactive, synergy, starting a dialogue, thinking outside the box, revolutionary, situational fluency, paradigm shift. Additional overused words include the following:

Your publics want information in their own words, and that they want proof. Every time you write, you have an opportunity to communicate and to convince.

1. Know Your Brochure's Function in the Buying Process
Your product, the market, even your approach to how you want to make the sale are all major factors in how you write your brochure. Determine where your brochure functions in the buying process:

2. Know If Your Brochure Stands Alone
Some companies have one brochure for one product and that's it. Others use their brochure in combination with other advertising mediums (commercials, print ads, direct mail, etc.). If you're writing a brochure to be used with other forms of advertising, your content will be determined by the ad campaign.

For example, you've written the perfect direct mail package. Your sales letter covers the reasons your prospect has to buy your product now.

Don't follow up your direct mail masterpiece with a repetitious brochure. You've already convinced your potential customer that you have a great product. Now show them the benefits and features your product offers.

3. Know Your Audience
You've already determined where your brochure fits into the buying process. Don't forget to target that particular audience.

Decide what type of information this audience needs and write your brochure accordingly. You wouldn't want to write a respond to inquiry brochure the same way you'd write a sales support brochure.

Five Types of Brochures

Five Essentials for Planning an Effective Brochure

Brochure Marketing : 12 Tips on How to Do it Effectively...

Five Types of Brochures

Lesson 2 Create a brochure describing a process or proj...

Quoted from or closely adapted from David Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

Chapter 13:

Chapter 13. Web content.

B2B = Business to Business

Content drives action on websites, but unfortunately, the content aspect is often overlooked.

Consider these questions your publics have:

Does this is organization care about me?
Does it focus on the problems I face?
Does this site only include information describing what the company has to offer from its own narrow perspective?

You need to start with the site navigation that is designed and organized with your public in mind. Don't simply mimic the way your company or group is organized. You should learn as much as possible about the buying process, focusing on issues such as how people find your site or the length of a typical purchase cycle.

One way many organizations approach navigation is to link to landing pages based on the problems your product or services solve.

It's not an either or decision. It's worth having your message in different formats.

Not only do people like different formats, but psychologists have shown that people learn better with different media.

PR professionals should have messages in as many formats as practical. Even though the messages are the same, they will appeal to different groups of people.

It is important to create a distinct, consistent, and memorable sight, and an important component of that goal is the tone or voice of the content.

I'm feeling lucky, which is a fun and playful way to get you directly to the top listing in the search results, is a strategy Google uses.

Be wary of very different large image sizes and of using distracting multimedia content like flash video. Visitors want to access content quickly, they want sites that load fast, and they don't want to be distracted.

A good site provides a great way to engage visitors, build their interests, and move them through your sales cycle. You might consider stockbroker, charting applications, e-mail your Congressman tools, for example. Make sure you have an easy to find contact us link. Continue page 158.

Quoted from or closely adapted from David Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

Chapter 15:

Chapter 15. Media room.

The online at media room, sometimes called a press room or press page, is that part of your organization's website that you create specifically for the media. In some organizations to his page is simply a list of news releases with contact information for the organization's PR person. But many companies and nonprofits have the elaborate online media rooms with a great deal of information available in many different formats: audio, video, photos, news releases, background information, financial data, and much more.

All kinds of people will visit your online media room, not just journalists.

Your publics, your current customers, partners, investors, suppliers, and employees all visit those pages.

When people want to know what's current about an organization, they go to an online media room.

Visitors expect that the main pages of the media site are basically static. That means they do not update often. But they also expect that the news releases and media targeted pages on a site will be fueled the very latest about a company.

Design your online media room for your buyers. By building a media room that targets publics, you will not only enhance your pages as a powerful marketing tool, you will also make a better media site for journalists.

When news releases are posted on your site, search engine crawlers will find the content, index it, and rank it based on words, phrases, and other factors.

When designing a new online media room, or planning an extensive redesign, starts with a needs analysis.

When you have collected some information, build publics and journalists needs into your online media room.

The best online media rooms are built with the understanding that some visitors need to search for content and others are browsing. Many people already know what they are looking for, the latest release, perhaps, or the name of the CEO. The second way that people use content is to be told something that they do not already know and therefore couldn't think to ask.

You should publish a set of background materials about your organization, sometimes called an online media kit or press kit, in an easy to find place in your online media room.

Innovative communicators make use of non-text content, such as photos, charts, graphs, audio feeds, and video clips, to inform site visitors and the media.

Communicators who use online media rooms to offer valuable content are more likely to succeed. Organizations often shy away from posting much of their content because they deem it proprietary. On many sites, even information like detailed product or services specifications and price lists are available only through a direct connection with the PR contact or a lengthy registration form with approval mechanisms. Yet this is exactly the sort of content that, if freely available, would help convince journalists to write a story.

The more valuable. Your media groups content looks to reporters and buyers, the more attractive your company will look to them as well.

The effort to create an offer or give local content customers worldwide can help an organization better serve both local and global journalists.

Don't forget that the rest of the world uses different paper size, so having fact sheets and other materials that print properly on both formats is useful to users outside the United States. Providing content in local languages can also help show the global aspects of your business, though this need not mean a wholesale translation of your entire online media room. A simple web landing page with basic information in the local language, a few news releases, a case study or two, and appropriate local contact information will often suffice.

Some journalists may never have written about your company before; they need the basics spelled out in easy to understand language.

The best way to get your organization journalists calendars is to make certain that they know where your executives will be appearing.

It is a great idea to include special offers for the media. Perhaps the simplest thing to offer is an executive interview.

Embrace bloggers as you do traditional journalists.

Avoid jargon, acronyms, and industry speak.

Many organizations have the RSS subscription page as part of the online media room and use it as a primary way to does it hurt news release content.

The online media room is one place on your organization's website that you can control, without interference, approval processes, so it presents a terrific opportunity for marketing and PR people to get content out into the marketplace. On the web, success equals content.

Quoted from or closely adapted from David Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

Chapter 16:

Chapter 16. The new rules for reaching the media.

For years, PR people have been shot gun blasting news releases and blind pitches to hundreds, or even thousands, of journalists at a time. They failed to give any thought to what each release actually covers, just because the media databases we subscribed to make it so simple to do.

The PR spam approach simply doesn't work. What's worse spam brands our organization as one of the bad guys.

Pay attention to what individual reporters write about by reading their stories. Better yet, read their blogs. And write specific and targeted pitches crafted especially for them. Or start a real relationship with reporters, by commenting on their blogs or sending them information that is not just a blatant pitch for your company.

The new rules of media relations:

Nontargeted, broadcast pitches are spam.
News releases sent to reporters in subject areas they do not cover are spam.
Reporters who'd do not know you, yet are looking for organizations like yours and product or services like yours, make sure they will find you on sites such as Google and Technorati.
If you blog, reporters who covered the space will find you.
Pitch bloggers, because being covered in important blogs will get you noticed by mainstream media.
When was the last news release you since? Make sure your organization is busy.
Journalists want a great online media room.
Some, but not all, reporters love RSS feeds.
Personal relationships with reporters are important.
Do not tell journalists what your product or service does. Tell them how you solve customer problems.
Does the reporter have a blog,? Read it.
Before you pitch, read, or listen to, or watch, the publication, or radio program, or TV show, you will be pitching too.
Once you go, what a reporter is interested in, sent her an individualized pitch crafted especially for her needs.

Blogging is a terrific way to get exposure, because the rate of pickup and amplification is remarkable.

Sometimes you really want to target a specific publication:

Target one reporter at a time.
Help the journalists to understand the big picture.
Explain how customers use your product or services or work with your organization.
Don't send e-mail attachments unless asked.
Follow up promptly with potential context.
Don't forget, it is a two-way street, journalists need your pitch.

As one journalist says, "The single most effective thing PR people do is read what I write and send me personalized, smart pitches for stories that I actually like to write."

If you have a small thing to pitch, pitch it. But try also to think of the bigger story that it can fit into, such as a page 1 or Sunday section front story. That could even wind up meaning your company is mentioned alongside three or four other competitors, but wouldn't you rather be mentioned in a page 1 story than in a 120 word News brief?

There is no doubt that mainstream media are still vital as a channel for your publics to learn about your product or services.

Reporters have a job to do, and they need the help that PR people can provide to them. To get noticed, you need to be smart about how you'd tell your story on the web, and about how you tell your story to journalists.

Quoted from or closely adapted from David Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

Chapter 18:

Chapter 18. Podcasting and video.

Creating audio and video content for marketing and PR purposes requires the same attention to appropriate topics. It requires targeting individual buyer personas with a thoughtful message that addresses some aspect of their life or a problem they face. By doing so, EU brand your organization is smart and worthy of doing business with.

Podcasting.

A podcast is a piece of audio content tied to a subscription component so people can receive regular updates.

The most important thing is show preparation.

You will want to have a script laid out ahead of time.

Show preparation and includes gathering ideas for the show and creating a script.

Recording when you are near your computer is done with a microphone, many options to choose from, that delivers the audio into your computer.

Mobile recording gear is required if you are going to do the roving reporter thing and interview people at events or perhaps your employees around the world.

Phone interviews require a single recording switch device, such as those built by Telos systems, that connects to your telephone.

Editing your audio files is optional; you can always just upload the files as you recorded them.

Postproduction editing sometimes includes running a noise reduction program to get rid of that annoying air conditioner noise in the background. And sound compression, to even out volume of sections that have been recorded at different times and places.

Tagging the audio is an important step that some people overlook. This step involves adding text based information about the audio to make it easier for people to find. This information is what appears in the search engines and audio distribution sites such as iTunes. Your tags also display on listeners iPod displays, so don't ignore or gloss over this step.

Hosting and distribution is necessary to ensure that people can easily obtain your podcasts.

Promotion is essential to make sure that people find out about your podcasts.

A companion blog is a key component used by nearly all broadcasters to discuss the content of each show.

Case Study: Note student loan network case study, page 221.

Podcasting is great public relations because, like blogging, it is a human voice. Most podcasts don't have a PR stamp on them, so the shows come across as being human. The reason why this is interesting is that there is a big marketing shift going on right now. The older, traditional advertising model, like 1950s TV, is that we publish and you consume. However, today's marketing model is that we publish any respond. It provides real feedback from real people, so there are real conversations and it is interactive.

Customer service is no longer about spin, but instead becoming a part of the conversation.

24 minutes is the average commute, which makes a good length for a podcast.

The idea of companies using video for Web PR is still new.

Methods of video distribution include the following:

Posting to video sharing sites.
Developing an online video channel.
Insertions into YouTube.
Vlogging is short for video blogging.

Vodcasting. A vodcast is like a podcast but with video, a video series tied to a syndication component with itunes and RSS feeds.

Inciting your customer communities to submit video.

Quoted from or closely adapted from David Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

Chapter 19:

Chapter 19. Social networking sites and PR.

My space has 55 million unique visitors as they spoke 14 million unique visitors in August 2006.

PR on these sites can be tricky because the online community at social networking sites hates overt commercial messages.

Case study: See the Volkswagen Helge case study page 230.

Squidoo is based on people's expertise in a niche subject. Squiddoo is another way for marketers to build an online presence easily and for free.

See the auto repair a case study, page 232.

To get the most out of us using social networking sites for PR, consider the following:

Target a specific audience.
Be a thought leader.
Be authentic and transparent.
Creates lots of links.
In courage people to contact you.
Participate.
Make it easy to find you.
Experiment.

In the Web PR, the tools, techniques, and content are constantly evolving. This approach is more art than science, and your publics reward creativity by responding to your online efforts. But the Web moves very quickly.

See the case study about Second Life.

Try to imagine second life as a three-dimensional webpage.

Text100 is a public-relations firm serving technology companies which has a PR office in Second Life.

PR on the Web will continue to evolve quickly. Success comes from experimentation.

Quoted from or closely adapted from David Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

Chapter 20:

Chapter 20. Search engine PR and marketing.

This entire book is about search engine marketing and PR.

Let's start with a few basic definitions:

Search engine PR means using search engines to reach your publics directly.

Search engine optimization, SEO, is the art and science of ensuring that the words and phrases on your site, blog, and other online content are found by the search engines and that, once found, your site is given the highest ranking possible in the natural search results. That means, what the search engine algorithm deems important for the phrase entered.

Search engine advertising is when a marketer pays to have advertising at pier in search engines when a user types in a particular phrase that the marketer has purchased.

Many SEO firms are a bit on the shady side, promising stellar results from simply manipulating keywords on your site.

Specific content to enlighten and inform the people who just clicked over to your site from the search engine.

A landing page is simply a place to publish a targeted message for a particular demographic that you are trying to market to.

Effective landing page copy is written from the publics perspective.

Keep the following landing page guidelines in mind:

Make a landing page copy short and the graphics simple.
Create a page with your companies look, feel, and tone.
Right from the prospects point of view.
A landing page is communication, not advertising.
Provide a quote from a happy customer.
Make a landing page as self-contained unit.
Make the call to action clear and easy to respond to.
Use multiple calls to action.
Only ask for necessary information.
Don't forget to follow up!

Quoted from or closely adapted from David Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

Chapter 21:

Chapter 21. Make it happen.

There is no doubt that your organization will benefit from your getting out there and creating Web content in whatever form you are most comfortable with. But Scott is also convinced that no matter who you are or what you do, your professional and personal life will improve to. If you are an innovator with the ideas in this book, it may lead to greater recognition in the office. And if you are like many bloggers and podcast or is Scott knows, you will derive a therapeutic benefit as well. It is fun to blog and podcast and it makes you feel good to get your ideas out into the world.

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