Social media marketing campaigns can be divided into two modes—maintenance mode and outreach mode.
Maintenance mode includes the regular, every-day running of your campaign. This could involve posting tweets on Twitter, monitoring comments on your blog, or engaging with fans on Facebook. During maintenance mode, you should plan to spend 2 hours per channel a week running your campaign.
Outreach mode, on the other hand, involves a concentrated effort to build buzz about your brand. This can include running a contest and trying to get contest entries or pitching a story and trying to get bloggers to spread your story via word of mouth. Because outreach campaigns require a lot of effort and online buzz dies down quickly, outreach campaigns run for a short period of time, usually less than 3 months. Expect to spend 25-35 hours on a 2-4 week campaign.
We recommend running outreach campaigns 2-4 times a year (depending on the size and scope of your campaigns) and spending the rest of the year on maintenance. Thinking of your social media strategy in these modes helps make managing your campaign easier.
Of course, the overarching question is how to manage your to-do list on a day-to-day level. Since we’re still sorting that out ourselves, here are two links from Harvard Business Review that have been helpful:
What are blogs?
Blogs are networked environments of people with shared interests. A metaphor that we like at Boxcar Marketing is that if the internet is a big party, then bloggers are clusters of people having a conversation.
Who is blogging?
Everyone and anyone with something to say.
Why do we want to reach out to bloggers?
Because bloggers are journalists, and if our story is a good match for their blog’s audience, then we might have an interesting conversation with them and they might considering sharing some of that information with their readers.
There are two parts of Blogger Outreach.
1. Finding Bloggers
When finding bloggers, we basically search for them using any means possible. Google Search is our starting point. With well researched keyword phrases we can quickly suss out the top ranking blogs or lead bloggers in a particular niche. Even a general search for “[subject matter] + blog” will establish a strong starting point for your research.
Advanced Twitter search, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Ning, Bing and Google Blog search are other resources we use to reinforce what we learned from our initial Google searches. Even reviewing a blog’s blogroll helps to construct our understanding of the niche and the connections between bloggers.
When researching bloggers, it’s important to document your research in a useful, organized manner. For our own blogger outreach we create an excel grid that documents:
Other details that will be useful when pitching, such as a blogger’s defined pitching specifications or the URL of a specific blog post that relates to the story we want to pitch.
2. Pitching Bloggers
Once you’ve found the right bloggers to pitch, remember that pitching is like joining a conversation at a cocktail party. Here are the party rules:
Use your human voice, not your marketing machine, monotone voice.
Individual attention: do not send out the same spammy email to a lot of bloggers. They know each other. They’ll post your marketing spam. They’ll taunt you. They will know it’s the same email everyone got. You have to find a way to be efficient but still individualize the content.
Hi Susan is better than Hello blogger. Hi Susan is also good if the blogger’s name is Susan, if it’s Sally, you’re in trouble. Get the name right.
Be generous. Pitching is not about what you want, it’s about identifying why the blogger’s audience could benefit from the information you have to share.
Show that you get it. Provide a link upfront. Be brief. Provide interesting information. Then get out of the way.
PRWeb, a press release distribution service specializing in online visibility for small business, has also kindly provided further tips on contacting bloggers.
Do your research! Don’t send a press release or pitch to bloggers any information that they may not be interested in. It’s the fastest way to get blacklisted and you run the risk of having them blog negatively about you or your company.
Before sending a press release or pitch to a blogger, get to know them on a personal level first. Have a casual conversation with them and offer helpful resources or tips. You can do this by commenting on their blogs and adding your opinion to their posts, providing insightful articles that follow up on the topic of a post they did, or point them in the direction of a source that might be able to weigh in on a topic they recently highlighted.
Summarize your most important points. Try sending a clever, relevant and succinct pitch with a link to your press release instead of just sending the release. Doing so shows that you have taken the time to get to know the blogger, that you have personalized your news to their needs, and that you respect their time and right to follow up on the information or not. If your topic is compelling, they will click—and they will appreciate that you’ve distilled the relevant information they need. This is often preferable to sending the full press release with company boilerplate or cramming all the information into a long email that will likely get scanned then tossed.
PRWeb also has an upcoming webinar with Peter Shankman, founder of HARO (Help a Reporter Out) on big publicity ideas for small business success. Visit the webinar page for more information.
In today’s environment, successful public relations needs to incorporate social media.
Social media can enhance your public relations efforts because of the potential for word of mouth and how quickly and easily conversations can spread online.
Social media has changed how you write and send out a press release. The purpose of an online press release is to increase the visibility of your news, improve your search engine rankings and drive traffic to your website or a particular landing page. In addition, you also want to encourage online media and bloggers to pick up the story and blog about it, tweet about it, etc. in order to spread online word of mouth.
Best Practices For Social Media Press Releases:
Title: The title of your press release should be about 60 - 80 characters to ensure that the full title is displayed in search results. Think of the keywords that you want your press release to rank for and be sure to use them in your title.
Body: The body of your press release should be under 500 words. This means that your press release needs to be concise and to the point. Think about what story you need to tell and what story the media will care about. What’s the primary story? What’s the secondary story? What It Takes to Run a Successful Contest talks about the SPHERE approach, which is also applicable for press releases.
Again, use the keywords that you want to rank for in search engines.
Links: Make sure to include a link to where you want people to go. Do you want people to go to a specific landing page? Your Facebook page? Your homepage? What’s the call to action for your press release or where can readers get more information? The link should be near the beginning of the press release because some sites will only post the first few lines of your release. We usually repeat this link near the end, too.
Sharable Content: Include content that is easily shared, like a corporate video, logo image or photos. What can bloggers use if they decide to write about your news? Make it easy for them to share your story.
Consider creating a media or press page on your website where you can direct the media for more information as well as provide content they can use. Here’s an example of a media landing page that we created for a recent contest we were running: http://pages.foodtree.com/media-room-so-nice-a-better-organic-world-contest/.
Notice that we have included Twitter share links, a sample Facebook post and badges, logos and photos that the media could use.
Distribution: There are various online wire services that you can use. We like to use PRWeb because we seem to get the most coverage and the best search engine ranking when we use it. It costs $140 for the Standard package and $200 for the Advanced. The benefit of the Advanced package is that your press release can go out the next day, whereas with the Standard package you have to wait 2 days.
Once your press release has been sent out, don’t stop there. Promote your press release on all of your social media channels incuding your company blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Promote it wherever interested parties are likely to be looking for news.
Coming up in our next post: Using your press release in blogger outreach.
It’s August and, albeit reluctantly, we are busying preparing for Fall. What better time than now to review your website’s usability?
Todd Sieling of Corvus Consulting recently presented at the SFU Summer Publishing Workshops on usability and outlined his three golden keys to creating better online user experiences. He’s been kind enough to share them with us:
The Three Golden Keys of Usability
See Through Your Audience’s Eyes
Usability is about walking in the steps of your audience and understanding their needs and wants. Todd uses the example of Walt Disney walking around his theme park crouched down so that he could see things from a child’s height.
At Boxcar Marketing, we try to walk in the steps of our audience by creating personas. Personas are character sketches of individual audience members that outline their demographics, likes and dislikes, lifestyles, technical abilities and their needs and wants when using a site. Personas are helpful because they move you away from thinking about what the project team wants and towards what the website visitor wants.
You May Need to Give Something Up That You Love
The user experience trumps design. It doesn’t matter how mind-blowing your design is, if it gets in the way of what a user is trying to do (or what you want the user to do) it needs to go. People are busy on the web and don’t have time for flashy designs that get in their way.
Todd uses the example of Apple’s new remote. Apple loves simple design but, on their new remote, they’ve added an additional button. Todd believes that, in this case, Apple had to give up their love of simplicity for ease of use. Good designers know when to comprise.
Don’t Make People Think
Building on the ideas from Steve Krug’s book on web design and usability, Don’t Make Me Think, Todd says that your site should make it clear what you want people to do. Anticipate your users’ confusion. Make your instructions and guidelines as clear as possible. Clear calls to action need to be present throughout your site.
Steve Krug says to imagine your users are whizzing by on the freeway. This metaphor is closer to the truth of how users interact with your site than the closely scrutinized treasure map we generally believe that we’ve created and they are following.
The Reservoir of Goodwill
In Don’t Make Me Think Steve Krug talks about the reservoir of goodwill. Website visitors start out with a reservoir of goodwill. Each problem they encounter on a website lowers the level of that reservoir.
When reviewing your site’s usability, the questions to ask yourself are:
How would users see/perceive this?
Is this element needed for users to complete a task?
Are the calls to action obvious?
Overall, website usability is about designing from the users’ perspective to create the best experience possible. If a user has a good experience on your site they are more likely to return and think positively about your organization.
If someone contacts your company via email or phone, respond.
I know this sounds elementary, however, last week I was looking to hire a web design company and I was astounded at the number of companies who never returned my phone call or email.
James and I were talking about how this affects our perception of a company, and we shared tales of bad experiences about company sites without contact information and companies who insist on filtering people through online contact forms but who never respond to those email. It was quite the rant.
If somebody from among those 40 or 50 million people on the Internet takes the time and trouble to write to you, take the time to write back.
Designate people within your company to respond to various topics. Design your Web site to route e-mail to the appropriate person.
Internet experts say that rapid and certain response is probably the single most important factor for building a die-hard audience, just the kind you want.
So if you want to stand apart and generate positive feelings about your company, simply answer the phone and respond to emails.
Tech writer Tom Johnson does a nice job of outlining some good practices for creating a usable blog in his article Twenty usability tips for your blog.
Much of the advice Tom mentions now comes ready-baked into many blogging platforms, either by default or as a configuration option. I really like the article because it reinforces how important the details of implementation are to the success of a web project. Having a blog is great but doesn’t mean you have a great blog. Sweating the small details and making the technology work for your visitors means payoffs immediately and in the long run.
In the spirit of web collaboration, here are a few additional points to add to Tom’s list:
Have clean URL paths that use words, not numbers, and preferably words related to the content of the page, like the title.
Take risks with your content and writing.
Move beyond just writing. Experiment with audio, photos and video, if appropriate.
Be opinionated. Consider all the other websites out there that would gladly have the attention of your visitor. Now make sure you’re keeping their attention.
Be personal. You don’t have to reveal your deep fears but you have to create your own voice and style and identity. People love to connect with other people. Give them someone to connect with.
Use good verbs. In fact, use only good verbs. Deploy them like pace cars to lead readers through your posts. Rock your verbs and you’ll rock your readers.
Here is one simple thing that you can do to ensure your web business practices work for your customers: Pay attention to your contact form and reply when someone hits it!
Seriously, this is one of the easiest and most overlooked tactics you can employ. Robert Ouimet suggests, with some creative symbolism, that you think of your email just as you do your phone. You wouldn’t consider not answering a customer calling on the phone would you?
Robert points to the Hornstein E-Mail Survey that shows email customer service is terrible—only 33 percent of brand name companies bothered to respond in 24 hours—and getting worse.
Hornstein’s research (and common sense) says that almost everyone sends an e-mail to a company at some point and that all of us expect a response within 24 hours. In 2007 only 33% of companies responded within 24 hours, down almost half from a high of 63% in 2002.
Remarkably, only 51% of the companies responded in any time period—down from 86% in 2002.
Now, I take the results with a grain of salt, since the whole survey is in effect a placed ad for Hornstein Associates. But at the same time the results square with my own experience.
So what’s to be done?
We often have clients approach us to do web marketing for them. Excellent, that’s what we do. We love new business. It’s our promise: we make you a web marketing genius.
They often want to do all the right things: search engine advertising, blogger outreach, email newsletters, website redevelopment, copywriting, online public relations. Awesome, those are all highly effective. We love delivering results and those are great ways to do it. But before we get to those things, let’s start with the simple things. Does your contact form work? How do you deal with email customer service?
Here are a few practical rules to implement or to compare against your own practices.
Making contact needs to be easy and available. Make sure your contact information or a link to your contact information is on every page of your website.
Make sure your contact information is labelled simply ‘Contact’ or ‘Contact Us’. It’s cute to say ‘Knock Us Up’ but it means different things to different folks.
Make sure your contact page works. Can people email you? Can people call you? When was the last time you tested it?
Set an expectation at the outset. On your contact page can customers see your available hours? Should you have a prospective response time (say, 24 hours)? Should you send an auto-response email to confirm receipt of the inquiry?
Offer self-service alternatives—on your contact page, its thank you page if you use a form, and in any auto response you might use. Most people browsing websites are already engaged in an active pursuit of information. Make it easy for them to find what they’re seeking.
Start an FAQ and update it with your frequently received email questions and reponses. But only if you’re frequently getting the same email inquiry. An FAQ is a frequently asked questions. It’s not a chance to pitch product benefits, unless it’s the right response to a question you’re getting over and over. (And then maybe it’s time to rethink more than just your contact form. If your benefits aren’t front and centre what is?)
Contact from your customers is an incredibly valuable feedback loop. What are you doing with that feedback?
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