Party Harder: C&M’s Five Basic Social Theories of Online PR

CATEGORIES: Papers   ///   10 Dec 2008
TAGS: Branding, Content Optimisation, Online PR Agency, SEO, Social Media Agency, Social Media Marketing

We’re having an increasing number of conversations with clients who are looking to us for that all-important pixie dust that will drive new levels of awareness and traffic.

No surprise there, right? That’s our job! But rather than sit on these experiences, we thought we’d do the decent thing and share our insights with you…

Nine times out of ten we strike on a a set of common, fundamentally ‘social’ ideas that we know will make 100% of difference – and yet, for one reason or another, they tend to grate with traditional marketing theory.

As such, this paper is our attempt to convince you that great Online PR is easy. All it takes is some basic rewiring.

The idea is simple: in order to engage with your audiences online, you need to shape your words, messages and tactics around their agendas, not yours. In other words, your Online PR efforts need to be a whole lot more social than they have been up until now.

An Early Digression: The ‘Party Hard’ Principle of Online PR

Aida Eldermariam wrote a great piece for the Guardian in December 2008 on this very topic. Entitled ‘The Most Popular Story in the World,” it looked at how news media are adapting their tactics to engage better with a fragmented online readership.

She shares the same problem as our clients: how to ensure a message hits home in the manic environment of the web…?

Eldermariam draws a super analogy with the social mechanics of a networking party. Imagine it’s in full-swing and you have an important message to pass on to your fellow guests. You have limited time and resources, and no stooges to spread the word on your behalf…

How do you do it? Do you…

a) Stand on a chair in the middle of the room and shout your message repeatedly?

b) ‘Speed date’ by shaking the hand of everyone at two minute intervals, cranking out the message whirlwind-style as you go?

…or

c) Mix, mingle and meet folks, and – when you find the nice guys – pass on your message in the context of a conversation (and in the process encourage them to go spread the word on your behalf)?

Unless you carry the charisma of Jack Nicholson, then options a) and b) are out. Actually, they’re counter-intuitive – they’ll probably alienate you. (Who are you? Why should I care? Jesus – go away!! Somebody call the authorities!!!)

The point is, of course, that when you’re operating in a loosely structured environment like the web / a party – an arena where nobody ‘owns’ the terms of engagement – the best way to communicate is by being more social. Yet we seem to miss this point on a consistent basis.

As Eldermariam describes, the crux of our problem is that when it comes to the web (or newspapers, or any form of mass communication) there’s “a great tension between what people want and what we think they need to know.”

We’re so obsessed with the importance of our message – and so ignorant of our audience’s wants and needs – that we seem content to bleat without direction into outer space. In practice, we run elaborate flash banner campaigns (hey, give me that big chair to stand on – I’m gonna try to shout the LOUDEST!), and we build reams of funky little microsites (hey, screw this, nobody’s listening…let’s have our OWN party!).

A much better approach is to listen first, and then do the talking. We should try to understand what our audience cares for before we open our mouths. Effective web marketing does this in spades, just like the good guys at the party. They get their message across (and get all the traffic) not because they shout the loudest, but because they’re the most engaged and the most engaging…

In other words, it’s all about being more social.

With this in mind, here’s our five Basic Social Theories of Online PR…

(We recommend you print them out on nice glossy paper, stick them on your wall and then bake them into everything you do online…)

C&M’s Basic Social Theories of Online PR

1) Listen up! Don’t attach names or labels without taking counsel

Launching a new piece of content or a new site without first understanding the language of your marketplace is Online PR suicide.

SEO 101 teaches us that in order to make our content ‘findable’ by users and ‘indexable’ by search engines, we need to work within the linguistic framework of our searching public.

It’s easy to understand the psychology of search via tools like Google Suggest and Wordtracker – both will give you an instant read on the keywords your audience is using. Your job is to take this vocabulary and weave it into the fabric of your content: in site names, urls, page titles, meta descriptions, headers, links, and so forth.

For example, if you provide a slicker-than-average ‘personalised tone service’ for mobile phones, you may want to position yourself as something bigger and groovier than a plain old grubby ringtone …but your customers won’t be making that distinction. They don’t even know you exist. You might prefer to call your stuff a BingTone or a HumTone, but they’ll be searching for a plain old ringtone. And if ringtone isn’t at the heart of your content strategy, then rest assured you’ll be off the Google map and missing a stack of motivated traffic.

Getting these principles right is what’s known in the trade as Content Optimization – and you can learn how to do it here. It’s inherently social: it’s all about talking like a customer, and it’s the most cost-effective way of generating the right kind of web traffic.

2) Be interesting: create noteworthy content (make people laugh, mad and/or excited)

Whenever you create content you have a choice to make: you can work hard to engage with your audience, or you can choose to be lazy and just crank the stuff out.

This dilemma is what separates good Online PR from bad. Your primary goal is to find a home for your message. Your secondary goal is encourage people to spread it on your behalf. As such, you should do everything you can to make your content interesting and worthy of emailing to a friend, bookmarking, commenting upon, or linking to.

If you can encourage people to do this, you’ll achieve a wonderful snowball effect (formerly known in ‘creative’ circles as ‘going viral’). In simple terms, a reference to your content on someone else’s blog enhances your ‘findability’ in the true sense of a referral. It’ll also help your SEO because it represents a ‘backlink,’ which makes you more desirable to the Greater Google God.

As such, you should ask yourself what it’ll take to frame your next piece of content in a more desirable, funny and/or controversial fashion. Tools like Google Trends, Twitter Search and BackType will tell you what the world is currently searching for and talking about. Use them religiously and try to find ways of embedding relevant and popular themes into your work.

At the same time, other more basic formatting ideas will make your content more enticing and accessible: for example, you could re-cut that white paper as a natty, controversial list rather than a long boring essay. And you might find the right angles to change your product literature into cool three minute VoxPops video shorts.

Another thing to consider is the inclusion of ‘social’ tools that will make it easier for people to pass your content around and/or bookmark it. It’s a simple task to embed an ‘email a friend’ widget and a social bookmarking tool at the bottom of your page templates; and you really ought to provide an RSS feed for all your content as default. In addition, there are a number of great ‘widget’ tools to help you create ‘Content Feeds’ for FaceBook, desktops and web pages – so that users can get hold of your content when and where they please, without having to visit your site.

3) Party harder: seek and you shall find. (Don’t expect folks to come to you!)

The most profound idea in Online PR playbook is the ‘give to get’ rule. Your content could be optimised to the max, super-hot and super-sharable, but if you don’t work hard to hawk it around then it still might still miss the mark.

This principle is all about operating within your target markets. Once your content (or web site, or widget) is ready, you need to make it stick by seeding it in the most vibrant, influential and interesting places.

Tools like Addictomatic, Google Alerts, Twilert (for Twitter), BackType, and MonitorThis will help you to keep a close watch on the most active and relevant communities of the web. They’ll all provide you with a daily dose of alerts based on your chosen keywords. They’ll also allow you to identify and follow the most influential people within a given debate. It’s powerful stuff!

Once you have this ‘social targeting’ knowledge, your task is to actively participate in the right hot spots and to seed your ideas and content. You should be commenting on and contributing to other people’s blogs, forums and profile pages on a daily basis, and generally getting engaged with the conversations that you’d like to be part of.

Like the party analogy, you need to be a social butterfly. And if you can do this effectively, we guarantee that you’ll soon be able to steer the debate. (In addition, tuning in to communities, debates and forums is simply the best way to get new ideas for new content. When you participate you become part of your own focus group, which takes the guesswork out of content generation.)

4) Be a good social citizen: give your content away freely and generously

This idea ought to be common sense by now …But we still see firms that are obsessed with locking up their finest content assets in secure zones that only reveal their secrets in exchange for a name, an email address and an inside leg measurement.

This approach is crazy. It’s you who should be working hard to generate buzz, sales and leads, not your customers! You invest stacks of time and money to drive people to your web site, so there’s no sense in locking people out.

In our experience, when you take away the sacred ‘web to lead’ form, the effect is always positive: you open up more keyword-rich content for Google to index and you enable more people to distribute it freely on your behalf. What you lose in ‘leads’ (and I’d question that term strongly – how hot-to-trot can a web sign up ever be!?) you gain in increased visibility and distribution. So, if you haven’t done so already, get your content out in the open today.

The same goes with any non-core tools and services that you create. When you give peripheral value away for free you generate respect, trust and loyalty. A great example that’s close to home for C&M is SEOBook. If you ever need a steer on the science of SEO then look here. You can pay to buy the book or attend the courses, but the site also gives you a stack of fantastic free tools to help you do better SEO work.

As a result, SEOBook makes a lot of money and has an incredibly loyal following. Even better, its decision to give much of its value away for free has had an immensely positive effect on its Google performance on ultra-competitive keyword searches like ‘SEO tools.’ (Note: because much of their stuff is free and because I love it, I’m linking to the site here and adding to that SEO equity. In this respect, ‘free’ and ‘useful’ approaches can really become virtuous.)

5) Be socially useful: don’t build unnecessary content services

This last point is an extension of ‘free’ thinking. ‘Free’ is only good if it’s also ‘relevant’ and ‘useful.’ Your latest whiz-bang content widget will only be successful if it ticks all of these boxes.

This point is best illustrated by some negative examples:

• The celebrity CEO blog sounded like a great idea in 2005 – until we figured out that it had a) no audience, b) nothing interesting to say and c) no real value or utility. (So we ditched it and replaced it with a product development community blog, which is now going great guns.)

• Likewise, the FaceBook widget that lets users connect and share their passion for SprocketWise version 5.7 is also doomed to fail. It may be free, but it has no purpose. (I’ll stop now. This one really gets my goat!)

The point is that all of these new-fangled widgets, platforms and content services can really help us to sell, support, and educate in more sophisticated ways – but only when they’re used in the right context. Social networking platforms are great for hosting virtual ‘before and after’ a conference session. They’re superb for any product or service that has an inbuilt community with a passion for sharing information. But they tend to fail when they’re built for the hell of it. So make sure you can prove their value before you start working with them.

Conclusion: Great Online PR is Social

I started off by saying that effective Online PR grated with more traditional marketing techniques. From our perspective, it’s important to let go of yesterday’s ‘command and control’ approach to communications.

In today’s web-dominated world, the winners will be the firms that are able to listen and tune in to their audiences before they embark on the next big thing. This is what we mean by a ‘social’ approach to Online PR.

It’s not happy or clappy, it’s just common sense. Do a bit of research first, understand your users wants and needs, and then give them a little of what you know they want.

In other words, make like the good guy at the party and work the room. You don’t need an MBA or a degree in Marketing to do this well.

 

CATEGORIES: Online PR Agency Resources, Papers   ///   10 Dec 2008
TAGS: Branding, Content Optimisation, Online PR Agency, SEO, Social Media Agency, Social Media Marketing