PitchPersuasion

Gary Vaynerchuck is a very well established entrepreneur who has built a multi-million dollar wine business from scratch.

From his talk at the largest European web conference LeWeb I took some very important points which although I’ve heard before, can’t be impressed on too importantly for Agencies, SMBs and Brands alike.

-You’re a clown if you’re not using Tubemogle to upload video,  as it is the best way to distribute and track video online.

-You have to love your audience, care about your community, and be authentic with content that you understand.  Caring, answer all your fan mails in a serious and authentic way.

-Two things matter: Word of mouth - Now instead of a maximum audience of 100 now people have audiences of thousands if not tens of thousands & Customer service will prevail, if it’s good.

-If you can build a personal/people based brand you should as it will add value to yourself and the company you are working at.  A company/brand with a board of celebrities is always going to be more valued by a customer base than one which is invisible.

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Gary @ LeWeb in Paris 2008

Source: Gary Vaynerchuck, Winelibrary.tv

This weekend I listened to Pete Wailes at MCL#2 on digital content.  Most of the things he covered are general knowledge for those writing blogs and creating content but here were a few of his key points:

-Tailor to your audience: Create personas, look at who you are targeting, Age, Sex, Location, Level of intelect, Technical understanding..

-Make it scannable: Keep massive blocks of text to a minimum and break up with bullet points and images E.g. ProBlogger.

-Title is king: For attention and SEO

-Multimodal content: Some people prefer to digest their information in different formats, podcasts, PDFs, Videos.. The more you consistently offer the better you will cater for your audience.

-Video: Don’t be scared to do it, but keep it moving and interesting and if possible fun e.g. YourGeekNews, Newspepper…

-Focus on a niche: E.g. Gamers/Who like Xbox/Who like shooting games/

Source: MediaCampLondon, Pete Wailes ‘Explosive Content: the art of creating content for digital audiences’

Just a quick post regarding sucessful blogs, Danny @ SEOmoz posted a very interesting post covering his research into what makes blogs sucessful.   The results are very interesting and show some very interesting common factors.

Domain Names & Blog names

From a marketing perspective .coms are still leading the way domain names and 76% of the top 100 blogs according to Danny, their names/brands are either made up of one or two words.

Unsaturated Market

Of the top blogs, a very large proportion of them were technology orientated with a serious shortage in the areas of fashion & green topics.  This would suggest that there is still pleanty of scope to win over the marketplace.

Only 13% of the blogs focussed specifically on women which Danny felt was mainly due to demand but could also be interpreted as lack of supply..

How do we keep a blog running

People

It takes more than one man to run a ship and indeed of the most sucessful, only 20% are run by one person.  I would suggest finding some good journalists who work within your area, getting some aspiring journalist interns to help you or get some of your clients to do it for you.

Content

In the land of blogs content is king, agencies are lucky in that if they are able to convince the client that it’s a good idea (more on this anouther time) they will be able to get a stream of the hottest news, information and comment on everything that’s going on within that industry.  This effectively allows them to own a party of the conversation and direct some of the conversations.

How do we do it sucessfully

While I’m in no position to tell anyone how to do their job, I would advise that a good bit of planning, research  and ideas generation into the specific niche that you want to target and then do a test project over 2-3 months to demonstrate to the client that you are able to build a community and that it is not bad for them.

Any final words?

Don’t lie, as soon as you start the online community will sus you out very quickly.  There’s no point creating anonymous/semi-official blogs, be true to what you are doing and transparent and you will be able to build trust much faster than if you try to start hiding things.  If your client has skeletons in the closest then they should address them and move on, why just talk to the press when you can also tell your clients/customers/brand lovers directly.

Historically when creating websites people have followed a very classic method of trying to create a carbon copy of what they believe their organisation looks like into a website.

While this approach does cover off the basic needs of an online presence it does not help educate the buyer, nor does it entice them back to the site in the future. Companies need to start to realise that they need to look at what the people visiting their site might need/want to know.

As most of us now make a decision to purchase before speaking to a sales rep it’s important that the essential information can be easily found and is laid out in a way which is digestible by the various audiences.

Key Points:
- Think about who needs information from your site, e.g. Buyers, Existing, Clients, Press, Investors..;
- Look at the ‘Personas’ of the people visiting your site and ensure that their needs are catered for;
- Work together as an organisation so that Marketing, Sales, Web developers & Agencies are a co-ordinated machine.

Good Example of a client centric site:
Webex - http://www.webex.com

Links/References:
The New Rules of Marketing & PR, David Meerman Scott