PitchPersuasion

Making a company well known within a marketplace is undoubtedly one of the most important goals for Directors, PR & marketing departments as well as agencies of those companies.

An often missed gem of this is using the companies own management as superstars and heroes of their industries. Most people know Microsoft and Bill Gates, Apple and Steve Jobs, these companies have very strong brands but they also have a team of execs who are portrayed as super heroes.

What is often found is that the execs already have a wide network of contacts, clients and suppliers however what is required is to join this already well known person with the brand and they will boost each other.  It inspires confidence in clients as they see the people whom they are dealing with in a different light and it boosts the brand by putting real human faces to what can often seem a large corporate.

One barrier to achieving this is that it really needs to be done in a way in which the person seems like a human which a strong personality.  Whereas many PR companies, departments and directors when first presented with this idea go for the far too unoffensive and uninteresting grey robot which is all to often found in annual reports.

One thing that is all to often forgotten in the world of business be it b2b or b2c, is that people by from people not just brands.

Here is a quick overview of two very easy to use tools which can be used to measure and monitor online social media presence and effectiveness.

For the purpose of this blog post we’re going to use two well known brands: Sony Playstation & Nintendo Wii

Tool #1 - Addictomatic

Addictomatic is not very measureable, however it is very good to see where your brand can and cannot be found.

It’s very simple to use, all you have to do is go to the address: www.addictomatic.com and type in a topic of your choice, in this case “Sony Playstation”  & “Nintendo Wii”

The results can be seen here:

• Sony Playstation

• Nintendo Wii

From these two you can see that these two very well known brands appear in all of the main stream social media channels.  Looking at the content on both of these two pages the more experiences marketeers will be able to spot the different messages that are getting through and those that aren’t.

Tool #2 - Twitter League

This is a relatively simple yet very effective tool to measure the number of followers on twitter across a number of twitter accounts.

Simply by visiting the site & logging in, in a number of minutes it is possible to create a comparison list which is kept up to date for you live, making those reports easier to fill in at the end of the month!

As you can see from above, the code can also be embeded into blogs and there’s even an option to get the raw XML which if you know what you’re doing you can use for anything you like.

It’s worth noting that I couldn’t find an official XBox 360 user on Twitter only the unofficial ‘fanboy’ user..

SEO has become one of the most important factors online with more and more consideration being put into it Year-On-Year.  One area which is often overlooked is the optimisation of a domain name/brand.

The first consideration for domain name SEO is based on whether you are aiming to develop a brand or simply a mindless website.  Most would probably say yes, that they are either developing a brand or a mini/micro-site for a brand.

Second one must consider two of factors which most search engines notably Google hold in high regard for domain names:

-Age of the domain: Older domains will be considered more important especially if they have had a consistent keyword theme.

-Inbound links (IBLs): Everyone knows that the more links they get pointing to their site the better, especially if they are from other sites with high pagerank.

With these two considerations in mind lets look at two examples.

Example 1: LeWeb

Context: LeWeb is one of the largest annual events which is focused around Internet entrepreneurs each year in Paris.

Why: This is an example which I would consider to be the ‘wrong’ way to go around keeping your brand alive and increasing its web presence year-on-year/campaign-on-campaign.

Problem: When I search for LeWeb on Google, the first result I come across is from the event in 2007 and not the more recent 2008 edition. Quel Disastre !

Solution: The easiest solution for them to follow would be to use their leweb.net address and create a sub-domain for each year/event. e.g.  http://2007.leweb.net, http://2008.leweb.net.. and so on.  This works especially well if you have a different developer/agency working on your site each year.

Alternatively they could simply have www.leweb.net/2007/, www.leweb.net/2008/…  Often simplicity is the key!

Example 2: Carsonified

Context: An events company focussed on running events for developers and entrepreneurs in the UK.

Why?: Because they’re doing it right!

Examples:

FOWA London 2008: http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/content

FOWA Dublin 2009: http://events.carsonified.com/fowd/2009/london/

Conclusion: New domain names for brands which you want to keep alive year on year need to be under the same core domain name. The examples here are for events however it applies to everything from sites which release annual reports through to mini/micro-sites.