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..

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