Broadcast Dialogue – The #Podcast:
With two incidents that saw hackers gain control of the Twitter accounts of Rogers Radio stations News 95.7 Halifax and News 1130 Vancouver, Momentum Media Marketing’s in-house digital experts James Wallace and Christian Lind offer insight into how the hacks occurred and how media organizations can take steps to protect themselves.
Online strategies aren’t just about setting up accounts on the right platforms – your strategy needs to involve true engagement.
Driving online community engagement requires planning, risk management, and a cohesive objective that is clearly stated to all of your key staff members.
1. Word-Of-Mouth Only Goes So Far
You need a plan. Simply signing up for an account on any given social platform does not mean your organization has fulfilled its obligation. Social connections via your chosen networks are not obligations but opportunities to engage directly with your members, prospects, fans, or clients.
As your message spreads and your community grows, how will you feed the appetite for more? Will you be equipped as an organization to create and disseminate your message?
This direct connection requires a clear plan with regard to infrastructure, integration, and, most importantly, a set of rules and policies for disseminating your message. There is nothing more important than a planned and coordinated process for responding to inquiries, comments, and requests.
2. Identify Your Advocates and Feed Them
The key to any community is the full engagement of its members. Early on in your campaign you will discover those advocates who are willing to share your message and push that message to their respective networks. With every Facebook post, tweet, or blog post, your advocates wait to share what your campaign is providing.
Gaining the trust of your online advocates and providing them with a continued stream of shareable content provides ever expanding reach; in turn pulling in more campaign advocates from their respective networks.
Reward their efforts. Recognize and identify your advocates publicly. Thank them whenever, wherever, and however you can. These individuals are the backbone of your campaign’s success.
3. Trust Your Community
Astute observers of successful online campaigns understand the nuances of online communication. Well planned, effectively executed online campaigns have assessed the risks at hand and understand how to mitigate those risks when required.
Just as your community trusts and advocates your campaign, you in turn must trust your community when negative comments or posts arise. Well-fed advocates who have been provided with the right tools will assist in regulating your community – most times without direct intervention.
Ask yourself before you begin: Do you understand how to mitigate risk? Can you identify those in your community who are your advocates? Can you identify those in your community that are Influencers?
4. Rules Of Engagement – Rules / Fears / Clarity Over Control
The rule of online engagement has shifted, placing the power of the message in the hands of the viewer, consumer, or visitor. The intention of a Rules Of Engagement policy is not to handcuff those posting and engaging online.
The intention is to provide a set of guidelines for disseminating content, insuring all messaging is on brand, on target, and true to the core message. Direct brand connections create deep inherent value and keep visitors and advocates coming back.
Community engagement using social media requires a shift in the way organizations view themselves and their relationship with the public. The shift is happening on a cultural, organizational, and individual level. Before committing resources to a social media program, organizations need to know how to mitigate the risks while maximizing the rewards.
The first step is to create a safe space for staff, volunteers, and other stakeholders through clear, effective social media policies. Clarity over control.
When everyone involved knows the purpose of the organization’s social media initiatives—if each individual is clear about his or her role in achieving that purpose and the parameters in which they can participate—those social media initiatives will be that much more successful from the start.
Do you understand the nuances of your community? Have you provided your key internal staff and your community manager with a clear community engagement objective?
5. Tools Don’t Build Communities – People Do
Many times online community engagement continues to fall back on the tools an organization commandeers to share their brand message. However, those tools don’t drive themselves. It’s the people that organize and implement the campaign who are the key to a successful campaign.
Your community manager, the advocates, and the influencers will make or break the success of your online initiatives.
Can you identify those in your community who are your advocates? Can you identify those in your community that are Influencers? Have you empowered your key internal staff with the tools they require to create a successful online campaign?
There is no more important consideration for a bricks and mortar retailer than discovery. In the past, this type of discovery relied heavily on the local Yellow Pages. The big yellow book was the means by which many people found the services they required.
With the advent of Google Places in 2009, the importance of proper listing within this platform has become more and more important for local small businesses. In fact, the importance of a properly optimized and validated Google Places / Local listing for a small business in many cases outweighs their need for a full-scale web presence.
What drives such a bold statement you may ask? Relevance.
Momentum client Budget Brake & Muffler Auto Centres engages our services to optimize their current web property for placement in organic searches. We have taken on the challenge to create high rank for blanket search terms such as “auto repair” and “car repair.” We are optimizing the web property for localized searches that depend on the physical location that the search is taking place from. The results are dramatic. We concentrate a considerable amount of effort in this optimization campaign on mobile searches – as we can see through proper tracking that a large amount of searches occur from mobile devices. This comes as no surprise considering that a large portion of individuals requiring car repair are searching on a mobile device from the vehicle that requires repairs.
With this focus on mobile platforms we have discovered something about the traffic this type of search creates. A large portion of the traffic that searches for and discovers the location of a Budget Brake and Muffler Auto Centre never end up clicking through to the company website. Why? Properly optimized, up to date Google Places / Local listings for each Budget location provide a direct connection to the local Budget franchisee right in the Google search results. The relevance of the result provides a direct path to the franchisee – discovery equates to a customer at the push of a button. Pushing Budget’s Google Places / Local listings to the forefront requires a consistent effort and a cohesive strategy involving the participation of each franchisee within the organization. Each Places listing requires up to date location information and validation of the business owner through Google’s own phone validation process.
Beyond the administrative tasks of ensuring each listing has the correct contact details and hours of operation, one key factor came to the surface. Reviews in these listings have a direct effect on placement both in search results and map placement. Franchisee’s who have positive reviews within their Google Places / Local listing consistently rank higher than those with poor or no ratings. Google views these reviews as a crucial key to providing their users with relevant results that create a positive outcome for the searcher.
Every small business owner now needs to understand that the relevance of their online listing is not based solely on their hours of operation but on the service they provide to new and returning customers. The Internet and Google itself is in a perpetual state of evolution.
It’s critical to reach out to your digital team to stay in-synch with these changes in order to maximize discovery for your business and real-time conversion of search traffic into real traffic, real satisfied customers, and real revenue.
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For most clients, design is the fun part of a web development project. It’s exciting to choose colors and pontificate palette decisions. And it’s tempting to start there.
My counsel is always to take a step back and consider critical business issues. Ask key questions. Then let the answers inform the design choices.
For example, in the case of a retail business that sells online as well as in brick and mortar stores:
1. Conversion Paths – The objective for the web presence should be to drive customers to the point of purchasing product, filling the cart, or driving them to physical locations. These conversion paths can be plotted and mapped from existing metrics and taken into account when building out the wireframes. The objective is to get traffic to convert. Understanding and monopolizing the path will ultimately deliver a design that provides conversion. Not the other way around.
2. Wire Framing – Before fixating on stylized elements there needs to be some importance weighed against the architecture, how you are drawing the customer in, and the paths you are pushing them through, etc.
This pushes usability to the forefront and provides clarity to the objectives of the website beyond its aesthetic value. Ultimately, proper wire framing will draw out the inherent flaws in architecture, providing insight into conversion paths, as well as where the roadblocks are from a user standpoint. It is important to draw the functionality out of the core branding and creative work. Otherwise the core functions of the website (selling the product) will be lost in the back and forth over colour, style, etc. A contractor wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint.
3. Brand & Creative – There is an established brand that already exists. Once the architecture, wire framing, and mapping is established then it is time to apply the brand elements. This will make the design process iterative in its nature, in turn providing a well thought out, properly executed design that serves the user base and draws them in to convert to a paying customer. I often sound like a broken record (remember those?) but not unlike the in-store experience, where stock is carefully placed according to consumer behaviour, one needs to need to understand the customer before choosing the website aesthetic. By evaluating metrics via Google Analytics, we can develop an experience that better suits the ultimate goal – conversion.
Assess. Wire-frame. Map. Then design it! Approaching it any other way is just plain “bass ackwards.”
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Over the past 10 years business has been forced to move because an educated consumer has shown up on their doorstep armed with remarkable intelligence. Access to on-demand information has been a game changer in every business sector and with it comes an expectation of how your business enables and responds to its community.
A shift is occurring and we are seeing it with all of our clients – a changing dynamic in the function of their websites. Those metrics, which we track ferociously, now see brand engagement occurring on all platforms equally – or in some cases traffic and engagement of the brand outside of the website well exceeding the traffic to the organization’s URL.
Your website creates one destination for the information customers seek. A cohesive jumping off point for the brand. However, this is only the beginning of an overall strategy that needs to take into consideration all of the platforms currently available to support and enhance your brand.
The creation and dissemination of content may be what binds your website marketing messages together, however, that content now needs to be offered within the right context. Contextual content that your customers are compelled to share to their respective networks is the key to a successful strategy and a high traffic website.
The key motivator for this shift in contextual search results is, without a doubt, the deep market penetration of mobile devices. Predictive in its results, this type of search technology is pushing information to your customers based on what information the device already knows about their likes, habits, and social connections.
Effective marketing campaigns now have to adopt an active listening approach to fully incorporate customers in the feedback loop. The consumer voice has never been so strong and those businesses that pay attention to active consumer voices will see the rewards. Your company’s reputation online has never been as important as is it now.
In addition to active listening, inbound marketing becomes an important factor in an effective marketing strategy. Focusing on being found by your customers by providing high value content that is relevant to their wants and draws them into contacting you is now the strongest tool in attracting potential clients.
As your content takes shape and becomes distributed across networks your offering obtains authenticity. For many, this is a drastic shift from the traditional outbound model, however, brands that do not shift a portion of their marketing budget to an inbound marketing model will have more and more difficulty conveying their message.
We have said it before and we’ll say it again – online strategies aren’t just about setting up accounts on the right platforms – your strategy needs to involve true engagement. Engaging and driving online communities requires planning, risk management, and a cohesive objective.
Your company needs to measure the impact of each platform; your website, landing pages, request for information forms, YouTube channel traffic, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn traffic – all measured.
Consumers are educating themselves on your brand, where they what, when they want. The shift is happening. Business must meet the consumer with content and information that engages, informs, and a path to purchase.
Your inbound marketing agency can help you get your strategy right and show you how to implement and track it for optimum results.
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The New Rules For Reaching Retail And Institutional Investors
The key factor behind the bottom-line of any investor relations professional is valuation. The art of effective communication to achieve the highest possible valuation for your company or client is the driving force behind successful, profitable investor relations campaigns.
The internet has fundamentally changed the way in which investor communication is disseminated to investors and potential investors. Early on, the IR section of your company website was a “nice to have” but not a necessary feature. However, in today’s market not only is it expected that your organization maintain an in-depth IR section on your website, governing regulatory bodies now provide guidelines on requirements for those web pages. Communication with investors via your website and the industry standard email subscription newsletter may feel like an effective means for getting out your message but are you effectively harnessing all available channels?
The exponential growth and relatively fast adoption of various social platforms on today’s internet provides IR professionals with an even deeper set of tools to tell their story. You only need to take a look at IR Web Report’s current social media section (click here >) to understand the importance these tools now play in the marketplace. Publicly traded companies are harnessing social channels to communicate with potential investors and shape their brand message. The key to utilizing these essential social channels is a cohesive brand message across all platforms with the understanding that this is a direct connection to your audience; a connection that well exceeds the usual email newsletter approach.
With this direct connection comes a new set of considerations:
1. Cohesion Across Platforms
Across all social platforms, your investors, both retail and institutional need to be viewed as one audience. Retail or institutional, both require the same information. Just as social cannot be the only means for disseminating timely investor information no longer can your website and newsletter be relied upon as the sole means of communication.
2. The Benefits Of Immediacy
Social content pushed through the appropriate channels now places higher than the most meticulously crafted SEO optimized content when searching on Google. Why? Many searches are now based on relevancy and how timely the indexed information is that is being searched for.
3. Shaping Your Message
Monitoring and tracking what is being said about your brand online provides your organization with the ability to engage in conversations that previously occurred beyond your reach. The effective shaping of your corporate message and the governance of a cohesive rules of engagement plan assists in mitigating the inherent risks.
Social media, on all platforms, is no longer a tool solely intended for consumer communication. B2B, HR and now some of the most innovative IR professionals are beginning to appreciate the value in social. We are seeing the emergence of fully socialized businesses in all sectors including those that are publicly traded.
We can help evolve your social strategy, right now. We begin every client engagement with a Marketing Assessment. And that process begins with a simple conversation.
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The push is on to put SEO to the bottom of the pile and for good reason. The web has become a sea of discoverability, no longer dictated by outdated SEO placement tactics and replaced with what can only be described as a true content push.
Your users or customers are less and less fooled by the SEO tactics of the past and are now drawn into content that has personal value. Strong content pushed to social circles by friends, followers and business peers is now drawing as much, if not more, audience than any well placed search term.
Large scale online properties, such as The Atlantic, are now pushing traffic through social channels much more effectively than through SEO based placement.
[info]“Sixteen months ago we received the same number of monthly referrals from search as social. Now 40% of traffic comes from social media,”
Scott Havens, Senior Vice President of finance and digital operations at The Atlantic Media Company.
[/info]
The creation and dissemination of content may be what binds your marketing message together, however, that content now needs to be offered with in the right context. Pushing that content within the right context requires deep, cohesive strategy that goes well beyond key words and a strong headline. Contextual content that your readers are compelled to share to their respective networks is the key to a successful strategy.
There is a deep shift occurring in how people find what they are looking for online. This shift is not solely based on algorithms and programming but also takes into account – location, browsing habits, relevancy and social connections. Users are now provided with web search, particularly Google, that is predictive in nature.
With the advent of Google Now users are beginning to see the shift in how they will search for online content. By combining predictive search technology with real time visualization we can see Google’s continual shift from a simply a search engine to a predictive, personal assistant that will understand what you are searching for within context. Google Now achieves this by accessing your email, calendar, contacts, text messages, location, shopping habits, payment history, music choices, books read and movies you have watched. For some this may seem to be a deep breach of privacy and those privacy parameters are yet to be fully established. For others, like myself, this appears to be the natural progression of technology to become the personal assistant we have only seen in science fiction until now.
The key motivator for this shift in contextual search results is, without a doubt, the deep market penetration of mobile devices. Predictive in its results, this type of search technology is pushing information to you based on what information the device already knows about your likes, habits and social connections.
So how will effective marketing campaigns have to reshape themselves within a world driven by predictive, location aware search results?
Effective marketing campaigns will now have to adopt an active listening approach to fully incorporate customers in the feedback loop. The consumer voice has never been so strong and those businesses that pay attention to active consumer voices will see the rewards. Your companies reputation online has never been as important as is it now. Products and services spoken of favorably online will, without a doubt, see themselves pushed to the top of predictive search results.
In addition to active listening, inbound marketing becomes an important factor in an effective marketing strategy. Focusing on being found by your customers by providing high value content that is relevant to their wants and draws them into contacting you is now the strongest tool in attracting potential clients. As your content takes shape and becomes distributed across networks your offering obtains authenticity. For many marketers this is a drastic shift from the traditional outbound model, however, brands that do not shift a portion of their marketing budget to an inbound marketing model will have more and more difficulty conveying their message.
So does this mean that SEO is still a relevant means to garner traffic for your online properties? Probably yes. However, predictive search technology does create some division in how content will be optimized depending on the platform you are focusing your efforts on. With mobile access now exceeding desktop access for many online services, a deeper focus will be weighed on relevance and reputation in regards to predictive search results.
It’s all about location, location, location.
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