Facttactic
Corporate and technical writers
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Obnoxious and we loved them for it when young. Still obnoxious but not quite so endearing as middle-aged gents.
See the title of this post? And see the date of my previous post? Yes, I know!
One of the big problems for small business owners is the time and thought involved with keeping social media fresh. Without dedicated comms staff to do the leg work, social media participation can easily become a burden on top of managing clients, staff, bookwork, etc.
If you don’t have the time to do it well, or the budget to outsource, an option is to have a website purely as a static brochure (as, otherwise, you will be totally invisible online) but to forgo the blog or the Facebook or Twitter account. A poorly maintained social media account is a worse marketing strategy than no account at all. You may have more targeted methods for reaching your clients.
Having said that, a regularly updated blog does show you as a thinker, a knowledge centre and a communicator in your industry and is very helpful for giving potential clients some idea of your expertise and suitability for their projects.
It also lets customers build a relationship with your organisation by posting comments under your original post and so starting a dialogue with your business.
On top of that, search engines love blogs, they are always looking for fresh content. The more you blog, the more search engines will index your site, giving it potentially better visibility in search results.
Communication is good … just don’t wait 13 months before before writing your next post!
More young women are embracing online communities while fewer men feel their online communities are as important as their offline equivalents, according to a new study.
This is apparently a sharp reversal in attitudes and has taken place over just a couple of years.
Researchers at the University of Southern California say 67 per cent of women under 40 feel as strongly about their internet communities as their offline ones, while only 38 per cent of men said the same. In 2007, the numbers were just the reverse, with 69 per cent of the men and 35 per cent of the women feeling that way.
If the numbers turn out to be accurate, it could be a pointer to a rethink by us PR hacks over how we plan online campaigns.
A Chicago woman made derogatory comments on Twitter about her landlord and her rented property. The landlord reportedly went straight to court to sue the woman.
The citizens of cyberspace are Tweeting and blogging like crazy about it. Messages for and against both parties.
The woman may or may not have the best intentions. The landlord may or may not be the world’s best landlord. But who’s right? Who’s wrong?
It doesn’t really matter anymore. The lid has been lifted, the genie’s out. Damage control will be difficult to put in place. Take care how you project and protect your corporate reputation!
With blogs fast becoming authoritative sources of news in their own right, the avenues you need to reach to get comprehensive publicity coverage can sometimes appear infinite. But you do need to communicate with far more than just traditional media outlets.
Spend a bit of time online researching who is writing the most authoritative and informed blogs on topics relevant to your business. You will easily be able to find the blogs you should be talking to.
People in your industry will be aware of leading blogs. The Technorati website shows who the most popular global blog sites are. Google’s Blog Search works well if you type ‘New Zealand’ after whatever topic search you are after.
What is news on a blog?
How does news develop and grow in the online age, where blogs are taking on papers in the news-breaking game and often winning? American journalist and new media expert Jeff Jarvis defines it as “product versus process journalism.”
“Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning.”
The way blogs work include “collaboration, transparency, letting readers into the process, and trying to say what we don’t know when we publish – as caveats – rather than afterward – as corrections,” Jarvis says.
Traditional news outlets like to project the impression that their story is the definitive version .
Whereas, as the Irish Independent reports, journalism – as practised by bloggers – exposes the workings of a scoop. “[High-profile technology blog] TechCrunch, for instance, publishes the beginnings of a story that may only be a rumour. The responses to that rumour, often from reliable sources, generate updates to the story, which is polished with the help of readers to get closer to the whole truth.”
“This is journalism as beta,” Jarvis writes. “Every time Google releases a beta, it is saying that the product is incomplete and imperfect. It’s a call to collaborate.”
And that call to collaborate is drawing millions of blog readers and comment writers. If you want your company to be where the word-of-mouth action is, you need to be noticed in the blogosphere.
… And, lastly, just to add to the proliferation of news sources you need to pay attention to: Is Twitter the news outlet for the 21st century?