Creating a blog can be a very powerful tool to help your company with SEO, increasing traffic to the website and establishing your company as an expert in your industry. In fact an article by Mashable stated small business websites with a blog receive 55% more traffic than the ones without a blog. Using the [...]

When running any type of campaign it is important to monitor the success and sentiments of the campaign in order to make adjusts to the strategy. In social media, there are many ways to track company information, competitor data, sentiment, chatter and conversations taking place in your industry. There are paid monitoring tools like Radian6 [...]

Ok I know it’s a bit late but better late than never. ad:tech is an interactive advertising and technology conference and exhibition. This was my first year attending and I really enjoyed the keynote speakers. I think the unofficial theme this year was Social Media. Everyone talked about how important social media is and how [...]

I see it all the time. A marketing head says we need to be engaging in social media. Next thing you know they have a Facebook and Twitter page up and running and the company is satisfied that they are now “engaged” in social media. A couple months down the road the company wonders what [...]

I really like Guy Kawasaki. I saw him at Ad Tech in San Fransisco and he was hilarious. If you haven’t seen the Art of Enchantment speech you should watch it. My favorite part of the video is at minute 20.28 – 23.01 where he makes fun of how companies come up with mission statements. [...]

Now a days it seems everyone has a blog, a twitter profile, a linkedin profile and a Facebook page. Of course some people do it for fun but the smart people are doing to brand themselves. In this ever connected time, personal branding is more important that ever. Personal branding has helped to launch careers [...]

You know who we trust? Our friends. Our families. Our respected peers.

You know who we don’t really trust? Faceless companies.

Yet the vast majority of marketing campaigns are less than personal and follow the traditional model of companies pushing the discussion in one direction.

I can’t be the only one having an issue with this.

So how might the opposite of this look?

Let us use as our example the evil entity known as Rogers Communications. The parent company of everyone’s least favorite wireless brands Rogers and Fido. Now I could write a whole post on all the horrible things that Rogers/Fido do to their customers, but for the sake of brevity do a search on twitter for #rogers and #fail…case made.

Is it just me that sees a massive opportunity for Bell and Telus to not only steal some customers away from a rival, but also to tap into the voices that those around us trust?

If I were Telus and Bell, I’d be searching on Twitter and making a list of say 10-20 people who are extremely unhappy with Rogers/Fido. I’d then go to these people and explain that you would like to take care of them, get them on better packages, with better customer service, better phones and get them away from the evil Rogers/Fido.

As our society moves away from traditional media and we begin to go to web-based resources for our news and entertainment needs, the public relations game is shifting as well. Connecting to online sources such as blogs is now an important aspect of many public relations campaigns.

If you’re thinking of using blogger outreach for your business, here’s my quick primer on how to approach this tactic.

Qualify blogs based on their audience
There are over 200,000,000 blogs on the WWW and the vast majority have little to no following. Not to say that more is always better (if what you are marketing is a very niche product then that niche blogger with a small but loyal following could be an incredibly effective media outlet) but in general, a decent size audience is important. The other thing that I think should be obvious is that the blog’s audience should directly correspond to the target market of whatever it is you are marketing.

Read the blog
This is also part of the qualifying step because there is nothing worse for a blogger than to have to waste time going through pitches that aren’t relevant to their blog or their audience. Engaging through comments or on twitter is also a good way to start to build a relationship with the bloggers you are hoping to gain coverage from.

Stiletto Marketing interviews Charles Zuckermann, Glowbal Group’s social media guy.

Stiletto Marketing – Interview with Glowbal Group’s Charles Zuckermann from Stiletto Marketing on Vimeo.

Part three of my series on the different solutions organizations have found for their social media marketing. Read Scenario #1: The Overeager Intern and Scenario #2: X-Company is Going Social and Everyone’s Invited!

Scenario #3 The Big Guns

The ideal situation is one where the organization’s founder, president, or CEO is in charge, or heavily involved in the company’s social media. In this case, this person can become the true “face” for their company. Where we are actually seeing the most of this is in small business or start-ups which makes sense. In these cases, it’s often the owner who is driving sales to start off with and actively trying to promote their company and develop a name for them-selves. What better place to start than social media?