Lead Generation

SEO for PR Pros

Yesterday I participated, along with Tom Lynch of interactive web marketing firm Astek Consulting, in a PR News webinar on SEO best practices. I'm not an SEO expert, but have developed a strong interest in search over the past several years. To me, it goes hand in hand with PR.

We all know that PR is about telling great stories. But to tell those stories, communicators have to create more content, and content of different types, than we did even a few years ago. At Schwartz MSL, our target audiences are generally online, so it makes sense to optimize that content for search to increase the likelihood that people who are looking for information on problems that our clients can solve find them online. I can't imagine running communications programs that don't take SEO into account.

If you're looking ahead to 2012 and planning your content and PR strategies, will you factor in SEO? Or do you feel that great content will be found and shared independent of optimization efforts?

Posted by Laura Kempke on September 28, 2011 at 11:36 AM
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PR Pros: Get Into the SEO Mindset

A couple of days ago, I spent some time with colleagues learning about a tool to help identify online "influencers" -- the people many of our clients would like to reach, naturally. Those influencers are mostly not reporters, although it's interesting to see as we start using the tool that reporters are at the top of many of the search results.

It used to be that PR was largely about media relations, but now we of course know we need to look far beyond reporters. Journalists matter, but so do people who blog or tweet or otherwise share info about the topics they're passionate and knowledgeable about.

Anyway, so there we sit, talking about the new tool, which seems mercifully easy to use. Everything is rolling along until the person conducting the training comes to keywords -- you need to lose the SEO mindset, she says. To find the conversations you care about, don't use your SEO keywords.

Sacrilege! How about if you tell me next that down is up and the world is flat. I had to think it through for more than a couple of seconds (which I probably shouldn't admit) and now that I've started using the software, I'm still not sure that "leave SEO aside" is the most accurate description of what's required. I'm now thinking of it as keep what you know about SEO, but add phrases that people use when writing. For example, "buy for your SMB" might accompany "database security software."

I'm glad I worked through that potentially emotional issue. I really didn't want to think that the terms people use to find information that they care about should ever be anywhere other than the very front of my brain when I'm creating any sort of content.

By now you've probably seen The Content Grid v2 from Eloqua and JESS3. If you have not, it's lovely, so cast your gaze upon it:

It seems to me that to get to the content in the middle of that grid -- white papers, demos, case studies, press releases, analyst reports -- you'll often use a search engine. If the content lives on your website, on Twitter, on YouTube, it should be optimized, right? But, you say, that will naturally happen if you're creating content that speaks to problems and interests that people really have. Are fancy techniques necessary when you have fabulous content that speaks to your audience's issues?

Personally, I agree that some marketers are so in touch with their target audiences and so able to deal with both volume and quality that they can't help but create content that appeals to search engines. That's a fantastic thing. I'm guessing that many marketers, however, could use a few pointers. The ebooks, customer profiles, demos and graphics aren't flowing so freely that all the search stuff is going to work itself out.

In a month, I'll participate in a PR News discussion of "day-to-day SEO tactics" that should give people who don't have technical backgrounds some guidelines on creating content that can readily be found online. I'm looking forward to it because I know it'll make me even more focused on the subject. I don't want to "lose the SEO mindset."

How do you work info about search into your day? If the answer is "I don't," here are a few things you might check. They'll inform you without overwhelming you:

• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• B2Bbloggers
• TopRank Online Marketing
• SEOmoz -- some of the software requires a subscription, but there's a lot of free info, too. 

Posted by Laura Kempke on August 25, 2011 at 7:37 PM
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The power of simplicity

Take a look at the billboard below. Do you think this is effective communications or not?

I took a photo of this billboard as I was driving through Connecticut. I was convinced this was one of the worst billboards I had seen in my life.

Yes, the message was simple. If you are injured, you should get Carter.

I love simplicity, and frequently point out that a simple message delivered with a 10 lbs. sledgehammer can be very effective.

But sometimes simplicity goes a bit too far.

• Carter who?
• Most importantly, how do I “Get Carter?”

There is no phone, no email, no twitter, no address, no Website. The full name is in tiny print that is tough to see as you are speeding by.

I knew who to get (but not why), but had no way of getting him.

I was pretty set on writing a fairly critical post about the billboard. But then I did what millions of people do. I Googled it. The search was simple – Injury Carter.

The results are below:
 

What do you think?

Posted by Mark McClennan on June 16, 2011 at 10:28 AM
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Analytics and Measurement in Practice at SxSW

For me, Sunday at SxSW could best have been described as analytics day. They decided to have all the research and measurement die-hards make the trek out to the AT&T Executive Conference center.  The surroundings were plusher, the seats much more comfortable and the data was fascinating.

There were two interesting panels on measurement and analytics and the most exciting part is none of the speakers were from vendors. Shawn Brown from MIT’s Sloan Management Review and Chris Traganos at Harvard  spoke about how they measured Web success and worked to increase traffic; while Elizabeth Winkler from the University of Texas - Austin, discussed how she and her colleagues developed a model that showed how Twitter chatter accurately predicted movie revenues.

Harvard was doing some very interesting things and relies primarily on five social media tools:

• Wordpress feeds
• Facebook Open Graph
• Chartbeat
• QR codes
• Socialflow

By comparison, the tools MIT highlighted included:

• Google analytics
• Bit.ly (Think about using Bt.ly pro so you can have custom links you can control if Bit.ly goes out of business in five years)
• Google alerts
• Topsy
• Tweetreach

These are tools most of our readers know, but it shows that tools like these, used intelligently and backed by great content can deliver very good results. A few practical tips on how they grew traffic included advice such as:

• Lots of tags are your friend: every story they push has 30 tags that are fed into blog aggregators
• If you aren’t using Facebook’s OpenGraph and you create content, you need to start doing so. Instead of the share button, use the like button. Despite the power of the tool, you should check URL Linter to see what Facebook is getting and not getting.
• Chartbeat is a perfect complement to Google Analytics. I haven’t used it on my sites, but I plan to check it out. It gives you real time analytics in a way Google does not.
• Probably the biggest “huh” in the session was the tidbit that the smaller the URL, the less dense the QR code is, so it works faster. Keep using those URL shorteners, and make sure they point to a site that is optimized for mobile.

These are great practical tips for growing and analyzing site traffic.

This was a great primer for the next session that looked at how Twitter chatter could be used to tell how good a movie will do on a weekend. Elizabeth Winker and her team used a set of 20 servers to gather and aggregate tweets on movies and store than in a database for further analysis.

They first eliminated the false positives (which was very tricky for the movie “The Hangover”) and broke the results down by positive, negative and neutral using an automated system they built themselves. By then analyzing how many people said they planned to go to the movies and the reaction and buzz afterwards, they showed how positive Twitter chatter mapped nicely to box office sales for the 60 movies they analyzed.

One area Winker touched on briefly, but I think is worthy of further consideration is the power of Twitter and geolocation. They could map the Tweets on a certain movie to the subset of those that have enabled geolocation on their phones and break out the analysis and prediction on a regional level. This could help allocate ad and marketing spends to the areas where it is most needed. One Winkler didn’t explore that I would love to see is if there is greater correlation based on the chatter that is made immediately after a movie (which a movie company should be able to do by mapping the tweets to theatre locations). This also has implications for CPG and consumer technology companies.

The panels weren’t earth shattering, but they gave good practical advice and a glimpse into the future of quick, high-volume analytics.

Posted by Mark McClennan on March 14, 2011 at 11:15 PM
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3 Simple Tests for Before, During, and After Delivering Content to Your Audience

I read two good blog entries yesterday about how marketers need to make sure they’re creating content that is engaging. One of them was a piece in PRWeek written by Schwartz president Bryan Scanlon. (I’m sure you’re all shocked I would speak highly of a blog written by my boss.) The other was a blog by Ann Handley of MarketingProfs, of whom I’m a big fan.

Both of them make basically the point that sometimes marketers lose track of the ultimate goal of content – to connect with or engage a community. In other words, yes, it’s important to create A LOT of content, but it’s more important that the content is educational and not overly self-promotional so your audience will come back for more. A marketer could create five eBooks and ten webinars in a year and say to their CEO, “You wanted content marketing, well mission accomplished!” But in reality, it only moves from being content creation to actual content marketing if you can show that you connected with the audience.

So how do you do this? There are many different ways to test whether your content is engaging, but as a start, I thought I’d just provide one thing to think about at each stage of deploying your content:

Before Deploying Content:
This has been said before (and probably said best in Ann Handley’s book Content Rules), but before you put any content “out there,” you should make sure it’s solving a problem for your target audience. Ask yourself: “does my content explain a problem and provide a solution or does it only explain how my product/service works?” Ideally you’d present the problem, and help your audience to see many ways to solve it that will eventually lead them to you for help. Start with making it interesting, and hopefully the customers will come to you. This always reminds me of what 1960’s ad executive Howard Luck Gossage said: “People don’t read ads. People read what they’re interested in and sometimes it’s an ad.”

While Content is Being Consumed:
Two words: trackable links. This is not at all a new way to measure engagement, but all of your content pieces should contain trackable links within them so you have data on which links were interesting enough for people to click on. It’s ok to say “500 people downloaded my eBook,” but it’s not a real measure of engagement unless you look at what they did once inside the eBook. You can also go way beyond data about clicks when measuring video content engagement using tools from VisibleGains and others. It’s critical to know how long people viewed certain segments and where there was drop off.

After:
This may also seem obvious, but the best measure of engagement is what your audience does with the content after it was consumed. Did they forward or share the content with others or tweet about it? Did they come back and consume more content from you later (content that you were, of course, smart enough to push out to them)? Did you check in with them within a week and ask what they thought of the content? I’d rather have 200 people read a piece of content, share it, and return later for more content, than have 500 people read some content and never come back.

Posted by Matt Duffy on February 8, 2011 at 10:32 AM
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Only 18% of News Release Headlines are Optimized for SEO

The two most important elements for optimizing a news release headline are keyword inclusion and brevity. A company’s top keywords should be included in the headline when possible and should be placed early in the headline. In terms of brevity, a full release headline must be 65 characters or fewer to be fully displayed in Google.

Many search engine optimization (SEO) experts, including our experts here at Schwartz, advise that companies try to keep the characters in the headline under 70 characters. Anything beyond that will be less effective in supporting a company’s SEO.

The Schwartz Communications Research Group, with invaluable help from Business Wire, analyzed the headlines of more than 16,000 news releases issued over Business Wire in a 31 day period (July 26, 2010 to August 25, 2010). Since Schwartz cannot know the keywords that thousands of companies are hoping to use to optimize their content and releases, the Schwartz Research Group focused on headline length as a success factor
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The findings of this analysis were that the vast majority of PR practitioners are still not fully optimizing their headlines. (I am sure Schwartz is guilty of that as well from time to time.) Our analysis showed that only 18.4% of all releases have headlines with 65 characters or fewer.

While the majority of releases are under 150 characters, we did see some examples that were much longer than the recommended length. The most egregious cases were the 2% of releases with headlines in excess of 300 characters, with one headline that was over 1,000 characters. The shortest headline we found was 18 characters, which is also probably not ideal for SEO as it’s unlikely that enough of the company’s keywords were included. Overall, the analysis found the average headline length to be 123 characters.

This shows that many companies still have room to improve their press releases (even the social media releases).

The Schwartz Communications Research Group has written a Research Brief that takes a more in-depth look at this topic. If you would like additional analysis, including buzzword usage, a geographic analysis of effective headline writing and other headline analysis, you can download it here

Posted by Mark McClennan on October 12, 2010 at 8:27 AM
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Schwartz's Clients Take Home The Gold

Earlier this week, the Publicity Club of New England recognized the best public relations and social media campaigns and tactics of the past year. The Bell Ringer judges were senior practitioners from Chicago and Boston.

Schwartz is proud that we have continued the tradition of being recognized with more Bell Ringer Awards for work we have done with our clients than any other PR Agency in New England.

Most gratifying to us this year is that we won 10 Gold Bells for our clients, and that Schwartz was recognized for having the two best campaigns of the year, winning both Gold and Silver Bells, for its work in the business-to-business, healthcare and high-tech public relations categories.

When asked by many, how do we continue to win so many awards, we believe it is based on two key elements:

1)    As a strategic communications firm, we understand that we don’t succeed by ourselves. Schwartz works closely with our clients to make sure our communications, content and public relations activities help them realize their business objectives. It is this close relationship, senior level involvement and comprehensive approach - including social media, content marketing and inbound marketing services -  that help our programs succeed.

2)    We don’t expect our clients (or Bell Ringer  judges) to measure our work based on the “thud factor”, or in social media Thud 2.0. Our work, and our award entries, are judged on how we helped public relations close the loop with sales, patient recruitment or other business objectives.

For the 2010 Bell Ringer Awards, this ranged from driving qualified leads from trade articles to creating enough demand to crash one client’s servers. It included driving hundreds of patient inquiries to cutting consumer misperceptions in half. It is based on helping drive hundreds of thousands in product sales to opening new channels with key prospects.

We are proud of the work of our employees and our clients. If you have any questions about how we can help your company, let us know.

Posted by Mark McClennan on June 9, 2010 at 10:22 AM
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When Story Met Sales

The classic 80s movie “When Harry Met Sally” follows two people through the years, originally stuck together for a Chicago-to-New York drive, then by chance bumping into each other and finally into love and a long relationship.

This is not unlike what we've seen happen with marketing and sales. Anyone with tenure in the business world knows that these two organizations need to be brilliantly in love and joined at the hip, moving together or else stumbling separately.

There was a time where a great “story” got ink and everyone was happy. Pump up the volume. But now, every good business is looking to connect the sales impact of initiatives, in marketing, public relations, everywhere. Many chief marketing officers are now experts in inbound lead generation, in addition to the traditional staple of brand, awareness and visibility. And the real magic is where they intersect, with one driving the other.

Today’s announcement of Schwartz's partnership with HubSpot is another great example of the transformational work we’ve been doing for years: tying storytelling to sales at all turns, and even rejecting stories that may seem to have cool headlines, but don’t move a needle on any measurable front.

Some of the most interesting work Schwartz is doing for its clients today is what we’ve dubbed “closed loop communications” --- being able to execute a strategy that loops directly into inbound marketing efforts. We’re creating content of interest, optimizing and pushing it out with professional and social media relations, search marketing and other services. That in turn is driving awareness, measured in web traffic and leads. Then we're reporting back on exactly what’s working, who’s looking and what’s prompting action in a client’s communities.

At Schwartz, we’ve nailed an outstanding strategy and process for doing this through many different types of approaches, tactics and tools, including inbound web marketing (leveraging HubSpot), digital video content (including some brilliant video marketing solutions from Visible Gains) and other strands. Whether you're in healthcare, technology, cleantech or consumer, we understand your business and the right mix of levers to pull, buttons to push, and people to influence to deliver tremendous impact.

The best meal on the menu is closed loop public relations. Order it.

Posted by Bryan Scanlon on May 19, 2010 at 9:04 AM
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Small Businesses Use Social Media to Connect with Customers

Over the past couple of years, I've watched and wondered as many self-appointed social media gurus have worked to convince technology industry executives that they can market on the cheap, if not for free, using social media.

The idea is so appealing. Entrepreneurial companies are working with limited budgets, their marketing people are being asked to quantify ROI pretty quickly, and if the "I" is supposedly nothing and the "R" is greater than zero, they're in good shape, right? And let's be honest--social media is the newest thing and just sounds like more fun than the options.

What's becoming apparent is that using social media effectively requires a fair amount of knowledge about the industry at hand and more than a few minutes a day of time. In other words, the "I" can be substantial. The fact that many of the tools are free is great, but this doesn't obviate the fact that execs' time is, in fact, money and the people they might hire to use the tools charge for their time and expertise. And then there's the critical question of tangible returns and how they stack up versus returns from other marketing or customer support activities.

Late last week blogger Tony Faustino suggested, in "Successful Social Media Marketing Is Neither Free Nor Easy," that small business owners need to understand that there's not likely to be fast pay-off for using social media. Think several years, not a few months, he says. (I'd personally suggest that there's benefit to be had after several months of consistent use, but understand Mr. Faustino's point.)

He was reacting to a mid-March Wall Street Journal article, "Entrepreneurs Question Value of Social Media," which said, well, you can guess what it said. Here's an excerpt:

"Last year, social-media adoption by businesses with fewer than 100 employees doubled to 24% from 12%, says a survey released in January of 2,000 U.S. entrepreneurs from the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business and Network Solutions LLC, a Web-services provider in Herndon, Va.

"Meanwhile, a separate survey of 500 U.S. small-business owners from the same sponsors found that just 22% made a profit last year from promoting their firms on social media, while 53% said they broke even. What's more, 19% said they actually lost money due to their social-media initiatives."

The article offers a few anecdotes of success and frustration. What I'd have liked it to suss out, however, is whether the companies that have met with some success with social media employed some strategy other than "interact with customers." I'd also be interested in learning how the small business owners are balancing social media with other forms of marketing and customer support. I assume social media isn't the only tool they're using.

At Schwartz, we generally advise companies that are starting to use social media that they need to work with it consistently for about six months before really starting to judge what it's doing for them. The next step is figuring out, based on early results, how much time and effort should go to social media compared to other customer outreach and support programs.

I suspect that the self-styled gurus are learning along with entrepreneurs and communicators that social media isn't free, that you can measure returns only if you defined a goal at the outset, and that those returns have to be stacked up against those of other marketing programs.

Posted by Laura Kempke on April 5, 2010 at 12:02 PM
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B2B Social Media for Website Traffic and Lead Generation

eMarketer's got an informative post from Debra Aho Williamson this week, "Why Social Media Makes Sense for B2B Marketers." She presents some info on the different ways that B2B and B2C companies measure the success of social media programs. The top three for both are website traffic, brand awareness and engagement with prospects.

Here's where they diverge: B2Bs are more interested than B2Cs in using social media to generate a high volume of quality leads and, not so surprisingly, they're less likely to evaluate success by looking at a direct increase in revenue. I assume this is because every B2B marketer knows how difficult it normally is to draw a straight line from any single marketing activity to an actual sale.

To help generate those leads that B2Bs want to see, Williamson mentions a product from Optify. One that a number of technology PR clients at Schwartz have been using is from HubSpot. What's particularly interesting to me, as a PR person, is that HubSpot allows us to see which articles in the media (social or professional) drive traffic and, in turn, sales leads to clients' websites. That helps us fine tune technology PR programs over time.

Another current post I found valuable was from Chris Koch, who offered advice on "How to use social media for B2B." He talks about monitoring, engaging and managing. "Wait a minute," I thought when I read his post, "what about measuring?"

I had a hard time not seeing measurement on his list, so read back over his previous posts to see Koch had stated earlier that "[s]ocial media is notoriously difficult to measure and ROI is unclear. Therefore, social media should be used as a platform to drive traffic to the channels that are easier to measure and have proven ROI. There should also be a way to get customers and prospects from social media into systems for tracking and managing interactions (e.g., CRM)."

I agree with his first and third statements and am still thinking about the second. But clearly his observations and eMarketer's survey results are in line with each other: informed B2B marketers look to social media today for traffic and leads, but not--yet--ROI.

Measurement techniques and the necessary link between social media and CRM or marketing automation systems haven't kept pace with B2Bs' use of social media. Looking at increases in traffic and leads, though, it's natural to expect quantifiable returns to soon become clear.

Posted by Laura Kempke on March 24, 2010 at 3:32 PM
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Schwartz Twitter Campaign Yields 70% Increase in Referral Traffic

This week's issue of PRWeek describes a holiday Twitter campaign that Schwartz designed and executed for Australian client RetailMeNot.com.

RetailMeNot is an online discount and coupon site. They're a current Schwartz client, but this article focuses on a push made around the 2009 holiday shopping season to reach RetailMeNot's target demographic of women between the ages of 18 and 39 with messages about new merchants, discounts and other offers to help drive website traffic.

Check out PRWeek for a description of Twitter tactics. The result was a 70 percent increase in referral traffic to RetailMeNot.com and continued strong traffic after the conclusion of this particular campaign. Pretty nice for a campaign that lasted just over a month.

Posted by Laura Kempke on March 2, 2010 at 3:27 PM
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Traditional and Social Media Intersect, Reinforce Each Other: PRWeek Interview with Bryan Scanlon

Traditional and social media relations are connected and shouldn't be viewed as "either/or," Schwartz Communications President Bryan Scanlon says in a new video interview with PRWeek.

He describes how the agency, which serves established and entrepreneurial businesses in industries that include healthcare, technology, cleantech and professional services, performed over the past year and notes that our diversification across industries, lack of reliance of a handful of big clients for revenue, and ability to span social and traditional media at a time when many agencies push one over the other were sources of strength in 2009.

Bryan also answers questions about agency and client PR workloads in 2010 and notes that the recession has forced both ends of the PR team to focus on the highest value activities--those that help bring sales leads, drive website visits and close sales.

Check out the full interview at PRWeek.

Posted by Laura Kempke on February 23, 2010 at 5:50 PM
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Fortune 500 Fail SEO. Opportunity for Market Challengers?

A report today from Conductor, a company that provides SEO technology and services, concludes that "the Fortune 500 fail natural search." Specifically, the report looks at big companies' visibility in natural search results for terms that those companies have elected to purchase for ad campaigns.

The idea is that if an advertiser is paying a lot (and they probably are--the report says that the Fortune 500 pay $3.4 million a day on nearly 100,000 keywords), the word may be important enough to also be supported with a natural search campaign.

Sears, a company that I personally like, received a poor grade. That caught my eye and I asked myself what a business such as Sears, which sells thousands of unrelated things, could do to make its products appear on the first page of natural search results.

I suppose the real answer is that optimizing on all of the most competitive (i.e., expensive) search terms is entirely impractical and so they have to pick their battles carefully by focusing on the company's biggest money-makers, which may not be the same thing as the most competitive keywords.

What does any of this mean for companies that are taking on the industry behemoths?

The most obvious conclusion is that market challengers should be optimistic that they can outmaneuver or at least pull alongside big competitors when it comes to organic search. The simple fact that their product lines tend to be more focused should make it easier for them to build momentum in a way that a company with more offerings may find difficult.

Since great placement in organic search rankings may realistically be within medium and smaller companies' reach, it would stand to reason that they'd want to be attentive to good SEO practices. (Search Marketing Sage; Search Engine Guide, which focuses on search marketing for small businesses; and Search Engine Watch's "search marketing topics" section are good resources for thoughtful SEO advice.)

Most of the companies that Schwartz works with--they tend to be innovators in markets like technology, healthcare, cleantech, materials and professional services--fully appreciate that website design matters. Many have overhauled their websites with things like better navigation, URLs and page titles in mind.

That's good, but they shouldn't lose sight of Google's advice (Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide; Version 1.1; November 13, 2008) that "[c]reating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here," (i.e., more than website mechanics).

So, good website content matters, but so also do things like inbound links from reputable websites to the innovator's website. Securing these links, not via cheesy requests, but through on-message media and blog coverage that points back to the company's website, is part of PR's job these days. As is being aware of the company's keywords and using them intelligently in content like news releases, which can have nice SEO value when syndicated.

Freshness of content and consistency over time also impact SEO. Smaller companies sometimes think they can turn PR on and off. This works in a limited set of cases, but is normally ineffective for an array of reasons.

Reflecting on the conclusions of today's report and considering what we know about the importance of good content in supporting SEO, as a PR person, my conclusion is that market innovators and challengers--those who haven't yet made the Fortune 500--are well served by communications strategies that are created with SEO/lead generation in mind and that are pursued steadily over time rather than in fits and starts.

Posted by Laura Kempke on February 17, 2010 at 5:58 PM
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Measuring Social Media ROI

Here at Schwartz, we've been talking quite a bit lately about measuring results of social media programs. Not just programs we've designed for clients, but those of people who we meet at conferences or with whom we're just chatting.

Without a doubt, many companies are thrilled with their involvement in social media. They love the outlet that participating in blogs or forums gives them, they're able to talk with people on Twitter whom they'd likely otherwise miss and they're connecting with patient communities on Facebook. (One client, Digium, gives us a tour of their use of social networking technologies here to gain "customer feedback, suggestions, highly qualified sales leads" and to talk with people in their industry.)

Some, though, are a little disappointed in social media. When I hear that, my first question is always "what did you hope to gain that you're not seeing?" I often wonder whether they're measuring success based on number of Twitter followers or Facebook fans--today's corporate version of a teenage popularity contest. This would be unfortunate because such metrics are nearly irrelevant for many B2B companies.

PR people need to keep in mind the Cheshire Cat's words of wisdom to Alice: "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there." It's our job to help clients think through exactly what they're trying to achieve and to recommend use of social platforms because they make sense, not because they exist and are free.

Last week I attended a Mass Technology Leadership Council discussion on social media and lead generation. Mark Roberge, HubSpot's VP of sales, led the talk. Toward the end, he turned the group's attention to measuring social media ROI--certainly a topic of interest to a number of people today. (Some great reads are here, here and here.)  

Mr. Roberge talked about website visitors and sales leads--reasonably straightforward things to quantify and important metrics for any B2B company. He also talked about "SEO assets" such as inbound links and improved performance in organic search results. Those things take time to build--perhaps a problem is that some companies look for an immediate impact in this department when it may be more reasonable to expect a change in six months' time. 

Just guessing, but I bet some of the letdown that a few companies feel stems from their desire to get something for next to nothing--a measurable impact from use of free technology. Certainly using social technologies is free, but so is calling up The Wall Street Journal or "Good Morning America." Anyone can do it--the question in every case is whether you've got anything interesting to say and can articulate it in something like a compelling manner. In any case, it's your PR person's job to figure it out.

Altogether, these things are a great reminder to me that B2B companies using social media--and their PR people--need to be clear in setting objectives and in understanding the likely timeframe for success.

Posted by Laura Kempke on September 14, 2009 at 4:35 PM
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Best Practices in Social Media Webinar: Learn from the Past

While some claim the summer months are a time when business slows down, anyone involved in retailing and consumer PR knows that it is when holiday planning swings into high-gear.

To help companies maximize their social media efforts (particularly around the holiday shopping season), the team at Schwartz Communications will be hosting a Webinar on July 22 at 1:00 p.m. ET.

The Webinar: "Groups, Handles and Widgets—Social Media Best Practices and Case Studies for Online Retailers," will explore how companies can leverage the latest online tools, measurement practices and social networks to maximize their communications impact.

Led by Mark W. McClennan, APR (BillMeLater, CheckFree) and Jason Morris (RetailMeNot, BeatMyPrice), vice presidents in Schwartz’s Consumer Practice Group, attendees will learn social media best practices and be presented with case studies of award-winning social media campaigns that drove business results.

To register, click here

Posted by Mark McClennan on July 13, 2009 at 9:29 AM
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