The New Southern Standard

Article on long content:

The Difference a “Big Post” Makes

Once companies start to blog, they’ll quickly become focused on SEO.

Here’s a great article for Wordpress blogs:
WordPress SEO

Analysis: Mainstream Media vs. Blogosphere

Bloggers: Big Media Is Watching

Social Networking Will Go Mainstream

From IDC:

IDC Finds More of the World’s Population Connecting to the Internet in New Ways and Embracing Web 2.0 Activities

Worldwide Spending on Internet Advertising Will Soar Past $106 Billion in 2011

How does this increase sales?

That is the question put forth by Scoble in a recent post. Jeremiah started the questioning in his post, but from a broader perspective. Read the comments for Scoble’s post. They are worth the time. I’m also certain this topic was discussed last week at Enterprise 2.0 .

Let’s tackle the question from a slightly different perspective. There are two sides of the balance sheet. Let’s look at the left side and focus on where I can save money. If we reduce costs our margins improve, cēterīs paribus. The cost side discussion is often more more equitable to medium and large businesses for several reasons. One, the rhetoric of trying something ‘new’ often translates to great risk in the corporate world. And, unfortunately, risk is not a popular concept.

The second reason is the officers are often working from a budget. It is often impossible to ask for new budget dollars, but very easy to re-allocate and shift dollars from the current budget.

Spoiler alert: If your customers aren’t online, this won’t work.

Reduction in trade journals spending traditional ad dollars in traditional channels

Move a portion of the money you are spending in trade journals. You don’t need to retire your entire spend, but buy smaller size ads or reduce the frequency. 25.9% of total B2b 2006 ad spending went to business publications.* There is a fair amount money in the trade pubs.

Reduction in pre-sales travel

Before a sale closes, a salesperson will often travel to the customer’s site to facilitate the closing. This is especially true in companies with long sales cycles and complex products. Reduce the amount of pre-sales travel and use social media to pre-qualify potential buyers and resolve their major issues. With gas prices predicted to reach $5.00 a gallon, spending less money on upfront travel could help subsidize your effort in designing and building a social media campaign.

Reduction in traditional media buys

Similar to the trade journals, re-allocate some of your dollars in T.V., cable, newspaper, radio, and outdoor. Shift some of that money over to a social media campaign.

Reduction in customer support or customer retention

Use RSS, Twitter search, and blog searches to monitor for issues and address them before spiral out of control. This upfront monitoring will reduce your ‘emergency’ funding for customer support. (To be fair, some companies budget customer support separately from other initiatives. If this is you, technically, you can’t re-allocate from the support budget. However, you can gain another champion in the Support leadership by saving her some money.)

Reduction in lead generation campaigns

You could pull some money out of partner programs, trade shows, and other lead gen campaigns in order to help subsidize your social media plans.

(Ultimately, you want to be thinking in terms of returns, not necessarily revenues or costs. For every dollar you invest, you should get more than one dollar in return. )

*Data from eMarketer report

There have been several conversations social media and it’s use in business. For those of you who can’t seem to make a dent in the corporate world, you might consider this approach.

With the high fuel prices and new charges from the airlines, people are traveling less. Take advantage of that by budgeting less for your trade shows. The fuel prices will definitely produce a hit to the trade show attendance. Convince your marketing director to re-direct the dollars from the trade show into a small social media campaign.

At least try to start a small one. If nothing else, you can call it a ‘trial run.’

This is an interesting article by John - Advanced SEO

I agree with the internal thoughts behind the article, but one this is absolutely clear to me. SEO should be ingrained in the marketing team’s efforts. Not all team members need to be intimately involved with the details, but the concepts of rank, keywords, and conversion should be considered at each meeting.

I always wonder about companies who don’t get this. I wonder how many customers they are losing because of the web. Or, more specifically, because of their lack of understanding of the web.

Decide what content you are going to write by understanding your audience.

There is a tool to help determine the make-up of your audience called an ‘audience persona.’ A persona is a written overview of your customers’ traits. The big agencies use them for campaigns, but your internal personas don’t have to be fancy, complicated, or even high budget.

A persona sheet is used by the blog writer to focus in on the audience’s preferences for content. For an obvious example, it is unlikely that a vegetarian would read articles highlighting new recipes for pork chops. A persona provides a guidepost for the type of content to write. A well-executed persona are essential to create an efficient decision process for new content.

Here are other resources on personas:

Buyer Persona Blog by Adele Revella

Post by Matt Dickman at Techno/Marketer: Developing personas for marketing strategy

Article from Pragmatic Marketing : The Power of the Persona

Here’s a persona-like page I did on Squidoo: Marketing to Engineers

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With the persona, deciding the type of content you write is easy. You write about something your audience wants to read. The topics could be anything that falls within the intersection of them and you. You might not need to create new ground or even be a thought leader. But you should follow one adage - write about topics that interests them, not you.

I am an advocate of social media and other technology tools for businesses. I see a disturbing trend of folk discussing techniques for building out their social media strategy, but few seem to acknowledge the end goal of a firm - to make money.

Let’s be clear on one thing. If a new tool is introduced and everyone knows it is new and innovative, that’s fine. [ I stand on this side. I think we are seeing new channels for business, yet I also admit that the possibilities for revenue generation still need to be refined. ]

If a new tool is introduced without the full understanding of the downsides, that’s irresponsible.

My suggestions for corporate media? Start small, measure the results, re-invest the gains, and grow.