PR 20/20 Blog

Blogger Outreach: A Tactic to Keep Your Strategy Fresh

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:35:00 -0400

This is a guest post by Kristen Matthews, marketing and community manager for GroupHigh in Boulder, Colorado. She loves the collaborative elements of modern marketing so feel free to contact her for anything at Kristen@grouphigh.com and follow her on Twitter @Kristenwords and @GroupHigh!

As outbound marketing tactics become obsolete, establishing relationships with bloggers who can promote your brand via word of mouth is becoming more important than ever.

Now that modern consumers are wired to tune out traditional ads and have the self-empowerment to research brands on their own, marketers and PR professionals are scrambling to fill the internet with good content about their brands and their client’s brands.

The sweet spot lies in not only producing content that subtly links back to your brand but also establishing a balance of content about your brand produced by others. It all comes down to the fact that humans trust word of mouth recommendations over self-promotional garble.

This is where blogger outreach comes in. And trust me, you want to get the influential bloggers on your side before your competitor does.

The Research

A decision should never be made without considering solid facts so here are a few for you.

This Digital Influence Report from Technorati reveals some key information about influencers, consumers and top brand marketers. I recommend reading through it but in the event that time isn’t abundant today, here are some highlights.

“Though blogs and influencers don’t get a large portion of a brands’ digital spend, they rank high with consumers for trust, popularity and influence.”
Blogs are in the top five sources of trustworthy information.
“Influencers are most active on blogs, as 86% say they have them and 88% of those say they blog for themselves.”

This SlideShare presentation from BlogHer shows just how much consumers trust blogs. Another one I recommend reading for yourself but here are the key points:

81% of the online U.S. population trusts the information and advice they get from bloggers.
61% of the U.S. online population has made a purchase based on a recommendation from bloggers.
41% of the U.S. online population says that blogs are better than Facebook to find out about new products.

Companies Using Blogger Outreach

Because I work best with examples, here are a few companies who do blogger outreach really well and have seen success.

SAAS: Nestivity gave exclusive access to influential social media bloggers to their new Twitter tool. This surfaced a lot of reviews and hype before the official launch. Smart.
Fashion: American Apparel used bloggers in their catalogue so that they’d write about their experience.
Sports teams: The Harlem Globetrotters used blogger outreach to target family focused bloggers and gave them passes to their games for posts. Ah, the power of the mom blogger!
Hotels and travel agencies use blogger outreach prevalently. They send travel bloggers on trips to review the destination. Makes me want to be a travel blogger…

How You Can Do it Too

Once you’ve established the need for blogger outreach, the inevitable questions remains: How do I come aboard?

First you need to consider and outline the perfect bloggers for your next campaign. If you put yourself in your target audience’s place, what types of bloggers would you follow? Hone in by filling out these categories in an outline:

Genre of blogs: such as cooking, fashion, marketing, etc.
Niche: such as vegan, high risk fashion, inbound marketing, etc.
Reach: For example you may have a visually driven campaign and want your bloggers to have an active Pinterest presence. Perhaps you want your bloggers to have a certain amount of unique monthly visitors or a decent MozRank.

Follow your outline precisely. If a blogger only sort of fits your criteria but has a ton of Twitter followers, refrain from reaching out. Keep in mind that you are going to have the most success reaching out to bloggers who are a snug contextual fit instead of email blasting every blogger in your genre.

Once you know who you are looking for, you need to decide which avenue you are going to take to find them. If you are going to be doing a moderate to heavy amount of blogger outreach I’d recommend investing in a blogger outreach tool like GroupHigh which is worth its cost in time saved.

If you are still unsure about blogger outreach and are not ready for a tool, check out Google’s blog search or Inky Bees free version.

Do you have any blogger outreach tactics that have worked well for you? Share in the comments below and cheers to a good discussion!

Stay updated: Subscribe to the PR 20/20 blog, check us out on Facebook, and follow the team on Twitter.

Schema.org SEO Markup: What Non-Coder Marketers Need to Know

Fri, 10 May 2013 07:37:56 -0400

When the world’s largest search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo! and more, collaborate on an initiative to improve the indexability of the web, marketers should take notice. In June 2011, these search giants did just that, and the result was a new microdata mark-up called Schema.org.

Microdata is simply HTML tags put around different web page content to provide valuable context to search engines. There are a variety of microdata tagging systems out there, so to help webmasters, and in turn themselves, leading search engines banded together to create a standardized tagging system they all recognize.

Schema.org was the result. While Google and Bing have said Schema tags alone won’t increase your rankings, they do give search engines a clearer understanding of what content is on your web pages so they can in turn show more relevant information to searchers. In fact, at SXSW this year, Duane Forrester of Bing couldn’t stress enough the importance of Schema tags.

In this post, I’ll walk you through the things you need to know when integrating Schema.org tags throughout your site, and at the end offer some tips on how to get started. You can also go to www.schema.org for full instructions and guidelines.

Please Note: This post is more technical than anything we’ve written before, so if you have little HTML knowledge and no interest in learning [this is a ‘non-coding marketer’s guide’ after all], take this article to your website team for discussion, and work together to implement the schema tags.

What You Need to Know Before Getting Started

Setting up Schemas is pretty straightforward, but before we get into that there are several HTML elements with which you’ll need to familiarize yourself.

If you have no HTML coding experience, I recommend going through some training first. Codecademy.com offers some good interactive lessons, and if you’re committed to learning about web and program coding, definitely check out TeamTreehouse.com—it’s a paid program, but unequivocally the best training I’ve taken so far.

Fundamental HTML Elements

There are two fundamental HTML elements you’ll need to know to integrate Schema.org tags:

<div>s are block-level elements that group together a section of HTML code. Alone these tags don’t make any noticeable changes to the content on the page. However, when CSS style elements are applied, you can change the content block’s font color, background, layout, alignment with other page elements, and much more.
<span>s are inline elements. Where <div>’s group blocks of code, <span>’s are intended to manipulate specific lines of text. Similarly, alone they don’t make any noticeable difference to the content on the page, but you can add CSS to change their appearance.

Many of the Schema tags you will apply to your web pages will be added using both <div> and <span> elements. You will use <div>s to assign Schema types to a section or page of content, while <span>s will be used to call out individual properties.

I promise this will make more sense after reading the next sections.

Schema Types and Properties

Schemas are organized into types (or scopes), and each type has its own set of properties. For example, the “Organization” type includes properties for: Name, Address, Email, Telephone, Founder, and many more.

Schema types cover a wide variety of web content from Events to Places to Products to Restaurants to Creative Works (e.g. blogs, images and videos).

Schema types are organized into hierarchies, each level down getting more focused. For example, if you are a self-storage facility, your Schema hierarchy is:

Thing
- Organization
  - Local Business
    - Self Storage

Or, if you have a video you want to mark up, your Schema hierarchy is:

Thing
- Creative Work
  - Media Object
    - Video Object

Check out the full Schema hierarchy here.

Marking Up Your Pages with Schemas

To mark up a web page, use your content management system’s (CMS) HTML editor, or a text editor to update the HTML page files. First, group the page’s content by placing a <div> at the top of your page, or at the start of your content section, and a </div> at the end. For example:

<div>
<h1>Self Storage Company</h1>
<p>Intro Text</p>
<p>Address: 5555 Storage Parkway, Cleveland, OH 44115</p>
<p>Phone: 216-555-5555</p>
</div>

Next, tell the search engines the Schema type to which your content applies. To define the Schema type, within the <div>, add itemscope and itemtype as shown below. Itemtype is set equal to the URL of the relevant Schema.org page.

In our self-storage example, we’ll tell search engines that the page content between the <div> and </div> is about a self-storage company by setting “itemtype” equal to the page Schema.org/SelfStorage. It would look like this:

<div itemscope itemtype=“http://schema.org/SelfStorage”>
<h1> Self Storage Company </h1>
<p>Intro Text</p>
<p>Address: 5555 Storage Parkway, Cleveland, OH 44115</p>
<p>Phone: 216-555-5555</p>
</div>

It’s important to note here that lower levels of a schema hierarchy adopt the properties of all higher levels. So in our self-storage example, we don’t need to tell search engines the content applies to the Thing, Organization and Local Business Schemas, so long as we set the type to the Self Storage Schema.

Now, we can go in and start marking up the specific property content within the <div>. For this, we’ll bookend the content to be marked up with <span> and </span>, and then use the itemprop tag and set it equal to a property defined on the Schema.org type page.

In our self-storage example, we marked up our page code below with phone and address tags:

<div itemscope itemtype=“http://schema.org/SelfStorage”>
<h1> Self Storage Company </h1>
<p>Intro Text</p>
<p>Address: <span itemprop=“address”>5555 Storage Parkway, Cleveland, OH 44115</span></p>
<p>Phone: <span itemprop=“telephone”>216-555-5555</span></p>
</div>

While this is a high-level overview, it doesn’t get much more complicated than this. There is another aspect to adding Schemas called embedded items, but to avoid overcomplicating things, you can read about them here. This section addresses what to do when a certain property has it’s own set of properties. For example, in the Product schema, the property “width” has its own properties, including “value” and “unitCode” (aka unit of measure).

After you’ve marked up a page, make sure it is done properly by running it through Google’s rich snippet testing tool, which will show you a labeled list of all the marked-up content it finds on your page.

Getting Started

Following are some tips on how to best get started.

Make sure you have access to your HTML code either through a CMS or the actual HTML files. If you don’t, you may need to work with a web developer.
Go through the full list of Schema types to identify which are relevant to your website, business and content.
Scan through the properties listed under the relevant Schema types and flag any property items that can be found on your web pages. Note: You likely won’t use all of the tags.
Create an outline that bullets Schema type and relevant properties. It is good to have this documented for future use and consistency.
Prioritize the pages to be marked up on your site. This can be a time-consuming task, so by prioritizing the pages you can tackle the most important first, and then gradually work your way through the entire site.

If you want to see a real-life example of a properly marked up web page, view the source code of this blog post. I’ve marked it up with the Blog Schema type (http://Schema.org/blog). Please note: Our CMS adjusts the order of some of the tags in relation to each other, but everything still works properly. Click here to view the Google Rich Snippet report or view a portion of it below:

For more information on installing Schemas on your site, read Schema.org’s detailed instructions here.

Work Smarter, Not Harder: Creating a Strategic Content Marketing Plan

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:53:22 -0400

Henry Ford and the assembly line. Steve Jobs and the personal computer. Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Google’s algorithms.

The common thread among these inventors and innovators is the desire to work smarter, not harder—either through enhanced processes, more powerful tools or better strategies. Throughout history, just when mankind thinks they’ve reached their limits, they reinvent the game, leaping forward to a new era of productivity.

Content marketing is reaching a similar threshold: One by one, marketing teams are realizing they can’t produce enough content, fast enough, to outrun the SEO game. There’s always more to publish, more keywords to claim, more longtailed search questions to answer.

As my colleague Mike Kaput (@MikeKaput) explains, “Ravenous crowds want more content. And more competitors than ever are rolling out buffets. To keep up, as readers and creators, our schedules are packed. Deadlines never die.”

Add your team’s other responsibilities to the mix, and the reality is unnerving. If you feel like you are on a never-ending publishing treadmill, you’re not alone. According to HubSpot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing annual report, most marketers are still working in very small teams:

“Eighty-one percent of all inbound teams contain fewer than six people. This small team environment is pervasive at every level of the industry, as 31% of companies with 200+ employees still work in five-person teams or fewer.”

Arguably more troubling, the Content Marketing Institute found that fewer than 5 percent of marketers had any sort of editorial or content marketing mission statement. Asserts CMI founder Joe Pulizzi (@juntajoe): “This is a major problem. How can we execute a content strategy if we don’t have a clear vision for why we are developing the content in the first place?”

The tide has shifted toward content-driven, permission-based inbound marketing tactics, and the verdict is clear: Unless you dramatically shift your focus to work smarter, not harder, on content marketing efforts, you are almost certainly destined for failure.

As Warren Buffett puts it, “In a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.”

If you spend your weekdays drowning in content creation, it’s time to get out of the boat.

Rethinking Your Content

What can you do to keep your marketing team afloat?

Function less like a newspaper and more like a magazine.

Many content marketing teams function like newspapers: Coming up with topics for content as they go, and seeking inspiration from current events or trends.

And that model works fine for newsrooms, which dedicate their entire workweek to content production (though some would argue that they too are falling flat in the age of real-time journalism and the 24-hour news cycle). But the model fails marketers for two reasons:

1. It doesn’t allow for balance with the other responsibilities marketing teams have—whether account management, servicing other departments such as sales, data management and analysis, or outbound marketing programs.

2. It focuses on what is newest, not on what is most strategic.

But as anyone with experience in journalism, media relations or advertising knows, magazines have long lead times. The editorial calendar for the entire year is decided on by January, with advertising due months in advance and stories planned six months out.

The result? A well-developed, strategic product intended to entertain and inform its audience throughout the year. Long-term planning is key to addressing the fatigue of endless content creation, enabling you to:

Allocate team resources more effectively. Put an end to the need-it-yesterday hunt for topics; a practice that stifles creativity, causes staff burnout and allows low-quality ideas to slip through.
Achieve greater relevance. Balance proactive and reactive content creation by planning content specific to major events, holidays and seasonality you already know are ahead.
Proactively address gaps in content. Refine your strategy by addressing weak or absent content for specific keywords, buyer personas or stages in the sales funnel.

E3 Content Strategy founder Kathy Hanbury (@KathyHanbury) summarizes it well:

“You don’t necessarily need a large, formal content strategy. You just need to take the time to think things through and determine your goals, resourcing, workflow and success metrics, which can save you from the high cost of ineffective content. You can’t expect to get where you want to go if you don’t know where that is, what you need to do to get there, or how to even recognize it if you stumble across it.”

Approach the year strategically, so you have the bandwidth to learn and adjust based on performance. It should feel a bit like painting a mural: Ideally, you should be able to step back at the end of the year and see a well thought out picture.

By carving out a few hours a month, you can save yourself and your team from a year of heartache—and Alka-Seltzer. Here are some ideas to get started.

A 12-Month Content Marketing GamePlan

Annually

Your goal: Take stock of your assets and align your vision.

Tactics:

Take inventory. Review the organization's content (here is a sample content inventory spreadsheet). Evaluate and identify gaps or weaknesses.
Set objectives for the coming year to address gaps. Specify topics, content types (e.g. blog posts, premium content, multimedia content), and success metrics (e.g. page views, unique visitors, downloads).
Align with sales and organizational goals. Sit down with key stakeholders and identify major milestones for the year. These may be internal, such as new product launches, organizational restructuring, rebranding, or moving into new verticals, or external—like major events, trade shows and reports in your industry, as well as events important to your consumer (e.g. holidays).
Develop a content calendar. Similar to a magazine editorial calendar, outline theme(s) for each month that will guide content creation efforts, as well as premium content pieces, such as ebooks or white papers, that will require additional time and resources to publish.

Quarterly

Your goal: Review the major projects ahead. Identify tangible, near-term objectives to move inbound marketing efforts forward.

Tactics:

Quarters are a good time to review goals. You have enough data and learning to adjust goals based on performance, priority shifts and obstacles (such as another project eating up more time than anticipated), but it’s still big-picture enough to avoid getting too tactical.
Focus on the next 6 months. What do you plan to do this quarter to move marketing efforts forward, and how do you plan to build on that next quarter? Identify builders and drivers, then prioritize.

Monthly

Your goal: Build out content calendar with publishing workflow and milestones. Solicit input from stakeholders outside of marketing.

Tactics:

Review your content calendar, including slated topics, upcoming events and dates of significance in industry.
Set deadlines, workflows and publishing estimates, working backward based on how long you forecast to write, edit and publish.
Assign deliverables to members of content creation team.
If possible, hold a monthly cross-functional editorial meeting. Take this opportunity to pull in decision makers and subject matter experts across the organization to perpetuate organizational buy-in for inbound marketing efforts and to solicit feedback and content ideas.

Weekly

Your goal: Assess and adjust team workload as necessary. Perform a team gut check.

Tactics:

Conduct a weekly review. Set aside time each week for planning and organization. Review publishing deadlines, and get caught up on industry news.
Hold a weekly editorial meeting for the content-producing team. Share and discuss news and strategize timely content ideas. This is an especially helpful practice for more traditional marketing departments that are going inbound, where this process is less organic.
Review weekly assignments with editorial team. Make sure they know their assignments, shift workloads as necessary, and keep the team moving forward on larger content pieces.

Daily

Your goal: Execute and communicate.

Tactics:

Carve out time to write, to monitor and to publish. If you’re not part of content production, make sure the team commits some time to this each day.
Keep the lines of communication open, both for project management and idea generation purposes. An enterprise social network such as Yammer is ideal for this.
Fill slow days by producing evergreen content. Encourage your team to maintain a standing, shared list of ideas that they can “harvest” during downtime. Asana and Evernote are both great tools.

Remember, it’s not about doing all of these things at once; it’s shifting from proactive to reactive, urgency to strategy, quantity to quality.

I’ll leave you with Ardath Albee (@ardath421), who described this shift in a roundtable discussion at the 2012 Content Marketing World:

“We don’t plan anymore. We really don’t think about it, so we’re not being real thoughtful with our content. And that’s why I think there’s so much stuff out there that’s a repetition of what they’ve read or saw somewhere else ... Now everybody’s going to have to start backing up to, ‘What really makes our content work for us?’”

Photo credit

18 Marketing Performance Metrics that Matter

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:35:00 -0400

This article was originally published on the Marketing Score Blog. We decided to share it here as well because we think you'll find great value in it. Let us know what you think in the comments!

Section 3 of the Marketing Score assessment focuses on marketing performance. At the end of the day, how does your marketing impact the organization? Marketing Score examines 18 factors, which, to varying degrees, affect your organization’s bottom line.

Metrics such as cost of customer acquisition (COCA), customer lifetime value (CLV), retention rates, lead volume and revenue growth are almost universally accepted key performance indicators (KPIs) for every organization. Supporting metrics, including content downloads, inbound links, social media reach and “owned” subscribers, are critical to showing progress at the top and middle of marketing funnels.

Use Marketing Score to benchmark your organization’s marketing performance, and then construct an action plan that will drive improved results.

Rank Your Marketing Performance

In this post, we run through an overview of each factor featured in the performance section of the assessment.

Traditional Marketing Metrics

Following are more traditional metrics that show the value of your organization’s marketing efforts.

Content Downloads: What are your organization’s top downloads? (You’re using content to gather online lead insights and contact information, right?) Consider dynamic apps, videos, webinars, articles, handbooks, or any resources hosted online. Rank this factor well if you’re happy with the quantity and quality of current downloads.

If you don’t have downloadable content on your website, mark “N/A” for this factor, and consider the contact information you could start gathering by placing some of your most valuable content online behind a lead form.

Learn more about content marketing in the Marketing Score Resource Center.
Inbound Links: The number of quality inbound links coming to your website signal power to search engines like Google or Bing. The Wikipedia entry for backlink has more details.

You can also identify the power of inbound links to your site with tools such as SEOMoz’s mozRank and Open Site Explorer, or HubSpot’s Marketing Grader.
Lead Quality Score: How do incoming leads compare to your organization’s ICP (ideal customer profile)? Do you have automated scoring set up to grade incoming leads? If you’re unsure about how to grade leads, here are a few helpful resources:
- Are They Hot or Not? A guide to aligning marketing and sales by implementing lead scoring, from Marketo.
- Lead Scoring: 13 Criteria You Should Be Using to Grade Leads, by HubSpot.
- Big List of Lead Scoring, a checklist with more than 250 lead scoring rules from Marketo.
- What Is Lead Scoring and How Can It Benefit My Business?, from Kentico DevNet.
Lead Volume: How does your lead volume rank in terms of the resources put into top-of-funnel (TOFU) marketing? A tip to help assess your organization’s lead volume: work backward. What’s the overall business goal for marketing, and how many marketing qualified leads (MQLs) do you need to achieve that type of conversion?
Social Media Engagement: Whether social media drives brand awareness, customer service, media relationships, or retention, are your organization’s social media efforts engaging two-way conversations?

Social Media Today’s article, Measuring Engagement Levels in Social Media, by James Meyer (@NetProfitsMedia), offers a few good tools for finding additional insights into your social media performance.
Social Media Reach: Evaluate your social media reach based on what drives community and your brand. Do social media efforts promote your organization as a thought leader and influencer? Is reach growing—with the right audiences?

“Efforts to promote social profiles, pages, sharing, and engagement are meaningless unless they support a path to conversion and positively impact the bottom line.” – Rebecca Murtagh (@virtualmarketer), 5 Steps to Calculate Social Media ROI Using Google Analytics
Subscribers (Blog, Email, Newsletter, Etc.): How have your “owned” contact lists grown? Do you have a steady influx of subscribers to your blog or email list, and are you actively engaging your most interested audiences? Note, lists you have bought or rented don’t count. Opt-ins only!
Website Traffic: Much of what traditional marketing efforts drive is TOFU (top of the funnel) awareness and brand building. Social media efforts, content, blogging, events, speaking and PR aim to bring visitors to your website.

Does your organization measure overall website traffic, and is your website meeting the traffic goals that will convert leads and sales? How do your traditional marketing performance metrics add up? Take Marketing Score to benchmark and improve performance.

Integrated Marketing Metrics

As marketing and sales work more closely together, advanced metrics can track and measure the marketing performance that drives business results. The following metrics tackle marketing’s effect on the bottom line, and require close sales integration.

Cost of Customer Acquisition (COCA): To oversimplify, COCA takes your entire cost to acquire a customer over a given time, and divides it by the number of customers you acquire in that given time. Complexities arise when you take into account different variables that may be included in the formula, such as sales, support and marketing staff compensation.

For well-balanced business, COCA should be less than customer lifetime value (CLV, #10 on our list). Most businesses also aim to recover COCA over a set time frame. This advice, and a few example formula templates to find your COCA, can be found within the For Entrepreneurs’ blog post, Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): “At its simplest, the formula is meant to compare revenues generated by customers to the costs associated with acquiring them.” – J.J. Colao (@JJColao), Forbes, In Defense of the Lifetime Value (LTV) Formula

To differentiate from No. 9, COCA looks at what resources your organization puts into landing new customers, while CLV examines the potential value that customers bring to your organization.

The article above examines HubSpot’s CLV model, via this equation: [Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) xMargin]/Churn = CLV. The screenshot below shows how HubSpot arrives at its totals.

Source: In Defense of the Lifetime Value (LTV) Formula
Customer Retention Rates (CRR): Customer retention may be a performance measurement that most marketing managers dismiss or lack necessary insights to calculate. However, as marketing capabilities move deeper through the funnel to help improve customer loyalty, marketing, sales and customer service departments must share strategies and results.

How are your organization’s marketing efforts aimed to engage and nurture existing customers, and increase loyalty to start the sales cycle over again? Focus here if your product, service or existing customer base has potential to act as brand ambassadors.

An easy formula to calculate CRR: (Original Number of Customers – Lost Customers) / Original Number of Customers for the Given Period = CRR. For example, if you start the month with 100 customers, and lose 30 of the original customer base, the formula would be: (100-30)/100=70% CRR. Note: Do not include any new sales from this period of time.
Employee Retention Rates: Employee retention implies that your marketing team focuses on internal audiences, as well as boosts overall company perception. Good retention rates vary by industry, but impact the bottom line across the board in terms of the internal resources needed to interview, hire, onboard and develop new employees.

To find your company’s retention rate, look at number of employees last year at this time. For example, let’s say company ABC had 500 employees. After a full year, 350 of those original 500 employees are still working at company ABC. The retention rate is 350 / 500, or 70% (which isn’t very good).
Inbound Job Candidates: Job candidates may not be the most obvious performance metric, but companies that have the business cores and marketing foundations in place can tap into a larger, higher-quality pool of talent.

The more brand awareness your company generates, the easier it will be to hire. Rather than seeking out the best applicants, a powerful marketing program can prompt highly qualified candidates to find and engage your company for career opportunities.
Lead-to-Sale Conversion Rates: Once your marketing program starts to bring in leads, you have an opportunity to convert them to customers. Make sure your leads are well qualified by assessing the lead-to-sale conversion rate. You can measure it with the following formula: (Total Lead Conversions / Total Leads) x 100.

There are a lot of articles out there about improving lead conversion rates. Here are a few:
- 30 Lead Conversion Strategies, by Marketing Wizdom.
- 10 Ways to Improve Your Website Conversion Rates, by Added Bytes.
- The Technology You Need to Fix Dismal Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rates, by HubSpot.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): Net Promoter Score is based on the theory that one question, “How likely is it that you would recommend Company ABC to a friend or colleague?” can measure customer perception and performance.

Here’s an example NPS scale:

Source: The Net Promoter Score and System
Profitability: In The Marketing Agency Blueprint, Paul Roetzer (@paulroetzer) declares that, “inefficiency is the enemy of success.” He goes on to show that the more efficient marketing practices are, the more profitable businesses can become.

Any marketing metric you can tie to the bottom line gives marketers the chance to prove impact on profit. Consider some of the following when ranking marketing’s impact on profitability:
- How well is your marketing team talent bringing solutions to the table and getting high-quality work done?
- Is every marketing program tied to a bottom line business goal?
- How is marketing driving COCA down?
- How are you marketing to your most loyal customers for a more profitable upsell, referral and greater CLV?
Referrals: Often one of the strongest assets an organization can have—referrals are the direct result of a positive experience with your company, and bottom of the marketing funnel result of continually engaging existing customers.

Is your marketing team working to engage existing customers, making the most of customer testimonials, and tracking customer referral results?
Revenue Growth: “The sole purpose of marketing is to sell more to more people, more often, and at higher prices. There is no other reason to do it.” – Sergio Zyman, The End of Marketing As We Know It

You really can’t be more clear than this. Is your marketing program designed to sell, and is it working well to drive revenue? Rate your marketing accordingly.

Improve Marketing Performance

Growing your marketing team, program and results starts with the benchmark of where you are now. As you rate your marketing performance, consider strengths and challenges throughout the factors above. It’s a great conversation starter within the marketing department, between marketing and sales departments, and among an organization’s leadership team that proves marketing performance impacts bottom line results.

Let us know how you’ve been measuring marketing performance: what factors are the most important to your team, and what more are you measuring that may not be included above?

Developing Your Marketing Superpowers: Resources for Young Pros

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:06:36 -0400

You have to feel bad for Batman’s foes.

Poison darts. Smoke bombs. Grappling hooks. Just when the bad guys think they know what’s coming next, they get a batarang to the face.

Batman is rarely unprepared. And he always keeps the competition guessing, thanks to an array of tools, technologies and tactics that cross disciplines.

If you’re not a DC Comics fan, Marvel’s Tony Stark offers a similar example. Stark’s design philosophy for each new Iron Man suit is simple: More weapons in more places. Just when you think he’s out of tricks, his left boot heel unleashes more firepower than an entire navy.

Batman’s half ninja, half engineer. Tony Stark’s part man and part machine. Today’s marketers need to be hybrids, too. It’s an approach we at PR 20/20 advocate in our Evolution of the Prototype Marketer ebook. And it’s a professional philosophy young marketing pros need to embrace.

The Hybrid Marketing Utility Belt

Like Batman and Iron Man, today’s marketing professional needs an arsenal of knowledge, strategies, tools and technologies in their utility belt (or battle armor) to survive and thrive.

But you don’t need special powers to tap your inner marketing superhero. Whether you’re a young aspiring marketer or a seasoned pro looking to update and enhance your skills, Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark have some important lessons for all of us.

1. Knowledge is power

The training montage is an action movie hallmark. Cue two minutes of epic music and cut it with scenes of our protagonist training, inventing or doing something else appropriately awesome. The result? Zero to hero in 120 seconds.

Both Batman and Iron Man went through a montage to become heroes, but don’t be fooled: Behind every montage is days, months or even years of learning, trial and error, and study.

Start your own journey with these essential reads:

Inbound Marketing by Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh) and Brian Halligan (@bhalligan). The founders of marketing software company HubSpot explain why inbound is marketing’s future and how to succeed at it in this step-by-step guide.
The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott (@dmscott). Marketing strategist David Meerman Scott walks you through the essential online technologies and modern tactics that companies need today to reach customers
The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) and Ben Casnocha (@bencasnocha). Uncertain economic times. Rapidly changing job requirements. Disruptive technology. Hoffman (of LinkedIn founding fame) and Casnocha show you why you need to treat your professional life like a startup: an agile organization devoted to constant improvement and delivering value.
The Marketing Agency Blueprint by Paul Roetzer (@paulroetzer). OK, maybe we’re a little biased, but here PR 20/20’s founder and CEO teaches you how to create a disruptive marketing agency and recruit a team of A-players. Though you might not be starting your own agency, this book has valuable information on how marketing is changing—and how you can keep up.

2. Pick the right tools for the job

Batman didn’t assemble his utility belt overnight. The first Iron Man suit was a shadow of what came later. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by all the educational resources and marketing tools out there, but many offer training to help you out. Here are some suggestions.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation software is swiftly changing the marketing game. Big players to watch and learn from include HubSpot, Marketo, KISSmetrics and Eloqua. These tools help marketers attract leads, create powerful content and set up email campaigns. And the companies behind them often offer rich marketing resources—from blogs posts and ebooks to videos and certifications—to sharpen your marketing skills.

Check out HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Certification program: it’s free (you’ll need to sign up for an account) and it gives you a solid grounding in everything inbound marketing—and, if you pass the certification test, a shiny certification to boot. Marketo offers a large library of marketing content and the KISSmetrics blog is packed with valuable tips.

Analytics

The ultimate free analytics engine, Google Analytics is the modern marketer’s Jarvis (or perhaps an Alfred Pennyworth on steroids). The tool itself is invaluable, and Google offers free training seminars. A certification test will set you back $50—a small price to pay for the value offered here. Microsoft Bing’s Webmaster Tools offer similar capabilities for the company’s search engine.

Without tools and technology, comic book fans would be reading the obituaries of Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark. The same goes for marketers: the marketing landscape is changing at light speed. Failure to keep up is fatal.

3. Invest in yourself

Sure, Bruce and Tony both have billion-dollar companies with their names on the buildings. But you don’t need a vacation home (or bat cave) to grab some world-class education.

You might, however, need a change of mentality. Spending disposable income on self-education, especially after paying for a college degree, is daunting. But it’s necessary to keep up, deliver value and advance your career.

A college degree is the money down; self-education resources are the lifelong payments that keep you afloat. Here are a few worth your time and money.

Treehouse

Treehouse is an online learning platform that will teach you everything from HTML and CSS coding to business fundamentals and responsive web design. Combining videos and practical lessons, the courses are in-depth and clearly explained. We use it at PR 20/20 and find it invaluable. A Treehouse subscription costs $25 to $49 per month.

Industry Events

If it’s a skill, there’s a conference for it. Industry events are valuable ways to meet new contacts, improve your skills and better understand the tools you learned about in Step 2. Try the following:

Hubspot’s Inbound
Content Marketing Institute’s Content Marketing World
DreamForce hosted by SalesForce
SEOmoz’s inbound marketing conference MozCon

Need more inspiration? Here’s a list of major marketing events nationwide.

Making Connections

Sometimes, the best connections are made one-on-one. Allocate some of your budget toward taking interesting people out to lunch or coffee. Every industry needs marketing—and everyone has something to teach you, either about modern marketing or their unique field.

Local chapters of national industry groups also provide great opportunities to connect. Organizations like the Public Relations Society of America and the Business Marketing Association offer discounted member fees for new pros. Member pricing on most events (lunches, happy hours, etc.) is typically lower than non-member pricing.

4. Find your Avengers (or Justice League)

Even Batman and Iron Man needed help. Batman had the Justice League; Iron Man joined the Avengers. Together, these teams fought the battles that lone superheroes couldn’t.

Whether you’re learning modern marketing with like-minded individuals, conducting informational interviews or vetting a potential employer’s culture, people matter more than the pay, perks or position. They’ll be the ones who push you forward, support you when you fail and make your work experience exceptional.

Superheroes need allies, friends and mentors. These people aren’t just helpful resources—they actively make the protagonist better. Seek them out at any cost.

And in the meantime: Live every day like you’re Tony Stark.

15 Skills of the Modern Marketing Team

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:15:00 -0400

This article was originally published on the Marketing Score Blog. We decided to share it here as well because we think you'll find great value in it. Let us know what you think in the comments!

“To be successful nowadays, you need have both a breadth and depth of skills. You have to know what to ask for and how it’s done. Without both of these capabilities, you’re prone to be less efficient than a colleague or competitor who does." — Jamie Steven (@jamies), SEOmoz, Every Marketer Should be Technical

Digital marketing has revolutionized the industry, leaving many organizations scrambling to adapt their teams.

In Evolution of the Prototype Marketer (download the free ebook), we delve into the marketing industry’s rapidly growing talent gap, driven in large part by the velocity of change, rapidly evolving consumer buying behaviors, and demands being placed on marketing leaders to show measurable business results.

Consider the following:

Gartner predicts that in just five years, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. (source)
IDC predicts that in 2013, more than half of all new marketing hires will have a technical background. (source)
On average, Google found that today’s shoppers reference 10.4 sources before making a purchasing decision. (source)
By 2016, Forrester forecasts interactive spending to reach $77 billion, up from $34 billion in 2011. (source)
In the 2011 IBM Global Chief Marketing Officer Study, 63% of respondents cited marketing ROI as the most important metric to measure marketing success, followed by customer experience (58%) and conversion rate/ new customers (48%). (source)
71% of CMOs indicated that they are underprepared to manage the impact of this data explosion. (source)
In October 2012, global smartphone users rose above one billion for the first time ever, with users expected to reach two billion by 2015. (source)
75% of marketers say their lack of skills is impacting revenue in some way, and 74% say it’s contributing to misalignment between the marketing and sales teams. (source)

So what does this mean to your organization, and marketing team?

The Modern Marketer: Rise of the Hybrids

Next-generation marketers are emerging today. They are generalists who are proficient in a variety of core marketing activities, analytical, creative, tech-savvy and driven. They push the limits of marketing and tie outputs to measurable results. We call these individuals hybrids.

As defined in The Marketing Agency Blueprint, “Hybrid professionals are trained to deliver services across search, mobile, social, content, analytics, web, PR, and email marketing. They provide integrated solutions that used to require multiple agencies and consultants.”

Evaluate Your Marketing Team

Section 6 of Marketing Score focuses on the skills of a modern marketing team. While not all employees may possess or excel at every skill, it’s important to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of your team, then train or hire staff to better accommodate your needs, or outsource them to marketing agencies or specialists.

Below are brief descriptions of the core factors featured in this section of the assessment:

Coding/Programming: While your company may not staff developers, your marketing team should make a point to understand the basics of coding/programming.

According to Eric Wittlake (@wittlake) in 7 Characteristics of Tomorrow’s Best B2B Marketers, “You don’t need to be a developer or systems manager (yet), but databases, scripting languages and APIs should open the window of possibilities, not make your eyes glaze over.”
Copywriting/Publishing: Marketers must be strong writers, as they construct the messaging that represents your company. They must write grammatically correct, with creative style, persuasively and concise, and accommodate style the given format, be it a website landing page, email or traditional press release.
Data Analysis: There is a growing need to prove investment in marketing through ROI. Marketers must have strong analytical skills—the ability to interpret website and marketing data, gauge the success of a campaign, and communicate meaningful results. They must be able to turn information into intelligence, and intelligence into action.
Email Marketing: Opt-in email marketing is an effective way to reach your customers, leads and prospects, and can be used to distribute action-oriented messages, including company announcements, product updates, new premium content and more.

Effective email marketers understand the buyer’s pathway, capture and target lists, segment messages for audiences, and tweak campaigns based on performance. How well does your marketing team integrate email solutions into their communication plan?
Event Planning/Production: How capable is your team at planning events for your business, networking purposes or other professional groups? Do they have connections with local vendors, venues and professionals? For event-focused organizations, this skill set is vital to executing a successful event.
Graphic Design: Visual storytelling is critical in modern marketing, and strong graphic design skills are key to enhancing the value and sharability of your marketing assets. Similar to coding/programming, teams need to either have capabilities in-house, or a trusted outsourced partner.
Lead Management/Nurturing: How effective is your team in managing and nurturing leads received through communication channels—website, form downloads, phone, social media, etc.? Use of a CRM or automated marketing solution is essential to organizing and engaging these leads through the funnel.
Mobile Strategy: According to the research firm Strategy Analytics, in October 2012, global smartphone users rose above one billion for the first time ever, with users expected to reach two billion by 2015.

We are constantly connected through mobile web browsers, social media, product and service apps, texting, and more. As smart phones continue to dominate the market and consumer usage rates increase, your team needs to have an understanding of how your company can make a play in mobile, and which format makes the most sense for your business and its customers.
Paid Search Management: If structured appropriately—with a pre-determined budget, intelligent segmentation, optimization and effective call-to-action—pay per click (PPC) campaigns can drive results for your business. Marketers need a technical understanding of how paid search programs work, and continuously evolve strategy based on results.
Public Relations: PR encompasses any activity, online or offline, designed to improve communications and build relationships. This includes, but is not limited to: analyst relations, blogger relations, community relations, crisis communications, employee relations, media relations and public speaking.

Marketing professionals with PR skills are valued assets in the modern marketing mix. How does your team measure up?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): According to Google’s Zero Moment of Truth study, consumers reference 10.4 sources of information before making a buying decision. Are they finding your company online?

Does your marketing team have a keyword universe it utilizes to optimize website copy, social media accounts and updates, online listings, and PPC campaigns? How capable are they in driving inbound visitors to these channels through targeted keywords, and how does organic search impact your conversion rates and sales?
Social Media: Social networks are critical to marketing and customer service. More than ever, consumers turn to social media to receive updates from brands, consult with friends and read reviews of the businesses they interact with. How well does your marketing team integrate social media with their communication plan, and respond appropriately on behalf of the brand?
Strategic Planning: The best plan is to prepare for perpetual change. The range of possible marketing activities can seem endless. What a marketing team must excel in is how they all work together as part of an integrated, strategic plan. How well does your team conceptualize the marketing strategy, select a course of action and determine upfront what the core KPIs of that program will be?
Video Production/Editing: Video is one of the most visually stimulating ways to engage your target audience. Does your marketing team have these capabilities, or do they partner with a reliable vendor?
Website Management: Your website is a lead-generation and multi-media content publishing tool. It gives your organization the ability to build a strong brand online that creates powerful connections with audiences, and drives business growth. The goal of your site should be to connect with audiences, drive qualified website traffic and generate leads.

Without a knowledgeable, driven marketing team, organizations will fall behind in their skill sets, understanding of technology and ability to run performance-based marketing programs.

“There are some traditional marketers that are lacking some newly defined skills. It’s out in the open now that it takes a combination of marketing savvy, a solid understanding of data and a bit of technical know-how . . . These people aren’t a dime a dozen.” — Chris Parisi, vice president of technology, Bulldog Solutions (source)

Move Your Marketing Team Forward

Join Marketing Score to assess your team, and download Evolution of the Prototype Marketer to learn more about what it takes to build a powerful modern marketing department.

Stay updated: Subscribe to the PR 20/20 blog, check us out on Facebook, and follow the team on Twitter.

15 Business Basics that Impact Overall Marketing Success

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 09:30:00 -0400

This article was originally published on the Marketing Score Blog. We decided to share it here as well because we think you'll find great value in it. Let us know what you think in the comments!

The first section of the Marketing Score assessment focuses on business cores, as these factors are the fundamental building blocks of an organization and brand. Use Marketing Score to benchmark your organization’s business foundations, and fuel meaningful conversations between marketing and management.

Rank Your Business Cores

In this post, we run through each factor featured in the assessment, categorized as business basics, product/service foundations, and team strengths.

Business Basics

Let’s start with the basic factors that determine if the foundation for success is in place:

Corporate Culture: Defined as the blend of values, beliefs, taboos, rituals, etc., which all companies develop over time, corporate culture can ultimately determine the way employees think and act.

Consider findings of Corporate Culture and Performance, by John Kotter and James Heskett, which argues that,“strong corporate cultures that facilitate adaptation to a changing world are associated with strong financial results. We found that those cultures highly value employees, customers, and owners and that those cultures encourage leadership from everyone in the firm.”

Does your corporate culture nurture positivity, performance, and innovation? Healthy corporate cultures fuel the best ideas, talent, and work—from marketing through product development.
Financial Stability: Businesses struggling to maintain financial stability are often under pressure to keep costs down, which can directly impact the quality of work coming from that organization. Financially stable businesses are able to invest in the best people, processes and technologies, without looming financial worries. These organizations don’t act out of desperation, and tend to remain committed to long-term, organic marketing programs that lead to sustained growth and success.
Innovation: Does your organization innovate, or does it copy existing models? Innovative companies thrive on bettering existing processes and working through challenges. These are the types of companies that move products, services, and the people associated with them, forward.

From the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: “I believe innovation is the most powerful force for change in the world … innovation fundamentally shifts the trajectory of development.”
Tolerance for Risk: How much risk can your business handle? Does it often take calculated risks to achieve set goals? Growth demands some tolerance for risk, especially in terms of new business and marketing tech adoption that demands we learn to fail fast (to succeed faster).
Vision: What’s your organizational vision? Is it clearly articulated by leadership, and does it inspire and resonate with how the business operates?

The following quote was adapted from Zingerman's Guide to Good Leading, Part 1: A Lapsed Anarchist's Approach to Building a Great Business, by Ari Weinzweig:

“A great vision is inspiring. It gets you and everyone in the organization excited to come to work; it's the cathedral everyone is coming to work every day to construct. This is not mere wishful thinking. A vision must also be strategically sound. You have to have a reasonable shot at getting there.”

For more on the importance of vision across a business, check out the full 2011 Forbes article, Creating a Company Vision.

Product & Service Foundations

All the great marketing in the world may not be enough if the product or service you’re providing doesn’t work. How does your offering perform? Consider the following:

Competitive Advantage: Can you define the competitive advantage of your organization’s product or service? If not, marketing that product or service is going to be an uphill climb.
Market Share: Does your product or service stand out in a crowded market, or is it in a market of its own? Know the overall market demand for your organization’s product or service—as well as where your organization stands in terms of existing and forecasted market share—to better align business and marketing goals with realistic expectations.

For more on market share, see this Investopedia guide.
Pricing Strategy: Your organization’s pricing strategy is critical to its financial health and sustainability. When determining optimal price points, consider brand positioning, market demand, costs, profit margins, point of differentiation, customer loyalty, and more.

Need more pricing resources? Our team recently connected with Price Intelligently, and found the Price Intelligently blog to be filled with solid pricing strategy information.
Product/Service Quality: Would you use and recommend your company’s product or service? Identify issues around product and service quality early in your business and marketing planning to devise smart, transparent strategies that address similar issues your customers are sure to also experience.

“Do a comprehensive review of your product, the benefits it offers and why someone would want to use it … involve in-market research, focus groups or asking non-biased people for their thoughts. What you’re seeking is honest, frank and constructive criticism, even if it stings. If your product isn’t good, let alone great, you’ve got a problem that no amount of marketing is going to fix.”Conversations around the overall quality of your offering will also fuel more realistic marketing and business result expectations. Mark Evans (@markevans) lays it out well in his post, The Best Marketing Is a Great Product.
Internal Communications: How does your team communicate? Are you a slave to internal email chains, or do you take advantage of internal social networks like Yammer? For many organizations, efficient internal communications yield better productivity, collaboration, and products or services.
External Communications: Do you have a sound communications strategy for all your external audiences—customers, media, vendors, job candidates, analysts, etc.? Are your communications consistent with your brand positioning across all channels? An integrated communications strategy is paramount to building brand preference and loyalty.

Team Strengths

Overall team strength—in terms of skill sets, as well as drive and attitude—can make or break a business.

Community Involvement: Does your business support employee volunteer efforts, or provide opportunities for employees to engage in community event opportunities?

Corporate citizenship—including having a positive social impact—is on the rise, and more employees expect the opportunity to give back and engage with their communities. According to Service Leader: “Businesses have begun to realize that their bottom line, delivery of profitable products and services, reputation, and retention of high quality employees all depend on their commitment to responsible, community-centered business practices.”

Additional business benefits that show the impact of community involvement, according to The Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College, include:
- A more cohesive, motivated workforce.
- Improved leadership and interpersonal skills.
- Improved employee performance and productivity.
- Better brand reputation in local markets.
Customer Service: Awareness, nurturing, and the sale are just the beginning of your organization’s relationship with its customers. Service, satisfaction and loyalty from existing customers can be one of your organization’s greatest assets—and revenue channels.

Your customer service team is often the point of most direct contact with existing or prospective customers. Rank your customer service team or help desk’s professionalism, resourcefulness and effectiveness.

Consider this: 89% of consumers reported doing business with a competitor after they received poor customer service (source: Oracle’s 2011 Customer Experience Impact Report). Would you be happy with the experience after contacting your support? Does poor customer service keep customers from calling, or drive them to switch to a competitor?
Marketing Team: How would you rate the overall strength of your marketing team? Marketing teams must be able to envision on a strategic level, build fully integrated campaigns, and execute on the tactical level, conducting activities that drive real business results.

Consider traditional and modern marketing skill sets, including strong competencies in business, IT and human behavior, as well as proficient copywriting, web, analytics and creative skills.

Check out our Marketing Team Performance post and new PR 20/20 ebook, Evolution of the Prototype Marketer: The Hybrids Are Coming, for details on what it takes to perform in today's modern marketing industry.
Sales Staff: If your business has a sales team, how successful are they?

Consider whether that team has the best tools (CRM, lead nurturing); processes (lead scoring and qualifications, marketing-to-sales handoffs, standard presentation tools); and personality for the job.

7 Personality Traits of Top Salespeople from Harvard Business Review lists the following personality traits to consider among your team:
- Modesty
- Conscientiousness
- Achievement Orientation
- Curiosity
- Lack of Gregariousness
- Lack of Discouragement
- Lack of Self-Consciousness

Set a Foundation for Success

Growing your business—and moving your marketing forward—starts with a solid foundation and aligned expectations. That’s what the Business Cores section of the Marketing Score assessment is about, and why it’s absolutely critical to the overall success of your marketing program.

As you rate your business cores, consider strengths and challenges for each of the factors above. Use the honest answers as talking points with your organization’s management team.

Let us know what else you consider when evaluating business cores in the comments below.

Photo Credit: billaday via Compfight cc

Is There Room in PR for Content Marketing?

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:30:00 -0400

Following is a guest blog post by Keith Ecker (@Keith_JaffePR) vice president of public reputation services at Jaffe PR, a public reputation agency that provides services to the legal marketplace, including law firms, legal technology vendors and legal associations.

The buzzword on every marketer’s lips this year is content marketing—and with good reason. Never before have brands been able to so easily transform themselves into de facto content creators through the use of affordable publishing and distribution tools, such as blogging platforms, Twitter and LinkedIn. Meanwhile, the definition of what constitutes a traditional media outlet continues to be flipped on its head as websites, blogs and social media sites become go-to reads for consumers and key decision-makers.

So, what does this shift in the way information is produced and consumed mean for the world of public relations? If audiences are more prone to read a Twitter feed over the New York Times, is it time for all us publicists to hang up our hats and call it a day?

While it’s no longer business as usual for the PR industry, I’d argue that this is one of the most exciting times to be a publicist. Rather than fight the inevitable changes, I recommend embracing these changes as an opportunity to redefine the profession. Content marketing isn’t making PR obsolete; it’s forcing it to adapt to make itself more effective than ever.

The following are just some of the ways in which publicists can retain their relevancy in this age of content marketing.

Repurpose impressions: Strategic publicists know that securing an impression is merely step one. The real traction comes when you find ways to repurpose that impression. As brands increasingly become their own content creators, the demands for new content are ever-growing. PR’s central role in content marketing is to land impressions that can be circulated back into the content marketing workflow and repurposed as blogs, website content, infographics and a variety of other types of media.
Manage social media accounts: Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ are more than just great ways to kill some time at work. They are the largest publishing platforms in existence, each with its own built-in audience of millions of users. Why not cut out the middle man—that being traditional media—and deliver your client’s message directly to the target audience?
Become a Twitter expert: Besides helping to manage the social media of your clients, you can also use social media as a robust PR tool to monitor and engage with traditional media. Twitter is especially useful in this arena, as practically every publication, editor and reporter has an active handle on the site these days. In fact, by actively seeking out media feeds that are relevant to your clients, you not only can get instant insight into what the outlet is covering, but you can also directly engage with the outlet through retweets and Tweet @s.
Understand SEO strategy: There are two parts to SEO: the humans and the robots. The humans are your site visitors. The robots are the search engines and their complex algorithms, which dictate where your site ends up in search engine results. While humans are drawn to the quality of your content, the robots are influenced by a number of other factors. One of these factors is backlinks – links from authoritative websites that point people to your site. The more reputable backlinks, the higher your site might rank. Publicists should consciously think of ways to strategically land backlink opportunities for their clients. For instance, having a bylined article published on a reputable industry website and embedding backlinks into that article can help raise an organization’s SEO profile.
Get traditional media impressions: Yes, I just said that we have entered an era in which traditional media is losing its relevance. But decades of aggregated industry clout don’t disappear overnight. Established media outlets have two things going for them that many new media sites do not: credibility and circulation. Few can compete with the cachet of credibility established by the likes of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

As the PR industry continues to experience a sea change, publicists have to make the choice to fight the current or ride the wave. Those who learn to adapt will thrive, while those who stay the course may see diminished returns over time. The greater point, though, is that content marketing is not a threat to PR; it’s just the new reality.

How has your organization adapted the role of traditional PR for today's market?

Stay updated: Subscribe to the PR 20/20 blog, check us out on Facebook, and follow the team on Twitter.

Corporate Social Media Law: An Attorney’s Input on Things to Consider

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:00:00 -0400

It’s no surprise that social media has made its way to the business world. As organizations and professionals alike become increasingly active—blending personal and professional personas, time, and commentary—there are many areas for corporate leaders to consider in regard to social media legalities. Intellectual property, copyright and libel issues, HR considerations and ownership rights, just to name a few.

As a consultant who guides clients on their social media policies and procedures, the broad topic of social media law is of great interest, and I try my best to stay attuned to recent news and cases.

That said, I’m no lawyer. So, to get some insider insight I reached out to Peter S. Nealis, partner, Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP.

Peter mainly represents early stage, venture capital backed technology companies. Because of the nature of his clients, many facets of corporate social media law are of interest, and find their way into consultations. Common issues that Peter has consulted on include:

Ownership of intellectual property and other intangibles
Employee rights
Libel
Data privacy
Business-specific regulations

Following are details on each of these areas, per my conversation with Peter. (Click on any topic above to jump to that section.)

Ownership Rights

Who owns an employee’s Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, or Twitter account? What about intellectual property—developed during or after work hours—that is related to the company and its industry?

Peter’s experience: Several clients have come to Peter with concerns about this issue, including:

Solicitation of the company’s customers via public LinkedIn connections, Twitter follower lists, etc. by competitors.
Worries about employees stealing technology and other intangibles, particularly “soft” assets like code, client lists, and intellectual property.
Legalities of suing former employees to obtain their Twitter followers.

How to protect your company: Address these issues in non-compete agreements, as well as through written social media policies. These documents are good for covering ownership of Twitter follower lists or other soft assets. Ideally, you will want to explicitly cover any anticipated issues, so that there are no gray areas. Regularly update these agreements as new situations arise.

Ensure that employees have confidentiality and non-solicitation provisions built into their contracts, should they leave the company.
Include an inventions clause. This clause governs ownership if an employee develops technology / software within the scope of his or her employment duties, or if the development occurs using company funds, information, technology, or other resources.
Make sure to explicitly cover Twitter account and follower ownership, potentially with varying degrees based on the nature and name of the account (ex: @laurelmackenzie may have different ownership guidelines than @PR2020Laurel).

Employee Rights

How far can employees go in social media updates? When can legal action be taken against an employee who talks ill of the company?

Peter’s experience: Clients have called in instances when an employee complained about his or her company or boss on social networks. They want to know what their recourse is. Can I fire this employee?

How to protect your company: Again, have a social media policy in place that addresses such online chatter, which you can point to for grounds if needed. However, before getting too deep into creating a policy based solely on what you want, familiarize yourself with any applicable legal or regulatory restraints.

For example, in interpreting the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has taken the position that certain broadly drafted social media policies may cover activities that are protected under the NLRA, regardless of whether or not the employer is unionized.

That said, there may be restrictions on how far an employer can go to regulate online activity. For example, you generally cannot restrict employees from friending one another or complaining about work. As mentioned above, be as specific as possible in your policy to manage expectations and avoid arguments.

Cool thing for HR folks and corporate social media geeks: Check out the NLRB’s reports on lawfulness of social media policies.

Libel

When does negative online chatter cross the line to be deemed libel? When can legal action be taken to remove postings or request payment for damages?

Peter’s experience: Certain clients have had to deal with negative online comments and reviews concerning a client or its business—either from customers or employees. How can one deal with such situations, particularly when comments are unfounded?

Peter notes that commentary found online will typically not hold up in court as being libelous. Many comments are protected as statements of mere opinion. Further, the host / webmaster of the offending website is often protected by various statutory and common law safe harbors. Most important, given the anonymity of the Internet, it is often difficult (as a practical matter) to even identify the offending commentator, let alone assert jurisdiction or reduce a defamation claim to judgment.

How to protect your company: When something is highly derogatory, in some cases it’s worth contacting the website host, or even writing a “lawyer letter.” However, these sorts of communications are often met with pushback from webmasters, who will point to First Amendment rights, or statutory or other legal safe harbors.

There sometimes may be a more practical solution. Some of Peter’s clients have had success engaging a firm that specializes in branding, social media and/or social business, which can help you better manage your company’s online presence and reputation.

Note from the social media consultant point of view: At PR 20/20, we often recommend to clients that if the site in question enables the company, or a company representative, to respond to the post, that they do so. This is, of course, depending upon the nature of the comment. But, often an apology, explanation and potentially an offer for a refund, discount or second chance can help change the negative Ned or Nancy’s experience to the positive.

Data Privacy

What promises do you need to offer to your online community to keep their information safe?

Peter’s experience: Any time you host a community, encourage people to log into your site, or store contact data, you need to consider their data security, and thus the security of your website and network. If your customer data is hacked—particularly if you hold financial data or personally identifiable consumer information—you may be held liable for damages.

How to protect your company: Specifically address data security standards in your website privacy policy and other customer agreements.

Website privacy policy: Explain what your company will do with contact / customer data, how their data will be protected, how much data you collect from users, and what protections the company has in place to protect their data. In the case of a hack, this could be a source of recovery. Your policy needs to be flexible enough to change as your business changes, as well as to cover a potential sale, reorganization, or other strategic transaction.
Customer agreements: Clearly state what customers can expect, and hold you accountable for. For example, if your business hosts customer data, software, websites or other business-critical assets, you need to account for details like uptime, availability, security levels, backups, and disaster relief / data recovery plans. Work with legal counsel to develop a fair agreement that limits your company’s liability in case of a breach. Also, prep your sales team to understand where there is and is not wiggle room in these agreements, as they are often highly negotiated.

Business-Specific Regulations

How can organizations and professionals in regulated industries stay compliant on social sites?

Although virtually every business is online nowadays, not every business is the same. Depending on the nature of their business and its customer base, some may face a host of legal and regulatory issues.

As a web-based business becomes more specialized, the legal issues become more specialized as well. For example, sites targeting physicians or medical issues will need to be aware of Federal and state laws regulating the practicing of medicine. In addition, there are always going to be liability issues if there is faulty advice or other content found on the site.

How to protect your company: Though you may not be building a social network, it’s still important to consider your liability for comments and chatter that takes place on your corporate web properties, and those your employees make on other networks.

For hosted properties, carefully consider your website terms and conditions, as well as customer or community member agreements if applicable. In some cases, you may need to have individuals explicitly sign participation agreements—typically through the use of a clickwrap acceptance feature on your website.

If you are running a specialized site, limit access. In the physician example, you can help mitigate risk by limiting access only to licensed physicians.

Regulations are also something important to address in your company’s social media policy. Work with your HR and legal teams to determine any regulatory issues specific to your industry that should be addressed in regard to online behavior, to determine what policies should be put in place, and what types of disclaimers may be needed for online content, social accounts and employee commentary.

Is This Legal Advice?

While we’re on the subject of industry regulations …

There are many lawyers active in social media, as in other professions. Peter mentioned that a lot of his peers blog, write articles and the like, but there is an ever-present concern about writing legal advice, so you’ll see lots of disclaimers. Like this one:

This blog post does not establish an attorney client relationship. Peter’s participation is to provide observations, not legal advice.

That said, if your organization finds itself in a web-driven legal quandary, here are some things to keep in mind should you need a lawyer who is modern / social business savvy. Look for:

Corporate lawyers that specialize in computer and / or internet law or that have a background representing tech companies (web-based companies in particular). These types of lawyers can add value by identifying and addressing technology issues that may not be apparent to the general practitioner.
Also look for a lawyer who has helped clients through the entire company lifecycle. As companies grow and become more successful, their business and legal needs are likely to change. An attorney that has been through this process will be able to anticipate issues before they even come up.
Look for counsel with a broad business background as well as securities expertise. These individuals will be able to assist with capital raising and other matters commonly faced by growth-oriented businesses. The right lawyer will often have the capability to act as outside general counsel for web startups, ideally taking them through the entire life of their startup—from seed capital, to VC investment, to exit or IPO.

What Else Do You Want to Know?

What additional questions do you have about social media legalities? What situations has your organization faced? Let us know in the comments!

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How to Rank Better on Google and Bing (SXSW Session Recap)

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:35:00 -0400

You will never again hear me criticize teenaged girls for sobbing at the sight of their favorite boy band. I lived an hour in their shoes when Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan), editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, led Matt Cutts (@mattcutts), head of Google’s Web Spam Team, and Duane Forrester (@duaneforrester), senior product manager with Bing’s Webmaster Program, on stage for the “How To Rank Better on Google and Bing” session at this year’s SXSW Interactive conference.

For those of us who follow SEO closely, it doesn’t get much better than this, and the trio didn’t disappoint. The session was Q&A style, where the crowd asked search-related questions and the panelists answered in turn.

While nothing ground-breakingly new came of it, a lot of the advice was very actionable. Despite my trembling hands, I was able to take copious notes, the highlights of which I’ve polished below.

Overall Takeaway

Before we get into the Q&A, one central theme seemed to resurface in most of the answers given:

If you want to rank better on search engines—both Google and Bing—publish high-quality content that is relevant to your audiences. Both search engines strive to deliver the most valuable content to users, and the more a site’s content is shared, engaged with and linked to, the more valuable search engines consider it.

Now on to the Q&A.

How do I know if search engines are properly indexing my content?

Different technologies (i.e. Flash and some JavaScript) can hide content from search engines, and if Google and Bing can’t see it, they can’t rank you for it.

To test that Google and Bing are properly indexing all the content on your site:

Conduct a search on Google for your company or website.
Click the double-gray arrow next to your site’s search result (see below).
Click on the “Cached” link below your page title in the right column.
On the next page, click on the “Text-only version” link in the grey bar along the top.

What you see on this new page is your web page without any design elements. This is what search engines see and is the extent to which they can index. If you don’t see your content here, then neither does Google or Bing.

This type of report is also available in both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.

How can I compete against powerful sites if I’m small or just starting out?

In one of the more hilarious parts of the session, a woman who runs a well-intentioned sex-education site asked how she can compete against the juggernaut that is online porn since in many ways they compete for the same keywords.

This type of issue isn’t constrained to the porn industry, as many startups and small businesses also have a seemingly Sisyphean task to face when trying to rank for competitive keywords.

To “climb porn mountain,” both search engine reps advised that the woman find a niche that she could own, and then build up authority around that topic through relevant, valuable content. They recommend to start focused on one or two specific niches, and then as the site gains credibility in those areas, expand into other, more competitive topics.

What value do online press releases offer in terms of search?

Both Google and Bing have downgraded the value they place on online press releases and their embedded links, even though they get “picked-up” by some powerful sites. What they found was that by and large, searchers did not find these releases useful and online press release links were not a good indication of valuable content.

Forrester went on to mention that this is not to say companies should stop publishing press releases, just that time spent on online distribution methods may be better spent in focused media pitching. The value of a press release, at its core, is to convince a reporter to write about you or your company, and links from well-established news sites pass a lot of PageRank.

“You really only need a couple high-quality links from highly credible sites to make a noticeable difference in rankings. You don’t need 10,000 different links.”

What is Schema.org and should I be using it?

Schema.org is a collaboration by Google, Bing and Yahoo! to improve the web by providing “a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines ... rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.” (Source: Schema.org)

When asked whether webmasters should use Schema.org mark-ups, panelists offered a resounding “Yes!” Schema.org isn’t necessarily meant to help you increase rankings, but it does help search engines better understand your products and website. The better understanding they have of your content, the more confident they are showing it to their searchers.

If marked-up properly, search engines can also better integrate different information directly into your search results listings, like ratings, reviews, profile pictures, etc. According to SEOmoz, “many companies have seen a 20-30% rise in click-through rates when using rich snippets.”

Schema.org is similar in purpose to other rich snippets mark ups, but it is the only standard agreed to by all search engines.

Additional SEO Resources

Obviously, a lot more was covered in this one-hour panel. Listen to the complete session here.

Also, below are some resources both search representatives recommended looking into to help improve your understanding of what search engines look for in a website.

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