Your company might have clout in your industry – but does it have Klout?

Klout, as you may have heard, is a website that automatically attaches a rating from 1 to 100 to everyone – and every business – who has at least a public Twitter account. Those whose numbers are higher have more “clout” on social-media networks.

And why is your score important?

As Seth Stevenson writes in Wired:

Last spring Sam Fiorella was recruited for a VP position at a large Toronto marketing agency. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications. But midway through the interview, he was caught off guard when his interviewer asked him for his Klout score. Fiorella hesitated awkwardly before confessing that he had no idea what a Klout score was.

The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”

Partly intrigued, partly scared, Fiorella spent the next six months working feverishly to boost his Klout score, eventually hitting 72. As his score rose, so did the number of job offers and speaking invitations he received. “Fifteen years of accomplishments weren’t as important as that score,” he says.

Klout is also influential outside of the hiring sector. As Andrea Proulx notes at March Communications, the Klout score of a company as a whole or of its top executives specifically can affect their marketing and public-relations operations. If a Klout score is “low,” for example, journalists might not think you are an authority and worth interviewing. Depending on your specific sector, customers and clients might not give you their business.

Megan Butain summarizes the increasing desire to hire people with good Klout scores:

Certainly, if you are a recruiter, the Klout score has joined the ranks of a Google search, a LinkedIn profile review, and a thorough research of a candidate online as another tool in your arsenal to find top talent.

Just change a few words, and you will see the relevance to companies themselves:

… the Klout score has joined the ranks of a Google search, a LinkedIn page review, and a thorough research of a company online as another tool in your arsenal to hire the top companies.

As a result of Klout’s increasing influence, companies and executives are looking to increase their scores. However, the question “How Do I Increase My Klout?” is the wrong one to ask.  First, you need to understand what exactly Klout measures. As Mark Schaefer, the author of “Return On Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing,” tells Chris Crum of WebProNews:

“A Klout score simply shows whether you are somebody who can move content over social media channels that creates reactions,” he adds. “And if you think of how many jobs depend on that ability these days, this can be a very useful number to consider.”

In other words: People and companies with high Klout scores tend to post online content that garners high numbers of “likes,” retweets, “+1s,” “shares,” and other items on social-media networks. So, the question to ask is, “How can we create and execute a social-media strategy that maximizes engagement?” Once this occurs, your Klout score will increase naturally over time.

Klout itself states that the website currently incorporates more than four hundred factors into its algorithm from networks and websites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia (and it is important to note that some of these channels allow only personal profiles and not company ones):

The majority of the signals used to calculate the Klout Score are derived from combinations of attributes, such as the ratio of reactions you generate compared to the amount of content you share. For example, generating 100 retweets from 10 tweets will contribute more to your Score than generating 100 retweets from 1,000 tweets.

As a result, your social-media strategy will need to incorporate the best-practices for each specific network and social media in general. Here are a few tips:

• Quality, not quantity. Because Facebook, for example, is primarily a visual outlet, posting third-party articles three times a day on your company’s page will not lead to a lot of user interactivity. Instead, creating an original, beautiful and authoritative graphic once a week will prove to have a much higher engagement rate on that network. Create something that will truly stand out amid the millions of posts, tweets, and other pieces of content that flood the Internet each day:

• Interacting with influencers. A reply or retweet from Barack Obama increases your Klout more than one from your grandmother (unless she happens to be famous). Compile a list of the top influencers in your industry, and interact mainly with them on Twitter. As you develop a relationship over time, their mentions and retweets will help.
• Increasing your brand offline. Use traditional public relations to build a name for yourself in major publications and websites so that you can use the citations to submit a page to Wikipedia and have a greater chance of approval. The more that you are mentioned in the media, the more that people will also search for and follow you on social media.
• Use paid advertising to grow your followings. Use the paid advertising offered by many social networks to grow your followings – but make sure the ads are targeted to relevant people in your sector. Having large followings will grow your Klout directly and will lead to higher levels of overall engagement.

In addition to using Klout to showcase their reputability, companies can also use the network directly to improve both their customer-service and marketing operations.

Businesses can offer “perks” to influencers in their sectors with high Klout scores. Alex Knapp notes at Forbes that companies can use Klout to prioritize customer service based on those people who have the ability to commend – or criticize – a business online. One example from the Wired article:

At the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas last summer, clerks surreptitiously looked up guests’ Klout scores as they checked in. Some high scorers received instant room upgrades, sometimes without even being told why. According to Greg Cannon, the Palms’ former director of ecommerce, the initiative stirred up tremendous online buzz. He says that before its Klout experiment, the Palms had only the 17th-largest social-networking following among Las Vegas-based hotel-casinos. Afterward, it jumped up to third on Facebook and has one of the highest Klout scores among its peers.

Klout is starting to infiltrate more and more of our everyday transactions. In February, the enterprise-software giant Salesforce.com introduced a service that lets companies monitor the Klout scores of customers who tweet compliments and complaints; those with the highest scores will presumably get swifter, friendlier attention from customer service reps. In March, luxury shopping site Gilt Groupe began offering discounts proportional to a customer’s Klout score.

The importance of Klout is growing with each passing month. As Greg Finn recently reported at Search Engine Land, answers from Klout authorities are now appearing in certain Bing search results:

Since Google itself is incorporating more and more social signals in its results, it will likely only be a matter of time before Klout influences the search-engine giant’s algorithm (if it does not already). The purpose of search-engine marketing (SEM) in general is using a collection of best practices to “get found in search engines.” Today, having a high Klout score is yet another necessary way to achieve that goal – and to help your marketing in general.

This post is the first in a series relating lessons from popular Aesop’s Fables to strategic communications and marketing.

The Ant and the Grasshopper:

“The ants were spending a fine winter’s day drying grain collected in the summertime. A Grasshopper, perishing with famine, passed by and earnestly begged for a little food. The Ants inquired of him, “Why did you not treasure up food during the summer?’ He replied, “I had not leisure enough. I passed the days in singing.” They then said in derision: “If you were foolish enough to sing all the summer, you must dance supperless to bed in the winter.”

Moral: Even in good times, prepare for the worst

When things are going well, it is easy to become complacent and forget the all the hard work that brought you success. If your company is flourishing and the online buzz is positive, the imperative to continue building up your brand image may not feel as pressing.

Remember, though: consumer opinions of your brand can change as rapidly as the seasons. While they may be warm and positive now, unforeseen events can quickly upend sunny dispositions. Consequently, constantly finding new ways to provide value to your customers is important to build up the trust that will save you when winter comes. Only through the constant reinforcement of your brand’s relationship with consumers will you build advocacy that will reward in-turn.

Ask yourself: Am I in a position to sustain a serious public-relations disaster? If something goes wrong tomorrow, how will the public and — most importantly — my customers react?

Enjoy the summers, but always be preparing; you’ll thank yourself when the leaves begin to turn.

As technological innovations occur at an ever-increasing rate, marketers often develop unrealistic expectations because they think that each new gadget or medium has made all of the previous communications strategies obsolete.

Far from it. For example, social media is a form of public relations and not some heaven-sent technology that has changed everything, and as such, it and other online-marketing methods need to incorporate traditional best-practices from the beginning. It is crucial not to throw decades of communications knowledge out the digital window. Companies today need to ignore the so-called “hype cycles” that occur in all new marketing mediums and methods, instead understanding that classic communications theory never changes.

From search-engine optimization (SEO) to social-media marketing to other types of online marketing, many such tactics have gone through “hype cycles” in which attitudes and practices went from being:

• Unrealistic and unsustainable, to
• Pessimistic and dejected, to
• Mindful of what has actually worked

As each new technology is born and businesses race to use it in marketing, it is important not to have inflated expectations that will lead to disappointment. It is best to understand and use the sustainable, long-term best-practices from the start of your marketing efforts.

The Gartner Hype Cycle

What is a “hype cycle”? As Greg Satell notes at DigitalTonto, Gartner publishes a Hype Cycle that shows the status of emergent technologies. Gartner’s template graphic is at the top of this post. Here is the 2010 graph with specific technologies:

Emergent marketing methods go through similar cycles – especially when people do not understand the most relevant and best communications practices from the beginning. Here are examples of two popular Internet-based strategies that experienced this cycle: SEO and social media.

The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of SEO

After Danny Sullivan first wrote in 1996 about the effectiveness of ranking highly in search results, online marketers quickly skyrocketed to the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” described in the above graphics. Acting ignorantly on the advice of careless or malicious “black-hat SEO” charlatans in a race to rank first by any digital means necessary, companies used tactics including:

• Stuffing websites with keywords
• Constructing artificial link networks
• Submitting dozens of entries to useless, generic online directories
• Spamming forums
• Building exact-match anchor text links
• Placing content on article-submission websites

Then, marketers fell into the “Trough of Disillusionment” after Google released updates including Panda and Penguin to combat such spam tactics – thereby costing the companies their rankings and traffic and rendering much of their prior work useless. The resulting feeling for marketers? The notion that “SEO is dead.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Such sensationalist headlines are usually cheap attempts to get website pageviews from people in the industry. “True” SEO has never changed – and will never change. Search-engine optimization has always been a collection of best practices that:

• Institute the technical recommendations of search engines themselves to help them to crawl, index, and determine the topic of your website
• Use quality content, social media, and other communications-based methods to increase your company’s authority in your sector and thereby improve your website’s position in search results naturally
• Incorporate inbound marketing and conversion optimization to convert incoming organic traffic into sales and business leads, or towards some other goal in line with your business strategy

In fact, many of the recommended practices for “off-page SEO” and “linkbuilding” today are largely functions of public relations (see this short video by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz):

The best online marketers had always known these truths, and they silently laughed as other companies slipped into the “Trough of Disillusionment” after trying to spam and manipulate Google. SEOs who use the aforementioned tactics mentioned above rarely need to worry about future search-engine algorithm changes.

Today, the knowledge of “true” SEO is being reborn among marketers in general, and the “hype cycle” is moving towards the “Slope of Enlightenment” – where the actual SEO experts have always resided. We can eagerly expect that the “Plateau of Productivity” for SEO will arrive soon.

The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Social Media

As social-media networks exploded in prominence in recent years, the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” was reached quickly. Some common expressions: “We can reach our customers directly!” “We can advertise to consumers who self-identified as already liking our product!” “We can get a hundred thousand ‘likes’ to increase our brand awareness!”

Well, such feelings did not incorporate a few important points:

• Consumers hate getting direct advertisements and related messages on social media – even supposedly “subtle” ones as users become more and more cynical
• The majority of people “like” company pages only to get a “freebie” or to receive (only occasional!) notices of discounts and sales – they really want only to interact with friends and family on the networks
• “Engagement rates” with B2C companies, even when defined liberally, are abysmal and on-par with banner advertisements

As a result of their misuse of social media, marketers entered the “Trough of Disillusionment.” As Bob Hoffman, the former CEO of Hoffman/Lewis advertising in San Francisco and St. Louis, notes:

Coca-Cola got all tangled up in its underwear last week. At a marketing research whack-a-thon their senior manager for marketing strategy came out and said the unthinkable — social media marketing is a big fat waste of time and money. Well, he didn’t actually use those words. What he said was…“We didn’t see any statistically significant relationship between our buzz and our short-term sales.”

That’s how senior marketing managers talk. So, hang on a minute. You mean “tweets” and “likes” don’t create sales? Get outta here!

Why do you think a can of Coca-Cola is worth 50¢ more than a can of Safeway cola? It’s not because of the Coke ad you saw last night or last week. It’s the ones you’ve seen for your entire life.

Today, more and more companies, such as General Motors, are cutting or stopping advertising on Facebook because the resulting sales revenue does not make it worthwhile. Social media indeed is usually not the best tactic for direct advertising and selling – it is generally better used for other strategic goals.

Hoffman, an admitted social-media skeptic, indeed raises many important issues. But with all due respect, the recently-retired CEO misses the larger point because, as a lifelong advertising man, his primary frame of reference and metric of success is only B2C product sales. Social-media marketing is indeed not the best tactic for direct, B2C sales – but there are many other effective uses when one looks at the greater context. Traditional advertising is a one-way communications medium – social media is two-way, meaning that the possible tactics are numerous:

• B2B marketers can discuss best-practices, industry news, and obtain business leads through quality interaction – not through “spamming” or “advertising” – on social networks including LinkedIn and Quora
• Companies, even B2C ones, should maintain an active Facebook page and Twitter account for customer-service purposes (among others) – people are increasingly more likely to post a comment on a Facebook page or send a tweet rather than wait on hold for thirty minutes on the telephone or wait for days to receive an e-mail response
• Having an active Google+ page for a company that obtains many “+1s” – the Google equivalent of a “like” – will help a business be found more prominently in search-engine results. And Google, as Hoffman admits, is a far-better place to fulfill demand in a consumer context than social-media networks
• Building a quality online community (a related type of social-media marketing) over time can generate tremendous sales and ROI – Proctor & Gamble’s “Being Girl” website, for example, has been four times as effective as traditional advertising

These are just a few examples. The point: In a marketing context, the best practice for social-media marketing is not – and never has been – about advertising and making direct sales. Social media is largely public relations in a different context and medium and should be primarily a function of a company’s communications, rather than sales, department.

The more quickly marketers understand the best-practices that have always been true in social media, the faster that the “Slope of Enlightenment” and then the “Plateau of Productivity” will be reached.

Ignore “Hype Cycles” and Focus on Strategic Best-Practices

The best SEO practices have never been to try to manipulate Google – the best uses had always been to build engaging, authoritative, content-based websites that convert traffic towards one’s desired marketing and business goals.

The best social-media practices have never been to overwhelm users with advertisements. The best uses have always been to use the channels and methods that align with your communications objectives – whether they include customer service, lead generation, community building, or any other goal.

Those marketers who succeed are those who ignore “hype cycles” and the digital flavor of the moment and instead understand and use the best-practices for each technology and medium from the beginning. If you see people overhyping a “sure thing” in marketing – those individuals are most likely trying to sell you something.

TEL AVIV – Here in the Silicon Valley of the Middle East, I finally saw the hit movie “The Avengers” only recently since it had finally come to Israeli cable TV. As a fan of Joss Whedon, who directed the film and had created my favorite TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” back in 1997, I loved watching how a group of heroes with expertise in specific areas came together for the common good because I saw many parallels with how so-called “SEO” needs to function today.

In a similar fashion (but without a nifty superhero outfit), I will explain here how “SEO” today needs to involve a team of people including website developers, public-relations professionals, social-media marketers, and content creators. Just as a single Avenger could not defeat Loki of Asgard alone, so do SEO best-practices today need teamwork across multiple disciplines in what is better termed “holistic marketing.” Without any superpowers, a single person cannot do all of the needed tasks by himself:

“SEO is Really a Collection of Best Practices”

Since I love and obsess about online marketing as much as I do about Joss Whedon, I routinely answer online-marketing questions on Quora on behalf of our company. (Feel free to follow my Quora questions and answers here.) Recently, I saw a definition of “SEO” by Fang Digital CEO Jeff Ferguson in this Quora thread that perfectly summarizes everything that I had been thinking for years. And that definition is the headline you see right above.

SEO Holistic marketing is now the use of numerous, related disciplines because those elements are now all taken into account by Google’s algorithm. If you do not have inbound marketing and conversion analytics; an effective, holistic marketing strategy; technical SEO; quality content; and public relations via social media, then your SEO efforts will no longer be as effective as they were when the SEO process years ago was merely optimizing a website and building links. You need a team of experts in all of these areas to work together – just as the Avengers worked together to defeat Loki.

SEO Holistic marketing today consists of:

1. Setting up website analytics to track traffic sources, conversions, leads, and/or sales (and then adjusting your tactics as needed in light of the future data and results)
2. Ensuring that your overall marketing strategy maps to your business goals and is in line with the best practices of traditional marketing and communications
3. Optimizing your website for search engines on a technical level
4. Indentifying the targets from whom you want sales, conversions, links, and mentions from potential customers and media outlets
5. Creating quality content to engage those targets and obtain links and traffic to your website
6. Using public relations – often through social media – to promote your company and content among (and obtain links from) the targets and the public in general
7. Keeping abreast of any Google algorithm changes that may affect your efforts in all of these areas

Just as different Avengers have different skills, so will your SEO team need experts in these various areas to save the world achieve your online-marketing goals. Here’s what you can learn from the superhero blockbuster:

• Nick Fury (management). As the leader of SHIELD (the world-saving organization that uses the services of the Avengers), Samuel J. Jackson’s character answers to a mysterious council and has to justify his team’s actions and plans. If an “SEO person” has a specific role today, it is to keep the “big picture” of inbound marketing in mind while managing his own team of Marketing Avengers and showing the results to his council – the board of directors, CEO, or client – via web analytics and conversion data.

“I’ll save the world and get you website conversions – all while wearing this tough-looking eye-patch.”

• Captain America (traditional marketing and communications). Chris Evan’s character, who had been frozen since World War II, has an old – but still valuable – worldview. Today, the traditional best-practices and guiding principles of marketing and communications remain – only the tactics and tools have changed. As Bob Hoffman, CEO of the Hoffman/Lewis advertising firm, often notes in his Ad Contrarian blog, marketing tools such as Facebook and Twitter are not miraculous cure-alls by themselves – especially when they are not used correctly. If your online-marketing strategy does not map to your business strategy and hence would not make sense to a traditional marketing veteran, then you risk sounding like the speaker in this Onion parody of TED talks on social media:

• Iron Man (technical SEO). Robert Downey Jr.’s character is a technological genius who was an arms manufacturer before he became a superhero. In the same vein, website developers need to use their powers for business good not only by building engaging websites that sell but also by optimizing them to help search engines (and then be indexed and ranked appropriately). Your team’s technical genius needs to understand how the latest developments will affect SEO beyond the commonly-known elements such as keywords and sitemaps. For example: As people increasingly search the Internet on mobile devices (rather than computers) and respond to visual content (rather than text), webmasters need to know how to use HTML5 to help Google to index websites that consist mainly of images and banners rather than text. For starters, see this SEOmoz webinar (registration required) by Graphitas Managing Director Justin Taylor on how live text and other technical innovations can help:

How to optimize for both user experience and SEO? Tony Stark would know.

• Hawkeye (targeting). Jeremy Renner’s character is a master archer with a multitude of trick arrows to aim at his targets. Today, you need to identify your target keywords, influencers, media outlets, sales targets, and general audience before you aim your inbound-marketing bow with its various arrows at them – and the more specific and niche-oriented the targets, the better. A person searching for “weather mobile apps” in Google is more likely to convert on The Weather Channel’s website than someone who is searching for “mobile apps” in general. A reporter or blogger who covers mobile apps specifically is a better PR target than one who covers mobile phones in general. The more precise your targeting, the better your conversion rate. What is better: 100 out of 1,000 visitors converting or 50 out of 2,000? Your specialized bow needs to aim for quality, not quantity, in your SEO and inbound marketing efforts for reasons that other Marketing Avengers below will address.

“If I can aim accurately while falling off of a building, you can target the right audience!”

• Thor (quality content). Chris Hemsworth’s character’s weapon is a mighty hammer – and that tool in the guise of content is what powers SEO today. Now, search-engine marketing is not about “linkbuilding” – it is about “link earning” and answering the question: “Why should I link to you?” The answer is content. If you create remarkable blog posts, videos, podcasts, and infographics for your industry, then your targets and people in that industry will want to spread the word by linking to your content. The benefit is twofold: You build your reputation as a thought leader, and you get quality links and traffic to your website. Use the hammer of content to nail high website rankings.

“Your content had better be more interesting than my character!”

• Black Widow (public relations). When we first meet Scarlett Johansson’s character in “Iron Man 2,” she is selling herself to Tony Stark – by defeating a strong man in a boxing ring. In the beginning of “The Avengers,” she is deftly obtaining information from a Russian general while she is “being interrogated.” Later, she comforts Hawkeye after he had recovered from Loki’s spell that had caused him to switch sides. Black Widow is adept at communication, and your online-marketing team needs to be just as good when you use social media as a form of public relations, create online communities, conduct customer service on Facebook, deal with the media, or promote your content to influencers in your sector and industry to gain backlinks, traffic, and brand mentions and build yourself as an authoritative thought-leader.

“I said that quote was off the record! You wouldn’t want to cross me, would you?”

• The Hulk (Google penalties). Mark Ruffalo’s character is a mild-mannered scientist who helps the team with his knowledge – until he gets angry and becomes a force of destruction. In the same manner, Google can help you – unless the search engine becomes angry with you. If you use SEO best-practices from the start, then you’ll have little to fear from any future algorithm changes such as Panda (copied or thin content), Penguin (spam links), and EMD (exact-match spam domains). But you’ll still need to follow the latest SEO news so the Google Hulk does not thrash your website because of something you may have missed.

“Duplicate content and spam links make me angry. And you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”

Forget All You Know About SEO

I often hear about companies both here in Tel Aviv and in many other countries that are looking to hire an “SEO person” – but those firms are years behind in understanding what SEO holistic marketing has become today. A single person cannot do all that is needed.

When I first started working in SEO years ago, the process was simple: optimize a website and build links. But for countless reasons outlined in our blog and elsewhere, such a simple process does not cut it anymore. You need content creation, social media, and public relations to earn quality links and social signals for search engines. You need PR leading to co-citations – mentions of your company on authoritative websites, even without links – to build your brand and increase the authoritativeness of your company in your sector. You need quality content to attract the best links rather than relying on the old methods including directory submissions and article websites.

In short, you need a comprehensive, holistic strategy that incorporates all of the elements outlined above. Holistic marketing needs to map to a company’s business plan, and SEO is part of that.

The Hulk may have given Loki a good thrashing in “The Avengers,” but it was not enough. All of the Avengers, in the end, needed to work together to save the world. Using old SEO methods may have given your website a Hulk-like advantage in the short term, but your company will need a holistic strategy, technical optimization, influencer targeting, content creation, and public relations for long-term success.

Otherwise, you might as well surrender your online-marketing efforts to Loki, who, in Norse mythology, was essentially the god of chaos. And no one wants that.

Samuel J. Scott is Director of Digital Marketing and Communications and SEO Team Leader for The Cline Group. You see more of his thoughts on Google+, LinkedIn, and Quora.

Over the past five years, many public-relations professionals (some have called them publicists) became “social-media gurus” overnight, writing books and helping to spin what social-media marketing and SEO allegedly really are. Then, they became “digital-marketing specialists” or gave themselves other titles. Eventually, many woke up and realized again that, in the end, they are still marketing and communication specialists. Several have written three or more books since 2007 to regain their places as true marketing professionals.

In many ways over the past five years, I have felt that I been fighting a battle on my own to make people understand that social media and parts of SEO are only channels of public relations just like traditional media relations, blogger relations, and interactions with influencers – the differences are primarily in the specific tactics and mediums, not in the overall strategies and goals.  A marketing expert and a person I think very highly of, Geoff Livingston, got lost in the difference. Geoff’s book “Now Is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs,” which he co-authored with Brian Solis, was the first time I thought I was missing something (or maybe they were). I kept my head down and waited for people to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Geoff’s book was among hundreds with the same perspective.

Geoff is a friend who I met in 2001 or 2002 when he was pitching me new business. I was pleased to see his new book out, “Marketing in the Round: How to Develop an Integrated Marketing Campaign in the Digital Era.” Look for a future blog post regarding the key points in this book.

I was lucky enough to have a mentor who taught me a holistic approach to marketing – how all the traditional channels of public relations work with marketing and how it is all for one thing and one thing only: to reach the business and sales goals.

So, how do social media and SEO fit into public relations, and how do digital and traditional channels map to a marketing plan that is aligned with one’s business objectives? Let’s start with SEO’s links to public relations, marketing, and sales.

SEO and Public Relations

As my colleague Samuel J. Scott wrote in a prior post, the research, identification, and usage of targeted keywords is the backbone of any search-engine optimization (SEO) strategy. However, the decision of which search terms to target has public-relations implications as well.

In a nutshell, the initial SEO process answers this question: For which keywords do we want to rank highly in Google? The choice usually involves determining which specific search terms are being researched by those people most likely to “convert.” (Obviously, if your company website sells “sales software,” you would want to rank highly for terms related to that specific keyword and not “accounting software.”)

Still, the choice of keywords will also affect your company’s image. The tactics that a search-marketing strategy will implement will brand your firm – and your products or services – in a very specific way. Here are just a few reasons:

• The keywords that you target will be used in most, if not all, of the page titles, text, and articles on your website
• The blog posts and other content that you publish will be focused on the themes contained in the targeted keywords
• The influencers with whom you interact in efforts to gain links will also be associated with the specific topics of the desired search terms

Take the stated example of “sales software.” You may also want to consider dozens of related search terms based on the themes of “marketing software” and “conversion software.” But this is important: Is your PR and branding strategy to be known as a company that provides quality “sales software,” “marketing software,” or “conversion software”? The differences are subtle but important, and the implications are obvious for any company in any sector.

It may be easier to rank highly in Google for one batch of keywords, but your branding goals may necessitate a different set. (Sometimes – but not always – a choice between these options needs to be made.) Since SEO is often a part of public relations, you need to incorporate both aspects into your inbound-marketing strategy.

Public Relations and Social Media

After Facebook’s lackluster IPO, the company is under enormous pressure to maximize advertising revenue – and that means fostering many more “likes,” “shares,” and other forms of engagement. So, it is no surprise that the social-media network mandated the new Timeline layout on Facebook profiles and pages.

The new design places a much-greater emphasis on photos and videos – the items that, as Jonha Revesencio notes on research compiled by M Booth and Simply Measured into an infographic, encourage the most interaction:

• On Facebook, videos are shared 12X more than links and text posts combined.
• On Facebook, photos are liked 2X more than text updates.
• 42% of all Tumblr posts are photos. On YouTube, 100 million users are taking a social action on videos every week. Photo and video posts on Pinterest are referring more traffic than Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Posting on Facebook is now just more than sharing articles – it is about branding your company and interacting with customers, fans, and influencers in a way that is aligned with your PR goals. When you create photos, videos, infographics, and other content to share on social media, you need to address these questions: What message do you want to convey, and what subconscious impressions and qualities do you want to associate with your firm? The answers to these questions, among others, will determine how you will interact on social media.

A related aspect of PR is also true for Twitter. The nature of the social-media network allows you to communicate with customers and users concisely and quickly – and a simple search can be created to let you know every time someone mentions you, your company, or any other term. In addition, you can interact with targeted media and influencers – journalists, bloggers, and more – just as easily.

LinkedIn is also about branding and not just “social-media marketing.” Specifically, it is about branding yourself and not your company since only individuals, not businesses themselves, can interact on LinkedIn. The branding and relationship-building comes through activities including answering LinkedIn Questions and participating in groups that are relevant to your sector and industry. The image that you want to build will depend on your public-relations goals. And the same is true in online forums and related locations: you want to brand yourself as a helpful, knowledgeable expert (and not just someone who is selling something).

Holistic Marketing Based on PR

Just a few years ago, companies could afford to treat inbound marketing like a buffet: one might pick and choose between SEO, online advertising, social media, or public relations (among other tactics) – or some combination of two or more these strategies.

These tactics were viewed as isolated practices essentially occurring in a vacuum, but as Internet and inbound marketing become increasingly holistic, the paradigm has shifted back to the beginning: comprehensive marketing and communications in different contexts and under the umbrella of public relations. Today, the point is to adapt PR to new contexts and mediums – from SEO to social media to elsewhere.

If you want to understand why pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has become a less and less viable option for small businesses and start-up companies, ask Tom Telford.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, he had founded a vacation rental-management firm named Blue Creek Cabins and had been paying Google roughly $0.60 per click in paid-advertising campaigns since 2001 in return for many leads and sales.

However, his success did not last:

By 2010, Mr. Telford had started a new management company, Cedar Creek Cabin Rentals, and was spending $140,000 a year on pay-per-click advertising to promote the 45 cabins in his charge. The programs had become increasingly popular and competitive, which meant that in order to retain his ranking in search results, he had to pay about $1.25 a click, double what he had paid initially. “The cost per keyword climbed dramatically over the years,” he said. “And it’s still going.”

And that is a problem. While Mr. Telford agreed to pay more for his keywords, he said he did not see a commensurate increase in sales. “For a while, I was spending more than I was getting,” he said. “It finally hit me to ask, ‘Can I sustain this?’”

As more and more businesses in general have recognized the value of online advertising, PPC competition and prices have increased. Another example: Say that you are a freshly-graduated Boston personal-injury attorney who wants to gain clients for your individual practice through paid online advertising. At the moment of this writing, here were the costs-per-click (CPC) of a few relevant keywords (the prices are set at an ongoing auction):

I doubt that a new lawyer just out of law school, whose per-hour billing rate would be far lower than that of major firms, could afford to pay more than $50 for every person who comes to the website through a paid campaign – particularly when a small percentage would likely ever become clients. So, PPC is now benefiting large companies (and large law firms) who can afford the increase in costs more so than small businesses and start-ups (and private law practices). The same increase in PPC prices has been occurring in nearly every industry and sector.

Telford, the vacation rental manager, has not been the only one to notice problems in PPC advertising today. Earlier this year, Sookie Shuen wrote at Social Media Today that PPC is usually not a viable option anymore for many businesses who are focused specifically on leads and sales (even though it is great for Google) because of two reasons:

It’s a short-term fix

PPC is purely about grabbing the potential customer’s attention without actually developing a lasting relationship with them. It focuses on the attraction stage and neglects to actually nurture and convert the buyer. This is why used alone, it can only ever offer limited returns.

It is brand-unaware

PPC is purely about the ad and about capturing the interest of window shoppers. With no brand awareness or value proposition around it, the PPC campaign tends to attract window shoppers who are focused on cost rather than quality.

The issue also stems from a fundamental disconnect between the interests of publishers and those of advertisers. As Kevin Ross of the University of California at Santa Cruz and Kristin Fridgeirsdottir of London Business School note in a statistical paper (with our notes): “… publishers usually prefer CPM [or CPC] pricing as they find it less risky while advertisers prefer CPA [cost-per-action] pricing, which is performance based.”

If I am Google or run my own advertising network, my goal is to maximize the number of clicks since that is how I earn revenue. I do not generally care whether the clicks ever actually help the business that is advertising. If I am the business, I want to make sure that I am getting the most leads and sales for my advertising dollars. And the first option is usually more expensive for the advertiser.

To demonstrate the point graphically, here is one hypothetical example from a client’s sales funnel (we have blocked out the identifying information, of course). Note: This is not an actual PPC campaign – we are just providing some numbers as a demonstration:

Say that this is a conversion funnel for a PPC campaign that costs $1 per click. In one day, there were 485 clicks and 27 conversions – in other words, the PPC cost was roughly $18 per conversion. The total cost was $485. As a result, $458 of the money spent had come from clicks that had not generated leads – only $27 of the budget had done so.

Now, this is not to say that PPC advertising as a whole is worthless. In Google Analytics and other advertising platforms, one can see which traffic from which keywords is leading to more conversions and sales. However, this requires the constant monitoring and adjusting of campaigns to minimize the costs coming from clicks – removing keywords that do not lead to conversions, adding negative keywords to restrict the instances when advertisements appear, and finding more long-tail keywords to catch people that are further along in the buying process.

However, it takes a lot of continuous work over time to optimize a PPC campaign to deliver the greatest value – and the fact still remains that many clicks, even after the constant fine-tuning of campaigns, will not leads to leads and sales and will be wastes of money as a result.

Enter cost-per-action advertising (CTA) – also known as cost-per-acquisition advertising. In this type of campaign, advertisers pay only when a click leads to an action that, depending on a company’s marketing goal, could be an e-mail inquiry captured through a form, a product sale, or something else.

The benefits of CTA advertising, as noted by Social Compare (with some of our notes), include factors that PPC does not:

• The advertiser pays according to results [leads or sales], performance only
• Receives [brand] exposure even without clicks
• Low vulnerability to frauds [publishers clicking on ads to make themselves money]
• High correlation between ads and sales or leads
• Indicator of campaign and banner quality

However, CPA costs are generally higher than PPC ones since a CPA lead is usually much more qualified – one that is more likely to lead to a conversion or sale – than a PPC lead coming from a random click. Still, CPA campaigns as a whole are often less expensive – but you need to test to be sure.

Take our hypothetical client example above. The PPC cost was $1, and the cost per conversion was $18. As long as the CPA cost would be less than $18, the CPA alternative would have saved the company money. The total cost of the one-day PPC campaign would have been $485 – but if the CPA, for example, would have been $7, the total cost would have been $189. Testing these two options in any campaign will tell you which one is best.

Still, different methods of online advertising do have valuable purposes, depending on the specific context. Here is a graphic from Social Compare that demonstrates the point:

CPM advertising is based on the cost per 1,000 people who will see your advertisement – if you, for example, want to build a general brand or generate buzz around a future product among masses of people, this can be the best method. PPC can be a good way to gain traffic to your website in general. If you want to get sales or conversions, then CPA can be the most-appropriate strategy. It all depends on your specific business and marketing goals.

The key, as in many aspects of online marketing, is to test to see which method is best for your business. And as PPC costs continue to increase, it is likely that CPA campaigns will deliver the greatest value over the long term – especially if you are a small business or a start-up company.

At one point in my career, I was hired to manage the digital marketing for a particular Israeli start-up, which would ultimately end up folding over two months later due to a lack of successful fundraising. During this period of time, the CEO had asked me to create an Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint for promising investors on the potential for market penetration.

Supposedly, the start-up had had a way to convert speech to text in some new, exciting manner (the product would automatically transcribe voicemail and then send it to you over e-mail or text message), and the goal, I was told, was to exit by selling to Google. First, however, they needed to obtain investment and subsequently show successful sales and usage within various test markets.

I was to research the number of mobile-phone users in various countries and then estimate a “capture rate” of one percent and monthly revenue of $10 per user. (This data is only an example – this occurred years ago, and I do not remember the exact information.) So, basically, here is what the CEO had presented to potential investors:

Country X

10 million mobile-phone users X 0.01 capture rate = 100,000 users
100,000 users X $10 fee per month = $1 million in revenue per month

This process was repeated for four additional countries. Assuming a capture rate of one percent – if only 1 in a 100 people would use the technology – the total revenue would be enormous.

Unfortunately, for both me and the company, it did not work out. However, the idea of a “capture rate,” also known as “conversion rate,” is a principle that has continued to increase in importance since I was laid off from the start-up years ago. Like in the formula above, even a miniscule change in the capture rate would change the firm’s gross profits by millions of dollars. As is plainly illustrated, a rising or falling conversion rate can severely affect your sales.

If you have a website, a PPC landing page, a Facebook page, or anything similar, your goal is likely (or should be!) to engage users actively. Whether by downloading a mobile app, signing up for an e-mail newsletter, requesting information, purchasing a product, or something else (depending on your marketing and business goals), your ultimate objective should user participation. In relation, the conversion rate is what percentage of the incoming traffic takes that action.

Conversions can occur in many places: a form that is highly visible on your website; a tab on your Facebook page; a clickable button on a PPC landing page; a link in a tweet, LinkedIn update, or e-mail newsletter; and so on. Additionally, each method will likely have a different, generalized conversion rate: For example, Facebook is normally not very effective in B2B marketing (it’s more B2C), so, in a B2B context, e-mail newsletters or LinkedIn advertising campaigns might lead to higher conversion rates.

The key is to test early and to test often. While every business wants to see results quickly, in the long term, initial testing will lead to better overall results. For example, instead of merely assuming that a Facebook advertising campaign will generate the best return and consequently sinking your entire $100,000 marketing budget directly into it, it may be better to test Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google PPC campaigns for a week by allocating $1,000 for each platform. Afterwards, you will not only be able to see which mediums have the best conversion rates but will then be able to apportion your remaining budget accordingly. As a result, the increased conversions and sales would more than cover the $3,000 tested on other mediums.

Still, your testing would not yet be complete.

A whole subset of the online-marketing industry has developed around the practice of “conversion-rate optimization” (CRO). This optimization technique relates to increasing a website’s conversion-rate percentage through the constant tweaking and testing of items including keyword targets, website text, graphic designs, and calls to action. (You can see an example of a conversion funnel and its data at the top of this post.)

One example: Say that your PPC traffic generally has a conversion rate of 30% and is the best-performing medium. CRO would aim to get that number even higher by sending different batches of traffic to different landing pages to see which types of pages perform the best.

As with scientific experiments, the best practice is to isolate and test multiple variables individually. (If there is only one difference between two items, then any change in performance must be a result of that difference.) If five pages differ only in their background colors, then you can see which hue performs the best. A similar situation could be seen when only the text in pages’ call-to-action buttons differs. The scenarios go on and on.

Once you test and subsequently know which specific elements perform the best, you would then be able to combine these elements into a single PPC landing page. If your conversion rates increase, let’s say to 45%, after this testing process, the increased sales from that point on will have been well worth the time and money.

Because, obviously, the product had not yet been sold, the CEO at my old company did not have any real data on capture or conversion rates. However, in the online world, it is easy – and crucial – to research and test for the best results.

And what can – and should – you test? Here’s part of an infographic by Monetate on what businesses are already testing on their websites:

Many clients ask me, “What is a good conversion rate?” To be honest, there is no answer to that question because every website, industry, and sector is different. A better question is, “What is our conversion rate now, and how can we make it better?” And the answer is simple: Test early and test often.

Samuel J. Scott is Director of Digital Marketing and Communications and SEO Team Leader for The Cline Group. You see more of his thoughts on his Google+ profile.

Note: This is the first part in a series.

By Allison Seifert

In 2008, Forrester Vice Presidents Carlene Li and Josh Bernoff published “Groundswell,” a revolutionary book about business and marketing in what was then the beginning of the mainstreaming of social media. Four years later, their thoughts have not only become predicative of the growing trend of social media but have become essential for understanding the greater context in marketing and public relations.

The nutshell: For practically any product or service, there are thousands, if not millions, of Internet users who would love nothing more than to become unknowing brand ambassadors and help to spread the digital word. You just need to locate and then inspire them.

A good way to build and foster an online community is to use the various mediums that the Internet has to offer. These platforms – including blogs, specialized non-corporate websites, podcasts, social networks, YouTube, and forums – have acting as a virtual segue between  a business’s message and  the consumers’ conversation. As Li and Bernoff note:

Communities are a powerful way to engage with your customers and deliver value to them. They’re also effective at delivering marketing messages, as long as you listen, not just shout.

In addition, online communities are effective ways to directly manage the brand and reputation of your company. Today, you no longer need to go through journalists and other middlemen. Because we are currently living in a time when anyone, through the Internet, can write and spread a message, there have become fewer and fewer hurdles to leap over in order to get your brand’s message out there. Through your virtual community, you will have the opportunity to influence the groundswell and consequently how those people will comment on your business’ products and services. Engaging your users in this way will drive your newly-created ambassadors to do your marketing for you.

Based on the current brand recognition of your company, there are a variety of ways to approach community building. Here, we will give some general strategies to get you started.

1. Research your current and potential users and customers. Where are they specifically discussing your product or your general industry? Setting up a Google Alert for your brand name may tell you exactly when and where your company is being mentioned. Be it in certain publications, on Twitter, or possibly even on a huge message board devoted to a relevant topic, Google Alerts are good way to determine the impact your brand’s message is having. A good Mashable article by Megan Berry quoted consultant Mike Berry as saying that companies should look for “pockets of users who are excited about your product or service.”
2. Focus on quality of passion, not quantity of users. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, too many companies make the mistake of overvaluing raw numbers. A thousand Facebook “likes” from people who will love to share and comment on your posts is better than ten thousand from those who will not. As a result, you want to identify the places online where the sentiment is overwhelmingly positive. The importance of word-of-mouth advertising is true, both online and offline, and it must be noted that believe more what their friends and family tell them about a business than what the business says about itself.
3. Know what motivates your users and fans. Marketing research has always included demographics, but you will need to dig deeper to relate to your communities. As Stephanie Gehman notes at Social Media Examiner: “General categories of demographics use age, gender, life-cycle stage, income, social class, lifestyle, education, religion and location and are collected by varying means of market research. These categories help give shape and definition to your audience and clarify who they are, what they do, their habits and more.”

Too many marketers talk only about their businesses and their products when they should be talking about their customers. The positive conversations that can occur in communities should not only focus on how the product or service will solve their problems but also how it will change their lives (or businesses) for the better.

Once you know every detail about your audience, you can then go about framing discussions on relevant issues. One example: Maybe the majority of your users are busy working mothers who feel swamped and overwhelmed?  One way to connect is to address how to save them time and reduce their levels of stress.

In “Groundswell,” the authors provide a real-life example: Procter & Gamble’s successful creation of the online community “Being Girl” (see the picture above) to reach early-teenage girls who have just entered puberty but feel too embarrassed to discuss tampons with, well, anyone. On the website, girls discuss, amongst themselves and with experts, the topics of dating, teenage life, school, and related issues, in an anonymous, safe setting. Within the community, users are not only encouraged to return themselves but to bring their friends.

Through the methods described in the book (see pages 118 to 123 for details and results), P&G’s results from Being Girl had become four times as effective as traditional advertising. To break even, the site only needed to persuade 6,250 total girls to use Tampax since women tend to use the same tampon brand for life. The company’s site now receives two million visitors each month (as of the book’s publication).

Procter & Gamble tapped into the groundswell and succeeded. In the first part of this series, we wanted to introduce the importance of building online communities, provide a few tips to get started, and show you one example of success. In the next part, we will offer further suggestions of how to manage and grow an ongoing community.

But remember: The important thing to understand is that nearly all types of Internet marketing and public relations take time to work – P&G did not get to two million visitors per month immediately, but once the company had invested the time and effort, the strategy certainly paid off.

Note: This is the third part in an ongoing series. Parts

By Samuel J. Scott

Social media is all about the “social.” On Twitter, you want to converse not only with influencers and journalists but also with current and potential customers. On LinkedIn, you want to brand both yourself and your company as experts in your particular sector while still participating in group discussions and LinkedIn Answers.

On Facebook, however, the rules have changed. Now, the social-network giant has set its sights on establishing its monetary benefits. (More on that later.)

In this series, I have been discussing how to use integrated-marketing strategies to build a personal website online. I have taken you through the various techniques and practices that I have used to build my own website, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer Online.” (I have been a fan of the cult-television program since I first saw it in 1998.) My goal is to show how holistic marketing can benefit any website – no wooden stakes needed – and highlight the inherent similarities to what my colleagues and I at The Cline Group do for our clients.

Before you continue with this installment, I recommend that you begin by reading part one, on website development and optimization, and part two, on calls to action and holistic marketing. Within this post, I will be discussing the specific social-media and public-relations tactics that I use on a daily basis.

How to Get Facebook “Likes,” Now

How do you increase the number of Facebook “likes” on your business page? The old answer, in part, was to comment (as your page!) on other pages’ walls and as replies to other individuals’ comments. Engaging the social media platform in this way could be used as a tactic to pique the interest of the followers you are targeting.

Unfortunately, this system does not work anymore (at least not as much as it used to). Following Facebook’s less-than-successful IPO, the company is under enormous pressure to increase advertising revenue.  As a result, Facebook has made some significant changes. First off, page administrators can rescind (like I did) the posting permissions for any third-party users:

Secondly, I have noticed on my page that many postings by other pages, comments with links, and duplicate comments are being flagged as spam (and do not actually appear unless I specifically approve them). Finally, page owners can ban any user or page from commenting again – as often occurs because most posts by pages are little more than spam.

The point: Facebook has made it more difficult for pages to promote themselves for free. As a result, marketers now have three options to garner more “likes”:

• They can post on other fan pages, hoping that people will see the posts, click on their page, and subsequently “like” it – gaining a small number of “likes” each month, over time
• Directly promote their page on their websites and other related portals
• Use content marketing and PPC advertising

As is probably obvious, the latter two are the most successful. Unfortunately, it is all too common that a website, seeking to grow its Facebook page, situates its Facebook icon in an almost imperceptible location. If you want to pursue a Facebook-based strategy, then it is essential to include a call to action to “like” your page “above the fold.” For example, I placed Facebook’s box in the top-left corner of my “Buffy” website and (until recently) had a banner advertisement above each page’s content:

By optimizing my website for social media, I had, over a period of time, gained several hundred “likes.” Unfortunately, this did not meet my business and marketing goals. I required content marketing and PPC as well.

The next part of this series will detail precisely what I did. Here is a teaser for the coming blog post:

• At the start of your page creation, using the network’s PPC advertising is a better way to gain “likes” than the more-traditional methods
• Creating and publishing original, quality content sparingly but in a way that will spread both on Facebook and via your website and targeted mediums
• Using public relations to identify and communicate with targeted influencers on Twitter (and elsewhere) and getting links from them
• Having your Facebook page fulfill the same goals as your main website
• Adding social sharing and related items on your website

Stay tuned for the next part – how much of social-media marketing is just a type of public relations.

Samuel J. Scott is Director of Digital Marketing and Communications and SEO Team Leader for The Cline Group. You see more of his thoughts on his Google+ profile.

Let’s face it: we are a visually-oriented society. From images to video, the manner in which we prefer to process information has continued to move toward these optically-stimulating mediums. As this cultural preference has become ingrained in society, consumers have come to expect – nay, demand –  that their chosen brands and companies be prepackaged with familiar and relatable storylines that are presented in this manner.

It is here that visually-oriented, digital content comes into play. More and more companies are turning to these resources out of a desire to develop and shape communities of consumers around their brands. Even Hubspot blogger Pamela Vaughan notes the trend, stating that “visual content is not only taking the online world by storm; it’s also driving engagement!” There is also no indication that this trend will slow down. As YouTube’s own vice president of global content states: “Online video will soon in a few years be 90% of online traffic.” Now more than ever, companies need to be hopping on the digital bandwagon, seeking to fill their social-media portals with professional, visual content that appeals to their target audiences.

While focused on the broadcast industry, here is a brilliantly-crafted video infographic focused on facts and trends within the video-content world:

This is just one example out of countless possibilities in any sector. With the social-media world continuing its rapid expansion, companies and marketing professionals alike have been handed the perfect outlet for forging these communities through the use of valuable content such as the broadcast-industry video infographic. Unfortunately, social-media platforms alone act only as metaphorical staging grounds for the production. As with any good theatrical production, the stage must be constantly occupied — populated with creative, relevant vessels that drive the message home. These identifying forces must be primped, pampered and packaged in narratives that are aesthetically pleasing, creative, and compelling.

When seeking to develop communities around their brands, many companies make the common mistake of simply choosing to allocate digital content rather than create it themselves. While there is a time and place for third-party content, it should always be used as a means to direct consumers back to your own production. Likewise, text-based content should be used frequently and as a tool to maintain focus and interactivity between self-made productions.

It is important to keep in mind that composing your own digital content is not an easy task. Because of the number of factors that must be taken into account when going about your own production, it is best to seek out the aid of industry professionals. Companies who create this content without acquiring help run the risk of having their productions – and subsequently their brands – appear amateurish.

From animation to live-action, there is not necessarily any right or wrong way to deliver your message. What matters is that your company works with these marketing and industry professionals to identify the specific stylistic elements that will appeal to your audience and consumer base. Doing so will not only drive attention towards your brand but will also help to define and centralize your core values and message.