Business Blogging

"Thinking about things and having opinions" - two advanced skills you'll need to master if you want to write a blog post

As a social media specialist, the number one question I get asked is: How do I blog? I show them how WordPress works, or whatever blogging platform they’re using, explain that it’s really as simple as using a word processer, but 90% of the time they respond with: Yes, but what do I write about?

So, I’ve put together this simple guide to help PR people and other comms professionals write blog posts.

I’m going to take a leap of faith and assume that, because you’re undoubtedly a highly competent executive, you like to keep yourself informed of important developments by reading the trade media.

You might have noticed that when you read articles about events and issues in your industry that sometimes clouds of words start to form in your head. These are what experts call “opinions” or “ideas”. Try to practice thinking like this as often as possible, but be careful not to over-exert yourself.

You might like to try gentle warm-up exercises like having an opinion on something you saw on television last night. Maybe that floppy haired teenager you like got voted off the X-Factor? Maybe John Torode said something mean about Anne Widdicombe’s mango parfait on Masterchef? What kind of “thoughts” did you have when you watched the show? Did you think this was a good thing, or a bad thing, or a soul crushingly banal and facile thing?

We’re making progress, but don’t stop there! Now try to think about why these things are good or bad; how would you explain the “reasoning” behind your “opinion” to another person? What if that other person disagrees with you; how would you respond to their “argument”?

Now that you’ve practiced creating a fully formed thought in your mind, we’re ready to move to the next level.

This is the really important part; you need to find a way to get that thought out of your head and onto your computer. Social media experts use a tool called a “keyboard” to write down words that are in their minds so that the words can be shown on computer screens to other people – this takes some practice, but you can start slowly if you like.

Remember that because you are a “communications professional” people will expect the words you write to be spelled correctly and to follow the basic rules of grammar. You should attempt to write down your thoughts with style and clarity, so that it is easy for other people to read and understand what you are trying to say. If this is something you find difficult, you might consider advanced, special training, such as a GCSE English course at your local night-school.

So, now that we’ve talked about how to have an opinion about things and how to write English, you’re ready to start blogging!

If brands want to hold the attention of their audiences, a commitment to creating high value content is essential

For a recent pitch we were challenged to come up with ideas for helping the brand engage with UK attendees of an international trade show held in Germany. One of the ideas we came up with was for a “survival kit” in the form of a mobile app. The app would contain helpful information about the show itself, useful local intelligence such as places to eat/stay, public transport tips, handy German words and phrases, and so on.

The point was that by providing a genuinely useful resource which people could simply load onto their smartphones, we would be able to establish a direct communication channel with the audience. This would enable us to send them live updates, via the app, during the event and encourage them to visit the company’s stand.

The potential client’s response to this idea was “But what gives us the authority to publish content like this? Surely this is the kind of thing that the event organisers should do.”

I’m intrigued that anybody would think an organisation needs permission to create useful content. In an era when brands are looking for creative ways to catch and hold the attention of their audiences, creating high-value content is something that should be in the DNA of all businesses.

Suggesting that it’s the responsibility of another organisation to create the content your audience wants is tantamount to saying that you’re not at all interested in speaking to your market and you’d rather hand the opportunity to somebody else.

Just wanted to flag up an article I wrote recently for Business Computing World on the business potential of Google+.

The short version: it’s still too early to say, especially since Google hasn’t unvieled the brand pages yet, so any conversations about the platform’s potential are a little premature. Nevertheless, it’s a nice service and Google has built up a lot of valuable experience with its advertising platform and analytics tools, so it’s safe to assume that will be deployed with great effect on Google+. Eventually.

The ongoing turf war between SEO and PR shows little sign of blowing over any time soon. The reason for this is that there is a clear overlap between the two disciplines and lots of people in both camps are very defensive about their roles. This is compounded by a widespread lack of understanding of SEO.

In this post I’m going to take a stab at explaining the issues in neutral terms, so that hopefully we can start to think about the bigger picture and escape from the circular argument that has so far failed to answer any of the important questions.

Let’s start by outlining the objectives of both disciplines:

• SEO – aims to ensure that the brand’s website appears highly in search engine results for relevant search terms
• PR – aims to ensure the brand has a positive reputation amongst its audiences

One of the main sources of friction between the two camps is that they both employ similar tactics to achieve these aims. One of the best ways to improve SEO is to get other websites to link to yours. Links from authoritative, high profile websites, such as respected media sites like the BBC, Wall Street Journal or Engadget are extremely valuable in this respect, and the easiest way to get a link from one of these sites is to convince them to write about your company in an article.

So, immediately we have a conflict. Managing relationships with the media is something PR feels it should definitely be in control of, but SEO also needs to find ways to engage with (online) media in order to get those links. Nothing is more likely to send a PR manager into convulsions than the idea of another department (or, worse still, external agency) talking to the media.

Even when we’re not talking about working with high-profile media, SEO people are still likely to want to place bylined articles with a wide variety of third-party websites to get more links. Often, the PR team might not always agree that the content of the articles or the type of websites being used

But things get more complicated when social media is involved. From the SEO perspective a corporate blog provides an ideal opportunity to post lots of keyword-rich copy on the company website to attract the attention of search engines, whereas PR will want to use it to publish thought leadership pieces and news announcements. The two objectives don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but in the real world you can usually expect fierce disagreement about who should take ownership of the blog.

SEO could also make a reasonable case for owning channels such as Facebook and Twitter on the grounds that these can also be used to enhance search engine rankings, while PR will argue that these are vital tools for reputation management.

Different copywriting styles

SEO copywriting tends to focus on technicalities, such as ensuring the text contains the correct density of keywords and appropriate use of hyperlinks, and since they are written for search engines rather than human readers the quality of the articles can be quite poor. PR copywriting, conversely, focuses on getting the brand’s messages across persuasively, but usually no consideration is given to SEO even if the article is intended for online use, which is clearly a missed opportunity.

When creating a press release, the first aim of PR is to try to ensure the story gets picked up by as many journalists as possible; the release is designed to catch their attention, not (usually) to be published itself. But SEO people write press releases for online syndication; that is, they expect the release to be republished verbatim across a large number of news aggregation sites, which will provide lots of links back to the company website. Again, these are two very different objectives achieved using similar tactics, so it’s no surprise that there’s confusion about the roles and responsibilities of PR and SEO.

Obviously, all businesses are different and there can be many other ways in which SEO and PR overlap. The problem is made much worse, I think, by a general lack of understanding about how SEO works; most PR people don’t get it and neither do a lot of people from other marketing communications disciplines. Likewise, a lot of SEO people (who generally tend to be from a digital background) don’t understand PR issues.

Unfortunately this means that the most obvious solution often gets overlooked; You need somebody who understands both PR and SEO to coordinate their efforts, and it has to be somebody with enough clout to force them to play nicely together.

‘PR vs SEO’ is great fodder for blog posts, Twitter debates and digital marketing talking shops, but the real world consequences of failing to get on top of this issue are wasted budgets and missed opportunities. If you can get your SEO and PR people working in synch, the results can be wonderful; I’ve seen it happen.

The barriers to achieving this are largely political, since in most organisations there’s no shortage of people with the right skills; it’s really just a matter of getting them to work well together.

Just a brief post to highlight this article from Financial Director magazine, which mentions the FTSE 100 on Twitter research I put together a while ago. The article looks at how financial directors view the use of social networks for their businesses as well as their personal activity.

Please excuse any strange goings-on around here over the next day or so. I’m currently upgrading to the latest version of WordPress for this blog, which also required me to upgrade MySQL and PHP to more recent releases, and this resulted in a few technical hitches.

Fortunately I’ve recovered all of the posts and comments, but putting it all back together again is going to take a day or two. I hope WordPress 3 turns out to be worth it…

I’ve been quoted in Reputation Online today for a story about search and PR and, just in case anybody’s interested, here are my slightly expanded thoughts on the subject:

PR and search are closely linked, and a lot of PR people are already doing SEO even if they don’t realise it.

SEO has two main elements; On-page and off-page. On page SEO consists of all the technical stuff (like making sure your site is set up properly to be efficiently indexed by the search engines) and having plenty of good content that is relevant to your business.

On-page SEO is largely going to be handled by the digital team or an in-house SEO specialist, but PR can contribute by doing things like running a corporate blog which will be a source of good quality, relevant content.

Where PR can really make a difference is with the off-page SEO. Off-page SEO essentially means getting plenty of links to your site from others, and wherever possible these links need to come from respectable, well established sites. The higher profile the site, the more valuable the link. For example, a link from a page on bbc.co.uk can be incredibly powerful in SEO terms and the long term value of that link could probably outweigh the initial PR value of the coverage in a lot of cases.

How to get those links? Create compelling stories, drive conversations, do things that are interesting so that people want to talk about your company and will link back to your website when they do so. These are traditional PR skills, and it’s a happy coincidence that SEO people usually struggle with this side of things; I don’t think many SEO experts will argue that creating and pitching stories to journalists and bloggers is something they should be doing.

Let the SEO guys take care of the technical and on-page aspects of the work, and let the PR people do the part which involves persuading people to write about your business. So, even though a lot of PR people might not think they understand SEO, if they’ve ever pitched a story that has resulted in online coverage with a link back to the client’s site, they’ve already made a great start.

There are technical issues to consider such as keyword selection, anchor text, deep-linking and so on which require a little know-how, and for this reason I think PR and SEO teams need to work together to be most effective. I always try to make friends with clients’ SEO people because, even though I understand the technicalities, I still need to understand what strategy they’re using and what keywords they’re focusing on so that I can align our efforts with theirs.

So, to summarise, I think PR can contribute to SEO in a number of ways which complement the skills of SEO experts:

• Creating compelling content on the client’s website/blog which will encourage people to link to it
• Generating coverage in mainstream and social media which will often come with high-value links to the client’s site

It’s not just about getting top spot in the search results

Obviously getting the client to the top of Google’s search results for their relevant keywords is a good thing to do, but what about the rest of the page? Ideally, if a consumer is researching a brand or product, you want all of the search results below the client’s website to consist of positive third party recommendation: glowing press coverage, product reviews on blogs, consumer recommendations in discussion forums, information about CSR activity, etc.

Most SEO activity focuses only on getting that top-spot for the relevant keywords, but all of this other stuff is vitally important too. It’s here that digital-savvy PR people can really add value, both in terms of driving those positive discussions in the first place, and in helping to make sure they are visible to consumers.

Text 100’s London office went on a team outing to watch The Social Network last week and, while it’s an entertaining enough film, it’s also fair to say that we’ll never know for sure just how accurately it depicts the true story behind Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg himself has pointed out that the most accurate part of the film was his wardrobe.

All the same, if we look at the film as being largely a work of fiction, is there anything we can learn from it? I think so:

Doing things just because they are cool can pay off big: Facebook starts life as a cool project rather than an explicitly profit motivated venture. Even when the site grows rapidly, Zuckerberg resists the urge to plaster it with advertising, in order to keep it cool. This is a good principle for the age of digital business: sometimes it’s worth doing something cool even if there’s no clear business benefit, just to see what happens.

Ideas are easy, execution is what counts: Zuckerberg gets sued by people who think he stole their idea. But here’s the thing: Facebook was not the first social networking site. Lots of people had similar ideas at that time, whether or not Zuckerberg was influenced by or simply stole somebody else’s idea is immaterial. What’s important is that he executed the idea far better than anybody else.

In my latest post on the Text 100 blog, I argue that social media has a lot in common with cinema. Both are spaces that consumers emotionally fence off as being primarily for personal entertainment rather than commerce, but if brands are careful they can find a way to participate which enhances the experience rather than intruding on it.

Cinema has had the best part of a century for brands to discover the most effective ways of getting involved, but at present social media marketers are still very much experimenting with what works in this space.