Roger Warner, Managing Director, C&M

July 2009

Qtn:

How many Online consultants in fipfops does it take to screw up a goodmarketing plan?

An:

Normally just one, but we’ve seen wholeagencies go ‘tribal’ on a perectly soundset o ideas on more than one occasion.

(NB: this paper has also been published by our friends at New Media Knowledge).

Shut Up, Listen and Spin:

The Five Step Guide to Online PR and Social Media Agency Work //

C&M

//July 2009

You’ll be pleased to learn that we’rea dierent kind o consultancy (we ownsensible shoes and oten wear suits tomeetings). Taking the pretentious outo PR, this paper is designed todemystiy all this hip digital marketingstu and show you how we normallyexecute a basic Online PR campaign –in under 10 pages!It’s quite simple really: all we do is

shut up, listen and spin

. Here’s ourve step guide…

This rst step is arguably

the

most important aspect o good Online PRand Social Media strategy. I our clients are good talkers but not so goodat listening then we politely request their attention.Shutting up is really important because, as you’ll see, great Online PRprogrammes are never just about ‘me, me, me!‘ For this reason, wenever normally advocate building an ‘Acme Corp’Facebookwidget oradedicated social networking platormstraight out o the blocks. ‘Iwe build it, they will come’ was never a great maxim or the Interweb.Instead, we recommend some o the ollowing…This is good marketing 101: understanding what your customers want.We

always

do a spot o research beore we dive in. The goal is to get aeel or the kind o language that our audience is using in relation to ourstu, and to identiy when and where they’re actively talking about it.

Here’s How:

i. Keyword Research

UsingGoogle Suggestwe can quickly tune in and learn how people aresearching the big, bad Interweb or our specic product/service oeringsand the things that are related to them.Ideally we’ll nd that our content commands a decent level o searchtrac. Just

how

much will depend on the market we’re in – obviouslyone would expect less trac or B2B terms and more or B2C… Butwhatever the case, this research will show us whether our currentmarketing language is in tune with the people that are out there lookingor us.It’s easy to understand how keenly contested these ‘keyword markets‘ are in relation to the rest o the web. We just plug them intoGoogle to see how many other pages are out there ranking or the terms.Our aim is to nd some keyword ‘sweet-spots’ around which to optimiseour work …In other words, a set o descriptive terms that are wellsearched or and not particularly well used by our serious competition.

Shut Up, Listen and Spin:

The Five Step Guide to Online PR and Social Media Agency Work //

C&M

//July 2009

ii) Blog and Twitter Research

Next we apply everything that we’ve learned toGoogle Blog Search,TechnoratiSearch andTwitter Searchto see i these tools can reveal who’s talking about us and where they’re at.Once we’ve identied relevant blogs and/or orums we can get a veryconcise eel or how ‘infuential’ they are by running them throughanalysis tools likeLink Diagnosisand Xinu(in basic terms, i a site is popular and infuential, it’ll have a lot o links pointing to it – particularlyrom places likeTechnoratianddelicious ). Having done this we make a note o the good ones and bin the rest.

iii) Research our ‘High Net Worth’ People

Next we useBackTypeto get a handle on the blogs that our mostinfuential people are reading and to understand how these people areinteracting with each other. BackType is basically a tool that lets us ‘nd,ollow and share comments on the web.’ In simple terms, once we’veestablished a set o keywords and people to ollow, BackType alerts us totheir presence whenever they show up in blog comment strings. It helpsus to stay abreast o all the latest infuential chat and to ensure that we’remonitoring in all the right places.

iv) Stay Alert…

We also create a bunch oGoogle News, Blog and Video Alertsor all oour most important keywords, so that whenever somebody so much assneezes on our patch we’re the rst to know about it.

v) Stay on Top of Things. Create anOnline Influencer Monitoring Dashboard

At this point, the prospect o so much data is probably making you itch.But don’t worry – the Dashboard is where we pull everything together inone place. All o the ‘listening’ inormation described canbe accessed via a series o RSS eeds andaggregated into a simple Dashboard like the oneto the right. This Dashboard is a central part oour work – it’s our window onto the web. It’salso one o the primary mechanisms or seedingour content eectively.From let to right we have a variety o ‘tabs’ thatprovide important eeds on all o our brand-related terms and keywords romGoogle,MSN, delicious,Flickr,Twitter, and other key services. In addition, we have tabs that relay every new posting rom competitorblogs, partner blogs and keyword-related blogs. We also have a varietyo tabs dedicated to specic blog comments in relation to our targetpeople, blogs and keywords. And nally, there’s a tab or all o ourkeyword-relatedGoogle Alerts.Our ‘dashboard’ is created usingNetvibes, but you could just as easilyuse any RSS reader. The important thing is that it’s web-riendly so thatit can be published as a page or a distributed team’s perusal. The otherthing to note is that Campaign Dashboards are highly addictive: they’vebeen known to kill mornings, evenings and weekends at single sittings –so use them wisely!

‘Social-ness’ is the magic ingredient of all great Online PR.

Our primary goal is to nd the right homes or our messages and tooptimise them (with keywords) to resonate with our audience. Our‘listening’ research and dashboard help us to write good targetedcontent and learn where it needs to be seeded.