DIY PR by Penny Haywood Calder

Got some thought provoking tips on social media from Seth Liss, SunSentinel.com's news community manager. He's making the point that a lot more people are using social media now and it's harder to get noticed. But social media is still a better bet than advertising for driving business to ecommerce sites, so it's worth making the effort.

He kicks off with the obvious: drop the drab everyday stuff.

When you do post a newsworthy event, he points out that it's the details that make it more interesting. How did it happen? Where? How does that make you feel? Not easy in 140 characters, but when was really good communication ever easy?

He reminds us to avoid engaging in a 1-2-1 conversation on public sites - it's really boring for everyone else.

He also reminds us to place posts with links into context. We need to judge for ourselves whether the link is worth pursuing.

It looks as if people have had enough of blatent promotional messages from their friends. Edelman's Trust Barometer survey shows "the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company has dropped from 45 percent to 25 percent since 2008." (Edelman's annual Trust Barometer survey is based on nearly 5,000 25-minute interviews with informed people aged 24-60 in 20 countries).

He suggests sharing good information is the key to being interesting. Develop interesting sidelights on your business sector to demonstrate your knowledge in action.

Plus timing is key. Most people dip into their social media accounts so they miss a lot: If you can spot patterns when key people are posting, you can predict when they are more likely to see your posts.

Finally advises: listen first, then comment. "If people know you are interested in what they have to say, they will most likely be curious about what you have to say as well."

I'd say: there's no quick fix. It's a case of listening well before you speak to have a better chance of engaging with well respected people with a good following. People who enhance your own line reputation, and in turn, that boosts your online business.

Labels: DIY PR, ecommerce, online PR, online PR and marketing, online sales, PHPR, PR, social media

Staff are at the front line and spend a lot of their waking hours with you, so they could be your business' most knowledgeable and credible advocates - if you give them the information they need.

Even if the 6 degrees of separation theory has been disproved, most people are better connected than we realise: your staff among them. Even if it’s only friends like them who would be good workers, saving you lots of recruitment costs and time. But you’d be amazed at who their uncle knows.. so keep them up to speed with the company. But they can't pass on good news about your business if they don't know it!

Same goes for your family and friends. I once met a wife who was playing tennis with the wife of the top guy on her husband's key potential client list. He hadn't told her, so she never even thought to mention the surname of her tennis pal to him... A simple dinner invitation was all it took when I pointed out the connection.

And advisers.

Your lawyer and accountant are dealing with 100s of businesses a year. Why shouldn't they refer you if they come across a need for your services? But you won't be at the front of their mind when they come across someone who needs your goods or services if you don't keep them up-to-date with positive feedback. And they are businesses too. You might want to explore a more formal arrangement to cross promoting each other?

But different people swim into your orbit at different times and there comes a point when keeping track of these newsletters and contact actions needs to be organised so you don’t send out the same snippet or newsletter twice to the same person. It's all too easy to do if you get a few interruptions in your day...

This is where a CRM (customer relationship management) program like SalesForce or Act! or the free open source program: ChannelCRM.dk (it has been translated into English) could be very useful. Don't let the ‘customer’ bit in the name put you off - these are contact management systems that work well for managing communications with potential client.

This is the seventh in a series of posts re-visiting some of the 30 low cost or free publicity techniques featured in PHPR's founder's best-selling book: DIYPR, the small business owner's guide to 'free' publicity by Penny Haywood.

The 30 techniques are a mix of digital and offline sales, marketing and PR tools because you need to work all three disciplines (sales, marketing and PR) to effectively boost a business.
That's because:

PR raises awareness.

Marketing describes the features and benefits of your offerings and decides how to position them in the market (positioning for price, gaps in the market, distribution etc versus your competitors).

Sales matches the benefits to an individual buyer's particular needs and handles the mechanics of the sale and after sales service liaison.
As the series develops, choose a few to trial for a few months.
The aim is to work up to 10 varied publicity techniques that work for you and your business to create a rolling PR Plan for success.

Your feedback is most welcome and may be included (with proper attribution) in the forthcoming revised edition of DIY PR.

Labels: 6 degrees of separation, communications, DIY PR, ecommerce, PR, running a business

Generally, the high value sales “follow the face”, especially in the early stages of generating business-to-business service sales, even if the sale and most of the service delivery happens online.

1-2-1 networking and building relationships and referrals is key at this stage.
But you can accelerate a business relationship in between seeing people face to face by staying in contact in a thoughtful and helpful way. For example:

1) Provide personalised news snippets – maybe send a link and a note - like a personal Tweet?
2) Keep them up to speed with e-newsletters if you have contact permission and know they'll be interested
3) Hang out online and comment on their blog, answer or comment on their forum posts - that's really good for generating feel-good as many blogs don't generate much feedback.
4) Ring if you have news that could be very useful – keep it light. No pressure.

It's worth keeping in mind when you are desperate for a sale that they tend to come when you don't push. Not everyone is immediately ready or able to buy immediately, so these contact efforts are never about in-your-face selling. It's about being a familiar and trusted contact - and being at the front of their mind when they are ready.

This is the fifth in a series of posts re-visiting some of the 30 low cost or free publicity techniques featured in PHPR's founder's best-selling book: DIYPR, the small business owner's guide to 'free' publicity by Penny Haywood.

The 30 techniques are a mix of digital and offline sales, marketing and PR tools because you need to work all three disciplines (sales, marketing and PR) to effectively boost a business.

That's because:

PR raises awareness.
Marketing describes the features and benefits of your offerings and decides how to position them in the market (positioning for price, gaps in the market, distribution etc versus your competitors).
Sales matches the benefits to an individual buyer's particular needs and handles the mechanics of the sale and after sales service liaison.

As the series develops, choose a few to trial for a few months.

The aim is to work up to 10 varied publicity techniques that work for you and your business to create a rolling PR Plan for success.

Your feedback is most welcome and may be included (with proper attribution) in the forthcoming revised edition of DIY PR.

Labels: boosting your business, business promotion, DIY PR, ecommerce, online sales, PR, public relations, publicity

Small budgets rarely stretch to the really effective levels of advertising. Unless you already have strong design skills, you'll need to buy those in. And ads need to be repeated often to achieve impact. That's the bit most small businesses forget. Many small businesses stop at one insertion, but most people don't notice the first three times an advert runs in most publications.

But what do you do when you need to shift, for example, loads of beds in a hurry? Unless Mary Queen of Scots slept in all of them, they will need to be advertised in the local media on and offline. The clever PR alternatives would just take too much time.

TIP: Google sometimes gives away vouchers for £30 of free AdWords. Mine arrived by post after I registered my business on Google Maps, but sometimes these offers falls out of business magazines.

It helps to have a well-written, optimised site that anticipates the information a buyer might need, and answers that, ending with a clear call to action on every page.

You'll save a lot of money if you think about who you need to reach. Can you reach them any other way?

Would an in-store event work, with treats and discounts for invited existing customers? Or a leaflet drop? Can you ring round guest houses and hotels offering a bulk deal (and take away the old ones to minimise the hassle?). Can you offer matching bedside tables and wardrobes?

Advertising does work if you have a large budget and top creative skills. It can be an expensive first resort for those with smaller pockets.

This is the fourth in a series of posts re-visiting the 30 low cost or free publicity techniques featured in PHPR's founder's best-selling book: DIYPR, the small business owner's guide to 'free' publicity by Penny Haywood. The 30 techniques are a mix of digital and offline sales, marketing and PR tools because you need to work all three disciplines (sales, marketing and PR) to effectively boost a business. As the series develops, choose a few to trial for a few months. The aim is to work up to 10 varied publicity techniques that work for you and your business to create a rolling PR Plan for success.

Your feedback is most welcome and may be included (with proper attribution) in the forthcoming revised edition of DIY PR.

Labels: advertising, DIY PR, ecommerce, PR, PR Edinburgh, public relations, publicity, small businesses, SMEs

Klout now lets you see the most influential Tweeters on a topic so you can build a Twitter list of the results. The Klout Twitter app measures the influencing powers of individual Tweeps to "find the people the world listens to"

Labels: ecommerce, influence, influential, Klout, online PR, social media, Twitter

I am indebted to Simon Allen here at shopfitter.com for sending me a link to this article. It details a case study where the requirement to register resulted in an $300 million loss in online sales revenues.

The $300 Million Button

I don't know about you, but I recognised myself in Jared M Spool's description of online behaviour when website users are confronted by a simple login/registration form involving just a email address and password, with login/register options and a forgotten password link.

We see this all the time, so we assume it's a well proven formula that will work if we copy it.

Yet how often do we arrive at a similar form and wonder whether we have registered or not with the site? It's fine if we use the site a lot, but a real pain if we don't. I buy from very few sites frequently enough to be familiar with the login procedure and it seems I'm not the only one.

Just like the users they researched in the article, I put in an email address and stab way at a variety of the usual passwords. And if I've changed my email address, was it before or after I registered? No wonder they found some people had registered several times. Others (to the tune of some $300 million) gave up and either found another seller that was easier to buy from, or did without.

Most users resented the registration process. First-time buyers weren't sure whether they would be repeat customers so they had no interest in relationship building. They viewed the process as yet another spam generator. Most repeat customers couldn't remember whether they were new or not.

Yet how many marketing people bang on about collecting email addresses to create a permission-based list that will be your future gold dust? Yes, the ability to send well-timed and well-spaced offers and interesting information to customers will surely generate repeat sales. But it is counter-productive if the timing of the contact information collection gets in the way of the first sale. I suspect you need to analyse user-experience to determine the best point in your repeat sales cycle and make the process as easy as possible - every keystroke counts online.

Simon was making the point that this doesn't happen with web shops on the shopfitter.com platform, and it's a good point.

I remember being commissioned to write a series of case studies (one of our specialities) for an online payment provider that didn't require the payee to register. The first interviewee reported a 24% increase in revenues on the day they switched to this payment services provider. When I asked the others, none had noticed, but when they looked into it, all saw 20+% increases in sales as a result of a massive drop in failed carts (purchases abandoned during the sales process).

The next time I'm specifying or re-vamping a web site, I know I'll be looking at removing barriers to sales, not creating them. The memory of the $300 million invisible sales hurdle will live on in my memory.

Labels: case studies, ecommerce, online sales, shopfitter.com

It's easy enough to find comment mentioning your business name or key search terms on websites, forums and in the news using Google plus their news alerts service.

But finding the most influential tweeters on Twitter in your sphere was a bit of a hit or miss using apps like Twollow. Not any longer. Have just discovered WeFollow on Twitter and I can recommend it. It is a directory and you can use it to find entrepreneurs, celebs etc.

But use it on a keyword search and it will dig out the people who are tweeting in your sector. The results come back ranking Tweeters numerically according to the number of followers they have attracted, which gives a fair indication of their influence.

And helps you see where you are in the pecking order. You do have to register to be placed, so it's not totally comprehensive, but I suspect most people wanting to be seen as a heavyweight in a subject area will be seriously tempted to sign up.

http://wefollow.com/

Labels: ecommerce, online PR, SEO, social media, Twitter, wefollow

If you run your own ecommerce site, you probably have generated additional content to boost your SEO, so you know how hard it can be to generate good content.

Particularly if writing snappy informative copy is not your thing. With so much free content out there, an investment in good writing is not often high on the publicity budget. But a failure to invest in writing goes much deeper and the current trend towards shedding writers in the media could affect all businesses.

The big question is, with all the free news around, can we retain quality news outlets where a mention is respected to the extent that it boosts a business reputation?

Several UK media have seen their offline circulation plummet as more people access content online. But despite higher online readerships, many media are reportedly struggling to make money online as content users blank out a lot of online advertising.


Does it matter?


Well, yes, if you want to generate high quality media coverage (on or offline) that people choose to read. Material that packs a powerful editorial endorsement factor, recommending your company to thousands and sometimes millions of others.

Yes, it matters If you want an editorial endorsement that you can wear like a badge of honour for the next squillion years: "as seen on BBC TV" or "as featured in the FT", with links to the coverage or a hotlink to a quote from it.

Yes it matters if you want a media recommendation your business can be proud of, because someone has to pay editorial staff to create the content that you are proud to be seen in, and edit the publication to maintain its reputation for credibility.

A media recommendation where anyone can get a look in is no recommendation at all, regardless of whether the news source is on or offline.

So it matters when an influential author like Chris Anderson writes a new book, called “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” arguing that there is a law dictating that anything made of ideas, like information, gravitates inexorably to being free - that it 'wants' to be free. And he doesn't mean unfettered free speech. He is talking about free of charge.


Now free of charge, when it comes to information usually translates into a vastly reduced budget to invest in good writers. You would think that PR people would welcome that as it might open doors for news releases to be used almost wholesale. But I know I am not alone in being more concerned with the bigger picture. Sure, getting news releases taken up is one thing, but a swing towards accepting unrestricted content reduces the impact of coverage on the site to the point that it would be worthless from a PR point of view.

Anderson is editor of the popular Wired magazine and author of the best-selling book, The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand. In that book he argued the Internet offers everything to everyone, and trailing in the wake of an initial success, a tail of endless near misses can now have a market. That never convinced me entirely. I can see that there is more of a long tail than before the Internet, when physical shop space limited the choice on offer. But I've always thought that assuming an upward graph line will continue forever is just that: an assumption. So I couldn't see how the tail of unlimited demand would continue indefinitely. Surely the near misses would start drifting further off the mark and become irrelevant?

In today's issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reviews Anderson's latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price and finds similar holes in the idea that a tendency towards free information is the only force affecting pricing online. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=all

Gladwell is no stranger to big ideas. He was named one of the top 100 most influential people by Time magazine in 2005 and his books: The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers have all been international best-sellers.


Gladwell takes Anderson's examples of how we all rush to free services, so they cost a bomb to handle the demand, like YouTube, forcing owners to retreat from the abundance thinking model that propels free information. Universal free information is often of such questionable quality that even YouTube pays for professional content provide from TV stations and film production companies for quality content to keep users happy and deliver audiences for advertisers.

Gladwell says there are plenty of models where information is running in just the opposite direction from free - in drug companies, for example where the high costs of trialling to meet regulations need to be recouped. Or where both models are used: the New York Times puts its content up free on the Web site, but the Wall Street Journal has over a million subscribers paying for online access to its content.

Gladwell predicts Apple could make more from selling iPhone downloads than from the iPhone itself and may one day offer the phone free to boost download sales (yes, please!). Or give away downloads to boost the phone sales. Or carry on charging for both.

He concludes that the only law is that "the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws".

And that's good news for those who want quality journalism to continue, because quality comes from an editing process to sort the wheat from the chaff. Plus sources to provide information and run around getting pictures set up and arranging interviews (PR people). Plus someone to write it up and place the information in context - and that understanding of context comes with in-depth experience in a sector.

All that means skilled intelligent human intervention - and with humans come minor factors like a liking for food, a need for clothes and a roof over their heads, plus obligations to care for family members and spending money.

In short: great media needs to be paid for somewhere down the line.

And great media is an inspiration and a challenge to PR people to come up with issues-led ideas and spokespeople that can stretch to fit the news agenda, add to the debate and showcase their company's talent. And when they do, they get all the conferred credit that editorial endorsement can bring.

Used well (and I've seen an astonishing number of businesses fail to capitalise on good quality coverage of their businesses) good editorial endorsement is like a prestigious award and can be referred to almost indefinitely thereafter.

Labels: Chris Anderson, content, ecommerce, editorial endorsement, Free The Future of a Radical Price, issues-led PR, Malcolm Gladwell, online PR, PR, The Long Tail, The New Yorker, YouTube