Obama has made almost perfect use of Web 2.0 to build his campaign - and generate income at a speed that has amazed most observers, and shocked all his rivals. I think people writing about PR on the web may use his campaign to show exactly when Web 2.0 came of age, and for many years quote it as a textbook example of building community support by

• Offering unique appeal to core supporters
• Encouraging them to build communities
• Using - or enabling others to use - every possible medium to spread the message

The Amazing Money Machine by Joshua Green in The Atlantic gives a detailed analysis of just how effectively all this has been done. Green ‘opted to undergo the full tech immersion while reporting this piece, and soon had Obama ring tones on my phone, new networks of online “friends,” text-message updates from the campaign, and regular e-mails

from its manager, all gently encouraging me to give money, volunteer time, bring in new friends, and generally reorient my life in ways that were made to seem hip and fun’.

For me, there are two key points. First, Obama understood the influence of the web at the right time - and knew where to find the people who can wield it, and how to appeal to them. He is proposing the kind of legislation to appeal to Silicon Valley, and has made himself available. The result has been powerful affinity groups like entrepreneursforobama.com and social networking and campaign focus sites such as my.barackobama.com doing all the hard work, and doing it much more effectively than a central organization.

The second point is that he does not seem to be acting a part. Being new, young, and intelligent appeals to web users and entrepreneurs, be he also seems to be sympathetic to the ideals of the web - openness and resistance to manipulation. That has also meant letting the thing roll rather than trying to control it too much, which would probably have killed it.

Like Apple, Obama ‘got it’ at just the right time. Like Apple, Obama has had a lot of negative press on the web, but had built a strong enough core following and ‘cool factor’ to achieve critical mass by then. I am sure people will try to paint Hillary as akin to Microsoft, (predictably, but very amusingly, including Fake Steve Jobs), and perhaps with some justification as someone who got it a bit too late - and not quite as well.

An introduction to Web 2.0 PR - PR Secrets for Startups - on TechCrunch, by Brian Solis, gives a great list of ‘to-do’s for startups. As a few commentators say, these are not exactly secrets, and one or two suggest his main idea is to publicize his PR agency FutureWorks, in Silicon Valley, but I think that’s probably a little cynical, though obviously this blog won’t hurt.

OK, it’s not new - most of these ideas you can see quite widely - and it’s maybe a little bit generalized, but it’s still a compact list that shows really well where to concentrate the effort. Key examples are working on relationships with the right journalists and bloggers, especially the ‘Magic Middle’ (blogs with a sizeable rather than a huge following), and monitoring success carefully all the way according to current business aims rather than just maximum exposure.

Key among his 12 points are ‘Participation is Marketing‘, ‘Identify The Target Audience For Every Step Of Your Growth‘, ‘Get a Spokesperson‘, ‘Your Company Blog is More Powerful Than You May Think‘, and ‘Follow the Conversations and Join In‘.

For me, the one area he falls short on is how to use new media, especially mashups and video, to create more shareable content - something that, though it’s moving fast, is getting increasingly mainstream.

The Inquirer has started a genuinely funny spoof series, their Guide to PR on a Dollar a Day. The first instalment at the start of May, on news releases, advises:
Problem is, if you make it sound simple, people won’t respect you. They need to be confused, so they feel a little bit inadequate and inferior. So bulk out your press release with some powerful sounding - but impotent - phrases like “world’s leading” “best in class” and “strategic partnership”.

The second, a fortnight later, is entitled Get a Hack the Sack, and passes on some really useful ways to force journalists to bend to your will, such as:
…always phone every journalist at least 12 times. Each phone call has two important functions. One, you must always break a journalist’s concentration, whatever they’re doing, and make them think about you instead…Call 4. Is it OK to phone you just before we send you the release?
Call 5. Is it OK to call you the moment we have despatched the release?

However implausible their tips may look, you can bet Nick Booth, the author, is speaking from direct experience of what agencies do. I’m really looking forward to more - and not just for fun, but just to make sure I don’t fall into any of the traps he mentions. So far, so good (I think).

Over 25 years ago I spent half of my gap year (between school and university) working on a building site as a plasterer’s labourer. Hard work but a lot of fun. My boss - a veteran plasterer known - I still have no idea why - as ‘Chap’ (or ‘Chappy’ to his best mates) - would introduce his musings on the world by sighing and asking ‘So, what’s it all about, Ade?’. I’m not in touch with him now, and in fact he’s probably not around any more, but I would love to be able to show him this list of the 75 million answers, courtesy of Google, retrieved in the blink of an eye:

I think that more or less sums it up (especially if you’re a gifted, asthmatic victim of internet fraud). And, strangely, not an adult site on the front page. Courtesy of Google, but ultimately of course of the World Wide Web, whose birth - when its intellectual property was released to the world was 30 April 15 years ago.

I thought I would have a look at a slightly more serious side of the Web’s general usefulness. At university, I had real problems trying to complete a couple of essays about the history of science. It sounds simple enough to find and compare different sources and commentators, but the relevant works (in English) were often unobtainable. Trying to come to independent, balanced conclusions about the what exactly various individuals thought about the world hundreds, or thousands, of years ago was hard. For a lot of work (at University College. London) I used their library resource computer network, called EUCLID to find sources. It made me think then that in another twenty years students would be typing in natural language questions and getting all the sources they needed.

How did the Web perform (again, using Google)? This time, two blinks, 2000 results. And again, no adult sites. Add wikipedia to this list (including the discussion page) and this is far better than I was able to manage at the time. My conclusion - maturing nicely. Just how good is it going to get when the semantic web finally arrives? I think I’ll try these searches when it turns 20.

Here is an excellent overview of how to use video to publish your company news. Duncan Riley at TechCrunch gives tips on creating high quality video on various platforms, adding effects and publishing it where it will be widely seen (predictably enough, the top-ranking places to publish are YouTube, YouTube and YouTube, but others are listed as important).

Two of his recommendations are live TV streaming (which you can edit for later publishing as a video), and just watching YouTube to see what works and what doesn’t. You can see that being one of the more popular jobs at the office, can’t you?

Sprout is a really easy-to-use online WYSIWYG editor for Flash, started in January 2008 and now released in a public beta that is free to download and works with IE, Firefox and Safari. Templates make it easy to publish and manage widgets, mini-sites, banners, and mashups using components from PollDaddy, Google, Ribbit, ChipIn, and others. Publishing is simple. You get the code to copy into your website, or use a quick post feature to place in a blog or social network.

Sprout could be a great help to entertainment promotion, both for bands and for cool gadgets. The problem I foresee is the ‘more is more’ principle. Just as a previous generation started to use every Photoshop and Illustrator trick on every headline and graphic, will we end up with overdone and amateurish multimedia marketing everywhere we look? Probably best to take it gently for professional PR and marketing, but excellent for launching and changing lightweight campaigns fast. And, as you can also track the number of views and the number of times it is copied, great for seeding and reseeding viral campaigns.

Sprout also includes an SDK to add new features, and has taken off hugely. It could become one of the web’s fastest ever acquisitions, and if so could serve as an object lesson in how to do it.

First published on the Extendance Marketing Blog site

If you read this blog regularly, you will have noticed that we often have an issue with bad use of marketing communications language.

Now I came across a statistic in the excellent book The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott. He put a list of jargon phrases together and had the occurrences in news releases analyzed by Factiva from Dow Jones (www.factiva.com). This Lab then analyzed how often these phrases occurred in news releases published in North America between January 1 and September 30, 2006. The news release wires included the ‘who’s who’ in the market, namely Business Wire, Canada NewsWire, CCNMatthews, CommWeb.com, Market Wire, Moody’s, PR Newswire, and PrimeNewswire. Of the 388,000 news releases published in these nine months, over 74,000 of them contained at least one of the jargon phrases. Here they are:

• next generation, 9,895 uses
• flexible, robust, world class, scalable and easy to use, each over 5,000 uses
• cutting edge, mission critical, market leading, industry standard, turnkey and groundbreaking, between 2,000 and 5,000 uses
• interoperable, best of breed, and user friendly, each over 1,000 uses in news releases.

I guess you got nervous now since the exact same words are in your news releases as well: Maybe time to rethink your PR communications as well?

The ultimate acid test comes now. Substitute in your news releases your company name with that of the competition. Does the text still make sense? If so, you have a clear case of where the opportunity to communicate something unique for your company in the news release has not been used. Too bad. Fortunately, your competition is practically always doing the same too, so not quite so bad after all. Quite strange, though, that nearly everybody seems to waste money in this way!

First published on the Extendance Marketing Blog site

A number of times recently I have come across websites that offer fake social interactivity. Pages are billed with keywords like ‘group’, ‘community’ or ‘club’, and you confidently expect something that offers the kind of dialog offered by their real-world equivalent. Clicking for the sake of curiosity, though, you find either more company news, special offers, or some edited testimonials and questions. Every time I see this, I wonder how customers are going to react. I mean, how they will feel if you ask them to a party, and then when they get there tell them to keep quiet while you talk about yourself?

What I imagine happening is that marketing partners or employees are told the company needs some kind of social networking feature. Then, when individual options are discussed, they look like too much work for little return (blog, wiki) or too open (online forum). Companies decide instead to play it safe and use the ‘feature’ to include marketing content that didn’t make it onto the home page. Making the marketing department, and the management, happy - even though customers are disappointed!

But social interactivity is a genuinely useful tool. It means essentially two things - creating open dialog and sharing useful information. One thing that doesn’t belong in the picture is company information. It’s just bad form to start a conversation by talking about yourself. The choice of medium is important, but it’s the underlying aim that is crucial. If there is a genuine desire to open up the communication, this will make itself clear. But, if your company and product info are not promoted, where is the value? The answer is that it is indirect. Customer relationships are improved through active involvement, and your expertise, trustworthiness and intellectual leadership are implicit. In the case of innovation factories, customers can actually contribute to your expertise and product development, too!

The fear of customers damaging your reputation is unrealistic - people using facilities that you host are generally going to behave well. Joining up already shows a degree of loyalty and respect. If you have given a customer cause for complaint, that’s an opportunity for you to demonstrate good customer service. If they misunderstand something about your products, that’s a great chance to explain it better and share useful information with others. And in the unlikely event that a contributor abuses the medium, it’s not you but they who look bad.

The question is simply, what kind of open communication do you want with your customers, and do you have the resources to do it right? How you answer those questions determines the medium you use. If the answer is, we want a feature but not real communication, you are just wasting resources. You need to look at how the web has changed things in the last few years. Information is so open now that buzzwords are of little value - it’s now all about being accessible and authentic - the real danger lies in faking it!

First published on the Extendance Marketing Blog site

Web 2.0 features such as rich content and social networking tools have changed web design fundamentally, creating new businesses and new ways of doing business. This can make it tempting to hand over the whole creation process to your webmaster rather than risk getting out of your depth. However, the single most important aspect of creating a website has not changed at all - writing content that drives your business goals. That means getting the attention of your target customer, keeping it, and persuading them to take the next step. In a high-tech, large sales environment that probably doesn’t mean an online order form, but the next step is still crucial, be that joining a mailing list, signing up for an event, or setting up a meeting.

Making this happen probably depends not so much on how sophisticated your website is as how good the content is. Design and online marketing tools enhance content but are no substitute for it. To make sure that your content is effective, you need to stay close to the creative process, and stick to a few golden rules.

So, what are the rules?

1. Know your audience. You need to have a clear idea of exactly which buyer persona / personae will be reading your page, and why they will be reading it. You also need to be clear exactly what you want them to do next (- and make it clear to them, too!).

2. Be friendly. You want to develop a close relationship with the reader, so don’t keep them at arm’s length. Address them as ‘you’, and use personal examples that will help them see you as a trusted friend.

3. Tell your readers something they want to know. News, useful information, a solution to a problem they have. Ask yourself, ‘Even if they don’t take the next step in the buying process, will they be glad they read this page? Are they likely to use the information here, bookmark the page, or talk to someone else about it?’

3. Headlines are all-important - though writing them can be an art. Lists are good: ‘10 things you need to know about…’. ‘How To’ statements work, too, e.g. ‘How to increase sales on your website in 3 easy steps’. Figures are good: ‘Why 97% of all our customers say they will buy from us again next time’. Problem-solution statements are helpful: ‘Make certain your software purchases match your business needs, every time.’ The headline should attract but not mystify readers.

4. Write top-down and use subheads. Many readers scan. They need to see the main points easily, and that means that the crucial information should be visible at a glance. Most important points should be first line, and the subheads should spell out rest of the content clearly. Using bold text for key points also helps.

5. Clean, clear copy. No typos, stick to grammar rules, make the style simple, consistent and effective. Try to use action verbs. You may well need a professional copywriter to write or at least edit your text, but that will be money well spent.

6. Offer a definite benefit in the content, and link it to action. Time-limited or free offers are classic B2C tools, and can work for B2B too, but at the risk of cheapening your image. For B2B, the principle still applies to e.g. papers, webinars, conference tickets, newsletters etc.

7. Use ‘calls to action’ in your copy. Asking people to click a button increases response rates dramatically.

8. Use visuals. Why? Firstly, they will get attention and make your page more interesting. Secondly, they make the product or solution more visually appealing, and your claims more convincing - also maybe easier to understand. Thirdly, they give you an opportunity to repeat the selling message in captions and labels!

9. Monitor effectiveness and revise accordingly. Record your visitor numbers and clicks. Ask your customers what they read, what convinced them, what they discovered when reading the site, how easy it was to understand. A content management system is enormously useful here - though you must be sure to proof your revisions carefully and not complicate site structure.

10. Make your site search-engine friendly. Search engine optimization is a specialized topic, but a couple of key rules are: Use all the key phrases that your prospects will be looking for and that are relevant to your them, and include them in headings where appropriate.

First published on the Extendance Marketing Blog site

Mobile World in Barcelona and Cebit in Hannover are two of the big events coming up soon. An army of PR firms will attend and many of them most likely will also stop by at your booth to offer their services. In case you have ever wondered how to check out the quality and competencies of these firms, here is a simple check list.

• International experience: this is key for any ICT firm. What this means, though, is that the PR firm has people on board who have worked long-term not only in one country, but also in the US and in Asia. So ask them how long, where and for whom they gathered their international work experience and cross-cultural know-how and sensitivity. If they claim to have locations or contacts in a particular part of the world, this is completely meaningless, since you need to create a worldwide campaign using people who can do that. To have someone in Moscow as a media contact and another in the Philippines won’t help here at all.
• Do individuals in that firm speak multiple languages (min. 3) or only English? This is an ultimate check how far the international sensitivity goes, since only once you master a country’s language can you truly claim to have cultural insight into that country.
• ICT market and technology know-how. Most IT PR firms will claim to have lots of ICT customers, which is certainly true. Does that mean they really understand your technology and business? Mostly it does not, which will inevitably lead to fatal outcomes for whatever they communicate, as they cannot relate to what you do and what your customers are looking for. Check: Ask them to explain the differentiator of your company and products, and also explain in their own words what you do. Ninety per cent of ICT PR companies will fail that test!
• Create their own content. In order to guarantee quality and consistency of content, it is crucial that it is created by the PR firm themselves and not commissioned to other freelancers. A rolodex of experts with different expertise writing your white papers or customer success stories for the PR firm will not only be hugely expensive (the PR firm will charge you min. double what the freelancer charges them) but also lack the consistency and uniqueness that is important for product marketing content. PR firms leave their own territory here and become resellers of other services that they cannot do themselves. Check: find out who writes such content for them and if that person exclusively works for them or is just a freelance professor, unemployed technology expert or retiree. Also check that the content they create has not been sold five times already to other companies and simply re-cooked for your company. A Google search can often help here when checking supposedly self-produced reference work.
• Online marketing expertise. Does the PR firm have deep know-how here, not only about how to set it up but also how to create content for it? Check: ask them to show you blogs they have written. You will learn a lot about that PR firm and their people when reading them. Is there expertise in creating ROI calculators or product configurators or other online marketing tools? If not, then you most likely have an old-style PR firm that is out of touch with where the industry is now moving. Not something you would usually want!
• English. Yes, you read right. I mean English itself is an important criteria to check. American PR firms write in a style that is often unacceptable for Europeans. Too pushy, too simplified and therefore not creating much trust. On the other hand, British English is generally unsuitable outside the UK - including Europe and the US. So what you want is a company that can write International English or adapt the English language for each territory. Of course, the latter is often impractical since not really manageable. Best is International English and then, depending on the importance of the US market for your company, you can use US style there.

More tips on this topic can be found in our How to article website.