Category Archives: Talking to your customers

Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto! The SEO wars rumble on…

Talking to your customers

As Louis Armstrong once crooned:
“You like potato and I like potahto
You like tomato and I like tomahto,
Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto!
Let’s call the whole thing off!”

Marketing departments and their PR/comms counterparts all over the country are having conversations which go (something) like this every day. And at the heart of this tug of war, is very often the battle between a marketing’s team desire to push traffic to the company
website via weblinks and search engine optimised (SEO) copy, and the PR team’s desire to make sure that any published online content underpins the company’s brand in terms of interest and quality.

It’s my ball
My answer to this playground tussle is quite simple: the two objectives are not incompatible. It is possible to write interesting, engaging copy – suitably endowed with the right search terms. The key is for the two sides to work closely together right from the start of the process. PR teams are great at creating engaging content: marketing teams have the SEO know how to make sure the content serves the SEO brief. Use good writers suitably briefed with decent content material and awareness of the SEO terms they’ll need to include.

The result is high quality content that any PR manager would be proud of which also meets the SEO brief and should keep the marketing team happy. One thing for sure, outsourcing your SEO work to a separate agency, divorced from the PR team and focused on SEO only, seems nonsensical and hardly brand enhancing. Who wants company spam littering the web?

In that happy spirit of détente then, let’s leave the last word to old Pops himself:

“So, if you go for oysters and I go for ersters
I’ll order oysters and cancel the ersters.
For we know we need each other,
So we better call the calling off off!”

The spies we love

Social media, Talking to your customers, Working with the media

You’ve got to admire GCHQ’s recent campaign to find its modern day code-breakers. A great swathe of coverage has already been achieved across broadcast, print and online media for its ‘Can you Crack It?’ campaign www.canyoucrackit.co.uk, challenging those who fancy their puzzle solving abilities to come up with an answer to what seems a random collection of numbers and letters.

What I particularly like is that it appears they’ve pushed this out by carefully seeding it online – nothing so gauche and obvious as a press release for the government super sleuths.

Again it shows how the communications world is changing in terms of how you can execute an idea – but it still needs a good idea at its heart. And this is a good one.

Fortunately there are still three days left to crack it….I might need three years.

So please, please, please (tell me a story)

Talking to your customers, Talking to your employees

The Christmas John Lewis advert is creating lots of interest
at the moment…which I suppose is what you get if you mix a touch of the
Smiths, with a heart rending tale of familial selflessness.

Whether you like it or not – I’m on the fence – it does seem to be the best of a rather dismal collection of Christmas ads from the big stores. The big difference is it tells a story; sugar coated admittedly, but a story nonetheless. Without sounding too simplistic, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end with a nice twist (to reward people for watching).

Are you sitting comfortably?
People like stories; they hold interest; stories are how we learnt to read and write; it’s why millions like watching Downton Abbey of a Sunday evening.

So how about some more story telling in your communications? Good
times for a change…

Slaying the media beast: PR professionals should be pleased, there is competition in the jungle

Social media, Talking to your customers, Talking to your employees, Working with the media

There was a time when the media pretty much dominated the world of public relations. Want to reach that particular client segment? Try the trade press. What about those potential investors? The business press. Looking for mass exposure? A good piece in a national should do it.

The big beast
It is fair to say that the media was the apex predator; the big beast which every PR practitioner would have to wrestle with, sometimes playfully, sometimes not, and usually on a daily basis. The good news, for PR people anyway, is that the media in all its print or online forms no longer has the jungle to itself (stretched that metaphor enough yet?).

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations defines PR as being:

“…the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.”

That last word – ‘publics’ – whether it’s your clients, suppliers, investors or employees, is critical in that social media has upset the old order and provided PR professionals with a whole new set of tools and channels to communicate with their publics in an increasingly targeted and segmented way. And best of all, you can actually have a two-way conversation…I think that helps that bit about mutual understanding.

Let Hercules do what he may…
That’s not to say that media relations has had its day, but when you’re considering your next communications project, the media relations element should arguably take its turn and queue up to have its merits considered like everyone else – of course, you shouldn’t expect journalists to sit down and take it. They can still be wild (sorry, I couldn’t resist it) but gone are the days when they dominated, which can only be a good thing for PR professionals and the businesses they promote.

A headline alone can’t hack it

Talking to your customers, Talking to your employees

I was reading a national newspaper the other day – it’s an occupational hazard – when I was struck by the paper’s complete absence of sub-headers (it was the Guardian if you must know). There’s the headline in all its attention grabbing glory, but what happened to all its little brothers and sisters scattered strategically throughout the piece to help the reader navigate the article and keep them interested?

A barren landscape (there’s a sub for you)
There was a big investigative story that looked interesting, but confronted by the acres of news print, I couldn’t quite face the read. It all looked a little daunting.

One click and you’ve lost it (make them engaging…)
Writing for the web for instance demands that you write less; break it up into manageable chunks; have clear signposting in place; and basically do all you can to keep a tenacious hold of the reader’s digitally shortened attention span. One click and you’ve lost it.

Now I know writing in newsprint gives you a bit more of that reader’s attention span, but just how much? Would you have an article without pictures?  I would say that good sub-headers are just as important.

Free money (…but keep them relevant)
So when you’re next writing a piece whether it’s online or print, an internal newsletter or an article for external publication, think what you can do to the layout to make it as engaging and as easy to read as possible.

It doesn’t matter how well crafted your words are if no one bothers to read them.