Many of us spend a great deal of time seeking ways to advertise our websites and businesses to stand out from the crowd.
How much time is spent actively reacting to what others are saying about us?
Some time ago I was subcontracted to do some marketing research for a company. Their products sold in the $100k+ range and they wanted to know what their primary competitor was doing online. The results surprised me and are something we could all learn from…
Over and over again I found places where the competitor missed out on golden opportunities to share information about their product with people who are in their target audience. Forums catering to people who would be in the market for their product were discussing the product and its potential to add to their business. Quite often questions were raised that none of the forum members knew the answer to.
The missed opportunity for the manufacturer was that no one from the company found those conversations (I found them through a simple Google search on the company name) and jumped in with the answers. It was the perfect set up for the company to join the discussion, promote their product and not been seen as a spammer. In fact, they would have been seen as being proactive about seeking out new customers and being helpful.
I suspect due to the regional nature of their business that many of those questions remained unanswered because a reseller from Florida didn’t want to waste time on a prospect from Texas. And the parent company did not want to infringe on the territories of its resellers.
As a sub-contractor, I submitted my report and have no idea what the competitor did with the information.
What I learned from the experience is that branding is not always about pro-active marketing and is sometimes about actively reacting.
The phrase “actively reacting” stems from a conversation I had with another blogger several months ago. On her blog post, entitled Is There Anybody Out There, she talked about several of the big companies that have left comments on her blog after she included them in a blog post. Ann mentioned that both Harvard Business Review and Dell Computers took the time to stop by and comment on her blog while many other companies did not.
Another blogger I know wrote an interesting article about corporate blogs that offer readers something more than simple product announcements and other boring stuff. The Kodak blog was singled out as being one that talked about something that truly mattered to their customers – taking great pictures. Instead of just using the blog to promote their latest cameras and equipment, they have filled their blog with glorious pictures from around the world taken with that equipment. The site is more of a blog of world travelers than one that is just an extension of the corporate website. (Yes, they do have mentions of specific cameras but the mentions are part of the conversation and the focus is truly on the pictures and the adventures had in getting them. The entries about traveling in China and attending the Beijing Olympics are great reads.)
Within a day, one of the staffers from Kodak visited Matt’s blog and left a great comment.
That comment caused me to check out the Kodak blog over the others discussed and come to think of it I never did visit any of the others.
Sure, Kodak, Dell, and the Harvard Business Review can afford to have members of their marketing staff constantly searching the net for mentions of their companies and products. Those of us with the smallest of businesses (one man or woman bands so to speak) may not be able to actively react to blog posts about us and our companies within 24 hours but we should certainly spend some time now and again searching for conversations about our endeavors and when possible join in on the conversation.
A really nice write-up Michelle. I spend a lot of time trying to explain to clients how important it is for them to become involved in their online communities.
It works on many levels – purely for SEO and the links that it helps generate, it helps networking and devloping contacts that you would never get to meet offline, and of course it drives targeted visitors.
I guess this also helps to show I practice what I preach and monitor my online mentions as well 😉
Hi Matt,
I had wondered if that trackback showed up somewhere. lol.
It’s harder for smaller companies to justify someone working full time on reputation management and corporate relations but I was shocked with the lack of response by the company I had researched. I admit that when I found those forums that I had no idea there were actually large and active forums for folks in that business. But, that goes along with the aspect of knowing your industry and where your customers are.
Thanks for the comment. I’ll have to get better at practicing what I preach in this regard.
Michele
If you have something very newsworthy going on in your web site, then you may wish to think about submitting a press release about it. If it gets picked up by main news organizations like cnn.com, this can be a extremely powerful source of links and visitors.
Great Point! I doubt many of us would get picked up by a giant like CNN but there’s certainly a chance of getting attention from local or state media outlets with the right press release.
I waste so much time checking my backlinks that I never thought to see if I could add to the conversation. What good are backlinks without any follow-up? Will be changing my strategy on this aspect of my branding for sure.