I heard a little story the other day that made me smile. One of our earliest clients, which selected Bluetext for a digital platform and website overhaul as well as marketing and social media strategy, has seen their business go through the roof since executing the campaign with us. What makes me happy is that this client was very hesitant to spend the money, skeptical about the potential results, and had never done any impactful marketing. Thinking back to this early project, I think it’s instructive to explore why working with this reluctant client turned out so well.

First, we did our homework on its industry and competitors, and designed a digital platform that demonstrated to the market that it was serious about the future and committed to the business of its customers. As a rule, when designing websites and digital platforms, you have to understand the user experience, how your customers interact with your business, and what they can and should expect when working with you. Many businesses organize their websites around how they operate instead of how their customers want to consume content. And many businesses think that a new website is merely lipstick on a pig.

Second, the client spent the money on a custom photo shoot, which we strongly recommended and helped to execute, as its products lend themselves to having their customers see them and get a clear sense for what they are going to get (as opposed to, for example, a software product). Sometimes, creating a sense of something tangible in the digital world can be very important.

Third, it got aggressive with social media in a market where it originally believed it was not important to prospects. The client committed for the long haul to develop new content and push it out via all channels.

Everyone wants happy customers that benefit from the work you do for them – in this case, a major investment which was met with skepticism has significantly benefitted the bottom line. That is the kind of success that makes me and the entire Bluetext team smile.

Bluetext is very excited to announce that it has been chosen by the Meridian International Center as its official Branding and Marketing Partner for Meridian’s 44th Annual Ball and Global Leadership Summit, to be held October 12, 2012. The Annual Ball has been named one of the top five social events of the year by The Washington Post, and attracts more than 1000 political, diplomatic, and business leaders from the Washington community. This is the first year for the Global Leadership Summit, and one of our assignments is to help make that a valuable and memorable event.

“We look forward to working with Bluetext to prepare for the 44th Annual Ball and Global Leadership Conference,” said Greg Houston, Meridian’s Senior Vice President for Development and External Affairs. “It’s vitally important that those who attend and enjoy the Ball every year recognize the value that Meridian brings to the global community, and Bluetext will help us develop and convey that message.”

Hosted by Meridian in partnership with Gallup and the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, the Summit will feature presentations from The Gallup Organization and from Fred Smith, the legendary CEO of FedEx. This year’s Ball and Global Leadership Summit will be co-chaired by Mr. Jay L. Johnson, chairman and CEO of General Dynamics, and Mrs. Sydney McNiff Johnson. The Summit will convene a cross-section of international and domestic policy makers, corporate and diplomatic leaders, academics, and members of the media to explore more efficient, effective ways to address global economic and social challenges.

While the Ball is well-known in Washington, the inaugural Global Leadership Summit preceding the Ball will bring leaders from Congress, the Administration, the diplomatic community, and the corporate world together to discuss issues that are central to the challenges they are facing. Part of Meridian’s mission is to bring leaders together to interact with and learn from each other, because leaders make better decisions through shared experiences.

We are honored and excited to be working closely with Meridian on this year’s events. Our brand and marketing experience gives us a unique opportunity to help Meridian deliver to its attendees a great understanding of what Meridian achieves for the international community, and how its members can engage with the organization to further that mission. We want everyone who comes to the Summit and Ball to leave there with a greater sense of global purpose, and also to have a great time.

 

The Meridian Ball is one of the most prestigious annual events in Washington. Now in its 44th year, the Ball brings together policy makers, private sector and cultural leaders, and the diplomatic corps to celebrate Meridian’s ongoing efforts to strengthen international understanding through the exchange of ideas, people, and culture.

Traditionally held in October, the Ball in known for its intimate dinners, each hosted by an Ambassador at his or her Residence or Embassy, in addition to a dinner hosted by Meridian at its White-Meyer House. After dinner, all guests convene for dancing, dessert, and dialogue at Meridian House, an architectural treasure listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Ball is well attended by public officials including Cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, and members of the U.S. Congress, as well as prominent media figures, foreign Ambassadors, and representatives from the international business and cultural communities.

 

Infographics—Today’s Press Release
The Why and How of Telling a Story with Data Points

You might have the best content around, but if no one sees it, what good is it for your brand?
I think we can all agree that people don’t have time to read white papers or even press releases. They scan rather than scour. To get their attention, you need to grab them quickly, with easily digestible content and compelling graphics that tell the story at a glance. For this reason, infographics are becoming a requirement with every marketing campaign. They can accomplish in one screen what would otherwise take pages of text, and they can be an opportunity to present your brand in the best possible light.

Yes, infographics have become today’s press release. Bluetext clients are clamoring to take their data and turn it into provocative infographics. But then what? How do you ensure that key audiences will see, and digest, this gorgeous piece of storytelling art?

Here are out top tips on how to get visibility with an infographic:

  • Make Sure Your Content is Credible. Team with a research or think tank to develop compelling data points. Credible content with a built in audience base are great components to an infographic campaign.
  • Use premium content to promote the infographic. Create a blog post for the infographic and support promotion through the blog’s social channels (Facebook, Twitter, Email, social news & bookmarking sites).
  • Optimize for sharing. Providing graphics optimized for sharing is important, so take care to present your art in a very friendly manner to maximize impact. A week or two after publishing and promoting the infographic, upload the full image and unique description to Flickr with a link back to the original web page.
  • Tease out the data points. Extract the data points integrated in the infographic and drip them out with links back to the infographic webpage. A similar, but more visual approach can work with Facebook as well.  LinkedIn’s redesign is very oriented to visual communications, so this tactic also works well there.
  • Leverage aggregators. Submit the infographic to popular infographic aggregators and directories.  An example is http://www.visual.ly/
  • Put it out over the news wires. Drive visibility to the infographic by leveraging it within a media release that includes a link to the full infographic and distribute through a news distribution services.
  • Earned Media is also good. If the data is newsworthy, pitch it out as a story to trade and other publications that might be looking for a good graphic on the topic. And don’t forget bloggers who might also be interested.
  • Send it around via email. Leverage email marketing by blasting this infographic to all your in-house as well as purchased email lists.
  • Tweet this, Like this, Recommend this, Pin this. Be sure social sharing is always integrated next to the infographic.  Whatever the sharing mechanism is, offer them all.
  • Animation will take it up a notch. Leverage the infographic into rich media and animation.  Look at our latest animated infographic here for Riverbed.
  • Make it easy to use. Port the infographic into Powerpoint format to support sales enablement and other marketing communication functions.  Publish this on SlideShare, Scribd, DocStoc, and other social document sharing services.
  • Keywords are important. Stuff keywords that are search engine relevant. This will help drive organic visibility.
  • Streamline distribution. Provide embed code for your infographic to streamline sharing and posting into the blogosphere.

 

How do you define success with your federal government PR program? Are you still trying to count clips? Do you need to secure a set number of interviews to make your boss happy? Unless you have been living under a rock you know that the world of public relations has changed, the number of publications that will cover you has shrunk significantly, and unless you have a real game changing technology it is very difficult to get ink. But don’t despair…content is still king, and if you have a good strategy to deliver it via multiple channels to reach your customers wherever they may be, you can have a great PR program.

 

Last month Mark Amtower wrote a great column in Washington Technology (http://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2011/02/24/amtower-column-march.aspx) that very much aligns with what we at Bluetext have been telling clients. That is why our tagline is “Any Challenge…Every Channel” and why we have built our company with experts that understand the power of different mediums for different messages. So the next time your technology lead clamors that they should be more coverage of your company in GCN or The Washington Post, grab your Flipcam and ask them to start talking – if the story is good there are ample avenues to deliver it.

Google announced some significant changes to the way it ranks page results this past weekend to better weed out low quality sites that are used to prop up companies seeking to game the system. This move, chronicled best in The Wall Street Journal, follows the high-profile cases of J.C. Penney and Overstock.com, who both got caught using spam-filled link farms to capture the results of hundreds of searches. The ongoing cat and mouse game will continue as long as there are cats and mice, of course.

But here’s what I found most interesting in The Wall Street Journal’s article Saturday reporting on Google’s changes: widely-followed scholar and academic VivekWadhwa pronouncement that he had written off Google because of its allowing spammers to take control of search. When someone like Wadhwa dismisses the value of a Google search, that’s a problem for Google. Wadhwa does say that Google’s improvements made him “optimistic that they may well get this under control.” But more alarming, he told the Journal that, “It’s not rocket science; they know who the bad guys are, they compensate the companies” by letting them post Google ads and share revenue.

I wanted to know more about what’s behind Wadhwa’s dark view of internet search, so I went to his blog site to find out. Let me quote from a recent posting:

“But what has really changed in search [over the past 15 years]? We still go to the same text boxes, enter expressions that we hope the computer will understand, get back lists of web pages that reference those words, and click on links to find the information we are looking for. The only real difference is that now the top links take you to spam sites—which want you to click on other links that make them money and that make Google money. Creating low-quality, low-cost information pages has become such big business that the leading content farm, Demand Media, just went public and is valued at $1.9 billion. According to Blekko’s spam clock, over 1 million spam pages are created every hour. So the web is becoming one giant heap of trash.”

 

For organizations truly hoping to provide quality content across the internet in a legitimate desire to attract viewers, this isn’t good news.  First, it makes every result that much more competitive with the spammers.  Second, it undermines confidence from key audiences that search results will provide quality results.  And third (and this isn’t really bad, just another challenge), it means that companies trying to target their audiences will have to broaden their outreach– through social networking sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, through traditional media and paid advertising, and through new avenues that emerge every day.  Google will remain important, but if it doesn’t get the spam results under control, it may be soon relegated to oblivion.

 

Not a week goes by where I don’t see an email about a special offer for some last minute advertising space left in an upcoming publication. While the offers can be enticing and very reasonable financially, my advice to clients before they pull the trigger is to remember the way you need to analyze every activity like this – make sure it is strategic and not episodic. Is this a publication that you have been advertising with recently so the audience is conditioned to seeing your name regularly? Is the message and creative you may develop for this one-off the same as readers may see across other mediums? The point is, when you are executing a strategic communications campaign, every tactic must tie together and continue to tell the same story. You don’t want to surprise audiences, and trying to get lucky by placing one add that will likely get no traction falls into this category. Sure, it may be buying season in the Federal Government, or the entire issue is dedicated to the key market area you want to penetrate.

 

Despite how enticing this opportunity may be, I would only consider this offer if it is part of a strategic, ongoing plan and it aligns with all the other messages that are getting delivered to the market. If you are going to execute an advertising campaign, then do it right by starting with the goals you are trying to achieve and matching up your buy accordingly. Otherwise, I can think of a lot more strategic ways of spending that money on that “last minute” advertising space.

 

It may be a surprising question.  Google, after all, is a search engine, Facebook a social network that by all appearances is the hot property over the past 12 months.  The number of users is growing exponentially, and investors believe it is worth billions of dollars. But there is real evidence that Facebook is inadvertently losing its primary attribute– intimate social interaction– that truly differentiates it from the all-data driven promise of Google.  It may seem counter-intuitive and will, take a little explaining, but it all became clear when reading Time Magazine’s Person of the Year cover story in December on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s erratic founder.

 

The gist of the difference between the world’s largest search engine and the world’s dominant social networking site goes something like this:  When you look for information on Google, such as restaurant critiques, movie reviews, suggestions for vacation resorts, or anything else you can think of, you are getting the wisdom of strangers.  When you seek that same information on Facebook, you are getting the recommendations from friends.  The latter would seem to be more valuable for most people because it is from individuals with whom they have those types of relationships, and not from faceless (and often nameless) Internet personalities.

 

That’s just one example of the utility of Facebook.  It is also much more of a place to have a dialogue with people with whom you have a relationship with– to see what they are up to, what they are reading, or how their families are doing, or just to look at their photographs.  In other words, where Google is about broadcasting information, Facebook is about engaging in conversation with friends.

 

But look what’s happening on Facebook when it comes to having “friends.”  The definition has changed– dramatically.  In the off-line world, friends are people with whom you share experiences, spend quality social time, and interact with on a personal level.  In the Facebook world, the meaning of the term “friend” goes far beyond that– it is anyone who hits the “accept” button.

 

My daugthers each have well over 800 friends on Facebook.  In their off-line life, the number is a fraction of that.  I have one colleague who has more than 3000 friends on Facebook.  When he asks for movie recommendations, even from his Facebook friends, the response is no different in my mind than from a Google search– it is merely the opinion of strangers who happen to be friends by this new definition.

 

From a practical stand-point, there is no way he can follow the news feeds of those 3000 friends, not can he engage in any meaningful conversation.  When he posts a status update, links to an article or video, talks about his weekend, he isn’t engaging in dialogue on a personal level with anyone.  He is simply broadcasting his posts, hoping that, as with Google, people will see it.  When online friends don’t really have the same attributes as off-line friends, the social networking component disappears.

 

What does this mean for communications professionals?  For one, Facebook can be a great place to broadcast information far and wide. But it’s going to become a more difficult place to actually engage key audiences– be they consumers, customers, employees, policy makers, or just friends.