Social Media, Digital Marketing & PR Agency

Blogging for your company is very different from blogging for yourself as an individual. It is more challenging because you have to tread a fine line between having a personal voice and toeing the company line.

We set up, populate and manage many corporate blogs, some of which have been nominated for awards, and these are some of the essentials elements for corporate blogging:

1. Design – If it isn’t actually part of the company website it needs to be branded the same and be joined to the website seamlessly. It should be on your own platform rather than a popular blogging platform, and be hung off a proper domain with a proper corporate url (preferably www.companyname.com/blog). It needs to be easy to post to and curate, able to video, images, audio, and it must give you as much flexibility as possible. It should be excellent for search purposes and easy to tag, and a breeze to share on social media. And finally, it needs to be easy to measure so you can get the stats. And you thought it was just a blog…

2. Purpose – Begin with the end in mind, in other words, what are you trying to achieve here? What do you want to get out of it? What are the KPIs and what ROI are you hoping for? HINT: it may not be, in fact probably won’t be, measurable in pure financial terms.

3. Content, Content, Content – A blog is easy enough to set up but it is worse than useless if it is left empty. And no one will read it if it is boring. Populate your blog with interesting and well-written, non-jargonistic and relevant posts. Write catchy headers. Include great pictures, photos and graphics. Promote it.

4. Blog Regularly – And this means at least twice a week and daily is best. It doesn’t have to be long posts, it doesn’t have to be all from the same person (guest blogging is good on a corporate blog) and it doesn’t even have to be written solely by the company as an industry news story is good for keeping a blog up to date and this kind of post can always be personalised with a C-level statement or comment.

5. Stay on Brand – All blogs work best when they are consistent, but it is particularly important when it is a corporate blog. Re-establish the brand messaging, create guidelines, set up a Social Media staff policy (if you don’t already have one). Ensure these are adhered to. Make one person responsible overall and give them the KPIs and reporting structure. Then loosen the reins and let it breathe.

6. Establish Sources – Blogs can quickly run out of stream/inspiration/time, especially if it is left to one (usually busy) person to populate and manage. Spread the load by tasking everyone who can write and has something to say with doing at least one post a month, and establish sources, such as social bookmarking, that everyone can contribute to and so share good links and stories.

7. Be Individual – It’s a company blog, but to be engaging it needs to be, er, engaging and that means it needs to have some individuality. Yes, it’s a tightrope to tread between adhering to brand and allowing personality and opinions to shine through, but then no one claimed creating a good corporate blog was easy. That’s why few companies actually manage it.

8. Mix It Up – Change the length and type of post. Blogs work best when they are a bit quirky and interesting, so think video, audio, with picture/without picture, top industry tips, impassioned arguments, industry comment, a word from the CEO, company news etc etc.

9. Link Out – Social media is here to stay and is in fact overtaking everything online at a rate of knots in time spent and traffic, include search and individual websites. A blog is your access point to making it work for your business. Link out your blog to your key business social media profile and make it easy for visitors to share your content. And then promote it, because it doesn’t how well you do it, if you don’t flag it up to people who are interested they won’t come and read it.

And if you need some more help setting up your corporate blog, populating it or managing it, or helping you with your company’s social media strategy, online marketing or PR, and integrating all of this in to your traditional marketing, we can help – mail us at hello@themediamarketingco.com.

We came. We saw. We judged.

And now it’s nearly time to head south across the river for the actual Awards Ceremony aka Corp Comms The Monster Digirati Party and find out Who Won What.

There were lots of good entries across the board, and some less impressive ones if I am honest. In fact, it was quite a mixed bag this year so it should be an interesting event with, perhaps, some surprises!

Good luck to every one who entered.

The Monster Digerati Party will take place on 5 July at Delfina, Bermondsey Street, London

Today we heard that Thorntons are thinking of closing a high proportion of their High Street stores. This has come hard on the heels of Habitat’s sell off and the closure of fashion chain, Jane Norman, which has gone into receivership with debts of £120m. Jane Normans’ clothes were aimed at 16-25 years, a demographic that has suffered most during the recession, so perhaps it is, after all, not surprising, but Thorntons…?

Online versus High Street
There has been a growing trend through the past few years High Street shops closing down while their online counterparts thrive, and when we checked rival online fashion store ASOS (As Seen On Screen), we found they had just posted a 41%  rise in profits, making a pre-tax profit of £28.6m in the year to 31 March 2011…

Alison Wetton, CEO of LBD (Little Black Dress), which offers posh-frocks for up to a size 32 and is featured on ASOS , says their customers “can’t get enough of online shopping” and that for Plus Sizes, it’s all about convenience and not having to try clothes on in a High Street changing room. Which is a fair point, given how small and awful most High Street changing rooms are, how badly lit, how unflattering the mirrors, and how often they are manned by vacant stick insects chewing gum.

Shopping experience also seems to be key in other High Street closures. For Habitat, who appointed administrators for 30 of its 33 outlets this week, it was down to location. Habitat said that, “trading conditions have remained challenging for retailers of big ticket items such as furniture” and that a return to profitability for the business in the UK appeared unlikely as many of the stores were expensive and poorly located.

And where High Street fails, online can succeed – Woolworths caused a storm when it shut down in 2008, yet has since reopened successfully online. Presumably its virtual staff are nowhere near as rude and unhelpful as its flesh and blood staff were when it was on the High Street.

Coupons and Vouchers
However, other factors may also be at play. Coupon and loyalty cards usage have both increased in recent years (see our post on social shopping), and while newspaper inserts are still the primary method of coupon distribution (89%) and redemption (53%), internet redemption has skyrocketed, rising 263% in 2009. In people terms, this means that 13.1 million Americans redeemed internet coupons in 2009, approximately 88 million will do so in 2011 and it is predicted that this will increase to 96 million by 2015. Which is a lot of people using the internet to reduce their outgoings.

Stats on the usage of discount coupons and vouchers

Recently I researched a new vacuum cleaner online. I found the one I wanted to buy at the cheapest price at Curry’s, and then up popped the Nectar Card information bar saying I could collect Nectar points on the purchase. Excellent, I thought, that’s a bonus. However, when I went to place the order the shop couldn’t deliver for 10 days, so they said, ‘come and pick it up in store as we have one at your local branch’. Which I duly did and the staff were helpful and pleasant, carried it to my car, took the old one away for recycling, everybody happy… except apparently I had unwittingly forfeited my Nectar points.

“Sorry’” said Nectar customer services, when I contacted them, “we can’t help, we only give Nectar points via online purchases, not in store…”

Retailers At Fault – Or Is It Their Marketers?
So it does rather seem that the retailers themselves may be at least partly to blame for this shift towards online buying and away from the High Street. Interestingly most people prefer to touch, smell and see the things they want to buy, especially clothes and furniture, even if they go online to actually buy it because they get extra bonuses or deals, or because they are busy and online is perceived as being faster (even when it isn’t).

Many of the High Street shops also appear to have stopped trying with their windows and displays and in-store experience, and many are allowing their business to be driven online by clever coupons deals and rewards. Or perhaps that’s really just a case of letting their marketing department jump on the ‘newest’ band wagon (ie Digital) at the expense of traditional marketing? In which case, why does it have to be one thing and not the other?

So if High Street brands are really serious about not going to the wall and we as a nation are serious about not losing our High Streets, there’s our advice for retailers – and their marketing departments:

• Online stores should be BEAUTIFUL and a fabulous experience, and reflect the customer experience of the real shop, which should also be BEAUTIFUL and a fabulous experience. Hire a decent shop fitter and be creative. Hire a decent digital team and let them be creative. Make sure they are joined at the hip and communicate. Ensure the brand experience is seamless.

• Invest in your staff – good staff are crucial and whether in the real shop or online, they should add value and offer excellent customer service and should be as unfailingly polite and helpful as the staff in my local Curry’s and nothing like the old Woolworth’s staff. Nor like the dismissive Nectar employee.

• Cater for the senses – people like to touch and hold, taste and smell and try on. They like moving images, they like nice sounds, they are tactile. The High Street is also a social experience, so shops shouldn’t be hidden away or located out of town – they should be at the heart of a community. Online stores should be –and are fast becoming – part of the social media landscape. So integrate them properly and invest in finding out about your customers as the fully rounded people that they are, not just numbers in one channel or the other.

• Bully councils to lower costs – The FSB and local markets have been campaigning for years against short-sighted councils. Get together and add your weight to the argument.

• Rewards should be given, and given across the board – don’t try to divide online and offline and pitch them against each other. Don’t drive people online at the expensive of offline. And if you are focusing on analytics and tracking, marketers, then get clever and use the vouchers, codes, coupons to track when people browse online but purchase in store – and vice versa – because here’s the final point:

• People don’t follow the rules – they don’t just shop online. They don’t just go to the High Street. They might be looking for a sofa, for example, and look online and in store, in magazines and on television. When you are looking, you look everywhere, which is why the brand, the design and the overall level of customer satisfaction across ALL channels is so very important.

In addition retailers and their marketing departments should stop treating online as somehow separate, but rather treat it as it is – a research centre, a sounding board, a launch pad, a social activity and an outreach of the physical store.

In summary, make shopping INTEGRATED.

This week (well, last two really) has had a bit of a legal feel about it, whether it’s people breaking the law, trying to uphold it or trying to change it. Sony has hit the headlines again with news that LulzSec, a hacker group had stolen the personal details of one million users from Sony Pictures and published them on the internet. The names, birth dates, addresses, emails, phone numbers and passwords of people who had entered contests promoted by Sony were all published on the internet.

Apparently, the group, who have performed similar stunts, said it had done it to prove how vulnerable companies were to ‘simple attacks’.  Maybe they have a point, although publishing the details was maybe not the best way to make it. Another hacking group, Anonymous, has hacked into Iranian Government emails to illustrate that they can control the servers.

British Intelligence too have been doing a spot of hacking by inserting a PDF file of cup cake recipes into an online magazine called Inspire, which is a jihadist site in English and devised by supporters of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. The recipes replaced bomb making instructions and apparently ‘scrambled’ the site apparently rendering it unreadable. You couldn’t make it up could you!

More legal wrangles this week about file sharing laws and the potential penalties, with lawyers suggesting that taking an internet connection away could breach people’s human rights.

Those pesky super injunctions are still around this week, thanks to an anonymous twitter member, Sue Mae, who posted details (including court papers and personal details) of people involved in the recent spate. And after an embarrassing photo was published on Twitter allegedly by US Congressman Anthony Weiner, it has become apparent that there are potential security issues with Yfrog, although it’s not clear whether he did send the ‘crotch’ picture to his colleague or not…

Over in business land, which seems to awash with money for the select few, Groupon has published details of a proposed $750m IPO (how lovely for Groupon).

And Nokia are denying rumours that Microsoft has offered to buy them for $19billion (how much??!!) although there is less financial enthusiasm for poor old MySpace – News Corp would like $100m for the site and, not surprisingly, the initial list of potential buyers has dwindled to just two. Oh dear.

And to finish off, we have the delightful news that Gwyneth Paltrow has this week joined Twitter and Facebook so that she can impart some of her wonderful down-to-earth advice to the little people. Interested? Mmm, thought not.

Have a fab weekend all, we’re off to sunbathe – see you next week, which is threatening to be the first ‘normal’ week for ages!