Corporate Eye

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Archives for March 2011

Why Your Brand Needs to Rank High in Google Searches

There are two primary reasons why your brand needs to rank high in Google searches. The first is simple — if someone is searching for keywords related to your business, you want to be one of the top results to boost traffic to your website and hopefully convert some of those visitors into customers.

However, it’s the second reason that’s even more significant. In short, reason number two is because your target audience is undoubtedly using Google. It’s by far the most popular search engine and there is no indication that Google will lose that title in the near or distant future.

Think of it this way — what do people do when they want to find a specific type of business, product or service? They don’t pull out the local phone book anymore. Instead, they go to their computers, mobile devices, iPads, or whatever web-enabled gadget is closest at the time, and they visit Google.com. Bottom-line, your audience is on Google and you need to be there, too.

The key to success is investing the time and effort into boosting your Google search results for your targeted keywords. You can do this in two ways. First, you can use ethical search engine optimization techniques when you create your content. Second, make sure your content is amazing enough that the online audience you spend time building likes it enough to talk about it and share it with their own audiences.

By investing time in building your online audience and relationships through social media marketing and establishing your reputation through focused content marketing initiatives, your brand reputation and your Google search rankings will grow organically simply because more sites will link to your own content. More incoming links equates to more credibility and authority according to Google search algorithms.

In other words, all of your online activities will ultimately help your efforts to boost your Google rankings. As long as you understand that your brand needs to be represented on Google, then you’re on the right track to making sure you’re not just represented on Google but ranked near the top of search results for your targeted keywords.

Have you spent time implementing search engine optimization techniques, building relationships, and publishing amazing content in order to boost your Google search rankings? Leave a comment and share your story.

Image: stock.xchng

Story Matters

corporate storyAre you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Once upon a time…

Everyone loves a story, even as an adult (though you may not all be old enough, or British enough, to recognise my introduction).

Maybe there’s less oral story-telling these days; maybe fewer people read stories in print. But we often watch people enact stories on a screen or a stage, and it may be that story-telling will be taken up by other media, or many media-streams simultaneously, in the future.

I recently received a review copy of Tell to Win by Peter Guber (out this week, and Kindle edition available now from Amazon – if you want a physical copy and live in the UK, you’ll have to wait).

Just like my introduction to this post, the book is culturally specific, and as a Brit I had to work harder to get the point in some places, but it is a quick and easy read. His key message is about the importance of story-telling, and he certainly has a wide range of stories to tell – many, but not all, from the entertainment, sport and media sectors.

Naturally, you’d expect stories from these industries, which stereotypically contain strong, creative characters. However, some of these stories are business-based and highly relevant to corporate communications, whatever the type of story being told:

  • internal – perhaps conveying the corporate culture
  • external – maybe conveying brand messages
  • small-scale – one-to-few stories, perhaps presentations
  • large-scale – one-to-many stories, such as via the corporate website.

And this is, of course, what we’re interested in here at Corporate Eye.

Several aspects of the lessons Peter teaches through his many stories correlate with themes that our criteria are designed to tease out of a corporate website, such as how to communicate transparency and trustworthiness.

Corporate storyboard

Of course, some companies are more explicit in telling stories about themselves than others. But company stories are more than just stories about their company origins, or about individual products. They can be used to convey something of the company culture and values, of the corporate behaviour and vision. And every story told about a company adds something to the skein of stories, whether it is a CSR case-study of a community programme undertaken by the company or a video profile of a new graduate employee talking about their first few months at the company – or a customer-service story told by a customer on Twitter.

For me, the most interesting chapter comes right at the end, when Peter talks about a Papuan storyboard.

This is literally a board, decorated with pictures which make up an outline of the story: of the core message and impact to be conveyed. Stories change as people tell them, each adding variants and emphases according to their own interests and back-story; the storyboard is an aid to keeping the core story and messages consistent.

Consider the corporate website, and its relationship to the many and various aspects of the corporate story as told by the company’s social media outposts. The corporate story is told by many voices in many places.

We’ve talked before about the importance of the corporate site as the hub (or repository): perhaps we can see the corporate site also as an equivalent to the Papuan storyboard, keeping the stories consistent, being the stable reference point in a series of overlapping and entwined stories.

Mark Hill of The Group, in our recent interview, talked about the authenticity generated by many voices telling related stories (go and listen, if you haven’t already). The essence of a company, after all, could be revealed in the common strand of story.

Of course, the company doesn’t have control of all the stories told about it, but if it isn’t listening to the stories told, or trying to tell its own stories, then, according to Peter Guber, it may seem to lack credibility or authenticity. He argues that credibility and authenticity can be enhanced by online engagement – and assessed by quantifying your social capital.

Peter quotes Bran Ferren:

“the Internet represents the greatest story telling technology since the development of language. It will be far more important than reading and writing as a purposeful tool. Everything that is enabled by story telling will be enabled by the Internet.”
(Bran Ferren – Applied Minds)

Interesting. What do you think?

The Corporate Website: Interview with The Group

dancing with firePeople usually think of major companies as large, monolithic entities, with massive momentum and a lot of muscle-memory, making it difficult for them to weave gracefully around the dangers of modern media, or to dance with the speed of new technologies.

However, some companies do manage the trick of fire-dancing with their corporate websites, staying alert to the danger while creating something innovative and interesting, even beautiful to see.

For an agency view on corporate websites, and on how best to use new technologies and trends to communicate with visitors, we recently interviewed Mark Hill and Frank Harkin, both from The Group. For those of you not based in the UK, The Group are a surprisingly low-key agency providing very high quality websites for many of the biggest companies here in the UK.

Why do I say surprisingly low-key? Well, as they modestly say on their website: you may not have heard of them. Of course, if you’re in any way responsible for a big corporate website, you’ll know who they are…

Do listen to what they have to say: this is a wide-ranging discussion, covering everything from content curation to social media, crisis comms to video, smart phones to personalisation.

I’ve broken the interview down into bite-size pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about, but I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1: Corporates getting social

Frank Harkin recently published some research on the take-up of social media by FTSE 100 companies: do go and read it if you haven’t already seen it.

Key points:

  • examples of companies using social media in a crisis
  • corporate concerns: change and compliance
  • changes being seen in corporate communications teams.

Soundbite:

“There will be more and more of these types of events where crisis communications requires a social media communication strategy… the world expects corporates to have conversations online, and they’re not ready to go there yet”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/the-group-pt-one.mp3] Length: 10:44
Download: The Group interview: part 1

Part 2: Tools for transparency

Key topics:

  • executive blogging and authenticity
  • XBRL and integrated reporting
  • the authenticity of many voices

Soundbite:

“Social media and corporate blogging are a way to bring transparency and authenticity to corporate communications… people will want to see chief executives blogging”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/the-group-pt-two.mp3] Length: 4:54
Download: The Group interview: part 2

Part 3: Governance on the corporate website

Key points:

  • breaking down the silos: governance, risk, responsibility
  • using third party material to add credibility and context

Soundbite:

“More and more corporates are looking at the sustainability angle of their comms as part of their brand… an issue that many corporates face is that they’re having to figure out where this responsibility stuff fits, and how it should be articulated as part of their story”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/the-group-pt-three.mp3] Length: 7:15
Download: The Group interview: part 3

Part 4: Importance of video

Key points:

  • the power of video: production values matter less than the content
  • video keeps visitors longer on the corporate site
  • visitors get a clear idea of who you are and what you stand for through video.

Soundbite:

“Not enough corporates are looking at their sites and saying to themselves “We’re kind of a mini TV channel”, and they need to think about themselves like that”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/the-group-pt-four.mp3] Length: 4:45
Download: The Group interview: part 4

Part 5: Annual and CSR Reporting

How are annual and CSR reports going to evolve?

Key points:

  • powerful graphics, video and tools should push story-telling online
  • there will be a trend towards continuous reporting

Soundbite:

“The issue that many corporates are grappling with is that they’re doing tons of stuff each quarter, each six months, that needs to flow into the website”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/the-group-pt-five.mp3] Length: 5:28
Download: The Group interview: part 5

Part 6: Investment cases and Investor sections

Key points:

  • making the investment case easy to understand
  • providing resources which the investor/analyst wouldn’t be able to find themselves
  • making the corporate website more enjoyable and engaging.

Soundbite:

“This is the lost opportunity, in terms of having a proper valuation of your company… there are a lot of companies that are cheaper than they should be”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/the-group-pt-six.mp3] Length: 5:45
Download: The Group interview: part 6

Part 7: Impact of mobile devices on the corporate site

Key points:

  • there’s more to life than an iPhone app
  • audiences expect your site to behave gracefully on a smartphone

Soundbite:

“Corporate websites in effect are country cousins… people will have to make corporate sites more engaging, more fun, simpler, easier to use, with better tools”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/the-group-pt-seven.mp3] Length: 4:18
Download: The Group interview: part 7

Part 8: Accessibility

Are companies treating accessibility as less important now?

Soundbite:

“Accessibility is part of the process, like the content is part of the process, so it’s not such a big deal”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/the-group-pt-eight.mp3] Length: 2:32
Download: The Group interview: part 8

Part 9: Working with agencies

Key points:

  • the average age of a corporate site is 3-4 years
  • the better the initial architecture and strategy, the longer the site will grow and evolve
  • importance of a strategic roadmap: research, audit and compare to best practice

Soundbite:

“We like to engage in conversations with people who are interested in online corporate communications; we want to share our knowledge and learn from other people, so bring it on – come and knock on our door”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/the-group-pt-nine.mp3] Length: 4:47
Download: The Group interview: part 9

Here’s the whole interview, for you to listen to while driving home, or while jogging in the park; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/the-group-interview.mp3] Length: 50:30
Download: The Group interview (whole interview)
Download: Transcript

Many thanks to Mark and Frank for taking the time to talk to Paul.

Who were we speaking to?

Mark HillMark Hill founded The Group, which is one of the UK’s leading agencies providing online corporate communications services and consultancy advice: corporate websites, marketing and campaign sites, blogging and brand management portals and online annual and corporate responsibility reporting. The quality of the company’s creative offering has been recognised with more than 200 industry awards, both in the UK and internationally.

Mark graduated in 1980 with a business degree in marketing and accountancy from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Subsequently he worked as an equities analyst for a major insurance company and spent three years as a financial public relations consultant.

Before establishing The Group, Mark worked in London for Georgeson International, the investor relations and shareholder services consultancy.

Frank HarkinFrank Harkin is part of the editorial team at The Group, having studied Communications at Dublin City University before moving to Spain where he worked as a copywriter for an American start-up during the heady days of the dotcom boom. On returning to London, he worked as a freelance copywriter and web editor, counting BSkyB and AOL among his many clients, before joining The Group in November 2007.

Frank has a Masters degree in Latin American Studies from the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London.

Mobile Trends of 2010 by the Numbers

Last week, I wrote a post here on the Corporate Eye blog where I asked Is Mobile Marketing Still an Option or Now a Requirement? In that post, I talked about some predictions for mobile marketing in 2011 and beyond, and today, I’d like to take a step back and look at how mobile marketing evolved in 2010. It’s an amazing, fast-moving story.

comScore released its 2010 Mobile Year in Review report this month, and that report provided a lot of data about the mobile industry:

  • 2010 was all about smartphone adoption with most markets in the United States and Europe surpassing 25-30% market penetration.
  • iPhone sales lead the way in both the United States and EU5. RIM (i.e., Blackberry) was still the leading platform in 2010 though.
  • Android-enabled smartphone sales were six times higher in the United States in 2010 than in 2009.
  • PC-based email use declined for the first time as more people switched to accessing email via their smartphone devices.
  • Social media was considered one of the fastest growing mobile phone activities. As comScore explains, “in the U.S. the number of mobile social media users grew 56% to lead all content categories, and in the UK Facebook accounts for 40% of all time spent on mobile sites.”
  • Mobile advertising became a priority for many businesses, but those businesses were still in the very early testing and learning phase.

The mobile world certainly changed in 2010, and the trends started during that year will continue and evolve even more in 2011. Apps continue to explode in both development and use, and tablet devices like the iPad are changing when and how people interact with content on the go.  Local marketing via mobile devices is hotter than ever, and opportunities are wide open for companies of all sizes and businesses in all industries.

2011 will be the year that we’ll start to see some real trends in mobile marketing as some of the winners in terms of marketing opportunities will undoubtedly begin to rise to the surface and some companies and brands will raise eyebrows for their innovative mobile marketing initiatives.

Will your brand be one of those that raises eyebrows in mobile marketing this year? Leave a comment and share your thoughts about mobile marketing in 2011.

Image: stock.xchng