1. It’s about slow, real relationships, not in-your-face advertising campaigns.
2. It’s about tried and true, not temporary and shiny.
3. It’s about meeting people, like you would at a chamber of commerce event.
4. It’s about knowing what the different sites allow you to do, and remaining within those bounds. (Trust me, we had one account shut down due to skirting some of the site’s rules).
5. It’s about a strategic effort to teach the world about your product or service, so that they’re exposed to your brand and eventually contact you, because they love what you’re doing and selling.
6. It’s about genuine relationship-building, in a more formal online process than has ever been available before.
7. It’s about generating your own leads, through reaching out strategically to potential clients.
8. It’s about getting out of the office, and eventually meeting face to face.
9. It’s about never missing a day you’ve scheduled to blog. No. Matter. What.
10. It’s about choosing wisely which online networking systems meet your goals, and not just getting an account on Bebo because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
11. It’s about writing for your readers first, and worrying about search engine optimization second.
12. It’s about devoting hours and hours over weeks and months to learn the tools, and not assume it’s only going to take an hour or two.
13. It’s about listening, listening, listening.
14. It’s about not expecting your first video – or 51st – to go viral, but putting out what serves your company best.
15. It’s about not trying to be all things to all people.
16. It’s about tailoring your content to the culture of each community.
17. It’s about taking seriously what you’re telling the world, and not expecting them to read what you wouldn’t.
18. It’s about making it easy for the rest of the world to share your content.
19. It’s about not wasting people’s time.
20. It’s about knowing your niche.
21. It’s about using the tools every day, regardless of where you are.
22. It’s about people.
Posts Tagged ‘client’
A Google Fiber Tip: If You Can’t Be Yourself, Be Someone Else
Friday, May 7th, 2010
This is the sixth installment in a series titled, How to Get Your Client on the Front Page of the New York Times, explaining how PureDriven helped vault the Google Twin Ports initiative (focused on Duluth, MN and Superior Wis.) to national prominence in its effort to win Google’s attention and become one of the few sites where Google will build an ultra-high speed fiber network. I’ve written this series in hopes of sharing with businesses, politicians and grassroots organizers how to best gain offline and online attention for your cause, event or organization.
Lesson 6: If you can’t be yourself, someone else, literally
Meet my good friend, Speedie Gigabit,
This little man was created by local designer Brian Barber, and it was possibly one of the most successful ideas of the campaign, which I initially balked at.
Luckily, PureDriven as a whole and the rest of the volunteers at Google Twin Ports loved the idea of the character. My main complaint was that it served as yet another project our staff didn’t have the time or resources to manage. In fact however, it turned out to be a fantastic way to rally our supports and speak to them on Facebook. Here’s why it worked so well for us, and you might want to consider having a mascot or single person represent your business online.
1. It gave our volunteers a unified voice online. Right now, if your business uses a Facebook Fan page that you are an administrator of, every time you make a comment, it’s like the company logo responding. If you’d rather respond as an individual, you have to remove your administrative privileges from the Fan Page, and then get someone to make you an administrator again, when you want to change the page in some way. Here’s an example of when I post something on our company’s Facebook page.
Even though I’d like the person to know who I am, responding as the page’s owner, makes the logo appear, where ideally, I’d like my face to be.
In some cases, an employee might also want to respond to a customer. But if he or she responds as an individual, an introduction explaining he or she works for the company would have to preface every comment.
But a mascot, or even one person creating a personal profile on behalf of the company, solves that dilemma.
Whether it’s a person or a mascot, the personal profile can respond to comments and take part in conversations, with a clear, singular voice, instead of multiple individuals respond to comments, or having the company’s logo appear by each answer.
But in the world of Facebook and sites like it, real pictures of real people are preferred. And people do business with people. So having a picture of a real person on Facebook and especially Twitter to represent you, is ideal.
Because our campaign was a regional effort, we went with the mascot. It provided a “person” yet didn’t identify the entire campaign around one real face, as would be best for solo-entrepreneurs and candidates for office.
On a Facebook Groups page there is no company logo issue, but you still want that unique person or logo people can latch on to. And even if you’re a private individual with your own business, having two private accounts – one as you, and one as your public persona – is often most effective on Facebook.
A friend of mine runs a new business called Sgt. Steve, for weight loss and coaching. His real name is Steve, but when he responds to a customer or potential customer, he uses a separate Sgt. Steve account, to go along with the persona, and to keep people from wondering, “Is this someone named Steve, or THE Sgt. Steve?”
So how do you create a second private account?
All that’s required is a second e-mail address. If you don’t have one, just sign up for a free one at Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail.
So Remember: Having an additional private Facebook account to speak to customers either with a picture of a person or a mascot, can give your business or organization more of a voice online, and it’s more personal than a logo talking to a customer.
To read the first post in this series, visit “Google called, so we vaulted our client to Page 1 of the New York Times”
To read the second, visit “In Campaigns, Little or No Money Sometimes An Advantage”
To read the third, visit “When Running Big Projects, Simple Tools Work Best”
To read the fourth, visit “Steer – Don’t Order – Volunteers For Best Results”
To read the fifth, visit “My Mistake Was Not Viewing E-mail as Critical“
In Campaigns, Little or No Money Sometimes An Advantage
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
This is the second installment in a series titled, “How to Get Your Client on the Front Page of the New York Times,” explaining how PureDriven helped vault the GoogleTwinPorts initiative (focused on Duluth, MN and Superior Wis.) to national prominence in its effort to win Google’s attention and become one of the few sites where Google will build an ultra-high speed network. I’ve written this series in hopes of sharing with businesses of all sorts, politicians and grassroots organizers how to best gain offline and online attention for your cause, event or organization.
Lesson 2: Why Getting Paid Is Overrated
- Credit: FutureShape
Google only gave communities about 45 days for the entire project, making a nimble initiative critical. Many volunteers came forward, along with a handful of local advertising agencies and people
willing to work for money.
Because of Minnesota disclosure laws, asking for money from Duluth to hire a firm or firms would take too long. So if a company wanted to help, it had to do so with the understanding that it would be strictly on a voluntary basis. It was a frustrating thought, considering we’d heard anecdotal information that other communities were handing their organizing committees checks of $10,000, $20,000 or even $30,000. We on the other hand, had to work completely for free at the beginning, even spending our own money for incidental costs like food and parking fees, with no guarantee of being paid back. But this lack of money ultimately translated into a boon for us. 1. Organizations only interested in the project if they could make money off it, quickly vanished. 2. That in turn allowed for those lesser known individuals and organizations who showed up for mainly altruistic reasons to take over, such as the TwinPorts Commonwealth, which co-managed the project with PureDriven. Companies like Outcom Consulting and ProPrint also pitched in for free. And others lowered or nixed their prices altogether. Had we had money to spend, what we got for free wouldn’t have been so free. To see a complete list of all the companies that helped out or supported the project, just visit GoogleTwinPorts.com.
So Remember This: Not having money is sometimes a wonderful thing. If you’re a business, consider getting involved in a project with no guarantee of getting paid, because often it will in fact pay off in the long run in ways you didn’t expect. PureDriven probably received more than $50,000 in free advertising, simply because our name was attached to the project, which was being talked about throughout the area and all over the Internet. When money isn’t the object, the people you want to work with – because their motives are in the right place – tend to materialize, and those who may be talented but only in it for the money, fade away.
If you missed Lesson 1 of our series, just click here: How to Get Your Client on Page 1 of the New York Times.
Google called, so we vaulted our client to Page 1 of the New York Times.
Monday, April 26th, 2010
On Feb. 10, 2010 Google announced a nationwide contest to build one or more test locations for ultra-high speed Internet, which would run between 100 and 1,000 times faster than what it currently available. By several measurements, the Google Twin Ports initiative was the most successful at getting grassroots support and national attention based on this share of voice report. This is a series of posts on how we did it.
Google wanted communities to show them two things. 1. The engineering of the city, and logical pros and cons of Google trying to build this test bed in their community. 2. Whether the community as a whole liked the idea, by voicing grassroots support. This is the story of how PureDriven and a cadre of dedicated volunteers together vaulted our effort spanning the Duluth, Minnesota and Superior Wisconsin communities – an area commonly called the TwinPorts – to national prominence (Step 2). Traditional stories about our effort ran nationwide; our mayor was interviewed on CNN; and video and photographs of him leaping into Lake Superior for Google showed up on the front page of the New York Times, CBS and CNBC, and hundreds of other traditional and online news outlets. Overall, the Google Twin Ports effort ultimately was discussed or mentioned more than 1,500 times online according to data collected by PureDriven.
We tell this story to explain what worked for us, so businesses and grassroots organizations can build similar successful efforts, and avoid our missteps. What is written here is also only the opinion of me, Patrick Garmoe (although it was reached after talking with other volunteers informally). As a full-time staff member of PureDriven, and a 10-year veteran of print journalism, I led the public relations effort, and therefore had first-hand knowledge of the tactics used here. Each of the blogs posts in this series will begin with a short story, followed by tips you can apply to your efforts to gain both traditional and online exposure for your company, cause or initiative.
We will be posting the full collection prominently on the blog indefinitely.
Lesson 1: To really get on the national radar, you need both real news, and an image that encapsulates what you’re selling. Ours was cheap camera footage of our mayor, Duluth Mayor Don Ness, leaping out of the freezing waters of Lake Superior. (By the way, the mayor was going to leap into Lake Superior as part of fundraiser for Special Olympics anyhow, so it wasn’t any more work to do it in the name of the Google project as well.
I knew early on we needed something that without words, would really show how much we wanted Google to come, something the public and media would respond to, and catch fire online and on the web, because it was so funny, or interesting, or crazy.
The day before the Polar Plunge, I heard about the leap. I called around that Saturday morning to videographers I knew. No one was available. So I grabbed my $100 Flip video camera that I use for video blogging purposes, and shot this video.
I took a couple hours to edit it that weekend with iMovie on my iMac, (it was the first time I used that particular software by the way) and slapped it online our PureDriven’s YouTube account. The image didn’t pick up steam immediately, nor did I expect it to. I knew that if this effort became a national story, traditional media organizations would need visuals. Ultimately that’s exactly what happened. CBS news ran a story, along with CNBC, and likely dozens of other news networks across the region, and even internationally. That’s why I assume the New York Times eventually asked for a picture, which we were happy to provide (the one that ultimately ran in paper was from our local newspaper, the Duluth News Tribune. I’ve included a link to the picture below.
Duluth Mayor Don Ness Leaps into Lake Superior
I believe CNN saw the New York Times story, and therefore opted to call our mayor to be on its morning show the next day. Whether it’s local or national media, television takes its story list from newspapers and websites. During the same segment, CNN also interviewed the mayor of Sarasota, Fla., who also happened to have pulled a public relations stunt that got them coverage in the same New York Times story. There are thousands of cities competing for Google. Why did Duluth get so much attention? Because we did the best job coming up with a visual for news organizations to show.
As of this writing, we’ve had nearly 40,000 views of the video on YouTube. That isn’t bad for an unrehearsed piece of footage that took only five minutes to shoot. Not even the part on the end where our mayor challenges other mayors to jump in Lake Superior was rehearsed.
So Remember: As long as the picture isn’t fuzzy and the audio is decent, quality often doesn’t matter. The video looks jumpy, because I was racing around without my tripod. Don’t over think video. Just start filming. And it’s best to get a newspaper or website to tell your story. Because often the television stations look at what the newspapers do, and copy it, especially if there’s footage they can show.
