Gravity Free Radio SEO Special with Todd Miechiels, Stacy Williams, Tim Parker and Jenni Hilton
GRAVITY FREE RADIO!
Todd Miechiels, guest host
Lee Kantor, guest host
Transcription done by www.RightTypePro.com
March 16, 2010
Todd Miechiels: Hey, good morning everybody. This is Todd Miechiels, the guest host of Gravity Free Radio! I’m taking over the studio with some friends of mine on behalf of Erik and Stephanie who are at SXSW this week. I’d like to bring in and introduce everybody. Lee Kantor is going to be running things here; he knows how to run these shows. How are you doing?
Lee Kantor: Allegedly.
Todd Miechiels: Lee will be keeping us honest and make sure that we don’t ramble on or talk too techno babbly. I’m pleased to have in the studio with us Stacy Williams of Prominent Placement. Stacy and I go way back.
Stacy Williams: Way back.
Todd Miechiels: Maybe 1999?
Stacy Williams: Something like that.
Todd Miechiels: The Prince song. The Prince classic song.
Lee Kantor: That’s what brought you together?
Stacy Williams: We were partying like it was 1999.
Todd Miechiels: I started an SEO company back in ’99 and Stacy Williams, and I’m not exaggerating, was legendary.
Lee Kantor: In ’99?
Todd Miechiels: In ’99.
Lee Kantor: So imagine what is she now? Mount Rushmore?
Stacy Williams: Old.
Todd Miechiels: She is seriously, with the exception of Danny Sullivan, Stacy is one of the…
Stacy Williams: You’re sweet but I just remember finding out about your company and back then there was nobody doing this and I was so excited. I was like “Somebody who might understand what I’m talking about.” We got together for lunch and the rest is history.
Todd Miechiels: Anyone that has ever met Stacy knows how gracious and giving she is of thought leadership, which is one of the things we’re going to be talking about today. We’re going to talk about SEO.
Also I have with me a new friend, relatively speaking, Jenni Hilton, has been on the client side of things. She has worked at a couple of technology companies for Business to Business and we reconnected through social media. She is doing some social media consulting as a freelancer so I obtained her services and I’m leaning on her both for her expertise and her support. We’re going to be hearing from her as well in a roundtable type format.
Also later in the show we’re going to have Tim Parker from the Bloom Group who is an expert in helping companies become thought leaders or at least be perceived in the marketplace as a thought leader. One of the things that is most difficult of any company, I can speak for myself, is trying to get thought leadership material out of your brain and on to paper or onto podcasts and then get it out into the marketplace where it would be construed as valuable information.
With that we’ll get right into things. I wanted to talk a little bit about SEO, search engine optimization, not to be confused with paid search marketing. Stacy has been at the forefront of SEO for a good 10, 12 years now?
Stacy Williams: Yep.
Todd Miechiels: Let’s just start with you’ve been to an awful lot of conferences of late and we’re not going to do a whole lot of Basic 101 SEO, so for those people that have been doing SEO for the last 3, 4, 5 years, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what’s hot right now in terms of SEO and what we as marketers need to be aware of or we’re going to fall behind real quick.
Stacy Williams: Sure. That’s the thing about this industry. I love it but it drives me crazy. It moves so fast that it’s hard to catch your breath and stay on top of the trends. Several of the things that were talked about at some of the conferences I went to are things that we have been talking about for a few years but they really are hitting now. One of them is Universal Search. This is sort of a fancy word for saying that when you run a search, say on Google, and you look at the organic listings you don’t just see 10 blue links anymore. You see all kinds of other stuff. There are still the 10 organic listings there but they’re pushed further down the page often by either news results, shopping results, or more recently, images and videos. Then at the bottom of the page there is often results from your social circle. This is bits of content that your friends may have posted.
Even if you get a number 1 organic ranking in Google, if that number 1 organic ranking is being pushed below the fold, as we call it, below that first screen, the people running that search aren’t necessarily going to see it because they will see the paid ads at the top like they always do plus videos, images, things like that. We’re no longer just thinking about optimizing websites, we’re thinking about optimizing all your online assets; images that are on your site or on Flickr or other social media sites, videos that are on your site or Youtube or other video sites, shopping feeds, all those kinds of things. It’s really becoming much more holistic and complex.
Lee Kantor: Has this changed the user’s behavior in the sense that before they might see those 10 links originally and say “I’m going to choose from one of those ten as the place I’m going to click to.” Now they see all this other stuff. Are they now going two or three pages deep into Google or are they still on that first page and leaving?
Stacy Williams: That’s a good question. As far as I know they’re still on that first page. I believe only something like 7%of people will click through to the second page. More often if they don’t find what they’re looking for on the first page they’ll refine their search and start over with different keywords.
Todd Miechiels: With the images and videos for example, in layman’s terms, what kind of algorithms is Google using to decide which images are going to be at the top and which videos are going to be at the top?
Stacy Williams: As usual with all things Google, nobody really knows for sure, but if you want to get your images that are on your website found, the simple best practices are to use keywords in the file names and in the Alt tags, and then if you’re uploading them to Flickr or something like that, using them in the title of the image in the description and in the tags. With video, Youtube is, I think 85% of the videos that are displayed on Google and the organic listings are from Youtube so that is definitely the place you want to be.
Lee Kantor: Wow, that must be a coincidence? Right? (laughing)
Stacy Williams: A huge coincidence. It has nothing to do with the fact that Google owns Youtube. There again, best practice is in putting your keywords in the title of the video and in the description of the video, in the tags and really for Youtube a lot of it is centered on how many views you get, how many ratings you get, how many comments you get, those kinds of things.
Lee Kantor: It’s going to pick the most popular in their mind?
Stacy Williams: That’s part of it. The videos that get watched more and get commented on more and favorited more, those are more likely to show up in the search engine results.
Todd Miechiels: Tell us a little bit about personalized search. What I understand is it used to be we all ego surf, if not for our own names and our company, well at least I’ll admit that I do it once in a while.
Stacy Williams: You should. You need to know what’s showing up.
Todd Miechiels: Right. For our companies that were managing our SEO campaigns, we certainly want to see how they’re coming up for their key phrases and it used to be that you could run a ranking report or just manually go to Google and see where am I coming up, but my understanding is with personalized search and some of the other changes, what you see is very different that what John Doe might see and what you see in Atlanta is very different than what someone might see in California.
Stacy Williams: Absolutely. Personalized Search, that’s another thing that’s really hitting this year. There are three different ways that your search results might differ from other people’s. One as you mentioned is geographic, so if I’m in Atlanta and I run a search for pizza, even though I don’t type in Atlanta pizza, I’m going to see Atlanta pizza, not pizza nationwide, which is great from a user experience. It just makes it very tricky to report on rankings.
Also, your social circle, like I said earlier, at the bottom of the results sometimes you can see results from your friends and that is personalized. I think the biggest change is based on your past surfing habits or your web browsing habits. It used to be only when you were logged in. When you were logged into Google, whether it was your Gmail account or some other Google account, Google would know it was you and they would be able to marry your past browsing history, put it all together and know that you were the person that yesterday searched for Hershey Bars or whatever.
Now, even though you’re not logged in, Google will know if you’re using the same computer. A classic example is if I go into Google and I type B-A-S-S, if last week I was doing a lot of searching on fishing sites I would see bass fishing types of sites. If last week I was searching for music and guitars, I’d see bass guitars or there is Bass beer, there’s Bass shoes, there’s all different kinds.
I will tell you from personal experience, I’ve been seeing this a lot more lately, we have a new client called Wavee, W-A-V-E-E, it’s an online auction shopping site. When I first went to look them up in Google and typed in W-A-V-E-E into Google to see what would show up, and Google said do you mean Wave as in Google Wave. All the results were Google Wave and no, that’s not what I meant. I spent the next few days on Wavee’s site and now when I go to Google and I type in Wavee, I see Wavee.
Lee Kantor: It learned.
Stacy Williams: It learned. They’re scary smart over there at Google. The bottom line is the ranking reports of long ago really are meaningless. What does it mean to have a number one ranking? I might see a number one ranking but you might not see the site at all.
Lee Kantor: From your client’s perspective, if it’s so personalized and everything is changing individually for the people out there, what are some of the strategies a person can use to bubble up so that they do get found in those circumstances?
Stacy Williams: That’s a good question and again it just goes back to best practices of optimizing your site, optimizing your blog, optimizing all of your online assets.
Lee Kantor: So the rules really haven’t changed in that regard.
Stacy Williams: No, the rules haven’t changed it’s just that you can’t rely on organic rankings as a reliable metric is what I guess I’m saying. Better metrics would be amount of traffic driven to the site from search engines and an even better metric than that would be online conversions from search engines. That is somebody who saw a ranking somewhere on a search engine clicked through to the site and then took the action you want them to take on the site whether it’s an eCommerce site and they made a purchase, or maybe it’s a lead generation site and they filled out a form or signed up for your newsletter.
Todd Miechiels: Ten years ago recipe book for SEO success was have a search engine friendly site, one that had clean code. Step Two would be have relevant content that was written about the phrases that you want it to perform for and then the big differentiator was link building, who can get the most links, who can get the most relevant links. Now that has kind of leveled the playing field, tell me about the last two years or so, where is link building, how important is it anymore, what are the most basic strategies that we as marketers should be trying to do to build more links?
Stacy Williams: I think link building is probably more important than ever because more and more people are savvy to how to optimize a site, so the competition just keeps getting stiffer. Links are something that it’s really hard to manipulate and it takes time to build. In terms of strategies, there are lots of different ways to build links. One that I like is to figure out how many sites are linking to your main competitors’ sites and see what opportunities there are for you. It’s easy to find out this information. You just go to any search engine and in the little search box you type “link:www.competitorsite.com” and then the search engine will return all the sites that it knows about that are linking to your competitors sites. This can be really interesting to do.
One warning, most people will be tempted to go straight to Google to do this and you should see what Google says, but Google likes to be tricky and they only show a fraction of the links they really know about. Yahoo is a much better search engine to use for this purpose.
After you’ve pulled the data, which is the easy part, the hard part is trying to get links. It’s tedious and time consuming but go through and look at the different links. Some will not be appropriate to link to you but you may find sites where they’re listing your competitors and they’re not listing you, or just other opportunities.
Lee Kantor: When you say they’re listing your competitor, do they just have a list of sites like recommended sites or is it integrated into their web copy?
Stacy Williams: It’s probably both. There’s going to be all kinds of things. You’ll find junk, you’ll find great sites. I guess that example was thinking about more like directories, say a vertical industry directory that’s listing players in the industry.
Lee Kantor: Then that would be fairly easy to add you as one of the players.
Stacy Williams: Yes. That would be a low hanging fruit. I would say other link building tactics, we’re big on optimized press releases. We like to use PRWeb and optimize a press release just like a web page and distribute it across PRWeb. We submit to directories, high quality directories like Business.com or Bestoftheweb.com.
Lee Kantor: Do you have to pay to be in those directories?
Stacy Williams: Yes. There are plenty of free directories but they won’t do you any good. It’s the ones that you pay for that tend to give you the most link juice, so to speak.
Lots of other ways to do it. Social media is a great one, building those profiles. Social media profiles, I love them because it’s more content that can show up in the search engine results pages. For example, do a search for Prominent Placement and just about everything you’ll see in the first several pages of Google will be our profiles on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter or whatever. You can also build in links on those sites pointing back to your site. Some count for more than others. Google is smart enough that they don’t necessarily count every link pointing to your site but social media and blogs too. Blogs are wonderful from both standpoints: (a) its more content that you can optimize and show up in the search engines and (b) its a great way to build in links pointing back to your site.
Todd Miechiels: One of the things that Erik, the host of this show, is so great about is he builds a lot of websites on the WordPress platform which is a blogging platform. We’re making that recommendation to a lot of our smaller clients as well because they get the best of all worlds. They get the blog platform and the search engine friendly website because WordPress kind of comes out of the box built to be very search engine friendly.
Stacy Williams: It does. I’m actually rebuilding my blog as we speak, Searchadvisory.net, and using WordPress. There are a ton of free plugins that you can use too so that you can tailor the title tag of each page. Automatically it would be the title of the post, but maybe you don’t want it to be the title of the post. Maybe you want to stick search terms in that title tag. I agree, WordPress is awesome.
Lee Kantor: That’s a recommendation for maybe somebody that has a small business or is starting out?
Stacy Williams: Yes. Blogging is great for so many reasons. We’re going to talk about thought leadership later but I look at it really from an SEO point of view, again more content, more links. It is a commitment. I can tell you personally it does take a lot of time. You’ve got to do it right.
Lee Kantor: If that person was going to decide if I’m going to invest in a website for my business or a blog for my business, would they be better served with a blog?
Stacy Williams: That’s a great question. Ideally both, but in terms of…
Lee Kantor: A website on a blogging platform?
Stacy Williams: That’s fine. A lot of companies are starting to put websites on a blogging platform. I would say with a website it seems to take a lot of effort to get it up and do it right and a lot of people forget about it after that, which you shouldn’t do. Blogs are great just from an ongoing fresh content.
Lee Kantor: Right. They’re relentless.
Stacy Williams: They are relentless. It’s good and bad. It’s great for your visitors and readers.
Lee Kantor: Right, but it requires a commitment on your part.
Stacy Williams: It does.
Todd Miechiels: Let’s bring Jenni in on the conversation before we get Tim Parker on the phone. Both Stacy and I, we’ve really, really given our clients tough love. It’s like “Okay, pick some keyword phrases, now we’ve hired a copy writer to write 10 or 12, 15 pages of copy, maybe you’ve got some articles out there, but we’re looking at the Google Analytics and we’re not seeing the traffic pop and we’re not seeing our rankings move and it’s like this whole SEO program didn’t work for us.” We’re like “You’ve got to build links. You’ve got to get your content out there.” As someone that’s been in the trenches, assuming that you’ve got some content to work with, what are some of the most highly leverageable things that we can do as marketers on social?”
Jenni Hilton: Some of the easiest things to do is to take your existing content, every company has got a library, white paper or article, something that you don’t want to recreate the wheel, you just want to redistribute it. It’s really like you’re being your own publisher. You can attach your LinkedIn profile to your company blog, you can pad all the posts to that from there and make it automated. That way people are seeing your company through LinkedIn, or you can set up on Facebook.
Lee Kantor: Is this the same exact copy? Are you just cutting and pasting and placing all these things or do you have to rework it in each location?
Jenni Hilton: I guess it depends on the audience and if you’re on a forum and its targeted to a different industry, then you would want to tweak that.
Lee Kantor: In those profiles do you get the same Google credit or search engine credit?
Stacy Williams: That’s a great question. Best practices would be to have somewhat different copy everywhere, not to have duplicate content.
Lee Kantor: Somewhat different meaning change a couple of words or do you have to rework it to make it…
Stacy Williams: Ideal from an SEO standpoint, you’d totally rework it, but think about your branding too. I like to look at the world through SEO eyes but then I have to slap myself and say “No, we need to worry about our actual live target audience too.”
Lee Kantor: Right, it has to be readable.
Stacy Williams: And from a branding perspective you need to have a consistent message. I think just changing a few words here and there would probably do it.
Todd Miechiels: What kills me, if you could speak to this Jenni, is that we as marketers talk to our clients and we try it ourselves, we toil over getting this thought leadership asset created. I noticed two things happen with both myself and my clients: it takes a long time to get it done and then once you get it done it sits out there and a year later it’s old to you but you forget how new it is to so many different people. What are some of the different ways that you could challenge a company to repurpose that content, the different mediums like SlideShare for example. I’ve never done a SlideShare.
Jenni Hilton: If people have presentations, if you have someone that goes and speaks at a conference, a lot of people have a library, they just don’t realize that it’s there and it’s new to someone else that hasn’t been to your site or been familiar with your corporation. SlideShare is a good example. There’s a lot of people doing video now. A lot of people get those Flips now and you can talk to your customers and set up a Youtube channel. It’s low cost but again there’s a time investment by who is going to own that project and who’s going to distribute through whatever you deem necessary, like Twitter.
Lee Kantor: Is that a go to thing now where you just recommend to your clients just grab a Flip and just talk news of the day kind of thing and everyday take a raw video of the news in their space?
Jenni Hilton: It’s a trend that we’re seeing.
Stacy Williams: I agree. I was at a conference in February where I learned that with the iPhone you can shoot video. There’s a site called Qik, qik.com, and there are a few others where you can automatically upload it from your phone and then you can copy and paste the URL and post, embed the video right into a blog. I’ve been fiddling with it myself as a test before I want to recommend it for clients. That’s what I like to do. We like to be the guinea pigs. I’ve found that there are some sound issues with the iPhone. I think I need to get an external mic or something. But yeah, it is so easy and cheap and fast to do these days. It is something that is worth trying for sure.
Todd Miechiels: What’s incredible to me is that you get clients of all different types. You have clients with big budgets that want to do SEO and then you have small clients with reasonable budgets and they want to do SEO, but they don’t want to be remarkable. They don’t want to be bold. They want to just go through the mechanics. It’s like even if you get the rankings, they still have got to come to your site and you’ve got to say something.
If you’re trying to get new clients, if you’re in a professional services business, all the traffic in the world if you get the rankings that drive to a page that’s just sales copy, that’s not going to be nearly as effective as thought leadership copy. We’re going to bring Tim on in just a couple of minutes, but when you talk about multimedia content, video, radio, podcast, white papers, at some point I think the client has to make a decision, for every dollar that I spend I’m going to be much more effective if I can come up with something bold that’s relevant to my marketplace that’s going to make me stand out.
One of the things I struggle with my clients is forcing them or encouraging them as a tough physical fitness trainer if you will, it’s like “Hey, are we going to do this or not because if you’re just going to go through the motions, it’s not enough anymore. Everybody is going through the motions.”
Stacy Williams: Absolutely. Tying back with what I just said about how easy and fast and cheap it is, that means there’s tons of content out there. You can make a video everyday and some people do but is anybody going to watch it. So to your point, yeah, to break through the clutter you’ve got to do something unique and different and bold that really appeals to your target audience and isn’t the same thing everybody else is saying.
Lee Kantor: You mentioned earlier it’s about the branding. Do you want to be seen as the person who cranks out mediocre stuff but a lot of it, or do you want to just do something remarkable that people remember and share. Isn’t that what you’re trying to do is create shareable content because that helps everything?
Stacy Williams: Absolutely.
Todd Miechiels: I don’t have a valid excuse other than fear for not having my own video on my own website. Have you put video on your website yet?
Stacy Williams: I have an appointment with Elani Channel next week to put some video up there.
Todd Miechiels: I think it’s something that’s bigger than SEO, it’s bigger than social, it’s bigger than viral. If you’re a stakeholder of a company, whoever your person is that you’re trying to get out in the marketplace to develop relationships with, what is the reason or reasons that you have not yet gotten on podcasts, gotten on video. Budget cannot be one of them anymore.
Lee Kantor: Right.
Todd Miechiels: And technology can’t be one of them so it’s got to be fear.
Stacy Williams: And time.
Lee Kantor: That’s why I think you have to find the platform that works best for you, that’s congruent with you. If you’re a great writer than maybe you should be blogging more and doing more of that. If you’re extremely good looking, maybe you should be doing more video.
Todd Miechiels: Right. One of the ways that we got Jenni involved with us was to bust though those obstacles much like hiring a fitness trainer. It’s not like I need a fitness trainer, although I do, but I need someone that can force me and extract me to get out of my shell and come up with some media content.
Let’s bring Tim Parker on if we can.
Lee Kantor: Sure.
Todd Miechiels: Tim Parker, how are you doing?
Tim Parker: Good thanks, how are you doing?
Todd Miechiels: Good. We’ve been talking about social media and SEO and the importance of thought leadership content. Real quick, Tim Parker is one of the principals of Bloom Group. Where are you guys out of Tim?
Tim Parker: Boston. Boston, Mass.
Todd Miechiels: Boston. I met Tim through social marketing. I had found him on LinkedIn and what appealed to me about Tim was an ebook on his website at Bloomgroup.com which was called Generating Revenue with Thought Leadership. I’m like “Hmm, that’s pretty cool because everybody talks about wanting to do thought leadership.” And everybody, at least my clients when I say you need to do thought leadership, their first question is how am I going to make money doing this when I advertise.
Tim’s company specializes in helping companies put out not just thought leadership like we’ve been talking about just getting it out there, but getting stuff out there that’s good and that works as defined by generating revenue. Tim, can you tell us a little bit about what you construe to be good thought leadership and effective thought leadership as it pertains to generating revenue?
Tim Parker: Yes. If I was to give you a shorthand of that because I could probably talk for far too long about it, one way that we measure it is by something that we call Seven Hallmarks of Good Thought Leadership. In a nutshell those criteria are Novelty, Relevance, Validity, Focus, Practicality, Rigor and Clarity. Let me cut that down a bit because that sounds like a bit of a handful to be dealing with. These criteria, by the way, if you were to go and look at the guidelines for authors at Harvard Business Review for instance, you’ll find their stuff pretty similar. Leading business publications at least would regard it as minimum criteria for publishing the material.
The two most important probably are, because most of the others are kind of table stakes, but the two that are most important and the two that are most easily overlooked I think are novelty and validity. I’m not saying something new that people can take an interest in because nobody else has said it before. And is it underpinned by good examples? For instance, they’ll say you’re served by seeing the same ones used before. If you got genuinely new examples, it would give us new insights.
I think as we all know, as we’ve all seen, you can see the same circle of thought leadership pop up time and time again and if you’re reading about social media these days you’ll see the some of the same yada, yada, yada to the point that some of us are beginning to tune out I think.
To get people’s attention and to get them to not just come to your website, perhaps they’ll come to your website because it’s well optimized, but to come back to your website and to tell their friends through social media, you really need to be saying something new. We focus much of our time on helping our clients say that. Very often, of course, they’ve got good things to say but they need some help saying it. Sometimes they’ve merely got an idea and they need some help doing the research and gathering the material to be able to put together something that’s fundamentally new.
My last comment on this before I give you a break to ask my another question is that new insights come from perspiration rather than some kind of epiphany that you have in the shower, generally speaking. The latter kind to get a real breakthrough out of thin air is very rare indeed. I’m not sure if anyone has ever done it. Generally, it takes some work to dig through the data and find something new.
Todd Miechiels: If there are listeners out there that don’t have necessarily the budgets to outsource or hire a research and writing firm to come up with a thought leadership paper, where do they start? How would they come up with some different abstracts to consider which would be the best one to start writing about?
Tim Parker: Where companies have a flying start is where they do a lot research in the course of their normal work. So to take an example, I’m going to take a big example but it’s one that springs to mind and it’s in an unlikely place. If you look at Herman Miller, the office furniture people, they’ve been at the leading edge of their industry for some time, not just in design, not just in advertising, but in research about the work environment and what makes happy and productive employees. They publish that on their site. If you look at the backlinks to their research section, actually I think at the very time we’re speaking there are not that many because they’ve just completely reorganized their site, but there’s lots of interest in Herman Miller’s material. They publish that material which architects and others use as a result of the research that they do in developing their products.
Many professional services firms of course will have a depth of experience from client work that they have done. If they go about capturing it well they may have something that they can say without doing a great deal of extra work. Unfortunately, what we often see in a management consulting firm for instance, is you have one consultant that’s done two projects and thinks they want to write a paper for Harvard Business Review or with some other leading business publication and they simply don’t have enough depth and they simply haven’t done enough thinking. If they syndicated with their colleagues or if they did a bit more extra work, they might have a better story.
What we see is a range of situations from people that have got lots of material ready and you just help with synthesizing it and often times, of course, many companies do it themselves through to people who really don’t have much material but think they’ve got enough for an article and in fact what they need to do is quite a bit more work.
Todd Miechiels: What makes a piece of thought leadership patently bad in your opinion, that would actually do more detriment than good?
Tim Parker: In the words of Fred Allen who is the leadership editor at Forbes.com who we interviewed recently, I think he put it very succinctly. He said that if it’s a lightweight piece of fluff there’s nothing that I can do with it, that’s number one. If he gets some pieces that have something interesting to say but need a bit of work, he’ll do the bit of work to make them publishable but as he said if it’s a lightweight piece of fluff there’s nothing I can do with it, that’s number one.
Number two, if it’s blatantly self-promotional, if it’s trying to sell something. You may have seen this but there’s quite a lot of research and data out there now to show what it is that buyers of professional services and indeed B2B products and services, what they dislike about, for instance, white papers from suppliers is that they’re self-promotional. There are things you can do that are self-promotional that are okay. As Fred says in this interview we did with him a couple of months ago, if somebody has written a business book and it’s good and they’d like to plug it on his channel, that is the Leadership Channel on Forbes.com, that maybe okay because it’s nice if the book is coming out to have the voice of the author explaining why he or she wrote it, for instance.
If the material itself, if the interview itself adds value of itself to somebody else, that’s fine. But if it’s blatantly self-promotional, that is the problem. If somebody is running an HR software company and their article is about how the problem with America today is that HR functions aren’t automated and if they were than everything would be okay, then nobody is interested.
Lee Kantor: How do you differentiate between an article, thought leadership? Is thought leadership ten pages and an article is 500 words? Can you define the terms a little bit?
Tim Parker: It used to be that professional services, we really meant that you’re going to write paper that is self-published or an article that we might get published in Harvard Business Review. What we tend to do these days is we tend to drive out a framework or a template, an outline if you like, of the whole idea from covering essentially what’s the problem, why the current approaches not work, what’s the new approach, why does it work, what are the examples and what are the benefits that we see? That’s kind of the framework we draw out. Then out of that you can derive either an article that you self-publish or an article that you publish in a third party channel like Forbes or Business Week or something online in particular because those are the easiest and fastest to get into and they don’t have the constraints of space that the print ones used to have.
From that come blog posts and other smaller snippets that you can drive out. I think today we’d say thought leadership is anything that hits the main criteria of being novel and relevant and hopefully well written but there are lots of forms that it can take.
Lee Kantor: When you’re working with your client do you develop an editorial calendar where you say, “Okay, we’re going to do six pieces of thought leadership and from those we’re going to make so many blog posts and so many articles.”?
Tim Parker: I think in an ideal world we would and the truth is that it’s really hard to get clients to do that. Some are very organized of their own accord. There are certain large consulting firms out there that I could name, there’s one in particular. Let’s talk a moment about McKinsey, that is probably the leader in its field. It has McKinsey Quarterly that it publishes regularly, it’s got McKinsey Quarterly Online, it publishes also those articles on Facebook and so forth. They have an editorial calendar and they know what they’re doing and they don’t need us to help them with their editorial calendar and that’s for sure. Most companies tend to be more stop and start. Most of us don’t have time horizons in order to quite see and stick to an agenda that long. Many more I think should have editorial calendars and of course to be focusing, making sure they hit the topics that their clients are interested in or might be interested in for the forthcoming year.
Todd Miechiels: Tim, we’ve got one final question for you. We appreciate your time and once again listeners, you can go to Bloomgroup.com, B-L-O-O-M-Group.com and they’re got a great ebook there, Generating Revenue with Thought Leadership. One of the things that I always wonder and I don’t have enough data to make a valid case for or against is what gets people interested more, is it the pain angle or the pleasure angle, if I may sound like Tony Robbins for just one second? Do people gravitate more towards thought leadership that promises pleasure or helps them avoid pain?
Tim Parker: I think the general answer to that is its material that helps them understand a complex issue and that can be a problem or an opportunity. It works best when it’s right at the leading edge, for instance, how do I use business intelligence and financial services to make more money or how do I get my head around data center virtualization? It’s something that is big and complicated and I haven’t quite understood yet and I’m not at the point of looking for a specific solution or a specific supplier but I want to understand it better. That’s where people go for thought leadership to help.
Todd Miechiels: Alright. Thanks a lot for your time, Tim.
Tim Parker: Thank you. Have a good day.
Lee Kantor: Bye. Thanks.
Todd Miechiels: Tim obviously does a lot of writing for big, big, big enterprise.
Stacy Williams: When the Harvard Business Review is his example, yeah.
Todd Miechiels: Sometimes, Jenni, maybe you could speak to this because I know you work on the IT software side company, if you don’t have this big research arm what can we do to partner up with maybe an organization…?
Lee Kantor: Call Jenni, right?
Jenni Hilton: Right, yeah. You can find similar companies that compliment your product or service and partner up. There are a lot of good outsourcing freelancers, industry specific people that write about tech. Those are the people you would want to go to but you could partner up. If you’re in an association, if it benefits the whole association maybe there’s other people who might pitch in with you. It makes you look more professional and it’s not just you selling your product. It’s something in the industry of a problem you’re trying to all collectively solve.
Lee Kantor: What’s your take on the personal branding side of this of having someone ghostwrite this kind of information? Does anybody have an opinion on that?
Jenni Hilton: For outsourcing the freelance?
Lee Kantor: If somebody is like Joe Consultant and they are hiring someone else to write thought leadership about consulting and then they are slapping their name on that and they’re putting it out, from an SEO standpoint that’s probably good, right?
Stacy Williams: Better to (a) have the content and (b) have it be good quality content even if somebody else wrote it than for you to either never get around to it or maybe you’re a thought leader and you’re brilliant but you can’t write.
Lee Kantor: Right.
Stacy Williams: I’m all for it. I just think when it comes to the social media aspect you have to be kind of careful.
Lee Kantor: A lot of thought taken there.
Stacy Williams: Yes.
Todd Miechiels: One of the things that I’m looking forward to like where Jenni is, a lot of times I inadvertently or subconsciously talk too technical or I talk what’s important to me about the subject but isn’t important to my client or prospect. So Jenni, having come from the client side will be invaluable to me in certainly editing, and if not doing a lot of ghostwriting. I want the person that’s in her mind…
Lee Kantor: You want to get all the stuff out of your brain and she’ll translate it for the public consumption. Right?
Jenni Hilton: Right.
Todd Miechiels: I’d like to send the listeners away with a couple of actionable challenges, kind of tying it all together. We have SEO we’ve talked about, we have thought leadership and we have content development, and social. We’re all drinking our own Kool-Aid here. We’re trying, right? What I’d like to propose is that maybe of those companies that are doing SEO, maybe you go through your Google Analytics or your ClickTracks reports, or if you don’t have Analytics please get those set up. Find out what the one or two phrases are that are most valuable to you regardless of where you are ranking for necessarily, and then go through your historical content library, or maybe it’s time to freshen something up and say, What’s the most remarkable, as Tim said, the most novel, the most valid, the most relevant thing we could say about this keyword; and then go out and maybe what would we think? Where would you guys start? To me it would be like an abstract, like maybe an abstract for a podcast interview or something?
Stacy Williams: Actually I was thinking about that as Tim was talking. We’ve talked earlier about repurposing but if you have enough to do a white paper or maybe freshen up your old white paper in its version two or whatever, and there are all kinds of white paper directories out there where you could submit it, and yeah, an abstract that will be able to be read by the search engines. Then maybe you turn it into an article, maybe you turn it into a press release, you put it on your Facebook page, you put it on LinkedIn, you tweet about it, it’s on your blog, there’s just endless places to sort of splash it everywhere.
Todd Miechiels: Let’s just say that you’re listening to this show and you don’t have a lot of thought leadership content, you don’t know where to start. One of the things that I’ve noticed with my clients that aren’t being very responsive in terms of writing is if you’re not going to write let me give you my iPhone. It’s got the voice memo app, talk about it. Talk about it while you’re brushing your teeth, shaving or in the car or drinking coffee or grab Stacy or Jenni or Lee or whoever you’re comfortable with and just have a roundtable over coffee and record it. Just doing that forces you to get it out of your brain and onto some medium that you can…
Lee Kantor: Then buy one of those Dragon transcriber things and just take it and have it transcribed and then you’ll have all the words there and then maybe you can now start playing around and editing it and making those articles and the white papers out of it.
Stacy Williams: Can I throw out another idea? There’s a sort of new phrase that I keep hearing over and over just the last few months of content curation. Think of a curator of other people’s content so maybe if you don’t have time to create your own you can become a repository of the best.
Lee Kantor: Right, you aggregate.
Stacy Williams: Yes, you aggregate, you vet, you only have the best and then you become the place where people come to find out what’s new.
Todd Miechiels: Maybe like where the rubber hits the road, it’s like where are the fruits of my labor? Maybe a good thing to do would be to just start a blog that’s even private, like a private journal that you can maybe not open up to the public until you feel it’s ready, but at least much like a diary or a paper journal, at least get yourself in the habit of putting up content. It’s hard. As a business owner myself, it’s like I’ve gone through many seasons much like not getting out of the bed in the morning and just running. If you don’t do it…
Lee Kantor: Right. You’ve got to do it all the time. That’s the magic.
Stacy Williams: I’ve found it helps for me personally for my blog, I actually schedule out time Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Lee Kantor: You put it in your calendar, right?
Stacy Williams: I do and I don’t always make it. In fact, lately I really haven’t but if I put it in my calendar three times a week I’m more likely to actually do it once or twice a week.
Lee Kantor: Right. That’s how you have to look at it as this is just something you do. It’s an appointment you make with yourself to knock out some content.
Todd Miechiels: I’d like to thank everybody as Erik and Stephanie like to do at the end of every show. I believe that each of us are going to talk about a quick little tool or a service that we like and want to promote that helps us run our business better. I’ll start and then I’ll hand it over to Jenni.
One of the ones that I admittedly just started using, even though I’ve know about it for years, is Google Alert where you go to Google and you type in a query like your name or a keyword and every time that website talks about it you’ll get an email. It’s been very helpful for me to help communicate to my clients why we’re doing all this stuff. So Google Alerts. Jenni?
Jenni Hilton: My favorite is a social media press release company called PitchEngine. It’s free and it’s basically out of the box. You create your press release, you can upload it with a free account, it’s listed for 30 days and they have a deal with Google News so it does show up, it’s optimized. You can include social media links like video, audio to your website so it’s very helpful and you can see how many people have viewed it.
Todd Miechiels: Cool.
Stacy Williams: The tools that I’ve decided to talk about are really aimed at running a virtual business. My business is virtual and technology makes that so easy these days. One is Grasshopper, it’s a virtual phone system where people can be in different locations and there is one main number with extensions that forward wherever you want it forwarded, your home phone, your cell phone, whatever.
Also, we use a wiki called PBwiki.com and our process manual is on that because with a virtual business one of the challenges is making sure that everybody knows what to do and that we’re all performing the same tasks consistently. Rather than have a paper process manual that becomes out of date very quickly, it’s all up on this website and each of us can log in and make a change on the fly when we notice that Google’s system has changed or something. We pay for that which is good because we’re customers and the data is not going to disappear but it’s only like $30 a month and Grasshopper is under $100 a month.
Todd Miechiels: Cool. Lee?
Lee Kantor: Great. Something I just used, I’m doing a networking event this evening and I used Eventbrite, E-V-E-N-T-B-R-I-T-E, to do all of the invitations and it allows you to preschedule how many times you’re going to Ping the people to remind them. It will even do, it you want to make it a paid event, our event tonight is a free event but if you want to make it paid they accept payment and it’s easily shared. The links are easily shared so it plays nicely with all the social media stuff. I found that and I’ve used that. It worked really well.
Todd Miechiels: Very cool. I’d like to thank Erik and Stephanie at Gravity Free Radio! for letting me come on in here and ramble. Hopefully everybody learned a little something they can take away with. I’d like to thank Stacy Williams at www.Prominentplacement.com, and Jenni with an I, Jenni Hilton, social evangelist, she’s going to be everywhere. Watch out for her online and if you need any help with some social give her a ring. And thanks to Lee for running the show and Erik and Stephanie will be in here next Tuesday.
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