Six Ideas for Getting More Eyeballs on Your Blog

August 2, 2012 Amanda Walter

There are millions of blogs out there – more than 120 million on just Wordpress and Tumblr platforms – with this much content circulating cyberspace, getting your’s discovered is not a simple feat. A solid content-promotion strategy is just as important as the quality of the blog content itself. Luckily, there are a lot of ways to promote your blog and build your audience. Here are six ideas from me. Leave us a comment with the tips that work for you.

1. Make it easy for readers to come back. This may seem obvious, but if you want people to come back and read your next post, include an easy way for them to be notified when you publish. In blog platforms like Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr you can easily add widgets for Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds or “subscribe to this blog” options. Also, readers who enjoy your content are likely to be connected to others who may like your content, so include social sharing options so that readers can tweet, like, + or even pin your post without having to leave the page.

2. Use keywords in your posts so that people searching for the topic you write about are more likely to find you through search engines. Search engines love blogs for their fresh content and drive the majority of traffic to blogs. In fact, many companies start their blog strictly for the purpose of search engine optimization and traffic that this can drive to the site. Don’t go crazy with keywords though. If it reads like you are writing for a search engine, your reader will probably lose patience and leave.

3. Call attention to like minded bloggers to expand your readership. This can be as simple as creating a blog roll on your site that lists links to similar blogs and influencers in your field. In the AEC world this could be blogs that inspire and inform you as well as those of your clients, your subconsultants, industry allies or even other blogs that support the same causes as you do. If you can help drive traffic to these blogs, they are more likely to promote yours. If these blogs influence you in some way, give them credit by writing about them. A feature story or even a guest post from someone you’ve done business with is likely something that they will want to promote through their own social media channels. This opens your blog up to their network of readers. Don’t know any AEC blogs? Here’s a list of influential blogs from this week’s AEC Social Media Twitter chat (#AECSM Tuesday 1pm PST).

4. Participate in other forums with a similar audience. Look for other blogs, publications, LinkedIn and Facebook groups that target the same demographic as you do. Spend some time reading these and when you have something to add or a question for the author, leave a thoughtful comment. You can also include a link to one of your blog posts when it is relevant to the topic, but be careful not to be overly self-promotional. No one likes to be spammed. Participating in other forums and contributing useful information and knowledge helps to build your reputation around the subject at hand and provides visibility for your firm and brand. If you leave a compelling, interesting comment in one of these forums, other visitors may be curious about you. Remember that the social web is a very connected space, so make sure your profile on each of these networks is up to date and includes a link back to your blog.

5. Approach the blogger, editor or community leader about writing a post for their publication or ask if they would reblog a post you’ve already written. All bloggers are hungry for good content, so if you have an essay or a point of view that is in line with their blog’s purpose they may just take you up on the offer. Not only are these opportunities good content for your social media channels, they help you gain exposure within the industry and a credible introduction to a new community. Don’t forget to include a link to your blog in your byline.

6. Tap into a blogging community. Many companies develop their own proprietary blog. The “pros” of a customized blog is consistent branding and style with the firm’s website. The “cons” of having a customized blog is that you don’t have access to the sophisticated platform that these companies have created and are continually updating. I’ve watched clients with beautiful custom blogs get frustrated when each little tweak requires a whole new change order and days or even weeks of programmers’ time just to add a simple function. The Wordpresses and Tumblers of the social web give this to you for free. Your proprietary blog won’t be a part of a community of bloggers and you won’t have the advantages that these networks provide. On Wordpress, each time I post I’m informed of a handful of similar new posts that I may be interested in – and I often am interested in these. The community of bloggers can help you activate your blog with dialog. After all, only a very small percentage of internet users are actually content producers and content producers are the ones who are more likely to leave comments or ask questions. These blog networks are serving you up a community of very active and very vocal contributors. Seek out blogs of interest within your platform, follow them and follow back the blogger that follow you. Reciprocity goes a long way.

What do you think? Are there other tactics that work for you?

Tips for Your Social Media Road Map

June 1, 2012 Amanda Walter

While social media has become exceedingly accessible and appears to be simple as everyone is posting, tweeting and pinning, it’s important for firms to have clear goals and a mapped route for getting to these before embarking your firm’s social media experiment. Like any marketing or communications initiative, you won’t understand what social media can do for your business unless you have a plan.

I recently attended a social media webinar hosted by Jason Falls, coauthor of No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing and founder of Social Media Explorer. The crux of his presentation was that businesses need a strategic planning process that incorporates social media marketing business drivers for success. With a plan you can build, define goals, measure, execute and engage in tactics. Having a plan is a fundamental imperative for you to get what you want out of social media.

Granted, Falls is focused almost exclusively on B-to-C, so here are the nuggets of value that can be applied to the landscape, architecture, engineering and development world of professional services.

What can social media do for your firm? Once you understand what social media can do for your firm, you can assess what is achievable and how to fit this into your business goals.

Falls cites seven drivers of social media:

Enhance branding and awareness
Protect your reputation
Expand public relations
Build community
Enhance customer service
Facilitate research and development
Drive sales and leads

You should decide which of these drivers are most important for your firm. If you focus on more than one, which is more than likely, you’ll have to assess your resources and budget.

Now that you know what social media can do for your firm, you can develop a strategic plan. But just how do you approach the strategic planning process in social media?

Falls defines a strategic planning process as the following:

“A strategic planning process delivers a set of defined initiatives (projects) that achieve a desired set of business goals.” – Dennis McDonald, technology expert

According to Falls, there are four things needed for a solid strategic plan:

Clearly defined goals
Measurable objectives for each goal
Strategies to meet objectives
Tactics/tasks to accomplish strategies.

When defining goals, each goal should have a singular focus instead of multiple ones. It’s very likely you will have more than one goal. Goals should support your strategic plan. Examples of goals include increase website traffic, increase online sales, decrease negative online sentiment, capture consumer insight and improve search results.

For most AEC firms, a strong content strategy will show prospective clients, competitors and the public what their firm does. Your firm may want to develop a content strategy that features work, the process of a project, a firm’s personality or project awards. Does your firm offer specialized areas of expertise? A solid content strategy may be a good opportunity to showcase these subject areas. Your content strategy could also show related work … Are there assets that you use internally that may be useful to your public audience such as a photo library, product data or original or aggregated research? Again, these may be valuable to showcase as part of a strategy, but it supports the drivers of social media such as building a community or enhancing public relations.

According to Falls, another key element in making the strategy successful is to ensure that objectives support the following:

Point to one of three things, which is especially critical in the public relations world
Have a result or outputs which in most cases is content or product
Have outtakes such as information or entertainment
Have outcomes such as a change in metrics
Indicate a target audience
List an expected level of attainment
Identify a deadline or timeframe

One of the AEC industry’s biggest misconceptions about social media is that these networks are just another newsroom to post information and news. Social media goes beyond that – it’s not all about your firm’s accomplishments and announcements. One of the most important drivers of social media is building community. This means interaction. It’s about getting to know your followers and fans and engaging with them so you can create content that connects with them and learn what they are doing as well. If you promote their feats and successes, they in turn will talk about your firm’s accomplishments in their circles, expanding your audience and stakeholders.

THE Marketing Event

October 24, 2011 Amanda Walter

I had the good fortune to be invited to moderate a panel on social and media for 8th annual The Marketing Event hosted by the New York chapter of SMPS expertly organized by Lauren Hlavenka, Nancy Kleppel. This year they teamed with Chris Parsons of Knowledge Architectureand expanded the topic to include technology, knowledge management and a focus on the economy. There were three tracks for the event so I can’t speak to the full event, but the sessions I sat in on were really useful. Chris kicked off the event with his keynote address that set the stage for the remainder of the day. Chris is half way through a research initiative studying the social media efforts of the top 500 AE firms. At this point, he’s looked through all the blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook and LinkedIn pages and he is now in the early stages of interviewing each firm for insight into why they chose their path.

If you have the chance to see him present – and he seems to be speaking everywhere these days – I highly recommend it. This guy is smart.

He talked about types of content that firm’s are putting out there and pulled out some of the strongest examples and examples of firms that are trying something all together different – like Perkins + Will’s approach to Twitter where just about every office has its own Twitter account to better track and connect with local people and topics that relate to their local services. (As someone with a background in big firm corporate communications, this idea makes my palms sweat as visions of every office, business line, practice area and knowledge center going public with their own brand of social media.) As Chris says, “This is either crazy or genius and I’m still on the fence.” If you want a front row seat to his research, be sure to attend his conference KA Connect in San Francisco this spring.

The other memorable speaker that I listened to was Nancy Egan of New Voodou. I’d been hearing about Nancy from several people for quite some time now, so it was really good to meet her and to hear about the work she does. Nancy’s session “Between Now and Next” focused on how firms are managing the recession and the bold moves that have made some more resistant to this downturn – the “keep your knees bent approach to life” as she describes it.

Nancy aims her spotlight on idea- and issue-based firms and accurately conveys that the successful firms will be marketed through a combination of the strategy, content and relationships. I especially liked hearing about Albuquerque, NM architect Van Gilbert (perhaps because Albuquerque is my hometown and not a city often associated with innovative architects). She described how he parlayed his zoo and aquarium design experience to spearhead collaboration with representatives of some of the top zoos and aquariums in the nation to consider and publish their aspirations for the future of these institutions. He and the others are now presenting their collective vision at industry events. He’s also shepherding a partnership between the Albuquerque Zoo, the Albuquerque Aquarium and a high school in Bernalillo, NM to support the science curriculum development in a time of budget constraints.

In my session “Picking Your Path in Social Media”, I shared the podium with Tom Abraham from elemental architects, Jim Kent from Thornton Tomasetti and Harry Kendall from BKSK Architects who each represent a firm of a different size and a different approach and different level of experience in social media.

Elemental has been blogging and posting on their Facebook page steadily for more than 3 years with their own defense of architecture from the cable TV do-it-yourself and Design Star impression that many Americans have of the profession and its craft. Their blog is syndicated on at least three other blogs and they’ve amassed more than 10,000 Facebook fans. Their profile is a testament to the accumulative effect of a consistent social media strategy.

Thornton Tomasetti’s program is driven by a strong internal communications engine – repurposing the best and publicly consumable content as tweets and Facebook posts. They are continually exploring ways to get staff involved and shared some tactics for opening eyes of the technical staff to the type of content that would be interesting.

BKSK just started their Tumblr that is guided by the wisdom that “if it’s interesting to us internally, it may be interesting to others”. In a few short months, they are already starting to understand the type of content that gets staff excited and compels them to contribute. They also realized that the process of updating the Tumblr may in fact be the process that makes the firm more aware of its most interesting aspects.

The remainder of my afternoon was spent in smaller breakout sessions designed to be free form conversations on a particular topic, like “Social Media Tactics”. I attended three of these and by the third, my creative energy was draining and I wish I’d attended the session on “Navigating the Ocean of Professional Possibilities” instead.

I left for the airport directly after the last session with a handful of new contacts and a head full of ideas. If you have the chance to attend the 2012 version, I recommend it.

Fueling Social Media Through Internal Communications

April 21, 2011 Amanda Walter

This post originally appeared on the Knowledge Architecture blog.

It’s not uncommon for architecture and engineering firms to assign the goal of “creating a social media presence” to the marketing or communications departments and expect to see great results. When social media is all about sharing and presenting an authentic voice, a centralized approach for an intellectual and technical crowd could be looked at as an obstacle. But, you have to engage. Luckily, you are sitting on a wealth of ideas, knowledge and sources — you only need to look inside your firm. Here are seven internal communications tips to tune up what will be the engine of your external social media program.

1. Find a multi-directional communications tool to use internally.

If your firm uses an internal blog, SharePoint, or other internal social tools, your foundation is already in place. If not, talk to your IT staff about setting up a WordPress or similar free-blog tool behind your firewall. These tools let you post messages and queries to employees and interact with those who comment. Ideally, these tools should allow other employees to initiate conversations and ask questions too. It’s important for this to be a democratic space because, equally important to your role as content contributor; you’ll also need to be an active listener.

2. Survey your staff.

Some of these internal social tools will have a survey function built in. If yours doesn’t, tools like Survey Monkey make it really easy (and free if you keep it short) to survey and monitor results quickly. Get a sense for how many employees have accounts on the primary social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and how often they use these. Is anyone blogging regularly? How do they use these networks?

This information can not only help you identify colleagues who are interested in, or even knowledgeable about, social media (perhaps they could be the initial members of an internal social media community), but these statistics could also be a valuable benchmark for future surveys or data to track your success.

Report the findings and your assessment back to employees and ask for their analysis of the results.

3. Advertise your social media efforts.

Tell everyone about the firm’s new accounts. Ask them to “like”, “follow”, subscribe or join the company pages and accounts – and ask them to refer their industry friends/contacts to the accounts as well.

Make your program objectives clear and include information on how they can participate. (These could be informal or formalized guidelines). Use other internal vehicles, like printed posters hung in common areas or an email blast to promote awareness of the social media program and invite them to participate in the “behind the scenes” efforts that go into creating external marketing content.

Publish hyperlinked headlines and subheads of new external blog posts internally to encourage people to read, comment and forward on blog posts. Share external social media accomplishments with the group. Pass along complements to your contributors through these visible internal channels “Jane Doe’s opinion blog post was picked up by three widely read blogs, drew six thoughtful comments and we saw a 66% spike in blog traffic.”

4. Ask for input.

Let staff know what topics you are researching for future external blog posts and ask your readers specific questions to help you develop these, i.e. “Does anyone know a source for this type of research?” or “Have we used this technology on any of our projects?” You could also make an editorial calendar that sets some preliminary dates for when you’ll be blogging on a particular topic and allows staff to submit projects or ideas to you in advance.

5. Find the low-hanging fruit.

Keep your eyes and ears open for internal mentions of material that could be repurposed. This could be presentations that have been given at events or conferences, articles or whitepapers that an employee has written, general research that was conducted for a project or even popular internal conversation threads. With a little work these can be broken down into singular ideas and repurposed as blog posts, or cleaned up and made available on iTunes or the firm’s YouTube channel and then promoted through Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

6. Identify knowledge centers and groups.

In most firms’ intranets, subgroups are popular activity centers. Collectively these can be a wealth of information and ideas. These very focused units can bring a diversity of scale to your social media content. Big lofty idea posts are great for showcasing big picture visions, but a smattering of focused stories, like how a 3-D visualization helped community members understand and support the proposal for a new development, can show the care taken at each phase of a project.

7. Reach out to active voices.

Take stock in the people who are most comfortable engaging internally and the topics they gravitate toward. These could be subject-matter experts with knowledge to share or simply people who are comfortable sharing feedback and extending conversations in social forums. Contact these people individually to consider ways they could be helpful outside the firewall as well. Encourage them to contribute a blog post, submit a comment, man the Twitter account or even just forward interesting data and articles that are worthy of tweeting or posting.

There is a component of ego in the design professions. Tap into this by aiming the spotlight on individuals or their work can pay off in their loyalty and interest in helping you the next time around.

After all, the culture of social media is about engaging and sharing. It only makes sense to start with your own community of employees. By leveraging internal communications tools to grow your network of resources and ideas, the social media program you create makes the most of the ambitious and authentic personalities within.

Fueling Social Media through Internal Communications

April 20, 2011 Amanda Walter

This article was originally posted on the Knowledge Architecture Blog. It’s not uncommon for architecture and engineering firms to assign the goal of “creating a social media presence” to the marketing or communications departments and expect to see great results. When social media is all about sharing and presenting an authentic voice, a centralized approach for an intellectual and technical crowd could be looked at as an obstacle. But, you have to engage. Luckily, you are sitting on a wealth of ideas, knowledge and sources — you only need to look inside your firm. Here are seven internal communications tips to tune up what will be the engine of your external social media program.

1. Find a multi-directional communications tool to use internally.

2. Survey your staff.

Report the findings and your assessment back to employees and ask for their analysis of the results.