Earlier this month I attended the Public Relations Society of America Travel & Tourism conference in San Antonio, Texas. Whether or not people realize it, public relations and Internet marketing go hand in hand . . . I’ve always seen publicists as the original link builders. A lot of great tips came out of the three-day show, some that I think even the most seasoned Internet marketer will find handy.
Here are my seven favorite tips-by-tweet from the event.
I’m not sure if this data applies to business categories and Facebook, but it drives home an important fact: Facebook is not the be-all-end-all of Internet marketing. It’s just one channel, and it deserves to be treated as such. Running a Facebook URL as the only site in a multi-million dollar ad campaign is not respecting the fact above. You can have all of the likes you want, but is Facebook actually sending any traffic to your website and driving conversions? Don’t lose sight of this, especially if a growing percentage of your “fans” are hiding your updates.- If this stat is true, I can imagine every Internet marketer on the planet is going to start producing video for their sites at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning. 🙂 Interesting to think about, but if good content is the driving force of all things rankings, video may be the final frontier of content.
- I saw this particular quote get retweeted A LOT. I think it really resonated with the crowd. This is the same mentality I have about fans/followers, but there’s been a lot of talk surrounding page views lately as a throwaway metric. It’ll be interesting to see in the coming months the conversations around page views, what is positive and negative about it as a main metric.
- Blogger pitching = link building. I think there’s a huge misconception out there about link building: it isn’t hard, it’s just tedious. There are a lot of ins and outs of link building, and research is a huge component of that. Is the site relevant to the campaign you’re working on? Is the website even worth reaching out to? Raven has many cool research and link building tools, such as the Link Manager and Backlink Explorer. Blogdash looks to be a great resource, too, for folks who need to simplify the research when building links with bloggers.
- Another interesting data point . . . this must be 93% of customers who know what social media is believe companies should participate in the space. I guarantee you, however, that my parents could care less if companies are using social media, so there is always that angle to consider. With that being said, just because 93% of your customers think you should have a presence in social media doesn’t mean you should enter into the space haphazardly. Everything is about customer service, and if you open the door for a customer to communicate with you, you have to be ready for it. How are you going to handle the volume? What’s your crisis communications plan?
- Content, content, content! When you’re deciding to give your business to someone, wouldn’t you want to see what you’re getting yourself into? Photos, video, articles—it’s all valuable information, and your potential customers are clamoring for it.
- What KPIs mean the most to you? Funnels that lead to conversions? Engagement with social media? Time on site? KPIs don’t have to be for one specific purpose, either. You could set various KPIs for different goals throughout your organization. Define what those are for you, and pass that on to others around you. Maybe even use Raven to help you measure and manage them as well.
