People Are Talking About You: Join the Conversation

There’s a sea of conversations swirling about your company and perhaps even you. If your products and services are popular and your company is successful then the volume is deafening.

I’m going to show you how to locate, stimulate, monitor and join those conversations. Doing it well can be hugely beneficial to your company. I’m also going to show you how to become a thought leader in topics and markets that are important to you. How to translate that leadership into valuable exposure (and how to place an approximate monetary value on that exposure). And finally how to use the conversations you take part in to improve your company, your products and your market share. If that doesn’t sound valuable I don’t know what could.

An article like this is problematic for us. Most of the work we do winds up being very proprietary to our clients. Even the most open of our clients would NOT be comfortable about a deep dive into analytics, and that’s what I need to show you.

Instead I’m going to use two trivial examples: Blogs I started personally about recreational things I do. I’ve used these blogs to do many experiments, and because they don’t connect to Babcock & Jenkins or our clients, there are no secrets or limitations.

The two blogs are www.AllAluminumTour.com which is about vintage racing cars, and www.ponohouse.com/ponoblog which is about living and playing in Maui, which I do part of the year.

The first thing to do is locate and track the conversations. The blogs have been live since November 2006, but I started focusing on the Web 2.0 marketing aspects in February 2007. In the two months prior to writing this article the phrase “Pono House” went from 13 Google references to 436, and the even odder phrase “All Aluminum Tour” went from 3 to 540.

People are starting to talk. Who are they, where do they come from, and what are they talking about?

Find the Conversations

In order to participate effectively in the conversations you need to know which ones are important, and that means Web analytics. I’m using Google Analytics for three reasons–it’s adequate for my purposes, it’s simple to set up, and it’s free.

As you can see from the executive summary below, a lot of people are typing the URLs directly into their browser or clicking links. The site is getting about 40 unique visitors a day who on average look at three pages. Some are coming from particular forums (more about that later) and many come as the result of a Google search. What are they searching for?

The next report answers that question.

The two most common keywords are variations of “Stand Up Paddle Surfing,” which is a new form of surfing that’s growing in popularity, and “Haile Maile General Store,” a superb local restaurant. My blog contains both how-to articles about Stand Up Surfing and a review of Haile Maile.

So how are these people finding my blog? Google.

If you do a Google search of Haile Maile General Store or fragments of that name, Pono House comes up #1 in organic search out of roughly 500 hits. For Stand Up Paddle Surfing, Pono House is #9 for 450,000 hits.

The Haile Maile results are an interesting accident. The two topics I’m trying to become a “thought leader” for are Stand Up Paddle Surfing and Longboard Surf Sailing. As sources for visitors to my blog I’m doing well with Stand Up Paddle Surfing (SUP) because it’s a rapidly growing phenomenon among surfers and wannabe surfers. Longboard Surf Sailing is slower growing, but I suspect it will become about as popular as SUP. If you do a Google search for Longboard Surf Sailing, Pono House is #2 but there’s less than 100 total search results.

These are pretty esoteric topics. According to Overture only about 300 people per month are searching for them. Why do I want to be a thought leader for these topics? Two reasons, I enjoy them, and “what part of experiment did you not understand?”

So now we know something about what people are talking about and where they are coming from, and we have some idea how to separate the important conversations from the trivial (though for this site, there are few enough that they are all important).
Let’s join some conversations. We’ll start with our top key phrase, stand up paddle surfing and just add the word “forum” or “blog”.

Here’s where some of the conversations are taking place. Once you join them you’ll find others. The people you talk to (and more important, listen to) will guide you there.

The #1 organic result is Hot Sails Maui, a company that builds windsurfing sails. The owner, Jeff Henderson, is also interested in stand up paddle surfing so his forum has a topic relating to stand up. Coincidentally, my favorite windsurfing sails are Hot Sails Superfreaks, and I know Jeff. Small world.

So we go to his forum. Here’s where you have to use your imagination. If you’re running marketing for a big telecom equipment company, what you’re going to be looking for are conversations about your company, your equipment, your competitors, your customer service. You want to go where those conversations are already taking place and join them. I’m also going to stimulate further conversation and get people to visit my blog. Do it right and you’re adding to the community, do it poorly and you’re just a spammer, or a troll, or you’re trying to steal visitors.

That means walk before you run. Ask questions, have a conversation, offer up some knowledge. Make it clear who you are and establish some credibility.

So I join the conversation. Note that my signature line includes both the URLs for my blogs and the RSS feed links. And you can be a little more blatant if you like:

The “Laird Hamilton” keyword result shown in the Google Analytics report comes from this posting and the related content on my blog. In this case I’ve started a new topic and a new conversation. This topic quickly expanded to eight people responding and 560 people viewing the posts. If you go to this forum you’ll see that I’m a fairly active member. A good number of people come to my blogs because I participate in this forum and other similar ones. I don’t participate in all the forums and blogs that I could–this is just an experiment. But when we do this for real with a client, we make sure there’s representation everywhere that’s important.

Placing a Value

So what good is this? Remember those Google results? The billions of dollars spent on search engine marketing are for the stuff in the sidebar that no one looks at. In two months I’ve been able to get to #9 in Google out of 450,000, #4 out of 44,000 in MSN, and #11 in Yahoo in the natural search section–the place everyone looks first. I did it without any SEO snake oil, no “short cuts,” just good content and honestly joining the conversation.

If you’re spending money on adwords or search engine placement, then you shouldn’t have any problem understanding the monetary value. Please don’t think I’m weaseling out on showing you the money. It’s simply that your mileage will vary. But there are very few companies that wouldn’t spend a lot of money to get on the first page of a Google search. The shortcut, manipulative SEO approaches might get you there briefly, but it won’t last. Doing a good job of creating content that people value and joining the conversations wherever they are is the most effective method in the long run.

What’s the value in being THE thought leader in your industry? Only you or your CEO can answer that, but I bet she will agree with you that it would be a very good thing if you managed to do that for your company.

Let’s look at other kinds of conversations you can join, start, and nurture. Below is a Social Networking site I created for Vintage car Racing–another of my interests and another experiment. I just formed this recently, but it’s growing in popularity. I’m mostly promoting it on the older forums as a way for members to share videos and photographs. Most of the forums do that in a clumsy manner. Social networks enable the same kinds of conversations that take place in forums, but they often don’t happen as readily in these venues because people are more used to the simple forum framework.

I’ve also just added a forum to the AllAluminumTour blog. I haven’t done anything with it yet, but it’s integrated into the blog, tanned, rested and ready to go. Like any of these approaches you actually have to DO something with it to create interest and begin the conversations.

Summary

So I said I’d show you how to locate, stimulate, monitor and join conversations about your company.
Check.

And I said I’d show you how to become a thought leader in topics and markets that are important to you.
Check.

And how to translate that leadership into valuable exposure and how to place an approximate monetary value on that exposure.

Well, maybe I over-promised on the second part of that statement–hey, I’m a marketer, not an accountant–but for any of you that have a search engine placement budget, there’s your number. It’s worth at least that amount.

I also said I’d show you how to use the conversations you take part in to improve your company, your products and your market share. That’s the easiest part of all.

Shut up and Listen.

Most companies just talk. Conversations have two elements, and listening is the most valuable part. You aren’t learning anything when you’re doing the talking. We spend money on focus groups so we can learn that nobody looks at pornography and everyone works out. Want to learn what features of your (and your competitors) products infuriate users? The truth is already out there in conversations already underway.

People are talking about you. Join the conversation.