• Are you getting closer to your hot prospects by inviting them to submit guest posts?
• Are you maximising the power of influencers by filming and interviewing them for a storming guest vlog?
• Are you linking up with your peers by positioning your blog as a ‘sharing and learning’ platform for them to get involved?

At Quest we love to celebrate the expertise of guest bloggers such as Gini Dietrich, Mickie Kennedy and Jon Buscall.

It’s also fantastic to be invited to spark debates on your peers’ blogs and meet more great people.

So get your guest bloggers planned into your blogging and vlogging calendars and enjoy the ‘win-win’ of:

1. Giving them a great opportunity to boost their profile
2. Giving yourself an opportunity to show them how awesome (and fun) it is to work with you
3. Enhancing your relationships with clients, prospects, peers and influencers
4. Boosting your SEO
5. Watching your blog become a magnet for generating ‘buzz’
6. Giving yourself a breather from your calendar to keep creating great content

Before you take off down this route – here’s a couple of excellent tips on what to do before you invite your guests. As More Google Traffic says ensure your blog is worthy of your visitors by having a respectable ranking and that it well prepared for them by looking good.

After all you wouldn’t invite anyone to dinner without getting dressed, setting the table and getting the shopping in – would you?!

For more information on how Quest PR can help you to build your profile through the power of blogging contact Sharon Cain on sharon@quest-pr.com or through Twitter @sharoncain or on LinkedIn.

We hope you’re all having as storming a week as we are at Quest where we deliver social media training, traditional PR, and media training and campaigns to small and medium sized enterprises, the public sector – and not for profit organisations. 

Meet our team of former journalists and experienced PRs who enjoy hobbies varying from cycling tennis, trekking (Harriet is on a sabbatical in Peru at the moment and we’re really envious!) and running. Sharon and Sarah are training for this year’s Great North Run for one of our favourite charities Henshaws. 

We’d be delighted to hear from you on our blog and to answer any questions you may have.

Following on from Quest’s previous posts on our video blog training courses and what equipment to use we’re now focusing on how to present great vlogs. 

Some of the tips are similar to the ones we give our clients in our media training programmes. 

Sharon Cain, a former Sky TV on-screen reporter, shares six top tips on how to prepare and present fab vlogs for your blogs.

1. It’s important to project well so start with some breathing exercises to get everything flowing  – they can include things like la, la, la, laa – you may want to do these somewhere private!
2. Check your hair and clothing and jewellery before you start – even if it’s just head and shoulders you don’t want people distracted by strands of hair sticking out or a tie that’s askew – or a necklace that’s lopsided.
3. Pick a great background – Gini Deitrich has set her vlogs against a lake which looked stunning.
4. Look straight into the camera if you’re doing it yourself – this is in contrast to looking at the interviewer if you were doing it for TV.
5. Watch your hand gestures – windmill gestures can be off-putting although it’s good to see a bit of hand movement from time to time.
6. When standing find what’s the most comfortable posture for your hands either keep them beside you or behind your back.
7. Give your presentation energy and exude enthusiasm.
8. Smile – you may even enjoy it!

With YouTube now the worlds 2^nd largest search engine with over 2 billion views every day and over 200, 000, 000 blogs in existence, the power and importance of video has never been greater. 

At Quest, we’re training SMEs and our peers in vlogging – now known as the video-blog and so called because it features video shots instead of text.

Follow our 12 step plan and boost your google rankings and get close to your clients and prospects.

1. Film your video on a camera that has an external microphone and always use a tripod.  Invest in good lighting and take more footage than you need.
2. Save your footage onto the PC to ensure it is not deleted off the camera by mistake.
3. Download Windows Movie Maker which is free and edits video footage very adequately.
4. Import your media onto the dashboard. You can also include audio clips and photographs.
5. Open up the story board and place your clips in the order you want them to appear. You can also add sound tracks and narrations.
6. Keep it short, creative and interesting.  Cut out any unnecessary footage – you can always put it back in. Remember people get bored easily especially with video.
7. Add transitions and effects between clips to make it more professional. Fade in from black at the beginning and out to black at the end for a smooth finish. Also add fades between clips.
8. Add a title at the beginning and a credit at the end of the film. You can also add titles between clips and personalise them with brand colours and fonts.
9. Save the project as you go along – just like you would do a Word document.
10. When you are happy with the film in its entirety publish it and save it to the PC. This is like making a PDF copy of a Word document – it doesn’t mean you have ‘published’ it anywhere.
11. Sign up for an account on YouTube.com and upload your published film onto your account.
12. Here you can tag your film for SEO purposes, rename the film and change the thumbnail image. You can also add a coloured border around the clip. Click on Embed to copy the URL for WordPress blogs.

 For more information you can contact me by email sharon@quest-pr.com, follow @sharoncain on Twitter and find me on LinkedIn under Sharon Cain.

We’re getting some storming feedback from business leaders spanning manufacturing,  leadership development and world class speakers who signed up to Quest’s Social Media Strategy courses.

The sessions spark some lively debates with videos highlighting some brilliant ‘viral successes’ like Bensons Beds employees Domino Mattress attempt and how a Dominoes Pizza apology went down a Tweet! Media guru Amy Korin tweeted her gripe to thousands of followers.

Our next courses are on Thursday 15 July and Wednesday 28 July. To book your place or find out more please email sue@quest-pr.com or telephone 01423 564192.

We’re also launching a series of video blogging courses in the knowledge that videos are 50 times more likely to receive an organic first page ranking than traditional text pages. With YouTube second only to Google as a ranking heavyweight, you can produce videos for little cost and maximum impact. Here’s how to get started: 

1. Get a YouTube account

2. Buy lights, camera and microphone and practice first

3. Rehearse your blog presentation until you feel comfortable with it

4. Choose vibrant backgrounds

5. Keep youp posts to under 3 minutes (remember we live in a soundbite society!)

6. Learn how to edit

I’m interested in your thoughts. You can leave a comment or contact me by email sharon@quest-pr.com, follow @sharoncain on Twitter and find me on LinkedIn under Sharon Cain.

Should you blog your way through a company crisis? Short Answer: Yes.

There are many different reasons for blogging during a company crisis, but the most important reason is that your blog is the platform where you can reach consumers directly. As an added bonus, with proper SEO, you may reach the top of search engine results pages for keywords related to the crisis, allowing you to explain your perspective first.

Reaching Your Customers First

If you have a dynamic company blog (and you do, don’t you?) and a crisis arises, the first place customers and reporters go will be your blog. This gives your company a chance to explain the crisis, along with explaining how you will be responding. This can put your customers at ease. In addition, it allows customers a place to comment and ask questions on your turf. You can tend to their concerns directly on your site, adding to their general comfort in staying with you as a company. Another advantage of listening to your customers’ concerns is a better understanding of how consumers view the crisis, which can lead to better idea generation and crisis management.

However, in the same way a dynamic company blog can help alleviate the crisis, NOT blogging can help to perpetuate it. The last thing you want your customers asking is “Why are they ignoring this?”

What Can Happen If You Don’t Blog About the Crisis

By not blogging about the crisis, instead of allowing your company to address it, you allow others to speak for you. If your consumers aren’t reading about it on your blog, they will be reading about it in other places. Not blogging about a crisis tells customers that you aren’t addressing it. Not responding to customers’ concerns can make it appear that you don’t care. These two factors alone can lead to an exodus of consumers.

In addition to this, with people reading and commenting other places, you lose the ability to respond directly to consumers to help alleviate their concerns. That direct interaction that makes blogging such a useful tool in good times, along with bad, is gone.

How Not to Blog About a Crisis

A bad blog can be worse than no blog during a company crisis. Nobody wants to see an embattled company fail to take any responsibility for its difficulties. If, like BP, your company plays the blame game instead of addressing a crisis head-on, your crisis may worsen. Finger-pointing doesn’t placate angry customers—even if you’re technically correct. Don’t blog until you’ve cooled down and are prepared to offer something that won’t come off as tone-deaf arrogance.

Where SEO Comes Into Play

If you address your company crisis using an SEO-optimized company blog, you stand a good chance of being the first result for web searches relating to the crisis. This allows anyone searching directly for your company and the crisis to land at your blog first, bringing the ball back into your court. When you are in crisis, it’s important to take control, not bury your head in the sand. Your blog – a great public relations tool during the good times – can be your lifeline during a bumpy patch on your business’s journey.

This article is written by Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases, an online leader in affordable press release distribution. Grab a free copy of the Big Press Release Book – Press Releases for Every Occasion and Industry. Mickie’s blog, PR Fuel, covers PR and social media and is updated every weekday.

An increasing number of businesses are harnessing the power of Social Media to drive sales, open doors and position themselves as experts.

If your clients and prospects are engaging with their audiences through tools such as blogs, LinkedIn and Twitter and you’re not – your ‘Social Media savvy’ competitors will steal a march.

As more of Quest’s delivery centres on consulting on Social Media strategy, managing blogs and training companies how to present, film and edit videos for their websites and blogs, we always advise our clients to listen before launching.

Use tools such as Google alerts to find out who is saying what about your brand, your industry and your competitors. This intelligence gathering will steer you to the right tools.

Then decide who to engage with, establishing different messages for different audiences. As ‘Content is King’, produce ‘killer content’ to achieve stand out.

To launch a B2B Social Media campaign that accelerates your traditional PR programme, follow this 12-step plan for maximum impact:

1. Intelligence gather via Google alerts and tools
2. Establish content plan for blog
3. Establish blogging team and arrange training in making blog videos
4. Set up LinkedIn profile, contacts and testimonials
5. Launch twitter and build followers
6. Launch blog with six posts and two videos (Google loves video)
7. Feed blog content to journalists
8. Use blog content to drive LinkedIn discussions
9. Use Twitter to ‘Tweet’ blog content
10. Use blog content for marketing activities (e-shots etc)
11. Measure ROI via SEO/Social Media platforms
12. Sustain the killer content and momentum

As more journalists seek out interviewees from company blogs and Linkedin profiles, Social Media – when executed properly – will turbo charge your marketing campaign. See www.questblog.com on how it is boosting companies’ bottom lines.

CONTACT
T 01423 564192
E  Sharon@quest-pr.com
www.quest-pr.com, www.questprblog.com, follow us on LinkedIn (Sharon Cain) or @SharonCain and @QuestPR on Twitter.

I’m here to tell you that the old saw about how you “can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” is dead wrong! Even Yoda has learned the value of Social Media.

I provide advisory and mentoring services to small business owners, based on my 30+ years experience as an entrepreneur and CEO leading, growing and turning around small businesses. However, with a whole bunch of folks, seemingly providing the same kind of services, I had to create a brand that would be distinctive, create a positioning in the prospective buyer’s mind and a buzz that took my company ‘above the noise’.

So I branded myself “The Entrepreneur’s Yoda,” based on the fact that at its fundamental basis, I was delivering “wisdom from an experienced old guy.” However, at the same time, having spent the previous nearly five years doing a steady diet of turnarounds of small companies, I had allowed my network to stagnate. So I faced two problems. First, I had no brand awareness. Second, I had no network upon which to leverage.

Enter Social Media. 

Some colleagues recommended that I use LinkedIn. I did just that using some tried and true techniques to begin to expand my network, reaching out to folks I hadn’t spoken to, in some cases, for ten years or more. Then I began answering questions in the Q&A area and I joined a bunch of groups focused around my target market – entrepreneurs and small business owners.

At the same time I created a blog, creatively titled, “The Entrepreneur’s Yoda,” to both further my brand and provide a forum for my advice and viewpoints. Then came the heavy lifting.

To both further my brand awareness and to get folks to my blog site, I began seeding the discussion groups with provocative questions. It took a little trial and error to get questions that actually engendered interest and discussion, but I guess it’s worked. In less than 5 months I’ve generated over 2500 responses and picked up more than 200 new connections.

Finally, to further drive traffic to the blog, I started a Twitter account, where my tweets highlight various blog posts and key articles regarding small business in various trade journals as well as other relevant blog posts that focus on entrepreneurs. Jury’s still out as to whether I’ve fully exploited Twitter (since I’m only about three months into it), but I’ve developed a nice following that grows every day and has driven even more traffic to my blog in recent weeks.

The result – a half dozen new clients and a brand awareness that is now ready to be exploited with the second phase of my plan for my business, which involves rolling out a new website and providing online training and electronic management guides for small business owners.

Using Social Media has really been fun and one of the most interesting things this “old dog” has ever tried in marketing. The best part is that, except for your own labour, it’s by and large, free. So you can “trial and error” it to your heart’s content. But I can tell you, emphatically, it works. Yoda knows these things. His job it is.

They’re proud to be opinionated, they aren’t constrained by the politics of the newsroom or by journalistic creeds, and there are millions of them with more popping up every day – they are bloggers, and reporters are increasingly seeking them out as sources on every topic imaginable. If you’re a PR pro and you don’t have a blog, you may be missing out on interviews with print and broadcast media.

Blogging acts as a complement to a traditional media relations campaign, allowing you to reach out and connect directly with customers, peers, and journalists. When you target a journalist, you’ll be a more attractive source if she can check your blog and see that you have an established following and an engaging style.

Your clients, too, need blogs—unless they want to be left behind as their competitors are discovered through search engines and social media. Nearly anything a client is promoting can be promoted through a blog. Keep the following three tips in mind, whether you’re blogging about your own work in PR or helping a client create a blog:

1. The best blogs are tightly focused. Just like you would when writing a press release, start by finding an interesting angle. Look for a niche that isn’t too crowded. You don’t want to spend weeks on a blog only to find that you’ve got no hope of making it into the first page of Google search results for your topic, thanks to hundreds of competing blogs that are older than yours and already have an active, engaged audience.
2. Err on the side of more honesty, not less. Don’t worry about turning readers off by admitting that the author of the organic cat care blog you’re promoting is your client, who sells organic cat litter. Blog readers want to hear from experts and they’re smart enough to differentiate between content and a sales pitch. Furthermore, if you want your blog to get noticed by the media, showcasing your client’s experience in the blog’s niche can only help you.
3. Be discoverable. So you wrote a brilliant post featuring 25 case studies of companies who are succeeding in social media. What good is it to you if a journalist researching a story on that subject can’t find your blog? Learn about basic SEO, participate in the blogging community by leaving substantive comments on similar blogs, maintain a responsive Twitter account, and use resources like HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to reach reporters directly.

This article is written by Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases, the online leader in affordable press release distribution. Download your free copy of 7 Cheap PR Tactics for Success in Any Economy.

In 2009 Analox began investigating how best to use social media in our marketing mix.  Is it as powerful as people are saying?  How could it benefit Analox?

Our ultimate aim was to get the Analox name recognised as a trusted source of information in each industry sector we supply.  Therefore, it was important that our social networking focus not on selling but informing, and on directing people to our website to find out more.

The push into social networking has coincided with the launch of our new website.  Rather than create an online product catalogue, the new website is designed as an information portal – a place where visitors can find market-specific information.

Alongside analox.net, we’ve created our own YouTube channel, and market specific Blog and Twitter accounts.  These increase the wealth of information we’re offering, catering for different markets and different people by varying the formats used.

So what’s the benefit of social media?  Through YouTube we can show people how to use our products.  Watching someone else is easier than interpreting a series of diagrams.  We also convey other people’s experiences by creating our own ‘video diary room’ at exhibitions.  There’s nothing more powerful than other people talking about our products.

As well as creating a central Blog and Twitter account, we’ve used sector expertise within the company to create individual targeted Blogs and Tweets.  The personal touch works well – the blogger might well be someone you speak to on the phone when you call Analox.

But, is social networking delivering for us as a company?  Our website statistics show that in April 2010, both Twitter and the Analox Blog are in the top 10 sites which refer visitors to analox.net.  And those visitors who come from Twitter or the Blogs stay longer on the Analox site and view more pages.

Yes, there’s a cost in preparing videos and websites, and there’s a time commitment required to regularly update blogs.  However, as part of a marketing mix, social media is a cost effective additional method which raises awareness of the company’s name and helps in positioning us exactly where we want to be – as THE source of information on gas analysis.

Michelle Morley – Marketing Manager at Analox Sensor Technology Ltd

LinkedIn

analox.net

Twitter