On Friday, June 18, at Digital Capital Week (#dcweek), Zenzi Communications will share the top tips and best practices for “PR in a Digital World.”  As marketing and PR are changing rapidly with the constant evolution and expansion of the digital ecosystem, success requires integrated efforts that combine the smartest tactics in traditional PR combined with online marketing and SEO practices. The Internet has changed how we receive information, how we interact and engage with each other, with brands and with media. PR is a critical aspect of the marketing mix and there are fundamental shifts in strategy and approach that Zenzi, an integrated marketing & PR agency, will share at this workshop.

With smaller staffs in traditional media newsrooms, many more ways to communicate, and consumers taking control of their incoming information flow, it is imperative to maintain a two-way dialogue with your target audience.  Keep in mind that everyone is a journalist now and each individual should be treated that way.

Below are the top 10 tips (some old, some new) that should be utilized in a cohesive manner together to achieve your communications goals in today’s marketplace:

1. Know your audience

2. Develop and communicate a clear and consistent message

3. Create and maintain relationships

4. Be authentic & credible

5. Engage & entertain your audience with big ideas and valuable insight

6. Learn how to use digital tools

7. Communicate using multiple touch-points

8. Manage your reputation proactively through online word of mouth

9. Create a crisis PR plan

10. Combine and strategically merge SEO and PR efforts

If you are attending Digital Capital Week, be sure to register for this session to learn more about the new PR landscape and digital ecosystem.  For more information or to register visit http://schedule.digitalcapitalweek.org/event/e2204cd37a3fe0bf055d0d649b4cbba0.

Before diving into this gold-mine of digital marketing tips and tricks, and depending on how brave you are, click here to take our quiz and we will send you personalized results to find out if your efforts and knowledge add up to classify you as a Digital Daredevil! Then, continue on below for an overview of our recommendations to make you a digital marketing superstar.

DIGITAL MARKETING ESSENTIALS

Don’t attempt to tame the brave world of digital PR and marketing without mastering the basics first. Get your campaigns up to speed with these helpful tips from Zenzi:

Start with a Strategy

Digital marketing offers a multitude of opportunities for businesses to establish immediate and real-time relationships with customers, deepen connection and engagement, drive feedback and positive word of mouth and strengthen your brand.  And just like any other important business initiative, it takes advance planning to define your target audience and business objectives. Study your customers and see how they are behaving and interacting using various social media channels. What are their habits? How can you participate in their conversations in a way that adds value? Before you dive in, you should document your approach, objectives and success metrics for each different medium.

Set Clear Benchmarks

The question of ROI is often top of the list when companies consider investing in social media marketing activities. According to the 2009 Mzinga & Babson Executive Education study, over 80% of professionals do not measure ROI for their company’s social media programs.  Establishing clear performance benchmarks, tracking your efforts, collecting data, and measuring results is critical to fully optimize your marketing initiatives and link them to business outcomes. These will differ for every company, although commonly used metrics include Website visitors and sources of traffic, qualified leads generated, network size (followers, fans, members) and quality of commentary.  Use tools to measure website traffic (Google Analytics, Quantcast), social media buzz (Radian6, Filtrbox, Serph, Trendpedia, Omgili Charts, Hootsuite), and trends (Google Trends, BlogPulse Trends).

Know Your SEO

Optimizing your website and social media for search engines is a ‘must do’ strategy for being known and found online. Start by researching the most relevant, highly searched and competitive keywords for your site and the websites of your primary competition. You should develop a comprehensive, accurate list of keywords from multiple data sources including the Google Keyword Tool, WordTracker.com, Thesaurus.com, The Free Keyword Niche Finder and others. This is one of the most important aspects of SEO, since you will build upon the keywords selected and use them throughout your website, social media, PR and marketing efforts.

Optimize Press Materials

Once you have identified the most relevant keywords, begin organizing them into groups by theme, popularity, relevance, etc. and prioritizing them for specific pages of your site.  Before you distribute an article or press release to media and online sites, make sure that the same keywords are integrated into the headline and body of the information and linked back to the relevant section on your website.

Keep Your Eyes Peeled

With so much happening online, it’s critical to keep your eyes open and continually monitor conversations about your company, competitors, and best practices in your industry. This will help you cut through the clutter and participate in the dialogue in a way that is relevant and meaningful. Keep up with what’s new and notable on the web with search tools such as Technorati, Addict-o-Matic or Google Trends. To assess the strength of your company’s online presence, check out Social Mention.

Target Key Influencers

If used effectively, tools such as Twitter can be a great way to build relationships with key influencers in your industry, create a dialogue and position yourself as a credible expert source.  Before you get started, consider your target market and how you can provide tangible value to that audience. Build your network by creating a list of influencers, media, analysts and potential customers, and follow or link to them.  Keep your tweets/ posts real, to the point and relevant to your audience. Avoid self-promotional information or sales pitches! Continue to build your database by adding social media URLs to your email signature, finding and following contacts online after in-person or phone meetings, and researching Twitter search sites: Twellow.com, Twitterholic.

Engage with Video

A new survey conducted by PR News and Medialink reveals that PR pros aren’t using online video as often as they’re watching it. While 69% of the nearly 300 people who responded to the survey said they’ve watched online video footage for business purposes within the last 10 days, only half have video posted on their corporate Web sites. Video that is optimized with the proper keyword and social media tags can be very beneficial to a company’s SEO efforts, making it a valuable cost effective tool to have in the mix. In addition to producing content from scratch, re-purpose existing video assets that are already available and leverage your ability to attract a targeted audience through a visually compelling means.

Build High Quality Links

Influencing highly trafficked and relevant websites to link to you while adhering to Google’s quality guidelines is the key to successful link building and SEO management. The process starts by developing a list of sites and working to establish relationships and reciprocal links. On an ongoing basis, submit press releases and articles to search sites, directories such as Wikipedia, media, and relevant blogs. Don’t forget to add keywords to your press releases and other marketing materials to ensure your messaging is as consistent and powerful as possible.

Keep Content Fresh

In addition to a PR tool, producing informative, relevant and fresh content for a company blog can help to boost your SEO. By drafting 1-2 articles or blog posts per week rich with keywords, you can build the online reputation of company executives and increase your presence on the first page of Google and other search engines. Once created, the content can be marketed and posted on other websites to drive traffic and search engine attention to your website.

Stay Top of Mind

A customized email newsletter is a great way to establish top of mind awareness with your target audiences and remind them you are a leader in your industry. Keep the content freshly updated by mapping out an editorial plan for articles and asking team members to contribute topics on their areas of expertise. To build your email list for more effective email marketing, consider offering a downloadable e-book, white paper or other promotion. There are many templates to choose from on sites such as Constant Contact and Cooler Email.

Extend Your Reach

If you are working on a tight budget like most marketers today, it’s a no brainer to take advantage of the many free sites to jumpstart your PR efforts. If you are looking to connect with journalists seeking sources, sign up for queries from HARO.com.  Looking for feedback on your media pitch? Go to Your Pitch Sucks for an honest assessment. Search and subscribe to news through Pitch Engine. To boost pickup of your release in search engines, there are many, many sites such PRleap.com and PR.com where you can post press releases for free.

Be Cohesive

Using digital tools together with traditional PR and marketing can pay off with big benefits and increased efficiency, but only if your efforts complement and support each other and your message is consistent. Your brand should communicate with a strong and powerful voice that is authentic and unique. This personality will extend from your Website copy and advertising to social media campaign. Encourage crossover by promoting online specials in a direct mail campaign. And no matter where you are, make it easy for your customers to find and follow you with your Web address and links to sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

Want to learn more? Call us to inquire about signing up for a “Be Known & Be Found” brainstorming session.

Call 858-523-9020.

Those of us who have been around the block know that in the not too distant past, the gold standard by which to measure public relations success was “The Ink”.  Back then, “ink” could mean an article in a magazine or newspaper, or broadcast coverage during a morning news broadcast, but either way, measuring success was fairly simple.  How many people read the paper?  Check it off.  You’ve got measurable impressions.  How many people watch the news program?  Yep, that’s also easy to track and measure.

Even better, marketing executives understood “ink”.  Similar to the tried and true measurement of advertising efficiency, everyone inherently grasped that when X number of people read a publication, that equals X number of eyeballs on your brand and your message.  And an eyeball is an eyeball is an eyeball.

But even then, before social media came along and changed PR measurement forever, there was that little voice, the one we all heard but most ignored, that said “But, but…. Aren’t SOME media impressions better than others?  Why do we count an eyeball on the Oprah Winfrey show in the same way we count an eyeball on the 39^th page of an obscure medical journal?”.  Enter “advertising equivalency”, which is yet another (old school) tool in our arsenal to attempt something that is at the heart of one of the biggest hot button in the PR industry today:  Quality of Impressions.

**Gulp**.  Yep, I said it.  Everyone say hello to the elephant in the room.  And guess what?  With social media playing such a huge part in our marketing plans, that elephant is getting bigger. And louder.

Sure, there are lots of reputable, established companies that are devoted to measuring social media success.  There are algorithms, programs, click-thru tracking, verbatim transcriptions of online discussions….  Whatever the method, all are attempting to remove some of the mystery and nail down the value of social media impressions, ie:  the “ink” of the current millennium.

Hey, I’m not knocking it.  We use these methods of measuring social media for our clients, too.  They are the tools that are currently available to us.  But the discussion we keep having, the one that spawns a lot of hand gesturing, raised voices and debate in the halls of Zenzi, is this one:

How do we measure the value of a conversation? Because truly, the simple act of conversing over a digital platform has changed everything.  Forever.

Think of it this way:  You have a problem.  What is more useful to you personally?  Reading about the topic in a newspaper (ie:  static information), or talking to a group of people who have been there, experienced what you’ve experienced, and come out the other side?  No question, right?

So, think of traditional media (conveying information) and social media (sharing and discussing information) in the same way.   It’s not just about eyeballs vs. eyeballs anymore.  Would you rather have 10,000 people simply read your message, or 1,000 people talk passionately about it? What is worth more to you as a marketer?   Even better, can you put a number on it?

We’d love to hear what you think.  Post your comments, and we’ll be writing future entries based on your thoughts.  It’s an ongoing conversation, right?  Let’s get going.

            Social media is always fun and games, until someone (a.k.a. Nestle) gets hurt (a.k.a. suffers an onslaught of Twitter and Facebook accusations by environmental activists). In essence, protesters are claiming that by purchasing palm-oil from an Indonesian company, Nestle is aiding to the devastation of Indonesia’s rain forest, accelerating global warming and endangering orangutans. The Wall Street Journal explains that Nestle’s Facebook and Twitter pages have been overrun by these criticisms, prompting Nestle to react rather defensively.

          This social media explosion has prompted many of us to wonder; what is the appropriate and most effective way to deal with social media crisis? Is there a handbook somewhere? Jeremiah Owyang of  Web Strategy tackles the issue of crisis planning and preparation.

We loved this handy guide to the social landscape from CMO.com.

As you have probably heard already, Southwest Airlines recently made the unfortunate mistake of angering a passenger that harnesses a lot of power on Twitter.  According to reports, actor/director/writer/comedian Kevin Smith, best known for his role as Silent Bob, was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight from Oakland to Burbank, CA, this past Valentine’s Day weekend due to his weight.  Since then, dozens of tweets have been posted by Kevin Smith — @ThatKevinSmith –(last time we checked, his Twitter page was overloaded and couldn’t be accessed via the Twitter website but we were able to check it out via TweetDeck).  To put it mildly, he is angry, and quickly gave Southwest Airlines a fast-moving social media crisis communications situation to deal with.

I’m going to go ahead and ignore taking sides on how airlines should handle seating issues with overweight passengers and focus on the area that I actually have some knowledge and expertise on — the PR and social media strategy by Southwest Airlines to undo the damage.  Our readers can go ahead and check the facts for themselves to form an opinion on whether he should have been kicked off the plane, what the requirements should be for this kind of situation, etc.  The curious, opinionated side of me could go on for a while about that side of the story, but the communications strategy minded, PR professional side of me is more intrigued by how this is being handled by Southwest Airlines.  They have a reputation as a company that prides itself and is well recognized for having stellar customer service, and a lot of generally happy fans on Twitter that they interact with regularly.  So it’s no surprise that they swiftly responded to this digital firestorm of complaints and attacks and have become a part of the conversation, rather than sitting back and watching everything unfold as their name gets tarnished in the process.

This is an unusual situation with a celebrity involved, but it is an excellent case study in the power and reach that Twitter has to either build up or damage an organization’s reputation.  While this story is still playing out and we have yet to see what the outcome will be, so far it looks like Southwest is handling the situation in the way they should be.  They have posted a few tweets apologizing to Mr. Smith and linking to their blog entry which apologized with more detail, explained the situation and the immediate steps that were taken to remedy the damage, and outlined their company policies and procedures in this area.  An apology can go a long way in this type of situation, and the transparency they are demonstrating will likely help them to retain a high level of trust and respect among customers and fans.  Though, according to Smith’s tweets, perhaps Southwest isn’t being quite as transparent as they seem to be.  There are always two sides to each story and we can all learn from watching how Southwest is handling this very public dispute being broadcast via Twitter.

The Southwest Airlines blog post can be accessed here.

ZENZI HELPS COLORADO BUSINESSES ‘BE KNOWN’ AND ‘BE FOUND’

-Highly effective integrated agency opens office in Boulder focusing on digital marketing-

San Diego, CA, and Boulder, CO, February 1, 2010—Zenzi Communications, an award-winning agency that combines traditional marketing and PR with search engine optimization and social media for maximum impact, has expanded operations to Boulder, Colorado. Veteran marketer Anke Corbin will lead a local team focused on the digital aspects of helping companies ‘Be Known’™ and ‘Be Found’ through a creative and results driven approach.

Headquartered in San Diego, Zenzi is one of the city’s fastest growing companies and specializes in working with technology, B2B, consumer and hospitality clients. Among those on the firm’s roster include Boulder-based Parascript LLC, Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, Fresh Express Artisanal Salads, San Diego Botanic Garden, Palm Springs Bureau of Tourism, California State University-Northridge, Bank of Nevada, Mushroom Networks, Sandvine, Business OnLine, BeneTrac (a division of Paychex), and more.

“I grew up in Colorado and always considered expanding Zenzi into my home state. The time is right to take our cutting edge and highly effective approach to marketing and communications to this region. Our goal is to continue to serve leading businesses who want to move at a fast pace, innovate, grow and enjoy success regardless of the surrounding economic climate,” said Sarah Znerold Hardwick, founder of Zenzi.

To spearhead operations in Boulder, Zenzi is partnering with expert Internet marketer Anke Corbin whose background includes Internet startup Interzine Productions, online marketing for Times Mirror Interzines & Times Mirror Magazines, Time Inc., VP marketing at Transworld Media and her own Internet Marketing Agency Anke C. Marketing On-Demand.

“Our objective at Zenzi is to help our clients BE KNOWN, which in today’s world includes being found by search engines, connecting online and developing social relationships, influencing stakeholders including media, investors, prospects, current customers, vendors, employees and most importantly-being relevant.   Combining my boutique Internet Marketing agency with award-winning Zenzi Communications is a perfect fit, positioning us to provide exactly what savvy companies have been asking for,” said Anke Corbin, Zenzi Colorado Partner. “We’re excited to be in Boulder, and we’re currently looking for the right office space and skilled and passionate marketing specialists to join our team.”

About Zenzi:

Zenzi means crescendo: the culmination of carefully crafted notes, harmonies and dynamic sounds. As a full service integrated marketing and PR agency, our mission is to create a similar phenomenon for our clients. We help you BE KNOWN and BE FOUND by developing creative integrated solutions that work in harmony for maximum effectiveness.  We specialize in getting the word out in a hurry using multiple touch points. Whether it’s lead generation, sampling a product on college campuses, outreach to bloggers, improved search results or a feature story in Business Week, we have the connections and expertise to do it all. Founded in 2002, Zenzi is one of San Diego’s Fastest Growing Companies and has been recognized by many of the nation’s leading PR, marketing and business organizations for our creative and results-oriented campaigns. If your goal is to increase market share, break into new industries, find investors or generate qualified leads, Zenzi can help.

In the context of communication overall, social media applications are a major innovation in general, though they aren’t exactly new or groundbreaking on their own anymore. We are keeping an eye out at Zenzi for cool new innovative ways that people and companies are using social media. There is no special code or guaranteed path to success or popularity with social media – much like viral videos — some of the biggest successes just happen because of a creative idea and an audience that catches on and takes it by storm. There are multiple elements that need to click into place to create a successful social media campaign, and one of the biggest elements, at least with the most exciting and unique examples out there, is innovative ideas.

One of our favorite classic examples of an incredibly successful social media campaign is the Kogi Korean BBQ Taco Truck in L.A., which was touted as “America’s first viral restaurant” by Newsweek. While their Twitter (@kogibbq) following is impressive with over 50,000 followers, it’s not just this number that makes them a ridiculously huge Twitter success story. It’s the fact that through Twitter and their website, within just a few months of opening for business there were often hundreds of people waiting on some street corner in L.A. for the Kogi BBQ truck to pull up. The trucks now make the rounds to the bar scene as well, tweeting about one of their two trucks’ next stops, where hungry people armed with iPhones and Blackberries eagerly await the arrival of their late night snack.

These stories are what have landed this fancy taco truck (the regular variety are a dime a dozen on the streets of L.A. during the lunch hour) in publications such as Time, Inc., GQ, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit and Gourmet. To start with, the food is delicious and different, and combine that with a savvy social media strategy designed to work in line with the company’s goals and business model, and you have a successful, innovative social media campaign that has truly taken on a life of its own. Twitter may have played a role in creating an entirely new fast food trend. Kogi BBQ has definitely set a new standard for a perfect recipe for success in social media through an innovative business model that has better served their customers by using Twitter to speak to their customers’ stomachs.

Here at Zenzi, we strive for excellence in all areas of the marketing matrix. We pride ourselves on keeping up with every new trend and delivering unprecedented PR results. In an effort to increase the quality of our PR efforts, we have launched the Zenzi SEO PR service.

Zenzi SEO PR is a new service that leverages blogs, online and traditional media, reviews, video search, photo search, events and social media networks to influence and optimize your Website results.

With Zenzi SEO PR, we have expanded the traditional definition and approach for SEO to include both Organic SEO and Universal SEO. Organic SEO is about optimizing your own site. Universal SEO optimizes links from influential sources such as reviews, video sites, social media and directories, which can either positively or negatively impact your website’s level of relevance.

We offer a variety of SEO PR plans to fit your individual needs. Please give us a call for more info!

Written by Sandvine’s Matt Tooley

Each year around January, the world waits in anticipation to see what big electronics companies have in store for the coming months in terms of the latest in computers, gadgets and home entertainment. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is akin to “Disney Land” for all gadget aficionados with a handful of new solutions grabbing a predominate portion of the media’s attention. This year the buzz centers on Google’s Nexus One, a new smart phone deemed by many as the “iPhone Killer” (doubtful it will knock iPhone off its perch – but we shall see). Flying a bit under the radar at this year’s show yet gaining tremendous traction in the real-world marketplace are solutions for blending the Internet with television.

Early talk about IPTV positioned the technology as the telco’s secret weapon for entry into a space cable operators have forever dominated. Now, cable operators themselves are looking towards Internet based television as an avenue for lucrative service offerings with many analysts and industry experts touting it as the next big thing in cable. Helping cultivate this push, equipment vendor Cisco Systems announced in late 2009 Cisco Blue, an interactive guide for cable-based IPTV set top boxes based on a Web-browser where widgets pull data from various sources such as Yahoo News or Twitter allowing subscribers to easily use their television to interact with the Internet. In addition, Arris demonstrated how IPTV- over-DOCSIS 3.0 can deliver more than 50 percent in bandwidth savings over traditional RF QAM channels.

Now that video and audio streaming already constitute 27 percent of all global Internet traffic (based on Sandvine’s 2009 report analyzing over 20 million broadband subscribers) the need for a much smarter and efficient Web will become even more critical as potentially millions of new Internet- enabled sets plug in. Internet-based TV has a great potential to not only modify the way the Web is managed, but to turn market sectors such as advertising on its head just by the very nature that people will watch their shows and interact with others online.

Much like how IP voice communications was slow to take off, and at one time even scoffed at due to quality of experience issues as a result of jitter and latency, Internet-based TV has experienced the same slow start. We are however at a tipping point where it is no longer a matter of “if” but “when” IPTV will surpass traditional television services – and that’s a story much more worthy of media buzz than the latest smart phone.