Category Archives: Online PR

Slaying the credibility trolls

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Sonia over at Copyblogger has a great piece on “The #1 Conversion Killer in Your Copy (And How to Beat It).”

What makes people almost buy? What makes them get most of the way there, then drop out of your shopping cart at the last second? What makes them stare at your landing page, wanting what you have to offer, and yet, ultimately, close the page and move on to something else?

It turns out there’s a hideous troll hiding under the bridge. Every time you get close to making a sale, the troll springs out and scares your prospect away. Get rid of the troll and your copy will start converting better than it ever has before.

The ugly, smelly, dirty, bad-mannered troll is prospect fear. And it’s sitting there right now, stinking up your landing page and scaring good customers away.

She does a great job of explaining where the “conversion troll” comes from, and she’s 100% correct. If you’ve grown up in this society, you have probably have a degree of well-justified trepidation about trusting the claims of those trying to sell you something.

I’d go her one better, though, because I feel like the principles she’s articulating when she says that “[t]rustworthiness, transparency, credible authority, lots of high-value content, and just plain old decency are your best weapons” apply to a lot more than the point of sale. Continue reading →

S&R hits significant milestone: you, too, can be a social media star

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On April 16 some colleagues and I launched Scholars & Rogues, a team blog covering politics, media, art and literature, culture, sports – really, we wanted to cut a pretty broad swath through our readers’ lives, and whether you agreed or disagreed (heck, we don’t even agree with each other all the time), we wanted to encourage thinking and intelligent discussion. Continue reading →

Customer service: the “desk jockey” past vs. the “service ranger” future

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I’m reading Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba’s Citizen Marketers on a friend’s recommendation. A lot of folks in his agency are starting to tweak on social media and this highly regarded (and extremely readable) examination of viral and customer-generated marketing activity is guiding a good bit of their thinking and questioning. Good on ’em – a lot more companies need to be exploring these issues, as well.

My only complaint so far really isn’t about the book, which is a very worthwhile read, so much as it is a general idea that all this online activity, and corresponding company attention to it, is a very new thing. To some extent this is true, of course – as I note above, it’s not like engaging the blogosphere and the “citizen marketer” is something that a lot of companies are doing, and even fewer are doing it effectively. I guess I’m frustrated because I’ve been carping on this for years and haven’t seen the kinds of uptake and results that I know are possible.

Here’s an example. Continue reading →

Show, don’t tell: of blogs and splash pages

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You may have noticed something a little different about the Black Dog page. It’s the landing spot for my business, but it’s also a blog. The blog isn’t hanging off a link – it’s the center of attention.

I’m not the first person to do this, but it’s extremely rare. I heard some reservations from people I asked to advise me, too. Landing pages are supposed to tell the visitor right away what you do. Landing pages can’t be cluttered. Never put your opinions up front. All sound advice from a traditional perspective. And it may turn out that this is a bad idea.

However, if the Black Dog brand is about innovation and unconventional, and if it’s going to have things like online PR and social media marketing as a centerpiece, it makes sense that I should show, not tell. Continue reading →

Redfin – a case study in the value of openness

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In my last post I talked about how the Internet can be your online PR friend if you understand how it works and let go of the fallacious idea that you can control it. Now Shelley Jack at Ripple Effects Interactive in Pittsburgh forwards along a Wired story I had missed about how one company turned near-catastrophe into what looks like a major success.

Last year, [Glenn] Kelman was the newly hired CEO of Redfin, an online brokerage firm that was, as he puts it, “the ugly red-haired child” in the real estate world. Continue reading →

The death of message “control”

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For years I’ve been talking to anybody who would listen about the basic principles that make online communication efforts work – and the ways in which the Internet has completely altered the rules for successful PR in all arenas. When I talk about openness and transparency, though, the train often jumps the tracks because corp comm pros who have been around since the pre-Net days are obsessed with message control.

What they don’t always grasp is that everybody who encounters a corporate message today – be it advertising, marketing collateral, PR, whatever – instinctively smells the topspin. Continue reading →