This week’s Age of Conversation podcast features Bob Glaza. In his chapter, Give and Grow, he talks about the value of participating in online conversations outside our own websites. Bob’s in the newspaper business, and I started as a radio guy, so our conversation turned to changes in traditional media, and how the online conversation presents opportunities to media businesses. You can read more of Bob’s thoughts at his blog, One Reader at a Time.
But please remember that so much of the growth of your blog is dependent on the amount of time you spend OFF your blog! Your ability to create a vibrant community is dependent on you being a good community member yourself. If visitors become regular readers and commenters at your blog, then you should return the favor by spending time on THEIR blog reading and leaving comments! I advise the companies I discuss blogging with to invest at least half of their ‘blogging time’ to reading and commenting on other blogs.
The end of his post also includes a good discussion of Return on Investment, and I know a lot of you are facing those kinds of questions from your bosses when you push for more investment of time or money online.
The single most important thing you can do for your organization is to continue telling stories, and video is an important part of that. See What’s Out There has a wonderful post, which is a spin-off of a magazine article called Telling Moving Stories. The article highlights the American Jewish World Service, an organization that’s been using video to tell its stories in creative new ways. These are not the typical, slick fundraising videos. They’re stories about the day-to-day work being done by the organization on the ground in far-off parts of the world.
Susan Rosenberg, American Jewish World Service’s director of communications, says these projects are important to the organization because video, more than any other medium, can tell powerful, emotional stories that move supporters and donors to take action. Instead of simply telling potential donors about the organization’s overseas outreach work, it can show them the people it helps and allow them to hear volunteers and those they help in their own words.
Even if you have to hire someone to “cover” your organization like a reporter, on a freelance basis, you should be doing it. It will help you build emotional connections with the people you most need to reach — and the investment will pay off many times over. (And it’s easy, too.)
Roger Anderson might have the coolest resume ever. He’s a business consultant and a public speaker and an author — and, oh yeah, a molecular biologist. His blog, Modern Magellans, is focused on helping business people map their way in the 21st Century. And he’s written a book on the same topic. I talked to him about his chapter in the Age of Conversation, "Keeping the Message Consistent." That doesn’t mean everyone’s got to be speaking from exactly the same script.
Show Notes for Episode 5: 1:45 Marketing is the same, even for technical products
3:30 It’s important to keep your message consistent
4:40 "Consistent" messaging doesn’t equal "canned" messaging
Thanks to Saurab Bhargava for our theme song, called Conversations. You can subscribe to the podcast here.
Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog has five good lessons for professional communicators or marketers. They come from Alan Andeasen, and they all center on the notion that listening is the first part of communicating. To whet your appetite, here are the first two (but go read the rest!):
1. You’re in trouble if you see your product (or your cause) as inherently desireable. It’s not.
2. You’re in trouble if you see lack of success as the target audience’s fault. It’s your fault.
I see these mistakes all the time when I’m talking to people about how they want to communicate for their organizations. Their first priority is to identify their agenda and start pushing it. But that’s exactly backwards. You must first identify the agenda of the people you want to communicate with. What are they looking for? What kind of information do they need? What do they care about? Only after you’ve identified that (by listening to them) can you hope to communicate successfully.
This week’s Age of Conversation podcast features Bob Glaza. In his chapter, Give and Grow, he talks about the value of participating in online conversations outside our own websites. Bob’s in the newspaper business, and I started as a radio guy, so our conversation turned to changes in traditional media, and how the online conversation presents opportunities to media businesses. You can read more of Bob’s thoughts at his blog, One Reader at a Time.
