Tag Archives: audience development

3 Ways to Capture (& Keep) Audience Attention

Posted on December 27, 2012 by | 6 Comments

Emerging naked from a roaring fire with a baby dragon on your shoulder is one way to get people’s attention. (Thankfully, there are some easier ways to capture your audience’s attention, which we discuss here today.)

Yesterday we published part one of this two-part post on capturing audience attention.  Today, author Ken Dowell offers thoughts on approaches that rely on utility and relevance, rather than diversion, to garner the attention of your organization’s constituents.

Creating great content that will capture attention and truly engage audiences is a new imperative for communicators.   But how exactly do you do that? One approach is to be so brilliant that you can produce staff that is so good an audience will congregate around it.  Since that option isn’t open to most of us we need to think of quality in terms of who it is we want to reach.  You can, for example, be writing on behalf of a accounting standards organization and you know you’re stuff isn’t exactly going to go viral.  But quality in this example means producing content that will be informative to the professional accountant audience who you’re trying to reach.

If you don’t have something that’s of interest, it isn’t going to much matter how you distribute it.  But the definition of what’s of interest is in the hands of the audience and your job in distributing information is in finding the appropriate audience, positioning your content to be discovered by the very people who would find it valuable.

The 3 S’s of content strategy

To do that you need to take into consideration the three S’s of modern content distribution:  search, social and syndication.

Search is still probably the ultimate consumer tool to filter out the noise and go directly to what you want.  In fact a whole industry has been built up around SEO.  And SEO practice became so prevalent that the search engines, led by Google, tweak their algorithms almost weekly to neutralize the practice of manipulating headlines and keywords and links, etc.  What would Google advise?  Create good content and post it on good sites.  Not a bad option.

Social replaces the diverted eyeball approach with the implied endorsement of being recommended by friends, followers or connections.  It’s a kind of discover mechanism that does for content what talking to your friends and acquaintances does for say restaurant recommendations.  My advice here is similar to what it is for search.  Worrying about “optimizing” through use of hashtags or optimum time of day or repetitions is not going to be nearly as important as producing content that your audience is going to want to share.

Syndication is perhaps less commonly thought of, but it’s a powerful content discovery tool that needs to be considered in determining how you are going to distribute your content.  Specific interest is trumping general interest for information consumers and syndicators that address that need are going to get you where you want to go.  (For example the PR Newswire widget that is deployed on hundreds of Web sites and blogs worldwide delivers to each site only the content that meets their description of what their readers want to see.)

New media, new devices, new tools have opened up new opportunities in marketing and public relations to be publishers and talk with audiences instead of at them   But there’s a crowd of others doing the talking and the listener is more and more fine tuning the message stream.   Only good content available in the right places will get through.

Author Ken Dowell is PR Newswire’s EVP of social media & audience development.

Image via i09.com

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The Diverted Eyeball Strategy: Why It’s Not Working

Posted on December 26, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Professional communicators have traditionally based a lot of their activity on capturing what I would call diverted eyeballs, putting content under the noses of an audience that only sees it because they were really looking for something else.

Most advertising works like this.  You’re reading a story in a magazine and when you have to turn the page you get, not the continuation of your story, but a glossy full color photo of a bottle of rum.  Or you may be watching October baseball and in trying to focus on whether that long fly ball clears the wall, you may or may not notice the name of the beer brand painted on the wall.

PR placement is a little more subtle but nonetheless based upon the reader sort of accidently falling upon the mention.  Maybe that involves an inch or two of commentary embedded in a larger news story or a couple of sentences rewritten from a news release that fills a hole in a newspaper page.

The diverted eyeball strategy was justified by some audacious claims as to audience reach.  That one graph short on an interior page of the local newspaper raised claims of an audience equivalent to the circulation of the newspaper.  Score a TV placement?  That means millions right? Because however many viewers Nielsen projects to have watched that station during that time period potentially saw the snippet of video or comment that you snuck in front of them.

Still working?  Not so much.  While the theory of diverted eyeball distribution made the migration from traditional media forms to online, it’s not quite the same.  Because the claims of audience reach are based upon a concept of a passive news consumer casually taking in whatever is hoisted at him (or her).  It’s about starting the day by paging through the newspaper at the breakfast table and ending it sitting down with the family to watch the evening news.

That’s not what today’s news consumer looks like.  Paging through the morning paper now might be scrolling through headlines from 10 news sources on Twitter.  Casually perusing what’s on the next page is less likely than searching directly for the information you want.  So with more paths to get information and more devices to access it, the role of editor or gatekeeper has in many ways passed directly to the information consumer.

What that means for the communicator?  You’re not going to be successful riding the coattails of someone else’s quality.  It’s up to you to produce the content that captures an audience.

Author Ken Dowell is PR Newswire’s executive vice president of audience development & social media.

Image via http://nicolemerrifield.wordpress.com

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How to Amplify Messages by Cultivating Audiences & Influencer Relationships

Posted on September 13, 2012 by | 3 Comments

It’s not a comfortable question, but in today’s connected world, it’s one we communicators have to ask ourselves.  And here it is:

How many of the media and influencers in our  media databases hear regularly from us (or our brands) other than when we have a press release in hand or a story idea to pitch? 

In many cases, the answer is “Rarely.”  However, social media offers us the ability to develop relationships at our fingertips, as well as some opportunities to significantly improve our personal effectiveness, and the resonance of the messages we publish, specifically:

  1.  The ability to create a landing pad for messaging, by cultivating an interested audience; and
  2. A way to develop personal relationships with key influencers that will keep you “present” and top of mind.

Creating a bouncy landing pad for messages by cultivating your audience before you communicate:

It’s not unusual for a PR campaign to still operate on the “Ready, aim, fire” principle.  The audience is targeted and the message is subsequently distributed.  Follow up calls are made.   This approach misses one of the greatest gifts to PR from the inventors of networks like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest – the gift of ongoing audience attention.  Any content marketing strategy worth its salt makes social channels a key distribution network for messages.  PR pros need to embrace this strategy, too.  Why?

Every day, on social networks all over the world, with absolutely no regard at all or whatsoever for our various and sundry communications plans and corporate schedules, conversations are happening relating to the products, services, ideas and causes we spend our days promoting. People are looking for information.  Bloggers are blogging. Consumers are considering what to consume next.  If we’re lucky, several of these actors might alight upon a message we published.  If we’re unlucky, however, they may overlook our brands completely.

Now, some folks aren’t considering capturing these spur of the moment opportunities.  However, those communicators who are more dialed in to their marketplaces – and, arguably, their company KPIs (key performance indicators) – do care deeply about these opportunities – and they’re wise to do so.   The ability to capture the ongoing attention of your audience can result in extremely measurable outcomes, and create a soft, springy and receptive landing pad that can bounce your messages around to different people who will amplify it for you.

Modernizing media relations with meaningful digital connections

The second opportunity social media offers public relations practitioners is a more modern approach to media relations.  And no, I’m not talking about simply sending out pitches on Twitter.   By paying attention to what journalists are doing on social media, you can:

  • Develop a good idea of what sort of stories interest them. (What do they tweet, bookmark or read via social reader?),
  • Identify other opportunities for coverage or exposure beyond their primary beat (Do they pin images on Pinterest? Contribute to a blog in addition to their beat?  Create vlogs or podcasts? These are all parts of the news hole.)
  • Learn what sort of content is popular with the larger audience.  (Which stories trigger enthusiastic sharing?)
  • Find non-traditional influencers who weren’t on your radar screen but are nonetheless influential, especially in niche areas of interest.
  • Understand what topics are near and dear to the hearts of the audience.

The act of simply paying attention to the conversation around topics central to your organization is always informative.   An added bonus is that you’ll be able to subtly introduce yourself into the conversation (and to the key players) by adding value when you start sharing useful information, and sharing content posted by others among your own social network.   Tweeting a journalist’s story is a positive way to get on his or her radar screen, especially if you have cultivated a solid and relevant following yourself.

Developing digital relationships

The good news is that cultivating audiences and developing good digital relationships with media and influencers on social networks are achieved through similar means.    Here’s how you do it.

  1. Develop a focused presence on the social networks germane to the topic you’re promoting.   This presence is ideally branded, but it can be a personal presence bearing your name, as well.  If you’re ambitious, you can do both.  Either way, be transparent about who you are, and where you work.
  2. Delve into the topics at hand. Become an expert, share your expertise, and share good content.  Engage in conversation.  Focus on being helpful, interesting and authentic.
  3. Research hashtags, follow lists and read what others tweet.  Get a handle on the nature of the conversation in your space.  Learn what sort of content resonates with the influencers who have gained your interest.
  4. Look at your media list and connect with key media who have also developed professional presences on social networks.  Important: pay attention to how these folks use social media.  If they don’t talk shop on their Facebook wall, you should avoid doing so too.
  5. Commit to building these presences over time.  It takes time to gain traction with an audience.  Along the way, you have to care for and feed your social presences.
  6. Practice the 90:10 rule.  Fully 90% of what you share shouldn’t be brand-focused.   Act as an editor at large, finding and sharing lots of interesting stuff.   Yes, you can drop one of your messages into the stream every now and then.  But if you want to create and maintain interest, you’ll need to be selfless with the content you curate and the presence you construct.

As you proceed, you’ll pick up more followers, and find interesting people to follow. You’ll identify influencers.  And if you do it right, you’ll become a valued member of the community, one who others rely upon for great information.   You’ll be creating a receptive audience for key messages, and positive relationships with influencers who matter, and triggering a loop of incredibly valuable attention, interaction and opportunity.  We call this new approach to PR and content marketing Agile Engagement.

Author Sarah Skerik (@sarahskerik) is PR Newswire’s vice president of social media.

Image courtesy of Flickr user  stevendepolo.

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