As I write this post on Oscar Awards Sunday, I thought the title of this post was appropriate. While I will not be making any winner predictions, this post does center on my efforts to publicize this blog, and the results that were achieved.
This week, we were tasked with publicizing our blog. As a public relations professional, I welcomed this task as a way to exercise the skills I have developed over recent months to utilize a mix of traditional marketing and social media.
My first step was to go the traditional route; in doing this, I sent out an e-mail to a targeted audience – those who have an interest or currently work in public relations and marketing. I selected people who are colleagues and fellow members of the local chapters of AAF-Cleveland and PRSA Cleveland. I believed this would be an engaged audience who would find the information on this blog informative and useful.
Also, these individuals were selected based on two key factors in selecting a target market. The first is the attractiveness of the segment. As mentioned above, these individuals are marketing communications professionals, which make them an ideal audience for this blog. The second factor is whether or not this audience fits into the objectives of the blog (NetMBA.com, 2007). The goal of my blog is to be an educational resource. The audience selected would be interested in these topics and are currently seeking ways to increase their knowledge on the ever-evolving world of digital marketing.
The next approach I took was engaging social media. The first outlet I selected was Facebook. With more than 400 million users and recently surpassing Yahoo as the second most popular Web site in the United States, Facebook was a logical choice for getting the word out about my blog (Campanelli, 2010). Granted, I know that not all of the 400 million users are going to see my posting, but nonetheless, Facebook was a great outlet for disseminating information about my blog. With one posting, I was able to reach a large audience.
My first step in using Facebook was to post the link to the blog on my firm’s Facebook fan page. I then reposted this link to my own Facebook page. With more than 100 fans of Roop & Co. and more than 500 of my own friends on Facebook, I believed this was a strong venue to disseminate this message.
The final vehicle I used was Twitter. Once again, I posted the link via the Roop & Co. Twitter page and then I retweeted the post from my account. This tactic reached approximately 300 engaged users.
Before I give you the overall results in numbers, some of the qualitative results speak volumes.
From my e-mail campaign, I received positive feedback from numerous members of my target audience. Interestingly, no one commented on the blog. Instead, I received these comments in a reply e-mail. I did thank everyone for the comments, but I also encouraged those individuals to post their comments to the blog since blogs are a way to elicit conversation between people (Uhrmacher, 2008).
From my social media results, I saw comments from friends and colleagues on my Facebook page. When looking at Twitter, individuals had tweeted the link to this blog to their own followers. This example truly demonstrated to me the genesis behind Twitter and the power it had. As a result of this Twitter activity, I gained some followers who work in the Greater Cleveland public relations industry. This is a win/win. Not only was I able to share the knowledge I am gaining from the digital marketing program at WVU, but I am also building a network among my professional peers in the process.
And now, the numbers…
Well, just as much to my disappointment, like those who went home Osacr-less, when I set up my analytics account, I also added filters on my overall reporting. Yet, I did this incorrectly. Instead of posting the funnels to a different report on my account, I added it to my overall accout. This mean my data was missing because I did not post these on a separate report on my account. Yes, this is definitely a learning process, but this article on Google Analytics helped me navigate my oversight as well as a conversation with my professor. Have no fear, the problem has been alleviated, and I will now take the tactics outlined above and once again put this plan into action. I will post the full results from this experiment in publicizing this blog later this week.
References
NetMBA.com (2007). Target Market Selection. Retrieved March 7, 2010, from http://www.netmba.com/marketing/market/target/
Campanelli, J. (2010, March 1). Cleveland personalities find lots of friends on Facebook. The Plain Dealer, PDQ section. Retrieved March 7, 2010, from http://www.cleveland.com/pdq/index.ssf/2010/03/cleveland_personalities_who_ha.html
Uhrmacher, A. (2008). How to develop a social media plan for your business in 5 steps. Mashable Blog. Retrieved December 1, 2009, from http://mashable.com/2008/07/10/how-to-develop-a-social-media-plan/
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