Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
We recently started working with The Shops at the Bravern, a stylish shopping center in Bellevue that offers a wide variety of shops and restaurants such as Neiman Marcus, Karen Millen, Tory Burch and local favorites John Howie Steak and Chocopolis.
Our first task was driving awareness for The Bravern’s Christmas tree lighting on Fri., Nov. 19, which also served as the kick-off to its “Enchanted Holidays at The Bravern.” Hosted by KIRO TV’s Jenni Hogan, along with the SeaGals escorting Santa’s sleigh, attendees were treated to carolers, kettle corn and hot cocoa to help kick-off the holiday shopping season in style.
In order to drive awareness and attendance at the event, we developed a media alert and conducted outreach to local print and broadcast media as well fashion, food and mommy bloggers. As a result of our outreach we garnered coverage in several local publications including 425 Magazine, Bellevue Reporter, Downtown Bellevue Network, MOMStart, Red Tricycle. We also secured more than 18 placements in local event calendars.
The tree lighting was only the beginning of a season full of wonderful holiday events at The Bravern. The Bravern has a wide variety of fun holiday activities for the whole family including free pony rides, breakfast with Santa and Mrs. Claus, cookie decorating and photos and letters with Santa. Big kids at heart are invited to partake in “Cool Winter Nights,” a happy hour-inspired evening by the fire sipping cocktails and enjoying nibbles from Wild Ginger. If you are interested in any of these events, feel free to visit The Bravern’s holiday website at http://www.thebravern.com/holiday.
If you’ve never experienced The Bravern, the holidays are a great time to visit, whether it’s shopping for the perfect gift or looking for a unique stress-free holiday experience for the family. Communiqué decided to host our holiday gathering at The Bravern enjoying spa services at Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spas and lunch at Wild Ginger. It was a perfect place to relax and enjoy each other’s company.
Recently, my colleague and I attended a focus group conducted by Hebert Research for one of our clients. The aim of the session was to get feedback on a nonprofit’s website and other marketing materials, and it was a productive event.
As a result of our experience at Hebert, we thought we’d share a few of our thoughts around best practices for successful focus groups. Here are our thoughts:
- Be clear on the purpose of the focus group and what you want to achieve. For example, our client was particularly interested in obtaining feedback on its website and a video it created so it could determine what enhancements or changes needed to be made.
- Develop a set of questions. Ideally, you want to develop questions that encourage discussion and solicit honest perspective. Before finalizing the questions, think about what response it will elicit in order to ensure the questions will enable you to gather the information you seek.
- Identify participants. A key component of a successful focus group is the right mix of participants. In our session, Herbert Research invited men and women between the ages of 40 and 50 years of age, which is representative of our client’s target audience.
- Make sure you have a strong moderator. Jim Hebert was the moderator at our session. He was tactful, kept the participants on track, and was able to engage everyone in the room. He was really adept at building a rapport with the range of personalities within the group.
- Analyze results. This was the best part of the session. Clear themes emerged from the discussion about the design of the site as well as the video. At the end of the session, which we listened to from behind a one-way mirror, we revisited the feedback and decided how to make it actionable in the coming weeks and months.
Our client successfully achieved its objectives from the session. Clearly, focus groups can be a treasure trove of insight but only when they are well-planned and efficiently conducted. We’d love to hear your thoughts on other best practices for conducting a successful focus group.
A company website can be a vital tool to educate and engage current and potential customers. Customers’ first brush with a business often comes through a search on the Internet. According to data from analyst firm iProspect, “62 percent of search engine users click on results within the first page of search results and 36 percent believe that companies whose websites appear at the top of the search results are leaders in their field.”
Therefore, it’s critical that company websites are optimized for search engines to help increase search rankings to drive more traffic and business.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a tried-and-true method to earn higher rankings in Google, Bing and Yahoo. Below are a few tips to get started:
- Keywords: Identify who your target audiences are and what key phrases they are using to search for a business like yours. A free tool to search for keywords is Google Sktool. With this tool, users enter their company and its competitors’ website links and compare the keywords that are driving traffic to each site. Based on this search, you can optimize your site by adding keywords or phrases to the website titles and content.
- SEO-friendly URL: To ensure that web pages are ranked high in search engine results and draw traffic, use static URLs (e.g., http://www.test.com/test-aboutus) instead of dynamic URLs (e.g., http://www.test.com/php?category=title). Search engines index static URLs more quickly than dynamic ones. Static URLs are typically ranked better and bring more traffic to the site, simply because users are more likely to click on a URL that is easier to understand and matches the key phrase used in search query.
- SEO external links: Backlinks coming from external websites (e.g., industry sites, blogs or Wikipedia) to your homepage are a sign of quality and trust and help increase a page rank. If possible, try to secure links from .edu and .gov sites by contacting them directly via email or a phone call. These links are considered more reputable than .com, .biz, .info, and other domains simply because they are difficult to secure. Another practice, we recently explained in our blog post is link baiting – creating valuable content for the website that encourages people to link to it from other websites. The older, the better. But be aware that getting too many new links in a short time suggests you recently purchased them.
- Add a postal address to your site’s pages: This is important to drive local traffic and business. This tactic reinforces the location of the business to the search engines. Try to add your postal address to as many pages as possible, for example at the bottom of each of your webpages.
- Optimize your local business search: Search engine directory listings play an important role in local searches. If your business is not already listed, then “claim” your own local business listings on Google Places, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local. Fill out the profile completely with the company address, phone number, website link and target keywords. By doing this, your business will also come up in mobile-based searches, which are equally important.
Using these steps, you can take charge of your website traffic and make it easier for your target audience to find your company’s website using today’s high-powered search engines.
Another one of Communiqué PR’s clients is a finalist to win a coveted Stevie Award, one of the world’s premier business awards. Sarah Carr, CEO of Earth Class Mail is a finalist for the 2010 Stevie Awards for Women in the categories of “Best Turnaround of the Year” and “Best Executive.”
Founded in 2002, the mission of the Stevie Awards is to recognize and generate public awareness of excellence in the workplace. Today there are four Stevie Awards competitions: The American Business Awards, The International Business Awards, The Stevie Awards for Women in Business, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.
The judging of Stevies is conducted in two phases: preliminary and final. Preliminary judges apply to be judges on the awards’ website. If selected, they are then assigned categories, based on their industry, function, and experience. The preliminary judges select the companies or individuals who will move to the finalist round.
The final judges determine the winners of the Stevie Awards. Every category that has at least one finalist will have at least one Stevie Award winner. Final judges also have the option to award multiple Stevies in a given category.
We are keeping our fingers crossed that Sarah Carr will be two for two in her quest for this year’s Stevies. The winners will be announced on November 12 at the awards dinner in New York and the Stevie-winning entries will be published on the Stevie Awards for Women in Business website.
Finally for those who are wondering, Stevie is taken from the name Stephen, which is derived from the Greek for “crowned.” If Sarah wins, she’ll receive a Stevie award statue that is approximately 16 inches tall, and is hand-cast and finished in 24-karat gold.
On October 18, 2010 the Port of Kingston launched a new express, passenger-only ferry service between Kingston, Wash. and downtown Seattle called SoundRunner. In order to drive awareness of the service launch, the ferry program manager reached out to Communiqué PR to enlist our help with outreach to local print, online and broadcast media to drive coverage before and on the day of the launch.
Our scope of work included working with the Port of Kingston to develop key press materials and talking points about the service. In addition, we developed and distributed a press release announcing the service, which was sent via buddy e-mail to more than 40 key Seattle-based reporters who cover local news and/or transportation.
As a result of our efforts, we secured more than 32 stories about the service with publications and outlets such as Seattle Times, SeattlePI.com, Associated Press, KING 5, Q13, KOMO 4 News, KUOW FM, North Kitsap Herald, Kitsap Daily and Kitsap Sun. Additionally, the news was widely tweeted about on Twitter by both consumers and media outlets.
The Port of Kingston offered free rides on the first day of the service and had an overwhelmingly positive response from passengers on both sides of Puget Sound with commuters, joyriders and even students riding the ferry. Overall, the coverage surrounding the service was extremely positive and positioned the SoundRunner as a reliable, comfortable commuting option to connect passengers from the Kitsap area to downtown Seattle either for work and play.
Crowdsourcing is an emerging trend in which tasks traditionally performed by internal or professional teams are outsourced to a crowd. The term coined by Wired magazine writer Jeff Howe, owes its genesis to the trend of leveraging the possibilities of mass collaboration brought on by the growth of Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. This emerging trend is worth investigating for a number of business projects.
Why Crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing offers many benefits including cost effectiveness, increased efficiency, collaboration and innovation. For example last year, we wrote about the success of the Threadless T-shirts partnership with Twitter to crowdsource designs for a new line of “Twitter Tees.” For some companies crowdsourcing is becoming a path toward innovation, whereas for others, crowdsourcing ideas may mean saving money on expensive services.
For a bootstrapped entrepreneur, the world of crowdsourcing acts as a new marketplace, where companies can get professional services at a lower cost. For instance, a newly formed business looking to create a new brand logo, website and stationery design can now simply post a design brief on websites such as 99designs, crowdSPRING or DesignCrowd to gather ideas. Similar to a contest, designers from across the world respond to the brief and the best design or idea earns the contract. Among hundreds or even thousands of designs received, the soliciting company has the option to select from the wide range of respondents offering competitive bids, often spending a fraction of the money that would be normally spent for branding and design.
Recently, however, the Gap’s use of crowdsourcing to revamp the company’s logo received strong public backlash. Some experts condemned the idea of asking for designs upfront and companies only paying for what they like. Opponents of crowdsourcing, argue that professionals should be paid for their work and that speculative work can be “disrespectful of the discipline of design, and a devaluation of the profession.”
Given this, when crowdsourcing for design concepts it is important to consider the scope of the project and be considerate about the how much time and free resources you are asking from the community.
Crowdsourcing the Team
Not restricted solely to ideas, crowdsourcing can also be used to source teams. Businesses faced with fluctuating demand and constant pressure to reduce costs are now hiring on-demand teams for seasonal or specific needs.
A San Francisco-based sporting goods retailer, Lombardi Sports, engaged Cloudcrowd for creating an online catalog for the company site. The Cloudcrowd task force gathered the information needed from manufacturers and other sources and created an online catalog with limited involvement from Lombardi Sports at lower than expected prices.
There are other services that are helping businesses create and maintain websites inexpensively. oDesk and Elance connect qualified technology professionals from around the world with companies who are looking to create a new tool or software application, or manage day-to-day office tasks. To hire a team, all a company needs do is post a job requirement and select from the appropriate bid based on profiles, experience, ratings, credentials and portfolios.
For many companies crowdsourcing a team is a cost-effective way to off-load trivial tasks. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk allows businesses to outsource small tasks, such as reviewing online content to ensure there is no profanity, verifying the database for accuracy or providing content development such as tagging product images to people over the Internet instead of hiring an in-house workforce.
Crowdsourcing’s collaborative approach is helping companies reduce overhead and increase efficiency. With the abundance and availability of web-community talent and service providers at a fraction of the cost, every business now has access to a world of affordable professionals.
Have you used crowdsourcing for a specific project, to gather ideas or to complete a task? If so post a comment and let us know.