UPDATE: Within 2 hours of this post, @titusferguson from rTraction called me at my desk, and @AndrewEchidna from echidna (who we had already met with, unknown to me) left a great comment below. It seemed my post got a couple people interested, but why not others?
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So I have a dilemma, or at least JMP does. We know our website needs a refresh (and I am being nice). Ken and I, along with Paul Wilson, our VP of Sales, have been discussing the website, a content generation plan, and a SEO/Social Media strategy, and have had a few discussions with some vendors.
We are a large control systems integration company. This is an industry in its infancy when it comes to social media and sharing content. I started controlsoverload.com and it is like pulling teeth to get contributions, even though the site gets thousands of unique visitors a month… but I digress.
We have lots of smart engineers, and we have hundreds of customers, and have provided thousands of solutions to those customers. We want a new website to help market our company, our employees and our solutions, and a plan to generate consistent value added content. We also have some good ideas (I think so anyway) on a social media strategy, and would like to discuss our approach.
We want to be the number 1 site that Google finds when people are looking for more information on controls, automation, and information solutions!
Have I included enough buzzwords in this post yet? Ideally if someone is out there, marketing the fact that he/she can create functional websites, optimize SEO, and run successful online campaigns to attract more traffic to our site, shouldn’t that person be able to find this blog post?
I am waiting….is anyone listening?
Ok…. seeing as I have not done much marketing on this blog, and don’t have a huge following (yet), I will send this out to LinkedIn and twitter using a couple good #hashtags, and drop a couple of @mentions, hopefully to get a RT that peaks someone’s curiosity.
But don’t you agree I should not have to try too hard? Please RT!
Hi Jeremy –
Great post and a great way to search for a vendor! My company Echidna has been to speak with Ken, Paul and Brian but we never had the pleasure of meeting you. You clearly have a clear passion for Social Media and understand it’s potential for a professional services firm. We were originally brought in to talk about a new website but it became clear that an overall marketing plan was really what was needed – which isn’t in our range of offerings.
Based on your blog post, it sounds like you now have a good understanding of where you need to go and have already brainstormed ideas on how to get there.
I’d welcome the opportunity to speak with you regarding our expertise in building functional websites optimized for SEO and how it all ties back in to social media channels.
That said, the core of any plan will be centered around a commitment by your team to creating content of value on a regular basis. You echo the sentiment of many of our clients that they struggle with motivating staff to “generate consistent value added content”. It will take an internal shift of attitude to make this project successful. We recommend clients use techniques that re-purpose content that is already being generated vs. making more work for people. These techniques may manifest themselves as subtle changes to your workflow that would be edited to include short intermediary steps where your communications professional (likely yourself) can acquire content of value and distribute to various social media channels. This same professional would be responsible for marshaling requests and/or opportunities for participation from your channel and engage/educate staff in how to participate. As the program grows the end goal would be to connect your engineers and the channels but in the interim your role would be to bridge this gap. Like all good programs we run, we would also put in tracking metrics to measure the investment.
Anyway, as you can likely tell, I am very passionate about this but unfortunately didn’t take the opportunity to show this to JMP on our first go around as we were solely focused on the website.
If you are up for a good brainstorming session, I’d welcome the 2nd chance to meet in person.
Good luck in your search – once again, great idea!
Cheers –
Andrew McClenaghan
andrew@echidna.ca