SCOUT Corporate Blogging Services

SCOUT Corporate Blogging Services' Blog

The SCOUT Corporate Blog is a resource for company executives looking to understand how blogs and other forms of social media can support business goals including lead generation, thought leadership and top search engine rankings.

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PRSA to hold Digital Impact Summit in New York

It’s happening. The mainstream PR profession is really getting serious about how to achieve client goals by combining PR with social media, AND search engine optimization best practices. The latest proof of this is The Digital Impact Conference hosted by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), Cision and Medialink. I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at this important two day conference designed to help PR and Marketing professionals understand how to align their business strategies with emerging technologies.

 My session is titled “How a Little SEO Can Go a Long Way or the Wrong Way”. If the clever title isn’t enough for you to start reserving your tickets and packing your bags, here’s a quick teaser about my session.

Title: How a little SEO Can Go a Long Way or the Wrong way

Session Summary: For some companies, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be the difference between success and failure. In this session you will learn how an established computer company’s lack of SEO savvy reduced the impact of an otherwise good marketing and PR effort. You will also learn how SEO and strategic blogging catapulted a little Internet startup to success, achieving top search engine rankings along with blog buzz and national media coverage. Come see why PR professionals are uniquely suited to tap into some of that Search Engine Marketing budget, and learn how to better your business by avoiding the top ten things companies do to kill their natural search engine rankings.

This session is on Monday June 9 (Day One) and it will follow Lee Odden’s general session about SEO where he will discuss strategic approaches to getting in the news and how SEO affects social media. The keynote speakers are Josh Bernoff, principal analyst at Forrester Research and David Carr, columnist, Monday Business section, New York Times. The conference is packed with great sessions and speakers so check out prsa.org info page for the latest info and how to reserve your spot.

Last but not least, I want to sincerely thank Bryan Person, one of the most selfless bloggers on the internet for nudging the folks at PRSA to offer me this slot. Thanks Bryan! See you all in the big city.

Tags: conference, digital impact, new york, ny, PRSA, public relations society of America, search engine optimization, seo, social media, speaking
Filed under: PR Tips

Scout Blogging and SEO Client Destined for Mega-Millions According to Donny Deutch

We have reason to celebrate here at Scout this month. One of our clients, Internet startup denim retailer TrueJeans, is getting some mass media recognition for its concept along with its search engine marketing results. Just over a year ago, the folks at TrueJeans hired us to help promote their website and brand with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing Pay-Per Click Campaigns (PPC), and blogging strategy. Over the past year we've been able to achieve some great results by following Backbone's philosophy that the three keys to search engine marketing success are indexability, relevancy and links. For TrueJeans, we optimized their existing website's content and introduced a blog to initiate continually updated, relevant content, and to encourage community awareness, discussion and links from other sites.
 
What prompted this entry in the first place is that TrueJeans has made an appearance on CNBC's popular financial segment "The Big Idea" with Donny Deutsch! Their 'Minute to Millions' interview can be seen below in the video segment included in this post.

For anyone unfamiliar with the show, what happens is this: Donny Deutsch brings in a representative or representatives of a budding business venture. He then pairs them up with a couple of industry experts and, after interviewing the business hopefuls, gives the experts one minute to elaborate on why they think the business will or will not succeed. He asks them such questions as "What do you see as the obstacles for this business?" "Is there an edge here?" "Is this really a 'Big Idea'?" The feedback is important for the guests in moving forward with their business plans, and of course, they get exposure! Happily for TrueJeans, the results were all positive. The experts had some great feedback, and in the end, they got the thumbs up from Donny confirming that TrueJeans' service is definitely a Big Idea.

Donny points out during their mini-interview that they had earned a top-ranking position on Google for the extremely competitive term "jeans", which, in this technological age of fierce online competition, is a major point in their favor. TrueJeans was new to the blogging and SEO scene in January 2007 when we first initiated our services, but by the Summer, we had helped them to reach the top five, then top three, and eventually number one position on organic search rankings in Google for "jeans". This has really helped to bring in a plethora of new business by helping denim shoppers to find their site quickly and easily when searching. 

As one of our original blogging clients, TrueJeans has had a strong vision from the get-go. We couldn't be happier for them throughout their continued success. This is yet another feather in their cap to add to the already growing list of accomplishments including networking with influential bloggers, helping more and more readers find their perfect fit, partnering with the National Eating Disorders Association to combat unhealthy body image, and even traveling to Hollywood to help celebrities find their perfect pair of jeans for TV's Access Hollywood! 

We don't want to take all the credit for their success, of course, but we like to think that the blog has really had a profound impact on the wonderful opportunities that have come their way this past year. Keep up the good work, guys! 

Tags: blogging, corporate blogging success story, donny deutsch, scout blogging services, search engien marketing, seo, true jeans, true jeans donny deutsch, truejeans
Filed under: Blogging Strategy, Blogs Developed By Scout

Scout Launches New Corporate blog for Carlisle Wide Plank Floors

I'm pleased to announce the launch of our latest corporate blog, Surface for our client, Carlisle Wide Plank Floors. Carlise is a hardwood flooring company that produces and sells very high quality hardwood floors made from old growth trees and recycled wood.

If you're looking for a great example of a company that's right for blogging, this is it. I mean everyone we've meet at the company from the President down to the receptionist is truly passionate about working at Carlisle, the customers they work with, and especially about the wood. If you don't believe me just watch this video of company President, Don Carlisle talking about the wood.

They have been an amazing client so far providing us with great feedback every step of the way and lots of access to their top sales and customer support people. We used this access to understand the needs and interests of their clients. After speaking with these folks we realized it also makes sense to make them the bloggers because they are the people that the clients most want to speak with.

Our established online marketing goals for the project center around brand awareness and search engine marketing. Together we have developed a strategy to create a discussion with their audience that that goes beyond product centric terms like hardwood flooring wood grains & styles to also delve into more customer centric topics like home decor styles, green living and forestry.

Now that we are past the blog community research design and development phase, the Scout team and I are looking forward to providing Carlisle with daily Scout Reports that help their bloggers key in on topics and keywords that are relevant to our overall marketing strategy. Please check out the blog and let us know what you think.

Tags: blog design, blogging strategy, carlisle wide plank floors, corporate blog, good example, hardwood flooring, new blog
Filed under: Blogs Developed By Scout

Reflections on our Second Year as a Strategic Blogging Service

The holidays are upon us, and things have been picking up here in the Scout office this season! With some new clients getting ready to launch their blogs, and another client's blog underway, we've hardly had time to dedicate to this blog! But that just means that we've been busy, and that's certainly a good thing. Reflecting back on this year, we're proud to have helped many clients develop blogging and social media strategies.

Appistry. This company helped us to really develop a broad understanding of what's happening out there in the most deep-rooted industry of blogging - technology. Since technology experts were the first ones taking advantage of the Internet, it only makes sense that they were also the first ones to blog. While social media and blogging has certainly evolved over the years, we found that there's a very rich network of blogs and other social media outlets dedicated to the sharing of technological knowledge, from Java programming tips and tricks, to the more business-oriented strategies for upper level IT managers and CIOs. Appistry develops a product that they have entitled "application fabrics", which offer clients with ways to ensure their data is safe, secure, and accessible. We found ourselves plunged into forums and blogs stretching from Microsoft to Apple, Sun Microsystems to freelance coding enthusiasts. We're grateful to this client for helping to expand our realm of knowledge not only of these technological concepts, but of the audience and participators in technology-driven social media.

TrueJeans. TrueJeans has provided us with a glimpse into another very active social media community - fashion. As a new company breaking into business by offering an online tool to help men and women find the 'perfect fitting jeans', TrueJeans has an edge to offer in an extremely competitive, cutthroat industry. Through our research for TrueJeans, we've been exposed to the many different faces of fashion in blogging and social media. We've found that forums are not only constantly populated with bargain hunters and upscale fashionistas, but with men looking for a great fit as well! Blogs are brimming with celebrity style reports and online coupons. There are fashion shows and behind the scenes fashion interviews on YouTube. For TrueJeans, launching their blog has really been a window to their customers. It's helped them to stay on top of the latest trends as well as make their voice heard about social issues like Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty, and TrueJeans' recent partnership with the National Eating Disorder Association to help women be aware of these diseases and learn to embrace their bodies-both efforts of which we at Scout are proud to be a part of.

Spherion. As one of the top employers in America, and North America's 6^th largest staffing firm, Spherion is no stranger to connecting to people and finding out what their strengths are. We were delighted to be able to provide a way to further reach out to their audience - prospective job applicants, companies looking to hire, retirees, recent college grads, really anybody looking for, leaving, or currently at a job. Through our research for and communication with Spherion, we discovered that the development of their blog, The Big Time, was just what people were looking for. More and more people are turning to the Web for advice and knowledge, just as more and more people are turning to the Web for job postings and business communication. By exploring these areas of the blogosphere and forums, we were able to provide Spherion with the advice needed to establish an authoritative career blog.

In addition to these 'big three', we've also helped a medical device company monitor medical forums, and a market research firm develop a strong strategy should they decide to venture into corporate blogging someday. We have to keep them anonymous for now, but that doesn't mean that we haven't valued our partnerships with them and wish them the very best.

Carlisle Wide Plank Floors. As for up and coming projects, we're looking forward to launching a blog next month called Surface for a New Hampshire-based hardwood flooring company called Carlisle Wide Plank Floors. The blog will have multiple authors and we've already met all of them and can say firsthand that they're a great group of people! We'll leave it at that for now, but there'll be more news ahead once we're up and running, so be sure to check back later in January.

HomeAire. We've also just launched our first client blog utilizing our new content services, air quality company HomeAire's Clearing the Air blog, and you can read all about it in our previous entry.

For now, we're excited to ring in the new year with some new endeavors, and continue help our current clients stay on the cutting edge of social media in their industries. As we develop more and more understanding of different niches and industries, we're excited to see how we might be able to help similar companies in the future!

Tags: appistry, appistry blog, blogosphere, carlisle wide plank floors, corporate blogging, fashion blog, home aire, home aire blog, homeaire, homeaire blog, new scout clients, scout clients, scout corporate blogging services, scout services, spherion, spherion blog, spherion the big time, technology blog, true jeans, truejeans, two years of scout
Filed under: Blogs Developed By Scout, Social Media

Announcing a New Blog for Living Greener and Cleaner

One of our newest clients, HomeAire.com, just officially launched their corporate blog, "Clearing the Air" last week. HomeAire is a subsidiary of Spruce Environmental Technologies, a company of super nice folks up in Ward Hill, MA who are passionate about the air we breathe. They offer products ranging from indoor air purifiers to central vacuums, dryer booster fans, and radon testing kits. After getting to know them and familiarizing ourselves with their products and services, I think we're all feeling the need to check our air and get tested for radon. Who knew it was so prevalent in homes today?

The reason I'm talking about this client in particular is because HomeAire marks a new turn for us in the Scout services road. We've been trying to figure out new ways to better serve our clients, and one thing that has always stuck out has been the fact that often times, clients want a corporate blog, and they understand the benefits and agree with the concept, but they either don't have the time, or don't want to be writing it themselves. Upper level executives are particularly busy, so having the pressure of their jobs heightened by the pending topics sent to them by the Scout team can cause them to feel overwhelmed.

Taking these thoughts into consideration, we've expanded our services to include content development. Now, companies have the option of either: a.) going the more traditional route of having our blogging team send over topic ideas with strategic advice, coaching the company's bloggers on what to write about and how to optimize for search results, or b.) the new approach of directly writing the content for the blog, optimized and approved by the company. This still allows executives and employees the option of updating the blog if they so choose, but the pressure of frequently writing enriched content is eliminated.

Now, you may be thinking, "but I thought you were against ghost blogging!" There's a fine line there, between what constitutes ghostwriting and what doesn't. By submitting posts under the username of "The HomeAire blogging team", we're acknowledging that we are working as their blogging team, without appending another individual's name to our content. Understandably, this can be a touchy subject with many, but we like the happy compromise and the opportunities that this allows. If someone comments on the blog, a knowledgeable representative from HomeAire can directly respond without causing confusion of having different names.

We're really excited about this new venture and hopefully other clients will see the value in our content writing services in the future. Feel free to head over to HomeAire's blog to see some of our work, and happy holidays!

Tags: blogging strategy, content development, corporate blogging, ghost writing, ghostwriting, home aire, home aire blog, homeaire, homeaire blog, new blog, new scout services, scout services, scout services blog
Filed under: Blogs Developed By Scout, Social Media

How Blogging Can Get You Press Coverage

For anyone wondering how blogging can help your company's brand awareness and thought leadership profile via press coverage, here are a few real life examples of how blogging has helped generate press coverage for my business.

In August I posted some advice on the best way for a company to handle a bad Consumer Generated Media thread.  Last week I was contacted by Vawn Himmelsbach, a writer from ITBusiness.ca, an electronic news outlet owned by IT World Canada. The reporter, told me that she found my blog post using Google's regular search (not blog search). Last week Vawn published her story called "How do you stop a disgruntled employee blogger?" and if you read the piece you will see that I was quoted heavily throughout the story. 

Here's another example. In March 2007 I asked "Should corporate blogs use ghostwriters?". That lead to a call from a reporter Tony Kontze, a reporter for Investors Business Daily and this story called "Writing Blogs Can Be Hard, So Get ‘Help’". Unfortunately, you can't read this piece without setting up a trial subscription but if you do you will also see that the reporter cited me repeatedly and gave me the last word.

How did I do it? Very simple. In both cases I took questions that I was hearing over and over again from my target audience and tried to offer my own insight and perspective on the matter. I laid it out there and cited a few related posts that helped make my point. Days, months or years later a journalist does a search in Google, finds my post and says here's a person that will give me a good quote or two. I made their job very easy. How is this different from traditional PR and media relations? I'm not a PR expert but I think reporters like to dig things up on their own but they're not out there pounding the pavement, their using the instant and relevant gratification of your typical Google search or the more timely search power of blog search engines like Technorati.

Simple things you can do. Talk to your customers, and monitor the blogs. At conferences listen to the questions that people are asking the 'expert panel'. Talk to your sales people and people on the front lines with your customer. Figure out what the reporters in your industry are going to be looking for in the next 2 - 10 months, pounce on the issues surrounding the big hairy questions and make sure you post it on a blog that does a decent job at getting indexed by Google.

Now, it may seem like I'm taking this opportunity to toot my own horn, and I am, but here's my point. I'm a big advocate of blogging but I don't blog every day. In fact my average blog post is about one per month. However, my blog posts deliver relevant search traffic to my site, get me invited to speak at conferences, inlinks, and del.icio.us social media bookmarks and quoted in major and minor publications. Here are two clear cases of how blogging can help put your business (in this case a small company) in front of journalists at the critical moment when they are conducting their research and looking for relevant voice.

Tags: blogging strategy, IT World Canada, media relations tactics, Online PR, press coverage, reporters, Vawn Himmelsbach
Filed under: Blogging ROI, Blogging Strategy, Blogging Tips, New Communications, Viral Marketing