Just posted a new case study on Base Camp Comm’s launch of Backcountry.com’s newest ODAT site, Chainlove.com. It’s a look at how an interactive PR approach that includes traditional media relations, social networks and word-of-mouth strategies can take a new site from zero to, well, lots of customers in just under a month.
Traffic numbers have been redacted and messed with to protect secret stuff. All comments and questions encouraged.
In our last newsletter, we wrote a little ditty on how a social media strategy should be a logical element of your brand marketing strategy. Logical meaning that first you have to understand who uses which social media channels, how they use it and how frequently.
Now Forrester Research takes a little of the guess work out of the social media strategy with their free Social Technology Profile Tool. It displays social computing habits based on age, gender and country.
“Companies often approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a podcast there — to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for.”
There aren’t huge surprises (it shows younger demographics much more active in social media than older demographics), but the value is in how Forrester breaks users habits into six categories of participation. These six categories are the key to the social media aspect of your brand marketing, or the social media optimization of your current marketing properties.
If you want the full download, I recommend Groundswell. It’s a good social media overview with strategic punch lists of action items so you’ll at least feel like you know what you’re doing.
What happens when an award-winning editor of a leading outdoor consumer magazine plays a central role in a false alarm rescue alert from a friend climbing Denali and then writes a riveting account of the experience on the magazine’s blog?
Backpacker Magazine’s Rocky Mountain field editor, Steve Howe, was on a little product testing trip on Denali when the following message was sent from his SPOT Satellite Messenger to Steve’s wife and to Steve’s friend and Backpacker Mag editor, Jon Dorn: “Steve Howe is injured or immobilized & cannot proceed, but has no immediate life-threatening condition. Evac please.”
Thing is, Howe wasn’t actually in need of evacuation. Due to some unfortunate, yet-to-be-determined series of events, the SPOT unit was inadvertently activated and sent the distress call that ultimately initiated preliminary search and rescue activities.
Read Dorn’s blow-by-blow account here.
It’s a great story, so great that other blogs and publications are linking to it. Lots of them. Which, according to how SPOT handles it, could be either a great opportunity for them or a big problem.
- Trebon Pedals To First At Crested Butte XC Race, While Moseley And Wicks Face World’s Best In Italy -
KONAWORLD (June 23, 2008) - Coming off two first-place finishes at the Oregon State Championships and Teva Mountain Games in the last three weeks, Kona Factory Team rider Ryan Trebon added another crown to his bag of medals after taking the cross-country title at the fourth Mountain States Cup event in Crested Butte, Colo
rado last weekend. While Trebon was cruising along in Colorado, fellow Factory Team members Tracy Moseley and Barry Wicks faced stiff competition at the UCI Mountain Bike and Trials World Cup races in Val Di Sole, Italy.
Racing in the pro men’s division in the eighth annual Wildflower Rush Shimano XTR XC race at the Crested Butte Mountain Resort, Trebon took the 28-rider field by storm, winning the race with a time of 2 hours, 15 minutes - nearly seven minutes ahead of the second-place rider. Pedaling on dry, buffed-out singletrack, the race featured three, 10-mile laps which covered a total of 5,400-vertical-feet of climbing. This was Trebon’s first Mountain States Cup race of the season.
Riding against some of the best cross-country and downhill riders in the world, Moseley and Wicks showed their racing dedication and desire at the World Cup races in Italy, but just came up short. With Italy hosting the World Cup event for the third time ever, Moseley, who was coming off a World Cup DH victory in Fort William, Great Britian two weeks ago, finished sixth last weekend after tackling a fast, technical course. After starting in the back of the pack in the XC race, Wicks slowly climbed into 30th place but was sidelined after suffering a costly flat tire which shattered his hopes of a better finish. Wicks took 56th place overall.
- XXX -
After ThePiton’s calling out of a particularly dizzying press release, we had a couple of emails asking us if we do new client announcements: Is it news? To whom? Why? and So What?
The tricky dynamic of this “news” is that it should actually be two press releases: One from the new client’s perspective announcing a major investment in their marketing activities and one from the PR firm’s perspective announcing a sweet new business win.
However due to the relatively limited media coverage of our industries, the new client’s target audience gets their news and information from the same places that the target audience for the PR firm’s release. Two releases would be overkill. Sometimes, one release that tries to do too much is just as bad.
Is there a right way to do this? Who knows…each firm has their own style and approach, different clients have different demands, but…
We feel that you can address the needs of both new client and PR firm by writing a sweet release from the new client’s perspective and make it valuable and newsworthy by honestly answering the question, “Why did they hire us? No, really.” The answer to that is the ‘So What’ for the release.
Let’s look at it step-by-step:
Is it news?
New Client: Yes.
PR Firm: Yes
To Whom?
Client: Dealers, prospective dealers, employees, vendors, sponsored athletes/events, distributors, the competition.
PR Firm: Current clients, prospective clients, The Media, employees, vendors, swag hunting brethren.
Why?
Client: Has made a major investment in it’s marketing to become more competitive through increased brand name awareness and differentiation among target audiences, increased demand for products, drive sell through at the retail level, strengthen brand loyalty, win awards, get chicks and generally sell more stuff.
PR Firm: We’re growing, we know our stuff, Suck it Other PR Firms
So What?
Client: ?
PR Firm: Suck It Other PR Firms (We’re all friends and we enjoy competing…)
This release is the first shot at establishing brand position under the new relationship. So, it’s important. Again, each firm and client has their own approach and needs, so whatever works…but first think about how it would feel if your release wound up on ThePiton for the wrong reasons…and then begin to write it.
Also, don’t franken-quote unless it is adding some color, something interesting other than how pleased you are…
Base Camp’s on again/off again affair with Twitter is on again except when it (Twitter) is off again.
Twitter’s popularity as a communications channel is soaring, so much so that Twitter’s servers can’t handle the traffic. That there hasn’t been a mass exodus of Twitter users to competing micro-blogging platforms due to Twitter’s frequent service interruptions demonstrates Twitter’s popularity and perceived potential.
So why Twitter?
People are tired of crafting long form, deep thought, ego and credibility building blog posts and have discovered that they can, usually, communicate the essence of their thoughts in the required 140 characters of less. Twitter forces you to be succinct and there is Joy therein.
Twitter is also more immediate. Blogs, RSS feeds, aggregators, etc… have made us impatient. We no longer want to know what is going on with the people and companies we respect, we want to know what is going on NOW. Twitter/Tweets provide the answers.
As well, people/companies we respect are using Twitter in cool, valuable ways: VeloNews sent/Twittered(?) race updates from the Giro and the Tour of Pennsylvania; The Piton Twittered updates from OIA/Leisure Trend’s market research conference call; SteepandCheap fans are Twittering the current deal in real time, to name a few.
Continuing to experiment in our test kitchen, Base Camp Comm has been sending press release headlines with links back to the full release. So far, the system works.
Did I mention that the linking to/from also helps build search results rankings.
Finally, Twitter is so simple that there is no shortage of professional and amateur programs trying to make it more complicated by creating all sorts of applications that make Twitter available in any format, flavor, system, platform you need. Some are even helpful and valuable.
So, if you are into it, follow Base Camp Comm on Twitter, and we’ll see where this goes.
It only looks that way…
New York Mag’s regular Party Lines photo collage feature documenting the Big Apple’s most swank and fabulous society and media affairs visited the 2008 National Magazine Awards on May 1st and caught Backpacker’s JD and Runners World’s David Willey after they received their, um, trophies(?). JD for General Excellence under 500,000 and Mr. Wiley for General Excellence Online
