Strategically Communicating

Saw this post and it made me think about how we need to take a targeted approach to social media. Too many people and companies jump into the fray without a solid understanding of their audience or what they want to accomplish. Don’t waste time on a segment that doesn’t get you any results and for heaven’s sakes don’t tweet or post endless content with no purpose in mind. Every tactic needs to have a goal and for any social media strategy to work, there needs to be in-depth understanding of how and why you’ll engage the people/outlets that you do.

http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-media-whos-who_b18546

As I sit down to write this, I am preparing myself for another round of enlightenment. I manage a website for work, but without a background in web design, much of what we learned last class was new to me. Donna and the good folks from Anvil gave us plenty to think about last week.

However, I can’t help but feel overwhelmed with the volume of knowledge availabe on SEO/SEM and the rate at which that information changes. Without staying glued to tech blogs and industry news, I feel like it is difficult to maintain a digital advantage for the smaller organizations that have less resources available.  With that said, I am going through the website I manage to implement as much as possible from our classes!

My aha moment from last Saturday was the fact that marketing has now become this 8-headed monster that can very quickly get out of control and create chaos for a company’s messaging strategies. This may not be a revelation to many of you but I am certainly fascinated by it. With social media, SEO, blogs, internal news-feeds, press releases, sales forces, traditional advertising, and the multitude of Internet advertising available to organizations, I can imagine that many business owners’ heads are spinning! If you get lucky and actually get your message out consistently among all channels, keeping up with the changing technology, your competitors, and monitoring your results can still become a huge challenge. I like what Hubspot is doing and wonder how effective it is, especially for small business owners who may be trying to manage a comprehensive marketing strategy on limited staff and resources. I’ve attached a link to Hubspot’s Youtube video if anyone is interested.

 As I entered my office building this morning, my eyes quickly focused on the flyer posted to the elevator wall that read, “KP launches hospital services website.” I was struck by surprise to see that our new external website had gone live overnight. I have worked as a member of a multidisciplinary communications team over the past year to develop this website and the launch was a huge milestone for our region.

When I finally reached my office on the 8^th floor, I quickly logged into my computer and BOOM the first thing appearing in my inbox was an email to all of our employees announcing the website launch. I clicked on the link to read more about the story and was redirected to a prominent space on our internal intranet website where a catchy heading forced me to read on.

The point of this story being, we did a stellar job at letting our employees know about the website launch. However, we did a poor job at informing the general public—our target audience. The same question has haunted my thoughts throughout the day—How is our audience going to find us?

I strongly believe that with every failure comes an opportunity—a chance to improve. And, I see an opportunity to apply SEO to our website. I’m excited to uncover the many opportunities for optimizing our website and driving user traffic through SEO. The Anvil Media presentation from last week’s class evoked a sense of “get ‘er done” vivacity within me. I’m thrilled to be learning more about SEO and all of its capabilities.