Tag Archives: best practice

What can we learn from the Shippam’s paste Twitter affair?

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Let’s start at the beginning… A few weeks back a Twitter feed appeared, purporting to belong to Shippam’s Pastes, and manned by ‘Ben’, an ‘executive social media intern’. Being new to the world of social media, he was quite honest about his intentions and shortcomings:

The feed read like a social media engagement for beginners’ rulebook, sometimes perhaps a little too literally:

The Tweets led many to question who was behind the account. Was it a hoax? A genuine attempt at ‘engagement’ from a naive intern? Or a stroke of marketing genius from a largely forgotten brand (à la Old Spice…)? As the Guardian revealed over the weekend, it was indeed a hoax. The man behind the account explained, “faking a spectacularly inept attempt to ‘do Twitter’ just seemed funny – as did picking a real, but nearly forgotten, brand to do it. A large part of it was also simply wanting to see what happened.”

Funny is certainly how the feed was perceived, picking up over 9,000 followers before it was closed down. We learnt of Ben’s nights out in Wetherspoons, and his failures in seducing the local chip shop girl, as well as admirable attempts to help us consumers engage with fish paste, of course:

Having seen so many corporate failures on Twitter, as the author remarked, “A company attempting to get involved with an internet ‘thing’ like Twitter and cocking it up entirely is also completely believable.”

The feed played on the idea of ‘engagement’ being seen as the holy grail of ‘doing’ social media and ensuring the whole thing is ‘fun’. In reality though, the feed had very little engagement, being largely a broadcast of disparate thoughts and product references. It broke all the best practice social media ‘rules’, and yet was a great success.

So what can we learn from this? Largely a reminder of the old mantra that content and creativity are key, and even more so in social media, where everyone’s fighting for our attention. Ironically, given the account was fake, original ideas such as this is what brands should be doing. Content which is genuinely engaging and disruptive will attract our attention and make us click ‘follow’ (as the success of the Waterstones Piccadilly feed testifies, as well as our old friend, the insurance quote comparing meerkat).

We must not of course forget that this account was not authorised by the brand, Shippam’s. I would, however, be very interested to see their web analytics for the past few weeks, and also to see if there’s been any rise in sales. If I ever feel like a ‘batenberg sandwich of the sea’, I certainly know where I’ll be heading.

Mama Glide’s Email Guide

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Hello and welcome to my short introduction to the confusing world of email delivery and how Glide hopes to make this simple for you.

If you’re reading this article, the chances are that you are either lost or you’re interested in the fact that we are now using a new partner called Jango SMTP to help us deliver the emails you send through Glide. If you’re lost and really not interested in this article, why not take 5 minutes out of your busy day to have a laugh at http://failblog.org/

Why the move to Jango SMTP?

We send emails on your behalf to journalists, stakeholders and consumers. We strive to make sure that your communications arrive in their inboxes looking good. Whilst we can’t make them open the email, we can do our best to make sure the emails actually get to them.

‘Surely that’s easy!’ I hear you cry.

Well…

The Email Obstacle Course

80% of all email communication is Spam. Some of it is silly, some of it’s annoying and some of it’s downright eat-the-heart-out-of-your-network malicious.

Organisations have rightly spent a great deal of money in preventing this spam from attacking (or just annoying) their users by putting in place obstacles and checks which each email has to get past in order to be delivered (otherwise known as Gateways or Firewalls).

Your little email is swimming in this sea of spam and is trying to get past these same systems. So what do these systems check for?

Do you have good hygiene?

Email hygiene works like personal hygiene: if you stink, no firewall will touch you.

If you send the same message to 20 people in an organisation at the same time, but 10 of the email addresses you use are invalid (misspelt, don’t exist at the company anymore, abducted by aliens etc) then the firewall could think that you’re a spammer who’s trying all sorts of email combinations at random. It is a bit like when you try and gatecrash a party by saying you know ‘Louise’. This kind of behaviour makes some Firewalls so mad that they will delete all of your emails – even to those contacts whose email addresses you got right.

It is therefore VITAL that you keep your lists clean. To find out more about how you can do this within Glide, contact support@glidetechnologies.com or tweet me @mamaglide

Reputation of the sender

There are two parts to this. The actual bit of kit sending your email to your journalist needs to be of impeccable character. In Glide’s case this is an organisation called Jango SMTP who work 24/7 to make sure they are liked by these Firewalls and Gateways. They’re included on ‘whitelists’ which means they are seen as reputable organisations that aren’t after your credit card details.

The second part of this is the sender of the email. If you send something to Mary at the Times, and she doesn’t know why you’ve sent her a communication about extreme cycling, she can mark you as Spam. Depending upon the systems that the organisation uses, this can be used to block ALL of your emails to the Times. This is very, very bad news indeed. Especially since some firewall systems share information with each other…

Are your emails on their best behaviour?

The email that gets sent upon this obstacle course needs to be in the best of health. It needs (and if you use Glide your emails will have all of these):

• A plain text alternative (called a multi-part email, this allows systems that block HTML to receive your communication)
• A one-click unsubscribe process for people who simply aren’t interested
• Decent coding with no funny business going on behind the scenes.
• To tell people who you are and why you’re contacting them. In the footer of each email communication we ask our clients to provide full postal address, email and telephone number together with a disclaimer about why you are contacting them. Ignore this at your peril
• Personalisation. At Glide you can easily insert a personalised message to the person you are sending your communication to. This reinforces the idea that this is a one-to-one bit of communication and not a spammy message to all and sundry about surgical enhancements.

Are you who you say you are?

If you send an email from Samantha@fredblogs.com to the Times, the Times Firewall (as part of their many and varied checks) may have a look at the actual bit of kit that sent the email and see if that bit of kit is registered with Fredblogs.com or has the authority to send on behalf of fredblogs.com. If the bit of kit that sends this email has nothing to do with fredblogs.com then the firewall thinks that your communication is just like one of those emails from eBay asking for your account details which are in fact sent from someone’s basement. It’s what we call “phishing” and it’s anything but relaxing.

Using Jango, Glide allows users to sidestep this issue. Jango stamps an invisible sender address in the email header which can only be seen by the firewall system. This provides a level of authentication which firewalls like, along with some others (DKIM, SPF, Sender ID and Domain Keys) which they also like. If you really want to know about these, have a read of this helpful article: http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/emailauthentication.htm

Spammy Content

Once past the firewall, the content of your emails may still be analyzed for spammy content. This is where you should really check out if your press release writing styles are up to date or still in the dark ages.

• TITLES THAT SHOUT ARE A BIG TURN OFF for, well, everyone. Mashable.com list this as one of their pet peeves . This is what they say about it in a great article on their site: “USING ALL CAPS – It baffles me that people write subject lines in ALL CAPS. For one, this means that less of your subject line shows up in the preview screen in Gmail, meaning you have fewer words to convince us that your story is worth covering. Second – and this is like mid 90s Internet etiquette – it’s considered SHOUTING. Finally, it also seems that ALL CAPS is at least one red flag for spam filters, so if you use them, your message might not even get through to us at all.” – http://mashable.com/2008/04/18/bad-pr-pitches/

• Emails that are one big image can get seriously marked down. At Glide all emails make sense whether the recipient of the email has images turned on or off but here’s an interesting article on how a design got someone blacklisted: http://blog.mailchimp.com/how-your-email-design-can-get-you-blacklisted/

• And the cardinal rule: Do not send unsolicited emails. Use Glide to send introductions to your stakeholders and invite them to tell you how they’d like to be contacted.

If you’d like help seeing if your emails are likely to fall foul of spam filters, give us a call and we’d be happy to run some checks for you. Email support@glidetechnologies.com or tweet me @mamaglide

Finally it is worth noting that Firewalls are different. There is no magic bullet that will ensure your email is delivered 100% of the time. We have a part to play and you have a part to play in this, but the good news is that lots of it is down to common sense and an understanding of who your audience is and what they want to be contacted about. Sound familiar?

Best Practice Online Newsroom – Part 2: Measuring the success

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As outlined in part 1, online newsrooms are an essential tool in helping you to engage better with your key audiences, increase your exposure, and protect your brand’s reputation.

As Sam Phillips explained in his post, it is now essential for corporate communication teams to be able to demonstrate their value. Setting up and measuring key performance indicators (KPI’s) has become fundamental to evaluating the performance of an online newsroom and proving its success and presenting its value at director level.

1. Focus on what matters

First of all, it is important to start with your objectives in mind when establishing your KPI’s. You may be looking to increase the number of repeat visits or sign-ups to your corporate communications via the newsroom.

2. Use analytics to monitor your traffic

Treat your newsroom like a corporate website and implement an analytics solution to allow you to analyse traffic and user behaviour.  This is a great way of providing you with insight so that you can understand how people get to your site and what content they like. Some basic KPI’s are listed below:

• Number of visits
• Number of unique visits
• Average time spent
• Sources of traffic i.e. search engines, blog, social media

Google Analytics is a good free solution that can be used.

3. Evaluate your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Understanding how your newsroom is performing in the major search engines allows you to ensure your optimisation work is paying off.  If you’re not showing within the top 20 results, the chances are you could be missing out on lots of relevant traffic.

Some basic SEO KPI’s:

1. Number of pages indexed – this allows you to understand how easy it has been for the search engines to read and index your content
2. Number of external links – this allows you to assess how popular your content has been as people are linking to it. It’s also a really important factor when it comes to gaining a high ranking in Google
3. The range of keywords driving traffic to your site – if you’re only being found for brand related terms then you could be missing out on a ton of traffic for keywords which relate to your products or services

If you’re providing multimedia content on your newsroom you should also look at the ranking of your assets on the search engines.

Use “link:www.yourdomain.com” within Google or Yahoo to assess link popularity, or site: www.yourdomain.com to analyse the number of pages indexed.  Tip: Yahoo is a bit more transparent when it comes to disclosing the actual volumes. 

4. Measure through Social Media

If you have prominent links/feeds from your social media channels within your newsroom, on a basic level you should be monitoring the number of people who ‘like’ you on Facebook and the number of followers you have on Twitter.

Another simple way to use social media is to incorporate Facebook “Like” and Twitter “Re-Tweet” buttons. They automatically count the number of interactions and will allow you to easily identify your most popular stories.

5. Access full engagement reports

Taking it a step further, an online newsroom combined with a communication management platform will provide you with much richer reporting. This powerful combination will track engagements, such as:

- Number of visits per release
- Number of interactions with each of your assets (e.g. watched video, downloaded a document)
- Number of media requests

In effect, it will allow you to understand the success of each of your releases and assets.

Adding login access to your newsroom will make you aware of each individual visitor, allowing you to track the success of your communications based on your key contacts.

6. Evaluate the impact in the media

Good monitoring and evaluation tools allow you to analyse your offline and online coverage and link it to each of your releases. As stated in the Barcelona Principles, “measuring the effect on outcomes is preferred to measuring outputs.”

Those tools can provide you with an in depth breakdown of those effects:

• Your coverage by release
• The tonality of your coverage per release (positive, neutral or negative)
• Evaluation of the coverage that is linked to your newsroom
• Share of voice amongst your competitors

Such a solution will let you understand the success of each of your stories and the impact that your newsroom has on your coverage.

These best practices should allow you to evaluate what has been popular and why so you can refine your future communications. You will also be able to demonstrate the newsroom’s overall success and Return on Investment.