Communicating With Customers

Jamie O’DonnellSEO-PRAugust 6, 2006

“A panoply of offerings and options” for communicating with customers

SEO-PR has optimized web sites, press releases, blogs and RSS feeds for Accenture, Consumer Reports, Southwest Airlines, Verizon SuperPages.com, the Wharton School and other clients

Before SEO-PR, I was President and co-founder of IDM Partners, an online direct marketing agency that integrated telemarketing and direct mail with email and targeted online advertising

IDM’s clients included Microsoft’s Great Plains Division, IBM Global Services, Palm Computing, GE Capital IT Solutions, Sprint, UPS, EDiets and Planet Out

In 20th century, some invested in telephones, others in loudspeakers

“After taking power in 1917, the new Soviet rulers could have invested in telephone networks, as other nations were doing at the time, but chose instead to emphasize another emerging communication technology – loudspeakers.”

Source: Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media, 2004

Do customers think of RSS feeds as telephones or loudspeakers?

RSS technology allows you to identify the content that interests you most and have it delivered directly

But, Feedster has indexed 44,167,770 feeds

Average Bloglines user tracks more than 20 news feeds

The most we’ve ever heard of is 1,400 news feeds

Not everybody has the stamina for that amount of information

Sources: Consumer Reports, Feedster and Bloglines

We created six RSS feeds and optimized titles and descriptions

Source: http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/customer-service/rss-feeds/index.htm

They added feeds to their site and we submitted them to 80 directories

Sources: http://www.press-feed.com/ and RSS Submit

Key was creating “news I can’t find elsewhere,” not creating RSS feeds

Sources: Blogads, March 2005, and http://www.consumerreports.org/rssfeed/cars.xml

Daily blog citations and LinkRank jumped when RSS feeds launched

Sources: IceRocket Blogs Trend Tool, Nov. 12, 2005; PubSub SiteStats, Nov. 12, 2005

In 21st century, some organizations lecture, others hold conversations

“Journalism schools need to reflect the evolution from a lecture mode to a conversational mode. At a minimum, journalism schools should insist that students understand genuine interactivity, which is the basis for a conversation with the audience.”

Source: Dan Gillmor, We the Media, 2004

Do potential MBA students want to hear lectures or hold conversations

Source: http://mba.wharton.upenn.edu/mba/community/profiles/

Wharton’s MBA Admissions blog’s student2student discussion board

Source: http://mba.wharton.upenn.edu/mba/

Think about term users would type to find your post and actually use it

Source: http://s2s.wharton.upenn.edu/wh-wharton/messages/?msg=14727

Wharton MBA Admissions Blog ranks #2 for term mba admissions

Source: Google, Aug. 2, 2006

94% of students seeking full time employment report full time offers

In addition to RSS feeds and blogs, we also optimize press releases

Newsforce and Business Wire have announced: Keyword research tool Press release SEO tool Link building tool News release distribution News search engine

ranking report Internet traffic report

Communicating with prospects important, too