Aerospace eBusiness

How to effectively combine website, blog, and Twitter? August 18, 2009

Several people have recently asked me how to combine multiple internet communication channels most effectively. Most companies have an official website but find it difficult to integrate blogs and micro-blogs (Twitter) effectively with it. Although “old” websites should be updated as I suggested in a previous blog, I will assume here that we start from a “classic” and established internet presence.

The way I see it, the three channels represent an information pyramid with Twitter at the top, blogs in the middle and websites at the bottom. Here is how each element fits:

• Website: This is your reference library. This is the “big bucket” of information about your business. It contains practical information (contact, eServices login, support, events) which will be the most accessed. It also contains reference information (solutions description, customer testimonials, press releases, documentation, white papers) that can be voluminous. Even though it will hopefully have a basic navigation and search feature, the website will still be too massive and intertwined to be useable by your curious prospects. For example, think about how many clicks it would take from www.Raytheon.com to find a specific niche product or service (Answer: 5 to get the Interdaptor® product sheet if you even know that is what you need). In these days of information overload, chances that someone will land on your website and start sifting to the many reference pages is very slim. Prospects will need a reason to get there and have a pre-existing interest. That is why well tagged reference pages will get visitors from Google and Bing search engines. Someone typed a query and then jumped into the middle of your website. But competing for attention based on Search Engine Optimization is more an art than a science so blogs are another way to bring people in.
• Blogs: These brief “discussions” are no more than one or two pages (a dozen paragraphs) and provide highlight of ideas or news events that are easy and fast to consume. To be successful, blogs should be educational and thought provoking rather than commercial. They should definitely contain links to reference information on your website, so if someone is interested they can “dig deeper” to, for example, a white paper or a customer testimonial. Entries should discuss all relevant subjects of interest in hope of positioning the company in the role of a trusted source of information and expertise. This means the blog should also discuss news that may not translate directly into a product sale, but rather in reader education. There should be plenty of external references and links to other sites to encourage “exploration”.
  To increase exposure, blogs should be available as an RSS feed so they can be integrated into other sites from news organizations and industry associations. Links to blog entries should also be posted on other forums such as LinkedIn discussion groups, FaceBook pages, or community sites such as AeroLeaders2. Surprisingly, blogs can have a fairly long shelf live, especially when they are linked back from future entries. Keeping old blog posts up to date is a good practice. Most importantly, they should be created to solicit feedback and “engagement” with prospects. Comments and poll answers from potential prospects are excellent audience barometers.
• Twitter: Think of this as the “Headlines News” channel to your company and blog. Unlike blogs and websites, Twitter entries will only have a very brief life. People that follow you or a particular subject (like #aerospace), will rarely read an entry that is more than 36 to 48 hours old. This should be used as an “alert” system for your community that there is something they should pay attention to. It could be a new relevant blog post (from you or someone else), a new document on your website, or some related breaking news. Because of this, quality is much more important than quality. Unless you are at an important event where many things are happening (e.g. ParisAirShow), companies do not need to post every day. I would say that a minimum of once a week is a good measure. As with the blogs, don’t just post news about your company. Posting other relevant information such as partner or customer news is as important. Re-Tweeting other posts can also be an effective way to stay “interesting”. The bottom line is to stay in the forefront of your prospect’s mind with little gems of interest without become boring, irrelevant or, worst, annoying!

How do you combine these three elements? What has worked well for you? What has not worked? Please leave your comments and suggestions here for further discussion.