When you’re talking with your friends, the last thing you’d expect or even want, is for a stranger to come and interrupt you mid sentence by shouting about how great they are. If they did want to join in with your conversation, their best tactic would be hang round in similar places as you, become familiar with your interests and wait for the right moment to politely introduce themselves. Next they should ask a few questions about you and most importantly LISTEN so they can start to understand your likes and dislikes. Then you probably wouldn’t mind if they started offering useful related stories and information in the flow of the conversation. How about they then used all the information they had learnt and threw a party – where the food and music were exactly to your taste. You’d probably go. And you’d probably bring your like minded mates with you. And during the party you’d also probably be happy to listen to the host with an open mind about what they have to...

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The recently reported news that the Office of Fair Trading is looking to prosecute companies who pay bloggers for positive coverage of their products makes interesting news for all of us at Propellernet. Why would anyone offering quality content need to pay for coverage? Our approach has always been to develop content that offers genuine value to our target media, be that amateur bloggers, professional bloggers, or standard online media.  The fact that we use search personas and that we’re specialists in the travel and retail sectors means that we know the key media contacts well and we’re able to determine which sites are right for our clients’ target audience quickly and easily.   From there we use various inputs to determine what content will prove valuable both to our clients’ target audience and to the media that we’re targeting. The result of this approach is that we value good relations with all our key contacts from bloggers to journalists (regularly...

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Ok, so web content is nothing new; people have been creating new content (good and bad) since the birth of the web. But creating exciting, relevant content for your website... now that is a completely different kettle of fish! In the first instalment of ‘Get Creative in 2011’ we gave an introduction to what it is to produce great content for your website. We also discussed ways of using ‘Design SEO’ to benefit your online audience and produce the best content to boost your search possibilities. In part two, we will discuss why the production of smart, creative and well designed content is SO damn important to your brand and how you can squeeze every last drop from it. Read the rest of this entry...

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I recently told a friend of mine who is a journalist that I was doing online PR. “Ah”, she said, “you’ve become the enemy!” We had a good old giggle, but this illustrates perfectly the love-hate relationship journalists have with PRs and why it is such a challenge for us PRs to pitch to them. Just to explain how it all works, here is what I do. As a PR, it’s my job to ‘manage the flow of information between an organization (my client) and the public (target market)’. Just like with offline PR, I need to create personas, or target market segments, find out which publications they read (in my case websites) and then get their products onto these websites, for free. Some people think this means pushing out an offline press release on a news wire, but it is much more than that and with online PR particularly, the relationship with the journalist is key. Read the rest of this entry...

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We are increasingly aware of how customers are looking to get the best price for the best product, but how can us online marketers ensure that we reach these potential purchasers and get under the skin of what really motivates their buying habits? We need to go back to basics and forget about the traditional demographics which have influenced marketing campaigns for years. Of course age, sex, income and marital status are important but what you really need to think about is who are your target customers, what influences their spending decisions and which sites do they visit during their spending journey? Its time to get personal and the answer lies in creating personas... Personas are fictional characters. They take on identities and represent your customers by their buying trends and search habits. The persona will put a human face to data and create something that can seem real and familiar. Ideal online customers are no longer just ABC1’s, they are individuals sat in...

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