Monday, May 7, 2007

Content is King in Online Technology and Globalization

A new report by Forrester Research says, "most companies get involved in social media in a haphazard way - a blog here, a podcast there - with no coherent web content strategy based on audience needs."

MarCom has been ahead of the curve in online technology because we have been focusing on technology and software companies over the last twenty years, and those companies are the ones that developed online technology. Now it's going global, and other industries are catching up fast.

One of our more recent clients is in another field - the medical industry. The Wiley Protocol has a fabulous content-rich website - www.thewileyprotocol.com. We started working with the company in December, 2006 and the first thing we did was a keyword analysis. The company specializes in bio-identical hormone replacement therapy - a hot topic these days among 40 plus women, and now, the US Senate thanks to a new law circulating that could limit compounding pharmacies. Their audience is pretty clear cut. Consumers, doctors, and compounding pharmacies. This means we have content being developed to use, as I say, "six ways to Sunday." On the website, in press releases both online and offline, newsletters to consumers, doctors and pharmacies, at trade shows, online in articles, blogs, forum posts, podcasts, radio and TV shows, and more.

The company's website designer used the open source content management product called Joomla. It's free, and actually pretty easy to use. The first problem we encountered was that because Joomla uses Global tagging, it's challenging to optimize the site's Meta tags and pages. But my associate Mike Keesling is going to be able to do it now that we were trained in using Joomla. Next we needed to be trained for an hour on how to write, edit, add images and disseminate one of two newsletters via Joomla. Not to mention how to use the mailing management tools for the lists of those who signed up via RSS feeds. After an hour of training this weekend, I edited my newsletter draft and then didn't hit SAVE, so I lost it all. Today it took another couple of hours to revisit, rewrite, and I still have to figure out how to add my images. Learning these tools to save time is money in our business.

We look at all this as an investment in our future. There are other more customizable content management tools such as www.enthusiastinc.com - and this company's version 2 will be set up for easy optiomization. But the bottom line these days is that as marketing practitioners, we all need to invest the time in learning how technology and globalization is changing our trade, because it's not going to stop growing and changing any time soon.


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