Making your earned media an effective source of new traffic can sometimes be a difficult process to manage.
You have a great third party endorsement whether it be a positive review or great press coverage. But one earned media placement only goes as far as the immediate audience and it may not be the right audience.
Here are a few tips to make the most of your earned media.
1. Keep Track of It
You may find a number of earned media placements are not the result of your direct PR efforts, in which case are you certain you’re aware each time your brand is mentioned in the press? Set up a mechanism for routinely gathering this information (daily, if possible). Google Alerts is a simple solution.
2. Amplify It
Think of content marketing like oral storytelling; once the story’s been told, it can be passed on to other audiences in ways organic and paid. Let your goals dictate which channels you pursue for each piece of earned media. For example, if your goal is to drive conversions, that means attracting the most qualified audience. Outbrain’s solution to increasing the circulation of your story is placing it in front of engaged audiences on some of the most high-traffic areas of the web – premium publisher sites. Driving traffic to your earned media has a number of other benefits beyond sheer reach. The more people engage with it, the longer the shelf-life for your content.
3. Repurpose It
One of the undervalued aspects of earned media is that the parties producing it have different perspectives and ideas about your brand, product, the market etc. For this reason, earned media can be a springboard for owned media. If a piece of earned media highlights a problem, misconception, or even a positive asset related to your business that you had never considered before, use it as an opportunity to generate your own content addressing those issues or demonstrating those assets.
4. Further Media Relations
One of the most important audiences to reach, regardless of your consumer base, is other media outlets. Compelling earned media can open up further organic media relations, improve your media pitches and lead to more overall placements [see how Fleishmann Hillard did this], all the more reason to amplify it and increase its overall visibility. If your press contacts have been reading about your brand recently or have just seen your name pop up in a couple of key places, they might be more receptive to your pitches or otherwise including your brand in their editorial.
The post 4 Tips On How To Make The Most of Earned Media appeared first on Small Business Technology.
Today in interesting moves comes the news that serial entrepreneur-turned-investor Russell Buckley – who co-founded AdMob (which sold to Google) is joining the UK government to accelerate its policies around startups, mainly funding. Specifically, he’s joining the UK Government’s Venture Capital Unit. The Unit, launched last year, is designed to help UK companies attract funding from abroad and thus help resolve the funding gap which often exists at early and mid-stages. The Unit is headed by veteran entrepreneur Chris Wade and embraces Clean Tech, Life Sciences and Hardware. Here’s Russell’s blog post on the matter:
My New Job
It’s been about two years since I left Google following the AdMob acquisition and as I forecast here at the time (http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2011/03/30/on-a-personal-note/) I’ve been practicing a portfolio career of being a very active angel investor (Ballpark Ventures has about 25 investments), mentoring at Springboard (soon to be TechStars), doing various Speaking gigs and being a Non-Exec Director of a handful of more mature UK businesses.
To sum up this little role, I wrote:
So, trying to draw this together in one cogent theme, I’m planning to spend the next 10 years helping the UK to become a world class part of the tech scene and one which regularly produces mega-successes like the next Twitter, the next Facebook or the next Amazon. There’s plenty of reasons why The Valley has the advantage over us – early stage funding and a huge natural early adopter market, are my personal bugbears. But if we think big and harness the creativity and talent available, I believe it’s a realisable dream.
I’m delighted to say that I’ve been offered the opportunity to help realise this vision on a more macro-scale, by joining the UK Government’s Venture Capital Unit. The remit of the Unit is to help UK companies attract funding from abroad and thus help resolve the funding gap I was writing about above. My focus will be on tech companies, though the Unit as a whole (headed by veteran entrepreneur Chris Wade) embraces Clean Tech, Life Sciences and Hardware.
To be quite frank, it is the only job that anyone could have offered me that I would have accepted at this stage in my career. It fits perfectly with my personal mission, so when I was approached about the role it didn’t need a lot of thinking about and I find the opportunity to make a real difference to the UK tech scene very exciting.
In the first instance, my focus will be on developing a portfolio of the very best UK tech companies to showcase what a fantastic place the UK already is. And in time, my new colleagues and I will use our best efforts to help find overseas investors, to complement the UK investment community, to help these companies flourish. If you run such a company, or know of anyone who should be on this prestigious list, drop me a line here Russell AT mobhappy DOT com and we’ll get the ball rolling.
Exciting times!
Investor Chamath Palihapitiya’s skeptical comments about the current wave of tech startups (comments that included a not-too-veiled dig at Snapchat), ended up fueling plenty of discussion at our Disrupt NY conference earlier this week. In fact, when I interviewed Sequoia Capital partner Aaref Hilaly backstage, Palihapitiya’s remarks provided a springboard for Hilaly’s take on messaging apps, including Sequoia-backed WhatsApp:
To us, they’re a pretty significant change. We see a company like WhatsApp as reimagining the social network. And the way I think about it is, What’s your real social graph? Is it the people you communicate with and spend time with, or is it the 100 people you barely know on Facebook? We think it’s pretty clearly the first of those, and that’s what mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp capture.
Hilaly went on to praise WhatsApp’s growth (users are supposedly sending 20 billion messages per day) and its design, but he also said there are other companies doing well, especially if you look in other countries. I asked if there’s a bit of a generational divide in terms of usage (which is another way of asking if I’m too old), and Hilaly said “it’s generational and it’s geographic.”
“A lot of these messaging apps get traction outside the US,” he said. “They’re popular in the US, but people live on them outside of the US. I think both factors have made the world a little bit slower to wake up to them than to other big trends.”
If you watch the video, you can also listen to us discuss Hilaly’s move from the startup world to venture capital, and Sequoia’s involvement in New York.
TechStars London, the UK outpost of Boulder, U.S.-based uber-accelerator TechStars after it merged with Jon Bradford’s Springboard, has announced that its found a permanent home at newly-established Warner Yard, a co-working space owned by early-stage fund Playfair Capital.
Why is this news, you may ask. Well, not only does it means that teams will now get up to 6 months free office space in the UK’s capital city, rather than just the 3 months they are on the program, but it follows the recent news that TechStars London has been approved as a Recognised Seed Competition, smoothing the way for participants to qualify for a UK Entrepreneur Visa. This means, I hasten to add, that TechStars London startups are far more likely to stay located in London long after they graduate.
Zooming out a bit more, it also adds further weight to London’s claim as a leading tech hub, espoused by the British government’s Tech City project (now led by Joanna Shields, ex-Google, AOL/Bebo, and most recently Facebook’s head of EMEA operations), alongside the network effects that have grown out of the organic “Silicon Roundabout” tech cluster in East London, which has seen the likes of Google and Amazon invest in the area.
The official announcement says TechStars London’s new base is located in “the heart of Tech City”, though in a later statement Jon Bradford, Managing Director of TechStars London, describes Warner Yard as “close” to Tech City, proving that nobody knows for sure where the UK government’s branding for the London tech scene starts and ends. For those who are familiar with London, Warner Yard is actually in Clerkenwell. Due to open on the 29th of May, it will feature 154 desks over 4 floors including 5 quiet booths, 4 meeting rooms, 3 kitchens and space for presentations and pitching. It will be open 24 hours a day and will house both PlayFair Capital’s portfolio companies, and external companies — including TechStars London, of course, who will also use the space to host events for the wider community and provide hot-desking facilities for TechStars alumni.
In a further boost to the local ecosystem, the new co-working space, which is modelled on Passion Capital’s nearby White Bear Yard, is being targeted at early-stage investors and angels as an alternative to hot-desking at various coffee shops in London. At launch, it’s signed up EC1 Capital, #1Seed, Hotspur Capital Partners, Ballpark Ventures, Doug Scott and Richard Fearn — a sign of more cozying up by London’s investment community.
Here’s Bradford’s statement in full: “Finding the right environment for TechStars London has been a priority since our launch. Warner Yard provides both TechStars London teams a great central location being close to both TechCity and also the West End with an awesome environment alongside other seed funded companies for the duration of the programme and also immediate run out period.”
Meanwhile, applications for TechStars London close on 5th of May 2013. Startups interested in applying can come from anywhere, not just Europe, but must physically come to London for the three-month program. In total, €85k of funding is up for grabs per team, though the majority of this is a convertible note.
However, funding mechanics aside, the fact that the accelerator’s investment in each startup crosses the £50k mark, combined with TechStars London’s newly acquired Recognised Seed Competition status, means that its entrepreneurs have sufficient “points” to qualify for a UK Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) Visa.
Here’s how TechStars describes the win:
The approval will allow TechStars London teams from outside of the EU, to work in the UK for up to 3 years and towards the end of this period, can apply to extend their stay by a further 2 years if they want to continue living here. Furthermore teams, after 3 years have the right to apply for permission to settle in the UK if their business has created at least 10 new full-time jobs in the UK. Partners and children of the teams can also apply for settlement.
Tastebuds, the London-based startup that matches people based on their musical tastes, has been kicking around for a while now. A graduate of the accelerator Springboard (now TechStars London) back in 2011, the company has ploughed along bootstrapped ever since — garnering a not-too-shabby 100,000 registered users along the way. Now the company looks like it’s finally set to step on the gas. Today it’s announcing a $600,000 seed round from Black Ocean, which will be used to launch mobile apps, grow its developer team, as well as formally launching in the U.S.
In addition, Tastebuds is currently developing features to connect members offline through gigs, festivals and music meetups, thus building on its existing online-to-offline social networking proposition.
Originally positioned as a dating site that focused on music as a way of matching prospective dates, Tastebuds appeared to have hit onto something, gaining a reputation for its ability to reach users who wouldn’t normally consider doing the online dating thing. Accordingly, it says that almost half of its users haven’t used a dating website before. However, that appears to have only taken it so far. Online dating is one of the most competitive spaces with very high user acquisition costs and high user churn. So, perhaps smartly, the startup has since broadened out slightly and can now be thought of as a competitor to services like Badoo, along with the usual online dating suspects.
“We first launched as a dating service but we’ve grown way beyond the dating use case,” says co-founder Alex Parish. “The site is designed to make it as easy as possible for people to meet others who share their tastes, in whatever capacity. It’s obviously working in a dating respect as we’ve had numerous weddings off the site.”
To build your profile on Tastebuds, you search for and select your favourite bands/artists. Alternatively, you can import data from your Last.fm account or import your Facebook music-related “Likes”. In addition, you add the usual demographic information required for social networking, along with, crucially, your location — the end goal is to meet people offline, after all. You also get to state if you’re looking for a date or just want to meet like-minded people. Tastebuds then begins displaying potential matches, including which artists you have in common, so that you can start conversing.
You can also “Like” users so that their Tastebuds status updates show up in your news feed, such as what they’ve recently listened to. You can also see any gigs they are planning to attend if they’ve linked their SongKick account.
Finally, last May Tastebuds launched a Spotify app, which essentially embeds the service inside of the streaming music site. As one of the first apps on the platform, around half of its users have come via Spotify, although this has petered out somewhat. “When we launched we were registering thousands of users per day from the app,” says Parish. “This has dropped since the number of apps [on Spotify] has ballooned but the app is still significant for us, making up around a quarter of daily registrations.”
Tastebuds is free to join, although the company has experimented with a number of premium micro-features, such as “Incognito mode”, which hides your online status and enables you to browse profiles anonymously. However, it isn’t ruling out a more standard recurring subscription model in the future. “We’re also going to investigate the possibility afforded by offline events and live music,” says Parish. “The focus until now has mostly been on growth and achieving the right product-market fit.”
As for what’s immediately around the corner for Tastebuds now that it has money in the bank, Parish says that, along with much-needed mobile apps and growing the team, the company is busy “building technology to help people meet offline at live music events which we’re really excited about.”
