This is a guest post by Rebecca Haden, college teacher and
founder of Haden Interactive, a content-focused
web services firm. She’s an expert in building a quality web presence for
companies and individuals, which starts by understanding the risk of
fragmentation.
New clients often come to me with a misconception:
that they have a strong handle on their online identity. They may have a Facebook
page, a LinkedIn page, some press releases, a couple videos on YouTube and one
on Vimeo, an interview posted on someone’s blog and 2 news article mentions.
And my first task is often to help them understand that this is not a
strong web presence, but a scattered one--definitely not the
best way to leverage their marketing and time investment. 3 Critical
Points:
- When information is all over the web, it’s hard for
customers to find it, and thus not nearly as valuable to you and your
business as it could be.
- Even when your content ranks with search engines, each
item often turns up with keywords that aren't what your customers are
looking for, or out of context.
- By not aggregating, companies miss opportunities to
leverage unique content to create a unique point of view of their brand,
and develop multiple story lines about who they truly are from a content
and value standpoint.
What would be really valuable to you, is if
people could find every relevant online reference to you and your company in one place, understand who you are by looking
at storylines and your breadth of assembled content, and then explore the
references that best fit their purpose! By doing so, you combine all of
the value you have created elsewhere onto one page that you can optimize for
keywords, ultimately optimizing your chances for success.
That’s where Spoke comes in, to centralize and organize your online presence.
CLEAN UP THAT MESSY DIGITAL PRESENCE
Sure, you could put all your content onto
your website, but that’s usually not the best solution. Why? Because your
website is intended to generate more revenue from customers and prospects--who
are looking explicitly for answers to specific questions about their needs, and
don't want to scroll through dozens of external links. As a result, all
of your external content doesn't have a good place on your website, and usually
gets demoted onto a "press page." They’re called press pages for a
reason: they're intended for the press, as a collection of your links and
podcasts. Moreover, press pages, even "about pages" for that
matter, are not designed to work with different types of content (videos,
articles, etc,) so you can easily end up with a sort of "scrapbook"
effect.
So how do you deal with all those articles, videos, slide
presentations, and social profiles?
Easy. Spoke.com
REPUTATION CURATION
Spoke has become a great starting place to understand your
presence across the web. It is designed to aggregate your social media, company
or personal timeline, videos, pictures, news, links, and all the other content
you have roaming around the web. You can organize it all onto one Spoke page
and keep the integrity and purpose of each part of your web presence (facebook
for your community, linkedin for your recruiting, and website for your
customers and prospects.)
Now that you have all this information on one Spoke page,
you can start tuning it and expanding on it to make it relevant to the story
that you want to tell. That story could contain the history of a company,
major milestones, major active projects, etc. You can even start creating
pages (topics, companies, people) within Spoke to further elaborate on
specific elements of your story, such as your competitive
positioning, your partners, major market developments, important people--and
link them all together inside of Spoke. And one tidy link from your
website to your Spoke page makes it all available to visitors without
compromising your design and the core goals of your website.
And all along the way, Spoke will help you with resources,
content, and reminders to keep your body of information current for your
audience. And there’s more. Spoke will also provide you with
additional search-engine visibility to complement your website. So make
sure to add the links to your web presence to your Spoke page to send
interested traffic to the relevant destinations.
As of today you have a lot of content spread among
disconnected places that you're not taking full advantage of to tell
interesting stories. Spoke enables you to take control, and define your
identity by letting you tell your own stories. In doing so, not only will
you create very unique experiences for your customers, prospects, and potential
employees, but also very rich content for search engines to crawl and
show--generating additional traffic for your web presence.
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Want More?
Rebecca Haden is
a leader in the reputation management space and can help you understand, and
subsequently optimize, your online presence. Feel free to email her with
questions or inquiries at rebecca@hadeninteractive.com; or to see a live
example, compare her website with her company Spoke page!
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