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Soulati-'TUDE!

Blog Distribution Channels To Earn More Traffic

04/28/2016 By Jayme Soulati

Blog distribution is rarely thought of, and I’m here to tell you that has to change! Your blog posts, the most valuable pieces of owned media you have in your archives, should never just be published on your website and forgotten. These stories need to be distributed on a wide variety of channels and in a wider variety of repurposed creativity.

Let’s explore further, shall we?

Blog Distribution Channels — A Long List

1. So easy and obvious, is the very first place a blog post is published and greets the world. Ensure your website is owned by you; it’s your created domain name, and it’s on a hosting platform you’ve selected.

1a. A blog post comment section is key for links to others’ content to get added. Sometimes a blogger asks for shares, and these can get added manually. If you sign up for Livefyre, a blog comment platform, your latest blog post is automatically added to your bio descriptor.

2. LinkedIn posts are another obvious pseudo blogging channel. In fact, I had elected to craft this post and publish it on LinkedIn FIRST. Then, as I kept writing and writing, I realized how dumb that would be. I need the content and link juice for my own blog! Remember, that when you publish original content elsewhere first, you miss out on the strength of that content for links and traffic. Do build up your own archives first. Because I’ve been blogging since 2010, I have archives of more than 650 blog posts to my credit. A blogger’s life is never over; there is always a fresh audience seeking content with a twist. Stand out! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Blogging 101 Tagged With: Blab.fm, blog distribution channels, Blogging, Branding, Business, Facebook, Google+, Happy Friday Series, heart marketing, heart of marketing, Instagram, Jayme Soulati, John Gregory Olson, LinkedIn, marketing, marketing your blog, podcasting, SnapChat, Social Media, Triberr, Twitter

A Nuclear Energy Twitter Case Study

04/12/2016 By Jayme Soulati

ALT="Soulati Media, Hitachi, nuclear energy, Twitter"In the fall of 2015, I agreed to join my long-time colleague, Caren Kagan Evans, CEO of ECI Communications, as the Twitter professional on nuclear energy for the Nuclear Industry Summit 2016. The Twitter handle @2016NIS was brand new for this event; there wasn’t a single tweet or follower, and ECI Communications was hired, as part of an entire event strategy, to ensure that the Twitter stream was active on a daily basis and earning power up to and through the global event. Daunting, eh?

The Summit culminated April 1, 2016 with 1,656 tweets (I have no idea if this is a lot or not!). This story shares my experience as the only person permitted to tweet on behalf of #NIS16. The State Department, Nuclear Energy Institute, and influencers in the nuclear energy sector monitored the stream closely. I felt the pressure, but pummeled through and focused on the task at hand.

The Objective

Twitter was to be the pulpit for the Summit – to inform, share, educate, invite, engage, and coalesce folks under the guise of the Nuclear Industry Summit 2016.

Nuclear Energy Twitter Strategy

  • I had to immerse in the subject matter quickly and identify those who were safe to retweet with positive and neutral content.
  • I had to maintain a neutral balance without injected opinion, and was thoughtful about retweets of events oriented to nuclear energy.
  • I was to be informative and be the announcer for everything on the brand new website ECI Communications created for this specific event. It’s full of several new videos, presentations, exhibitor information, Summit agenda, awards, a Flickr account for all the Summit photography, as well as industry reports and documents.

The Tacticals

I’ve been on Twitter since 2009, I know the ins and outs of launching Twitter streams from scratch; still, this project was global with key government officials from countries around the world as well as other influencers in the sector.

I identified the influencers and slowly began to get my feet wet. Previously, I had no prior knowledge about nuclear energy; thus, I painstakingly reviewed each influencers’ Twitter stream to learn who the players were, what they were tweeting, and whether I could engage enough to get them to follow me back.

At the same time, I had to ramp up knowledge by immersing in articles written by academia, bloggers and journalists to understand a semblance of the issues. To earn confidence that I would tweet pro-nuclear content versus the negative content presented by anti-nuclear folks, I was more careful than ever before about re-tweeting. I opened every link before it was tweeted, and if it was something juicy, I shared it with my team via email. Often the stories were already known, but a few times I was able to share a story that had not surfaced yet.

The topic of nuclear energy is highly controversial. I set up two search streams for ‘nuclear energy’ and ‘energy media’ to identify news of the day. Probably 70 percent of the news in nuclear energy came consistently from Asia and Europe. There is a lot of global activity on this topic as nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear security remain hot-button issues for the entire world. In addition, there are new nations coming into the nuclear age with new plants coming online while European plants are shutting down. It is a fascinating industry, and the general populace in the U.S. is not up to snuff on the facts about nuclear energy.

I bumped into scholars, academia, students, organizations, companies, countries, journalists and bloggers, atomic/solar/wind energy experts, non-profits, governments, and utilities in the Nuclear Industry Summit stream always careful to be gracious, professional, helpful, and cautious.

The First and Last Tweets

The first tweet posted soon after the New Year, and I averaged 22 tweets per day with scheduled tweets every 30 minutes on a daily basis. I monitored the stream all day, never closing out of Hootsuite and often relegated to Twitter.com to look at the streams of my followers to ensure I was in touch with the leaders in the field.

In between the first and last tweets, the stream became the microphone for the entire Nuclear Industry Summit 2016 to amplify everything on the website as well as news releases to promote the event, and to also pitch and engage media. The tweets were helpful in earning traffic to the website; in fact, I’m going to take a guess that prior to the first news release, Twitter was responsible for 85 percent of the website traffic, and it grew daily closer and closer to the Summit.

It was always intended to live tweet at the Summit, and that’s what I did. I sat in all the sessions and used TweetChat.com to set up my ‘studio’ so the hashtag #NIS16 populated in every tweet automatically and also enabled me to track others using the hashtag, too. (If ever you’re tweeting a live event, do check out Tweet Chat.)

At the Summit Expo, I took photos with my iPhone of each exhibit booth. I posted tweets and images for all of the event’s sponsors and added more tweets and images of other exhibitors from around the world.

The final tweets included newly added materials on the website posted after the closing ceremony, as well as information to alert people to the Flickr account and videos.

Key Takeaways

The reason this Twitter strategy was a success is due to my years in social media and my time-seasoned experience (I don’t mean to blow the horn here). Twitter can be extremely tactical for many folks; in fact, Twitter is a highly strategic channel that requires a thoughtful approach to relationship building and engagement. A less-seasoned professional may not have the strategy under their belt to understand the best way to approach a stream being built from 0 to 100 mph in three months.

Prior to marketing automation, this is how we engaged on Twitter – with 1:1 conversation on a consistent basis. People shared appreciatively, and actually read content, too. Those were the basics, and today, this is not being taught.

I could have done a better job had I known more about nuclear energy going in. That was the biggest issue I had, but we were hired to showcase the event. Few people understand how beneficial it is to have subject matter expertise when you tweet; yet, specialty experts who do don’t have the social media knowledge. That’s why I vote for ‘a me’ – someone with the how-to knowledge versus the subject matter expertise. When you seek someone with the how-to, they are going to be seasoned in their craft, and the knowledge will come. (We only had three months though, so it wasn’t necessary to be an expert in nuclear energy for this project.)

The field of nuclear energy is nascent on social media. That was a challenge to earn engagement; perhaps as time goes by, the field will begin to use Twitter more profusely, especially as emerging teams and nations want to share their good news.

A Twitter stream planned to promote a global event needs credibility. It is very important to have a handful of ambassadors who can make introductions and invite others to follow and share. It is always nice to have more of that at any time given the challenges of building from ground zero.

After a short several weeks of scouring the topic and industry, I soon realized the global sector was more active than the U.S. domestic sector. I predicted we would have more international attention at the Summit and more international journalists attending the Industry Summit than U.S.-based journalists. I was right; it’s what Twitter told me!

I love Twitter for what it delivers, how it engages, how it introduces relationships and shares knowledge. The biggest key factoid I can share after this career-high experience is that behind every Twitter avatar that is a logo is a person. I was honored to be that guy for this event.

Filed Under: Social Media Strategy Tagged With: Caren Kagan Evans, ECI Communications, Jayme Soulati, nuclear energy, nuclear industry summit, Twitter, Twitter strategy

Marketing Predictions In The Year Of Fear 2016

11/30/2015 By Jayme Soulati

Credit: Jayme Soulati via iPhone 4S to Instagram

What will 2016 hold for you? Will you have a chance to be authentic? Or will you keep the same old business practice and just manage in the Year of Fear 2016?

I have a bunch of marketing predictions, and they are based on the following factors. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Heart Of Marketing Podcast, Public Relations, Thinking Tagged With: Branding, Content Marketing, heart marketing, heart of marketing, marketing, marketing predictions, predictions, Public Relations, social analytics, Social Media, Twitter

Is Twitter’s Messaging Enough For Wall Street?

11/14/2014 By Jayme Soulati

ALT="Twitter Wordle"Twitter, my former-fave social media app, is suffering from low mojo amongst Wall Street analysts. Since its IPO one year ago (November 2013), the honeymoon is over and tough questions are more the norm.

Twitter has had a recent spate of lackluster messaging being disseminated via tweets and blog posts versus the accustomed 1:1 analyst interview.

Message Mapping By Soulati

Perhaps Twitter should’ve engaged Soulati Media for a message mapping exercise? Hey, Twitter, it’s not too late to give me a shout!

That’s my shameless plug, and why not? Don’t forget to see my infographic on message mapping here!

Back to Twitter

Upon review of The New York Times Nov. 13, 2014, “Twitter Speaks Up With Growth Strategy Intended to Soothe Wall Street,” it seemed Twitter’s dog and pony for financial analysts had the right messages. What also seemed to be the problem was the reception of those messages.

Revenue is weak; plans to raise revenue are average; users aren’t visiting as much as prior; there is management turmoil; the future looks bleak for the company (according to the story); and, new features aren’t being launched fast enough.

In my view, Twitter really messed up by not communicating in the last 12 months about its plans to shore up the publicly traded company and keep share price growing to investor satisfaction.

Seems to be Twitter’s problem may be its messaging and its messaging delivery; that’s called public relations. When you open the doors as a public company and invite all kinds of scrutiny, investor relations is critical. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Marketing, Message Mapping/Mind Mapping Tagged With: Anthony Noto, Asia-Pacific, BBC, Bloomberg L.P., Dick Costolo, Facebook, message mapping, message mapping book, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Twitter, Wall Street

I’ll Never Forget The Glory Days Of Twitter

05/09/2014 By Jayme Soulati

ALT="future, past, sign, Soulati"It’s time to have a retirement party and bid the glory days of Twitter so long. It was a good run. We made a lot of connections, met peeps IRL, bantered, and did a bit of business. It was the first check-in in the morning and the last check-in late night. It’s where blog jacks launched, and ‘raderie was born. We survived a recession on Twitter, and together we kept the ROFLs and LMAOs and LOLs rolling in the stream.

The Twitter Glory Days

Twitter used to be the gathering place for anyone who was anyone. Actually, let me rephrase that — Twitter used to be the gathering place for anyone who was no one! Twitter made us someone. It built our personal brands and the frontrunners, self-professed Twitterholics like moi, lapped it up and enjoyed the ride. We all launched about 2009, and didn’t know what we were doing, so we did anything. In these archives, you’ll find a sheep video with Danny Brown and Dino Dogan. It’s a gem, a keeper, and only the old timers know of it! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: Danny Brown, Dino Dogan, glory days, golden years, Social Media, Triberr, Twitter, Twitter IPO

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ALT="Jayme Soulati"

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