Well the team at ZN.be have a secret weapon – Campaign Commander. It’s a content management and statistics gathering tool. We use it to manage social media activity for various clients as well as the agency. It helps us not only be effective with time management but churns out some great statistics.

Recently Campaign Commander contacted ZN to capture our views of their tool on camera, so here follows a quick one and a half minutes by CEO Nicholas Brooke who introduces the company’s communication services, followed by yours truly talking about the value of the tool itself.

a) Search engines are programmed to dislike duplicate content.
b) You are creating unnecessary competition with yourself. Potential visitors will have to make a choice on link they find, and they’ll most likely select the one higher up the search results. So if you added a personal blog to a community of blogs, the community blog will probably be higher up on the search results and therefore winning the visitor’s click.
c) Pasting the same content across domains means you are spreading yourself (your visibility) thin.
d) Then there’s the magical link juice effect which gets all messed up and irritates those darn search engines again. Learn more about it here http://thekeywordacademy.com/link-juice-explained
e) Focus your content and your all up presence online, don’t try to be present everywhere.

So what’s the solution? Well from what I have found it’s more of an art than a science.

a) Change unto 50% of the content without loosing the initial sense of the post.
b) Move paragraphs around if possible, and change the beginning of some of the paragraphs particularly the first one.
c) get friendly with the thesaurus and use similes
d) Make sure your link backs are to original source

If anyone has more advice on this, please share!

Have you been following the Volkswagen vs Greenpeace ‘Darth Vadar and the Empire Strikes Back’ saga online? It all started at the end of June this year.

No? Ok watch this video first…

Cute huh? Now watch this…

Imagine the collective cold sweat as the VW marketing team watched it.

But then there’s another one…(The rebels strike back). And then Darth Vader invades London. Meanwhile Greenpeace does its good old swinging from scaffolding stunt and hangs huge VW Darkside posters in Central London. And no NGO campaign would be complete without a “Join the rebellion” campaign www.vwdarkside.com with 380,000 Jedi rebels (Greenpeace supporters) already in training, helping to increase the campaign’s momentum and visibility.

At this point does it even matter what the VW Darkside campaign is all about? Greenpeace has won anyway, whatever it wanted to win. VW has been naughty and Greenpeace cops have caught them red-handed. Will it stop me buying a VW car? I doubt it, but I am interested to see if it influences VW’s long-term marketing and lobbying efforts.

Greenpeace is accusing Volkswagen of using its “political muscle to lobby against key environmental laws”. Through ACEA the automotive lobby, VW has apparently been trying to block European proposals to reduce emissions by 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. From what I can see VW isn’t single-handedly blocking proposals, it’s a united effort from all ACEA’s members. However unfortunately for VW it is taking the hit thanks to its fun Star Wars advert.

VW response? Well, from what I can find, it has opted for a two press release response. I didn’t even find the first one, but the second one was a short, ‘we don’t understand why you’re picking on us, still?’ response. ‘Our cars are even better than before’. So they aren’t responding to the policy accusation but defending from a marketing stand point. Which would imply that VW isn’t ready to cope with this kind of attack. Plus its responses have absolutely no visibility compared to Greenpeace’s massive presence. And from what I can see, the car lobby ACEA is keeping its head well down.

A great marketing concept becomes a public affairs nightmare. So what the learning?

1. The internet yet again shows its immense power and agility as a medium to communicate compared to traditional paid media.
2. As Greenpeace already has build a huge campaign-minded following, it’s easy to flick the switch on a new issue and get everyone engaged and sharing messages for you.
3. VW’s online strategy is only built for selling more cars by using offline marketing techniques. But today you can’t get away with marketing green solutions anymore; you actually have to do it. In today’s open age, doing the opposite behind closed doors doesn’t stay secret for long.
4. VW doesn’t appear to have a platform for discussion to deal with these kinds of issues. It has a blog but it’s just more ‘buy this car’ marketing.
5. It’s too late to fight this one, so once the dust has settled, VW should sort out its lobbying efforts and clarify its political opinions where we can see them, on and offline. It needs to ‘walk the green talk’ if they want to keep selling cars.

Greenpeace really is master of creative campaigning and in all fairness, VW lawyers, lobbyists and crisis communication managers couldn’t have seen this one coming. Sadly I imagine the VW lawyers are probably cracking down on any future imaginative marketing. That’s not the solution; but building a strong presence online that shows all sides of the company, that we can have access to, engage with and build trust, is.

After working in the pesticide industry for several years, I know how NGOs can exaggerate the truth to make a point. So I don’t necessarily believe that VW is evil more than other car company, but what is clear, VW lost this fight because it didn’t have the right online presence and ambassadors to fight back fast and effectively.

Cross posting from ZN.be

At a recent event, I was delighted to see most of the exhibitors had QR codes on their display posters.  A what I hear you cry?! A QR code or Quick Response code is this strange square image on the left here. QR codes are two-dimensional bar codes, which can hold way more information than a standard bar code. You can scan them with an app on your smart phone. I use i-nigma, a free one I found on the App Store.

So of course with phone in hand, I had a go. Admittedly I’m a bit of a geek, so I found it really exciting to scan a code and see where it would take me. The exhibitor’s chose to direct traffic to their websites, rather than invest in dedicated landing pages. This is totally understandable because QR codes are a bit ahead of the curve in Brussels and not many people will know what to do with them. However it got my mind racing. So here’s my two cents worth on what you could do with this kind of technology.

1.    Make the code easy to get to, rather than at the top of a 2 metre poster, for example.
2.    Take the visitor through to a mobile-enabled dedicated landing page that is easy to read and navigate… on a phone.
3.    Add tracking to get statistics on your visitors and their behaviour. This will help you improve the process next time.
4.    Give a way cool stuff (suitable to the target audience) to get people to register their name, email address and/or mobile number.
5.    Add a call to action to register for a your newsletter, follow on Twitter, Like you on Facebook or hook up via G+circles.
6.    Add these subscribers to a ‘cool’ list in your database. This tool is pretty advanced for the average bod, so make your QR code-scanning-people feel special; give them VIP treatment when you can. You never know they might help you in the future to share content, give feedback on new marketing approaches etc.

Trying out different internet tools and platforms is fun but potentially a bit of a time suck. However they can be an extremely effective tactic to achieve one part of an overarching communication or marketing strategy. When we have a better understanding of the opportunities that these tools can offer, we can develop and implement plans that bring a real return on invest.

For one client, over the past couple of years I’ve been learning and writing about the frustrations of European business start-ups who are held back by national and/or European legislation that prevents them from growing. I’ve listened as European-based start-ups have highlighted the big differences between the energy and flexibility of Silicon Valley compared to the risk-adverse, worker-centric Europe.

Those frustrations have all been quite theoretical to me, until now. Now I want to grow a business idea. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but I’m prepared to give it go. I’ve decided to invest in some extra help as I’m already pretty busy, and “Halleluiah!” I found someone I like and trust to help … BOOM! Even though she’s European citizen, I still need to get her a work permit and convince some clerk in Brabant wallon (Belgium) that she is more qualified to do the job, than a local. And if we pass that test, I then have to pay a fortune to the Belgian state each month for the privilege. It’s all in the name of protecting the employee, but she won’t actually receive the benefit. This is for a short-term contract by the way. So as it stands I can’t afford it.

I’d like to give a sarcastic round of applause to Belgium and the European Union for doing their best to squish my enthusiasm and energy.

I really do feel the frustration of European entrepreneurial community, I really do understand the need to dramatically change legislation here in Europe. I really had thought that long-term members of the EU would have seen, heard and UNDERSTOOD this problem, and the opportunity it presents, and would have fixed it by now?! We have straighter bananas, we have fewer dangerous swings in the parks, and we all have high visibility vests in our car boots, but we don’t have legislation to make it easier to grow business and employ people to save Europe from growing old and dying.

It seems that the European Union is in fact building a massive old people’s home… with one exit.

These days I find myself writing for other people; other companies; other priorities. Tell me that fact two years ago and I would have laughed in your face. I would have told you that I despise ghost bloggers, that content needs to be genuine and from the heart… basically from the real author. So how did I get from there…. to way over here?

Well I’ve certainly grown a bit older, but I don’t know if that’s actually an influence. Perhaps I’ve grown a little less idealistic? One thing’s for sure I’m still a walking contradiction; I advocate how important a blogging presence is, yet I can’t find the time to blog myself. So if the truth is just one’s own perception, let’s just talk facts.

The fact is…

• many companies don’t have the time or internal flexibility to create quality blogging content, let alone lots of it but..
• web visibility depends on lots of ‘remarkable’ search engine friendly content
• understanding your audience’s needs, and creating content that fulfills that need, with the right language, will help attract an audience
• good regular content needs structure and a storyline with clear direction

So here I am, two years on, my full time job entails helping other people to develop the right stories, in the right tone, that will reach the right audience. I’m happy but my poor blog is taking a hit

You can waste money rebuilding your website every two years and simply reposition the same old boring content, I know many who do.

A better move would be to work with search engine experts who’ll analyze your website and content. You’ll find the results surprising, the bill is usually pretty surprising too. A key value-added though is the technical improvements SEO experts will propose to your website. But for the rest – the content and connections – there’s no magic bullet. You need to increase your genuine inbound links to your site; you need to understand (and accept) how your audience will search for your content and ensure that you use their language in your content and that language appears regularly in content, titles and urls.

Basically search engine success takes good old-fashioned hard work, a relevant storyline and commitment.