December 01, 2017 by Ronn
It's great when there's member follow-up to my posts, and this week provided some very beneficial after-column info.
In yesterday's post, I wrote about the importance of getting feedback from your frontline people who are dealing face-to-face—or phone-to-phone—with your customers. I had to send before connecting with Christina Karabetsos, executive vice president of telemarketing-and-more firm QCSS. I was interested in how they know what their callers are hearing.
"When the representatives are having phone conversations, we set up a database that allows them to document responses in real time in data fields we create," Karabetsos wrote me last night. "Anything that falls outside of the capture fields we have created gets documented in a free form text field.
"Both are valuable! I love the specific data fields because that data can be aggregated easily and quantified. The free form text, however, is also nice because it allows more breadth for documenting conversations—just takes a bit more time to work through!"
In a volunteer position, I'm not encouraged to relay the comments I hear from the audience. Karabetsos urges the opposite. "If there is anything unique/interesting/one-offs, we encourage folks at every level to raise their hand and share! Likely, other representatives and our clients can benefit from the information. This can be done by anyone through their CRM—and it doesn't have to be a big, robust tool! Just somewhere to easily, and consistently document meaningful customer interactions regularly!"
On Tuesday, I posted a Social Media Tip Sheet from North Coast Media. One part that resonated concerned blog posts—their length and how to get full effectiveness. (The tip sheet suggested 500 words.)
"My opinion is 700-1500 words is a good spot to fall between," Nate Duea of MedLearn Media wrote on the SIPA Forum. "I've also seen studies that show 2500-plus word posts receive the highest amount of social shares. The real focus is your primary and secondary keyword strategy and ensuring your content structure checks all the boxes for Google and other search engines... I am a fan of SEMRush and their free SEOquake extension—within the page diagnosis tab; they give you a text/html ratio score that indirectly relates to page ranking."
"The 300-word length used to be a great target," wrote Ed Coburn, CEO of Coburn Media. "Then it was 500, and then 800, all things being equal—so note that means a great 300-word piece may outperform a weak, 800-word piece.
"Google wants current, authoritative content to point users to, and that's the most important thing so you don't have to be too concerned about the length once you're over 300 words. Also, adding links to related authoritative content, on your site or others, seems to suffice for demonstrating 'weightiness' to Google."
"A great free tool for scoring your posts (including credit for increasing the length of posts/articles) is Mequoda's SEO Scorecard, found here," wrote Bill Dugan, senior vice president & client success group leader of Mequoda. "While length is important (and can be an indicator to Google about the depth of the content), it's just one piece of the puzzle about how authoritative Google will view your post."
On Monday, I wrote a post about celebrating your company anniversary with a promotional campaign. Lesley Ellen Harris, CEO of Copyrightlaws.com, wrote to me that "2018 is Copyrightlaws.com's 20th anniversary, and we're planning some things!"
An anniversary can also be a good time to update a website or logo. A consulting company called Capgemini unveiled a new logo 50th anniversary in October. They were "keen to move away from rigid logos and humanize the brand with a handwritten look."
Kubra, a customer experience management solution provider, celebrated its 25th anniversary in March with a new "Future Forward" campaign, to work more with charitable organizations.
And in 2015, Getty Images celebrated its 20th anniversary with a campaign that showed "20 years of famous [celebrity] faces." One excellent piece of advice I read is that it's never too early to start the planning. So even if your anniversary comes in 2019 or 2020, good to put the pieces in place now.
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Nevena Jovanovic.
Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 and SIIA in 2013 as editorial director…