This is an archived blog from when I ran Conscious Public Relations Inc. from 2008-2018. Excuse the potential outdated-ness!
The basics of blogging and word of mouth marketing
Marketing tools are moving and emerging faster than we can stop to understand them. At yesterday’s LOCO BC Mixer I had some very interesting conversations and was honoured to talk to a few companies that expressed interest in working with my company. It wasn’t because of my membership – it was because I saw some colleagues I had caught up with that I hadn’t connected with in a while, and because someone there was looking for PR and I happened to be there. So it’s both fate and almost 7 years worth of word of mouth.
This, along with Mitch Joel’s blog post about the usefulness of blogging today, got me thinking about how the basics are still all you need sometimes. I was thinking about Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and how he says you have to clock 10,000 hours to be an expert in an area. I didn’t think that I’d yet clocked 10k in my PR career, but when I did the math on 9 years of experience, at the end of 2014 I’ll have clocked almost 16,000 hours. Holy shit, that’s a lot of hours.
I’ve also gotten more props this year about our blog than ever. I have posts dating back to 2007 before I even started this company. And since blogging almost daily since mid 2012, I guess I have garnered a bit of a reputation for consistency. This “reputation” combined with the natural SEO that my blog gets us online, well, is a pretty damn good PR tool.
Consistent blogging gives you something to share on your social networks, when you get tired of scrolling news feeds and think you have nothing to say. There are too many untold stories. Contribute, dammit. Tell good stories.
As for the word-of-mouth marketing, I really have no secret potion. Create a strong brand if you don’t already have one, networking like heck in your industry, and make loyal friends and colleagues, ones you come to hug on a regular basis and smile when you see them. Develop relationships. Go back to the basics.
