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I've been asked to join the Communication Group for COSCA to help look at how to better promote the Clan Societies and the work done by the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs.
I thus thought I'd put some of my thoughts on this down on paper as a starting point for future discussions and figured I'd copy it here as well so here are my thoughts...
In today's world companies and organisations are seriously challenged to get exposure for their cause despite the fact that social networking has been touted as the way forward.
Traditional news sources such as newspapers no longer provide an easy way to contact your target market as they simply no longer have the readership numbers.
Social Media in my opinion is also seriously challenged to reach your market as people simply don't use that media in that fashion. How many social media communities have you joined? And how often have you visited them? Unless you are personally invested in them I suspect you visit rarely.
What Social media has done however has shot the marketing industry in the foot as more time is now spent on them than traditional web sites that should have been the best way to communicate. Like some estimate that most Facebook users are actually only interested in playing games.
How often have you had an invite to link to or be a friend of someone? It happens to me daily and 99.9% of the time I have no idea who the person is, why they want to link to me or be my friend.
And then there are web sites but here also there are many problems and you only need to look at a web sites visitor numbers to see whether you are getting enough visitors.
I did a specific analysis on my own web site which was started back in 1997 to see how well I was communicating. I found that if I wanted to get certain information in front of my visitors then a web page wasn't going to cut it.
Now my site does get an average of 180,000 unique visitors each month. Two years ago I started another web site and despite there already being a huge amount of content I only average around 3,000 unique visitors per month and I add content daily. I believe that in part shows how difficult it is to launch a new web site and get decent visitor numbers. Yet new web sites spring up all the time.
There is only so much time that people can devote to the Internet and this is time when you aren't working or taking time to be with family or friends or running the kids to events.
So I was looking for a means to get a message to all my visitors rather than just a few of them or at best a few hundred. In other words how could I get a message to all 180,000 of them?
I concluded that the only way was to have a main banner in the header of my web site and thus on all my web pages that would change at least weekly to reflect the current message. That banner would need to link to something that was seriously interesting otherwise after clicking on one or two of them they would be ignored.
So not only would a marketing company have to create specific content to go with each banner but they'd also need to create a compelling banner to attract people's attention. How likely is it that any marketing person would be prepared to put in the work to do that? I would say very unlikely but that's also why marketing people today are ineffective in what they do.
However that isn't the end of the barrier to this type of adverting as there is a cost. To get a banner across all pages of a site, which is what is needed to get in front of all my visitors, you need space that the web site makes money from. Why should any web site actually lose money to promote your marketing campaign? The answer of course is that they wouldn't. Also, that space on any decent high traffic web site is where most of that sites income comes from. So they not only need to be fully compensated for that but as the site is now tied to one company, one product, they are likely going to want a fixed contract and at probably a higher rate that they would charge normally as no web site wants to put all their eggs in one basket.
All of this means that free marketing won't work or at best only have a very limited affect. You only need to look at how Homecoming Scotland was promoted to realize that. Despite all the chatter on social media about it that didn't translate into numbers needed to make the event a success.
No high traffic web sites were used to get the message to the Scots Diaspora as none of them had the appropriate space to donate to ensure the message got out there. So all they got was the odd article on one web page somewhere on the site and at best that probably only reached hundreds and not the hundreds of thousands that they needed to get in front of.
So what I am saying is that communicating to hundreds of thousands of people in your target market is not going to work unless you come up with some serious money.
In my view the only other way is to get a genuine partnership between many different web sites where they cross promote each other. However I have never seen this working as in short people are just selfish. Why should COSCA help to promote Electric Scotland? In short they wouldn't as they want people to go to their site and not Electric Scotland. However that is never going to happen as Electric Scotland has a much wider base that COSCA as not only do we have a lot more information on Scottish Clans but we also have a huge amount of information on every possible aspect of Scottish history and also a huge amount of information on the Scots Diaspora. So that means people have 99 reasons for coming to Electric Scotland against one reason to go to COSCA.
I have written several articles about COSCA but when did COSCA write an article about Electric Scotland? That is what I mean about being selfish. This of course applies to all walks of life and I talked about this very matter back in 1997 when I gave a talk to Scottish Members of Parliament about what the web could mean for Scotland. I said at the time that we had to come together in Scotland to provide a wider community for the world to learn about us and do business with us. That never happened and everyone went their own way and that didn't work and you just need to look at how poorly Visit Scotland has performed over the years to see that.
The other factor is that most Scots are invested in their Scottish roots but comparatively few are invested in their clan connections. And being interested in genealogy does not actually translate to wanting to belong to a clan. And at least 75% of Scots have no clan connection at all. Many in the Diaspora have more than one clan connection so which one will they join? Often the answer is none of them.
Now I am personally a Scot, born in Scotland and worked and lived in Scotland for many years. Going back as far as I can with my genealogy I can only find more Scots on my line so I'm as Scottish as you can find. Am I proud of being a Scot? Yes, indeed I am. Am I proud of being a member of Clan MacIntyre? That doesn't even factor into my thinking. When have you ever heard of the old pioneers saying they were proud of their clan connection? Probably never but I'll bet you've often heard of them being proud of their Scottish roots or the place they came from in Scotland.
So in my opinion promoting Scottish clans is a huge task to undertake and unless some serious money can be found or a major change of attitude in the clan organisations then I doubt much can be achieved.
So starting from this point where do we go next?
I would suggest that there are only some dozen Scottish web sites that get decent traffic and by that I mean over 100,000 unique visitors per month. I would suggest run of site advertising would cost around US$3,000 a month on annual or longer contracts. That's then $36,000 a month or US$432,000 a year. Problem is not all these web sites can currently offer run of site advertising but they could if they had a decent incentive to do that.
Now take that money and then add the work needed to produce compelling articles. I would suggest that the articles should come in one a week so 52 a year. All these articles need to be archived on each site and not be a link to another site where they would be held. A banner graphic would need to be created for each article.
While this sounds like a lot of work it really shouldn't be as there is more than enough information available to pull this together. You do however need to plan the work and ensure each article can have links, embedded videos and have good hi-res graphics. Perhaps a professional writer might be employed to produce the articles and each article should be good ones... perhaps up to 20,000 words.
Promoting Scotland should be the theme as that gets wide recognition and within that clan matters can be discussed. Each article would educate us on some aspect of Scotland or some region of Scotland.
Now while I've suggested this would cost some $432,000 a year you need to remember that this activity is looking to produce billions in new tourism revenue and exports and even inward investment. It is thus a very minor cost. It just needs people with vision which currently is sadly lacking in Scotland.
Against this cost there is also the possibility to do all this at a lesser cost but that needs genuine co-operation by all parties both public and private. Let us remember the magazine idea. Many of us subscribe to a magazine on a certain topic but we rarely subscribe to two on the same topic. We may purchase another magazine on a one off but rarely do we ditch one we've been getting for a while.
Same with web sites. We go to the ones that we like and when it comes to Scottish web sites that means we might visit 3 or 4 but usually that is it unless we're looking for something specific. That's why you need to get involved with a number of web sites as that way you'll reach a much larger market.
Let us remember that the highest social network for Scottish matters claim 30,000 visitors. And how many of that 30,000 actually post on a regular basis or indeed visit the forums on a regular basis? You'd be lucky to reach even 1% of that figure. So by engaging the big Scottish web sites you are going to reach millions which is a much better market than social networking can reach.
OK.. so I've established what needs to be done to make a real difference but let's say you simply have no money to do this. What is the way forward?
The answer is to share. Let's take COSCA as an example. They, together with the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs, want to better promote clan societies and by doing so also help Scotland. They want to encourage Scotland to have good clan gatherings where lots in the Diaspora will visit Scotland to take part.
To get better exposure they need to work with other organisations in a meaningful way. Let me illustrate this by using my own web site as an example. They should offer a high profile link to my site from their own home page. However, when the link is clicked it should go to a page on their own web site where they tell people about my web site and what we offer.
They could then create two pages under that which would be (1) What's New on Electric Scotland and (2) Electric Scotland's ScotNews Feed. Now all they need to do to create these pages is add a wee bit of java code to the page and lo and behold they get dynamic pages where the content is displayed on their own web site.
So do we complete with COSCA? No we don't. So what is preventing them from doing that? Lack of vision would be the answer.
Now in return for that they should also offer a regular digest of their own news and send me a link to that on their own web site. Electric Scotland would then be able to add that link to our own ScotNews feed. Remember the ScotNews Feed merely provides a Title, a short description and then a link to go to so you can read the article. We are thus providing links to other web sites and rarely to our own content from the ScotNews Feed.
Now having done that for Electric Scotland they can then do that for other Scottish web sites. For each they can provide a decent write up about the site and depending on the site they can also do a regular update on what's new on that site. Of course they may need to contact these sites to find out how to best get a regular update on what's new. They would also discuss how each web site could link to their own news on a regular basis.
As most clan societies don't do much in the way of updates they may simply have a page where each clan is listed so they can provide a link to their web sites although again I'd encourage them to create a page for each clan society with onward links to their site. On the specific page for each clan society they should ask each society for a write up or failing that do one themselves. All of that provides them with a huge amount of content and encourages everyone to work with them.
Note that none of this costs money although it will take some time to create the pages.
So that's what I mean by sharing and helping to build a great resource where people come together.
The Scottish Government and their agencies could do something similar but unfortunately they don't work very well with the private sector despite that being an enormous market that they don't currently reach.
So there you have my views on how to better communicate your message in the online world. You have to give a little to get a lot.
Alastair
I thus thought I'd put some of my thoughts on this down on paper as a starting point for future discussions and figured I'd copy it here as well so here are my thoughts...
In today's world companies and organisations are seriously challenged to get exposure for their cause despite the fact that social networking has been touted as the way forward.
Traditional news sources such as newspapers no longer provide an easy way to contact your target market as they simply no longer have the readership numbers.
Social Media in my opinion is also seriously challenged to reach your market as people simply don't use that media in that fashion. How many social media communities have you joined? And how often have you visited them? Unless you are personally invested in them I suspect you visit rarely.
What Social media has done however has shot the marketing industry in the foot as more time is now spent on them than traditional web sites that should have been the best way to communicate. Like some estimate that most Facebook users are actually only interested in playing games.
How often have you had an invite to link to or be a friend of someone? It happens to me daily and 99.9% of the time I have no idea who the person is, why they want to link to me or be my friend.
And then there are web sites but here also there are many problems and you only need to look at a web sites visitor numbers to see whether you are getting enough visitors.
I did a specific analysis on my own web site which was started back in 1997 to see how well I was communicating. I found that if I wanted to get certain information in front of my visitors then a web page wasn't going to cut it.
Now my site does get an average of 180,000 unique visitors each month. Two years ago I started another web site and despite there already being a huge amount of content I only average around 3,000 unique visitors per month and I add content daily. I believe that in part shows how difficult it is to launch a new web site and get decent visitor numbers. Yet new web sites spring up all the time.
There is only so much time that people can devote to the Internet and this is time when you aren't working or taking time to be with family or friends or running the kids to events.
So I was looking for a means to get a message to all my visitors rather than just a few of them or at best a few hundred. In other words how could I get a message to all 180,000 of them?
I concluded that the only way was to have a main banner in the header of my web site and thus on all my web pages that would change at least weekly to reflect the current message. That banner would need to link to something that was seriously interesting otherwise after clicking on one or two of them they would be ignored.
So not only would a marketing company have to create specific content to go with each banner but they'd also need to create a compelling banner to attract people's attention. How likely is it that any marketing person would be prepared to put in the work to do that? I would say very unlikely but that's also why marketing people today are ineffective in what they do.
However that isn't the end of the barrier to this type of adverting as there is a cost. To get a banner across all pages of a site, which is what is needed to get in front of all my visitors, you need space that the web site makes money from. Why should any web site actually lose money to promote your marketing campaign? The answer of course is that they wouldn't. Also, that space on any decent high traffic web site is where most of that sites income comes from. So they not only need to be fully compensated for that but as the site is now tied to one company, one product, they are likely going to want a fixed contract and at probably a higher rate that they would charge normally as no web site wants to put all their eggs in one basket.
All of this means that free marketing won't work or at best only have a very limited affect. You only need to look at how Homecoming Scotland was promoted to realize that. Despite all the chatter on social media about it that didn't translate into numbers needed to make the event a success.
No high traffic web sites were used to get the message to the Scots Diaspora as none of them had the appropriate space to donate to ensure the message got out there. So all they got was the odd article on one web page somewhere on the site and at best that probably only reached hundreds and not the hundreds of thousands that they needed to get in front of.
So what I am saying is that communicating to hundreds of thousands of people in your target market is not going to work unless you come up with some serious money.
In my view the only other way is to get a genuine partnership between many different web sites where they cross promote each other. However I have never seen this working as in short people are just selfish. Why should COSCA help to promote Electric Scotland? In short they wouldn't as they want people to go to their site and not Electric Scotland. However that is never going to happen as Electric Scotland has a much wider base that COSCA as not only do we have a lot more information on Scottish Clans but we also have a huge amount of information on every possible aspect of Scottish history and also a huge amount of information on the Scots Diaspora. So that means people have 99 reasons for coming to Electric Scotland against one reason to go to COSCA.
I have written several articles about COSCA but when did COSCA write an article about Electric Scotland? That is what I mean about being selfish. This of course applies to all walks of life and I talked about this very matter back in 1997 when I gave a talk to Scottish Members of Parliament about what the web could mean for Scotland. I said at the time that we had to come together in Scotland to provide a wider community for the world to learn about us and do business with us. That never happened and everyone went their own way and that didn't work and you just need to look at how poorly Visit Scotland has performed over the years to see that.
The other factor is that most Scots are invested in their Scottish roots but comparatively few are invested in their clan connections. And being interested in genealogy does not actually translate to wanting to belong to a clan. And at least 75% of Scots have no clan connection at all. Many in the Diaspora have more than one clan connection so which one will they join? Often the answer is none of them.
Now I am personally a Scot, born in Scotland and worked and lived in Scotland for many years. Going back as far as I can with my genealogy I can only find more Scots on my line so I'm as Scottish as you can find. Am I proud of being a Scot? Yes, indeed I am. Am I proud of being a member of Clan MacIntyre? That doesn't even factor into my thinking. When have you ever heard of the old pioneers saying they were proud of their clan connection? Probably never but I'll bet you've often heard of them being proud of their Scottish roots or the place they came from in Scotland.
So in my opinion promoting Scottish clans is a huge task to undertake and unless some serious money can be found or a major change of attitude in the clan organisations then I doubt much can be achieved.
So starting from this point where do we go next?
I would suggest that there are only some dozen Scottish web sites that get decent traffic and by that I mean over 100,000 unique visitors per month. I would suggest run of site advertising would cost around US$3,000 a month on annual or longer contracts. That's then $36,000 a month or US$432,000 a year. Problem is not all these web sites can currently offer run of site advertising but they could if they had a decent incentive to do that.
Now take that money and then add the work needed to produce compelling articles. I would suggest that the articles should come in one a week so 52 a year. All these articles need to be archived on each site and not be a link to another site where they would be held. A banner graphic would need to be created for each article.
While this sounds like a lot of work it really shouldn't be as there is more than enough information available to pull this together. You do however need to plan the work and ensure each article can have links, embedded videos and have good hi-res graphics. Perhaps a professional writer might be employed to produce the articles and each article should be good ones... perhaps up to 20,000 words.
Promoting Scotland should be the theme as that gets wide recognition and within that clan matters can be discussed. Each article would educate us on some aspect of Scotland or some region of Scotland.
Now while I've suggested this would cost some $432,000 a year you need to remember that this activity is looking to produce billions in new tourism revenue and exports and even inward investment. It is thus a very minor cost. It just needs people with vision which currently is sadly lacking in Scotland.
Against this cost there is also the possibility to do all this at a lesser cost but that needs genuine co-operation by all parties both public and private. Let us remember the magazine idea. Many of us subscribe to a magazine on a certain topic but we rarely subscribe to two on the same topic. We may purchase another magazine on a one off but rarely do we ditch one we've been getting for a while.
Same with web sites. We go to the ones that we like and when it comes to Scottish web sites that means we might visit 3 or 4 but usually that is it unless we're looking for something specific. That's why you need to get involved with a number of web sites as that way you'll reach a much larger market.
Let us remember that the highest social network for Scottish matters claim 30,000 visitors. And how many of that 30,000 actually post on a regular basis or indeed visit the forums on a regular basis? You'd be lucky to reach even 1% of that figure. So by engaging the big Scottish web sites you are going to reach millions which is a much better market than social networking can reach.
OK.. so I've established what needs to be done to make a real difference but let's say you simply have no money to do this. What is the way forward?
The answer is to share. Let's take COSCA as an example. They, together with the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs, want to better promote clan societies and by doing so also help Scotland. They want to encourage Scotland to have good clan gatherings where lots in the Diaspora will visit Scotland to take part.
To get better exposure they need to work with other organisations in a meaningful way. Let me illustrate this by using my own web site as an example. They should offer a high profile link to my site from their own home page. However, when the link is clicked it should go to a page on their own web site where they tell people about my web site and what we offer.
They could then create two pages under that which would be (1) What's New on Electric Scotland and (2) Electric Scotland's ScotNews Feed. Now all they need to do to create these pages is add a wee bit of java code to the page and lo and behold they get dynamic pages where the content is displayed on their own web site.
So do we complete with COSCA? No we don't. So what is preventing them from doing that? Lack of vision would be the answer.
Now in return for that they should also offer a regular digest of their own news and send me a link to that on their own web site. Electric Scotland would then be able to add that link to our own ScotNews feed. Remember the ScotNews Feed merely provides a Title, a short description and then a link to go to so you can read the article. We are thus providing links to other web sites and rarely to our own content from the ScotNews Feed.
Now having done that for Electric Scotland they can then do that for other Scottish web sites. For each they can provide a decent write up about the site and depending on the site they can also do a regular update on what's new on that site. Of course they may need to contact these sites to find out how to best get a regular update on what's new. They would also discuss how each web site could link to their own news on a regular basis.
As most clan societies don't do much in the way of updates they may simply have a page where each clan is listed so they can provide a link to their web sites although again I'd encourage them to create a page for each clan society with onward links to their site. On the specific page for each clan society they should ask each society for a write up or failing that do one themselves. All of that provides them with a huge amount of content and encourages everyone to work with them.
Note that none of this costs money although it will take some time to create the pages.
So that's what I mean by sharing and helping to build a great resource where people come together.
The Scottish Government and their agencies could do something similar but unfortunately they don't work very well with the private sector despite that being an enormous market that they don't currently reach.
So there you have my views on how to better communicate your message in the online world. You have to give a little to get a lot.
Alastair