A Discussion with Taan Worldwide’s Peter Gerritsen: Part 2

A few weeks ago, I joined Peter Gerritsen, president of Taan Worldwide, for a video chat on a variety of agency- and digital-marketing-related topics. What we thought would be a very brief conversation ended up running longer — turns out we had a lot to talk about together! Because of that, we decided to share the transcript of our discussion here, broken out into three parts (you can also watch the full video here). The first part, which covers some of the most common issues we see with agency websites today, went up on our blog recently.

In this second post, we discuss content marketing (and whether your blog should be housed on your website or on a separate URL) and the role of social media.

Peter:    You see lots of agencies building their blogs and utilizing not just senior leadership but others in the organization to create blogs and write articles to post. Do you think blog content should be embedded throughout a website? Should a blog be built separately so you have the ability to make opinions that aren’t directly tied to that agency?
Probably yes and no to any one of those questions. I get that question a lot. “I want to start promoting my blog. Is it something I should be promoting on my site? Should I be promoting it separately to the site but connected?”

Mark:    This is a great question that comes up all the time, and I think one of the reasons why I hear this question all the time is because my opinion on the matter is counter to another consultant’s opinion on the matter.
Michael Gass on Fuel Lines, who is just a wonderful and brilliant guy, really excellent consultant and just … the agency industry is lucky to have him. Really good guy, and he’s helped a lot of agencies with their social media efforts, both for themselves and for their clients.
I’ve gotten to know Michael pretty well over the years, but on this one topic we, on the surface, disagree.
We had a conversation about this recently, and basically, my understanding of his perspective is that, when he’s going into an agency and they’re just getting started on a content strategy, and maybe it’s the principal who’s going to get things going, he recommends this 30 posts in 30 days thing, just to create the habit of content creation inside of an agency. It’s a tool he uses to, in some ways, show them how much they actually know. I’m behind all of that stuff.
He suggests, when you’re doing that, to do that in an offsite blog, and some of the reasons he has for that … I think, one, to make it so that you can set it up really quickly. It’s going to be on their site, and they have to rebuild a portion of their site and make it look good, get all that stuff. His goal is just get them writing as quickly as possible.
Another reason is that they might be testing the waters of a new positioning on this blog before the agency commits to it, and so that’s another reason he recommends offsite.
Based on the conversation we had, it does seem that we’re of like minds. Once they have decided on a positioning, and once they have created the culture of writing and they have committed to it, then he agrees that having the content onsite is a good idea; and that’s where we come together.
The reason I think the content ought to be onsite is because oftentimes this content is the most time-intensive marketing effort an agency is going to put forward because, as you mentioned, Pete, the executives are doing this content along with other people. There are people all throughout the agency taking their time to create this content, regardless if it is blogs, newsletters, webinars, whatever.
When you have that content offsite, its ability to impact your business is limited. Your site is your temple. That’s where people can go, see the work, see the people, get the vibe of the place, see the offices … see whatever they want to about the agency. When it’s offsite, you’re expecting they’re going to click from that blog over to your main site, and studies show that fewer than 10% of people actually do that, so 90% of the people who are discovering you through this great content you’ve written will never actually see your site.
That’s wasteful.

Peter:    Great point.

Mark:    When Michael is getting people set up and started, jump-starting them into this, that’s great; but as soon as it’s proven, move that content into the site.

Peter:    Related to that, so all this discussion about LinkedIn pages, Facebook pages … how much are they … they’re valuable, but how much do you replicate versus building different things for those entities versus your site?

Mark:    Again, my perspective is: the site is a temple. That’s the source of truth for all the contents around the agency. Then, again, just from my perspective, you use the different social media outlets to distribute that content. If you’re ready to add a blog post to your site, you’re going to broadcast it through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and post an excerpt on those channels, the ones that allow that, at least; but the link after they read those first few sentences goes back to your website.
The content resides on your site, but those other channels are basically distribution networks to build awareness around the content.

Peter:    That’s something we’ve been trying to do with Taan is, when members are writing blogs, put up the first paragraph on the Taan site but then have it link back to yours. Make it connected … connected to the organization, to you, and back again. I agree with that very much so.
I still personally am not sure exactly how Facebook fits into that. The audience that’s looking at an agency’s Facebook page versus a LinkedIn page … I think LinkedIn is probably more valuable in some ways, but then again that’s … it’s like job posting. They’re looking … I’m just not sure.

Mark:    Honestly, from our very immediate perspective, Twitter trumps them both tenfold.

Peter:    Right, absolutely.

Mark:    It’s just amazing what can happen on Twitter, and the reason is somebody picks up on some link and they like it, and then they re-Tweet it, and then ten of their friends, and ten of their friends, and ten of their friends. That can catch on fire.
It’s funny. What we see, for better or worse … and it’s really both … is that oftentimes people will re-Tweet something way faster than they could have possibly read it, so oftentimes people are re-Tweeting just to look like they’re reading to look like they’re smart and in the know; and they don’t even read the thing, just hit the re-Tweet button and go.
For better or worse … it’s better because it gets you more exposure, but these people might not necessarily have any idea what they’re actually promoting. We see a lot of that.

Peter:    I see that, too. I’ll see a Tweet, I’ll go to the article, I’ll read the article. It was posted an hour ago, but there’s already a hundred re-Tweets on this thing. It just took me ten minutes to read this. I agree with you.
There’s so many things you could be re-Tweeting. You have to have some sort of editing mind in your head about what you want to re-Tweet and what makes sense for you. Then you could spend all day just commenting on the articles that are there, which is another whole … I know there’s a whole method to the madness of commenting and having those comments come back, too.

Mark:    Absolutely. It’s a big deal.

Peter:    Here you are working with lots of companies, and you’re doing some amazing great work.

Mark:    Thanks, Pete.

Stay tuned for the third and final post, in which Pete and I talk about the biggest surprises we at Newfangled encounter in working with agencies, the role of mobile, and measuring each site’s performance with analytics.