Guy Clapperton, Author at Clapperton Media

Social media is a great place to put your own content. You’ll have realised that by now. No journalists to misinterpret it or put their own spin in place, just your business and its readership. It should be ideal but there’s a problem. You don’t own your social media.

At the time of writing this has become apparent to a lot of people. Some are higher profile than others. One you probably won’t have heard of is a friend of a friend (bear with us, it’s a true story). He has a large profile on LinkedIn and is known for being a little unorthodox (you can translate this as “he swears like a trooper”). He gave out a casual insult (to someone he knows well) in a LinkedIn group.

LinkedIn revoked his access almost immediately. Not just to the group but to the whole of the network. It took weeks to get this looked at by a human being who could see the lack of harm immediately. However there will have been damage in the meantime. LinkedIn is social media and like all of the other networks it’s owned by someone other than its users – in this case Microsoft.

Social media and business

A number of people will say that social networks are too involved in their own power grabs. Twitter in particular has come in for flak since Elon Musk bought the entire business. This comes mostly from people who believe the content has moved further to the right of the political spectrum. It may well have done so; the problem, though, is that people on the right had previously felt alienated.

They didn’t like that it was a largely lower-case-l-liberal playground. It’s now a rather further right playground and it has fewer staff keeping people safe, but this is the point. Neither set of people owned it.

And yet.

People keep using social media as their main marketing platform. Years ago LinkedIn had something called LinkedIn Events (it does now but it’s a different thing). People would sell places on their LinkedIn event and earn a living by doing so. One day LinkedIn decided it no longer wanted to sustain these events for the very good reason that they were not bringing in any cash for the company.

Members complained vehemently. LinkedIn had ruined their businesses, they said. How dare LinkedIn damage their livelihood. You could see why they were annoyed except in one respect. They did not own LinkedIn. None of them paid for it. You might just as well ask: how dare they use a network they didn’t own to promote their vested interests?

Social media and governments

10 Downing Street for social media post — 10 Downing Street

There are other examples in which entire governments have taken against social networks. On the day we are typing this blog entry (we’re very current here) the British government has banned its employees from having Tik Tok on their phones.

What’s that? You make a product or offer a service to teenagers and Tik Tok is the very place you want to promote it? That’s fine, you’re not affected by a government ban but here’s the thing: when the government starts to issue edicts people start to pay attention. Lots of it. If you doubt that then you need to consider the fate of Huawei. It’s a worldwide concern and survived but have a look at its collapsing share of the phone market on that link. Up until 2020 it was in the top five suppliers. Everybody stopped buying it once then-president Trump banned Google from working with it. So it didn’t have access to the Android system any more.

Predictions are dangerous things but suspicion over China could damage Tik Tok’s position on the world stage of social media. The result would be that anybody whose marketing presence depends excessively on Tik Tok would need to look again, rather carefully. Nobody knows what’s going to happen with this one but it’s certainly something to watch.

You need your own playground

The problem with using someone else’s playground is that you end up needing to play by their rules. Let’s say Clapperton Media set up its own social network. This is a stretch, and a bigger stretch is: let’s say it really took off and that you wanted to use it.

Now let’s say Guy had some stupid idea to make it distinctive (this is less of a stretch) and decided everybody had to have a rabbit in their avatar picture. He also decides that you have to refer to rabbits somewhere in every post (OK, this is back to “a bit of a stretch”).

If you want to take part in our network you have no choice. As long as we’re policing our own network adequately it’s our playground and works to our rules. Users and others in the community can object as much as they wish but the bottom line is that if you don’t like it, you don’t have to be there.

Ditto LinkedIn if you want to go a bit rogue with your tone. It’s the same with Twitter if you don’t like Elon Musk or the promoted Tweets you’re getting or indeed Tik Tok if you agree with various governments about security risks pertaining to China.

Effectively you need your own playground which is why we worry about companies, particularly on the smaller side, throwing everything into a particular network and neglecting their own website.

You need the other playground too!

This doesn’t mean social networks are unimportant. You need to claim your own company name on all of the networks to ensure nobody else does, say an unscrupulous competitor. Also never forget that the first place a journalist will look when preparing to interview you is LinkedIn. You might well find they actually go to Google first but LinkedIn’s search engine optimisation is so good that they’ll find your entry there as well.

However, this is a bit like having a market stall in someone else’s market. It might serve you extremely well but you’re always going to be bound by the rules of that particular market and if the owner decides to start imposing new rules, charging or anything else, you might be without a place.

Always, always keep your own site in order as well as communicating on someone else’s site.

Last week we took a look at producing your own media. You might not want to go through indirect channels, you might have a base of customers and prospects that will respond to the direct approach.

There is a lot to be said for the indirect route. You produce your own podcast, fine, but it’s going to contain whatever you want. You get someone else to interview because you’re interesting and the listeners will know you’ve been sanity-checked. It’s like the difference between a traditionally-published book and a self-published effort. A self-published volume might be excellent but it might also be full of typos. The traditional version will have been accepted by a publisher and had an editor looking over it to ensure it follows in a logical order and the spelling and grammar are OK.

If you’re convinced you have enough to say, however, why not try? There are many ways to run a podcast so we’re going to use Guy‘s “The Near Futurist” as an example.

Image of the Near Futurist podcast cover — Guy’s podcast – you can tell he’s not a visual person, the writing and logo are squashed when this appears on a phone screen

What is your podcast about?

It might sound obvious but the first decision to make is going to be the topic of your company’s podcast. “It’s going to be about my company” is unlikely to succeed. There are a number of reasons for this. Primarily the things that interest you in and about your business might not be all that thrilling to someone else. A small glazing business once came to Guy for thoughts on its website. It had started the copy (with changed names): “Ben and I had been trading independently for ten years but we thought, recently, let’s be serious – so we incorporated as a limited company.”

Nobody in the history of glazing has ever had “but are they a limited company or partnership?” as the first thing they want to know. Some need to understand whether the glazier is experienced. Many want to see pictures of windows they have installed. Probably all want to see testimonials.

Your podcast is the same. Making it about your business just won’t work. Guy’s effort, for example, could have been about journalism. Only other journalists and PR people/spokespeople (OK, that would be the readers of this blog, we grant you) would listen. So he decided to make it about the near future, taking advantage of 30+ years as a technology journalist .

So you need to decide what it’s about. Maybe there’s a niche within your own business that you can exploit.

An aside: the business purpose

The business purpose was and is different from just entertaining people, although he likes doing that too. Guy wanted to ensure he wasn’t one of those media trainers who had done some journalism years ago and whose counsel was therefore likely to be out of date. He wanted people to hear he knew how to interview people, to have a platform for his voice so if people wanted to check him out for some corporate voice work there was a current source, and perhaps a secondary source of income – which, thanks to a small amount of sponsorship, it has produced. Your own podcast needs to have a reason behind it as well.

Where do you start?

A theme you’ll get used to with us is the satnav image. You don’t start with “who do I interview” or “what microphone do I use” – you start with the business purpose. That’s your destination and like a satnav, the route you take has to be the best one to get you there.

It’s particularly important to be realistic with that destination. Few people are going to listen to a podcast and think “I’ll go and buy some of that item/service immediately”. You’re much more likely to achieve branding and thought leadership as long as you have a strong enough idea; this means putting obvious self-promotion to one side and focusing on issues that will resonate with your target client. It’s important at this stage to speak to a few of them!

You’ll need to decide some of the basics. Some podcasts are an hour long. Some are ten minutes. How long will your listeners listen? Ask them!

Guy Clapperton takes up the story:

My own podcast was relatively easy to formulate because the idea was to act as proof that I could interview people rather than just tell them about being interviewed – it’s a proof point. It’s also subtle proof that whether I’m more or less in my late fifties or not, I’m not put off by newer technologies – you hear a lot from marketing people about ‘over 55s’ as if we’re an alien species and I was keen to kill that stone dead.

Having those aims in mind it made complete sense to take advantage of my contacts in the IT PR industry and get them to supply me with some guests. I did so and it became easy to start building up a set of shows. The mechanics are surprisingly simple.”

Record and publish your podcast

When Guy is out interviewing people he doesn’t bother with an intimidating mic or other IT set-up (we get that you’re going to cry “we know, we’ve heard it”. Instead he uses his phone – just voice recorder on the iPhone or the equivalent on your Android phone. In terms of recording remote interviewees he uses Zoom although here he does use an external mic; the Blue Yeti was very good until he dropped it; the Blue Snowball does just as well. It connects to your computer like any other USB device.

He arranges the time for the interview and sends some topic areas over and records. He then uses a copy of Audacity (you can download it free of charge) to take out the umms and aah’s, his own and those of the interviewee. It’s worth leaving a few in so that you don’t end up sounding fake.

He then adds music, again using Audacity and he downloaded this music from Audiojungle – always use music for which you’ve paid a small amount so you can be sure you’re allowed to upload it. Other sources of music and of course other editing software is available.

Getting it out there is the next stage and here someone advised Guy to look at Libsyn, short for Liberated Syndication. This is an inexpensive way of uploading your edited and complete podcast; you can add “cover” artwork and show details.

It’s up there but nobody knows

At this point you’re published but nobody knows about it. This is where Libsyn has some clever workarounds; once you’ve filled in some details and selected some sources it will push your podcast to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Acast, your own website, just about wherever you want.

Then it’s up to you to publicise it.

Caveat: lies, damned lies and statistics

There are two things to beware of here. The modern version of Libsyn has two sets of figures you can look at. One is “Unique” and for a long time, Guy looked at these. What he didn’t realise was that it would register every time someone scrolled past a Tweet mentioning his show prompting it to start automatically. The fact that someone clicked off immediately was not, apparently, a problem.

The figure to look for is the IAB figure which is easy to select. This will be lower but it excludes accidental starts and other “non-listens”. Guy is now quite happy having 2-3000 downloads a month of his podcast.

The other thing to watch out for is your own time spent on getting your word out there. A small section of people reading this article might have ambitions to be full time podcasters in which case, great, go for it. However, most of you won’t, and it’s all too easy to put so much time into your podcast and publicising it that you might as well have taken it up as your sole occupation.

Always remember in the case of this or any other sort of marketing, it’s great as long as it’s doing its job. If it doesn’t perform or starts to suck all of your spare time out of the equation, it’s not doing you any favours – try something else!

And good luck – if your podcast attracts attention you can become a permanent fixture in your ideal client’s ears. This will make it all the more likely that they’ll come to you when they need a service like yours.

Your own content is a vital part of the media mix, Over the last few weeks, we’ve looked at why you might want to take part in the media and get coverage. There have been, we hope, some compelling thoughts. There will be people, however, who will wonder why they have to bother. Their own blogs, LinkedIn posts, Tik Toks, Instagram and reels allow them to contact clients and prospects really easily.

There is an element of truth to this. There are risks, however. Your own media is going to offer your side of the story and nothing else so everyone is going to expect it to be promotional. The trick, we believe, is to offer value without pretending it’s otherwise (we like to think these blogs are a good example: yes of course we want you to buy media training from us as a percentage of you do, so by all means these posts are promotional but we aim to add genuine insight to encourage you to keep reading!)

The aim of this entry, then, is to consider what you might want to put out into the market in terms of your own media. We will make a few assumptions:

You know what you need to get out of your media and what you want your audience to do next
You’ve done some basic research on your prospects so, for example, you won’t be aiming to do a Tik Tok if you’re aiming at senior people or a LinkedIn entry for the consumer market.

Those basics should be obvious but they don’t seem to be to everyone!

Own content: what are you good at?

There are many articles and resources online which suggest your social media is not about you, it’s about the client. Well, yes, up to a point and that’s why we kicked off with a couple of questions about your customer. There’s another factor, though.

Actually, the subheading up there is a big clue. You need to ask yourself what you’re actually good at.

For the moment, as we type, Google‘s algorithm (according to our excellent webmasters at Rare Form New Media) favours longer-form blogs that emerge regularly and contain original content. Longer-term followers might have noticed that prior to the website’s complete overhaul, you’d get a quick 300-400 word tip and then we’d end the article; 1250+ is apparently what’s going to be picked up and highlighted on Google now so we’re behaving accordingly.

The thing is, lead trainer and founder Guy writes all of the content at the moment (yes folks, it’s me). And as you might expect from someone who’s been a professional journalist for over 30 years, he’s pretty words-oriented. There he is, posing like a whatsit in front of some books he has no intention of buying.

So this plays very well into exactly what Google seems to want from websites at the moment, lots of fresh content with links outside and inside with an unobtrusive focus on the SEO phrase (in today’s instance you’ll notice “own content” crops up a few times).

Alternatives

Business advisors we’ve had have also suggested we look at other social media. Again, LinkedIn tends to be pretty good for us because it’s wordy. Instagram, however, is fine for “reels” – the short-form films that lend themselves to tips, we just re-use the ones we send to YouTube – but people scanning it for still photos will be out of luck as Guy has the visual sense of a particularly slow hamster. With a blindfold.

This may not be great for business and it drives the advisors up the wall but we do urge you, if you want to generate your own content, to stick to something you’re going to do well. Here is our basic impression of the social media and owned media out there at the moment and how to tell whether they’re right for you.

Your own blog

Obviously, a blog is in your playground, you’re paying for the space so you won’t face sudden controversies as a new owner takes over or the politics take over. You’re not restricted by word length so take advice from web experts – assume the lengths we’ve described above will be out of date if you’re reading this when it’s a year old or more. However, it’s worth considering people’s attention span. You might notice we’ve broken up every long entry not only with pictures but with subheadings. This helps people concentrate and it also helps structure the article; the main heading has subheadings and these in turn have H3 headings underneath them. Google will look out for well-structured content that isn’t duplicated from elsewhere and if Google’s algorithms like it, it’ll perform better when people are searching.

Facebook

A lot of services have their own company pages on Facebook. This can be a great idea for consumer-facing businesses. In our experience the business community isn’t as excited by a Facebook group so if you’re a business to business supplier then it’s worth looking at LinkedIn. Try to remember people go to Facebook to relax and unwind a little so it’s worth keeping it chatty.

LinkedIn is intended as a business network. Microsoft owns it; the original founders had the idea that you shouldn’t connect with people you didn’t know personally so you could recommend anyone in your network. Somewhere along the line, members jettisoned this idea en masse so connecting with anyone is pretty commonplace.

This has the advantage for business owners in that its audience arrives expecting business content. It also has a newsletter function with which you can reach people who follow you very quickly and in large numbers.

As you’d expect from such a widespread service, however, just about everybody is aware of those services so you’ll find competition for attention is fierce. You can get attention by adding constructive comments and debated to other people’s entries. Be careful though; this is a slow burn, results are not swift. This in turn means it can be quite a drain on your time.

YouTube

If your following would benefit from how-to videos or other forms of video content then YouTube is a useful resource. Remember everyone can upload videos so it will pay you to take a little more care than most; brush up your editing skills and buy a better webcam and microphone than the ones that came with your laptop. Very few people will look at a video and judge it as good or bad because of the video quality consciously. Many will walk away with a bad impression and not be sure why when the image is off centre, when the sound is muffled.

It’s arguable that YouTube is more the consumer brand and for business to business services you will look more professional with a paid account from competitor Vimeo. Depending on your market you may find a certain polite bewilderment if you even mention them; without any suggestion of this being a good or a bad thing, Google owns YouTube and therefore has a lot of marketing and branding muscle to throw at it.

Instagram

Insta (as the kids call it) has moved beyond the still-images-only network of years ago. You can now upload short videos (or “reels”) and therefore talk to as well as show things to your target market. Don’t forget to engage afterwards; you really don’t want this to end up looking as if you’re just shouting into the void.

Tik Tok

For a long time we wrote Tik Tok off not because it wasn’t going to succeed but because it was primarily a young person’s thing and in the consumer market – so if you’re in those markets it’s going to be good for you. Inevitably the young people from ten years ago are in their twenties and sometimes even thirties and are still watching Til Tok videos; from our point of view we’ve started duplicating our “tip” videos from Instagram and YouTube into Tik Tok just so we have a presence; it looks likely that people will still go to Tik Tok for something more entertaining.

Podcasts

You can of course make your own video series or create your own podcast. This isn’t difficult and in our next blog entry we’ll have a look at how lead trainer Guy puts his Near Futurist podcast together and gets it out there.

Overall it can be worth publishing your own media because it’s inexpensive and you get to tell your own story rather than allow an intermediary like a journalist to handle it. Before you decide to ignore the independent channels, however, remember they offer a sanity check and some legitimisation. You say your business is great to work for, that’s fine. Nobody is cynical enough to suggest you don’t believe it but they will recognise that you have a vested interest. If an independent journalist says you’re a great employer, however, people are more likely to listen.

Managing expectations is a bad phrase. It is often perceived as meaning “this is going to be a bit rubbish” – go on, when someone says they want to manage expectations a bit, that’s what you think they’re going to say.

In PR and media terms managing expectations is important. So often we’ve had initial meetings with clients who believe that once their interview skills are up to scratch, sales will go through the roof. Look at Steve Jobs. He was an incredible presenter and speaker and when he spoke people bought his iPhones. Well, yes they did. He also had an absolute fortune of marketing spend behind him.

There are more serious objections to working with the media, though, and this article is about one of them.

Will the journalist will just do what they want?

When we were preparing Clapperton Media for the redesign and rebrand (if you like the website then we got it right, if you don’t, not so much) we spoke to a few advisors. One of them asked us what our main mission in life was and we said – as it says on the homepage – that our clients were concerned that a journalist would take their points (or their clients’ points as many of our partners work in PR).

Our job, we said (and will continue to say), was to ensure our clients had the tools in place to manage an interview. The response was “I don’t accept the premise, I know journalists, they’ll just go away and write what they want”.

We didn’t end up working with him, as you can imagine. He had the same expectation as a lot of people, however; go into an interview with a journalist and they will take over and set the entire agenda themselves.

Some might, and it’s in avoiding those that the PR community can demonstrate a lot of value. The wiser ones, however, will allow you to set a lot of your own agenda. Here’s why.

Managing the journalist’s expectations

What so few people tell you is that journalists themselves have expectations for an interview. Here’s a blog entry from journalist website Muckrack that takes you through the sort of preparation they’ll do.

What they expect from you is very straightforward: expertise. If you’re dealing with a journalist and you want to publicise your business, they won’t want to act as your PR department but they’ll want to write about your area with some authority. And here’s where we get to the related point about journalists: they will have done the research and may even specialise in writing and commentating about your area, but they’re unlikely to have taken part. Your knowledge is going to be better than theirs.

This means that we need you to take over the agenda from time to time. Here’s a link to a YouTube video we use for media training sometimes:

It’s Dido Harding, then chief executive of TalkTalk, on a cyber-attack that happened eight years ago. The point we want to highlight is exactly three minutes in. Kirsty Wark is trying to interrupt but Harding persists in talking over her and introduces the notion that the company is offering its customers free credit monitoring so they can see whether they are at risk.

The interview improves

Wark may have been frustrated about this (we don’t know her, can’t ask) but Harding didn’t work for her, she worked for TalkTalk and wanted to be accountable to its customers. She is right to take control here. It’s also noticeable that she adds value. Wark couldn’t have known about the plan to help with credit monitoring, it is entirely up to Harding to introduce it at this stage.

She does so by taking control. She establishes her expertise. The viewer will trust her a great deal more than someone just answering yes and no and allowing the journalist to dictate the agenda completely.

So what should you expect?

The journalist expects you to share expertise and they won’t expect a sales pitch – if they get one it will stay in their notebook and not get shared or it will end up on the cutting room floor.

So if you can’t go in heavy with the sales pitch, what can you do and what should you expect to get out of it? Here are a few ideas.

Address some issues

You know your market better than the journalist. They might follow it carefully but their information is second hand. Pick some issues that are important to your business. The chances are very good that they will be important to others too, specifically the journalist’s readers. Qualify those issues by saying why they are important. Use phrases like “our customers are telling us” and “what the market is doing is…” and you will start to gain traction.

Limit what you address

One of the most frequent complaints we come across is clients thinking journalists are at fault because they fail to grasp the complexity of an organisation. They don’t get the nuances.

Let’s turn that around for a second. A journalist visits you or your organisation, or arranges a call. You spend, what, 45 minutes once the polite noises are out of the way? And you are expecting someone to master all of the nuances of a complex organisation in which you’ve been full time for several years within the space of that three quarters of an hour.

It’s not going to happen. The way to ensure you don’t get misquoted or misunderstood is to limit the topics you speak about. Expecting a journalist to grasp everything too quickly is a non-starter so the thing to do is to offer them a great deal less. Tailor what you say to that journalist’s audience.

Be careful with exclusives

One thing you’ll need to watch as interest in your business grows is the idea of an exclusive. Giving a journalist something no other outlet has is going to go down very well – with that publication. The tricky thing is navigating your way around other journalists when you’re perceived to have done someone a favour. For our money the easiest thing to do is to treat them all equally; by all means you’ll have some you’d rather deal with than others because you’re human but we’d recommend trying not to play one off against another. It rarely ends up serving any useful purpose (and if you’ve been giving exclusives to one particular trade journalist because they worked on your favourite publication, what do you do when they move job and work for the competition?)

Final expectations

You can and should expect to be treated fairly. Journalists will always get a balancing comment if someone is criticising you (if said journalist knows what they’re doing). You should expect accuracy – they might not highlight the bits of your messages you wanted them to, which is another good reason for limiting what you tell them, but they will correct it if they get something factually wrong.

As we’ve said before, in terms of what the reader or listener is going to do next, it can be a good idea to start at this point and work out your communications strategy from there by moving backwards. Getting back to the point with which we kicked off this entry, it would be very unusual, unless you have Apple’s marketing dollars, to get a load of sales out of a piece of press coverage. It tends to be a slower burn than that. But if you play the game, deliver relevance and engage with what’s important to the reader, it’s a slow burn you should be able to ignite.