Pilote CEO, David Fuller was recently invited as a Guest Speaker to present to the International Council of Yacht Clubs (ICOYC) at the Royal Southern Yacht Club in the UK. The topic for his speech was ‘Social Media for Yacht Clubs‘.

The Commodores and senior management of more than 20 of the world’s biggest yacht clubs met to discuss many aspects of Yacht Club management including pressing issues relating to attracting and retaining members.

David’s speech covered some of the ways in which Yacht Clubs can use social media to become part of members’ daily lives and communicate relevant and timely news on platforms that younger members might use more than older members. Yacht Clubs like Melbourne’s Sandringham Yacht Club already use sites like Facebook to talk to members who are important to the overall demographic of the club.

As a result of the presentation and through discussions with some of the world’s top yacht clubs including the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, Seattle Yacht Club and the Royal Southern Yacht Club, David and Pilote Media have developed a 1 day workshop for Clubs that are looking to learn more about how to use Social Media effectively.

The workshop is designed to meet the specific challenges of yacht clubs and sailing clubs and deliver against goals like increased revenue, increased member retention and the reduction of the average age of members. Speaking about the workship David said:

All clubs are facing challenging times. The idea of committing to an organisation is something that less people are doing – whether it is sailing clubs, golf clubs or political parties. Social Media is one way that clubs can adapt their communication strategy to help with some of their challenges. The leadership of some of the most innovative and modern clubs are showing that social media can be a very useful tool and we want to give other clubs some of the insight into best practice.

More information about the Social Media for Yacht Clubs workshop can be found here.

New Website for Wendy Lee Taylor.

Wendy is a singer, dancer, actress, songwriter and seamstress. Wendy’s talents cover so many facets of the entertainment industry. Her career has taken her from her home town Melbourne, to Japan, Paris, and London’s West End.

Earlier this year, Wendy asked us to build a website with that would allow her to promote her music as well as her shows. The website also had to support content in English, French and Japanese. Pilote’s web team used plugins that work with well known music artist platform ‘Reverbnation’ to create a site that Wendy can update from anywhere in the world.

Wendy said:

I love the new site. It is fresh and clean and says what I want it to say about my work and my music. Its great to be able to make changes myself and I like the way it links with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Pilote Media were great to work with. I just gave them a list of things that I wanted and they made the changes quickly and within the budget I had.

Taking the T.E.A.M. Approach

Arizona based physical trainer and massage therapist company T.E.A.M. Approach is a great example of a small local company that can benefit from being found online for key phrases. Trainer Andrew Panagopoulos wanted a website that was simple – just enough for his clients to find the right number to call for in-home massage near Scottsdale.

The Melbourne based Pilote Media team used Skype to work with Andrew to create the look and feel he was happy with.

Andrew said:

It came to the time where we knew we had to update our website. We didn’t need all the bells and whistles – just something that quickly comminicated our service offer to clients and gave them the phone number to call. We wanted to publicise our in-home massage service especially and the guys at Pilote Media did some basic SEO to help us be found on Google for some key phrases.

For more information about getting your website built or rebuilt by Pilote, contact us.

A new study, reported in Melbourne’s Age newspaper, suggests that Australian CEOs aren’t too interested in diversity with only 22% of 1200 Chief Exectutive Officers saying that they have appointed – but worse – even intend to appoint a female senior manager. When asked if they had any women in, or intended to appoint any women to, senior management (a C-level job) – 75% of CEOs of small- to mid-sized firms said no.

The lack of diversity in the boardroom means that Australian businesses may be making bad decisions, not just in relation to who they employ, but also in relation to their customers too.

Christina Ioannidis, an international marketing consultant who works with Pilote Media spoke from Dubai where she is running a training course for companies in the middle east who want to get it right:

If you don’t have a diversity of experience and points of view in your management team, how can you have empathy with over 50% of your customer base? Men and women make buying decisions in very different ways, so if your marketing communications are not aimed at the right audience, you may be losing customers, which in turn will impact your bottom line.

Female consumers want to know that their interests are being looked after at the highest level, but it flows all the way down the business. In online marketing, women consumers use social media more than men, so if you have social media as part of your digital marketing strategy and you don’t have diversity in your online marketing team, then you might be getting it very wrong.

Pilote Media offer companies training and consulting in the areas of diversity in marketing and marketing to women. In the short-term, Christina can facilitate product innovation sessions and advise on marketing strategies that ensure the huge female market is being properly addressed.

We thought we would do a bit of mystery shopping for SEO, just to see what companies in Melbourne are being offered.

Our first surprise was that many of the companies exhibiting at the Melbourne Internet Show were not from Melbourne at all. Many were from Sydney and one was from California.

Our second surprise was that several of the companies that had SEO written in big letters on their exhibition stands, didn’t really do SEO and we suspect they get in a sub-contractor or freelancer should anyone ever ask them about it.

We shouldn’t be surprised these days to find a couple of SEO agencies reluctant to talk about how they actually did SEO. None would reveal if they used platforms like SEOMoz or Raven Tools or Linkdex.

Only one admitted to buying links, saying – “because if everyone else is, sometimes you have to in order to compete.”

You should always be wary of an SEO company that charges the same price to do SEO for a head-tail keyword in a very competive space as a relatively uncompetitive keyword. While the process might be the same, the amount of time and effort required for one is a lot more than the other.

Like many of these exhibitions at the moment, the buzz is around Social Media. Everyone is an expert – but just as LinkedIn is a way for recruiters to do background checks on potential hires, Twitter is a great way to see if digital marketing experts are ‘walking the walk.’ Several of the speakers at the Melbourne Internet Show are not on Twitter, and some that are have just a handful of followers.

We think that Melbourne companies deserve a bit better. We know that we have a better SEO solution that what we saw on the day, and we also think that we can deliver great value across the range of digital marketing services including Social Media.

We were asked by Abarth to make sure that the brand competed with bigger, more well funded brands like Mini. We created a strategy that used content marketing to engage a passionate fan-base for the brand on multiple channels including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and a purpose built blog.

Pilote were also the official online agency for the Trofeo Abarth 500 GB race series which ran in 2010. We also provided PR and press services, video production, event organisation, sponsorship activation and hospitality.

This week, I’ve been a guest of US Virgin Island Tourism and the International Rolex Regatta on St Thomas in the Caribbean, to see how a small sailing event has worked with its title sponsor – Rolex – for 39 years and how local businesses benefit from sponsorship as part of their marketing strategy.

The one marketing tip that I will take away from the trip, is a reminder that in a world of social media, everyone is an ambassador and you can find influential voices outside the mainstream media who will promote your product or service or event to a global audience.

At Pilote Media, we like to use sponsorship as a way to create engaging content for businesses that might operate in industries that on the face of it might not seem that exciting. Sponsoring a yacht in a small, local event can also be useful to motivate your employees or give your prospects a once in a lifetime experience.

The International Rolex Regatta only has about 60 boats competing, compared with Geelong’s Festival of Sails which had around 300 in 2012, but each of those 60 boats has a hundred stories and the photos and videos of those boats are now broadcast at the speed of light around the globe.

As well as the big events, like the Grand Prix or the Tennis, Melbourne also hosts a huge variety of smaller events that get an international audience. Participating in these smaller events as a sponsor or a marketing partner can be very cost effective, especially when part of a larger marketing strategy that involves social media and professionally produced content.

I’m looking forward to sharing some of the best practice that I picked up in St Thomas with event organisers in Melbourne.

Brand journalism is a growing trend amongst companies who are using professionally produced content to help them with their marketing communications, search engine optimisation and content hungry social media.

The Pilote brand journalism team will include business authors, journalists, bloggers, film makers and photographers, all of whom have been trained to tell stories and find interesting and relevant subjects – even in areas that might at first glance seem mundane.

David Fuller, CEO of Pilote Media also runs a blog for decision makers in the sport of sailing. He says that marketing and PR professionals need to think like journalists when creating content or risk alienating prospects and customers. He commented:

Cutting corners when creating content is a false economy. If badly written or badly produced content ends up on the web with your brand on it, then it can seriously damage your reputation and brand equity. This is especially evident in social media, where interns and junior staff are given huge responsibility for speaking publicly on behalf of a company.

There are many reasons why having a journalistic approach can be beneficial.

Journalists are trained to tell a story. Marketing people who work day in and day out with the same products and services can be desensitised to good stories that people might be interested in.  Brand journalists can see interesting and engaging content in places that internal marketing people might take for granted.

A journalistic approach also forces people who create content to think about the audience. This is something that marketing people – especially in start-up businesses often don’t do well. David Fuller, who has consulted to many digital entrepreneurs and start-up companies says:

The answer to the question “who is your audience?” is very rarely – “everyone”. This is the same for produce development as it is for creating marketing communications. Your prospects and your customers need different information. Your shareholders or investors are looking for different information to bloggers or other parts of the media.

Your “audience” might not even be a person. In the case of SEO, you want to create great content for readers, but you also need to keep in mind your keywords. People with journalistic training or a journalistic approach can balance these audience requirements when creating copy, which is why we have focussed on that kind of background when putting together our team.

Other advantages to using a brand journalist to create content include: the ability to translate industry jargon into language that is understood by a wider audience, a tendency not to exagerate or use hyperbole, and they can seem more credible as a source.

The Pilote Media brand journalist team will be announced later in the year.

The agency, which specialises in online marketing techniques such as SEO, mobile marketing and social media will initially be based in Melbourne.

Founder and CEO, David Fuller said:

It’s great to be coming home. There are some great Australian companies who are doing great things, both at home and overseas and we want to be able to help them using the latest online marketing techniques. Having operations in Australia will allow us to utilise the best digital marketing ideas from around the world and benefit our Australian and global clients.

Pilote is set to bring some new technologies to the Australian market including a cloud-based SEO platform that allows businesses of any size to take control of their search engine optimisation processes.

David commented:

SEO is one area of online marketing that we think we can bring something new to Australia. We’re committed to providing a ‘transparent seo’ service where our clients own the process and all the intellectual property associated with it. There are a lot of SEO companies who still operate in a ‘black-box’ and just give their clients a report at the end of the month. Our process helps the whole company be involved.

Pilote is also looking too promote Australian companies abroad using its international networks and expertise.

Christina Ioannidis, one of Pilote’s senior marketing consultants who specialises in international marketing said:

Australian manufacturers are doing it tough at the moment due to the high dollar, but there are some really world-class Australian companies that are making great products and delivering great services and we want to help them compete on the world stage. Online marketing is one of the best ways to do that – especially social media. Brands can engage customers all around the world and create brand ambassadors and evangelists who act as a virtual sales force in almost any country.

As well as focussing on digital and online marketing, Pilote will promote content creation and ‘brand journalism’ as a way for companies to succeed at SEO and social media.

David remarked:

Good content is an asset that can give you a return on investment right across your marketing and communications activities. We are big advocates of ‘brand journalism’ which has benefits for SEO, but also engages prospects, clients and internal customers. Feeding social media can be time consuming, but a good content strategy helps you get on top of Facebook updates and Tweets as well as more traditional outlets like press releases.

For more information about Pilote Media in Australia, call 03 9010 5502 or email us.