WaPo goes out of its way to say this isn’t news, but “first and most comprehensive examination of the complex system.” I’m sure news will come out of it, but it doesn’t need to given the results they’ve already achieved. This is far cry from your average investigative journalism piece and it’s an inspiration for a new generation of corporate thought leadership.

Enforcing a Longer Attention Span

Having created this package, they’re using a non-traditional tempo to distribute it.  Instead of dropping this huge mass of information out there in a day, they’re dripping it out slowly over time.

Why?  Because WaPo and your company face the same marketing problem. Even if you unveil a great study (for WaPo, a story) there’s so much competition you simply can’t hold the public’s attention for long.  How’s WaPo solving that?  The same way you can!

• They’re taking a week to release portions of their research.  Each day another article will come out, keeping a stream of people fixated on their topic and coming back to their properties. It also makes the effort feel big and compels the audience to reflect on the topic over a period of time.
• The video intro gives the site an imprimatur of weight and authority to the package.  It communicates, “this is so special, so historic that we created a dramatic video about it.”   And yet video production is now so cheap any thought leadership study can have its own flashy intro and feel weightier.  Bonus points for making it entertaining.
• They’re escaping the tyranny of the traditional media news cycle by using social media.  Who cares if the press jumps onto some other story next week ?  The conversation with readers will continue online, especially among those most interested in the issues it raises. WaPo says their TSA-focused blog is the anchor of the microsite, “providing updates on Top Secret America coverage, original journalism and insight around related national security matters… will serve as an online destination for further reporting, discussion, analysis, and interaction. Priest and Arkin will host this continuing conversation throughout the rest of the year…”
• In several places on the site, WaPo states how much work it took to assemble. “Two years in the making…more than a dozen Washington Post journalists.” Readers know when real work goes into something.  If WaPo took two years to create this, the least I can do is give it a serious look.

Other good moves to emulate:

1. Microsite: The content has its own microsite.  That conveys the importance of the topic and gives WaPo the freedom to customize the layout that’s as unique as the content. It also frees them from WashingtonPost.com’s format, which resembles a print newspaper — not an interactive research tool.

2. Authors are people, not institutions: The authors of the package, Dana Priest and William Arkin, are prominently featured on the site with head shots and bios and they make appearances in the intro video. That puts a face to the topic and will help with recall when the authors appear on TV through the week.  Readers will also note their bylines in subsequent pieces.  Especially in professional services circles, where clients are buying people’s expertise, it’s important to show the faces behind research.

On the downside, I was hoping to see a way to connect to the authors.  A twitter feed or blog I could follow, maybe a LinkedIn or Facebook account to connect with (not ones dedicated to the topic, but the experts on it).   Alas, these reporters are probably too busy to run those channels, but it’s a lost opportunity.  Even a box to fill in an email address to sign up for their latest articles would have added to the WaPo’s win.

3. Social media: There are the standard share/comment buttons. A prominent section of the microsite is devoted to “Conversation” with Twitter (@PostTSA) and Facebook channels.  A Twitter scroll of #topsecretamerica is included to show they’re listening and to give readers a chance to see the conversation evolve over time.  I couldn’t find any embed code to include their tool on my blog, but I’ve asked them via Twitter if that’s available and will let you know if they come back.

4. Who cares about the press release?: The press release is at the very bottom of the microsite — where it should be.  Really, compared to these other channels, how can a release compare?

5. Helping the reader: Under the banner of usefulness, they have a helpful reference section with definitions and explanation of national security terms and services. Again, it gives the visitor a reason to come back multiple times and makes you feel indebted and thankful to the company.

6. Send us Tips: Tip section headlined with, “Talk to us. Want to contribute to this ongoing project?”  Every page has one, from the front page entry point to each and every company profile entry.  You’re invited to upload docs, video or audio.  Wow.

7. SEO: They’ve set up multiple domains and routes into the package.  There’s http://topsecretamerica.com, http://www.washingtonpost.com/TopSecretAmerica, and http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america. Multiple domains mean they’ll dominate their search results more with their own material.  (Any SEO experts want to offer something specifgic on why this is a good/bad idea?)

Here’s what it looks like to completely dominate a topic on day one of release:

The first couple results are authoritative blogs (NYT, CNN and third, ironically — WaPo).  Note that on the right hand side are adwords for Video: Top Secret America.” Talk about integrated marketing!

The next two results are Washingtonpost.com properties, then Slashdot (having a proud geek moment), followed by a live-tweet stream punctuated by blog posts in a scrolly.  YouTube videos from the companion PBS documentary are next.

Finally, a Google trends chart that states the topic is the 16th most popular search in the past hour.

So there’s our new high bar for thought leadership dominance.  What ideas do YOU get from WaPo’s delivery of this story?

1. Assemble the keywords you anticipate customers (I’m going to say “customers” but I mean any targeted audience) are using to learn about a topic.

2. Run ‘em through the top search engines. Sit back and consider the terawatts of power, gigabytes of
storage and millions of people hours that went into compiling the list of results before you.  They’ve worked for thousands or and potentially millions of other searchers. This is your scaffolding.

Among the results are blog posts, forums, news articles, wiki entries, YouTube videos, Slideshare decks and Flickr pics. Every one of those types of media have comment boxes underneath. Use them! Post comments, post links to your studies, use the publications and blogs that come up as a hit list for byline pieces.

Be strategic, be authentic, thoughtful and don’t be overly talkative.  Recognize that if you’re articulating a complex, sophisticated and nuanced vision, the followers you want to attract are already paying very close attention to these hits.  They’ll see your contributions to the conversation and then follow your links back to your own intellectual web.

These comments will not be indexed. Pretty much all comment infrastructures have a “nofollow” line of code in the HTML that tells search engines to ignore what comes next. But the end result is the same. People searching for information on your topic will find YOU.

A few tips:

When making comments, a lot of blogs allow a unified sign-in like DISQUS.  It allows you to build a profile based on all your comments online.  If people like one thing you’ve written under a DISQUS account, they can click on it and see everything else, further drawing them in to your point of view.

Don’t forget to use specific search engines for blogs, like Icerocket and Technorati to find prominent discussions to show up in.

When news breaks, be sure to join in the conversation. Search engines increasingly track the “real-time web” and recognizing that those results will be on top and then using ‘em is about as useful as SEO can get.

Remember, it’s a web. Customers don’t have to land in the center for you to capture them. Find a strand, yank on it and reel ‘em in.

This is the fourth of five posts marking the first ever Thought Leadership-SEO Week.  Be sure to take the poll on how companies are using SEO for thought leadership, how to use SEO to promote white papers and how the psychological principle of closure affects SEO.

Choose the right format.  PDFs, Microsites and Domains, Oh-My.

4. Microsites are best: It’s likely your white paper is in PDF form.  The bad news is that for a variety of reasons PDFs don’t index as well as regular web pages.  To retain the beautiful formatting of the PDF, yet achieve the search-friendliness of HTML, set up a one-page microsite on your site that contains all the text and charts in the document.  Include a link to the PDF so people can download it.  Use this URL in all the steps that follow.  Keep in mind, the idea is to be a thought leader, not a specific document in a specific format leader.

5. Don’t mistake sites for pages: Individual web pages, not sites, are what can be optimized for search engines.  If your company’s site is #1 on Google, that’s great.  But it doesn’t mean that when someone is searching for keywords related to your topic that your white paper will come up.  Every white paper needs its own page and optimization effort behind it.

6. Sub domains: Consider setting up a sub domain name for the white paper.  If you use dashes-in-the-address with your keywords then the search engines will see it and better understand and catalog your work.

Select Your Keywords

7. Empathize: Using every empathetic bone in your body, imagine the keywords that your target audience might use to find your white paper.  Include lists of terms used by people who use your jargon, don’t use your jargon, and those who are looking for your information but don’t know it yet.  Are they the right keywords? Right means what people use to search, not what you think they should use to search.  If someone else is using your keywords (i.e. “servers” in the restaurant field versus technology) even if they’re in another field, find another set.  Remember what Sun-Tzu says about being where the enemy isn’t.  There are hundreds of keyword analysis tools you can use.  Which ones?  Ask a search engine!

8. Spelling: Make sure the term you’re trying to own is easy to spell and doesn’t have hyphens or sound like it might require them.  Slight word variations and typos can detail the most well-intentioned SEO effort.

SEO-Friendly Edits for Your White Paper

9. Page location: The higher up and further left your keywords, the better. Optimally, you’re using your keywords in your headline, subhead and beginning of the body.

10. Style: Bold, underline, italics, bullet points, bigger sized text all help search engines know which words are most important.

11. Keyword density: The number of times your keywords appear on a page matters.  Over-use them and it will annoy readers search engines might smell a rat.  Use them too little and you won’t get your point across to either humans or algorithms.  Use too many different keywords and you’ll dilute the impact of the important ones.  What’s the right balance?  No one really knows.  The best principal to keep in mind is “how useful is this to my audience?”

12. http:// When citing links, always use http://www.  Not just www…

13. Outbound links: Embed links to reputable resources in your white paper.  Search engines are trying to figure out where in the web of ideas your report fits.  You can help them by showing what resources support and relate to your findings.  Linking to other people’s content, even that written by competitors isn’t a failure to lead.  It’s a necessary part of marketing when search engines are gauging your intellectual honesty.

14. Geography: It’s is increasingly affecting the results people get when they post.  If your white paper has a geographic angle, highlight it.

Build links – Most SEO experts agree that the number and quality of inbound links is the most important determinant of rankings.

15. Anchor text: This is really, really important.  “Anchor text” are the words that are linked to a site.  Having those match the title of your page will make a world of difference in your rankings.  For example, if your white paper was on Greek bond sales in July, it’s good for people to link the words “Greek bond sales” in their hyperlink.  But it’s even better if “Greek bond sales in July” is selected.  Again, provided that precisely matches the title of your page.   So whenever you ask people to link to the white paper’s URL, ask them to use the precise keywords you want.

16. Bylined articles – If the white paper is good, you’re likely pitching these anyway.  But to add the element of SEO, pick publications that can bring in the most link juice.  Optimally these are sites that are highly ranked themselves, well trafficked, narrowly focused on your topic, and — critical — they’ll let you embed a link (with anchor text!) back to the URL.

17. Multimedia: Link building isn’t just about building up the visibility of one link, but creating several properties that can dominate a list of search results.  Distributing multimedia versions of your white paper is a great way to do that.  That can include a video interview of the paper’s author posted to YouTube, pictures of the document’s cover page and charts posted to Flickr, and a Slideshare deck summarizing the findings.  And since there’s a lot less competition for your keywords in multimedia formats, the chances of you pushing out some irrelevant text links from the results page are high.

18. Press release: Issue a press release on the white paper with links to the white paper’s URL.  Remember the anchor text lessons above.  Links in press releases will help, though only so long as the releases remain online.  A lot of newswires pull them after a few weeks.

19. Twitter: Tweet your report. Multiple times.  Be conversational, not promotional. Hold a #conversation on the topic.  That way you can tweet the report multiple times without coming off as spamming.

20. Put a face on the study: Tie an executive bio to the white paper. It gives you another page to appear in the search results.  Google Profiles and LinkedIn are musts.

21. Employee blogs – These can be a great source of links.  Just don’t be an ogre, pressuring employees to do a post.

22. Industry associations: often have newsletters or sections of their sites where you can contribute a piece.

23. Conferences: Try to unveil the white paper at a conference. The conference’s site will likely let you post a link, plus you’ll have people in the room tweeting, blogging and writing articles about the paper. Record the speech on YouTube and post pictures of the person making the speech to Flickr. Use your keywords in the video and photo titles and tags. Post links to the white paper in the comment boxes.  Content in comment boxes are almost never indexed (see “nofollow” for why) but if the titles and tags get crawled, they’ll come up in search results and people will open those gateways and find their way to your URL.

24. Use your community: Remember how your boss was looking for a reason why it’s good to have lots of fans on Facebook?  SEO is one reason why.  Distribute the white paper to your fan base, encourage them to share it, post it online and link back to the URL. That’ll build inlinks.

25. The final tool for your starter kit is…Search Engine Optimization for Dummies.  A great read, chock full of resources, and well worth the time and money. It also makes the HTML aspects easier to understand and deal with, even for non-techies.

Ideas? Thoughts to add?  Examples you’ve seen of other ways to use SEO to promote white papers?  Add ‘em in the comments below.

2. Leading the horse to water: Thought leadership is often an exercise in convincing people they have a problem they’re not aware of.  They stumble around in the dark, thinking it’s sunshine, grappling with the problem’s symptoms not knowing its causes.  So how to get a target audience from searching for one topic to find another?  By associating your TL keyword set with terms that the target is currently searching for.  There are many ways to do this (and they’ll be discussed later in the week in another post) and it takes a good deal of planning to pull off, but once done, your targets will quickly fall into your marketing funnel.

3. Your multimedia image: With the launch of the “Jazz” user interface, Google is now displaying multimedia results alongside text links in response to search queries (Bing did this in many ways from its launch). Videos, pictures, not to mention news stories and tweets, are all building a picture of your company.   Could any aspect of image management be more important today? It’s PR’s role to figure out the best combination of multimedia results that should come up in searches and then deploy an SEO strategy to reverse engineer it into existence.

4. Community leadership: Social media allows for a totally new form of thought leadership: community creation.  This is where a group of like-minded people are brought together online in the name of a new idea and goal.   It could be in a LinkedIn group, Ning, Wiki or some other structure, but the point is that the first step in people joining is for the home base site to be found.  That takes SEO.

5. Crisis communications: When a crisis hits, the first channels people check out are broadcast news and the web.  What they find will have an immediate impact on how the coverage plays out.  What will your frightened and angry stakeholders see if they search for your company right now?

Why SEO needs PR to do thought leadership right:

1. Reputable links: For all the optimization tricks that SEO experts can pull off, the number one way to increase search engine rankings is links from reputable sources.  The highest ranked sites, like traditional media outlets, influential blogs and educational institutions, send the biggest waves of link juice to your page.  Convincing reporters, bloggers and academics to link to your thought leadership is a job left best to PR.

2. Keyword messaging: The second most powerful influencer of search engines is the keyword(s) hyperlinked to the page containing your thought leadership.  “Click here” is just about the most useless kind of term to have linked to your page.  But “Greek bond interest rate threshold,” if it links to a page on that topic, is worth the weight of its home server in gold.  So how to stimulate usage of the right keywords?  How to pick the right ones in the first place? That falls right into the domain of PR messaging.

3. Pointing out: Search engines not only look at inbound links, but outbound ones to figure out where int he locus of ideas a specific web page sits.  So choosing those sites strategically, with an eye to both relevance and authority, can make a big difference in a TL’s life.  Knowing who has “juice” as measured by both web analytics and industry savvy, is a skill that typically PR – not SEO – professionals bring to the table.

4. SEO is part of a campaign: Thought leadership campaigns don’t happen in a vacuum.  For example, a company may debut a white paper at an industry conference where an executive gives a speech.  Interviews with reporters happen in tandem, followed by webinars and other promotional tactics.  Each of these mediums has associated web properties, and getting them all to link to your TL in the most optimized order and time frame takes campaign-style thinking.  Of all the parties involved, PR has the best ability to draw all these threads together.

5. Great writing: SEO requires a lot of fancy footwork when it comes to language.  Factors like the geographic placement of a term on a page matters to search engines, as do the use of bullet points, bold words, and keyword density.  The problem is, documents written optimally for search engines and documents written optimally for people can look very different.  In fact, journalists have blamed the recent focus on SEO for making headlines duller.  It takes great PR writing skills to strike that perfect balance and create a document that can be easily understood by search engines, yet readable and pleasant to a human.

For all these reasons and more, take your company’s SEO staffer or agency out to lunch this week.  Shake their hand warmly, acknowledge how important their role is.  Open your mind and ask them to do the same.  After all, when it comes to thought leadership, SEO is now PR’s best friend.