Competitive Analysis With SEMRush and Summit Community Bank

  Summit Community Bank is a nearly $4 billion regional community bank. It provides banking, lending, and trust and wealth management services at 44 banking locations across three states. While primarily focused on maintaining its strong footprint in legacy locations, Summit Community Bank has used a successful merger and acquisition strategy to encourage steady growth over the last six years. As it continues to grow in new markets, new opportunities bring new, diverse challenges, including exploring new peers and competitors, expanding brand awareness, and capturing market share. In the digital landscape, competitive analysis is especially important when it comes to optimizing one of an organization’s most valuable online resources, its website.  Competitive analysis, as SEMrush notes, can help benchmark a business’ current SEO performance, identify areas of improvement in SEO strategy, reveal any competitor gaps or weaknesses, and discover competitors' winning strategies (Sl...
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Why conversation may not be king…in all cases


Hello Class,

I have mentioned a couple times on the board, that I personally am losing faith in social as a conversational medium (with the exception of questions and/or complaint resolution) and tend to view social as more of an information distribution channel. This is not absolute, but I think this is especially true in local, where the need is often very momentary. I have had the opportunity now to watch social for more than a dozen years and there has been a definite shift. I think that machine learning may be accelerating this trend.

Even big brands which appear to have conversational threads only do because they have hundreds of thousands or even millions of adherents and there are numerous responses to each post. However, if you read them carefully, most of the “conversations” are actually hundreds of people shouting out their own thoughts. Here is a great article by  John Boitnott  (2016) that discusses that concept of distribution vs. conversation better than I ever could. He doesn't totally say conversation is dead, but it can be very hard to come by. 

I look forward to your thoughts.

Prof. T

Reference:
Boitnott, J. (2016, February 3). Why you should post more and interact less on social media. https://www.inc.com/john-boitnott/why-you-should-post-more-and-interact-less-on-social-media.html

Follow John at https://twitter.com/jboitnott


Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 5, 2019 at 8:18 AM

    Hi Professor. In my blog you will note that I DO condone the idea that starting conversations on LinkedIn is a good idea. I said this both because I found the Novak article compelling (maybe even passionate?) and because I have, indeed, had multiple experiences in person with U.S. Commercial Service customers that prove conversations ARE King when it comes to sharing business information and advice. Having said that, I could not agree more that what we see on much of the consumer social media platforms like Twitter is a lot of people who enjoy hearing (or reading) themselves talk. I would think situations like that make it hard for a brand to keep up with and respond to constructive conversations.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark TietbohlNovember 5, 2019 at 11:09 AM

    Hi Laura,
    Thank for your comment! You can still encourage conversation, but it is hard to achieve with any but the most devoted. LinkedIn is better at this than most, and occasionally I will find a good Twitter thread.
    Most "conversation" today seems to be rants, especially on the personal side. Most business comments are either queries or complaints and many businesses prefer to take these offline. In some ways, I wish they would not, as it shows how they respond to their customers....

    ReplyDelete

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