Your company did something good this year and nobody outside the room knows about it. That is the most common and most fixable marketing failure I run into.
It came up twice in a fortnight of interviews, from two people with no connection to each other, in almost the same words.
The SEO who kept finding out afterwards
Rob Bonham has spent over twenty years in SEO, more than half of it inside agencies. His most consistent frustration is not technical:
“I’ll come across something, like some some sort of mention or like a press release of something cool that that the brand or organization I’ve I’m working for did and and I never heard about it. And and I think that’s that I think that’s the biggest issue that that I have is the the disconnected communication with the SEO department”
— Rob Bonham, on Unscripted SEO
And the part that makes it expensive rather than merely annoying — his question about a large charitable donation was simply whether anyone got a press release out of it. Usually nobody had.
The team doing the community work is rarely the team that knows what a mention is worth. A social media manager, a communications lead or an operations director does a genuinely good thing, tells the people who were there, and moves on. That is not negligence. It is an org chart problem.
The marketer who wants your reputation to match your reality
Mike Montague runs Avenue 9 and hosts a podcast on human-first AI marketing. He has the cleanest statement of the goal I have heard:
“I think the goal should be that your online reputation exactly 100% mirrors your in real life work, like you’re saying there. If you give to charity that should be documented online, if you do a hundred jobs. A hundred jobs should be documented online”
— Mike Montague, on Unscripted SEO
Note what he is not saying. He is not saying to inflate anything. He is saying the opposite — that the internet currently under-represents what most good companies actually do, and that closing the gap is the work:
“I think SEO has always been erroneous a little bit in that they’re it’s like trying to get an outsized rank for your your company. And really I think we need to get like the reputation and the the traffic that we deserve.”
— Mike Montague
Do it because it is right, then document it anyway
The obvious objection is that publicising charity work cheapens it. Rick Haggerty, 25 years in home improvement across several Nashville companies, holds both things at once without difficulty:
“we don’t necessarily do it from a marketing standpoint. We do it because it’s just right. You know, I mean, it’s just the right thing to do. You know, if marketing, if, if, if work comes out of it, that’s great. But I think that you need to give back.”
— Rick Haggerty, on Unscripted Home Improvement
He sat on a local private school’s board of trust, and encourages his staff to take time for whatever philanthropy they choose. His reason for it is connection, not coverage. The documentation is a separate decision from the motive, and treating them as the same thing is how the record ends up empty.
What to capture, and who should capture it
A community cleanup, a sponsored little league team, a chamber event, a school board seat. Each one produces material that will never exist again if nobody takes ten minutes on the day:
- Photos with people in them, taken during rather than after.
- A count. Bags collected, volunteers turned up, hours donated, dollars raised. A number is what makes it citable by someone else.
- Two named quotes — one from an organiser, one from a participant.
- A page on your own site, so there is something for a local paper, a partner or a chamber to link to.
- One nominated person whose actual job it is to send that page to the marketing team. This is the step everybody skips.
The compounding part
Mike’s argument for why this matters more now than it did five years ago is about evidence rather than reach:
“If you can show that you have the highest number of reviews and the highest overall rating, and you’re literally doing the most plumbing jobs with the best reviews in Nashville, it will pick that up. It will give you the rating that you deserve.”
— Mike Montague
Claims are cheap and getting cheaper. Evidence of a company that actually turned up somewhere, with photographs and a date and other people’s words attached, is the thing that is getting harder to manufacture and therefore more valuable to have.
You already did the work. Write it down.
Quotes are verbatim from the raw Riverside transcripts, trimmed only for false starts and filler. More at Community Clean Links and Unscripted SEO.