#006: How to Engage Your Audience with Brittany Thomas of Cabot Oil and Gas

The Oil & Gas Digital Marketing Podcast

Reading Time: 26 minutes

Brittany Thomas from Cabot Oil and Gas joins us this week to discuss how to reach and fully engage your audience both online and offline. We talk the benefits of transparent internal and external communication, and she shares loads of tips on how to maximize the impact of your outreach across the board.

It should also be noted the Red Wings defeated the Penguins 5-4 in overtime the day after we recorded this interview.

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The industry is wide open for digital marketers that want to go out there and kill it and dominate. – @JamesHahnII (tweet this)

People’s expectation for how quickly they get information is radically different than 20 years ago. – @britt_thomas (tweet this)

I think it cannot be stated enough to not underestimate how powerful online communities are. – @britt_thomas (tweet this)

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Links Mentioned

WordPress SEO by Yoast
Well Said Cabot
Cabot Oil and Gas
Brittany Thomas on Twitter
Cabot Oil and Gas on Twitter
Cabot Oil and Gas on Flickr
Cabot Oil and Gas on YouTube
Bill Roth at Industry Infographics
The Top 5 Marketing Mistakes Oil & Gas Operators Make – And How to Avoid Them
Free 90 Minute Digital Coaching Session

Transcript

James Hahn II: Welcome, welcome, welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome into another episode of the Oil and Gas Digital Marketing Podcast. I am your host, James Hahn II, of triberocket.com. This is the podcast for marketers in oil and gas and B2B marketers across the globe.

And here we are episode number six and I got to tell you, I am fired up this morning. I just got done recording today’s interview with Brittany Thomas of Cabot Oil & Gas and we just got into it. I was geeking out. You will see that my geek level in this episode is got to be well over a thousand. But before we get into that interview, let’s go ahead and transition over to another Pay Zone Power Move. Let’s get into it.

Pay Zone Power Move

All right. The Pay Zone Power Move is a digital marketing technique, tactic or strategy that will help you move the needle online in your business. And toward the end of this interview, you’ll hear that Brittany and I get into one of my favorite topics which is very near and dear to my heart which is search engine optimization or SEO.

Now, if that is the first time you ever heard that term or if you’ve heard it several times before but not been able to convince yourself that you could actually go out and figure how to do this, I am here to give you the good news. Well, not the good news because that’s the gospel, but some good news at any rate that it’s not that complicated.

You don’t have to be a JavaScript writer. You don’t need to know C++ or any other PHP crazy languages out there because of the Power Move which is the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. If you’ve read the blog lately, you might be tired of hearing me talk about this plugin, but I really have to bring it up as much as possible because I contribute the vast majority of my success online to this plugin.

I just had a fantastic call this morning with someone who found me through Google. And because people link up with me on LinkedIn often and I always shoot a message back and say, “Hey, thanks for linking up. I’m just curious, where did you find my profile?” And he said, “I found you through Google searching something about social media,” and he came across to who I was.

And that can only happen because I’m at ranking right at the top of a lot of really great keywords around oil and gas. And like I said, I mean it has to do with a lot of things, but the great thing about this SEO by Yoast plugin is that it does all of that hard work coding, scripting stuff for you so that someone as technologically inept as myself can actually figure out how to do this stuff because I just know enough code, HTML and CSS, to break my site every now and again and then call support for help. We’ll get through that maybe on another episode.

But the great thing here is that the Yoast, it grades your content and it tells you exactly what to do to rank higher. And so I’m looking at my blog post that went out this morning and the focus keyword that I chose which is the main keyword that I’m trying to rank for with this content is oil and gas news.

And it’s telling me, all right, you have oil and gas news in the heading. You have it in the page title. You have it in the URL. It’s in the content a few times. It’s in your meta description, which is that little snippet underneath the Google blue link, the little description of the site that can — you know, it’s another opportunity for you to convince people to come and check out what you’re doing. So it grades it on that.

But then even over and above that, it gives you in depth page analysis and tells you how many — or it gives you information about keyword density and a really important thing called the Flesch Reading Ease Test which is actually a part of the Google algorithm now, and the Flesch Reading Ease Test is exactly what it sounds like. How easy is it to read your content?

And it’s really important that you keep an eye on this number because if you’re producing content that is scoring around 45, which means it’s pretty difficult to read, you have really long sentences that are filled with big words and just run on for days, that will get you in the 35, 45 range. And then something that’s shorter sentences, a little easier to understand, that will usually get you up around 65 to 80 or something like that.

But if your content is going up and down and up and down that scale, what Google’s algorithm or robots are going to do, they’re going to figure out, hey, whoever is producing this content is clearly not a human being because they can’t write at a consistent level. Sp what we’re going to do is downgrade that page and it’s going to get pushed down in the search rankings.

So you want to make sure that you’re always producing the same quality content and gives you other great tips, like you have more than 300 words in the body of the article which is a really key point because a lot of people asked me, “Hey, I’ve put all these videos,” or what have you, “why is it not showing up in Google?” And then I’m going, “Look at the page,” and it’s just a page with a video.

The point is that if you post the video, you have to post some content along with it because if there’s no text there, then the robots are just going to say, “Yeah, whatever. This isn’t important,” and move on.

I know I’ve been hitting on this plugin a lot on the blog. Maybe you don’t listen to blog and this is the first time you ever heard of it. My only point is that search engine optimization is not complicated. It’s not that hard. If you do it right, you can go out there and rank for some amazing keywords that are — I was just looking at a potential client’s website and doing a little keyword research yesterday. I was amazed to find that they could easily rank at the top of Google for probably every service that they have because it’s just that wide open. That’s the way that our industry is. It’s wide open for digital marketers that want to go out there and kill it and dominate.

If you jump in quickly, I mean the nice thing is that sometimes you don’t really have to be good; you just have to be first. Now, if you listen to this podcast and read my blog, hopefully you’ll be both good and first. But the point is you can do it. Don’t be overwhelmed by that term “search engine optimization.” Check out the SEO by Yoast plugin.

In the meantime, let’s get over to this interview with my girl, Brittany Thomas, of Cabot Oil and Gas.

Brittany Thomas of Cabot Oil and Gas Interview

Joining us on the program this week is Brittany Thomas. She is the Coordinator of External Affairs for Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation. In this role, she is responsible for coordinating outreach and education efforts, large-scale event planning, and managing the company’s social media presence.

She has also been involved in the creation and management of several education programs about the natural gas industry including the Annual Cabot Community Picnic, which was attended by 24,000 people over a four-year time period. Brittany serves on the Board of the Women’s Energy Network, Appalachian Chapter — shout-out to my Grandma O’Neal [Phonetic] out there — as the Director of Social Media Communications. In 2013, she was honored with a Shale Media Group WING (Women in Natural Gas) Award for service and leadership.

Prior to working for Cabot, Brittany studied at Pennsylvania State University where she graduated with degrees in Public Relations and Psychology. She currently lives just outside of Pittsburgh but close enough to attend Penguins games whenever possible. Let’s go Red Wings.

You can follow her on Twitter @britt_thomas for her musings on social media, the Natural Gas Industry, chocolate cupcakes, and life in general.

At last, please welcome my girl, Brittany Thomas. How are you doing, Brittany?

Brittany Thomas: Doing well. Thanks for having me today. I like the “Let’s Go Red Wings” that you sneak in there. I hope that nobody hears it.

James Hahn II: It’s too bad I didn’t have you on for last week because that was number five in commemoration of Nick Lidstrom, but we don’t need to get into our — I don’t think these people want to hear our hockey trash talk as much as they’d like to hear about what you all are doing up there in oil and gas online.

Let’s just get right into it. Tell us a little bit about Cabot Oil and Gas and then your role at the company.

Brittany Thomas: Sure. Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation is an E&P company. We have roots dating back 125 years ago in Western Pennsylvania. So the Marcellus was actually an opportunity for the company to come back to where it was founded. There’s a Cabot Pennsylvania which was named after our founder on the western side of the states. So it’s really neat to see where everything started and where it is now.

So Cabot, like I said, E&P which means we are drilling for Marcellus. All of our activity is in Susquehanna County which is Northeast Pennsylvania, about an hour north of Scranton. And we have other activity in the Eagle Ford and elsewhere across the country, but we have a real focus on the Marcellus right now.

James Hahn II: Tell us a little bit about your social media presence, your digital marketing presence. Well, let’s talk about your Well Said Cabot blog because you’re kind enough to feature me on there way back in my days at drilling info. Tell me a little bit about that, what that does for your public outreach.

Brittany Thomas: So Well Said, it’s wellsaidcabot.com. It’s a great pun if you ask me, but it was created as a way for us to help get our message out. As a PR person, obviously, I think everything that my company does is wonderful and should be talked about and more people need to know the story, and it can be difficult getting it out in the newspaper or on television.

So Well Said offers us a way to a couple of times a week put out stories. We make commentary on, for example, if there’s a news story about the, I don’t know, the ethane cracker possibly in Western Pennsylvania. And we have comments about “Did you know that all of these different products could be made from that?” Or we talk about, for example, when you were back with Drilling Info, we try and highlight different organizations or people out in that community who were talking about oil and natural gas.

And it’s just a way for us to just keep feelers out there in the community and touch base with them and let them know what we’re doing but also highlight what others are doing, and it’s been really successful thus far. We have close to I think a thousand people on our mailing list that get the daily updates from us and just read what we’re doing. That way we can, even when we are out from the community, say, “Well, did you see? We put out information about the latest community grants from the pipeline project and it links back to the library.”

It’s a great way to just connect everything we’re doing with the organizations and the people in the community.

James Hahn II: I love that focus because what you all really do really well is bridge that offline with the online communications. Talk a little bit about that.

Brittany Thomas: It’s really important when you decide who your outreach focus is to understand that not everyone takes information in on the same way. For example, where we might be, it’s more of a rural setting so putting ads in newspapers is important. We want them to see pictures of our employees who they’re going to see in the grocery store, that kind of idea of identifying with our company in knowing “Oh, if I see that truck that’s part of the natural gas industry.”

The other side is some people would want digital content via web banners or whatever that might be. A lot of what we do besides just writing up blogs and telling people what we’re doing, we’re sharing all of our content across the multiple platforms we have. We have a Flickr account, we have Twitter, we have YouTube. Those are all being put into blog posts that people can have another way to see them.

And then we also use a lot of our print advertising when we talk about impact fees, for example. We have an actually physical ad in the newspaper and for more information visit wellsaidcabot.com/topicofinterest to learn more. It’s just another way that you’re getting your message which we feel is important out to a larger audience.

James Hahn II: I love the point that you’ve made because it really drives home the fact that people, like you said, they like to consume information or you can just think about the different learning styles that you know. What is it? Auditory, kinesthetic, all that stuff.

And so by essentially being everywhere when it comes to social media, when it comes to a blog, a YouTube page so they can see you visually, something like a podcast or some other way that they can hear you. Just giving them so many different ways to interact with you and your brand, it just amplifies whatever you’re doing online.

Brittany Thomas: Absolutely. And there’s different kinds of people out there too. I think a lot of times people get all caught up in the numbers or followers or the numbers of views and that’s great.

Also, what you want to do is make sure that you’re reaching a community that’s interacting with you as well. It’s great for people to read your stuff but if you can find people in the community that are actually interested with the story and post comments on the blog or have a conversation back and forth on Twitter, it’s much easier to get feedback that way on a larger scale. Otherwise, you just have to be in the community and we are. Our employees one on one are finding out what people like. But taking it to the digital side just makes it so much easier to access a larger group at once.

James Hahn II: Another really fantastic point because of the fact that it allows you to scale your communications. So instead of only being able to talk to one person at a time, you can hear back from multiple people and get multiple viewpoints on something that could be really crucial to moving your business forward.

Brittany Thomas: Sure. And we even use it for our employees as well. They can go on and see from all over the country what’s going on in Northeast Pennsylvania. Oh, they have the top 13 wells in the Marcellus. That’s really neat to hear about. Or this community event is coming up. I wonder if I’ll be in town. It’s just the constant communication not just with your community leaders or your landowners also your employees is crucial. That way you’re all on the same page.

And what’s important to the company is going to need to be important to your employees because there are so many great things going on. You just need to make sure that they know about it and they’re proud to say, “Did you know this about my company?” Making sure they have that constant flow of information. And there’s always room for improvement. We’re always looking for new ways to do it, but just starting someplace and making the effort to continually grow that outreach is hugely helpful.

James Hahn II: Now you’re hitting on all my favorite points because now we’re into corporate culture and communication and internal marketing really is so important especially in an organization that has, like you said, you’re focused in Pennsylvania but you’re not only in Pennsylvania. So to make sure that culture permeates throughout the entire organization across the country, it’s really hard to that if you’re only doing conference calls.

Brittany Thomas: Yes. Any kind of communication is good, I would say. If you’re doing conference calls, that’s a good first step. It’s always things you take for granted though. For example, one of the big arguments in Pennsylvania is, well, how many people does the industry really employ? Is it 24,000? Is it 100,000? What’s the real number? Well, I think part of the question is, well, what do you consider in employee in the industry?

If you look at our companies it’s not just people who are the drilling supervisors or are managing our completions operations. You also have people like myself who are in the external affairs, the communications part, that makes sense. But then you have people on accounts payable who are responsible for making sure that all of the bills get paid, and you have the support systems in place for all the different departments. Then you have people who have never seen a drilling rig in their life.

You just need to sometimes take a step back. I know we definitely did. And part of the picnic was great. So the community picnic, we would set up every aspect of Cabot. You would have the land department, geology, drilling, completion, production. And we would be bring people up from Pittsburg and West Virginia and they would be there to answer questions in the community which was great, one-on-one interaction.

But what also happened is in addition to our employees being there and explaining their side of what they do, it was kind of bolstered by their online communication then seeing a blog about what a production unit looks like. And all of a sudden we have one on the fairground and you can actually see what it looks like. So just making sure communication — it’s not necessarily what you think you know. It’s what everybody else knows.

You have to take in mind, some people have never had that opportunity. So any way you can get that, it’s really lessons learned in seeing things and touching things. It’s a great way to do it — video, blogs, intranet, anyway you can give them the information. It’s kind of like a little light bulb goes off in their head like, “Oh, that’s what I’m paying for the invoices for.” So it’s always neat to see that happen.

James Hahn II: Yeah. And you’re making another great point that I think we touched on in a recent episode that really drives home the fact that I guess the old cliché is seeing is believing, right? And I’ve made this point several times on the blog where I think in the oil and gas industry we can get a little frustrated when people are skeptical or questioning “What’s going on with this? What’s going on with that?”

But we forget that we’ve been drilling in primarily really Texas for the last hundred years where people are really accustomed to seeing oil rigs, where people are really accustomed to seeing trucking, pipelines being installed, and so forth. But now with places like the Marcellus, the Bakken, and so forth, we’re moving further and further away from the traditional production places.

And so we do have to do those things and reach out to those people so that they’re — because oftentimes you can be afraid of what you don’t know. And so that’s what I love about what you all do is just that education aspect.

Brittany Thomas: Absolutely. One of our cornerstones is education. We have a whole section on our corporate website, cabotog.com, and in the community area where we’ve put together kind of like an educational brochure, but it walks you through the entire life of the well from land development, drilling, production, completion, water use, air emissions, things that we have questions about all the time.

And where those come from is an actual physical brochure that we would — we started as direct mailers and inserting them in newspapers. And eventually, it was bound into a book that we would hand out at the community picnic and now we use them as PDFs. And whenever there is a question, you’re absolutely right; people in Texas tend to know more.

But some issues are pretty consistent. For example, water use. That’s a big talking point in Texas same as across the country. People want to know, how much are you using? What does this mean? We can go to our website and email them the PDF. It’s an easy way to say, “Here’s some information we put together. We’re being completely transparent about, you know. What we used the hydraulically fractured well is about five and half minutes of water use in New York City” — putting things in perspective because it makes sense.

People, like you said, they’re afraid of what they don’t know. But there’s not really a reason to point at them and say, “Well, you’re silly for wondering that point.” They’re not silly. They just want to know exactly what to expect and put in perspective of the rest of their life.

Once you talk to them about what’s going to happen and what trucks are going to be driving down the road or how much traffic or will we fix the roads? All of those topics, just making sure you have them available, again, in different formats. Elected officials sometimes want hard copies or they want it emailed to them. If you make it available, it takes a lot of the fear away from it. We’re not trying to hide and saying, “We’re going to do this in a way.” It’s “Here let us show you what we’re doing.”

James Hahn II: That right there speaks to the need for I guess what a lot of people these days are calling self-service information in that Google has trained us all to get the exact answer for our question in about two seconds. And so if they can’t find that answer on your website, then they’re either just getting frustrated and bouncing off and then going and watching some documentary or they’re just thinking, “Honestly, are they trying to hide something? Why aren’t they giving us this?”

And so the fact that it’s not only the self-service information but it’s also that point that it’s just radical transparency and being completely open about what’s going on with what you’re doing in the community.

Brittany Thomas: Absolutely. And you hit on a great point. People’s expectation for how quickly they get information is radically different than 20 years ago. Back before the internet, you would mail things. And once the internet first started, it was a little different. Now, news cycles are 24 hours. Twitter if you don’t respond in three hours, it’s an issue. Facebook, same thing.

So everybody expects it’s instant gratification. I ask the question, you instantly tell me what’s happening. And it’s a real challenge in all industries, but I would say especially the oil and gas industry. It’s compounded by we’re used to operating in areas where people know us. So if they have questions, we can go to them and explain it versus we’re in a totally new field of operation be it Utica, Bakken, Marcellus.

And then on top of everything, one thing that we don’t do well is SEO. We need to make individual efforts because when you type certain keywords, if you type in “fracking” or if you type in “Marcellus shale” or if you type in “water use and natural gas” these certain search terms I would pretty much bet my firstborn that these are high hitting topics. People want more information and just making it easier to find your information. We have all this great stuff but if nobody knows it’s there, it’s difficult.

And yes, we as companies, can promote it. But one of the best examples is fracfocus.org. Cabot has been part of the program pretty much since the beginning. So what you can to on that site is go to a specific area, you can search by the well name, you can search by the operator, you can search by the county, and you can see exactly what was in the hydraulic fracturing fluid minus the proprietary information depending on state so that little asterisk is there but it’s there.

So when people claim that there are millions of chemicals, there’s really not; we use these four things. It’s one of the best ways that we’re being transparent not just for people, for the community, but also for regulators. They want to know what’s in it and in some states they’ve made it the standard of this is what you’re going to do.

But again, how much of that is being promoted? When you search hydraulic fracturing fluid, the FracFocus comes at the top, just things like that. I really think that SEO is going to be the next great frontier of we have great content. We have great context. How can we make sure people outside of our circle of influence are seeing what we’re doing?

James Hahn II: You must have read my blog post that I shipped out this morning already because I asked the question in the post: if you publish a website on the internet and it never ranks so people can see it, did it ever get published on the internet, right?

I was looking at it actually from the perspective of driving revenue because I think that obviously yourself being in the PR and communications, that is the natural default tendency for people in the industry to think it in that way, but I was thinking in terms of revenue. But this is a really great point because with the SEO, you can also start to take over those keywords where people need to know the truth. And if we can get the right sites to rank where they should in the search engines, then it’s going to be all the easier for people to come to the right site as opposed to someone else who might lead them down another path.

Brittany Thomas: Right. And I’m just going to say great minds think alike. We’ll go with that theory. It’s interesting. You’re right; automatically, I do think about getting information out. But for our service providers, if it’s big or huge, Halliburton, NOV, Weatherford, whoever it is, for whatever we use, maybe it’s not a direct sales ratio but I’m imagining that when you search certain oilfield services, you would want your own site to rank.

So you’re absolutely right. Maybe it’s not a direct click to make money but it’s when you search this product, who’s the first company that shows up because everybody uses the internet. A lot of times it’s word of mouth, but you still have to be able to find them to get the information. So you’re right. SEO, it sounds very scary and I think that some companies do it extraordinarily well.

Some of the larger companies, they have either search results. They pay for search results on certain topics. I think that’s huge. We just need to make sure that the bulk of the industry is continuing that trend because the more information and not just our story or what we think is happening, it’s the facts. Putting the facts out there and making them easy to find.

People tend to be very rational if you present them with this is what’s happening. You wanted, just like you said, you want an answer, you google it; okay, there it is. But if it’s buried on the third page of results and the top two pages are just hypothetically this is what they’re doing and hypothetically it doesn’t work, they’re going to make up their mind based on things that aren’t fact statistics and science. So SEO — I need to go and read your blog post now.

James Hahn II: I think this would be a good time to throw in. Maybe I’ll throw it in my Pay Zone Power Move but take the content for right here because I think it’s a great place to put that which is where do you start when you’re wanting to do some SEO.

And really whether you’re trying to look at it from a PR focus or whether you’re trying to drive revenue, all you need to do is sit down and start brainstorming and think of every question that your prospect or your audience or whoever it is out there, every question those people have ever asked you and just start to answer them because those questions will give you those keywords. And if you answer them openly and transparently, then you’re going to earn that trust and people are going to naturally want to do business with you whether it’s sign an oil lease or buy your drill bits or whatever the case might be.

Brittany Thomas: It sounds scary, like I said, when you first start. And not even necessarily for people who have blogs, things to think about, or corporate websites too. I mean how are we making sure SEO results are optimized for our corporate results? If you search any name on our Board of Directors, the first site I would hope would be ours. I don’t know that. Please don’t google that for sure yet, but just things like that, things you wouldn’t think about.

The more you make sure that you’re at the top, the better because oftentimes what happens is Wikipedia tends to be at the top. Wikipedia is a whole different animal when it comes to corporate communications and there’s a lot of ethical things there. For example, I can’t directly make edits to our Wikipedia even though it’s about, oh, ten years out of date now. There are just things that you can and can’t do.

So if you can’t fix things, if you can’t update things, you’ve got to find to work around it. SEO is a great way to do that. Maybe I can’t update our most recent production statistics, but we can optimize our press releases or our news section so that people are finding that off the top. So when you search Cabot Oil & Gas news, that’s what shows up.

James Hahn II: Yeah. And I think the point to drive home there is not only SEO to get the traffic there, but what do you want them to do when they actually arrive there. And I think it’s fantastic that you have the mailing list that you’re able to continue to communicate with those people because I would say the vast majority — actually, now I’m going to have to write a case study about you all because I actually said in the blog post, if you can find anybody who has an email focused on their website, I will write a case study about them. So now I’m going to eat my own words there.

But the point being is that don’t just get them to your site. Have a purpose for it when they actually arrive and make that a useful interaction instead of just reading some information and bouncing off and going about their Facebook day.

Brittany Thomas: Yes, that’s hugely important be it email or for us sign up for the email, that’s great. The next step is we want you to share our stuff. We want you to take our information and put it out there to either email it to somebody or print it out or do whatever works for you but making things easy to digest.

One of the things that we try and focus on is — you know, we work in a very technological industry which is fantastic, but people have a very hard time grasping drilling one mile down and one mile out. I mean that hurts your head when you try and think about it. It’s underground. It’s hard to see. And that’s only one example of things that we do that try to explain to people they need a little bit of assistance.

So infographics are a great thing even if you’re a business explaining what you’re doing. Make it very visually appealing, make it easy to understand, make sure there are no typos. That’s always the worst thing in my life. When I find a really cool infographic and there’s a massive typo on it and it just makes me sad because then I can’t share it.

Make sure that it’s relevant information. It gets your point across — your sales are increased, your reliability is at 98.9%, whatever it happens to be, and make sure it’s easily sharable and that if you want to get that content out that you give them ways to do so.

James Hahn II: And right here is the place where I have to give a plug and shout-out to my friend Bill Roth over there at industryinfographics.com because he has been doing some work with Drilling Info, and I’ve seen plenty of his other work with — I think he’s worked with Chevron and several other people.

And you’re right; it’s about that visual storytelling aspect because not everybody wants to sit down and read a thousand word blog post or listen to a 40-minute podcast or even watch a 5-minute video. But if you can put some visuals in front of them that actually tell the story to get the point across, that really performs extraordinarily well especially on Facebook and Twitter and so forth. So that is a great point that you added there.

Man, I’m just geeking out with you here, Brittany. This is fantastic, but it has been 26 minutes. And I think we should start to wrap because otherwise we’re going to end up going for 75 minutes and bore all of our listeners to death. But I wanted to wrap on this last point that you made earlier, which is having an engaged community because that’s just such a huge point that so many people think, “Oh, I need 100,000 followers on Twitter,” or Facebook or whatever the case might be. But I will take 500 extremely enthusiastic engaged listeners or readers over 100,000 barely even noticing what you’re doing people any day of the week.

Brittany Thomas: Yeah. And I will go back to when you decide to put together what you’re doing. Is your goal just mass information or is it creating a community? And I think it cannot be stated enough that do not underestimate how powerful these communities are.

Now, one social media that we didn’t talk about — LinkedIn. Most people don’t think about it. We get so much interaction on LinkedIn from the people who follow Cabot. It’s absurd. It puts everything else to shame.

And the neat part is what you’ll see is once you start regularly putting content out, letting people know that I can come here and get information, if something else gets spread on that site, you will be shocked at how quickly — these people who don’t even work for you, may not work in your industry, you may not have met in your life, it’s the virtual community that will come to the defense of your company and say, “Well, I had a great product experience from these folks,” or “That’s not right. They recently published their water usage. You can see it here.”

And it happens with a lot of great brands, easy thinking, dog foods or favorite toothpaste, but it doesn’t just have to be consumer products. It’s also companies. You are a brand. Your business is a brand and if you build that community online, there’s nothing more powerful than that because all of a sudden it’s not you spitting out your message. It’s other people doing it for you and acting as that voice of “Well, I stand behind this.”

You can have a million followers but if you have 50 people who are out there saying, “This is what I know,” that’s just as impactful.

James Hahn II: If not even more and I just can speak from personal experience that both at Drilling Info and now with Tribe Rocket, there are a few people out there that kind of like, as you could say, troll certain pages where I post my content. And there are people that watch those pages that oftentimes they jump in and start defending what’s going on there long before I even noticed — had time to get back to the comments.

So you’re right. Having those enthusiastic, engaged followers who evangelize your brand and stand up for your cause is absolutely important. And LinkedIn, yeah, it’s such an important place for oil and gas people to be. I’m not sure exactly if it’s the demographics that drive everybody to that site, but it’s amazing how much traction you can get with your content in that venue.

So wrapping up then, Brittany, do you have any final words about Cabot Oil & Gas or anything else you would like us to know about what you all are doing out there?

Brittany Thomas: We are always trying out new things, trying to figure out the right combination, making sure we are reaching the right people. And just knowledge to anybody who’s thinking of getting into social media or more digital content or whatever it is, don’t be afraid to try. It doesn’t mean you have to be everywhere all at once. Pick something, do it well, make a name for yourself doing that, and build your community there, and then go on to the next thing.

It’s great to see all the folks out there in the oil and gas industry. And I just hope that the community continues to grow and we continue to connect on that level. Thank you for having me.

James Hahn II: No, it’s been my great pleasure. And actually one last point, yeah, that I took down this note earlier “just start,” just start whether it’s a blog, whether it’s a Facebook page, whether it’s podcast or whatever it is. Just start. Get your message out there. And you’re not going to be perfect out of the gate but the more that you do it, the better you are and the more people you’ll attract to your brand and the bigger your following will be and the better — I think, like you were just saying, the more we can connect online, the better it is for the entire industry.

So Brittany, if you wanted to send anyone anywhere to a particular website to find out more about Cabot Oil & Gas or yourself in particular, where would you send them?

Brittany Thomas: You can go to wellsaidcabot.com or cabotog.com. Once more, community focused cabotog.com is our corporate website so you can get more of a background on the company as a whole. And also follow me on Twitter because I tweet about chocolate and cupcakes. If you’re not into that kind of thing, maybe I tweet some healthy things to you. I don’t know. We’ll see.

James Hahn II: And you can also make fun of her when the Red Wings beat her team tomorrow night.

Brittany Thomas: I’m sensing we’re going to need to do a part two of this podcast just on Red Wings and Penguins, and I’m okay with that.

James Hahn II: I’m completely good with that. I don’t know if the listeners would care, but maybe we’ll just do it for our own sake.

All right, Brittany, this has been fantastic. I always have a pleasure catching up with you and talking to you. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast, and we’ll see you out there across the interwebs.

Brittany Thomas: Yes. Thank you for having me and thanks for listening, guys.

Wrap

James Hahn II: Oh, my goodness. Here we are once again at the end of yet another Oil and Gas Digital Marketing Podcast. I don’t know if you enjoyed that interview with Brittany Thomas quite as much as I did. As I said I think, I think my geek level was completely maxed out there. We’ve got a lot of work to do with the show notes that I can get you all of the links that are mentioned or just articles that will support what we were talking about, but I just had a blast with that. Hopefully, you’ve had a blast listening to this.

Once again, I have been your host, James Hahn II, of triberocket.com. You can check us out over there where you can download our free e-book called The Top 5 Marketing Mistakes Oil and Gas Operators Make – And How to Avoid Them.

And if you do download that e-book, we will give you a 90-minute free digital marketing audit or a coaching session, whatever you want to call it. We will get on the phone, do a screen share with you, walk through your website and a whole lot of successful websites and sort of compare and contrast, look at what you’re doing right. Honestly, we’ll probably look a lot about what you’re doing wrong, but we’ll give you as much free advice as we can in that 90 minutes so that you can go back and hopefully implement those best practices and start to move your business forward online.

Also, I continue to beg and plead for your help. Go to triberocket.com/review if you enjoy listening to this podcast. If you don’t like to listen to this podcast, just send me an email and tell me how bad I am at doing this. I got thick skin. I’ve been in sales for 13 years and I also have an older sister and an older brother and two younger brothers. So you’ve got to really know how to fight for your own in an environment like that.

But the point is I really need your help. Go there, triberocket.com/review, and that will open up iTunes where you can open up the iTunes application and leave us a review if you enjoy listening to this podcast. We love 5 star reviews. Really at this point, any review would be fantastic. Because of the fact that we’ve been talking SEO, SEO, SEO, iTunes is a search engine and the more ratings and reviews you get, the higher you rank and the more people that can find this podcast. So if you do us that favor, we would greatly, greatly appreciate it.

Many thanks to Brittany Thomas for all of her time and insights. Thank you very much for tuning in. I hope you have a fantastic week. Now, let’s get out there and like J. Paul Getty said, “Rise early, work hard and strike oil.” Folks, we will talk to you all next week.

The post #006: How to Engage Your Audience with Brittany Thomas of Cabot Oil and Gas appeared first on Tribe Rocket Inc..