DIY PR by Penny Haywood Calder

Total viewing time for online video is approaching the time we spend watching TV. TV ads are outside smaller business' reach, but the audience for online video is a great opportunity for SMEs to punch beyond their weight.

That means every smart business spokesperson needs to develop clever presentation skills to take advantage of this most powerful medium.

There's free communications training resources on a new blog from an excellent Scottish company, VoiceBusiness: www.voicebusinesstraining.co.uk. They walk the talk with videos - see http://vimeo.com/6007276 for a quick pre-speech exercise.

Or join a Toastmasters International (TMI) club. TMI is a not-for-profit organisation. They have trained >4 million people in public speaking and leadership skills world-wide. Their website has good free presentation resources and a local club finder at http://www.toastmasters.org - scroll past the map to see the local clubs in your area.

And speaking skills that work on video are also great for networking, giving talks and pitching for new business.

Picture created from the words in this blog piece at www.wordle.net.

Labels: communications skills, online video, presentation skills, public speaking, speaking skills, TMI, Toastmasters, VoiceBusiness

We all have times when we get stuck for a good picture to liven up our marketing materials, our website, blog or presentation slides. Especially if the idea we want to get across is abstract, or you want to talk about an intangible service.

Cue the rather lovely Wordle (http://wordle.net). Wordle takes your words and transforms them into art.

And that's art you can use to make something tangible to sell. Cards, T-shirts, you name it....

You've probably seen word clouds on blogs or presentations - where words are displayed by size, the largest being the most frequently used (ignoring very common words). Wordle takes the word cloud a step further and turns it into art, by arranging the words in all sorts of directions, fonts and colours. And you can play about with the mix to create unique Wordles.

Interesting graphics from alphabet letters are bang on trend just now. And you are free to use the Wordles you create for commercial purposes, but there are some caveats. Do check out the conditions of use at wordle.net/faq regarding attributing Wordle. It's clearly and concisely explained. Since the application was created by an IBM employee on that company's time, it would probably be wise to stick to the ground-rules, which, in my opinion, are pretty generous for such a fabbie tool that you can use commercially.

Labels: commercial art, computeractive, intangible, Labels: cnet, on trend, picture, visual ideas, word cloud, Wordle, words into pictures

It's great to see that the things that really work in any form of human interaction are the lasting traits for success online. That's according to an interesting post at Top Rank Online Marketing blog called "Let's revisit these 16 rules for social media optimisation (SMO) and see which are still relevant"

Different social media sites wax and wane, but a lot of the best practice tips come down to attending to the basics of good communications: listening and reacting appropriately, plus good ideas, clearly presented.

And there're lots of good tips too.

Labels: communications, online PR, SEO, social media, Top Rank Online Marketing

I've heard Brad Sugars, founder of ActionCoach business coaching say that you need to put in 10,000 hours to become an expert in a subject. I reckon I must have put in that in for online PR and marketing if you count taking formal learning and continuing to learn by applying it.

My CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations) CPD Excellence log shows I've clocked up an average of 250 training hours a year, mainly on online PR and marketing. I've done that each year for the last 4 years. That's currently 1,000 hours of formal training logged, not counting at least 10 times more time refining that training through practice.

That's around an hour a working day on training. And that's not counting all the online PR and marketing tips I pick up while I'm working. Plus Twitter throws up all links and time chasing them is not logged. Nor is watching the world's top experts on TED.com, although it's fair to say that's not so focused on online PR and marketing, but it is useful information as I tend to stay within client industries.

Planning your training for each year in accordance with your training goals keeps the training focused and logging that training puts good statistics behind you.

I find that gives me confidence in negotiations: you are not just buying our time, You are buying into a whole structured development process that feeds into our business processes and service delivery.

But something as basic (and, let's face it, a tad tedious) as planning and logging time on training is something that many small company owners and freelancers put off doing. Large companies have structured training and development, with goals set and training recorded, but in my experience, their employees often put in less training hours than small business owners that have to stay on top of a wide variety of key business areas, on top of developments in their industry sector.

Would your business do better if you focused your training, and used it as added plus point for your business?

Labels: ActionCoach, Brad Sugars, online PR, online PR and marketing, training

Caffeine is the codename for Google's new search engine. An early version has been released to web developers for testing and feedback.

Most of the clever stuff is under the bonnet so users will notice little obvious change, although results should be faster.

But what is it likely to do to your optimised web pages? The good news is that you don't need to be a pro to find out. A web developer has set up very neat solution: www.comparegoogle.com - a side-by-side comparison site of the top Google results for your nominated terms and your website.

I ran our clients' search terms on the comparitor. All of them had been performing well in the top 20 for some months on organic search alone. And all of them performed slightly better on the caffeinated version, so I'm looking forward to a pepped up Google.

Labels: on and offline PR, online PR, SEO