DIY PR by Penny Haywood Calder

Got some thought provoking tips on social media from Seth Liss, SunSentinel.com's news community manager. He's making the point that a lot more people are using social media now and it's harder to get noticed. But social media is still a better bet than advertising for driving business to ecommerce sites, so it's worth making the effort.

He kicks off with the obvious: drop the drab everyday stuff.

When you do post a newsworthy event, he points out that it's the details that make it more interesting. How did it happen? Where? How does that make you feel? Not easy in 140 characters, but when was really good communication ever easy?

He reminds us to avoid engaging in a 1-2-1 conversation on public sites - it's really boring for everyone else.

He also reminds us to place posts with links into context. We need to judge for ourselves whether the link is worth pursuing.

It looks as if people have had enough of blatent promotional messages from their friends. Edelman's Trust Barometer survey shows "the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company has dropped from 45 percent to 25 percent since 2008." (Edelman's annual Trust Barometer survey is based on nearly 5,000 25-minute interviews with informed people aged 24-60 in 20 countries).

He suggests sharing good information is the key to being interesting. Develop interesting sidelights on your business sector to demonstrate your knowledge in action.

Plus timing is key. Most people dip into their social media accounts so they miss a lot: If you can spot patterns when key people are posting, you can predict when they are more likely to see your posts.

Finally advises: listen first, then comment. "If people know you are interested in what they have to say, they will most likely be curious about what you have to say as well."

I'd say: there's no quick fix. It's a case of listening well before you speak to have a better chance of engaging with well respected people with a good following. People who enhance your own line reputation, and in turn, that boosts your online business.

Labels: DIY PR, ecommerce, online PR, online PR and marketing, online sales, PHPR, PR, social media

Klout now lets you see the most influential Tweeters on a topic so you can build a Twitter list of the results. The Klout Twitter app measures the influencing powers of individual Tweeps to "find the people the world listens to"

Labels: ecommerce, influence, influential, Klout, online PR, social media, Twitter

Is the real cost of 'free' social media our friends' data?

Labels: marketing, online PR, social media

Social Media Trends for 2010 from David Armano in Harvard Business Review: social media will be more popular, more mobile, and less social.

Labels: online PR, social media

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

It's easy enough to find comment mentioning your business name or key search terms on websites, forums and in the news using Google plus their news alerts service.

But finding the most influential tweeters on Twitter in your sphere was a bit of a hit or miss using apps like Twollow. Not any longer. Have just discovered WeFollow on Twitter and I can recommend it. It is a directory and you can use it to find entrepreneurs, celebs etc.

But use it on a keyword search and it will dig out the people who are tweeting in your sector. The results come back ranking Tweeters numerically according to the number of followers they have attracted, which gives a fair indication of their influence.

And helps you see where you are in the pecking order. You do have to register to be placed, so it's not totally comprehensive, but I suspect most people wanting to be seen as a heavyweight in a subject area will be seriously tempted to sign up.

http://wefollow.com/

Labels: ecommerce, online PR, SEO, social media, Twitter, wefollow

If you run your own ecommerce site, you probably have generated additional content to boost your SEO, so you know how hard it can be to generate good content.

Particularly if writing snappy informative copy is not your thing. With so much free content out there, an investment in good writing is not often high on the publicity budget. But a failure to invest in writing goes much deeper and the current trend towards shedding writers in the media could affect all businesses.

The big question is, with all the free news around, can we retain quality news outlets where a mention is respected to the extent that it boosts a business reputation?

Several UK media have seen their offline circulation plummet as more people access content online. But despite higher online readerships, many media are reportedly struggling to make money online as content users blank out a lot of online advertising.


Does it matter?


Well, yes, if you want to generate high quality media coverage (on or offline) that people choose to read. Material that packs a powerful editorial endorsement factor, recommending your company to thousands and sometimes millions of others.

Yes, it matters If you want an editorial endorsement that you can wear like a badge of honour for the next squillion years: "as seen on BBC TV" or "as featured in the FT", with links to the coverage or a hotlink to a quote from it.

Yes it matters if you want a media recommendation your business can be proud of, because someone has to pay editorial staff to create the content that you are proud to be seen in, and edit the publication to maintain its reputation for credibility.

A media recommendation where anyone can get a look in is no recommendation at all, regardless of whether the news source is on or offline.

So it matters when an influential author like Chris Anderson writes a new book, called “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” arguing that there is a law dictating that anything made of ideas, like information, gravitates inexorably to being free - that it 'wants' to be free. And he doesn't mean unfettered free speech. He is talking about free of charge.


Now free of charge, when it comes to information usually translates into a vastly reduced budget to invest in good writers. You would think that PR people would welcome that as it might open doors for news releases to be used almost wholesale. But I know I am not alone in being more concerned with the bigger picture. Sure, getting news releases taken up is one thing, but a swing towards accepting unrestricted content reduces the impact of coverage on the site to the point that it would be worthless from a PR point of view.

Anderson is editor of the popular Wired magazine and author of the best-selling book, The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand. In that book he argued the Internet offers everything to everyone, and trailing in the wake of an initial success, a tail of endless near misses can now have a market. That never convinced me entirely. I can see that there is more of a long tail than before the Internet, when physical shop space limited the choice on offer. But I've always thought that assuming an upward graph line will continue forever is just that: an assumption. So I couldn't see how the tail of unlimited demand would continue indefinitely. Surely the near misses would start drifting further off the mark and become irrelevant?

In today's issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reviews Anderson's latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price and finds similar holes in the idea that a tendency towards free information is the only force affecting pricing online. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=all

Gladwell is no stranger to big ideas. He was named one of the top 100 most influential people by Time magazine in 2005 and his books: The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers have all been international best-sellers.


Gladwell takes Anderson's examples of how we all rush to free services, so they cost a bomb to handle the demand, like YouTube, forcing owners to retreat from the abundance thinking model that propels free information. Universal free information is often of such questionable quality that even YouTube pays for professional content provide from TV stations and film production companies for quality content to keep users happy and deliver audiences for advertisers.

Gladwell says there are plenty of models where information is running in just the opposite direction from free - in drug companies, for example where the high costs of trialling to meet regulations need to be recouped. Or where both models are used: the New York Times puts its content up free on the Web site, but the Wall Street Journal has over a million subscribers paying for online access to its content.

Gladwell predicts Apple could make more from selling iPhone downloads than from the iPhone itself and may one day offer the phone free to boost download sales (yes, please!). Or give away downloads to boost the phone sales. Or carry on charging for both.

He concludes that the only law is that "the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws".

And that's good news for those who want quality journalism to continue, because quality comes from an editing process to sort the wheat from the chaff. Plus sources to provide information and run around getting pictures set up and arranging interviews (PR people). Plus someone to write it up and place the information in context - and that understanding of context comes with in-depth experience in a sector.

All that means skilled intelligent human intervention - and with humans come minor factors like a liking for food, a need for clothes and a roof over their heads, plus obligations to care for family members and spending money.

In short: great media needs to be paid for somewhere down the line.

And great media is an inspiration and a challenge to PR people to come up with issues-led ideas and spokespeople that can stretch to fit the news agenda, add to the debate and showcase their company's talent. And when they do, they get all the conferred credit that editorial endorsement can bring.

Used well (and I've seen an astonishing number of businesses fail to capitalise on good quality coverage of their businesses) good editorial endorsement is like a prestigious award and can be referred to almost indefinitely thereafter.

Labels: Chris Anderson, content, ecommerce, editorial endorsement, Free The Future of a Radical Price, issues-led PR, Malcolm Gladwell, online PR, PR, The Long Tail, The New Yorker, YouTube

Google's forthcoming Wave looks like email meets instant messaging, only better (imo). I think it will be rather handy for working on collaborative projects - and in PR, what project isn't collaborative these days? Good for fine-tuning press releases, articles, online PR materials, web copy and other marcoms text.

Wave is due to be launched later this year.

As MicroSoft tries to move into Google territory with Bing and Google is attempting to venture into MicroSoft territory with Wave, the first video below provides an overview of both Bing and Wave. It also demonstrates the added value that good media analysis brings to a subject, if you compare it to the second video below, but that was a preview for developers, and it does contain a useful demo of Wave.









(you can skip the long preamble - the actual Wave demo starts c6 mins 30 secs into the video).


I've already blogged on Bing. With Wave I like the almost instant transmission of characters as people type in replies, so you can be formulating your response and not staring at a "X is typing" message. I don't think speaking through a keyboard can ever be truly like a conversation, as Google claims, but I think it does look more conversational than instant messaging.

There's a very neat trick where you can take some bits of the online conversation to selected recipients and the ones missed out don't know. And easily add others in later - there's a neat playback facility the newcomers can use to replay the wave construction sequence to make sense of it unfolding.

Nice one Google.

Labels: Bing, collaborative working, Google, online PR, search, Wave

I'm grateful to Ian Burgess at http://www.linked-it.co.uk/ for pointing me towards http://www.WordTracker.com.

He explained keyword research in Google Analytics is based on past performance, whereas WordTracker is predictive and they are an excellent way to find extra profit avenues from your search terms.

A new version of WordTracker is coming down the line that looks very useful - see the beta video at

Wordtracker New Tool Tutorial from Wordtracker on Vimeo.

If most of your online business comes from searches involving just 20 keywords, finding another 20 good keywords would give you a decent hike in new business. WordTracker provides initial free tools and tutorials to turbo-charge your keywords research, with enhanced paid-for offerings.

As WordTracker's free tutorial says: "you can't get enough good keywords", and they open up avenues to unexplored profits, and provide useful information. The words I've looked at to date have shown unexpected differences in popularity. I'll be reviewing my content. Can I encourage you to take a look if you're not using WordTracker already?

And there's good marketing and management advice to be had at http://www.linked-it.co.uk.

Labels: boosting your business, business promotion, ecommerce., marketing, online businesses, online marketing, online PR, sales, small businesses

One of the best explanations of how online PR and marketing works is "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" by David Meerman Scott. Having been online and in PR for a long time, I'd pieced together a lot of the points he makes. But he was the one that pulled it all together and made sense of it - and a fair number of folk agree judging by the popularity of his book.

Online PR lets you to build a brand through making great connections: with bloggers and key influencers, which can include online media. Meerman Scott notes that online is where marketing and PR meet, and in my book DIY PR, I made a point of highlighting that small businesses don't separate PR, marketing and sales. It's all publicity or promotion.

That's why most small business owners will 'get' online PR and marketing. They are unencumbered by the separate training routes for PR and marketing and can happily get stuck into results-driven online promotion. Meerman Scott shows it's not rocket science. But it does need application and effort. With every major purchasing decision involving a Google search, it's worth getting your online PR and marketing right.

I keep seeing a lot of search engine optimisation people claiming to do PR, and some of the text examples are so optimized they are a really clunky read.The whole point about being online is to establish conversations and relationships directly with customers and anyone else you want to talk to.

You don't do that by throwing optimised content at them.

You do write brilliantly interesting or useful material that compels people to recommend you and you place it very well. Then wait for the comments.

PR folk have been identifying audiences to speak to and adapting content for them for years, so have a head start, but anyone with a passion for the subject will give them a close run for their money if they crack the placement angles.

Labels: budgeting for PR, David Meerman Scott, online PR, small businesses, The New Rules of Marketing and PR

If you want to be found online (and if you're trading online, why shouldn't you?), one of the best things ways to boost your website content is to create an online news room on your site. It's a great opportunity to post wonderfully rich and detailed search engine content. Creating your very own online newsroom is too good an opportunity to miss, but even larger companies with PR advisers often miss out on this. And web designers that say they offer search services have actually asked me what an online news room is, and what should it contain.

But that's fine, because it means there's all the more chance for you to romp up the search engine results if you do use an online newsroom to build up your content.
It's not the only way to build up content. In fact, an embedded blog, like this one, is one of the fastest methods you can use to make an impact on your search engine performance.

But an online news room not only adds to your other content. It is really important if you want media coverage to point back to your site. Since most online media coverage is very highly rated because of the massive amount of content they carry: a link from them to you is a powerful booster to your own site rankings.
Plus good quality media recommendations carry the vital editorial endorsement factor, which is like a super-charged testimonial. If you get a good media comment, it's wise to quote it again and again, at every opportunity, as it will carry a lot of weight.

How does an online news room work?

The reason online newsrooms work is because reporters rarely read news releases these days: they are swamped by them. But they do what anyone does when they need information. When they're asked by an editor to write about a topic, they turn to Google to search for relevant information. So it really matters that you put useful content about key issues that are relevant to your industry up there in your online news room.

The online news room allows you to put up all your news releases and articles, plus background on your company, bios of key people etc. It builds up into a large body of highly relevant search engine friendly content that will help the media write about you. And boost your website performance in online searches.

You can also add product and service background information. In fact anything a journalist might be interested in. Of course, if you have press kits, they should go up. And photos (but be sure to have a link or a request form for high resolution images as web pictures are far too small for print media). Maybe you run events that the media would be interested in? Or have good blogs, videos or pod casts that can be linked to? And financial information that you are willing to disclose - maybe about your backers (with their approval, of course).

But it's not just for the media. If you run the analytics, it's amazing how many ordinary site visitors like to see what you're putting out to the media. The online news room is a very popular page on a website. That means you are communicating your company progress and background to all sorts of useful people: potential recruits, investors and clients, plus suppliers and advisers. In fact, everyone involved with you. Existing staff, friends and family, for example, will all be better able to recommend your business if they can tap into good quality information on the site. Especially if it is distilled into media-friendly factual nuggets stripped of all the marketing BS.

It's really important that people can find their way round the information in the news room, so it has to be search-able. A recent survey of journalists in the US showed well over 90% needed news search-ability on a site. At the most basic level you can put up a list of headlines with jump links to the release text below, but that will only cover a screen-shot sized list of headlines. Anything more needs to be properly search able, but it is not rocket science as Google has a 'search this site' option you can highlight. I'm sure your web designer will come up with something more elegant if you wish.

Good PR people should be able to come up with an inexhaustible supply of ideas for releases to keep your newsroom fuelled.

Labels: media relations, on and offline PR, online news room, online news rooms, online PR, PR 2.0

As Simon Allen here at Shopfitter says, "Google loves blogs" and certainly the posts on blogs appear a lot faster online than many website updates. That means you'll get results much faster with blogs if you want more web traffic on your site.

If you want to know how to blog really effectively, online PR guru, *David Meerman Scott's Twitter page put up a link yesterday to a great set of tips about professional blogging. It's written by a professional blogger and self-confessed geek called Yehuda Berlinger. I reckon he outlines a pretty clear road from start-up to star of the blogosphere and I will be working to apply a lot of his tips, including having a massive cringe at all the blogs I set up in my initial experimental phase ("not professional" says Berlinger. I'm just glad he refers to a defunct blog himself, so I can stop beating myself up, but you don't have to fall into the same trap!).

You can track the effect of all your efforts on your website visitor statistics with the excellent free Google Analytics tools. You can even get free Google lessons and qualifications in all of this wizard stuff to enable you to boost your web traffic and increase your confidence at handling it all. Good on Google! And Berlinger for sharing his blogging tips.

David is the author of the excellent "New Rules of Marketing and PR" book which outlines how to reach buyers online directly. Highly recommended (and no, I don't get anything for that!).

Labels: blogging, David Meerman Scott, Google Analytics, online marketing, online PR, SEO, Yehuda Berlinger

No fancy YouTube videos here. Just the sobering thought that if orange handled scissors can be made to fly online, you can do it too. Check out:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/135/made-to-stick-getting-your-ideas-to-fly.html?partner=homepage_newsletter

And don't forget to leverage that marketing with a piece in your newsletter, your blog, comments on all your social networking sites and - why not - the video and podcast.

Labels: fast company, online PR, PR 2.0, viral marketing