SEO PR TIPS

Oh no!

Picture the scene – you are going to visit one of your company’s major clients (worldwide household name FedEx) and it’s a pretty unattractive place where they’ve decided to stick their HQ. It’s not long before your meeting, you’re bored (maybe a little nervous), so you mess around with your Blackberry and decide to make a Twitter post.

“True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, ‘I would die if I had to live here.’”

Unfortunately, you are such a successful “Key Online Influencer” that you have too many followers to really be checking on who they are and someone from FedEx sees your Tweet, knows only too well which s***hole you’re complaining about and…well, you can guess the rest…FedEx are not happy and they don’t care how many people know that they think you’re an idiot.  Full story here – definition of a PR booboo.

It’s going to happen more and more as social networking sites blur the personal and the professional and we’ve been discussing it a lot at work.

The consensus is that Facebook is (largely) for fun and Twitter more for business, but that doesn’t mean that Twitter is confined to business-speak.  I use it to have “jokes” with colleagues and even the major big shots post stuff that is a world away from corporate-speak.

Come across any other social networking mess ups?

Story brought to us via @jamie247

Just a quick post on this…

From Cision blog
Media relations professionals and journalists can enjoy an authentic and mutually beneficial interaction on Twitter – but will they?

The media relations industry is (pardon the pun, but I need to get it out of my system) all atwitter (*collective groan* See? I warned you!) about the micro-blogging site that has attracted hundreds of media and PR industry professionals. Link

T-Mobile are in the middle of a campaign that ticks all the boxes for modern multi-channel, multi-media, search engine friendly “buzz marketing“.

This Google search should provide all the background you need.

Basically, they organised a “flash mob” of dancers at one of the UK’s busiest train stations to stage an inpromptu mass dance-off in the main concourse and promoted the event, and the TV premier of the advert online.

So far so good. The advert was shown in one of the ad breaks for Celebrity Big Brother and it’s being hailed as a fine example of guerrilla marketing.

Why my negativity? I’ve seen the ad, and it just looks wrong. There are too many people in just right casual wear and subtle make-up. There’s far too much co-ordination (what’s the probability of 100s of random people all having natural rhythm?). Where are the ugly people? Where are the people getting annoyed because they are going to miss their train because of some dancing idiots? Also, it doesn’t have any wit. In short, it just looks fake and therefore irritates the hell out of me…

Almost related. A bed company are sponsoring Celebrity Big Brother and I think it’s a bit of a mistake. Why?

I can’t remember their name
Their promos just make me think about going to bed (and switching off the TV)
Hearing the shrillest part of Jackie Wilson’s “The Sweetest Feeling” every 15 minutes is tortuous.

Trackur is pretty simple to use. You enter in your search term, fill out a couple of other criteria (exclude domains, text results, videos or images results) and here you go with a list of the sources that quote your brand name!

I try it for our agency WebCertain and filter the search asking it not to include results with the main company URL and unfortunately I am a bit disappointed with the results as it looks really messy…

I could not see some of the sources I get while doing a basic search on Google Web such as our own PR resource http://www.newscertain.com or on Twitter or LinkedIn in which the company is registered.

I also noticed that most of the links appearing on the listing do not lead you directly to the main article page speaking about your brand but, to a link to a page that has just a link on your brand name.

I explain myself more precisely with the example below:

The result underlined in red is a PR we wrote for a client and that has been published in one of the well known news service wires einnews.com. The link drives you directly to the article.

However, the result underlined in green directs you to a total different article not in relation with the one you are looking for – this because the page of this article just contains a link to the brand name. And then it’s not easy to see it when you don’t have a view of the cached page that you get from a Google search.

Briefly, you have to play around and check the listing to get at the end what you really want – but does that save you more time than playing around the web using Google search?

The good thing about Trackur is that you can share a result with a friend via email so that you can make him aware of a bad or a really good comment that appeared on a certain blog or site. Another good point is that Trackur gives you some notes on the influence of each website (views numbers, top discussion, traffic rank of the site) where your brand or article has been quoted to see the benefits of it. But I have to say I am not sure how this ranking worked… I assume that a higher number indicated more influence??? Also, I wonder if clients will understand or rate a Trackur rank, compared to Google Page Rank, or Alexa.

Unfortunately, it is a shame you can’t select the results you want to make appearing on the listing and share the whole listing of it with your company or clients (or is this option available in the paid version??) – I am thinking notably of yahoo search explorer that offers you the possibility to save your links listing results in an excel format…

A good thing nevertheless is that you can save your all searches within the site and set it up as a RSS feed and start monitoring what’s being said about your company.

Working for a multilingual company, I have to say as well Trackur is not the best tools to track results in any other languages than English. I try to assess the results for a French PR campaign I managed but none of the sources I can find while tracking through Google come up with Trackur…is Trackur supposed to be multilingual?

Conclusions and suggestions

I think that charging up to $197 a month (that is actually the price for the enterprise option) for the tool that doesn’t offer substantially greater benefit than Google Alerts is a bit too much…

The pricing model definitely seems aimed at businesses. I can somewhat understand this because I am sure the tool is a good resource, but need to some extent to develop more options to be perfectly well respected in my opnion…(dealing with more languages, keeping preferences for viewing search results, having the possibility to add notes to specific items, or the possibility to view results in summary or excel form…etc.)

I am looking forward how this tool will grow and see what can be the differences among the many other e-reputation metrics tools across the web…

I was also quoting in my last post the site Brandseye and Jenny just came up with some news about it thanks to her Twitter connections!!! Apparently this one would be multilingual…

I follow Jenny’s article (or you could say I “Twitt” her in a proper geek language) to speak about tracking and monitoring online PR.

As she mentioned with the ClickThrough Marketing article example, there are many PR professionals who still do not know how to best measure the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. And this is more than understanding when we know the amounts of new blogs, social networks and plethora of online communities, created and interfering in today’s online space!

Nevertheless, there are many tools online that already allow you to keep records on the buzz created through your campaigns while assessing bloggers’ feelings, number of links, bookmark views…etc.

According to Lee Odden, the following software tools can help make things easier for Online PR professionals:

Google Alerts for brand monitoring
TweetBeep – twitter tracking tool!
Small biz: Trackur
Enterprise: RADIAN6, Buzzlogic

Some others that are worth looking at are:

Collective Intellect
Keotag
Crimsonhexagon
Vibemetrix

Brandseye
Reputation.distilled
Reputationdefender.com
Sentimentmetrics.com
Reputrace.com

We are looking at the moment at Trackur which is an online reputation monitoring tool that has been developed for companies who take a serious look at what is being said about them in the blogosphere so that you can take action when need be, and prevent a storm of bad e-press whenever possible (as we know how easy a business can live and die by online referrals and word of mouth!!)

The best way to get a handle on Trackur is probably to give it a try while signing up for the free 14 day trial (what we do at the moment and for which we will come with thoughts really soon), but any good comments by those who had already experienced it by the past are always welcome!!!

However and according to the Demo video that I have already watched, Trackur seems to have a much more integrated package as, compared to Google News Alert, it allows you to monitor what is being said about you and your company in the blogosphere.

What Trackur does exactly is to search blogs, forums and other online publications in order to track items that are pertinent to you.

According to Andy Beal, users can be up and running with Trackur in just 5 minutes which “removes the hassle out of maintaining dozens of manual reputation searches.”

He explains: “We take the hard work out of monitoring social media. We monitor news, blog posts, images, videos – even Twitter! Users can set up multiple searches, use sophisticated filtering to remove items that are not relevant to them, bookmark items, share items, sort items, then subscribe by email or RSS – or just use our beautiful AJAX interface”.

So far, Trackur appears a bit more sophisticated than Google Alerts with some obvious advantages such like the management platform or the fact it covers data sources outside of Google’s Index, but for this extra advantages you will have to consider an extra price of $18 – $88 while Google remains free…

Let’s see…

A new blog that charts the commercial deals celebrities have made has been launched by Brand Republic.

Celebrity Sell Out promises to give the low down on celebrity marketing.

I’m jealous – they are effectively writing about celebrities and pretending it’s work! Of course, this blog has been gradually moving in that direction…

The blog is entertaining and informative, skipping between serious issues like, “The Creative Coalition, a ‘non-partisan political group founded by actor Alec Baldwin” and daft stuff such as Samuel L Jackson carrying a man bag.

Strkikingly, the content isn’t that much different to a straightforward celebrity blog (like Perez Hilton), which is more of a reflection on modern day commerce and views of celebrity than anything else.

In the last year I’ve seen a proliferation of courses for PRs training them how to write for online publications. These courses are expensive! Save your money, here are the essentials.

Do what you would normally do.  There’s all sorts of talk about writing your copy to fit around keywords, but it’s much more important to write naturally – and hopefully informatively and compellingly.  Start with a strong story and then optimise it.

Optimise it by reviewing what you’ve said.  The first thing that journalists are taught is never repeat yourself, hence the use of tabloidese.  Britney Spears is the “pop princess”, “troubled pop sensation” etc.  But you want your clients’ brand name to be prominent, so use it, repeatedly.  Happily search engines like repetition – as long as it’s natural.

Consistency gives keywords more prominence.  Back to the Britney Spears example, if she wanted to rank for “American pop star”, then in her press release should describe herself as “American pop star Britney Spears” throughout, not  sometimes as “US pop star Britney Spears”.  Another simple thing to look out for is the use of plurals and singular.

Include the url!  It’s amazing how many people forget to include a full web address in press releases.  If you’re lucky it will be published as an active link and if not, readers will be able to copy and paste it to easily visit your clients’ website.

Do produce different versions for different readerships.  And do continue to personally contact key editors.

Always have images ready for publication and include them when you distribute your content.

The standard format for online distribution is Headline, Intro, Main body, About text

There’s a balanced article in the Independent about the crossover between PR and journalism – as there are now more people employed in public relations than journalism.

“Over the past century, PR has grown from negligible beginnings into an industry which, in both the United States and the UK, now employs more people than journalism. The underlying reality is that, in a way that is seldom studied, almost all modern organisations – governmental, commercial or charitable – spend an increasing share of their resources on attempting to manage media coverage.”

Pure journalists criticise hacks that move over to PR as moving over to the dark side, but I agree with this writer that the lines are very blurred – and even more so when you look at SEO PR…

For example, this morning, one of the major “news” reports was footage from the premiere of the latest Kate Winslet film, with talk of Oscar buzz and praise for the Winslet’s dress, it was surely good PR – by definition.

In a post yesterday I mentioned that clients are even more concerned than usual about getting value from money from online PR

The Econsultancy Online PR Trends Briefing says that the metric of measurement are crucial for online PR in 2009.

From ClickThrough Marketing: “Metrics such as improvements in search can be an effective way to benchmark online PR, but such measures neglect the wider value of company reputation…”

The times they are a-changing.

A Twitter user published the first picture from the scene of the New York-Hudson River plane landing.

The caption reads “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”

This is freaky.

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones has written an excellent article about the use of Twitter as a newswire – which appropriately enough I came across when a friend “twittered” it.

After having been heavily sarcastic about Twitter, I’m actually starting to enjoy it now – especially after installing the Mozilla plugin Twitbin, which makes it so much more user-friendly.

If you really want to, you can follow me being rather dull on Twitter…