SEO PR TIPS

One thing that all professional writers are taught when they are starting out is to know your audience – visualise them in your head when you sit down and write and it will make it easier to pick the right words.

This is one of the cornerstones of writing press releases and remains unchanged. You imagine the grumpy sub-editor who has a chip on his shoulder about supposedly overpaid PR types, looking for grammatical mistakes as an excuse to spike your story. You imagine the stressed out young reporter who has a target of x stories per day to write and might just be tempted to overlook the fact that this is a bloody press release, because it won’t need much re-writing and it just about comes across as a kosher news story (not that working in the media has made me cynical. Oh no…)

But now if you work in online PR, you are more than likely writing on social networking sites and imagining your audience is a much more complicated affair (ignore the hecklers shouting, “it’s easy, they’re all geeks!”).

For example:
On Facebook, my boyfriend updated his status with the esoteric statement “…is baking in the boulangerie of the mind”, which was understandable to precisely one person (me, it’s a long story).

Again on Facebook, a friend posted “…thinks 5-0 will do very nicely, thanks.” This is understandable to everyone that knows that he is a Man Utd fan.

Meanwhile on Twitter, Laure is wondering where John is (and appropriately enough in this mixed up, muddled up world, this is a reference to said John’s unexplained disappearance from Facebook). Meanwhile I’m confusing people with an oblique reply to Oscar about the mayor of London (“who’s Boris?” I’m asked by a third party).

My point is that on social networking sites you are often addressing different overlapping audiences, with different interests, and with different levels of knowledge about your subject matter. Confusing things even further is the presence of friends-of-friends who don’t actually know you at all.

It’s obvious that if your boss or clients might be reading, this isn’t the place for letting off steam at the end of a bad day at work. Correction, it should be obvious.

If you are planning on using social networks for marketing or online PR, you need to go back to basics and define who you are and who you want your audience to be.

You have the choice to be an online mate, a handy bite-sized news source, the straightforward corporate face of your company, or the knowledgeable (but human! I am human, look what I had for my lunch while I was finding you that link to the latest data on web usage in Uzbekistan!) SEO-expert networker – the latter accounting for approximately 50% of people on Twitter by my reckoning.

NB – Imagining my audience for this blog is super-easy – it’s the most intelligent and beautiful group of humans known to man – aren’t you! Do leave a comment if you have any thoughts on this.

Online and Email Marketing is an instant way of keeping in touch with clients and contacts, it’s why it’s so popular with many industry sectors.

Recently the tour operator Activities Abroad sent out an email to all its clients and contacts apparently as a “tongue-in-cheek” marketing strategy! I haven’t been working in online PR and marketing for very long however, I do know that offering ‘Chav Free’ holidays wasn’t the best angle to go at, the offence that its contacts have taken especially over typecasting people’s names is understandable when you work damn hard for a living etc, you can check out the story on The BBC website

Mr McLean, Director of Activities Abroad claimed he was sticking up for ‘Middle Class’, I don’t believe there are class systems in this country anymore, or am I mistaken? Surely there are better and more inventive ways to market holidays, especially through email marketing and online, its the fastest growing segment way to market, is it not?

I’ve known about Twitter for a couple of months now, but just decided to sign up a few days ago now to understand the all madness around this new social network… I do think the tool can be amazing – to “twitt “about things of interest to me and to engage with people who are saying and doing things that I do and enjoy -  and so create proper relationship and network with it. However, when I went to play around more closely and come across the such examples (see below) I can’t stop thinking what all those people are on about?

·         “My unplugged printer just came to life..spooky”

·         “Love spring. Hate allergies. This sucks”

·         “I have a ghost in my database”

·         “I think the IT guy might kill someone, this is great. His job really isn’t that stressful”

·         “Might cry. Or kill someone”

·         “What’s this smell”

What are the benefits to know that some stranger will probably kill someone by the end of the day or someone is going to the toilets in a minute or…

Well, I should probably let you watch this video on Youtube untitled “Twitter Madness” that sums up really nicely and artistically the whole addiction around it…

Twitter Madness Video

Well well, so far, I keep thinking positively and try to consider twitter as the new way to let off steam in everyone’s daily routine or as Jason Lee Miller describes it incredibly well “as a weird Twitter nirvana” where the crowd’s thoughts are simply indefinable!

Please share your thoughts about the twitter Madness!

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

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…

The A0 poster of the 2008 Web Trend Map (841mm x 1189mm / 33.25in x 46.75in), is now up for grabs at http://informationarchitects.jp/web-trend-map-3-get-it/

For those who are not geeks and wonder what this web trend map is, it is all about representing in the shape of a tube map the main services and trends of the Web 2.0.

The Web Trend Map refers to more than 300 Web 2.0 services – using the world-famous Tokyo Tube map as its model.

The UK’s Community Secretary Hazel Blears has launched an attack on the “vicious nihilism” of the political blogosphere.

She partly blames the political apathy in the UK on the attitude of the bloggers (or at the very least makes the connection between the two).

This is very much in contrast to the huge impact blogging, social bookmarking, YouTube etc. have had on the American Election, with the re-energised electorate.

I think we can all agree that blogging is a hugely important part of any political campaign…

<p style=”text-align: center;”><a href=”http://twitter.com/therealbritney”><br><br><img style=”border: 0px;” title=”Britney Twitter” src=”http://www.webcertain.com/uptest/upload//Webcertain-PR/twitter-britmey.jpg” alt=”" width=”560″ height=”30″ /></a></p>

This may be not that exciting news but our dear singer friend Britney Spears seemed to have joined the world of Twitter.

Some argue that Britney’s presence on the network means the beginning of the popular miroblogging site going mainstream. However, there are no doubts that HER people have launched both a Twitter account and a bloggy sort of site with constant updates on her fascinating life to avidly promote the “noisy” singer.

The blog doesn’t appear to be “Britney” and Britney’s Twitter stream appears to be deeply monitored by her PR team, and so strongly appears less genuine.

Wouldn’t be fun if Britney were actually twittering? Oh yes I guess, exchanging advice on hairdressers, being “tired and emotional” on stage…but I won’t wait for that day to come.

Firstly, I am sure there are a lot of us who will agree that Twitter isn’t the easiest thing to understand entirely at first – follow me it is just cool! Secondly, celebrities are an easy target for malicious gossip online – so why put themselves in the firing line by being “online” in this way? Conclusion: celebrities should avoid being there really. And finally, let’s be fair, if the real Britney was twittering 100 times a day, she wouldn’t have time for singing or arguing with Kevin Federline!

Anyway it looks like Britney is not the only celebrity to play with social networks. Here is a list of the many others joining the social media trend. http://www.celebritiesusingtwitter.com/

You can read also more about this in http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/19/omg-britney/ and http://www.blackweb20.com/2008/10/23/celebrities-using-twitter-revisited/

Also we may not be celebrities, but you can still follow us on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/newscertain

A post on one of The Guardian’s blog is a textbook example of boosting visitors via controversial blog posting – link baiting.

The Guardian’s Lost in Showbiz (LiS) blog recently featured an article by Marina Hyde putting the boot into Lily Allen’s PR team for comparing her lyrical strengths to the great Romantic poets – calling Lily Allen the Wordsworth of the MySpace generation no less.

In the article the PR who had written the hyperbolic statement was called up and challenged on his knowledge of Wordsworth’s poem (limited). One of Allen’s more base couplets about lying in the wet patch in bed was featured to highlight the contrast between her and the daffodil enthusiast’s romantic views of their surroundings.

So far so good, a dent was made in the music industry’s hype machine – walk on, nothing to see here?

Except, Lily Allen is most definitely of the MySpace generation. She made her name with her very personal blog which is frequently updated. She is also clearly of the Google Alerts generation and before too long the singer (and it was her, not one of her press representatives) turned up on the comments section to defend her corner and to criticise the Lost in Showbiz team for being unable to grasp the humour of her PR’s overblown statement. Allen also slammed them for the perceived harassment of the hapless PR in question.

It’s not that often that an actual celebrity posts a comment on an article about themselves, so this became a story in itself. The Guardian stuck it on their front page, boasting of Allen’s response and influential websites (such as Popbitch) picked it up, sending large numbers of visitors to Lost in Showbiz. This is the classic example of “buzz”.

Soon there were 8 pages of comments (363 the final total) – a huge number for a pretty ordinary story about a British celebrity. NB – by far the easiest way to generate huge numbers of new visitors is to say something slightly insulting about American foreign policy or evangelical groups – just sit back and watch them swarm in foaming at the mouth. Also, consider that it was dwarfed by the showbiz story of the week (the Russell Brand – Jonathan Ross farrago) – a big enough story for the PM to take a break from the economic summit to comment on it.

In pure search terms, this is a big result for LiS (and the Guardian generally) and it is a textbook example of how to generate links and visitors through News – which makes me suspect it was deliberate link baiting.
1) Write something controversial
2) Pick a subject that has a huge ONLINE profile
3) Invite commentary and let that commentary become a follow-up story

The story is currently 15th of 5,350,000 total results in a search for Lily Allen in Google (behind the ubiquitous MySpace page and a number of strong news results) and it’s all good publicity for the singer’s new album.

So, we should congratulate The Guardian and be satisfied that it’s a good result for everyone concerned? I’m not so sure.

The Guardian is already one of the most powerful and effective online News outlets in the UK – they got online very early and have pursued a clear online strategy that works very well alongside their print arm. LiS may not be as high-profile as other sections of the paper / website (such as the excellent Sports section), but it sits securely in the Guardian’s blog network. If I were to criticise it, I would just say that it’s sometimes difficult to find the right blogs of interest on the Guardian site (it gets particularly confusing if there’s a TV / Media / Showbiz crossover with there being a number of blogs covering these subjects). On a personal level, I’m not a particular fan of the content in LiS which is often a bit lazy (and I say that as someone with about a dozen entertainment / gossip sites on my favourites, so I’m not exactly picky when it comes to reading this sort of stuff).

Was there any need in this case to use such tactics to boost visitors / rankings? Could it potentially backfire and lead to a reputation problem for possible new readers?

Looking through the comments (which takes some time), the readers’ view were somewhat mixed. The Guardian’s largely metropolitan and very media-savvy readership were not overly surprised that Allen’s record company would come out with such hyperbolic statements and many people were discomfited by what they saw as the rather personal tone taken against Allen (in both the original article and subsequent comment replies by Hyde and other commenters). This also sat rather uncomfortably against the default “Latest stories” links under the comment box, one of which was “Allen loses baby”.

There were, however, a lot of fans of the column writing in to support the original article and from the tone of them; many of these appeared to be by the loyal, regular readership – the lifeblood of any publication.

But the new readers attracted by the comments and postings on external sites may well have been put off from visiting again, by both the critical comments and by the way they were introduced to the story. It’s dangerous playing with sites like Popbitch where the regulars are not inhibited from posting the sort of gossip that wouldn’t be allowed on a broadsheet and where details of Ms Hyde’s personal life were mocked…

It would be interesting to see the visitor stats for LiS over the next few weeks and see if any of these new visitors continue to return. It will also be interesting to see if there are similar stories with high volume generation posted on LiS in the future.