SEO PR TIPS

While Twitter membership rapidly grows and endless column inches a day are devoted to the phenomenon, marketers have been scratching their heads about the best way to use this new tool.

The obvious appeal is the ability to immediately reach out and create two-way communication with a wide audience, giving you the opportunity to sell yourself – and to handle customer service / reputation management issues.

The concern so far as Twitter is still largely populated by early adopters and members of the web marketing community – can you communicate with the right people?

Here’s a little anecdote to illustrate the marketing potential of Twitter.

My colleague (@davidsegal) has a friend who works for Sarah Coggles (@coggles_com) – an independent fashion retailer.

We have another colleague in our London office (@ballueder) who maintains a personal blog, posting pertinent and sometimes esoteric content.  This content is sometimes included in his Twitter posts.

We noticed that @coggles_com had linked to something @ballueder had posted – probably completely coincidentally, but this led to me tofollow @coggles_com and take a look at some of the clothes on their site.

I found a dress that I love and cheekily asked for a discount as a Twitter follower – which I have been given!

The end result is that I am seriously tempted to ignore the credit crunch and splash out on a new dress – all because of Twitter…

More info to add to my presentation on the opportunities and threats of marketing through Twitter that I’m giving at the International Search Summit later this year.

Lingerie brand Agent Provocateur has launched an online social media campaign to promote its Hello Agent Provocateur blog using Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.

HelloAgentProvocateur.com was created by StrawberryFrog and includes blog posts, updates and news revolving around relationships

Originating in the US, the website’s launch coincides with a steamy new ad campaign designed to remind men to remember Valentine’s Day.

With the slogan ‘Love me tender… or else!’, the ad is appearing on the company’s website as well as the new HelloAgentProvocateur.com blog page.

Both campaigns come as UK-based private equity house 3i hosts a men-only party in collaboration with Agent Provocateur, inviting London’s bankers to a preview of the lingerie brand’s latest lines over drinks and canapes…and those misters can follow the all updates on Twitter @msprovocateur

More info in here

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.

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.

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.