Research is essential in defining the direction of ideas, if you don’t know the brand, how can you come up with new ideas? Knowing the products and services you sell and adapting them to fit with a certain brand culture can be tricky, however using a creative and imaginative drive will help you work to fit your products or services to suit the brand.

Creating a new service is a great way to enhance the agency portfolio. Every brand has a different culture, objectives and goals. Agencies working with brands need their products and services to be readily available and adaptable to suit the needs of any brand.

With virtual social networking taking the world by storm it’s no wonder marketers have already jumped on the band wagon promoting their businesses and colleagues, for example, the use of Twitter has totally entranced our colleagues here @ WebCertain, follow: @globalppc @starbuck8 @jennysimpson @davidsegal @davidecorradi @ballueder @WebCertain @J__9 @YorkSEO @globalseo @andyatkinskruge @seoprtips @newscertain @WebCertain_DE @AnaVLeckenby @oscarcarreras, for updated information on specialised areas of multilingual search!

Promoting the latest international search summit, general information about PR, SEO, link building, PPC etc… has developed a wider knowledge on each subject, by sharing and re-tweeting relevant data to enhance the specialised knowledge arena WebCertain hold.

Many businesses and organisations are using online facilities and companies such as WebCertain not only for English articles, as we are multilingual; multiple languages from across the globe play a large part in how they operate, especially for clients. Online PR is a great way of getting your company, news / press releases / data, relayed around the world, especially using press release sites with an overseas domain, rather than the traditional offline methods. This however, does vary upon client needs; everyone wants something different and to be unique, so be adaptable and knowledgeable on your subject arena to create the best possible service for your company and your clients!

Many larger corporations and anyone who can afford to use SEO companies and/or multilingual SEO organistions, are there to improve or enhance your site in order to gain better search rankings, however there is no guarantee that an SEO company will improve your site rankings. Search engines tend to keep you in the best position for your site, and unless you suddenly produce the best possible site there is a limited possibility that you will drop your position.

Consider the following factors to enhance your search results:
• Content – ensure the quality is good and contains plenty of keywords to maintain visitor numbers, to further your content make the use of niche words. Also bullet points in content will always be picked upon, try to add them in your content.
• Design of the site and software used to build it can also make a difference as to where you rank. Text is important in helping the visitor get to the information they have searched for, whether the content is written on your page or there is a link to whatever the visitor is looking for. If you have any images on the pages, ensure they have alt tags and title tags. Important Note: alt and title tags should always differ.
• Title of your site should contain no more than 12-14 words (include keywords in the website title). The header of the post must contain keywords also in order to attain higher page rank.
• Navigations should always be created using text, the use of images will deplete any page rankings you have. The keywords used in the navigation menu should always be the same as they are general web standards.
• Any links which are on your pages should relate to your site, to increase the chance of high search engine rankings, any external links should relate to your sites niche.
• An up-to-date site and an eye on your competitors will ensure you stay ahead, keep an eye on current SEO news and use the techniques to your advantage.

Always keen to share tips on international PR strategies.

We’ve been doing some work in the Czech Republic recently and found a good number of online press wire services – after putting in some leg work and doing some digging around.

So far, I would  concur that -

“In the Czech market it seems there is a lack of exploitation of new media. Blogging and social media in general are perceived as ‘something for the geeks’ by the general public.”

“On travel companies not reviewing Web 2.0/Social Media as part of a comprehensive Internet marketing and distribution strategy, together with website re-designs and optimisations, search marketing, email marketing, strategic linking, online sponsorships and display advertising: Many travel companies don’t have the resources or confidence to think holistically.” said Scott McNeely, Director of Consumer & Affiliate Web, Viator Inc. also recommends that travel suppliers should constantly update content.

take a look..

The need to keep up-to-date with social media and business is imperative to promote the brand as much as possible…SEO, SEM, link building, web design etc

The WebCertain International Search Summit event about Social Media and International opportunities will be held in London @ the British Library on 14th May 2009… Find out more

I’m in the process of putting together some training documents for the multilingual WebCertain taskforce – it isn’t easy…

Although press wire services exist with a pretty standard format in most countries, I’ve come across lots of little, unexpected differences. For example, in Germany the fashion is for press releases with a short headline followed by a short strapline and in China and Korea, personal blogs are used quite differently.

Also, at some point in a PR campaign, you are going to have to communicate with a human being…

Now in the UK, we are happy to send an email with a simple “Hi” to the addressee. Not so in France. that would be insultingly bald. French business-speak is incredibly polite and it reminds me of when Laure was preparing to start at the company. I’d sent her a welcome email (“Hi Laure”) thinking I was being nice and friendly, but unwittingly caused great consternation to her as she debated back and forth how to address her reply to me. Was I a Madame or a Mademoiselle? She didn’t want to offend her new “chief”.

So, such a very simple issue can make the difference between making a new friend or enemy (or a story hitting the front page, or being spiked). What’s our advice?

• Always (always) use a native speaker with experience of the local market – and listen to their advice
• Never think you can cut corners by following an English / UK pro forma of communication
• Get a name for your contact (that is very old advice)
• Good luck!

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

“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.

The most common thing is to remove hyperlinks, and even company names in more extreme cases. (I do it myself on our newsfeeds “a major airline company reports”, for example). So how can PRs try to preserve the most important elements of their press releases?

One basic one – use the full web address as the company name so that even if hyperlinks are removed readers can copy and paste the address.