Public Relations and Marketing for the Web - Brent Skinner - STETrevisions

Caffeine: Do You Really Need It?

2009-08-19T08:33:00.000-07:00

Have you heard of caffeine? I know that I have.

Many of us think we need caffeine; some of us indeed do. That's why it's in coffee, that thing the jet-setting among us purchase for $2 or more every morning. For the same reasons, caffeine is in those carbonated beverages that some of us drink in the afternoon because we again need a caffeine fix and realize those funny ads about those kinds of drinks aren't too far off the mark.

But have you heard that Google thinks it needs Caffeine, too? (That, by the way, is Caffeine as a proper noun, baby.) In its continual effort to better itself by improving the accuracy of its search engine technology, Google is rolling out the biggest update to its indexing criteria since Jagger in 2007. Go here for a good rundown of the changes Caffeine apparently will bring. The Google Blog talks about Caffeine, too, and Google is even letting you test out Caffeine and provide feedback.

And I encourage SEO and SEM people everywhere to refrain from providing Google with any feedback. No, really. OK, that was meant to be humorous, but not at the expense of being at least partially serious. Don't help them figure out how to thwart organic SEO efforts.

Is that paranoid? Maybe. But how good is the organic search engine optimization industry for Google's Pay-Per-Click revenue stream? We don't really know. Even so, it's probably safe to say Google itself would be just as happy without this industry revolving around it. Sure, all the attention has played its role in making Google a household brand name, but the organic SEO industry hasn't exactly added to Google's bottom line. As more and more companies figure out that they can produce more and more content to please Google's spiders and thus appear in the first search engine results page (SERP), a major pillar of Google's revenue stream, premium placement on the first page of search for a premium price (i.e., PPC), begins to appear irrelevant. Not that PPC is entirely irrelevant -- but it's not like its essential, either.

Google has plenty of other reasons, of course, to evolve its search engine technology. I won't go into all those in this post except to say social media is a big one. But nobody should be surprised that one of the changes Caffeine brings, apparently, is a continuation of Google's efforts to individualize search engine result pages (SERPs) for every user. Taken to its logical conclusion, this march toward individualization fundamentally alters the dynamics and meaning of page rank, and the attendant conjecture within the search engine marketing community has been, well, spirited. Some suspect that Google may be gaming its own system to favor PPC. And why wouldn't Google do this? The potential attrition in PPC revenue because of SEM dollars instead going to organic SEO firms is a clear and present danger to Google.

Fortunately, spirited competition may be at hand among the major search engines, and it might yield viable alternatives that would be welcome any time now. This is the last thing Google probably wants, but the company may finally have brought this upon itself. I speak of Bing, which is already gaining traction among SEM types. In my next post, I'll share my thoughts on how Bing might take advantage of the growing discontent.

Nichey Nichey, Bing Bing

2009-08-18T07:09:00.000-07:00

Savvy readers will recall that Google itself explored ways to work with Yahoo! some 10 years back. With the recent partnering of Bing and Yahoo!, is Microsoft taking a cue from Google's own playbook in a bid to leapfrog Larry Page and Sergey Brin's brainchild to become king of the search engine marketplace? Or are the designs humbler, saner?

The answers are unclear. But let's look at where search is today, now that the two search engines whose names aren't Google have joined forces.

News this week indicates that even search engine users Bing and Yahoo! may call their own use Google more, according to research from comScore. This amounts to as much as three-fifths of the time. Clearly, then, any upstart that wishes to become a long-term force in search has an uphill battle ahead. This, we know. It's cliche, and everyone says so. But what will that battle entail? What are they fighting for? A niche is what I say. The real mission for Bing-Yahoo! is that they must identify and target a niche of search engine users to wine and dine over time. And it might not even take that much time.

At first blush, this isn't exactly flattering for their alliance, but a huge opportunity may be at hand. Does niche mean small, for instance? Not necessarily -- stay tuned for more blog entries about this.

PodCamp Boston -- Kind of Like Woodstock, but for Social Media

2009-08-10T06:48:00.001-07:00

Woodstock may have been three days of peace and love 40 years ago, but it had nothing on what I experienced less than 40 hours ago. Subtract the mud sliding and the loud music*, keep almost everything else, add some uber-smart businesspeople and academics with cutting-edge ideas on social media and the Web, and you'd have a pretty accurate rendition of PodCamp Boston**, the event I attended this past weekend.

PodCamp was everything I expected it to be when it comes to social media -- and many other things I didn't anticipate at all. At Woodstock, kids from all walks of life descended upon a small town to share a passion for music and cultural change; at PodCamp, businesspeople, academics and others descended upon the UMASS Boston Campus to share their passion for social media and the change it fosters in business and in daily lives. Hard-core entrepreneurs, "solopreneurs" and well-sorted corporatists shared space and ideas with intensely dedicated "social-preneurs," idealists, realists and eternal optimists alike. The unofficial goal seemed to be to understand each other and to reach a common understanding regarding this newfangled social media we find ourselves using every day. (Common understanding -- wasn't this, as well, an idea from the Age of Aquarius?)

Because of PodCamp, I've reached a few conclusions regarding social media, how it affects your business, and how you might best use it. Actually, let's just call them conclusions in progress. Nevertheless, I can't wait to share these ideas with you all. Stay tuned.

*Even so, I did see an impromptu game of frisbee form outside, and at one point, someone vocalized some rapper beats over the PA system.
**Oh, and by the way, unlike Woodstock, parking at PodCamp Boston was orderly and easy -- and even free on the second day of the event.

Twitter, Meet the Upside-Down Pyramid…Sort Of

2009-07-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

You ought to be inverting your tweets. This will make sense shortly. Read on.

The hallmark of informative writing is the inverted pyramid. Think about walking into a bona fide Egyptian pyramid. I've never been inside one myself; maybe you have. But I do know that no real, live pyramid is inverted. The fattest part, the footprint, is at the bottom, flush with the ground. And you probably have to climb a musty, ancient stairwell to get to the top. That's what I'm guessing, anyway. As I said, I've never been inside one myself.

But where's the top of the figurative pyramid when you're reading a news release, the mainstay of informative writing? That's right. The top is at the bottom. When we read, we read from top to bottom, and the most -- and most important -- information appears at the top of this upside-down pyramid, also called the inverted pyramid. Skillful writers can stuff that info into the first sentence, even. This way, if you're the reader, you're sure to learn everything essential in the first paragraph, and if you're the writer, you've imparted the gist of your message in the space where your audience is most likely to pay attention. And if the lead paragraph compels you to do so, as the reader you have the option to climb down into the rest of the news release, just like you have the option to climb to the top of a real pyramid if you are so inclined.

Sure, the analogy is rough. In a real pyramid, for instance, curiosity might compel you to climb to the top regardless of what's at the bottom. I don't know what's inside the fattest part of a real pyramid -- perhaps nothing of note. But the fact remains that you must first enter the fattest part of the pyramid before you can get to the tip, and the same goes when you begin to read a news release.

Take stock of the inverted pyramid's utility, for doing so will help you to write more effectively online. A well-put-together online news release, for example, contains many of its most important keywords in the very first few lines -- again, the fattest part of the inverted pyramid. These very first few lines, in turn, display directly underneath the news release's headline (another critical component) on a SERP (search engine results page).

Put another way, people aren't the only ones who best pay attention to and digest information presented in the inverted pyramid format.

But how do these concepts possibly apply to Twitter? Well, I recently read an article that shares several ideas on how to write tweets, and when it comes to Twitter SEO, one of these ideas cuts to the core of issue: your tweets' visibility online. To squeeze the most possible organic SEO out of your tweets, you must write them as tiny inverted pyramids of information. Include the keywords up front, within the first 30 characters or so, because when search engines index your tweets, these are the characters that will appear on the SERP.

Where, by the way, does this leave shortened URLs, the very basis of many tweets and arguably just as important as a tweet's original content? Place them at the end of a tweet. That's what I do, and this means my tweets take on the form of not just one pyramid, but two: an upside-down pyramid at the beginning joined at its tip to that of a right-side up pyramid at the end.

Yes, that's all pretty complex for a mere 140 characters.

But with just 140 characters at your disposal, do you really need to think about capturing the reader's attention before those 140 characters are up? Shouldn't even the most boring tweet still command some attention simply because it's only 140 characters? Conversely, shouldn't it take at least 140 characters to get someone's attention in the first place?

Yes and no. It almost seems pathetic and silly, the ultimate indictment of our ever-shortening attention spans. And it would be, except that the "reader" in this instance is a search engine, where a large population of your potential followers will learn of your tweets' very existence, let alone take interest in your micro blogging. In key ways, this makes the search engine your gateway audience, and now that Google has announced plans to make real-time search a reality, the time has come to invert your tweets and make them search engine–friendly.

Ongoing Changes to the Blog Color Scheme

2009-06-12T04:29:00.000-07:00

If you're visiting this blog right now, you might be encountering difficulty reading some of the text that displays in the right-hand column. We're still tinkering with the new design and its attendant color scheme. Stay tuned for legible text in the very near future. ...

Get found when you're down

2008-11-12T04:29:00.000-08:00

Just yesterday, the stock market dipped again. You don't need me to tell you this. Even so, I just did. But I want to get it out there that I know you don't need me to.

It's interesting. Given the plunges of Biblical proportions that occurred last month, yesterday's drop didn't seem that bad. Nevertheless, people are hurting, wondering where the economy might be headed, hoping that the destination isn't what it seems.

But here's why I'm telling you all this:

We who operate under the broad umbrella of search engine marketing can take solace. New research strongly suggests that SEM might be the sweet spot poised to weather the gathering economic storm largely unscathed.

Amid adverse economic conditions, SEM is gaining in popularity among businesses seeking an online marketing method that yields "measurable returns," reports Zero Strategy, which cites an ongoing study into the matter by Sempo UK. Natural listings receive the majority of clicks in the search ecosystem, with more than 80 percent of all activity occurring in the natural search space, according to Conductor, Inc., whose recently announced research into Fortune 500 firms revealed that less than 30 percent register any presence in natural search.

In other words, we're in that sweet spot I just mentioned. Companies of all kinds want to try SEM as a marketing tactic at a time when their accountants are scruitinizing the books. This is good news. It means they think their accountants will like the idea. And, with all those large companies failing to take full advantage of natural search, the opportunity is there for smaller players to absorb the real estate for themselves, under the radar.

Plenty of aspiring thought leaders can use natural search to their advantage, as well. A colleague of mine, Susan Friedmann, does so herself. She also hosts her own online radio show. Called "Riches in Niches Radio." Susan's show airs every other Tuesday, at 8pm EST, on wsRadio.com. Just recently, her guest discussed how she harnessed the power of natural search to catapult her own business into the limelight. You may listen to the recording simply clicking on part one and part two, both archived mp3 files.

SEM feeds social media activity that leads to leads

2009-06-05T08:51:00.000-07:00

Last week, we looked at how search engine marketing (SEM) leads not only to good search engine optimization (SEO), but also to a Twitter frenzy. But can activity in social media lead to, well, leads -- and closed sales, for that matter? Yes.

Forty-eight percent of businesses have generated qualified leads by utilizing social media, according to a survey of 880 marketing professionals whose responses are compiled in the Social Media Marketing Industry Report. Presented at Social Media Success Summit 2009, this white paper by business research expert Michael Stelzner also reveals that 35 percent of these same participants have witnessed social media marketing closing sales for their business.

The report itself includes a great deal of data on who's using social media and the results they're seeing. For those in talent management, we've already established that TMT's approach to SEM can provide a big boost to a company's SEO, which runs a high likelihood of inspiring a flurry of activity on social media sites such as Twitter. All that's necessary is a presence on social media in the first place.

Web 0.0

2008-11-04T03:44:00.001-08:00

Before Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 entered the lexicon, and before talk surfaced of Web 3.0, we lived in a Web-free world, a world worlds apart from our world today.

During Web 0.0, the Web was only an Internet, and without the pretty pictures, fancy functionalities and august applications. Nobody talked about this Internet. Normal people didn't talk about it, anyway. Most didn't even know about it. The vast majority of us interacted face-to-face or via phones (many of which sported rotary dials). Truckers and other cool people used CB radios. Only geeks and the military found themselves interacting via electronic mail with others from disparate, sometimes remote locations, and only geeks and the military would have understood their lot in this way.

The Internet of yore was serious, solely for the conducting of serious business. And that serious business wasn't even business; it was serious scientific research and the serious matter of national security, both facilitated by real-time communication. Life was slower for everyone else, who also went about their business, commerce or personal, in real-time, but didn't know it was in real-time, or off-line, even though it was.

Sit there. Imagine what this world must have been like. If you're old enough, conserve those creative juices and simply remember. Civilization still managed to advance by leaps and bounds over the many years that predated the Web, and progress progressed at a breakneck pace for the many more years that predated the Internet. We don't need the Web, but it's a blessing to have.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, the Web is becoming more and more like Web 0.0. It's growing ever more organic and natural. Organic is a buzzword, of course, and natural is one of those empty descriptors that annoy professional writers. What I mean is the Web is trying to get back to Web 0.0, but with a twist. Many-to-many communication is slowly but surely achieving the same fluidity that one-to-one communication has always enjoyed without the aid of high technology. The Web is growing ever more efficient.

Think of interaction without the interference of high-tech media. It's natural and effortless. It's organic. Interaction in a Web 0.0 world -- which still exists, by the way -- is efficient, albeit archaic and constrained by inherent limitations of logistics. But the Web has limitations, too: the limitations of technology. As we've striven to render Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and beyond as Web 0.0 as possible, we've been painfully aware of these limitations.

And that's the point. In everything we do online, we pine for the Web to be as natural, effortless and organic as Web 0.0 has always been, but without the limitations that led great minds to lay the groundwork for the Web in the first place. We search for the efficiency we enjoy when we share dinner and a conversation with a friend or colleague, but on a grand scale and with the speed that technology allows.

In our quest to get back to a Web 0.0 world, we look for it within the Web. In our attempt to communicate ever more efficiently online, we create Web 0.0 redux.

Circumvent the news media

2008-05-06T18:50:00.000-07:00

Many think of PR as MR—i.e., media relations, and by that, they're thinking of relations with the news media. They're thinking of publicity, really. And this is an attitude that existed when I first entered the business in the late ‘90s, and certainly a long time before that. Furthermore, news media relations is but one piece of the public relations puzzle. So why is it that so many think public relations is at once synonymous with and nothing more than the practice of trying to get publicity?

The problem is that the two were functionally one and the same for a long time. Why? Until recently, the prevailing vehicle for PR practitioners to reach their many publics with a message was the news media, the information brokers and middlemen of communication. And, so, the PR industry built an empire around relationships with these information brokers, and to this day this empire holds tremendous cache in the minds of clients who still see the news media through the lens of awe. Think Walter Cronkite. Think "The Tonight Show." You understand now, don't you? These are icons. They command reverence. Clients want to get on these shows. The PR industry has sold itself well.

But these shows don't deserve all your energy (a highly devoted portion of it, just not all). Any business can now reach its target markets directly. It's just not as sexy. Or is it? Well, that depends on who you ask.

Although the ideas of "getting ink" and "shooting b-roll" are sexy and enamor people with the notion of PR, Web 2.0 is in fact sexier to the person who practices public relations. After all, who in this business wouldn't want to circumvent the news media entirely to reach target audiences directly with unfiltered, highly targeted messages? Not only that, but these target audiences are apt to believe your communication just as much as they would if they were to read it in the paper, hear it on the radio, or see it on television.

I saw evidence for this in my own research while in graduate school. And I'm seeing it now, in practice. I'll talk about all that some more next time. For now, suffice it to say that you used to have to rely on the brand name of a traditional news media outlet to carry your client's brand (or your own brand, if you're doing this yourself) across the finish line; in the new environment, you can take the brand of yourself or client, and rely quite a bit on just that.

Plaster yourself all over the Web with Web 2.0

2008-05-05T04:38:00.000-07:00

I won't burden my readers with too many details of the Sunday morning traffic jam I encountered yesterday. Yes, I just wrote Sunday morning. Let's just say one of the two major thruways to Massachusetts from Central South New Hampshire had transformed into a parking lot at a key intersection of highways south of the state border. I use that term, "parking lot," literally: Cars were parked. The guy in front of me opened his door and walked out into the median to survey the situation. The guy in front of him did likewise. They shook hands. I didn't know they knew each other. Maybe they didn't, but I joined them, and we tailgated.

No, we didn't tailgate. I also just lied about joining them. But you get the point, I did get out of my car, and the standstill did last a good 25 minutes. Fortunately, this wasn't long enough to keep me from arriving in Cambridge, Mass., in time for the day's festivities at the Branding & Promotion Lab, an installment in a series of events that the National Speakers Association has produced this year to present ideas on how professional speakers can, well, brand and promote themselves.

A longtime colleague of mine (note: link includes automatic sound generation) was there to give a presentation on his phenomenal success in regularly attracting major news media hits. I was there to co-present, and took the stage at about 10am to share my thoughts on how professional speakers can post high-quality content online to plaster themselves all over the search engine pages, and how this can, in turn, be a powerful pull-marketing tactic to win business.

Later this week I'll share more on the concept of a direct-to-consumer news release campaign, a simple yet effective approach to public relations online that often achieves these very objectives. I'll also take the 50,000-foot view of news media relations vs. public relations. Yes, they're different, and this fact speaks volumes about just about anyone's PR objectives online.

Grab the microphone, or blog?

2008-05-03T20:37:00.000-07:00

About a week and a half ago I went to an alumni event at the Boston University College of Communication (COM). Being a graduate of the school and member of its adjunct faculty, I figured I'd better make an appearance, maybe even do some networking. And it wasn't just any COM alumni event, anyway; it was the mother of all COM alumni events, a celebration of 60 years.

"Sixty years of what?" you ask. Sixty years of the world's first graduate degree program in public relations, that's what. You see, COM is the place where that happened, and the main attraction at the event, a spirited debate by a panel of distinguished alumni, quickly justified the reasons why we COM alumni venerate our school with such gusto.

A crowd of nearly 200 gathered to listen to the panel contemplate the event's title: "Progress and Public Relations: A Look at Where We've Been and Where We're Going." The panel's very composition, a coterie of industry luminaries, screamed the depth of COM's longtime influence on the profession of public relations:

Harold Burson, founder of PR powerhouse Burson-Marsteller and inspiration for the honorary Chair of Public Relations in his name established at COM in 2002

Carol Cone (COM '78), chairman and founder of Cone Communications, Inc. and pioneer in the cause of Cause Branding®

Dr. Otto Lerbinger, sage of the public relations industry and professor emeritus at COM, where he has been on the faculty for almost as many years as the number celebrated at the event

Graciously and aptly sitting in on short notice, Paul Rand, president and CEO of Zócalo Group, a freestanding division of Omnicom Group subsidiary Ketchum Inc., whose own CEO and Senior Partner Raymond Kotcher (COM '79), the originally scheduled panelist, found himself at a conflicting, last-minute meeting with a client halfway across the globe

Moderator Dr. Donald Wright, professor of public relations at COM, tossed the ball into play and then got out of the way. The panel discussion gave rise to a sprawling yet keen Q&A that meandered, just as any proper discussion of communications these days should, into the topic of online communication's effect on PR.

I found myself casing the many rows, keeping an eye on the guy at such events who mills about the audience as he carries the microphone. Fighting the urge to raise my hand and share my two cents, I ultimately resolved to refrain from speaking -- out of restraint, really. After all, I have this blog for that sort of thing. I'll share with you all some of the topics discussed, and my thoughts on them, over the next few weeks.

2008-05-02T05:46:00.001-07:00

This is a test of the blogcasting system. This is only a test.