Archive for March, 2008

“The State of the News Media 2008,” by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts has far too much information to be covered in one blog post. 

Here are the major trends:

• News is shifting from a product to being a continually updated service. Story telling and agenda setting — still important — are now insufficient. Journalism also must help citizens find what they are looking for, react to it, sort it, shape news coverage, and — probably most important and least developed — give them tools to make sense of and use the information for themselves.
• A news organization and a news Web site are no longer final destinations. Every page of a Web site — even one containing a single story — is its own front page. And each piece of content competes on its own with all other information on that topic linked to by blogs, “digged” by user news sites, sent in e-mails, or appearing in searches.
• User-created content appears to be more limited than first thought. The most promising parts of citizen input currently are new ideas, sources, comments and to some extent pictures and video. Few news sites allow the posting of news, information, community events or even letters to the editors.
• The newsroom is perceived as the more innovative and experimental part of the news industry.  Most poeple think that journalists writing blogs, the ranking of stories on Web sites, citizens posting comments or ranking stories, even citizen news sites, are making journalism better — a perspective hard to imagine even a few years ago.
• The agenda of the American news media continues to narrow, not broaden.  Even as the media world has fragmented into more outlets and options, reporting resources have shrunk.
• Madison Avenue, rather than pushing change, appears to be having trouble keeping up with it. Advertising executives, in other words, do not have answers any more than the news professionals. The question of whether, and how, advertising and news will remain partners is unresolved.

There is lots more data in the report – it’s worth a read.

Do not underestimate the power of videos online was one clear message from SES NY 08.

In February 2008 alone 116 million of internet users watched an average of 124 minutes of online videos! They viewed more than 5.9 billion video streams; 72% watched news video online at least once a week.

So the audience is there, its your job to make sure you make it as simple as possible for them to find you.

Even local small businesses can profit from using video online. Many ’yellow page’ sites are integrating video with business profiles. Now that Universal search results puts video on web search pages it’s a strategic move to add video to your online yellow page listings.

You are 2.2x more likely to get a click from a Search Engine Results Page if you have a sponsored result and a local listing, but if you have a video plus local your 3.2x more likely, said Steve Espinosa, Director of Product Development and Management, eLocal Listing, LLC.

Tips to follow to improve your online video presence:

• Enhance existing text content with Video Thumbnails. This makes a huge difference when the user selects which video to click.
• make sure you have the right keywords in the title tag and description
• Use keywords in the video file name and separate them by hyphen. Example: www.herroom.com/sports-bras
• One video per URL (and avoid Flash and pop-ups)
• Surround video with on-page relevant text
• Allow video files to be embeddable and include logo watermark . this is very importnt as it makes it possible for bloggers to use your vidoe material
• Brand yourself in the video: right now it’s easier to rank for video than text
• Mention your videos where ever your key audience would be

Online video offers a burgeoning PR opportunity for branding and visibility.

 

For the past five years I have been telling PR professionals that search is affecting the practice of public relations. This week I got to tell a room full of SEO specialists that PR is affecting search.

And even though we were the second last session on the last day of the conference, as you can see the session was well attended. In fact, numbers were up for the whole conference – they had over 8000 attendees. Search is still a very hot topic and Search Engine Strategies is the place to get the latest scoop.  People come from all over to hear their search experts speak.  One of the attendees in my session was from Scotland and another came from Italy! 

This session was called Beyond Linkbait – getting authoritative links.  Lee Odden and I spoke about using traditional PR and media relations techniques to improve your search ranking and visibility online.

Google search engineers have made it quite clear that links from other websites are a big part of the search ranking algorithm.  Inbound links definitely affect the other PR in SEO – PageRank.  Page Rank is a trust factor that Google assigns to a web page and they gauge this trust factor by the quantity and quality of the sites that ‘vote’ for you with a link to your content. The links they value most are those that occur naturally in a piece of editorial content.

Does this sound familiar?  It should.  It’s the classic PR model.  They’re ranking your web pages on third party endorsement from unbiased, high-quality editorial content.

How and where you appear in search engines affects your brand value and your reputation – both of which fall into the purview of PR. And now that images, logos, videos and news content are being mixed into the web page search results, you should be even more interested in how your company or your client appears on those search results.

So what is an authoritative site?

•  has a large number of pages – hundreds or thousands.
•  has themed content about a subject
•  has links to and from other big, quality sites with similarly themed content
•  has a high Google PageRank

Google favors non-commercial sites, so dot org, dot edu or dot gov sites get a good score, if all other parameters are in place.  They also favor media sites as most of them rank as an authoritative site.

Media relations is no longer just about calling the mainstream media. Every story in the Wall Street Journal print edition has a small box at the end that says podcast interview on wsj.com and video on wsj.com. 

Reporters at most of the big media outlets have been tasked with getting images, audio and video content when they cover a story for the print edition.  This content goes on the website. 

You could become a valuable resource for journalists in your field if you provide this kind of backup material.  Add placing your news and educational content on sites that meet the authoritative criteria.  Media site are of course perfect.  But there are many more sites you could work with.   Influential bloggers are an important category.

Find the top ten bloggers in your space and build a relationship with them.  If you have more than one product line you should find the 10 bloggers that would be appropriate to reach the right people for that line.

Here are Lee’s Do’s and Don’ts for online media relations

A publication or blog would love to find a great resource they can cite and link to over and over again.

• Do your homework
• Be relevant
• Understand the difference: journalists vs bloggers
• Make it easy
• Publicize your publicity

And here are the DON’Ts:

• Don’t be sloppy or spammy
• Don’t be a one trick pony
• Don’t be arrogant
• Don’t ignore multiple promotion channels
• Don’t forget to say thank you

My do’s and don’t’s for bloggers

• Give them good content
• Find something they can have first 
• Build relationships
• Don’t pitch cold
• Don’t send press releases

There will be lots of more about how to do online media relations at the Summit

PS:  The SEO folk in that room were very intersted in how to use these PR techniques.  There were quite a few questions about hiring PR people who know how to do online media relations.  There is an opportunity out there to expand your practice.  All you need is SEO -PR training.