Archive for December, 2008

The results of the Junta42 survey done this month are most encouraging.

Back in 2000 a Forrester Research study found that the number one reason someone comes back to a site is the quality of the content.  And in Google’s recently published SEO starter guide they say that the most important factor in SEO rankings is fresh, relevant and exclusive content.

One of the biigest mistakes companies have made in the past is to spend their budget on design and programming – and not be willing to invest in content creation.  Happily,  that is changing.

And the survey showed that social media is top of the investment list for 2009.

Is your agency ready to deliver?  The Bulldog Reporter Social Media Bootcamp and Advanced Social Media Practice workshops can get you upto speed.

Online news has seen a sharp spike in the last year.  According to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press the percentage of people getting their news online jumped from 24 percent a year ago to 40 percent.  And in this same time period newspapers have been hovering around 35 percent.

If you’re after a younger audience the figures are even more startling: For those under 30 the internet now rivals television as a main source of national and international news. Nearly six-in-ten Americans in this age group  (59%) say they get most of their national and international news online and an identical percentage cites television.

This is also a huge change in the last year – in September 2007, twice as many young people said they relied mostly on television for news than mentioned the internet (68% vs. 34%).

If this makes you rethink your media relations strategy for 2009,  the PRoactive Report on News and Media Relations in the Internet Age would be a good read right about now.

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A new study by MS&L, conducted in partnership with GfK Roper, examines some of the corporate values consumers find most important today, and the effects of such perceptions on maintaining long-term business, reports Brandweek.

The study polled 6,000 consumers worldwide in the U.S., U.K., France, Italy, Sweden and China on topics such as “what defines a leading company?” and how blogs, the Internet and the media influenced their perception of a company’s values.

While the report covers many aspects that influence a company’s perceived values, one key finding is that more  than half (59 percent)  of Americans believe they can judge a company’s values by its online presence (versus 45 percent in the U.K.)

Another interesting finding is that while price and quality may be the primary purchase influencers in tough times, in the long run, it’s values that matter the most.

If your online presence is not yet part of your PR plan for 2009 this report should nudge you in that direction. Now is the time to figure out how to make the most of online tools that can keep you close to your customers

“The findings underscore the need for marketers to shift their business focus from being “driven by a coherent set of core values” to one that emphasizes how those “values [can] be communicated effectively at every touch point or companies risk undermining both their relationships with their customers and their long-term success,” said Mark Hass, CEO of MS&L Worldwide.

That places it squarely in the PR arena. And if more than half of them judge you by your online presence, it’s time to make that a PR priority.

The Bulldog/PR University’s Social Media Bootcamp will be taking an in depth look at how to use social tools to enhance your online presence.

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The Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University has a report out today:News and Information as Digital Media Comes of Age.

The United States is now several years into what promises to be a transformation of the media. It is driven by the rapid expansion of the number of people and organizations newly engaged as authors, editors, and publishers, says the report.

The aim of the research is to identify areas where core journalism functions in a democracy are at stake and where there is potential for the networked digital media environment to offer something richer and more representative than anything previously available.

Six Key Issues:

• Under pressure from falling revenues and the disruption of their business model, traditional media outlets are reducing and shifting the scope of their original reporting.
• Web-native media entities are not addressing all of the crucial reporting gaps left by traditional media. Current structures and mechanisms do not provide sufficient incentives for them to do so.
• In the changing media environment, news consumers risk relying on news sources that are neither credible nor comprehensive.
• Participation in the online media space is not evenly distributed; some populations and ideas remain underrepresented.
• There are elements of critically important journalism that have not yet found reliable sustainability  models in the online media environment.
• Efforts to understand and address these issues are limited by a lack of solid empirical evidence, and must rely instead on incomplete information, anecdotes, and intuition.

The Overview paper goes into possible responses for these challenges and in-depth look at media and news in the digital age.

There are more downloads available, such as

International News: Bringing about the Golden Age

Principles for a New Media Literacy

Meaty stuff here.  Take it home for the holidays and dig in.  A great preparation for your 2009 PR and media relations strategy.

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A post on TechCrunch today titled Death to the Embargo really brings home the fact that news has become a cut-throat, do-eat-dog activity.  The race to be first to publish a story is the result of shifts in media consumption,  a 27/7 news cycle and a cooling economy.

Image by Nebbish1

“As the economy turns south, PR firms are under increasing pressure to perform and justify their monthly retainers.”

One PR standard that is being tossed aside in the race to be first with a story is the embargo.

“The benefits are clear – sites like Google News and TechMeme prioritize them first as having broken the story. Traffic and links flow in to whoever breaks an embargo first. That means it’s a race to the bottom by new sites, who are increasingly stressed themselves with a competitive marketplace and decreasing advertising sales.”

As a result TechCrunch announced in this post that they’re taking a radical step: “From this point on we will break every embargo we agree to.”

There will be exceptions, they say

“We will honor embargoes from trusted companies and PR firms who give us the news exclusively, so we know there won’t be any mistakes. There are also a handful – maybe three – people who we trust enough to continue to work with them on general embargoes (if you are a PR person and wondering if you’re on that list, you’re not).”

I guess the PR lesson here is to be offer really great content equally to all parties.  Cherish your relationships with media – offline and online.  Being a trusted source is priceless.

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Search Engine Strategies is a conference all about search optimization and visibility. It is not a PR conference. So I was surprised to hear the panel on SEO basics talking about press releases.

I caught up with Greg Jarboe after the session and asked him to explain why optimizing press releases, which used to be an advanced SEO technique, is now considered an SEO basic and why this is a big opportunity for PR practitioners.

News, Universal Search and how to optimize a press release is part of the Social Media Bootcamp in February 09

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Social media marketing is spreading. Companies are recognizing the benefits of blogs, online video and social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and more.

According to Forrester Research, the number of social media “spectators” – people who read or watch social media – has increased from 48 percent last year to 69 percent of the people who venture online.

One of the questions CMOs and CFOs ask is – how do you measure social media marketing?

At Search Engine Strategies in Chicago last week I asked Matt Bailey this question.  Matt was one of the presenters on the Social media Measurement panel.

Every social media campaign should follow a strategy, starting with setting goals that can be measured.

What you measure won’t be traditional PR metrics, but there are many social media stats that make sense in a PR world.

Measurement will be one of the subjects covered in the Social Media Training Bootcamp in February.

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eConsultancy just released their 2008 Benchmark Report about the state of Online PR in the UK.

The results show a surprisingly large percentage of retained PR budgets are being spent on Online PR. Company respondents report that 39% of their PR activity is online whilst agencies report that 47% of their clients’ retained fees come from online PR.

When companies outsource Online PR to agencies or specialists, only half (51%) of companies are using PR agencies.  A significant percentage are using search marketing agencies (29%) and web development agencies (22%) to develop and deliver Online PR strategy.

When online PR and optimized press releases first appeared back in 2003, PR agencies in the US showed little interest – it was SEO and web development agencies that took the lead. Perhaps the same thing occurred in the UK.

The most popular definition of Online PR by respondents was “maximising favourable mentions of your company, brands, products or websites on third party sites”, indicating that current Online PR objectives are more outreach and engagement-based than identifying, listening to and understanding stakeholders.

Strange that there is no mention of content strategies, brand awarenss thorugh search, online reputation managemen or online news and video in this definition.

Although many PR agencies have a separate Online PR division and consider online activity as a specialism, its predicted to become immersed into the overall PR strategy over time. How many PR agencies have a separate “broadcast PR” division after all?

One important finding is that agencies and specialists should take note that levels of client satisfaction are not encouraging and they may need to improve their Online PR knowledge and offering.

Online PR training, incorporating SEO/PR and social media training, should be a priority for in-house and agencies in 2009.

Clients also recognise that their own knowledge could be improved -  just less than half (49%) say their Online PR knowledge is good and 12% poor.

What online PR services are most popular in the UK?

• outreach services such as online (traditional) media relations (84%)
• search engine optimised press releases (74%)
• press release posting sites and wire services (72%)
• blog relations (70%)
• corporate/brand microblogging via channels such as Twitter (38%)
• widgets (35%)
• virtual world activity (12%).

I believe that video and online reputation management should be on the list.

You can get up to speed at the next round of social media and online PR training days from Bulldog’s PR University.

Feb 5, 6 NYC.  Feb 12, 13 in Washington DC. Feb 19, 20 in Chicago and Feb 23, 24 in San Francisco

Registration is now open. Early bird till Jan 16 2009

There was a lot of discussion at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago this week about online PR, optimized press releases and search.

Since Google started returning news results in what they now call Universal Search results pages, and news is one of the most clicked results on a page, its become vital to understand how search works and how to get your content in many different formats, so it can be found in Universal Search pages.

I interviewed some of the best speakers at SES Chicago and I’ll be posting the videos every day next week.

Here is the interview with Shari Thurow about news search, optimized press releases and duplicate content.

NOTE:  What a web developer calls a boiler plate is different from the boiler plate in a press release – they mean the template of a web page.

Social media is the ultimate bright light that kills any hope of keeping something hidden in a closet.  And the speed of that light is – well, the speed of light.

Witness the PepsiMax suicide ads printed in a niche lifestyle mag in Germany.

Some folk found the ads offensive and in no time flat they’d been scanned and posted to the Web.  One of the people who saw the ads was blogger and social media maven Chris Abraham,  who is very active on Twitter and also happens to blog for AdAge.

Right there is the plus and the minus of content getting attention online: You have no control over who sees it, and how influential they might be.

Chris tweeted about a post by Matt Creamer.

Pepsi has responded to Chris and agreed that he could post the email. He has done so in his post on AdAge today and he makes the comment that perhaps we’re all being cleverly manipulated into participating in an orchestrated viral campaign for PepsiMax.

I hope that’s not the case.   I’m not a believer in the idea that any publicity is good publicity.

The point is that even when you flight something in a small market in another country, if it resonates with people – good or bad – that content will come to light.

And it will get seen in the search engines.   What appears on page one in Google when people search for your name affects your brand and your reputation,  so companies and PR folk must pay attention to those search result pages.

There are already 550,000 results for ‘Pepsi suicide ads’ in Google.  A blog post about the ads is already at #11 when you search Pepsi Max. Five of the ten results on page two for Pepsi Max are about these ads.  Give it a few more days, with the links being created to these sites, and they’re going to end up on page one.

But what it does show is that when content resonates, good or bad,  it get legs. And it gets seen.

PR lesson: Listen to your audience.  Figure out what kind of content is needed and wanted. Create excellent, interesting, valuable content that your audience will love – and share.

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