Archive for November, 2009

The way people are finding news and information has changed dramatically.  Search engines are paying attention to the fact that a very high percentage of people say they are looking for discussions and opinions from others  on a subject when they search.

To stay ahead of this curve Bing andGoogle recently made deals with Twitter and Facebook

When you do a search in Yahoo! they display the latest news for that search term  – with tabs for news, images, videos and Twitter.

Why is this important?

Whether you participate in social media or not, others are.  And they’re doing it in rapidly increasing numbers.   These conversations are gaining in influence.  And as the search engines tap into this stream of social content everyone who does a search for your company, product, or even your generic category, could come across the discussions going on about you.

Understanding search and SEO is fast becoming a modern PR skill.

And if you are in the Chicago area, there are two excellent sessions about search, social media and PR at Search Engine Strategies on December 7  and 8.

And here is an interview with Vanessa Fox (ex Google) about her new book.  About half way into the interview she talks about  search and social media and why it is so important.

The 2009 Arketi Web Watch Media Survey has some interesting statistics about how BtoB journalists find stories. 95% use search when starting a story. At 92% press releases are the number one source for BtoB journalists.  PR contacts and industry sources came in second at 85%, newswires at 77% and websites at 70% make up the top 5.

While most companies have their eyes firmly on the social media prize, if you’re in the BtoB space don’t neglect search strategies and your online newsroom. Having your news in a feed (RSS) can boost the search visibility of your news content remarkably.  And search is the first port of call for a BtoB journalist. When they type in that keyword you want your news content to pop right up.

There are several good sessions on search, social media and PR at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago Dec 7 and 8.  If you’re going to the show please stop by my sessions on Monday and Tuesday and say hello.

Sally Falkow

The Proactive Report, your social media PR guide

Predictions are that over 80 percent of companies and organizations will be using social media marketing in 2010.  Who is going to take these companies to the next level - move them from the random ‘dipping a toe in the social media water’ approach to a strategic business activity with actions tied to outcomes, benchmarks and measurement?

Will this be  PR, advertising or marketing?  One of the speakers on this panel was Joseph Jaffe, a dyed-in-the-wool Madison Avenue man and author of Life After the 30-second Spot and Join the Conversation.

In another session about social media Rob Keys of Converseon said that 2008 was the trial and error phase, 2009 was the checklist phase (I’ve got a Facebook page, I’ve got a Twitter feed, I’ve got a blog) and that 2010 will be the year social media finally ‘grows up.’

Social media is not going away – it is only going to get bigger.

There are 25% less journalists today than there were in 2001.  Media relations in the Internet age demands new skills.

PR people are excellent at creating content and building relationships.  But to win this race we also have to learn how to monitor online PR and measure the results.  This is where Joe Jaffe and his Madison Avenue cohorts could take the prize. They understand digital measurement.   Since social media is all about collaboration and sharing, perhaps the best answer is not to try to win the race, but to collaborate internally too.

If you want to lead the charge in your company get started now and prepare a complete social media strategy.

Related links:

Measuring Engagement

Why Digital Agencies are Ready to Lead

The PRSA National Conference got off to a good start in San Diego yesterday with a thought-provoking keynote session.

Arianna Huffington spoke about her views on new media, old media and the need for ethics in PR.  Then she interviewed Wendell Potter about his change of heart and the decision to embrace transparency and honesty.

Arianna opened with the statement that the news business is at an amazing turning point.  People consume old media sitting on a couch. We engage with new media – and it’s fast. Like galloping flat out on a horse.

In this new media world it can be more effective to give your news to a select few (online reporters and bloggers) than sending out a press release.  PR people have to learn how to use these new tools and techniques.  As the news business changes, so the practice  of  PR has to change.

One thing that’s changed is that in social media you don’t tell the story once and move on – you tell the story bit by unfolding bit, and then mine all the conversation around that story.

New media reporting has become more personal.  It’s not ‘just the facts, jack’ anymore.  We’re back to the model of meeting and sharing  information in the town square.

Touching peoples hearts is more powerful than touching their minds.

Use facts and statistics, but also  tell the human story behind the facts.  Include the drama of those involved.  People are looking for real stories and human drama.  It’s not enough to report that 10% of people are out of work or 50 000 lost their homes.   Find the people who have compelling stories to tell.  Show how that ripples into the community.  Success in new media is all about compelling content that people will want to read or watch – and then share.

And you want your content to be shared and passed around.  While promiscuity is not good for a relationship, it’s very good for online content. The more people who see it, read it and share it the better.

One major change new media is ushering in is truth and transparency  PRSA has always had a firm code of ethics, but there have been instances of spin, flackery and downright dishonesty.  Arianna emphasized the need for honesty in PR and the need for people who have a change of  heart or a strong opinion to stand up and be counted at the time. Don’t write a book two years later and tell us how right you were then, she says.  Do it right when it happens.

A case in point is Joe Biden’s disagreement about increasing troops in Afghanistan. She recently wrote a post with the headline Why Joe Biden Should Resign.

And to fully illustrate this point, she interviewed Wendell Potter on what he calls the spin and flackery in the healthcare industry. Potter left his job as head of communications for one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies to assist organizations advocating meaningful health reform.

AH:  We all have the capapcity to make a change – what led you to your change of heart?

WP:  I had lost my moral compass. I dealt in numbers and was not looking at the human reality of what I was doing.  The health care reform debate heated up and some very devious PR  campaigns were in full swing – campaigns with front groups, false information and disinformation.  I found I was doing things I was not proud of and then numbing myself so I would not have to face that.

My advice: when you are in constant fear that you’ll do or say the ‘wrong’ thing – do an ethics check.  Something is way off base.

Related links:

An interview with Wendel Potter on PBS In his first extended television interview since leaving the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter tells Bill Moyers why he left his successful career as the head of Public Relations for CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest insurers, and decided to speak out against the industry. “I didn’t intend to [speak out], until it became really clear to me that the industry is resorting to the same tactics they’ve used over the years, and particularly back in the early ’90s, when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan.”

Although most teens and young adults are very social media savvy, it’s all for personal use.  They have no experience of using social media to achieve business goals.

In a Businessweek article Dr. Elaine Young, an assistant Professor at Champlain College, says that schools need to give students the immediate skills they will need once they graduate, so that they can begin their professional careers.  For PR students social media is one of those skills.   Every employer expects new PR hires to have all the traditional PR skills, but today they also expect that they will be able to use social media in the mix.

“Over the past decade, there has been a sea change in the marketplace demands for graduates. Whereas broad skills used to be sufficient, now our students must demonstrate a set of concrete skills that not long ago were required only of those in highly technical majors.

Nowhere has this change created a greater shift than in fields such as marketing and public relations, which traditionally have been viewed as nontechnical but are now demanding a technological competency that is astounding.”

At one PR agency, where I taught a one-day workshop on strategy for PR and social media, the younger members of the staff were surprised that someone much older than they were was teaching the class. But they soon realized that creating a social media strategy is a far cry from using Facebook and Twitter to stay in touch with friends.

Last week I spent a day at Cal State Fullerton as a guest lecturer in the Communication Department.  Again, although they were all very savvy kids, none of them was fully up to speed with the social media skills they are going to need to enter the workplace.

And this doesn’t only apply to teaching PR – earlier in the year Dr. David Hulme taught a class on Middle East Politics at USC and had the students set up a news blog and post information about the countries they were studying as part of their course.

“Why is all this important? Because the businesses that don’t know how to respond to and use social media are filling knowledge gaps in staff by hiring students with these skills fresh from college. In the lean organizations of 2009, students will not simply learn on the job; they will be asked to implement these tools strategically – because no one else knows how.” Dr. Elaine Young  Businessweek.

The idea of young folk being responsible for a business strategy has not been universally well received.  A recent post in Valleywag called out  a major PR agency for using 23 yea-olds to teach their execs about social media after reading this  article in the Chicago Tribune “Younger employees help senior executives unlock social media mystery” but it is happening in the workplace.  A survey for the Center for Work-Life Policy found that 40 percent of respondents had asked younger colleagues for help with text messaging, social networking and using iTunes.

Business and Communication schools need to prepare their students so that not only can they deliver  their personal knowledge of the digital world, but actually integrate that knowledge into a communication strategy.

The last word goes to Dr. Young:

“Professors need to lead students by example by knowing the mechanics of social media and showing our students how to use them strategically for the good of their employers.”

Image Credit:  Mike Perez

There has been speculation about the efficacy of putting news content into RSS feeds for some time.

As early as 2005 Charlene Li, then at Forrester Research, said “if you do nothing else, put your press releases in RSS feeds.”

The TEKgroup/Bulldog Reporter survey shows increasing use of RSS feeds by journalists every year.  Other research shows that 98% of journalists start a story by doing a Google search.  It has been suggested that content in a feed gets more attention from Google and now they’ve confirmed it.

“Using feeds for discovery allows us to get these new pages into our index more quickly than traditional crawling methods. We may use many potential sources to access updates from feeds including Reader, notification services, or direct crawls of feeds.”  Google Webmaster Blog.

If you do not yet have your news content in RSS Feeds it should be top of your list of action items for 2010.  In fact, get your news content into a social media newsroom with feeds on all content categories.  Make it easier for Google to find your content and index it faster.  Get an edge in search so journalists find your content when they search your topics.

The Google blog post also has advice on how the feeds and the website should be programmed – bear with me here, this gets a little technical: In order for us to use your RSS/Atom feeds for discovery, it’s important that crawling these files is not disallowed by your robots.txt. To find out if Googlebot can crawl your feeds and find your pages as fast as possible, test your feed URLs with the robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster Tools.

The point of this is that we’ve seen many a feed incorrectly programmed.  Google has to see it right away andthey have to be able to crawl the feed. So make sure your webmaster or IT department is up to speed on the latest RSS technology. If they don’t see the feed on your site it can’t be used to get you faster indexing and better ranking.

All feed content should be optimized for search and the feed should automatically notify the major feed aggregators when new content is entered. (Notification services is one way Google says they find your feeds.)

If you have audio and video content, the feeds have to have specific tags added so that your multimedia content gets indexed not only by search engines, but also by sites like iTunes.

If all this is Greek to you, pass it along to your webmaster or your IT department.  If you have questions about how to leverage your news content with feeds, email me at  sally@press-feed.com

Image credit:  Derek Kwa  Flickr