Tag Archives: think

Online Marketing and Online PR Converge

I got trained up in marketing and evolved into PR and there is a convergence going on. Not just between PR and marketing but also with advertising and … SEO (yes, I said it). David Hargreaves of Bitemarks agrees that there is a strong convergence — and so does the originator, Jeremiah Owyang:

Jeremiah Owyang produced an interesting piece earlier today asking what will happen to PR firms in a recession based on research among 200 PR agencies. I must confess I am not surprised to see that a small majority of firms are predicting that PR budgets were smaller than they were in fiscal 2008, but then if you if you look at any operating cost, I would be surprised if this wasn’t pretty much tracking the downward pressure on all operating costs.

Having said that I think cost reductions fall into two categories: reducing costs because in this climate ‘you can’ and ‘you need to be seen to’ and then there are those companies that are having to reduce costs because ‘they must’. I wonder what if the PR budget reductions are greater or smaller than comparable ad budgets?

I both agree and disagree with the second point Jeremiah makes when he says that “things don’t look too rosy for the PR industry.” If you are a traditional PR agency doing the same old stuff then I would be worried. However, if you accept that the world has changed and embracing social media is neither an option or an add on to your traditional offering then the world looks rosier.

By putting social media at the centre of what we do, we have a fantastic opportunity to extend our remit more broadly into the world of online marketing. Far from being gloomy, as someone who has been involved in the PR industry for 20 years and who has always embraced technology, the future for the industry has never been more exciting.

SEO Strategies Aren’t Either Or But Both

Nick from Search Engine Optimization Journal says it short, sweet, and right on, Is Organic SEO Really Your Best Option?

For years SEO practitioners have been proclaiming the virtues of organic SEO. It’s free. It’s easy. It’s not PPC. Etc. By the same token, PPC experts have been signing the praises of PPC – it’s fast, it’s dynamic, it’s targeted traffic, and it’s not organic SEO. Does it really matter?

Personally, I think that your Internet marketing efforts should all work together. It’s not a matter of SEO vs. PPC. It’s more a matter of whether or not you are targeting your traffic through the tools that are available to you, and organic SEO is one tool at your disposal. And it’s a valuable tool.

Organic SEO is about targeting the keywords that are important to your business and achieving business results for your targeting efforts. There’s more to it than simply picking keywords out of a vacuum and throwing them against the wall. The idea is to target the keywords that searchers looking for a service or product like yours would use to find it. If you can identify the keywords that the market thrives on then you can drive traffic to your website. You can do this through organic SEO and PPC as well as through other avenues.

The only thing I might add is the power of digital PR, blogger outreach, and online engagement to help out your war of search placement; otherwise, this is the best I have read in quite a while.

This is not a game of panaceas, it is a game of content-creation, site architecture, organic SEO strategies, PPC, and all the rest, over time. SEO is about consistance, predictability, and is much more of a war than it is a battle.

Mind you, try not too lose to many battles along the way.

Sage Advice to a PR Professional of Tomorrow

Earlier this week, I guest lectured on digital PR at the American University and reported on the experience, Public Relations and Communications’ Future is Bright!. I said that I would not write anything nice unless someone sent me a thoughtful email from the class.

Well, I received two nice notes, one from Juliana Serafini (who promises to email me again next week) and one from Kari Elam, who had a lot of great question. I will not expose her questions, but the long story short is that Kari is writing for music, culture, arts, and society blogs and wonders if that it good enough as a way of writing herself into a smashing agency job in PR and I told her that while it couldn’t hurt, it is also essential for her to go a little further.

Well, here is the ‘sage’ advice I give to Kari: Kari, what you’re doing for your current blogs is more editorial writing. While editorial and column-writing might very well help you with a publishing career in the future — and doesn’t hurt your portfolio — I must underscore the fact that while blogging about music — being a blogger — is super-important when it comes to being a respected part of the community — the “who the hell are you?” factor, there is another more important blogging strategy to pursue if you want to end up in a top-ten national PR firm.

What you need to do, in addition to blogging is “meta blogging,” — blogging about social media, about digital PR, about public relations, about advertising, etc… It is really important to make sure you’re always taking a step back and think not only about the what of social media but also about the why and how.

What this could look like is a blog about your studies of PR at AU and what you’re learning and how it contrasts with what you’re learning at your PR Internship. If you’re interested in music, society, the arts, and culture, explore it in the context of the Internet, of online branding, ads, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and even television and radio. How do you see what you’re learning about traditional PR dovetailing into social media marketing and digital PR? Can you see a continuum? Can you maybe help the fogies of traditional PR find their way to digital PR? If you can light the path and maybe even map the way, you’re golden. Move to NYC and start shopping for apartments, you’ll be on Madison Avenue in no time.

However, don’t forget the basics. As a PR consultant, you will be required to know how to not simply consume content (read blogs), not only produce content (blog), but analyze and understand how to conversation works, how best to leverage and participate in conversation, and also how best to manage conversation and manage reputation. Being a PR professional is about knowing how things work behind the curtain. And, since you are young and “cyber,” people assume that you have a valuable and important insight into the future.

PR firms are beginning to realize that “all kids get the Internet” may be true, but not in the way they thought — that “kids” get the Internet with only the level of sophistication that people from 35-50 get television — as a source of entertainment and information.

So, it is your job to publicly and prove, on a daily basis, on a blog, that you get what’s going on, that you’re current with the movers and shakers, that you have a passion for that space, and also that you will be able to prevent the future from blindsiding your PR VP and your client by keeping on top of technology, social media, new PR, and new and important channels through which you need to use to promote and protect your clients.

Your music blogging and your trend blogging and your other blogging means that you can now think like a blogger and that you’re accepted into the blogosphere — which is an important first step. The second step is proving you can strategically and even tactically make the Internet work for your clients and your agency.

Not to insult us marketing, advertising, and PR bloggers and blogs but there is a lot of room in the Power 150 for more voices, that’s for sure. If you start today, you may very well shoot up the list. A new voice is always welcome. Also, don’t be intimidated by what this sort of blogging means. You don’t have to act out of your focus. Take what you already love and then just spend some time getting meta on it — spend some time playing. Spend some time taking the articles you’re writing elsewhere and slice them and dice them a little academically. Do things like create your own case studies and give away the sort of campaigns you might recommend yourself. Feel free to critique or compliment campaigns and brands and firms and agencies — especially the ones you’d like to work with.

I swear to God, you can write yourself into this business. You can write yourself into a very fine career as a PR professional. You’re good as gold if you can prove that you’re both someone who has been trained in traditional PR and who gets digital PR; that you’re someone who gets both theoretical social media as well as practical social media.

And, good luck to you, Kari!

Via Chris Abraham

Advice to a PR Professional of Tomorrow

And, good luck to you, Kari!

An Interview with Martin Oetting of Germany's trnd

Cross-posted on SocialMedia.biz — As part of my exploration of branding and communication around the world, I am starting a series of interviews with as many European and world-wide movers-and-shakers as are willing to submit themselves to my barrage of probing questions.

I was inspired to start this series of interviews while at lunch with today’s interviewee, Martin Oetting, partner and director research at trnd. We met at a bistro in Prenzlauer Berg, a trendy neighborhood in Berlin, where Martin lives. We ate and talked and realized we had both a lot of thing and a lot of people in common. After we both pedaled away on our bikes, it occurred to me that it would be super cool to be able to share all of this great stuff with you – and it would be great to be able to ask a bunch of questions to as many people in the branding, new media, and communications as possible.

With no further ado, here’s my interview with Martin Oetting:

Continue reading →

I think I committed suicide in Twinity

My CEO, Mark Harrison, downloaded and installed a new 3D virtual world called Twinity, based in Berlin, that will recreate the world’s coolest cities, starting with Berlin. Mark loves Berlin more than anything, so he tried exploring his #1 home from his #2 home, Mauritius, and here is his story, as reported in an email to his Berlin posse, I think I committed suicide in Twinity:

Mark Harrison – Mauritius – 22 February 2008, 14:05 — After over a week of trying – endless module and update loading, and countless crashes - I finally got logged into Twinity.com, a 3D virtual world, a la Second Life, but set in renderings of real cities. The first of these Twinity cities is Berlin, my favorite city in the world, and my summertime home (and apparently the best-mapped city in the world, as well as the home to Twinity’s headquarters).

I was incarnated as a completely physically average white guy in his late 30′s – quite accurate in many respects except for the color and quantity of hair, and the hue of my eyes. The statistically average white guy, even in Germany – counter to stereotypes – has brown hair and brown eyes. Average Guy Mark was dropped into existence at Hackischer Markt, which is a good place to come into the world, since it is essentially the center of the universe, if your universe consists of only Berlin, you are a wired hipster type, and you are a provincial just arrived in this big, big city and instantly lose your bearings if you can’t see the TV tower on Alexanderplatz.

I decided to walk home – to my apartment in Moabit – and take the path along the Spree river that I take on almost a daily basis in my real-life Berlin when I am there. I walked over to Monbijou park (eventually figuring out how to run by holding down the shift key, which reduced my impatience a bit), bouncing off a few trees, but successfully oozing straight through a pissoir. I walked over to the railing at the edge of the river, looked around, then took one more step. To my surprise, I found can walk through railings just as effectively as I can walk through pissoirs.

I fell a couple meters and found myself standing knee-deep in the Spree – not very realistic at that point in the Spree, considering that it’s a major shipping channel, but convenient for me as an avatar in the river. I could still walk.

I walked along the river a bit, thinking I could perhaps just walk all the way home in the river, maybe climbing up one of the stone staircases I knew should be coming up along the way, if Twinity’s mapping of Berlin is indeed that comprehensive. After a few steps I came to what I assume was the end of the universe… a wall of beige halfway through Monbijou Park, cutting across the river, and t-ing into the riverside wall of the Boda Museum. The end-of-the-universe wall was insurmountable, as was the vertical, stone wall bank of the river. I didn’t really want to spend the rest of my virtual life knee-deep in a fetid central European river, so I hit the “map” button, assuming that there could well be a way to fly, or teleport or something like in Second Life.

This hubris clearly angered the gods. I guess I should have accepted my humaness and walked back up the river looking for a ladder or something rather than thinking I might game the laws of the universe and escape the limitations of my corporal form. My world was wiped from existence with a cold Windows dialog box announcing that Twinity was no longer responding to anything I might ask it to do. Then Vista went looking for Answers as to the Reason for this caprice of the gods, and unfortunately came back, giving me only more questions. Quite realistic, that part of Twinity.

A restart of the program, and a surprisingly quick login process later (considering logging in took me a week of trying and failing, then a good 10 minutes when it finally worked today), I was again granted a view of my Twinity existence.

I think I am dead.

I have only a setting sun in a golden sky, adorned with a few evening clouds and the pregnant belly of a pale, twilight three-quarter moon. I have a 360 degree view of my heavens, and when I spin on my axis – my only remaining mobility in my gentle, but solitary, god-forsaken purgatory – the clouds tremble as if in silent horror at the eternity of loneliness I have been damned to by my unforgivable, cardinal sin of suicide (is self-murder through clumsiness officially suicide? Anyone know a theologian?) in the murky virtual waters of my beloved Berlin.

Life is so short. So meaningless. So incomprehensible.

Mark Harrison
Born: February 22nd, 2009 18:52 Berlin, Germany
Died: February 22nd, 2009 19:04 Berlin, Germany
“Well, there’s always LinkedIn.”

Using Directories for SERM and ORM

I think you should check out Michael Gray new article, Using Directories for Search Engine Reputation Management, because it is a very interesting article — essential reading — I have only excerpted a wee bit of it here because I think you need to go over there and spend some time with the article, which is really valuable and essential as a way of inoculating your brand in advance of anything going wrong.

Search engine reputation management (SERM) is a growing discipline under the larger umbrella of search engine optimization (SEO). If you deal with client services, and you don’t already have at least one reputation management client, chances are you will in the very near future. The more tools or options you have at your disposal for this type of project, the easier the task will be. In this article I’m going to look at one of those tools; directories. (via Marketing Pilgrim)

I think it is really important for me to start writing more on this topic. I have written a few things on this topic: I, Online Reputation Manager, The Powerful SEO Benefits of Blogger PR Outreach, An El Al Jumbo Jets Chaffing and Flaring the Skies Analogy, Online Reputation Defense: Resistance is Futile, Online Reputation Management, and Online Reputation Management Needs to Be Proactive. Via Marketing Pilgrim and Chris Abraham.

Using Directories for Search Engine Reputation Management

Search engine reputation management (SERM) is a growing discipline under the larger umbrella of search engine optimization (SEO). If you deal with client services, and you don’t already have at least one reputation management client, chances are you will in the very near future. The more tools or options you have at your disposal for this type of project, the easier the task will be. In this article I’m going to look at one of those tools; directories. (via Marketing Pilgrim)

It is Illegal to Photograph a Bobby (or a Building) in the UK

Cory Doctorow talks about the new law in the UK that makes in a crime to take a picture of a police officer or a building, Britain’s no-photographing-cops law: even the cops hate it — and the US isn’t very far behind, to be sure — and be sure to listen to the CBC article about this law in As It Happens (MP3):

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio show As it Happens did a great job covering the new British law that makes it a crime to take a picture of a police officer or a building, where that picture might be useful in “planning an act of terrorism.” First, they interviewed Peter Murray, Vice-President of the National Union of Journalists, who, predictably, worries that his members will find themselves with arrest-records as terrorists for violating the law. But then, they talked to Peter Smyth, Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, who also thinks the law is ridiculous — and this is just stupendous. Smyth says that there’s no evidence that terrorists use photographs to plan attacks, admits that this is an invitation for scared officers to abuse the law, and says that it will needlessly create conflict with journalists and the public.

The program tried to locate someone — anyone — who supported the law, but no one was forthcoming.

The contorversy about Yelp

Jonathan Trenn popped this insightful article about Yelp over on Marketing Conversation, The contorversy about Yelp (and be sure to check out David Gelles’ article on a similar topic over at the Financial Times, Yelp rejects claims of extortion):

Ah, controversy.
Now, it’s with Yelp, the mega online review site. On Wednesday, the East Bay Express, an alternative newspaper that covers Alameda and Contra Costa counties in California, published a very provocative article , “Yelp and the business of extortion 2.0″ on the sales operations and tactics of Yelp. The paper made some very pointed accusations, some of them seemingly legitimate while others sounding too nebulous. They state that Yelp is both maniupulating the placements of restaurants reviews as sales tools and then using scare tactics to then solicit advertising sales from these same restaurants.
The accusations are alarming but, because I think the article was poorly presented, it’s left me thinking that Yelp perhaps had a major sales problem in one office as opposed to a company wide sleaze factor policy.
Yelp’s initial response, written on the company blog by CEO Jeremy Stoppleman is inept and insufficient. He’s likely satisfied that his blog posts are enough…and it may appear to be just that for the time being…but controversies such as this, be they true or just speculation, have a way of undermining a company’s integrity in a hurry. Especially a site that 1) is about user generated online reviews, and 2) has trust as a hallmark of its standing.
Oddly, the Yelp blog doesn’t allow comments. That’s not a good idea…especially for a site that’s about online reviews and citizen participation. Continue reading →