IBM have tackled this issue in an innovative way with their Blog Muse tool, described recently on Gigaom as:

“…a kind of social recommendation system for blog posts in which users say what they want to read about, other users then vote on those suggestions, and the most popular topics get distributed to those most likely to want to write about them…”

Sadly this tool is currently only available to IBM bloggers via an internal system, but with the wealth of analytics and trending tools available, there’s nothing to stop any company or individual blogger putting a similar process in place to inform their blogging schedule.

If you read Roger’s recent post on Informed Creativity, you’ll have seen our Social Media Planning slidedeck, which outlines C&M’s approach to content planning. And as far as blogging is concerned, it’s not a million miles away from IBM’s technique.

From my point of view, as the person who drives the creative side of content planning, it helps to pinpoint more general content themes for each client, around which to write specific blog posts. This not only gives a focus for the analytics that drive topic ideas and keywords, but helps to ensure a good balance of content on an ongoing basis.

These themes are obviously different for every client and industry, but here are some of the recurring ones as a guide:

• PRACTICAL: Deconstruct industry practices, offer advice/recommendations
• EVENTS: Identify and write about key industry events/conferences. Live tweeting from events can also be made into post-event blog posts
• CASE STUDIES: Interviews with key customers/clients – this could be via an embedded video or podcast, or a plain old-fashioned written piece
• CHALLENGES: Respond to common industry problems, encourage customers/potential customers to interact
• NEWS: Staying on the pulse of related online content and commenting on high profile news pieces/articles, adding your own thoughts on a subject via blog posts/tweets
• SURVEYS: Encourage customers and general public to participate in area/event/topic focused online surveys and use the results to create blog posts and stimulate conversation
• STAFF: Individual blog posts by employees with more personality (i.e. ‘The team recommends’, opinion pieces, fun stuff)

There are plenty more I could include, but you get the picture. Once this content framework is in place, we use our analytics and trending tools to identify the best subjects to blog about at any given time and the best keywords to focus on within those broad themes.

Our blogging guide tells you more about this content planning process, as well as lots of other useful tips on blogging in general – including what to write about and how to get your blog noticed once it’s up and running.

Remember that a good post doesn’t have to equal a long blog post, in fact short and sweet is often the best way to ensure that the whole post gets read and isn’t dismissed as ‘TLDR’ (thanks, @Jake_Doran, for that gem). Many blog posts these days simply consist of a Social embed (Flickr slideshow, YouTube video) with a little bit of an intro – and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as it’s useful, relevant and interesting to your readership.

And whether you decide to blog daily, weekly or monthly – stick to a consistent publishing schedule so that your regular readers will know what to expect and you will know exactly how much content you need to be producing in your planning cycle.

If you follow these simple principles, you should never find yourself asking “what shall I blog about today?” or plucking random subjects out of the air.

The thumbnail that accompanies this post was adapted from a photograph by FarleyJ on Flickr.

I thought I’d share the machinations of a recent uber-hot campaign with you – just to give you a sense of how we do our Online PR agency mojo.

This one’s in the technology space, with our good friends at Squiz, and it’s a great example of really specific ‘BootStart’ style gig. We were in and out in two days, with results delivered and a new business lead for the client on the afternoon of day three.

Here’s what happened….

The Client

Squiz. Developer of one of the world’s leading Open Source CMS’s. They do fab work with folks like The Royal Society for Arts, Oxford University, Boots and others. All of whom use their product, MySource Matrix, to run their web sites.

The BootStart Gig

Squiz recently developed a very slick (and functionally comprehensive) Open Source version of a Social Networking Platform. Like FaceBook, but one that a company can build and run themselves in order to mantain their own social networks – for community forums, events management, that kind of thing…

Having done the hard development work to create it, their immediate goal was basically to sell it hard: to put it in front of a select bunch of people and win some development and implementation projects before Xmas.

Which is where we came in…

Our Online PR Recommendations

…also involved some good old fashioned offline tactics.

Firstly, the no-brainer selling opportunity was to take it to existing customers, or those in their current pipeline. Like, ‘Hi, got Matrix? Wow! Have you seen what you can do with our new Open Source Social Networking Platform…?’

So, we suggested working together on an exclusive breakfast seminar in town where they could invite  their sales targets in to hear all about why the new product is so great, and why it’s a must-have item.

So far so good – once the venue was booked the sales teams hit the phones and started the invitation process,

In addition, we supported this direct selling effort with a two-pronged Online PR campaign, as follows:

• SEO: get the product some high-profile traction on Google
• Buzz: get the product out across the web via some standard network distribution

Our Online PR Process and Deliverables

Here’s how we approached it:

Day 1…

• AM: we took the client brief
• PM: we made our recommendations
• PM: we delivered our keyword strategy and stated our goals, as follows…

Strategy: optimise our online push around the terms ‘Open Source Social Networking’ and ‘Open Source Social Networking Platform’, which we knew – combined – would attract around 2,000 searches per month.

Goal: first page presence on Google for the product on this term (and variants of it)

Day 2…

We researched, created, delivered and implemented on site the following HEAVILY OPTIMIZED content:

• A new product page (see: MySource Matrix Open Source Social Networking Platform Software)

• A press release (see: New Open Source Social Networking Platform Software from Squiz: MySource Gets Plugged into the Social Matrix!)

• A blog post to position the offering (see: Open Source Social Networking Software: Platforms & Integration!)

• A seminar registration page (see: MySource Matrix Open Source Social Networking Platform Software Seminar)

We then applied some extreme motion to the above by pushing it out into the interweb with the express aim of raising awareness, generating backlinkage and such…

Late in the day, we also developed the home page creative which you see above (‘The Non-Windows Vista Social Club’)…. to add a little bit of fun to the proceedings at Microsoft’s expense. (Note: the sales prospects are technical – the ‘Vista’ joke was for their benefit exclusively!)

Our Online PR Results

Once we’d done all this stuff we had a good lie down – day two was a long old day!

The next thing to do was wait…. and wait, until the Google God had indexed the new content. (We knew this would be fast because of how we’d seeded the content on other external platforms.)

Day 3….

12pm…

New pages were indexed by around midday…. Here’s page 1 of Google on our broadest (ie toughest!) search term – note, our press release appears at #2, the target page appears at #4 (click the thumbnail for an enlarged view of the results page):

And here’s page 1 of Google on ‘Social Networking Platform’ (Note – no ‘open source’, just straight to the meat on a broader term)… This draws an audience of approximately 1,000 searchers per month. We’re #1 for our press release, and #3 for the target page – sandwiching the good old BBC…

Hmmm…. Looks like all the bases are covered then!

2pm…

Lo and behold, a product SALES INQUIRY from a large central London organisation appears in the sales team’s inbox. This led to a meeting being set up for a demo and a chat.

4pm…

The seminar sign ups begin (aided by the sales teams phone efforts).

6pm…

A beer or five.

The Net: What Online PR Can Do For You

Given a tight brief, a close working relationship, and some good source material, our Online PR tweakery can help you kick butt in the SERP’s (search engine results pages), get you and your products in front of the right people, and generate leads and sales.

Easy as day 1, 2, 3….

Meantime, here’s what Squiz has been up to lately…

Here’s our top five reads of 2008. The following ought to give you some idea on how and why we do our schtick…

(NB: only some of the following were published this year; others we only just got around to reading.)

1: My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising (Claude Hopkins, 1966)

It being the year of doom, gloom, Black Swans and ‘I told you so,’ we found it good to ground ourselves in a little history. Claude Hopkins was one of the founding fathers of modern advertising: not of the glossy, brand-driven type, but of the hard-edged, research and coupon-driven type. Next year the spoils will go to those who can measure what they do. Check out our man Claude for a bunch of fundamental ideas on this theme… (We’re still in the same business as he was all those years ago, you know.)

2: Here Comes Everybody (Clay Shirky, 2008)

Mr Shirky is a professor of ‘Interactive Telecommunications’ at New York University. He’s documented pretty much every major trend in the Interweb over the past 10 years. You might say he’s a bit of a guru. He’s certainly hip: no academic twaddle here, just a stream of superb ideas on how the Interweb is changing the way that communities are built and mobilized (including a super story about how one guy with a laptop can raise an army to help recover a stolen mobile phone). An essential read for anyone with a Social Media brief.

3: Building Findable Web Sites (Aaron Walter, 2008)

Much of what we do at C&M takes a steer from the semi-technical worlds of SEO and web usability design. Up until now we’ve been mashing things together in our own way. Then we discovered this book. ‘Building Findable Web Sites’ does what it says on the tin: it provides a complete framework for optimising every single atom of your web site so as to make it stick with Google and users alike – from code to colours to content. Very much a new C&M bible.

4: Mckinsey’s Marvin Bower: Vision, Leadership, and the Creation of Management Consulting (Elizabeth Haas Edersheim, 2004)

More on the history tip, this time from the man who invented modern Consulting (with a capital ‘C’). Before Mckinsey it was your accountant who told you how to go about your business. After Mckinsey it became the job of a bunch of super-talented super heroes in blue suits. Granted, the world of the Management Consultant has become maligned of late, but this is a superb insight into the birth of a new kind of information-based business service and the generous mind of its creator. If every consulting company were run this way then the world would have many, many more happy clients…
 

5: Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design (Paul Mijksenaar and Piet Westendorp)

Mr Mijksenaar and Mr Westendorp make this list a) because their book is genuinely funny, b) because it teaches us the basic principles of good information design in a beautiful way and c) because they’re Dutch (and hence make it all seem so very simple!).

The subject of information design is one of those sublime things that we so often get wrong because it seems so fundamental to our thinking. We’re all experts on ‘telling’ because we do it hundreds of times each day, right? This book shows us otherwise – it takes a mass of commonplace examples from today and yesteryear and shows us what a hash we make of the art of explanation. (Check out the instructions for the first VHS video recorder: classic stuff – brought back fond teenage memories of wrestling with an eight page fold out on the living room floor. Check out Mijksenaar’s blog for more of the same…)

Bonus Ball!: At Large and at Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist (Anne Fadiman, 2008)

This collection of ‘familiar essays’ (aka, noodling and musings on stuff that Ms Fadiman finds interesting) is a superb bedtime / fireside read. It has bugger all to do with what C&M does for a living, but it does have the ability to restore your faith in the power of great writing. So if you care for well crafted copy or just love a little lyricism in your life, then give it some time…

Online PR Agency Content & Motion got all hot under the collar today with a new ‘Think Piece’ that suggests that ‘Old School PR’ is a waste of money for companies of a certain shape and size – those in the ‘small to medium’ bracket.

The piece looks at the basic social economics of the Old PR business model, and states that “Traditional PR no longer works as a revenue and brand building exercise for small to mid-sized companies with a limited profile and budget…. even if they have great ideas, products and services. The reason for this because the traditional PR game doesn’t scale very well.”

The full piece can be read at:  http://www.contentandmotion.com/blog/why-the-old-pr-game-is-broken-spend-wisely-online-pr-rules/

It’s controversial stuff – and a recommended read for anyone in the PR business or those companies who are evaluating their PR spend. The basic premise is that if a traditional PR agency has “X number of clients (and more, if it’s a good agency), then every day it will make decisions that enhance its core assets (its media relationships) at the expense of some of its clients interests.” …and goes on to reason that Online PR delivers far more value and less risk when it comes to generating brand awareness and quality web site traffic.

Says author of the piece and C&M founder, Roger Warner: “our intention isn’t to rubbish ‘old PR.‘ But in many cases ‘old PR’ simply won’t work for small to mid-sized companies because the cards are stacked against them. We’re biased of course, but, nine times out of ten, if you’re looking to drive awareness, sales, signups and general web site traffic, then our advice is to check out Online PR first.”

For further information about who C&M is and what the hell they do, see: http://www.contentandmotion.com/online-pr-agency-services/

About Online PR Agency, Content & Motion

C&M is an Online PR agency that excels at Content Creation, Content Optimisation, and SEO. We use a variety of groovy web marketing techniques to help you win new friends and influence people. The company was founded in mid-2008 by Roger Warner – web marketing junkie, ex-director of PR at IBM Europe, and personality type D.

The company works on the partnership model of all great consultancies, meaning that ownership is shared, staff are obsessive, brains and egos are large, and attention spans are notoriously focused. Fortunately this is good news for our clients, who tend to benefit from consolidated bouts of outrageously good service and smart thinking and execution.

For further information about what C&M, the Online PR Agency does, see: http://www.contentandmotion.com/online-pr-agency-services/

Here’s our (semi-controversial) hypothesis on what’s at play…

‘Old PR’ tactics and large PR Agencies no longer work as a revenue and brand building outlet for certain types of small to mid-sized companies who have a limited profile and budget…. The reason for this is because the ‘old PR’ game doesn’t scale very well.

I’ll explain why in a moment.  First off….

Here’s a quick review of the mechanics of ‘old PR’

Acme Corp will pay PR&Co a monthly retainer to help convince reporters to write about them in print and online news media.  PR&Co may offer additional services such as writing press releases and positioning and message consulting, but this is a second order of business to generating press interview opportunities – as it’s really only here where this stuff can be put into practice.

So, the primary function of ‘old PR’ is to act as a broker of relationships between Acme Corp and a set of reporters.  And the reason that Acme Corp pays PR&Co a retainer to do this is because PR&Co – because of it’s track record in press relations – is able to do it better (and on a more flexible basis) than Acme Corp could in-house.  In other words, Acme Corp is paying PR&Co to trade on its database of press contacts and relationships.

(At this point I should say that this stuff really does work extremely well in the right circumstances.  The Acme Corps of this world can’t do this work effectively themselves unless they employ an army of PR consultants in-house – and even in this case a ‘old PR’ agency will tend to do a better job because they have a greater variety of experiences and reporter relationships by virtue of working on more than one account.  And there are stacks of really great ‘old PR’ firms out there.  Plus the flip side of this client/agency relationship is the relationship between ‘old PR’ agency and the media, which is also invaluable because reporters rely on good ‘old PR’ relationships to supply them with decent content to write about.)

As such, this setup tends to work best when Acme Co is either ‘hot’ or ‘loaded’ – ie, when it’s…

1. …an established brand that reporters really care about
2. …an innovative company that has ideas that reporters want to learn about
3. …a wealthy company capable of spending large amounts of money to convince reporters (and their agencies) that they really ought to care

But if your company doesn’t fit this description then there can be problems.  You may be either a start up or a smallish fish in a big pond that struggles to be noticed.  You may also have good ideas and products that don’t quite sit in the ‘killer’ category.  And, of course, like many of us in today’s climate, money may be tight.

As such, I’m suggesting that these types of ‘contender’ firms shouldn’t spray their money on ‘old PR’ with a traditional PR agency in an effort to become ‘hot.‘  (Typically, I’m talking about those firms who are plugging away with a spend of £3k per month or less on ‘old PR’ services)… because the cards are stacked against them.

Here’s why…

‘Old PR’ Agency Service Models Don’t Scale Well to Accommodate Smaller Fish…

As mentioned, ‘old PR’ agencies trade on their relationships with reporters.  These relationships are treasured, polished and nurtured over time.  They are of incredible value to PR&Co – they’re the Coca Cola formula that the company sells to its clients; and they’re the assets that Acme Corp is really buying when it buys ‘old PR’.

The trouble is that they’re finite and that PR&Co also works with other – often bigger – clients.  There are only so many relationships that PR&Co can establish within a given market, because there are only so many magazines and reporters that really matter.  And it’s PR&Co’s express objective to nurture and protect these relationships by providing reporters with a steady stream of helpful, smart comment and ideas that will help them to write better stories and advance their careers (this is the end game for ‘old PR’ – the brokerage service).  As such, the ability for PR&Co to provide a good service to reporters is dependent on its roster of clients and the quality of these company’s stories/pitches/ideas etc.

Now, this is all fine if Acme Corp is ‘hot’ or ‘loaded’ – because its commercial interests are perfectly aligned with the agency’s.  But if you’re not so hot or not so flushed with cash, then the ‘old PR’ model gets a little bit broken because it doesn’t scale to accommodate your needs.

Look at it this way: if PR&Co has X number of clients (or more, if it’s a good agency), then every day it will make decisions that enhance its core assets (its media relationships) at the expense of some of its lesser clients interests – since some of its clients won’t possess powerful (or helpful) enough stories/pitches/ideas.

Or, to put it another way, how willing is PR&Co to pitch your story over and above any other story that it may be responsible for pitching?  Are you ‘hot’ or ‘loaded’ enough to compete in this finite market of ideas and relationships?

An Alternative Way to Drive Your Brand:  the Online PR Agency…

Alternatively, you could invest your time and money in an Online PR Agency.  In fact, if you’re not currently ‘hot’ or particularly ‘loaded’ we’d say it’s the best thing to do right now.

Here’s why…

Great Online PR is primarily concerned with making you more noticeable in and around the web – via search engines like Google, and within the right online communities and blog networks and such.  It aims to:

1. Generate real Online PR buzz when and where its needed most… (eg, a blog- and Twitter-torrent and Google stardom at the moment you’re pitching the big deal)
2. Get important people to do the things you really want them to do… (eg, drive people to crucial events, have them put their hands up, declare love for you and even buy stuff off the page)

And, as a healthy byproduct, this activity will tend to radically improve your PageRank (by using smart Content Optimization, SEO and link generation techniques).

Great Online PR is all about raising your brand awareness and driving web site traffic in an very tangible and measurable way via smart online networks.

Importantly, Online PR doesn’t have to maintain a set of relationships with a finite number of human beings.  (It can do if you want to use Online PR tactics to feature in online news stories (ie, by doing media relations, online); but in order to generate the type of outcomes outlined above, traditional PR techniques aren’t really necessary).  Instead, successful Online PR is driven via a different mechanism where search engines and other web-based networks are the middlemen.  In other words, Online PR Agencies are in the business of convincing Google rather than reporters.

And this is the critical difference, because there’s no real concept of ‘scalability’ in Online PR. Unlike a reporter, Google can’t get enough of your content.  In fact, the more the better.  And unlike a traditional news media outlet, the web possesses a myriad of platforms that will all welcome your contributions.   As such, a sensible spend with a good Online PR Agency ought to enable you to create great (well optimized) content and seed it in such a way to create buzz, excitement and, most importantly, search engine visibility.  (And you don’t need to be burning ‘hot’ or ‘loaded’ to do it – you just need to be SMART.  Check out this case study as a good example.)

(Note:  I’m not talking about ‘content spamming’ here! I’m talking about smart generation, distribution and seeding of good content in the most appropriate outlets to drive quality traffic and boost your Google rankings on a set of pre-determined keywords.)

Conclusion:  Think About Online PR First, ‘Old PR’ Second

Don’t get me wrong: my intention isn’t to rubbish ‘old PR.‘  I’d be a fraud if I did.  This is my background, and I know that it works extremely well given the right client/agency fit – and there are many, many great ‘old PR’ agencies out there that do super work on behalf of their clients and their reporters.

My point is that in some cases ‘old PR’ simply won’t work because of the mechanics described above ….and yet many companies seem hell bent on spending their way out of this dilemma.  (Believe me, lots of firms continue to burn cash in this way – as there are no shortage of agencies waiting to pick up the cheques….)

So if you’re looking to drive awareness, sales, signups and general web site traffic, my advice is to check out Online PR first.  It’s an extremely simple way of standing out in a noisy marketplace.  It may not buy you a framed reprint of an FT centre spread feature, but it’ll probably help you to drive sales via your web site in an extremely measurable and cost-effective way.

Besides, there’ll always be time for an executive press breakfast briefing after you’ve made your first £15 million….

Here’s the C&M top 10 Online PR Tools and Resources links for November:

1. Best Practices for Online PR: a C&M white paper, giving you some good ideas on how to generate buzz and use social media effectively.
2. Best practices for SEO content: another C&M paper, this time showing you how to do radical things for your SEO through Content Optimization (ie, creating more search friendly stuff for your web pages and finding/using better keywords).
3. Reputation / Keyword Monitoring Tool-age: See MonitorThis for a rather brilliant way of conjuring pixie-like RSS feeds to keep tabs on the buzz surrounding your brand and/or keywords.
4. Content Creation Tool-age: Check out Ranks.nl for a awesome way of assessing your how search friendly your content really is. Gives you keyword density, keyword proximity and a bunch of other useful metrics.
5. PageRank Watcher: Use this FireFox Rank Checker plugin to monitor your web site’s keyword performance on major search engines over time. Use Site Rank Reporter to take this data and draw natty graphs to show your progress (or otherwise).
6. All You Ever Wanted to Know About SEO But Were Afraid to Ask: a C&M paper that gives you the science in layman’s terms.
7. Content Optimization and Keywords Tool-age: a mega list of useful widgets and blidgets to help you do better keyword research, content creation and content optimization, all in one place, courtesy of C&M.
8. Cut Out & Keep Guide to Online PR: a nifty little wallchart to help you think through the processes behind generating buzz and improving your PageRank.
9. Nice Ways to Keep Tabs on Your Web Site Performance: take a Mint. This is a seriously slick dashboard app that puts all your important data in front of your nose, on one web page.
10. Get Yourself Some Online PR Help: If you need to phone a friend, here’s an all-new overview that describes what the hell our Online PR Agency is all about : )
11. BONUS BALL! SEO X-Ray Magic!: Say no more. Plugin for FFox. Magic it is. Shows you a page’s SEO underwear. Quite literally. Very cool stuff indeed.

We hope you find this stuff useful. Do let us know via the comments box below… Your feedback is always muchos appreciated.

Our latest best practice paper doesn’t beat about the bush.  Nope.  It’s our QuickStart guide to SEO copy writing and how to radically improve your Search Engine ‘Indexibility’ (…and hence your SEO) by creating better, more search engine friendly web site content.

Without further ado….

Why Keywords & Content Optimization are so Important to SEO

The New York Times published a great article a couple of years ago that totally nailed the question of why Keywords and Content Optimization are so important to search engines. The piece was written by a reporter who was coming to grips with the fact that he was no longer writing just for his editor and his readership ….but also for a new, third reader called Google.

Here’s his leader: “Journalists over the years have assumed they were writing their headlines and articles for two audiences — fickle readers and nitpicking editors. Today, there is a third important arbiter of their work: the software programs that scour the Web, analyzing and ranking online news articles on behalf of Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.”

It’s a great introduction to how and why we need to rethink our web site content in order to make it perform better for SEO.  In short, creating SEO-friendly content requires two changes to everyone’s writing habits…

1: New Types of Keyword Research

In order to understand and address an audience via search, it’s critical to understand the language that they’re using everyday on Google. In other words, instead of just crafting witty headlines, a large part of the creative work becomes a matter of aligning what you want to say with the langauge that you know your audience is using. Tools like Google Suggest help us do this Content Optimisation research with pinpoint accuracy.

2: New Types of SEO Copywriting Skills (Content Optimization)

Google (and others) ‘read’ web content in certain ways. For example, page titles, the things that sit in the top (grey) bar of your browser window – are extremely important. Google takes them as an important indication of what your content is all about. From a technical perspective, most good CMS’s will take this title from the headline that you give to your page. At the same time, Google prefers to read blocks of title text that are 70 characters or less. As such, the scope for creativity in headlines is somewhat changed…. And this is just one Google ‘reading quirk’ amongst many. (Don’t worry, we’ll explore some more of them below…)

As such, if we want our content to be more attractive to search engines then these two thoughts – keywords and good content optimization – should inform every single piece of content that we generate for the web.

That’s it for the theory – let’s take a look at how it’s all done.

Keyword Research:  How to Do It

Your aim is to structure your content using the words that your audience is using to search the web – so that you improve your chances of featuring on the first couple of pages of Google in relation to a given search query.

For example, if you’re in the business of IPTV and your audience is searching around your backyard using phrases like ‘IPTV content management software,’ then you need to align the language you use to describe yourself with these terms.

At the same time, you need to be aligning yourself with a set of keywords in a ‘win-able’ arena amongst competitors: some keywords will have no competition, others will be red hot.

In simple terms, this last point creates a ‘keyword index.’ You need to place a calculated bet on where you want to play. Your choice should be calibrated by the following formula:

Volume of daily searchers on any given key word

(…divided by)

Volume of other web pages that are optimised around those keywords

You want to engage with as many people as possible that are using search terms related to your products / services. At the same time, you want to position yourself where you can compete, given the resources you have to hand.

The challenge is best illustrated by a quick experiement….

If you’re in the business of software apps for sales support, you might choose to optimise around the term ‘CRM.’ This would currently give you an audience of 563 searchers per day on Google. Unfortunately, it would also put you in direct competition with 129 million other web pages that are optimised on that term. Alternatively, if you were to focus your keywords around the concept of ’sales management software’ you’d have a total audience of around 50 searchers a day; and using this route, you’d be up against approximately 150,000 other pages.

Clearly the chances of capturing the attention of a ‘sales management software’ searcher are far more likely than for a ’CRM’ searcher…

But choosing keywords is not just a question of running the numbers. Other branding considerations are also essential to a successful keyword strategy.

For example, you need to consider the following things…

• You brand equity – what’s does your overall investment in non-web language mean to this work? What about your sales patter and your product naming conventions? Do these things fit with your keyword findings?
• Market maturity – does your current searching public really reflect where the market is at? Are you leading them or following them? What stage is your market in terms of possessing a common body of language to describe its problems and requirements?
• Influential people – are industry analysts setting the market terms? Or are they just spinning far-fetched yarns? Do you need to follow or ignore them? What influence do they have on your customers? Will this influence matter tomorrow? Has it already had an impact?
• Your resources – can you afford to compete in hotly competed areas? If you have a mega-budget, why not just nuke it out? If your resources are small, can you find smarter keyword arenas to play in?
• The quality of the data sample – if you’re playing in niche territories, are you willing to bet a keyword / naming convention on a sample of 10 searchers per day? Once your product category matures, how are the trends going to change?
• The state of the nation – can you afford not to play in competitive fields?

The above questions should create an interesting debate where branding ideas meet public perceptions of you and your products and services. But ultimately, your keyword choices should be determined by your gut feel and your resources.

Content Optimization: Better SEO Copywriting

Once you’ve established your keywords, you then need to integrate them within your web site content.

Here’s our QuickStart guide for good keyword implementation.

Technical Page Content Optimization Tips

Here at C&M, we always use a CMS for our client sites. We choose these apps carefully, and always ensure that they let us do some essential Content Optimization and SEO-related things from a technical and functional page perspective… Because, for good SEO copywriting, there are a bunch of things you really have to do at a technical page level:

• Edit each of your page titles independently. Your page title is the thing that will be printed at the top of a browser window (in the centre of the grey horizontal bar, next to your minimise/maximise buttons). You should try and make this title brief – around 70 characters or so, relevant to the page and peppered with a few important keywords or phrases. This is because, like us humans, crawlers tend to use ‘titles’ as a good indication of what the page is about. (NB: don’t go crazy on the keywords! The page title MUST be readable and easy on the eye to humankind as well!)

• Edit each page’s metadata descriptions. This is the stuff that Google uses to describe you when it displays its results (ie, it gets used as the blurb that sits underneath the page title link in Google’s listing for you). As such, this field should describe the page, include a few keywords, and also a call to action like ‘read more’, or ‘find out more’ or ‘get your free offer here…’ etc. (Think about it – this globbet of content is really, really important – this is your ’sales pitch’ on a Google results page…. so a call to action is a good thing to draw people into the click.) This text should be around 160 characters or less. Anything more will get cut off at the knees.

• Edit each page’s metadata keywords/tags. Whilst this used to be important, it’s not any more…. but you ought to do it as a matter of good practice. Here you should list all your relevant key phrases, separated by a comma. This could be a big list, or it could be small…. whatever you think appropriate. You should note however, that this metadata field isn’t really used by search engines as a measure of importance or relevancy any more. It does, however, give them a clue about who you are and what you’re about.

• Use keywords in your navigation schemes wherever possible. Also use them (sensibly) in important on-page functional items like buttons, pull quotes, maps, and other such eye candy.

On-Page Content Optimization Tips

So much for the functional and technical stuff. What about the writing? Here’s my ultra-condensed guide to producing good, SEO-friendly page content….

• Make your content chunky – use header tags to split it into bite-sized paragraphs that are easy for crawlers and humans alike to read and understand. (ie, header, para, space; header, para, space, etc.)
• Use keywords in them there headers wherever possible, and wherever it adds value to the process of scanning or skimming the page.
• Create as many internal links in the page as possible, whilst still retaining a (human) reader’s focus. Use keywords in the descriptive link anchor text (if you’re using a half decent CMS, then you ought to get prompted for this). This anchor text is basically a descriptive label. It tells a crawler what your link is about. Hence, if you’re in the business of CRM systems, then your internal link from your home page to your products page ought to include an anchor text that goes something like this: ‘XYZ Corp’s CRM Software helps mere mortals sell ice to eskimos.’ In other words, use a bunch of sensible internal links to help a crawler find its way around your site and learn about what you do in the process.
• Create as many external links as possible. Use the same approach to anchor text as described above. Whilst internal links are important to help a crawler scoot around your site, external links will help them understand what kind of other web sites you associate yourself with. So, if you’re in the business of selling small handheld computing devices, make sure you link out to popular media sites that cover this topic and also other vendor sites that compliment you (and even compete with you). The more popular these sites the better – your goal is the bask in their sunlight.
• If you’re blogging, or using a CMS that uses blog-style principles (and of your front end design houses them) then use categories and tags for your posts/pages wherever possible, and try to infuse some keywords in there whenever you can. As per the points above, these navigational elements help crawlers to understand how to navigate your site and understand who you are in equal measure…. just like they help us humans.
• Put your most important content at the top of the page. By important I mean the stuff that’s full of useful keywords, headings, and links. Save the waffle for later in the page. (Like us, crawlers get bored easily.)
• Think of your page as a hierarchy of content. In fact, think like a robot in a hurry. Big, important words go at the top in big important heading styles. Weave linkage into this important stuff wherever you can, and try to ensure that this linkage reinforces the big keywords in its anchor text. In other words, keywords get kind of scored in order of descending importance, depending on where they feature in your content: from page titles down through primary navigation, headers, body text links, bold text and boring old plain text.

All You Really Need to Remember About Keywords and Content for SEO…

In sum, all of the above illustrates that crawlers basically read the way that we humans do – they scan the page and pick out key phrases and content elements to get a sense of meaning. As such, good SEO content should also be good to read…. and to be able to write it is to have a good level of empathy with readers and crawlers alike.

If you’d like to know more about all this new-fangled SEO Content Optimization stuff, then just call us.  We’re an Online PR agency that specialises in just this sort of thing :  )

Meantime, if you’d like to just dive on in and get going on some Content Optimization work, then we recommend you check out our recent paper on Online PR and Content Optimization tools for the masses…

London, 29th October 2008

Online PR agency Content and Motion today released it’s all new, all free ‘Cut Out & Keep’ guide to Online PR.  Based on a bunch of new theories in interweb PR dynamics, the guide has been designed by Online PR people to help Online PR people generate buzz more easily ….and is simple enough for nine out of ten cats to use.

You can download it, free of charge here:  http://www.contentandmotion.com/blog/free-%E2%80%98cut-out-and-keep%E2%80%99-guide-to-online-pr

Says C&M founder, Roger Warner:  “We’ve been scribbling this kind of thing on white boards for our clients for some time now, so we thought it’d be good to show a little love and get it into the hands of the rest of the world.”

C&M’s ‘Cut Out & Keep’ guide to Online PR gives end-user Online PR people real-time, non-virtual access to a set of concepts and tools that will help them go about their daily business of making buzz on the interweb more effectively.

It divides life into two broad sets of activities – ‘on-site’ and ‘off-site’ and covers concepts like keyword research, content optimization, content generation, content distribution and content engagement (oh, and measurement!).  C&M feels pretty confident that if people follow its simple advice then they will win new friends and influence important people.

Says Warner: “We encourage folks to come visit our site, download it, stick it on their walls and follow its advice.  We also encourage folks to tell us what they think of it all and leave us a comment or two on our blog.  We’re planning to write a new ‘best practice’ paper on the mechanics of Online PR and content-driven SEO in the next couple of weeks – so feedback would be very welcome indeed!”

For further information about who C&M is and what the hell they do, see:  http://www.contentandmotion.com/online-pr-agency-services/

About Online PR Agency, Content & Motion

C&M is an Online PR agency that excels at Content Creation, Content Optimisation, and SEO. We use a variety of groovy web marketing techniques to help you win new friends and influence people. The company was founded in mid-2008 by Roger Warner – web marketing junkie, ex-director of PR at IBM Europe, and personality type D.

The company works on the partnership model of all great consultancies, meaning that ownership is shared, staff are obsessive, brains and egos are large, and attention spans are notoriously focused. Fortunately this is good news for our clients, who tend to benefit from consolidated bouts of outrageously good service and smart thinking and execution.

For further information about what C&M, the Online PR Agency does, see: http://www.contentandmotion.com/online-pr-agency-services/

It’s our free ‘Cut Out and Keep’ Guide to Online PR!!

Go on, print it out and stick it on your office wall. It’s concise and perfectly formed …and if you follow all the bubbles step by step then we guarantee you’ll soon be generating a stack of buzz and some great new web traffic.

Here’s a quick tour….

1: Keywords

Keywords are critical. We recommend you do your keyword homework before embarking on any Online PR, social media or SEO activity. You ought to know what your audience is interested in before trying to woo them with your content. Use tools like Google Suggest to discover who’s searching about what (and why). Your goal is to latch onto established keyword markets and optimise your content within this context. If you’d like to know more about the science, then check out this post on keyword identification and content optimisation.

2: Content Optimisation

Once you’ve established your keyword markets, it’s content optimization time. Your content is both your bait and your destination, so you need to ensure it’s dressed for the occasion! Make it search crawler-accessible by cleaning it up at the code level, and structure it properly so that Google can really get its teeth into it. Naturally, everything should be keyword-rich, including server-side concerns like domain names, url paths and the like. And it should also be easy on the human eye, because your end game is to have people clicking, signing up and buying. Check out this post If you’re interested in learning more about the ins and outs of content optimisation.

3: Content Generation

Now that your house is in order, it’s time to generate a steady stream of compelling, keyword-rich content and host it on your site: video, podcasts, blogs, papers, articles – all those wonderful assets that’ll get your site visitors engaged and coming back for more. Importantly, all of these things should be presented on your site in an accessible (and standards-compliant) way so that search crawlers can get excited about them too.

4: Content Distribution

When your content’s in place it’s time to go tell the world about it. ‘Build it and they will come’ was never a great maxim for the web. Instead you need to get this content out and about and into people’s faces. How? By distributing your press releases via online news hubs; creating social media profiles on which you can post videos, presentations, articles and all your other stuff; and persuading other bloggers and/or media outlets to feature it on their sites. All of this will extend the reach of your ideas and messages. It’ll also make it easier for other people to do the talking on your behalf (services like YouTube are built to help content go viral via code snippets that make it easy to embed your content in other people’s site, and ‘send to a friend’ functionality, etc).

5: Content Engagement

At the same time, you should start interacting with other like-minded companies and individuals: get involved in their debates, exchange ideas on their forums, and participate in their social networks. All it takes is a little time and effort. Read blogs and comment on them. Link out to other sites and encourage them to link back to you. Make your content easy to comment upon and bookmark with social tools like delicious. If you can do this effectively, you’ll find your content becomes part of the fabric of the web – embedded in the discussions that are relevant to your brand (and/or ideas), and firmly set within some very specific keyword universes.

In Short

If you can execute the above, your PageRank will improve as a direct result. You’ll join new conversations and connect with new, influential people. And all of this will have a very positive effect on your site traffic: better quality visitors, who are more engaged and more likely to buy and/or interact with you.

Measurement

Finally, you need to measure your progress ….regularly, and using some concrete metrics like PageRank, SERP (search engine results page) performance for your chosen keywords, volume of backlinks, visitor bounce rates, time on site…. etc, etc.

But enough of the theory. Let’s go make some noise…..!

(Footnote: Online PR 101 White Paper to follow very soon. Watch this space…)

The reason it’s important is because two worlds are colliding.

By a twist of fate, all effective, modern SEO is essentially PR by another name. It’s no longer the preserve of teenagers in board shorts with technical chops: it’s clear that all the prizes are now going to those with the best content and the best off-site ‘engagement’ strategies.

So why should you care?

Because we need to rethink how to do good SEO, and all other web marketing.

The lesson of web 2.0 is clear: you can do wonderful (and cheap) marketing with the web nowadays if only you can get other people to blog about you, link to you, bookmark you, and tweet about you. Do this, and you will win new business, reduce your support costs, and maybe even sign a major record deal out of the blue.

Conversely, when you successfully cultivate a reputation and a following in this way, you also do the best possible job of convincing Google that you’re the real deal. The PageRank algorithm was designed specifically with this in mind.

Notably, both of these things require some good old-fashioned machiavellian smarts with a fair dash of geekery thrown in. Keywords. Content. Distribution. Relevance. Influence. Optimization. Reputation. Persuasion.

Spooky, huh?

Is PR dead? Is SEO dying? Long live their crazy love-child, the Online PR agency….

Online PR agency Content and Motion today announced it’s nearly out of Beta mode and into whatever comes after Beta but involves staying one step ahead of the pack and helping companies to connect more quickly and cost-effectively with their audiences via the web.

The agency, which delivers Online PR results via a healthy mix of Content Optimization and SEO skills delivers three essential benefits to its clients:

1. It generates real Online PR buzz when and where its needed most… (Imagine a blog- and Twitter-torrent and Google stardom at the moment you’re pitching the big deal)
2. It gets important people to do the things you really want them to do… (It drives people to crucial events, encourages them to put their hands up, declare love for you & even buy stuff)
3. It radically improves a company’s PageRank using smart Content Optimization and SEO techniques… (It’s a virtuous circle: everything it does is designed to impact your Google standing in a very positive way)

For further information about what C&M, the Online PR Agency does, see: http://www.contentandmotion.com/online-pr-agency-services/

C&M’s range of Online PR and Content Optimization services are built on the premise that good web marketing and good SEO = great content and vice-versa …and the fact that traditional PR agencies don’t really do Online PR, and a digital agencies usually avoid good old fashioned PR deliverables like content. The best marketing solutions are now a marriage of PR and web. And C&M is your host…

C&M helps companies to rewire some of their basic marketing approaches so that their awareness and conversion tactics become a lot simpler and more cost-effective …and it’s committed to getting results for its clients FAST!

Said C&M founder, Roger Warner: “Four weeks after we launched, I think it’s safe to say we’re out of Beta mode and into the next big thing. We’re obsessed with web marketing, so I doubt we’ll ever really stand still – being Beta is always better in our book. That said, the team’s in place, the service offerings are tight, and we’re already generating some great results for clients – so bring it on!”

About Content & Motion

C&M is an Online PR agency that excels at Content Creation, Content Optimisation, and SEO. We use a variety of groovy web marketing techniques to help you win new friends and influence people. The company was founded in mid-2008 by Roger Warner – web marketing junkie, ex-director of PR at IBM Europe, and personality type D.

The company works on the partnership model of all great consultancies, meaning that ownership is shared, staff are obsessive, brains and egos are large, and attention spans are notoriously focused. Fortunately this is good news for our clients, who tend to benefit from consolidated bouts of outrageously good service and smart thinking and execution.

For further information about what C&M, the Online PR Agency does, see: http://www.contentandmotion.com/online-pr-agency-services/

He’s also famous for saying “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.”

He was a wise man indeed, knowing how hard it is to keep things brief. (Go on, read him. If he were alive today he’d have probably seen the financial meltdown coming.)

Well, I’ve been doing a spot of pondering myself these last few days.  It’s just over one month since we brought C&M into the world, and I’ve been out and about chatting to various folks about who we are and what we’re up to.  Along the way I’ve had to revise my thinking about our mission – for the better, I feel.

Last week, one of my closest friends in business said to me that our story was too complex for the people who most need our help. Being a blunt guy (something I thank him for), he asked me to stop ‘overthinking’ things and to go away and try to describe on half a sheet of A4 what we really do …in three bullets or less.

As soon as our chat was over I got to scribbling.  Then I went back to this web site and re-read some of our core ‘mission-like’ pages.  Then I decided to start afresh.

Five days later, I’m coming up for air.

This is what C&M does for its clients:

1. We generate real Online PR buzz when and where its needed most… (Imagine a blog- and Twitter-torrent and Google stardom at the moment you’re pitching the big deal)
2. We get important people to do the things you really want them to do… (We drive people to crucial events, have them put their hands up, declare love for you & even buy stuff)
3. We radically improve your PageRank using smart Content Optimization and SEO techniques… (It’s a virtuous circle: everything we do is designed to impact your Google standing in a very positive way)

I can now say that, first and foremost, we are an Online PR Agency.  Not a traditional PR agency, nor an SEO (or some other) digital agency, but a bona fide Online PR Agency. Everything we do is web-first and content-related.

This is why I’m so excited about the opportunity ahead, because every form of marketing is now web marketing, and all great web marketing is content-based.  PR meets web.  Web meets PR.  And we’re your host.

That’s about as simple as I can make it. It took a long while to make it short.

Meantime, if you think we’re smoking something, then use the comments box below to tell me!

Something about the name of the blog and the article should have warned me…. But I waded in nonetheless. It’s a good read – very provoking, and very right and totally wrong in equal measure.

The basic argument is this: you don’t need to pay top dollar for specialist SEO services because all of your SEO best practices ought to be built in to your site design and production at source.

This thinking is spot on.

Who needs additional ‘Content Optimisation’ and ‘Link Building’ strategies if we’re creating compelling, SEO- and user-friendly content in the first place? Nobody! Well implemented content and good site design pleases the Google God and human readers in equal measure. And, if your stuff is really interesting, then someone, somewhere may be kind enough to give you a backlink or two by referencing your stuff in their content, or bookmarking you on Stumbleupon.

There’s just one problem: we don’t live in this world. Not every marketing manager, web designer, or copywriter understands the basic principles of good SEO.

When all’s said and done, the discipline of SEO – as an activity and a profession – is a stepping stone on the road to online marketing enlightenment. One day we won’t need to outsource all of this wizardry to yet another consultant whose role it is to overlay technical SEO smarts on our stuff.

Nope, the future is a place where every online marketing person does SEO as part and parcel of their wider work. Great search optimized page titles will be written without taking counsel; great code will be implemented without expensive rewrites; and great link-generating content will be dreamed up and implemented…. all because the marketing of the future will be web-native. Anything and everything we do online will be done in the spirit of ‘Online PR’.

Born-on-the-Web firms get this (particularly those that are offer promotion-based services like Twitter and Seesmic), as does the FaceBook fraternity: every move they make promotes the brand or the individual in a web-friendly way. It’s all about online PR and awareness building. They participate in other people’s online presence and they facilitate and encourage dialogue via the fantastic content they produce and the tools they build. SEO is just a natural part of their DNA – it’s not an add-on.

As such, smart companies don’t ‘do’ SEO – they do Online PR instead.

In the meantime, the rest of the world is in catch up mode: it needs help so that it can rewire the work that it does.

Footnote: the source article is a GREAT example of a smart SEO campaign. Controversial content, well written, technically spot on, and stuffed with great ideas and keywords. The result? Bucket loads of comments and links and references to it (including this one), all around the keyword theme of ‘SEO.’ Our man doth protest too much! I know a good SEO at work when I see one.

In terms of a vision, what we do is relatively simple – and top-line commercial:

The point of a web site is to connect with people. The point of what we do in ‘Online PR’ and ‘Content Optimization’ is to facilitate this in its widest possible sense. Put simply, we make web sites FINDABLE.

Here’s how he describes it:

“The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message.

A website that ignores findability is whispering into the wind, hoping that someone passing by might catch a hint of its message. To further complicate the chances of reaching your target audience, a cacophony of other websites are vying for the same commodity—attention.”

Although his message is aimed at the web agency fraternity (it’s a petition to make the role of ‘findability’ more central to the web site development process), I strongly recommend you read it.

….Because, in the brief history of web design, somewhere along the way we managed to sideline the skills and disciplines that are essential to ensure that what we build will ultimately find a home in the browsers of our intended audiences.

As such, Content and Motion exists to put these things back on the map and to safeguard the direction of your online marketing strategy. We need this stuff now more than ever. We’re helping our clients to integrate the best of Online PR, SEO and content development so that their entire online marketing efforts meet their commercial goals. Because, to borrow from Aarron again…

Findable Content = Increased Profits.

Or, in other words, if you don’t use the necessary Online PR and Content Optimization noodles to engage with your audience in every single piece of online marketing that you do, then frankly you’re wasting some or all of your money ….And we’d really, really like to prevent this!

Leading Online PR and Content Optimistion agency C&M today announced the availability of a new, white hot ‘DIY Rough Guide’ to Online PR planning.

The paper, which is available as a freebie download via C&M’s web site, is designed to help modern marketing managers from companies of all sizes figure out how to take advantage of new-fangled webby things like blogs, social networking platforms and search engine optimisation (SEO) in order to boost their wider PR and brand awareness efforts.

The paper also provides a bunch of free planning tools to help more experienced web marketers plan and execute Online PR better in their day-to-day jobs.

In addition, it suggests that…

• Anyone with an ounce of web marketing smarts can plan and execute an effective Online PR campaign

• You don’t need to spend a fortune, but you do need to commit human resources to make an impact in Online PR

• To do Online PR well, you need to focus (like a maniac) on content optimisation

• You don’t necessarily need an agency to do Online PR for you

• Online PR doesn’t really translate well to campaigns: it’s a process and you’re either in or you’re out

Says C&M founder Roger Warner, “Our new paper provides a ‘fast start’ overview for marketing managers who are trying to get to grips with all the new opportunities that exist for generating buzz and executing a PR campaign in an online environment.”

“The bottom line, we’re happy to say, is that it ain’t rocket science… But you do need to start acquiring some new skills in order to do your core Online PR work more effectively. The paper covers all the things you need to know to get an Online PR campaign up and running quickly and to start optimising your stuff so that it’s more appealing to Google and other search engines. Superior SEO in our book is the number one payoff for doing great Online PR.”

About Content & Motion

C&M is an Online PR agency that excels at Content Creation, Content Optimisation, and SEO. We use a variety of groovy web marketing techniques to help you win new friends and influence people. The company was founded in mid-2008 by Roger Warner – web marketing junkie, ex-director of PR at IBM Europe, and personality type D.

The company works on the partnership model of all great consultancies, meaning that ownership is shared, staff are obsessive, brains and egos are large, and attention spans are notoriously focused. Fortunately this is good news for our clients, who tend to benefit from consolidated bouts of outrageously good service and smart thinking and execution.

Of course, this hasn’t always been the case.  Before the web – and in particular the brave new world of web 2.0 – you needed extremely deep pockets if you hoped to move the needle.  Many of us would have sat in planning meetings a few years back wondering what the hell we were going to do to justify our fee or salary.

To do good PR used to mean having either the resources or the assets to convince reporters that you were ‘hot’ enough to write about for their magazine – and if you had neither, then it was probably best (and cheaper) to simply not turn up.

Today, this is far from the case.  Good PR today is Online PR, and good Online PR represents just about anything and everything you do on the web.

I’ve written about some of the fundamental differences between old PR and Online PR elsewhere, so won’t dwell on them here – suffice to say that any company with an ounce of ambition and a browser can make an impact right now through Online PR…

This, then, is C&M’s Rough Guide to planning an Online PR campaign.  We have FIVE rules for you, but before we dive in, we’d like to make the following points absolutely clear:

• Anyone can do it
• You don’t need to spend a fortune, but you do need to commit human resources to make an impact
• Everything is based on the publication of superior content
• You don’t necessarily need an agency to do it for you
• Online PR doesn’t really translate well to campaigns:  it’s a process and you’re either in or you’re out

If this sounds a little different than PR 1.0 to you, then great – so it should.  It’s also incredibly exciting and liberating.  So let’s crack on….

Online PR Rule 1:  Have Something to Say and Say it (Get Some Attitude!)

The first rule of Online PR is nobody talks about Online PR.  No, scrub that – bad joke.  The first rule is, in fact, make sure you do have something to talk about and then talk about it all of the time.

Think about this one for a minute.  In days gone by it was virtually impossible for any company of any size to say anything to its marketplace unless they’d just split the atom or landed a man on the moon.  PR 1.0 decreed that your main outlet for communication was a press release, and, as mentioned, it was only ever worth creating one if it was to have an audience.

(Not that this stopped us – I pity the poor reporters who used to (and still do) fence calls from young PR execs on the importance of the release of version 5.1.3 of Sprocket X!)

In other words, in the bad old days of PR, to talk to the world you needed a press release, a receptive reporter and a magazine willing to publish your story.  There were other ways, of course, like publishing your own magazine or advertising in the FT or on the TV, but these things tended to be out of reach for the majority of us.

Today, we have web sites, blogs, content management systems, and email tools, and it’s incredibly easy to publish our news, views and opinions.  We can cut out the middle man and go straight to the interweb, right!? So far, so obvious.  But reminding you how easy it is to publish is an important point to make, because to build an effective Online PR machine you need to adopt a new attitude.

This isn’t particularly simple because it’s behavioural.  The machine needs feeding, and the only way to do this is to throw off the shackles of PR 1.0 and to start publishing your stuff on a regular basis.

Instead of filter, edit, polish and then publish, your new mantra needs to be PUBLISH FIRST, THEN FILTER.  (Read Clay Shirky’s excellent new book ‘Here Comes Everybody’ for a snappy review of this trend.)

Don’t sit on your ideas, conversations and stories and expect to lay the occassional golden egg… Get some some new attitude.  Get your content out there.  The cost is zero and the upside is huge.  (And you don’t need to subcontract this if you don’t want to…)

More of the benefits below.  For now, here’s some publishing tools to help you spread your word easily and cost effectively…

Our Rough Guide to Online PR Publishing Tools

• Blogging Tools:  Wordpress, Blogger, Moveable Type
• Open Source Content Management Systems:  MySource Matrix (disclaimer, I’m an exec at Squiz!), Alfresco
• Micro-Blogging Tools:  Twitter, Pownce

Online PR Rule 2:  Help People to Find You

I sat through a meeting last year with a Hollywood Exec who had been asked to bring his wisdom and philosophy to the Online PR space.  His closing words were ‘In Space, Nobody Can Hear You Scream.‘  Now, despite his rants about production values and the spirit of Ben Hur, I left the meeting impressed.

His point was this:  all this new-fangled publishing is just posturing unless you can get people engaged with it.  The web is a big old space, and it’s easy to sink without trace.

Rough Guide Rule to Online PR number 2, is then, is to get out there and get yourself noticed.  How? Well, there are already a bunch of well trodden paths, ranging from paid-for (eg, Pay Per Click advertising) to more traditional PR-ish ways (eg, have an online magazine or influential blog write about you).  But these aren’t the most exciting because in our book they’re not the most cost-effective.  The best ways are free…

Here they are…

• Firstly, identify and participate in important blogs, magazines and forums.  This is simple and essential.  You ought to be keeping a running book on all of the most influential media (blogs or otherwise) in your space, and have someone dedicated to monitoring them and contributing to them by way of comment posts, contributed articles, responses to questions, posing questions and providing feedback to other participants.  In doing this you’ll build both awareness of you and your company and also some important link equity for your SEO.  More of this in a moment…
• Secondly, publish your stuff on platforms other than your own.  Issue your (now plentiful) press releases via online news hubs.  Submit your thinkpieces to article submission sites.  Maintain profiles on social media destinations like YouTube, Flickr, Viddler and Squidoo and publish your content assets on them.  All these activities will establish a footprint for you beyond your own backyard and will help to persuade influential people – prospects, partners, media, etc – to come and visit your site.

But the real payoff for feeding an Online PR machine with a steady flow of content is in search engine optimisation (SEO) – more of which comes next…

Our Rough Guide to Blog, Social Media and Buzz Monitoring Tools:  for identifying content and debate related to your brand…

• Google News Alerts
• Technorati Search
• Monitor This
• Social Scan
• Twitter Search

Our Rough Guide to Online PR Distribution Hubs and Article Submission Sites: for propagating your content on sites other than your own…

• PitchEngine
• FastPitch
• ClickPress
• Sane PR
• PR Log
• e-articles

Our Rough Guide to Social Media Sites:  for maintaining a profile and posting your content…

• YouTube
• Flickr
• Viddler
• Squidoo
• SlideShare
• Scribd

Online PR Rule 3:  Help Search Engines to Help People Find You (an SEO Primer)

When it comes to thinking about Online PR, the Godzilla in the room is SEO.  Put simply, everything you publish online, in whatever format and on whatever platform, is Google-juice.

Depending on your objectives, you might want to think content publishing first and SEO second, but whichever way you look at it, you can’t ignore the fact that your Google PageRank is 100% dependant on your publishing efforts.

I’ve written here about the mechanics of SEO, how to do it properly and why your content publishing efforts are so important, so I’ll lay off the science here.  But if you don’t know much about the subject, just remember this:  your ability to rank well in Google is wholly dependant on your content being ultra-high quality, ultra-equipped with keywords and ultra-accessible to web crawlers.

As such, your Online PR efforts have two audiences:  the first is made of flesh and blood and the second is made of lines of code.

So, whether you’re publishing content on your site, participating in forums, commenting on blogs, or publishing articles on user generated content sites, your aim is to please the God of Search as well as a human audience. And this where the Online PR and Content and Search Optimisation smarts come in…

Put simply, your goal in SEO is to publish compelling content that will i) encourage people to create backlinks to you in their web sites, blogs and social bookmarking tools, and ii) encourage Google to crawl your site extensively and to index it in relation to certain keywords.

‘Compelling content’ in this sense means a) findable, b) readable and c) indexable.  Here’s how you make it so…

a) Online PR and Content Findability:  AKA Keyword Research

Your first task when planning your content is to make it findable.

Your goal is to engage with ‘high value,’ ‘prospective’ customer traffic.  ‘High value’ means visitors who are engaged with your product/services set and are actively looking for help.  ‘Prospective’ means visitors who are new, or relatively new to you/your site and are looking to you as a potential vendor.

In simple terms, you need to structure your on- and off-site content using the words that your audience is using to search the web – so that you improve your chances of featuring on the first couple of pages of Google in relation to a given search query.

For example, if you’re in the business of IPTV and your audience is searching around your backyard using phrases like ‘IPTV set top boxes,’ then you need to align the language of your content with these terms.

There are an abundance of tools to help you identify these ‘keyword markets.‘  Many of them are free.  I’ve already created a list of great Keyword tools (and related things) for you here….

In the meantime, check out this recent blog post if you’d like to learn more about the art of effective keyword discovery and how important (but easy!) it is…

Our Rough Guide to Keyword Research Tools

• Google Suggest:  tells you average searches per month on any given search term
• WordTracker:  like Google Suggest but pulls independent data from multiple sources, and can therefore be considered more comprehensive and neutral.  Free version provides data from a small pool of searches; paid for version is extensive.

b) Online PR and Content Readability:  AKA Publish the Good Stuff

Your second task is to take these keywords and apply them to content that’s worthy of being read – by both humans and crawlers.  In simple terms, this is all about researching your market, or having a driving purpose to base your content around.

Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet here.  Your content is either going to be hot or it’s not.  Much of this will depend on your target audiences and how receptive they are to your overriding Online PR objectives, but here’s a few ideas to help things fly:

• Go back to basics and read those journalism manuals.  Creative headlines are what sells copy.  (Co-incidently, they’re also what will show up on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) as and when you get indexed.)  And don’t forget to include those keywords!
• In terms of subject matter, a good dose of Money, Sex and Ambition also helps – but if you’re out of these, then think of creative ways to frame your content.  Whether you’re producing text-based stuff, or audio or video, lists are always a good idea because they signal a snappy purpose and state clearly the claims you’ll be making on a reader’s time:  for example, ‘Five Rules for….’, ‘A Ten Minute Guide to….,’ and ‘Three Reasons Why X Will Fail.’
• Write concise excerpts (meta descriptions) for your content – including your keywords at the beginning.  This ‘meta’ content will feature prominently in the SERPs (….more on this below)
• Try to align your content with the search and keyword zeitgeist.  Use Google’s free Keyword tools (like Google Suggest) to get a read on the areas of interest that surround your keyword markets, and Google Trends to see if you can gain any play with the most popular search topics of the day.  For example, you might have a great research report to promote and you may be confident of pick up, but aligning its title with a hot keyword can earn you extra readership and linkage because it will ‘pop’ that little bit more:  eg ‘Fifty Consumer Trends in IPTV Adoption:  Why Christina Aguilera On Demand Just Won’t Cut It’

c) Online PR and Content Indexability:  AKA Content Optimisation

Finally, having established your keyword set and some marketable content ideas, you have to have laser-like focus on making the content as accessible and indexible as possible – via some strict Content Optimisation work.

Here’s what you need to do to make your content more Google-friendly:

• Keep your page titles brief – around 70 characters or less, and use your keywords within them
• Edit each page’s metadata descriptions. Use around 160 characters and ensure your keywords fature prominently.
• Include a rich variety of keywords in the page’s keyword metadata field.  Whilst this used to be extremely important, it’s not so much any more…. but you ought to do it as a matter of good practice.
• Use keywords as part of your navigation labeling wherever possible. Also use them (sensibly) in important on-page functional items like buttons, pull quotes, maps, and other such eye candy.

In addition, you should apply the following principles to your on-page content:

• Make your content chunky – use header tags to split it into bite-sized paragraphs that are easy for crawlers and humans alike to read and understand. (ie, header, para, space; header, para, space, etc.)
• Use keywords in your headers wherever possible, and wherever it adds value to the process of scanning or skimming the page.
• Create as many internal links in the page as possible, whilst still retaining a (human) reader’s focus. Use keywords in the descriptive link anchor text (if you’re using a half decent CMS, then you ought to get prompted for this).
• Create as many external links as possible. Use the same approach to anchor text as described above.
• If you’re blogging, or using a CMS that uses blog-style principles (and if your front end can accommodate them) then use categories and tags for your posts/pages wherever possible, and try to infuse some keywords in there whenever you can.
• Put your most important content at the top of the page. By important I mean the stuff that’s full of useful keywords, headings, and links. Save the waffle for later in the page. (Like humans, crawlers get bored easily.)
• Think of your page as a hierarchy of content. In fact, think like a robot in a hurry. Big, important words and concepts go at the top of the page in big important heading styles. Weave linkage into these areas wherever you can, and try to ensure that this linkage reinforces your big keywords in its anchor text.

If you’d like to learn more about effective Content Optimisation tactics, then check out this recent blog post – it contains a bunch of practical information on the whys and wherefores.

Online PR Rule 4:  Help People to Help Others Find You

OK, so you’ve created some great content and you’ve optimised it to help humans and search engines find it, but it’s not time for a tea break just yet.

A further consideration is Online PR ‘enablement.‘  How easy have you made it for other people to spread the word on your behalf?  Unlike PR 1.0, good Online PR is extremely scalable because it exploits the network effects of the web.

A few years ago, notions of ‘scalability’ and ‘network effects’ were tied to a practise called ‘buzz (or viral) marketing,’ which, by and large, involved dreaming up humorous video shorts and emailing them to a large list of random people. Then we discovered Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, and thought the smart thing to do was to dream up humorous video shorts and give them to ‘influential’ people who’d enjoy passing them on to other people on your behalf.

Both efforts were half-baked and not particularly empathetic.  But they did prepare our thinking in a positive way for the new world to come:  Web 2.0 and the FaceBook crowd.

Social Networks are fascinating things.  They give an online home to people with common interests.  If you own a community of followers (eg, your magazine subscribers) or can encourage one (eg, around a business or charitable campaign) then you should start exploring them right now.

In terms of Online PR, social networking platforms are superb tools for encouraging people to engage with you and others with similar needs and/or ideas.  An old school example is the forum. Squillions of these things exist on the web, and many of them will deal with your industry.  As mentioned before, our advice is to get in amongst them and start participating….

But when it comes to building your own, or building apps and widgets that sit on a third party platform, we recommend you think carefully before diving in.  Online PR through Social Media is very different to PR 1.0.

For instance, there’s a difference between using web forums to ‘pitch’ ideas to influential people and using them to participate in conversations which may influence other people.  The former involves persuading an influencer, and the latter involves being an influencer and helping people to connect with your ideas and services.

In our book, Social Networking platforms – and social media in general – serve a far better purpose as tools for participating and facilitating communications activities than for ‘pitching’ your ideas.

A good example is Barack Obama’s brilliantly executed electoral Online PR campaign..  This is big time.  His web site uses the best of the web -  a social networking platform, ‘MyBO’, a Twitter feed, etc -  to help people to enable other people to spread the word and get engaged.  He didn’t just use the web for pitching himself (which is what, by comparison, Hilary Clinton, seemed to do -  use the web as a soap box).

So how does this apply to you and your business?  Well, you can start thinking about creating platforms, tools and content that are designed to be taken up and used by interested parties – staff, customers, partners, etc – for engaging with other parts of the web, or for helping them conduct their business more effectively.

This can be done at both the micro level and the macro level.  Here’s some ideas….

Online PR Micro-Facilitation

• Make your content easy to link to and/or embed in other people’s sites.  For example, rather than solely hosting and branding your own video, think of the benefit of using YouTube as well:  aside from giving you another potential audience, YouTube outputs code snippets which allow people to feature your content on their web sites.  The same goes for images on Flickr, presentation material with SlideShare, and so on…
• Make it easier and attractive for people to pass on your content via embedded ‘email a friend’ forms.
• Make it easy to bookmark your content on social bookmarking sites by including aggregation tools within your content, like ‘AddThis‘.  (In turn, these social bookmarking sites will make your content more available to other people.)
• Render your content assets in a ‘Widget’ format, so that others can access it and feature it on their own sites as (for example) a sidebar feature.  There are now a ton of interesting widget-ization services available, many of which are free and do the work for you if you’re creating simple tools:  see WidgetBox, for example.
• If you can find the right angle, create more sophisticated widgets or applications to feature on other Social Networking platforms.  For example, there’s been great work done lately by the NSPCC to help donations through FaceBook.

Online PR Macro-Facilitation

• Create a ‘user generated’ FAQ section or forum for your site, or create a profile via a hosted service like Get Satisfaction.  Allow your customers and partners to engage directly with you and others on support issues.
• Create your own Social Networking platform for specific activities via hosted tools like Ning, or other Open Source social networking tools.  Good applications for Social Networking environments include:  events management (allow people to meet and greet online); education or training (host your coursework in an interactive space and have people mark it up, amend and improve it); host your fan-base (if you’re a rock star, or have any following of note!); best practise hubs (share your tips, tricks and insights in information-hungry or ‘expert’ environments)

The above examples show you how easy it is to co-opt other people into your Online PR efforts.  It’s not a rocket science activity, but one that does need to be treated sensibly.  One mistake to avoid is the ‘Build it and They Will Come’ mentality of many early Social Media marketing efforts.

Just because you’re a brand or you have an audience doesn’t mean that people will care about your new networking widget.  The most successful applications of Social Networking for Online PR tend to be those that are focused and designed to support a specific activity or application – eg, events support, customer support, and the like.

Online PR Rule 5:  Your Reputation will be SafeGuarded by Your New-Found Attitude

As mentioned above, good Online PR requires a different attitude.  Publish then filter is the way forward, rather than polish, polish and then publish.

In many respects, Online PR is a volume game.  The more great content you publish, and the more platforms you publish it to, the better your SEO will be and the more scalable your efforts will become.

Whilst this is a reductive view, it nonetheless speaks strongly to one aspect of PR that’s even more sensitive in the online environment than it used to be:  Reputation Management.

On the web, the idea that yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper simply doesn’t exist.  The web is more or less an indelible environment.  What’s published today remains published tomorrow, and will be forever findable via the links that are built up around it.  Indeed, search engine algorithms are built on this premise!

So, when it comes to Reputation Management, aside from monitoring what’s being said and published about you, your job is twofold:

1. Don’t publish stupid things that may come back to haunt you (think twice and edit your content sensibly before firing off that angry blog post), and…
2. Publish as much great stuff as you can, encourage good Online PR karma, and have as many pages host your content and/or link to you as possible in a positive way.

The second point is the most important here.  What we’re talking about is an Online PR insurance policy of sorts, so that when the crap does hit the fan, the weight of your positive footprint outweighs that of your negative.  In other words, if you’ve published enough good stuff, and have built some serious SEO equity around this, then this ought to see you through the bad times… in the sense that Google searches on your brand name are more likely to return the good results than the bad.

Hence, Reputation Management becomes a case of ‘may the best content win’….

Our Rough Guide to Reputation Measurement Tools:

• Google News Alerts: get alerts on breaking news containing your brand/keywords
• Technorati Search: a Google search for the blog world
• Blogpulse: another Google-like blog search tool that allows you to track brand ‘conversations’ via graphs
• Monitor This: get a huge variety of RSS feeds on specific keywords in one place
• Social Scan: monitor how popular your site is on common Social Media sites
• Twitter Search: monitor micro-blogging discussions about you in real time

Conclusion

By way of a summary…

Online PR is everything that you communicate online.  Specifically, Online PR is an attitude that requires you to publish more high quality content, more of the time in a way that’s sensitive to Google and to customers, using tactics that make it easy and attractive for other people to wage your campaigns for you.  It’s a continual process to adopt – in particular because these new publishing habits will protect you from storms when bad weather kicks in.

Measurement also matters of course, but we’ll save that for another paper sometime soon.

The key thing to remember in all of this is that effective Online PR can be free and easy to plan and execute, and that the field is open to companies of every shape and size.

So, no more reading…. go play!

In doing so I remembered a great article in the New York Times from a couple of years ago. The piece was written by a favourite reporter of mine, Steve Lohr (check out his book on the evolution of the software business – it’s great), who was at the time coming to grips with the fact that he was no longer writing just for his editor and his readership, but for the greater God named Google.

Here’s his leader: “Journalists over the years have assumed they were writing their headlines and articles for two audiences — fickle readers and nitpicking editors. Today, there is a third important arbiter of their work: the software programs that scour the Web, analyzing and ranking online news articles on behalf of Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.”

Written in 2006, it’s a fascinating insight into a world of writing that’s just been turned upside down. Lohr interviews a range of editors, large and small, from the BBC to the Sacremento Bee. All of them are adapting their work – in both creative and technical terms – in order to addess the mechanics of search crawlers and human search behaviour. As such, it’s a great entry point for any non-professional writer learning the ropes today…

In short, Content Optimisation requires two changes to our writing habits.

1: New Types of Research

In order to understand and address an audience via search, it’s critical to understand the language that they’re using everyday on Google. In other words, instead of just crafting witty headlines, a large part of the creative work becomes a matter of aligning what you want to say with the langauge that you know your audience is using. Tools like Google Suggest help us do this Content Optimisation research with pinpoint accuracy.

2: New Types of Execution

Google (and others) ‘read’ web content in certain ways. Page titles – the things that sit in the top (grey) bar of your browser window – are extremely important. Google takes them as an important read of what your content is all about. From a technical perspective, most good CMS’s will take this title from the headline that you give to your page. At the same time, Google prefers to read blocks of title text that are 70 characters or less. As such, the scope for creativity in headlines is somewhat changed…. And this is just one technical Content Optimisation consideration amongst many.

None of this was taught during my time at writing school. (Google didn’t even exist back then!)

In practise, good Content Optimisation and good web writing requires us to rewire the way we approach some well-worn writing fundementals – like the Who, What, Where, Why and When tests. To make our stuff more marketable, indexable and attractive amongst a sea of search results, we need to factor in how Google would also approach those questions and how much of a limited attention span it has. And, it’s clear that the way Google thinks is very different to your average human reader….

If you’re interested to know some of the magic behind C&M, then look no further. Like a ‘The Making Of…’ feature or a double page spread in Hello Magazine, we take you behind the scenes and give you a glimpse into our most intimate Content Optimisation workings. We also recline on a chez lounge in fur and high heels…

Frankly, it’s becoming a drag. Having a bunch of earnest questions flung in your face when you’re just about to hop into a brainstorm isn’t wholly conducive to blue-scaping or crea-magining, or whatever other super-urgent, creative things we’ve been contracted to do. Besides, we need at least 30 minutes in make up before entering a client meeting.

So I thought I’d jot down a few of our secrets to help these folks out. This way, the next time we get accosted we can just point people to a web page using a well optimised URL.

As such, here’s the essential Online PR & Content Optimisation tools which C&M carries in its handbag and uses day in, day out….

Online PR & Content Optimisation Research Tools

Things to help you understand which SEO/keyword markets to attack…

KGen

I nearly flipped my lid when I first used this plugin for Firefox. It’s a sidebar that – at the push of a button – scans whatever page you’re on and gives you a read on its keyword volumes and keyword density. It also provides this information as a natty, visual tag cloud for those with autistic tendencies like myself. You should use it for snooping on competitors. If they’re good at their game, you’ll learn heaps about why. I promise it’ll blow you away.

Google Adwords Suggest

Just type in whatever keywords and/or phrases you’re investigating, hit a button and this tool will tell you how many people have used the same verbage to search Google in an average month, and also how many competitors are out there bidding on the same terms as part of their PPC ad campaigns. When it comes to content planning, I’d be lost without this one. It tells me whether or not I have an audience for my keywords, and whether there’s any competition out there. As such, it helps me know what content to write, how to do it and how to promote it.

Wordtracker

Like Google Suggest, but provides (independent) data on keywords from a wider variety of search engines. Basically, it keeps a three month store of activity on Google, MSN and Yahoo, and tells you how many times a day your keywords have been used by the world at large. In addition, it gives you a superb competitive index that tells you how many other interweb pages are optimised for your terms. This is gold dust as it enables you to get a true measure of whether a Content Optimisation strategy is worth pursuing or not. (What looks interesting from a search volume perspective may often turn out to be a monster when it comes to competition!) Costs a couple of hundred bucks a year.

Competitive Online PR & Content Optimisation Tools

Things to help you understand what black magic your competitors are practising…

Keyword Spy

A very smart widget that shows you which other companies and/or sites are using your keywords for their PPC campaigns. Really useful for getting a quick view on who you may be up against on your new Adwords campaign (and for realising which keyword markets to avoid!).

Keyword Page Comparison Tool

From Aaron Wall’s wonderful SEObook.com. This rinky dink tool enables you to grab a quick read on the technical composition of a web page by scraping its title, meta description, meta keywords, page copy, and top keyword phrases and presenting it all back to you in one place. In addition, it allows you to do this stuff on a comparative basis, so that you can do a competitive bake-off between sites. And, even better, it lets you download this data as an Excel file, so you can get jiggy with it when you’re offline.

Keyword Density Tool

Again, via SEObook, this is a variant on the Keyword Page comparison tool, but gives you a bit more flexibility to include and exclude certain paratmeters. Great to use to get a rapid view on how well your competitors are thinking about keywords and SEO. (I use it to see if competitor pages spit out a range of meaningful words, or just a bunch of crap. If it’s the former, then I know I need to really get with the program; if it’s the latter, then I know I can make serious a difference to relative performance with some simple Online PR and Content Optimisation work.)

Online PR & Content Optimisation Dreaming Tools

Things to help you get creative when you’re in a tight spot…

Google Trends

Very neat service which plots you a volume graph over time for ‘big fish’ keywords (phrases that are being used by lots of searchers). Also tells you which geographies this traffic is drawn from, and gives you pointers as to the key news pieces that may have driven keyword interest. Won’t give you any data on smaller keyword markets, but certainly provides you with a firm handle on the keyword zeitgeist via its read of daily trends.

Thesaurus.com

Because we all need a little help with our dreamscaping.

Dictionary.com

Because we also need to spell words correctly, innit?

SEO, Online PR and Content Optimisation Analysis Tools

Things to help you understand your performance and your competitors (and keep you amused deep into the night when you really should have gone to bed a long time ago)…

SEO Quake

The daddy of SEO analysis tools. A plugin for Firefox that sits as an additional toolbar at the top of your browser window. When you’re on a page, it’ll tell you (immediately) key things like Google PageRank, page index volume, volume of inbound links, volume of external links, and other essential data. DON’T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT IT!

Xinu

This is an awesome little service that gives you an instant read on a site’s SEO performance across a wide range of metrics. At the press of a button you’ll see key indicators like social media footprint (how often a site’s been bookmarked), volume of backlinks (and their source), and number of pages indexed in key search engines.

Google Analytics

If you’re not using Google Analytics to understand your traffic sources, your top performing content and your keyword performance, then you need your head examined. Also gives good readings on important stuff like bounce rates, time on page, average page views and the like.

Opentracker

Much like Google Analytics, but has a cool feature that shows you which companies are browsing your site IN REAL TIME! (So that you can pick up the phone and harass them.) It does this by checking a visitor’s IP address against the Whois database. Costs peanuts a year and worth subscribing for this feature alone.

Google Webmaster

Lots of Jedi insider sprockets here to help you understand how often your sites are being indexed and which pages are being accessed. Also shows you what Google actually sees when it gets to your site. Invaluable!

Blog Content Research Tools

Things to keep you in the know and amongst the buzz and gossip…

Blogpulse

Kind of like a Google for blogs. Also free. Just type in a search term and it’ll give you back a ream of related (recent) blog posts. You can also do some neat ‘trending’ vs other keywords to get an idea of what’s hot and what’s not (an essential skill for any Blogsphere Gal-About-Town).

Twitter Search

A Google for Twitter. See who’s talking about you and your keywords. Then go and hide if it’s something you really didn’t want to hear. A fab time-sink for brands – as you can now see what the world’s saying about you in near-real-interweb-time. (Or at least listen to the Twitter crowd to check who’s bitching about you.)

Run of the Mill Online PR Tools

Things to help you spread the word and generate some backlinks at very little cost…

I’ll make it a list. They basically do the same thing: distribute your press releases around the interweb at next to no cost. Very handy! (They also tend to use clunky spliced verbs in their brand names. Go CheckWatch them out!)

• PitchEngine
• FastPitch
• ClickPress
• Sane PR
• PR Log

Social Media Tools and Other Online PR Goodies

I really have to thank my friends at Nixon McInnes for prompting me to write this post, as they’ve also been sharing some great Social Media tool-age via their latest (and very excellent) social media agency newsletter. So go check them out. They introduced me to the MIND BOGGLING MonitorThis RSS tool. I shall forever love them.

Need Help?

If you need some help to crack your Content Optimisation and Online PR challenages, then give us a call today…!

When I used to be head honcho for Media Relations at IBM many years ago, I’m ashamed to say that I sometimes practiced bad PR.  I spent too much time thinking about ‘message architectures’ and ‘soundbites’ alone in my office – things that I’d hoped reporters might get excited about and run back to their desks to reprint.

Not only did this high-falutin’ thinking never usually find its way into ink, it also never really left the confines of my own head.  On the rare occasions it met with success, the reason that something stuck had more to do with the reporters own ‘message architecture’ than mine:  if she wrote it up it was probably because she’d been mulling the same words and phrases over herself – and we’d just happened to luck out and strike a chord.

The more I think about this today, the more flawed I realise this practice of ‘soundbite’ dreaming was.  The time that I spent sat around on the 33rd floor sharpening my pencil and imagining new schemes would have been far better spent having a beer with a reporter or five and swapping some ideas.

This is what really good PR people do all the time.  They road test their stuff in dimly lit wine bars and refine their words and messages.  Sometimes they even wake up in the morning and remember them.  But the point is that the planning of good PR isn’t a private exercise – its a communal thing which involves co-creation and polishing through RESEARCH.

Thankfully, I’m older and wiser today.  And I’m also armed with Google.

Give me five minutes and a browser and I can now tell exactly what language my customers are using, and how best to engage with them directly via search engines.  It’s called KEYWORD RESEARCH.  Using things like Google Suggest and Google Trends (and some others), I can also quickly figure out what keywords are hot, and which are most keenly contested amongst my competitors.

With this information I can plan a tactical Online PR campaign with a great deal of precision.  I can figure out who I’m reaching, which channels are best used and best avoided, and, most importantly, how to use my keywords as a highly polished weapon rather than a stab in the dark.

Today, I never ever make the mistake of soundbite dreaming.  I always do my  KEYWORD RESEARCH first.  In fact, I don’t do anything at all without it.

This way, I’m able to find out what language my customers are using and use it for myself in all aspects of my online content – in my blog page titles, in my metadata descriptions, in my links and in my tags.

The difference is profound.  I no longer scribble in the dark.  I get out there and get noticed.