In a single hit, everyone’s favourite media baron Rupert has stuck two fingers up at Google and those of us who are too tight to pay for his newspaper content.  Nobody can access his stuff anymore, unless they pay for it.

It’s a big move. The standard web marketing and Social Media handbook tells us to give it all away for free – in the name of better indexing, bookmarking, word of mouth, distribution and other good things.

This approach is proven but deeply troubling for most publishers.  Unlike Tescos, Sainsburys and ASOS – who publish free(ish) ‘value-added’ content (magazines, emails, style guides, recipe cards, wotnot) in order to get us moving with more zeal around their freezer sections and web sites – the only thing that traditional publishers have to sell is (by and large) their content.  The concept of ‘free’ does not sit well with them.

Likewise, ‘free’ is a bane for those traditionally responsible for creating content.  Writers, editors, musicians, games developers, etc.  Where goes the pay check?

Yet we’re stuck in a space race for ‘free’ content.  If you’re not currently doing it then you probably soon will be because your competitors are – right now – offering a variety of free and juicy value-added social networking widgets, reviews services, hints and tips and other content-based merchandise for anyone willing to part with a nano second of their attention on the Interwebs.

This movement and its consequences have been already been described by better people than me.  See here for Jaron Lanier on Digital Maoism.  And our good pal Ian Delaney on Valuing Content.

I’m torn.  At heart, C&M is a content marketing outfit.  We know that the best way to generate a righteous storm of fans, followings, and traffic is to create great content – and then to give it all away for free.  Most of our clients are, however, more than a little hesitant when we begin this discussion.  Content is, after all, their IP – whether they’re a content business or not.  It takes time to plan and produce.

So why give it away if it’s good?

The Times – and News Corp – has the answer.

Free content in the context of an iPhone > iPad > iSofa scenario isn’t ‘free’ as we might know it.  Our relationship with content is changing fast, and – subsequently – so is content’s relationship with our wallets.

News is now free.  This is old news.  Check the classic Clay Shirky for this one (The price of information has fallen…). Other forms of content, however, don’t need to be all free, all of the time.  Here’s how the Times Online’s strategy is unfolding….

Firstly, they’re part of a network. News Corp does (Sky) sports, Caitlin Moran (on Saturdays), and lots of other bits and pieces.  News Corp describes the Times Online brand proposition as follows:

Essentially, this is a (customised) chocolate box approach.  I love lots of News Corp ‘properties’: Ms Moran, Mike Atheton and Soccer AM; but I find the Times Weekend glossy magazines kind of obnoxious.  In other words, I have a relationship with bits and pieces, but I’m not a big fan of the mothership brand and I won’t pay for it.  But, hey, I’ll happily pick and mix if Rupert is kind enough to carve it up for me.  I’ll also pay for some parts of it – so long as I can avoid paying a ‘one size fits all’ bill and the coconut creams at the back.

If you subscribe to the new Times Online, this is what you see on the other side of the wall…

A variety of subscriptions, apps and services ready for use.  Access to some will depend on your subscription level – e.g. I can (soon) get the Sunday Times on my iPad if I go for the super-sized rate.  Some will be free ‘value-adds,’ others will be one-off paid for events and activities.

My hope is that I’ll soon be able to subscribe to Soccer AM (perhaps paid-for).  And a widget for the Soccer AM YouTube channel and Boston Goals (free).  Or a podcast from just one of the Boston Goals commentary team (free, probably).  This kind of thing is happening now.

When News Corp starts to understand my content patterns and usage preferences (and when they start to cut up their content assets accordingly), they have my attention and my wallet.  Call it narrowcasting, personalisation or whatever you like, the progression is logical.  New content channels and consumption experiences are here to stay – iPad > YouTube > Twitter > TEN SNEAKY MINUTES ON THE SOFA WATCHING EASTENDERS BUT HECK THE WIFE ISN’T WATCHING > WOW FREEEEEBEEEES > SOME PAID BITS > UH, WELL, OK > BAM! ……so let’s divvy up our content catalogue (and our brand assets) to match.  Some free, some paid for, but all mixed up into different versions, formats and channels.

The same is happening in TV and broadcasting.  Anyone for a spot of Project Canvas?

The value of content is shifting

In both TV and newsprint, the value of content – and our relationship with it – is shifting from the network provider to the individual asset (the Caitlin Moran column is more appealing to me than the Times on Saturday / the News Corp brand) or the author / producer (Caitlin Moran)… and prices are moving around in step.  Smaller payments for smaller slices.  This I like.  And I’ll probably end up spending more.

The challenge for publishers (and other brands that now publish) is to figure out where the most valuable pieces are in their catalogues and how to make money from them.  Bits need to be distributed for free (in the name of Google, ‘findability’ and great (Social) marketing) and bits need to be kept closer to hand and charged for (in the shape of £ pound notes and/or email addresses).

This I also like. It’s my business to help brands figure out what content goes where and how. In fact C&M has been doing a rather good job of this for brands such as Hackett for some time now.  Same challenge (get me noticed, get me distribution, drive traffic / revenue, but don’t give away the crown jewels), only with different content collateral (branded content, not ‘media’ content).

Beyond content serving, the challenge for the Times Online is, of course, acquisition.  They now have a catalogue and a set of services that speak to the Google generation (iPad in hand on sofa).  But fully appeasing Google will be hard because they are hiding a lot of their stash.  Social Media represents an opportunity to do acquisition and awareness effectively – but they don’t seem to be really embracing it right now.  (See here for a list of Times columnists that they’re hawking on Twitter.  A step in the right direction, I feel – get me access to the bits that I like best, and quickly.)

Having mentioned her a few times, I’ll let Caitlin Moran sign off.  She summed things up quite nicely in her column last week (yes, behind the paywall!):

“I don’t think journalism should be free, because, tbh, bitch got to make rent. I’ve spent 20 years clawing my way out of a council house in Wolverhampton to reach a point where I can now afford a Nigella Lawson breadbin. If I have to start blogging everything for free, I am simply going to have to fall back on Plan B, and go and hang about in a red-light district somewhere. Meanwhile, the only journalists left will be posh people who can afford to do it as a hobby, in between skiing or renovating a folly. This column would be written by Lady Helen “Melons” Windsor or George Osborne [….] As a society, we now charge for essential dental work, but somehow found a way to throw in HD spit-roasts for free. What does that say about us? And when someone works out what that says about us, will they get paid for explaining it?”

(She likes paywalls, by the way. She also has a huge Twitter following for lots of mini slices of Caitlin Moran content …every day, for FREE.)

Further Reading

Check out Chris Applegate’s review of the new Times Online service.  Soup to nuts good stuff – including a great commentary on design and user experience.

Check out this book – Information Rules – by Carl Shapiro. He called all of this before the last Interweb bubble popped in 1998. (And I’ll be forever grateful to my mate Doug Kessler for making me read it.)

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.

(NB: it’s a year or so old… and we’re still, collectively, light years from realising what it really means and putting it into practice.)

Points I like:

• Search and find is everything / free is normal, right? (Slide 24)
• “…once we’ve realised the important thing is our content and not where it’s consumed, we should find it easier to let go.” (Slide 54)
• On the web our whole emotional attachment to content changes – it gets reduced. Content is easier to find, we pay/work less to get it. Therefore our relationship with it shifts to other dimensions. (Utility more than brand? Free-ness and immediacy more than accuracy? TBD : ) (Slide 25)

And for those who don’t agree with ‘free,’ a footnote:

We no longer own our collective content archive. In fact we haven’t for a long time. Google does. And anyone that values SEO (ie, all of us) has forgone the right of ownership, for all the right reasons. When it comes to search and discovery, it’s Google who makes your brand ‘presentation’ choices, not you. Google is one big old custodian of your brand. If you don’t like the fact that Google presents content A instead of content B to your hard fought customers, then tough – you just need to create different (better?) content. And If you want ownership back, then say goodbye to Google (as Mr Murdoch may well choose to do).

Oh, and ditto for our good friend Social Media – only now it’s other people who own the presentation of your brand, the circulation of your content (and the choices therein), rather than you.

So… best to just get with the program and let it all hang out. Your job is to ensure that all of your content is brilliant, all of the time – so that even that old blog post from the 2007 can be remembered and re-read lovingly.

Anyways – your thoughts? If you’re in the business of publishing like Mr M, then you probably see things a little different. (And you’re probably a bit miffed with the rest of the world becoming publishers too….)

Social Media Insights (and Social SEO)

The age-old debate (well, relatively) on Social Media, Social SEO, Social Media Agencies, and our own social media ‘how to’ guides – the meaning of life may also be answered here:

• Social Media Agency: C&M is a ‘Social Media Agency.’ We’re also an ‘Online PR Agency’ and a ‘Social SEO’ firm …which is to say that we do great PR, acquisition, retention and SEO through the use of Social Media tools, platforms, channels, communities and so on. Confused? Yes, it’s all a bit mangled isn’t it? We figure this is to be expected in this brave new world of ‘Social Media’. So much noise, so many claims and – let’s be honest – so little substance. Our intention here is to share some learning with you. We’ve been around the block a few times with folks like IBM, Hackett and Expedia/Hotels.co.uk and we have Social scars and Social medals to prove it. Read post

• Online PR and Social Media Content Strategy Map (A New Cut Out & Keep…): Having dabbled with Facebook and made forays with Twitter, many brands are now stuck wondering how the hell to get any decent ‘play’ out of their Social Media assets and profiles. Oftentimes this is down to two basic things: i) a desire to crack on and experiment and ii) a lack of time. And this dilemma (particularly in a large, multi-brand or multi-business unit organisation) usually leads to a mild form of Social Media schizophrenia and diminishing returns. In other words, when you’re rushing to pilot stuff with a lack of time it can be incredibly hard to execute in an integrated fashion… which is why the chart above might help. Read post

• Social SEO: 10 Reasons Why Being Social can be SEO (Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Chaaaanges!): Kasabian are the new Oasis, with a psychedelic twist. A board of organic crumpets, olives, with a selection of cured hams, is the new all day breakfast. According to an audacious poster campaign – dreamt up by mentalists – Chichester is the new Copenhagen. Patrick Swayze and Richard Gere are the same person. This is unarguable and final. But is ‘Social SEO’ – connecting ‘Social Media’ approaches and SEO thinking – the new approach to doing SEO? How, and why, should Social channels be used? Where are the similarities, cross-overs, and (brace) synergies between SEO and Social Media? Here are 10 thoughts on the matter… Read post

• Social SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Through Clever Content Creation: Creating optimised ‘Social’ content to rank for key terms isn’t a new idea but the search results are becoming more eclectic. With that fact in mind, we’d like to briefly run through which content types regularly appear and how to use this content to clamber through the sweaty throng of competing pages. Read post

• Beginner’s Social Media Guide – Free, Easy and Good to Go…: How to Win Friends and Influence People With Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the Blogosphere. Here’s our simple four step plan for doing effective, results-driven Social Media and Online PR work… Read post

• More Free Social Media, Content Optimisation and Online PR Agency Papers from C&M: Here’s a roundup of some of our recent white papers, think pieces and case studies …all in a highly desirable, super sharable, PDF format. Read post

Social Media Measurement and ROI

This is an old topic, but an important one. Here’s our take on the issue:

• Social Media Measurement & ROI: New Tricks for Old Dogs, But Still the Same Old Dogs: We’ve had a bunch of really interesting meetings lately, many of which focused on the good old question of Social Media measurement. Here’s the view from our seat… Social Media is not the ‘new marketing’ per se. It’s just a different (exciting, potentially more valuable) way of doing things. The aims remain the largely same in marketing land. In other words, when it comes to measurement and ROI, teach the Old Dogs new tricks, techniques, metrics, etc. But they’re still the same Old Dogs – acquisition, interactions, awareness, SEO, etc. Read post

• Social Media Measurement – Some Thoughts from the C&M Online PR Stable: Everybody’s talking about Social Media and how to harness its potential for business – indeed you can hardly have failed to notice the almost daily Twitter/Facebook/NextBigSocialMediaThing stories appearing all over the news. From Daily Mail health warnings to academic controversy, there’s an awful lot of spin surrounding the subject, making it a real can of worms for companies looking to play the Social Media Game (and who isn’t?) Read post

• Social Media ROI: The Return of Identity and the Hackett Story: We met with the good folks at Hackett London recently to discuss Social Media and Online PR plans for the coming months. Much of the conversation centred around creative ideas and the role of key people within the organisation in content production. Which leads us to think that there’s a key value to all of this Social stuff which many of you may be missing – the Return of Identity (a different, but essential form of ROI)… Read post

New Tools and Technology

We love to noodle with new technology, and there’s a lot to noodle with. Here’s our take on a few that we found particularly interesting:

• Google Wave: First Impressions and Buzz Round-up: It seems the web has gone slightly bonkers over Google Wave. With invites being offered (rather duplicitously in most cases, I might add) across the Twittersphere, and enterprising/mercenary individuals putting them up for sale for as much as $50 each on eBay, what could possibly justify this incredible amount of interest? Read post

• Twitter Tools for the Masses: Fact: the Interweb is huge. A quick Google search for “Twitter Tools” gives 83 MILLION results. We’re constantly looking at new tools, so that you don’t have to… So here’s a few essential Twitter gizmos for you, along with a spot of explanatory text for each. Read post

So looking forward to 2010, we’re certain there’ll be many more learnings, insights and digital debating happening on this blog in the coming year. Stay tuned!

Check out what it’s all about via the G-Monster’s rather (untypical) slick and sexy video:

Cool stuff, huh?

In essence, this new feature is both incredibly simple and incredibly powerful. Alongside our normal, time-honoured, static-ranked web pages, news pieces, vids and pix, we’ll now be presented with a ‘real time’ ticker of live Interweb updates in relation to our search queries. These will be fed via blogs and Social microblogging and status-update services like Twitter, Facebook, etc, etc.

Some of these results have been slowly creeping into the margins of Google’s SERPs over the past weeks, but now we are to be blessed with a slick interface to house it all – something that sets the ‘real time’ stuff aside from all the rest.

What does it mean to you? Social SEO

Well, this bit’s simple too. If you want to be omnipresent, then the general rule needs to be ‘Always Be Optimising.’ To appear in the live search results, you need to be thinking about staying on message (keyword) throughout all of your other activity on the Social web. In other words – you need a little Social SEO. One keyword plan, many channels… that sort of thing.

What does it mean to the Interweb at large?

If the goal is to stay on page one of the SERPs all of the time via this new feature, then no doubt we’ll see a raft of real-time-content-optimisation-update-bots that happily spew out a stream of SPAM via any Social Media profile you may care for… but to go this route would be short sighted.

Twitter et al are all about building followings, relationships and conversations and then doing smart things with these connections – and the surest way to nuke these brilliant new assets is to SHOUT, SHOUT, SHOUT lots of the same thing, most of the time (just try it – you’ll get un-followed in an instant).

Good ‘real time’ or Social SEO needs to be smarter than that. Optimisation should compliment the message, not rule it. We shall see…

The flip-side, of course is that everybody’s Tweets, rants and raves will now show up for any given search term – good, bad and indifferent. To this extent, any effort to be omnipresent is likely to be futile.

Context / try it!

This notion of ‘real time search’ is nothing new – the geeks among us have been using Twitter Search, Addictomatic, etc, as proper discovery / search engines for a while now. But this is different: this is Google. And everyone’s on it.

Meantime – hot damn, look here (that’s this post at the bottom of the list – I had to move quickly!)…. And click here (or the image) to see the thing in (real) action.

So, tell us your thoughts? What gives? Who’s off to build a new Twitter spamming app? (Oh, hang on – didn’t someone do that already…?)

PS: anyone remember Pointcast? Darn that 56k dial-up! Only 17 years too early….

And they’ve been especially busy recently, tinkering with their SERPs, adding new functionality and tightening up all the nuts and bolts on their search behemoth. Handily, we’ve rounded up some of these new changes and are going to share them with you… Yes, you.

Three Results in the SERPs

What it is…
Three results pages – due to a double indent – are appearing in Google (first position) results in response to search queries. This means that more than two pages can be optimised for a single term without ranking conflicts.

What it means…
You may be able to optimise more pages for similar terms in the future and also occupy more search space if you achieve first spot on the SERP: the position to aim for. However, this is a recent development and only present on pages that rank in first position or for branded searches. More reading here.

Meta Description Links (as well as Site Links)

What it is…
Links to other site pages are appearing below meta descriptions. Although the links that appear are determined by Google’s algorithms, they are influenced by the main links that appear on a given page.

What it means…
The most important pages on the site should be linked to using the main navigation. For instance, a link to a ‘Trade-In Offer’ page from the home page – within the main navigation – may encourage the appearance of one of these links on a SERP and result in better click-through rates. Read more about this here.

Rich Snippets

What it is…
Google is experimenting with rich snippets, in which additional content can be added to a webpage in a supported format (either microformats or RDFa), which is then returned in the search results near the meta description. At the moment, Google is mainly displaying reviews and people information.

What it means…
If positive information is displayed then it may encourage clickthroughs, as well as allowing a site to occupy more search ‘real estate’. More reading here, and here

Google SideWiki

What it is…
Google now allows users (who have installed the Google Toolbar) to install the SideWiki system and leave comments about a web page. These comments can then be viewed by other users. At the moment this is only available to users who have installed the toolbar – but this is not an insignificant number of users and will definitely increase.

This will allow Google to directly monitor sentiment about a given page and could even be used to rank pages in the future. This reinforces the idea that being useful (and indexable) is important.

What it means…
People can review your products, services within a SideWikis, and publicly comment on any part of your site. But be warned, this can of course, go both ways and you could receive negative reviews as well as positive ones. Find out more here.

Google User Data to Rank Pages

What it is..
Google seems to be developing its algorithm to take into account user search patterns, click-through rates and bounces, as well as traditional cues such as links. This is backed up by patent applications, as well as inferences from search results and the observations of the SEO blogging community.

What it means…
If – as public information seems to suggest – Google is boosting those pages that have better click throughs than others, then meta descriptions (the text that, by and large. features under a page title in a SERP) become an even more important factor for SEO. They need to contain keywords, and they need to be snappy enough (with a call to action) to encourage a a higher rate of click through. Whilst this is SEO / content optimisation 101, it’s a great reason to revisit any your more dusty metadata. Further reading on this can be found here

Google Blog Search Results Embedded in SERPs

What it is..
Check the bottom of your search results pages. The above example is a search for ‘Social Media Agency.’ As well as including ‘related searches’, Google is now including blog post results from its Blog Search index. In other words, it’s now inserting relevant, real-time results from a fresher content store (the two indexes are, of course, different – one deals with all web pages, the other deals with blog post pages only… which means that blog search results tend to be more up-to-date, real time affairs).

What it means…
Happily, against the search in question, we currently rank as both a web page in the main listing, but also as a blog post in the ‘Blog Post’ section. Over time, we need to work hard to maintain and improve our position in the main results. But it’s a lot easier to bolster this position by blogging regularly around our core keyword themes. Short term, if we don’t blog about being a ‘Social Media Agency’ we’ll be replaced in the Blog results by newer blog post content, whilst our position in the main listing is likely to be more stable. So, the point is clear: blog more about around your core keyword categories and feature twice on a page one SERP.

That’s all for now, but Google being Google, there will almost certainly be more changes on the way. And when they do, you know where to come for our thoughts and theories.

Turns out, we’re living in an age that’s much closer to 1960 than we think. The programmes we watch and listen to are still the things we tend to talk about the next day. The difference is that we now have Google and Twitter (etc) to turn to when we want to investigate some more.

In other words, you can bet your backside that searches relating to X Factor contestants are going to spike on a Sunday morning. And this is something we can tap into if we want to draw a little more traffic.

I’ll use my wife as an example…

She runs a web site called Skiff Vintage Knitting Patterns, which sells – guess what? – vintage knitting patterns. With Remembrance Day approaching she, and others around the web, have been busily knitting poppies to wear and promote the cause (a great initiative organised by KnitontheNet.com).

On Tuesday she blogged about her poppy – encouraging other knitting fans to do likewise.

On Wednesday, her site traffic peaked at around 600 visitors – almost double her average.

On Wednesday night she began to wonder why (something seemed out of whack – she often does similar cause-related things). Here’s a quick view of the search terms people were using to reach the site that day:

The blog post was (somewhat inadvertently) optimised around the term ‘Knit a Poppy’… and is now ranking extremely well on that term for Google UK:

On further investigation, she learned that “ace knitter Susan Crawford had a five minute spot on the Sarah Kennedy show on BBC Radio 2 on Wednesday morning to promote the KnitontheNet.com Poppy Appeal campaign.

So, listeners tuned in, liked what they heard and hit Google to find out more… Resulting in a healthy bump in traffic for my wife.

The learning here is not that we should rush out to hijack charitable causes and other trends that are unsuitable for marketing (see here for a quick analysis of how to mess up royally on this score, courtesy of Habitat)…

No, the point is that we shouldn’t forget mainstream media as a significant driver of public web activity…

And it works. From our own (silly) experiments, we tend to get a disproportionate amount of traffic from the search term ‘Susan Boyle’, recent X Factor star and flavour of the month in June 2009. Granted, nobody searching for Susan has ever bought anything from us (yet!), but you get the point. Seek out a traditional media event or happening, have something positive, helpful, interesting and relevant to say about it (in a non-spammy but well-optimised way) via blogs, Twitter, etc… and drive traffic. It’s a fairly routine PR / sponsorship tactic.

Meantime, the above shows that we should all be working harder to align what we do in marketing with good causes that capture the public imagination. Poppies are not just being knitted right now, they’re also being used for Twitter badges. Go get yours here if you want to show your support for war veterans.

And if you need a spot of knitting advice, talk to my wife : )

These links, rather than directing you to other pages within a site, now act as ‘jump to’ links within a single page. So in the above example, clicking on the main link will take you to the Wikipedia article about Rod, and clicking on the secondary links will take you to the section of the page about Emu, for instance. And who doesn’t love reading about Emu?

Google are also including links in this style that direct to deeper pages. The upshot of this is that it could now be possible to direct users to a particularly high converting page (a shop page, for instance), without a user having specifically searched for it. This addition to search snippets seem to be all about giving the user more options right off the bat; they can go ahead and read about Rod Hull, like they set out to do, or they can go down the other path of acquainting themselves with Emu, just like Parkinson.

At the moment, these links are generated automatically by Google, without your say so,  but there are things that you can do to encourage it to happen.

From the Google Webmaster Blog:

First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated  descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1”). The new in-snippet links only appear for relevant queries, so you won’t see it on the results all the time — only when we think that a link to a section would be highly useful for a particular query.

The takeaway? This poses a great incentive to keep your page content neat and tidy, organised and with a disciplined keyword relevancy match for headers and subheaders… which has to be a great benefit for visitors once they hit the page as well.

Much of what we’re doing is evolving, but quite a lot remains the same. As our name suggests we think that content is key. In fact 99% of what we do revolves around good old fashioned ideas of content marketing. The difference is that we’re trying to help our clients to do (better) content with a small ‘c’, not a capital ‘C.’

This may sound trivial but it’s not. We work hard to dissuade folks from building another microsite, and we like to encourage them to sit in front of a browser (and a bunch of Google tools) rather than in all day creative brainstorm sessions.

Fact is, Marketing (capital ‘M’) isn’t very comfortable with Social. This is because Social isn’t really Media at all. Twitter, Facebook & Co are just a set of tools that help people to quickly publish opinions, stories and interactions on a free (as in ‘free beer’) basis. They don’t lend themselves well to display advertising principles.

In other words, we spend lots of time helping folks to stop doing Marketing and start doing some talking.

Now this isn’t rocket science, but it does require a slightly different approach. We suggest firms get out of ‘Deliverables’ mode (capital ‘D’) and into story/conversation mode. In the process, like them to get happy with talking directly to customers/partners/prospects/etc. In fact this is a prerequisite (think Twitter).

This in itself is a different discipline to Marketing or Press Relations. It’s a communications effort… which may (or may not) be owned solely by marketing people. I won’t dive into marketing integration issues here, but it’s worth noting that as a day-to-day comms discipline, Social doesn’t really work as an exercise in approval processes, creative reviews and grandstand launches. Like a dog, it’s for life – not just Xmas. Besides, when was the last time a sales or support call required an upward approval cycle at your firm?

Here’s a nice (Ad Age) quote I found to illustrate the theme. It’s from Rick Web (great name : ) of The Barbarian Group: “Marketers need to abandon the time-limited campaign online and start to think of it as a constant application of a rigorous discipline. They should think of their marketing the same way that Facebook puts out a new feature every two weeks, tweaks it, changes it, and re-releases it…”

I’ll buy that. We need to stop polishing things and start getting into the trenches if this stuff is going to work properly.

A different (non-technical) analogy is the architect. Creativity isn’t solely based on the deliverable. What makes something fly or die has a lot to do with the environment (or space) that gets created. I think a lot of our work would be better if we forgot the gongs and started focusing more on how to facilitate our comms and content…. What tends to make stuff stick isn’t down to the ‘wow’ factor in the first instance. Values like ‘usefulness,’ ‘share-ability’ and ‘free-ness’ tend to be a lot more important. Foursquare’s a good example of this in practice. Not a game-changing creative idea – just something that integrates itself really well with the way we’re already using the web (Twitter meets iPhone meets Facebook).

Another observation is that we’re all totally sick of being sold Nescafe-like creative sagas. Microsoft’s Windows 7 party video is a classic in this respect – Social gone wrong (or radically right in terms of distribution, for all the wrong reasons).

And I love this recent story about ex-NYC ad guy Ji Lee. He wanted to talk back so he printed a bunch of speech bubbles and slapped them on the faces of display ads around the big apple. The results are brilliant.

The funny thing is that brands don’t need their display ads to be defaced if they want to communicate. They just need to rewire the way they approach their content and (unlike Microsoft) stop talking at people. Twitter’s already here. So is Facebook and all the rest. We don’t have to build new things if we don’t want to, and we don’t need to ham it up quite so much …We can choose to employ tools that already exist and use them to talk different. Got it?

Anyways, here’s the slides (PR, Social Media and Content Isn’t Media)

And here’s a neat little PDF we made on how to re-think a content strategy (PR, Social Media – Re-Wired).

C&M Social Media Content Strategy Map

Do tell me what you think….

With that fact in mind, I’d like to briefly run through which content types regularly appear and how to use this content to clamber through the sweaty throng of competing pages.

Firstly, here are some broad content principles that you should be focused on:

Keywords

…need to be selected, based on competitiveness, search volumes, and long-term trends.

Research

…the content themes and formats (eg, Videos, Blog posts, Tweets) that your target audience is most interested in.

Create

…good, interesting, valuable, sharable, content – and publish it freely where possible. Create something of unique value that can’t be found elsewhere.

Optimise

…this content. I’m not advocating a selfish SPAM approach, but why wouldn’t you want to give your content the best possible chance of being indexed, noted and linked to? Search Engines need to be given explicit cues (in titles, headers, links) – regardless of quality, content, and context.

Identify

…influential hubs and make sure that you promote your content within them (responsibly). The mantra of ‘build it and they will come’ won’t usually work.

Done That… What’s Next?

Here are the main forms of content you should be interested in. The key to a lot of content optimisation is getting search terms in a) The Page Title b) The URL, and c) including links to raise awareness, link equity, and the likelihood of others linking to you.

SEO Tip 1: Blog Posts

It’s also best practice to register your blog with Google and Technorati.

Why?: Good blog content can quickly appear on the front page.

Ideal when: Your blog is well-read, established, and has garnered some respect (from both users and Google).

Example: (Term = ‘Social SEO’, Results no 5/6 / PageRank 5)

SEO Tip 2: News Articles / Press Releases

Also, make sure you’re indexed by Google News and add selected keywords to your XML news sitemap if you’re using one.

As with blog posts, most CMSs can be used to add keywords to the most important places.

Why?: News articles rank (transiently) in most SERP sectors – increasingly at the pinnacle.

Ideal when: You’re regularly producing good, neutral, and newsworthy content and have the resources to continue to do so. Even better if your competitors aren’t using the same technique.

Example: (Term = ‘Hotels in London’, Result no 1)

SEO Tip 3: Facebook Pages

Why?: Social Profiles are becoming more prominent within the SERPs. Facebook pages are publically viewable and ranking with more frequency. Within pages, discussions and sub-sections can also infiltrate the results pages.

Ideal when: Your page has attracted high membership and you’re in a market that isn’t saturated with similiar pages. It’s also more auspicious for your page if your brand name is highly searched for.

Example: (Term = Hackett London, Result no 3 / 1,090 fans)

SEO Tip 4: Twitter Profiles

Don’t worry too much about links and the language used within them, they don’t pass any value or PageRank. However, I generally don’t shorten links unless I have to: user experience is improved if link text is explicit and descriptive.

Why?: Recent Google updates have led to Twitter profiles becoming far more prominent in the SERPs (although this trend has tailed off in recent weeks).

Ideal when: Your profile becomes established and linked to. Most profiles that rank are well established, highly followed, frequently updated, and continually on topic.

You’ll also stand a better chance of ranking with a valued brand name and a comfortable ‘social’ fit. eg, if you’re a known quantity in the Art or Tech sector, you’re likely to be followed in high volume.

Example: (Term = ‘Social SEO’, Result No 10 / 894 followers)

SEO Tip 5: YouTube Videos

It’s also best to include links back to your page in the video description and whenever possible.

As YouTube is effectively an independent search engine, make sure that tags are optimised so internal searches are returned in response to keywords.

Why?: Google owns YouTube and loyally places its video content within SERPs.

Ideal when: You’ve created a video that really is going to be viewed, rather than a thinly veiled corporate advertorial: most videos that rank are fairly popular.

Also helps if you’re in a relatively uncompetitive search sector and competiting against few similiar videos.

Example: (Term = ‘Social Media’, Results no 2 / 3 , 320,400 / 697,381 views)

SEO Tip 6: Images

Why?: Images regularly appear within the SERPs. Note, Google isn’t affiliated with one particular channel (like Flickr) and uses a slower bot (googlebot-image) to crawl images for inclusion within its image search index.

Ideal when: You’ve got a hefty selection of quality images to use on your site

Example: (Result no 1 for ‘Lesser Spotted Woodpecker’- the highest volume term on the teletext internet)

SEO Tip 7: PDFs / White Papers

Why?: Within niche, emerging, sectors, white papers and focused PDFs are vessels of valuable knowledge. Framing the paper by a key term also increases the chance of users linking using search terms as anchor text.

Ideal when: You’re in an emerging sector and have something interesting to say. As the sector grows, (early) established rankings can stick like muck.

Example: (Term = ‘Social Media Marketing’, Result No 7)

SEO Tip 8: Listings (Products/Jobs etc)

Why?: Product items feature heavily on the first page for specific search terms, and other items are Increasingly – but still sparingly – appearing.

Ideal when: You’ve got a steady flow of products to release onto the web that cover a wide range of long-tail search terms

Example: (Term = ‘Board Game’, Result 4)

There are a few other relevant content formats, but the principles remain the same.

Stick to the above and you’ll stand a good chance of ranking – even in more competitive sectors.

Adios.

Thankfully, Hackett has always good content in spades and over the years has consistently invested in assets such as brilliant sponsorship, iconic front men and great, great advertising.

Think Hackett, think British – it’s like eggs and bacon.

As a customer, one of the things that sits well with me – aside from the quality of the product – is the story that’s been built around the brand. Take Jeremy Hackett’s book, ‘Mr Classic,’ for example.

If you want an insight into modern British tailoring and classic clothing then check it out – it’s a superb read. It was published a few years ago – before Social Media arrived – as a ‘best of’ compilation of his weekly column in the Independent on Sunday.

In it you’ll find little in the way of selling, but bags of tips, anecdotes, insights, humour and personality that provide a ringside view of the world of menswear, Mr Hackett and his company. I first read it before I had enough cash for a Hackett key ring. A few years on I’m wearing a Hackett shirt and jacket as I write (granted, both sale stock – but hey I’m getting there). In other words, I’m a customer now mainly because Jeremy Hackett took the time and effort to tell me a bunch of great stories about something I care about.

Our role with Hackett is to help them to deliver this story to the web using Social Media. I won’t dwell on what we’re doing here, but our work together is highlighting something rather important….

Outsourcing Your Communications

In the time between my reading his original weekly columns and buying the brand, corporate comms has changed a lot. Today we’re pondering abstract content ideas like Thought Leadership, Ghost Blogging (great post, btw – do read), Brand Advocacy and the like.

Brands have grown, directors and managers have gotten busier, agencies have been retained and the soul of it all has disappeared.

All of which is fine if you’re dealing with professionalised disciplines like Media Relations and Advertising because you, the brand, only need to dip into certain parts of the process on a part time basis. You can turn up for press briefings and video shoots, say your piece and let the system take care of the rest. Your agency support – by and large – takes the shape of an outsourced production effort and grand creative scheming…. rather than a series of day to day services. (Granted, there are exceptions to this – but only amongst mega-brands who have a multi-million pound, ‘buy the team’ attitude to communications.)

But this approach to content won’t work for Social Media…

The Return of Identity

The point of Social Media (and its value) is that it helps you to talk to people directly and build new kinds of relationships. The mass of supporting tools – Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc – allow you to do this extremely quickly and cost effectively. No real production effort is required… and the basis for communication changes. We’re dealing mainly in conversations and stories now, not ‘events.’

This makes total outsourcing difficult. Because communication is frequent (think Twitter), it’s expensive to pay for your content on a day rate basis. Also, as a conversation – a set of tips, anecdotes, insights, humour and personality – it only really works when delivered from the inside, via the people on your front lines who generate the chat – marketing, support, sales, etc.

Getting back to my Hackett / Mr Classic example, Social Media can only really work when you make a serious commitment to a certain type of content …You need to start telling a series of stories again as part of your day to day life, and, in doing so, you need to take back the ownership of your brand and identity.

Social Media (ROI) Return on Investment

So here’s another spin on the great Social Media ROI debate….

Stop pretending to infuse leaders with someone else’s personality. Stop trying to distill fleeting thoughts into ghosted Think Pieces. Stop gambling on barnstorming creative virals and microsites.

Stop wasting money.

A Social Media strategy isn’t a ‘Media’ strategy at all. It’s a content and communications strategy. You are now the media and all these Social widgets are your tools – you blog, Tweet, post, chat, etc. From the get-go ‘being the media’ in this way can save you money and enhance the value of your brand if you rewire the way you communicate and produce your content.

Like Hackett, this requires a senior commitment to developing a content legacy. Important people need to start telling the story, rather than outsourcing it. Your leaders (and/or your front line) should be blogging – on a weekly basis ….they can also be capturing their slideware, documents, photography and general discussions in a way that’s fit for versioning on Social platforms. This costs next to nothing and is easy to do. When this happens, your stock of ideas builds – quickly – and you open up a mass of opportunity for engaging with new people in new networks.

You should also consider hiring specialists into an Online PR/Social Media/Digital Marketing role. These folks will take the content, shape it properly and give it legs in new domains – Facebook, Twitter, etc. This can also save you money. Ditch some of your agency retainer and reinvest it in staff.

Neither of these ideas are radical. When your firm was young it was driven in exactly the same way – through conviction, ideas, stories, chartware and conversations ….not Thought Leadership papers and a bunch of flacks.

Social Media is an opportunity to start over and bin the Corporate communications junk.

Social Media Agencies…?

This may sound a little odd coming from an agency, but it’s not.

The lessons of the past year tell me that our clients need to own much of what they communicate, and that this is healthy. It’s also essential if our work is to be a success. When Social stuff is out on its own on a wing on a prayer – as a tactical offshoot of something else – its impact is very limited and there’s a high risk of failure.

The role of the agency today needs to be as consultant, enabler, trainer, planner ….and as creator and executor of bigger content pieces. We’re helping CEO’s to Tweet, Marketing Directors to use a Flip camera, and Product Developers to blog. In the process we’re helping them to understand their market again in very anti-marketing ways. No key messages, just keywords – based on optimisation techniques and public data.

This is helping them to regain their voice and their identity and save money. And, as any decent brand consultant will tell you, this is the really valuable part.

As I write this post, at least two essential global inter-species combat tournaments are taking place. On the one hand, Microsoft has declared war on Google with its new(ish) search engine, Bing.  On the other, in a field in the middle of Kent, a Fox is locked in an epic battle against three Azure Winged Magpies and a Chaffinch.

And who cares?  Well, we do.  We have a vested interest in SEO, and we’ve just stuck a fiver each way on the Chaffinch. (Bite those ears! Bite them off!)

Back to Business:  Google vs Microsoft’s Bing

The rivalry between Google and Bing is now even more pertinent due to Microsoft’s recent alliance with Yahoo. A move which has also led to a plethora of bad portmanteaus – like Microhoo*

Nonetheless, If the Bing/Yahoo team does manage to wrestle more power from Google, then the algorithmic and presentation differences need to be analysed and understood. I’m starting here, through the nepotistic medium of C&M search queries.

Notes from the field…

Search Term 1: Online PR Agency

First things first: in Bing we’re first (and third) for the query and in Google we’re a shoddy second. And, In Bing our results generally seem higher, but our social content ranks lower.

Bing’s meta descriptions are neater than Google’s due to a less savage use of the guillotine. The handy pop-up meta description on the right hand side, with additional info, is useful.

A final quirk to observe: when I tried the query at an earlier date I was presented with a weird (but fleeting) local result at the top of the Bing SERP, concerning an Online PR agency from the hedonistic paradise of Preston.

The presence of this result implies that Bing’s either confused – interpreting the PR query text as a postcode – and/or approaching search from a more local angle and returning results to a wider range of queries. Local SERPs for local people.

Search Term 2: Social Media Agency

The key observation this time is in the way that Bing seems to be (non-) handling, and (non-) indexing, social content. Within the Google SERPs we rank for very recent posts and content, but in Bing, our results are older. The Bing result below is from January 2009.

Another historical observation: a few days ago I was presented with a Bing result referring to a blog post, but framed by the URL and title of the broader blog page – which is unusual, since SERPs usually just return the meta title of resulting page.

A final observation: Google’s content is also ‘richer’ – there seems to be a dearth of video, image, and news results in the Bing SERPs. However, this could be due to a lack of uptake for Bing’s ‘enigmatic’ listing services.

This, alongside the less prominent blog posts in the Bing SERPs implies that Bing is a) less social (it cares less for social content and profiles) and b) placing more filters on social content within it’s SERPs (it cares less for optimised social content).

Search Term 3: Social SEO

First shard of insight. It looks like Bing is less focused on exact keyword term matches – with four exact matches for this search phrase on the first page (within URLs and page titles), compared to Google’s nine.

The second thing to note is that Bing has less of a tendency to group results together from the same site. With Google, it’s common to see one or two pages smashed together, like this:

Bing has potential plus points here: if two results are grinning together like The Chuckle Brothers, then users are less likely to click through on both and, from a usability perspective, not using this technique will provide searchers with a more diverse selection of results (it becomes possible to render a more varied set of results on a single page).

Illustrating the increased importance of social content – and the need for SEO to embrace Social approaches, is the ninth result on Google (now 11th). It’s interesting to note that the ‘twitterer’ in question is an influential twittizen with over 1,000 followers, and a low following/follower ratio.

This content is transient, and won’t stick around on the first page for too long – however, it does show that Google is paying more and more attention to relevant social content and Social Media in general.

Meantime, Bing’s results are  – once again – far less rich and socially inclined that Google’s.

Once again, we rank higher in the Bing SERP: second as opposed to number six in Google.

Conclusions: The Bing vs Google Smackdown

This is a work in progress: Google is constantly evolving and Bing is still developing. These nuances could evaporate as new ones appear. There are already a few historical observations in this post.

It’s going to be interesting looking at the differences in the two engine’s differing approaches over time, and a full analysis of the importance of backlinks will be even more iluminating.

More soon…

*I like Yahmsoft. Or Yaft. Both could be successfully adopted by industry leading butter brands.

The first is simply an extension of it’s ‘Related Search’ functionality. As it stands, when you type a search query into Google’s search box you’re presented with a drop down list of a range of phrases which closely resemble the query that you’re typing. Broadly speaking, this is Google doing a bit of simple phrase-matching to help speed up your typing and your search activity – if I type ‘Online PR..’ then it presents me with variants such as ‘Online PR Agency…’ and so forth.

The new ‘Related Search’ functionality takes this thought a step further by presenting us with a bunch of semantically and/or thematically related search terms at the base of a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) when we’re using more complex (longer) search phrases. More than just helping us to type, this is Google helping us to think.

Most experts are saying that this neat little feature is based on the word matching technology Google acquired when it bought Orion in 2006. And it may mean some interesting changes in terms of how we think about SEO.

Clearly, one of the main principles of SEO is content optimization and creating a relevancy match between on-page content and search query. This new functionality adds an extra layer of ‘matching’ on top of this one-to-one relationship. Google is now pulling a bunch of related concepts from its index and presenting them to users as an alternative to their search efforts. This means that, in order to stay with a search thread (or intercede in one) it might pay to align yourself with both a primary keyword and a universe of (Google-defined) alternate terms. For example, a search for ‘online PR campaign best practices white papers‘ gives us alternatives such as ‘search engine optimization best practices’ and so forth… Where relevant and necessary this task will make the job of content optimization a little harder than usual. In essence, to cover all the bases we’ll need to think across keyword silos and find ways to place pages in multiple search ‘bins.’ All good food for thought…

Meanwhile, for longer search phrases, Google also announced that it will be rendering longer content snippets in its SERPs. Up until now it has been presenting us with around 180 characters underneath the main SERP links. The new format will – where Google deems it useful – give us around 250 instead. This ought to encourage new ways of thinking about how we create page metadata descriptions… The fact that the presentation logic is flexible (one search might return 180 characters, whilst another might return 250) means that it’ll be hard to optimize for this new feature. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing as we’ll simply need to focus on producing better content to be sucked from the main page body and cede control of this function to Google…

For more on the announcement from Google, check the Google developer blog here…

Online PR, Social Media, SEO and all this new-fangled web marketing stuff isn’t witchcraft. It’s easy. It’s all about good content and smart implementation.

We’ve been talking a lot about the hows, whys and wotnots with clients lately, so we thought we’d round up all our best practice advice for you in a single handbook, and a supporting presentation slide deck.

As a package, this gives you something like a Unified Theory of Interweb Love and Online PR…

The handbook is a 50+ page guide to Social Media, Online PR, Content Optimisation and SEO. ie, a crack survival guide for web marketing in this brave new world. It gives you step by step guidance on how to plan and execute an online PR campaign, as well as some forensic advice on the supporting mechanics.

The companion presentation is based on a series of training sessions we’ve delivered over the past month which gives self-starters all they need to know about why Online PR is a must-do activity. It also ponders on some of the bigger questions like ‘Why now?’ and ‘How did we get here?’ A bit like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Interweb Marketing.

In both cases, our advice is DON’T PANIC!

This material gives you all you need to:

• Run your own Online PR and Social Media campaigns
• Understand the Basics of SEO (in a non-scientific way)
• Disarm even the snootiest web consultant with an impressive array of best practises
• Evaluate Online PR and Social Media consultancy services more comprehensively
• Sleep more easily at night. (Don’t worry, you’ll see all this new Interweb stuff isn’t a threat: it’s a low cost opportunity to do some really exciting and measurable marketing work)


So dig in. We hope you enjoy.

And tell us what you make of it all…

Best Practice Guide to Online PR, Social Media and a Little Bit of SEO…

Don’t Panic Companion Guide to Online PR, Social Media and a Little Bit of SEO…

So this post from SEOBook on the profitability of online content got me going. It states that a solid SEO strategy can be the difference between a thriving online publishing house and a dying one – irrespective of the quality of their content.

This is intriguing because it turns accepted wisdom on its head. Surely the cream of the content rises to the top?

The issue is best summed up by Robert Thomson, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal: “Google is great for Google, but it’s terrible for content providers, because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively. And if you are going to get people to pay for content, you have to encourage them to make qualitative decisions….”

Now, like SEOBook, I’m not sure if this statement is 100% accurate because rankings are based on backlinkage too (a very definite measure of ‘crowdsourced’ qualitative approval), but Google certainly errs on the side of quantitative. Meaning that – potentially – I can write about Amy Winehouse and still rank above The Times if I’m Google-smart enough.

Now, if you look at almost every major successful online content provider I think this speaks to a new style of publishing…. To quantitatively boost i) content and ii) keywords, The Guardian and others are all massively open to – and somewhat reliant on – user generated content (just as Amazon is) to consolidate their positions in Google… They all publish an article (or a product page) and encourage users to write reviews / comments / responses / etc. In essence, they’re outsourcing an additional layer of content production on top of their core content – and this is the icing that really helps consolidate their spots on Google.

The lesson? Get your users/readers with the program and help them to help you by contributing some content.

NB: you can also go grab a Word version or a PDF over at New Media Knowledge, who were kind enough to publish it for their budding community of Online PR and Social Media wizards.

Let me know what you make of it all – would love to get your feedback here… How does it stack up? Is this how you see the world / do your work / understand all this groovy new stuff?

(NB: this paper has also been published by our friends at New Media Knowledge).

Question:
How many Online consultants in flip flops does it take to screw up a good marketing plan?

Answer:
Normally just one, but we’ve seen whole agencies go ‘tribal’ on a perfectly sound set of ideas on more than one occasion.

You’ll be pleased to learn that we’re a different kind of consultancy (we own sensible shoes and  often wear suits to meetings).  Taking the pretentious out of PR, this paper is designed to demystify all this hip digital marketing stuff and show you how we normally execute a basic Online PR campaign – in under 10 pages!

It’s quite simple really:  all we do is shut up, listen and spin.  Here’s our five step guide…

1: A Good Online PR/Social Media Agency May Ask You to Shut Up

This first step is arguably the most important aspect of good Online PR and Social Media strategy. If our clients are good talkers but not so good at listening then we politely request their attention.

Shutting up is really important because, as you’ll see, great Online PR programmes are never just about ‘me, me, me!‘  For this reason, we never normally advocate building an ‘Acme Corp’ Facebook widget or a dedicated social networking platform straight out of the blocks. ‘If we build it, they will come’ was never a great maxim for the Interweb.  Instead, we recommend some of the following…

2: Listening & Learning is a Good Online PR/Social Media Agency Skill

This is good marketing 101: understanding what your customers want. We always do a spot of research before we dive in.  The goal is to get a feel for the kind of language that our audience is using in relation to our stuff, and to identify when and where they’re actively talking about it.

Here’s how:

i) Keyword Research

Using Google Suggest we can quickly tune in and learn how people are searching the big, bad Interweb for our specific product/service offerings and the things that are related to them.

Ideally we’ll find that our content commands a decent level of search traffic.  Just how much will depend on the market we’re in – obviously one would expect less traffic for B2B terms and more for B2C… But whatever the case, this research will show us whether our current marketing language is in tune with the people that are out there looking for us.

It’s easy to understand how keenly contested these ‘keyword markets‘ are in relation to the rest of the web.  We just plug them into Google to see how many other pages are out there ranking for the terms.  Our aim is to find some keyword ‘sweet-spots’ around which to optimise our work …In other words, a set of descriptive terms that are well searched for and not particularly well used by our serious competition.

ii) Blog and Twitter Research

Next we apply everything that we’ve learned to Google Blog Search, Technorati Search and Twitter Search to see if these tools can reveal who’s talking about us and where they’re at.

Once we’ve identified relevant blogs and/or forums we can get a very concise feel for how ‘influential’ they are by running them through analysis tools like Link Diagnosis and Xinu (in basic terms, if a site is popular and influential, it’ll have a lot of links pointing to it – particularly from places like Technorati and delicious).  Having done this we make a note of the good ones and bin the rest.

iii) Research our ‘High Net Worth’ People

Next we use BackType to get a handle on the blogs that our most influential people are reading and to understand how these people are interacting with each other.  BackType is basically a tool that lets us ‘find, follow and share comments on the web.’ In simple terms, once we’ve established a set of keywords and people to follow, BackType alerts us to their presence whenever they show up in blog comment strings. It helps us to stay abreast of all the latest influential chat and to ensure that we’re monitoring in all the right places.

iv) Stay Alert…

We also create a bunch of Google News, Blog and Video Alerts for all of our most important keywords, so that whenever somebody so much as sneezes on our patch we’re the first to know about it.

v) Stay on Top of Things.  Create a Social Media Dashboard…

At this point, the prospect of so much data is probably making you itch.  But don’t worry – the Dashboard is where we pull everything together in one place.

All of the ‘listening’ information described can be accessed via a series of RSS feeds and aggregated into a simple Dashboard like the one below. This Dashboard is a central part of our work – it’s our window onto the web.  It’s also one of the primary mechanisms for seeding our content effectively.

From left to right we have a variety of ‘tabs’ that provide important feeds on all of our brand-related terms and keywords from Google, MSN, delicious, Flickr, Twitter, and other key services.  In addition, we have tabs that relay every new posting from competitor blogs, partner blogs and keyword-related blogs.  We also have a variety of tabs dedicated to specific blog comments in relation to our target people, blogs and keywords.  And finally, there’s a tab for all of our keyword-related Google Alerts.

Our ‘dashboard’ is created using Netvibes, but you could just as easily use any RSS reader.  The important thing is that it’s web-friendly so that it can be published as a page for a distributed team’s perusal.  The other thing to note is that Campaign Dashboards are highly addictive:  they’ve been known to kill mornings, evenings and weekends at single sittings – so use them wisely!

3: Social Content is the Key to Online PR/Social Media Agency Spin

‘Social-ness’ is the magic ingredient of all great Online PR.

Our primary goal is to find the right homes for our messages and to optimise them (with keywords) to resonate with our audience. Our ‘listening’ research and  dashboard help us to write good targeted content and learn where it needs to be seeded.

Our secondary goal is to ‘spin’ it… to encourage people to pass it around on our behalf. In order to achieve this, we do everything we can to make it interesting and worthy of Tweeting about, blogging about, emailing to a friend, bookmarking, commenting upon, or linking to (ie, we make it spin-able’). If we’re successful at this then we achieve a wonderful snowball effect (formerly known in ‘creative’ circles as ‘going viral’).

Basic formatting ideas for Online spin can help. For example: if our clients have great spokespeople, we can make their demos more enticing and accessible by re-cutting them as (lo-fi) Vox Pop videos. Blog posts can be redrawn as useful ‘Cut Out and Keep’ charts, and best practice white papers can be re-edited as simplified ‘Top 10’ lists.

Traditional ideas of spin are also essential.  Wherever possible we try to ensure that our content is aligned with the current news or ‘buzz’ agenda within any given market.  This is all about identifying the dish du jour via our dashboard (i.e. via Google, Twitter Search and BackType) and then integrating it with our core content.

Here’s a trivial example… It snowed here in the UK yesterday and, as usual, the country was brought to a standstill (nobody’s sure quite why, but it always seems to happen whenever the weather gets extreme).  Within an hour or two a popular meme was spreading across the Twitter-sphere.  Everyone had something to say about #uksnow, and so a Tweet using the phrase ‘uksnow‘ became a surefire way of driving traffic to your content.  Smarter applications of the same idea are fairly easy to come by – all you need is a nose for news, an intelligent way of tying your ideas to it, and a little bit of hustle (i.e. spinning yourself into the right online media pieces, blog posts, comment strings, and Google search traffic).

We also use simple web apps that make it easier for people to pass our content around and/or bookmark it – such as ‘email a friend’ tools, social bookmarking apps like AddThis.  And we always ensure that everything we do is published via RSS feeds. We also create simple content ‘widgets’ via services such as WidgetBox with which users can plug our content into their own sites and profile pages (eg Facebook) at their leisure.

Finally, we always try to be free with our ideas.  We ask all of our clients to give away any useful-but-non-core tools and services that they have.  We do this because giving away peripheral value usually creates respect, trust, loyalty and – most importantly – something worthy of being linked to.

Additional Publishing and Distribution Thoughts…

So much for the ‘spin.‘  At a practical level, we need to publish effectively so as to maximise our chances of getting noticed in the first place.  To do this we use some fairly basic tactics:

1. We publish our content to the most appropriate channel on our target web site:  i.e., the ‘resources’ channel, the ‘tools’ section, the press release page, etc (which in turn should be published via our RSS feeds).  This puts the content in the public domain for random browsers and returning site visitors.
2. We blog about the new content (which also gets RSSd).  This gives us a second opportunity to promote our content by alerting those people who tune into our blog on a regular basis (via RSS or directly).
3. We issue an online press release and/or a social media bulletin to announce the availability of the new piece.  This might get us a little coverage on other online channels (blogs, media, etc), but most importantly it establishes some third party backlinkage to our new web pages – something that Google likes and that will tend to have a positive (although lower level) impact on our search rankings.
4. We bookmark it via social bookmarking sites (eg, delicious and Stumbleupon) in line with our core keywords (often referred to as ‘tags’ on these services).  This puts it in the face of other like-minded people who are using these services to help their browsing or search activities.(Note: we never abuse these services.  Their true value lies in the communal effect of lots of people bookmarking lots of different web pages in relation to any given keyword/tag – so that fellow users are always presented with a rich and varied stream of relevant content.  We would be doing more harm than good to the wider service if we were to only bookmark things that belonged to us (in fact, some services like StumbleUpon will actively ban users who use their system for solely bookmarking  their own content).  This should never really be an issue, however, if you’re using these services for your general bookmarking needs in your day-to-day work.)
5. We Tweet about the content on our own personal Twitter profiles as well as the campaign profiles.  This places the content in front of all of our current Twitter followers.  In addition, when keywords are used sensibly (as in the #uksnow example above) it also places it in front of people who are actively searching for related material on Twitter (either Dashboard fashion, or via Twitter Alerts (see Twilerts) or on an ad-hoc basis).
6. We also publish the content ‘off-site’ to relevant Social Media channels, using optimised profiles which have been set up in advance to support the campaign.  For example, we publish video to YouTube (and embed the results in our blog posts), photographs to Flickr and articles to Scribd.  Again, this places our content on other networks that have pre-existing communities that are – if well researched – already proven to be interested in the core keywords used to optimise our content.

We do all of the above to distribute our content, raise awareness of it and drive web traffic.  Because this activity depends on fixed assets such as the size of our team, the number of Social Media profiles we create and the general volume of our web traffic and blog following, it can only go so far.  This is why ‘Going Social’ is so important to our work…

4: Engagement – the Mother of Online PR/Social Media Agency Spinning

Going Social really is the magic ingredient.  To go stellar we need to rely on more than our own distribution efforts: we need to invite other people to spin on our behalf.  This is where our ‘Shut Up, Listen and Learn’ principles come into play.

Our Listening dashboard gives us a view on who’s saying what in relation to our content.  It also tells us where and when.  We use it religiously to get engaged with the people, communities and forums that are likely to be most interested and therefore most willing to help us spread the word. (And, if we’re smart enough, it’ll help us to find people that want to work with us and buy things from us at the same time.)

‘Getting engaged’ in this way isn’t rocket science.  All it takes is time and commitment. We’re talking about developing relationships with people and places, so it’s nothing new (good PRs have always been great at doing this).  It’s worth remembering that a PR relationship is for life, not just for Xmas… so we always start as we mean to go on and give as much ‘utility’ as we can over the long term to each person, platform or community.

In practice this generally means getting involved in debates related to blog posts and Twitter streams, the giving away of something valuable (content, tools, widgets, etc) and generally just being a good citizen by participating fully so that the overall value of the relationship or target platform increases over time.  In short, we give a little to get a little… and if we can establish a good, professional (or fun loving) rapport then our counterparts are likely to reciprocate, get engaged with our content and spin it on our behalf amongst their networks and communities.  It’s a virtuous reciprocal circle of spin…

Step 5: Online PR/Social Media Agency Measurement

Lastly a word about measurement, because in cash-strapped times like these, no campaign would be complete without it.  It’s important that we demonstrate progress and justify our keep.

Our general approach to measurement is quantitative and ‘by whatever means necessary’.  I say this because we’ve learned over time that it’s not particularly helpful to throw random rubrics around with our clients.  What they really need is a set of metrics that are a) understandable and b) applicable in a useful fashion.  To this end, we’re not particularly big on ‘favourability’ or ‘sentiment’ reports, but do like to create hard numbers and graphs that can be cut up and used in Powerpoints by VPs of Marketing and MDs.  You can check out our general menu of quantitative Online PR and Social Media measures here. We use it as a ‘pick and mix’ for any given project, and usually focus on the following areas:

• Conversions: number of sales, sign ups, registrations, etc.
• Basic Web Site Metrics:  visitor stats, bounce rates, etc.
• PageRank: have we moved the bar on Google and increased search visibility and traffic potential?
• Engagement: volume of blog comments, re-Tweets, media mentions, followers, etc.

Conclusion

…and that’s all folks.  An Online PR / Social Media Agency campaign from A to Z in 10 pages.  It’s now my turn to Shut Up, Listen and Learn.  What do you think….? Send me a comment or five over on the Blog channel…

Back when we first started Tweeting it felt like just another time-wasting online diversion – a rant into the void. But with millions of people now connecting with others all over the world through Twitter, it has evolved into a powerful networking tool in which friendships are formed, ideas aired, deals  brokered and information shared.

As veteran Tweeters and PR gurus, we have come up with five simple steps to building a loyal Twitter entourage without becoming a Tweet-bore. And whilst we are clearly coming from an Online PR perspective, these rules could just as easily apply to MrsAnyone as to MrIAmPromotingSomething.

1) The Language of (Twitter) Love

Right, I’m going to get all teacherly on you now, but bear with me. You wouldn’t (or certainly shouldn’t) send out a press release or business letter with poor spelling and grammar, so why do it on Twitter? Don’t make yourself look like an idiot (because, er, obviously you’re not…ahem) by neglecting to proof read a Tweet before hitting the ‘send’ button. At a maximum of 140 characters to scan, this is hardly an arduous task, so get in the habit.

Abbreviated SMS-style-speak should also be avoided as it a) comes across as tacky* and b) makes your content far less searchable.

Adhering to the simple brief set by Twitter, to answer the question: “What are you doing?“ will result in a reader-friendly Twitter stream – more like a micro-blog than a dreary list of random proclamations. For example, instead of saying: “check this out: www.whatever.com” try something more along the lines of: “Recommending: www.whatever.com for excellent gig reviews”. Sticking to this discipline will increase the readability of your Twitter page, making it a more appealing destination for potential followers.

2) Style AND Substance

So, you’ve got the wordage nailed, but what about the actual content of your Tweets? For individuals, this can be as abstract or trivial as your innermost musings or the daily shopping, as long as you make it interesting, or at the very least amusing. The same rule of thumb applies to Twitter as a PR tool – it’s fairgame if there is  something of value or interest on offer, but they are not going to be fooled by your self-congratulatory puff. Think of yourself as a performer on stage, reaching out to your audience; who (apart from a certain niche market perhaps) would want to go to the theatre to watch a bunch of actors standing about boasting? To pull in a regular crowd, you need to offer something engaging, meaningful, memorable and perhaps a little thought-provoking.

The plethora of Twitter-feed and posting tools now available (TweetDeck, Twhirl etc) means that it’s easy to forget about your actual profile page. Don’t. Checking in to read through your own Twitter-stream once in a while gives you a sense of how it reads as a whole to potential followers, and might make you think more carefully about what and how you write.

3) Know Your Audience

Just the other day, I was ‘followed’ by a shamelessly self-promoting singer, who introduced herself by saying: “@Rowstar You seem to like ambient music, i would like to offer you 2 free new age music songs from my website. Feel free! Thanks!” Now I am not, nor have ever professed to be, a fan of ambient music – so at first presumed it to be a random spam-attack.  Then I remembered mentioning Enya in a recent Tweet, which presumably triggered an alert that prompted her to target me. But if this gung-ho muso had done her homework, she would have discovered that it wasn’t a favourable reference, so her ill-founded PR efforts were not only falling on stony ground, but actively irritating me in the process.

In case you were wondering, this rather self-indulgent vent does actually have a valid message. It goes to demonstrate the need for Twitter-based promotion to be well-researched in order to reach an appropriate audience. If you use Twitter alerts to identify potential followers, it’s worth checking out the lead; steam in blindly and you will (best case) rub people up the wrong way and (worst case) get yourself a reputation for being an annoying spammer.

4) Who Lives in a Tweet-house Like This?

Another way to engage with your fellow Tweeters is to inject plenty of personality or identity into your Tweets, just as you would with a personal blog or business website. A good case in point is national treasure and Twitter convert Stephen Fry (@stephenfry), who has notched up an impressive 47,411 followers in a relatively short amount of time. Rather than have his PR people relaying contrived content on his behalf, Fry’s Tweets are clearly direct from the horse’s mouth – making them a much more appealing prospect. The same goes for other successful celebrity Tweeters such as @Wossy (aka Jonathan Ross) and @JohnCleese, who, like Fry, make the effort to interact with their followers by responding and contributing to relevant threads rather than simply spewing out shameless self-promotion.

The parallel between celebrity Tweeters and brand/marketing tweets was nicely summed up on the Off Madison Avenue blog: “Give us some insights into your world. Make us feel a part of it. Be approachable. And most importantly, keep it real.”

Using an actual picture of yourself (or a logo if you are representing a non-person brand) on your profile, rather than an abstract image, will also help your personality to shine through.

5) Where do we Tweet From Here?

A good measure of Twitter-success is how often your posts are being ‘re-Tweeted’ by others. When you come across something interesting/amusing/useful via Twitter, it is considered good form to name-check the originator when passing it on, although you are free to add your own commentary. E.g.: “Retweeting (or simply ‘RT’) @MrBrilliant who recommended this genius website: www.blahblahblah.com”.

Re-Tweeting is a powerful (and free) distribution tool and a brilliant way of sharing information, so we should all be doing it more. Get yourself onto the radar of other influential Tweeters by acknowledging and passing on anything you find inspiring from them (they will know when you have). Check out www.retweetradar.com and www.retweetrank.com to see the sort of stuff that is being re-tweeted the most at the moment.

***********

And just in case you thought I was just making this stuff up, here are some verbatim Tweet-hates direct from the Twittersphere…

@jwatton: “bon mots” reaaaally annoy me. i’ve opted out of a few follows based on that alone

@meeware: People who put exactly the same thing in their personal and proffesional tweets with a 2 minute lag. Journos are the worst for it.

@abigailrieley: people who only post to self publicise. All the time. And give nothing back!

@Emclaug: ‘icanhaz’ thing annoys me – feels like people are trying to be too cool when it just seems lame.

@catnip: people only talking about work.

@ryanatmghwom: I hate Twitter auto-messages. “I look forward to connecting with you.” “Thanks for being my associate.” Really? Reeeeally?!

@joshmccormack: I dislike people who do no replies, essentially treating twitter as a 1 directional broadcast.

@sheenashe: really dislike wrong spellings on twitter. it’s hard to read.

@AnnetteElton:  I LOVE when people post valuable links and info – Dislike when they use Twitter for blatant self promotion:-(

@pawsforlavender: Dislike being preached to; sales pitch; self/peeps promotion in disguise.

iwork</a>: the thing I really dislike about 'official' Twitter accounts like DowningStreet is that they’re entirely self-obsessed

@SethGrimes: I dislike the non-personality of corporate twitter accounts.

And a few of our own…

@Rowstar: People who follow but never Tweet creep me out. Bring something to the party, weirdos.

@Rowstar: People who hold lengthy two-way conversations via Twitter instead of switching to DM. Get a room!

@rogerwarner: people who Tweet about ‘getting up’ ‘making tea’ and ‘watching telly’ …..LIKEIFREAKINGCARE (o really? earl grey?

Further reading:

• Ben Ayers on how ITV is using Twitter to engage its audience
• More on the joys of re-Tweeting from Immediate Future
• We Are Social’s thoughts on why people are using Twitter
• A recent Telegraph article aimed at Twitter beginners

Here’s a little ‘scrap book’ of the various free (or semi-free) tools and web services we tinker with on a regular basis to work some our Online PR mojo. Straight up from the East side (Sussex)…

(PS: We’ll keep this as a running, semi-regularly updated post for you. Because you know how things tend to change…)

Online Press Release Distribution Tools

• Pitch Engine
• PR Leap

Social Media and Blog Tools

• Twitter Search
• Re-Tweet Analysis
• Social Scan
• Ego Surf
• Addictomatic
• BackType
• MonitorThis
• Conversation

Keyword Tools

• Ranks NL
• Google Suggest
• Google Suggest Advanced (more widgets)
• Google Trends
• Google Site Trends
• Google Insights

SEO Tools

• Link Diagnosis
• Xinu
• SEOMoz
• SEO Book Tools
• Ranks NL