Online Marketing Blog

“Easy reading is damn hard writing,” opened chancellor Roy Williams at last week’s Wizard of Ads training seminar, ’12 Languages of The Mind.’

Never is this quote from Nigel Hawthorne (not Nathaniel Hawthorne, as it’s commonly credited to, per Williams) more apt than when you are a writer of any trade struggling to find that opening hook.

(To serve a personal example, the percentage of time I spent drafting this opening paragraph will exceed the percentage of time spent on any one remaining section of this entire post.)

SEO copywriting serves perhaps the greatest challenge when finding that hook, as we copywriters are encouraged to begin our posts with keywords as far up and to the left as possible in our titles.  (This post may be a bad example, as a blog that begins with ‘SEO Copywriting’ carries the promise of inherent fascination within.)

Harrison Ford may have been a robot. SEO copywriters are not.

Copywriting, and all of marketing really, represent that beautiful intersection between business and creativity.  Those of us lucky enough to find our way into this niche find that, amazingly, we can actually make a living being creative.

Granted, the work we create may not always grab the attention of our hipster friends, but it will put food on our clients’ tables (most important), put food on our own tables (second most important), and put food on our aforementioned hipster friends’ tables (if they’re lucky).

Perhaps the biggest mistake we can make as copywriters when we find ourselves writing specifically for a search engine optimization initiative is becoming untrue to our own creative personalities.

Working for TopRank Online Marketing, which offers both SEO and public relations services, I always enjoy attending sessions that focus on both.

In part, it’s an excellent feeling to know that the SEO services we integrate into our online PR programs are ahead of the game in many ways, and in part because there is always something new and of value I can continue to offer to our clients.

That was my exact feeling when attending the PRSA session “What’s The ROI On Your Press Release.”  This excellent session was presented by:

• Greg Jarboe, President, SEO-PR
• Laura Sturaitis, Senior Vice President Media Services & Product Strategy, Business Wire

At TopRank Online Marketing, many of our clients are intrigued with the prospect of going to market with green messaging. We match their excitement like most firms do when faced with the prospect of communicating an honest-to-goodness good story with so seemingly tailor made for results.

Is it really enough to announce that you’re going green, however, if your objective is to receive coverage?

The session “How To Leverage Current Consumer Trends & Most Effectively Communicate with Green Media” illustrated ways we could help ensure our clients do it right.

Presented by Annie Longsworth of Cohn & Wolfe and Sandy Skees of Communications4Good, the session dispelled the myth that it is simply enough to announce yourself as green in order to achieve increased media coverage.

(Rob Key, Peter Himler, David Bradfield, Lee Odden)

Prior to being engaged to someone with far more social tact and less complete obliviousness towards social etiquette than myself, it would have never once occurred to me to bring a “host gift” to a party or get together.

As I mature and meet more and more people, however, I’m glad to have someone around who actually realizes that most social groups will adhere to often unwritten social rules (including “host gifts”), and will be unlikely to truly welcome someone into their group unless they follow them.

When looking at the changing PR landscape, particularly the presence of new forms of social media, what can PR professionals learn from this example?

“Every company on earth, every client you have, every person you meet has to become involved in social media right this very second.  This is especially true if you are in PR.  If you are not sharing your messaging via social channels  – and I mean, like yesterday – you are hopelessly behind the times and yours, or your clients messaging, is likely to go nowhere.”

Is this really the case?  For those of us that have not been leveraging social media as heavily as others in our field, is the game over?

In the PRSA conference session Media Myths & Realities, Nicholas Scibetta, Global Director, Global Media for Ketchum let us know, thankfully, that those just getting started in social channels are not quite sunk yet.

Can you truly measure the effect of word of mouth in marketing, whether it be online or offline?  If so, which is more effective?  Further, if so, what exactly can we as marketers do with it?

These were the bold questions set forth by Jeffrey Graham,  Executive Director, Customer Insight, New York Times, in the day one PRSA International Conference Session “Word of Mouth Online or Off – What’s the Difference?”

The session’s formal agenda began with the stunning, though entirely unsurprising, admission that word of mouth, while noted as critical towards any marketing campaign’s success, is rarely accounted for in a campaigns budget.

The answer for this is surprisingly direct, in addition to being a complete cop-out: it simply cannot be measured.

How do you measure something that seemingly cannot be measured?  For example, how much do I love this little guy here who answers to the name of Clark:

And how much does this same little guy hate, just hate I tell you, taking a bath:

In both instances, it’s as wide as my arms can go.  So how can we analyze it?

That was the question Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners, and Shonali Burke, Consultant with ABC, sought to answer in the PRSA Session “True Tales from the Social Media Measurement Trenches – Using Research to Learn & Improve Our Programs” – an excellent session bookend by a social media case study on The American Society For Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (See!  You were probably thinking I was just showing off pictures of my new puppy!)

Next weekend, I will be deployed to Detroit, MI  to attend 2008’s PRSA International Conference titled “The Point of Connection” and will be sharing thoughts on several sessions, in addition to general overviews of the event itself, on behalf of Online Marketing Blog readers. So what am I looking forward to most about the PRSA International conference?

Visiting Detroit, of course!  When most think of Detroit, they will no doubt reflect on the history of Motown, past flawed baseball greats such as Ty Cobb and Denny McClain, or “Detroit Rock City”.  My nerdom leads me elsewhere, however.

For me, Detroit will always be immortalized as the city that hosted the monumental world premiere of  “Night of the Demons” in Halloween of 1988.  Per IMDB’s invaluable trivia feature, had this filmed opened nationwide with the numbers posted in Detroit, it would have ranked among the top grossing horror films of the decade.

“For the first time in the history of calculating the ROI of marketing expenditures, influence behaviors and patterns of the volume achievable only on the social web begin to offset the overall cost of marketing,” quotes the new book “The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World” by Resource Interactive’s President Kelly Mooney and Innovation Consultant Dr. Nita Rollins.

While not appearing on page one, this idea is certainly one of the most important, and likely most sought after skim through takeaways marketers (both on the client and agency side) will seek when first hunting for the knowledge contained within this book.

This past Saturday, I visited local Twin Cities brewery, and soon to be local institution, Surly for their weekend growler sale. As per usual, my group and I were not alone in our quest as local denizens lined up to purchase as much as they could carry of the finest locally produced brew since the Hamm’s bear danced straight into our hearts.

So what is it that makes Surly, a beer that’s only been in existence on a local scale since 2006, a brand already demanded for by name and housed in a brewery that has become a Saturday destination point for many? The answer for Surly as well as other brands with an enthusiastic following can be found in Rohit Bhargava’s new book “*Personality Not Included.”

In the film Hollywoodland, Adrien Brody plays a private eye tasked with determining whether TV star George Reeves, famous for playing Superman, did indeed commit suicide or, as his mother suspects was murdered. Brody’s character remarks that if the biggest headlines are insisting that Reeves’ case is indeed closed, the only way to reopen it is to sway public opinion to the mother’s side by manufacturing their own headlines, simply too large to ignore.

I was reminded of this scene, and how far we’ve come in a relatively short amount of time, while reviewing Andy Beal & Dr. Judy Strauss’ excellent new book “Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online.”