Online Marketing Blog

The last session of the day for me was “Press and Public Relations Campaigns” with Robin Liss of Reviewed.com and Joe Beaulaurier from PRWeb. Moderation duties were scheduled to be handled by Brett Tabke but were switched at the last minute to Melanie Mitchell, VP of SEO/SEM at AOL. Sorry Brett, but I don’t think anyone had a problem with the switch.

Robin presented a case study for a promotion on the iPhone her site wirelessinfo.com did using multiple channels including Digg and a YouTube video that went viral. Joe presented the multiple media format press release options offered by PRWeb.

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“Of all our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.” Walt Disney

Jennifer Laycock Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Guide helped the audience understand the value of images and 3 benefits to submitting photos to image sharing sites, like Flickr.

She made an excellent point by demonstrating what impacts people the most:
Copy OR Images

Let’s try it. What impacts you more, the description of how I dressed my dog up for Halloween OR the picture of it?

Description: For Halloween, I dressed my pup up as an angel.

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The Bulldog Reporter Advanced PR Technology in Practice in San Francisco wrapped up and here are a few photos. One thing is for sure, I need to buy a new camera. Another thing is that the event started out with lots of conversation about using SEO to drive “pull” PR efforts and ended heavy on the social media. It was a great match for TopRank: SEO and social media for public relations.

A modest sized audience, but engaged and plenty of questions.

Jim Sinkinson, Publisher of Bulldog Reporter

One of my presentations: “Optimizing Press Releases for Search Engines (SEO) and Using RSS to Distribute Releases”.

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Many search marketing tactics come and go, but one channel of promotion that has steadily evolved is the practice of optimizing press releases for search engines. While it’s true that the future of the traditional press release has been up for debate over the past few years, wire services and the web sites they syndicate content to continue to produce results for the clients of savvy public relations professionals and online marketers.

Yahoo News is still more popular that MSNBC, AOL News or CNN. Being able to rank well on the most popular online news web site as well as Google News simply by optimizing and distributing a press release offers attractive benefits at a nominal cost.

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At ad:tech last week, fellow PR/new media marketing practitioner and blogger, Rohit Bhargava and I were talking about his new book, “Personality Not Included - Why Brands Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Companies Get it Back”, and he mentioned that I should send him a list of recommended reading for a new bookstore feature he’s adding to his blog.

I thought that was a great idea and with so many smart marketers reading Online Marketing Blog, I’d like to invite you to share a few of your favorite books on the subjects of marketing online, social media and new media public relations.

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On the heels of the PRSA conference last week, the topic of how search plays a part in online PR effectiveness has continued to enter into the increasing numbers of discussions we’ve been having with companies working on figuring out where to best leverage their 2008 marketing/PR dollars. It’s that time of year again.

Now more than ever, PR and media relations efforts can benefit from attention to how search engine visibility influences consumer perceptions and the way both consumers and the media find information online. With an increasing variety of search types to choose from including standard search like Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask as well as platform or content type specific search such as news, blog, image, video and options within social media web sites, brings new opportunities to optimize content.

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I just returned from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) International conference being held in Philadelphia where I participated on a panel, “Social Media, What Every PR Practitioner Needs to Know” with Rob Key of Converseon, Nicco Mele of echoditto and Peter Himler of Flatiron Communications who handled moderation duties.

Fifteen minutes before the session, the room was packed with people eventually standing against the back wall and it was clear that both the room and the topic of social media were going to be hot.

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With so much uncertainty due to inflated promises, bad press and a fast changing industry, what “signals” of credibility do companies look for in trusted internet marketing partners and resources? Our gift to you today is an annotated list of 25. In one way or another, TopRank is involved with all of the following marketing and PR tactics either for ourselves or for our marketing and public relations clients.

But I’m also curious what Online Marketing Blog Readers have to say on this topic. Let’s have a little vote shall we? After the list there is a poll so you can vote for your favorite.

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In the past I’ve written about blogger relations offering tips on how marketers or PR professionals ought to present their story ideas to bloggers. Pitching bloggers and print journalists are somewhat similar, but in the end, they can be very different things.

Here are a few “what you should not do” tips based on the 3-5 pitches per day we get at Online Marketing Blog:

• It should go without saying not to pitch irrelevant stories, but all those PR interns out there hacking away make it so. Please don’t.

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Online Marketing Blog’s coverage from day one of Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2007

Day 1 at SES San Jose began with the “no more horsing around” session, “Public Relations Train Wrecks in the Interactive Biz: Disaster Can be Avoided”, moderated by Kevin Ryan, VP & Global Content Director of SES & Search Engine Watch.

For those that remember my introductory post, this session held special interest, for, in my role as an Account Manager handling the Public Relations initiatives of several client firms, I constantly strive to ensure the phrase “train wreck” is the furthest concept away from not only my own personal vocabulary, but my client’s business psyches.

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For this post I am using for inspiration (with attribution) a recent post headline from Steve Rubel, “The Future of PR is Participation, Not Pitching“. As with most “this tactic is dead” posts, I think the reality is that while pitching the media as we know it today is in decline, it will always provide value as a method of communicating story ideas to journalists. It’s the method or technology that will change such as pitching with Del.icio.us or RSS rather than a phone call.

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Monday was a bit of a late start for me to the conference but I went all caught up with emails, which is a good thing. I heard Juan Williams’ keynote was excellent and the good news is Sally Falkow blogged it.

I caught the tail end of Katie Paine’s blogs and social media measurement session and as always, she provided an abundance of information on all the things you can measure in the tricky space of social media. I know many search marketers will read that last sentence and think, “What’s tricky? Measure traffic and conversions!” which I can certainly relate to.

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