Online Marketing Blog

The 2012 Community Manager Report

Community Manager is an essential, yet still uncharted territory for many companies that are expanding their presence on the social web.  What should you know about the current state of this position?

• 67% of Community Managers work for a brand
• The most popular city for Community Managers is New York
• 65% of Community Managers are Female

Be sure to check out the rest of this report presented by Social Fresh.

Google & FBI: All Your Social Data Are Belong to Us

For non-geeks, here’s the reference (Zero Wing video)

Press Release SEO has been one of the most popular topics to attract Google search traffic here on Online Marketing Blog.  We’ve seen the ups and downs in the Public Relations industry over the years and have helped inform many Public Relations professionals on the finer arts of SEO by speaking at events like PRSA, providing training for PR agencies and corporate communications departments and writing about the topic here.

After seeing the nice write up by Adam Sherk on Ragan on how to write press releases Google will love, I decided to curate a list of our own Press Release Optimization tips and share them with you. Plus Lee’s added a few more at the end of this post.

As a longtime customer of PRWeb, I’ve seen many changes over the years. The oldest optimized press release I could find of mine that’s still online dates back to mid 2001 and in the years since, it’s been an evolving relationship moving from customer to consultant.

From the days of talking new features as a super user with founder David McInnis to our current role as search and social media consultants, the focus on innovation and serving customers has always been a mutual focus. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Vocus Product Manager for PRWeb, Jiyan Wei, Director of Online Marketing, Meg Walker and Vocus CMO Bill Wagner as well as other members of the Vocus team and they’ve been working very hard to make an array of substantial changes to the PRWeb platform to better serve customers.

We’re starting this Spring Break week off with a very rare guest post from TopRank Online Marketing client, Jiyan Wei. Jiyan is Director of Product Management at Vocus, Inc. where he drives product platform strategy and roadmap execution for PRWeb. I’ve presented on panels with Jiyan several times at search marketing conferences, talking about the virtues of search, social media and public relations, finding him to be a very strategic and smart marketer. We’ll be co-presenting at the upcoming MarketingProfs B2B Forum in May on Content Optimization and Marketing.

In this post, Jiyan discusses the progression and importance of news content in blended search:

Once upon a time, Page 1 had a special meaning for PR practitioners and business owners alike.

TopRank Online Marketing has been working with PRWeb providing SEO consulting services starting in 2008. PRWeb was founded in 1997 to help small businesses and communications professionals leverage the web to share their news directly with the public. As part of this process PRWeb lead the way for the “direct-to-consumer” press release, enabling companies to communicate their news directly to customers, prospects, analysts and the media.

During the past decade, PRWeb has reshaped the traditional press release and changed how companies large and small distribute news. Innovations of PRWeb over the years include:

• Search engine optimization (SEO) for press releases to increase the visibility of news in search engines like Google and Yahoo!
• Social bookmarking tools like trackbacks and bookmark links to take advantage of the explosion in social networking

Recently I was invited to give a basics webinar on optimizing news content  for search.  The intersection of search and PR/communications are obviously something quite familiar.

The outcome exceeded all expectations thanks to the excellent promotions by PRWeb and SEW plus Mike Grehan’s smooth handling of moderator duties amidst technical difficulties. Over 7,000 people registered, there were over 400 questions and 650 Tweets using the #prweb hash tag during the webinar.

The way it goes with many webinars when you’re invited by an organization to participate, is that the topic and title/description are determined beforehand. The speaker adapts themselves to that.  This presentation content focused on optimizing writing for the web with a particular emphasis on optimizing content common to public relations.

Today at the PRSA 09 conference, it was a packed room for TopRank CEO (and author of Online Marketing Blog) Lee Odden who gave a presentation on SEO for Public Relations.

He started by explaining why SEO is/should be important to PR Professionals.

In a 2008 Journalists Use of Search Survey by TopRank, we discovered that 91% of journalists use standard search to fulfill a component of their job whether researching a story or locating a subject matter expert.

With journalists writing for more channels and with less resources making your content visible within search is critical.

Here are Odden’s 10 SEO Tips:

Online Marketing Blog readers are well aware: news search engines offer a great way to receive targeted traffic related to breaking topics or to help with a public relations launch.

What are the latest ways businesses and media are using content to tap into the power of news search?  Mark Jackson, SEW Expert & President/CEO, VIZION Interactive moderates this group to dig deeper:

• Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce
• Allison Fabella, SEO Manager, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR
• Lisa Buyer, President & CEO, The Buyer Group
• David Radicke, Consultant, SEO, SEM, Web Analytics, Radicke eCommerce
• Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google

Mark led this session with a brief introduction of each speaker and quickly turned it over to let the panel members give their presentations.

One of the most popular keyword optimization content types for SEOs and Public Relations professionals alike are press releases. As a news communication tool, the value of press releases has undergone changes.  However, press releases provide a substantial amount of content to news search engines and can rank well in standard search engines like Google or Yahoo.

Multiple studies have documented that consumers and journalists are searching for and reading press releases. Optimizing press releases for a specific audience makes them easier to find and therefore, more of an asset for communicating news and attracting traffic to the company web site.  As a result, it makes sense for marketing and PR practitioners alike to understand how to make press release content easier to find.

Today we’re doing a webinar (2:00 pm EST) with PRWeb on the topic of leveraging search engine optimization and news content for improved search engine marketing performance.  Registrations for this webinar were capped at 2,500, so if you didn’t make it in time, please visit the comments for this post as we’re contining the conversation there after the webinar.

The bottom line for the presentation is that there are opportunities to gain advantage from optimizing content according to it’s purpose or goals. In the case of news content, make it easy for consumers and journalists alike to find your message on the channels and in the format they prefer. That means understanding the difference in search behaviors for consumers vs journalists and analysts doing research on companies/individuals.

[Editor note: Please welcome TopRankMarketing.com Senior Account Manager Jolina Pettice with this guest post that addresses a common issue with Search Engine Optimization engagements: Getting SEO recommendations implemented!]

Optimizing press releases can be an important part of any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program. It’s usually pretty easy to convince clients of the need to optimize news content since these kinds of releases can reach journalists and bloggers as well as consumers. One common question I often hear involves getting optimized press releases approved by the Public Relations department. PR approved news messaging and SEO keywords are often not in alignment.

An additional consideration is that optimizing press releases often crosses over into different departments, creating an additional group of people who need to be convinced of the benefits of SEO.

At TopRank Online Marketing, we’re keen on matching content and therefore optimization efforts with the right audiences. News is a perfect candidate for optimizing by intent. Below is a presentation I did recently as part of a PR News webinar on the topic of writing for the web, optimizing online PR communications.

As part of the presentation, I included insights from a recent poll of journalists and editors from a mix of print and online publications we conducted. The poll was designed to get a better understanding about their use of search to find sources, conduct research and any other search function that helps them do their job.