Online Marketing Blog

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.

After speaking about various aspects of marketing and PR through social media at a search marketing, public relations and a direct marketing conference in the past 2 months, I can see there’s no doubt the “participatory web” is hot on the minds of many company marketers, agencies and vendors that serve this market.

Susan and I made it to Sydney, Australia early this morning and go to watch the sun rise over Eastern Australia during the descent. After a few hours getting through customs, then getting our bags x-rayed on the way out and then getting checked again to get into a line to get to the exit of the airport, we made it outside for the line to the taxis. It might have been a lot of hurry up and wait, but we were just thankful to be outside in the fresh air.

Tomorrow I’ll be doing a presentation on SEO and Public Relations. The buzz about SEO and PR has been strong the past few years, especially with Greg Jarboe, Jamie O’Donnel, Sally Falkow, Amanda Watlington and many others including TopRank making significant headway into developing new strategies and tactics for clients.

After getting into the Chicago Hilton, a familar place from SES conferences, I walked the 3-4 blogs to the Columbia University campus where Bulldog Reporter was holding the Advanced PR Technology event. Greg Jarboe and I switched the time of our session with Katie Paine so she could make a plane to Dubai.

Regrettably I did not join the event in the am when it started and missed a number of fantastic speakers including Debbie Weil, but I did get to meet her for the first time. We are fellow bloggers over at Business Blog Consulting. Shel Israel blogged about Phil Gomes presentation here.

One of the things that often happens with people in the search marketing industry is that after being in the business for a while and attaining a certain level of expertise, it becomes easy to take for granted that not everyone in marketing and business is consuming and digesting as much information. References to strategies and certain tactics do not have the same meaning, because of the dependencies on previous knowledge.

This happens with SEO or search engine optimization pretty easily. Chasing after the next “silver bullet”, whether it’s SEO and PR, social media, social networking or personalized search, can distract marketers from what’s important. The search marketing industry is one that can be counted on to change on a regular basis. Strategies, tactics and best practices will emerge as new channels of distribution evolve and consumer search behaviors change. Just look at the shift from offline news consumption and traditional media to online as an example.

Press releases were originally designed as a communication tool between company PR staff or public relations firms and the media. But now that online news sites such as Yahoo News and Google News contain such an abundance of press release content and RSS makes it easy to syndicate news, press releases can be effectively used as a direct to consumer communication tool.

Not only are press releases an effective tool for distributing content to the media and consumers, they can easily be syndicated creating a excellent opportunity to attract incoming links. Some of the press releases our SEO firm optimizes and distributes have gained as few as 30 unique domain name links and some have garnered over 500 – all from a single press release.

Yesterday one of our account managers emailed me about a very nice hit (mention in an article) for a media relations client (way to go Bill!) in a prominent technology publication. This pub has an online version and the topic was pretty provocative.

I did a quick search on Google blog search and noticed a significant number of blogs buzzing about this topic. It would be a great opportunity for the client to participate in those threads of dialogue and present their unique perspective. Doing so with a blog post to link back to offering more details would be a great way to connect with a community that cares deeply about the topic. Except one thing. The client doesn’t have a blog.

Note from Lee: Another contributor to Online Marketing Blog, Karen Sams who also writes her own blog at Media Relations Blog, makes her debut in this post about the ongoing challenge to gain original content for clients. Fresh content isn’t only necessary for making web sites attractive to search engines, but it’s also a critical component for marketing efforts in any channel – including Karen’s specialty: Public Relations. Read on to find excellent tips on how to make the most out of limited content.

One of the biggest challenges I face as a PR professional is eliciting content from clients. When I do identify valuable nuggets of information, I know that I need to leverage every aspect of that nugget across an array of tactics, including:

The WebProNews video blog posted an interview Mike McDonald did with myself and Stephan Spencer during the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference where we talk about marketing and public relations issues with blogs and social media.

Congrats to Mike, Chris and Richard on a great job with these videos!

Blogs have been one of the big buzz items in 2006 along with social media. It seems companies are still trying to figure out whether blogging is worthwhile for their business and where social media fits in within overall marketing strategy. The number of “blog consultants” also appears to be growing at a much faster rate than business blog adoption.

For our clients, we use blogs extensively in both our public relations practice as well as for search engine optimization. One of the most productive uses of blog software as a content management system is for an online media room.

This Friday I will be doing an online radio interview with eMarketing Talkshow about “Push and Pull Online Public Relations”. I’ll be talking with Cindy Turrietta about the market opportunity with online PR, explaining the concept of push and pull with examples of each as well as considerations on measuring results.

With all the buzz about optimizing and marketing with social media as well as the emerging meme in public relations on the social media news release format, there is an opportunity to help marketers better understand how these concepts can be applied in a practical manner.

Too often tactics get promoted as the latest and greatest trends without any substance or real world references. This interview is intended to provide a framework for understanding how marketers and public relations professionals can increase their reach and ability to be found by consumers as wel as the media by incorporating SEO concepts along with PR and social media.

One of the key components of the presentation I gave this morning at the Las Vegas Pubcon conference presented the idea of press release optimization and social media news releases in the context of push and pull. But before that, it’s important to understand the market opportunity with news search.

According to a report released by comScore, half of all internet users visited news sites in June 2006. Of the most popular news web sites, Yahoo News is #1 surpassing CNN, MSNBC and AOL News.

There’s also an increase in the use of social media both by end consumers and the media for tracking information that interests them. This includes: blog and news search engines, social news, social bookmarks, podcasts and video. The thing that ties all of this together is RSS. RSS enables people to subscribe to the kinds of content from the channels or formats that they are interested in.

Later today I’ll be presenting here at DMA-06 on a panel called, Blogs, RSS and Podcasting with Amanda Watlington from Searching for Profit and Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts. Basically, my presentation will cover how blogs can be used as public relations tools in the context of “Push and Pull PR”. The presentation is broken up into:

• Opportunity
• Push and Pull PR
• Blog Optimization & PR
• Blogger Relations
• Case Study

The “opportunity” section explains how many journalists are ignoring the noise of getting pitched by so many PR firms and company PR staff. Whether it’s a pitch by phone or email, many members of the media go online (98%) to find news sources (76%), story ideas (92%), experts and to research press releases (73%). The percentages come from a study done by Middleburg/Ross.