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B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.

4 Things Lady Gaga Can Teach Us About Social Media PR & Online Influence

Lady Gaga with one of her Little Monsters

Photo Credit: Flickr gjkooijman

Lady Gaga is the definition of an influencer offline and online; her music, fashion sense, and passion for social causes have spread around the world in only a few short years.  Love her, like her or hate her, you know who she is and you’ve probably heard more than one of her songs.

When searching for a way to improve your online PR strategy, increase your social reach or build a better influencer marketing strategy, who better to learn from than one of the most influential celebrities in the world and on the web?

Social Media is Going Gaga

  • Lady Gaga Facebook Fan Page Followers – 46,608,220
  • @LadyGaga Twitter Followers – 18,198,577
  • Lady Gaga Google+ Followers – 20,852 (only 4 days after signing up)

4 Things Lady Gaga Can Teach Us About Social Media PR & Online Influence

5 Tips on Creating Video Content for Public Relations

Lights, Camera, Action. Video puts a new spin on traditional Public Relations.

If you are  Public Relations professional (or online marketer), the time has come to implement new tactics that will keep your audience excited, engaged, and encouraged to share.  While optimized press releases, case studies, and white papers are great forms of online content, it’s time to take advantage of one of the hottest media formats on the web.  A study done by Forbes stated that 75% of senior executives surveyed said that they watched work-related videos at least weekly, and 52% watched work related videos on YouTube at least once a week.

I will warn you that implementing a video marketing campaign is not always easy and not always successful, but there are some practical tips that can improve your chances of #winning with an online video strategy.


5 Tips on Creating Video Content for Public Relations

Where Does SEO & Social Media Optimization Fit Within Your Company? Hint: It’s Not All About Marketing #optimize

social seoWhen most people think of search engine optimization for a company, it’s usually as a marketing function. That makes sense since SEO is such a low-cost, high impact and measurable method of attracting new customers and revenue. However, I think looking at SEO and optimizing social media solely as a marketing function is like looking only at the eyeball of your favorite portait. Take a step back and you’ll see a bigger, more interesting picture.

Think Outside the Marketing Search Box. Companies publish a variety of content besides products and services but usually rely only on people’s familiarity with the company website to find that information.  Customers, employees, partners, job seekers, news media, industry analysts and investors need a variety of information from those companies and with over 11 billion queries handled every month by Google, search is a prime channel for discovery. So is social. Facebook has over 800 million members, Twitter has over 200 million and LinkedIn over 100 million. If content has a purpose and an intended audience, why not optimize for findability and shareability?


Where Does SEO & Social Media Optimization Fit Within Your Company? Hint: It’s Not All About Marketing #optimize

Newsjacking – Own the Second Paragraph with David Meerman Scott

NewsjackingWith SES Chicago over, we’re picking up our Wednesday guest posts again. This time with my friend David Meerman Scott, best-selling author of numerous books including The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Real-Time Marketing & PR and a new book called Newsjacking (Wiley) created specifically for the Amazon Kindle. David is someone who has always been a forward thinker and a few steps ahead of most marketers. This post gives some perspective and an example of newsjacking that opportunistic marketers are increasingly tapping in to due to availability of trend, buzz and social stream monitoring tools. 

David Meerman ScottWith Google now indexing new content in real-time, there is a tremendous opportunity for clever people to rank at the top of the results for emerging keywords. One great way to accomplish this is to engage in what I call newsjacking.


Newsjacking – Own the Second Paragraph with David Meerman Scott

Mastering The Content Workflow

content marketing workflow[Note from Lee: While I fervently pursue the home stretch of writing my own book “Optimize“, I’ve asked a few friends to share their thoughts on topics such as Content Marketing, SEO and Social Media. This post comes from Rebecca Lieb, who I’ve known since her days at ClickZ, then Econsultancy and now she is digital advertising and media analyst at the Altimeter Group. Her new book, Content Marketing: How to Think Like a Publisher to Market Online and in Social Media comes out this week.]

Content workflow is the point at which content marketing gets tactical. It’s nuts-and-bolts process: content calendars, creation, approvals, style guides, templates, and tools.

Get this part right and you’ll be ready to run a newsroom.


Mastering The Content Workflow

How Public Relations Can Avoid Failing at SEO

SEO for Public Relations FailOur Online Marketing agency at TopRank has been providing practitioners in the Public Relations industry information and insight on Search Engine Optimization for nearly 10 years.

Starting with adding SEO to our media relations services in 2001 to having provided SEO consulting to PR industry leaders like the national PRSA, Cision, PRWeb and Radian6, we’ve been in the thick of SEO and PR for some time.

The demand for smart Social Media and SEO information from PR agencies and corporate communications organizations has amplified significantly this year. We’re talking with numerous companies, helping them get up to speed with strategy, road mapping and training. One of the most useful insights we can provide is guidance on what to avoid when it comes to incorporating SEO and SMO (social media optimization) into PR content strategies. No one likes to #fail, so here are several things to avoid:


How Public Relations Can Avoid Failing at SEO

8 Social SEO Questions Public Relations Pros Need the Answers To

Social SEO PR TipsIn the course of providing expertise and advice, I’ve really come to believe that it’s more important now than ever for Public Relations professionals to accelerate their knowledge of SEO and Social Media. The storytelling business is a competitive one and great messaging isn’t realized until it connects with influencers and those in a position to propagate it. Both SEO and Social Media facilitate discovery of news and information, so PR pros can boost reach and impact by becoming Social SEO savvy.

Thanks to an invite from Justin Goldsborough and Heather Whaling, I participated in a #pr20chat chat this week to talk mostly about SEO and PR with a hint of social media. For Twitter chats, I prepare by getting the questions to be asked in advance and then I answer them in a “tweet ready” format so I can be as useful as possible during the chat itself. That prep makes for a good blog post too 🙂


8 Social SEO Questions Public Relations Pros Need the Answers To

5 Tips: Content Sharing Beyond Facebook

Alright, you’ve just come up with a brilliant and revolutionary idea that will forever change the face of your industry. So what do you do now?

If you’re like a lot of people, you run to Facebook and share it with your friends, colleagues, and anyone that will listen. Is that a bad strategy? Not necessarily, as Facebook and Twitter can be great places to reach large audiences. In fact, Facebook continued to grow even stronger in its use as a sharing site in 2010.

However, you can’t safely assume that Facebook is the only or best method of content distribution. Social media is a hot market right now and use of these channels are not a bad thing. Though a strategy of a few tweets and a fan page update will not get you to your goals. Ultimately there is no singular model that is always the ideal for any company but a few points to consider include:


5 Tips: Content Sharing Beyond Facebook

Tasty Ideas to Maximize Online Marketing for Events

Online Marketing EventsMarketing efficiency is always a good thing. I mean, who has an unlimited marketing budget? Well, maybe some companies do, but for the most part, being able to get far more value out of a marketing investment than projected is cause to celebrate.

For example, events.   In the digital marketing world, the number of online and real world events has exploded. Despite many options to choose from, it can get costly to send staff to multiple events per year and even more if you sponsor or exhibit.

But this post is more about what one might do holistically to leverage multiple communication channels to promote an event and how an event can serve multiple marketing and business objectives.


Tasty Ideas to Maximize Online Marketing for Events

Will the Real Social Media PR Consultant Please Stand Up?

social media consultantWhen you search Google for “social media consultant” there are about 10,600,000 search results. Yeah, really. Go check and come back.

That’s more than two times as many search results for “marketing consultant” or “pr consultant” (about 4m each). Those industries have been around a lot longer, yet the hype has attracted even more content focused on social media.

The ease of publishing online has made it correspondingly easy to lay claim to expertise that is often subject to some curious interpretation.  There are some smooth talking folks out there with great communication skills that haven’t done more than count Tweets, comments and mentions.  See the recent post, “What does social media success really look like?” for more on measuring social media success.


Will the Real Social Media PR Consultant Please Stand Up?

The Junction of Social Media & Content Marketing in New Zealand

social media junctionIn a little over a week I’ll be giving the opening keynote at a social media conference in Auckland, New Zealand called Social Media Junction. The topic? The answer to one of the most common questions asked about social media:  “The Truth About Social Media ROI”.

New Zealanders aka “Kiwis” are an active bunch on the social web with more than 2 in 5 interacting with companies via social sites and 84% of mobile social networkers there having visited Facebook (Nielsen). The social media momentum is growing and companies are hungry for information and perspective.

I’ll follow up the keynote presentation with a workshop, aka Masterclass Programme, the following day focused on Social Media Content Strategy that drills down into the mechanics of social media marketing, content marketing and SEO.  Here’s a bit of a preview on what I’ll be presenting in the workshop:


The Junction of Social Media & Content Marketing in New Zealand

SEO & Social Media Marketing at PRSA International 2010

Congratulations to our 2 winners of a free pass to the PRSA International Conference in Washington D.C.!
PRSA International Conference

Thank you to everyone that entered! You will receive a copy of our eBook “Optimize: SEO for Public Relations.

With our roots in the public relations and media relations world, TopRank Online Marketing has a deep appreciation for the strategy, storytelling and networking skills that are essential for successful PR campaigns. We’ve also talked a lot here about the intersection of both SEO for PR and Social Media with PR.  It’s an incredible combination that increases reach, engagement and delivers even more value to business than Media Relations alone.


SEO & Social Media Marketing at PRSA International 2010