Search Engine Optimization

Here are some nice tips on getting search engines to find your web site, thanks to Amy Campbell:

1. Use keyword-savvy "page titles," and strategic and proper metatagging on all pages.

2. Allow search-engine robots easy access throughout your site via text links, alt-tagged navigation icons, or a site map.

3. Register your URL with major search engines, directories and specialty sites, as well as select paid directories (such as Yahoo!).

4. Use strategic home page content (keywords in context in HTML text).

5. Use hyperlinks to further weight in-text keywords.

6. Encourage in-bound links from other relevant sites to your pages.

7. Add an integrated web log to your web site.

8. Add/update content frequently. (Write dammit!)

9. Avoid Flash-based opening home-page screens, improper metatag code, as well as any schemes meant to "trick" search engines.

10. Get a search-engine optimization audit for your web site.

Build a Better Blog

I've got a link for anyone wanting to build a better blog. Why does your blog stink? Good question...here's a blog with good answers:

www.whymyblogstinks.com

It's a fairly new blog, but includes insightful tips on improving the smell of a stinky blog.

Mobile Marketing

I love gadgets. I love marketing. You would think I'd be the ultimate expert on mobile marketing! I really need to get into it.

Here's a nice article on it.

Excerpt:

Mobile marketing should encompass more than just building brand awareness. It needs to be a robust part of the overall marketing strategy, helping companies to not only manage their overall brand message, but also to improve customer relationships, educate customers about products and solutions, and essentially give the company even greater control over its sales funnel.

Blogging and search engines

It's no doubt that adding a blog to your business site is good for business--creating open lines of dialogue between you and your customers, especially when needing to generate buzz prior to a product launch, just makes sense.

A blog is also good for search engines. Not just good--terrific! Search engines love blogs!

If you want in-bound traffic from search engines to your site, you couldn't ask for a better way to achieve your goal than by adding a blog. Why?

• Search engines favor relevant content, and blogs that are regularly updated with keywords commonly searched by surfers are ripe for the picking. If your blog is updated frequently and on a common theme or topic, it will find favor with the search engines.
• Search engines like sites with incoming links--and links are what brings blogs alive and connects them to related content. Search engines give extra weight to links from sites focused on the same topic. Referrals from other blogs add credibility for your own blog in the eyes of the search engines.

There are plenty of reasons to start a business blog, and search engines are one of the best ones.

The Story Behind Digg

Don't be a Johnny-come-lately when it comes to knowing about Digg and it's democratic approach to news. There WILL be imitators and anyone in PR and business communicators will need to know about it.

Here's the story.

Hold the press (releases)

TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington spoke about likes and dislikes from PR folk. One stand-out suggestion: don't send him press releases. This is a common view from bloggers...they'd much rather have something quick, personal, and with good links.

Summary here.

Candor in Communication

Read this dandy column on how refreshing candor would be in political communication.

It certainly goes against the grain, as PR folk, to NOT put the best spin on every piece of communication; yet, people long for authenticity. They're almost starved for it in this age when no one admits fault or that they don't know the answer to the question being asked.

Perhaps a dose of candor would go a long way toward building credibility with your audience!

Podcasting, MP3 Players Stealing Radio's Audience

PodcastingNews reports:

Podcasting and MP3 players are stealing radio's audience, according to the latest figures from Bridge Ratings. According to Dave Van Dyke, President of Bridge Ratings, "By 2010, today's 94% penetration for terrestrial radio will have sunk to 85%."

27% of people 12-24 attribute their reduced use of radio to MP3 use; 22% attributed it to tired radio programming; 3% attributed it to podcast listening.

New RSS Services

NewsGator has been busy! Here's the latest:

03-28 NewsGator Technologies, an RSS platform company, announced NewsGator Inbox 2.6. Previously known as NewsGator Outlook Edition, the new offering includes clippings synchronization with the NewsGator Online Web-based RSS aggregator, integration with FeedStation, NewsGator's podcatcher, and the ability to view Web pages while working offline.

03-28 NewsGator Technologies also announced FeedDemon 2.0. The new version of the company's desktop RSS aggregator for Windows adds seamless synchronization with the entire NewsGator Online platform, and improvements in usability and system performance.

Outted by Plaxo

Anybody who uses Plaxo to keep their Outlook Address Book up-to-date should be warned: you can blow the news of a job change or company acquisition simply by updating your own Address Book entry!

I know a guy whose company was acquired by another company. It was to remain a secret until a later date, but he went ahead and changed his contact information in his Address Book--and lo and behold pretty soon hundreds of his contacts received Plaxo updates that included his new title, employer and contact info.

Within hours, there were blog and news postings about the acquisition and they had to speed up plans for their announcement of the acquisition.

PR is Stale at Yale

Yale recently admitted a former top Taliban official as a student and refuses to answer questions about it. This is the same Yale that refuses to allow the establishment of an ROTC group on campus. Anti-military and pro-Taliban? On an American campus? Gosh!

From today's Opinion Journal:

"Yale is practicing a most unusual media strategy," says Merrie Spaeth, a public relations executive whose father and uncle went to Yale. "I'd call it 'Just say nothing.' " Another PR expert characterized Yale's strategy as "Trust that people will lose interest in the questions if there are no answers."

Pretending that your crisis will go unheralded and it will all go away if you simply don't answer questions is a guarantee that your crisis will be blown into bigger proportions than ever. Yale responded to the Wall Street Journal writer by saying it wouldn't respond. Perhaps the communications officer is a former member of the Bush Administration. Bush is, after all, a Yale alumni and heads an administration that famously makes poor use of proven communication strategies.

Here are some tips on crisis communications:

• Before a crisis hits, you should have a crisis management team established, including key officers, a spokesperson, and a communications strategist (if not the spokesperson);
• As soon as a crisis storm starts to brew, start pulling together the necessary facts (the who, what, where, when, why, and how);
  Be quick to share the information you think the media should have and will want to have;
  If they don't get the information from you, they'll get it from somewhere else--sometimes giving information is painful, but it's better coming from you than someone else;
  Don't shoot from the lip--if you don't have the answers, say you'll find out and get back to them;
• During or after a crisis is a great time to demonstrate that your organization is a good civic citizen--do something good for the community;
• Don't act like Yale.

Speaking of speaking...

Yesterday I was the guest speaker to a Washburn University "senior seminar" class of Mass Media students. I spoke to them about lessons along the pathway of my career.

While I was talking about some of my key rules for managing your career, the big rule that I should have remembered was to bring bottled water with me. By the end of my 45 minute spiel I was so cotton-mouthed that I sounded like Harry Belafonte (without all of the ridiculous political statements, of course).

Can your CEO speak better than Jon Stewart at the Oscars?

I didn't watch much of the Oscars. It was a bad movie year--the ones I enjoyed weren't nominated for hardly anything and the ones that did likely won more for their appeal to the liberal glitterati of Hollywood than for their artistic merit. I've heard that Jon Stewart didn't go over well as host, which is somewhat surprising to me--but Bulldog Reporter has pulled out some lessons that PR practitioners can glean from his example:

1. Don’t assume your client who speaks well in front of 20 people in his or her own conference room can make an instant transition to speaking in front of 100 people in a convention center.
2. Don’t assume your client who speaks well in front of 100 people can make a smooth transition to speaking in front of 1000 at a trade conference.
3. Help your clients get conformable with the size and sound of the room by rehearsing in the same room where they will be giving a speech.
4. Any new technical equipment (e.g., wireless mics, TelePrompTers, lights) needs to be rehearsed with in advance—not used for the first time in front of a real audience.
5. Help your clients build their confidence levels by exposing them to increasingly larger audiences—don’t make them jump from an audience of five to 500 in one presentation.
6. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse (and do it with video).

Measuring the Influential Experts on Business Blogging

Onalytica decided to measure influential experts on business blogging and makes some good points about the difference between popularity and influence:

When Technorati ranks blogs they count the number of link sources pointing to a blog. So a blog that has 10 inbound links has higher rank than one that has 5 inbound links. So far so good. The blog with inbound links from 10 different sources is clearly more popular than the one with 5 link sources. However, when they use this measure of popularity as “authority” they are stretching it too far. David Letterman may be popular when it comes to the topic of US national politics, but few would call him an authority on the topic.

Check out the findings at the end of the post. It may lead you to some very helpful information on the topic.

iSift

I've become a fan of Digg.com, where you have the opportunity to vote for stories that you "digg" and raise its ranking on the page. More popular articles get higher placement, and rather than being chosen by an all-powerful editor who uses his own subjective bias to determine ranking the big stories are the ones most popular with the readers.

Here's a new one: iSift. From their home page:

iSift.com is a community for publishing and rating Internet-related news and content. Submit content or vote for submissions that you think are interesting. You can also give a story a negative vote. iSift has been inspired by digg.com and del.icio.us but places a greater emphasis on independent news and content.

Does blogging help or hurt?

This Bulldog Reporter op-ed makes the case that blogging may not be all it's cracked up to be. He advises against jumping into the latest "craze" and, instead he advises "increasing investment in real advocacy education and civic debate in order to achieve goals." He says that blogs encourage people to only tune into messages that reinforce their currently held beliefs rather than exposing themselves to alternative viewpoints. This is valid because blogs that one visits are most commonly linked to other blogs that support the same viewpoint. But then again, so what?

Blogging is going to happen whether you "invest" in it or not. Who do you want to influence? In business, you want to invest in communications that targets most likely consumers. If you sell toilet paper, you're going to have an audience of just about anybody--but who wants to go to a blog about toilet paper and its uses anyway? Blogging is effective when it draws a crowd of people with specific interests and engages them in dialogue. Operating a blog and engaging those who operate blogs that target those with a common interest is smart business, and there are few communication tools out there that could do it more effectively than blogging.

Even if you're a politician or a civic organization, why not blog? I don't get the point of arguing against it. You want to energize your base with a blog and keep your natural constituency informed. Those on the other side will do the same. Those in the mushy middle will have blogs of their own and may visit blogs on the right or left. Blogs may spread false propaganda, like tabloids in the checkout lane, but they can also accomplish for you what the MSM won't. You don't have to look further than Rathergate to know that the blogosphere can hold the MSM accountable.

To me, it's all good.

The Voicemail Opportunity

My friend Cyndi Menzel, Communications Director of the Kansas National Education Association, doesn't waste an opportunity. Her email messages are always signed with the organization's tagline: "KNEA: Making Public Schools Great for Every Child." And her voicemail echoes the same message. She concludes her voicemail message with something along the lines of "We're busy making public schools great for every child."

I'm shocked at how many people waste the voicemail message opportunity. Not only do they blow it by not even using the name of their company, they fail to seize the chance to emphasize their brand message.

I cringe when I call someone on their work number and their voice mail says something like, "Hello, this is Bud. Leave a message and I'll call you back." Yuck!

Sad to say, many calls find your voicemail more than they find you. What is the experience you are offering your callers? If they have made it through voicemail hell to get to your extension, make it pleasant and your message to the point. Don't do the ordinary, lame message. It is not just your business brand, but your personal brand that is being wasted.

Here is a nice article on other ways to promote your personal brand.

IABC Leadership Institute

I am currently attending IABC's Leadership Institute in Charlotte, NC. It concludes tomorrow. This is not a conference on great new communication skills, but how to run a thriving IABC chapter. You can see our pics on our IABC Photo Blog.

Blogging tips

Here's an article that includes some great tips on blogging.

Robert Scoble, Microsoft's best known blogger, and Shel Israel, a veteran consultant for start up companies, have teamed up to write Naked Conversations: How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers, a book the authors say is intended to tell businesses of all sizes and in all places why they will benefit from blogging. The ZDNet article is an excerpt from the book.

Right Wing Podcasts

There was a Townhall column today by Jennifer Biddison on how political conservatives are using podcasts to supplement their dominance on talk-radio. The column includes a how-to section on getting started with listening to podcasts.