Escherman

“Public relations expert Brian Solis discusses how to find your audience online and how to communicate directly with them.”

From Revolution magazine: “The mystery of the rising rankings

Since the beginning of this year, increasing numbers of big brands are appearing in the top ten search results on competitive generic search queries. They are elbowing out of the way thousands of lesser sites in the process. No-one is quite sure why this has happened, but some suspect that changes to Google’s algorithm made in February dubbed the ‘Vince update’ (after the Google engineer that made them) are responsible. This has benefited big brands to the detriment of smaller players.”

Alan Patrick: “Note that the blogosphere feeds off the mainstream media, in the main – which begs the question of what happens if it kills its host….”

3. Socialize. This is my personal favorite. I actually had a fellow consultant on a project look me in the eye with grave concern and pose this question:

“Have you socialized that idea?”

I was dumbstruck and quickly tried to recover. “Uh, do you mean, did I take it out for drinks and show it a good time?” I asked.

What a dunderhead. My fellow consultant merely wanted to know whether I had discussed the idea with our client.

Let that be a lesson to you. Treat the best ideas like sailors who just arrived in port for an extended shore leave.

You know what to do.

Twitter received almost 3 billion impressions — 2.73 billion, to be exact — in the past month, a time period that doesn’t even include the frenzied weeks in April in which Oprah and Ellen weighed in on the micro-blogging service. TV contributed to 57% of the PR value, newspapers 37% and magazines 5%. Incidentally, Fox News bested CNN in terms of total PR value delivered by its Twitter mentions, although CNN dropped the name more often.

In reality, said VMS CEO Peter Wengryn, the number of impressions over the past 30 days could be as much as double that, considering the company doesn’t measure mentions in all the smaller newspapers around the country.

“This is huge. It’s very, very high,” said Gary Getto, VP-integrated media intelligence at VMS. “In fact, we looked at online coverage of Twitter vs. Google. Twitter is running significantly higher than Google and I didn’t think anything was more popular than Google.”

In contrast, the media value of the coverage given to Microsoft’s Bing was just $573,834, and the reach of its free media came in at just 63 million impressions.

Presumably these valuations are based on advertising equivalence – sigh.

When I came into this business 32 years ago, my worst nightmare was to be presented as an empty-headed flack touting products without understanding, paid to drink with reporters in order to generate hits in the press. There are thousands of PR practitioners who work in an ethical and intelligent manner. This article missed the opportunity to present public relations as a vital profession at a time when reader attention is dispersed among media and ideas bubble up from the bottom.

Richard Edelman’s 5 myths of the PR Profile, “a more nuanced form of ethnic profiling.” Comments to his post are worth reading too.

“Gone are the days when snaring attention for start-ups in the Valley meant mentions in print and on television, or even spotlights on technology Web sites and blogs. Now P.R. gurus court influential voices on the social Web to endorse new companies, Web sites or gadgets — a transformation that analysts and practitioners say is likely to permanently change the role of P.R. in the business world, and particularly in Silicon Valley.” Claire Cain Miller, New York Times

Good post from Alan Mitchell at Marketing magazine:

“To reinvent marketing successfully, I believe we have to jettison marketing’s Persuasion Paradigm: the belief that marketing is ‘effective’ when it changes consumers’ attitudes and behaviours, and that this is what good marketing does.

Persuasion isn’t marketing’s only paradigm. The other paradigm is alignment – the belief that successful companies and brands align themselves to doing what their customers want them to do.

With very few exceptions, these two belief systems are contradictory and mutually exclusive. If one is right, the other one can’t be. If you are doing more persuading, you are also doing less aligning. And vice versa.

But today, elements of both are alive and well in marketers’ minds, battling it out for supremacy. This constant warfare isn’t helpful.”