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Digital marketing digital pr IT security online pr tech pr Technology PR

How do you distribute and monitor social media guidelines?

Strict businessmanMore and more organisations are looking to draw up social media guidelines. As I’ve previously pointed out, many larger companies have already put in place policies relating to blogging and social network participation. However, it occurred to me there is not much discussion around the subject of distributing, monitoring and enforcing social media guidelines. Having a written social media usage policy is clearly a necessary first step. But how do you make sure people have seen these guidelines? More importantly, how do you know that they have actually read and understood them? And are aware of the consequences of failing to abide by them? (Take Cisco for example: “Please be aware that violation of this policy may result in disciplinary action up to and including termination.”)

Perhaps social media might be able to learn something from the world of IT security. There are already tools that allow businesses to readily distribute and monitor IT security policy, as well as educate employees. So why not for social media guidelines?

What do people think?

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Digital marketing digital pr online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

Does your PR agency really understand Page Rank? A client checklist.

Talking to various people over the last weeks, it is clear that a small but growing number of PR firms are attempting to use Page Rank as a metric for measuring the value of online media coverage.  However, it seems that some either don’t really understand what Page Rank is – or are misleading clients over the real Page Rank (and value) that their coverage has delivered.

For example, I’ve been told of a few firms who if they gain a piece of client coverage on, say, Computing’s web site, will claim that the value of the coverage is Page Rank 6.  However, what they really mean is that the Computing home page has a Page Rank of 6 – the actual page where the coverage appeared will almost certainly have a Page Rank of 0. That’s a mighty big difference.

In fact, almost all press coverage (or indeed any new web page) will have a Page Rank of 0 to begin with. Any new page added to a site will first have to be indexed by Google. And it takes Google time to take account of factors that will determine what Page Rank should be assigned. It is certainly possible to get Page Rank up to 1 0r 2 relatively quickly if people begin linking to the coverage  – but unless you get some very high Page Ranked backlinks rapidly, the chances that a piece of coverage will have gained a Page Rank of 5 or higher in the space of a few days is highly unlikely.

Traditionally, gaining a piece of coverage on a major site like the BBC would be cause for celebration. And I’m not saying it shouldn’t still be. However, we need to be honest about what value that might really deliver. And why we need to be careful about using Page Rank as a PR metric.

For example, the Guardian has a massive 3.8 million unique visitors and 130 million page views per month in the UK alone. Some PR firms might be tempted to say that getting coverage on The Guardian site provides an OTS (opportunity to see) of 3.8 Million. Of course, this is not exactly the case. The Guardian has roughly 20.3 million indexed pages – not of all of these are going to be editorial pages, but most will be. Fact is, not all pages are equal. Only the publishers themselves know the real data, but I’d hazard a guess that a smaller percentage of the total number of indexed pages gain the majority of site traffic. That’s the same for any website.  The challenge with using Page Rank as a PR metric is that it is an indirect measure of traffic. If you think about it, if Google determines that a page has a higher relative importance than another then it is likely to have more traffic. In which case, try randomly sampling some pages from the BBC and other major sites and you’ll probably find that the Page Rank is o.

Here is another example. This story was one of the Most Popular on the BBC site a few days ago. However, it has a Page Rank of 0. In spite of 49 backlinks, including backlinks from pages with rankings of 7. Now the Page Rank may change over time, but again, this is unlikely unless further interest is generated via additional backlinks.

That’s not to say that over time, an article might not be able to build a higher Page Rank. But how many PR firms do you know that would recommend and implement an ongoing “merchandising” strategy to try and generate more backlinks and comments to a piece of coverage in order to improve Page Rank? Or would be able to track changes in Page Rank over time and demonstrate what factors may have caused that change in Page Rank? And have a plan for using that change in Page Rank to generate further traffic to the client’s website? (Disclosure: this is a standard approach at escherman)

The traditional PR mindset is one that says once a piece of coverage has appeared, the job is pretty much done (other than to prepare a clippings book and invoice the client). Part of the opportunity with online PR is that generating the initial coverage can in fact be the start rather than the end of the process.

So beware of PR firms touting Page Rank as a metric. Here’s a handy quick checklist of things to ask them:

1. Explain what Page Rank is and why it is important. Hint: go here to find out for yourself.

2. If a PR firm claims a high Page Rank for a piece of coverage that has appeared in the last 2 days, ask them to explain what factors have caused this to be the case.

3. Ask them if they have a plan for potentially improving the Page Rank of a piece of coverage – and how they would track that over time

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Digital marketing digital pr online pr tech pr Technology PR

UK interest in online PR will peak in September 2009: Google

Google has just announced an update to its Insight for Search tool which now includes predictions for future search volumes.

I thought I’d give it a quick test on a few relevant terms. First up, online PR.

According to Google, search volumes for “online PR” in the UK will reach a peak in September of this year. They will tail off dramatically in October, rise again a bit in November, fall off again at Christmas – and then reach another spike in March 2010 – but not as high as Sept 2009 (interesting to note that the graph has shown a recurring pattern over the last few years – what happens in September to spike interest in online PR? AdTech?)

As noted at the Google Research blog: “Having predictable trends for a search query or for a group of queries could have interesting ramifications. One could forecast the trends into the future, and use it as a “best guess” for various business decisions such as budget planning, marketing campaigns and resource allocations.”

For example, anyone in the business of selling online PR services may want to focus their efforts on September 2009 and March 2010.

There are also ramifications for PR content development. You might plan to develop specific content for the future based around predicted keyword search volumes.

Of course, as ever, this all hinges on the accuracy of the predictions. And as Google are quick to point out, they are only extrapolating from previous data. Still, better than nothing.

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Digital marketing digital pr marketing online pr

Seth Godin’s Blog: When tactics drown out strategy

New media creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities for marketers, and many of them cost nothing but time, which means you don’t need as much approval and support to launch them.

As a result, marketers are like kids at Rita’s candy shoppe, gazing at all the pretty opportunities.

Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don’t feel confident outlining one unless we’re sure it’s going to work. And the ‘work’ part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, “I’m going to post this.” If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.)

“Building a permission asset so we can grow our influence with our best customers over time” is a strategy. Using email, twitter or RSS along with newsletters, contests and a human voice are all tactics. In my experience, people get obsessed about tactical detail before they embrace a strategy… and as a result, when a tactic fails, they begin to question the strategy that they never really embraced in the first place.

The next time you find yourself spending 8 hours on tactics and five minutes refining your strategy, you’ll understand what’s going on.

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So true.

Posted via web from Andrew’s posterous

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Digital marketing digital pr marketing online pr

The Real ROI of the Press Release | BNET (and some odd logic)

A year and a half ago, if you had tried to Google either the Next Level Wellness Center or its founder, Dr. Vasili Gatsinaris, you would have had to wade through 16 pages of search results to find the first mention of either one of them. Then in early 2008, the company’s publicist Donna St. Jean Conti began issuing monthly press releases for $200 each through PRWeb, a wire service that distributes releases to 30,000 online publishers. Total amount of press coverage the releases generated? One mention in a local magazine — but that’s not the point. When the press releases started popping up on page four of Google search results, Conti knew the investment had paid off. “Our primary goal was to make it onto Google,” she says.

Let’s do the maths on the above. Assume early 2008 = January 2008, then Donna has spent around $3800 on press release distribution (this doesn’t take into account the money spent on writing the releases). It is stretching it a bit to say that getting to page 4 on Google is “the investment paying off”. Nobody looks at page 4 results. But if you look at what comes top for a search on “Vasili Gatsinaris”, it is indeed a PRWeb release. Then again, what about search volume on the terms mentioned? According to Google, broad match searches on “Vasili Gatsinaris” total one (1) per day. Perhaps that’s the company themselves checking to see where they are on Google? Search ranking without reference to search volume (or indeed the target audience) is a pretty fruitless exercise.

PS Mr Gatsinaris’ LinkedIn profile could do with beefing up http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/vasili/gatsinaris

Posted via web from Andrew’s posterous

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Digital marketing digital pr marketing online pr

Why do we search for “marketing” 135,000 times per day in the UK? And where have all the click throughs gone?

Marketing: searched for 135,000 times per day in the UK
Marketing: searched for 135,000 times per day in the UK

According to Google, we Brits enter the term marketing into our favourite search engine 134,466 times every day.  That translates to around 4.1 million times per month (curiously, by contrast, the term selling is searched for only 32,877 times per day – or just over 1 million times per month).

The accepted wisdom is that the number one organically ranked page on Google can expect to gain – on average – a potential 42pc of the total number of searches performed for a term. In the case of marketing in the UK, this should translate to a whopping 56,475 visits per day to the lucky page. And according to Google, the beneficiary should be the home page of Centaur Publishing’s Marketing Magazine – to the tune of around 1.75 million page views per month.

However, according to Google Ad Planner, the total number of page views to the Marketing Magazine site as a whole is currently only around 260,000 per month.

Clearly, there is a discrepancy somewhere.

Let us assume that Google’s search volume figures are correct. What are the possible explanations?

  1. For some bizarre reason, the vast majority of people who click on the term marketing don’t actually then click on any of the results they receive.
  2. The principal that the vast majority of click throughs from search occur on the first SERP (indeed, 42pc from the top ranked result) doesn’t hold in reality. Could it be that for certain terms, people stray far and beyond the first SERP?

Or it could be that Google Ad Planner’s figures tremendously underestimate the actual page views that Marketing Magazine is receiving?

Once again, in spite of all the data made available for free – and the ever growing list of general “rules” of internet marketing – the simple expedient of testing out data and theory together seems to throw up a host of contradictions.

Or perhaps I have missed a blindingly obvious explanation for all of the above – I’m more than willing to have my ignorance in this matter corrected. As, I’m sure, will most client side marketers who need to demonstrate the validity of their decisions.

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Digital marketing

How to boost your online rapport | Graham Jones

I hate Graham Jones. The volume and high quality of his blog posting is positively obscene. Yet another insightful observation: “All too often, people confuse usability with rapport”.

Posted via web from Andrew’s posterous

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Digital marketing

What Ad Agency Clients Think – eMarketer

“If you don’t have a good grasp of new media, you had better get on it,” says US business development firm Reardon Smith Whittaker in a new report.

Posted via web from Andrew’s posterous

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Digital marketing Web/Tech

What is Your Unique Buying Proposition? – Content Marketing Today

Good post on how the traditional concept of a Unique Selling Proposition views the problem of positioning “almost backwards”. Hence the idea of a Unique Buying Proposition.

As Newt Barrett says: “A UBP is a first cousin to a USB. The difference is that a UBP is all about the buyer and what the buyer will gain from doing business with you. Thus, your buyers don’t care that you are the only maker of green widgets in the United States. They do care if your green widgets will enable them to double their sales or cut their manufacturing costs by 50%.

Therefore the structure of a UBP should be something along the lines of: You will achieve X positive outcome by taking advantage of our solution Y which is precisely designed to solve your most challenging problem Z.”

Posted via web from Andrew’s posterous

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Digital marketing digital pr Entrepreneur General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

How to start a PR company in 2009 with Google and a credit card: version 2.0

By far and away my most popular blog post of 2008 was How To Start A PR Company with Google and a Credit Card. As of this morning, the page has had nearly 2000 views since I originally published it in March of last year.

The general principle espoused in the post remains true – but I thought I’d update a few things.

1. Do I need to own my own computer?

Last year I suggested you could get a cheap laptop for a few hundred pounds – certainly if you opt for a netbook, that is still true. However, if you want to really boil it down to operating expenses over capital investment, there are various deals where you effectively rent your laptop and internet access – say for around £22 per month.

2. Do I need my own software?

I’d add to the original list Xero, an online accounting package. Rather than spend money on Sage or similiar, you have 24/7 online access to your accounts for around £19 per month. It is a very slick service – the world’s first enjoyable to use accounting software.

3. Other additions

I’d also suggest online back up service SugarSync (10GB for a few pounds per month) and RescueTime for time managment (free, or £5 per month if you want to download stats).

And why not throw in your own “on demand” car service with Streetcar?

In fact, it is perfectly conceivable to start and run a business (certainly in its early stages) purely on operating expenses of less than £100 per month and no capital expenditure (assuming you don’t need a virtual office or accounting services – even then you could probably achieve this for under £300 per month).

So in spite of the current dire climate, don’t let cost be a barrier to the entrepreneurial spirit.