Category: online pr

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

Escherman to handle UK PR launch for Pogoplug consumer multimedia device: personal cloud computing for the masses

[wpvideo GOJi2QuW]
You know how PR folk are always “excited” and “delighted” when they win an account.
Well, I can honestly say we are REALLY excited and delighted that we are handling the UK and European PR launch of the Pogoplug from Cloud Engines Inc.
So what is the Pogoplug?
For an immediate sense of its capabilities, have a look at the video above. In simple terms, the Pogoplug is “a multimedia sharing device that gives you more flexibility to store personal content safely in the home and then access, manage, and share it from anywhere on the Internet. The Pogoplug acts like a gateway from your home or office through the Internet. It allows you to access, share and even stream personal digital media directly to anybody, anywhere in the world. Your content always remains physically in your home or office, making it secure, convenient and available on your terms. Pogoplug is perfect for those individuals with increasingly mobile lifestyles and small businesses in need of simple, inexpensive mobile data access solutions. The Pogoplug hardware sports a new design boasting multiple USB ports supporting up to 4 external drives for expanded data capacity. The new Pogoplug also gives users improved sharing capabilities, an easy drag-and-drop interface to create engaging multi-media slide shows, seamless media playback, and enhanced sharing with friends on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.”
Very cool.
The latest version of the device launched in the US last November – and for once, the phrase “universal acclaim” isn’t all hype.  A number of eagle eyed observers in the UK have already been asking when it will be available over here. Well, they won’t have to wait too much longer.  Mid-February is when the product should be available in the UK.
In the meantime, we’ll be doing our bit to keep press and bloggers up to speed with review kit and  information. We will be making evaluation units free for review to relevant media outlets and bloggers in due course. Drop me a line at andrew@escherman.com or Tweet me @andismit if you are interested in taking a look at the Pogoplug.
In addition, Cloud Engine CEO Dan Putterman and VP Sales & Marketing Jeff Fochtman will be over in the UK in early February – we will be organising press meetings and a press/blogger demo and drinks evening in Central London. More details to follow.
Another happy by product of handling the PR launch is that I’ve had a Pogoplug installed at home for a few weeks now. And it is rather good.  I really did get it up and running within 60 seconds.  I’ve been showing off to friends my ability to stream video from a home drive via my iPhone. And they all want a Poguplug now.
And my mother in law who lives in the Channel Islands has been able to view some Xmas videos of my son remotely without the need for me to upload the material to a third party site. Neat.
I’ve also created a Poguplug folder on one of my drives that will over time contain a variety of relevant press and blogger information. If you’re going to walk the walk……
That’s probably enough for the moment. I’ve included below a fuller list of features and benefits. But suffice to say we’ll be talking a lot about the glory of the Pogoplug over the next few weeks and months.
POGOPLUG FEATURES
Automatically Synchronize Photos, Videos, Music and Other Selected Content
Users can synchronize their Pogoplug with their PC or Mac to automatically import new content from popular applications such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, and iPhoto. This feature allows Pogoplug owners to “set it and forget it” and always have access to new photos, videos and music from anywhere on the Internet.
Drag-and-Drop Music and Photo Slideshows
Users can easily create and share fun and engaging slideshows using their stored photos, videos and music.  Creating a slideshow with Pogoplug is as simple as drag and drop, and sharing these slideshows is just as easy as ever. Once a user’s link is shared and viewed, their slideshow will immediately begin with the photos, videos and music they selected, playing seamlessly in the viewer’s browser.
Easier Sharing with Pogoplug Address Book
Pogoplug Address Book greatly improves the speed and ease of use of sharing with a user’s friends and family. Pogoplug automatically remembers all email addresses entered in a user’s previous shares – even if that share no longer exists – and makes them available in an easy to use address book to make sharing truly one click away.
Global Search Across Multiple Drives and Pogoplugs
With support for multiple drives on a single Pogoplug (and multiple Pogoplugs on the same account) Pogoplug has added “global” search support across all of a user’s Pogoplugs and drives.  Search filters are now a distinct feature, allowing users to view all of their photos, videos and music in a single organized view, or to search for a specific file across all Pogoplugs and drives.
Organize Your Music, Photos and Videos
Pogoplug automatically displays music by Album, Artist and Genre, and shows cover art for quick access to a user’s favorite music. Photos are now displayed by photo timeline and videos are only a click away, including the ability to watch a preview in the thumbnail itself.
Play movies directly from my.pogoplug.com, or even to the iPhone
Pogoplug now supports the playback of videos directly from a Pogoplug, with support for the most popular cameras, video cameras and mobile phones.  Movies can be shared and viewed directly from the Pogoplug website – or even from an iPhone!
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Digital marketing digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

Engagement – PR’s lost metric

I was intrigued by a recent blog post from Tom Foremski where he “raised the possibility of PR agencies developing the ability to drive lots of traffic to specific news stories” and suggesting that this would constitute a PR firm’s “killer pitch”.
I immediately thought of a superb piece by Ashley Friedlein at E-Consultancy (New metrics and business models for digital publishing – selling outcomes not inputs).
He may have written it nearly a year ago, but it still makes good sense. His opening question – are publishers using outdated metrics – could equally apply to PR.
And it was this that struck me about Tom’s post.
The implicit assumption in Tom’s analysis is that all traffic is good. And more traffic is better. However, even publisher’s don’t think this. Rupert Murdoch clearly doesn’t think so. Specifically, traffic from search engines. In which case, why is traffic generated by PR firms going to be any better?  In fact, you could argue that they will generate precisely the kind of traffic that Murdoch and other big publishers protest to hate – namely, sporadic, non-loyal readers.
Given that this is 2010, surely the traffic for traffic sake argument is well and truly exploded. Isn’t engagement the name of the game?
What is the point of increasing traffic, or indeed unique visitor numbers as per Gawker, if the bounce rate rises and average engagement time falls?
As per Ashley Friedlein’s post, last year, the Newspaper Marketing Agency in the UK found that 56% of newspaper site visits last for under one minute. That’s not a great deal of engagement with content. If increasing traffic leads to greater numbers of unengaged readers, then who cares. I’ve long argued that only publisher’s have access to the data that advertisers (and PR firms) should really care about eg readership figures for specific stories, engagement time with specific pieces of coverage, etc. However, as Friedlein points out, advertising and PR clients are now in a quite powerful position – they know not only the input they’ve paid for (ads or press coverage generated), but they know the outcomes that these inputs have created (or not). They can now easily compare different input mechanisms and see which ones perform better than others. In the context of PR, those that are focussing on delivering outcome based campaigns are clearly going to fare better than those that deliver inputs.
In short, engagement is the name of the game.
But lack of engagement exists everywhere.  The New York Times has nearly 2.3 million Twitter followers – and yet the click throughs on links to its stories via Twitter often barely break into double figures. Even the best ones are in the low 000s. Massive reach in this case isn’t necessarily translating into engagement with content (at least not on the scale that you might imagine)
To return to Tom Foremski’s argument, I’d be curious to know how a PR might go about bumping up traffic to a particular news story (I have an image of hapless PR execs spending their days furiously opening and re-opening the web page of a piece of coverage to try and bump up the viewer figures – again, it might increase traffic, but engagement time is clearly zero).
If you were going to take this approach, why not just run a PPC campaign instead? (don’t publishers do this already?) Why do you need a PR firm to do that?
As Friedlein aptly puts it: “Too little attention is given to measuring outcomes. Specifically, digital media and digital publishing offer greater opportunity to track and measure outcomes that are not so readily available in ‘traditional’ media.”
Likewise with PR. The sooner the PR sector starts to think about outcomes and engagement rather than inputs, the better for all concerned.
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Digital marketing digital pr Media online pr Web/Tech

Bloggers and journalists needed for annual Glide survey

For the last few years, Glide Technologies (purveyors of the well known Online Press Centre product) have conducted an annual journalist survey to delve into the nitty gritty of what kind of information journalists want and how they want to receive it.  The Glide surveys have tended to stand out from other similar, run of the mill research efforts in this area – they actually do seem to come up with some valuable insights.

The 2009 survey is now getting underway – the key difference this year is that Glide is looking for input from both journalists and bloggers (sorry, no PR folk required).  I realise most hacks would rather poke their own eyes out rather than spend time on yet another bloody survey – but if the thorough approach of recent years is replicated again this time around, I’d say it is 15 mins well spent.

As an added incentive, everyone who helps by completing a survey will be entitled to enter a prize draw and a chance to win 2 bottles of Champagne –  3 sets up for grabs – and of course, everyone who takes part will receive a full copy of the results (naturally).

So if you are a journalist or blogger, feel free to go here to complete the Glide Technologies 2009 Media Survey. Go on. You know you want to.

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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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via sethgodin.typepad.com

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.

via bnet.com

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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online pr Uncategorized

Get Shorty – The Elevator Pitch is Dead | Integrated Marketing and Media | Social Media Consulting – Convince & Convert

Understand that the Elevator Pitch is Dead. You remember the elevator pitch. The notion that you should be able to describe what your company does in the length of time consumed by the average elevator ride. I’m here to tell you, that’s way too long these days. Elevator rides seem interminable.

Instead, I humbly suggest that you develop a 120-character pitch for your business. Today. Not the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter, but an even tighter 120 characters to allow for re-tweets, and the inevitable next round of brevity.

I realize that 120 characters sounds like the linguistic equivalent of Gary Coleman, but it’s not as short as it seems.

(in fact, the previous sentence is exactly 119 characters)

Go ahead, try it. Leave your elevator pitch in the comments. Maybe you’ll meet a new friend or customer.

Here’s mine: Social media strategic counsel for mid-sized companies & PR firms. Plus, invigorating social media speeches & training. (119)

and you?

via convinceandconvert.com

Posted via web from Andrew’s posterous

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online pr Uncategorized

Just Being There Isn’t Enough | Convince & Convert

This pretty much sums up why brands like Ad Age are missing an opportunity on Twitter. They ignore any conversation, they NEVER respond to comments or inquiries. And they break the most common rules of etiquette for the community. This isn’t surprising considering they represent both the print media (who clearly doesn’t understand how to exist online) and advertising’s Old Guard (who desperately want to remain relevant but usually can’t wrap their head around it).

A typical post is represented by an example like this one: Brink’s Set to Unveil $120 Million Rebranding Effort: NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — At a time when awareness of its br.. http://tinyurl.com/nt623f

They ignore the 140 character limit completely, clearly copying and pasting from an article. Doing this demonstrates that they don’t care about the way information is exchanged on a specific channel (in this case Twitter). Even worse, it has that old media stench, the “WE will tell YOU what is important and you will read every last word”. Using the full character count with a wasted segment of an introductory line also keeps the piece from being re-tweeted. (see another example of AdAge Social Media Blindness)

In this forum, it would be be best to rewrite the headline or summary of the piece to fit the forum. It would also help with engagement if they would add some posts asking for reader opinion or feedback, or by occasionally responding to a tweet in their direction.

Social site users aren’t there to talk about your brand, even though they may occasionally indulge you. They are there to share experiences. To participate in a conversation that they might not have offline. That’s why you should be there too.

via convinceandconvert.com

Posted via web from Andrew’s posterous