This August marks 10 years since I started my freshman year of college, and while it doesn’t seem as though I should be that far removed from today’s college freshmen, consider this list: - I did not own a cell phone and would not get one for two years.
- I did not have a laptop, nor did many of my classmates. My new desktop cost around $1,100.
- The most cutting-edge portable music player of the day involved CDs.
- Digital cameras were an expensive novelty that few of my classmates owned.
- Text messaging was not widely available on all mobile phones.
- “Google” was not a regular part of our vocabulary.
- Facebook would not even be dreamed up until well after I had graduated.
Today’s students are arriving at college with all manner of gadgetry and Web savvy. Most have had Facebook profile for a few years, are all but addicted to text messaging, regularly snap and share digital photos of their friends (often on their phones) and can’t think of a question that Google hasn’t been able to answer.  For students studying PR and communication, the key foundations of the curriculum haven’t changed (communicating an organization’s story in an engaging way) but the tactics are vastly ... read more >>
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 The transition from old to new technology creates both challenges and opportunities for communications professions. The field of public relations is directly tied to the publishing industry which of course, is directly connected to business and consumer information discovery and consumption. The migration from offline to online has left these industries in a state of flux and traditional PR becoming increasingly digital is no exception.
There are tactical challenges as well as strategic. For example, the shift towards digital communications means a new set of tools must be learned in order to accomplish today’s PR goals. Now more than ever, public relations professionals need to familiarize themselves with a new arsenal of tools to adjust and thrive in a digital world. Which tools and tactics are most effective for online PR? What are the best practices and guidelines for using each tool appropriately? Here are five tools every digital PR practitioner should have in their online PR toolbox. Search Engine Optimization – Search is the top method for finding information online. Keyword optimizing news content is a key device for digital PR professionals. ... read more >>
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AddtoAny study shows Email is leading sharing toolNeil Behrman, President of Delivra, says there are lots of reasons to use email as part of your marketing mix. 5 to be precise. They're instant, affordable, dynamic, measurable, and best of all, its easy! I started thinking more about this the other day when I saw this on chart of the day:According to AddToAny, a company that provides Web publishers tools to let their users share content, more people use Facebook to share links than any other service -- including, to our surprise, email.Now, if you read the original article closely:Interestingly, if you combine all of Yahoo’s properties – Delicious, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, and Yahoo Messenger – it accounts for 14.4 percent of sharing, making it second on the list. Less surprising, MySpace has fallen well down the ranks with just 5 percent of shares. Other notables include Digg at 4.4 percent, Bebo at 3.1 percent, and LinkedIn at a mere 0.4 percent.Either way, the way I look at it - email is still accounting for 11% of the way that content/information is being shared. This raises an important question for some of you that insist that social is king. Isn't email the original . ... read more >>
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Here are some ways to look at using social media to expand the impact of your public relations efforts: - Expand message reach. Share your messages on social media. This includes formal pieces like press releases and newsletter articles as well as informal items like comments from your leadership and talking points on key issues. Always direct readers back to your website, blog, social media sites, etc.
- Gage satisfaction. Use social media to listen to what makes consumers happy about you and what makes them unhappy. Do the same for your competitors. Contact people directly and engage them in addressing problems. Use the knowledge you gain to correct specific situations as well as to guide your messages to play to your strengths and correct weaknesses.
- Monitor your brand. While you are listening on social media, pay attention to your brand on-line. Do more than support the mentions you like and correct the ones you don’t. Listen to how consumers relate to your brand and consider making adjustments where there are disconnects. Changing to catch up with where consumers already are can give you terrific momentum.
- Generate leads. Make sure your messages are aligned with your . ...
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When someone talks about a social media strategy or a social media campaign; what are they talking about? Are they the same thing? Hopefully you said no. The two are definitely not the same thing. The terms social media campaign and social media strategy have been used interchangeably quite a bit so I wanted to clarify what the difference between the two of them in a clear bulleted list. Social media strategy - Comes before a social media campaign
- Is set to build the social media foundation for all other social media efforts
- what tools are going to be used and how are you going to use them?
- Is a long term umbrella approach for company social media
- Includes specific objectives, strategies, tactics, and metrics
- i.e. social media for pr/marketing/sales/product development
- Should integrate into existing marketing efforts
- i.e. the company social media plan
- Clear analysis of your audience
- Seeking to solve client/customer pain points
- Maps and plans out allocation of resources
- More about providing and creating content as opposed to looking for immediate results from a community
- Focused more on longer term ...
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The One Big Thing you really do need to know about this week is Facebook’s forthcoming feature, real-time activity feed search. The feature will allow users to search in real time the activity feeds of the people in their network as well as anyone person or page that has set their feed to be publicly available. Inside Facebook points out: - Updates from your friends come before updates from everyone.
- All updates contain rich content in-line, from videos to music to thumbnails of shared links.
Visit Inside Facebook’s post to see some screenshots of what this will look like. As I said in my previous post, this will be a vast improvement over Facebook’s current search and will give us at least some capability for monitoring buzz. Right now, the only tool we have to do that is Facebook Lexicon, which is pretty useless except as a crude sentiment measurement tool. With Lexicon you can only see the volume of chatter for a given keyword. With the new activity feed search, we’ll be able to discover conversations and find where they are taking place. And that leads to engagement. And that is what we strategic online communicators call A Very Good Thing.I know I already wrote ... read more >>
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Last week, I wrote a blog post called “6 Reasons You Shouldn’t Brand Yourself as a Social Media Expert” and it quickly became the most popular post I’ve ever written on this blog (since October, 2006), with over 400 retweets and almost 60 comments. There were a feel people who disagreed with my statements and those that gave me credit for my observations. I wrote the post because I’m perceived as a social media expert at my day job and I believe that title will evolve over the coming years, as we are all pulled into this brave new world and our positions become ubiquitous.
I received a few emails, that will remain anonymous, of individuals who frown at the term “expert.” I, on the other hand, think that it’s one of the most important aspects of personal branding. In fact, if you aren’t an expert, your perceived value diminishes, you won’t get as many opportunities and it will be hard to position yourself for success. Your biggest challenge The title of this post may sound scary, especially to those who don’t feel they are experts in their fields quite yet. Your biggest challenge in life: Finding your passion and connecting it to your expertise, while ... read more >>
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As I work with our clients on their link building projects, I am often testing out new tools to make the process more efficient. After meeting with Lee at PubCon South in March, Jeremy Bencken - one of the founders of BuzzStream - followed up with Lee for the opportunity to demo and test out their link building tool - BuzzStream for Link Building. Lee requested that I take a look at this tool, and I was glad for the opportunity. For many webmasters, managing link building campaigns can seem pretty daunting. Identifying a link building strategy is one key to success. Another is ensuring link building efficiency and follow up. Identifying processes and tools to help increase this efficiency can greatly increase the amount and value of links you achieve. BuzzStream is one such tool. Developed by the creators of ApartmentRatings.com, BuzzStream helps identify sites from which to request links, and makes this link building process efficient and human. The BuzzStream for Link Building tool works in 4 key ways: Identifying contact information, managing communications, managing link opportunities and link request sent, and monitoring backlinks achieved. When searching for link ... read more >>
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 This is post #5 in a series of 10 on the intersection of PR and SEO. We’ll discuss a few best practices content SEO tactics as well as a few things to avoid.
While there is much to understand about successfully implementing and maintaining search engine optimization efforts, there are a few fundamental concepts worth starting with, including the notion of quantity, quality and time as appropriate to content and links. For the most part, the more web pages, digital assets and inbound links, the better the search visibility. Each link is a conduit and each page is a potential entry point into the web site. As a general guideline, the same is true with quality. The higher quality content and link sources, the more competitive advantage for better search results. Search Engine Optimization professionals can be instrumental in advancing the SEO Quantity and Quality measures. Time, on the other hand, cannot be “facilitated”. The longer a site has been known to a search engine, including web pages and the links pointing to those pages, the better. That means making sure search engine spiders can find your content from day one and then again on day two, ... read more >>
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