Archive for July, 2009
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
With hundreds of article marketing sites on the web, you’re probably wondering which ones are the best for your company. Article marketing, like free press release distribution, can help to expand the base of your social media and public relations campaign. Some sites like eZineArticles.com have a higher Page Rank, some are user-friendly in regards to formatting, some take unusually long wait times to gain acceptance to your article, and others are just downright torture. We also recommend that you do not use article syndication services. Submitting your articles to hundreds of lesser known distribution sites is less effective then hand-submitting to five or ten high Page Rank sites. If you use a syndication service you run the risk of your articles being picked picked up as spam, which will hurt your marketing campaign. Here’s the PR-echnology Article Marketing Breakdown.
The Easiest
If you want to spend the least amount of time submitting articles to websites, here are the two we recommend. Keep in mind that Scribd.com and Docstoc.com are do-it-yourself publishing platforms, which means no wait times for article acceptance. You upload your article and voila! it’s ready for the public eye.
Scribd ( PR 8 ) is my personal favorite. The company calls itself the “largest social publishing company in the world — the website where more than 60 million people each month discover and share original writings and documents.” You will receive exposure to your article on this site if you do two things. 1.) Use precise tags for your documents, a good description, and put the article into the proper category. 2.) Join groups that relate to your industry and post your articles to those groups. Scribd requires some effort on your part to promote the article to related groups. Considering how easy it is to upload and distribute articles, however, this additional task is well worth the effort.
Docstoc (PR 6) is more or less the same as Scribd.com, except for professional documents. You may find that the categories at Docstoc fit your social media objectives better than those at Scribd. The main categories are: “Legal, Business, Personal Finance, Education, Jobs and Careers, Tax, Real Estate, Current Events, Politics and History.” You can showcase multiple documents via your website and blog using the custom “DocShots” code.
The Best Exposure
Ezine articles (PR 6) is one of the original article submissions sites and is considered by many to be the best. Ezinearticles.com delivered the most traffic to my articles, and also back to my sites; but it took awhile for me to enter the pipeline. Meaning, the more articles you submit, the quicker they seem to get approved. That’s usually because you’re still learning what you can and cannot do in your articles. For example, Ezinearticles is very strict on self-promotion and linking to your own sites within the article. But building a reputation on this site pays off. As an “expert author”, visitors can easily browse your collection of previously written articles and check out your profile.
Go articles (PR 6) provides a nice balance of ease-of-use and higher-than-normal exposure. The articles you submit are usually indexed in the database within one day, and I’ve never had a problem getting an article accepted here. According to the site, “Posted articles are seen by hundreds of newsletter publishers and site owners looking for free content, providing much greater exposure than an article might normally receive” and “Posted articles are downloaded daily by visitors to GoArticles, exposing your links, services and/or products to a targeted and interested audience.”
Article Alley (PR 5) attracts a good deal of traffic. The most popular articles are placed in their own section, which increases traffic further if you are selected. In addition, your article may be published to a number of information sites connected with Article Alley. The editing features on the site are basic, and when I was using the service, I had some trouble retrieving articles that I’d already written.
Article Biz (PR 6) has a huge selection of categories and sub-categories and a significant amount of incoming traffic. The simple page layout and easy navigation has separate sections for featured articles, most viewed articles, recently added articles, and article comments. Articles can also be rated.
May not be worth your time
Buzzle (PR 5) boasts “a dynamic network of authors and content contributors who we proudly refer to as our Intelligent Life on the Web.” This may sound good in theory; the problem is getting your articles accepted. If you don’t have a lot of time on your hands for registration, and then waiting for acceptance, you might want to skip this one.
iSnare article (PR 6), like Buzzle, offers a good deal of exposure, but the process of getting your articles accepted is almost not worth the effort. I received the longest wait times for article acceptance from iSnare. Keep in mind that you have to register to most of the article sites listed above. After you register you’ll need to spend at least 15-20 minutes formatting your article to meet the restrictions of the submission site. If there’s a chance you’ll never hear back from anyone, you’re better off submitting your articles elsewhere.
One final note on linkbacks. There are three possible places on most article sites for you to include linkbacks to your site. When choosing a submission site, you want to determine if you have one, two, or all three of these options. The first place is your author profile. The second place is a bio section at the end of your article. And lastly, you can usually put linkbacks into the body of the article. Article sites, however, tend to discourage more than two or three self-promotional links within the body.
Good luck! And remember you can always consult with PR-echnology on the best article marketing options for your business.
Tags: "article alley", "article submission", "ezine articles", article marketing, scribd
Posted in article marketing | 4 Comments »
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
Information may be free these days, but two important resources are dwindling fast: time and attention.
Herbert Simon, an American economist and psychologist, first articulated the concept of the “attention economy” in 1971. He wrote: “Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”.
Definitions and theories about the attention economy have evolved since then, and today the concept is continually talked about in business, PR, and social media websites and magazines.
How should a business strategically position itself in the attention economy? Let us look at two key distinctions of this concept. The first distinction is based on choice. According to ReadWriteWeb, a popular web technology site, the consumer can choose where their attention is “spent”. The second distinction is relevancy. The information must be relevant to the consumer’s interests, or he/she will go elsewhere.
 - Source: ReadWriteWeb
The attention economy is niche-based, concentrated on personalized news, information, and goods or services. Businesses that closely monitor online statistics, regularly modify ad campaigns based on those statistics, and participate in the active cultivation of a community around their sites, will already have some key insights into what people are paying attention to. A business has to ask itself, “What makes people stick around?” These insights will serve as the foundation for the best public relations and marketing strategies. In other words, listen to your consumers. Listen hard!
The battle to secure the most online attention is only bound to get more competitive. As Jon Fine from BusinessWeek writes, “the monetization of attention—audience–is harder online.”
1. Provide a satisfying experience for consumers. Without a satisfying experience, consumers will not return to your site. Offer recommendations, special offers, and networking opportunities. (1)
2. Free content is expected, so have lots of it. Think of your business as a personalized media outlet—videos, blog posts, press releases, articles, news updates, tweets, etc. Your marketing efforts are a blend of free information and products/services, and possibly even free “tools” or applications.
3. Protect consumer information. You don’t want to end up with people bad-mouthing your business practices on Twitter or any other social media network. Be sure to maintain the privacy of your consumers. (2)
4. Create a filter that has value. Digital culture expert, Kevin Kelly, writes: “When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable.” Your business can act as filter for consumers and other businesses. Select the most important issues to review and analyze. People on the web need you to filter information for them; they need you to tell them, “This is important.”
5. Avoid practices that even resemble spamming. With millions of spammers bombarding us every day, you want to eschew “information pollution” as a business. Your reputation depends on it.
6. Social networking is key. Networking is becoming the single most important factor in business. Our network of relationships is now determining whether or not we get business deals, clients, or employees. The social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter offer a way to develop a wide range of diverse contacts for your business.
7. Measure online attention to your sites. Follow statistics closely and adapt your marketing strategies based on your findings. Attention strategies must be constantly updated to adapt to user flows and click-through ratios.
8. Build a social community around your business. You’re going to need a community of followers and fans to energize the base of your business. Followers and fans of your products create the ongoing attention you’ll need to survive and ultimately prosper.
9. Manage your friends and fans. The more acquaintances you have on Facebook and Twitter, the more people you have to manage. This produces a drain on your ability to do other things.
10. Focus on relationships. Relationships come before sales; relationships matter in the attention economy.
To read a related post on the changing landscape of Public Relations click here.
Tags: attention economy, Herbert Simon, pr, ReadWriteWeb, social media
Posted in attention economy | 3 Comments »
Sunday, July 12th, 2009
The changing role of public relations is in the news again with an outstanding article in The New York Times Sunday Business Section for Sunday July, 5, 2009. “Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley,” talks about the impact of social media and social networking in public relations and how these new business practices are actually shaping the success or failure of start up companies in Silicon Valley. You don’t have to be a start up in Silicon Valley to know that the same truths hold for elsewhere in the world of public relations. Newspapers and magazines used to be the gatekeepers of publicity for companies, but now social media and social networking is changing all of that.
We created PR-echnology to harness the power of social media for small businesses. We are steeped in ideas, practices, and experience that leads to the most important thing about the new PR: community cultivation. In this blog post, I’ll review The New York Times article and another exemplary article by Brian Solis, the Principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley. Solis was interviewed for The New York Times article and he responds to it on his blog by clearly stating what he believes is the essential character of the new PR.
First, some highlights from “Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley”:
This is the new world of promoting start-ups in Silicon Valley, where the lines between journalists and everyone else are blurring and the number of followers a pundit has on Twitter is sometimes viewed as more important than old metrics like the circulation of a newspaper.
In the new world of social media, P.R. people must know hundreds of writers, bloggers and Twitter users instead of having six top reporters on speed dial.
Despite all these new channels, Ms. Burke says it’s still essential to know which mainstream publications to approach.
The Times article excels in bringing attention to three new changes in public relations. (1) The people with the most influence are not always who you would expect. A journalist and a popular blogger may now be on the same footing when it comes to publicity. (2) Social networking is essential to the new PR. A web of connections to influential people in diverse areas and niches often serves as a greater advantage than knowing a couple reporters or news agencies. (3) Power users on social media platforms such as Twitter must be reckoned with and utilized.
It’s important not to get so excited about the new PR that we forget the old one. Mainstream publications still play a role, but that role is becoming more limited and less of a monopoly.
Brain Solis, who was interviewed for the Times article, revealed on his popular blog, P.R 2.0, that he felt the article missed the point. He praised the article for featuring PR professionals “who are helping to usher in a new breed of corporate communications,” but underscores that “PR is undergoing a much more significant renaissance that receives almost zero attention in this article.”
Solis has a nuanced understanding of the impact of social media on public relations. He actually looks at PR from the point of view of a technology analyst. His response to the Times article illustrates this fact. He believes the new PR aims to equalize the spikes and valleys (of media/consumer attention) which occur as a result of traditional publicity strategies. The problem with traditional PR, Solis argues, is the focus on news and events. This leads to a spike in attention, and then a drop off. Solis sees the role of the new PR, or PR 2.0, as equalizing the distance between the spikes and valleys, while at the same time building “communities of power users who will extend the story across multiple networks”.
 It’s the difference between a campaign mindset and one of community cultivation. The single most distinguishing factor of the new PR is not technology, as one would assume, but people. Solis writes, “This is about putting the public back in Public Relations, nothing less, nothing more.” Therefore, community cultivation is seen as the most effective public relations strategy with the best long term results. By cultivating a community around a product, brand, or website, you avoid the pattern of spike and valley with news and events. Essentially, the conversation never ends and the public relations strategy is ongoing.
Solis writes:
Every launch or news strategy should be supported by an ongoing program of community building and influencer engagement from the a-list all the way to the Magic Middle (the group of people who reach and impact peers of potential and existing customers and decision makers through blogs, twitter and other social networks).
With this new insight into public relations, we can move forward with PR and marketing strategies that tap into the social web and use it to form long-lasting bonds with consumers. PR-echnology is at the cusp of these changes, bringing our clients into direct contact with the communities that support them.
Tags: "PR 2.0", "social networking", public relations, social media
Posted in PR 2.0 | 4 Comments »
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