October 15th, 2009
Business in the online world involves a spectrum of services that may require outsourcing. By outsourcing, I mean online contract work for specific projects rather than hiring on new people. Depending on your business, you may find a need for the following services:
- programming/development
- graphic design
- article writing
- SEO
- Search Engine Marketing
Good business sense tells you to outsource these tasks for cheaper, rather than to hire someone outright. The reason for this is simple. In recent years, there has been an explosion in the online contract market. Thousand of people are willing to take on your project from every corner of the world. Now, how do you find them, and perhaps more important, how do you find someone reliable?
These are some of the top sites to look for freelancers on the Web:
A recent post on ReadWriteEnterprise notes that “Elance reports that they are seeing a 46% increase in hiring for contract work, compared to a year ago.” The recession has definitely contributed to a surge in the online marketplace.
I began my contract work on Elance several years ago. I’ve worked on both sides; hiring and being hired.
So, let’s say you want to hire, manage, and pay experts to do your work. Elance is the most reliable site for this. Before you post a job, you might want to search the category of work you are looking for.
In the “Find Experts” box, type in the online contract work you are looking for. Narrow it down by category. As an exercise, I entered “blogging” under the “Writing and Translation” service. Now I can see a full page of professionals who blog for pay. The professionals with the most earned income and the highest ratings will appear at the top of the page.
You can examine their profiles and portfolios on Elance. If you would like to hire them, you simply press “Get a Proposal”. You can also conduct an online interview with them.
But let’s say you want to post a job instead. Posting a job will get many more eyeballs to your project. Moreover, the bidding process involves professionals telling you their lowest rate for the job. The bidders cannot see each other’s quotes. You must enter in a ballpark figure for what you are willing to pay.
If you are looking for work, you post a description of your project and categorize it accordingly. Be descriptive in your job post–tell your potential bidders exactly what you are looking for. This includes the time length of the project, whether you will pay hourly or a fixed rate, and if there are more opportunities after this project is complete.
In the next step, professionals will make bids on your job. You may receive twenty-five bids on a project or more, so be prepared in the next couple days to comb through the bids.
The private message board allows you to ask questions to a potential bidder. This feature can help give you a better idea of the services the professional is able to offer you.
The public message board allows you to make announcements to your bidders about the overall project. Maybe you had to modify the job post or add some details; you can notify your potential bidders through the public message board. In addition, the bidders themselves can use the public message board.
Online contract work can be a huge benefit to your business. But it’s important to do your research on each service provider, and take your time in the process of hiring the right company for the job.
Tags: consulting, hiring, online contract work, outsourcing
Posted in online contract work | No Comments »
October 1st, 2009
The first thing we suggest to companies that want to utilize social media is to create a blog. It is becoming common now for small and large companies to have a blog attached to their main website. The advantages of having a company blog are numerous. Blogs are dynamic, while websites are static. Blogs are engaging and conversational while website pages tend to be more formal and they do not typically engage the user.
With the explosion of other social media, blogging has become stronger, not weaker. Now you can connect your Facebook Fan Page to your Twitter account, and your blog to both. The interconnectedness of all social media around your blog and company website is the definite trend.
But simply setting up a blog and making the occasional post will not gain much traffic to your website. Through trial and error, bloggers have learned the most effective ways to build traffic. I will share some of these tips and tricks now.
1. The more posts you make on a weekly basis, the more traffic you will get.
This is the hard and fast rule of blogging. Nothing is more predictable. The more you post, the more traffic you will receive. Granted, if the quality of your posts are poor, you may be better off making fewer, high quality posts. But in general, a steady stream of useful and interesting information will gain traffic to your blog/website.
2. Read blogs that are similar to yours and comment on them.
This is another fairly predictable way to attract attention to your blog. If your company blogs about local coupons and discounts, then discover some other blogs in this niche. When you comment on a blog, you leave your name and website. Most people click on the links to learn more about who made the comment. Not only will your comments attract the blogger whose blog you commented on, but also the readers of that specific blog. If the information on your site is similar, people will also be interested in your blog/website.
If you frequently comment on a handful of blogs, you may get to know the bloggers who run the sites. This can lead to link exchanges and other cross-promotion opportunities.
Lastly, reading blogs in the same niche as your company helps you to get to know the community. This community will turn out to be much more important than you originally thought. Business on the Internet differs in some significant ways from business in the “real world”. One difference is the huge importance of community. To get traffic, you have to be connected to a community. You have to know people with similar interests. Later comes “fans” and “followers”.
3. Use Keywords
This may seem obvious, but keywords are often used in the wrong ways. For example, when I first started blogging I used too many keywords. After you create a blog post, review the content and pick out two or three words that summarize the topics you cover. If you make a blog post about wonderful travel locations for fly-fishing, then make sure you make “fly-fishing” one of your keywords. Also use the exact location names as keywords. Your keywords should be repeated only four or five times in your post body, depending on length. Don’t try to trick Google by stuffing your posts with keywords because it won’t work. Lastly, make sure one of your keywords appears in your post title.
4. Social bookmark your posts
After you make a post, it may go unread for two or three days. The best thing to speed up the process by which somebody sees your post on the day you make it is to use social bookmarking. We suggest you set up an account on Twine, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, and possibly Digg. Every time you make a post, share your post on three or four of these social bookmarking sites. A couple things to keep in mind: The category or tags of your post is important. Make sure you list the most accurate category for your post. Also join groups on social bookmarking sites. Without joining groups, you may not have much of an influence. Reddit, specifically, has sub-categories of smaller Reddits, such as SEO, Art, Photography, Travel, share your post to these smaller categories rather than the main Reddit. Twine, too, is an excellent way to get traffic. Join twines, make contacts, and submit your posts to the appropriate categories.
Like social bookmarking, Twitter is an excellent way to boost the traffic to your blog. Every time you make a post, you can tweet it on your account. If you are curious about Twitter and want to learn more, try “Twitter Etiquette: Ask the Experts“.
Tags: keywords, social bookmarking, traffic
Posted in blogging | 1 Comment »
September 13th, 2009
While the debate has died down recently, about a month ago the Internet was abuzz with the discussion of free goods. The debate mainly came about as a result of Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Anderson is the editor of Wired magazine.
Discussion of the concept of Free on the Internet centered around the “freemium” model of Free, which I will elucidate in a moment; and the old media/new media controversy. The old media/new media controversy is basically where old media representatives such as Malcolm Gladwell from The New Yorker disparage the concept of Free, saying it won’t work and it’s cheating people, namely, hard-working journalists. The new media representatives respond by saying that it does work, many people are benefiting from it, and hard-working journalists will too!
The question of whether Free should or should not occur on the Internet is a moot point. Because it’s already occurring, and not only that, it happens to be the status quo. Most of what you see offered on the Internet as a service is based on the freemium model.
In the freemium model, there are two levels of service. The first level is a basic, free option. This can either be a trial version, or an ongoing free option. The second level is a subscription option, where you pay to receive more features (larger storage space, extra tools, etc.).
Flickr, the most popular photosharing website, uses the freemium model. For free, anyone can register an account, and upload photos to the server. The Pro Account, however, gives you unlimited uploads and storage, statistics, and various other features such as access to your original files. This costs $24.95 for one year.
The idea behind the freemium model is that the 5 or 10% of users who buy the subscription service essentially “pay for” everyone else. Flickr only needs 5 or 10% to break even (rough estimate); and then, Flickr can monetize in other ways, such as advertising.
You are probably reading this blog because you want to learn about how social media can help your business. The content we’re offering on this site is free, another example of freemium. As a consultant for Prechnology, I am paid to write these articles, but you are getting them for free.
If Prechnology decided to do away with the whole idea of having a blog and just sold our social media packages, what do you think would happen? Our clients would most likely go elsewhere for the information, and they would end up going elsewhere for the packages as well.
So the point I’m getting at is: Offer something free on your site. This can be free content, industry or niche-based free information like the Prechnology blog, or it can be a trial subscription or a free product.
Your free offering will attract people to your site, and that’s the important thing. Because before you can build a large consumer base on the Internet, you need an audience and you need traffic.
In an excellent article on freemium and freeconomics, Dan Wilson writes, “Once you have built that audience, you can deliver upsells via freemium models, you can monetize it via advertising and you can branch out into other services which are easier to monetize.”
You might be eager to get traffic to your site, but this is not going to happen until you entice people to return again and again. Free is one way to speed up the process. Check out my post on “The Truth about Social Media Marketing” to learn more about the bigger picture of social media development.
Tags: Chris Anderson, Fred Wilson, Free, freemium, social media marketing
Posted in freemium | No Comments »
September 1st, 2009
Link bait is essentially viral content placed on your website or blog. You can also place link bait on other sites. For example, you can create a viral YouTube video with a link to your company website at the bottom. What distinguishes link bait from other content is the intention. This is content that is meant to be reblogged, reposted, shared, and linked to.
Why would your company want to create link bait? The simple answer is traffic. You may find that the content your company is creating does not reach as wide of an audience as you would like. Hence, viral content or link bait. Spending some time to design a clever, humorous, or uber-clickable post can cause your name and your brand to be spread throughout the Internet.
Link-baiting is a double-edged sword, however. In order to make viral content, you need to do something different, something that stands out. Often in the process of creating something that stands out, you run the risk of negative attention. This happens a lot in the advertising world. A company will create an ad that achieves its goal of attracting attention, but the attention causes a backlash of criticism, offense, and scrutiny. To use a recent example, Burger King’s “It’ll Blow your Mind Away” ad. Everyone was talking about Burger King after this ad was launched. The ad appeared on thousands of sites and social media networks. But the viral content was not effective. People complained and Burger King’s image suffered.
So what is the best kind of link bait for your company?
There are a number of different types of link bait used on the Internet. The goal is always the same, to create viral content which in turns produces traffic back to your site. Depending on your position in a given industry, the size of your company, your company’s image, and its target audience, consider the following strategies:
1. Resource-driven link bait
Resource-driven link bait is a good, safe alternative to risque content. With resource-driven content, you are providing people with useful, aggregated information. This is a common strategy on the Internet. Think about what you or your company is an expert in, gather your known resources, and present them in a simple, easy-to-read format for readers.
After submitting a hundred or so press releases, I became somewhat of an expert on free press release submission sites. I was also aware of just how many sites there were out there and how confusing it could be to newcomers. I decided to create a post of the best free press release submission sites with a short description under each stating the site’s Page Rank and other relevant information. In addition, I linked to a helpful SEO press release tutorial. On Prechnology, I’ve created a similar post except for article submission sites.
Another type of resource-driven link bait is an interview. If you can find an expert in the industry to interview, then people will want to read it. Another strategy is to review services or products. By linking to and discussing a popular product or service, you may garner the attention of consumers, and possibly, a spokesperson from the company that created the product.
The top ten list, 50 Best Sites list, or some variation is a ubiquitous link bait strategy. Oftentimes, the longer the list, the more impressive. What people are really looking for is the quality of your choices. If you make a lists of the 70 Best Photoshop Tutorials, make sure you have reviewed more than 70 tutorials. Smashing Magazine can be considered an expert at list-making and much of their traffic results from the resource-driven link bait they create.
Here are two examples how you can even make link bait out of link bait techniques. Problogger’s “20 Linkbaiting Techniques” and Jim Westergreen’s list of link bait ideas.
2. Image/Video link bait
Perhaps the most effective viral content is in images or video. The reason for this is simple. Images and video produce immediate gratification. A viewer reads the comic, looks at the picture, or watches the short video and (hopefully) wants to immediately share it.
Important here is that the link bait does not overshadow your company. Make sure that a link to your company website or blog is apparent on the image or underneath it. Another concern, which was mentioned earlier, is that the image creates negative attention rather than positive attention.
Twitter comics are a good example of link bait. Posting a single panel comic about Twitter on Twitter is likely to spread. Webdesigner Depot’s “30 Funny Twitter Comics” is thus an example of both a resource-driven link bait and an image link bait.
A lot of start-ups will create a cute video tutorial of their site and post it on YouTube. Many of these clips are humorous and informative, but also ingenious marketing techniques. They tend to use stick figures with funny background music.
Search Engine Roundtable reports that Mingle2’s “How Dating my Ex was Like Playing Doom II on Nightmare Mode” received 4000 diggs and 1700 links. These types of comedic sketches/commercials are also common marketing strategies.
3. Trending topic
To ride the wave of a trending topic with link bait is often an art. Basically it requires you to spot a topic right before it becomes over-blogged about. You can either deliver the news first such as the release of an Apple product; or you can add a new angle on a trending topic that is already in the news. A combination of the resource-driven link bait and the trending topic link bait would be a compilation of news items. You can also refute the news, debunking a popular news story. (More on the news hook here)
4. Just cool
The “just cool” link bait is mainly an eye-popping, curious, or fascinating link. Futility Closet posted this mathematical conundrum:
0.999… is the same as 1. Not just very close, but precisely identical:
a = 0.999…
10a = 9.999…
10a – a = 9.999… – 0.999…
9a = 9
a = 1
There’s no trick here. It’s just a mathematical fact that most people find deeply counterintuitive.
To test out the the link bait, I tweeted the link to my 11,000 followers. Sure enough, within minutes, I had scores of people responding to me and retweeting the link. What is it about this mathematical conundrum that engages people? First, there is disbelief; and then a good number of people will try to figure it out. Some more people will then argue about it. The link creates an attraction and soon people are linking to it.
There are many examples. This hugely popular link “They Didn’t Study” continues to be an Internet hit year after year. Just imagine if your ran an education company what a link like this would do to draw attention to your name.
5. Creative Campaign
The creative campaign or contest involves getting people to take a certain action. In my post on the Prechnology blog “How do I Create a Facebook Page?” I talk about the social media campaign by Vitamin Water which centered around a fan page on Facebook and the poll question: “Which athlete is the NBA’s top player: Kobe Bryant or LeBron James?”
Vitamin Water made the decision to run this contest on Facebook versus their corporate site because of the built-in linkbating features on Facebook. According to Mashable journalist, Adam Ostrow:
- The page has social media features, such as a poll and built-in wall posting, which increases participation and involvement.
- The “fan” system of Facebook is viral. Once your friends become fans, their friends become fans, and so on.
By launching creative campaigns can expand your influence on the web, widen your audience, and attract new customers. Often it depends on the creativity and cleverness of the marketing strategy. Campaigns such as Vitamin Water’s always stand the chance of not catching on. It all depends on the idea, the execution, and the moment in time.
Tags: advertising, Burger King, link bait, linkbaiting
Posted in link bait | 1 Comment »
August 17th, 2009
We see SEO and SEM firms, social media marketing firms, firms that specialize in link building, firms that specialize in article syndication, and many other subsets of Internet marketing. To business customers who don’t know a lot about marketing on the Internet, this can lead to confusion and a real difficulty finding the right service provider.
To make matters even more complicating, every SEO firm has a different approach. This was bound to happen. There is so much new technology on the Web that naturally some firms are going to emphasize certain strategies over others. I use the SEO and social media marketing strategies that I’ve developed over the years and found most effective.
Some of these strategies include:
- Creating profiles on the 10 major social media sites
- Regularly using four or five social bookmarking sites
- Investigating niche social media sites
- Cultivating community on social media sites
To keep up with the new technologies, a social media expert is constantly trying out new tools, exploring new platforms, and also utilizing older networks they’ve learned how to mine for traffic. We are looking for what works the best in terms of viral marketing and exposure for a site.
Social media marketing is organic; it evolves over time. To give you an example, I have been submitting posts to StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site, for about two years. Only recently, however, have I begun to reap the benefits of my submissions. Now, when I submit a post to StumbleUpon, I am almost guaranteed to get traffic—and lots of it. For a couple days last week, I was receiving over 1,500 unique visitors to my site per day.
So how did I do it? Patience and dedication. You learn the best places to submit links for your specific content. You learn how to make viral content. You learn how to properly “tag” your submissions with labels that people can easily find. You also learn the importance of community cultivation. This means communicating with people on social media sites about their projects as well as yours, and sharing similar interests with them.
“Sharing” is the keyword in social media. Collectively, we act as filters. We direct people to the best content; the content that will interest them. We help each other find things.
Identify the niches on the Internet where your business topics are discussed. You can find these niches by running a keyword search on any social media site. Create a profile or many profiles, and start to engage people in your area of interest. Join groups, add comments, and write reviews of other people’s links and blog posts.
Your social media campaign will not happen over night. That is the truth. The good news is that once social media begins to work for you and your business, traffic will exceed your expectations. These services have been created to produce viral effects. Your submissions are at the whims of large numbers of people. You need to assimilate yourself into the social media environment before you can direct traffic to your sites, and promote your own content.
Learn how to create a social media Squidoo lens for your business
Tags: niche social media, social media, social media marketing, StumbleUpon
Posted in social media general | 3 Comments »
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 »
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 »
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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