High-Tech PR Blog >> Beyond the Hype

3 ways to leverage Google's new blog search

One the areas I invest a lot of self-learning time around social media and online marketing is understanding (as best I can) Google's algorithm.  Doing so is half the battle for social media success. Despite the prevailing wisdom that Google is super secret about its algorithm, it does leave good clues and SEO bloggers make good detectives.  

The most recent breadcrumb was left within its most recent "This week in search" roundup.  Google updated its Blog Search to make it a much better resource for finding more than just individual blog posts about a topic query, but a blog itself.  This is shown in the following screen shot, which I generated based upon a search on "high-tech pr" from the main Google search page, then clicking on "Blogs" in the sidebar.

What this shows is a new section at the top called "Related blogs about "high-tech PR" and a list of links to the homepages of three blogs, ours included.  Below that are links to individual posts related to the same search query, with a recent post by Don Jennings included in the results.  

Clicking on the "Related blogs about high-tech pr" pulls up an expanded listing of just the homepages of related blogs.

What this means for you 

As we typically do here, I want to offer three takeaways from these changes in practical terms based upon how you can leverage these changes to Google blog search now. We are here to help.

Use Google blog search to find bloggers worth linking to.  A blog is a two-way street.  The best way to grow traffic and influence is to pull in bloggers with similar interests through reacting and responding to their opinions and linking to them in the process.  This change in Google blog search makes it much more useful to find the bloggers and subscribe to them.

An efficient way to do this is to get to the blog homepage search based upon the path described above and then searching on different terms from there.  The blogs listed in the first few pages are ones that are most relevant and influential on that specific topic.  What's nice about this new search is how targeted you can get with your search term to find bloggers on niche topics.

Search on your market/product category to determine where you rank.  This can be done from the blog homepage search page that you arrive at when following the path described above.  If your blog is not on the first three pages of results, it's time to review and tweak the SEO settings and options provided by your blog CMS, such as the meta description, meta keywords and blog title.  Does it include those keywords for which you want to rank highly?

Just as it is important for your corporate web site to rank highly in regular search results, it will be equally important for your blog to rank high for more people to find it, link to it and use it as a source of information

Consider where else to strategically add keywords. SEO blogger Bill Slawski suggests that Google might be looking at information such as feeds, blogger bios, post titles and post content to determine the ranking of results for the blog homepage searches.  Based upon my own testing using various keywords, it does appear to me that the search snippets (the result summary presented for each link) Google generates uses keywords from these various sources to determine relevance.

This requires even more diligent SEO considerations in ongoing blog writing, as well as a review of the elements of the blog that heretofore we might have thought was not important, like a bio page or field.

If you've tried the new Google blog search, what are your takeaways?

A Hat Tip To Spur Discussion

 A while back, Paul Roberts, a PR practitioner and all around good Twitterer (@paulrobertspar), asked an open-ended question, “Which delivers more value, PR agencies or in-house PR departments?" in a blog he wrote here.  In the interest of full disclosure I can’t vouch for Paul outside Twitter, but based on his profile I feel like we’d have more than a few things in common aside from PR and social media, including (bad) golf.  I would have thought the question he asked would spur a great deal of discussion. 
 
Surprisingly, crickets began to chirp. 
 
It’s funny because I’ve been fortunate to work with a number of great PR people over the years; great internal folks, great agency folks and great independent folks, and have spent the better part of seven years talking through this debate with a few of my favorite storage PR people. 
 
The reason many may not jump right into the discussion is they may mistakenly think there’s only one right answer to the question.  Agency or internal.  However, what has made my seven year long discussion so lively with one storage PR practitioner in particular is he often jokes with me, “I wish I only did PR.”  He often mentions how his focus is applied across multiple disciplines, including: comms, marketing, customer relations, social media relations, employee relations, and media and analyst relations. In any given day, he may wear many of those "hats," some of which could be considered classic public relations.  
 
Many times, especially with small-to-emerging companies, PR professionals wear more than just one hat -- traditional PR is only one of them. That speaks more to the evolving role of PR and those of us who love doing it more than anything else.  Wearing many hats is not new to agency PR practitioners, as it’s required attire in much of the work we do.  The only difference is it’s often done for more than one company. What I see more than anything is it’s never going to be an either/or answer. There is value in each role (agency and internal) and, ultimately, success usually comes when both are collaborating, working together and executing as a closely, integrated team. And, in the digital age we work in, transparency and authenticity extends between roles as well. 
 
So, I’d suggest revisiting the debate in the interest of spurring discussion, which hat is most important?

Sometimes it doesn’t take much to do a corporate blog

 

Many of us at LP&P were talking about the recent blog post by the team at JetBlue.  If you haven’t read it, you should.  It's here for reference.   

Mostly because it’s a good approach at saying no comment but in a tactful and appropriate way.  What struck many of us was the way the comments were being used as a way to connect to the community but also have best practices discussed in such an appropriate manner.  It may not always be easy to do in all industries but it serves as a reminder on how sometimes you don’t have to say much in a blog to make an impact.

So, nice job JetBlue.  It's nice to see PR handled so well (especially through social media).

Is Forbes playing catch-up or doing something new?

We've been following the changes at Forbes.com as another gauge on the evolution of journalism.  They are coming quickly because of the appointment earlier this year of Lewis DVorkin as editorial director of Forbes.com.

Jessica Sutera recently weighed in on the first of DVorkin's major moves to open Forbes to guest blog posts outside of their regular staff of paid freelancers and contributors.  While we said that it is merely the latest in the slow transition of traditional media properties to open up its audience to more viewpoints in a crowdsourced/community based model, time will tell how successful it is.

The latest change was first reported by Business Insider on Monday regarding the fact that every reporter would have his/her own blog on a revamped Wordpress-based network.  The new network was supposed to go live on Tuesday afternoon, but didn't officially until yesterday with DVorkin's unveiling post.

Today, Forbes takes yet another bold step forward, knowing the world demands still more from its media industry. We are soft launching (yes, that means bugs) a blogging platform that puts news — and what I like to call “Entrepreneurial Journalism” — at the center of social media. It’s just the first step in our plans to open up our digital and print platforms to content creators, consumers and marketers alike. The platform was initially developed by True/Slant, a start-up company that Forbes Media invested in 2008 and purchased just two months ago. I was its founder and CEO.

Catch-up or something new?

Based upon the description above and what we see on the new site, it's hard for me to see anything distinctly innovative.  DVorkin makes it clear that there's more to come in September, but for now the highlight is a site with a cleaner, more readable and more social-oriented design.  As for the nugget in Business Insider that every reporter would have their own blog, that doesn't appear to be true yet, as the content is segmented by topic/industry vs. by individual journalist.  That is the same approach taken by most other business publications and other popular online blog networks.

DVorkin goes on to detail how the Forbes 400 issue in September will be a revamped print product with a "Web sensibility." The melding of print and online has been a constant experiment by the media for at least three years now, first attempted by BusinessWeek before being sold to Bloomberg and more recently by the likes of Esquire with augmented reality codes and Sports Illustrated with MMS symbols that returned videos of the swimsuit models.

I'll reserve final judgment until more of the Forbes changes are rolled out, but for now, it merely seems like the latest of one, long industry experiment.

What do you think the most innovative part of this experiment has been?

What do Old Spice and Google have in common?

It's day 2 of the Old Spice Guy social media campaign, with more video responses to the brand's followers on all forms of social networks.  As of this writing, Old Spice has posted over 170 videos between 15 and 50 seconds in length that are, in effect, personalized commercials.  The writing for each one is just as hilarious as the original TV commercials.  In addition to responding to everyday consumers, Old Spice smartly targeted responses to large brands, social media personalities and celebrities with big followings.

Here is Old Spice Guy's response to Starbucks' question:

 

The video response aspect to this campaign obviously is critical given that it allowed Old Spice to fully utilize the talent and brand personality brought to life by actor Isaiah Mustafa.  In my opinion, this is a social media tactic that is extremely underutilized.  The idea of responding to questions from your community via video is powerful because it comes across as highly personalized and more engaging because of the format.

In a more relevant business example, Google does this very well within its Webmaster Central community.  It has a channel on YouTube, on which Google's Matt Cutts responds to the questions posed by webmasters and online marketers in its various forums that it feels have broad applicability and relevance to the community at large.  Following is today's response:

As mentioned above, these types of responses are much more dynamic and engaging because of the form they take.  By publishing them as YouTube videos, they are highly portable, allowing community members that benefit from the answers to share them in numerous ways, including publishing to a blog, posting to their Facebook news feeds, or sending links via e-mail.  This contributes to making the community more engaged with the company and with each other, and shows the company as highly personalized in its communications.

I would expect that we'll now see more companies utilize this tactic as part of their social media communications and CRM efforts.  

Do you have other good examples to share?

Exhibit A why social media and sanitized information don't mix

Over the last few weeks, the passion for the World Cup has been palpable, even in this country, which is not as soccer mad as the rest of the world.  People who normally crowd around the television in our company's break room for major golf tournaments or significant playoff games in other sports were glued to the set to watch many of the matches.  

The incredible fervor of the international football fans in this country for the US Men's National Team's games during the World Cup make it very clear how much the world's most popular sport has to potential to take hold in the U.S., even if it will still be dwarfed by the interest in American football, basketball, and baseball.  I've certainly seen this over the past 15 years as my family has supported our local Major League Soccer Team, the New England Revolution, which plays at Gillette Stadium (which most people will recognize as the home of the New England Patriots, not the New England Revolution.)

The same organization owns both franchises and clearly favors the more popular one, although the soccer management team has made more efforts lately to use social media to engage with its fans.  One of my colleagues and fellow Revolution season ticket holder, Andrew Karl, pointed out to me their new blog on the Revolution web site which attempts to have the head of player personnel (and former player) Mike Burns answer the questions fans have posed about the team's dismal record to date, the crazy number of injuries (including a nearly two year absence of star Taylor Twellman), and the seeming lack of investment in stronger players that can make us competitive in this league.  

In his most recent post, Burns provides very carefully sanitized answers to the tough questions these passionate and frustrated fans have been asking.  It's clear that these answers were parsed so carefully that they contain virtually no real information.  Andrew pointed out to me that within two days of the post, there were 60 comments to date, most of which were negative due to the lack of real information.  If anything, it seems this attempt to engage with the fans turned off more than it turned on.  Here's an example of one of the more recent comments:

"Disappointed Revs Fan Says:
July 8th, 2010 at 6:03 pm

The fans are speaking and demonstrating our passion for the club. Hopefully management is listening so positive change can happen. We all want this team to succeed so the ball is in your court. Show us you care as much as we do so we can move forward collectively and once again be proud to support this club.
Go Revs."

As Andrew Karl put so well when he sent this to me, "You need to do more than engage your audience.  You need to engage them with good, compelling content.  This is an example of how an engaged fan base will simply not accept this brand of bologna."

It's a good lesson for anyone who is trying to use more direct channels like blogs to engage with their customers.  It's possible to build tremendous loyalty with your customers by connecting with them in the right way and truly giving them information and answers to their questions.  If you're not ready or willing to do both of these, however, the direct connection isn't a help and may actually be a hindrance.

If the New England Revolution front office and Mike Burns are smart about this, they will recognize that this large outpouring of frustration from knowledgeable and passionate fans -- combined with the broader interest sparked by an exciting World Cup -- is something they need to tap into with real information and a firm commitment to improve the team and let the fans know this is in the works.  Otherwise, they are confirming some of the commenters' assertions that the soccer team is only a way for Gillette Stadium -- and the surrounding Patriot Place shopping area -- to get more usage when the Patriots are not in season.  

If you agree to be transparent, you need to say something.

What the King James spectacle teaches us about publicity, communications and image

LeBron James' over-hyped, overblown, over-analyzed and ultimately over done free agency signing saga has treated us to a fascinating lesson in the power of celebrity, publicity, communications and image. 

As the most celebrated free agent in the history of sports, LeBron and his handlers knew that his choice would be be huge news.  The question they faced was how did they want to manage it?  Ultimately they chose to play it out like a combination of The Bachelor, with teams and fan bases publicly wooing him with incredible deals and public displays of affection, and an Apple product launch, keeping "The Decision" a secret until was revealed in prime time on an ESPN special.  

From my vantage point, team LeBron got an A in hype creation and coverage, but a D at best in message delivery and perception. 

In choosing to go to Miami, LeBron and his team knew that there would be negative repercussions.  Leaving any team creates bad feelings, leaving your home town team after failing to win a single championship to go to another where it will be easier to do so will look and feel traitorous to some.  See this letter from Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert to the fans to get a taste of this.   

What Team LeBron under estimated was the additional negative fallout that has been heaped upon LeBron about the process itself.  For many, it has all been just too much, sending a message that has led many to view him as overly narcissistic, caring more about the LeBron brand than being seen as someone committed to winning and even sacrificing to do so.  And that's too bad because what is somewhat lost in all of this is that LeBron is taking less money to go to Miami for what he sees is a greater chance to win.  Unfortunately, he failed to communicate his choice in a way that would at least begin to soften the feelings of anger, hurt, rejection and loss from the fans who loved him the most, those in Cleveland.

In concert with his decision, LeBron launched his official new web site and Twitter handle, @kingjames.  But incredibly, he has failed to use these channels to ensure the effective delivery of his message and counteract the negative fallout.  The site itself contains no content.  There, he should have at least posted a video or a letter explaining his decision and thanking his fans for understanding why he felt he had to make this move.  The Twitter handle has only five tweets as of the Friday morning following the ESPN show, including a request to submit questions, which he promised to answer last night. I guess LeBron and his team are too busy partying down on South Beach to get back to the 375,000 fans he picked up in a couple of days to provide those answers.

The King James Image Runs Aground

What is sad in all of this is that up to this point LeBron had done a great job managing his image.  From the age of 13, he's been pursued, promoted and profiled like no other athlete, perhaps with the exception of Tiger Woods.  Until "The Decision", he had navigated the tricky waters of sports celebrity remarkably well, but with this event he ran aground and it will take some work to get The King James ship righted and cruising through calmer waters.

In and interesting juxtaposition to LeBron's signing, Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder, announced that he agreed to a 5-year extension with the team.  The NBA's leading scorer and 2008 Rookie of the Year, Durant arguably will be the most important player in the NBA over the next decade along with LeBron.  But unlike LeBron, Durant chose a much different communications strategy to get the news of his signing out.  He simply put the news out through his twitter page.  A long time user of twitter with 13,000 tweets under his belt and 200,000+ followers, Durant has received high praise from many fans and the media for how he handled his signing compared to LeBron. 

These events have shown how much the world of communications has changed.  Yet they also remind us that sometimes you can have too much of a good thing and that often less can be more.  

Tell me what you think.  Did LeBron's brand managers miscalculate? How long will it take for his image to get back on solid ground?

What Google, Viacom and Prince tell us about the Web in 2010

 

The Hollywood Reporter said it best:   "The Google geeks have beaten Hollywood chic."

The article went on to describe the clear message in federal judge Stanton's ruling in favor of Google, which had been sued for $1B in damages by Viacom over perceived copyright infringement on its YouTube subsidiary: 

When user-generated video sites implement reasonable takedown procedures, they are shielded from infringement lawsuits based on the copyrighted content that users upload.

'If a service provider knows of specific instances of infringement, the provider must promptly remove the infringing material,' Stanton wrote in the opinion. 'If not, the burden is on the owner to identify the infringement.'

Wired's coverage of the decision views this as "a boon for internet freedom, especially as it applies to search engines, video-hosting companies, picture-hosting services like Flickr, social-networking sites like Facebook and micro-blogging services such as Twitter. But it will make it all the more difficult for rights holders to protect their works."

Propagation of the hive mind

The decision certainly reflects how rapidly the way business is conducted has changed since the suit was filed in 2007.  In that respect, it feels like a good thing for continued freedom of creating and sharing content online.  But I also can understand Viacom's statements (referring to internal emails) that YouTube knowingly used copyrighted material to build their following and their business value and only policed this when their hands were slapped.  Clearly that will be the basis of Viacom's planned appeal, as the New York Times reported:

'Copyright protection is essential to the survival of creative industry,' Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s general counsel, wrote in a blog post. Mr. Fricklas said that before YouTube put in place a filtering mechanism to more easily detect copyright infringement, the company had built itself on pirated material and sold itself to Google for $1.65 billion.

'YouTube and Google stole hundreds of thousands of video clips from artists and content creators, including Viacom, building a substantial business that was sold for billions of dollars,' Mr. Fricklas said. Legal experts said that the ruling blessed YouTube’s practices for dealing with copyrighted material, as well as those of many other sites that handle user-generated content in a similar fashion.

One of my younger colleagues, Zack Daschofsky, pointed out the decision favoring Google to me, noting in an e-mail: 

This ruling is less about Google specifically and more about the propagation of the hive mind that marks the internet, and, to a lesser extent, my generation.  YouTube is simply one of the first incarnations of the everyday person being able to post their own ideas, parodies and, yes, even copyrighted material.  The question for artists now is not 'who can we sue to make money,' (like the music industry had done over and over again in recent years), but how will the market adapt to incorporate this new mentality.  

We have to face it: people will be illegally downloading movies and music from now on.  Many artists like OK GO and Radiohead have adapted by realizing the way to make money off of performances, merchandising, etc.  Radiohead recently gained notoriety by giving away their music on the internet and OK GO releases music videos on YouTube.  So as someone who has grown up with this mentality, Viacom represents the old business-model that wants to be belligerent instead of adapting to new services such as Hulu.  This ruling is not saying that stealing copyrighted material is morally acceptable, as much as a wake-up call that this is the new means of proliferation.

And judging by the reaction to Prince's declaration that the "Internet is over", this debate will not end anytime soon.  I can see both sides of the coin on this one, although watching my own teens and young adults participating in the inevitable "collective hive mind" Zack describes is leaning me toward Google on this one.   What do you think?

What does the TechCrunch-Forbes spat mean for the future of journalism?

By now, we know all too well that journalism has changed and evolved by leaps and bounds in recent years with the advent of blogs, Twitter feeds and the like. We know how to approach reporters differently than we would even just a year or two ago. This is nothing new. 

But what is new is the way editors are approaching content. Journalists on staff are stretched so thin -- covering multiple beats that span different technologies, business segments, etc. (This is an issue in and of itself, but that's a post for another time...) Given how tightly and leanly publishing houses run today vs. years' past, editors are being forced to think differently -- as in, well beyond their on-staff journalists to freelancers and contributors...and (*gasp*) to vendors.

Yes, the dreaded "v" word.

While contributed content and bylined articles have long been a mainstay within technology and vertical trades, very rarely, if at all, has this extended to mainstream business publications.

Until recently.

The TechCrunch-Forbes Spat

Cue TechCrunch's scathing critique of Forbes' new editor Lewis Dvorkin and his decision to open Forbes to guest blog posts outside of their regular staff of paid freelancers and contributors. Paul Carr's view is that this decision is the death of Forbes:

Not only will this new breed of hacks add thousands of pages of self-promotional, unedited (Forbes simply doesn’t have the resources to monitor thousands of contributors) drivel to Forbes.com but, by lowering the barrier to entry to anyone with a keyboard, the publication will also scare away those top tier contributors – captains of industry, statesmen and the like – who are prepared to pen a free article for Forbes just for the kudos that comes from being asked.

My view? This isn't quite as scary as TechCrunch is portraying it. If Carr's fear is that Forbes literally is going to allow any Joe Schmoe off the streets post content to Forbes.com, he's wrong. From recent experience placing one of our clients' experts here as a guest blogger, Forbes' editorial team does indeed review each guest blog that is submitted, editing the content as needed (for accuracy and neutrality, only) to fit within Forbes' editorial standards. So - his point that "anyone with a keyboard" will be published on Forbes.com doesn't hold weight.

The Editorial Standards Debate

The bigger issue that Carr raises, though, is this: is this the new advent of journalism? The "decentralized journalism" approach - one, large body of journalists versus a small, highly centralized body of journalists? And if so, what does this mean for editorial standards going forward?

While I'd agree that editorial standards are at potential risk for lowered standards if more business publications allow for a certain level of 'citizen journalism' than in previous years without proper editorial standards put into in place, I certainly don't agree that this is the death of journalism as we know it (or of Forbes in this case). This is just another step in what has become an entirely new journalistic style. Quite honestly, I find it interesting that TechCrunch - a blog, of all things - is finding fault with Forbes, a traditional business publication by my definition, for opening up the Kimono to guest bloggers. Isn't this very shift from traditional media and traditional journalism to the more open, web 2.0 approach what's made TechCrunch the influential powerhouse that it is today? 

What do you think?  Is this just another case of TechCrunch being quick to slam old line media properties or does its critique have merit?

Traversing the mobile marketing generation gap

I attended a meeting recently of a large group of very bright people who shared ideas, thoughts, products and suggestions for how communicators and marketers need to incorporate mobile devices into their marketing programs.  The attendees included some technology specialists and a broader group of practitioners who are using technology, but haven't lived and breathed it over the years in their work.  The demographic slanted toward the more experienced, shall we say, which made the overall dynamics in the room interesting for someone like me who likes to read between the lines of most events I attend.

There seemed to me to be a serious divide in the group regarding comfort with this emerging world of mobile marketing.  It was evident in one panel discussion in particular.  I divided the panelsts into three categories:

1. The Young Smug (YS) group -- These represented technologies (let's face it, they are "apps") that support mobile marketing or companies that offer mobile devices.  Their expressions and demeanor seemed to suggest they were bored with the questions about this, as mobile marketing and their approach to it already is pervasive and mission critical.   "Get on board or get out of the way" was the main impression I took from their comments.
2. The Old Anxious (OA) group -- These people are not necessarily old (by my relaxed standards), but definitely are not using all of the latest and greatest tools and technologies today.  Their expressions and discussion reflected a combination of great excitement about this whole new channel to market to customers and tremendous fear that this is completely new territory for them they are terrified they won't be able to master.
3. The Old Skeptics (OS) group -- This group is already in the thick of the pressure to adapt and change many aspects of marketing, adopting new channels and approaches, but isn't in awe of the latest and greatest approaches.  They are applying the same skepticism and need for research they always have applied to any approach that requires investment -- does it really work and where's the ROI?  (I'll admit I'm in this group.)

I didn't see another group I'm hoping will emerge -- the Young Evangelists (YE's).  These experts in this new field/channel will promote it and educate the masses about it without making them feel inadequate if they don't already know the lingo.  I believe they are out there, just as they were out there in the early days of every new market shift.  They just were not at this particular meeting.

In the long run, it's important to be open to all new approaches to marketing and communications, but not to automatically shift to the latest shiny new thing until it has been evaluated based on your market and your ultimate customer base.  It also needs to be part of an overall integrated strategy rather than the new approach that erases and replaces all former programs and techniques.

I will certainly be watching the news and my Twitter feed and RSS reader as the discussion continues and I will let you know if the YE's are emerging and the OAs are starting to feel less anxious.  

Where do you fit in on the spectrum?