This morning, word spread quickly of a legal letter from Intuit asking Mint.com (rival of Intuit’s Quicken) to clarify how they count the number of user they have, declaring that:

“While we do not wish to suggest that Mint.com is engaging in false advertising, the substantial difference in claimed user numbers over a short period time [from 600,000 to 800,000] is of some concern. As a result, we’re requesting that you provide us with the Substantiation and evidence that you rely upon to support the above reference claims… before February 6, 2009″

Of course, such a threatening sounding letter was eventually leaked to the public by TechCrunch. TechCrunch both released the entirety of Intuit’s letter with an article titled “Quicken Cannot Believe Mint Doing So Well; Sends Threat Letter,” where it sarcastically mocks Intuit:

Note that the letter says that Intuit doesn’t “wish to suggest that Mint is engaging in false advertising”, despite the fact that that was the entire purpose of the letter. Nice. [Emphasis Mine]

There was obviously a high level of negative fallout with nearly 400 blog postings (via Google Blog Search) covering Intuit’s letter appearing in a under 24 hours.

So how did Intuit respond?

How did Intuit Respond to their Mint.com Letter? What Are the Takeways?

1. Documents Will Be Leaked. Do You Have a Plan To Handle When It Happens? These days any document has the potential to be leaked and online; and when it does, it’ll spread quickly. Do you have a plant to respond for such contingencies? The threatening sounding letter from Intuit to Mint.com may well be “traditional legalese”, but once leaked to the public – it took a life of its own.
2. Be Ready to Respond to Negative Fallout Promptly and Multiple Channels I directly twittered Intuit (http://www.twitter.com/intuit) telling them that I thought they gave publicity for Mint.com at the expense of their brand. Within hours, Intuit responded to my tweet and others personally with a link of their response to TechCrunch’s article.

   

   

   Indeed, whenever a potential customer is reaching out and saying something about your brand – that’s an opportunity to address them and win them back. The fact that an Intuit representative replied back personally and promptly with an actual response meant that they knew it was an issue and were addressing it.

3. Respond Directly, Publicly, Personally…and Give Back When You CanThe founder [Both Mint.com and Intuit have informed it was actually Scott Gulbransen] of Intuit quickly responded to the TechCrunch article – not by releasing an official statement on some forgotten corporate blog, but by writing a clear, non-PR speak response directly on the same TechCrunch article. Some commenters felt that his response fell short, but Scott both apologized for the threatening sound of the letter and also disclosed their own membership numbers. So his response was also an apology and attempt to make amends by disclosing something about themselves.

Conclusion

It is important to remember that when asked about the “ROI of social media” that social media is not single platform, but is a term that covers many different websites – twitter to YouTube to Wikipedia – where people can share information. In some cases, social media websites can help support sales (for example, Dell made $1 million in sales via Twitter) and with others it being a forum for customer service and public relations.

In this case, Intuit’s active response on Twitter and the blog TechCrunch helped addressed negative brand and PR fallout. There are plenty of other cases invovling hard ROI numbers, which will be covered here later on.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

While there has been much discussion – including here – how “Social Media is a Conversation”, it is clear that marketers need more concrete and less theoretical lens to view Social Media. Basically, “how does this make me and my boss look good?”

This is Social Media. But which is PR? Or Marketing?

First, we need to cast off the idea of Social Media as some hippie “Joining the Conversation” thing. It’s more of like the behavior of users or a characteristic of a website. But to make it concrete let’s call Social Media a Platform, just like how the Internet is a general platforms from which you can conduct advertising. There are lots of channels/tactics within a platform.

Above is a fairly comprehensive chart of Social Media by Brian Solis, which defines all of the various components that make the Social Media Platform. Understanding the “Social Media Platform” is important, but we also need to start thinking about the next stage:

Social Media. I get it. But what does each Social Media channel do? And who should do it? What’s the goal and ROI?

Looking at the graph, there are only many channels but many ways it can correspond to different areas of advertising. For simplicity sake, let’s focus on Marketing, Public Relations, Customer Relations and Community Building – looks pretty limiting.

In the rest of the post, I’ve sketched out a basic model of how to approach 10 of the channels/tactics – document sharing, link baits to microblogging – but ultimately, you should do the following:

Print out a few copies of Brian Solis’s Social Media Prism chart, bring the PR, Customer Service, Marketing, and Evangelist folks. Go through each channel and brainstorm how it could apply to them and their goals.

To help you guys start, I’ve started jotting down a few thoughts below. There are plenty more Social Media channels to explore and more creativity ways to exploit opportunity in a way that gives you ROI and not just “joining the conversation.”

Social Media Channels: Which One? For What and Why?

1. Widgets on Facebook to iPhones to the Google Homepage
Marketing, Public Relations, Community Building

This is an easy one. Widgets are basically mini-applications so they’re capable of being anything. From sweepstakes, to viral marketing, to letting users get in touch with other users and providing instant reviews on services or products.

2. Blogging: Blog Outreach
Public Relations, Customer Relations, Marketing (SEO Focus)

Blog Outreach is connecting with bloggers to understand their feedback on a product or service, as well as, help spread news (usually via seeding viral content) and for my purposes – SEO. Blog Outreach is something I’ve done over at e-Storm for SEO purposes with some great results for the SEO campaign.

3. Document Sharing – Sharing Online Documents, Presentations
Thought Leadership, Branding

Document sharing communities like Slideshare.net (PowerPoint sharing website) is a perfect place to reach the B2B Audience – other business people who are looking for knowledge in specific areas, case studies, industry trends and presentations from conferences. One can find all sorts of material from Social Media/SEO/PPC presentation from yours truely to Morgan Stanley’s annual report on the Technology Industry.

There is also an SEO benefit as you can use leverage SlideShare.net’s authority to get your content ranked well. Your content will be under SlideShare.net, but it will still be your content in front of users in the top 10 search results.

3. Linkbait – Creating & Sharing Content to Encourage Viral Lift
Public Relations, Branding, Link Building for for SEO

Linkbait – creating content that will be virally picked up and discussed – is basically one step above “viral videos”. It is about creating viral content – videos, tools, content, photos etc – that will be talked about, Digged, Blogged about…and hopefully linked to. As you may know, the more links pointing to a website, the better the chances the website will rank well on Google. Heck even Google says Social Media is great for SEO.

4. Blog Community
Customer Relations (Developer Community/Brand Loyalty)

A few companies, such as Ugobe (former client), which creates a sophisticated dinosaur robot called the Pleo, has created a community for Pleo owners which allow them to exchange their Pleo dinosaur experience with each other through their own “Plogs” (basically, Pleo blogs).

A company that provides a product that customers will have a strong connection to (like Pleo owners treating their robot dinosaurs like real pets) would be an ideal environment for allow users to connect and share via an internal blogging community.

5. Blogging on Corporate Blogs
Customer Relations, Public Relations

The United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to Marriot CEO Bill Marriot now have blogs. Blog are officially the mainstream for interactive marketers and public relation folks. They perform as a non-traditional communication tool – SEC recently declared that you can make official financial statements on blogs – that goes beyond the stiffness of a press release. And more interestingly of all, people are generally allowed and encourages to leave comments, provide feedback, and link to them.

6. Microblogging
Customer Relations, Public Relations, Marketing

Microblogging services like Twitter are a fast paced version of a blog and chat room rolled up in one. As I’ve written on previously, Zappos, HR Block, and Downing Street (UK equivalent to the US White House) have effectively used Twitter as a way to not only “microblog” new happenings but interactive with the twitter community.

Payoffs can be measured as real ROI, as Dell made +$1 million in sales via Twitter, or in terms of branding and reputation where disgruntled customers can be readily and transparent addressed (See Comcast example on the New York Times).

7. Social Networks: Advertising
Marketing, Branding, Engagement

Putting display ads on Facebook is not a Social Media plan. And ditto for placing ads on blogs, that’s still just good old fashioned ads.

It is as innovative as putting a banner ad the iWon search engine in 1999 (You guys remember iWon, right?). While Social Networks are known for having horrible CTR, Facebook SocialAds and MySpace Hypertargeting at the best hope for marketers and those with shares in social networks.

However, Facebook’s Social Ads and other new forms of social network advertising do show signs of promise when well executed as part of an integrated campaign.

8. Social Networks: Engagement
Customer Relations, Public Relations, Marketing

This can be anything from having a Facebook Page that you actually make active or something like the Expedia campaign, which had the lovable Expedia Gnome leaving comments on MySpace users’ profiles.

9. Social Networks: Presence (Creating Profile, Fan Page)
Public Relations, Customer Relations

United States Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome have frequently updated Facebook profiles. The Gavin Newsome staff have used Gavin Newsome’s profile active with news on Mayor Newsome’s upcoming events, videos of recent talks and even updates on his status message (to reflect his position on relevant news stories).

10. Wiki Collaboration
Customer Relations (Developer Community)

Wiki can be an interesting way of “crowdsourcing” a company’s help and support page or at the very least augmenting. Central Desktop, a project management SaaS tool, is one company that allows its users to contribute guides on new ways to use Central Desktop.

Related posts:

1. Moving Beyond Asking “What is the ROI of Social Media?” Countless publications and blogs, including this blog, have been dedicated...
2. Fitting in Social Media Marketing within the Agency For the past few months, I’ve been rethinking what it...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Last week was a rough week for marketing and PR professionals in the blogosphere. Chris Anderson (Wire/Longtail), David Meerman and Marshall Kirkpatrick (Read/Write, TechCrunch) wrote critical posts to PR folks who are trying to reach out to bloggers. Chris even published a list of emails from PR people he’s blacklisting.

But what are the responsibilities and expectations of PR/Marketing Agencies and Blogggers?

While I am a marketer by profession, I am also a blogger. I’ve received plenty of horrible blog pitches, like the dreaded “Dear Website Owner” emails or even those completely misunderstanding who I am or who I work for. I’m right there beside with Chris, Marshall and others on this.

We bloggers embrace the long tail influence we have over traditional media, but we don’t like being on what looks like a “Press Release spam list”. Marketers and PR folks need to adapt to this. And as Bloggers, we’ll always be caught with horrible “Dear Site Owner” emails every once in while. It just shouldn’t be every blog pitch email.

As someone involved in e-Storm’s Social Media efforts, we spend time reading and targeting each blog we recommend our clients to contact. We build a list of bloggers along with a description of each, plus an “Approach & Messaging Recommendations” document for each blogger. Generally, these documents have to be approved both internally by e-Storm and externally by the client before any blogger outreach happens.

Bloggers: Help Educate us PR/Marketing on How to Do It Right

And to my fellow bloggers out there, instead of just being angry, write back and tell them what you’d prefer. Educate us marketers because in this ever changing Blogosphere, we’re all learning what it means to be a blogger, what is a blogger mindset and how can we reach out to bloggers relevantly.

Marketers and PR folks need to learn that the blogosphere is a community, not a place to send press releases to. Let’s show them by helping them join the community in a relevant and helpful way.

To those rightly annoyed bloggers, point us PR/Marketing flacks to the right direction:

• Emergence Media Blogger Relations Outreach Guidelines
• SHIFT Communications Blogging Guidelines
• Word of Mouth Marketing Association: 10 Principles for Ethical Contact by Marketers

I’ve also set-up a Wiki on Blogger Outreach, which is available here. Feel free to contribute as you wish and save bloggers from poorly targeted PR pitches and help PR/marketers from embarrassing themselves.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

• Overall Strategy
• Messaging and Approach
• Making the Connection: First Contact
• After the Review Blog Posting

The full article is on the Emergence-Media Wiki (seldom used admittedly) to encourage everyone to contribute ideas to the “Blog Outreach: How to Pitch Bloggers” article. Here are some excerpts:

Build Your Relationships: Recognize Them Publicly
Lots of companies may send “thank you’s” for reviewing their product (good or bad) on the blogger’s website. But how many create a “Blog Mentions” page on their corporate website (or blog)? Think beyond listing the generic press releases under your “Press Room” section. As they say, give some “link love” back to the blogger (regardless of the review).

Be Clear with Your Blogger: On Reviews, On Embargoes etc.
The big Microsoft Vista incident with the free Acer Laptops was due to the lack of clarity and consistency on what conditions were bloggers given the review units. Bloggers are like lack amateur journalists, they may not know exactly what you mean by an embargo or what a review unit is. Be clear and consistent – but in human language, not legalese. Bloggers will compare notes and see if they received different emails, they did this publicly with Microsoft Vista with embarrassing results.

Know the Landscape Part 1: Look Beyond the A-Listers
It’s one thing to know the A-List bloggers, its another to know what mid-tier blogs they read. Just like in regular PR, you may need to hit the mid-tier bloggers (who are read by the A-List bloggers) before you get covered by the big leagues. Don’t be fooled by looking only at Alexa data or Technorati rankings, see who links to them too.

Please see the entire “Blog Outreach: How to Pitch Bloggers” article at Emergence-Media Wiki (seldom used admittedly). Everyone is encouraged to contribute ideas appropriately.

Not sure how well this whole wiki thing will work out, but it’s an experiment I’m trying out.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Update: Fixed MS Word HTML issue. Thanks to Jake for letting me know.
Search Engine Optimization or Strategic Website Positioning?

Search marketing veterans have seen the shift of SEO tactics moving from keyword density and page title optimization to the leveraging of PR-like tactics to conduct link-building (building rankings by having others link to your website) and to now even more complex strategies. At this point is SEO still SEO or has it outgrown that name? Maybe it is time to look at the idea of “Strategic Website Positioning”?

The maturing of the SEO industry has resulted in many changes. The top four has been 1) the further integration of PR-ish tactics like “linkbaiting”; 2) the embrace of social media in social media marketing; 3) changing the metrics from rankings and to relevant traffic and conversion; and 4) thinking about usability and conversion optimization, not just search traffic generation.

All of these new changes will be unfamiliar to someone from the early days of SEO, which mostly concerned itself with placing important keyword on the webpages.

What Does Strategic Website Positioning Mean?

The Working Definition

The idea behind “Strategic Website Positioning” is not original. Businesses create websites with considerations of what the website should be to their targeted audience.

The idea of Strategic Website Positioning is to think of search marketing (organic SEO and PPC), social media marketing and website development as an integrated approach, by asking questions centered around:

• How is your website’s content, structure and usability fit with the intent of your audience?
• How does your website “fit” in how people search (one-box searches on Google/Yahoo, Technorati, Oodle, vertical search engines)?
• How is your website positioned in Social Media Community? How do you want to participate?

From this we can build further questions…

Community Positioning

• “What are similar people tagging (or perhaps tagging with similar words) – Del.icio.us and Google Search History” (SEOBook)
• “What are similar people reading? (Via My Yahoo! or Google Reader or MyBlogLog) – Graywolf recently highlighted how MyBlogLog can use your readers to show what community your site is in” (SEOBook)
• “What words are associated with your brand or site? What sites are associated with those words? What searcher intent is associated with those words? What else are they searching for?” (SEOBook)
• What Terms Are Your Competitors Using? On their website, on their copy, on their AdWords campaigns?

Content Building based on Community Positioning

Building on the above, but including:

• Content Funneling (See Emergence-Media on “Building Content for Branded and Non-Branded Search“)
  How is your website catering to your target audience in general product research, comparative shopping and purchasing mode? How can you be considered an authoritative source for each?
• What is the approach on new sources on online content like blogs and widgets?

Social Media Assessment

• How Visible are You in Social Media Websites?
  How “popular” are you online? Do reputation management? See how communities, blogs, reviews and del.icio.us describe your website?
• How do you want to Participate in Social Media Websites?
  Do video promotions? Community building? Virals? Podcasting?

Search Engine Positioning

• Getting on One-Box Search (See Google on Travel searches, Website Searches)
  Are you using Google Base to get listed on Google’s Real-Estate Seach?
• Getting on Vertical Search like Technorati, Oodle, Kayak, *Shopping Search Engines*
  Beyond the big search engines Google/Yahoo/MSN/Ask, what about the specialized vertical search engines?

Greater Marketing/MarComm/PR Integration

• Sharing “Keywords” Knowledge:
  Does some department have consumer studies on what words people use to describe your product?
• Integrating Offline Ads with Search:
  What’s your slogan, hook, that song playing in the background of your commercial. Is that integrated into your search strategy?

Conclusion: SEO Needs a Conceptual Reset and Reboot

I could go on and on, on the list above. They are not hard and fast categories, but they are the type of questions that need to be asked. They maybe best laid out in a mindmap (see Emergence Media’s SEO Mindmap from last year).

There are many folks trying to tackle what the new SEO exactly is. Todd Mailcoat has placed it forward as “New School SEO”, pointing to various other tactics that beyond traditional SEO: Social Media Marketing, Video Promotion, Community Participation et cetera. Aaron Wall has looked at the community (a more precise type of link authority and PageRank) as the next possible area where more search engines will determine relevancy.

Whatever it is, conceptual we need to rethink how we think of SEO. It’s not just about using WordTracker to do keyword research anymore, so our frame of thought has to change too. “Strategic Website Positioning” is an attempt to reset that thought. Once we figure what exactly SEO will be, there comes the next step: How do we explain it to our clients?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Part I discussed the following:

• Outlining Engagement Metrics (in a Dashboard Report too): Eric Peterson lays out in snapshots not only what his view of metrics would be, but also look like in a actual report (something other have yet to do).
• Calling for Holistic Measurement: Working with “buzz measurement” companies like BuzzMetrics is only half the battle, this needs to be combined with on-site analytics tools like WebTrends, WebSiteStory HBX/Visual Sciences and others.

On to Part II

Defining: Engagement Metrics v. Reputation Management

Words like “Engagement Metrics” and “Metric Management (as it applies online)” are evolving terms. For the sake of this discussion, I’d like to say they are different but overlapping.

• Engagement Metrics: A broad term to identify any data that measures how actively social media content is being use, where answering the question “how well-known is my Video-Sharing website?” proves more difficult than quantifying pageviews.
• Reputation Management: Reputation management needs most of the numbers from Engagement Metrics (and then some), but its obsessed with more traditional PR concerns: “What are people saying about my Video-Sharing website?” What is the Tone? Who is saying that? How can we influence/make the best of what is being said? This is harder to quantify, as it is asking for quality, vibrancy, and direction of the conversation. This is no longer really the realm of gather metrics, but rather deep analysis.

Defined by above, Engagement Metrics is far easier to define than Reputation Management, which requires far more understanding of the competitive landscape and marketing/pr/branding goals on a case-by-case basis.

Applying ROI to Social Media: Can Engagement Metrics Really Do This?

By separating Engagement Metrics v. Reputation Management, let’s focus on Engagement Metrics and its challenges in quantifying data.

In gauging Reputation Metrics, one major question for a company’s management is “How many people from a corporate blog, youtube video, widget are visiting a website and interacting (purchase, registration) or phoning the sales team?”

The value in answering this question is obvious. While the above goes beyond Engagement Metrics (as defined here), the boss that holds the marketing/pr budget will eventually asks this question. Social Media will have to answer to ROI.
Trying Inventive Ways of Tracking
But can we literally track a YouTube video about on “Brand X” Blueray DVD player all the way to a purchase? Sure there are some inventive ways: blogs/widgets/youtube videos displaying unique and trackable URLs, phone numbers and promotional codes to trace everything to a sale. But are they reliable and worth the trouble?

Limitations and Pitfalls
While there are cases where this may work, in most general cases it is not advisable nor practical (at least with current practices/technology):

• Sales Cycle can be long causing issues regarding short-term ROI v. long-term ROI (how long is long?).
• With so many ways for a company to be contacted, you cannot entirely rely on a simple – easily circumvented – tracking mechanism (a unique URL), when someone could search your website and find the corp. sales number.
• Metrics are needed to understand that out of 100 visitors who used the special codes, how many on average didn’t?
• Additionally, there maybe other parallel campaigns being conducted. Are searches for “Company ABC” going up because of the blog or video? Or because of massive banner campaign?

Assessing Success as a Online Marketing v. Online PR Person: Going for the Hybrid
Online Marketers are used to the ability to track everything to the dime – gathering data on how a banner or PPC campaign led to a whitepaper download, registration, or making a purchase. Social Media (at its current form) throws these expectations off balance.
Meanwhile, PR folks are used to more fluid metrics that while can be tangable – how many people came to an event or mentions in major media outlets – are not as “hard ROI” as an online marketers reports on for a PPC campaign for an online retailer, for example.

Since Social Media is online there is data to be tracked, however there are too many unknowns to pin down a “hard ROI”. A middle approach (between marketer and PR) is needed.

Here are some quick thoughts of what that would look like:

• Marketing: Getting a direct “Dollar Value” for Social Media ROI (Taking from Forrester):

• Assigning Dollar Value to various trackable Engagement Metrics
  (e.g.: press mentions archived on online media outlets v. cost for doing the same via other tactics, youtube views/cost of video vs. reach of television ad campaign/cost)

• Value of participating in a medium targeted audience are active in
• Brand building and awareness

Overall, we must seek to help understand and analyze Social Media using currently understood metrics, yet the “newness” and uniqueness of the medium requires us to approach and apply it differently and understand most importantly the limitations in metrics.

Personal Note

Please note that I myself am uncovering and researching where I stand on engagement metrics, so apologies for the lack of proper organization in this series of posts. I hope that you’ll be encouraged to participate and help shape the conversation in this discussion.

Related Links

• Jeremiah Owyang:
  Factiva Social Media Roundtable helps to answer “What should we measure”
• Steve Rubel:
  Forrester Creates a Model to Measure Blogging ROI

Related posts:

1. Fitting in Social Media Marketing within the Agency For the past few months, I’ve been rethinking what it...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Stowe Boy gives a rough (and somewhat cynical) description of SMR and asks one of the common question critics ask about SMR:

For those who have missed the idea, a social media press release is supposed to be a webbish/bloggish version of old timey press releases. These will incorporate elements of the now commonplance blog motif: links, tags, comments, and trackbacks, for example.

This all begs the question (which I raised early on in the evening): Why not just use blogs? Why do we need these so-called “social” press releases?

Brian Solis, a SMR supporter, goes further and reminds us of the qualitative goals of SMR:

The IDEA is to strip out all of the bullshit and hype from traditional mechanical, and useless press releases and rebuild it as a focused compilation of relevant facts, links, media and a subscription feed to help readers write, tell, and share a story their way (without having to sort through a sea of crap to find out what’s real, what’s canned, and what’s important.) This is what a good release should be anyway, regardless of trends and titles. Basically it’s the press release redux. It takes out what’s wrong with press releases and modernizes them into a usable format for journalists, bloggers, and individuals.

See an example of an Edelman Social Media Release in action here.

Todd Defren, principal at SHIFT Communications, was an early proponent (early/mid 2006) of the Social Media Release, followed quickly by Edelman in late 2006 with the release of StoryCrafter (a CMS for making SMRs). Chris Heuer, Brian Solis and others have been promoting a more open approach to Social Media Releases, including the use of the microformat hRelease.

Where’s the Metrics to Prove/Disprove SMR?
What I find curious about the whole debate over the merits of SMR is the lack of discussions regarding any data: Let’s Gather Some Engagement Metrics.

• How many people actually add a Social Media Release to Del.icio.us? Or Digg it?
• How many people clicked on the SMR Pictures or Media Section?
• How many people left comments on comment-enabled SMR?
• What does Technorati/Google tells us regarding track/backlinks for SMR? Are the numbers any different than the average “Old School” Press Release?

These are just the few metrics that should be readily available to any SMR ever released. Let’s see how much of the “social” aspects of SMR are being used by people.

As for qualitative aspect of SMR that Brian Solis has described, this is difficult to measure and indeed an aspect that can be applied to traditional Press Releases as well (as he has said himself). We can’t measure that, but if we find no one is using the new features of SMR (Del.icio.us, Media Links, Comments etc), this may cast some doubt over its effectiveness over traditional Press Releases.

Conclusion
Of course, the cynics will look at SMR as simply a Press Release with “Social Media Optimization” or simply “a bloggish Press Release”. But, I believe that SMR is a required evolution of the traditional Press Releases – for it to remain relevant and engaging to the public at large. And for that, Brian Solis, Chris Heuer, Todd Deffren and others are doing a great job in helping promote SMR and advance online PR.

I don’t believe in discounting SMR, but the question that Stowe Boyd asks “Why not just use blogs” is an important question to address. Maybe the answer depends on how the client wants to be positioned: fully open and cutting edge via blogs or partially open and more “traditional” via SMR?

But in any case, intelligent debate can only be done with evidence and data. Other wise, this debate is simply a mental/philosophical exercise. I’m a supporter of SMR, but if we want to debate SMR constructively let’s try to have some data to base our arguments.

So who is going to release the first report on the number of SMR Diggs, Del.icio.us and Trackbacks? Edelman? The SocialMediaRelease.org? Or maybe their critics like Strumpette?

Todd Defren has issued a “Quick Progress Report” on the early successes of SMR. Perhaps we need to follow-up with more data?

Links for Further Reading

• SHIFT Communications: “Social Media Press Release” Template
• Brian Solis: “Enough Already: Getting the Social Media Release All Wrong“
• PR Squared: “The Social Media News Release: A Quick Progress Report“
• Social Media Release
• Steve Edelman: “Edelman Debuts StoryCrafter Two-Way Press Release“
• Strumpette: “Mega PR Firm Releases “StoryMakerUpper 1.0“

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Quick Commentary

Steven Rubel recently proclaimed that there’s no such thing as Social Media because “in 2006 all media went social“. Throwing up RSS feeds and enabling comments – or SMOing articles in the Washington Post– does not make you newspaper a social media newspaper. That’s just retrofitting, like PDFing your brochure and placing it online and calling it a website. I’m siding with Karl Long on this one.

We have a long way to go before social media becomes a fundamental element of what it means to be on the web. One of the important factors in helping shaping “old media” to “social media”, will be in the new, evolving synergies between public relations and online marketing.

As PR agencies – even cutting edge ones like Edelman (See the Vista/Vista/Blog Issue) – struggle to come to terms with how to engage social media, PR must have a mindset of shift away from pushing material into engaging, learning and shaping the conversation more intimately. Remember, its less “Old School PR” or “Cluetrain Manifesto” but “How to Win Friends and Influence People“.

We must frame the shift from generally thinking of managing “Public Relations” (PR) to that of the more specific act of engaging in “Social Media Relationships.”

It is difference of degree, but not in kind. PR has always been about helping shape a positive image of a brand or product – but now the connections are more intimate and less amorphous than some vague “Public”.

Yes “Social Media Relations” is another yet another meme, but it serves an important cognitive shift. PR agencies need to revamp themselves as helping companies empower their own voice and orientation in the “Conversation” (again, excuse the meme). PR should not be contacting bloggers directly, PR agencies should educate their clients on how to do so as a normal marketing/pr procedure.

Attention! PR appears to be the first agency to use the term “Social Media Relations Agency” and surprisingly not many other have. Unlike other memes, I’m hoping we’re see this a little bit more as some PR agencies attempt to reinvent themselves in the Social Media area.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A study by Fotrune Interactive, a well-known SEM and Reputation Monitoring firm, has found that inbound link quality, the quality of the websites that link to your website, is the most important common factor for ranking well in Google, Yahoo and MSN (GYM).

These findings highlight the need for SEO teams to work and integrate with PR and Creative Agencies, to find creative ways to entice bloggers, Digg users and the general media to link to your website to help ensure high rankings across all search engines.

This highlights the strong and positive role PR campaigns, creative agencies and Word-of-Mouth (WOM) campaigns have in the general SEO effort. SEO is no longer just about “Keyword Research” and ensuring that the best keywords are in page titles and content; of course, keyword research is still essential but it not longer carries the only weight. (Of course, for some, it hasnt been for awhile but the proliferation of social media has made the number of links proliferate with ease.)
“Link building” – which includes traditional link builders and now PR and Creative Agencies – will have to be a critical component to a large SEO Strategy, especially for websites in a competitive space and with the budget/resources.
Introduction

Fortune Interactive, of Marketing Pilgrim fame, just did an upgrade to their tool SEMLogic, which instantly compare websites against keyphrases across the search engines, breaking them down by linking structure, content, keyword density etc into visual and actionable data.

As part of their study on the algorithmic differences among GYM (Google, Yahoo, MSN), Fortune ran a report focusing on the top 100 websites for the word “laptop”. Their findings were (taken from here):

• Inbound Link Quality is the most important factor across the board.
• Inbound Link Quantity is of least importance relatively among the off-page factors across the board.
• Achieving the coveted trifecta of ranking well across the search engines requires strong values in the two most important influential factors for each search engine.

Links Campaign and Creative/PR – Essential to SEO?

Fortune Interactive’s repot finds “inbound link quality”, having good websites link to you, as one of the key components to ranking well among Google, Yahoo and MSN. This highlights the increasingly important role of the “link campaign” vis-à-vis the traditional SEO role of “keyword research”, which supplies the title page recommendations and content building.

The surest way to bring quality websites to link to your website is to have strong content or “linkbait”, which entices everyone from bloggers to Digg users to the established media to link to you. Success in this area also helps of course in general public exposure.

Examples of PR/Creative Effect in SEO

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz touches on the PR/Creative influence in his article on GE’s marketing campaign called “Imagine at Work”. In conjuction with this, GE created a linkbait called “Imagination Cubed“, which lets people “draw” online with their friends. This is a fantastic app that their creative agency/team has come up with.
Thousands of blogs and websites have linked to the “Imagination Cubed” webpage, lifting the website to top rankings with over 23,000 links for the term “imagination”. (This, mind you, is a site all in Flash with little to no SEO-optimization on the website itself.)

Similarly, the online search travel site, FareCast, has lifted their rankings on Google via a PR effort – company profile and interviews – that has helped them have hundreds of websites link to them in a few weeks. More on that later on a future post, but the results were that FareCast (after going into public testing) were able to quickly reach top 20 on Google, in the very competitive field of online travel, specifically terms like “cheap airline tickets”.

Closing Notes

In a future post, I’ll discuss more on the need for SEO teams to work with creative and PR agencies, esp. on how social media and WOM will increasingly change the approach to SEO.

Related Links

• Emergnece Media: SEO Project Management
• Fortune Interactive: SEMLogic Research Series: Laptop
• MarketingPilgrim: Revealing Search Engine Algorithms
• SEOMoz: Even GE has Caught the Link-Baiting Bug

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Via Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion, eMarketer released a report stating that only 1.5% of the 200 companies on Forbes’ “Best Small Company” list have a blog, compared to 5.8% of the Fortune 500.

Quick Analysis

While eMarketer’s statistics are interesting, there are two issues to consider:

1. Resource-wise, larger companies can afford to blog, while smaller businesses are pushed for resources and may feel that resources spent on traditional advertising and marketing is more effective than blogging.
2. What the excerpt of this eMarketer report fails to states is if these large corp. blogs are genuinely embracing blogging with honesty, openness and transparency, or are they just hyped versions of press releases?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.