As if things weren't already bad enough for the PR industry

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Merchants of DeathZap2it reports that NBC is developing a television series pilot based on “Thank You for Smoking,” the movie adaptation of Christopher Buckley’s novel.

For those who missed it, the movie/novel’s protagonist, Nick Naylor, is a PR spokesman/lobbyist for Big Tobacco. He consorts with fellow “Merchants of Death” who represent the gun and alcohol lobbies. While ultimately Naylor emerges with a vestige of integrity, the overall context portrays PR at its worst: amoral, facile and mercenary.

If this one gets picked up for the prime time season, PR practitioners everywhere should get used to friends failing to return telephone calls and neighbours’ kids refusing to come out and play with their children.

A desperate blogger's plea for help

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Well, it seems that every few months, I get very busy at work and fail to post for a few days. And when I do, I find it hard to get started again. Just nothing to say.

Thank you HughSo, I’d like your help. If you’re still subscribed to my feed after the past week of silence, I’d really appreciate your suggestions about what is interesting in the PR blogosphere right now. Please point me to the best posts from other PR/marketing blogs during the last week.

I’ll get started by commenting on other people’s posts. Then, I hope I’ll again develop the itch to write about things on my own blog.

I need inspiration. Help me, please!

*Thank you to Hugh MacLeod for the “cartoon on the back of a business card.” I think it’s pretty appropriate to my current predicament.

CaseCamp: Now in Second Life

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CaseCamp Second Life

Word today that the next CaseCamp will be held in Second Life.

Throughout 2006, marketers in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver have come together at CaseCamps to share some of their best work and to exchange advice on how it could be made even better.

The concept is simple. A marketer has 15 minutes to present a case study with a maximum of eight slides. Then the audience spends fifteen minutes discussing the case, asking questions and offering comments.

Bryan Person talks about how the background to this initiatve in a dedicated episode of his New Comm Road podcast. Kate Trgovac, C.C. Champman, and Eli Singer, the founder of CaseCamp, are the other organizers of this event, which is being hosted at Crayonville.

If you’re interested in experiencing the Second Life CaseCamp, you can register at the CaseCamp Wiki.

Getting the Most from Your Website

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Eric Hagborg is a man with a mission. He wants companies to make their websites work for them. And he told Ottawa CaseCamp how he does this.

What makes a strong corporate Website?

  • Design is the first thing that people judge your website on.
  • Second, is it relevant to what they are looking for?
  • Does the navigation scheme help them to find the content they want once they’ve arrived at your Website?

How can you support these things?

  • Qualify your visitors as they come to the Website. Feed them information in small doses. Start off with basic information. If they want more, provide them with additional layers of information.
  • Accommodate all kinds of learners. Balance text, graphics, pictures, graphs, and other kinds of information being provided.
  • Demonstrate the value up front.

How can you do this?

  • Start with a professional designer.
  • Build in User-centric navigation. Don’t focus on yourself. Focus on the needs of your visitors. And design your navigation scheme to respond to their needs. You’ll need to research the needs of your visitors. But this is a worthwhile investment.
  • Ensure your content is concise and succinct. You’re not writing a novel.
  • Build in lots of supporting graphics.

Eric illustrated the effectiveness of this approach by citing the experience of his client,  ipMonitor to dramatically increase visitor retention and conversions on its website. Following a reworking of their corporate Website, they increased visitor retention by 59% and increased conversions by 128%

Pretty good results. And a pretty good presentation from a guy who knows his business.

Alec Saunders Wows CaseCamp Ottawa

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VOIP wunderblogger Alec Saunders wowed the inaugural CaseCamp Ottawa with a boffo presentation on how he has used his blog to promote the profile and credibility of his company, Iotum.

He started with three benefits to corporate blogging:

  • Thought leadership. Trying to magnify a point of view and thought and to get other people to pay attention to it.
  • To try to get communities to grow around your product. A blog is a fabulous tool for creating a conversation around your product and your company. Microsoft has done an extraordinarily good job with this.
  • Pure visibility. A blog is a way to create more visibility for your company, if properly tied to your corporate Website.

After twelve months of working on his site, Alec’s blog is generating over 184,000 visits a month. He likens this to the equivalent of a small magazine. He ensures that this generates traffic for the Iotum corporate site by crosslinking regularly to the Iotum site.

Why does this work? In a nutshell:

  • First because blogs are optimized for search engines.
  • Second, as you post good content, a community of like-minded individuals will begin join your conversation and link to you. Alec has built up over 23,000 links from other blogs to his site – generating great Google juice.

What do you have to do to be a good blogger?

  • Write frequently. Every day. At least once. Better twice or more.
  • Participate in “the conversation.” Find where the conversation to your market exists. Read those blogs. Comment on them.
  • Write meaty posts. Don’t waste people’s time with a series of one lines. You must generate posts with interesting things.
  • Ask for link love. If you’ve written something good, write to your community, tell them about it and ask them to join the converstion.
  • Ping. Make sure that your blog software is pinging the search engines each time you post.
  • Use your blogroll to generate links and community to the people who are part of your community.

And just as importantly, Optimize for Google:

  • Optimize your pagecount with WordPress.
  • Use a Google Sitemap. Make it easy for Google to find and index your site.
  • Give your posts titles. Interesting titles draw visitors.
  • Give em GOOD titles. Good titles draw even more visitors. Make it interesting.
  • Link and Trackback: Be part of the community and feel the love come back.
  • Get a top level domain: Don’t bury your content with an obscure domain.
  • Tag, tag, tag. Help people to find your content through linking.

Alec closed off his presentation by citing his post on the Voice 2.0 Manifesto. In the past twelve months, 1.6 million posts have been indexed by Google on Voice 2.0 – a topic that Alec coined. Clearly, this guy is onto something good.

Other presenters included:  Ian Graham on competitive intelligence; Mitch Brisebois’ on marketing software as a service and Eric Hagborg on how his company, Axionic, helped a client to dramatically increase visitor retention and conversions on its website.

About 40 people attended this first Ottawa CaseCamp. It appeared that most were drawn from web design firms. A much different crowd and a much different atmosphere from the Toronto CaseCamp, which has a much stronger advertising and marketing flavour to it.

Congratulations to Peter Childs for the initiative in launching this in Ottawa.

Michael lets the cat out of the bag…

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Michael O'Connor ClarkeMichael O’Connor Clarke has posted on his blog that he will be joining Thornley Fallis tomorrow.

Whoopee!

We’ve been sitting on this news for several weeks as Michael worked his way through the process of obtaining his Canadian work permit. But now he’s official and it’s official.

Michael, we’re really looking forward to seeing you walk through the door tomorrow morning. And I’m sure that you’ll be greeted by a set of thousand watt smiles. Now, let’s have lots of fun with this social media thing!

Can you see the future of blogging?

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Matt Mullenweg and Liz Lawley closed out the Blog Business Summit with a look ahead to The Future of Blogging: Tools and Trends.

Liz Lawley:

Transparent functionality will be built into all tools. The easy integration of photos, videos, books, audio and collections that is offered in Vox, launched yesterday by SixApart, represents the new standard.

Liz also looks for a trend to Low Overhead Blogging: tools that enable you to easily add information into your blog.  An early example of this type of tool is ShoZu, which enables you to easily move videos, photos and music while you are on the go.

The idea of Global Input will be hugely important. The ability to input from a mobile device. She points to Microsoft Aura! as the type of tool that will support this.

Selective Sharing will become an essential function. Sharing based on user defined groups. This also relates to Selective Publishing. As more people blog, they will demand a tool that enables them to selectively publish to one or another of their blogs.

Socially Filtered Search, the ability for me to filter my search results through my social network. When I am searching, I care more about what the opinion leaders in my space or my network think that I care about the universe as a whole. We need tools that let us build our own network for this purpose. And early entry into this space is the “Add me to your network” badge on del.icio.us.

Matt Mullenweg:

Blogging technology was developed ten years ago. What is different today is that there is a mass audience that is using and reading them.

It’s not about the technology. It’s about the audience. And with the larger audience, we are increasing the opportunities to publish.

Before, the publishing Internet was restricted to 1%. Now, more people are able to join in.

And this expanding audience and subset of authors will shape the future.

Discussion:

Liz Lawley: I predict that within five years the word blog will become as irrelevant as the word homepage has become. This will simply be a part of what we do.

Dave Taylor: The future of the web is conversation and social networking. This will not be tied to any single tool.

Matt Mullenweg: If we are successful, in five years you won’t know what WordPress. It’s elements will be incorporated in all platforms and their operation will be invisible to the user.

And the final word on design goes to ZeFrank.

Blogging and SEO Tips from the Pros

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Following his keynote, John Battelle returned for a panel with Tris Hussey and Dave Taylor on Blogging and SEO Strategies.

Dave Taylor kicked off the the presentation with some tips:

  • Keyword research pays dividends. Use tools like WordTracker, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Google AdWords.
  • Keyword density: Be sure to use your keyword periodically (although not unnaturally frequently) in a post.
  • The Secret to inbound links? The way to get inbound links is to give outbound links.

SEO Best Practices.

  • Good titles. The headline of the entry should also be the title in your browser window. Put the title of the individual entry first ahead of the blog name.
  • Good headlines: Make them active and catchy.
  • Reasonable Keyword Density
  • Occasionally emphasize a keyword with bold or italics. This will reinforce the importance of that word or phrase.
  • Good category names. Do keyword research on your category names to find terms that people look for most often.

A great place to learn how to do this is on Google’s Webmaster Central.

Is it worthwhile to include keywords in URLs? Notice that when you do a search, if the term is located in the URL it will be highlighted.

Two useful tests to determine that you are showing up in search engines is to type into the google search bar “site:[your domain]” and “link:[your domain]”.

Persistence is also a virtue from the perspective of the search engines. So, when beginning a new blog, recognize that you must blog for a sustained period of time before the search engines will start to rank you.

By installing code from HitTail, you can track the keywords that people search in coming to your page.

Blogs, search and the Changing Media Landscape

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John Battelle delivered the Friday afternoon keynote address on Blogs, Search and the Changing Media Landscape.

“Why am I standing in front of you? I went to Berkeley ;-)” The story: Wired. Hotwired. Industry Standard. The Standard. The 4th. quarter of 2000 – out of a job. Back to Berkeley. The Search. Searchblog. Web 2.0 Conference. Federated Media Publishing.

The Internaet Economy is the third wave of tech and culture.

  • First wave: Digitize the Back Office. The C:_ command prompt. Only a few people touched the technology.
  • Second Wave: Digitize the front office. The PC. A lot more people touched technology and a lot more money came into it.
  • Third Wave: Digitize Customers. Google. Touches everyone.

Search is still in its infancy. We use the command prompt/search bar. But the big difference is that we can enter plain language. And that’s a big thing.

Web 2.0 principles:

  • The web is a platform
  • The architecture of participation: Companies understand that it is smart to let their customers help them make their business better. The web can be a platform to make that happen.
  • Lightweight business models: Many companies were developing new things, but they weren’t trying to do it all by themselves. For example, up until recently, Google News had only 17 employees.
  • The Long Tail: These companies were harvesting new value that was being created by the Web.

Search rules.

  • Search drives Web 2.0 businesses.
  • Our culture’s point of inquiry, the spade with which we turn the web’s soil, artifact of a new culture. Our search histories can be saved and mined and handed down.
  • A new reality for all forms of tradition business. Paid search is the first true leveraging of the database of intentions.

When it comes to marketing, search has provided an entirely new catchment point for marketing. We declare our intent in the search box. Then search organizes the data and presents it to us. In the old media days, we would buy commercial space on programs/media drawing a demographic. Now, with search we can buy keywords – expressions of intent. Intent drives content.

Search drives content to social media sites … where consumers expect all participatns to understand the mores of those environments. And they expect businesses to know what they want.

Marketing becomes a dialogue, not a dictation of one to another.

Traditional media and marketing is ruled by distribution: if you get that, you get attention. Now, attention is not controlled by distributors, it’s controlled by the consumer. There are now new centers of attention: search and social media platforms.

Content is once again king, and the landing page is queen. All businesses must join the Point-to Economy (links = votes = attention).

The promise of the web is the ability to know who you customers are and what they want and then draw them into converation. This requires business to think differently about retrn on investment. Marketing is about more than satisfying demand. It’s also about creating it. And how do you measure that?

New advertising campaigns must recognize all of these factors and break out of the old mindset (no more dinosaurs, Microsoft!)