Engage in PR

UPDATED AT END OF POST

As I’ve been discussing the past week, I’ve been putting together some materials for clients and prospects so that they can understand the concept of social media in general and blogging in particular. The Wall Street Journal has an article, “In Search of Traffic”, that discusses some of the points I’m bringing up with people. The piece focuses on building site traffic for small businesses, but many of the points pertain to any company.

The article describes how companies should “Get lots of links”, “Be the expert”, and “Think More Narrowly”. These thoughts should be used for the entire site, but they certainly transcend over to the blog and how a corporate blog can help drive site traffic, in turn helping achieve business goals (more leads, investors, employee retention…).

Right now one of the points I make in my presentation is:

Is this too aggressive; presumptuous; off the mark? Assuming that you have gone through the precursor of determining if a blog is the right tool for a company (VERY important), I believe that a solid blogging program will be the most cost effective communications tool a company can use.

UPDATE (12:17pm): Shel Holtz has a post that sheds more light on this topic:

A couple weeks back, the Economist Intelligence Unit reported the results of a study that revealed 80% of companies believe the range of technologies that fall under the Web 2.0 label can lead to improvements in their businesses. Since then, a couple companies have announced significant initiatives.

/kff

Caught the show about Twitter from On Point. Scoble was on the show, as was Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter. If you haven’t gotten into Twitter their a lot of good points made about the power of Twitter and what it may mean. Also check out how Todd Defren used Twitter recently.

/kff

Funny Will Ferrel video. Now this may be offensive to some folks (foul language from a 4-yr old), and as we learned this week 80% of blogs are now offensive.

Have a terrific weekend and congrats to my ‘rents, celebrating 35 years of wedded bliss!

PLEASE NOTE: I’m in the midst of moving my blog over to www.engageinpr.com. Right now you are reading it at blog.engageinpr.com or you were pushed there from the old hosted Blogspot URL.

Everything will still be up, but in the background I’m working on a new template and blog structure. At that point there will be a new RSS feed, but until now your old one will work.

Yesterday we had our uproar over the PR Week 3.0 hype. Today the response from PR Week EIC Julia Hood. I caught the response first through Brian Solis’ blog and his comment on Julia’s post.

The last part of Julia’s post is a good summation and she lists some of the sites that had an opinion:

So that’s the rationale. Public Relations 2.0 was simply not far enough - the industry has quite suddenly found itself facing a refreshingly high set of expectations from clients and the public alike.

Opinions re: 3.0 can be found here.

I wanted to respond to Julia’s post and then add it here as well. I kept it short and sweet since Brian really beat me to the punch and said much of what I would have wanted to say (he’s fast!):

I second the kudos Julia, great to read the post and the rationale for the 3.0 moniker.

I still have trouble believing we are in the ‘third age’ of PR, particularly if 2.0 was the second stage. From my day-to-day work I would say the majority of folks are still not using social media, digital tools, and ‘transparent communications’ techniques. It is getting better every day, however we are only in the midst of the second age of PR where we are finally catching up with how to best use technology, many of which have just been finalized during the past 24 months.

When will we move past this moment? I don’t know…wish I did. All I can contribute is my opinion from the work I and the people I work with do everyday.

I still think we are better off discussing the best ways to employ PR 2.0 techniques rather than push into another stage that is a ways off. That way we can meet those high expectations that are now being demand of us all.

All of that being said, this is a great debate to be having. I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Definitely make sure you go and read the post and be sure to continue this conversation, it’s important!

/kff

I’ve talked about my Twitter experiment in the past and my ideas of how to use Twitter as a comms tool. Today I did a quick take of my Google Analytics for this blog and wanted to share.

January 1st through March 28th = 805 unique visitors or 9.25/day

March 29th through April 25th = 354 unique visitors or 12.6/day

Now check out this graph showing that in the month of April 5.31% of my visitors came from Twitter.com. I have to infer that some of the increase in daily visitors can be directly related to expanding my audience using Twitter. But I also must acknowledge the role that Google plays in driving visitors to the site, and therefore the direct impact of good content that ranks high with keywords.

The reason I bring this up is that today I’m having a conversation with a client concerning a new blog initiative they are undertaking. It is a very exciting program because this company’s CEO has some really fantastic opinions and thoughts. For the meeting I put together a “Blogging 101″ deck that I’m going to use, including a Top Ten Tips. After we share it with the client I will share it here for your thoughts.

/kff