Online PR Campaign Planning: The C&M Fab Five Rough Guide

CATEGORIES: Papers   ///   07 Oct 2008
TAGS: content, Content Optimisation Agency, Content Optimization Agency, Keywords, Online PR Agency, PPC, Reputation Management, SEO, social media

Here at C&M we’ve racked up a fair number of years in the marketing game, and – despite the grey hairs now showing – we’re more excited than ever about the potential to create and execute wonderful, results-packed Online PR campaigns.

Of course, this hasn’t always been the case.  Before the web – and in particular the brave new world of web 2.0 – you needed extremely deep pockets if you hoped to move the needle.  Many of us would have sat in planning meetings a few years back wondering what the hell we were going to do to justify our fee or salary.

To do good PR used to mean having either the resources or the assets to convince reporters that you were ‘hot’ enough to write about for their magazine – and if you had neither, then it was probably best (and cheaper) to simply not turn up.

Today, this is far from the case.  Good PR today is Online PR, and good Online PR represents just about anything and everything you do on the web.

I’ve written about some of the fundamental differences between old PR and Online PR elsewhere, so won’t dwell on them here – suffice to say that any company with an ounce of ambition and a browser can make an impact right now through Online PR…

This, then, is C&M’s Rough Guide to planning an Online PR campaign.  We have FIVE rules for you, but before we dive in, we’d like to make the following points absolutely clear:

• Anyone can do it
• You don’t need to spend a fortune, but you do need to commit human resources to make an impact
• Everything is based on the publication of superior content
• You don’t necessarily need an agency to do it for you
• Online PR doesn’t really translate well to campaigns:  it’s a process and you’re either in or you’re out

If this sounds a little different than PR 1.0 to you, then great – so it should.  It’s also incredibly exciting and liberating.  So let’s crack on….

Online PR Rule 1:  Have Something to Say and Say it (Get Some Attitude!)

The first rule of Online PR is nobody talks about Online PR.  No, scrub that – bad joke.  The first rule is, in fact, make sure you do have something to talk about and then talk about it all of the time.

Think about this one for a minute.  In days gone by it was virtually impossible for any company of any size to say anything to its marketplace unless they’d just split the atom or landed a man on the moon.  PR 1.0 decreed that your main outlet for communication was a press release, and, as mentioned, it was only ever worth creating one if it was to have an audience.

(Not that this stopped us – I pity the poor reporters who used to (and still do) fence calls from young PR execs on the importance of the release of version 5.1.3 of Sprocket X!)

In other words, in the bad old days of PR, to talk to the world you needed a press release, a receptive reporter and a magazine willing to publish your story.  There were other ways, of course, like publishing your own magazine or advertising in the FT or on the TV, but these things tended to be out of reach for the majority of us.

Today, we have web sites, blogs, content management systems, and email tools, and it’s incredibly easy to publish our news, views and opinions.  We can cut out the middle man and go straight to the interweb, right!? So far, so obvious.  But reminding you how easy it is to publish is an important point to make, because to build an effective Online PR machine you need to adopt a new attitude.

This isn’t particularly simple because it’s behavioural.  The machine needs feeding, and the only way to do this is to throw off the shackles of PR 1.0 and to start publishing your stuff on a regular basis.

Instead of filter, edit, polish and then publish, your new mantra needs to be PUBLISH FIRST, THEN FILTER.  (Read Clay Shirky’s excellent new book ‘Here Comes Everybody’ for a snappy review of this trend.)

Don’t sit on your ideas, conversations and stories and expect to lay the occassional golden egg… Get some some new attitude.  Get your content out there.  The cost is zero and the upside is huge.  (And you don’t need to subcontract this if you don’t want to…)

More of the benefits below.  For now, here’s some publishing tools to help you spread your word easily and cost effectively…

Our Rough Guide to Online PR Publishing Tools

• Blogging Tools:  Wordpress, Blogger, Moveable Type
• Open Source Content Management Systems:  MySource Matrix (disclaimer, I’m an exec at Squiz!), Alfresco
• Micro-Blogging Tools:  Twitter, Pownce

Online PR Rule 2:  Help People to Find You

I sat through a meeting last year with a Hollywood Exec who had been asked to bring his wisdom and philosophy to the Online PR space.  His closing words were ‘In Space, Nobody Can Hear You Scream.‘  Now, despite his rants about production values and the spirit of Ben Hur, I left the meeting impressed.

His point was this:  all this new-fangled publishing is just posturing unless you can get people engaged with it.  The web is a big old space, and it’s easy to sink without trace.

Rough Guide Rule to Online PR number 2, is then, is to get out there and get yourself noticed.  How? Well, there are already a bunch of well trodden paths, ranging from paid-for (eg, Pay Per Click advertising) to more traditional PR-ish ways (eg, have an online magazine or influential blog write about you).  But these aren’t the most exciting because in our book they’re not the most cost-effective.  The best ways are free…

Here they are…

• Firstly, identify and participate in important blogs, magazines and forums.  This is simple and essential.  You ought to be keeping a running book on all of the most influential media (blogs or otherwise) in your space, and have someone dedicated to monitoring them and contributing to them by way of comment posts, contributed articles, responses to questions, posing questions and providing feedback to other participants.  In doing this you’ll build both awareness of you and your company and also some important link equity for your SEO.  More of this in a moment…
• Secondly, publish your stuff on platforms other than your own.  Issue your (now plentiful) press releases via online news hubs.  Submit your thinkpieces to article submission sites.  Maintain profiles on social media destinations like YouTube, Flickr, Viddler and Squidoo and publish your content assets on them.  All these activities will establish a footprint for you beyond your own backyard and will help to persuade influential people – prospects, partners, media, etc – to come and visit your site.

But the real payoff for feeding an Online PR machine with a steady flow of content is in search engine optimisation (SEO) – more of which comes next…

Our Rough Guide to Blog, Social Media and Buzz Monitoring Tools:  for identifying content and debate related to your brand…

• Google News Alerts
• Technorati Search
• Monitor This
• Social Scan
• Twitter Search

Our Rough Guide to Online PR Distribution Hubs and Article Submission Sites: for propagating your content on sites other than your own…

• PitchEngine
• FastPitch
• ClickPress
• Sane PR
• PR Log
• e-articles

Our Rough Guide to Social Media Sites:  for maintaining a profile and posting your content…

• YouTube
• Flickr
• Viddler
• Squidoo
• SlideShare
• Scribd

Online PR Rule 3:  Help Search Engines to Help People Find You (an SEO Primer)

When it comes to thinking about Online PR, the Godzilla in the room is SEO.  Put simply, everything you publish online, in whatever format and on whatever platform, is Google-juice.

Depending on your objectives, you might want to think content publishing first and SEO second, but whichever way you look at it, you can’t ignore the fact that your Google PageRank is 100% dependant on your publishing efforts.

I’ve written here about the mechanics of SEO, how to do it properly and why your content publishing efforts are so important, so I’ll lay off the science here.  But if you don’t know much about the subject, just remember this:  your ability to rank well in Google is wholly dependant on your content being ultra-high quality, ultra-equipped with keywords and ultra-accessible to web crawlers.

As such, your Online PR efforts have two audiences:  the first is made of flesh and blood and the second is made of lines of code.

So, whether you’re publishing content on your site, participating in forums, commenting on blogs, or publishing articles on user generated content sites, your aim is to please the God of Search as well as a human audience. And this where the Online PR and Content and Search Optimisation smarts come in…

Put simply, your goal in SEO is to publish compelling content that will i) encourage people to create backlinks to you in their web sites, blogs and social bookmarking tools, and ii) encourage Google to crawl your site extensively and to index it in relation to certain keywords.

‘Compelling content’ in this sense means a) findable, b) readable and c) indexable.  Here’s how you make it so…

a) Online PR and Content Findability:  AKA Keyword Research

Your first task when planning your content is to make it findable.

Your goal is to engage with ‘high value,’ ‘prospective’ customer traffic.  ‘High value’ means visitors who are engaged with your product/services set and are actively looking for help.  ‘Prospective’ means visitors who are new, or relatively new to you/your site and are looking to you as a potential vendor.

In simple terms, you need to structure your on- and off-site content using the words that your audience is using to search the web – so that you improve your chances of featuring on the first couple of pages of Google in relation to a given search query.

For example, if you’re in the business of IPTV and your audience is searching around your backyard using phrases like ‘IPTV set top boxes,’ then you need to align the language of your content with these terms.

There are an abundance of tools to help you identify these ‘keyword markets.‘  Many of them are free.  I’ve already created a list of great Keyword tools (and related things) for you here….

In the meantime, check out this recent blog post if you’d like to learn more about the art of effective keyword discovery and how important (but easy!) it is…

Our Rough Guide to Keyword Research Tools

• Google Suggest:  tells you average searches per month on any given search term
• WordTracker:  like Google Suggest but pulls independent data from multiple sources, and can therefore be considered more comprehensive and neutral.  Free version provides data from a small pool of searches; paid for version is extensive.

b) Online PR and Content Readability:  AKA Publish the Good Stuff

Your second task is to take these keywords and apply them to content that’s worthy of being read – by both humans and crawlers.  In simple terms, this is all about researching your market, or having a driving purpose to base your content around.

Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet here.  Your content is either going to be hot or it’s not.  Much of this will depend on your target audiences and how receptive they are to your overriding Online PR objectives, but here’s a few ideas to help things fly:

• Go back to basics and read those journalism manuals.  Creative headlines are what sells copy.  (Co-incidently, they’re also what will show up on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) as and when you get indexed.)  And don’t forget to include those keywords!
• In terms of subject matter, a good dose of Money, Sex and Ambition also helps – but if you’re out of these, then think of creative ways to frame your content.  Whether you’re producing text-based stuff, or audio or video, lists are always a good idea because they signal a snappy purpose and state clearly the claims you’ll be making on a reader’s time:  for example, ‘Five Rules for….’, ‘A Ten Minute Guide to….,’ and ‘Three Reasons Why X Will Fail.’
• Write concise excerpts (meta descriptions) for your content – including your keywords at the beginning.  This ‘meta’ content will feature prominently in the SERPs (….more on this below)
• Try to align your content with the search and keyword zeitgeist.  Use Google’s free Keyword tools (like Google Suggest) to get a read on the areas of interest that surround your keyword markets, and Google Trends to see if you can gain any play with the most popular search topics of the day.  For example, you might have a great research report to promote and you may be confident of pick up, but aligning its title with a hot keyword can earn you extra readership and linkage because it will ‘pop’ that little bit more:  eg ‘Fifty Consumer Trends in IPTV Adoption:  Why Christina Aguilera On Demand Just Won’t Cut It’

c) Online PR and Content Indexability:  AKA Content Optimisation

Finally, having established your keyword set and some marketable content ideas, you have to have laser-like focus on making the content as accessible and indexible as possible – via some strict Content Optimisation work.

Here’s what you need to do to make your content more Google-friendly:

• Keep your page titles brief – around 70 characters or less, and use your keywords within them
• Edit each page’s metadata descriptions. Use around 160 characters and ensure your keywords fature prominently.
• Include a rich variety of keywords in the page’s keyword metadata field.  Whilst this used to be extremely important, it’s not so much any more…. but you ought to do it as a matter of good practice.
• Use keywords as part of your navigation labeling wherever possible. Also use them (sensibly) in important on-page functional items like buttons, pull quotes, maps, and other such eye candy.

In addition, you should apply the following principles to your on-page content:

• Make your content chunky – use header tags to split it into bite-sized paragraphs that are easy for crawlers and humans alike to read and understand. (ie, header, para, space; header, para, space, etc.)
• Use keywords in your headers wherever possible, and wherever it adds value to the process of scanning or skimming the page.
• Create as many internal links in the page as possible, whilst still retaining a (human) reader’s focus. Use keywords in the descriptive link anchor text (if you’re using a half decent CMS, then you ought to get prompted for this).
• Create as many external links as possible. Use the same approach to anchor text as described above.
• If you’re blogging, or using a CMS that uses blog-style principles (and if your front end can accommodate them) then use categories and tags for your posts/pages wherever possible, and try to infuse some keywords in there whenever you can.
• Put your most important content at the top of the page. By important I mean the stuff that’s full of useful keywords, headings, and links. Save the waffle for later in the page. (Like humans, crawlers get bored easily.)
• Think of your page as a hierarchy of content. In fact, think like a robot in a hurry. Big, important words and concepts go at the top of the page in big important heading styles. Weave linkage into these areas wherever you can, and try to ensure that this linkage reinforces your big keywords in its anchor text.

If you’d like to learn more about effective Content Optimisation tactics, then check out this recent blog post – it contains a bunch of practical information on the whys and wherefores.

Online PR Rule 4:  Help People to Help Others Find You

OK, so you’ve created some great content and you’ve optimised it to help humans and search engines find it, but it’s not time for a tea break just yet.

A further consideration is Online PR ‘enablement.‘  How easy have you made it for other people to spread the word on your behalf?  Unlike PR 1.0, good Online PR is extremely scalable because it exploits the network effects of the web.

A few years ago, notions of ‘scalability’ and ‘network effects’ were tied to a practise called ‘buzz (or viral) marketing,’ which, by and large, involved dreaming up humorous video shorts and emailing them to a large list of random people. Then we discovered Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, and thought the smart thing to do was to dream up humorous video shorts and give them to ‘influential’ people who’d enjoy passing them on to other people on your behalf.

Both efforts were half-baked and not particularly empathetic.  But they did prepare our thinking in a positive way for the new world to come:  Web 2.0 and the FaceBook crowd.

Social Networks are fascinating things.  They give an online home to people with common interests.  If you own a community of followers (eg, your magazine subscribers) or can encourage one (eg, around a business or charitable campaign) then you should start exploring them right now.

In terms of Online PR, social networking platforms are superb tools for encouraging people to engage with you and others with similar needs and/or ideas.  An old school example is the forum. Squillions of these things exist on the web, and many of them will deal with your industry.  As mentioned before, our advice is to get in amongst them and start participating….

But when it comes to building your own, or building apps and widgets that sit on a third party platform, we recommend you think carefully before diving in.  Online PR through Social Media is very different to PR 1.0.

For instance, there’s a difference between using web forums to ‘pitch’ ideas to influential people and using them to participate in conversations which may influence other people.  The former involves persuading an influencer, and the latter involves being an influencer and helping people to connect with your ideas and services.

In our book, Social Networking platforms – and social media in general – serve a far better purpose as tools for participating and facilitating communications activities than for ‘pitching’ your ideas.

A good example is Barack Obama’s brilliantly executed electoral Online PR campaign..  This is big time.  His web site uses the best of the web -  a social networking platform, ‘MyBO’, a Twitter feed, etc -  to help people to enable other people to spread the word and get engaged.  He didn’t just use the web for pitching himself (which is what, by comparison, Hilary Clinton, seemed to do -  use the web as a soap box).

So how does this apply to you and your business?  Well, you can start thinking about creating platforms, tools and content that are designed to be taken up and used by interested parties – staff, customers, partners, etc – for engaging with other parts of the web, or for helping them conduct their business more effectively.

This can be done at both the micro level and the macro level.  Here’s some ideas….

Online PR Micro-Facilitation

• Make your content easy to link to and/or embed in other people’s sites.  For example, rather than solely hosting and branding your own video, think of the benefit of using YouTube as well:  aside from giving you another potential audience, YouTube outputs code snippets which allow people to feature your content on their web sites.  The same goes for images on Flickr, presentation material with SlideShare, and so on…
• Make it easier and attractive for people to pass on your content via embedded ‘email a friend’ forms.
• Make it easy to bookmark your content on social bookmarking sites by including aggregation tools within your content, like ‘AddThis‘.  (In turn, these social bookmarking sites will make your content more available to other people.)
• Render your content assets in a ‘Widget’ format, so that others can access it and feature it on their own sites as (for example) a sidebar feature.  There are now a ton of interesting widget-ization services available, many of which are free and do the work for you if you’re creating simple tools:  see WidgetBox, for example.
• If you can find the right angle, create more sophisticated widgets or applications to feature on other Social Networking platforms.  For example, there’s been great work done lately by the NSPCC to help donations through FaceBook.

Online PR Macro-Facilitation

• Create a ‘user generated’ FAQ section or forum for your site, or create a profile via a hosted service like Get Satisfaction.  Allow your customers and partners to engage directly with you and others on support issues.
• Create your own Social Networking platform for specific activities via hosted tools like Ning, or other Open Source social networking tools.  Good applications for Social Networking environments include:  events management (allow people to meet and greet online); education or training (host your coursework in an interactive space and have people mark it up, amend and improve it); host your fan-base (if you’re a rock star, or have any following of note!); best practise hubs (share your tips, tricks and insights in information-hungry or ‘expert’ environments)

The above examples show you how easy it is to co-opt other people into your Online PR efforts.  It’s not a rocket science activity, but one that does need to be treated sensibly.  One mistake to avoid is the ‘Build it and They Will Come’ mentality of many early Social Media marketing efforts.

Just because you’re a brand or you have an audience doesn’t mean that people will care about your new networking widget.  The most successful applications of Social Networking for Online PR tend to be those that are focused and designed to support a specific activity or application – eg, events support, customer support, and the like.

Online PR Rule 5:  Your Reputation will be SafeGuarded by Your New-Found Attitude

As mentioned above, good Online PR requires a different attitude.  Publish then filter is the way forward, rather than polish, polish and then publish.

In many respects, Online PR is a volume game.  The more great content you publish, and the more platforms you publish it to, the better your SEO will be and the more scalable your efforts will become.

Whilst this is a reductive view, it nonetheless speaks strongly to one aspect of PR that’s even more sensitive in the online environment than it used to be:  Reputation Management.

On the web, the idea that yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper simply doesn’t exist.  The web is more or less an indelible environment.  What’s published today remains published tomorrow, and will be forever findable via the links that are built up around it.  Indeed, search engine algorithms are built on this premise!

So, when it comes to Reputation Management, aside from monitoring what’s being said and published about you, your job is twofold:

1. Don’t publish stupid things that may come back to haunt you (think twice and edit your content sensibly before firing off that angry blog post), and…
2. Publish as much great stuff as you can, encourage good Online PR karma, and have as many pages host your content and/or link to you as possible in a positive way.

The second point is the most important here.  What we’re talking about is an Online PR insurance policy of sorts, so that when the crap does hit the fan, the weight of your positive footprint outweighs that of your negative.  In other words, if you’ve published enough good stuff, and have built some serious SEO equity around this, then this ought to see you through the bad times… in the sense that Google searches on your brand name are more likely to return the good results than the bad.

Hence, Reputation Management becomes a case of ‘may the best content win’….

Our Rough Guide to Reputation Measurement Tools:

• Google News Alerts: get alerts on breaking news containing your brand/keywords
• Technorati Search: a Google search for the blog world
• Blogpulse: another Google-like blog search tool that allows you to track brand ‘conversations’ via graphs
• Monitor This: get a huge variety of RSS feeds on specific keywords in one place
• Social Scan: monitor how popular your site is on common Social Media sites
• Twitter Search: monitor micro-blogging discussions about you in real time

Conclusion

By way of a summary…

Online PR is everything that you communicate online.  Specifically, Online PR is an attitude that requires you to publish more high quality content, more of the time in a way that’s sensitive to Google and to customers, using tactics that make it easy and attractive for other people to wage your campaigns for you.  It’s a continual process to adopt – in particular because these new publishing habits will protect you from storms when bad weather kicks in.

Measurement also matters of course, but we’ll save that for another paper sometime soon.

The key thing to remember in all of this is that effective Online PR can be free and easy to plan and execute, and that the field is open to companies of every shape and size.

So, no more reading…. go play!

 

CATEGORIES: Online PR Agency Resources, Papers   ///   07 Oct 2008
TAGS: content, Content Optimisation Agency, Content Optimization Agency, Keywords, Online PR Agency, PPC, Reputation Management, SEO, social media