As of April 2011, Twitter’s search API handles 1.6 BILLION queries per day. Twitter fields nine times more search queries per second than it does tweets. And Twitter averages 2,200 tweets per second. People are constantly watching hashtags and complex search queries that can help narrow down audiences, key words and trends. Millions of people routinely scour social networks seeking peer-generated content. They are real-time discovery engines just as much as they are social network. The challenge for us as content strategists is: How do you get your content found? By optimizing your content for social networks, you can take advantage of the possible benefits that they offer to search rankings.

Top five ways to optimize for search

The influence of social networks on SEO is clear. But how can communications pros capitalize on the networks we have worked so hard to build for our clients? Based on the wisdom of those in the SEO industry and the research I’ve done, I’d like to recommend the following five tactics to help optimize content for search across the various social networks:

1. Brevity
2. Authority
3. Keywords
4. Network
5. Plan

Brevity

Did you know that the average shortened URL takes up 20 characters? Commonly accepted best practices suggest limiting the contents of a tweet to no longer than 120 characters to allow for retweets. This means that when you are writing a headline for an article, you now only have 100 characters remaining to fit your keywords in. In order to shorten your headlines, AP style offers some great tips: don’t ask questions, don’t use passive voice and don’t use proper nouns.

Authority

As I discuss in another post, SEO resources for public relations, who links to your content is almost as important as how they link. Search engines are placing emphasis on metrics they call quality scores. These analyze engagement metrics, quantitative analysis (number of fans/followers/etc…) and other factors to determine how important a link is. You can keep an eye on who links to your content and use your analytics to determine who sends the most traffic to your content from their links. This will help you determine who is authoritative about the topics you are writing about.

Keywords

One of social media’s greatest benefits is it can be a source of keyword research. As you’re aware, keywords are the search terms people use to find content and, chances are, you’re already using keywords taken from your team’s prime messaging. Being able to track, monitor and interact with topics or keywords in near real time is amazingly valuable for the PR pro. By using tools such as Twendz Pro  (employer’s product) or Row Feeder (that’s a referral link, I get fancier graphs if you use it), you can observe who is talking about which keywords. And this is key: You can then create content to capitalize on keyword trends as they emerge and capture the mind share of the people using those keywords. For more information on keyword research, this is a very comprehensive guide.

Network

Link building (the act of proactively soliciting for links) can be a daunting task, but by focusing on the “relations” part of public relations, it doesn’t have to be. When working with an influential on a story, one of the greatest selling points is to offer prepackaged content that helps them tell a story. This is often a blog, but could be an infographic, video or podcast. If developing an infographic, as a supplemental tactic to help drive traffic and boost the number of people that will likely link to your content, consider purchasing a sponsorship on an aggregator site such as Reddit. After doing so, work closely with your network of influentials to seed ideas and encourage them to link to your content. In other words, when working with a reporter or blogger, ask them to link to your site or announcement with the keywords you have identified. You can even go so far as to provide them with the HTML code for the link, using the anchor text that contains your keywords.

Plan

You can optimize how you tweet about a Web page by having an editorial calendar and focusing on your desired keywords, researchers have seen a positive correlation on the search engine results pages (SERPs). In addition, Twitter, most of the major Twitter clients and search engines can parse shortened URLs for your search terms. Meaning if your search terms or keywords are in a URL, it can be seen, even though it has been automatically shortened. Having an editorial calendar of tweets, Facebook posts and even replies handy that focus on your keywords will help maximize the opportunities you create when you create content.

As Duane Forrester at Bing says, “don’t stray too far from the core that content is king.” This mantra ties in with our stance of be the story you want to tell. When you think about that next press release or blog post, don’t forget to think about how you are going to optimize it for the social experience as well.

Such as one tweet from Ashton Kutcher generating more than 13,000 views of a YouTube video with a single tweet. Click on that link, because it contains a slight shift in the definition of “influence.” It renames it leverage. It’s not influencing a purchasing or life decision, it was just a lot of people clicking a link. Leveraging your popularity to get people to do stuff.

When rapper 50 Cent tweeted about a small cap public company that he turns out to now be a minority equity shareholder, he caused shares to jump 290% to 39 cents, boosting the company’s market capitalization to around $82 million, a jump of roughly $60 million in a single day. Monday’s volume reached almost 9 million compared the issue’s usual churn of less than 30,000.

But, when we as communications professionals define influencer (hint: it’s not this), we often think of self-anointed gurus that have labeled themselves as such and we completely forget those that have the power to shift the direction of a brand.

I wouldn’t normally name names, but let’s consider a tech reporter such as Aaron Ricadela, a tech reporter whose byline is frequently found in Businessweek and Bloomberg. If we apply the metrics such as Twitter followers or Klout score, he is not influential at all. He’s only tweeted four times and has 14 followers.

But he’s absolutely influential.

My point is, if you approach influence with a narrow perspective based solely on social media metrics, you are missing out on engaging with a ton of people that can shape the perspective of your clients or brand. And isn’t that why we’re in this business?

But these errors, I can’t help but wonder if they’re the result of poor execution of if the embargo is inherently flawed. As PR practitioners, we want to have a way to get our news out to as many people as possible and having journalists who agree to them is a great way to do that. Plus they piss off journalists.

The challenges with embargoes are that some people like to break them, sometimes PR people screw them up and sometimes they’re not worth the effort. But what are they inherently flawed or are we as PR practitioners simply failing to do our jobs well?

In defense of the embargo

Timing can be everything in the public relations world. Our clients want to see the most results possible and depending on the scope and impact of the news item an embargo is a good way to go. The clients get to spend quality time with the reporter and go in depth into the news item.

When the embargo lifts, you can monitor the outreach easily and pull the coverage in a more efficient manner. But I think the great thing about embargoes is that they help keep the time line of an announcement intact. If news breaks before a Web site is ready or before an executive is ready to talk about it, the perception can quickly turn negative.

Proper execution

I think the best thing to do is go to your list of outlets and just ask them what they want. A simple concept that rarely gets acted upon. Talk to your influencer and know what he or she wants. That conversation, regardless of the outcome, will help you down the road.

So, how do you properly execute an embargo?

Plan. A proper plan makes all the difference in the world. Are you seeding exclusives? Are you looking for video? Radio? Print? How will you optimize for inbound interview requests? So many criteria can make or break an embargoed announcement.

Research. Executing a successful embargo partly depends on who is receiving the news. Have you worked with a particular reporter before? Does he/she have a reputation for breaking them? Making a tiered list of outlets that you wish to offer pre-briefs and embaroed news to is almost as important as the news you are sharing.

Have news. Not all press releases are created equally. Make sure the news you are trying to have released under embargo is actually newsworthy.

Communicate. Work with the writer. Make sure they have all of the information and materials they need in order to write the best post possible for their audience. That’s the key, making sure their audience is happy.

Monitor. Sometimes mistakes happen. Be ready for those mistakes. Post published early? Have the release ready for the wire and be ready to react.

As I said before, the embargo can be a valuable PR tool if utilized properly. What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

As communications professionals, how we put our messages together for the mobile Web is essential. How we craft strategies to tell our stories and create media that utilizes the mobile platform matters. Only 15 months after its launch, mobile text messaging platform textPlus announced that more than 3.5 billion messages had been sent.

According to a recent Comscore report, 81.7% of mobile users in Europe sent a text message in June, 2010. In Japan, 75.2% of mobile users browsed the internet, accessed applications or downloaded content from their mobiles. In the table below, you can see the most popular destinations mobile users access from a mobile device.

So, where does this leave us? It leaves us needing to develop strategies for utilizing the mobile Web as a communications channel.

SMS: Simple Messaging Solutions

At this week’s BlogWorld Expo, I will be a part of a panel with special guests Kenny Hyder, who has years of experience in SEO and mobile optimization, and Dave Fleet, VP of Digital at Edelman Toronto. We will be discussing the importance of mobile content for bloggers and in the communications industry.

There are three factors to consider when assembling a mobile plan: content, accessibility and integrated strategy.

Smart phone apps limit the interaction with the Web as a whole, so the need is to create content that is easily portable, easily found. This content is brief, to the point and actionable (yes, I know this post is more than 500 words…). It conveys your message and messaging but is also portable and gives the reader a reason to act and share the content.

But getting that content found is becoming more of a challenge. Applications that are single-purpose have limited our interaction with the broader Web. Having an understanding of search, accessibility and the ability to drive actions through a mobile device will help us create integrated strategies that provide value to a wide network of readers.

Global mobile Web

XKCD made this map to show the relative scale of various social networks. The various social networks occupy how we interact. But the real impactful part of this is in the detail in the upper left. Spoken language is still about 90% of our interactions. But in most of the world, SMS is the number one form of digital communication. Email still trumps all, but even that is just a portion of our communications.

The more we isolate ourselves on the islands of Twitter or the Bay of Flame in the blogosphere, the more of a disservice we are doing to those that our content could reach.

Being aware of how we tell our stories and how we integrate the multiple technologies that surround us to tell those stories will make our communications strategies that much more effective.

I’ve already accomplished a lot. Placements in major tech blogs, video interviews with major outlets, numerous speaking placements and other opportunities. But in my head, I know there’s more. More opportunities to grow my skills and to benefit whichever client I am working with.

We talk a lot in PR about goals, metrics and other tangible benefits. But these are usually immediate or short term at best. How many hits will this pitch get? How many people will click this link? How many new followers did we get? I think it’s equally important to consider long-term personal and professional goals.

So, I thought I’d put some of mine out there. The only order they’re in is top of mind:

• Cover story on: Newsweek, New York Times, Wall St. Journal, USA Today, Time and Wired
• Asked to contribute to a book on digital media.
• Running an account team and guiding it to helping the client realize a bump in revenue and exceeding all other metrics
• Similar to above, lead a campaign that doubles the metrics set in the plan’s goal
• Keynote a conference
• Master the art of metrics
• Lead a new business pitch for a global 100 account
• Win a peer-nominated and peer-voted award

Some of those might be a bit of a stretch, others are pretty achievable. I’d love to hear more about your goals. Do you differentiate between short and long-term goals?

I am currently working with the latest group of interns at the office. Some of the brightest young minds in PR (Seriously, I’m intimidated) are jumping face first into the world of PR and digital media. I got to meet with them today and we talked a bit about the importance of how you are perceived by your peers and the influencers you work with.

Brand your personality

Yes, I know, we don’t like the phrase “personal branding.” But it works. We know what it means, so I’m going to use it. If every interaction you have with an influencer is a pitch, how does that affect all future interactions? I think that it is important that a PR pro’s relationship with an influencer, from Kara Swisher to a hyper-local news blog, be symbiotic.

If both parties are benefiting, then the relationship is much more productive. This is especially crucial in direct-to-consumer efforts when you may be working directly with an influencer throughout an event or media tour. Your personality becomes one of the most important aspect of your professional repertoire.

Be yourself

I do my best to be myself around an influencer that I will be working with in the future. But what else can you do to help maintain your place in the wide world of PR? Here’s my ideas:

• Walk the walk. Start a blog, learn about SEO, go shopping, become a PR Geek. The point is if you share the passion and excitement of a product you want your influencer to share with his or her audience, it will be far easier to tell that story.
• Be seen. Get out and meet the people you want covering your clients. Be part of the community. Be active and engage with them.
• Be genuine. Hopefully you end up representing clients you like and getting involved is easy. On the off chance you are stretching yourself daily, I think that sometimes it is OK to admit you are learning the space or learning the products and admit you are not an expert.
• Reach out and touch somebody. Once you establish a relationship. Maybe it was a successful placement of a pitch; could have been a cocktail hour. Whatever the start was, it is up to you as the PR pro to continue the relationship. Tweet them, comment on posts and maybe even give a phone call.
• Have an opinion. In this industry, it is important to be forward thinking and it’s not OK to put that opinion out there. Start a blog or even ask me (or somebody far more popular) if you can guest post.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the type of persona you think a PR pro should have. Tell me in the comments and let me know!

As public relations professionals, part of our job is to monitor and influence our clients’ reputation. All one needs to do is set up a news or blog alert for “Insert client name here” sucks. In no time you will see a constant flow of detractors, fanboys of competitors and the occasional piece of valuable feedback. I had the good fortune to spend a day at SMX Advanced, a conference put on by Search Engine Land, which is a top influential outlet in the search space. The conference is focused at SEO/SEM/PPC, but there were some tremendous nuggets for PR as well.

Real-time search

We all tweet, facebook (yes, it’s a verb too), blog and text. We are surrounded by the real-time Web. It is alive and learning about us as fast as we learn about it. But to a search engine, it’s just data. Google announced during the show that its caffeine update was live. Google Caffeine is essentially a real-time index of any document pushed live to the Web. If it is publicly viewable, the Google bot is poised to index it and list it in SERPs in near real-time.

In addition, Bing (and soon Yahoo!) also cull social sites in real time. It has integrated the Twitter firehose to flow in public tweets. Remember, it’s available as soon as you hit send.

Real-time ranking factors

The real-time Web is all about content. Strong content published by authoritative users across active networks is content that search engines love. Search engines tend to skew toward relevancy over recency. Just because a post is new, it is not the best. With Google and Bing hooked directly into Twitter’s “firehose,” both are constantly evolving how they parse this data.

Here, you can see how Google is handling tweets, blog posts and other recent content for SMX Advanced.

The links on the right are dynamic and change to reflect not only current trends, but also authoritative pieces of content. Engagement does not appear to be a major factor in establishing authority for real-time ranking. For some accounts, it is able to rank high because people RT, click the links and otherwise interact with its content.

Author quality, quality of the site being linked to and the “freshness” of the content on that site all have an effect on how links being shared rank.

Other possible factors that affect real-time rankings:

• Recent activity: An active account is a crawled account. This means using it for more than just sending out your news. Sharing other content will keep it spider fresh.
• Keywords in user name: This can be hard for groups such as Education. But a possible best practice is to establish two accounts. One for engaging and one for broadcasting.
• Age: Well-established accounts tend to rank higher.
• Tweet quantity, ratio of follow/followed and lists: These appear to have limited influence on some algorithms but are important to consider.

Real-time content strategies

This is about getting your content found beyond when you have an announcement. We have been championing a digital strategy that utilizes multi-media content when pitching a story. But a blog should not just be a pitch vehicle.

Based on this, it makes sense to counsel your clients to use their digital properties to generate discussion on their respective sites. Coverage is great, becoming an influencer is better. Unify your content and make your blog or your FaceBook page an on-going discussion hub.

Accomplishing this requires one thing: Content. Well, not just content. Content that people want to read. Content that adds value. Content that solves a business problem. So, how do you make sure that you are creating quality content?

• Monitor hot trends. Tools such as Google Insights and Bing xRank can show evolving search trends, who is sending traffic to your site and even what site broke a story so you can be sure to link to those sites.
• Get your fans/customers to share your services. Using solutions such as ShareThis, visitors to a website can quickly share your your content across multiple networks. The discussion point here is, should higher emphasis be placed on niche sharing sites such as the Bing blog being shared on Sphinn?
• Employ content that appeals to social-savvy audiences. The adage “Brevity is Beautiful” applies here.
• Don’t update multiple accounts on Twitter. Instead, utilize the old method of “retweeting.” Establish a main account and let others RT that.
• Don’t create content that is keyword saturated. Some Web crawlers view this content as Spam. Also, spammy-looking tweet streams will be eliminated and using multiple hashtags will cause an account to be flagged
• Don’t use same IP address for many accounts. This is a technical concern. I don’t know how it affects people in the same office using Tweetdeck as an example.

The real-time toolbox

Of course, these tips, tricks and hints would be useless if I didn’t give you the methods to use them, right? Below is a huge list of some great apps and tools for monitoring various social networks, social sharing sites and even forums (yes, forums).

List of apps for monitoring and interacting:

• Google Insights: Custom search trends
• Rowfeeder: monitor Twitter and Facebook conversations based on keywords. Import into a Google Spreadsheet
• Social Mention: pull out mentions and other metrics
• ScoutLabs: Paid solution that combines Social CRM with tracking/monitoring.
• Twitter widgets: Customizable Twitter widgets that can be embedded on any website.
• Friendorfollow: Establishes your follwers/followees for mutual relationships.
• Klout: A standardized measure of a Twitter account’s influence/
• Wildfire: manage contests and promotions. Can track the FaceBook fan ID and allow you to followup.
• Knowem: Username check across multiple social networks
• Digg Alerter: Notifies you when you get votes or hit the Digg front page.
• di66.net: Digg stats
• Big Boards: monitor message boards and forums.
• OMGILI: bulletin board and forum search engine.

For more tools, check out Tony Adam’s presentation from SMX Advanced.

Wow, that’s a lot of information. And I have more. I am more than happy to answer questions as best as I can. There are a few more points I would like to pontificate on at a later point. But for now, let me know what your real-time strategies are.

Special thanks to Stew Langille, Vice President, Marketing, Mint.com; John Shehata, Director of SEO & Social Media, Advance Internet, Inc.; Chris Silver Smith, Director of Optimization Strategies, KeyRelevance and Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land for their presentation at the conference.

But since then, I’ve softened my stance. And now I am fully prepared to acknowledge that its email (not e-mail), website (mot Web site) and that I have to type out Washington.

Yes, I am finally entering the modern era. Read on for the post from April that helped push me over the edge…

New journalism rule: Use AP style except when something else works better

Paul Balcerak is the assistant editor of New Media for Sound Publishing and curates content at PNWLocalNews.com. In his free time, he blogs about journalism and new media at paulbalcerak.com.

Source: allaboutgeorge's Flickr page

The AP is now recommending that journalists not abbreviate state names (California instead of the former Calif., for instance). It makes sense when we have unlimited space online and as some have already observed, the intent of the switch is probably to emphasize SEO (no one’s typing in “Calif.” when they Google California), but I don’t really see a reason news orgs should tie themselves to AP style anymore anyway.

The intent of the AP has been, for a long time, to establish some measure of consistency across news publications with regard to spellings, capitalizations and other small references. Consistency in little details like that has been devalued to a great degree, though, as news has moved online and everyone has gained the ability to publish. I’m not saying journalists should just shrug and lower their standards (god forbid), but chill out a bit—in the grand scheme of things, Osama bin Laden versus Usama bin Laden is not something we’re going to live or die by. (Note: It’s a type of confusion that could be easily addressed, too, if more news orgs would maintain wikis or topic pages. Or link to ones that already exist.)

In a lot of cases, journalists would be better served by ignoring AP style than by following it. Perhaps that ought to be the rule: Use AP style except when something else works better. For instance:

• Feel free to use digits in headlines—sometimes people are more likely to click on them.
• Write in first person if you feel like it.
• Start sentences with lowercase letters (iPad, etc.) and digits (Two-thousand ten or Twenty ten is just weird when 2010 is available) if you have to.
• Refer to people by their first name if a surname seems awkwardly formal.

Remember: You’re not writing for the AP, you’re writing for your readers—use whatever rules work best for them.

Related:

• Student journalists need to learn SEO more than they need AP style
• “students…should write for their audience and the medium, not for AP or other journos” (@greglinch)

Don't do this.

A new service just getting into Beta called put.io, which is a cloud-based storage service that allows you to stream your media, has this as a splash page if you try to sign up for its closed beta. In an attempt to be Web-developer cute, it took this tone in its image: “Dear friend. You are using Internet Explorer. Please don’t do that.”

You see, this is a great way to alienate an audience. A potentially paying, engaged, promotional audience. In this case it is also alienates more than 63 percent of Internet users, myself included when I’m at work.

What may be cute in Silicon Valley is not cute in corporate America or in most households that are connected to the Internet. My initial reaction was surprise.I was surprised that somebody allowed that to go public. I was surprised that somebody didn’t do the market research. I was surprised somebody was not thinking about a business model.

Please do this

I am an admitted Mac user at home. I run Firefox and at times Safari. But at work, I am on my PC. Running Internet Explorer. Like 63.27 percent of the country.

The lesson to this is to make sure the message you are curating is one that supports your core business model. Having a corporate personality is an essential part of today’s digital media landscape. But don’t do it at the expense of potential revenue.

I know that Internet Explorer has compatibility issues with some technologies and it does not have the robust external developer ecosystem that Firefox and Chrome enjoy. But insulting the user for the choice in technology they’ve made seems asinine.

This is an instance where a solid PR counsel would have raised this issue and helped this young company along its path to success. By offering guidance around messaging, market perception and helping to craft the language used, PR could have helped this company have at least one more customer.

UPDATE: It was just pointed out to me that the percentage of people who would be looking to try this app that run IE might be quite low. Maybe this is a case of “Know your audience” and I’m just being overly sensitive.

What do you think about this messaging and tactic?

Old tactics, new results?

This post originally appeared on PR Breakfast Club. Enjoy.

In the business world, thinking outside the box is the unofficial motto. In public relations, we’re tasked with being creative thinkers. Our clients want us to find different ways to get in front of influencers and, ultimately, customers.

But we are so quick to focus on what’s next, sometimes we do it at the expense of what’s current.

ADOS

Peter Shankman says he suffers from ADOS: Attention Deficit … ooooh shiny! And I think that as PR people we’re guilty of it too. Our clients sometimes push back on us with the charge to be “more creative.” But what is the cost of creativity?

It comes down to a simple ROI calculation. If clients value a mention in a metro print publication more than 50 tweets, perhaps your creative thinking time is best spent taking the metro writer out for coffee or trying to line up a desk-side meeting. If the time you spend trying to be “creative” outweighs the rewards of the action, then it is not worth it.

Defining creativity

I’ve embraced this newfangled “Internet” thing. I know how to hand-code a blog entry, complete with some SEO tricks and I know about metrics in the social media space. But I also know how to dial a phone, send an email or go to an event to connect.

My point is that depending on your goals, news or message you’re trying to send, each of those tactics could be called creative. What some of us consider a de facto tactic in any PR campaign, others would consider it experimental and risky. Again, it all comes down to knowing your client and its goals.

In order to define creativity, you need to be aligned with your client and its goals. Pretty simple stuff, right?

The creativity plateau

I think we might be in a creativity plateau. Hosting a blogger dinner is no longer innovative. A campaign to comment on influencers’ blogs is not cutting edge. SEO for public relations (see what I did there?) is an established industry.

I think we’ve hit a temporary plateau. And that’s OK. It is OK to use established and effective tactics to generate reliable results. It is not imperative that every PR campaign feature a door-to-door singing telegram for every reporter in New York. Actually, maybe that’s not a bad idea…

What do you think?