I recently sat in on a brainstorm for a client that will be launching a product. We were debating video when the idea of a slide show popped up. I quickly said that would not work. And when asked why, I simply pointed to my mobile device.

I'm wondering how many people read this post on a mobile phone?

The reality is that according to Comscore, 69.6 million mobile users accessed an application on their phone in April 2010, an increase of 28 percent from the previous year. And, it’s my honor to be discussing tactics and techniques for creating messaging that is simple, yet actionable and effective at BlogWorld and New Media Expo 2010 (Affiliate link)!

The future present of media consumption

Mobile is how people consume media. All you have to do is get on any form of public transportation. Look at how many headphones you see. Those people are all consuming media. I frequently receive and send email, tweet and read on my mobile device. The fact that Apple sold 1 million iPads in mere weeks after it launched shows that our society has evolved into one mass of multi-tasking, shape-shifting people constantly on the move.

And publishers must be aware of this. Which also means that as PR pros, we need to be aware of it too. If your website does not detect the version of a browser being used and redirect to a mobile version if necessary, then that is a fail. I have abandoned countless page loads because the site tries to load the full version.

Sure, this still counts as a page view, but just one. If I don’t read your content it is safe to assume I probably won’t be back.

When pitching stories, we need to remember the adage “Brevity is Beautiful.” Here’s some things to consider when pitching to your influencers:

• Format your mail, press release etc… with a short, tight summary. Call it twit pitch, elevator pitch, escalator pitch or whatever, just keep it short.
• It’s OK to have longer text, just on a different page. Keep your digital media concise, but make sure product pages are robust, multi-media enabled and complete.

I’m only giving you two. Remember, Brevity is beautiful

How we package our pitches makes a difference. Finding new, innovative ways to will always be at the forefront of “good” PR. What tips do you have for packaging a story for the mobile age? Share in the comments!

And also go register for BlogWorld and New Media Expo 2010.

My alternative title was: PR doesn’t suck. Well, OK, there’s some really shitty PR stunts out there, but YOUR PR doesn’t have to suck.

I wasn’t trying to convince the attendees that PR as an industry doesn’t suck. But what I did want to convey was that with some simple steps in choosing the proper counsel and setting a clear direction, your PR can not suck.

The client relationship

I started off by asking who had been a client of a PR consultant/firm. Since it was a small group, only a couple of folks had, but the stories we shared quickly became all too common.

Her: They didn’t get it.
Me: What steps did you take to fix it?
Her: We fired them.
Me: What was the WORST part of that experience?

Of course there were some steps in the meantime, but this seems to be a pretty common theme and I’m actually kind of thankful that most people are willing to fire a company that simply isn’t getting it. But  before you scrap the relationship, make sure you’ve gone through the effort to help them “get it.”

I wanted to make sure this session was meaningful, so I thought up five ways to help un-suck your PR:

• Treat selecting a PR person like selecting a spouse. This person or company will know your deepest, darkest secrets. Interview them, spend time with them and be honest with them.
• Let your PR person do his/her/their job. You have hired a person to be your communications professional for a reason. Let them have some freedom to be creative, try new ideas and experiment. Trust.
• Share your passion. Carefully. We feed off the passion and excitement over your products, services or thoughts. But it’s our job to ask you what’s cool, why is this news and why should people care.
• PR does NOT mean public relations anymore. A press release is not the most important document your communications counsel produces. Fully comprehensive digital and analog plans encompass both media relations, as well as publicly consumable content. (there’s a whole other technical topic here, but we won’t go there)
• Look in the mirror. If the messaging sucks, maybe you haven’t communicated it well to your communications counsel. It might be time to reassess your goals and objectives.

You’ll notice in number 4, I switched the language I use. PR is no longer “write press release; write pithy email to editor; profit.” This is an important shift. I think that it embodies the change in dynamic that digital media has caused in this industry.

Say it with me: PR today is about creating a plan that encompasses media, public and consumer relations through the use of multiple channels of communication.

If you want your PR to suck less, there’s a few ways to do it. Tell me how you made your latest campaign suck less in the comments.

Note: All of my photo glory can be found on my Flickr page.

I have a lot of small businesses that are just becoming aware of the world of the web. Many are B2B businesses that think that Press Releases are the best way to get attention for their services and products. I think that these are dated techniques for “many” businesses, especially if it’s their main avenue for inbound traffic.

What are your thoughts on this?

A few weeks ago, I asked for some requests on what to blog about and I wanted to pull this one out of the queue based upon a brief exchange of Tweets I had on the relevance of PR in a startup world.

PR as communications is essential for the success of any company, large or small. Of course I am biased in this, but my reasoning is a bit more fundamental. Most CEOs and technical founders are smart in a lot of areas. crafting a story generally isn’t one of them. Public relations is an art and we are artists and a company is our medium. We help companies tell their story. The great thing that a company’s leadership provides is passion.

We provide the ability to translate that passion into English.

OK, that being said, let’s get back to the question that was asked: Is a press release the best way to get attention, especially in the B2B space? My simple answer?

No.

There is no magic ingredient when it comes to an outbound communication strategy. Successful public relations is a lot like a well-executed curry. Have you ever tasted turmeric on its own? Not so good. But combined with a myriad of other spices, it’s delicious. The same can be said of a company’s public relations efforts. By combining media relations, digital communications, customer storytelling and other activities, you can create a lot of attention for your company.

If you have a topic you would like for me to ramble incoherently comment on, please submit it here. If you have a comment on this, please tell me below!

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?

But when things are busy, it’s hard to be timely. So, I want to run a little experiment. I want you to tell me what to write. Yup, simply fill out the form with something PR related that you would like to see my perspective on. I’m not a big name, but I’m honest.

Oh, and comments welcome.

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?