eriksr on March 26th, 2007
Alright all you cool cats. You’ve got your Google News coming in via Email. You’ve got your RSS feeds bustin’ out news from sources you’re monitoring (hopefully via Netvibes, but if you’re using Internet Explorer 7 or something then hey, that’s…cool, I guess). In other words…Your. Clients. Are. Covered.
Now what about you? I ask this because sometimes we get so wrapped up in keeping track of who is saying what about whom that we neglect ourselves. I’m talking about anything from celebrity gossip to sports news, world events to horoscopes. Today, I’m going to introduce you to a Website that will bring your reading into modern times.
Spotback
Spotback is a news site. You can get all sorts of news from Spotback, just like any source. But the beauty of the service is how it tailors itself to suit your interests. Each news item on Spotback includes a slider, set to the number 0, that you can slide to the left (towards -5) or the right (towards +5) to indicate your interest in a particular story. Through this slider you’re telling Spotback what you’d like to see more of or less of. In my experience, Spotback was nicely trained within just a couple of days of casual voting.
Other Goodies
Spotback, of course, has a number of other tools that can be useful to a PR professional. Take a look at the top of the page — NewsSnacks is essentially an RSS reader that has Spotback’s sliders built in. You can also track specific keywords.
eriksr on March 8th, 2007
Quick Note: Today’s entry is courtesy of Cece Salomon-Lee, marketing communications manager for ON24.
Aside from a couple of side ventures, I’ve been in PR for nearly 10 years now. Until early 2006, most of my time has been at an agency. During my tenure, one of our challenges was demonstrating our value with hard measurements — 
the Holy Grail for PR. It wasn’t until I went in-house, and most recently with my current company, that I discovered some neat tips and tricks to measure PR’s impact. The following tips are based on measuring traditional formats of print and online coverage.
URL Links: How do you know that someone came to your site based on a newspaper article? One thing I just learned is tracking URLs. Our marketing folks use unique identifiers in URLs to measure different marketing promotions. For example, we can determine if you came from an e-newsletter or specific Website ad because we use different URLs for each. If leveraged for releases or media outreach, I could determine if a specific reporter reviewed the online demo or if people came to the site from Dr. Dobbs vs. The Wall Street Journal. The key is to work with the marketing department to see if they have a tracking system in place for marketing promotions.
Unique pages: Alternatively, you can create separate landing pages for press releases and news coverage on your Website. In practice, you would give WSJ one page to track vs. another for Dr. Dobbs. Though this requires a lot of time and coordination to pull off, the pay-off is providing personalized content based on your target audience
Combining 1 & 2: You’ve sent an email and you want to know what captured the reporter’s eye. Was it the first paragraph or the last? Taking a page from email marketing promotions, try putting links to company information at the top and bottom of the email. These links would either be unique Web pages or contain unique identifiers in the URL so you can track what is resonating with reporters.
Blog Traffic: For those seeking to measure site traffic to a blog, I started using alexa.com to determine audience size. The difficulty is that these stats are based on who downloads their tool bar so that Alexa can track their viewing habits online. Nonetheless, I’ve come to rely on them as a way to determine a site’s influence and get some numbers when unavailable elsewhere.
Web Analytics: Ever wonder if site traffic increases with an announcement or article? For us, we leverage Google Analytics to track traffic, most popular pages and other data for our website. By working closely with your client’s marketing department, you can track numbers on the day of and after an announcement. See if you create traffic spikes with announcements or when coverage appears in the media.
Continuing on the tracking theme. If you then give each media outlet a unique landing page or tracking-enabled URL, you can further pinpoint which outlet is driving the most traffic to your site. This is also key as this can drive sales leads. For example, we closely monitor our sales lead source via our salesforce backend. We then track the progress of that sales lead to eventual sale, which means…. we can actually put a monetary amount to the value of PR as it impacted the sales lead generation process!
The key lies in understanding how your client is tracking site traffic, their sales lead generation tracking process and if media coverage is indicated as a lead source in their system.
Blogosphere Buzz: There are several tools out there for this and I found BlogPulse’s (a service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics) trend search () to be the best. Tracking the “buzz” over the past few months (up to 6 months), this trend line gives you a sense of how your PR efforts are impacting your client’s image in the blogosphere and relative noise about your company. You can also track against competitors, which is a great way to determine your momentum. Blogpulse also has a for-pay service that provides more detailed information.
The February 12th issue of PR Week highlighted some of these points in an article titled “Many factors involved in measuring PR’s online impact” (http://www.prweek.com/us/search/article/631416/factors-involved-measuring-PRs-online-impact/) by Tonya Garcia.
Though some of the above may be familiar to you, the key point is working with marketing. The next post is how to make your client’s marketing department your friend.
Cece Salomon-Lee is the marketing communications manager for ON24 Inc. She can be reached at cece dot lee at on24 dot com.
eriksr on January 21st, 2007
How often have you asked for something via email and then forgotten about it? Sad to say, it happens to me more often than I like. But I recently found a way to deal with it — and I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me before. Whether you’re using Outlook or Entourage or that bizarre Lotus program from IBM, here are some quick and easy steps to ensure you never forget to follow up.
This is also great for following up on pitches to reporters, briefing requests for analysts, and those event & award organizers who NEVER get back to you.
- Create a new Email address for yourself — possibly at Gmail or Yahoo! mail or whatnot. Write that address down
- In your Email software, create a new folder to store messages. Call it “Follow-Up”
- Check your email client for a Rules or Wizards option. Outlook users can go to TOOLS > Rules and Wizards
- Create a rule that checks messages when they are sent
- Set the rule to check for messages sent to the Email address you just created
- Also set the rule to forward COPIES of messages sent to this new Email address to the “Follow-Up” folder we just created
- Save and activate the rule
- Be sure to enable the “BCC:” or “blind carbon copy” option for when you write your messages. Do a Google search for “turning on BCC” along with the name of your Email software for help
Voila. Now, whenever you are writing to someone with a request, or you know you need to follow up later, add your follow-up Email address to the BCC field. All of these messages will be stored in your follow-up folder.
I check mine once a day and I’ve found that it actually doesn’t get unmanageable at all. And there’s a bonus: You get offsite storage of all these messages. So if you’re at home and wondering what to do you can log-in to your Gmail or Yahoo account and see what needs your attention.
eriksr on December 27th, 2006
We all compile weekly reports for our clients. Some of us find the work tedious. Well, read on — you’ll find some details on a web-based program from Google (Google Docs & Spreadsheets) that eases the pain. And stay tuned for future posts where I’ll provide details on programs that are much more comprehensive! 
The Situation and the Problem:
Most teams follow a process that goes kinda like this:
- Account coordinator starts the document and fills in their updates, forwards the document to another team member via Email
- That person adds their updates, forwards the document to the next person in line via email
- Ultimately the account lead will take the document, sanitize it for the client or push it back with edits
This process is fraught with potential for error and aggravation. For example:
- There’s the bottleneck that occurs when someone sits on the report for hours at a time
- There’s the possibility that more than one copy of a document can be created. This inevitably confuses the next person in line and generates unnecessary work for them as they look for the changes in the document and figure out what to merge
- The account manager has to spend their time managing the process to ensure it resolves on time
The Answer
Although Google Docs & Spreadsheets (GD&S) isn’t the be-all and end-all of programs to help a team collaborate — I’ll cover something more comprehensive in a later post! — it is one of the easiest to learn and use. Also, because the Google name also carries some comfort and familiarity with it — a lot of people use Google for their web searches and news reading, after all — it improves the odds that your teammates will actually try the program. Here’s how it works, step-by-step:
- Someone creates the document to share and adds their updates
- This person sends an invitation to the Email addresses of their teammates
- The teammates open the Web-link they receive and add their updates at any time. Any formatting and spelling problems are sanitized by other teammates while they work or by the person responsible for delivering the report to the client
Same number of steps, yes, but the potential for error — and the amount of shepherding everyone must do to ensure the report is complete on time — is practically gone. Even better, GD&S can be accessed anywhere you find an Internet connection, so you can provide your updates just about anywhere.
GD&S is a great program to use for sharing the odd document or spreadsheet. However, for more comprehensive applications that allow teams to manage and work on dozens of different types of documents — even keep a team calendar and contact list — stay tuned.
