Archive for the ‘Quick Tips’ Category
eriksr on August 18th, 2008
Just a reminder here, folks.
Remember the poetry you wrote at thirteen years old and posted on your very first Website? Remember the rant against your girlfriend you so cleverly turned into a podcast? The lapdance you put on YouTube? The too-drunk-to-stand pictures you placed on Flickr?
No? Well, no worries, a Goggle search will find them. Don’t believe me? Search your partner, your boss, or for the brave at heart, yourself. Then skip to page 23 (if you’ve been busy) or page 123 (if you’ve been very busy). Why look. There’s your glorious opus, your silver-tongued tirade, your gluttonous grin, your, well, you get the picture.
You are there because the Internet has a memory like an elephant. It never forgets. Ever. Which means everything you have ever posted, in any format, at any time, is preserved for all eternity for all future bosses, potential spouses (and spouses-in-law’s), up-coming clients, and anyone else who can spell your name. Preserved forever. Me? I’m embarrassed by my old USENET posts where I show off my Warhammer rules lawyering skills. You’ll NEVER find them, by the way…
So watch what you say on the Internet. Watch what you post. Watch what your spouse posts. Watch what your kids post. And, heaven help us, if you are in PR, watch what your client posts. Even on their own Website.
Unless, that is, they are delinquent in paying their bill.
eriksr on July 9th, 2008
Contacts, good. Chatting with contacts, better. Turning contacts into leads, best of all.
And you can use LinkedIn to do it.
REACH OUT AND TOUCH . . .
Now, before we go any further, you should be aware that we are talking about a tightly targeted list. Not a massive sales list, but a short list of amazingly on-target leads.
Being this targeted means you are not sending out hundreds of emails. LinkedIn won’t let you. But being this targeted means that each and every person you are reaching out to is perfect, just perfect for you.
Which should give you an amazingly high response rate. Read the rest of this entry »
eriksr on May 8th, 2007
If you’ve ever found yourself in cut’n'paste land, know that you are not 
alone. Every day trillions of people toil away at the CRTL+X, CRTL+V keys (or the event less fortunate, who click “EDIT” and “CUT” then “PASTE) in an effort to get information from one place to another.
Thankfully, for some of you, Ditto has come to your rescue. Click the screenshot to see what it looks like, by the way!
So, how is this going to change my life?
Let’s say you’re constantly cutting/copying and pasting the same group of things. You have to go to your source, copy/cut, go to your destination, select your point, and paste. Ditto actually stores everything you’ve copied and kept on your clipboard so you don’t have to keep going back to your source — you just open Ditto and paste what you want from there.
Ditto can be launched quickly by hitting CRTL+` (it’s the rarely used button to the left of the number 1 on most keyboards).
Even better, Ditto hangs onto data for a long time, even after you turn your computer off, so you can access things you worked with days ago. Heck, you can keep whole tables in there!
eriksr on May 4th, 2007
Day in, day out, you blog and blog and blog. And then, one day, you run out
of things to blog about. Or, you just hit an incredibly busy day; just plain old don’t feel like it; life gets in the way…
Certainly it is a good idea to have a few extra blog posts kicking around for these times, but it you don’t, here are a few ideas to help you create a fast and dirty blog post.
Round ‘em up
Find you revisit the same topic again and again? How about a round-up of all the product reviews you’ve posted, for example, or all the how-to posts? You probably shouldn’t do this too often, but once in a while it’s great to help remind your readers of all the wholesome goodness on your site; wholesome goodness they might have missed.
Link lively
Got a great list of resources? Provide a “Top Ten Tech Links” list, for example. What about a list of blogs of interest? How about “Five Great Blogs Everyone Should Bookmark.” Or what about tools, such as time trackers or mileage calculators that your reader’s could use? “Fourteen Handy Tools for PR Practitioners” would work nicely. Not only is this truly helpful for your visitor but, even better, linking out may, just may, encourage them to link right back to you.
What’s new, pussycat?
Certainly press releases are a great source of information. But don’t forget the news, too. Particularly if something you hear will have an impact on your industry. This is where your RSS reader is your friend. And this, too, is where you get to show your visitors that you are a valuable source of the newest information.
Gotta get a guest
Is there anything easier or better than a guest poster? Your reader gets another point of view, which is great for variety. And you get to take the day off. Which reminds me, if anyone would like to guest post, just let me know. I truly value your insight. And my bottle of suntan lotion is standing by.
Comment heaven
The focus on blogs is traditionally the person(s) running the blog, not the people who leave the comments. But, hey, why should commenter’s get off scott-free? Instead, encourage them to do the work by posing an interesting theory, perhaps, or a question or story or what-have-you and ask for their thoughts. Ask “How would you have handled this matter?,” for example, or “What alternative avenues would you explore?,” or “Why do you think this failed?” and watch the comments fly. Do note, however, that this only works if you have commenter’s. Doh!
Everything old is new again
Wrote about something some time ago and changed your opinion, for example, or suggested a site and a better one has come along? It’s not a bad idea to review old posts. If any of them now require additional comments, it should be fast and easy to simply create a new post with new comments and a link to the old post.
Laughter is the best medicine
When all else fails, you can’t go wrong with the occasional theme-related cartoons, images, videos, or even jokes. Assuming they are not offensive. And they are funny.
eriksr on March 19th, 2007
I recently wrote about how Insight24 can create new ROI for webinars/podcasts by giving businesses a chance to post their tired content in a YouTube-like atmosphere. Today’s 
post follows in the footsteps of that one.
Scribd
Scribd is a social document sharing site. Here, they do a great job of describing it:
Part of the idea behind Scribd is that everyone has a lot of documents sitting around on their computers that only they can read. With Scribd we hope to unlock this information by putting it on the web.
Make sense? Scribd gives you a place to share your documents. You can tag ‘em, there’s comments, you can even embed them on blogs/Web pages. It’s your usual Web 2.0 site.
So why am I sooooo excited? Well, it’s a great place to repurpose your tired, worthwhile content. Have you put together an interesting case study? Something with real educational value, as opposed to blatant marketing fluff? Put it on Scribd. Has your client written a book? Put it on Scribd.
Why bother?
On the one hand, Scribd puts your content in front of a new audience. Great, but probably not your target. Fair enough…but the real reason Scribd is great is because it makes your content embeddable on Web pages and blogs and easy to share. Because Scribd presents documents using Flash, pretty much anyone out there is able to see what you’ve got. No need to open a .PDF, no worries about compatibility across PC and Mac, and no messing around with HTML code. It’s genius!
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.
