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PR for Pirates

Ideas, Startups, Social Media, PR, SEO, Austin

Selecting Keywords for SEO: A Quick Guide for PR and Social Media ProsNovember 21

Shannon Paul’s had a post yesterday that included very good advice for PR pros who want to plunge into the social media world (make sure you look at the presentation she’s embedded in the post).  Shannon suggests that PR pros need to start thinking about how they can make their content searchable and sharable in order to make the leap.  Kudos to Shannon for raising an issue that the clients of PR agencies have been demanding - make it easy to find the information - focus on keywords, SEO and links.

Given that the intersection of social media, PR and SEO is a topic that’s near and dear to our hearts here at BuzzStream, I thought I’d expand on one of the topics in Shannon’s presentation - keyword selection.  Picking keywords is incredibly important, and not just for press release optimization…do it right and it will help all of your marketing activities.

For our SEO-oriented audience, most of this will be fairly basic.  For those of you in PR that are new to this, I’m hoping it will give you some good ideas about how you can more effectively identify keywords, and do it in a fast, inexpensive fashion.  There’s no one right way to select keywords, but we like the approach I’m going to describe because it helps you identify keywords that are closely aligned to the terms your custome

More proof of the small business social media advantageNovember 17

Chris Brogan had two posts over the weekend about a guy named “Bob” at a Fortune 500 company who tried to engage with his customers and was cut off at the knees by management.  By themselves these posts are interesting reads, but for marketers at small and mid-size business, they’re even more interesting when read with Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post about Balsamiq.  I’ll get to that one in a minute, but first let me get back to Chris Brogan’s posts…

There’s a good discussion in the comments to Chris’ posts about whether or not Bob should have done this without the company’s approval and whether or not the company has legitimate reasons not to participate.  My take - I’d bet a dollar that the conflict stems less from the specifics of the situation and more from the fact that it’s a big company with a culture and org structure that’s not designed to support this kind of participation. I wrote a post a few weeks back about the social media advantage for small and mid-size businesses and Andy Angelos from Zocalo Group pointed out in the comments that often big companies want to participate in the conversation, but they’re simply not built for this.�

Why word-of-Mouth lets you run circles around bigger competitorsOctober 27

I posted this last week, but an IE bug was causing problems with it.   Turns out the original image was causing the problem (a photo of Gary V…who knew he’d take our blog down ;-).  here’s the repost.

I just finished watching Gary Vaynerchuk’s video explaining how word-of-mouth marketing is changing and what this means for brands today.  Great stuff…totally entertaining and Gary does a great job of explaining word-of-mouth in a simple, powerful way.  He describes the change like this:

Word-of-mouth has always been the most powerful (form of marketing)….But here’s where it gets (even more) powerful.  Word-of-mouth has fundamentally changed in the last three years, because of social media.  Twitter and facebook and other products like that have allowed your voice to go extremely viral.  So let’s just say Chris Mott over here was the biggest socialite in New York City and he just went to every event every night.  He was the biggest yenta in town.  How many possible people could he tell about your service?  Five hundred?  A thousand, if that’s all he did for a month?  Well now, one press of the button on

3 Quick Ways to Use Social Media to Get to Big MediaOctober 13

The world of PR is in a state of turmoil. As advertising dollars shrink, print pubs have all but disappeared and online media sites are strapped for resources. Only the biggest stories seem to get picked up these days. So, how do you get the press to pay attention? Try social media.

At BreakingPoint, I’ve seen a huge impact from social media activity on media coverage–primarily blogs and Twitter. In fact, I guestimate that a full 30% or more of my company’s Twitter followers are media or analysts. Recently one of our security experts posted an in-depth look at a clickjacking vulnerability on our blog, we posted on Twitter and a writer from Ziff Davis (one of our followers) picked up the story. This coverage has been one of our top sources of web traffic for over a week now. Amazing!

Here are a few very easy ways you can get started using social media to get to big media:

1. Monitor and get involved in the conversation. Set up your RSS feeds, Google Alerts, and Tweetscans in iGoogle and start watching the market. Identify issues and trends. Spot conversations and jump into the conversation. If someone posts to a forum about a need, offer advice. If someone mentions your company or product, by all means, reach out to them. HubSpot provides this excellent

The SEO StackOctober 6

Here’s a diagram I’ve been using internally to explain the strategies and tactics related to SEO, broken down in three major layers: the foundation, on-page, and off-page factors, and modeled in terms of a network layer model.

A network stack is a helpful way of thinking about this because it implies that each layer builds upon the other, and is dependent on the layer below it.  As marketers, we are the architects and optimizers of this stack, and it’s helpful to start thinking about how our decisions at each layer affect (and in some cases marry us) to choices higher on the stack.

A model for SEO that adopts the network-layer model

On more thought, as I’ve stated, I predict that traditional SEO as a distinct discipline is going to merge with PR.  That’s mostly correct, however some aspects are going to migrate to Product Management in my view.  I’ll expand on that in a later post.