071105 Online Pr

Online PR: A Primer In Reputation Management November 5 th 2007

Reputation Management
What is being said about you?
Google
SERP
PageRank
Google alerts:
Ongoing monitoring
Technorati :
RSS-fed buzz with authority meter
Yahoo! Site Explorer :
Inbound links

Finding Online Influencers
Ask peers, colleagues and particularly sales staff
Look at influencers cited in the mainstream media
Look at backlinks into existing web properties and competitor sites
Technorati, Ice Rocket
Google blog search
Look at their authority
‘ Found’ influencers’ blogrolls
A number of companies will provide their own methodology of finding the online influencers

Getting Favourable Coverage
Values:
Honest
Open
Transparent
Available
Have great content
Provide a provocative standpoint
Real news or a great story
Narrowcast rather than broadcast

Dealing with Unfavourable Coverage
Acknowledge salient points within the coverage
Offer to engage the author in person
Provide data points and external references for any rebuttal
Plan ahead to push unfavourable content down off the first 100 results on the SERPs and keep it off

IP Issues
Give online users the opportunity to use your IP where relevant in a legitimate manner
Image resource library and licence
Outline what ‘fair use’ means
Be clear in plain language what your trademarks are
Be polite and unthreatening in your communications with offenders
If you are still struggling with compliance go direct to the ISP or platform owner
Don’t put anything in writing that you wouldn’t want to see published

O’Reilly Publishing & Web 2.0
CMP Media with the knowledge and approval of O’Reilly Media legaled NFP IT@Cork
Hue and cry break outs in the blogosphere over the course of 3 days
O’Reilly Media step in and pick up the phone to Tom Rafferty and agree that Rafferty can use the web 2.0 descriptor

Tools & Techniques for Online PR
Online news sources & RSS:
Mainstream media
Personal blogs and sites
Business blogs
Podcasts and video
Virtual worlds
Social networks
Micro media

Online News Sources & RSS
Mainstream media:
Modify existing PR approach to match the new media that the organisation is using
Expect more fluid deadlines
Do offer exclusives
Only think about stories in an appropriate media
Personal bloggers:
Engage10-20 carefully picked blogs
Read these blogs
Plan ahead: establish relationships by commenting on their blogs and linking to them
Don’t pitch them
Remember this isn’t likely to be their full-time job
Be inclusive
Make allowances on etiquette

Personal Blogs & Sites
You already probably have staff who blog:
Empower them by putting together a set of blogging guidelines:
Covers in simple language the obligations they have under their contract of employment
Good etiquette
Conveyed in a tone-of-voice that fits with the company
See if you have any product or industry mavens
Think about whether you want to provide them with a blogging platform

Business Blogs
Don’t start a blog without a commitment to maintaining it
Do have an understanding of the target audience and how they interact online
Think about the tone of voice

Podcasts & Video
Tends to be one-way rather than two-way communications
Dynamic delivery
Audio is portable and flexible to consume
Video requires captive attention – need to be respectful of the audiences time
Content needs to be: original, interesting, humourous
Two’s company – have a sidekick
Succinct
Curtis Audio blogs Q&A interviews Executive speeches Panel discussions Storytelling Self-guided product tour Online learning

Virtual Worlds
Virtual worlds, like all communities, have rules
Activities within the community need to respect the rules
Pick a community that your brand will fit in with and work with in the long term
The most important thing is to think about engagement rather than generating coverage

Social Networks
Think about your target group:
Their motivations
Their location
Where they are in their life
Be respectful of their personal space
Think about how you can add value
How do you engage beyond becoming a friend

Micro media
Is what it says it is
Not all communications needs to be long form: SMS
Address cards
Short messages

Maximise the Reach of Press Releases
Brevity
Hyperlinks
Supporting content
RSS feeds (think about the licence on the feeds)
Facilitate bookmarking and ‘curated’ web services:
Distribution
Newswires (vertical and general)
Company blog inbound links

Using PR to Achieve Search Traffic

Stakeholders (human & machine)
Search as the gateway to the web
A reputation engine
Stakeholders:
General public
Shareholders
Peers
Prospective clients
Prospective employees
Regulators
Pressure groups and NGOs

How Algorithmic Search Works
Content acquisition
Visits webpage, reads it, and crawls links to other pages up to 4 layers deep within the website
Consumes RSS feeds that highlight new content and links
Crawls a site map (sitemap.xml)
Directories (DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory)
Index web pages
Everything the spider finds is saved in the search engine’s index
Algorithmic categorisation: sorts through the Index and returns results based on mathematical calculations
Spam scoring
Relevance
freshness
Topological relationship to other sites
Appropriate for vertical search?

Searching the Long Tail Google, Live.com, Yahoo! and Ask algorithmic search Social Search Bookmarking Services Q&A services Trusted web Local search Maps Yellow Pages Mobile search Comparison shopping Mainstream Esoteric Vertical search (Google Scholar, Krugle, Scirus etc) Recommendations (Last.fm, Yahoo! Music)

PR Agency PR AND SEARCH Three Scenarios for Search and PR TRANSACTIONAL Specialists SEM/SEO
Traditional direct-response online marketing work
Direct response
Highly measurable
Very quantitative
Specialist field
Content: relevance, freshness
and quality
Provision for trusted web services
(digg, del.icio.us)
SEO for corporate and product
websites through collection of
inlinks
BRAND Content creation / Bookmarking SEO REPUTATION Trusted advisor SEM Content creation SEO
Purchase ad spots to drive consumers to company site to communicate clients’ side of the story
Create content to flush ‘bad coverage’ off the first search page
SEO to maintain position

Bibliography / Useful Links
The Cluetrain Manifesto
Collected papers and essays by danah boyd
Guidelines on social media by CIPR
Notre Dame University: Fifteen-minutes of fame: The Dynamics of Information Access on The Web (May 13, 2005) by Z. Dezso, E Almaas, A Lukacs, B Racz, I Szakadat and A Barabasi
Yodel Anecdotal blog by Yahoo! Inc
The Thought Kitchen blog by Nau
Daily Thoughts by Innocent Drinks
SHIFT Communications social media release template
Official Google Blog
Micropersuasion by Steve Rubel
Fastlane blog by GM
http://www.e-consultancy.com/publications/cipr/

071105 Online Pr

by Ged Carroll

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