Schultz on PubCon: Search Marketing and Public Relations Session
by Adam Schultz

After the superbloggers session I mulled in the hall for a bit and then joined the "Public Relations" session.

I had pretty high hopes about this one as I feel it is a critical piece of any online marketing campaign and I'm working hard (with Garrett) to integrate it into the MSI offering. I was not let down.

First to the plate was Lee Odden from TopRankResults.com covering how to apply SEO to press releases.

The session was an overall strategy of where you need to be looking and what you need to be doing to have your press releases return maximum SEO value.

What I got from it was a basic outline as kind of a to do list.
• Integrate other media and sources - try to Integrate your other feeds and podcasts into your releases including your blog or other press feeds. This way in case the journalist doesn't like this story, they have a way to see the other things going on with your company.
• Optimize your releases - (also see our post on how to optimize a press release)
• Use the online feed submission services.
• Wrap it all together - Work it into your other media like email and on your site with a consistent message.
• Follow up - when your release gets picked up, blog about it, comment on it and book mark it with social media sites.
• Finally, know your audience - different audiences require a different approach, pitch a story to a blogger differently than you would a newspaper.
• This served as a great appetizer for me. it was light and tasty and left plenty of room for the next course.

Lawrence Coburn from RateItAll.com was next. He really got into the meat of how to do the thing. Starting off with his Dumb Luck story of how ABC World News found him from a search on "shopping comparison engines" and proceeded to fly him out to be on the show. From here he got into why that happened to him and he provided some simple things to do and then how to do them to position your self for that kind of luck.

Know what's news worthy, offer a unique angle, look legit, be an expert and archive the experience.

He likes to look to blogs for notable topics as they tend to start a dynamic conversation rather than just dead-ending. The things that sucked me into the conversation was his use of some of the social sites like technorati, tech.memeorandom.com and del.icio.us.

He uses Delicious to identify who's who in a given topic and he uses it to then pitch his ideas to them on a particular story each with a customized message. He uses Technorati more for tracking the progress of the conversations he has either started or is taking part of.

For interacting in the mix he says that the best way to get the attention of "best in class" topical bloggers is to comment on their blog in an intelligent, stand out way. This, combined with knowing your market, being reachable, will help you to online PR success.

All and all I was quite satisfied and energized from his presentation.

As a final note, if you want to get ranked for your name, Lawrence recommends tagalag.com.

Robin Liss served as the refreshing ginger sorbet between courses, refreshingly unexpected, and later, your realize that it made the whole meal that much better.

She discussed offline PR for an online business. She runs camcorderinfo.com and digitalcamerainfo.com.

I was not expecting to see someone talking about offline PR at webmaster world but hey, we need to be having these conversations because until we know how these worlds integrate we are never going to be able to launch truly integrated campaigns for our clients.

The most interesting part of the presentation was how little her TV appearances affected her site traffic. Literally, when she went on a show in front of 5 million people to cover a product they had reviewed, her traffic barely even went up by a thousand visitors.

That's not even .02%. I had no clue! Wow! That is impressively bad.

So where is the value? It's in the untrackables: brand awareness, prestige, notoriety and credibility. It opens up the opportunity for large client sales, partnerships, and helps to maintain relationships. Oh, and you'd be amazed at what a link from CNN or the Boston Globe can do for your rankings.

She covered how to do it too. Be an expert and care about what your doing. Get a professional Media PR company to pitch you, preferably a small company or individual consultant.

Jump on the latest news stories as soon as they come out and craft yourself to a reporters story. You should also get listed in expert directories on your top of interest.

She also supplied a lot of tips about being on TV like have a personality and come ready with funny one liners and that nothing is off the record, nothing.

And now for dessert and what could be better for dessert than some sweet advice from David McInnis of PRWeb.

I'm not going to get too deep into all that was said in this presentation because I was too busy reading between the lines.

Basically, a lot of his presentation was about blogging and the new service from PR web for trackback/pingback urls. Honestly, that is what I was impressed with. Most people already know how to submit a press release through PRWeb.

Now there are these other services to help you get more out of your releases and use them to create conversations in the blog world. It is this kind of integration that will finally show the offline marketers what they are missing in the online channels and will wake up the single channel online marketers to how powerful these other channels could be for them.

I also think it means that somehow building an integration into social networks could be right around the corner.

How it works is that you simply add a trackback/pingback url to the bottom of your release and when people blog about the news of your release you will see all of the things that are being said right there with it. Granted, its just another way to track and extend the conversation but I love it because of what it represents.

Some of the more global topics he discussed that lean towards why this matters is in using press releases to go direct to the user rather than first having to get picked up by the media. This provides for a more immediate response, and a more robust online discussion. It also allows you to more quickly build reputation and become an industry expert.

He did also give some basic release advise like including a news image with your release and to tag any accompanying materials or media with meta information. He also mentioned that you should include everything in your releases, use some information to make them want to go to the site for more.

This session write up by Adam Schultz, MarketSmart Interactive's Manager of Product Development. (I think we still have a write up or two left out of Schultzy... I'll shake him down in the morning.)
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |