Social networks are extremely interesting things.  They give an online home to folks with common interests and hobbies - like staying in touch with one another or following Metallica.

They’ve actually been around for a while, under the guise of ‘forums’ ….But this new breed of FaceBook’ish tools that we’re now using are a little more sophisticated in terms of functionality:  they provide a bunch of extra widgets to help us throw sheep at one another, give people minute-to-minute status updates and generally stay in touch.  In other words, they’re built more strongly around sociability.

So how can this new-fangled stuff work in a B2B environment?  Well, you can start thinking about creating more ’social’ platforms and content as PR tools that can be used by interested parties – staff, customers, partners, etc – for  facilitating dialogue, spreading your messages and enabling you to manage your relationships in new ways.

This can be done at both the micro level and the macro level.  Here’s some broad brush ideas….

Social Networking Micro-Facilitation

• Make your content easy to link to and/or embed in other people’s sites and online profiles.  For example, rather than solely hosting and branding your own video, think of the benefit of using YouTube as well:  aside from giving you another potential audience, YouTube outputs code snippets which allow people to feature your content on their web sites.  The same goes for images on Flickr, presentation material with SlideShare, and so on…
• Make it easy to bookmark your content on social bookmarking sites by including aggregation tools within your content, like ‘AddThis‘.  (In turn, these social bookmarking sites will make your content more available to other people.)
• Render your content assets in a ‘Widget’ format, so that others can access it and feature it on their own sites as (for example) a sidebar feature.  There are now a ton of interesting widget-ization services available, many of which are free and do the work for you if you’re creating simple tools:  see WidgetBox, for example.
• If you can find the right angle, create more sophisticated widgets or applications to feature on other Social Networking platforms.  For example, recruitment is a great social application that’s enjoyed early success on Facebook and others thanks to these platform’s innate viral properties (’pass it on’, ‘recommend a friend’, etc)..

Social Networking Macro-Facilitation

• Create a ‘user generated’ FAQ section or forum for your site, or create a profile via a hosted service like Get Satisfaction.  Allow your customers and partners to engage directly with you and others on support issues.
• Create your own Social Networking platform for specific activities via hosted tools like Ning, or other Open Source social networking tools.  Good applications for Social Networking environments include:  events management (allow people to meet and greet online); education or training (host your coursework in an interactive space and have people mark it up, amend and improve it); and best practise hubs (share your tips, tricks and insights in information-hungry or ‘expert’ environments)

The above examples show you how easy it is to engage in new dialogues, manage relationships in new ways and to help other people to spread the word on your behalf.

That said, it’s important to identify the right kinds of application for using social media.  ‘Build it and they will come’ is a dangerous mantra in this field.  Just because you have an audience and a brand, you can’t expect folks to automatically care for your latest social networking marvel.  The most successful applications of social networking in the B2B space tend to be those that are focused and designed to support a specific activity or application – eg, events support, customer support, and the like.

So, enough of the theory.  Go experiment….!  (And please do share your experiences with us!)

OK, Listen Up

Your web site is not your field of dreams. Build it and most likely they will not come.

Nope, once it’s built your goal is to make it work as a sales sweat house – and this takes real effort and a bunch of web marketing smarts.

Your first order of business is to attract engaged and interested traffic to your site… with the ultimate goal of turning these people into qualified leads.

In order to do this effectively (and to filter out the tyre-kickers) you need to pull out your Web Marketing 101 Kit Bag. We’re talking SEO, social media, online PR and blogging.

Sound OK?

Don’t worry. It’s simple (and largely free to do). The key rule is ‘give to get’: you’ve just created a category-killing web site with a beautifully designed and executed value proposition…. now all you need to do is work hard to engage with the right kind of people and bring them to your door.

The idea is to increase your web ‘reach’ and improve your performance in search engines (ie, your SEO) so that you can engage with and drive high-value, motivated traffic to your web site.

Here are the techniques you need…

Step 1: Content Generation

Step 2: Backlinking

Step 3: ‘Rest of the Web’ engagement (via Social Media, Online PR and blogging)

And here’s how you can do it….

1) Content Generation

Put simply, you need to generate some content bait. Quality content is what will ultimately drive traffic to your site. You need to be publishing good content- and keyword-rich articles, papers, podcasts, and video regularly to your site. This will encourage those search spiders to return more often and, over time, it will give you a compelling body of work that you can publish off-site with the aim of steering people away from other web destinations and onto your site.

2) Backlinking

The links that are made back to your site are the number one influencing factor in Google’s PageRank algorithm. And the higher quality they are, they more influential they will be in boosting your ranking (for a full explanation of what ‘quality’ means in this respect, see our paper on SEO). To this end, you need to encourage as many of them as possible. How? By submitting your site to relevant, quality listings directories (such as the technology section in Yahoo’s business pages), creating reciprocal links with important partner sites and getting hip to…

3) ‘Rest of the Web’ enagagement via Social Media, Online PR and blogging

Here’s where you put that battery of superior content to use. You should be out there creating a variety of social media application profiles - YouTube, Squidoo, Flickr, Slideshare, etc - so that each time you create a new piece of content you can publish it on them, along with a healthy dose of linkage back to your site. Elsewhere we’ve described this effort as ‘Pico Branding’ - using top-flight content to engage with audiences elsewhere on the web with the intention of inviting everyone back to your place. It’s a fantastic way of driving interested traffic.

In addition, you should be taking a leaf out of the new book of PR and publishing all of your newsworthy content via online news distribution hubs. This is another means of backlinking - the hubs will take your content and distribute it far and wide across the web to ‘newsy’ destinations like Google and Yahoo News and others. Note - the aim here is not to convince a human being to write up your news story, but to have a web site somewhere deep in the interweb publish it, along with a link or two back to your key web pages.

Last but not least, you should start blogging your market-related ideas every time you hit on something of interest. Why? Well, we’ve already written on what we feel the value of blogging to be in B2B, but in short, blogging can be:

• Another reason for Google to pay you frequent visits
• A direct continuation of your sales discussions
• The place where your prospects head to to get a handle on the real people behind the product/service
• A great way of engaging with the fabric of the web and generating high quality backlinks

A word about measurement

Aside from all this content generation and ‘engagement’ activity, we’d also recommend that you measure what you do on a regular (monthly?) basis. Otherwise it’ll be hard to track the effectiveness of what you’re doing, and hard to convince other important people (like bosses!) that you ought to be dedicating more resources to the work.

Using a stats package like Google Analytics (which is free!), here’s a few simple yardsticks you can use to validate your work…

• Average page views per month
• Average time on site
• Average bounce rates
• Average number and cost of acquisitions per month (sign ups to newsletters, white papers, etc)

If you follow the above advice, I can guarantee you’ll soon have people beating a path to your door.

Alternatively, contact us and we can help you on your way!

There’s a great piece in this month’s Fast Company that asks if Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling notion of a ‘Tipping Point’ is fundamentally flawed (see: Is the Tipping Point Toast?)

The conclusion is yes, kinda… and it’s no doubt sent Gladwell’s afro into a tight spin, as well as the rest of the globe’s marketing mavens

So, all those billions of marketing dollars that are spent on locating and ‘tipping’ a market’s influencers may be misguided?

If you haven’t read it yet, here’s a quick synopsis:

• Web/network guru who knows lots about network effects releases research that undermines the value of the ‘maven’ in turning ideas into marketing epidemics
• He looks deeply into some long-standing common wisdom about networked-ness, such as the six degrees of separation theory, runs new tests and concludes that the results were unrepresentative …that normal people are just as important at spreading stuff as ‘influential’ types
• Further, he does a number of other interesting studies to suggest that it may be impossible for us to gauge at any one time why a given idea/product/pop band is able to ‘break out’ from the pack and go big time

The guru in question is Duncan Watts, author of ‘Six Degrees: The New Science of Networks‘ and senior researcher at Yahoo (a big network). He knows his onions. What’s interesting about his research is that it takes Gladwell’s ideas and zooms out on them to create a far wider field of enquiry.

For example, Gladwell picks Hush Puppies as the memorable breakout brand of the mid-nineties NYC hipster scene. Watts asks why didn’t other stuff that they were wearing fare equally as well?

We think this is a really neat question to ask.

What’s at stake here? As the Fast Company piece says, the idea of influencers and tipping points lends itself really well to the world of marketing, where data is in short supply but pixie dust isn’t. Bigwig execs at agencies become arbiters of taste, identify a group and persuade brands to spend a bunch of cash dreaming up clever schemes of ‘brand advocacy’ that they hope will spread. Does it work? Well, sure it does in some circles, but in others definitely not.

What if the original idea is a bad one? What if the context is wrong? What about the bigger picture? Those guys in NYC may also have been wearing ski goggles in June, but their inability to ‘tip’ the eyewear - perhaps a failure of ‘brand empathy’ or just their general lack of ‘stick-ability’ - isn’t in question.

Here’s our take on the whole thing:

Influence is critical, but if the basic story is wrong, or if the marketplace isn’t ready then you’re destined to fail if you’re trying to create a buzz. Further, these three elements need to be aligned - cosmic style - for things to ‘tip.’

Taking them in reverse order, finding a receptive marketplace can be a research game or a ‘go with the gut’ game. Either one will do, but one should recognise that out of everything, getting this bit right is the most important thing.

Story is a creative game. It’s all about how you tell them. Good content and great execution really counts.

Influence is an interesting one right now. ‘Tipping’ and ‘brand advocacy’ in the physical world involves spending time, money and tea-leaves on finding the right people to help spread an idea. Online, however, this can be a relatively scientific exercise. Tools like Technorati can help you seek out influential bloggers; social media services like Digg and Stumbleupon can help you understand how people are engaging with and spreading certain stories. These things can also help you attract numerous people - influencial or otherwise - to your stuff.

Watts’ recommendation on the whole thing - through his work with Yahoo - is interesting. His latest research is on a new product offering called ‘Big Seed’ marketing, which at face value seems like a nod to the old days whereby creative campaigns are cast widely into the mass market (eg, via web banner ads) and folks are encouraged to pass them on. This is very different to the tipper’s tactics (go narrow, persuade and cajole): it’s big, bold, brash, and - importantly - very expensive. Tactically this is based on the assumption that ANYONE can be an effective tipper, and that reach and volume rather that type of people is the thing that counts - which is exactly what he concludes in his Gladwell-trumping research.

As a game of one-up-tipping-manship this makes for interesting sport. What we’d advocate is a mix of the two. Certain media, such as ad banners, will themselves screen important people out (SEO guru Aaron Wall points this one out in his excellent post on the theme). It’s far better to use the tools at our disposal to take a read of the market and go seed from there…

In other words ‘influential’ may mean something different to the narrow view that Gladwell prescribes. In the B2B sphere this is likely to be a mix of the maven, the uneducated and the unshaven…. if they’re active in the sense of passing ideas around, then everyone has a role to play. We just need to find them and engage with them in a cost- and attention-effective way.

How? Well, here’s a view on what we do at Velocity, courtesy of our web stats package…

The first spike occurred after we blogged about an event we spoke at. The idea had a market, the content had a decent storyline and we passed it around the folks that cared about this kind of thing. The second spike occurred after we wrote about something that we knew was interesting to our industry. Again, a decent story, a marketplace and (after some cursory research) an engaged audience. No rocket science here - we just tagged it on a few social media sites.

The effects? Well, lot’s more interest in Velocity than usual for starters. But the second item also ignited an old flame. The first also generated a rousing debate amongst some really interesting people that were relevant to us, and placed us somewhere near the centre of things. Does this qualify as a ‘tip’? Yes - in our world of B2B the first challenge is to seek out and engage with ideas in a very rational way. Our work may not have taken us to the top of Digg, but then we’d never expect it to. Our audience is a narrower one…. as I’m sure yours is too.

So we think that marketplace, story and influence count. When it comes to ‘tipping’ in B2B then the pursuit of influencers alone (without a well-researched, well storylined context to place them in) won’t necessarily help you.

Here’s our first broad brush, crystal ball prediction of the year: 2008 is the year of web engagement for B2B technology firms.

You built v2 or v3 of your site last year. You have a bunch of corporate content (about us, products, services, etc). You have some interesting content assets - white papers, case studies, etc. You have a CMS to publish stuff. But this year you really want your site to work harder – to generate leads and help speed up purchasing decisions.

To do this your site needs to become more than a calling card or brochure. You need to make it an ancillary sales person that works for you once your sales meetings are over.

(Note: this is a philosophy to be adopted. No cost.)

Here’s what you need to do:

1) Invest (heavily) in banner content

Support the sales process by becoming CONTENT RICH. This means more than just white papers. Think webinars, video, blogs, online PR, screencasting, product demos. Tell compelling stories via your site that address specific product / service / customer issues via digital media. Captivate people’s attention through moving images and audio. Words are great, but not enough.

(Note: Treat these things as ’sunk’ costs to support specific products/services or campaigns.)

2) Make your site more available to your audience

Become super RELEVANT and TARGETED. Invest (heavily) in search engine optimisation (SEO). Find out how people want to engage with you via Google and rethink your marketing messages accordingly. Use sophisticated tools to do this investigative work.

Embed this new thinking via great implementation of keywords in your web site. This is a messaging exercise (embed keywords in descriptions of who you are and what you do) and a technical exercise (embed keywords correctly at the code level). It’s also a design exercise: you need to tweak your site structure to ensure that landing pages and navigation paths are logical and get people to the content they need, fast.

Then, engage with proactively with search engines and influence the way that they index you so that the next time someone types in ‘widget for SAP optimization’ into Google you have a fighting chance of showing up on the first page of results.

(Note: this is both a philosophy to be adopted (you need to change the way you describe and present your stuff, guided by user searching trends), and a strategic investment. Not especially cheap.)

3) Once you’re content rich, relevant and targeted, you need to engage with the world

You need to become CACHE RICH.

Note: this is a new philosophy. You have a great web site, stuffed with great content in highly targeted areas and improved visibility on Google. But you can’t stop there: the ‘build it and they will come’ approach no longer works on the web.

Firstly, stop thinking of your web site as your only online destination - it’s just the ultimate one.

To engage with new prospects you have to cache your online presence across the web… by following the right crowds, capturing their attention with timely deposits of relevant content and inviting them back to your place.

How?

1. Cache the news sites via Online PR: distribute targeted, keyword-specific press releases announcing company news or the availability of your new content offers via online news hubs. Your goal is to generate automated web pages that point back to strategic points within your site, in order to boost interested traffic and SEO.
2. Cache the content networks via Pay per Click advertising: the Haiku of marketing - tightly focused, personalised and relevant ads that contain offers related to your banner content. Again, the goal is to drive interested, prospective customers, and to ask them to engage with you in some way - sign up for more content, register for an event, etc.
3. Cache your prospect’s inboxes via (permission-based) e-Mail marketing: a series of newsletters or ‘blasts’ that draw your database of contacts towards your content assets and into new sales conversations.
4. Cache the Blogsphere: using words, video and audio to showcase your thinking, your product developments and all of your news via your own blog. Your goal is to engage with key influencer communities and to position yourself within important industry level debates as a thought leader. This will drive new, interested parties to your site and into the sales funnel. At the same time, comment on other people’s blogs and drive their readership to yours.
5. Cache your key content destinations via Affiliate and Display Advertising: use traditional methods to reach new audiences in niche, cost-effective areas - eg, newsletter sponsorship, blog advertising, etc. Again, your goal is to drive engaged traffic and new leads towards your content jewels.
6. Cache your influencer networks via Social Media: engage with prospects via your LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, de.icio.us, by posting valuable content, links, alerts, opinions, etc, that lead back to your site and your (related) content assets. (Note: this needs to be handled smartly - poor content and poor engagement strategies will benefit nobody.) Your goal here is to seed compelling content and ideas into active networks where your audiences already exist, and to encourage them to pass it on.

4) Once you’re executing and engaged, you really need to measure

This is critical - you need to treat your SEO and engagement activity as a perpetual beta program. Experiment quickly and at reasonable cost, see what works, back the winners and ditch the rest. You need to establish one key metric across all your activity - cost per acquisition (of leads).

How? By using tools like Google Analytics, Technorati and other keyword and SEO measurement apps to generate regular reports that provide a clear indication of how your engagement campaigns and web sites are performing (minimum quarterly, recommended monthly).

…and that’s it.

The answer of course is 57. There’s the SEO guys, the branding guys, the PR guys, the viral guys, the advertising guys, and so on…

The fact that there are simply too many agencies to manage was raised by Will McInnes at a session I chaired this week on the future of PR. Aside from Will, I was also joined by Sarah Ogden and Drew Benvie. All super smart folks who know their onions.

The event was put together by NMK as an open invite for the PR community to chat with a bunch of digerati about the future of their industry. (Note: my role was as stooge to the smart people… I tried to be as Alan Partridge as possible by asking all the dumb questions). All in all it was a good night. NMK’s Ian Delaney has written about it here, so I won’t dig on the detail.

I did, however want to pick up on Will’s account of the evening. Too many agencies can only mean one thing - industry shakeout.

The event left me with one big impression: it seems that - where the web’s concerned - the glass is half empty for PR companies. And, as Will suggests in his blog post, this is a little bit mad because they ought to be doing good things right now, rather than worrying about where their future might lie.

Here’s my thoughts on the matter…….

PR is dead. Long live woteva.

The first thing to note is that PR is, in one important way, knackered.

When I used to run PR for IBM, all I had to do was stop or start my fellow IBMers talking to the press. Sat on the 33rd floor of an office block in Paris, I was Master of the Goddam Universe, controlling, spinning and unleashing stories to small reporter types on the street. I also had some nasty fires to fight too, but this worked out OK because I always owned the source of the story - so if it was a bad one, I just turned the sources off. In short, I was a mover, shaker, and MEDIATOR.

Today, the communications process has gotten a whole lot more complex.

Someone famous once said that ‘freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.’ Well, now we all own a press. We can blog, Twitter and generally cache our most intimate feelings on Facebook. In other words, we have the ability to publish whatever we please for the world to see. And this is very radical. Yesterday, if a software developer at IBM wanted to tell the world about a new widget he was working on, he’d have to do so via me and Computer Weekly. Today, he can do what he damn well pleases. Voila. A core function of the PR agent is toast.

So, what to do?

It’s clear that the world still needs PR agents. Companies will always need help getting published in the FT. But what about all this other web-based stuff? What does it mean and how does a PR firm deal with it?

My view is that PR firms have a simple choice. They either embrace the web or they don’t. But - importantly - it’s not live or die.

It’s just a question of what business you want to be in…

How many agencies does it take to change a light bulb?

Ideally, one - a really, really smart one. One that understands the bigger picture and helps you sell stuff to customers and who helps you use every trick at your disposal to do it fast and cost-effectively.

This type of firm exists today. Ogilvy is pretty good at it. They’re stuffed with smart people who can run campaigns across multiple channels. They don’t do everything themselves, they outsource a bunch of stuff for others to implement. But this works because they are good at directing it and getting the desired results. The problem is they’re expensive, so not every firm can use them.

For non-mega budget firms, the choice is not so good. They usually end up having to manage a bunch of disparate agencies with different skill sets - which is problematic because the onus for making the right strategy choices usually falls on them. And, as many corporate marketing directors will tell you, this is no fun. The administration side sucks, and the smart ones among them know that they simply don’t have all the answers…. particularly when it comes to the web.

So what’s a corporate marketing gal to do?

Well, one agency above all the others seems to be in a good place to help. The PR firm usually sits closely to the marketing director, advising on what should be said and done. They also usually write the script. And when it comes to the web, all of these skills are important - keywords, messages and content are the crux of any successful web campaign, be it Google Adwords, blogging, SEO, woteva.

It’s crystal ball time….

This is my ‘Future of PR’ scenario number 1….

PR firms morph into fuller service agencies that do some core strategy work in-house, but subcontract much of the ‘doing’ out to trusted partners. In the process, they might stop doing traditional PR implementation, but they definitely get some web chops. They start to advise on web development, online communications and such. They do wonderful, smart and ground-breaking work. Their marketing director clients leave their spouses and run off with them into the sunset.

(Note: this is Velocity! We do a bunch of stuff, including what we call web relations.)

My ‘Future of PR’ scenario number 2 is….

PR firms focus on their knitting, stop pretending they do web stuff, and get better and better at traditional PR (after all, there’s change a plenty in the world of publishing and someone’s got to work out better ways to influence the new breed of reporter). In the process, they let other firms become type 1’s, and they focus a lot of their attention on building strong sales relationships with them. They do wonderful, smart and ground-breaking PR work. They leave their spouses and run off into the sunset with agency type 1.

(Note, this is also a GREAT business to be in!)

B.Y.O.B: Bring your own bottle (show, don’t tell)

But how to become a type 1?

Well, this type of firm has to be all things to everyone…. which is hard when it comes to the web because it moves so fast.

You can, however, succeed in making the transition. As many of the panelists this week noted, the biggest success factor lies in simply just doing it. That’s right, don’t wait for the inspiration to brand your offering or try to figure out how to apply the old rules to the new environment, JUST DO IT!

When it comes to selling web services, take a leaf out of our book. We practice this stuff ourselves, so as it evolves we can figure out the value in using it.

You see, Facebook isn’t arcane, it’s blissfully simple. It’s a smashing way of bugging your friends whilst you should be doing work. Now, there’s a tonne of great communications opportunities in there for smart consultants: things which provide value to Facebook users without abusing its conventions. But to know it you have to do it. Same with blogging and every other ‘web 2.0′ channel.

Because we use this stuff for our own communication efforts, it’s very easy for us to spot an opportunity to use it with clients and also to show them how it’s done (B.Y.O.B style). Importantly, in doing so, we always show them everything about the tools and how they’re used. Usually, this is a relief for them because deep down they know the tool set isn’t complex. (Note: this also works because they ALWAYS feel alienated when folks try to sell them a slick branded ‘productized’ service or application for something they know their teenage daughter is doing ten times better in her bedroom at home!)

When we create projects this way, we help our clients to understand where the goal posts are and we also very clearly define the value in the service itself. And this seems to me to be where the PR industry is going wrong with the web today…

It’s PR Jim, but not as we know it

What’s the point of blogging?

Here’s a stab at an answer: the point of blogging is to talk to a group of people who have an interest in you. Blogging is, after all, just an ability to publish stuff cheaply and easily and have people give you their feedback through ‘comments.’

So, what’s a good application for blogging? Well, internal departments could have one or more, to keep each other in the loop on all the cool new things that are happening. Software development firms could have one to keep their super-interested customers up to date on product planning for version 5 of their new widget.

A bad application for blogging is using one as a CEO mouth piece and cutting and pasting some PR material once a week. Yet, we often see this kind of thing happening, and I think I know why…

Many of these new styles of web publishing - blogs, Facebook, etc - ‘feel’ like the types of activity that a PR firm should be doing. They involve words and trying to influence others. This thought, however, is a mistake.

These new web apps are not the ‘new PR’ - they’re nothing to do with PR as we know it. They’re great new ways to communicate. They’re NOT great new media for channeling every possible bit of PR material that you can get your hands on. They’re different. They serve different purposes and are used in different ways.

The role of the press release is a good example of the difference between traditional PR and life on the interweb.

Traditional PR: one goal of the press releases is to help a reporter write a news story by giving him/her content to use and thoughts to consider.

Interweb: the goal of press release distribution has very little to do with generating a news story. The idea is to encourage new web pages to get generated, all with keyword-rich links back to a specific point on your web site.

Now, in order to do the first activity, I need the help of a traditional PR firm. In order to do the second, I don’t. I need either a different kind of service company to help me, or I need some extra help in-house to do it myself.

And this, essentially, is my conclusion on the whole thing… traditional PR is needed and so is the interweb stuff, but they probably shouldn’t be provided by the same service partner.

Conclusion

This rant has been circular. Forgive me if you got there ahead of time.

To summarise:

• PR is not dead, it just has a choice to make: learn to knit better or to do other (multi-disciplined) things
• The way to do ‘new media’ communications is to do it for yourself (and then do the same thing for your clients)
• Don’t treat it like rocket surgery. Don’t overcomplicate it (you’ll get found out). Just do it.
• Don’t force PR-shaped stuff into web-shaped holes. It’s dumb. Stop it.
• Either be a good traditional PR agency or be a different kind of agency. Don’t try to be a traditional PR agency that does web - I just don’t think you can pull it off…

Footnote

Web-savvy people in traditional PR firms who are currently frustrated by their lack of opportunities should probably start their own firms or join a ‘Type 1′ agency.

Download this B2B Technology Marketing White Paper in pdf Format

Summary

Let’s face it, search matters in B2B technology marketing. Just about every purchase involves a Google search at some point, often at the very beginning.

If you’re website doesn’t come out high in the Google rankings, it’s time to get to work. You can hire expensive consultants, spend a lot with the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) agencies… or you could read this paper and do it yourself.

It will give you a simple set of non-technical guidelines for improving your web site’s performance in all major search engines. Regardless of your level of familiarity with the subject, it will arm you with new thinking on how to tackle the your SEO challenges more cost-effectively.

In short, this paper will help you to ‘SEO like a Pro’ - without major investments in external consultancy services… because SEO is not a black art. It’s simple. There, we’ve said it. Now we’ll show you how to do it.

Framing SEO: What it is and How to Approach it

For the sake of this paper, we’ll refer to Google as our target search engine. Google enjoys an overwhelming market share as the most popular search engine, and the principles that drive it are largely employed by other search engines - eg, Yahoo, MSN, etc. We’ll work to the premise that what’s good for Google is good for the rest.

We also need to make a distinction between ‘natural’ search and ‘paid for’ search. Natural search results are those returned by Google in the main (white) content area of your browser. ‘Paid for’ search results are those returned in the highlighted content cell at the top of the page and the sidebar to the right. They’re referred to as ‘Sponsored Links’ by Google and are generated, as you’d expect, on a paid for basis - ie, the more money I pay Google, the higher my ‘Sponsored Link’ will appear in a listing.

This paper is all about enhancing your natural search performance. Obviously, this is the more strategically important of the two as these results are perceived by users to be ‘unbiased.’

Why search matters

Before we describe the core principles of SEO, it’s worth considering why it should be so important to us.

Regardless of what type of business you’re in, your web site is now your primary point of contact with customers old and new — and the majority of these interactions will be mediated by a search engine, because ’search’ is how we happen to navigate the web.

Your goals ought to be to exploit the way Google is used to:

1. Drive relevant and qualified traffic to your web site; and….
2. Learn more about how people perceive your products and services via their search behaviour

Note: the primary emphasis here is on understanding people, not technology. You first need to grasp how people are using Google - the technology stuff comes later, and relates to how you’re able to align your web site with these usage patterns. In short, we’re talking about understanding the language that people use to search for you, and the psychology behind this.

As such, SEO is first and foremost a marketing activity, not a technical activity. It works on the basis of helping search engines find you via the provision of superior web site content and adherence to solid web principles. Over time, this practice should also help you to better understand how and what you’re selling, as your SEO tactics will need to be guided by the language and behaviour of the people who are searching for you.

Everything else is of secondary importance when it comes to enhancing your Google rankings. Importantly, this means that ugly web sites may perform better than good looking sites. From a design perspective, your challenge is to ensure that the look and feel of your site is compelling enough to retain interest, whilst at the same time adhering to the implementation practices that we’ll describe below.

Another important point to note is that SEO for SEO’s sake is a bad idea. Your goal should be to attract qualified users to your site, not just any old rabble. This is because the flip-side of increasing traffic is that it carries specific costs - such as rising bandwidth and the amount of resources that you apply to the effort in the first place.

For example, a mobile network infrastructure company that Velocity works with needs to attract prospects that are interested in their specific technology - people who are interested in ‘femtocells’ as opposed to ‘mobile phones.’ If we were to optimise the site on the latter search term, we may well increase overall site traffic, but we would be unlikely to increase the company’s revenues.

So, to ensure that your SEO work is cost-effective, your primary aim is ‘conversion.’ You’re really only interested in generating the traffic that generates a sales lead, downloads a white paper, signs up for an event or registers some other form of interest in you.

For this reason, your SEO efforts ought to be focused on the web pages that ask people to register, buy, download and subscribe….as opposed to your homepage. (Directing users to your homepage will result in unnecessary wastage (or drop out) as they will undoubtedly find something else to do other than click through to the pages that really matter…..although, of course, you may also want to encourage general browsing).

In sum, our advice is to treat SEO as follows:

• SEO is a marketing exercise, not a technology exercise, and should be done by marketing people.

• Understanding and practising good SEO is first and foremost about understanding how your users behave when searching, and then applying this logic to how your web site is constructed.

• Your approach to SEO should be governed by conversions - to purchasing, etc. Therefore your home page is NOT your most important web page, your conversion page is.

SEO Principles: the Complex Bit

When someone conducts a search, Google presents them with a series of links based on relevancy to the search term. Obviously, it’s your aim to feature at the top that list so as to incrase the chances of having people click through to your site.

This much is clear. But to promote this likelihood, it’s necessary to understand how Google actually works.

Google uses its ‘PageRank’ algorithm to evaluate and sort its search results. Much like Coca-Cola, the inner workings of this algorithm are a closely guarded secret. However, its general working principles are well documented (see http://www.google.com/technology and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank).

Google describes PageRank as something that “relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.” In practice this means that Google “interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.”

In addition, PageRank also analyses the page that “casts the vote,” and assumes that “votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important.’”

In essence, Google practices a form of web-based karma, whereby it values your page more if it’s well respected - ie, linked to - by other web pages. So, the number one factor that determines your position in a Google search is the number of external web pages that link to you.

Now, if this were to be the sole determining factor, then we could all pack up and go home right now. Your job would simply be to propagate the number of linking pages out there on the web, whilst focusing on gaining links from the more important web sites (ie, from CNET, as opposed to the Kennel Club of Bow).

But Google is smarter than that because it “combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to a search.” What this means is that Google looks at how pages are linking to you and how relevant to the search term your page content is. In other words, there are good ways and not so good ways for pages to link to you, and - critically - the way in which your web pages are composed will have an enormous effect on whether or not Google thinks they are relevant or not.

This, then, is the technical bit. In order to influence Google and encourage it to view your pages as relevant, you need to know how it thinks….and, armed with this knowledge, you also need to tell people how to construct their links. We’ll deal with this shortly.

In the meantime, you should also note that your site must first be discovered, or ‘indexed’, by Google, and that Google does this via the use of software that crawls the web looking for, reacting to, and evaluating links (according to the PageRank algorithm).

This software is called a crawler, a spider or a search bot - but most commonly ‘bot’ for short. When a bot discovers your pages it ‘indexes’ them by storing a copy of them on Google’s servers. In turn, when someone conducts a search, it is these copies of your pages that Google presents to users as a series of links, ranked by relevance to the search term.

OK, so that’s all the science we need to know for now. It’s really not that complex. As mentioned before, the key to better SEO lies primarily in understanding how your users are searching for you, and applying this logic to the way that your site is built. You see it’s all about keywords!

Think like your customers (key words Part 1)

The point of ‘keywords’ is to convince Google that you are what you say you are, and that you’re therefore relevant to a user’s search query. And it’s at this point that traditional marketeers tend to run for the hills or hastily organise a focus group…..because the only way to convince Google that you’re relevant is to use the exact same language as your customers and prospects.

Now, it’s worth reflecting for a moment on what this really means. Remember your last marketing summit, where senior management assembled with sharpened pencils and powerpoints to streamline your corporate messages? Well, skip that stuff, because Google doesn’t care for it - in reality, one company’s ‘personal messaging and productivity optimising platform’ is really just an average users ‘email software.’

You get the point…. The skill in identifying key words lies mainly in being brave enough to describe your products and services in the real, everyday language that people actually use.

Here’s a general formula to keep you honest: if the answer is X, then what was the question? Or, if I sell email software, what kind of questions might users be asking in order to discover me? Perhaps something radical like ‘email software for Windows’??!!

Naturally this is heresy for traditional marketing thinkers…..For where’s the differentiation? Where’s the USP? And here’s the rub - successful SEO depends on not being different, but on being the same. Or just samey enough if you practice it well enough. Because however unique you may wish to treat each individual customer, your customers don’t really want to treat you in a unique way. That’s just asking them to work too hard - to remember a different message or word for every company under the sun.

In cognitive terms, we merge concepts into groups and create labels for them - and that’s good enough. So, email is email and nothing more.

There are exceptions to this rule of course. If you are Pepsi or Budweiser then you have the marketing budget to bend minds and make people think just like you want them to. But, for the rest of us, we have to move with the crowd and identify ourselves in ways that are already part of your target audience’s psyche.

The trick is to find a sweet spot and go for it.

But where to start? Well, focus groups may be an idea, but a more cost-effective approach is to investigate your search logs to see how people have arrived at your site (ie, see which search terms they’ve been using historically). Or there are a number of freely available tools that can show you the popularity of specific search terms and associated data such as the number of pages on the web that contain those words.

Here’s another crude equation that can help (we use it here at Velocity): first of all, you need to establish whether or not your keyword is relevant by understanding how many search terms are conducted on it per month (let’s call this number ‘A’); then you need to get a sense of who you’re competing against, or the number of pages already out there that use that same phrase or word (B).

So, in order to establish how hard it will be to attract interest and rank well in Google, it’s a case of dividing the number of searches (A) by the number of pages that might provide a search result (B)….and perhaps making that number a percentage term to give you a notion of probability.

As mentioned, the tools listed at the end of this paper will get you these numbers, but what you need to discover is a place where your chosen key words can co-exist happily amongst the competition - giving you as much chance as possible to be discovered.

For example, the phrase ‘Open Source Content Management System’ is relatively popular as a UK search term (over 74 searches last month). Coupled with this, the phrase ‘Open Source Content Management System’ has a reasonable presence on the web (59 million related pages are indexed in Google).

As such, using our formula, the chances of a user stumbling across any given ‘Open Source Content Management System’ page is 0.0001%. By comparison, the term ‘open source CMS’ was searched for 130 times in the same period, and yet there are only around 6.5 million pages indexed with that term….meaning that users have a vastly improved 0.002% chance of finding any given ‘open source CMS’ page.

Now, don’t be put off by the decimal points here, because there will always be more web pages than searches (think about it, if there was only one web page per search, then SEO would be so damn easy….and I wouldn’t be writing this paper!). Just treat this as a simple way of establishing what kind of market you’re playing in and how hard it might be to grab peoples’ attention.

The next step, then, is to take this maths and apply a bit of science to it in order to improve your chances of getting spotted - ie, to change that 0.002% number into something more positive (since the previous formula was based on a very even playing field - without taking any ‘optimisation’ practices into account).

To give us this competitive edge we need to understand why, in the eyes of Google, no two pages are created equal and apply some smarts to the way in which we build our web site. In other words, we have to….

Think Like Google (key words Part 2)

We’ve already stated that it’s not ‘rocket science,’ so we’ll keep the technical stuff to a minimum. In a nutshell, all you need to do to make Google happy is ensure that your content is King (or Queen!).

As mentioned, Google is not human. It uses bots, not eyes, and so in general it prefers words to pictures (ie, jpegs, Flash animations and video).

It also likes your content to be updated as frequently as possible, to give it an excuse to come visit you more often and ensure that your page ranking is as up to date as it should be. And it likes to be lead very, very clearly through your content, just to make absolute sense of it and to be sure that you are what you say you are (again, there’s no scope for subtleties - you’re communicating with a bot, not a real human being!).

As such, here’s some content rules that Google likes:

• Focus your content efforts on the pages that really matter. Pick a few and stick with them. They should be the ones that you really want people clicking through to as a result of a search. (This is unlikely to be your home page, and more likely to be your key products pages).

• More is more. Update your content as often as possible. Make it dynamic. Suggestions: write a blog; post press releases for anything remotely interesting (don’t save all the news for the annual report!); write opinion pieces and white papers (guess where this one’s going to appear soon!?); and if you have a ‘back catalogue’ of content (manuals, user guides, old articles, etc), then use it….anything to add to the volume of your content and the frequency at which it’s published!

• Where possible, let your site users take the strain of content production: create discussion forums for them; enable them to post reviews and/or comments to your pages; again, anything that adds to the volume of content on your site and its frequency.

• Use those keywords and use them well. Optimise your pages around your key terms in a sensible way, ensuring that humans as well as bots can read them. Common sense should prevail here - and you may find that you get penalised by Google if you ’stuff’ your pages with too much key word content. As a measure, if your colleague can make sense of your pages then its good for Google. If s/he can’t then it’s not.

With this in mind, here’s some technical guidelines on how to implement your content:

• Try to make your site name and/or your index page a keyword. You can see this by the text that appears at the top of your browser - it will always give you the name of the page that you’re browsing. And if your pages have no name, then shame on you….name them! Ideally, your content management system will enable you to do this as an editable piece of content, and you won’t need to re-code anything at all.

• Help humans and bots to understand you by structuring your composite page elements consistently and elegantly. For example, your style sheets should have a clear delineation between headers, in terms of font and text size, and your images should all carry alternative text tags so that they can be read by machine readers. In addition, your links should also be labelled with descriptive title tags and scroll bar tags (ie, the text that appears in your scroll bar when you hover over or click on a link).

• Exploit your page structure in terms of key word usage. Your page is composed of a hierarchy of elements, as described above - page header, header styles, navigational links, images, bold text, etc. Like a human, when a bot scans a page these are the elements that make a first (and lasting) impression. Use keywords within them - embed key words in your navigational scheme, use keywords as page headers, use them as image ‘alt’ tags, etc…. as a rule, use keywords for as much of your descriptive and/or directional content as possible, and think in hierarchical terms - eg, a keyword as a page title is worth more than one buried in your page content.

• When thinking about how long your pages should be, again, think human. As a guideline, 300 words is a good length to keep each page - this makes them easy for bots and people to read. Any less text and it becomes difficult to optimise your key words without making the page look stuffed. Any more text and your content will become unwieldy - both to read and in terms of its production (of course, the creation of content is an overhead!)

• ….and finally, just because you’re publishing a web site, don’t be limited in terms of distribution. Get your content out there using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, so that users can pick it up in formats other than directly via your site. RSS, for example, allows people to receive your content directly within their RSS ‘reader’ application of choice, without having to visit you. Publishing content in this way also allows other web masters to take it and re-purpose it for their own sites - ie, they can plug your RSS feed into their site, and (re)present it to their users….which should be encouraged since this will create more web pages that link back to you. In fact, ‘online PR’ also works in a similar way, and we’ll discuss this below…

OK, so much for the content production 101’s - all of the above advice is designed to help Google see you more clearly. The next thought is to help Google understand you….

Dress for Google: Some Site Design Tips

As mentioned above, it’s a shame, but because Google is geeky by nature, it doesn’t always appreciate beautiful web sites. It’s just not wired that way.

Instead, Google prefers to take its time to get to know you via some formal design and implementation principles - and beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder because ugly sites can, and often do, win.

When it comes to site design, your aim is to engage Google’s search bots for as long as possible in order to help them to get familiar with you. Here are some things to avoid:

• Overuse of Flash: because Flash doesn’t subscribe to the ’say it with text’ rule. Now, don’t get this wrong, because Flash is a wonderful thing - it helps to beautify and communicate - but don’t do all of your talking with it, because search bots can’t get at all those precious key words that Flash files contain within.

• Overuse of image files for key page elements: because, as already explained, Google bots can’t read images as easily as they can read text. Which is disappointing, because often your navigational labels may look better when rendered in a snazzy font with little icons by their sides….but if you go this route, you’re not helping Google to ‘read’ you.

• The use of files over web pages: for example, the use of a pdf download page rather than rendering all of that pdf content as html pages. As before, the trick here is to help Google to read you….and what Google likes to read best is html. So, whilst pdfs may be great for downloading, sharing and printing, why not render that content through a ‘print friendly’ design template? Or why not present both html text and the option to download as a pdf?

• Overuse of password protected zones: because, in the same way that you’re locking humans out, you’re also locking Google out. So, think carefully about the balance of content that you’re putting behind these firewalls. If you’re a magazine or a publisher you should at least put a snippet of your password-protected content on view to Google and the public. This way a sub set of the key words get indexed and become searchable. (Alternatively, you can always talk to Google about how to enable its bots to get behind your firewalls, without compromising your premier content).

In short, when it comes to good, SEO-friendly design, the things to avoid are all the things that are bad for general site accessibility…which means you need to try to present your content in a way that bots and other software programs (eg, text-to-speech apps) can ‘read.’

Further guidance on good accessibility design can be found via the W3C consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WIA) at: http://www.w3.org/WAI/. If you follow this advice then Google will love you!

Having listed the taboos, there are a number of design and implementation best practices to be encouraged. These are the type of things that encourage bots to spend more time indexing you and getting to know you.

For example: Submit your site map to Google, in a Google-accessible (XML-based) way. This way, Google can really get to grips with what you are. For further information, see: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318.

For page navigational elements - such as your main navigation scheme and title links for ‘push boxes’ (eg, a listing for ‘Latest Press Open Source CMS News’) - use key words wherever you can. As mentioned above, Google will view this stuff as carrying more ‘meaning’ than standard page text.

Also, try playing around with your navigation scheme - it may be beneficial to users and bots alike to have some level of repetition going on within the page. See http://www.salesforce.com for a great example of this. At the bottom of the page, they have a very subtle ‘quick link’ navigation scheme that repeats the main scheme…so that users can jump straight to ‘CRM News’ etc. And now look again at these links. Yup, Salesforce.com is a CRM application vendor. These links promote ‘CRM Support, CRM Events, CRM Investor Info’, etc…. all in the name of great SEO.

You should always encourage the use of human-readable urls. Once more, this helps both bots and humans to understand what’s going on on the page (from a human point of view, just think about how we receive links - often in the body of emails - and so http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk/archives/category/blog is of much more use than http://www.velocitypartnersco.uk/about/4%$123-7 !!!). An extension of this thought is to build key words into your url schemes. Any decent CMS should enable this.

You should also encourage both users and bots to explore your site in more depth by providing what is known as ‘deep links’ on your key SEO pages. For example, present a listing of your last six blog entries on a key landing page (with headlines that are all optimised). This will prompt search bots and users to go follow them and index/read even more of your site content.

Metadata should always, always, always be optimised around key words and this should always be designed into your page layouts to maximise its effects. For example, if you use custom metadata for page descriptions - such as a press releases synopsis - then you ought to ensure that this is rendered as the intro text on the main press release listing page. This way, bots and users are told what the page is about before they go and click on the page link….and this content can be optimised accordingly.

The use of internal page linking should be encouraged, particularly when using key words as the link description. Again, as an important piece of page content, a link helps Google to understand what you’re really about and get to the pages that really matter.

OK, so that’s some basic design and implementation advice. Let’s stick with the ‘relationship’ metaphor for a moment, because the next element to consider is how to attract attention to yourself… and the best way to do this is to be promiscuous.

The ‘Give to Get’ Rule

Now, getting your name known around town and within Google is not as sordid as you might imagine. As mentioned above, the first principle of SEO is to increase the number of web pages that point to your site (or your optimised page). There are a number of ways to do this:

1. Become notorious: spend lots of money on advertising via Pay per Click (PPC - to be covered in a separate, upcoming white paper), banners, offline ads, offline PR, etc…such that you capture the imagination of searchers everywhere through paid-for placement of links and have them search for you - robot-like - in the language that you prescribe.
2. Become even more notorious: monumentally succeed or screw-up…such that everyone writes about what you’ve done online and links to your web site. (Actually, this might be the sordid option!
3. Become charming: encourage lots of other web masters to link their pages to yours. This is otherwise known as a partner or reciprocal linking plan, and is encouraged highly. It takes time and effort, but using the ‘good web karma’ / Google PageRank logic that we previously mentioned, it can be hugely beneficial - in the sense that working hard to make the BBC link to you will have a positive pay off. (Whilst working less hard to persuade the Kennel Club to link to you is of dubious merit.) Whichever route you take, always try to ensure that the reciprocal links are relevant - ie, the BBC should only be a target if you are a in a related industry. And remember what Google described as its ’sophisticated text-matching techniques’ because accepting links from nefarious sources on the web (there are plenty on offer) does not tend to pay - for example, setting up or participating in ‘link farms’ or cloning your sites into ‘rings’ that all point back to the same source using the same content. Our advice is don’t do this because Google will find you out. (This is in fact your second sordid option!)
4. Become smart: use some freely available tricks and tools to get your name out there as much as possible and have pages linking back to you.

We’ll focus on option four. Here are some low maintenance and cost-effective ways of punching above your weight and generating links back to your web site:

• Submit your web site to Google, and other major search engines (see the ‘Tools’ section at the end of this paper for links and guidance on how to do this).

• Add your site url to the Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org/add.html). I won’t elaborate here - but it’s important because Google uses it as the basis for some of the ways in which it indexes sites.

• Submit your url to as many free business directories as you can (eg, Yahoo), and as many paid-for directories as you can afford (eg, the Yahoo Shopping directory). For all of these submissions, your aim is to get listed, and hence create another web page with a link back to your optimised page (reminder - this may not always be your home page, but your action or ‘conversion’ page).

• Encourage your team to maintain their own web properties and have these link back to your site. For example, have people refer to your site via their e-cademy profile page, or via LinkedIn, or SoFlow, or FaceBook. Have them build a Squidoo lens (http://www.squidoo.com) that links to you….Encourage them to maintain their own personal blogs and to say complimentary things about your products and services, and have them link to you using appropriately (optimised) language.

• Issue your press releases via free online distribution hubs such as ClickPress, PRLog and others, and fill your press releases full of links to your key pages. (Note: this is an entirely machine automated process, and, unlike normal PR, its goal is not to generate media coverage but to generate new web pages with links.) See the ‘Tools’ section below for a list of online PR distribution services.

Further to this, you should note that there are good links and bad links, as already mentioned. Here’s an example:

1. Good: Visit Velocity for their magic <a href=”http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk/papers“>tech marketing white papers </a>!
2. Bad: Visit Velocity for their magic tech marketing white paper,<a href=”http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk/papers“>here</a>!

You don’t need to understand too much about html to tell the difference, other than the fact that example 1 optimised the link around the phrase ‘ tech marketing white paper,’ whereas example 2 optimised the link around the phrase ‘here.’

Now in terms of these links’ value to our business, example 1 is better because it’s imparting some level of understanding and association within the code, whereas example 2 tells us nothing of who and what Velocity is all about.

A great example of how this plays out can be seen by Googling the phrase ‘click here.’ You’ll notice that the Adobe Acrobat download page comes out on top. This is because people have been placing pdf’s on their page next to a link that tells users to ‘click here’ to get Acrobat Reader if they don’t have it already.

Now, this is a fun example because just about everyone already has the application. But personally, I’d be kicking myself if a partner web site decided to link to my product in the same way (by using ‘click here’ as the descriptive element of the html) because I know that when people search for a tech marketing white paper, ‘click here’ is not the term they’re going to use!

So, it’s important to ensure that external and internal links are constructed properly, and that where possible you can influence web masters to do it your way, using your keywords.

So much for design and implementation and getting your name and links out there. There is one other significant way to help boost your SEO, and that’s….

Conclusion: Start Now!

To summarise, most of the things we need to care about in SEO are the same things we should be doing to make our web sites more accessible and more readable (and I would say enjoyable) for everyone.

The key here is that good SEO requires an absolute devotion to ensuring your content is kept on track at every possible point - and this means placing key words in page headers, navigation labels and the like, as well as describing your products and services in a language that makes sense to normal human beings.

The design and implementation tips that we mention ought also to be common practice to any decent web developer / designer, and the fact that a content management system can help make this stuff second nature ought not be a surprise.

So, to conclude. SEO isn’t a black art. It’s not even a grey area. It can be practised effectively by everyone and, to cover the key elements, this needn’t be an exercise that requires a stack of cash or a bunch of overpaid, under-aged consultants!

Useful Tools

O’Reilly PDF guide to SEO: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/seo/
Google Toolbar (to measure a site’s PageRank): http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/FT3/intl/en/index.html
Alexa Toolbar (to measure a site’s comparative performance): http://www.alexa.com/
Overture Inventory (for investigating key word popularity): http://inventory.overture.com/
Google Analytics (for measuring your site’s performance - eg, top pages, search terms, etc): http://www.google.com/analytics/
Opentracker (as per above, but with some extra cool tools - eg visitors by company): http://www.opentracker.net
SubmitExpress.com (for submitting your site freely to search engines): http://www.submitexpress.com/

Useful Web Sites/Online Tools

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/key word-density/
http://tools.seobook.com/
http://tools.seobook.com/general/key word-information/
http://tools.seobook.com/competition-finder/index.php

Useful Publications

SEO Watch: http://searchenginewatch.com/
SEO Book - http://www.seobook.com
Search Marketing Gurus - http://www.searchmarketinggurus.com
SEO Moz - http://www.seomoz.org
SEO Buzz Box - http://www.seobuzzbox.com
Search Marketing and Optimization - http://www.viperchill.com/blog
Search Engine Roundtable - http://www.seroundtable.com/

Online Press Release Distribution Hubs

ClickPress: http://www.clickpress.com/releases/
PR Leap: http://www.prleap.com/
PR Log: http://www.prlog.org/pub/free-press-release-submit.php
Sane PR: http://www.sanepr.com/

Download this B2B Technology Marketing White Paper in pdf Format

What’s a press release supposed to do?

We all know what it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to magically inspire reporters to write good things about your company. In reality, this is never the case. A press release can be many things - a marketing man’s nirvana; a CEO’s vanity play; and a great reason for a PR consultant to throw a party…. but more often than not, it’s not the thing that moves a reporter to write.

To get reporters to write you need four things: a lot of cash, a brand, a great story and a talented PR consultant. And here are the riders: when the story’s absent, you need cash, brand and talent in abundance; if you have no brand, you need the other stuff in spades; and if you have no cash, then you need to play by a different set of rules.

Oftentimes, the cash question is just about buying persistence. Your story might stink, but you may have enough resources to stay in the face of reporters long enough to get them to write about you. In other words, you buy the services of a PR firm. However, it’s a harsh fact that in today’s world, £2,500 a month buys you not a lot of talent…. and, consequently, not a lot of success.

What’s a smart, budget-conscious firm to do with PR?

Most likely your audience is very specific, and your stories are not of mass appeal. Your objective, however, remains the same. You want to raise awareness of your brand/product/service among prospects who don’t know you yet.

Now there’s a big wide world of PR agencies out there, waiting to eat your marketing budget, so here’s a word to the wise: let them focus on the clients they’re built for - the big corporate gorillas that have the cash and the brand to make the traditional PR model work. For the rest of us there’s an alternative: the web.

PR on the web: avoid the middle man

The starting point for PR on the web is the same as it ever was. You still need to generate compelling content to appeal to your audiences. You still need to craft your marketing messages with a great deal of care - be they via white papers, case studies, opinion pieces or good old press releases. The difference, however, lies in how you distribute them.

Email is cheap. Publishing stuff on your web site costs almost zero. Sending your press releases via web-based distribution hubs costs next to nothing. On the other hand, to hold the front page of the FT is a more expensive ride, because the man-power of PR is not cheap.
By using the web you can cut out the middle man and still get your message to your audience. As we’ll see, the approach is a little different, but the result can be a lot more cost effective, targeted and (most importantly!) easy to measure.

Raising awareness, web style

You already have a web site, right? Well, it’s time to put it to work.

Once you’ve created all of those classic marcomms pieces - the white papers, the think pieces, and the press releases, they need to find a home on your site…say the ‘resources’ section. This first piece of publishing should cost you nothing, especially if you use a Content Management System (a CMS is cheap, too and you really ought to use one for your website).

At the same time, your website should act as a hub for the creation of a web marketing database, capturing user information as they pass through your site. For example, you should be getting people to sign up to newsletters or whitepapers in exchange for their email address. If you’re doing this already then you’re half way there.

Using email to drive awareness

Now that you’ve published your content to your site it’s time to use your email lists and shout about it. There are killer email tools that help you do this at an incredibly low cost - such as Vertical Response.

Use your email lists effectively in tandem with these tools and build targeted email campaigns around specific areas of interest and in specific formats. For example, you can turn that latest sales presentation into a one-page opinion piece that ties into your latest sales promotion…and then fire it off to your customers as an email blast. Or, you can round up all the new content you’ve produced this quarter and turn it into a newsletter for your business partners.

This approach costs you next to nothing (perhaps a penny an email), and yet it enables you to get directly in the face of the people you care about - customers, partners, analysts and, er, journalists. And over time, as you begin to measure them, you can make your email communications smarter and more effective - you can personalise your content according to the things you learn from your audiences (ie, if nobody’s clicking on your white papers, then change them! And, if Acme Co. doesn’t click on your newsletter, then send them something else!)

Beyond communicating with people, today’s email tools also provide you with a mass of data about the effectiveness of your campaigns. Want to know the names of the people that clicked through and downloaded your latest white paper? You got it! Want to phone them? Go for it!

Rethinking press releases

At the same time, content distribution hubs like PR Newswire will, for a couple of hundred pounds, take your press releases and distribute them far and wide across the internet - to places such as Yahoo News, Bloomberg, and other more specialist news outlets.

The primary idea here is not to generate press coverage. As mentioned, that takes a bigger chunk of change to achieve. The goal is to generate web coverage. In practice, when your press release is distributed by these hubs, it ends up getting published in a thousand different places across the web. All of these places are web pages, and the majority of them are automated - they won’t need you or a PR consultant to persuade them to publish your story.

Whilst these sites may seem irrelevant to you, to Google and Co. they’re not. For Google, the fact that they’re out there means that somebody somewhere cares about you, and further, if your press releases contain links back to specific pages on your web site using effective keywords (eg, to the relevant campaign offer page) then this does wonders to the way in which Google understands you and ranks you.

So….by distributing press releases across the web, you’re encouraging Google to rank you higher, which in turn means more people will be able to find their way to your web site through their own web searches. In addition, web press release distribution helps you access new markets and new web site visitors from places you’d never reach before - for example, a listing on an obscure news aggregator in Eastern Europe may not be an immediate target, but it might bring you new interest and new business.

Stop the Press! PR for all!

PR has changed. It’s no longer solely about generating press coverage. This stuff is expensive to do well. It is still important, however. IBM will continue to spend zillions per year with PR agencies because the front page of the FT will continue to matter to them.

But for smaller organisations, PR today is all about communicating with people directly (through email) and generating web coverage and encouraging new visitors to web sites (through news distribution hubs). With the right tools in place, this approach is very cost effective and very measurable.

Like the old PR model, content is still king - in the sense that what you say must be relevant, valuable and timely - but the means of communication is radically different. It’s web-based. It’s cheap. And everyone can do it. It’s PR for all!