Being a nice chap, I thought I’d share a few of our secret web marketing tools with you. These are the apps and widgets that we use day in, day out to help our clients do wonderful things in SEO, PPC, and web content marketing in general….

Keyword Research Tools

Tools to help you understand which SEO/keyword markets to attack…

KGen
A sidebar that scans a web page and gives you a read on its keyword volumes and keyword density. Use it for snooping on competitors. If they’re good at their game, you’ll soon learn why.

Google Adwords Suggest
Type in whatever keywords and/or phrases you’re investigating, hit a button and this tool will tell you how many people have used the same verbage to search Google in an average month, and also how many competitors are out there bidding on the same terms as part of their PPC ad campaigns.

Wordtracker
Like Google Suggest, but provides (independent) data on keywords from a wider variety of search engines. In addition, it gives you a superb competitive index that tells you how many other web pages are optimised for your terms.

Competitive Keyword Tools

Tools to help you understand what your competitors are up to…

Keyword Spy
A very smart widget that shows you which other companies and/or sites are using your keywords for their PPC campaigns.

Keyword Page Comparison Tool
This tool enables you to grab a quick read on the technical composition of a web page by scraping its title, meta description, meta keywords, page copy, and top keyword phrases and presenting it all back to you in one place.

Keyword Density Tool
This is a variant on the Keyword Page comparison tool, but gives you a bit more flexibility to include and exclude certain paratmeters. Great to use to get a rapid view on how well your competitors are thinking about keywords and SEO.

SEO Analysis Tools

Things to help you understand SEO performance…

SEO Quake
A plugin for Firefox that sits as an additional toolbar at the top of your browser window. When you’re on a page, it’ll tell you (immediately) key things like Google PageRank, page index volume, volume of inbound links, volume of external links, and other essential data.

Xinu
A great little service that gives you an instant read on a site’s SEO performance across a wide range of metrics. At the press of a button you’ll see key indicators like social media footprint (how often a site’s been bookmarked), volume of backlinks (and their source), and number of pages indexed in key search engines.

Google Analytics
The daddy of analytics tools. It’s free. So use it!

Opentracker
Much like Google Analytics, but has a cool feature that shows you which companies are browsing your site in real time!

Google Webmaster
Provides lots of great tools to help webmasters understand how often their sites are being indexed by Google and which pages are being accessed.

Blog Research Tools

Things to keep you in the know and amongst the buzz and gossip…

Blogpulse
Kind of like a Google for blogs. Also free. Just type in a search term and it’ll give you back a ream of related (recent) blog posts. You can also do some neat ‘trending’ vs other keywords.

Twitter Search
A Google for Twitter. See who’s talking about you and your keywords.

Online PR Tools

Things to help you spread the word at very little cost…

I’ll make it a list. They basically do the same thing: distribute your press releases around the web at next to no cost.

PitchEngine
FastPitch
ClickPress
Sane PR
PR Log

Got any others? We’d love to know. Just post us a comment….

I’ve been doing a stack of content optimisation for client web sites lately, so I thought I’d share some of my ‘how to’ notes with the interweb.

As I do this stuff I’m usually working side by side with a marketing manager/director/etc in order to make decisions about SEO strategies, and how to best plan for the future. Content can be a messy business at times, particularly if there are more than a couple of people producing it for a site… anarchy often rules in the shape of strange formating and styling and irregular usage of language.

So I find it helps to give people some guidelines to keep them on the straight and narrow. And in doing so, it’s usually best to strip out the blather and get them focused on just the handful of things they *have* to remember when creating a new web page (so that they can continue to build on a good SEO foundation without our help!)

So, here goes…. notes from my content optimisation scrap book:

Technical Page Content Tips

Here at Velocity, we always use a CMS for our client sites. We choose these apps carefully, and always ensure that they let us do some essential SEO-related things from a technical and functional page perspective… Because, for good SEO, there are a bunch of things you really have to do at a technical page level:

* Edit each of your page titles independently. Your page title is the thing that will be printed at the top of a browser window (in the centre of the grey horizontal bar, next to your minimise/maximise buttons). You should try and make this title brief - around 70 characters or so, relevant to the page and peppered with a few important keywords or phrases. This is because, like us humans, crawlers tend to use ‘titles’ as a good indication of what the page is about. (NB: don’t go crazy on the keywords! The page title MUST be readable and easy on the eye to humankind as well!)

* Edit each page’s metadata descriptions. This is the stuff that Google uses to describe you when it displays its results (ie, it gets used as the blurb that sits underneath the page title link in Google’s listing for you). As such, this field should describe the page, include a few keywords, and also *a call to action* like ‘read more’, or ‘find out more’ or ‘get your free offer here…’ etc. (Think about it - this globbet of content is really, really important - this is your ’sales pitch’ on a Google results page…. so a call to action is a good thing to draw people into the click.) This text should be around 160 characters or less. Anything more will get cut off at the knees.

* Edit each page’s metadata keywords/tags. Whilst this used to be important, it’s not any more…. but you ought to do it as a matter of good practice. Here you should list all your relevant key phrases, separated by a comma. This could be a big list, or it could be small…. whatever you think appropriate. You should note however, that this metadata field isn’t really used by search engines as a measure of importance or relevancy any more. It does, however, give them a clue about who you are and what you’re about.

* Use keywords in your navigation schemes wherever possible. Also use them (sensibly) in important on-page functional items like buttons, pull quotes, maps, and other such eye candy.

On-Page Content Tips

So much for the functional and technical stuff. What about the writing? Here’s my ultra-condensed guide to producing good, SEO-friendly page content….

* Make your content chunky - use header tags to split it into bite-sized paragraphs that are easy for crawlers and humans alike to read and understand. (ie, header, para, space; header, para, space, etc.)

* Use keywords in them there headers wherever possible, and wherever it adds value to the process of scanning or skimming the page.

* Create as many internal links in the page as possible, whilst still retaining a (human) reader’s focus. Use keywords in the descriptive link anchor text (if you’re using a half decent CMS, then you ought to get prompted for this). This anchor text is basically a descriptive label. It tells a crawler what your link is about. Hence, if you’re in the business of CRM systems, then your internal link from your home page to your products page ought to include an anchor text that goes something like this: ‘XYZ Corp’s CRM Software helps mere mortals sell ice to eskimos.’ In other words, use a bunch of sensible internal links to help a crawler find its way around your site and learn about what you do in the process.

* Create as many external links as possible. Use the same approach to anchor text as described above. Whilst internal links are important to help a crawler scoot around your site, external links will help them understand what kind of other web sites you associate yourself with. So, if you’re in the business of selling small handheld computing devices, make sure you link out to popular media sites that cover this topic and also other vendor sites that compliment you (and even compete with you). The more popular these sites the better - your goal is the bask in their sunlight.

* If you’re blogging, or using a CMS that uses blog-style principles (and of your front end design houses them) then use categories and tags for your posts/pages wherever possible, and try to infuse some keywords in there whenever you can. As per the points above, these navigational elements help crawlers to understand how to navigate your site and understand who you are in equal measure…. just like they help us humans.

* Put your most important content at the top of the page. By important I mean the stuff that’s full of useful keywords, headings, and links. Save the waffle for later in the page. (Like us, crawlers get bored easily.)

* Think of your page as a hierarchy of content. In fact, think like a robot in a hurry. Big, important words go at the top in big important heading styles. Weave linkage into this important stuff wherever you can, and try to ensure that this linkage reinforces the big keywords in its anchor text. In other words, keywords get kind of scored in order of descending importance, depending on where they feature in your content: from page titles down through primary navigation, headers, body text links, bold text and boring old plain text.

All you really need to remember….

In sum, all of the above illustrates that crawlers basically read the way that we humans do – they scan the page and pick out key elements to get a sense of meaning. As such, good SEO content is good to read…. and to write be able to write it is to have a good level of empathy with readers and crawlers alike.

If you’d like to know more about a bit of the science, check out our best practice SEO white paper ‘How to be a Google Guru in 30 Minutes’….

The latest edition of our semi-regular newsletter update is now available. It’s packed with goodness inside, including our star new white pager, Marketing, Meet Sales, which offers eleven ways to make your marketing activity really drive new sales.

Other highlights include new papers on how to make your web site ultra-usable and how to make your PPC campaigns sing. Plus a roundup of our latest blogs and information on a hot new web marketing service we’re offering called ‘web motion.’

Go get it now!

We’ve been working on a number of ‘web engagement’ programs lately, where we’ve been helping clients to increase their web ‘footprint’ in order to improve their general SEO and awareness levels.

Now I’ve blogged and blabbed about this before, so I won’t go into the thinking - but if you’d like to get a sense of why social media and web engagement is so important then check out some recent posts such as ‘Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing,’ ‘Pico Branding‘ and our ‘web marketing trends for 2008‘.

This post, however, is all about the mechanics and how to do it.

In truth, it’s not hard. All you need is the following:

1. A dedication to publishing a regular stream of gold top content to your site (note: it needs to be good and valuable to the folks you’ll reach out to in #2)
2. A variety of web outlets in which to cost-effectively publish this stuff (note: per above, the idea here is not to abuse these places but to selectively publish your best stuff on them ….think sensibly about this as many of them are happy to ban content ’spammers’)

For help with #1, call us.

For #2, the mind map below gives you everything you need to do web / social media engagement by yourself. It’s easy. Just pin it on your wall and - once you’ve published a great piece of content to your site - follow the map clockwise and post it to the relevant destinations.

Let us know your thoughts (and results).

Note: your key to success here is to BE SOCIAL. Don’t just use these ‘outlets’ as a window for your own content. When you see other pages that you like, Stumbleupon/Digg/Reddit them - because this is their inherent value ….they exist to raise awareness of good, valuable web content. So, consider it your duty to promote everything that you really like, and not just the stuff you grow at home.

Here’s an experment for you to try.

Open your web stats app and check out which pieces of content are your top performers over the past month. (By top performers, I mean on key ‘attention measurements’ such as time on page - these are the things that tell you if people are really interested and engaged.)

What comes out top?

If you have a blog, or if you’re in the habit of publishing white papers or opinion pieces then my money’s on them. Am I right?

Here’s my hypothesis: for B2B web sites, the content that really matters in terms of positioning and prospecting isn’t your ‘markitecture’ pages - your product and services descriptions, corporate histories and such…. it’s your ‘thought leadership’ pages - the places where you express opinions and ideas rather than features and benefits.

More to the point, having done detailed analyses of a mass of B2B technology web sites, I can tell you that this rule holds firm for our entire industry, without exception (and, I’d hazard a guess, it does so in any information-hungry B2B market).

To give you a feel for it, here’s our top content stats for the year to date… (Note: we measure our content performance by establishing an ‘Attention Index’ - average time on page x number of page views…. and we only include those pages that have held people’s attention for more than two minutes.)

(Click to open!)

You’ll see that the most engaging pages are a bunch of white papers and blog posts.

Putting the blog aside for a moment, this is interesting because unlike most of the B2B technology industry, we make a point of giving our most interesting content away for free. Most firms take a strategic decision to lock prime content such as white papers away below a subscription line, and often within secure ‘walled gardens’ that render it almost completely inaccessible to all but the most motivated of site visitors.

The consequences are obvious. If you lock your most valuable, compelling content away beneath a subscription line, then you’re missing a proven opportunity to help your prospects select you.

The rationale for ‘content locking’ is straight forward. You hold out the promise of access to an interesting piece of content in exchange for a visitor’s personal information - usually a name and an email address. This is the concept on which ‘web-to-lead’ forms are built to support the growth of CRM ‘lead’ databases.

I think this approach is fundamentally flawed, and also detrimental to driving quality sales leads.

Why? Because if you lock your content below a subscription line, it’s not just sales prospects that you’re hiding from: you’re also hiding from Google.

Put simply, if your content is sat behind a firewall, then Google’s spiders can’t reach it. This means a big loss of SEO traction, since your ‘thought leader’ content is likely to be your most valuable in SEO terms - it’s going to be stuffed with all the key phrases and concepts that you want search engines to associate your site with. Also, if it’s sat beneath the subscription line then you’re discouraging other sites from linking to it - which is illogical from an SEO point of view (good SEO practice means helping sites to link to you).

Furthermore, what of the people that you lose along the way? To me, a commitment to form-filling is no great measurement of the quality of a sales lead. A far better tactic is to set your thought leadership content free and give people more ‘opportunities to engage‘ with who you are and what you stand for. In this way (and this is the flip side of ‘web-to-lead’ thinking) you give yourself more opportunities to convince the skeptics - the people who until this point believe in your competitors not you, or those who have chanced upon your site during some desk research. Let’s face it, most of us are commitment-phobes when it comes to the web anyway. Why not just accept this fact and move on?

Instead, we ought to be finding better, more intelligent and subtle ways of establishing leads. There are better deals to offer our prospects than ‘give me your names and I’ll give you some content’…. deals that don’t carry an SEO penalty. We can divide our content in different ways, and base a ‘lead generating’ offer on a really big ticket content item, after we’ve provided people with the opportunity to see all our other great stuff. For example, an offer for a piece of industry research can be embedded in a free white paper. Isn’t this a better place to pop the question? Wouldn’t the quality of resulting leads be better?

Whatever - my point is that a bog standard web-to-lead form slapped on as a firewall to the content that people (and Google) really care about is clumsy and negligent.

Here’s some questions to ask yourself:

• What’s your most valuable and engaging content?
• Do you make you accessible enough?
• What’s the upside of providing more opportunities to engage with it?
• What’s the downside of removing a subscription line?
• How scientific is your answer to the previous question? (Gut feeling, conventional wisdom, or based on small side-show experiment and validated by stats?)

I’d encourage you to play around with these thoughts and, if you’re not a fully paid up member of the free content brigade, to tweak the presentation of some of your content and see what it gives you…

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!

I just returned from a great week away in the Inner Hebrides - the small cluster of islands to the west of Glasgow. The single malts were stunning, the weather bracing and the walks heartening. I’m missing it already.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with B2B lead generation, but I did have one holiday experience that made me realise how wide of the mark we are when it comes to using ‘web-to-lead-forms.’

Convention has it that you build up an arsenal of banner content - white papers, research reports, etc - and then hide them away unless visitors supply you with their names, email addresses and inside leg measurements.

But how does this play out in practice? I think I have an answer for you by way of a rambling analogy…

At the end of my stay, on the way back to Glasgow airport, my rental car wobbled to a halt alongside the mighty Castle Minard on the A83. A callout to the RAC breakdown service was in order.

Castle Minard is a stunning place on the banks of Loch Fyne, half a mile off the main road at the end of a dirt track. It’s a hotel. A three star establishment, apparently - a bit rusty and crumbling around the edges. If you weren’t looking for it, or if you hadn’t broken down in the area, then you’d probably miss it.

Anyway, I parked up. The castle lights were off, so I knocked. No answer. I made my call to the RAC and sat down to admire the view. 45 minutes later (and bang on estimate), a big orange and white van trundled into view. ‘Och-Aye’ said Steve the mechanic.

‘Och-Aye indeed!’ bellowed a voice from nowhere.

Like a troll, the castle’s owner had pounced upon us from his impressive lair. A mutated cross between The Simpsons’ Mr Burns and a miniature Bobby Charlton, he hit us with the following barrage:

WHO ARE YOU?
WHAT’S YOUR NAME?
THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY!
YOU NEED MY PERMISSION TO BE HERE!
WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE UP TO?
…ETC, ETC

Golly - I jumped!

Composure regained, I reassured him that we meant no harm, we came in peace and that we were really quite happy (and lucky) to have broken down in such magnificent surroundings.

Privately, however, I’d decided that I really, really hated him. I was a long way from home in the middle of nowhere, I had a baby on the back seat wailing, a wife with a busted arm (seriously) and a car that patently didn’t work. I was really in need of some help.

At the same time, the accusation of trespassing seemed ludicrous against the backdrop of a once magnificent, but now empty and crumbling hotel. What was with this guy? As the proprietor, shouldn’t he be welcoming us?!

At this point, he turned and made a dash for the door. Steve the mechanic and I were expecting a musket in our noses. Instead, he reappeared brandishing business cards and a reassurance that “we have great guests rooms” and that “you can look us up on the web!”

We decided not to stick around. We fixed the car at the top of the track and shared a joke between us. This man was a sham, worse than Basil Fawlty. He seemed to revel in our twisted little exchange. But it all seemed so misguided and back to front. A grilling to greet us and a business card to say goodbye? No wonder his place was empty! My wife and I (and Steve) vowed never, ever to return.

Which, by the way, is what the majority of your web site users do when they’re presented with a web-to-lead form.

Think about it…. When you squirrel your content away and ask people to give you their email address before you’ve even said hello, you’re behaving exactly like Mr Burns. Is this any way to treat a valued prospect?

Here’s the context… I’ve worked so hard to find you: I have a problem to address; I Googled for ‘widgets’; I searched you out amongst a thicket of competitive pages; I see you might just have a white paper that interests me. Great! But then….

WHO ARE YOU?
WHAT’S YOUR NAME?
THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY!
YOU NEED MY PERMISSION TO BE HERE!
…ETC, ETC

Well sorry. Screw you! My life’s too short and I’m off to check out another site instead. Shouldn’t you be welcoming me on to your site? Isn’t life hard enough selling widgets without giving me the third degree?

It’s kind of insane really. Unless you’re giving a stack of cash away for free, then you’re making the following fatal assumptions with your jazzy ‘web-to-lead’ form:

• I need your stuff more than you need me
• I can’t find similar (or as good) stuff for free elsewhere

Which isn’t going to be true in most cases. So, why do it in the first place?

Here’s some questions to ask yourself…

• When was the last time a web to lead form clinched a sale?
• When was the last time a web to lead form ‘tipped’ a prospect into a customer?
• Can you afford for me to consider - even for a microsecond - that life would be easier (and more hospitable) on some other site?
• Is ‘WHO ARE YOU?’ really an appropriate question to ask me at this early stage of our relationship?
• If you were running a hotel, would you treat me in the same way?

Where content giveaways are concerned, please just ditch your web to lead forms right now - or those valued guests-to-be may decide to never, ever return.

Next up: “The value of free content: why giving it all away is good for your prospects and great for Google…”

Yes, we’re a living lab, practising what we preach and telling you all about it.

12 days ago I blogged about our (re)birth as a presence on Google. Today, we’re #2 on our key term ‘B2B technology marketing agency’ on Google.com (that’s right .com!).

Here’s what happened in the interim…

The great big ‘Velocity SEO Petri Dish’ experiment is generating some serious results.

Now, back in November, our plan was to optimize around the term ‘information technology marketing agency’ because we felt competition around the term ‘B2B technology marketing agency’ was a little too hot for a runt start-up like us.

But we’ve tweaked a few things and it looks like we’re winning. Here’s the view from Google today:

Google snapshot on Velocity’s SEO efforts around the term ‘B2B technology marketing agency’

And, for a live view of things, try this…

How did we do it?

Well, I’m conscious that this post is crowing and that these things have a habit of changing fast (competitors, algorithms, the gods). But, to be honest with you it’s not rocket surgery - you just need to know what you’re doing and you need to be committed to the cause to keep it up.

Here’s our paper on how to do it properly using some good old search engine optimization (SEO) trickery.

If you don’t have time to read it just yet, here’s the quickstart guide:

• Establish your terms: ideally, go for concepts that are high on searcher volume but low on competition
• Implement your site and your design using these terms
• Publish a shed load of content to your site on a regular basis around these terms and concepts
• Encourage other people to link to you using these terms
• Engage with the world through things like Pay Per Click (PPC - eg, Google Adwords), social media networking, online PR and blogging campaigns: drive people to your site

…and that’s basically it. It gets a bit more complex once you get into the nitty gritty, but these ideas should get you going.

Or, of course, just contact us and we’ll help you out.

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.

Do you remember the time when you didn’t exist? Nope, me neither. But today is a big day for us because we kind of experienced re-birth…

…web re-birth that is.

As you may know, our web site went live this week. But we hadn’t existed in any real terms because Google hadn’t recognized us.

We’ve been trying mighty hard to coax their tiny search spiders onto our site - using dead flies, midnight runes and some good old search engine optimization trickery.

And today saw the first signs of success. See below.

Our first link indexed in Google:

Our first Technorati ranking (8,911,336!):

Our first Bloglines links indexed:

So, like a small child, our site is now wailing in the world and I feel like a proud (search) father.

We’re gonna make a ‘web relations’ and ‘SEO’ case study of ourselves, and report the progress that we make on this blog.

Of course, the aim is for world domination around the theme of ‘information technology marketing agency’. Watch this space…