PR Communications

São Paulo's Social Media Scene

Rodrigo Capella, editor of the blog PR Interview (http://printerview.wordpress.com/) has been kind enough to write up a round-up of the Sao Paulo communications scene, here's his guest post. 

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Sao Paulo has been consolidated itself as one of the most important centers of digital communication in Latin America. It's very interesting to watch this transformation closely. If before the PR agencies only sent information to the media via traditional press release, nowadays they are increasing the use of modern tools such as Social Media Press Release, podcast and video-release. In this context, some groups, websites and virtual events are highlights. I am going to present a few of them, ten actually, as a request of John Cass (@johncass), editor of the blog PR Communications:

Congresso Mega Brasil de Comunicação (Mega Brazil Congress of Communication): From May 24^th  to May 27^th , Sao Paulo will host this important event, which will address various aspects of digital communication, like the impact of social media in corporate activities. The program includes lectures and courses. More information: www.megabrasil.com.br/congresso2011

Congresso Internacional para os Líderes de Comunicação (International Congress for Communication Leaders): Another important event focused on digital communication will occur in Sao Paulo, May 09-10^th. The event will discuss “The new owners of the web”, “Public Relations in new phase”, “Brand equity”, and “The challenges of contemporary communication”, among other topics. Some speakers: @cesarpaz, @YaraPeres, and @rosanacomenta. Information: www.cilic.com.br

Grupo de PR Digital da Associação Brasileira das Agências de Comunicação (Digital PR Group of the Brazilian Association of Communication Agencies): Coordinated by @evasques, this group is comprised of digital communication professionals. Online or in-person meetings, the participants exchange experiences and discuss cases.

ComRemix: This blog brings the latest trends in social media communication. Enjoy: www.comremix.com.br

Nós da Comunicação (We from Communication): This portal hosts several in-person discussions about the changes in communication. It is worth knowing: www.nosdacomunicacao.com

Comunique-se (Communicate!): This website performs, from time to time, on-line discussions with media professionals, highlighting the changes faced by journalists and PRs. The website also conducts courses about digital communication in Sao Paulo. These courses cover various aspects of Digital PR, like the use of video-releases, images and podcasts in the platform of Social Media Press Release, a technique often used in The United States and that has been gaining importance in Brazil. Visit: www.comuniquese.com.br 

PQN: The newsletter of the PQN Magazine, with strong approach in Sao Paulo, discusses key issues for Communicator 2.0. Check out: www.pqn.com.br

Aberje: In addition to publishing articles on their website, the Brazilian Association for Business Communication (Associação Brasileira de Comunicação Empresarial) promotes discussions about the new face communication with national and international experts. Also worth visiting: www.aberje.com.br

Observatório da Imprensa (Press Observatory): This website discusses the media, its relevance and its transformation. Track: www.observatoriodaimprensa.com.br

Mundo RP (PR’s World): This website stands out for its comprehensive coverage of communication events. Check out: www.mundorp.com.br

Does Google Panda | Farmer Support More Blogging?

The recent Google Panda (Farmer) update is a welcome change for me, not only does the update put an emphasis on quality content, but also quality links. In that just as it’s important to develop a website that has good quality content, you also have to make sure you've developed links from sites with good quality content.

I've previously listed some issues to watch out for in avoiding becoming a content farm, but I also think this change represents a return to some of the successful sites we saw five years ago.

Content, its quality and volume will I believe continue to play an important role in gaining a ranking on search engines. Just as the quantity of content plays an important role in social influence, especially if the volume of content is shareable and is shared by a community.

But as I’ve long argued that building relationships with community members will produce better results than just content strategies. In recent years I began to doubt whether that was the case because of the results we'd seen on Google. All that was required was to develop sufficient volume and enough links to achieve ranking with out too much concern about the quality of content, or the quality of conversation.

Quite a few pundits have suggested that blogging is dead; I'm thinking the recent update will actually see something of a resurgence in blogging, partly because companies will now be looking for better quality of sites, and a focused blog on a topic with strong opinions is probably one of the best types of website you can receive a link from.

How To Avoid Becoming A Content Farm

Google wants to improve its search results and has been working to improve its results in several updates over the last year. The last update called Panda by Google and Farmer by the community has had a significant impact on sites known as content farms. These sites are often large sites where content is developed by commission paid writers who develop content with the purpose to gain high rankings on search engines and attention in social media.

If you understand that content farms were focused on ROI from advertising, you'll understand why part of there strategy was to make content good enough to get a search ranking, but not quite good enough to satisfy a reader's quest for answers, rather, content farmers want to entice readers into clicking ads that will satisfy the searcher and so charge a premium for their content. This article discusses several insights from content farm owners, and the point about quality and ads. 

Google's changes to its algorithm that have resulted in loss of traffic to important content farms. One documented loss of traffic was to Mahalo.com, where the changes in traffic have resulted in job layoffs at the company.

This leads to the question why were sites penalized in the recent round of changes to the Google algorithm, and how can you avoid the same penalty?

• From the horse's mouth -- Google's take on quality content. I found this great quote from Google in this Mashable article: “You can expect sites with shallow or poorly written content, content that’s copied from other websites, or information that people frankly don’t find that useful will be demoted as a result of our recent algorithm changes,” stated the rep. “On the other hand, high quality pages — pages with original content and information such as research, in depth reports or thoughtful analysis — will get a boost.”
• Poor off-site linking strategies can still hurt your ranking results. As this great article illustrates, even if you built a site with great content, but if you have received most of your links from shallow content sites as part of your linking strategy, your results will be lower. Focus should be on gaining higher quality links from high quality websites. I personally found this very encouraging, I've long argued that blogging and social media communities the emphasis should be on developing relationships with colleagues in a community, and as a result of those relationships you will gain links from people who appreciate your content. This update to Google strengthens this tactic.
• Avoiding news release content duplication. Excellent article on the topic of duplication of press release content. This issue is certainly something both media sites and PR people should consider, there's a process of education here, where PR people can openly state they are giving individual media outlets and people exclusives on content and issues, not just because there's an advantage, but also because we want to avoid duplication of press release content.
• Request webmasters take down links when their sites have low-quality content. At the businessInsider, John McPheeFormic Media Inc., a social media marketing agency stated the following, "Track the links to your site as well as you can, and request the low-quality sites to take down their links. It’s a matter of negative association, and it’s not worth the backlink!"
• An ad-to-content ratio that favors ads. This article talks about a lot of factors you need to avoid in building a successful content site, but what stood out for me was the point that if you have too many ads to your volume of content, Google will penalize your rankings. Remove ads, or increase your volume of content to improve your ratio.
• Identify your content as the original content. Good advice in this article for SEO's. If you duplicate content once or twice, it is possible to avoid being labeled a site with duplicate content, use the original source meta tag and copysource service to distinguish your content as original, or not get penalized for duplicating content. 
• Manage the quality and length of your content. This comprehensive post answers many of your quesitons about the Farmer update, but I found the idea of thinking about how you manage the quality of your content to improve your standings the most insightful.  Put a no robots follow tag on any low quality content. Bruce Clay's advises that you mix up your word length of articles.  Plus, determine how often Google is crawling your website, and use this information to help determine when you can expect to see changes in your results, as well as what you may need to do in terms of increasing content production.

Searching For London’s Social Media Organizers

London's social media scene is not something I've spent anytime in yet! But working with Maria Aretoulaki, based in Manchester UK, I'm helping to put together a list of events related to social media in the city. We were inspired by my trip to the UK last September and Maria first post cataloging the Manchester social media scene.

Here's Maria's next post on the topic of London based social media related events. If you know of any more events please let either me or Maria know to update the post. Also, if you'd like to write a round-up about your event that we can link too, that would be very helpful, write about the theme of the organization, what typical events look like, content etc.

 

4 Steps To Marketing A Successful Event

What makes an event successful?

Location, topic, speakers and attendees.

Location.

-Select a location that people can easily get to...meaning by airport, or making sure people can access the location by transportation, and has good parking options.

-Make the most of your location, if you are in Nashville host an event at the country music hall of fame, if in Boston at the old state house. Whether it’s a social networking event or part of the conference leave the conference attendees feeling as if they got to know the city where you hold your event.

Topic.

-Pick a topic that relevant and current with your audience. Marketing people don't want to know how to develop a newspaper ad, but they do want to know how to market using location based services.

-You can even create a theme related to your topic...currently any event related to location based services or augmented reality is hot for example.

Speakers.

-Pick celebrity speakers who will draw a crowd, people who have a following. You may have to pay them, but don't worry about that too much, rather think about the ROI, what following they will bring.

-If you get pitched by vendors, think of offering a vendor speaking option, they get to pay to play.

-Most speakers don't really promote your event, if you sign them up, make sure you have a marketing plan with them, but make it easy for them to share marketing information with their followers.

-Give options for the types of events speakers can participate within, remember to reuse their skills in different events. They will prefer a single speaking slot, but if you also sign them up for a panel discussion, they will see they are getting extra mileage out of the conference and be more likely to commit more time and effort to the event.

-Even if speakers say they don't need audio and visual equipment, make sure you have back up equipment for them to use.

Attendees.

-Often forgotten, but the audience are what drives speakers to attend and sponsors to pay. Make sure you get some important audience members of your community to the event.

5 Ways To Develop Earned Media

Marketing has traditionally been a process of buying your own media, or producing your own media, such as company magazines, and generating media in other channels through public relations. That last technique has widely become known as earned media, mainly because the marketers have stepped in and are not working to systemize the process. Earned media is the process of generating content that gets published or shared on other websites or within other social networks.

Several tactics to earn media include the following:

-Infographics: Developing a visual image that describes complex information easily. Many bloggers and social influencers will rewrite an idea, but they will want to post or share an infographic within their own channels because they cannot reproduce such an image easily.

-Research: Creating unique and original research that establishes your thought leadership in the industry can be one of the best ways to earn media. Conduct a survey of your industry, and publish the results. Go one step beyond and ask other thought leaders what the information means, and provide their analysis of the data as well as your insights. Including other expert thoughts adds credibility to your own analysis.

-Round ups and opinion of the industry: Write a round up of what's currently happening in the industry, point to important voices and highlight their opinion. By bringing together everyone's voice and opinion you create value for the industry, and so as you contribute to the industry you become part of the industry.

-Write articles for important trade media: Many trade publications, whether traditional or new media accept submissions for content. Write a unique post and submit the article. Remember not to duplicate your content from your own website as duplicate content will hurt both websites especially given the recent Panda (Farmer) Google algorithm update.

-Influencer relations or engagement marketing: The process of listening to the community and important social media influencers in an industry, but taking account of what you learn from the process of listening; from developing infographics and research that includes influencer’s insights, to responding to their content, and building relationships with influencers in the community. Not only will a strategy of community management even if within a blogging community result in earned media, but you can use that intelligence to develop better content overall on your own sites. Shel Holtz and I discussed this issue several years ago related to blogger relations. Lastly, an influencer could be anyone who comments in the industry, as Dell’s early listening and engagement strategy of monitoring anyone that mentioned Dell highlights, or restricted to a small group of people on the web.

A few more related articles on earned media:

Earned Media Is Fueled By Engagement Marketing

3 Tips For Designing A Social Media Advocacy Program

Ford's Content Garden Story

I was looking at the Ford blog to attempt to determine what platform the company is using for its website for my post on business blogs of the Fortune 500, and decided to write up a blog post on the Ford Content Garden.

A content garden is a website that seeks to generate quality content using various content creation methods from; paid journalist, commission journalist, consumer generated media, social community, and/or aggregated content.  Content gardens are not content farms, but curated websites of quality content.

Ford has come a long way in just a few short years from the My Bold Moves website. There's the same concept a content site where good quality content is aggregated, but this time Ford does a better job of sourcing content, and bringing the customer's voice to the table.

Here’s an overview of the site by each individual section:

Your Stories

Customers can submit stories to a section called Your Stories. Readers have the ability to comment, share the content in social media and find the most popular content.

Our Articles

Ford has hired journalists or writers to write good well researched articles on Ford and car related topics. This gives Ford the ability to write content that's keyword focused, and tell their story. Again the design of the page means that readers can share content or comment easily. A widget let's you immediately see what are the most popular articles on the site.

Your Ideas

Readers and customers can submit their ideas to the site. You have to register to submit an idea, and also to vote the idea up or down. Again you can share or comment on any one idea. And there's a widget for identifying the most popular ideas, and related content. I found the category of ideas interesting, from; convenience, green, infotainment, performance, personalization to safety. A big theme throughout the site were green cars, I believe this helps to give the Ford brand a positive impression in the marketplace.

As of my review of the site there were 848 images on the site, this was an interesting feature, a wall of images appears on the site, and when you roll over each image, you see more information to an individual story. This means each image was included in an image library, and this section of the Ford site gives readers and customers the ability to scroll or search through images easily. You can search by articles, submitted stories, categories, period of time and types of vehicles. Images is a nice innovative feature.

Videos

78 videos on the site, most of them, 68, are featured on Ford articles, but 10 were submitted as part of Your Stories. Again you can search the videos by categories, time frame and article or story.

Ford Blogs

One interesting aspect of The Ford Story content garden is that blogs are not directly integrated into the main navigation, rather there are links, but they are seen as a separate site, though if you do go to the Ford Blogs the rest of the content Garden is clearly part of the blogs, in that the overview of the Ford Blogs has a top navigation to the rest of the content garden. I've be interested in hearing from the Ford digital team why they took that tactic?

Ford doesn't have a corporate blog, rather customers or advocates write on various blogs about cars and events related to Ford. I think this interesting, one because it may mean there's more ROI from having customers talk to readers, but the approach goes a little against the trend of corporate blogs highlighting employees. This may be that Ford would rather employee voices come through social networks like Twitter and Facebook, which actually makes sense to me. It's really tough to get employees to write a blog, while employees are using social networks anyway, and that's where customers are hanging out. The other issue with employee corporate blogs is that you don't get focused content and that’s one reason why Ford's content garden does an excellent job with the article section.

If it's difficult to talk about innovation from product managers with vehicles, the submit ideas section may do a better job of picking up ideas anyway. And customer service is not really a Ford issue anyway, the dealerships handle customer service, or the Ford social media team handles issues directly on blogs, or in social networks. It makes sense you would not necessarily have a corporate blog.

What I really liked about the design of the site was its ability to highlight other content throughout the content garden, even when content was generated by different sources, or even exists off site, such as the Flickr site. Plus, the ability to sort through content and find what's important, this reminded me of earlier sites that I called blog aggregators.

Overall, Ford’s content garden is a great site, and obviously works for Ford, though, there must be some lost opportunities not having employees blog, but given the design, content sourcing, and innovation features of the content garden, a corporate blog may have been more of a distraction in terms of content generation given all of the social content the garden is already producing. Supplemented with journalist content in the article section, the Ford content story is really one of content from customers and advocates.

Fortune 200 Nonprofits Adopt Social Media 100%

The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth publishes a new study on the top US nonprofits from the Fortune 200. The fourth in a series of surveys among the top charities since 2007, the study show social media adoption is very high. "For the first time, in the four years of our social media studies across diverse sectors, (Fortune 500, Inc. 500, colleges and universities and charities) 100% of those interviewed are using at least one form of social media."

When And Where To Use Agency Support For Social Media

I chatted with talked with Tom Hoehn (@TomHoehn), Director of Interactive Marketing & Convergence Media at Kodak recently about my ideas around corporate social media using the Immerse and Disperse model. I wanted to know if he thought the model was one that would work for companies and agencies.
 
We talked about the idea that you set up a central social media engagement center that’s responsible for crafting overall social media policies, and doing engagement, listening and triage work on a company wide level to support the overall brand. But to push out the adoption of social media to brands and divisions, you have to empower brand managers and division managers with tools and resources.
 
For Kodak, Tom told me how he saw social media deployed at the company. They started out with one blogger, and have now grown to 35 people. In the states Kodak corporate runs social media starting with one blog and employees are the voice of the company.
 
Tom said that setting up corporate social media is about spreading the ideas and methods of social media across the company, its not about just having one person, who will manage the Facebook page, but depending on the brand, product or corporate division, each unit will figure out how to incorporate social media into how to innovate, support and market to customers. Corporate social media’s role is to give support across the company, directly by supporting individuals, or by giving business units the tools to know how to deploy social media to reach their goals; from how to develop an editorial calendar, to writing an escalation and branding policy. One of the tools Tom developed to help with spreading social media ideas at Kodak was the Kodak Social Media Tips book.
 
He also thought that in large companies there’s a diversity of realities. Some parts of the company will want to embrace social media, and as a result not need support from an agency. But at the same time, other parts of the company will need support.
 
In Europe, Kodak marketing uses its public relations agency to augment Kodak personnel. These people add depth and can represent Kodak on the ground and in social media. There’s always a clear dividing line between who is a representative and who is an employee. The model works as Kodak scales its efforts in various country markets.

I wanted to know if Tom thought the Immerse and Disperse model is a workable one for agencies; he thought it was, because it addresses the changing nature of social media in a company. When you start out, you don’t have employees with skills and experience, part of your goal is to get them trained up.
 
I suggested that an agency using the immerse and disperse model would provide an engagement manager with supporting experts whose role would be tactical in terms of being a representative to build the long term engagement center that a company needs to build. But also strategic, in that by working and doing social media, you are training company employees on how to execute, and know where to get resources. As employees become proficient, the agency engagement manager would become more strategic, or move their role over to a brand or division to set up a mini social media engagement center. The engagement manager would work with the company social media director or community managers.
 
Tom thought such a model would allow an agency to be more nimble, and help structure an engagement in a way that works for a company.
 
In some ways this model of immerse and disperse is much more of a strategic or management consultancy play than it is a digital agency, just because we are talking about change management within the company, and agencies focus on creative project work rather than helping to change processes for a new business model.

Our Revolution Comes To Greensboro, NC

Ja-Naé Duane, author of her blog: Adventures In:, and the founder of Our Revolution a road trip from New York City to Austin for SXSW. The event will feature a road van, speaking and networking events, nonprofit fund-raising. I’m scheduled to speak at the Greensboro event this coming Sunday, hope you can make if you are in town.

4th March 2011:  NYC, Night Hotel, 132 W 45th St, NYC, NYC, Time: 7pm-9pm, URL:  http://ourrevlaunch.eventbrite.com/

5th March 2011: Wilmington, DE, Bella Vista Trattoria & Pizzeria, 5337 B Limestone Road, Pike Creek, Wilmington, DE 19808, Time: 11:30am-1:30pm, URL: http://ht.ly/46Guw

5th March 2011: Washington, D.C., Capitol City Brewing Company, 2 Massachusetts Avenue, NE, Washington, DC 20001, Time:  5:30pm-8-pm URL: http://ourrevdc.eventbrite.com/

6th March 2011: Greensboro, NC, Natty Greene's Brewing Company, 345 S Elm St, Greensboro, NC 27401, Time:  11:30am-1pm, URL: http://ourrevgreensboro.eventbrite.com/

7th March 2011: Atlanta, GA, Marlow's Tavern, 950 West Peachtree Street, Atlanta, GA 30309,
Time: 6pm-8pm, URL:  http://ourrevatlanta.eventbrite.com/

8th March 2011: Mobile, AL, Serda's Coffee Co., 3 South Royal St., Mobile, AL 36602, Time: 8:30am-10am, URL: http://ourrevmobile.eventbrite.com