How Spooky Is Social Media?

June 2, 2012 Leave a comment

In a recent opinion article for CNN, Andrew Keen, a British-American entrepreneur, professional skeptic and author of “The Cult of the Amateur,” and “Digital Vertigo,” warns us about the dangers not only of Facebook, but with our growing obsession with social media.  (Opinion: Facebook threatens to “Zuck up” the human race) He describes it as digital narcissism, a narcotic, that is defining and desensitizing us.

In his article he quotes, Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who says there is a “shift” from an analog world in which our identities are generated from within, to a digital world in which our sense of self is intimately tied to our social media presence.”

Keen explains that our capacity for solitude and an inner sense of self is quickly fading and being replaced by an external sense of who we are and how we are valued.  Scary stuff, mainly because it’s true.  Don’t get me wrong, I think that Facebook, Twitter and the other social media sites are great communication tools – for marketing tools.  They are tailor made to help build and brand, sell a product and build a business, but the trouble is most people use them to build personal relationships.  Or believe they are building personal relationships.  Most people are selling themselves using social media and not their company or products and by doing so are losing any authentic sense of who they are.

So what’s the secret to learning how to effectively utilize social media?  Understand what it can and can’t do.  Social media is great for staying in touch, but not so hot for being in touch.  It’s a great promotional tool, perfect for communicating information about your company product, service or cause, but it’s a poor substitute for real personal connection or communication.  Again, it’s an amazing promotional tool, perfect for PR and marketing, but it is not so great as a communication tool.

If you want to get the word out about your product, social media is a great way to do it.  But you are not a product, you are a person – deal with it!  If you want to connect with someone you care about, how about picking up the phone and talking, or (here’s a strange idea) actually getting together and meeting face to face.  Social media has very little inflection, or nuance, you don’t hear the person’s voice; you don’t see his or her facial expression or body language.  It’s a strange static form of expression.

But people seem to forget that and believe they are actually connecting.  They feel if they’re not on social media, they’re missing out, they’re not good enough, or stranger yet, they feel they don’t actually matter.  It’s spooky stuff.  The trick is to use social media for what it is.  Have fun with it; use it as a marketing tool, use it to set up face to face meeting, then get off of Facebook or Twitter – and go outside and play!

Copyright © Anthony Mora 2012

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SEO Press Releases: Part 2

May 31, 2012 Leave a comment

The upside about learning SEO is you’re not alone if you feel you’re behind the learning curve.  The truth is everyone needs to learn to keep on track in this field.  It’s an ever changing, ever shifting process.  So, wherever you are in the process, that’s okay.  My previous article focused on how to write an SEO press release in order to garner increased online visibility and ultimately more views.  The basic how-tos include knowing your keywords, using anchor text, and including your URL

While all of this helps you in the world of search engines such as Yahoo and Google, that’s not enough.  You don’t simply want to move yourself up in the search engine pecking order; you also want to have a compelling story, a well written targeted release that reaches your target audience.  Increasing your website traffic is great but it can be useless if it’s not the right traffic, you need to be speaking to your audience.

Whereas you definitely want to use keywords and it’s important you learn and know your keywords before starting to write a release, you don’t want to get lost in jargon.  Every business has its own jargon and to those outside of the business it often sounds like a foreign language.  That is not going to make for a compelling read, so keep your jargon to a minimum.

Be sure to bold your secondary keywords and phrases in your release and include a link that will allow the reader to access additional information. Double check that you’ve included the http:// portion of the URL in your press releases or the links will not be clickable when published.

Most releases have a date included, but in this case I think that backfires.  Unless your information is timely and has to do with a specific event, season or breaking news story adding a date to your release will only server to make the release look dated.  This is particularly true with online-oriented releases.

Write a concise descriptive headline that includes your primary keywords. Don’t be shy about them.  This is the real estate that counts.  You want to utilize your important keywords in the headline, in the lead and then pepper them throughout your message.  I’m not sure this makes for the best releases from a journalistic standpoint, but from an SEO perspective it reinforces your message

The writing and the story are the parts of your release that will engage your audience, SEO is the science of being discovered by your audience and in the online world – you need both.

Copyright © Anthony Mora 2012

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SEO Press Release Tips

May 30, 2012 Leave a comment

Business Wire, Marketwire, PrimeNewswire, PR Newswire, and PRWeb: these are the main paid wire services that American companies use. On any given day a couple of thousand press releases are sent out in the U.S. by those wire services.  So, how can you separate yourself from the pack?  How can your PR efforts and press releases be noticed in such a throng?  It’s not easy, but it’s possible.

It’s no longer enough to concern yourself with interesting the traditional media with your releases.  Yes, you need to create press releases that meet the needs of the traditional media, but you also need to maximize the use of search engine optimization (SEO).  Why do you need to concern yourself with SEO?  Will it help you land a story in the New York Times or an interview on the Today show?  Most likely not.  But it can help in other ways.  For example, when someone is searching online for a company that offers your type of product or service, are you the one they’re going to find?  Where do you show up when it comes to a Google search?

That’s where search engine optimization comes in.  SEO’s primary function is to help you rank in Google and Yahoo News and for your keywords.   And this is generally accomplished by knowing your keywords, and creating anchor backlinks for your blog or website.

Anchor text is the hyperlinked text on a web page.  They are the highlighted words you click on when you click a link.  It offers readers information about the nature of the page you’re linking to.  For example, this is my Public Relations Firm’s website linked to a keyword.  More importantly anchor text communicates with search engines.  In essence it tells search engines what the page is about.  It’s incredibly important to use in your press releases; used effectively it can boost your rankings and particularly your Google rankings.

Your first step is to learn your primary and secondary keywords.  Your press releases should reflect the keywords used on your website.  You want your releases to work for you by driving search engines to your site.  Don’t make the mistake of only using your keywords on your homepage.  Make a concerted effort to have a minimum of one of the keyword links in your press releases lead to a page on your site other than your homepage.

Focus on the first 200 to 250 words of your release.  These initial words set the tone not only for the release itself but for your overall search results.  You want to choose those words carefully and you want them to be targeted.

In most of my articles about press releases, my main focus is on the content; on telling a strong story with a compelling narrative.  Those are points you always have to keep in mind and my follow up article on SEO press releases will cover that in more depth, but here the focus is on making sure that your releases not only are interesting but that they also are SEO friendly.  A few points to keep in mind are to make sure your headline contains your primary keyword  and that you pepper the release itself with three target keywords.  Also, never forget to include at least one URL in the release.  You never know, your release might be republished without anchor text and by including your URL you’ll assure that the reader can find you.

SEO is an ever changing field and one I don’t think anyone fully masters.  So keep experimenting and keep writing new releases with SEO in mind, but also remember, when all is said and done, it comes down to telling a compelling story.  Don’t get so lost in the SEO game that you forget the basics.

Copyright © Anthony Mora 2012

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The Secrets of Fiction For PR Success

May 26, 2012 Leave a comment

I began as a fiction writer and then moved into journalism.  From there I found my way to PR.  It wasn’t a career path I was thinking of taking, it more or less was a process that evolved.  But, whether I’m writing fiction, journalism or for public relations campaigns, the basic tenants remain the same.  It all comes down to a good, compelling story.

When I worked as a journalist I wrote with my readers in mind.  I wrote with the intention of being relevant to my target market.  When I write a novel or a play, I’m looking to tell a good story, but I’m also looking to connect with the public.  In essence, as a fiction writer, I’m once again, looking to connect with my target market. To some writers that sounds crass and although I don’t write my fiction with the market in mind, I do hope and try to write a compelling enough story that the play, novel or screenplay directly connects with my audience.  From my perspective, that is part of my job as a writer.

I’ve written quite a bit on how PR comes down to effective storytelling, which is in fact what public relations is all about.   Here again, it’s not just telling a story, it’s telling a story that resonates with a specific audience.  When it comes to traditional media, your job is to convince that editor or producer that the story you’re pitching is going to captivate his or her readers, listeners or viewers.

It needs to be compelling, but it also has to be relevant to that particular target market.  For example you could have an incredibly captivating tale that has to do with sports or fitness.  From your perspective it’s a slam dunk.  It has all of the elements of a strong, powerful story.  But creating that pitch is simply step one, now you have to present it to the right media contacts.  If you spend your time pitching your sports-oriented story to the beauty editors of the top women’s magazines, I’d say your chances of landing an article are slim.  Yes, you have the story, but there is a disconnect when it comes to the media you’re pitching.  In effect you haven’t built the bridge necessary to take your story from being a strong concept to being a produced segment or published article.

There lies the secret.  You need to develop a strong story with a compelling narrative, but you also need to know when to pitch it and who to pitch it to.  In other words you need to know your audience.  Combine those two elements, a strong story and a defined market, and, regardless what style or form of writing you work in, you’ll succeed.

Copyright © Anthony Mora 2012

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How to Figure out what Marketing Is Right For You

May 24, 2012 Leave a comment

Mashable’s definition of Marketing is a great place to start thinking about your own company’s marketing mix:

How do you decide what marketing direction is the best for you?  That’s not necessarily an easy question to answer.  You need to know your company, your product or service, your target market and the direction you want your company to go.  Begin by writing out a marketing plan.  Initially have fun with it play with it, then start to hone it down.  Start with a list of questions and then fill in the answers.  But do it a few times and set it up so your answers can’t always be the same as the previous responses.  Look at your company and your business from a number of angles.

Do you need to:

  • drive sales?
  • find new clients?
  • build your brand?
  • reach a new target market?

PR and media relations can achieve a number of goals, but before launching a campaign, you need to define exactly what your specific goals are.  Once you have your marketing objective list, your next step is to review your marketing budget.  How much can you realistically spend to achieve your marketing goals?  Your budget is going to help define your approach.  If you have thousands that you can dedicate to marketing each month you have different options than if you have a couple of hundred or less to put towards your marketing efforts.

If you have a finite marketing budget, your first focus should be on establishing an online presence, by building an easy to read, informational website that speaks to your clients’ needs.  The Internet offers you a way to position yourself and your company online without breaking the bank, but simply having a presence on the Internet does not mean anyone is going to see it.  You need to drive visitors to your site.  This is when a social media outreach program, article marketing program and a blog can help.

But back to the PR question, although your budget will dictate how you’re going to implement your marketing campaign, your budget, or lack of it, does not need to stop you from utilizing media relations.  Draw up a campaign blueprint.  Then move forward.  Don’t waste valuable marketing time trying to figure out if you should launch a PR campaign, focus on how.  It is the one form of marketing that reaches your target market, offers you validation, credibility and establishes you as an expert in your field.  Define your needs, your objectives, your budget, the most appropriate approach and move forward.  The worst decision you can make is to do no marketing.  That’s a sure way to go nowhere fast.

Copyright © Anthony Mora 2012

Marketing. Mashable. Retrieved May 24, 2012. http://mashable.com/follow/topics/marketing/page/2/

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A Novel Approach to Reading: In Defense of the Lowly Book

May 22, 2012 Leave a comment

IPads and Nooks and Kindles have gotten more than their share of PR and media coverage.  There has been a press battle among them with press releases flying fast and furious.  And the media campaigns are working.  They’re selling.  These e-reader devices are fine for reading magazines.   I suppose they could be okay for reading some non-fiction books.  But when it comes to reading fiction, there I firmly draw the line.  It’s not so much that I’m a Ludite in this arena; it’s that as a reader you lose so much of the essential reading experience when you shift from a book to a shrunken computer.  There is a certain romance to reading novels that supersedes merely looking at and digesting words.

I’m an admitted novel junkie.  I cannot go to sleep without reading for at least half an hour.  And it has to be a novel.  Reading non fiction or current affairs as I lie in bed only serves to agitate me.  With a novel, I can blissfully drift towards Morpheus.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  Before I find myself lying in bed lost in strange and foreign lives and worlds, I need to choose the book.  Here too, I admit to being old school.  I actually go to bookstores.  Not only do I go, I do so with the same enthusiasm as a five year old goes to a toy store.  It’s an outing, an experience, an adventure.  I never know what I’ll find and seldom go with any particular book in mind.  I browse, pick up the various books, study the covers, and touch the pages, read some pages; it’s a totally sensual experience and not simply a visual one.  You touch books, feel them.  Books have a scent.  You can read them aloud and make it an experience that touches all of the senses.  Reading novels is not simply about the words, but about the experience of choosing, holding and being engulfed by a book.

If the focus is on how many volumes you can carry in a particular device and how quickly you can read a particular book, I’d say you’re losing a good deal of the joy.

There are people who like to figure out the most practical and least time consuming ways to eat; people who have shakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  They get their nutrients, their calories, but, at least from my perspective, they’ve lost quite a bit in that bargain.

And that is not unlike what I fear we’re losing when it comes reading.  It’s meant to be a sensual experience.  The focus is not supposed to be on transferring information from a machine into your brain.   The physical book, with its specific size, layout, cover, graphics, font and paper, is all a part of the total experience.

I suppose it’s an experience that is losing ground, as e-books and various pads and devices flourish.  Oh, well, I hold on to my book mania.  Plus, at least on my end, I really don’t have much of a choice.  You see, I often fall asleep while I’m reading, drifting off as I’m lost in a novel.  And, there are times, when said book falls from my hands to the floor.  This isn’t a constant occurrence, but it’s happened often enough.  And my novels, being the sturdy troopers they are, take the plummeting and live on to fight another day.  They neither complain, nor do they break.    Now think of me lying in bed reading my IPad and having it tumble onto the floor.  Disaster!  Reading would become such an expensive pastime; I wouldn’t be able to afford it.  No, I’ll happily stay on the sidelines in this e-reader revolution and stick with the romance of my books.

Copyright © Anthony Mora 2012

Tew, Sarah. “Kindle vs. Nook vs. iPad:…”  Photo. CNET. 05 12 May 2012. 21 May 2012. <http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20009738-1/kindle-vs-nook-vs-ipad-which-e-book-reader-should-you-buy/>
Carr, Austin. “Twitter Stats Reveal How the iPad, Nook, and Kindle Stack Up.” Photo. Fast Company. 11 Jan 2011. 21 May 2012.  <http://www.fastcompany.com/1716018/how-the-ipad-kindle-and-nook-stack-up-on-twitter>

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EXTRA! Buffett Buys Newspapers: Maybe Newspapers Aren’t Quite That Dead

May 18, 2012 Leave a comment

Berkshire Hathaway, perhaps best know as Warren Buffett’s company announced a deal on Thursday to purchase 63 newspapers from Media General.  Berkshire will be purchasing more of MEG’s daily and weekly newspapers for $142 million in cash.  Buffet’s statements on May 5 seemed to be heading him away from the newspaper business, which he described as an industry that was “declining” and one with “Problems”.  He then went on to say that generally it was best to stay away from declining businesses and that that’s not where they make real mon

ey at Berkshire.

But Buffet obviously still thinks there’s value in newspapers.  I think the secret here is that the focus is mainly on local and regional papers, where people still find a good deal of their information.  That’s where traditional journalism can grow and thrive.  It’s almost like a return to the early days of newspapers where all news really was local.  The internet and the cable new stations pretty much have a lock on national stories.  That’s a hard place for newspapers to compete now at days, but local stories and information can still keep newspaper journalists buzzing.  The local newspapers will have to be creative to remain competitive, but the death of the newspaper might have been greatly exaggerated.

Copyright © Anthony Mora 2012

 

 

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How PR Drove Facebook’s IPO

May 16, 2012 Leave a comment

Sometimes an amazingly effective PR campaign can be a dangerous thing.  Take Facebook for example.  The company raised the price range for its IPO to $34 to $38 a share, from $28 to $35 a share.  That illustrates how the media frenzy has hungry investors biting at the bit for this offering.  It also shows how perception can create what could be a false reality perhaps blinding investors to the reality of the situation.  Facebook’s initial price range put its valuation at $77 billion to $96 billion, but now that shifts to $93 billion to $104 billion under this revised price range.  That, my friend, is a lot of money.

Facebook has yet to prove that its $3.7 billion in revenue and $1 billion in profits last year can justify such astronomical evaluation. . Last month, Facebook disclosed that its first-quarter profit and revenue shrunk from the fourth quarter of 2011.  The company claimed that it was do to seasonal trends in advertising.

Facebook going public can be dangerous.  The pressure of being a public company can make companies lose sight of what made them so successful to start.   When it comes to Facebook, the pressure will be particularly great. Its earnings are quite a ways below its projections.  It’s hard to see how it will find a way to grow at the lightning speed investors will not only expect, but demand. 

Another red flag is that Facebook has real exposure to Europe. Apparently over twenty five percent of its users are fromEurope, giving Facebook definite financial exposure on that front. With the state of the European economy, and Facebook’s reliance on European advertising, that could be dangerous.

According to the media, most savvy investors seem to be shying away from Facebook’s IPO.  There are probably some credible reasons for that.  This is not to say that Facbook is not an amazing success story.  Its success and growth have been astronomical; still that doesn’t necessarily justify such aggressive valuations.  And that’s where the media and PR frenzy comes into play.  From newspaper and magazine articles to radio and TV segments Facebook’s IPO has been a front page story for weeks. And then of course, there is Facebook itself.  The social media outlet is its own non stop marketing machine.  The buzz creates more interest and investors start beating the investment drums.  It looks like a difficult road for Facbook to live up to those projections; time will tell whether the drum beating will lead to success or investor disappointment.


Copyright © Anthony Mora 2012

Flauraud, Valentin. “he loading screen of the Facebook application on a mobile phone is seen in this photo illustration taken in Lavigny.” Photo. Chicago Tribune. 16 May 2012. 16 May 2012. <http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/sns-rt-us-facebook-retailbre84f0x2-20120516,0,4596444.story>

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Is Traditional PR Still Relevant?

May 11, 2012 Leave a comment

According to a study done by PR newswire “ In both the US and Canada, pitches through a social network resulted in coverage approximately 70% of the time. In contrast, the standard pitch to a US or Canadian journalist rarely leads to coverage, with 66% pegging the success rate at 0-20%.”

Needless to say social media has forever changed the way PR works.  Whereas the traditional media still offers the best validation and credibility, that sort of seal of approval and trust factor is becoming its primary function.  Sure, if you land a segment on the Today Show or an article in USA Today, you are still going to get a huge boost, but overall the landscape has changed dramatically.  It used to be you could launch a very effective traditional PR campaign without landing any of the major media coverage.  Trade, local and regional media could and did carry a campaign.  But just as the music world has been turned on its head, so has the world of traditional media.  There are fewer outlets and there is a smaller audience.

So, does this mean that traditional PR is dead.  No not by a long shot, but the game board has changed dramatically.  Traditional PR is still vitally important, but to be truly effective it needs to be augmented by different forms of outreach.  This is no longer the time to only reach out to writers, editors and producers. 

Social media has become as important as traditional media, but each has a different function and must be addressed in a different manner.  Neither one on its own is as powerful as the combination of the two.  Social media offers a conversational style of communication with a connection to your audience.  This generally requires greater transparency.  It is a different type of communication and can lead to stronger and deeper personal relationships.

Conversational style—PR people used to interact primarily with industry journalists. “Pitching” and “spinning” were terms often used (not always with a positive connotation) to describe much of that interaction. Those days are fading, which is welcome news to many PR practitioners as well as their audiences. Greater availability of information requires greater transparency, but also leads to richer conversations.

Copyright © Anthony Mora 2012

Cwinters. “Media Free Agency.” Photo. Return on Reputation. 25 Oct 2010. 11 May 2012. <http://www.returnonreputation.com/2010/10/25/media-free-agency/>

 

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Ann Convery’s Total Money Makeover Mastermind is Today, Wednesday, at 2:00pm PDT—-There is one Seat Left! Train’s leaving the Station! Don’t let the train leave without you!

May 9, 2012 Leave a comment

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