Earlier this week, I guest lectured on digital PR at the American University and reported on the experience, Public Relations and Communications’ Future is Bright!. I said that I would not write anything nice unless someone sent me a thoughtful email from the class.

Well, I received two nice notes, one from Juliana Serafini (who promises to email me again next week) and one from Kari Elam, who had a lot of great question.  I will not expose her questions, but the long story short is that Kari is writing for music, culture, arts, and society blogs and wonders if that it good enough as a way of writing herself into a smashing agency job in PR and I told her that while it couldn’t hurt, it is also essential for her to go a little further.

Well, here is the ‘sage’ advice I give to Kari:  Kari, what you’re doing for your current blogs is more editorial writing.  While editorial and column-writing might very well help you with a publishing career in the future — and doesn’t hurt your portfolio — I must underscore the fact that while blogging about music — being a blogger — is super-important when it comes to being a respected part of the community — the “who the hell are you?” factor, there is another more important blogging strategy to pursue if you want to end up in a top-ten national PR firm.

What you need to do, in addition to blogging is “meta blogging,” — blogging about social media, about digital PR, about public relations, about advertising, etc…  It is really important to make sure you’re always taking a step back and think not only about the what of social media but also about the why and how.

What this could look like is a blog about your studies of PR at AU and what you’re learning and how it contrasts with what you’re learning at your PR Internship. If you’re interested in music, society, the arts, and culture, explore it in the context of the Internet, of online branding, ads, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and even television and radio.  How do you see what you’re learning about traditional PR dovetailing into social media marketing and digital PR?  Can you see a continuum?  Can you maybe help the fogies of traditional PR find their way to digital PR?  If you can light the path and maybe even map the way, you’re golden.  Move to NYC and start shopping for apartments, you’ll be on Madison Avenue in no time.

However, don’t forget the basics. As a PR consultant, you will be required to know how to not simply consume content (read blogs), not only produce content (blog), but analyze and understand how to conversation works, how best to leverage and participate in conversation, and also how best to manage conversation and manage reputation.  Being a PR professional is about knowing how things work behind the curtain. And, since you are young and “cyber,” people assume that you have a valuable and important insight into the future.

PR firms are beginning to realize that “all kids get the Internet” may be true, but not in the way they thought — that “kids” get the Internet with only the level of sophistication that people from 35-50 get television — as a source of entertainment and information.

So, it is your job to publicly and prove, on a daily basis, on a blog, that you get what’s going on, that you’re current with the movers and shakers, that you have a passion for that space, and also that you will be able to prevent the future from blindsiding your PR VP and your client by keeping on top of technology, social media, new PR, and new and important channels through which you need to use to promote and protect your clients.

Your music blogging and your trend blogging and your other blogging means that you can now think like a blogger and that you’re accepted into the blogosphere — which is an important first step.  The second step is proving you can strategically and even tactically make the Internet work for your clients and your agency.

Not to insult us marketing, advertising, and PR bloggers and blogs but there is a lot of room in the Power 150 for more voices, that’s for sure.  If you start today, you may very well shoot up the list. A new voice is always welcome. Also, don’t be intimidated by what this sort of blogging means.  You don’t have to act out of your focus.  Take what you already love and then just spend some time getting meta on it — spend some time playing.  Spend some time taking the articles you’re writing elsewhere and slice them and dice them a little academically.  Do things like create your own case studies and give away the sort of campaigns you might recommend yourself.  Feel free to critique or compliment campaigns and brands and firms and agencies — especially the ones you’d like to work with.

I swear to God, you can write yourself into this business.  You can write yourself into a very fine career as a PR professional. You’re good as gold if you can prove that you’re both someone who has been trained in traditional PR and who gets digital PR; that you’re someone who gets both theoretical social media as well as practical social media.

And, good luck to you, Kari!

Thanks to Wadds’ tech pr blog for hooking me up with this interesting article, Online PR basics in 30 minutes: DWPub white paper, featuring Daryl Wilcox’s free white paper,  Online PR in action:

Daryl Wilcox Publishing (DWPub) published an excellent 12-page white paper last week that is an excellent primer on digital PR for anyone in the PR industry. It’s free and is called: Online PR in action – an introduction to implementing and measuring a digital PR programme.

I’d go as far to say that it should be required reading for anyone that hasn’t yet explored the potential of audience and keyword planning, and PR-led content as a strategy for influencing SEO

On that last note, I would love to share The SEO Benefits of Blogger Outreach and Earned Online Media if you have not already seen it.

If you have not yet seen my deck about online PR and blogger outreach, please watch it below — also, feel free to check out my digital PR insights:

At Abraham Harrison, we have three practices: 1) online PR, web video marketing, Twitter and social media marketing 2) social media and SEO consulting 3) online reputation management. Read the below excerpt from Danny Flamberg, What Tactics Work Best in a Recession? — whoops! 

Ironically many of the highly hyped tactics – online PR, web video marketing, Twitter and social media marketing –  are sorted OUT because of their limited track record in delivering quantifiable results. Though today they are cheap enough and accessible enough for marketers with a few extra bucks and some extra imagination to use creatively and break through to hard-to-reach customer or prospect segments.

Search (both SEO and PPC) and e-mail are the work horses in a recession. The costs are containable, the targeting can be quickly and effectively tweaked plus the ROI has been proven again and again.They are sufficiently interactive to meet “social” marketing needs and can be deployed almost on-demand to suit anxious CFOs.

Oh well, this is a very insightful and well-thought-out article with a lot of truth and some very important insights. Since I have over a decase of information architecture and SEO experience, I know that #2 is going to get a lot more of my attention in 2009 — thanks very much for the benefit of your experience, Mr. Flamberg, and remember that there is much more to the article, so please explore the rest, What Tactics Work Best in a Recession?

Jonathan Trenn popped this insightful article about Yelp over on Marketing Conversation, The contorversy about Yelp (and be sure to check out David Gelles’ article on a similar topic over at the Financial Times, Yelp rejects claims of extortion):

Ah, controversy.

Now, it’s with Yelp, the mega online review site.  On Wednesday, the East Bay Express, an alternative newspaper that covers Alameda and Contra Costa counties in California, published a very provocative article , “Yelp and the business of extortion 2.0″ on the sales operations and tactics of Yelp.  The paper made some very pointed accusations, some of them seemingly legitimate while others sounding too nebulous.  They state that Yelp is both maniupulating the placements of restaurants reviews as sales tools and then using scare tactics to then solicit advertising sales from these same restaurants.

The accusations are alarming but, because I think the article was poorly presented, it’s left me thinking that Yelp perhaps had a major sales problem in one office as opposed to a company wide sleaze factor policy.

Yelp’s initial response, written on the company blog by CEO Jeremy Stoppleman is inept and insufficient.  He’s likely satisfied that his blog posts are enough…and it may appear to be just that for the time being…but controversies such as this, be they true or just speculation, have a way of undermining a company’s integrity in a hurry.  Especially a site that 1)  is about user generated online reviews, and 2) has trust as a hallmark of its standing.

Oddly, the Yelp blog doesn’t allow comments.  That’s not a good idea…especially for a site that’s about online reviews and citizen participation.

Here’s the gist of the article.  Writer Kathleen Richards talked to “dozens” of business owners over the “past several months” and found that six of them said that Yelp sales reps promised to remove or move bad reviews if the business chose to advertise.  And these businesses would often get sales calls from Yelp reps soon after they mysteriously started getting a rash of negative reviews.  The theory here is that Yelp employees would start to or enlist others to write negative reviews on a company, those reviews would then appear at the top of a company’s page, and the company would get a phone call from a rep looking for an advertising by so those reviews can “go away”…usually to the tune of $300 a month.

For those that declined, positive reviews seemed to begin to disappear.  For those that did manage to buy, negative ones began disappearing.

This is pretty damning stuff.  If true, it shows a coordinted effort between people in sales those on the back end tech team.  It made some establishments feel as if Yelp was acting as if it was the “mafia” in that Yelp was threatening establishments to pay (advertise) in order to not be damaged.  That’s called “protection money” in organized crime.

But as I red between the lines I ended up scratching my head.   Over several months, after talking to “dozens” of businesses, Richards found six restaurants that felt that either they were being offered a quid-pro-qo for advertising to reduce or eliminate bad reviews; or some felt that this extended to manipulative threats of the placement of poor reviews and the elimination of postive reviews.

“Dozens.  “What does that mean?  36?  60?  84?  How did Richards find these restaurants?  Did she talk to one and then ask the owner/manager if he or she knew of any others that had similar stories?  Both questions are important.   The first because it leads to how widespread the problem actually is in the Bay Area and the second, because if there is a lack or randomness to all this, then the sample restaurants are self selected by the reporter.

The article relies on the how some of the restaurant owners “feel”.  These feelings may be completely legitimate.  But it is hard to counter a “feelings”e of another is the one with the feelings remain anonymous.  I fully believe in using anonymous sources, but there should be greater evidence used.  That is, if one is trying to prove that this is a consistent sales tactic used by the company as a whole.

And speaking of as a whole.  This article seems to be focusing soley on the East Bay restaurant seen.  True, it is an East Bay pub, but the article is written as if it is a widespread problem and the issue here is “the business of extortion”.  It fully damns the Yelp based on a small sample of local business’ feelings.

Stoppleman has since written a few more blog posts, but he could use a change of attitude.  There’s been enough discussion on the net about this article denigrating Yelp.  Hundreds of tweets on Twitter, negative mentions on Technorati, and articles in substantial online pubs.

The reason why I say that Stoppleman could use a change of attitude is because he’s treating all of this as an illegitimate attack.  The accusations, regardless of their veracity, at least sound reasonable.  And his defensiveness doesn’t really address the issue.

He does have on post that does work, at bit, in my opinion.  “Nine Myths About Yelp” is designed to negate what he feels are falsehoods.  The most important one he lists is #3 (it should be #1, but he doesn’t seem to realize it).  It is stated here:

Myth #3: Yelp salespeople manipulate reviews for prospective advertisers (for example, offers to remove a negative review if a new client signs up, or a threat to remove positive reviews if the business owner does not choose to advertise with Yelp)

Reality: We have every reason to trust the smart, hard-working and ethical salespeople who work at Yelp.  Beyond this, to avoid even an appearance of impropriety, we’ve taken several steps to ensure no member of our team is tempted to game the system.  Specifically:
1. Yelp salespeople do not have access to the system that deletes reviews; only a few members of Yelp engineering and user support team have this access, and they literally work on different floors within the office.
2. Every Yelp salesperson signs an agreement that s/he will not write reviews of any business while employed by Yelp.  We trust our teammates in sales to live up to this commitment.  We also have several monitoring systems in place to ensure nobody (accidentally or otherwise) crosses this line.
3. Through our vigilance, we once did find a salesperson who encouraged a friend to write a positive review for a prospective client (that the friend had actually patronized). The salesperson’s role at Yelp ended that day.
4. When a new advertiser signs up with Yelp, the relationship is handed off to an Account Manager.  The Account Manager then takes the client through a 30 minute phone training session — and confirms that reviews have nothing to do with advertising.
5. After the training call, the Account Manager sends a follow up survey that asks each client how much s/he agrees with the following statement: “I understand that Reviews are completely separate from the Yelp Ad Program, and that there is an automated filter that may suppress some of my reviews whether or not I am a client.”  Any client who does not click “Completely Agree” in this case gets yet another follow-up call for clarification.

Myth #4: Yelp removes positive reviews from businesses its staff does not like, or from businesses that do not pay for advertising

Reality: A review you may have seen on Yelp previously is no longer there; this happens.  The review in question may have “disappeared” for one of three reasons:
1. The review may have been suppressed by Yelp’s automated Review Filter, which is always out there looking for suspicious reviewing activity (like those anonymous rants and raves you see on other sites).
2. The writer may have removed her own review; she has the right to do that at any time
3. Another user believed the review violated Yelp’s Review Guidelines and sent it to our customer service team for review. The customer service team agreed, then manually removed the review.

Both our customer service team and the Review Filter work exactly the same way for advertisers as they do for non-advertisers.

This is how he should have addressed the issue at the very beginning.  Blown opportunity and his company has suffered and will continue to suffer as a result.  And he has to go beyond stating that the sales people and the tech people with access to placement of reviews work on different floors.

My guess is what happened is that a few sales reps in that particular office would scour the reviews on Yelp, and when they found some recent newly written negative ones, they then picked up the phone and made a sales call, offering the package that places a selected postive review on top – one that is visibly marked as being sponsored.  Some pitches probably went far beyond this…saying that they could make the negative one “disappear”.  Sales people will say sleazy things.  Stoppleman should understand this and not discount this.  He should then conduct some sort of internal audit that would show the public that he is trying to address the problem and root it out if it exists.  Retrain.  Resolve.

Now is it possible that some sales types had relationships with the tech people.  Absolutely.  Different floors – HA!  So the problem may have been more than a poorly written article.  Yelp needs to look into that because, as Yelp knows, online reputations matter.

And to Jeremy Stoppleman…you should allow people to comment on your blog posts.

The advance guard of the blogosphere were afraid that they missed the blogging and social media wave back in 2006 when I wrote Surfing as a Metaphor for the State of the Blogosphere and Don’t Worry You Didn’t Miss the Height of the Blogosphere, which assured folks that the height was nowhere in sight (forgive me, I am from Hawaii):

Truth is, in terms of the height of the blogosphere, it isn’t even a wave yet. A few people have caught the wave already, but it is just forming. It certainly hasn’t crested! It is far from curling. The wave is still only accessible to the top 10%, but the real market is always in that 80%.

Well, maybe we have come upon the tipping point, according to Jay Deragon in his article, Has McKinsey Created A Tipping Point? In this article, Jay says,

“There has been plenty of discussions throughout the social web about how businesses can gain from the use of social media. marketers from every corner of the earth promote their services to businesses and proclaim “expert status”. However their is only one name in the globe that has the power of getting business leaders attention. That name is McKinsey.”

This may very well be true because McKinsey is, in fact, the living gospel of big business. You, too, can read this article,  Six ways to make Web 2.0 work: Web 2.0 tools present a vast array of opportunities—for companies that know how to use them.

Over the past two years, McKinsey has studied more than 50 early adopters to garner insights into successful efforts to use Web 2.0 as a way of unlocking participation. We have surveyed, independently, a range of executives on Web 2.0 adoption. Our work suggests the challenges that lie ahead. To date, as many survey respondents are dissatisfied with their use of Web 2.0 technologies as are satisfied. Many of the dissenters cite impediments such as organizational structure, the inability of managers to understand the new levers of change, and a lack of understanding about how value is created using Web 2.0 tools. We have found that, unless a number of success factors are present, Web 2.0 efforts often fail to launch or to reach expected heights of usage. Executives who are suspicious or uncomfortable with perceived changes or risks often call off these efforts. Others fail because managers simply don’t know how to encourage the type of participation that will produce meaningful results.

What say you?  Are we at the tipping point?  Can we all start making money now instead of just being gurus, mavens, connectors, and early-adopters? Well, hopefull. Again, from Jay:

This article should be considered a tipping point. When McKinsey speaks business leaders listen and you can bet this article will stir more engagement in social media activities from businesses around the globe.

Rohit Bhargava from the Influential Marketing Blog just posted a very insightful article about how we entrepreneurs can learn from Twitter, 7 Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Twitter’s Success — basically, make things easier, better, more open (as in API), and more insidious (all of Twitter’s competitors feel compelled to integrate with Twitter — how insidious is that — open API wins again):

By any measure, the growth and popularity of Twitter has been phenomenal. To say that Twitter has hit mainstream isn’t really the right metric to use. It’s more powerful to note that for a large group of Twitter enthusiasts, to spend even a day without using it would be as bad (or perhaps even worse) than not having email. It has become just that necessary. How did the site get to this point? And what are the lessons that any entrepreneur might be able to learn from how it got there? Here are a few thoughts on the real secrets behind Twitter’s success:

1. Focus on real time. For the socially connected online, there is little use for yet another place to talk to your friends. If anything, we all have too many of those to start with. But a site dedicated to RIGHT NOW stands out. It’s useful in a way that none of the other sites we use are.
2. Skip the extra step. Approving every friend request can be a lot of work – even if you’re not the most popular of people. It does make sense on most social networks, but when it comes to posting updates on Twitter, if you do it publicly, anyone can follow you without approval. The result is that any user’s audience on Twitter can grow exponentially without barriers.
   
3. Force your customers to do less. If you have ever heard the saying that “less is more” – Twitter is the ultimate proof of that. The forced 140 character messages have made us all refocus on brevity, and as a result of this volume decrease, those of us that are constantly overcommunicated look to the site as the one place where we can still feel that we are on top of the flood of communication that rules our lives.
4. Build enough evangelists to compensate when things go wrong. One of the most well known facts about Twitter is that the service has been notoriously unreliable and crashed frequently. Though it is much improved from those days, the site still goes down or loses functionality relatively regularly. Yet it has managed to build up enough power users and evangelists, that people forgive their down times and keep coming back.
5. Integrate with the most popular competition. The single most useful feature I personally uncovered from Twitter was the ability to integrate it into my Facebook page so that may Twitter updates also become my status on Facebook. This demonstrates a fact that many entrepreneurs already know – by integrating with your competition where your “customers” currently are, you make it easier for them to migrate over to your site.
6. Launch where your influencers are. A big reason for the early success of Twitter was their launch at the SXSW Interactive festival two years ago. It was a place where all the influencers that matters for Twitter were already going to be and putting the site in front of them there allowed them to become word of mouth ambassadors for the site following the event.
7. Offer a public ranking or authority. The final element that has helped Twitter to succeed is that it has a built in authority ranking with the number of followers you have. This is located right beneath your username on the site and it’s high visibility means that it is easily the ultimate metric for anyone using the site. And you can’t help but want that number to go higher. 

I received a call from CNN news this morning asking for my sage insight into the issue that Facebook has changed its Terms of Service (ToS) to expand its ownership of data to include your first born.  Well, I didn’t have any time this morning to know much about it so I was no good to Amanda over at Turner.  Well, I am finally back to my desk and I did all of my reading.  If you want to learn more, read Mashable,  Consumerist and the New York Times for more information.  Here’s the evil excerpt of the new Facebook ToS for your appalled amusement — hurts so good!:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

I know how Facebook works.  What Facebook does, historically, is make an assault on three privacy hills fully expecting to have to return one or two.  This was illustrated by the initially over-aggressive privacy invasion posed by Facebook Beacon, Here’s Why Facebook Beacon is Uncool for User Privacy, which ended up being mellowed in response to outrage (see, they took three hills and really only gave back one — this is their strategy).

This is what Facebook is doing again.  They’re demanding Copyright of all of your consumer-generated content and media through their new ToS; however, I bet you they’re going to do a little Mea Maxima Culpa “the lawyers made us do it” bullshit before loosening it all up.

Mark my words, this is how it is going to work from now on.  And, based on how addicted all of the student I met today at UMD are, I daresay that Facebook might very well be able to keep possession of all three hills this time.  We’re all addicted.  We’ll do anything for our Facebook!

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I spoke to two classes of communications majors today about digital PR and social media marketing. It was a wonderful experience. The University of Maryland undergraduate course was called Comm350:  Public Relations Theory and their communications professor, Sahar Mohamed Khamis, was amazing generous and welcoming, basically handing me the reins to her class, sight unseen.  The class is described as:

The historical development and contemporary status of public relations in business, government, associations and other organizations. Application of communication theory and social science methods to the research, planning, communication and evaluation aspects of the public relations process.

Everybody was super bright and super nice to me. One thing I was concerned about is that in both classes I taught today, both Comm350, only a couple people had Twitter accounts and I think there were just a couple folks who have a blog or who had every blogged.  And these are our future PR professionals.  Of course, when I asked, 100%  of the students in both classes were on Facebook.  Natch.

Well, I presented my A Guide to Blogger Relations slide show and then took questions.  I told them that blogging, Twittering, and participating in the wider conversation would almost guarantee them a good job at a local or national agency after college.  I told them that they should all, separately or in concert, start writing a blog about their take on communication, on advertising, on popular culture, on television, on PR, on social media — that the thing they learn in class every day would be interesting to the blogosphere, seen through their young eyes.  That there is no doubt in my mind that you can really and truly write yourself into the job of your dreams and if they didn’t blog, all of them, they were darned fools (well, maybe I didn’t say it — it was implied).

I receive quite a thank you note from one of student from the first class, Miss Chelsea Clark, who not only asked a question but also said the following nice things — a mixture of review, testimonial, and, I dare say, her first blog post once removed:

I walked into my Comm350 class on Tuesday expecting to sit there taking notes for an hour and a half like usual. Instead, our professor announced we were  having a guest speaker. I was thinking to myself that this could go one of two  ways: really interesting and way better than cramping my hand taking notes, or  really boring and put me to sleep.

Our guest speaker took the floor and introduced himself and described what his company does. I’ve learned about blogs in PR before, but I was never really able  to link the two together. Yeah, so blogs are a new media outlet, but how does  that help clients? How do businesses personally benefit from random people  around the country writing about their hobbies and interests? I never really  understood the connection until Chris’ presentation.

He described how he would have his team search for blogs that were written about topics that relate to his clients and then send out mass emails to the  bloggers to ask them to write about his clients. He was worried that we would  think he was a spammer, but, having made many annoying calls and emails to  reporters myself, I knew how he felt. He then showed us results of actual  bloggers that wrote about his clients. He got so excited! We all recognized this  feeling, for being PR people ourselves, we know how satisfying it is to have free  publicity.

I thought that Chris did a really good job with his presentation. I followed what he was saying the whole time and enjoyed some of his nerdy antics. I think  some of the people in the class were less interested or maybe didn’t follow what   Chris’ company is responsible for, either because they were pretending to take  notes while really checking their facebooks or because they are still a bit  unfamiliar with PR and got a little bit confused.

For me, the presentation was enlightening, exciting, and interesting and showed me new ways of getting publicity without necessarily resorting to TV and  newspapers. I would definitely recommend him to other PR college classes that  are looking for guest speakers!

That, Chelsea, really made my month.  I appreciate the kind words and thank you, again, to professor Sahar Khamis

who will soon be coming out with a really compelling new book you should all pre-order on Amazon,  Islam Dot Com: Contemporary Islamic Discourses in Cyberspace.  I look forward to it.

Also, if you’re curious as to the content of the slide show and the presentation I did, here it is inline for your enjoyment… however, I need to record one with my insight, wit, and wisdom one of these days soon:

After I wrote The Powerful SEO Benefits of Blogger PR Outreach, I looked around Google a little bit under the keywords “blogger outreach” and on the first page I discovered my new friend and partner, Stephen Davies of 3W PR and blogger for PRBlogger, and look what I found: corroboration! According to Stephen, “In fact, the SEO benefits could out-perform all of the other benefits of blogger outreach,” which we at Abraham Harrison, LLC, are discovering more and more every day! Check out The SEO benefits of blogger outreach:

The SEO benefits of blogger outreach

Blogger relations, or blogger outreach as I like to call it, is a relatively new concept in the PR and marketing arena. Prior to blogs and other forms of social media, people working in our industry have never had such direct access to influential people from all walks of life. The advent of these new platforms has also enabled us to tap into real insights, views and opinions on various products, brands and issues which in-turn have allowed us to have open and transparent *relations* with the *public* (public relations, get it?).

As proved by Edelman, Forrester and Nielsen, the opinion of the every-day person is increasingly becoming a more trustworthy source of information. The public is more ‘media savvy’ than ever before meaning marketing messages no longer have the same effect as they once did. If they ever did. Is it any wonder that PR people, marketers and the respective companies they represent are increasingly seeing the value in blogger outreach?

Using myself as guinea pig and my involvement in the O2 blogger outreach campaign. The company working on the initiative, VCCP, probably looked at this blog and classified it with having a niche audience. With around 1500 RSS subscribers I can safely assume that I don’t hold great powers of influence. Not to say this blog doesn’t hold *some* level of influence; it does. To what extent, though, I really don’t know, but I’m sure the guys working at VCCP have their own reasons for including me in the outreach.

So let’s assume that after I wrote both posts on the O2 Xda Orbit 2 I ‘influenced’ some of this blog’s readers. By “readers” I mean people who are subscribed to the RSS feed or email alerts and are updated as and when I publish new blog posts. How I actually influenced them is another matter. Did they rush out and buy the phone as soon as they read my review? Maybe not. Did I at least increase awareness of the phone to some of the readers? I presume so. Either way, some level of influencing was in play.

Job done? Maybe not.

What’s struck me the last week or so is the amount of traffic I’ve received by people looking for information on the Xda Orbit 2. Quite a lot in comparison for this itty-bitty blog. So-much-so that since I wrote the two posts about the phone on the 20th and 27th February they’ve proved to be the top two most popular blog posts from those dates to present time. Take a look:

Note: The Homepage and About page have higher traffic but these are static pages and not blog entries.

Again, if you look at the top ten keywords used to get to this blog since I wrote the two posts you’ll see that four out of the ten are related to the Xda including the most popular two keywords:

This, to me, is pretty impressive and it puts blogger outreach in a whole new different light. In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious that SEO plays a part in all of this but maybe I was too caught up in the ‘direct approach’ and ‘two-way conversation’ ways of thinking that I didn’t give it any thought.

In fact, the SEO benefits could out-perform all of the other benefits of bloggeroutreach. Two reasons:

Relevance – You can see by the keyword data that people who landed on either post through a search engine were actually looking for information on the Xda. The people who subscribe to my feed weren’t necessarily – I published it and they may have read it. No guarantee there, though.

Volume – If the search engine traffic to each post continues which, chances are, it will then those two posts will have received a lot more attention from Google and the like than they did through an RSS feed.

These two reasons make the point that SEO should not just be considered when initiating of blogger outreach campaign but should be high on the agenda. The measurement and evaluation process of the campaign should include any traffic and SEO data that are available to gather. They could be the most valuable results you’ve achieved!

The underlying objective of a blogger outreach campaign is, of course, to generate positive and authentic opinions on your product or brand. But if what you are promoting is a lousy, useless or even mediocre product, however, then the next title of a blog post could be “The SEO nightmare of blogger outreach.”

It’s all about the quality of the content or product you’re promoting at the end of the day.

Stephen is managing director of 3W PR, a UK based online PR consultancy. You can connect with him on Twitter or check out his LinkedIn profile. | Email Stephen

I just got off the phone with fellow AdAge Power 150 blogger CR Ransom and we had quite an amazing chat.  CR runs Mosnar Communications, Inc. Public Relations, an Atlanta-based firm focused on the African American luxury market, “folks who have over $250,000 a year to spend on lifestyle.”

During our conversation, I realized that it is a very exclusive market and hard for outsiders to infiltrate because the Black luxury market is guarded and takes care of its own.  I am told that this is a community that doesn’t really even need much of a web presence or a social media strategy because the market is closed and people are very loyal to one-another and to their Churches. These are very traditional, conservative, communities that require someone like CR and the gang at Mosnar to act as ambassador.

Mosnar Communications may well be based in Atlanta but its reach and influence carries far past the borders of Georgia. CR is very grateful for what Google and blogging has done for their practice as both platforms have given Mosnar a clientelle well beyond even the boarders of the United States.

In fact, CR told me that her firm competes — and wins — on Google in searches that anyone would die for about luxury brands, luxury branding, and the like –  even outside her core, which is aspirational, upper-middle-class, affluent, and wealthy Black Americans.

Because of the Internet, blogging, CR’s commitment, and Google, Mosnar Communications has gone from being a niche vertical geo-targeted regional Atlanta player to a firm that fields calls from major global brands and media from around the world.

CR Ransom told me that, to her, the key is Google and how Google’s algorithms don’t segregate based on her location, race, gender, company size, number of employees, the people she knows, or anything else, and that allows her offerings, content, experience, and insights to show up, in a search, right next to agencies and firms a thousand times bigger (and probably less likely to really understand her market like she does).