Communications Firm
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
So what does it mean to be a communications firm? It involves reaching the public with the right message that will help raise awareness and appreciation of a company. This communication is achieved a number of ways. We write content so that people searching will come across information and get the messages directly. Another way is to work with reporters to let them know about the company so that they will be interested in communicating that to their readers. Sometimes a viral campaign and outreaching to bloggers is the best way to work toward communicating with potential customers.
Communicating is all about getting a piece of information out to a certain person or groups of people. When the scope of this communication makes one-on-one conversations impractical, a communications firm can hit strategic places to get the message out through as many avenues as possible. Connors is a PR firm that specializes in successful communication.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, pr
What Makes a Good PR Person?
Monday, July 24, 2006
While blogging, I've spent a lot of time discussing what Connors does for clients and what sets Connors apart from the rest. When it comes right down to it, people are what make Connors successful. The talented and sharp public relations specialists who work here make all the difference. So what exactly does it take become a good PR professional?
A good PR person is someone who has impeccable speaking and writing skills. It is someone who can look at a bunch of information and pick out exactly what is news and what of it matters the most. A successful public relations agent is personable and can "read" people well, picking up on subtle clues and implied meaning as well as stated comments. To do well in PR, you need to always be thinking, strategizing, and brainstorming. If one method doesn’t work, you switch to another and always do research beforehand. Most of all, a PR professional can’t be afraid to pick up the phone and must be able to accept no as an answer. Most outreach does not lead to coverage, but it is this process of outreaching and building relationships that will end up getting coverage for clients.
A talented PR person can come from any major or prior career track. Much of PR is utilizing the relationships with reporters that you build through time in the industry. This experience gives you a better sense of what each reporter is looking for and what news will appeal to each. It is through these connections and knowledge that a truly successful PR agent is formed and Connors pools its experience in the industry to cultivate this success.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, outreach, pr
The Buzz About PR 2.0 Firms & Technology
Sunday, July 23, 2006
It seems that PR companies "getting it" either consists of partaking in online dialogues via blogging, optimizing press releases, or word-of-mouth buzz. I went to a conference recently, and any time I would introduce myself as being from a PR firm, people immediately thought I was going to talk about the "buzz thing". Some of our peers out there that have done a very effective job of positioning PR as word-of-mouth bumble bees, real-time bloggers or press release optimizers.
While we believe in and partake in these practices, the PR industry has been so successful in getting these messages out, that it makes the challenge even more difficult for PR agencies that are technological innovators. Its one thing to be experts at using online tools, such as blog software or newswires, but it's an entirely different thing to have the insight and capacity to invent wholly new technologies and marketing methodologies.
And PR agencies such as Connors are doing exactly that with applications such as HitTail. And now that we have defined a new category of software, tools to help you write for the long tail of search, we have to get over the hurdle that we're branded as buzzers and bloggers and blasters... oh my!
HitTail fosters a decidedly softer sell that's more aligned to the true mission of PR--to get you publicity that you could never have paid for at any price--usually in the form of editorial coverage. You generally pay less for PR than large advertising campaigns, but the pay-off can be much greater. The favorite saying is what is a mention in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal worth? Today, the equivalent is saying what's a top position in Google, Yahoo or MSN worth? PR and SEO are the same. And brilliant editorial coverage is what happens when the client's prospects FIND THEM in the due course of their research, vendor selection process, or the like. In other words, that taboo acronym: SEO, but made palatable to the mainstream marketers of the world.
So, the question is how does a PR agency formulatize the process of SEO? It needs the intimidating luggage that goes with that horrible acronym removed. And it needs to be executed in a reliable, confidence-building fashion, similarly to how the traditional process may involve positioning & messaging, SWOT analysis, pitching news to journalists, and staging newsworthy events.
PR's answer to online marketing is not merely making those same press releases more effective through search, though that helps. PR's answer is not just in opening a corporate blog and entering the online discussion, though that helps. And PR's answer is not merely in chatting it up online or off, though that helps. The answer is in incrementally and systematically dominating an entire conceptual area on the Internet. And since some conceptual areas are so difficult to penetrate in natural search, the answer is in finding the right starting point, carving out a niche, and continuing digging out from the niche in concentric circles until it grows into a crevice, then a cavern, then a canyon. This is not theory. It actually works. You can control a lot of quality traffic in your space this way.
HitTailing works because there's easy pickings out there in the long tail of natural search. If you pick a phrase that's at all off the beaten track and write about it in blogging software, you're almost assured a strong position in the search results. And it may pay off. The difficulty is in knowing where to begin and improving your odds. And a PR agency has the answer. A PR firm has such a deep strategic understanding of natural search that they were able to break out just a tiny piece of the SEO offerings that they offer to their clients, with that alone, potentially move the entire state of online marketing a large step forward.
The technology is necessary, filling a major missing hole in online marketing tools. Why? Because, if you begin in the wrong part of the long tail of keywords, you're going to be doing a whole lot of writing for nothing. But if you start in the right place, then you're going to start growing traffic and improve the accuracy in your decisions of where to go next in that endless long tail of potentially lucrative, but mostly time-wasting long tail of search. This technology is 50% automation, and 50% hard work, because you can't automate the craft of writing original content.
But I find myself constantly having to knock down the buzzing and the blogging and the news blasting hurdles, which were the first PR attempts to master online media. It has actually given the some SEM firm counterparts a lot of ammunition to discount PR agencies as limited in technical capabilities. As practitioners of warm & fuzzy relationship building, there's no way we can consult about search on a strategic level, some say. In fact, they plan on making the search discussion so technologically intimidating, that they scare away traditional agencies, and reduce the competition in the new media agency space.
Connors has actually made the deliberate decision to deliver paid-search through partners, and to focus instead itself on genuine editorial search coverage. This is the proper domain for PR, and is ever more widely acknowledged by industry observers as the most valuable company asset. Those who master natural search--especially ACROSS engines--are not beholden to anyone. As engines come and go, their asset and very strong posture will remain. With properly executed public relations, a strong presence in search is not the result of an advertising campaign that only lasts as long as you're buying the media. Instead, it persists, just as with the genuine reputation that comes from repeated exposure from trusted sources.
Connors has developed technology to do exactly that. It's different from the type of software you'll find in the SEM world, such as bid management tools, because it's not a media buy. It's a media seize--but in very small, smart increments. Results will be completely measurable, and over time, you can grab bigger and bigger pieces of the editorial media. Eventually, such small grabs will build enough critical mass within your site that making the big keyword grabs becomes possible.
What do I mean by that? Well for example, search for PR firm in any major search engine. Connors was not able to achieve the first page position across all major engines over night, even though it's the subject matter of the main homepage. We first had to start with smaller concepts. We used HitTailing to build up the content of our website and our blog. And over time, the concept of PR firms kept coming up, and natural links started to occur to us from people discovering our site, and they would reliably refer to us as a PR firm, without any prodding on our part. It's a 100% organic process that led from obscure HitTailing to spot-on cross-engine top positions on a paydirt primary keyword that PR firms much larger than us would kill for.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, MSN, outreach, pr, SEM, seo, Yahoo
PR Buzz
Friday, July 21, 2006
Every day around the office, we toss around PR terms and lingo. One of these terms and one of the most coveted results that public relations outreach can achieve is "buzz." When lots of people are all talking about one piece of news, it has buzz. But how do you get everyone aware and talking at once?
There are a number of ways to create buzz. One way is through traditional public relations, getting the news into print and other media. These news outlets must always be fed with stories and are seen by a lot of eyes who may talk about the articles or segments over the water cooler. Or, you could try to get a viral campaign started, tapping Internet resources and blogs. This is a smaller start but can be just as affective at creating big-time buzz. Another way to create buzz is through an effective advertising campaign, although this can be a costly and time-consuming approach compared to PR.
When working on generating buzz, it has to be the right kind. The tricky part is choosing the right message that will resonate and generate the most positive buzz for the company. It is not always the case that all news is good news and you need to make sure that you're creating beneficial buzz that is not only good for the company now, but will be built upon by future messages for maximum affect and brand building. This is where the expertise of a specialized PR firm like Connors Communications can come in handy.Labels: buzz, Connors Communications, pr
PR Plan
Thursday, July 20, 2006
What exactly is a PR plan and how does this lead to press coverage? It's much more than a matter of calling the media with news about a company. When outreaching, you need to know what news you are going to go out with when, who you are going to take it to, and what this will accomplish. An article here and an article there can get some people aware of what is going on at your company. However, articles carefully placed with messages that build off of one another create a bigger picture and help generate buzz.
It is this kind of PR plan that Connors helps companies create and execute that makes the most impact. It incorporates both print media and online media and then uses the messaging points that will make the news resonate. A carefully built grass roots campaign that gets local interest first has a much different momentum than a news story that makes a big splash in a few major papers first and then trickles down. Connors can see where the news will have the most impact and put together the right PR plan for the right message.
It all comes down to experience. Knowing the publications and knowing the reporters means that Connors can see who will be interested and where the news would be best spread. Also, being a leader in PR for emerging technologies, Connors has a knack for what angle to pitch. Every successful company launch or news outreach starts with a comprehensive public relations plan. Connors can help you build and execute that plan to get the most value out of your news.Labels: buzz, Connors Communications, pr
Boutique Agency
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
You may recognize by name the big public relations institutions that are located in New York City and elsewhere. These firms have lots of clients and a cookie cutter PR plan. Numerous employees can contact all sorts of media…for a large firm fee.
When a PR plan requires a bit more finesse, a smaller and more personalized PR firm may be more effective. A boutique agency like Connors Communications can create a strategic plan that fits your needs precisely. With highly experienced PR agents who have personalized contacts with media, your message will get out to exactly the audience you're looking for. Connors is especially experienced in emerging technology, being able to execute launch outreach, explain new technology to interested press, and outreach to traditional as well as online outlets.
With a boutique agency, you can get more attention and a more companied-specific outreach plan than at some of the larger firms. You know exactly who is working on your account and know you can trust each and every member of your PR team. A boutique agency like Connors Communications can create and execute a carefully-crafted PR strategy that will garner media interest in your company.Labels: Connors Communications, outreach, pr
Long Tails and Wise Crowds: Some Pre-qualification Necessary
Sunday, July 16, 2006
So, I'm just getting into James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds. I know I'm a Johnny-come-lately to blogging about this book, but as I encounter the pre-qualifications of what makes a crowd smart, I keep coming running into similarities to what makes a market have a long tail. With The Long Tail, the qualifiers are increasingly simple means of production, distribution and filters, turning making the supply-side virtually infinite. Because online shopping is striving to become a mere 25% of all commerce, long tail markets are still the exception and not the rule. Admittedly, it will be becoming more so over time, because improving technology dictates improving supply-side capabilities. But today, the long tail is mostly an eBusiness phenomenon.
Similarly, the absolutely counterintuitive notions of the wise crowd are predicated on a diverse sampling of people. If the crowd is too homogeneous, such as everyone being smart, the crowd actually gets stupider, because cohesion and bias sets in. James refers to the bad decisions leading up to the Bay of Pigs invasion as an example. The same people who thought up the idea were the ones consulted on whether they thought it could work, and vital facts were left out of the decision making process had they used a larger sampling of people, such as the intelligence branch of the CIA or the Cuban desk of the State Department. So, just because you have a crowd and an independent voting mechanism doesn't mean you have superior predictive or decision making capabilities.
And that has been on my mind recently, thinking about Digg. Digg has many of the things going for it that one would think necessary to create a Wikipedia-like phenomenon. There was a debate recently of whether Digg was better than The New York Times, and could one day have a larger audience and influence. This brought me back to making Digg part of my daily read, least I get left out. I quickly took it off again, realizing the signal-to-noise ratio was excessive for the finite time I was willing to allocate. Linux stories, no matter how small, are considered front page material by the Digg audience, while actual newsworthy stories, even in technology, faced a difficult challenge in rising to the top.
It was with this perspective that I watched with interest as Jason Calacanis helped AOL launch the new Digg-like Netscape, but with Anchor picks. I thought, OK, here's where the wisdom of the crowd could be brought to bear on news, but without the anti-Microsoft Geek agenda bias. Not because of the Anchors, but rather because of the broader and more diverse sampling of audience a site like Netscape could bring to bear on the problem. It's too early to draw any conclusions, and I certainly wouldn't replace the Yahoo top-headline RSS news feed on my mobile phone with the Netscape feed yet. But the fact that technology news is getting mixed right in with politics and natural disasters is an interesting sign. Considering it's the Time Warner conglomerate behind this, I think they could have given the endeavor an even better chance by picking a more news-oriented domain from their portfolio, like Time.com. It may have less traffic (according to Alexa), but it's probably a better audience for this sort of experiment. Now, that would have made news, and really tested the viability of the new news dynamic.
So, my summer reading list also includes Inside the Tornado and The Tipping Point, two books which I know are all about pre-qualification. Not every company finds themselves inside the tornado having to deal with hypergrowth. And since the bust, it's even fewer. But still, it does happen, such as with MySpace. And Connors may have such a case in HitTail--only time will tell. But I'm VERY interested in those pre-qualifications that the Tornado book deals with.
Similarly with The Tipping Point, not every industry undergoes rapid change analogous to the outbreak of an epidemic. It's only when such-and-such conditions are met (the pre-qualifications) that you reach a point of no return. It may take overcoming much initial resistance before a process is set irrevocably in motion. I revert back to the Google example. Google taking over the world was not inevitable in its early days as seems intuitively obvious today. DogPile and Mamma seemed MUCH better than Google to the casual observer in those early days. A lot of people had to be convinced to look closer before dismissing this minimalist colorform-esque site. What exactly were the pre-qualifying factors that ALLOWED Google to overcome and reach the tipping point? I need to know.
So my final point is that these generalizations about disruptions to the shape of business, culture and our lives always seem to require pre-qualification, which has something of a dampening effect. If every new business concept were as transforming as the hype accompanying the launch and the book's success, then society would be getting transformed and re-transformed at a more rapid pace. In the face of books like The Long Tail, The Tipping Point, Crossing the Chasm and others of that ilk, I'm constantly in conflict over how much I buy into the pontifications of business guru, and recently deceased, Peter Drucker. I REALLY believe most of what Drucker has to say about the underlying tenants of business, success and change. And in the end, I think Peter Drucker was right about most things: you might say about the first 20% of things that make 80% of the difference. And you'll really appreciate the irony of that statement if you're a longtailer.Labels: blog, digg, The Long Tail
Blogging Features
Monday, July 10, 2006
While we happen to use Blogger for this site, in others we also use TypePad and they recently introduced Feedburner integration. This will be great for advertisers looking to know those ever-elusive RSS circulation numbers and shows a great strategy for Six Apart. They also started a partnership with Kanoodle ads, allow a tip jar via PayPal, and maintain an impressive widget gallery. Blogger still serves its purpose but the Pyra team, wherever they are, had better keep their eyes open.Labels: blog, Paypal, RSS, Typepad, widget
Putting Your AdWords into Stealth Mode
Thursday, July 06, 2006
With the recent Yahoo settlement of the click fraud case, the flurry of follow-up news is coming out, including a study just announced by Outsell, Inc. Their survey states that 37 percent of marketers reduced their click-based advertising, and that the money paid in fraudulent clicks is about $800 million... compared to the $7 billion size of the industry, that's a sizable percentage if it is to be believed.
Are you planning to cut back your paid search spending? Perhaps we can recommend an alternative. If you want to get high-quality click through and conversion, advertise on keywords other than the obvious "benchmark terms" known by you and your competitors, then switch from broad matching to narrow matching. In this way, you keep running your PPC campaigns, but they go into "stealth mode" in the long tail of search.
But how do you choose such keywords? Well, Connors just happened to develop a tool for natural search engine optimization which is proving to be an invaluable asset in improving AdWords campaigns when you import the natural search keyword list. How is this possible? Your cost per click is driven down in Google as your relevancy is deemed to be improved. This is why you have to remove terms that are underperforming in order to "fine tune" your campaigns. We have HitTail users reporting campaign improvements doubling, from 3% to 6% click-through. Using your long tail keywords in your paid campaign appears to trigger off some sort of "relevancy" magic that both improves performance and drives down campaign cost.
So, use HitTail for a few weeks, and export the natural optimization keyword lists using HitTail's new export tool. Plow them into your AdWords campaigns. Switch from broad to narrow matching, and watch your PPC campaign go into stealth mode, and confound your competition who probably doesn't have the time or resources to monitor on more than a fixed list of well known benchmark terms.
This of course has the secondary advantage of helping you start to fix your state of natural search results. The same terms that will fine-tune an AdWords campaign are often excellent subject matter for new blog posts, which will in turn improve your natural search results and further reduce your exposure to click fraud risk by simply making a larger portion of your clicks into the free variety. It's a form of hedging your bets.
And this answers the two notions that have been nagging at the back of the minds of online marketers for some time: is click fraud happening on my site? And isn't doing well in natural search a better online initiative? If you answer Yes to both of these questions, then the time is perfect for you to check out the new HitTail tool that is advancing the state of online marketing.Labels: Adwords, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, Yahoo
Getting Your Site Indexed in One Month
So, the HitTail domain was registered only 1 month ago. Yet, it is already at the top of Google on some limited keywords, such as longtail marketing. Sure, it's obscure, but obscure keywords that actually are searched-on and convert are exactly the point of HitTailing. But maybe more significant is the fact that today is July 6th, and the HitTail domain only became active on June 6th. And yet, we're included, and indeed at the top of results, on many Google searches already. This flies in the face of conventional SEO wisdom, that you should expect up to a 6-month waiting period, especially on brand new domain names. What's going on here?
I'm particularly interested, because a story got pushed to the front page of Digg yesterday about getting your site indexed before you launch. The Digg crowd immediately lambasted the poster for putting up common sense information, being self-promotional, and generally spamming Digg. This is in marked contrast to the over 700 diggs the story received by the time I read it. There seems to be some disparity between the information that general Diggers value, vs. those who take the time to post comments. Because they're at a "democratic" news site (not really), they seem to already be interested in new ways of propagating news. Yet any story even touching on alternative online marketing methods, especially SEO, results in the geek game of pile-on the spammer. It appears that spam is only permissible if your agenda is the furthering of the Linux cause, in which case no story is too small (I got Debian running on my wristwatch, etc.)
One particularly unenlightened commenter had this to say:
"Hmmm. Maybe the highly intelligent person responsible for this article needs to find out about the Google Age-Delay feature. This prevents any new domain name being indexed and listed with any authority in the first 6 months of going live. This is to prevent domain spammers from using multiple domains to span a single site, or to create so many links between "fake" domains that the google PageRank is spammed into providing BS rankings. So - no - this doesn't work with Google unless your domain is already 6 months old - by which time it will be well and truly indexed. Kinda stupid really.
It's like these SEO companies that charge $70,000 to do a job which takes one guy about 2 days work, and none of it technical. [Deleted] useless. And the people who hire them: [deleted]." This commenter's notions are so incorrect, I don't know where to start. First off, brand new domains can receive top Google rankings in under 1 month. We've proven and documented that. Whatever "age delay" feature there may be in Google is merely a dampening effect to slow down the influence of suddenly appearing sites. It follows the same "crawl-to-crawl" iterative process documented in their patent applications from last year, meaning that brand new sites are diluted in their influence merely by virtue of not having built up any momentum.
There was some fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) introduced based on the large number of chances wrought by the updates nicknamed Jagger, then BigDaddy. But the core principles of BackRub are still as intact today as they were during the earliest days of Google behind the walls of Stanford. We know that through constant monitoring. The commenter's opinions are some speculative notions that were espoused around the time of these updates to explain why so many people were having difficulty getting new domains indexed. We had the same issue, and overcame it in the 6-month period the user stated. But the 6-month delay rule can not be used as a generalization.
A website's inclusion and positive standings in the results can be jump-started by sudden worldwide organic linking to a site in a way that is impossible to fake, such as happened with HitTail. I'm sure this is Google's way of not excluding sites that become significant suddenly in a very short timeframe. Were Google to not include such sites, it would itself appear not relevant. The Google default search is in itself a news source driven by the wisdom of crowds. And the crowd can accelerate relevancy and natural inclusion.
The point the commenter makes about 2-days of work for one person to do non-technical work... well, I'd like to see the commenter fix such a site with 10,000+ pages run by enterprise content management systems that never had search friendliness as a criteria in the first place. This is often the case. In fact, in addition to the sites being hopelessly broken from a search perspective, the organizations themselves are often riddled with politics--particularly between the marketing and the IT people. SEO is highly technical, sometimes requiring coding and implementing completely new "presentation layers" in existing systems, and sometimes requiring rapid and intelligent tagging of thousands of resources. On top of the technical projects, there is an equal amount of finesse in building consensus among all the stakeholders, so that the projects actually can get done.
Domains can be registered and brought to the top of Google results in under a month. It's easiest to do this when the website itself is graced with sudden worldwide popularity, and the inevitable globally dispersed organic linking that accompanies such popularity. It is also easiest to accomplish when the targeted keywords are not of the most competitive sort, but rather are long tail keywords, such as those recommended by HitTail. If you're looking for the edge in online marketing, ignore the conventional wisdom, especially if it's coming from Digg commenters. And that's a generalization you can count on.Labels: digg, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, seo
PR Firm Makes it to Museum of Modern Betas
Monday, July 03, 2006
That's right, a product created by a NYC PR firm has reached Saurier Duval's clever and popular Museum of Modern Betas site... twice! Thank you, Saurier for recognizing the value of re-listing us since our name change. It will help us a lot in getting established.
For a variety of reasons, we changed our name from MyLongTail to HitTail. And in doing so, lost some initial momentum. The MyLongTail beta site was becoming linked-to at an increasingly rapid rate. The domain acquired a Google PR of 2 within days of the beta announcement--rare for a brand-new domain. So it was with this sense of urgency that we wanted to get the renaming over with as quick as possible.
Thankfully, we are rapidly regaining our momentum, and just about everyone who blogged about us during our beta release in June has made follow-up posts with our new name. It's in this spirit of gratitude that I'm making this post, to acknowledge the important role that Saurier and site's like his play in giving new beta sites their fair chance in the new Darwinian landscape of Web 2.0... whoops, Web Infinitiy Plus One, betas. Now, if we could just show up in O'Someone's Radar and Michael Arrington's blog. All in due time, I suppose.
Incubating HitTail inside of a New York public relations firm has been an interesting experience, balancing the needs of clients against the desire to extract and abstract a tiny piece of the secret recipe that gives us our edge--then, altruistically giving it away to the world. We're doing this in great part because it is going to be a big public relations win, in and of itself. But we're also doing it with great care, so we do not upset either our Clients, to whom we provide a far greater superset of services, or the search engines themselves, for whom we wish to make their jobs easier and not harder.
The process has also been an exercise in intellectual acrobatics. The connection between PR and SEO was absolutely clear in my mind when I joined Connors. But the way to turn it into a universally appealing product that was not too techie, and which could also scale to meet the potentially massive worldwide demand was not. That took some thought. But we're there now.
Almost everything about HitTail is innovative and counter-intuitive. It hearkens back to the days when Google first started making the rounds outside Stanford. Remember your first reaction? It was probably "so what". It definitively took a few open-minded tries to understand why this stripped-down, seemingly rehash site was indeed something special. It was a culmination of simplicity, relevance and performance at a time that AltaVista and others left an opening so big you could drive a GooglePlex through.
And so it is with HitTail. But instead of the opening being made by anti-search Portal-centrism, the opening is made in the broad divide between the disciplines of natural search engine optimization (intimidating even just to say) and pay-per-click search engine marketing. In other words, the gap between SEO and SEM.
This gap is colossally larger than the chatter on the Internet would lead you to believe. One field is full of technical and editorial projects with built-in inertial resistance. The other field is becoming more like media-buying every day, as analytics increasingly tie back into the campaign / bid management software in order to auto-optimize campaigns, thereby removing the once-technical barriers; in other words, easy!
Are you following? SEO, the free and natural part, remains difficult and rife with politics and inertial resistance. SEM on the other hand, the $7 billion industry part, is becoming easier and more automated due to the financial incentives to make it so. In between lies the void. Atmospheric pressures collide, and there, inside the tornado, lies HitTail.
It is with this level of strategic thinking that we created the HitTail product. It is with the desire to fill this void that we named it with a noun, a verb, and a present participle. You use the HitTail site, therefore, you HitTail. This makes you a HitTailer engaged in the practice of HitTailing. And it is neither the intimidating uncertainties of SEO, nor directly paying homage at the alter of G/Y/M.
And because HitTail is solid, delivering on exactly what it promises, and is adding features with the same cautions "stay close to core" approach as Google, we're not getting shoved into the crowded analytics space (the "portals" of today). Also, similar to Google, our service is so radically different, without seeming so at first glance, due to something very analogous to PageRank that lurks behind the scenes--something that makes our writing suggestions super-charged for natural search effectiveness.
We are effectively taking a practice that many of the most advanced, top-of-their-field SEOs have long engaged in, and making the average marketing Joe able to do the same thing. But this is the nature of all technologies. They are arcane and difficult-seeming at first, but then someone comes along and cost reduces, improves ergonomics and markets it for the masses: like Henry Ford. Or like Prometheus bringing fire to the people. It's a recurring theme, and is inevitable.
But we are not simply making a high-end SEO method as it existed available to everyone. We are adding our own special formula. Just as Larry Page realized that hyperlinking was the equivalent of academic citations, and was a key indicator of relevance in what was to become PageRank, so have we come to understand the key indicators of what is bound to work in terms of natural search.
And THAT is what makes the HitTail data so special, and using HitTail such a source of competitive advantage.
So, on this note, we'll end this blog post that started as a simple thanks to Saurier Duval and the Museum of Modern Betas. It's a real sign of the times when a PR firm in New York City can incubate one of these puppies itself, from idea to execution, instead of waiting for it to come in as a Client.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, pr, seo, The Long Tail
PR Isn't Adapting, It's Leading
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Where does Public Relations' ability to embrace new technologies and business models come from, where traditional advertising channels are struggling to hold onto their piece of the global marketing budget pie? I think the ability to adapt and jump on unorthodox approaches to generating publicity is just part of the DNA of public relations. Let me explain.
The notion that a company can announce its own activities as newsworthy is in itself a radical and relatively new notion. It brings up church and state issues in journalism. None-the-less, there is no denying that the activities of companies impact society, current events, and even our personal wealth with how more people are invested in stocks. And where high-tech is concerned, it is all the more so, because it reflects upon the overall human condition. The constant flow of nanotube news comes to mind, and how we're inching ever-towards manufacturing on the molecular level. Pure science and industry have never been so closely coupled.
And it is this technology itself that is disrupting traditional media businesses. As data flows more freely, and distribution barriers fall, special interest channels rise, and reaching your audience becomes simultaneously cheaper and more challenging. It's cheaper, because your information is just bits that fly over the ether at virtually no cost. It's more challenging, because anyone can do this, and audiences are organizing and reorganizing themselves into ever-shifting ad hoc communities. Targeting them is more like programming an intelligent missile rather than aiming an arrow.
It is in this environment that public relations shines, and the "old formulas" of press releases and pitching transform into new formulas of blogging, email and social networking. The three big networks of ABC, CBS and NBC are forced to co-exist with countless cable networks, and now even user contributed content over sites like YouTube. Print has undergone similar fragmentation, and additionally has to compete with free RSS feeds that are readable now on the average mobile phone. There is no equivalent today of the ABC, CBC and NBC... well, almost no equivalent.
Search has elevated itself into a mainstream media, and today's giants are Yahoo, Google and MSN, constituting an eerily similar "big 3" resemblance to TV networks. In the runners up, you've even got the media mavens of QVC fame in Barry Diller of Interactive Corp and Ask, and Rupert Murdoch of Fox and MySpace. While you can't achieve similar saturation with a simple media buy as you could on the big TV networks 15 years ago, you can be sure that virtually your entire audience will be visiting Yahoo, Google or MSN some time soon. And you can "rig" the system to deliver your message at exactly the right moment... when... they... search!
It's like today's equivalent of the big-3 networks have an ultra-efficient method of delivering advertising, where you the advertiser never has to pay until the moment you know your intended audience is actually interested and predisposed to your message. And this form of media is competing for the same global marketing budget as TV and print. It is more like a redistribution of these fixed marketing dollars than it is growing or shrinking of advertising budgets. And public relations is uniquely suited to deal with these shifts.
While public relations does have a "formula" per se, involving press releases and pitching, it has always had a more versatile word-of-mouth and publicity aspect that revels in unorthodoxy. It is the unexpected or the extreme that can make a grab for the "free" editorial space that exists in all media. On TV, it's the equivalent of news spots and guest appearances. In print, it's usually the subject-matter of the main articles. And on the Internet, it is both the viral word-of-mouth thing, AND the "natural" results in search.
This is contrary to much of the message that the "inner circles" of the public relations industry are repeating these days. Much of the talk centers around how the traditional formula involving press releases is changing, or how blogging is such a powerful method of engaging in the public dialogue. While I wholeheartedly agree with these notions, I also think that they are missing the big picture by such a broad mark that I had to develop a product by way of responding.
And the HitTail product is Connors Communications way of throwing its hat into the ring. The field of public relations is not merely adapting to these media changes; it is leading. Public relations is not merely keeping itself relevant, it is educating the rest of the world on what it means to be relevant in the new media landscape. Public relations is not merely struggling to reproduce the big viral marketing wins of years past, it is creating brand new methods of virally disseminating a message.
Indeed, HitTailing is like solving simultaneous equations in a way that produces results already described by detractors as "too good to be true." It provides your corporate blogging strategy and your free search hit strategy in one master stroke. "Too good to be true" is quickly becoming the strongest argument among HitTailing naysayers. Think about that. The only things standing between us moving forward the entire state of Marketing are keeping pace with demand, and convincing users that "too good to be true" sometimes IS true.
This is an admirable accomplishment indeed, both for Connors Communications and the field of public relations as a whole. The very companies that stood by and watched as new businesses incubated from operations like Idealab are now able to become their own incubators, their own Angels, and their own Venture Capitalists. For Connors, it was the culmination of about two years of providing these services as a public relations value-add, realizing they had something that could only achieve its fullest potential if let lose in the Web 2.0 ecosystem, and so it has.
So, where multimillion dollar media buys can still allow you to achieve saturation of a sort on today's equivalent of the big-3 networks (PPC campaigns on Yahoo, Google and MSN), the equivalent of getting onto the Ed Sullivan Show or American Idol is HitTailing. It costs you nothing more than the work of putting yourself in the right place at the right time to be discovered, doing it by piecing together the minute clues left for you by your past website visitors.
This unorthodox thinking is something that has always been characteristic of the public relations industry. Sometimes it has taken the form of glitzy stunts that capture the news cameras. Other times, it takes the form of stunning acts of generosity and altruism by PR clients. Very often, it takes no form at all, merely being an invisible influence over what companies and stories are favorably covered. When PR is at its finest, you don't know it is there at all. And so it is that the free and practical alternative to paying for search hits was born in the offices of a New York PR firm, and is now suitable for use by every marketing department in every company in the world.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, MSN, Myspace, pr, Yahoo, Youtube
IPv6 and the Convergence Box
I remember the days of channel-surfing TV. The classic scene from Toy Story 2 comes to mind, where the Pig is flipping channels, passed the one he wanted, and said it's too late and he had to go round again. You could flip channels as fast as you hit a button.
What happened? Well, that was the old-fashioned days of analog cable. Now, we have digital cable and channel guides. The slow channel-flip seems to be connected to the MPEG stream decoding process. I'm not entirely sure about this, but my understanding is that the video stream is encoded for size AND that only one-in-10 (or so) frames carries the full image required to "tune in". Therefore, you've got processing time factors AND time interval "quantization". You can't instantly tune in a channel.
While channel guides are great for getting an overview of what's on TV that appeals to a certain part of your brain, it just doesn't appeal to whatever animal instincts that liked channel surfing. I miss it. There's just something about visually SEEING what's on in a rapid sequential overview that ensures you're not missing what you REALLY want to be watching.
I'm sure that this will be fixed in time. And people are aware of the problem. I bought the HDWonder card for my PC from ATI, and after doing some research about why the interface was terrible, I discovered that they intended to do an "automated" channel surf, and present you a thumbnail of everything that was on, but gave it up because of performance issues. But none-the-less, if graphic cards folks are thinking this way, we can only hope that Motorola, Microsoft, Scientific Atlanta and Sony are thinking this way too.
I feel the digital convergence coming--at least in the home. The desire for one wireless box that does it all is so strong you can walk on it. And I don't think it's only me. I see the XBox 360, PS3 or something from Motorola wrapping in the HD tuner, the gaming console, and a rudimentary computer for email, word processing and the like. The days of the TV not being suitable as a PC monitor are over. Pull up a chair, and fire up Word!
Everything old is new again, and the way the Commodore 64 was so massively popular in its day, coming virtually from out of nowhere, so will this convergence box. It simplifies our lives by making you not need to be a genius to wire up your home system or have a PhD to operate the universal remote. Better yet, it will be built into the monitor as a plug-in console, so it's truly wireless. No need for an extra box sitting somewhere! Bluetooth or something like it will connect it to your controllers and speakers.
Another seldom discussed point, which is amazing considering all the point-to-point broadband video services popping up, is how significant IPv6 is going to be. The next generation Internet supports something that is exactly akin to broadcasting over the airwaves, called IP-multicast. This is significant, because it is the last remaining piece forcibly preventing convergence. Let me explain.
Broadcasting is called broadcasting because you're blasting the same signal out to everyone with a tuner that can receive it. It's a very efficient way of communicating, because one outbound datastream can be tuned in by millions. But everything starts and stops at the same time. On any given channel, everyone is essentially watching the same thing. There is no variation. Today, TiVo and PVR fixes that. But it's fixing a problem we shouldn't have in the first place. Why can't you just ask for any program you want at any moment you want?
And that gets to the way things work on today's Internet that doesn't support broadcast. If you were to send out TV programming the way it is now, you need a separate discreet datastream for everybody who is watching. So, if 1000 people are watching at the same time, it's 1000 times more data than with the broadcasting model. But you can start, stop and pause whenever you like. Everyone's datastream is different, and there is a high degree of customization possible.
And that takes us to how things are going to radically change once the next generation Internet is widely deployed. It will take a whole bunch of Cisco routers being upgraded, but once it's done, broadcasting similar to today's dish networks or public broadcast TV will be brought to PCs... or tuners... or convergence boxes--whatever they're going to be called.
And instead of having to watch the SAME broadcast as everyone else, there will be TiVo-like features built into this box, displacing time as you like. And instead of one broadcast per day of your favorite program (or 5 per day of many cable channels), hot programs will be broadcast hundreds of times per day. Coupled with the TiVo-like features, you will effectively get the experience of true on-demand TV of anything that's "released". The concept of the TV Channel Guide goes away entirely, and all that remains is what moment new episodes are made available. And if the whole world rushes to the latest Lost episode, there is hardly any more strain on the system than if it were one person tuning it in. And there will be different viewing profiles for different family members, because data storage will be virtually unlimited in your home system.
Add to this the fact that "pod" technology like whatever Apple's iPod evolves into will "peel off" a portable copy of whatever is on your home system, so viewing in multiple rooms of your house, or on the go will never be a problem. The pod will be able to update itself with ad hoc Internet connections that it can acquire on the go. And it will have the resolution of ePaper, so it will also be your college text books, your newspaper, and your paperback novels. Voice recognition will be improving all the while, so the need for a keyboard constantly drops. And if Sony has their way, it may even be able to liquefy and be folded up and stuck in your pocket when not in use, only to seamlessly unfold to rigid 8.5 x 11 when flicked on.
All this rambling from missing Channel Surfing! Well, in my lifetime it will be nice just to see some form of the convergence box arrive, so we won't need Electrical Engineering degrees and a weekend put aside to hook up our media centers.Labels: Apple, Microsoft, Motorola
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