The challenges of counting heads to measure your online presence

By Jay Krall

Web metrics have long been crucial to proving return on investment for PR professionals who score digital ink with top Web sites and blogs. While new media metrics for measuring consumption of video, discussion in social networks and other multimedia content are coming to fruition, Unique Visitors per Month remains the gold standard for measuring a site’s reach. But what goes into calculating UV figures? And if one of your clients questions the accuracy of a particular number, how can you respond? The way these numbers are tracked is quickly evolving and will continue to do so in 2009.

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Last week at SES Chicago, a search marketing trade show, Tim Ash had a group of about 30 people crowded around him, shouting out the URLs for their Web sites. He was holding a site clinic,

Dozens of fans line up to have their copy of Tim Ash's book Landing Page Optimization signed by the author

critiquing Web pages that encouraged people buy spice racks, sign up for classes, join churches and so on. Tim, the president of SiteTuners, a landing-page optimization consulting firm, is a soft-spoken guy. But in his criticisms, he held nothing back. “I just came here by clicking on an ad, what do I need to know? I don’t even know what this is,” he told one webmaster. “Too much text here, keep it short,” he told another. “Oh, don’t have those annoying avatar people walking across the page.”

In the end, most of Tim’s advice boiled down to this: make it clear, and keep it brief. That’s exactly what PR professionals are trying to do as we adjust to a world in which the press releases we write are available directly to consumers as never before. News sites are archiving our releases, forever to be searchable for everyone, and the new content producers of the blogosphere are demanding information in plain English.

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Social media provides a plethora of places to find out about media changes - are they all accurate?

There are more changes going on in the media than ever before and having accurate information on the media is crucial to media relations professionals. At Cision US, we have recently received quite a few queries from our clients asking how Cision is tracking all of the changes, layoffs and buyouts that are being announced every day. This is typically our response:

“Because of the growth of online media and a struggling economy, our industry is currently changing at a more rapid pace than ever before. One of the unfortunate side affects of these changes is the layoffs and buyouts affecting nearly every daily newspaper in the nation, as well as a number of magazines, broadcast outlets and news services. The research team at Cision knows how important this information is to you.

To stay on top of these changes and provide you with the most accurate information possible, we are tailoring our research to ensure that we are providing you with the tools you need to communicate effectively. Through developing relationships with key contacts at major outlets, increasing the frequency of research at outlets affected by layoffs, monitoring hundreds of industry sites and thousands of media sites, and a variety of other research methods, our research team continues to provide you with the latest changes. We always strive to offer you the most accurate media database in the industry.”

At Cision US, we have dozens upon dozens of researchers working to verify these changes. We also keep an eye out on changes that are reported elsewhere online. Social media has allowed a plethora of users to post changes to a variety of sites, from wikis to Twitter to group pages on social networks. And although Cision monitors many of these sites, we don’t change anything in our database without verifying it directly ourselves.

One of the up-and-comers in posting media changes is @themediaisdying  on Twitter. The concept? Anyone can submit changes to an anonymous email address and the changes will then be posted on Twitter.

“So, Heidi,” you ask, “Can I trust the changes there?” Read it all..

An expert weighs in on how Web 3.0 is about to make media monitoring easier

Kingsley Idehen, a co-founder of DBpedia

For public relations professionals, finding mentions about a particular brand or product is getting more challenging as the vast clutter of the Web continues to grow. While paid monitoring services like those offered by Cision and others can help, for those using free-text search engines like Google for media monitoring, combing through pages of irrelevant search results has become routine. For example, acronyms pose a problem: how many instances of the term “HP” referring to “horsepower” do you have to sift through to find articles about Hewlett-Packard products? Plenty.

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Nobody’s perfect, but “I’m sorry” goes a long way

Last Friday night, my boyfriend was at the bank and, while he was filling out a deposit slip, he left his Blackberry on the counter. Within seconds, it was stolen. Upon his return home, I immediately called Sprint to put a freeze on his phone. The only problem? I couldn’t make any calls. Could this dastardly PDA robber somehow have sabotaged both phones on the account?? What should we do?

Then I remembered that Sprint has a live chat option with their customer service reps on their site. I quickly sign on, and, after some verification, I was chatting with Danielle, who was understanding and quickly shut down the stolen phone. She provided me with info on setting up a claim to receive a new phone and started troubleshooting the reason my phone wouldn’t make calls.

Turns out there were “voice outages” in my area. (For the record, I have never had an outage with Sprint before, and this one only lasted 20 minutes.)

I started to get really angry. “I am dealing with a traumatic situation here,” I thought. ”How could Sprint do this to me?” Then Danielle stepped in. She handled it so brilliantly that I will just include that portion of our conversation verbatim: Read it all..

Cision Blog talks to Fusion PR’s Bob Geller about the dual role of blogger and media relations professional

During the current explosion of social media and blogs, many public relations people are wondering if they should begin blogging themselves. There are quite a few high-profile bloggers who are also PR pros, from SHIFT Communications‘ Todd Defren and his PR Squared blog, to Jason Falls at Social Media Explorer, from Brian Solis of Future Works and his PR 2.0 blog, to Fusion PR’s Bob Geller and his blog Flack’s Revenge. So what are the benefits to being a media relations professional and a blogger? Should YOU start a blog?

I recently spoke with Bob Geller about his dual role. Geller is Senior Vice President at Fusion PR and started the Flack’s Revenge blog almost exactly two years ago in late November 2006. Geller encourages anyone to consider blogging as long as they have something relevant, unique and/or original to blog about. “It’s difficult to talk about something no one else is talking about,” Geller said. “But if you’re going to blog about it, you should have an interesting take or original idea on the subject.” Geller himself has a unique perspective on PR and social media that is evident on his blog because of his background in the tech industry, from sales, marketing and PR to his engineering degree that includes specializations and graduate-level work in microprocessors and digital signal processing.

Media relations pros in particular can benefit from blogging according to Geller. In his post, “I am in PR. Why should I blog?” he discusses how blogging forces you to write in a creative and engaging manner, come up with interesting ideas and concepts and stay up-to-date on important issues. “So what?” you ask?  Read it all..

Lessons in social media from a traveling minstrel

Paleo photo by Cary Norton.

In today’s social-media crazed world, everyone is pointing toward the next big social technology. To be sure, Twitter, FriendFeed and others are amazingly valuable tools for PR professionals, marketers, customer service professionals, and any professional communicator who needs to reach people. But the hype surrounding these next-generation social networks often overshadows the importance of finding your target community where it already lives online. That community may exist on a Web 1.0 message board, an archaic-looking discussion group, or that favorite punching bag of many social media enthusiasts, MySpace.

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Only as part of a larger mix of compelling content

David Cohn

The social news site Digg has come a long way from its origins four years ago as a hub for tech geeks sharing news about gadgets and software releases. Now, the site has more than 1 million users, each day swapping thousands of links to intriguing blog posts and behind-the-headlines news reports on every topic, including food, the arts, cars, business, health and science, the environment and politics.

The way it works is simple: submit a link to an interesting item along with a short description, and your friends will “Digg” it if they find it interesting. The most popular items rise to the site’s front page and topic-specific pages. Dozens of top-tier journalists are known to comb the site for story ideas, and its most prolific users, tracked on socialblade.com, broadcast the most intriguing news articles, photos and videos they’ve found to thousands of fans and friends on the site. Is there a way to engage this influential, news-hungry audience without being dismissed as fluffy and self-promotional? Read it all..

Exploring the implications of the DTV Transition

We’ve all seen the commercials: On February 17th, all full-power TV stations in the U.S. must begin broadcasting exclusively in a digital format. Other than making sure our old analog TVs are digital-ready, what does this mean for communications professionals?

First, a primer on the basics of digital television:

• Analog vs. Digital: Analog signals are the original standard for transmitting television, take up a lot of room within their assigned channels and are subject to interference, decreasing audio and picture quality. Digital transmits by computer code, which uses less bandwidth space and allows for higher-quality picture and audio.
• Multicasting: Because digital transmission will give broadcasters more room in their channel space, they will have the ability to broadcast in high-definition or multicast multiple stations within one channel. Some broadcasters are planning to multicast four or more programming choices during the day and then switch to high-definition for prime-time programming.

So what does this mean for communications professionals, advertisers and marketers? Cision Blog asked the National Association of Broadcasters. Our interview is below:

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How to avoid thorny debates when editing content about your brand

Photo courtesy animalspeek.blogspot.com

One day, I took it upon myself to add some content to the Wikipedia page about a little town in southern Japan where I had briefly taught English after college. Who else, I figured, would be inclined to add information about the local hotel and restaurant owners’ annual tradition of throwing live pufferfish into the harbor on a February afternoon? So, in December of 2006, I added a paragraph about it. I didn’t cite any sources because I couldn’t find anything written about the event…I had only attended it. A full year later, someone slapped a banner across the top of the page: “This article does not cite any references or sources.” My heart sank a little. Read it all..