Photo courtesy of Stock.xchg

It’s time for my weekly round-up of the best blog posts I have seen around the web this past week! Here’s the top five in no particular order…

The Most Overrated Social Media Metric via Convince & Convert

“Do you sell advertising on your website? No? Then why are you so excited about your website traffic?

The most overrated social media metric is traffic from social outposts.

This blog post is symptomatic of this problem, although there have been hundreds (thousands?) like it.

Here’s the highlight:

With only 1% of Facebook’s user count, Pinterest sends 13% of the traffic that Facebook does”.

Read it all..

This is a guest post by Gina Goodman, social media coordinator at Cision Navigator.

After grabbing the number one spot on CisionNavigator’s Top 10 U.S. Mom Bloggers on Twitter  list, we thought we’d catch up with Jessica Gottlieb to find out what she looks for in pitching, what she’d like PR professionals to stop doing and how she utilizes social media. As a mom blogger at her self-titled site, Gottlieb covers parenting and motherhood, the Los Angeles area, fashion, technology, and lifestyle.

Read it all..

Photo courtesy of qisur via Flickr

It’s time for my weekly round-up of the best blog posts I have seen around the web this past week! Here’s the top five in no particular order…

Need Blogger Outreach? A Case Study in How NOT to Do It via PR Breakfast Club

“Blogger outreach is an important component of both marketing and PR strategies. And there’s a right way to do it, and some very wrong ways. More on that in a minute.

Measuring influence (or trying to) is another key component of digital strategy, for both brands and agencies, not to mention a multimillion dollar business. There are many players in the market and, in our opinion, none of them have got this influence measurement thing completely figured out yet. And they won’t until they factor sentiment analysis into the equation.

But this post isn’t about influence measurement, really — it’s about blogger outreach. And how to do it in the most respectful, most effective and most fruitful manner possible.”

Read it all..

This is a guest post from Ken Magdic – Director of Product Management, and Kristen Hartmann – Manager of Global Product Development at Cision.

In early 2011, we kicked off a project to redesign and reinvigorate how users search for media contacts in CisionPoint. Our objective was to create an intuitive tool that delivered the comprehensive data our users expect, but in a new interface that improves the overall user workflow.

We began development by gathering feedback and preferences through customer interviews. Keeping this user insight in mind, we focused the redesign effort on supporting users’ critical goals when searching for media contacts, on resolving the obstacles they encounter, and on enhancing the criteria users rely on most regularly. We tested our direction and strategy through multiple prototype iterations, and even put ourselves on the spot by asking in demos, “If you logged in at 8am on a Monday morning and landed on this new search feature in CisionPoint, would you panic? Or would you be willing and eager to include this new tool in your workflow?”

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This is a guest post from Beth Blanchard – Supervisor, Internet Media – and Kristen Sala – Senior Manager, Electronic Media – at Cision.

Once again, Cision is pleased to present our Top 100 U.S. Social Media, Internet Marketing and SEO blogs.With this year’s list we’ve considered only US-based blogs, which has allowed us to shine a spotlight on some blogs that did not make previous lists. In addition, many industry heavy-weights have moved down, making way for new voices and fresh perspectives. Nearly half of the titles are first-timers.

To compile the list, we chose four Web audience metrics from Compete.com: Average Unique Visitors per Month (available in CisionPoint), Average Page Views per Month per Unique Visitor, Average Time (seconds) per Month per Unique Visitor, and Average Visits per Month per Unique Visitor. Using Cision’s media database, we were able to find over 400 blogs covering social media, online marketing and SEO. From there, we winnowed it down to US-based blogs that primarily focus on these topics. Finally, we ranked the blogs based on the four Compete metrics. Tied scores were broken by UVPM.

As an added bonus (and as part of our on-going campaign to list social profiles for media outlets and contacts in CisionPoint) we’ve taken special care to seek out the Twitter Handles, as well as Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn pages affiliated with these prestigious blogs. We’ve also noted the movement in rankings compared to last year. Without further ado, here are the results.

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Philip Sheldrake delivers his talk, "The Business of Influence", at PRSA Digital Impact 2012

I think it was evident at this week’s Public Relations Society of America Digital Impact conference that the PR industry has turned a corner from “playing at” developing social Web presences to focusing on advanced tactics. Having mastered the basics, we’re moving on to discuss techniques for optimizing our efforts and  honing our message for conversation rather than broadcast. That’s great to see. Here are three things I learned about at Digital Impact. Read it all..

This is a guest post by Vanessa Bugasch, SVP of Global Marketing & Product Marketing, Business Development at Cision.

Photo courtesy of Vanessa Bugasch

It’s hard to believe but it’s been five years since we changed our name from a breakfast food/star from Footloose (Bacon’s) to Cision.

Having been here back then I can tell you that Marketing was working round the clock to make sure every piece of paper, web property and sign had our new name while IT was furiously changing every application (and we had many back then) to the new Cision logo.  It was a crazy time but we were excited to pull our many brands  – Bacon’s, MediaMap, multivision, Delahaye, Bowdens, Romeike – into the single brand of Cision.  And even more exciting was the launch of CisionPoint a short time later.

Read it all..

Photo courtesy of Rosaura Ochoa via flickr

Here is the weekly round-up of the best blog posts we have seen around the web. The top five in no particular order:

100 years of Oreo: How the iconic cookie brand is using social media via PRSA

Oreo, “Milk’s Favorite Cookie,” celebrates its Centennial today. In honor of the occasion and for the New York portion of the Social Media Week conference, Kraft and 360i Foods presented a discussion titled, “How Oreo Is Using Social to Celebrate 100 Years of Brand Love,” on Feb. 14 at 360i headquarters.

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Photo courtesy of Kenski1970 via flickr

Elliott Almond is looking for great stories. He has covered nine Olympic Games and has covered Olympic stories – features, issues and news – since the late 1970s. We talked with Almond, who is an Olympics, soccer and college sports reporter for the Bay Area News Group, to find out what qualities he’s looking for in Olympic content.

Q: Do you have a favorite story or memory from your Olympic coverage?

A: This is an example of how society and the Olympics have changed. In 1984, someone I happened to know well through another reporter won a historic gold medal for that person’s country. We retired to a Westside L.A. taqueria that had a jukebox full of Patsy Kline tunes. Being the non-drinker I was charged with getting the athlete and journalist friend safely home. The gold medalist was staying in the Athlete’s Village at UCLA. When we reached the first one my friend grabbed the gold medal and handed it to me to show security: ‘I’m here to escort the Gold Medalist to the dorms.’ We got past two or three checkpoints this way and I dropped the athlete off in front of the dorm entrance. That is something from a bygone era and is terribly missed in our current security-heavy Games.
Read it all..

In the ever changing social landscape, it’s becoming more critical for PR professionals to quickly locate and target influencers within their social community. To better facilitate this, Cision is launching a new search feature in beta, allowing CisionPoint customers to perform keyword searches against real-time social content.

Pulling from a database of Tweets and blog posts, Cision’s Influencer Search will return contacts that have mentioned a keyword in the social space. While existing functionality in CisionPoint allows users to search keywords and return outlet information, the new Influencer Search will return a list of contacts sorted by Cision’s Influence Rating. Read it all..