Drew - 15/09/06 - "Dear Webmaster" - why Online PR is more than just broadcasting your news.

Online PR has begun to get some of its own "buzz" of late. I first appreciated the benefits of Online PR a few years ago when, as a Junior Search Engine Optimiser, I was involved in link building for a client (getting links from other websites to my client's site to improve its position on search engines). Tired of sending the same old generic letter in the hope of cajoling a link ("Dear Webmaster...") I struck on the idea of using articles to barter for them instead. After some experimenting in tone and content, it began to work. The more I personalised the emails, displaying a thorough knowledge of the site I was targeting and including useful information for the site owner, the more successful they became.

I have to admit it was a revelation to me at the time, but on reflection, it's not surprising this approach works. Most people liked being talked to. They'd listen. And if I could show them good reason, they'd try to help.

Of course, there were hitches. "The charger I bought from you is bust," emailed a webmaster during a campaign for a digital camera manufacturer's website, "what are you going to do about it?" After a quick phone call, I found out the company had a return policy for faulty chargers, so I passed on the information and although I didn't get a reply, a few months later a link appeared on the webmaster's "recommended" page to the very same camera company.

When my tenure as a "Link Monkey" came to an end, one of my new duties included optimising press releases and publishing them on PR sites (optimisation, at its most basic, is upping the frequency of certain words to give them a weight over others. Search engines use a calculation to work out the important words, so it's like giving them an easier job of it). This was my first interaction with proper PR and I was intimidated. Maybe it was the hyperbole - everything was "highly anticipated" - but I found myself checking and re-checking the press releases to make sure I hadn't messed up. I held my breath hitting the submit button.

Starting my first blog changed all that. Suddenly I was an expert on anything and had an opinion on everything else. There are a lot of firsts when you become an online publisher; your first spam comment ("Great post!" gushed Peter from viagra-4-u_today.com), your first writer's block, and, shortly after, the realisation that your Mother is the sole reader. But I kept at it, discovering first hand the commitment it takes to build anything online, how vulnerable it can feel and how often I was approached by people wanting something for nothing.

Few of them made any concerted attempts to woo me, as I had done when experimenting with link building, but I received plenty of irrelevant "noise". Anything that looked mass produced I deleted immediately. Most emails were charmless and too long. Occasionally I was emailed what looked like a press release from an Agency in New York - how they found me I'll never know, or why they continued to send me info about CD releases when it was obvious I didn't write about music. I wrote about was the wallpaper of my life, never dwelling too long on one subject; films one day, a great new organic anti-dandruff shampoo the next.

Links between blogs and websites are like votes, get more good quality links and they increase your credibility, attract poor or irrelevant links and you will find the opposite effect. So, on my blog I linked to people I felt I could trust, or as a thank you, or to try to get in with a cooler crowd.

Coming full circle, I am once again a "Link Monkey" (maybe "Link Gorilla" suits me better now) designing strategic traffic development solutions for my clients. As the name suggests, there is much more to this than simply sending out link request emails and hoping for the best. I aim to build campaigns creatively (to have the edge) and ethically (for better long term results) in order to grow traffic, links, credibility and brand.

I'd never really considered online branding in the early days, but blogs and forum posts, links from online communities like Friendster, Flickr and Myspace, and social tagging sites are shaping the way we think about companies. A recent study by JupiterResearch, notes that consumer-generated content - derived from a sizeable and vocal minority - has a disproportionately wide influence. Forward thinking businesses have realized this, investing in Online PR for reputation management and word of mouth advertising. I also liaise directly with a client's PR Agency, making sure the on and offline campaigns work together - adding a TV tagline on a PPC (pay-per-click) promotion for example, or reflecting a giveaway in one of my viral web-stunts.

As technology develops however, there's a risk of forgetting that there are real breathing humans at the other end. Online PR is best when it creates a dialogue, benefiting communities instead of finding weaknesses to infiltrate, forging a message instead of unleashing "noise". My experience, on both sides of the trench, is that most people like being talked to. They'll listen. And if you can show them good reason, they will act accordingly.

This article first appeared on www.profile-extra.co.uk, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations' news and views site.

Chris - 14/09/06 - Social Networking - I have already written a little bit about the social network phenomenon but after we launched The LifeSigns Network (www.lifesignsnetwork.net) recently, a site established to quickly gage trends and attitudes towards new products, especially in the fashion & beauty sector, amongst the young movers and shakers of cool around the globe, it occurred to me that whole online worlds are starting to take shape and more and more people are spending increasing amounts of their time in these virtual worlds.

Obviously, there has been loads of press about MySpace, FaceBook, del.icio.us and Flickr; and long established sites such as eBay and Friends Reunited are almost old hat but...

...There are more and more sites catering for niche communities than ever before. I use FreeCycle now and then, which allows people to pass on unwanted goods to others in their local area. It's a little bit like eBay but all the goods are free, as is access to the service, but there's no flash web site - it's just based on Yahoo groups but it serves its purpose well and puts people in touch with each other.

New sites and services are springing up all the time. NeoPets, a virtual pet website with over 125M users, is storming ahead and LinkedIn, the business networking site, seems to be going from strength to strength. One that I find quite interesting is Zopa.com which matches up borrowers with lenders, thus bypassing banks. They spread risk among the lenders and say that the number of people defaulting on loans using the service is extremely low.

I'm sure as the web moves forward there will be an increasing amount of blurring between the boundaries of all these online communities. I noticed already on FreeCycler that people are starting to give their MySpace URL on their e-mail signatures.

So you will a have a kind of on-line "personality" that will allow someone who is lending you money or you that you have been "chatting" to on a dating site, for example, to read your blog, see your picture, look at what you are selling on eBay etc. Obviously, it will be up to the individual to decide how much information to share and there could be downsides to this online exposure, think of fatal attraction but with a woman scorned who knows everything about you - scary!

However, on the other side maybe it would also reduce the number of people online pretending to be someone they are not, for example, paedophiles pretending they are teenagers. It might be easy to pretend on one site that you're really a 13 year old boy who is into Green Day; to create yourself a whole "online life" will be much more time consuming, with a much greater chance of being caught out.

I do think that some of these social networking sites are fun and can be useful too and maybe this knitting together of the networks will help people find like minded people even more easily, go some way to mitigating identity theft and even make grooming more difficult.

However, I do wonder whether our children are going to be spending so much time online that they loose touch with the real world. Already my nine year old nephew has to be prised away from the keyboard where he has graduated from Age of Empires to increasingly more sophisticated online games. When these on-line worlds, communities and networks merge and become ever more powerful I wonder whether some people will ever emerge from them.

Or I am just starting to sound like my father?