Anyhow, the point of all this is that I think this is a fantastic example of how to do a presentation with few words (I like it all the more because it’s about space exploration, and I happen to be an geek).

Users of social news services like Digg and Reddit will be used to the concept of marking up and down - if you see a story you like, you mark it up and it rises up the page, if you don’t like a story you can mark it down and it falls lower down the page. Using the wisdom of crowds in this way, social news sites are able to display stories which are more likely to be of interest to the majority 0f their readers, while the less interesting stuff gets relegated to the bottom of the page or discarded entirely. And, of course, what makes it all so much more fun is that everybody can leave their own comments on each story to share with other users, which often results in some lively discussion (or trolling and flamewars, if that’s your bag).

This isn’t exactly what SearchWiki is doing - you can mark up the search results you like and remove the ones you don’t (as well as leaving comments on individual search results), but this will only affect the results you see if you perform the same search in future, it won’t change the results other users see. At least not yet. I’d like to think that this is the first step of a social search experiment that could filter into the mainstream. Imagine the results produced by Google’s increasingly sophisticated algorithm being refined by the collective intelligence of billions of users helping to promote the best results and demote the worst.

Sure, there are a lot of potential problems to think about (the spammers will have a field day trying to figure out how they can abuse this idea) and others have tried before with no great success, but Google already has the momentum and resources needed to make this work.

What makes me think Google is looking in this direction? If you scroll down to the bottom of a results page while you’re logged into Google, you’ll see an option to display ‘all notes for this SearchWiki’ - this will allow you to see how many other SearchWiki users have marked up or down all the search results on that page as well as any comments they have left.

All it needs is a fairly simple option to display your search results so that the ones with lots of votes are at the top of the page, and you’ve pretty much got a functioning social search tool - half Digg, half Google. I’m not promising it’s going to work any better than plain old algorithm based search, but I’ll be really interested to see how it plays out.

Old-school offline public relations can be something of an ethereal discipline which delivers a lot of fluffy, intangible benefits but very little that can be clearly and definitively measured (beyond a few pretty looking press-clippings) but fortunately, I think, it’s a little easier to find useful metrics for online and social media PR campaigns. The important thing is to build measurement into the campaign right from the very beginning - this means making sure the client understands what can and can’t be measured and agreeing on the campaign goals and KPIs with those things in mind.

Since so much of online PR is focused on search engine optimisation tactics for the client’s website, one of the most obvious ways to measure results is to track how the site traffic changes in response to a campaign, although it’s a brave PR who’ll promise specific web traffic increases (either absolute or relative) as a KPI. SEO, like PR, is an inexact science. A more realistic approach might be to use inbound-link generation (since inbound-links are still the staple ingredient of good SEO) as a quantitative and qualitative KPI.  So rather than promising the client a 10% increase in traffic, you might instead tell the client that a particular tactic will generate 20 links (quantitative) to the specified landing page from subject-relevant sites with a Google PageRank of at least 5 (qualitative - for the record, I strongly agree with Steve Rubel’s assertion that PageRank is currently the best meaure of a website’s influence for public relations purposes).

But obviously this kind of thing can’t be the only measure of how a PR campaign has performed, so here are a couple of useful tools that I think are particularly good for producing truly meaningful metrics that are backed up by some solid science and should stand up to scrutiny from even the most nitpicky of clients. Plus, they both generate nice shiny graphs which look good in Powerpoint slides…

Google Insights for Search

What it does: Since 2004 Google has accumulated a massive amount of data on what people are searching for on the web. Insights for search simply lets you examine that data by entering a key word or phrase and seeing how the volume of people searching for it has changed over any period of time you select. You can focus in on the search habits of different countries, compare multiple search terms on a single graph, and even download the data into a spreadsheet if you’re feeling analytical.

How you can use it:  By examining the search volumes for your client’s brands, product names or other key terms related to the campaign, you’ll be able to see whether the number of people searching for those terms has increased, decreased, or remained unchanged over time.  This provides a good indicator of how public interest in these terms has changed in response to your campaign and you can also try comparing against competitors’ brands to get some market context.

Trendrr.com

What it does: Trendrr is a great tool for monitoring trends in various data sources, such as Google Blog and News search results, Technorati blog search results, Facebook application users statistics, YouTube video stats and much more. So for example, you can set up a tracker to show how many Google News results are returned for your clients’ brand/product name, and every day Trendrr will automatically perform that search and update your graph with the result so that you can see if the number of online news stories mentioning that brand is rising or falling over time - and you can do the same with Google Blog search results too.

How you can use it: This should be fairly self-explanatory. First think of all the key words and phrases that are relevant to your client and set up Trendrr trackers for all of them in each of the data sources you want to track (Google News and Blog results should be your absolute minimum). This will provide you with a useful ongoing measure of how widely all these terms are being written about by journalists and bloggers, and you’ll be able to see instantly whether your campaign has significantly increased volumes of coverage. Trendrr produces some nice graphs that you can cut and paste into reports, or you can download the data into a spreadsheet to create your own visualisations.

If you’ve got any favourite tools for measuring the success of online and social media campaigns, please feel free to drop them in the comments.

I recommend using a combination of the following factors to get a feel for how influential a blog is – there’s no magic bullet for this problem just yet, but with a bit of research you can build a fairly clear picture of which bloggers are worth focusing your efforts on.

Technorati

In this situation, most PR people will head straight over to Technorati to get ‘Authority’ rankings for the blogs they’re interested in working with. If you don’t already know, Technorati is the leading blog directory on the web and ranks blogs’ importance by giving them a rating which it calls ‘Authority’.

This is based on a fairly simple calculation of how many other blogs have linked to a particular blog over the past six months. Authority can (and often is) as little as zero, while the most popular blog listed on Technorati has an Authority of almost 29,000.

Although Technorati Authority is a useful guide for comparing the relative popularity of different blogs, it does have a few limitations and you shouldn’t rely on it as the sole metric for measuring blogs influence.

Google

Google assigns every website in its index with a rating of between zero and ten, which it calls PageRank (often referred to as PR, just to confuse things) and has a major effect on how highly that site is listed in Google search results. A site with a PageRank of 10 is extremely important and will get a lot of traffic, while a site with zero PageRank will have practically no visitors at all.

Google uses a highly sophisticated algorithm to calculate PageRank, and it’s always being tweaked in order to achieve the best results and prevent spammers from abusing the system to try and drive more traffic to their splogs (spam-blogs). For this reason, I think PageRank is a very useful and trustworthy metric to use for measuring a blog’s influence level.

Google does not list PageRank in its search results – if you want to view a site’s PageRank the best thing to do is install the Google Toolbar on your browser. Alternatively, there are plenty of free PageRank checker sites you could use.

Alexa

Under normal circumstances the only person who has access to a website’s traffic statistics is the webmaster, because he’s the only person who can accurately measure that data by running stats tracking software on his web-server. But Alexa attempts to provide similar data by monitoring the web-viewing habits of ‘millions’ of web users who have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browsers.

It provides a few different metrics, but the most useful is what it calls Reach – this is simply the percentage of web users who visit a particular site over a given period. For example, Google’s Reach over the past three months is 28.9% - which means that 28.9% of internet users visited Google during that period.

A lot of people trust Alexa figures when they’re researching blogs and other websites, but I think these figures are pretty flaky, mostly because I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody using the Alexa toolbar in real life and I can’t imagine why many people would want to use it. If millions of people are using it, I’m not sure they accurately represent the browsing habits of all internet users.

Common Sense

I think the best way to assess a blog’s influence is to take a good look at it. Browse through the archives and look at things like:

• How regularly is it updated? Some great blogs are infrequently updated, but generally speaking the more regularly a blog updates, the more likely it is to be influential.  
• How old is the blog? Blogs which have been around longer have more opportunity to build up a larger audience.
• How active is the community? Do lots of people comment on the posts?
• Does the blog have many regular commenters? Popular blogs tend to draw in a community of regular commenters, so this is a good sign.

All of these things should help you to form a better idea of a blog’s influence. No single metric can really give you the full story, but when used in conjunction with each other all of these factors will give you a much clearer picture of which bloggers you should focus your efforts on.

• What exactly is a blog, how is it different from any other content based website?
• What’s the difference between bloggers and journalists?
• How are we supposed to engage with bloggers?

These can be very complex questions, but they don’t need to be. For a start the word ‘blog’ is incredibly broad, and can be used to describe literally any site that runs on a blogging platform such as WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, etc. But to lump millions of different websites together simply because they happen to use a similar type of content management software, as some PRs have a tendency to do, is painfully stupid.

You wouldn’t put The Times and the local school newsletter on the same media list just because they both happen to be printed on paper. But because of this tendency to think of all blogs as equal, a lot of PRs still have a clichéd mental image of bloggers as greasy loners posting bitter tirades which nobody reads, which is a pretty moronic outlook when you consider the Technorati Top 100 blog list is littered with highly influential and professional blogs.

This brings me onto my next point – while some journalists, and possibly even bloggers, may not agree with this sentiment, from the perspective of the PR industry there is no real difference between the two. Somebody who writes for a professional, high quality blog is essentially doing the same kind of job as somebody who writes for a print newspaper or magazine. They are both influencers, they both have an audience, and ultimately that’s what really matters as far as PR is concerned.

As blogs and conventional publishers both branch out into areas like web based video and podcasts, it’s getting increasingly difficult to clearly delineate them. It’s no longer about whether you’re a blog, a newspaper or even a TV network, it’s about creating media brands and delivering strong content through a range of channels.

This is why I think it’s pointless to try and differentiate between bloggers and journalists at all. Instead, PRs should simply focus on identifying the influencers which are most relevant to their clients’ objectives, regardless of which channels those influencers choose to deliver their content.

However, there are likely to be obstacles to this approach for many organisations:

• PRs like to have nice clear metrics to measure influence, those metrics are well established in convention media but measuring the influence of blogs is much more difficult
• There can be political issues when different individuals/departments/agencies disagree over who should take ownership of relationships with bloggers, which invariably boil down to arguments about how blogs should be classified

These aren’t unsolvable problems, but they’re the kind of things that can really throw a spanner in the works if the will or creativity required to overcome them is in short supply. But there’s significant competitive advantage to be gained here – so either you figure out how to do it, or sit around and wait for your competitors to get there first.

(Er… I know I kind of skipped out on the ‘how do we engage with bloggers’ question, but I noticed this post was dragging on a bit, so I’ll leave that for another article.)

A big change that I need to announce is that after three happy(ish) years at Prompt Communications, I’ve moved to a new job at immediate future, a PR agency based in Kingston-upon-Thames which specialises in online PR and social media. I’ve been increasingly moving in this general direction in recent years, so it’s a good fit career-wise and I’m pretty stoked to be working at a company that’s right on the leading edge of all the progressive stuff that’s happening in the PR industry right now. Best of all, I’m working on accounts like Sony, which is a wet-dream client for a geeky nerdlinger like me.

Hopefully, all this will provide me with plenty of ammunition for the blog, although whether I’ll find the time to write anything is a different question entirely - redefining PR is a pretty time consuming business…

Lance Concannon, director of social media at Prompt Communications, added: “Businesses cannot afford to ignore online channels. This is where brand reputations and customers’ buying decisions are played out. Savvy consumer-facing brands such as Yell understand that social media must be included in communications strategies.”

The problem with all this blogging and social media stuff is that while plenty of companies are interested in this area, few are willing to go on record and discuss what they’re actually doing. This is understandable, but of course makes it difficult to get customer references and generate the press coverage we need to let people know what sort of services we offer and what kind of organisations are using them.

To have a client like Yell Group, which is happy to stand up and say they’re working with us in this area, is great for us. I just hope that as we move forward more companies will be willing to discuss their social media activities, because that would be good news for everybody. Social media is still perceived by many as a very woolly discipline, but if there’s a bit more visibility in terms of what ‘real’ companies are doing in this area, that will help demystify the subject and demonstrate some of the tangible benefits.

The difficulty is that there’s no kind of identifying tag which lets you easily and automatically ascertain the geography of a blog – you can’t simply perform a search for blogs only from the UK, or Asia or Western Europe. The only way to figure it out is to manually examine each blog and hope the author has explicitly stated a location in their profile, or at least left some sort of clue in one of their posts.

It’s tricky and time consuming, and it really needs to be done manually. So many companies in this space are trying to develop fully automated monitoring systems, but I think when you look at the requirement to segregate blogs geographically (combined with the technical problem of separating genuine blog coverage from spam-blogs and false positives) the only way to guarantee high quality results is to underpin whatever automatic blog monitoring tools you may be using with a strong element of human intelligence.

Some people in the industry don’t like the sound of this, because it essentially means that you need to have a member of staff taking the time to read each piece of blog coverage to decide whether it’s genuinely relevant to your client. This, of course, costs more than a software solution which could do the job automatically at the push of a button – but the truth is that no such system exists, and anybody who tries to tell you they’ve solved the problem is most likely trying to sell you snake oil.

Step 1) Post stacks of what we hope are interesting articles, which will hopefully encourage lots of people to regularly visit the site so that it eventually develops into a community of users who actively contribute content of their own in the form of comments and original articles.

Step 2) Make a truckload of money by selling targeted financial services related advertising on the site.

It’s a simple plan really, but it’s absolutely dependent on one factor which is almost entirely out of our control – search engine rankings. We can reach out to people who might be interested in joining a high-finance/economics community news site by joining relevant discussion forums and commenting on related blogs, which might help us pull in a few like minded people who want to get involved.

Ultimately, however, we need Google and the other search engines to send people to our site when they’re looking for articles about interest rates or investments or whatever. We need them to send a lot of people, if we’re going to make any reasonable amount of money out of the site. We can do our part by writing a vast amount of good quality content, but getting the search engines to show that content to people isn’t easy.

I really don’t like the idea of Search Engine Optimisation. I think that most of the SEO tricks out there are simply short term hacks to get a quick win before Google changes its search algorithm to counteract whatever black-hat techniques are currently in vogue. Google’s job is to give web users good quality results, SEO’s job is to trick Google into giving web users spam results. To me, that really doesn’t seem like a good way to build a content-based website that’s going to have a profitable long term future.

Obviously there are basic, common sense SEO techniques which everybody should use, but these are usually the same rules you’d follow if you wanted to build a good quality, usable website, so they barely count as SEO at all in my book. If you’re running a content based site or any sort of professional blog, I think there are only three simple, timeless, SEO rules which really matter:

1) Build your site for people, not search engines
Do your best to follow usability and accessibility standards when building your site. Search engines and people both love this. There’s plenty of information about it on the web, but this is a good place to start.

2) Publish high quality content
Regularly add good quality content to your site. Sure, you could regularly update your site with lots of hastily produced low value content, and this might even get you some short term success. But investing the time and effort to produce good quality content will deliver much better results because, simply, people will always link to good quality content. Everybody should know that getting lots of inbound links from respected, relevant websites, all pointing to different parts of your site rather than just the front page, is the holy grail of search engine rankings. Search engines see all of those links and they know that your site is full of good content.

3) Be patient
Time is one of the most important factors in SEO. From a search engine’s perspective, the longer a site has been around, the more trustworthy and reliable it’s likely to be – spam sites don’t stick around for years at a time, serious online publishers do. This is compounded by the fact that the longer your site is around, the more links it will get (assuming the content is up to scratch) which will in turn serve to further improve its search engine rankings. From my personal experience I’ve found it can take anywhere between six months and a year for Google to start showing any love at all to a brand new site. After that, the longer you stay online and keep publishing good content, the more you can expect your site to show up on the front page of search engine results.

My EconoMonkey co-conspirator, a journalist who I used to work with on PC Magazine back in the heady days of the nineties tech boom and now runs a relatively successful content-based website, put things into perspective for me the other day:

“The first year after I launched the site it made no money at all, but I was writing the content myself so it didn’t cost me anything but hosting charges. The second year, I was making a little advertising revenue and I used that to pay other people to write content for me, and I made a total loss of £35. The third year, I was paying a lot more people to write articles for me and it made a profit of £[Healthy five figure sum- undisclosed to spare his blushes]”

It’s a valid question, but the answer is simple: You can’t, so don’t bother trying. The internet is full of Bandwagoneers and Me-Too Merchants, if you tried to track every single start-up and predict which ones would be successful and, moreover, useful from a PR perspective, you’d go mental.

The good news is that there’s practically no advantage to being on the bleeding edge of Web 2.0 development. If you want to impress the client with your encyclopaedic knowledge of the very latest social media platforms, that’s all well and good, but there’s no point pretending that any of them have much to offer until they’ve reached some sort of critical mass in terms of users.

There’s a lot of pressure in the tech industry to constantly be on the leading edge, and that’s no bad thing because it’s always a good idea to know what’s coming over the horizon. But as far as PR is concerned, where’s the advantage? If that hot new start-up you read about really is the next Facebook, then it’s not going to be very useful to you until everybody else agrees with that assessment, and it’s still going to be around in six months time.

Venture capitalists may have to break a sweat trying to figure out who tomorrow’s winners are going to be, but in the PR business it’s our job to figure out how we can put these platforms to work for our clients, only after the markets have chosen the winners.