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What’s Up With Wikipedia for PR?

January 8, 2013 By 1 Comment

WikipediaWikipedia has an enormous impact on the perception of any company or individual, yet most PR people don’t have a Wikipedia strategy for clients. It’s somewhat understandable. Wikipedia is an enigma wrapped in an enigma, an endless frustration for PR professionals. When a client says “Write me a Wikipedia page” or “Fix my Wikipedia page” you have to say … well, it doesn’t quite work like that.

I last wrote about Wikipedia in 2009 for PRBlogNews – What is your Wikipedia strategy? Since then, Wikipedia has loosened up a bit. There are now identifiable editors. You can request a review of your Wikipedia page, and there are more readily acceptable solutions to correcting a bad Wikipedia page.

Why bother?  Wikipedia often comes up top in search results. It is the 6th largest site on the Internet for web traffic. An inaccurate or skewed Wikipedia page can undermine years of PR effort.

What not to do.  As a PR professional, or a member of a company, you cannot edit a Wikipedia page in which you have a vested interest even if it is grossly inaccurate. You will be slammed by roving bands of Wikipedia editors and the damage will take a long time to undo. Witness the recent comical case of author Philip Roth’s tussle with Wikipedia in which it was determined initially by Wikipedia that Roth was not a credible source to set the record straight on his own book.

What to do. Hire Influence Consulting : ) We integrate a Wikipedia strategy into the earliest stages of a PR program. We identify authorized editors who can assure that a Wikipedia insert is accurate and up-to-date. We create a Newsroom that serves as an excellent PR and SEO channel, and a single source for Wikipedia editors to pull reliable, published news on a company or individual. – Mark Rose

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The Future of PR 2013. Content Creation + Distribution = PR for Lasting Impact

January 4, 2013 By Leave a Comment

By Mark Rose, Partner, at Influence Consulting Group.

More and more, we place less and less bottom line value in traditional PR tactics, and a much greater emphasis on content creation and distribution for lasting PR impact.

Mark Rose, Partner, Influence Consulting GroupWe create content through press releases, commentary, analysis, important organizational events, and third-party endorsement through publicity. Then it gets pushed out through a distribution channel = blog or News Room (the mother ship), various social media outlets, and packaged for marketing.

An ancillary benefit is that the content leads to media interest and publicity. The point is that the content created has lasting value directly to the client, compounding as a digital asset, whether or not “the media” picks it up. Now, more than ever, we are the media.

We can demonstrate lasting PR value with a simple strategic matrix: content creation + distribution = PR for lasting impact.

Think of original content the way a typical, top-level news organization does. A single story from a Dow Jones reporter can go to print, online,  through social channels, and become a video story. That content can go across Dow Jones properties – MarketWatch, Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, et al. Reporters Tweet their stories, it runs through the LinkedIn network, on and on, and it lives in virtual perpetuity as a Dow Jones digital asset..

PR pros have access to virtually every digital distribution channel that Rupert Murdoch does (excluding print).

This is a thrilling time to be in PR. We have access to unprecedented news development and distribution capabilities. Most of these distribution channels are open source, free and are limited only by our imagination and willingness to devote time and attention. Publicity is still an important component of any PR program but it is best served by creating News that is delivered to target audiences, no filter, and also offered to the media. Increasingly, they will take credible content and re-publish through their vast channels.  PR is becoming a much more varied, fluid and creative business these days, much like the media whose coverage we covet. – Mark Rose

Influence Consulting Group content creation + distribution = PR for lasting impact

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Israelis Redefine Social Media World Game

November 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Israeli Social Media BunkerIsrael’s intense social media blitz during the recent Gaza conflagration has redefined the social media landscape. From a social media “bunker” and various locations hundreds of Israelis saturated Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube with Tweets, blog posts and videos in an offensive that resembled a communications war.

The Palestinians, of course, responded in kind, with their own spin on events disseminated through the social media sphere. It was like virtual missiles raining on an enemy who employed a defense shield and counter-attacks. In the end it was akin to Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), a suitable metaphor for the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So much social media bombardment cancels itself out and the noise becomes an annoyance, rather than a means of objective education. The story became the social media war, not the real war. I doubt that many opinions were changed due to the effort of the Twittering, blogging hordes.

The Israelis, believing that the world media is against them, see it otherwise.

“We’re removing the media middle men,” said Daniel Seaman, deputy director general of Hamas BlogIsrael’s Ministry of Public Diplomacy. “They used to say the Elders of Zion controlled the media. Well, here are the youngsters of Zion who are running it.” The Israeli military spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, a self-described Twitter addict, heads a two-month-old “Interactive Media” branch, staffed with around 30 soldiers trained in writing and graphic design.

If there is a winner in this war, purely from a communications standpoint, it is the Israelis. They capitalized on the digerati’s obsession with infographics (below), they produced a better looking blog (for what it’s worth) and they gathered more followers.

Israel's Social Media War

 

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Measuring the Unmeasurable in PR

November 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Mark Rose, Partner, Influence Consulting GroupMeasuring the value of PR is a constant struggle.  Some clients still insist on the print advertising equivalent of media placements, a completely antiquated metric since most of the value of publicity is online. How do we measure the value of online publicity? I spent a week trying to figure it out with one client and came up empty. That’s why I was heartened to see Courtney Seiter’s post Why Social Media ROI Can’t Be Measured – And Why That’s OK

Some blog posts on PRBlogNews spike in traffic years after they were posted. Why? Something happens that makes the post timely and relevant again. There’s an anniversary of an event. Keywords trend and the post rises in search results. Each blog post, if done right, is a digital asset that compounds over time.

Blog posts, like online news stories, are picked up by Google alerts and are fed into uncountable in boxes.

There’s a cumulative effect to online publicity and blog posts that defy measurement. Quality content that’s delivered in a search-friendly way accumulates and is the foundation of online reputation.

Also, online publicity impacts Wikipedia, which needs verifiable online sources as the basis of its content. This may be the biggest benefit of online publicity, and the most difficult to quantify to clients.

In the Internet age, public relations requires a lot of labor-intensive work that doesn’t yield an immediate, obvious benefit. Convincing clients of the value of these activities remains a challenge.  As Seiter suggests, quantifying and measuring what we can is a good start (page views, click-throughs,Tweets, etc.). The rest involves education about the nature of online content, and a leap of faith about the value of online conversations. – Mark Rose

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Getting Deep Into WordPress

September 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

WordPress is the standard -  the great, free, solution to virtually any web challenge, from a simple personal blog to a corporate website. WordPress is constantly evolving. There are legions of developers and educators out there who can guide the WordPress adventurer. This is one of the better ones. She’s engaging and she makes you feel secure that you can do this! Want a career that is flexible, pays, and is in demand? Become a high quality WordPress developer and designer.  We’re always looking out for them.

Filed Under: blogging, PR Practices, social media Tagged With:
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