1. NYtimes: Magazine sport fewer ad pages this January than usual.

January issues tend to be thin even in good years, and most magazines posted a decline in ad pages. But the average decline across all monthly magazines was only 17 percent, and most Condé Nast magazines fared much worse, according to analysis of Media Industry Newsletter data.

Wired, which is usually thick with consumer electronics ads, was the worst hit, down 47 percent from a year ago to 43.6 ad pages. Architectural Digest fell 46 percent, to 63.2, from 116.8. Vogue and Lucky were both down about 44 percent.

2. John Bell: The 13 Skills of the Public Relations Pro of the Future

Marketing and public relations are coming together. PR is growing as an industry while “traditional” advertising – what ever that is – remains flat. Still, we have taken no new ground in ‘measurement’ and articulating the tremendous ROI of P

There are several articles on how to Do It Yourself PR. I read one by Jimmy this morning most of which can be attributed to Jason Calacanis. There are several tactics to DIY PR, but there are 3 main strategies that we recommend.

1. Listen: Pick the topics / categories, areas of interest in your field and listen to what’s being said by key influencers – these include reporters, journalists, analysts (like Gartner, etc.) bloggers, micro-bloggers, video-bloggers, podcasters, and photographers.

After you listen for about a day you’ll get a picture of who’s who (or the landscape) in this space.

2. Learn: Pick about 20-30 of these influencers and get as much detail about them as possible. What do they write about? When do they write? Who is their audience? What do they care about? What topics interest them? What are unique stories you can tell them about your startup?

3. Engage: Attend relevant events that your influencers go to. There’s no substitute for face-to-face discussions. Commenting on blogs is the best way to make the initial engagement. Write and manage your blog by “joining the discussion”.

The key is discipline and making sure you do it consistently. You need to show and see results, but dont expect to get written up on the WSJ within a week of starting this process.

Image credit: http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk ]]> http://news.buzzgain.com/how-to-do-it-yourself-pr/feed/ 0 http://news.buzzgain.com/evolving-from-a-prsocial-media-conversation-to-a-business-conversation/ http://news.buzzgain.com/evolving-from-a-prsocial-media-conversation-to-a-business-conversation/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:10:24 +0000 Mukund http://news.buzzgain.com/?p=69

The only qualification I have to make this blog entry is that I have been a VP of Marketing before and have managed a annual PR budget of about $1.2 Million. I dont claim to know the business of PR well, but when has that stopped a blogger from giving his opinion right?

The question I want to address though is one asked by my friend Jennifer and another PR professional Michelle.

“Where do you think that line should be drawn? Subscribers? Alexa rankings? Google page rank? Technorati? Which bloggers make the list of desirables? Tell me…”

The question is one of which bloggers should you target – the “A list” ones with many readers or the other list – who have very little readership.

I think the question fundamentally should be a different one.

Web masters in the late 90’s (every marketing team had one remember), have now evolved into Internet Marketing functions whose role includes SEM, SEO, site design, buying optimization etc.

The PR professional has to go away from answering the question “How can I generate the most Buzz” to “How can I impact the marketing goals – be it for a company or a client“? Many smart PR professionals are already doing this.

The Buzz question prompts you to look for more PR mentions, or get your CEO on the cover of Forbes or get mentioned in EVERY local newspaper.

The Impact question begs you to measure the net result or “ROI of that buzz creation” to the bottom line. What that means is that you have to come with reports not that state the # of mentions and press clips of every mention, but reports that indicate “What % of the registered users came because you got a mention in a blog” Or “What was the conversion ratio for prospects when we got a mention on NYTimes vs. the Wall Street Journal”. I am the first to tell you that this is difficult currently to do, but you have to get there.

If you set out to address that question however and you are convinced that’s the way to go, then you’ll spend your time on 3 metrics through the customer acquisition pipeline:

1. Awareness generation: How many people were made aware of your products / offerings? This could be a simple case of taking the # of publications and bloggers you pitched to & got written up in and adding them up. Its not a great number but its a start. This is what you are probably most familiar with.

2. Actionable intent: How many people visited your website after that mention in that blog OR media publication? This is MORE possible to do now than ever. Granted you wont get EXACT metrics, but you will get close enough numbers. Become friends with you web analytics person and they’ll give you a good start.

3. Converted prospects: How many people from the previous number actually performed the call to action. This is also an important metric to track. Again this metric is being tracked by the analytics tools – you just need to be more familiar with them.

You need these three numbers because only then is it possible to justify your time spent on bloggers outside the “A list”. Why?

Its is our contention that the conversion ratio (# of people visiting to taking action to converting) is BEST in the niche blogs. Their audience is specific, tailored and is passionate about the only thing that blogger covers. That blogger usually has a GREATER influence over his niche audience than a blog network does.

Second, niche bloggers are more likely to give you good links that will improve the organic ranking of website in Google searches. This is huge since organic traffic is literally “free” or minimal cost to your company.

The large A list blogs and blog networks give you great traffic (i.e. awareness) BUT the conversion ratios are correspondingly poor.

You can argue if conversion ratios matter. That’s question #2.

It does. The  reason it matters is the MOST EXPENSIVE method to generate leads and conversions currently is Google SEM (Or Search Engine Marketing) or Pay Per Click (PPC) as they call it in the industry. As an alternative organic search results (which are obtained with more links to your website and good content) are a lot less expensive.

So if you can prove (with real reports and numbers to your VP Marketing) that you can generate better conversion ratios and deliver leads at a lower cost, you will never have to justify talking to B list bloggers or justify your engagement with any type of social media. ]]> http://news.buzzgain.com/evolving-from-a-prsocial-media-conversation-to-a-business-conversation/feed/ 0 http://news.buzzgain.com/the-moral-and-ethical-dilemma-of-blogger-relations-email-addresses/ http://news.buzzgain.com/the-moral-and-ethical-dilemma-of-blogger-relations-email-addresses/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:04:49 +0000 Mukund http://news.buzzgain.com/?p=60

Lets talk about the age old question about the differences between bloggers and journalists from the main stream media. First a categorization. To us there are 3 broad categories of people you can target to generate buzz.

1. Main stream media – journalists, reporters, freelancers, editors and publishers of magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, etc. These professionals are paid to learn and write about news and happenings. Our main competitors including Vocus and Cision (and smaller ones like Burrelles Luce) provide extensive information on over 40,000 of these professionals with their media database offering. Any media database has typically information about the publication, its reach, the beat the reporter covers and the reporters contact information (email and in some cases phone).

2. Blog Networks – Since early part of this decade, online publications that started as small one person blogs such as GigaOm and TechCrunch, now have multiple writers and editors with a fairly similar agenda to the main stream media but a focus on specific content such as startups (e.g. Paid Content) or social media (e.g. Mashable). The writers for these have a revenue (and hence pageviews, readership) goal either via sponsorships and advertising so they are also “pitched” by PR professionals. Some of these professionals encourage and lovehaving their contact information available online (providing an easy way for potential PR professionals to contact them) and others dont like being “spammed” with irrelevant pitches.

3. Independent bloggers – These are the mostly one person industry experts – Some of them love to have people email and contact them about new products and services – e.g. Louis Gray, (disclaimer: he’s helping us) and others feel its spam.

Our customers prefer to have the contact information for all of the folks in our database. We have about 80% of our targets mapped to email and phone, but we are choosing in our present version to NOT show direct contact information for the individual bloggers until we are certain they are not going to be used for sending useless PR pitchesand get blacklisted.

We currently allow our customers to comment on their blogs or news sites, but do offer contact information for the main stream media.

What’s your suggestion for the best way to encourage engagement between these 3 categories of influencers and the best way for our customers to get access to them?

A quick comparison of their circulation, unique visitors, online revenue and editorial staff is below. The interesting question raised by 247Wall Street is when do these publication die? Their models seem doomed if you consider cost of printing, editorial payroll costs and the steep decline in advertising.

Leaving aside whether they survive for a minute, lets focus on how you as a business can get a mention or get written up in these publications.

1. Pick the right reporter based on topic of interest: Notice the editorial staff on each of these publications. You can use BuzzGain to get the exact writer / reporter / journalist to cover your story or you can go to their editorial pages and get the entire editorial staff and contact them directly. The important thing is there are over 200 to 400+ reporters on staff. Just because they are a business magazine does not mean everyone cares about startups in the Web 2.0 space.

2. Focus on obtaining an online mention versus a print mention: Clearly the total circulation of these publications is individually about a million and readership about 2-3 million. Compare that to the total number of unique visitors on a monthly basis which is anywhere between 3-5 million. Why is this important? An online mention is more easily actionable – they can search and visit your website. In addition if the article provides a link to your website your chances of Search Engine Optimization improves.

3. Learn more about the reporters past writing style, story angle and suggest follow up pieces to previously written articles. The total number of links to articles written by other writers in this publication compared to the number of outgoing links is very high. This means most business reporters are linking to their own pieces instead of referring to other blogs, web sources. The more you can “link” stories they have previously written about to the story you are trying to pitch them, the better chance you have of getting your story written.

What’s worked for you with business press? Have you got a mention? What tip would you suggest?