CBS Televisions April 14, 2009 episode of ‘Without A Trace’ featured a fictional story highlighting the power of the blogosphere.  The plot included a ski business owned by the son of a a multi-millionaire business tycoon who put information on the Internet that sabotaged his competitors business.  As a retribution, the son provides a business blogger a fake story about his father insinuating that he is dying of cancer.  After an unsuccessful negotiation with the blogger to retract the blogger’s post, the father’s business is forced to liquidate.

Ironically, we have see these types of scenarios play out in real life where ex-employees, competitors, and others take their battle to the web.  The blogosphere is real.  Google alerts are a minimum for any professional or business owner.

At this past week’s DFWSEM monthly meeting, we assembled a pane of attendees and speakers who went to PubCon in Austin, TX this month to give their recap and thoughts on the conference.  There was one theme that was overwhelming–Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.

There is no question in that Twitter is the rage.  The question is whether it provides return on investment (ROI) to businesses who are investing time into it.  The even larger question is Twitter’s business model itself.  We’ll save that for a later post.

So, who cares what you or your business is up to on a minute by minute basis in 140 characters or less?  As with anything, it depends on what you have to say.  More importantly in the world of social media, it depends on how many people are listening as well.

Twitter Models that Won’t Work

I’ve heard countless stories of a business having their marketing person get on Twitter, reach out to a bunch of people, and try to sell them something.  In the email world we call it SPAM.  With the telephone world we see it as flat out annoying.  So, does changing the transport to Twitter make that any different?   Nope!

Twitter Models that Have Potential

It was reported at the DFWSEM meeting that Dell has a twitter handle in which they announce specials on overstocked items and open boxes via Twitter.  If you are looking for computer equipment, following those tweets has value.  I’ve also been introduced to an individual on Twitter that has 5K publicists and journalist following them and shares stories and information.  That has value.  People who attended PubCon and gave play by plays via Twitter making it available to those who couldn’t attend has significant value and can be considered a cost cutting technique.

Final Thoughts

Having founded a digital agency that more into Social Media than heads down SEO, I’m really glad that one of the premier SEO conferences was inundated by social media (Twitter).  I’m facinated by the number of topics and discussions that came out of our panel discussion from both a business and marketing perspective as well as SEO as it relates to Twitter.  So what was actually said during our panel discussion?  Well, if you are in Dallas, you should join us.  If you aren’t, find us on Twitter! 

I use press release sites for a variety of business purposes for my clients and our own business. However, we are not a PR agency; we are traditional Search Engine Optimization consultants that also do social media marketing. Thus, over the past several years, every time I logged into a traditional press release service site I felt like I was sneaking into a black tie event wearing jeans and a t-shirt. It’s not that my reason for being there wasn’t important; I simply wasn’t pitching a story to the journalist about a high powered politician or athlete. As we get close to the end of Q1 in 2009, the tables are changing and I am feeling a little more at home in my jeans and t-shirt.

Social Media releases are all the rage. I see this option pop up as an “up charge” on the traditional press release sites and I now hear the local publicists asking questions about them. The big question, however, is “What are they?”. Since we’ve been doing our own social releases for years, I thought I’d take a moment to give you my take and then review a new online service that puts the “social” part before the “press release” part of the word.

Social Media Releases

Social Media is about people communicating and sharing online. Typically when we’ve issued a standard press release, we’ve followed with a process that consisted of us putting out a little more colorful recap of the release in sites like Digg as well as our own social bookmark collections. If we didn’t follow with a post on one of our many blogs, then we’d go to Social Spark and find the types of bloggers we needed and compensate them to create a little buzz around our news. The problem with this process is that it forced us to have a bunch of tabs open in our browsers to get things done and the online press releases themselves were just drab, ugly, and stood no chance of getting viral without us pushing them along. Then enters pitch engine.

We decided to sign up for pitch engine in order to promote the reopening of a UK restaurant location for a large client of ours. Pitch engine is a online news release site that is heavy on the social features and light on the claims that you are going to get exposed to the chief editor of The Wall Street Journal.

After creating a my account and a brand for my client, it took me about 15 minutes to create an online social release that consisted of pictures, brand logo, news data points, and my base information. The result was a news release that looked phenomenal and had the interfaces to allow me to submit a tweet into my Twitter account, Digg the release, and move forward with the rest of our process.

What was the result?

I was very pleased with Pitch Engine as it created an incredible digital asset for my client, made it easy to finish out our social media process, and was indexed by Google within 3 hours and was top of search for our selected keywords. Now that they have my attention, I will be evaluating the results via hits on my client’s website and doing a little homework as to the fee based upgrades that pitch engine provides. I will also be curious as to how others within the Pitch Engine community interact with our release.  Here is the link to our Chilis Reading Pitch Engine release.

Update To The Post – (June 4, 2009)

After several months of utilizing Pitch Engine for client work, I have concluded the following:

• The releases garner strong search results on brand names and they remain strong.  This is especially true with Google.
• The video embed capability really helps to promote digital assets that normally get lost in YouTube.
• For our clients, the Pitch Engine releases have been in the top 10 traffic referrals for our client’s sites.
• Internet Explorer 6 continues to be a problem for the Pitch Engine development team but they have been very timely in their responses to fixing issues.   We don’t use IE but a good chunk of consumers on the Internet  still do.

The following is a list of a few more releases we consulted on that include video components.

• Generational Equity
• Brinker Mexico

I learned this week that Candice Crawford has joined Midwest Sports Fans as a volunteer blogger. Let’s make one thing clear: I’m not writing this post because Candice Crawford is the younger sister of celebrity Chace Crawford and happened to be a former beauty pageant crown holder and has now decided to blog. For those who know me, that is way too shallow of a topic for my views on how Social Media is impacting the marketing world. What I find interesting about Candice Crawford joining the writers at Midwest Sports Fans is that she is a traditional journalism student who is just flat out being smart about her approach to her future career.

I learned of this event as I follow Midwest Sports Fans. Candice was out the door with a great post about Pioli’s move to the Kansas City Chiefs. So, I immediately begin to ask, why are journalism students and television reporters joining volunteer blogs? Don’t newspapers, television stations, and universities have their own online outlets for blogging? So, I started to do some research by simply “Googling” and asking questions about Candice.

Candice Crawford’s career goal is to be a television sideline sports reporter. As an intern for The Blitz in the summer of 2007, she showcased her reporting drive as she kept up with the dynamics of The Dallas Cowboys both in the locker room and on the field. She has the education, proven ability, and the camera presence to stand out. So why join a sports blog when the cameras are rolling?

Traditional media is under severe pressure these days. One of those pressures comes from the Internet. A key mistake that traditional journalist sand media moguls alike have made in the era of the Internet is to approach it with the strategy “simply posting online is good enough”. That’s not what social media and blogging is about. The blogosphere is built on etiquette and undocumented rules that can literally define a blogger’s reach. When asked to speak on a panel for the Dallas Luxury Marketing Council this past year, several publicists in attendance asked how to approach bloggers. My response revolved around authenticity, which was a core theme in journalism and publicity alike long before the Internet. Moreover, Internet writing styles have to accommodate both readers and search engines alike.

I reached out to blogger Jerod Morris who runs Midwest Sports Fans and asked about the recent additions to his volunteer writer staff. One is Scott Reister, who is a television sports reporter out of Yakima, WA. The second, obviously, was Candice Crawford.

“We’ve had several higher profile writers inquire into Midwest Sports Fans over the past few months. I partially attribute this to the pressures being placed on traditional journalist to expand their horizons. As with any of our writers, I work with them to integrate them not only into our blog and its relationships but to other forms of social media where we have a presence such as Digg,” commented Jerod Morris, an online marketing professional and sports blogging enthusiast.

Social Media is changing the way we consume information. In many cases we turn to the Internet for the most up to date news. Whether it be live following of the bombings in Mumbai through Twitter or trying to validate rumors of a player trade through a sports blog, the Internet has changed the name of game. Smart journalists and students alike are getting out in front of this and in many cases it is in the blogosphere versus traditional media websites.