Posted on August 23, 2006
Using Tried and True PR Tactics to Ignite Online Buzz
BY JAMES CLARK
Every blogger has faced the pressure of what to blog about. We work with our clients to create online reputation management systems to get them plugged into listening to the conversation first so they will know: What are people talking about? and How they can add a relevant voice to the conversation? We've posted recently about strategic blog commenting strategies and how to enter the online conversation.
What I want to discuss are two techniques on how you can be the online BUZZ STARTER that everyone else is commenting and creating trackbacks on.
Having completely transitioned to online communications and social media, I brought along some tried and true PR tactics that can be applied to capturing the online conversations. As a matter of fact a few basic block and tackle PR tactics are some of the most powerful ways to be the BUZZ STARTER.
#1. Editorial Calendar Tracking
As much as those of us in the social media world want to lay claim to starting and generating the conversational trends, the fact of the matter is that traditional main stream media (MSM) continues to have a huge influence on conversational topics. The beauty of the MSM is that they are an advertising driven revenue model, so they must publish editorial calendars about subject topics in upcoming issues in order to secure ad sponsorship. Often times editorial calendars are published a year in advance. These calendars are your ticket to being a Buzz Starter. Go get the editorial calendars from your industry trade publications and find out what they are planning to publish in print and start blogging and writing articles for online syndication a month or two in advance of the publication issue. This gives the search engines the time to index your content giving you high visibility for the topic once the publication hits the street.
#2. Industry Conferences
The survival of great industry conferences depends on the quality of the speakers and the relevance of the topics to the attendees. Just like editorial calendars, conferences are planned well in advance, and conference organizers will put out a call for speakers based on subject matter they have identified as being timely and relevant to the audience. By looking at the speaking tracks you can identify subject trends that people will be seeking additional information and knowledge on. If you are subject expert on one of those trends, then start creating and syndicating content a month or two prior to the event. Find out who's speaking and engage in a conversation with them either via personal email, or posting comments and trackbacks on their respective blogs.
Okay, so the obvious strategy here is to also be in the stories presented in the editorial calendars and be the speaker at the industry conference. I'll go over that strategy in an upcoming post.
