Using public relations is a critical tactic in generating awareness for many businesses, and online businesses should be no different. The irony is traditional PR tactics (media relations, ed cal tracking, by-lined articles, speaking opportunities) to drive awareness in the main stream media (MSM), are as foreign to an online business as RSS feeds and blogs are to a majority of offline businesses.

Steven Van Yoder’s recent post titled “Why Online Businesses Should Embrace PR” provides excellent insights to using PR to drive traffic.

To quote Steven, “They read newspapers, magazines and listen to the radio. To reach your market niche comprehensively, you need to explore ways to reach your prospects beyond the Internet. It will help you drive traffic to your web site.”

We agree. Our experience has been that offline MSM coverage drives a tremendous amount of traffic to a company’s website. We know this because we work with PR teams to help them avoid The Placement Crash typically associated with MSM coverage driving new visitors to a dull and non-engaging website.

The magic happens when the PR team is able to work with the online team in delivering a unique and fresh conversational experience to those new visitors.

Don’t waste the amazing opportunity media coverage gives you. Capture the conversation by:

• Extrapolating the salient points in the MSM coverage on your blog and continuing the conversation by posting and responding to comments
• Setting up a teleconference on the coverage topic a week out and provide the ability to register for free online
• Get them to sign up for your email newsletter
• Provide an in-depth article on the coverage topic available for download

Because of the nature of online businesses, it is my honest opinion they are more apt to capitalize on the MSM exposure than many traditional offline business. The reason – they have the technical skills and flexibility to update and use social media and online technologies (blogs, podcasts, email newsletters) to capture the conversation that are often beyond the scope of knowledge for most companies.

For more information on strategies for leveraging the synergies between online and offline media tactics, check out our posts on The Placement Crash and Tried and True PR Tactics for Igniting Online Buzz.

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.

I thought he brought up some important points about business people being brought up in a way that keeps them from thinking for themselves when it comes to marketing. If you work your way up in marketing by simply doing what you are told, then when you are the boss you don't really know what to do. This is in the context of the importance of thinking small. Thinking small means thinking like a business owner.

Other interesting points he touched on related to blog traffic not being a good metric for the success of a blog. The question is how attentive are people to your blog. Does it have the potential to be viral? Is it something that others want to look to as a valuable resource?

One of the comments from a participant in the seminar pertained to how Seth was using business to consumer examples in almost everything he was bringing up. Seth's response was that businesses are just like people, they are just spending somebody else's money. Businesses are prone to fashion, just like everyone else. So marketing to them doesn't have to be as different as people may think in many cases.

Here’s how it works: Imagine that you land one big “media hit,” such as a Business Week article mentioning your company. This publicity lures volumes of new visitors to your web site.

…That’s great, IF your PR firm, online communications expert, or anyone in your marketing department planned ahead of time to Capture the Conversation during and after peak traffic to drive sales or solidify new business relationships.

Most companies – including yours, probably – don’t do that. Therefore, much of that wonderful web traffic gets wasted.

New visitors click away if you don’t engage them immediately. Every time that happens, your PR/marketing team is costing you an opportunity.

Don’t blame them, however. They’re just doing the job they’ve been trained to do. Unfortunately it’s only half the job that really needs to be done.

Most PR/marketing professionals are trained to attract attention (as media coverage), but not to turn attention into real results.

The key to truly successful media relations involving online media (such as your site) is to track sales, generate new leads, and – most importantly – engage in a meaningful conversation with new prospects.

Great media exposure does offer tremendous value. However, by itself it’s just not enough. You must also engage prospects and follow through. Fortunately, the Internet makes that easier than ever. Here’s how:

1. Make your site easy to find via a simple search in popular search engines such as Google.
2. Provide immediate access to critical decision-making information, presented using the customer’s perspective and language.
3. Use simple tools to nurture and follow online conversations, such as weblogs and forums. The content of these tools also becomes findable through online searches, widening your reach.

PR that clearly boosts the bottom line. Imaging this scenario: a new DNA testing company gains exposure on a leading national morning show. Before an audience of millions, the show’s anchor takes the test and discusses the health implications of genes and diet.

Of those millions of viewers, thousands visit the DNA testing company’s web site. When they arrive on the home page, they see a prominent link: “Learn more about our test featured on [name of show].” Beneath that, there’s an invitation to register to attend an upcoming free teleseminar with the company’s lead scientist, who will answer questions about the test and the science behind it.

Imagine that 700 people attend the teleseminar, and 200 of them purchased the test, yielding more than $40,000 dollars in sales!

Isn’t that a much better way to justify PR, compared to traditional monthly billing reports that attempt to justify the PR budget with antiquated, fuzzy measures such as Ad Value Equivalency?

A results-focused PR team can confidently state quantifiable, bottom-line results. That will get any executive’s attention – and respect.

I first introduced the The Placement Crash in the article Fire Your PR Firm, published in June, 2006. To view the extended original article visit http://www.www.capturetheconversation.com.

For the above scenario, we would use the following tools to capture the offline exposure and drive teleseminar traffic and track sales conversions:
Google Analytics – to track site visitor statistic, teleseminar sign ups and sales conversions
MovableType or WordPress – blog platforms to continue the conversation
AWeber – form capture and contact database application
AskDatabase – survey teleseminar participants on the top questions they would like answered
ReadyTalk – conferencing service, record as MP3 for playback or podcast.

Todd Defren and the team have taken the time to painstakingly research articles, topics and learnings about social media innovations.

We highly recommend you download the guide and read it now.

We'll have to update our Fire Your PR Firm paper and put Shift Communications in there as a "smart pr firm" and capture the conversation evangelist.

Of the Top 10 list, #8 and #2 are the knockout punches for many of the companies that have come to us seeking input on social media and starting blogs.

#8 – It’s hard to build an audience. It takes time, effort and skillful promotion to build an audience for a blog. Once we get into explaining that you actually have to put yourself out there, post on other’s blogs, be unique and have a point, most people begin to shut down. You can see their brains churning and the idea of “more work” leaves them to abandon the dream and go back to the comfort zone of doing it the old way.

#2 – It takes a lot of time. Researching and writing is a complex and extremely time-consuming task. A blog that isn’t kept up to date quickly loses its luster and its audience. Once again, the idea of have to put effort in and work at it is a deterrent. Funny how that is.

Thanks for the Top 10 B.L., we’ll be using it as our initial screening test from now on.

Nothing like a hard deadline to drive a project through to completion. In our case, it’s a guest speaking appearance at the Public Relations Society of America tomorrow morning in Denver. It should be good fun watching my business partner stand in front of our PR friends and explain why his white paper, “Fire Your PR Firm“, is front and
center on our home page. Ironically, the paper was actually written in part to help PR practitioners. When you
peel back the controversial title, you’ll see it’s all good.

The very concept of writing and distributing a press release is to let the world know what you are doing, and more specifically to let the press know so they can tell the world.

With the explosion of news hubs such as Google News and Yahoo! News most people looking to find, or reference, timely information on a specific topic will first conduct an online search and seek results from the news hubs.

For the press its better defined: 98 percent go online daily, 92 percent for article research, 81 percent for search, 72 percent to find new expert sources and 73 percent for press releases.

The idea behind the creation of these news hubs is to provide the most current and relevant information on a specific subject or keyword. Being current is a pivotal algorithm to these hubs. Normally it takes a search engine up to 30 days to index new page content, with the news hubs, it’s available the same day. Therefore the importance of posting and releasing news on a frequent basis becomes critical to an organization’s ability to maintain its leadership as a known and current subject matter expert.

7 Tips for Writing a Search Engine Optimized Press Release:

1. Determine a keyword phrase that relates to your product or service that people actually search for. For instance you may be offering mentoring services for teens, but find that most people originate their search with “teen in crises”. Research keywords yourself with NicheBot.
2. Create a headline to include the top two, possibly three, search terms.
3. Expand on keywords in the subhead, first paragraph and outline of the document. Target to repeat the top keywords at least three times outside of the main headline.
4. Write relevant copy to align with your keyword selection. If you can’t do this then you are off message with your target audience. They are not going to be picking up what you are laying down.
5. Clearly call out a link “http://www.checkthisout.com” to your web site within the text of the release.
6. Use generic descriptions of you product or service in place of, or in association with the proper product name. For instance use “homeland security software” in association with, or in place of, HomeSECURE.
7. Distribute the release, RSS the content and have it syndicated to news. We actually offer RSS content syndication services, and you can view the full syndication program at our website.

The Benefits of a Search Engine Optimized Release Include:

• Increases search engine exposure in the News sections and natural search results driving traffic to your site.
• In bound links to your web site from high page rank sites such as PR Newswire and BusinessWire and Google will increase your site ranking.
• Syndication through RSS will spread your message virally to those interested in the topic.