Keanu Reeves as a time traveller...

This is a PR blog and the internet meme is an industry obsession, so I am really keen to found out more about what makes a good internet meme.

In an attempt to make sense of this phenomenon and blog on the topic, I am currently interested to find out why Keanu Reeves has become a cult internet figure, much like Rick Astley, with sites like Reddit posting about him regularly.

If you have anything sensible to say on the subject, please leave a comment on the blog, or answer my request here on Quora.

If I get some good insight from this I will be blogging about this topic here on my PR blog

**update** here is one answer via Quora, from Joseph Jegvan-Andrej Cir. He said:

I believe it stems from two events. The first was when the story broke about Keanu giving away $72 million of his own money to crew who worked on The Matrix in the believe that they had been unfairly compensated. There is a notable story in itself, worthy of some mention and bearing some repeating. That is the kind of justice the internets can get behind.

The second is a sub-meme which branched from this initial spike in popularity: the photo of him sitting on a bench, looking miserable, and eating a sandwich. http://img.timeinc.net/time/dail… This photo is basically asking to be shopped, and shoppery is a very effective means of spreading a meme.

I am basing most of this on reddit, which is lately the place where I put my fingers to feel the meme-pulse of the web

**Update two** @inkhuldra from Norway via Twitter posted this helpful link

This is the link from the tweet which details everything you’ve ever needed to know about the Keanu meme.

**Update 3**
This helpful answer was lifted from Ask Reddit:

Despite the huge movies that he has featured in and the millions of dollars that he has earned, he is has been an exemplary person. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying motorcycles for all of the stunt workers from the Matrix because he felt that they did all the hard work. He has taken care of a sister for quite a few years who has been suffering from Leukemia. In addition to this, he actively donates quite a lot of money and does fund raising for Leukemia research. He has given up money for roles so that he can bring on other actors that he wants to work with. The list goes on and on.
Despite the opportunities and resources that he has, he lives a relatively modest life, giving what he can so that others can benefit more than himself. He is sort of a model for what celebrities should and can be.

                          

The link between SEO and PR is nothing new but recently everyone’s been talking it. More and more public relations and optimisation consultancies are starting to truly understand the interrelation between the two disciplines, although there are lots of consultancies who talk the talk but can’t walk the walk.

In both the SEO and PR industries there is widespread debate about consolidation between the two specialisms, and I expect over the next few years that the big PR groups will be acquiring SEO companies (in fact a few mergers, buyouts and even senior appointments of SEOs are already taking place).

Despite this trend, too many SEO and PR companies just don’t understand the other’s profession.

Some SEOs think that PR is submitting content to newswires, while there are far too many PR people that don’t even know what optimisation is or why an in-bound link has value, let alone more advanced SEO concepts.

Those of us in PR know that, while submitting content to newswires and article sites has SEO benefits, very few techniques can create high quality links like PR. And when I say PR I mean, good old fashioned media relations, never mind the ‘social’ side.

For example, can an SEO company get you a link on the BBC website? Only good old media relations can do that.

Likewise, though, can the average PR, fiddle under the hood of a website to optimise your site for search purposes, The answer is of course ‘no’.

The two disciplines need each other.

As illustration of the similarity between SEO and PR, during a recent PR campaign I analysed how many links were created and now pointing to a client’s site.

Over a third of all the links created were from press coverage or blogger engagement. And we hadn’t even been trying to build links; this was merely a by product of our work.

There are other metrics too, like site traffic and bounce rates, but it is the basics (link building) that many don’t understand.

In summary, SEO and PR are incredibly complementary for these eight reasons:

1 – 65 per cent of Google rankings are made up of off-page factors, such as in bound links
2 – PR campaigns naturally create inbound links, almost as a by product
3 – It is very easy to measure inbound links and prove that they were generated by PR
4 – Good public relations consultancies secure their clients links on high quality sites, such as the BBC, or other national newspapers. The sort of links SEO companies can only dream of
5 – SEO professionals can provide insight for PR campaigns, such as helping define key messaging or campaign targeting. PRs should work with SEO professionals where possible
6 – PR professionals can help with on-site SEO, by developing fresh content, rich in keywords (e.g. a blog, social content)
7 – PR activity can also help dictate the nature of the anchor text (which is another SEO factor)
8 – PR can also improve your social graph. (yet another contributing factor to SEO)

If you are still reading this post, and want to find out more, here is some further reading.
10 ways to make press releases more SEO friendly

There are tips galore on how to make your writing SEO friendly

There are plenty of articles on the best press release distribution services

The world doesn’t need another beginner’s guide to SEO either, but this one is pretty good.

                          

Quora for public relations?

For PR people interested in thought leadership, Q&A tools like Yahoo Answers have failed to deliver. In fact, sites like these have been the subject of much derision. Since 2008 a service called Quora has been emerging, and it is now about to break into the mainstream.

The increasing amount of unique users (see fig 1.) is not the main reason for jumping to this conclusion; nor is the user experience that sees a community which is ready to provide insight on serious industry topics, or light hearted fun stuff too.

Fig1.

stats

It is also not the way Quora combines the best of a wiki, Reddit and the ability to share your questions with a wider community on Twitter or Facebook.

The reason behind why Quora is so useful is that it is a genuine source of insight and a huge thought leadership opportunity for anyone willing to make best use of it.

I found it useful, if a little difficult to grasp at first, and I did make a few mistakes (putting comments where answers should be etc). However, I think in part it is this complexity which has kept Quora high brow compared to Yahoo Answers.

For the uninitiated, here are a few notes on Quora. Rather than writing my own thoughts, I felt it made more sense to construct this post from questions asked by me and others.

Why are the responses on Quora better than Yahoo Answers?
Speaking from my design instincts alone: Yahoo! Answers was designed for a very broad audience, and as with any service designed for a broad audience, you have to design for lower common denominators. That is, people who rely on dead simplicity and the ability to ask and answer questions easily. Over simplification and making something too easy can be a reason why the overall quality of information on a service is poorer – it’s simply too much perceived effort to create high quality information. Quora, with its more sophisticated features, seems to have been designed for a much narrower audience that cares highly about the quality of information that flows through the community

What is the need for Quora when Yahoo! Answers has such widespread adoption?
First, it’s all about the users and their interests. Yahoo’s user base is significantly different from Quora’s. They talk about different things. They answer in different ways. Early adopters set the tone and expectations of a community, and while Quora may/should/will eventually move beyond the silicon valley crowd, the culture is being shaped now by us social software loving alpha geeks.

Second, it’s hard for sites to evolve models once they have established communities. Yahoo Answers was cutting edge in 2006, but it doesn’t have wiki edits and its reputation system could use an update. Not all user bases can withstand significant changes, and you run the risk of driving them away.

How can I follow topics on Quora?
Almost anywhere you see a topic, it will either have a green “Follow” button next to it. If you click that button, you’ll start following the topic.

If the topic doesn’t have a follow button next to it, you can usually click on the topic name which will take you to the topic page where this is a big green “Follow” button in the top right.

Following a topic means you’ll see questions about that topic in your feed and it will be listed on your profile

I suspect they’ll have nearly complete indexation within 3-7 days. However, depending on whether the pages they encounter produce duplicate content or faceted navigations that show a lot of the same links/questions/answers, they may start dropping a lot of that over time. Hopefully, Quora’s been thoughtful about how they built their information architecture to help solve this potential

How long will it take Google to index Quora? (answered by Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz)
I suspect they’ll have nearly complete indexation within 3-7 days. However, depending on whether the pages they encounter produce duplicate content or faceted navigations that show a lot of the same links/questions/answers, they may start dropping a lot of that over time. Hopefully, Quora’s been thoughtful about how they built their information architecture to help solve this potential issue.

                          

Posted via email from jamescrawford’s posterous

                          

Posted via email from jamescrawford’s posterous

                          

Download now or preview on posterous

CIPR.pdf (756 KB)

This report was published by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) and looks into the state of the PR industry.

Posted via email from jamescrawford’s posterous

                          

Is Steve Jobs trying to protect Apple’s public relations image by deflecting negative PR attention towards himself?

As public relations crises go, Apple’s iPhone 4 launch is up there in second place behind BP’s oil leak.

The product launch has been besieged by negative press and PR coverage regarding the product’s aerial and connection.

Recently, many bloggers have focused on an email from Steve Jobs, in which he emailed a customer and allegedly said that the phone worked perfectly well and claimed customers are holding the handsets incorrectly.

Steve Jobs has a track record of replying to people personally by email, as illustrated by this Steve Jobs’ blog. As you can see, often his emails are short and terse.

Now, the latest public relations issue is revolving around whether these emails were real or fake.

This made me ask myself the question: is this email exchange an intentional PR tactic-come-stunt by Apple? It sounds like a crazy PR strategy to cook up a stink for your brand in this way. Or does it?

Are people now talking about the incredible failings of Apple’s New Product Development team, or is the focus on the crazy public relations style of Steve Jobs? Or, put more accurately, is Steve Jobs deflecting some of the negative attention away from the brand?

Engadget, Erictric, Gawker, 9 to 5 Mac, Mobility Site, Electronista, Gizmodo, everythingiCafe and Techcrunch have all published the email story. What is more, Steve Jobs’ email is the number two story on Techmeme and a top ten story on aggregator Popurls.com.

There are other famous examples of this tactic working to great effect. Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager, is also expert at this type of crisis management.

When his team is in trouble, he will pick a crazy fight with a referee, another club manager etc, just to take the heat off the team. Just read a few of these perfectly executed PR and press sound bites if you don’t believe me.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this was what Tony Hayward at BP was trying to do in the US (but badly). Most CEOs have shares in the business, and the last thing they want to see is their investment being hit.

If push comes to shove, a CEO can get another job fairly easily. Of greater importance to them is the value of the business and the return to their shareholders.

It is very easy to measure PR sentiment and other public relations objectives, like public opinion and a move like this can be carefully stage managed.

A large corporate like Apple can control their PR communications in many ways and a brave CEO won’t mind taking a bullet for the corporation, as long as it’s not a terminal blow.

                          

PR people from around the globe recently met in Barcelona for a conference on measuring public relations.

The professionals in attendance came up with a seven point measurement standard for the public relations industry.
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The initial reaction from the blogosphere was that these points didn’t offer anything new and told PR people what they already knew.

My guess is that the PR Week article didn’t reflect the depth at which each of these points were discussed. Instead it inspired me to write this post on measurement.

So, just how can you measure PR?

Prior planning
What seems to be missing from most PR blog posts on this subject is that measurement should begin before a proposal has even been written.

Public relations experts use planning tools, similar to those used in advertising, to find out about:
- Markets, products, services, demographics, media and attitudes, e.g. TGI data or Caci for example
- online media profiling, e.g. using www.google.com/adplanner or Metrica’s http://www.metrica.net/ tools, which I have used.

Note, I promised to blog about Metrica because I used their great planning tool but fatherhood distracted me, sorry lads.

By undertaking planning, PR consultants can target campaigns, but also help to inform objective setting. More on this later.

Set public relations objectives
The first important step is to set SMART PR objectives
- e.g. achieve a three per cent sales increase on an e-commerce site by targeting the travel media.
Without SMART KPIs you can’t measure. Don’t be scared to set PR objectives which link directly to business outcomes, rather than media coverage objectives. However don’t neglect media objectives too.

What to measure?

Impact
It doesn’t matter if an article had all your key messages in and was 32 pages long if it had no impact with your target audience. To measure impact you can:

- Use sales or footfall data. Have you seen a return on investment? What was it?
- Monitor behavioural change. Read this post on behavioural economics
- Undertake opinion tracking studies of customers.
- What do they think?
- Has it changed?
- Research the views analysts and industry experts
- Survey your staff.

Competitors
Don’t just monitor yourself. Monitor your competitors PR activity.
- As a percentage has their share of voice decreased?
- What is the impact of their campaign on yours? What do your customers think of them?
- Demonstrate client and competitor social search visibility.

SEO
PR has a huge impact on SEO so measure it. Too many PR agencies fail when it comes to measuring online coverage. IT IS SIMPLE TO DO.
- Use Yahoo Site Explorer to measure backlinks.
- Map out when press coverage was achieved and overlay it to Google Analytics data on site visitors.
- Is there a correlation?
- Referral sites, where did visitors come from?
- Compare news content ranking with competitors.
- Run a keyword ranking report and compare to a competitors.
- Set keyword ranking goals and overlay any changes with PR coverage.

Interaction
Has your campaign created interaction with a community or group, both on or off line? Radian6 is good for online but expensive. In the real world, maybe monitoring the impact on third parties is a job for a community relations officer?

Coverage measurement
Don’t forget that nothing makes the client happier than clippings. Although the real power of public relations is shown with its impact on the business, a managing director loves to see physical results.

- How many clippings, articles, bookmarks, retweets, reblogs, readers or viewers have you achieved?
- Group the media based on importance. Is this a tier one, two or three title (one being most important)?
- Regionality: are you reaching all the right places both globally and locally.
- Photography: it’s a metric for print media, but a picture can really improve page impact, and readability.
- Advertising equivalent value (AVE): Firstly contrary to the CIPR, AVE is OK and is not “dead”, it is just not that important in the grand scheme of things.
- Key messages: create key messages and measure their number, prominence and effect on the overall tone of the article. This can be done:

o quantitatively (e.g. how many times these appeared in the article.)
o qualitatively (e.g. was the theme of the article consistently on or off message?)
o by analysing use of spokespeople: where they quoted?
o Favourability.

- Journalists/ analyst/ blogger tracking: what are they saying and why and has it changed over time?
- Social-economic penetration: has the coverage reached your target audience?
- Reach frequency and opportunities to see.

There are lots more different ways to measure, but I am stopping now. I could go on and on and on. If you want to know more about PR measurement, drop me a line or visit AMEC.

                          

1. Measuring SEO for PR

2. Another cool news curation tool

3. A tidy post on geeky digital media presences

4. A CIA problem solving check-list- ideal for pitches

                          

In a recent PR post about online media and the world cup, it was suggested that FIFA has missed a trick with social media for this year’s World Cup.

My take in this public relations conundrum is that while FIFA has ‘dropped the ball’ with online media, it might have decided to:

1. ignore social media on inclusivity grounds
2. avoid the complex task of running a pan-global social media campaign

Firstly let’s look at point 1. Why would FIFA ignore social platforms on inclusivity grounds? Social media is the most inclusive form of media ever created, right?

My answer is simple. While I can afford a smart phone, a laptop, broadband and other modern luxuries, fans in North Korea or even in parts of host nation South Africa probably can’t.

Would moving parts of the World Cup experience into social media be excluding large numbers of people, perhaps the majority of football fans, from enjoying the tournament on an equal level to the rest of us?

I think it is very easy to argue “yes”. Just look at this map as an example, and look how many missing countries there are with no social platforjms at all.

Fig. 1.1. Click on the image to make it large enough to read on screen

Some might say that a true pan-global campaign should be tailored per country, allowing for use of social sites in some countries and not so in others, but I am not sure that this would be the right thing to do in this instance.

Football is a unifying force, so why exclude people from the experience? We are already seeing poor South Africans being priced out of tickets to matches, and this exclusion doesn’t need to be made any more prominent.

TV is still the number one medium globally, so let’s not forget that. I have been to rural villages in Asia and Africa and found families with TVs. It might be that during the tournament an entire village is crowded around one TV, but at least most villages can access a TV. Therefore a broadcast campaign should be the favoured platform.

Now let’s consider point 2, i.e. that a pan-Global campaign is just too difficult for FIFA. It is a slightly depressing consideration, but probably quite likely.

This presentation below starts to illustrate how difficult FIFA’s task would be. The presentation looks at which online media is popular in different countries, but even this very comprehensive study has lots of gaps, where there is no data, or possibly internet usage, i.e. Africa, parts of South America etc. Again, making a social media campaign is difficult to say the least.

Even in the ‘developed’ world some social platforms are more important than others. In Holland, for example, Facebook is not the number one platform and Twitter is even less popular. The Differences between platforms in other countries is a huge barrier and a complex problem.

Difficulty is no excuse of course for not giving social media a go. To the contrary, but while there are still organisations in the UK, US and elsewhere who are still baulking at trying social media because of a lack of understanding, one can imagine that perhaps FIFA found the task just too challenging.

Social Media around the World