On July 27 I attended and moderated a panel at the PR Summit in San Francisco. This blog post is a report being submitted for Intertainment Media, makers of the desktop communications and content app KNCTR and the real-time chat translation tool Ortsbo.

Pestering bloggers. It's a PR rep's time-honored tradition. A client has something to announce or show off, and PR reps go out of their way to get the attention of bloggers. But what's the best way to approach them?

At the PR Summit in San Francisco, four bloggers and I tried to answer that very question:

• Ryan Singel (Wired.com)
• Jolie O’Dell (Venturebeat)
• Beth Spotswood (SFGate, Huffington Post, and CBS)
• Michael Leifer (Guerilla PR)

12 recommendations on the best way to engage bloggers

Here are 12 tips and arguments that came up in the discussion on how to approach bloggers:

1. Keep it short and sweet. Far too many email pitches have endless copy. Ryan Singel was really impressed with a particular five-line pitch. It's OK if you have more information. Just send it once the blogger expresses interest.

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Strategies for standing out in a world without context

I am in the middle of guiding some new bloggers over at Marketing Conversation on how to blog most effectively. It is pretty exciting and instructive because there are many things I take for granted. One of the biggest trends I see is internal shorthand. What I mean is that my bloggers tend to write based on a lot of assumed context. When they write my company name, they might choose AH instead of Abraham Harrison; and, since that AH is on a corporate blog, they might forget to link it to the best page in the corporate website.

They simply assume that people who are reading content from Marketing Conversation or Because the Medium is the Message — or even an article on the corporate website — are in on the joke. That they grok the context.

Not only is that not true, but it is dangerous, because I am guilty of it myself. I would say north of 80% of the people I engage with on a daily basis online don't know that I am president of a digital agency with over 50 staff and dozens of clients.  See, I make the same assumptions.

I assume that I shouldn't be so self-referential because "they" surely know who I am by now, I have been branding for years. Pretty darn shamelessly if you ask me — at least I thought so.  Not so.

Brand perceptions don't keep up with reality

And I have not even gotten to the most important part: Even if people know who you are, what you do, the company you own, and its products and services intimately, their brand perception hasn't evolved at the speed of your business.  What I did in 2006 is quite a bit different than what Abraham Harrison does now, as a company.

Even worse, after we spend all of this time, resources, hours, money, and brain trust on creating insightful analysis and share it for free on our blogs and via Twitter and Facebook, we're living in a Derridian world: "there's nothing outside the text."  Let me explain.

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Manually posts may give your updates more traction

Have you ever wondered why some of your Facebook posts make it to your fans' news feeds and others do not?

Facebook prioritizes posts using a method they call "EdgeRank." Similar to Google PageRank, Facebook's EdgeRank uses an algorithm that attempts to determine what Facebook users would most like to see in their news feeds. This, in turn, determines how likely your posts will show up in a fan's feed.

There are three main elements to EdgeRank: Affinity, Weight, and Time as shown in the "formula" provided by Facebook below:

Where Affinity is based on how popular you are with a particular user, Weight is determined mostly by the type of post (video, photos, and links are weighted higher than status updates), and Time decay is simply based on the age of the post.

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I've run a social media marketing agency since Autumn 2006 so Abraham Harrison is almost five years old. In that time, we've learned quite a lot.

One of my biggest learnings is that you can't always get a direct bead on your demographic target — and that's OK. We've worked for a broad spectrum in these five years, from health care and pharma to huge radio astronomy projects; from global nonprofits to very specific public affairs campaigns. Social media marketing and blogger outreach and activation can be effective for everything, though it isn't always clear how. B2B seems to be the least confident that social can help them but I believe we have really sorted it out: What I've learned is that if you cannot target your dream customer directly, you can target everyone around him.

I call this "fire for effect," which is a term taken from artillery for when you don't quite know where your target is or your target is well-guarded or sheltered. So what you do instead is you fire downrange, doing your best to either step your shells closer and closer to the true target or to just use the shock and awe of incoming high explosive shrapnel shells going off everywhere else, distracting and engaging powerfully but indirectly.

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ALinkedIn InMap is a tool that can help you visualize your profession network on LinkedIn.

The tool generates a visual "map" of your entire network using nodes for each person in your LinkedIn network.

Clusters are formed on your map based on how people are connected to you and to each other. In the map below, I can clearly see the clusters that represent my connections in the social media realm as well as the publishing industry and within the college where I teach.

Within the "live" tool, you can click on a node to see who it represents.

Aside from just looking really neat, you can use this unique view of your network to your advantage in a number of ways:

• Visually understand how to better leverage your network
• Gain insight into how others in your network are connected
• Pass along job opportunities based on new insight
• Identify gaps in your networking strategy
• Analyze how well you are adhering to your overall networking goals within a specific industry

Are there other ways you have found to apply this tool?

This post originally appeared as a Social Media Tip of the Day on SocialMediaPower.com.

Part 1 of 4: Gary Vaynerchuk on how brands must adjust to the new world of social media.

Ihad the pleasure of meeting up with Gary Vaynerchuk recently when he was in Israel. Here’s his (almost) full speech at the event McCann Erickson held in Tel Aviv.

I am always amazed at how blunt and real Gary can be. Gary told the audience that they were doing all the wrong things in marketing their brands; that they were marketing in 2011 as if it was 2005; that no one watches commercials on TV any more because they all fast-forward with TiVo, and even those who don’t fast-forward are usually too busy looking at another screen (mobile) or even two other screens (Web and mobile) or even three other screens (Web, mobile and iPad). That no one looks at banners anymore and few look at billboards for that matter. Everyone is busy looking at their mobile, or their laptop, or their iPad. This is not the future. This is now.

The talk was insightful, brilliant and captivating. In an ADD world where it is immeasurably hard to catch people’s full attention (as I had demonstrated above), Gary was/is always up to the task. He is probably one of the only people in the world who can keep me captivated for a whole hour without checking my iPhone.

I split the speech into four different parts because of YouTube limitations. They're all worth watching. Enjoy!

• Part 1: Gary Vaynerchuk Speech (embedded above)
• Part 2: Gary Vaynerchuk Speech
• Part 3: Gary Vaynerchuk Speech
• Part 4: Gary Vaynerchuk Speech

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Guest post by Rand Fishkin
Founder & CEO, SEOmoz

If you use Google Analytics, you've undoubtedly seen a report like the one above. The problem is, there's no breakdown of "social media" in this view of traffic sources, and with the dramatic rise of social media marketing, marketers need an easy way to segment and "see" this traffic separately from the rest of their referrers. We know it's mixed in with "referring sites" and "direct traffic" but luckily, there's a way to extract that data in just a few simple steps.

Create a custom segment

1Custom segments are the way to go for separating traffic into filter-able buckets for deeper analysis.

Google Analytics makes this fairly painless:

From any of the "Traffic Sources" sections, just click the "Advanced Segments" in the upper-right hand corner and then the link to "Create a new advanced segment."

Add social sources

2This is the most crucial part, and requires that you have a full list of the sites/words to include. I don't recommend using just the domain names or URLs of the most popular social sites, but instead, some clever "catch-all" words using the "source" condition, as shown below:

Make sure to continue adding "OR" statements, not "and" statements. The latter will require that both conditions are met vs. any one of the "ORs." Here's the list of words I used, though you can certainly feel free to add to it:

• twitter
• tweet
• facebook
• linkedin
• youtube
• reddit
• digg
• delicious
• stumbleupon
• ycombinator
• flickr
• myspace
• hootsuite
• popurls
• wikipedia

Depending on your niche, it might be valuable to run through your top 2 to 500 referring domains looking for any obvious matches. You could also refer to Wikipedia's list of popular social sites.

Test and name your segment

3To create a fully functional segment, you'll want to test the logic you've created to be sure results are returning. Before you do that, though, Google Analytics requires naming your segment (I used "social media"):

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'The more retweets a link receives, the better it performs in search results'

I am very grateful to Cyrus Shepard of SEOmoz for doing the work that explains a little better how social media, online social networks, and the real-time Web heavily influence the results that Google proffers when we search in the form of Experiments on Google+ and Twitter Influencing Search Rankings — a lot more clearly than my recent How to become a super-node rant.

Abraham Harrison has this synergy in its DNA but I have been doing this since 2003 for various agencies sort of by feel. But here's a compilation of the results of Mr. Shepard's experiments: First, the real-time search you had been seeing from Google was highly reliant on a direct firehose from Twitter, which has been mysteriously cut:

The mystery began on July 3rd when Google Realtime Search went dark. The next day we learned that the underlying cause was Google losing access to its special Twitter data feed. The source of the disagreement is unclear, but the effects have been immediate. Realtime Search disappeared--all of it, not just the part that relied on Twitter. This included Realtime results from Google News, Blog Search links, Facebook fan page updates and more.

The direct result is that launching Google+, whether it was ready or not, was mandatory. Real time search of the real time Web is essential in order to be competitive with Facebook and especially Twitter — the epitome of the real-time Web — and so Google Plus is not an option, it is a requirement:

For the past two years Google used Twitter not only to power Realtime results, but also for faster indexation of content and, we believe, to calculate Author Authority for use in their ranking algorithm. Google says they plan on reinstating Realtime with the power of Google+. But the network will have to grow significantly before this works.

With real-time results, a highly influential tweet, widely retweeted, could end up as the #2 result on Google within a couple hours. For reals. Not the old answer of, "I think we can get you onto the front page of Google within six months, no guarantee," the natural SEO shop response of the past.

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KISSmetrics: a funnel reporting tool.

A roundup of the top analytics, email campaign, Web optimization tools & more

Guest post by Jamie Steven
SEOmoz

We often get asked, what apps does your team use? To answer the question, we decided to put together this blog post laying out the Top 10 Web Apps We Love.

The SEOmoz team decided on the Top 10 apps below (in no particular order). However, we found we liked so many apps that we decided to include another 15 that are definitely worth mentioning.

Take a look at our list and please let us know your own favorite apps in the comments.

Google Analytics: Still top of the analytics heap

1Google Analytics is an excellent free web analytics tool. Even if you have another analytics application, we think it's worthwhile to add Google Analytics to your site — it's that good. We use Google Analytics to report on the performance of the SEOmoz website and our online marketing campaigns. Our only requests? Real-time reporting, a referral report with complete URLs and the option to pay for a service level agreement.

Also recommended:
• Yahoo! Web Analytics
• Adobe SiteCatalyst
• WebTrends

KISSmetrics: Good funnel reporting

2Does your website require users to go through multiple steps? If so, you need good funnel reporting; we like KISSmetrics. Simple to setup and configure, but with plenty of options for segmentation and customization, we use KISSmetrics to monitor and report on the key user experiences of our site. It even provides details on the conversion funnel performance of each of our organic keywords-- a big plus for SEOs.

Also recommended:
• Adobe Discover
• Google Analytics (limited funnel capability)

Google Website Optimizer: Conversion rate optimization

3These days, Conversion Rate Optimization seems to be more popular than Harry Potter. Google Website Optimizer is a free way to do simple conversion rate optimization testing on your website. You can test varied landing pages using an A/B test or determine the ideal combination of elements using a multivariate test. Google's tool is free, and capable enough to get you well on your way with CRO.

Also recommended:
• Unbounce
• Visual Website Optimizer
• Adobe Test&Target

MailChimp: Email campaign manager

4MailChimp, oh how we love thee. MailChimp is one of the most intuitive and simple email marketing packages around. And yet, it remains incredibly powerful with detailed analytics, great social media integration and an adorable chimp, Freddie. MailChimp offers both free and affordable plans that work well for low-volume and high-volume email campaigns. Stay awesome, MailChimp.

Also recommended:
• ExactTarget

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