THINKing

A Question Of Trust

What companies do you trust? From all the recent headlines, it seems there are no trustworthy companies out there these days. Well, Forbes has just published its list of the 100 most trustworthy companies.

According to the story, “Audit Integrity, an independent Los Angeles firm that does research on corporate governance best practice (and which is a data supplier to Forbes.com), has drawn up its first list of 100 American companies that, in its judgment, “showed the highest degree of accounting transparency and fair dealing to stake-holders during 2006.”

Check it out and let me know if you agree with the list.

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Brainstorming Resources

When it comes to brainstorming, most people do it wrong. There truly is only one rule: initially, there are no bad ideas. The objective of brainstorming is to generate as many ideas as possible.

So, here is my list of brainstorming rules, followed by some resources.

• Develop ideas first, sort them out later.
• Identify the problem, discuss the solution.
• Generate ideas, ideas, ideas.
• Think quantity, not quality.
• Think, “Why Not?”
• That crazy idea may be a great one.
• Let one word or thought suggest another.
• Never criticize others’ ideas.
• Think positive. Exclude negatives.
• Imagine no budget restraints, no one to say, “That won’t work.”
• Stuck? Move on. Come back later.
• Don’t sweat the details.

BOOKS ON BRAINSTORMING/CREATIVITY
• How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, Michael J. Gelb
• Writing With Power, by Peter Elbow
• The Creative Brain, by Ned Herrmann
• 99% Inspiration: Tips, Tales & Techniques for Liberating your Business Creativity, by Bryan W. Mattimore
• Five Star Mind, by Tom Wujec
• The 5-Day Course In Thinking, by Edward de Bono

WEBSITES

• Creativity Workbook
• Creative Aerobics

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Dead Fish Website

Too often, websites are just repurposed brochures. When you hit the home page of one of these sites, they lay there like a dead fish in the sun. There is no interactivity, nothing to direct you on to deeper content. Colleague Jack Aaronson has some advice on how to determine what should be on your home page.

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My MediaRoom

Do you have a media room on your website? A media room is a dedicated web site for press releases, event announcements, a blog, and more. If you don’t have one, MyMediaRoom may be the answer for you. It is a community news platform that enables organizations to get their message out to targeted audiences.

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I Own You!

Who owns what? That is a question media buyers have asked for years. With this knowledge you often can craft a media buy that does a better job leveraging your media budget. With media moving toward the web, it is still a valid question. Here’s at least part of the answer.

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Optimize

Today?s news release is written differently than those from the past. It needs to be newsworthy and it needs to sound like a human wrote it. However, you also must include the right keywords in it. Let?s examine some news release optimization techniques.

Research Is Key. If you have already optimized your website, then you know what keywords to include in your releases. However, if you are starting from scratch, it is important to do some keyword research. There are some decent free keyword research tools, like the stripped down version of Wordtracker, the one from SEO Company and Google AdWords. Look for keywords that have the highest volume and the least competition. For instance, when we launched AccessURP, we searched for keywords that would bring people looking for commercial real estate in Charlotte, NC to the site. We used several variations of that phrase in our pay-per-click ads, in our search engine optimization, and in our news releases.

Anchor?s Away. Use anchor text in your releases. You?ll notice in the news release how I anchored the phrase commercial real estate. This provides an important backlink to the page you want people to visit.

Consistency. As I mentioned above, we used the same targeted keywords in our SEO, our pay-per-click ads and our news releases. They all need to work together to drive traffic to the right place.

Spread The Love. Now, place the release on your site and include a forward-to-a-friend link to make the release easier for your visitors to send it to someone else. Use PRWeb to distribute the release and use all the features it provides like social media tagging with Technorati keywords. PRWeb has a wealth of tools to help improve your release for the online environment. Additionally, PRWeb distributes directly to consumers and journalists interested in your topic. They also distribute releases to bloggers, and thousands of websites syndicate their content.

So, for as little as $120 per release, you can build high quality backlinks to your site and cost effectively reach people interested in your release.

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Digitize

Some say Ivy Lee invented the news release in 1906. But since its invention, a news release only rarely has scored anyone a placement in the New York Times. But, as we have discussed before, the news release is not dead. It has evolved into a powerful tool for publicity and driving web traffic.Written and distributed correctly, a news release can provide a real boost to your online PR program. How so, you ask?

Linked Up. Properly implemented, an optimized press release campaign can lead to high quality one-way links to your site. Many of the links will be from sites with a high Google Page Rank, which boosts the credibility of your site in Google?s eyes.

Search Me. Once your release is distributed to online media points, it becomes part of a searchable database of information about you and the keywords you have built into the release. This improves your organic search results. Look at this search for My Creative Team as an example.

The ?A? List. About 70 percent of Americans get most of their news online, and Yahoo! News is the most highly trafficked website online today. Properly optimized, a news release can receive very high placement in places like Yahoo! News, MSN News and Google News. Residual web traffic to your site can continue for as long as 30 days if you make it high on the list.

ROI. News releases are cost-effective vehicles for increasing exposure, web listings, and building brand awareness for your organization. Using low cost services like PRWeb.com, my news distribution portal of choice, allows you to bypass the media filter and go directly to consumers interested in your topic. PRWeb releases are syndicated by thousands of sites, increasing your reach. So, your return on investment is higher with a press release than with advertising.

Finally, if your release contains something really newsworthy, you might even get a call ? or a pick-up ? from the media. That used to be the measure of success for a news release. Today, it is just a bonus.

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Cool Tool

eHub calls itself “a constantly updated resource of web applications, services or sites with a focus on next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source, folksonomy, design and digital media sharing.” I call it cool.

Here you will find a list of many excellent tools like Grand Central, which provides you with one telephone number for life that can reach you anywhere. Cell, home, work – you decide the phone from which to pick up all your calls. Sweet. Or, how about GraphSomething? If you ever need a graph that you can port to a presentation or to a blog, this will let you do it once it is launched. It’s not live for all users yet.

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Social Media Ages Gracefully

Let’s face it, highly hyped sites like MySpace and YouTube are for younger people. I am not younger people. Nor are the people I’m trying to reach for my clients and myself.

For instance, my wife’s new murder mystery is out and I know that it is typically older females who constitute the bulk of mystery readers. So, I needed to find a way to get the book before this target audience.

Enter Gather. It’s MySpace grown up, a place for affluent adults who tend to skew a little to the left. The founder describes it as MySpace for NPR listeners.

I penned a review of the book and placed it online at MyGather. It’s tagged with all the usual words and I’m hoping it helps increase the audience for Double Dead. Too soon to tell. I’ll keep you posted.

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Web 2.0 Leads MSM Evolution

Many members of the mainstream media (MSM) are dinosaurs just waiting to die. But a few are starting to figure out how to evolve into relevance. USA Today has begun the evolutionary journey with its relaunch of USAToday.com.

The updated website is laden with Web 2.0 features like dynamic content-sharing and recommendation tools, video and blogs. It has a new widescreen format and expanded user-profile and social networking capabilities.

The New York Times, too, is trying to regain relevance in this new era. In a memo to staff recently, Editor Bill Keller wrote, “For this Presidential election cycle we are organizing our coverage in a new (for us) way: for the first time, a central political desk will supervise coverage for the newspaper and the web. This new desk will include not only newspaper editors, but also people with experience in web production, database reporting and software development. Newspaper and online journalism will get equal emphasis–we are well past the day when we can think of ourselves as a newspaper with a Web site on the side–for an audience that now expects its political news to arrive in full multimedia, interactive glory.”

It’s not too late for the rest of the dinosaurs but they need to move fast. The asteroid is getting close.

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