Ostensibly, a Chinwag meeting about PR Online is simply not my bag, but an interface appears to be forming (think Star Trek) between PR and Blogging exemplified by the use of conversation space on blogs (posts and comments) to communicate and respond to messages. And it was fascinating stuff!
Anyone who has seen my recent posts on my business site about the unfinished conversation economy and landing pages are opening conversations will have noted my ongoing obsession with the idea of new media as a conversational thing rather than a cleverly coded object that allows us poor mortals to ‘interact’ with it. This PR chaps have got this with a vengeance and are inventing some great terms like ‘conversational communities’ and ‘blogger relations’.
From a Tipping Point point of view, its about the PR community finding where the conversational communities are and who is the most influential within that community - named connectors by Gladwell - and conversing there.
Manipulative? For sure. Good for consumers? For sure too. Since Dell opened up to consumers after the Dell Hell and batteries debacle Market Sentinel describes that Dell users are voting for XP to be an option on new machines, alongside Vista. Dell have actioned this, this conversation has been resolved so they get an XP option. Would this have happened without this conversation? Like hell it would.
Better and less conversationally opinionated notes than mine are available at Neville Hobsons blog. Neville was part of a panel that included Jacqui White, Online Communications Director, Edelman UK; Stephanie Bonnet, Director, Burson-Marsteller London; and Mark Rogers, CEO, Market Sentinel, with Mike Butcher as chair. An excellent and well informed panel all at the top of their game.
It’s a shame there wasn’t more time to talk about Twitter, that bizarre new 140 character comms. Tim Hoang from Rainier PR asked whether it was important or not for online PR? Or is it a ‘finished conversation’? I guess we need to talk about it …
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Keen as I am becoming to save the planet, I’ve set up below. If you are local and interested, please come along!
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Decided to move to wordpress, with an aim to relieve my apparent Blog Fatigue. Why? Well and number of reasons:
- The Hawdale Associates Newsletters I send need a great deal of thought and edit to send out, and I’d like to get back to just posting some thoughts on design, just off the cuff.
- I’m looking at trying my hand at affiliate marketing with Free Bets Online, and I’d like to see if Wordpress or MT would cope best at this. (So far MT has the upper hand, but…)
- Might just try out Google Adsense here to see how useful that is.
We’ll see. Wish me luck… I’ll try to get something out after Xmas.
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Car Insurance SEO experimentation includes in this case just the simple use of page title, h1, initial body text, and alt tag (single image) to see how effective this is in achieving a high rating on this site across the different search engines.
I have been getting high ratings for some very odd things - an off the cuff short comment about Yoda from Star Wars gets top image rating on the search term ‘Yoda’ and search for ‘John Lewis Direct‘ gets a top three rating against 4 million and some. How can this be? This little test might help tell.
Apologies to all my regular readers, normal service will be resumed soon enough after this Car Insurance experiment.
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Check these statistics
- 57% of adults have access to the internet - web users in Britain are 27.8 million
- 5 million broadband users
- ?770 each spent on internet per year
Wow, I hear you say, this internet thing is really beginning to take off … but I think that if you look a bit harder behind the stats there is something a little more ominous. Try these stats, from the same sources (Mintel and YouGov) that are the hidden implications of the positive stuff
- Two thirds of internet shoppers don?t buy something online every two weeks
- 13% of customers bought less than they bought last year
- 84% made one online purchase, with less than a third being regular repeat - what about the other two thirds?
I see a pattern here. Maybe the internet does good acquisition … its a great draw … but it does poor retention. The experiences gained online are just not good enough to guarentee a repeat visit. In marketing spiel, its a leaky bucket.
I think we need to think about the experiences we are providing online. Are they really good enough to keep the mass market online? If it was just about Jakob’s usability and nothing else, shouldn’t we be doing better than this by now?
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