We all “blog with a purpose.” Our roles as story tellers necessitate this. But to tell a story with passion, to convey your soul through your words takes a lot of hard work.

What’s this have to do with public relations? Plenty. I’ve been doing a bit of soul searching. Deciding just what it is I do. Deciding how to be awesome and deciding what my path is going to be. And I’ve figured it out.

I want to leave a piece of me in every project I am involved with.

I will pour every ounce I have into making something awesome. Telling a better story. Getting the insider tip on what will make a publication pay attention. I will make damn sure the strategic guidance I provide is beyond anything else being done. I will leave my mark on every press release, blog post, RFP, tweet and mail. Even if that mark means not touching it.

Letting this industry (craft?) have a piece of my soul each day is the best I can do. What are you going to do to make your mark?

Words to live by…

What other changes should I make? Does it flow OK? Should I try a different look?

I’m not talking about the South by Southwest panel picker here. This time, I want you to help me be an Office Hottie. But in this contest, there could be a winner. Well, three actually.

Click here to vote for me!

So, why am I doing this? Well, at first it was a lark. A way to amuse myself by putting a ridiculous photo of myself in amongst the Affliction-clad, Axe-wearing bros and the spray-tanned, attention-needing girls.

But then I made it through to the third round, thanks wholly to friends and family on Twitter and Facebook. And I realized I could do some good here. So, here’s my pledge:

If I win, 100% of the prize will go the following charities:

• Jolkona Foundation. This is a pro-bono account for the agency I work for, but it’s also a great organization doing very innovative work to enable a culture of giving.
• Domestic Abuse Women’s Network. DAWN supports families that have been the victims of domestic abuse and is a local non-profit that I’ve supported in the past. It does good work here in my local community.
• A charity that is important to YOU! See, you’ve all helped this happen, so I want to give everybody a voice on where the money goes. Post a comment with a non-profit and a short reason why the remaining funds should go to it.

Now, go help me be an Office Hottie!

As of April 2011, Twitter’s search API handles 1.6 BILLION queries per day. Twitter fields nine times more search queries per second than it does tweets. And Twitter averages 2,200 tweets per second. People are constantly watching hashtags and complex search queries that can help narrow down audiences, key words and trends. Millions of people routinely scour social networks seeking peer-generated content. They are real-time discovery engines just as much as they are social network. The challenge for us as content strategists is: How do you get your content found? By optimizing your content for social networks, you can take advantage of the possible benefits that they offer to search rankings.

Top five ways to optimize for search

The influence of social networks on SEO is clear. But how can communications pros capitalize on the networks we have worked so hard to build for our clients? Based on the wisdom of those in the SEO industry and the research I’ve done, I’d like to recommend the following five tactics to help optimize content for search across the various social networks:

1. Brevity
2. Authority
3. Keywords
4. Network
5. Plan

Brevity

Did you know that the average shortened URL takes up 20 characters? Commonly accepted best practices suggest limiting the contents of a tweet to no longer than 120 characters to allow for retweets. This means that when you are writing a headline for an article, you now only have 100 characters remaining to fit your keywords in. In order to shorten your headlines, AP style offers some great tips: don’t ask questions, don’t use passive voice and don’t use proper nouns.

Authority

As I discuss in another post, SEO resources for public relations, who links to your content is almost as important as how they link. Search engines are placing emphasis on metrics they call quality scores. These analyze engagement metrics, quantitative analysis (number of fans/followers/etc…) and other factors to determine how important a link is. You can keep an eye on who links to your content and use your analytics to determine who sends the most traffic to your content from their links. This will help you determine who is authoritative about the topics you are writing about.

Keywords

One of social media’s greatest benefits is it can be a source of keyword research. As you’re aware, keywords are the search terms people use to find content and, chances are, you’re already using keywords taken from your team’s prime messaging. Being able to track, monitor and interact with topics or keywords in near real time is amazingly valuable for the PR pro. By using tools such as Twendz Pro  (employer’s product) or Row Feeder (that’s a referral link, I get fancier graphs if you use it), you can observe who is talking about which keywords. And this is key: You can then create content to capitalize on keyword trends as they emerge and capture the mind share of the people using those keywords. For more information on keyword research, this is a very comprehensive guide.

Network

Link building (the act of proactively soliciting for links) can be a daunting task, but by focusing on the “relations” part of public relations, it doesn’t have to be. When working with an influential on a story, one of the greatest selling points is to offer prepackaged content that helps them tell a story. This is often a blog, but could be an infographic, video or podcast. If developing an infographic, as a supplemental tactic to help drive traffic and boost the number of people that will likely link to your content, consider purchasing a sponsorship on an aggregator site such as Reddit. After doing so, work closely with your network of influentials to seed ideas and encourage them to link to your content. In other words, when working with a reporter or blogger, ask them to link to your site or announcement with the keywords you have identified. You can even go so far as to provide them with the HTML code for the link, using the anchor text that contains your keywords.

Plan

You can optimize how you tweet about a Web page by having an editorial calendar and focusing on your desired keywords, researchers have seen a positive correlation on the search engine results pages (SERPs). In addition, Twitter, most of the major Twitter clients and search engines can parse shortened URLs for your search terms. Meaning if your search terms or keywords are in a URL, it can be seen, even though it has been automatically shortened. Having an editorial calendar of tweets, Facebook posts and even replies handy that focus on your keywords will help maximize the opportunities you create when you create content.

As Duane Forrester at Bing says, “don’t stray too far from the core that content is king.” This mantra ties in with our stance of be the story you want to tell. When you think about that next press release or blog post, don’t forget to think about how you are going to optimize it for the social experience as well.

As I recently had the great pleasure of attending SMX Advanced, I listened to a presentation on how to use elementary PR tactics as an SEO tool. In addition, SEOmoz recently published a post outlining the potential dangers of SEO managing PR and vice versa: “At the risk of writing with very broad brush-strokes, the PR world still knows nothing about SEO. This ignorance is reciprocal. …As SEOs, we know very little about how public relations actually work, but we should. Applying PR fundamentals can turn your PR Agency into Linkbuilders on Steroids…”

On the surface that is fine; press releases and media relations can produce a lot of link juice if squeezed correctly. But when you begin approaching reporters or bloggers and pitching story ideas with the sole intent of getting a link to your content, you enter into dangerous territory.

Good tactics gone bad

At SMX, the speaker presented several tactics for engaging influentials to garner backlinks. One that he was proud of was to “Position yourself to be a counterpoint to a story.” While this may play well as an immediate hit, you need to consider your image agenda. Do you want to be the perpetual counterpoint? The long-lasting hits on your brand’s reputation might not be worth the inbound links you receive as a source of controversy.

Instead, add value to the influentials coverage, even if it’s not about you. Some industries such as real estate, restaurants and home rennovations lend themselves particularly well to strong media relations, even if you don’t have a steady source of “news.” (yeah, that’s my realtor, my mom’s restaurant and my cousin’s construction company, everybody needs a little link juice)

The speaker also promoted the use of embargoed stories and even exclusives to encourage journailsts to link to your content. As a practice, embargoes are a tough sell. A lot of tech blogs have explicitly said they will not answer them, while others rely upon an explicit agreement and quality relationship before they are even proposed. And I think that “Exclusive” is almost as meaningful as a “yes” RSVP to a Facebook event invite. It is losing its impact as a media outreach tactic and in the world that has “hamsterized” journalism has been losing traction as a content strategy.

Keep SEO in mind

So, how can you make SEO an active part of your digital communications efforts? There are a few key areas to keep in mind when preparing your content:

Link building

As much as it pains me to say it, press releases are still a good way to collect inbound links. Most wires publish press releases to many of the nation’s metro newspapers and news aggregating website. This is pure speculation, but I would imagine that the major search engines are on to this tactic and have devalued those links.

But, what is important is taking a moment to ask the blogger or reporter you’re working with if they could link to your site or announcement and even provide them with the HTML that uses the keywords you would like to rank for.

Keyword optimization

When you look for coverage on your company or client, what words do you enter in the search box? Those are the keywords you want to rank for and use in your content. Chances are, you’re not the only one putting them in the search box. Search Engine Land has compiled numerous keyword research tools and methodologies. Two of its best roundups are Search Engine Land’s Keyword Research Guide and The Giant List Of Keyword Tools. In addition, this is an amazing guide to keyword research.

As I mentioned earlier, focusing on your key messaging (also known as keywords) will help you create content that not only naturally ranks, but is easily linkable and sharable.

Make content that matters

As Scott Stratten, aka Unmarketing is fond of saying, “People share awesome.” By creating content that is actionable, sharable, helps readers solve a problem, you are making something that people will want to share. This is one of the keys  to not only obtaining inbound links, but also acquiring readers and brand advocates, which can help boost your quality metrics.

Tight, grammatically correct content that tells a great story about your market, customers or opinions are content that people want to share. People don’t want to share your press releases. They may read them and you may see the readership metrics that some of the press release distribution services provide, but they don’t want to share them.

As with any aspect of your overall strategy, SEO is just that. A piece of the puzzle. It solves a problem, not all problems. If your messaging is unclear or if your product or opinions are flawed, SEO won’t help.

Let me know your best SEO tactic that communications professionals can utilize in the comments!

Such as one tweet from Ashton Kutcher generating more than 13,000 views of a YouTube video with a single tweet. Click on that link, because it contains a slight shift in the definition of “influence.” It renames it leverage. It’s not influencing a purchasing or life decision, it was just a lot of people clicking a link. Leveraging your popularity to get people to do stuff.

When rapper 50 Cent tweeted about a small cap public company that he turns out to now be a minority equity shareholder, he caused shares to jump 290% to 39 cents, boosting the company’s market capitalization to around $82 million, a jump of roughly $60 million in a single day. Monday’s volume reached almost 9 million compared the issue’s usual churn of less than 30,000.

But, when we as communications professionals define influencer (hint: it’s not this), we often think of self-anointed gurus that have labeled themselves as such and we completely forget those that have the power to shift the direction of a brand.

I wouldn’t normally name names, but let’s consider a tech reporter such as Aaron Ricadela, a tech reporter whose byline is frequently found in Businessweek and Bloomberg. If we apply the metrics such as Twitter followers or Klout score, he is not influential at all. He’s only tweeted four times and has 14 followers.

But he’s absolutely influential.

My point is, if you approach influence with a narrow perspective based solely on social media metrics, you are missing out on engaging with a ton of people that can shape the perspective of your clients or brand. And isn’t that why we’re in this business?

But these errors, I can’t help but wonder if they’re the result of poor execution of if the embargo is inherently flawed. As PR practitioners, we want to have a way to get our news out to as many people as possible and having journalists who agree to them is a great way to do that. Plus they piss off journalists.

The challenges with embargoes are that some people like to break them, sometimes PR people screw them up and sometimes they’re not worth the effort. But what are they inherently flawed or are we as PR practitioners simply failing to do our jobs well?

In defense of the embargo

Timing can be everything in the public relations world. Our clients want to see the most results possible and depending on the scope and impact of the news item an embargo is a good way to go. The clients get to spend quality time with the reporter and go in depth into the news item.

When the embargo lifts, you can monitor the outreach easily and pull the coverage in a more efficient manner. But I think the great thing about embargoes is that they help keep the time line of an announcement intact. If news breaks before a Web site is ready or before an executive is ready to talk about it, the perception can quickly turn negative.

Proper execution

I think the best thing to do is go to your list of outlets and just ask them what they want. A simple concept that rarely gets acted upon. Talk to your influencer and know what he or she wants. That conversation, regardless of the outcome, will help you down the road.

So, how do you properly execute an embargo?

Plan. A proper plan makes all the difference in the world. Are you seeding exclusives? Are you looking for video? Radio? Print? How will you optimize for inbound interview requests? So many criteria can make or break an embargoed announcement.

Research. Executing a successful embargo partly depends on who is receiving the news. Have you worked with a particular reporter before? Does he/she have a reputation for breaking them? Making a tiered list of outlets that you wish to offer pre-briefs and embaroed news to is almost as important as the news you are sharing.

Have news. Not all press releases are created equally. Make sure the news you are trying to have released under embargo is actually newsworthy.

Communicate. Work with the writer. Make sure they have all of the information and materials they need in order to write the best post possible for their audience. That’s the key, making sure their audience is happy.

Monitor. Sometimes mistakes happen. Be ready for those mistakes. Post published early? Have the release ready for the wire and be ready to react.

As I said before, the embargo can be a valuable PR tool if utilized properly. What do you think? Let me know in the comments!