Since I joined the 360° Digital Influence team at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide about 10 months ago I have gained direct access to world-renowned thought leaders in the field of social media and word of mouth marketing, and had numerous opportunities to further my career in the realm of Internet marketing.  The latest of such opportunities was presented to me last week by John Bell, Managing Director of the Global 360° Digital Influence practice, who also somehow finds time to teach a graduate level course at Johns Hopkins University (oh…and be the President of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association – WOMMA)…crazy right?!?…. Anyways, he offered me the chance to give a guest lecture on search engine optimization at his class “Public Relations in the Age of Digital Influence.”  Needless to say I jumped at the opportunity.  Below you will find the PowerPoint deck I presented as well as a rough outline of what we covered in the class.

A little unsure of the class’s level of knowledge regarding search, the presentation runs the gambit from very basic concepts to more advanced  strategies.  On the class wiki Bell teed me up as “A search expert coming to share some SEO secrets…” so I wanted to provide information on some advanced tactics, but from my experience in dealing with public relations professionals I knew that even taking some time to explain the differences between search engine optimization and search engine marketing (or paid search), would be helpful distinction to make.

After about an hour lecture the class broke into their respective teams to apply what they learned to their two clients, PBS and Seeds of Peace, who they are developing a digital influence solution for over the 14 week course.  All in all being Professor Fleiss for 2 hours was an incredible experience that gave me a new found respect for a teacher’s ability to not only get through to their students, but also ignite and fuel an individual’s passion to learn.

Public Relations in the Age of Digital Influence

Monday’s Class: SEO in the Web 2.0 Era

Keyword Research
a. Search Behavior
b. Head of Tail vs. Long Tail Strategy
c. Measurement: Top Rankings vs Qualified Traffic

II. On-page Optimization
a. Importance of the Title Tag
b. Why Search Engines Love Blogs
c. Choosing the Right Domain Name
d. The All Powerful 301 Redirect
e. Google Webmaster Tools

III. Off-page Optimization
a. Inbound Linking
i. Google PageRank Explained
1. Google PageRank Toolbar
2. Significance of rel=“nofollow”
ii. What is a Quality Inbound Link and How to Find Them
iii. Link Bait
iv. TrustRank
b. Universal Search
i. Content Distribution Strategy
ii. Image Optimization
iii. Video Optimization

IV. Personalized Search & Google’s SearchWiki

V. Search Exercises
a. Keyword Research – Using Google’s Keyword Research Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) come up with 10 head of tail and 10 long tail keywords to target in your SEO campaign

b. Domain Names – Using your list of keywords and a Whois Domain Name Look up tool (http://whois.domaintools.com/) come up with 5 potential domain names for your client’s website.

c. Inbound Link Research – Download Google’s PageRank Toolbar (http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/FT3/intl/en/index.html).   Find 5 different web pages where your client’s website would benefit by obtaining a link from that page.

Have you ever taught a class or just explained a search concept?  What has been your experience in communicating this type of information? What methods have been especially successful for you?

I was surprised to see that a Squidoo lense for FriendFeed did not already exist, so I went ahead and created one. The lense is currently fairly basic. It has a brief description of what FriendFeed is, pulls in blog posts about FriendFeed from Google’s Blog Search, pulls in content from del.icio.us that is tagged with the keyword “friendfeed”, and finally has a list of all the social sharing sites with a short description that can be pulled into your friendfeed. I learned about some pretty cool social sites like Disqus, Tumblr, Jaiku, and Goodreads. Go check it out and tell me what you think. Definitely sign up for FriendFeed if you haven’t already.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch has reported that Google will launch Friend Connect on Monday. Like Myspace’s Data Availability and Facebook Connect this will allow users to bring their social profiles, friend lists, and away messages with them as they visit different sites. The “walled gardens” of social networks are breaking down.  Social networks will become ubiquitous with launching your internet browser.  Who will be the first to provide the service that is most conducive to allowing this social internet to thrive? My money is on Google? What do you think?

I’m currently listing to the founder of the human edited search engine, Mahalo.com, at SES NY.  He started off by saying he thinks “white hat seo” is important, and his comment 3 years ago at SES San Jose about seo being bogus was actually only referring to “black hat seo”

Mahalo currently has 400 people working from home submitting pages to the Mahalo for money per page submitted.

He’s now talking about a pretty cool service on Mahalo that allows you to submit links (descriptions, tags, etcs…) to 12 different social sharing sites all at once.

Mahalo has a rather robust social network that allows users to build friends, and discover their likes and dislikes.

“The New PageRank” Calacanis believes, is an algorithm based on human trust…This appears to be built based on the human review process.

Good Reads…social networking for books.  You can import your reviews of books on Good Reads to the Mahalo search results…

Flickster…social networking for movies

One more thing…Mahalo content will be syndicated into Google search results… the future SERP is part engine & part human….

SEO people “stuck in short term think”…”more into the gaming of the system than the long term value”…”black hats are poluting the web” leads to consumers not trusting the internet…”create less pages, but make ones that are really a lot better.”

Before attending my first marketing conference I decided to consult an industry veteran, well known social media blogger, and fellow Ogilvy PR / 360 DI colleague, Rohit Bhargava. Rohit has spoken on and moderated several Search Engine Strategies panels, so he’s definitely a qualified teacher for a novice like myself. Here are some of his pointers for making the most of a day at SES:

1. Have a back-up plan for which speakers/panels you want to attend each day in case you don’t like your first choice.
2. Sit near the back so you can slip out to another session if you don’t like it or got what you need out of it.
3. Choose a presenter or two to introduce yourself to.
4. Hit up the expo hall to get some cool gear
5. Look for vendors who offer something innovative and different
6. Don’t try to write everything down. Just make note of the big ideas

As a favor for providing his expertise, I’ll be passing out some flyers created for Rohit’s book coming out soon, Personality Not Included: Why Brands Lose Their Authenticity – And How Great Companies Get it Back.  Hopefully tommorrows Search Engine Strategies Expo will be a success and I will be able to develope my own list of tips for making the most out of such a day of learning.  Here are some of the sessions I’m most excited about:

Social Search Track
Social Media Marketing – What is it and What is it Good For?
Marketing to and through social networks means humans are hot again. Not as directory editors; it’s Web 2.0 and your customers are in control. The old-fashioned media buy has gone bye-bye. Social Media marketing is fast emerging as a must-have in search strategies. Learn about the social search revolution, and hear case studies of how marketers have successfully promoted brands and products with it.

Vertical & Retail Track
Big Brand Search Strategies: Build Connections and Fuel Online Promotions
If 80% of web browsing starts with Search—and consumers are spending up to 50% of their media time online—then why are many major Brand companies spending on average only 2.5% of their media budgets online?

As consumers search, they are expressing their interest in specific categories, brands and interest areas. How can Brand companies better connect with these hand-raisers and how can they better leverage their offline media investments? And how can SEM dramatically improve those connections, conversion, brand health and volume rates?

Carol Kruse, VP of Global Interactive Marketing at The Coca-Cola Company will address what it takes for big brand companies to shift their marketing mix to align with new customer behaviors, putting more ad budget to Search and digital advertising.

Presentation topics include:

• Tips for how to win budget increases for digital advertising within Brand companies
• How Search acts as a bridge between offline advertising campaigns and online interactive experiences leading a customer to action
• How to increase brand connections and fuel online promotions by enticing customers with relevant, affinity and community based offers such as the Olympics, and Nascar
• Tips on how Search can amplify the effectiveness of online campaigns such as Display and Social Media to fully realize the opportunity for customer engagement
• How Search can drive direct marketing goals for customer loyalty programs such as My Coke Rewards

Social Search Track
Social Media Research: Informing Search Strategies
If search engines are tapping into human knowledge more widely through tagging, click through tracking, search history features and other methods, so can search marketers. Social networks, blogs, feeds, tagging, social bookmarking and immersive game environments provide 24/7 real-time focus groups. Learn how Buzzmetrics, Cymfony and others help quantify and reveal critical insights.

Stay tuned to find out what I actually learn…

I will be heading to Search Engine Engine Strategies in New York for one day this Wednesday, March 19th.  I will be representing Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence team, and plan to do a live blog post on the DI group blog.  I am excited to hear Jason Calacanis speak, the Founder & CEO of the Mahalo human edited search engine.  The sessions I will be attending will mostly be on the social track in hopes that what I learn will be able to benefit Ogilvy’s word-of-mouth discipline.  Stay tuned for more…

On Wednesday night the 360 DI team of Ogilvy PR hosted a Mashable Meet-up. Upwards of 150 people attended the event, and I had the pleasure of registering people as they came in the door. It was a passionate and innovative bunch with several interesting presentations about different social media start-ups. The most notable presenter was Mixx.com, an alternate to Digg and del.icio.us that allows you to create your own blend of what you find interesting on the Web. It appears to be fundamentally the same as other social sharing sites, with tagging and user voting, but the interface is very user-friendly, and allows for a seamless switch between searching for different content formats (i.e. news, photos & video). Go Mixx it up and tell me what you think…

While I am fairly new to the social media scene, from this Mashmeet turnout it seems that DC may be becoming the east coast place to be for social media.

Aggregating content onto a microsite via RSS is becoming an increasingly popular strategy among PR marketers in the digital space.  Government and non-profit clients have loads of informational content that, if repurposed in an user-friendly manner, can become an effective tool for communicating on the Web.  RSS allows marketers to present this information in a “snackable“ fashion that is appealing to internet users constantly being bombarded with information.  Because of this new strategy, PR marketers need to become smart about the search engine optimization implications of RSS.  RSS and SEO are attached at the hip because of the fresh content and frequent linking intrinsic to syndication.  RSS feeds, however, can become significant search engine visibility assets if utilized in the right way.  Entire link building strategies can and should be built around the submitting of RSS feeds to RSS directories, as well as creating opportunities for your feed to be aggregated on third party sites.  Stephan Spencer gave a great lecture at last years Search Engine Strategies, called RSS and SEO: Implications for Search Marketers.  This is a great place to start learning… 

A Meatball Sundae, coined by Seth Godin, is “the unfortunate result of mixing two good ideas.”  Meatballs and Sundae are delicious by themselves, but the combination is simply repulsive.  For describing the opposite, the fortune result of mixing two good ideas, it would be easy enough to use an analogy like “bread and butter” or “spaghetti and meatball”, but in an attempt to stick with the entre / dessert combo, I think Sweet Potato Pie is perfect.  I digress….

The point is, a corporate blog, by definition, is a Meatball Sundae.  If a corporation decides to add a blog to their website, and everything about the blog remains “corporate” (aka: stiff, commercial, hierarchical, one sided, careful) the outcome will most definitely be unfortunate.  On the other hand, if they decide to embrace the blogging culture of creativity, spontaneity, truthfulness and two-way communication, than a Sweet Potato Pie will result.

My recommendation to any corporation creating a blog on their website: Use the Wordpress platform (Wordpress.org). By using Wordpress instead of simply making your blog an extension of your current site you will be off to a great start in regards to embracing the look and feel of what a blog should be.  There is also tons of great search engine and social media optimization benefits of using the Wordpress software.  Whether you cook up a Meatball Sundae or Sweet Potato Pie from there is up to you…

I finally found an EASY way to add the social bookmarking buttons to my blog posts.  Of course I am weary of overdoing it, but I’ve been trying to find an easy way to “socialize” my blog for some time, so I’m doing it!  Your on your way to Social Media Optimization bliss in just 5 steps:

1. Download Sociable 2.0 here: http://push.cx/sociable
2. Unzip the files to your computer
3. Using FileZilla (or another FTP server) upload the social folder (not just files in it) to the wp-content/plugins folder of your blog
4. Go to your Wordpress Admin and activate the plugin on the Plugins page
5. Go to Options and choose which social buttons you want and how you want them presented

 You get to choose from the following 61 sites (but be tactful!):

blinkbits, BlinkList, BlogMemes, blogmarks, co.mments, connotea, del.icio.us, De.lirio.us, digg, DZone, Fark, feedmelinks, Furl, Fleck, Gwar, Hemidemi, IndiaGram, IndianPad, kick.ie, LinkaGoGo, Linkter, Ma.gnolia, MisterWong, MyShare, My-Tuts, NewsVine, Netscape, Netvouz, PopCurrent, ppnow, RawSugar, Rec6, Reddit, scuttle, Shadows, Simpy, Slashdot, Smarking, Spurl, SphereIt, StumbleUpon, Taggly, Technorati, TailRank, Webride, Wists, Wykop, and YahooMyWeb.

My favorite 7 are in bold.  Which one’s do you like?