I was lucky enough to do the lunch keynote at the Bulldog Reporter Media relations Summit yesterday, with 500 PR professionals in attendance. The keynote was on What PR Professionals Need to Know About the Web (in addition to a panel session on social media), and there was some coverage here and here and here. But I found the other sessions to be quite interesting and I wanted to share my thoughts as I listened to the other speakers.
Robert Scoble did a great breakfast keynote—I jotted down several interesting ideas he had. He showed the attendees twittervision, where different Twitterers have their comments mapped from wherever they are in the world. He had some slides done with SlideRocket. But the most interesting thing I saw was what Robert called “a TV station in your pocket” when he pulled out is Nokia camera and started transmitting live video over the Internet through Qik.com.
Later in the day, Brian Kaminski of iProspect and Lee Odden of the Online Marketing Blog gave a great session on drawing traffic to your Web site.
Brian previewed some research on the clicks associated with blended search results pages, such as Google Universal Search. Brian showed that of all the new kind sof content added to the blended results page, news stories get the most clicks (38%), with images second (31%), and videos drawing 17%. Brian indicated that the dispartity in click rates is partially due to more news and image results than video results—he expected that video clicks will increase when more video results are shown.
Lee Odden followed up by emphasizing to PR pros how important search marketing is to public relations. He showed how half of all Web sites visit a corporate Web site or an online newsroom at least once a week. That’s why it is so important for PR folks to optimize these content assets. Lee had a great chart that showed the different online PR techniques listed by Push and Pull. Push techniques include sending your content to wire services and RSS feeds, and having people pitch the stories to reporters and even directly to customers through social networks. Pull techniques include search-optimized press releases, your online newsroom, social media techniques, and traditional media coverage.
From the questions I got yesterday, PR pros seem willing to take a few chances to try things the Web way.
