Now if only we’d registered .com for Technology PR and Online PR whilst we had the chance…

http://www.25yearsof.com

Just bought a car? “Should have got the SLX, with the double overhead camshaft like mine.”

Renewed your house insurance? “Should have gone with my lot, they would have saved you at least a grand.”

Been diagnosed with a fatal disease? “My grandfather had that, recovered in three weeks and went on to play for West Ham youth team before he got his leg broken while punching a Sherman tank into submission and saving the lives of his entire battalion. Montgomery himself pinned the Victoria Cross on him, after which he invented Penicillin; although Fleming got all the glory. Typical.”

The modern day tee-total pub for the office worker masses, popular social media sites, are awash with pub bores peddling witless one-sided opinion for the sake of a corporate online PR pound. “Excellent post Bob, you make some great points which I’ve expanded on in my blog.”

Pub bore comments on forums range from the tediously dull to the toe-curlingly self-serving. Hitting as many forums as possible with a repeated message of how fantastic your company or product is, especially inane trite  such as “I tried this great amazing new thing, why don’t you?” will drum up about as much interest as walking into a pub and reading out pages from your trainspotting diary.

The thing with forums is that, much like local pubs, the regulars are very quick to spot an outsider. And unless you treat that forum with the same respect you would if you didn’t want to get glassed by the group of angry Geordies sitting in the corner, you’ll soon be outed, ignored or kicked out.

Forums are a place for social interaction, and the tone of conversation is predominantly that of a group of people standing in a circle having a nice chat. By all means join in, but think about what you are saying, listen to others and respond accordingly. Posting anything along the lines of “I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but you really should,” or “this is the place you have to go,” is akin to walking up to a table of older drinkers and shouting that you know a great place round the corner that sells cheap coffins before walking on by to tell the darts team about a little shop where you can buy self-inscribed trophies.

Perhaps the biggest shame is that, while the pub bore can only visit a certain amount of watering holes before slurring and stumbling his way into a drunken sleep, the over-enthusiastic online PR bunny can just go on and on and on. 

—

Steve Loynes and Brad Jordan

Yet SEO is very much part of the communications mix and, as such, comms, marketing and PR heads all need to ensure they are working in unison to ensure that all activity is aiding the company’s overall search engine performance.

Beyond the actual website copy, public relations is the most powerful driver in an effective search engine optimisation strategy because of the number of links it can create that point back to the company’s website (“in-links”).

So, Chameleon thought it might be useful to share two basic tips to quickly assess the ‘profile’ of a company website as a starting point in thinking about SEO-centric PR campaigns.

Google gives websites a PageRank from 0 to 10. The higher the PageRank, the more likely Google will place it higher up its returns on relevant keywords (if two sites rate equally on the keyword “enterprise storage,” for example, the one with the higher PageRank will be higher up the list). And as Google has around 90 per cent of the UK’s search market, this is the one to focus on.

The easiest way to discover the PageRank of a website is to use one of the free online tools. A good one to use is PRChecker.info or, even better, install the Google toolbar as it has an automatic PageRank display. A score of four to six is pretty typical, while seven or eight should be cherished and a nine is nirvana.

Improving a website’s PageRank cannot be done overnight, but one of the main criteria of the PageRank calculation is the number of “inlinks” the website has and how ‘authorative’ those websites are (largely determined by their own PageRank). An inlink is, as the name suggests, is a link to the site from an external website (for example, a story on FT.com that carries a link through to the company cited in the news story would be an inlink for that website; and a good one too, given FT.com has a PageRank of eight).

You can check how many inlinks a website has by using Yahoo! Site Explorer (which helpfully reveals more info than Google). Make sure the complete URL is entered (e.g. www.chameleonpr.com) so it includes all results.

Click ‘Inlinks’ then select ‘except from this domain’ and ‘entire site’ from the drop-down option boxes to get a view of how many inlinks a site has; clicking through allows you to see where the inlinks come from. There is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ number, so the benchmark has to be made against competitor websites. Remember that more isn’t necessarily better; it is quality that counts (one link from FT.com outweighs thousands from automated websites that simply list news releases).

These two quick checks are a good first step to thinking about better using PR activity to improve PageRank. If nothing else, it stimulates debate and gets SEO out of its techie box and into the marketing mainstream.

Most of the findings are not too surprising, though, pointing out that 99 per cent of young British males are online every day (or nearly every day), and the internet is ahead of both mobile phones and TV in terms of how addictive they are to men aged between 18 and 44: 57 per cent are most attracted to the internet, then it’s mobile phones with 49 per cent, and lastly TV (46 per cent).

Taking the topic to bed doesn’t seem too shocking either (at least at first): 25 per cent are checking emails before getting out of bed in the morning and 18 per cent log on to social networking sites at the crack of dawn.

However, the surprising bit shows when taking a second glance at the extent to which young men use internet in bed: 38 per cent have apparently surfed the internet while in bed with their partner!

This is sad, no doubt about it, especially for the women. But is this in fact just technology winning another round over (wo)Man?

We’ve already got GPS technology, which basically lets drivers switch off their brains as they get in the car. This has resulted in wrong-way drivers on the motorway, who were just following the directions, but missing the fact that the Sat Nav leaves out roads leading from the motorway.

And with all the computer programs and super stimulus toys targeted at children, today’s kids never get to experience the great improvised games that come out of nothing and a bit of time to think.

Surely the bedroom ought to be sacrosanct from the march of technology.

Along with the usual YouTube videos, leaflets, tweets, etc, there are also three accompanying posters.

The Tories’ last poster campaign, you know, the one sporting a rather smoothly airbrushed David Cameron, looking rather Morph-like, didn’t take long for the blogosphere to say something about it.

Doctored versions of the poster started springing up everywhere, from Facebook to websites such as mydavidcameron.com, which even uploaded blank templates for people to edit as they saw fit.

And it only took a few hours Monday morning for exactly the same thing to happen again:

If the Tories had replaced their entire poster campaign from the previous in order to stem the effort non-conservatives were going to with parodying their messages as The Independent had reported, they failed. Before lunchtime the hashtag “#ivenevervotedtory” was trending worldwide on Twitter:

• #ivenevervotedtory because actually I think Gordon and Alistair have done a great job … mwahahahaha
• #ivenevervotedtory because that New Labour, New Danger ad campaign still gives me nightmares
• #ivenevervotedtory because I believe in genuine co-operative values not made up twaddle
• #ivenevervotedtory because of their position on Europe. Oh and because they remind me of all the stuck-up braying arses I was at uni with!
• #ivenevervotedtory because Phil Collins will come back if I do
• #ivenevervotedtory because they are home to homophobic bigots and promote an unequal society
• #ivenevervotedtory because Jim Davidson does. And you don’t want to be associated with that c**t

By mid week, the ‘I’ve never voted Tory but’ poster parodies had made pretty good coverage, both online, and nationally. They had spread across all manner of social networks and news sites, from Facebook to New Statesman. Seemingly a fail for the Conservatives, and a win for the Government. However, was this exactly what the Conservatives wanted to happen? (Cue evil genious laugh)

As Paul Owen wrote in his blog over at the Guardian, the new posters practically beg to be altered. The slogans are set out on big blue oblongs, making them so simple to edit my 5 year old cousin could manage it, and that half sentence; “I’ve never voted Tory, but” pleads for defacement louder than a whitewash wall in the middle of a rough estate.

The doctoring of the posters helped elevate public interest in the original campaign to levels well above what our political apathy often allows for, and at far lesser cost. Plus, by the end of Monday, the hashtag #ivenevervotedlabour had replaced #ivenevervotedtory, which was no longer trending:

• #ivenevervotedlabour because ultimately they run out of other people’s money
• #ivenevervotedlabour and never will because the bastards have stolen my hard earned pension
• #ivenevervotedlabour because they are a bunch of joyless self righteous authoritarians who want to dictate how we all lead our lives
• #ivenevervotedlabour because their policies are designed to keep poor people poor
• #ivenevervotedlabour because ALL Labour Governments run out of our money in the end
• #ivenevervotedlabour Because quantitative easing is the economics policy of Mugabe

The Tory tweeters had come out in force, in their Uggs and Jack Wills, probably sitting in the Sloaney Pony in Parsons Green, tweeting furiously on their iPhones.

If anything, the tweets from both sides provided a lot of public opinion, more so than you’d expect to get from spending thousands on focus groups.

As the dust slowly starts to settle and the posters continue to bounce through peoples’ inboxes, you’ve got to ask, was this a stroke of viral marketing genius? 

Good question. And this is exactly the question I found myself asking as I logged into YouTube to check out their latest changes to their interface for an upcoming blog post.

When searching for a recent tech PR video we uploaded (Chameleon’s view of PR in 2010’ – a short video highlighting some of our predictions for public relations in the new year), I took note of the ‘Related Videos’ to the side.

Whilst Steve was insistent that the relation of our video to clips from Miss Universe 2010 had something to do with the fact that he was first to appear on the film, after a quick look we realised it was in fact the titles were very similar.

This is interesting as the tags for each video are completely  different. It would appear that for the moment, YouTube is favouring indexing videos via the titles, placing less of a weighting on the tags users have specifically selected to categorise their content.

Whilst having the advantages of stopping users spreading content across YouTube, tagging videos with irrelevant key words; with the internet expanding rapidly, and more and more digital content pouring onto the internet, have YouTube picked the proper way to index their videos? Is there a better way?

Darius Pocha speaking at the Thinking Digital Conference 2009 from Herb Kim on Vimeo.

The title of this post could also be “how to make a great presentation” but regardless it’s nice to be able to post some genuinely fascinating content on digital communications. 

The video shows Darius Pocha, creative director at Enable Interactive (a new Chameleon client), presenting at Digital Thinking using a conehead and an orange to engage his audience. The talk is about why a digital experience can never match real life perception.

Most physical descriptions can’t be stimulated online, they can only be described. There are a number of physiological reasons why we are not wired up to find digital experiences interesting.

Our most memorable real-life experiences often occur in a state of heightened perception brought on by physiological changes in our brains and dependent on environmental circumstances.  Unfamiliar or unexpected surroundings, perceived or real anticipation or risk, heighten our perception or deliver us into a state of “depth-first processing”.

Most digital experiences are permanently on demand and accessible and therefore devalue our experience. The best digital campaigns need to include triggers that stimulate depth-first processing, while evolving the participant’s experience to be truly memorable.

Top tips for digital campaigns include:

- most physical descriptions can’t be stimulated only described so make your descriptions powerful

- introduce chance, uncertainty or risk to encourage your audience to enter depth-first processing. Humour also triggers this state

- “non-demand” is more memorable. If it’s repeatable at least evolve the experience

Or alternatively, get yourself a conehead!

Chameleon

However celebrations at Chameleon were slow to materialise when, dropping us the good news by email, Matt at Enable finished the note with a final line saying: “Let’s do some f***ing great things together.”

Our spam filter has a somewhat septuagenarian outlook to life, and language, and promptly blocked the message. Thankfully we got a follow up phone call before the ice melted and the beer got warm.

Yes, who needs a good degree in computer science when you’ve got a tiny waist, disproportionately large boobs and a chic outfit. And what is that outfit? Do female QCs wear dresses with wigs printed on them? Do women police officers wear uniforms sporting burglars and swag bags? No, so why the dress with a laptop and circuit boards print? And the old intelligent therefore she wears glasses cliché. Truly dreadful.

You wouldn’t mind, but she’s not even that good at IT by the looks of things. She’s got a Bluetooth headset from the 1980s, a watch that’s wider than her hand and that laptop has a decidedly blue screen. And as for the abomination in the executive car park…

Bernard Liautaud, founder of Business Objects, took to the stage as part of the Entrepreneurial Leadership Speaker Series and explained the company’s meteoric successes (and mid 90s failures) that led to the $6.8 billion acquisition by SAP in 2008.

Bernard Liautaud - “Inspire people to do better than they think can do on their own.”

Included in the story were lessons in the gentle art of attempting to purchase intellectual property from a programmer, raising venture capital and preparing for an IPO. Bernard achieved this in a period of just 4 years and in 1994 Business Objects became the first European company to list on NASDAQ.

However two years later, the glamour of Wall Street, and the pressure of investors, led the company to over-reach. Bernard committed the company to put all its energy behind the launch of a new product to run on the newly-released Windows 95. So committed in fact, that the software was not backwards compatible to run on 3.1. Making the mistake of exerting too much pressure on the development team, even the non-programmer, Bernard, was left staring at lines of code, when the delays hit.

Shortly after, a large customer deal in Germany fell through, forcing Business Objects to engage in the cardinal market sin of re-stating its earnings. Investors were furious and the stock price bombed from $55 to $5 in just two months.

However, in 1997 Bernard’s turnaround plan was in full swing. He took the decision to move the management team from France to California, in a deliberate move to cozy up to partners and investors. Meanwhile, his desire to re-innovate led to the creation of a web team and a pure internet-based product. That year the technology company posted a 50% growth and never looked back.

In 2003, Bernard desired to leap-frog the competition and his big bet was to acquire Canadian BI-firm Crystal Decisions. Organic growth continued apace and it was only a matter of time before SAP, IBM & Oracle made approaches to buy the company.

Click here to watch a video of the full seminar

Bernard Liautaud’s key success factors:

Value innovation

• A simple value proposition
• Create new market (Blue Ocean Strategy)

Entrepreneurial model

• Raising smart money (Silicon Valley & European)
• Assemble the greatest possible team (using equity)
• Shoot for an IPO 5 years down the line

Transnational model

• Go global quickly & head to the US (the driving market) in year one
• Transnational money, board & management team
• Go public on NASDAQ

Ambition / culture of passion

• An aggressive business plan to be #1 worldwide.
• Darwinian organisation (R&D)