I’m focusing more and more on social media lately and I’m more and more interested in PR and social media (surprise - if you read my blog you already know this). I still love working with smaller clients when it comes to online PR, especially when I’m consulting (not OrangeSoda work).

Large companies have PR departments that massacre my work. They remove or change the placement of keywords, they make plain things sound complicated. They expect immediate results. They make their press releases so company-centric that it’s boring to everyone but the company and their competitors. And it takes FOREVER to get the job finished, and then get paid. Not all large companies are this way, but it’s more common than in small companies.

Social media and PR are building relationships. Relationships are organic. They don’t take a linear path. It’s like the stock market, you see ups and downs in the short-term but you hope to see an upward trend over time. Like the stock market you probably will if you don’t get out too soon.
How do you measure trust and love? When it comes to building a community, social media is a long-term investment of building relationships. You can think it’s not worth it and be too impatient and stop participating, and not see the results. That’s when you say social media doesn’t work - because it’s not working for you. Businesses who are hierarchical and based on concentrating power and ego have a tough time with this concept. They should just pay for advertising where it’s much more black and white and they can control many aspects.
Right now I’m more focused on building community in my personal life - I miss the friends I had who I shared life with day to day. I moved. Now I don’t see them anymore. I moved to an incredible community that is unfamiliar to me so far. I’m impatient to make new friends. I’m starting to recognize people and feel comfortable chatting but it’s not the same. Eventually I’ll have people who I’m close to, who I see often and talk to often. Who trust me and who I trust. What is the value of that? That is life!

I found this gem that describes how I view the Internet:

The Internet is more than a medium. We believe it is more than a marketplace. The Internet is a community. Much more than some communities based on geographic location, the Internet is a community of real people sharing real experiences in real time.

That is what I have built and have neglected lately - my online community. I’m focusing on an offline community, because I need both and having just moved my offline community based on geography has shifted dramatically. An online community is as real as any offline community. Both happen over time and they evolve over time, just like people do. Blogging and forming an online community has been invaluable to my life and career. Blogs, social networks, and other social media are tools to form or join online communities. And they can be hugely valuable for your business.

I love this graph! It shows the number of full page views of a press release I wrote and distributed through PRWeb. Normally news has a shelf life. Once the news is past no one reads it. After a few days there is a sharp decline and it doesn’t rebound. But a press release online continues to get read because it stays in search engines long after its released.

The first bar is day one, with over 200 people clicking on the full press release. The last bar is after 28 days and there are thousands of opens. If this were a paid ad, and you were paying by the click, that would be 20 cents a click (which is cheap). Plus, it’s going to keep getting read.

The black line that you can barely see shows that the number of reads does drop off after the first two days, however, since the news has a permanent link, if people link to it, it can be found for months and years after its release.

There is no “old news.”

Today I ran across a new blog written by web comic Howard Tayler. I wrote a blog post on TheLatest.At/Wikipedia about his refusal to help raise money for Wikimedia, the organization over Wikipedia. He’s trying to start a revolution to make Wikipedia more diplomatic and to make deletions the exception not the rule. This guy is spirited. He’s had many articles deleted from the site, because they are not “notable” enough per Wikipedia’s guidelines.
He notes: “The excesses of elitist, deletionist editors and admins span far more topics than just webcomics.” And notes: “Don’t send Wikimedia Foundation your money until they change the system.”

I poked around and learned he lives close by. Maybe I can show up at Dragon’s Keep and interview him about the story. Oh, and I’ll add you to my list of Utah bloggers. Wait, he’s already on it.

Easy blog hosting and install just $6.95 a month with 24/7 support.

I loved this post from Guy Kawasaki about how Twitter has helped his blogging and his company. Since this is on my mind I think Paul Allen should Twitter. It really is an efficient and quick way to communicate, especially if many people hope to talk to you and you have limited time to reach out to them. There are some people that Twitter is the only way to reach them.

I can’t say I’ve had the incredible experience of getting a historic family document returned to me but here’s my list of why I love Twitter (and though I write in spurts, my enthusiasm hasn’t wained much):

• I met an artist in Mexico who I bought some art from (but the art has yet to arrive so I don’t know if this one is good or not).
• I started blogging for Marketing Pilgrim because of a twit that Andy Beal wrote.
• I stay up on news and what my friends are doing - many of us work from home at least part of the time and it connects us and keeps us informed of what’s going on.
• I get a sense of what is going on in internet marketing on a larger scale - people write from conferences and other goings on from across the country or world.
• Twitter sends traffic to my blog - sometimes it’s the best source other than StumbleUpon and it builds my visibility.

Today is a great day - my post on Marketing Pilgrim made Digg’s home page. It’s now at 388!
http://digg.com/tech_news/Alaska_Airlines_Testing_In_Flight_Internet_Access/

My friend wrote a post on TheShipper’s blog about how you can get the most out of Digg. Digg let’s you vote on stories you find. He got on the first page of Digg just last week. That means a lot of exposure. He is experienced and shares his secrets. You must read it: How to get the most out of Digg.

eComXpo is an internet marketing conference that is entirely online. It covers various aspects of the industry from affiliate marketing to email marketing. It’s well-attended and the speakers are usually excellent. Plus it’s free.

I’ve attended on and off for the past few years. You can listen while you’re at work and it’s free while it’s live. Otherwise you can pay $50 to access all the sessions to listen to later.

The biggest challenge of a virtual conference is not getting distracted. So plan time away from distractions for the speakers you really want to listen to. If you’re at work, go to a conference room. Or, buy the transcripts.

The conference runs October 9-11 - that is a Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Here are some highlights. Mat - they ask for speakers. Please apply and talk about Social Media Optimization and how to utilize web 2.0 Strategies on your Site.

* Bryan Eisenberg from Future Now will speak about web site conversion
* Geoff Ramsey from eMarketer will talk about digital strategies
* Anne Holland from Marketingsherpa will deliver great data as she usually does on Search engine marketing, Email marketing and Landing Pages

* Seth Godin on Blogging: How Blogs and Web 2.0 Can Change Your Business Forever - DON’T MISS THIS ONE

* The New Realities of Online Life: Lee Rainie – Pew Internet and American Life Project

Don’t put off registering because if you’re like me you’ll forget. They send you reminders. Seriously, no travel expenses and you can learn from the best minds in the industry.
Click Here To Register Now!

This in from Hitwise and the Web 2.0 conference (which I follow via Twitter and try not to get too jealous that I’m not there!). Visits to Web 2.0-style sites have spiked 668% in just two years! Visits to web 2.0 web sites is up to 12% of US web activity. Two years ago that figure was just 2%. Remember that for SEO, social networking sites are another word for FREE LINKS using your keywords as the link text.

I love being in such a dynamic, growing segment of the internet. It’s been about four years since I got into internet marketing and I’m still eating it up. Granted, I have a little more balance in life (it’s addicting!) but I still don’t consider it a “job” to write or be a part of it. It’s fun. It’s especially fun to own your own businesses and write your own ebooks (ours is coming along a bit slowly but there is progress). That’s my transition from consuming to creating content. I’m sure more of us will as we become more comfortable.

Just this morning I was remembering a video I made with friends in high school. I want to put it on YouTube. I’m calling one of my friends to see if he has a copy. I was playing broadcast journalist and there are some funny moments.

I read this amazing blog post about how Google’s Blogsearch ranks blogs. It’s featured on Problogger but written by Alister Cameron.

I haven’t read Cameron’s blog before but I’m subscribing to it on my Bloglines (which needs some Spring cleaning soon). After reading this post I don’t think I want to use all of Google’s products. It makes me feel like they are spying on me (and on us) too much.

Since I can’t link to a post on Podango and the formatting looks bad, here is my list:

Factors in how Google Ranks Blogs in their blog search engine Blogsearch:

- popularity of your blog (how many people click on your posts)
- how often your blog is listed on other’s blogrolls
- the quality of the blogrolls that link to you (A high quality blogroll is a blogroll that links to well-known or trusted bloggers)
- pagerank of your blog
- how many other blogs subscribe to your RSS feed and the popularity of those blogs
Google can tell if you have subscribed to your own feed or spammed the sytem. He thinks this is one of the MAIN ways Google ranks your blog because it shows loyalty. They may use data from their RSS reader, Google Reader. They can also see if people actually read and/or click on your posts.
- Social bookmarking - how often your post is bookmarked in Digg, Technorati, del.icio.us, etc. It also matters what tags they choose to describe your post. Here are rules for Social Media Optimization (SMO).

- Google looks for links to your blog in email, chat, even TWITTER (so use to your advantage! Twitter is good for more than building community, sharing news, or as a personal branding tool. It could help you build your blog rank too.)

It appears Google uses a different algorithm when ranking blogs.

Jeff Barr wrote a post about conferences and it had a reference to a comment on my blog. He’s saying how the best speakers at conferences don’t just drop in, deliver a speech, and leave. They participate and reference conference themes (like submarines!) in their speeches. They forward the conversation. I love when your comments start and forward conversations.

The best way to stifle a conversation is to try to control it or to downplay it. I’ve been guilty of that but it doesn’t work very well. Marketers like me at times have to fight themselves from controlling conversations (hey, look at my product!).

When I’ve listened to any good speaker or read any blog, the ones I resonate with most are ones that I can see myself in. My absolute favorite is when someone makes me laugh and it’s light-hearted and real. It’s all fun and I’m learning without even being aware of it. Then out of the blue they say something profound. It alters me. I’m moved. Stopped in my tracks. This is the punch line. It takes skill to get the timing right. Guy Kawasaki did this at an Affiliate Summit he spoke at. I still remember it. I was getting choked up!

As far as religious talks I love the ones that make me stop and think, wait a second, I have some work to do (I see some lies in my thinking or way of being that now I want to address). I literally am having a conversation about what they are saying within myself, with them, and with God - in real time.

I like the concept of mixing mediums, like artists do in collages. Taken together all these conversations going on and mashups create a rich life. So the conversation on on my blog started from a real life conversation or a blog post, carries to Twitter, MySpace, to a blogger’s dinner and to a class. I like how “Memory” on Twitter uses geek terms for common things. Rather than strip her hair of color, she’s deleting it.

I like how on Paul Allen’s blog today it’s not just family history, it is people getting married and making babies (yes, sex: something so alluring that even on academic Wikipedia it’s one of the most read topics). Suddenly it’s not a dating site, it is the beginning of a conversation about future families. That is something I can resonate with. Jeff Barr just Twittered about holding a Second Life family reunion. There needs to be a Second Life dating service too (there probably is).

This leads me to how the best businesses start and continue important conversations. After all, sex and business, though not at all the same thing, are really about creation. And creation starts with conversations.