Chris Brogan had two posts over the weekend about a guy named “Bob” at a Fortune 500 company who tried to engage with his customers and was cut off at the knees by management.  By themselves these posts are interesting reads, but for marketers at small and mid-size business, they’re even more interesting when read with Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post about Balsamiq.  I’ll get to that one in a minute, but first let me get back to Chris Brogan’s posts…

There’s a good discussion in the comments to Chris’ posts about whether or not Bob should have done this without the company’s approval and whether or not the company has legitimate reasons not to participate.  My take - I’d bet a dollar that the conflict stems less from the specifics of the situation and more from the fact that it’s a big company with a culture and org structure that’s not designed to support this kind of participation. I wrote a post a few weeks back about the social media advantage for small and mid-size businesses and Andy Angelos from Zocalo Group pointed out in the comments that often big companies want to participate in the conversation, but they’re simply not built for this.  They’re designed for deliberate, structured decision making and they’re optimized for preventing bad decisions from being made.  This just doesn’t work when the name of the game is speed and independent decision making.

So, as Einstein said, “in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity,” and in this case, Mister or Miss marketer at a small or mid-size business, the opportunity is yours.  If you doubt this in any way, go take a look at Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post on ReadWriteWeb about Balsamiq.  The post describes how the founder of Balsamiq has leveraged social media to build a kickass small business in a really short period of time.  We use Balsamiq here at BuzzStream to create all of our low fidelity mockups and we love it…what were we using before Balsamiq?  Microsoft Visio (i.e., the big company product).  Why did we switch?  Because Balsamiq solves a specific problem really well, we liked the way that the product was evolving, and we got great support from them.  On top of this, we just liked the mentality of the company and, even though we’ve never actually met him, we liked the founder, Peldi Guilizzoni.

So how do all these things relate to social media?  Peldi uses social media as the underpinnings for virtually all of his communications with the market.  Why does the product solve a specific problem so well?  Peldi blogs and uses twitter actively and gets tons of feedback on the needs of the market.  Why is support so good?  Balsamiq’s Get Satisfaction support community is very active and Peldi is heavily involved in the discussion (also great for driving product direction).  How did we find out about Balsamiq?  Word-of-mouth, resulting from his participation on blogs and twitter.  And what was it that made us like Peldi, even though we’d never actually met him?  Take a look at his blog…you can’t help but root for him.  When I use Balsamiq, I don’t feel like I’m using some product built by a nameless, faceless team of engineers…I feel like I’m using a product built by a human being who loved building it and is really excited about growing his business.  I wouldn’t feel that if it weren’t for Peldi’s social media participation.

As I’ve said before, we’re in the middle of the single biggest shift in marketing since the advent of television.  Few big companies are going to really embrace this in the near term.  As a marketing or SEO manager at a small or mid-size business, this is a huge opportunity for you.  If you’re thinking about participating or if you’re just dabbling,  now is the time to get in the mix.

Jason Falls blog, Social Media Explorer, is right near the top of the list of my favorite social media blogs.  Jason had a post last week about social media measurement that led to a pretty lively discussion in the comments, on twitter, and on a number of blog posts that linked to the original post.  For some reason, I can’t seem to get this one out of my head…there was a lot I agree with in the discussion, but also a number of things that just don’t ring true to me.  In no particular order, here are some of my thoughts:

Like it or not, ROI matters

Based on what I saw in the conversation that followed Jason’s post, people’s views about ROI measurement seem to fall along a continuum.  On one end is the group that argues that measuring ROI might be hard, but it’s not impossible, and, given that the end goal of social media participation is to grow the business, social media marketers are either going to figure it out or they’re going to get screwed.  Dan Thornton makes the argument pretty effectively in his comment when he says that engagement metrics are important, “but you still need to figure out where engagement sits for the rest of the business, and how it’s integrated into other areas. If it’s contributing to natural search results, for example, then without any measurement of other outcomes, the results are all attributed to SEO work, and engagement is disregarded.”

At the other end of the spectrum is a group that, at best, is ambivalent about the idea of trying to measure social media ROI in terms of financial metrics.  Shannon Paul’s comment is indicative of this:

“I understand that businesses make decisions based on the bottom line, but isn’t social media engagement all about humanizing organizations? Ultimately, businesses are made of human beings and most human beings I know are motivated by a number of things in different measure — profit is only one such motivator.”

Shannon is another one who’s writing some really good stuff on her blog, but I’m with Dan on this one (just in case the title of the post didn’t tip you off).  Peter Kim summed up my feelings about this best when he said “I have and will always believe that the purpose of marketing is to sell stuff, whether direct response or 30-year sales cycle.  Marketers who don’t believe that their job is to ultimately sell something should become receptionists instead, if all you want to do is talk.”

Yes, metrics that indicate the quality of conversations are important and, yes, people should get more out social media participation than financial gain.  Frankly, I don’t think you can be successful without these things.  But at the end of the day, if participation isn’t going to result in revenue for the business, the initiatives aren’t going to get funded and it’s all for naught.  Marketers can get away with this now because we’re still deep in the early adopter phase, but this won’t last long.  Particularly in this economic environment, companies are going to move quickly from exclusively measuring things that indicate level of participation to measurements that tie to revenue.

You can’t determine the right metric without first identifying the goals

Katie Paine talked about letting your objectives drive your choice of metrics in the video interview that accompanied Jason’s post (watch this video…the ROI on the 11 minutes you’ll invest to watch it is very high ).  Paraphrasing her comment, “in order to determine ROI, you need to know what the R is.”  In other words, you need to decide what you’re trying to achieve.  I think this is exactly right and it a point that gets missed often.  The metrics for measuring word-of-mouth effectiveness, for example, are going to be very different than the metrics for brand loyalty.

Incidentally, as part of this discussion, I’ve seen a number of tweets/comments saying that social media isn’t for attracting new customers, it’s for building relationships with existing customers.  Maybe I’m just misunderstanding what people are saying because, at face value, this doesn’t make sense to me and there are plenty of word-of-mouth case studies that refute it.  Some examples: 1) NetQoS’ viral video campaign - two of the primary goals were to increase traffic and drive leads.  The net result of their campaign was that it added $500,000 into the pipeline, 2)  Caminito Steakhouse, where they’ve seen a 30% increase in sales concurrent with a significant improvement in search engine rankings on key terms…they haven’t drawn a clear line that shows the link between participation, improved PageRank and increased revenue, but I guarantee you that it wouldn’t be hard to build a model that shows clear correlation, and 3) Martell Home Builders - take a look at the comment from Pierre Martell (the owner of the business).  Lead gen is a key part of their strategy and according to Pierre, “from an ROI point of view, because of the real estate fees were saving, it didn’t take many sales to justify this approach from a pure dollars and cents point of view.”

Traffic still matters

Katie argues that traffic doesn’t matter.  I disagree.  By itself it doesn’t, but in conjunction with other metrics, I think it’s still valuable.  Give me two blogs that are equally relevant to my customer, have the same average number of comments, have the same PageRank, etc.  Are you telling me that, even if one of these blogs has twice the traffic as the other, it’s no more valuable for word-of-mouth than the other?

Small and mid-size businesses have different measurement capabilities and needs than big businesses

Note the mention of ROI in the NetQoS, Martell Homes and Caminito Steakhouse word-of-mouth case studies.  For all three of these SMBs it just isn’t that difficult to measure ROI because the marketing mix isn’t that complex and the customer touchpoints are easier to track.  Very different than a big company, where measuring ROI requires fairly complex modeling since there are so many more possible drivers of revenue.  Do the metrics that the small business uses encapsulate all of the benefit provided by social media participation?  Definitely not, but it doesn’t matter.  Despite the fact that some of the value generated doesn’t get captured by the metrics (e.g., for NetQoS, prospects that become aware of the company as a result of the video campaign, but visit the site through organic search), there’s still enough measurable value to clearly justify the investment.

Measurement on the front-end is very different for the small business as well.  Big companies might think it’s important to conduct detailed analysis to determine influence, but small companies have neither the time or money for this.  While traditional metrics have problems, they’re simple and, when combined with engagement metrics, they’re good enough for small businesses.

So what does your social media dashboard look like?  What are your social media goals and what are the metrics that you track most closely to determine your success?

I posted this last week, but an IE bug was causing problems with it.   Turns out the original image was causing the problem (a photo of Gary V…who knew he’d take our blog down ;-).  here’s the repost.

I just finished watching Gary Vaynerchuk’s video explaining how word-of-mouth marketing is changing and what this means for brands today.  Great stuff…totally entertaining and Gary does a great job of explaining word-of-mouth in a simple, powerful way.  He describes the change like this:

Word-of-mouth has always been the most powerful (form of marketing)….But here’s where it gets (even more) powerful.  Word-of-mouth has fundamentally changed in the last three years, because of social media.  Twitter and facebook and other products like that have allowed your voice to go extremely viral.  So let’s just say Chris Mott over here was the biggest socialite in New York City and he just went to every event every night.  He was the biggest yenta in town.  How many possible people could he tell about your service?  Five hundred?  A thousand, if that’s all he did for a month?  Well now, one press of the button on twitter and tens of thousands of people are going to know.

Gary goes on to say:

Plus, understand word-of-mouth.  So now you tweet something else.  Well then somebody blog posts about it.  Somebody StumbleUpon’s that.  Somebody digg’s that.  The tail of word-of-mouth is the power of what the Internet has created.  As soon as you understand that, the sooner you’ll be able to build brands on the Internet.

Exactly right…and the beautiful thing for small and mid-size businesses is that big companies still aren’t participating to any great degree, which gives you a great opportunity to establish yourself in the marketplace.  According to research conducted by Ross Mayfield and Chris Anderson, only 12% of the Fortune 500 are blogging, which is WAY below the average for private companies.  Given the low level of participation on blogs, you can only imagine what the numbers must look like for social services like Twitter, facebook, digg, etc.

Why aren’t big companies focused on social media marketing and word-of-mouth?  Simple…they don’t feel the impact of not participating, so they don’t think they have to be.  They can skate leveraging traditional channels and relying on the brand equity they’ve built up over years.  We’re in the midst of the single biggest change to marketing since the advent of television, and as a small business it’s almost impossible not to feel the impact of this.  Big businesses won’t feel it for years though, so inertia keeps them from acting…momentum keeps a supertanker moving forward for a long time, even after the engines have been turned off.

At this very moment, someone in a Fortune 500 company is in a windowless conference room walking his boss and peers through a 42 slide PowerPoint about how social media marketing is “for real.”  When he finishes, everyone will congratulate him on the great work and they’ll all agree that “this is something we really need to keep our eyes on.”   As anyone who has worked in a big business knows, this is code for “I’m not doing s**t until someone tells me I have to or until it shows up in my bonus plan.”  For small and mid-size businesses, this provides a great opportunity to use twitter, your blog, comments and all sorts of other social tools to build the brand, pick off customers with long-tail searches, engage with the new influencers in your market, etc.  By the time the big business finally realizes that it needs to get off the dime, you’ve already established yourself…and the competitive advantage is sustainable because as easy as it is for the supertanker to rely on momentum to coast, it’s equally as hard to get it moving again once it stops.

Update: Jason Falls has a great case study up that demonstrates how one small business is incorporating social media into their business.  My primary focus in this post is on lead generation whereas Jason’s case study focuses more on the value that this business is getting in the middle part of the sales funnel (brand preference and consideration).  Definitely a worthwhile read.

The world of PR is in a state of turmoil. As advertising dollars shrink, print pubs have all but disappeared and online media sites are strapped for resources. Only the biggest stories seem to get picked up these days. So, how do you get the press to pay attention? Try social media.

At BreakingPoint, I’ve seen a huge impact from social media activity on media coverage–primarily blogs and Twitter. In fact, I guestimate that a full 30% or more of my company’s Twitter followers are media or analysts. Recently one of our security experts posted an in-depth look at a clickjacking vulnerability on our blog, we posted on Twitter and a writer from Ziff Davis (one of our followers) picked up the story. This coverage has been one of our top sources of web traffic for over a week now. Amazing!

Here are a few very easy ways you can get started using social media to get to big media:

1. Monitor and get involved in the conversation. Set up your RSS feeds, Google Alerts, and Tweetscans in iGoogle and start watching the market. Identify issues and trends. Spot conversations and jump into the conversation. If someone posts to a forum about a need, offer advice. If someone mentions your company or product, by all means, reach out to them. HubSpot provides this excellent piece of advice in their post on the topic:”Monitor your company / brand on Twitter. A while back we noticed that Guy Kawasaki mentioned Website Grader on Twitter.  Well, of course we had to let him know a bit more about Website Grader and maybe ask if he would also blog about it?  The result was this blog article on Website Grader which drove a good amount of traffic and leads.”  (See below for a cool tip on how to easily monitor people talking about your company on Twitter.)
2. Build a circle of influence with journalists and analysts. BreakingPoint’s Director of Marketing Kyle Flaherty provides a detailed three part case study in how we used these tools for PR and crisis communications. He shares these details about getting started:“With our goals outland a limited amount of knowledge concerning our community we set about reworking the way in which we communicated with the outside world.  Blogging and Twitter dominated our activities the past three months, but we’ve also been sure to be interactive with Vimeo (after realizing YouTube simply provides poorer quality), Flickr and to gather information at places like FriendFeed, Facebook, Squidoo and Ning.”
3. Sign up for Help a Reporter Out (HARO) Think of it as a free version Profnet.How does it work and why is it so popular? Journalists go online fill out a form and their request gets added to the three time daily email distribution to members. If you see a story that you could contribute to, your simply reply directly to the query. I’ve used it myself and have connected with several journalists. East Coast PR pro Peter Shankman started HARO out on Facebook where the service grew rapidly and needed a home off Facebook to manage the size. You can also follow Shankman on Twitter.
   
   I’m sure there are many more techniques you can use to get noticed in the media these days. Feel free to share in the Comments section.

Here’s a diagram I’ve been using internally to explain the strategies and tactics related to SEO, broken down in three major layers: the foundation, on-page, and off-page factors, and modeled in terms of a network layer model.

A network stack is a helpful way of thinking about this because it implies that each layer builds upon the other, and is dependent on the layer below it.  As marketers, we are the architects and optimizers of this stack, and it’s helpful to start thinking about how our decisions at each layer affect (and in some cases marry us) to choices higher on the stack.

A model for SEO that adopts the network-layer model

On more thought, as I’ve stated, I predict that traditional SEO as a distinct discipline is going to merge with PR.  That’s mostly correct, however some aspects are going to migrate to Product Management in my view.  I’ll expand on that in a later post.

I spent 8 years doing my own SEO while growing the site I co-founded, ApartmentRatings.com, from absolutely nothing into one of the top apartment-hunting sites.  I eventually reached the conclusion that my best SEO strategy was PR because it just seemed to work.  Now, I think this may apply to many more (all?) companies and point to a merger between PR and SEO in the near future.

Steve Rubel and Katrina French (by way of Jason Falls’s blog) got me thinking about my experience and that, thanks to Google, SEO and PR are ultimately becoming the same activity.  Same strategies, same tactics, same metrics.  Steve writes, “Google Page Rank is the ultimate way to measure online influence“, and Katrina says, “search and social are…intrinsically linked.”

So if you believe that the goal of PR is to get influencers to bring attention to your client or company, and Google PageRank is the ultimate measure of influence (and since we know that PageRank flows from one party to another vis-a-vis links), then a central goal of PR should be to acquire valuable, PageRank-passing links.

If you apply this to social media (which traditional PR agencies are now beginning to seriously engage), as Katrina points out, all these things that we’re doing in social media– building relationships, participating in conversations– all ultimately relate to search.  What’s search driven by? PageRank. Which goes back to links.  So this is all a big PR strategy.

I predict that we’re about to see a merger between two fields that couldn’t be more different.  Public Relations pros are (and I’ll generalize gratiutiously) some of the smoothest and nicest people you could meet– they are fantastic at building relationships.  SEO’s are, to put it nicely (and I count myself among them), usually geeks and hackers who have been toiling away in ways only alchemists would appreciate.

Lately, SEO’s have been talking about the fact that 75% of what moves the search results needle are off-page factors, and highest among them is link-building.  Yet the old methods are starting to falter — nowadays it’s about linkbait, better link pitches, press release optimization, and social media engagement.  And that pushes us toward doing things the old-fashioned way with human relationships.  You simply cannot expect to pitch bloggers, promote linkbait, ask webmasters for links, propose link-positive content partnerships, comment for dofollow links, promote your content on Twitter, etc. without quality relationships.  As Chris Brogan suggest, get to know people first, then ask.

For a lot of SEO’s, the prospect of our jobs relying on relationship-building is a little scary, which is why the merger with PR is inevitable.  PR people’s skills are simply too relevant and valuable to this process.  For PR, the Google PageRank paradigm is simply too dominant a measure of influence for clients not to expect their agencies to direct their efforts to improve it.  So look out, these two industries are about to merge.  It should be fun!

Updates/Comments

#1 Response to the argument that PageRank isn’t the best influence measure.

A few folks have argued that PageRank is not the best measure of influence for a variety of reasons.  Let me make a distinction– I care about measuring my influence in terms of the PageRank that I acquire– not particularly the nominal PageRank of influencers who link to me.  You can’t go around evaluating every prospective influencer by the PageRank stamped on their head.  However, your PageRank is a valid measure of your online influence compared to your competitors (which is ultimately what matters in the search results).

#2 Response to the argument that nominal PageRank is inaccurate.

I don’t want anyone to be confused that I’m saying they should focus on the nominal PageRank that’s displayed in the toolbar.  It’s a subtle distinction, but somewhere in the Google universe there exists a very precise, up-to-date calculated value of PageRank which I’ll call “true PageRank” that is factored into your position in search results.  For stats folks, the “true PageRank” is like the true regression line.  It exists in theory, but we can only see it via estimation, which contains error. Anyway, the point is that we should be focusing on activities that drive up our “true PageRank,” and evaluating how we spend our time and resources in light of it.

The Buzzstream Team, Paul our CEO, Randy our CTO, and I hit the TechCrunch party Thursday night at Pangae.  It was great to see so many friends and the number of cool ventures, many of whom are way under the radar, starting up in Austin.  Erick hit the nail on the head with regard to the investment climate in Austin driving companies to figure out how to grow by scaling a profitable business model.  I was glad he picked up on that.  And Paul made the video explaining the subtlety of not being a blogger but having a blog.  Funny stuff.

Image via Wikipedia

Now that the launch conference Ultimate Smack Down — TechCrunch50 v. DEMO– is over, I figured I’d take a few minutes (now going on few hours) to look at which conference’s presenting companies were more successful in generating press this week, based on a little Google News and Blogs research.  And here are the results:

A couple observations– DEMO companies received a much more uniform amount of press coverage (i.e. Google News hits) .  The top 25% of companies at DEMO received 3.3 times more press mentions than the average of the bottom 25%.  At Techcrunch50, the difference between the top and bottom quartiles was quite a bit more extreme– 8X.  This suggests some the best TechCrunch50 companies got much more press coverage that the worst, whereas at DEMO even the least-covered did ok compared to the most-covered.

But… if you look at blog coverage, TechCrunch50 was more uniform (they ended up with roughly the same distribution of coverage between bloggers and press).  TechCrunch50 presenters got more “steady” attention from bloggers; even weak DEMO presenters got a disproportionate share of coverage from traditional press.

The companies that got the most coverage at each conference were microcosms of these events– TechCrunch50’s big press winner was Ashton Kutcher’s BlahGirls with 78 press mentions (or measured by blog posts, DropBox, with 379).  At DEMO, it was Plastic Logic with 117 press stories and 2,367 blog posts.

While this is all very interesting, it would be too strong to declare DEMO the absolute winner; I have a few thoughts and caveats:

• * Mainstream tech and business press are still attending DEMO.  Kara
  Swisher told me she was at DEMO Monday and Tuesday, and was hoping to
  swing by Techcrunch50 afterward.
• * Techcrunch50 presenters tend to be smaller startups with a small (or no) PR budget
• * DEMO offered more established companies (e.g. Best Buy) who have press who cover them regularly
• * DEMO has more presenters, increasing the likelihood of round-up stories that mention multiple companies
• * DEMO had more companies unveiling core technology, whereas Techcrunch50 was mainly about applications
• * DEMO wrapped up yesterday; Techcrunch50 just wrapped up today, so some stories may be yet to be written on Wednesday’s presenters (however I’m not sure this was a huge effect if you look at how Monday’s TC50 presenters have fared)
• * The article counts include wire service press releases — DEMO may have shown more press mentions due to press releases, which many TC50 companies may have skipped.
• * The general meta coverage has been generally blasé; WebWorkerDaily said that it was a pretty blah week overall, so they didn’t cover any of it; that trend could favor DEMO because they had the big hit– Plastic Logic.  Who woulda thought this was a hits business?

I’ve saved the searches I used for this analysis (generally “company name”, past week, sorted by date with duplicates included) here: Techcrunch50 Google News Searches; DEMOFall08 Google News Searches.  In a few cases (Rudder, Yammer, Footnote) I had to search company+conference to filter out false positives, which I did manually (so it’s not saved in these searches).

The saved searches are “live” and will continue to update as more articles are filed and echo press comes in, so that should be fun to watch.  Email me if you’d like the spreadsheet (jeremy at buzzstream dot com).

Update: Found a great post from Allen Stern, who was on the ground at both conferences.

Wow.  The blogosphere has erupted into a near riot after Robert Scoble’s “companies launching at DEMO suck” series of blog posts.  The discussion has understandably been emotion-filled, but other than some really good link-bait, I’m not sure much value is coming out of it.

What I’ve been thinking about a lot though is how the “big conference launch” fits into our plans here at BuzzStream.  We’re a micro-financed business, so we look long and hard before undertaking a big expense like a conference launch.  I think the beat down that some of the DEMO companies took occurred because their approach to launch marketing doesn’t match the economics of their business.  There’s been a lot of talk about how the economics of building a product have changed.  The economics have never been better for starting a business and the way that companies get funded and products get built has fundamentally changed.  The problem is that, while a lot of companies have bought into the “micro” strategy for developing a product (small team, low financial commitment, etc.), they’re holding on to the traditional, big bang approach to getting the word out.  There’s nothing wrong with this approach for the traditional VC-funded company, but I’m not sure it makes sense for businesses like ours.

FACT: There’s too much that has to be done for these conferences in so little time, so something is almost guaranteed to suffer. For many of the DEMO companies, their marketing efforts appear to have taken the hit.

The cost and time required for the traditional, big-bang, big conference launch adds up quickly…and yeah, I know, TechCrunch 50 is free, but the entry fee is just where your costs begin.  Let’s look at an example.  My co-founder, Jeremy Bencken, was invited to present at DEMO to launch Tenant Market a couple of years ago.  In addition to the entry fee, he calculated the following costs for even a bare-bones approach:

1. devote 80 hours to prep time.  At $100 an hour, that’s $8K.
2. Speaking coach - $5K
3. Travel - three nights for three people - $6K
4. PR rep - $10k to $20K (lots of variation depending on the quality of the PR professional and the required retainer)
5. Booth, collateral, SWAG, etc. - $3K to $5K

So you’re looking at around $40K in addition to the entry fee.  On top of this, doing a big launch is similar to moving into a bigger house and suddenly realizing you need new furniture, art, etc.  If you look at what Scoble is keying off of, it’s the website of the DEMO companies….another big cost, and one you wouldn’t associate at first with the cost of a big conference launch.  When you go with the big launch though, you’re now expected to have the perfectly designed marketing website with the perfectly crafted message leading to the app that scales to an unlimited number of users.  LOTS more time and money for that.  For us, it just doesn’t make financial sense.  And we don’t view it as necessary either because we don’t think it’s aligned with how most micro-financed businesses typically grow.

Again, I’m not suggesting that shows like DEMO and TechCrunch 50 aren’t valuable.  For the right company, there are few marketing vehicles that can have as big of an impact.  A good showing can single-handedly change the trajectory of a company and put it on the map.  But we just don’t think that the big bang launch is aligned with the economics for a micro-financed business…and we look at going down that route as more than just a marketing decision.  It’s a decision that impacts the company’s core strategy.

For us, it just feels more comfortable to go with a more measured, “slow burn” approach to our launch.  We look at the initial launch as just a step in the process….and hopefully along the way our product will grow, our message will get better, we’ll continue to build relationships and our skills at link building, blogger relations and social media marketing will continue to improve.

There are lots of strategies for building backlinks to your site and let’s face it, they’re all hard (except for the ones that are ‘banned’)– linkbait, competitor backlink mining + begging, crazy n-way reciprocal linking, paid links, content syndication, etc.

But there’s a little-known strategy many user-generated content sites could take advantage of: creating reports for reporters.  The goal is to create information tools that help reporters get data from your site and make it really easy for them to cite you and link to you (without ever having to call you).

In a way, it’s like the old PR strategy of listing yourself as an expert on Profnet, and then hoping that when a reporter needs a quote, they’ll call you.  More modern examples include Google Trends and Google Zeitgeist.  Trulia, Zillow, and Hotpads all offer heatmaps.  And at my old site, ApartmentRatings.com, we created average apartment rental pricing charts by MSA.

The benefits of this approach are:

1. your website can get cited and linked even if a reporter doesn’t have time to interview you,
2. you can exert some control over the content, making it necessary for the reporter to link back to it,
3. this tactic tends to generate increasing links over time (which is sort of the opposite of how a linkbaiting campaign works)
4. and of course there’s the brand benefit of being seen as a go-to source and leader in your industry.

What should you build? Charts, tables, statistics, snapshots, trends… something interesting, based on the largest  sample set you can muster, and if possible, geographically-segmented (since local reporters are more interested in trends in their city and/or state).  Obviously your opportunities here will depend a lot on your website’s actual data, legal restrictions, your creativity, and your dev resrouces, but here are a few ideas:

• What are your users searching for? Offer reports showing search trends.
• Collecting leads? Offer reports showing buyer trends.
• Aggregating data from multiple sources? Offer a report averaging the data and highlighting trends.

Once you set up reports, your data should automatically update over time.  And of course, you should think about it from the perspective of a reporter- is your information quotable, do your graphs look nice enough to reprint, are the trends easy to understand, is it clear how the data was gathered and how many data points are represented, do you provide access to the underlying data so the reporter can give the data to their art department, can they embed your charts on another site (and if so, is your HTML setup to properly give you a text link back), if a reporter has a question is there an email or phone number readily available.