Shannon Paul’s had a post yesterday that included very good advice for PR pros who want to plunge into the social media world (make sure you look at the presentation she’s embedded in the post).  Shannon suggests that PR pros need to start thinking about how they can make their content searchable and sharable in order to make the leap.  Kudos to Shannon for raising an issue that the clients of PR agencies have been demanding - make it easy to find the information - focus on keywords, SEO and links.

Given that the intersection of social media, PR and SEO is a topic that’s near and dear to our hearts here at BuzzStream, I thought I’d expand on one of the topics in Shannon’s presentation - keyword selection.  Picking keywords is incredibly important, and not just for press release optimization…do it right and it will help all of your marketing activities.

For our SEO-oriented audience, most of this will be fairly basic.  For those of you in PR that are new to this, I’m hoping it will give you some good ideas about how you can more effectively identify keywords, and do it in a fast, inexpensive fashion.  There’s no one right way to select keywords, but we like the approach I’m going to describe because it helps you identify keywords that are closely aligned to the terms your customer uses to shop for or to find information about products in your market (as opposed to simply finding keywords based on things like overall keyword popularity).

Keyword selection can feel pretty daunting when you’re just getting started, but it’s not as tough as it seems.  Here’s how we do it at BuzzStream.

Don’t START with Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool!

Note that I didn’t say “don’t use the keyword suggestion tool.”  It’s valuable as a supplemental tool, but in my opinion there are a lot of reasons not to rely on it as your starting point.  The problems are similar in many ways to the problems with relying on shotgun blast media pitches for your media and blogger outreach efforts…it’s broad-based, but much of what you get is irrelevant.  Additionally, it doesn’t help you identify the long-tail search opportunities, which have a ton of potential value.  Instead, you need to start by trying to put yourself in the customer’s shoes (if you’ve developed personas and a positioning statement for the company, it’ll be even easier).  In order to do this, the first thing we do is brainstorm on the following topics …for each, I’ve included some of the more general terms we’ve identified for BuzzStream’s customer to serve as examples:

1. Who is the product for? - e.g., small business, SMBs, DIY
2. What type/category? - e.g., marketing, word-of-mouth, SEO, public relations
3. What is it? - e.g., software, service, tools
4. Verbs/adjectives? - e.g., improve enhance, better
5. What does it affect? - PageRank, publicity, lead generation

For each of these, start with the most general terms and progressively drill-down.  So, for example, you might have “marketing” as the most general term for “category,” and from there you might drill all the way down to something as specific as “microPR.”  The more general terms will have much more traffic, but they’re harder to rank on and they don’t convert as well.  It’s the exact opposite for the more specific terms, which is what makes them so valuable.

Once you’re done, you’ll end up with a bunch of keywords in each of the five categories.  Then you start putting the terms together - e.g., “small business marketing software,” and “tools to improve search performance.”  You can do this in Excel, so that you don’t have to manually create the combinations.  You’ll need to eyeball the combinations and remove the ones that don’t make sense…you don’t have to spend a ton of time doing this because the bad ones will mostly be thrown out when you test your keywords (I’ll cover this in a minute).

Check out the competition

You can supplement the concept-oriented keywords you created by looking at your competition to see what they’re doing.  There are lots of tools to help you see what others are bidding on and to see their ads.  This is valuable because you get to see the language they use in their ads…it also helps you identify competitors that you weren’t aware of.  Some of the tools to look at include adgooroo, spyfu and keycompete.  All of these tools include a free trial period.

Competitive keyword searching still won’t tell you which terms are working and not working though.  For that, you need to test.

Test, test, test!

Once you’ve generated your keywords combinations, you can test them with an Adwords campaign.  Setting up an adwords campaign is easy to do and it’s inexpensive.  You can take a very large list of keywords (thousands) and get a good idea of what your customer really care about for less than a $1,000.  The information you’ll get back is incredibly useful because not only do you find out what people are clicking on, you can determine what converts into blog subscriptions, email signups, leads, revenue, etc.

Other resources

This is really just the tip of the iceberg, and there are a ton of good resources if you want to dig in deep into keyword research and selection.  My favorite is Search Engine Guide’s series on keyword research, selection and organization.  Aaron Wall has great training information on keyword selection as well.

If there are specific areas of keyword selection you’d like us to drill into in future posts, let us know.

One other thing - keyword selection is as much art as science, so feel free to jump in here…PR and social media pros - what’s working well for you when selecting keywords?

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.

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.

We’re a startup Internet company based in Austin, Texas.  While we are not talking about our business much yet (except to say it’s really cool and if you work in the area of Internet Marketing, you’re going to LOVE it), here’s a quick rundown on our founders.

• Paul May, CEO - Paul was employee #1 at Support.com (SPRT) and has held senior roles in several Austin area startups, most recently at Alterpoint.
• Jeremy Bencken, Chairman - Jeremy co-founded ApartmentRatings.com and TenantMarket.com which were acquired by Internet Brands (INET).
• Randy Hammelman, CTO - Randy founded Conducive Consulting, a custom software development services business which has served a number of Austin companies.

We’re also excited to have great people advising us, including Pam O’Neal, VP of Marketing at BreakingPoint Systems, and Jack Long, founder of Chairman of PeopleAdmin and Master Teacher with the Acton MBA program.

While our product is still baking, we’re going to be blogging about issues relating to Internet Marketing, with a special emphasis on Blogger Relations, SEO, and PR.