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?

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.

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.

If you’ve been following my PR4Priates blog for any amount of time, you know I write all about the nitty gritty of helping entrepreneurs do their own PR, so hopefully my answer is obvious– not necessarily.  But take the test to find out.

ReadWriteWeb posed a different question today: Does Good Tech Need PR at all? Yes, you absolutely need some level of PR.  What RWW suggests is that there’s an inverse relationship between how compelling your idea/technology is and how much PR you’re going to have to do.

The fantasy world scenario is that you release your product on Monday, get some initial coverage on a few blogs, more bloggers find it, you hit Techmeme by the weekend, and then before you know it Walt Mossberg (WSL) and David Pogue (NYT) are calling begging for exclusive interviews.  Then the press is calling non-stop.  Before you know it, you’re joking around with Leno in the Green Room.

Ahem, the more likely scenario is that your technology is great but needs some explanation.  Nobody is begging for an exclusive and getting coverage requires actual sustained effort.  So then the question turns to whether you can sustain the effort yourself, or whether you need an agency.

Here’s a quick self test of whether you should consider getting a PR agency:

1. Can your technology/solution be understood in a 3 second sound bite?
2. Do you know who should be covering your story, like which specific blogs and reporters?
3. Does your story lend itself to being told?  Does it have a “hook” such as controversy, a great solution to well understood widely felt pain, or famous founders?
4. Does one of your founders communicate well?  Do you have someone who can communicate with the press, comment on blogs, and whose email messages don’t consistently elicit cringing?  And does this founder have time to handle communicating?
5. You don’t have ready access to a cheap, skilled PR agent with many contacts in your industry?
6. Is your company’s current bank balance below $1M?

If you answer “no” to more than two of these questions, you may want to consider using a well-connected, hopefully reasonably-priced, PR agent in your industry.  Obviously for bootstrappers this may still be a non-starter, so the job (like taking out the trash and watering the plants) falls to one of the founders.  But this little test gives you an idea about whether doing your own PR presents so many obstacles that your time would be better invested in other things.

For tech-related founders, beware of your natural instinct to over-invest your time in your product and technology.  Getting the word out about your company is one of your most important jobs, so don’t neglect it regardless of whether an agency is the right path.

Lastly, Scoble argues that you shouldn’t do any outbound PR at all– you should build something so awesome that your beta testers become your evangelists and are inspired to contact their trusted press contacts on your behalf.  Steve Rubel agrees. I’m not wild about this kind of hit-or-miss approach.  Most Type-A entrepreneurs won’t be either.

What are you supposed to do when your beta is almost over and you have no coverage?  Invest more in the product?  Pray? No, it’s time to take matters into your own hands.  Fire up the outbound engine… post to your blog, Twitter, comment on relevant blogs (without plugging or pushing your company), and, ahem, send friendly, relevant email to bloggers and reporters who should be writing about you because you’ve been following them AND built some kind of relationship over time.  Techcrunch also has some great suggestions about how this actually works.  It can even be fun!  I don’t mind trying the Scoble-Rubel build-pray-discover strategy, but it might not work for you, and you can’t just sit there doing nothing or build your product forever.

I just got an email from a friend who founded a video-sharing startup.  He wrote:

Question for you.  We are announcing the winners of our contest tomorrow and we are going to try to get some press in the local markets of the winners.  So we’ve drafted a press release, prepared a story line and a list of targets.  My question is whether it is worth it to use PR Newswire or something similar to put it out on the wire, vs. just sending alone ourselves.

Here’s my response:

In my experience, it is not worth it to send a release via PRNewswire, assuming you have a robust list of target reporters and you send them each a personalized note with your press release pasted at the bottom.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a press hit from using the newswire, even when we paid the big money for US1 distribution.  We got plenty of press, but it always came from directly emailing the right reporters.

One suggestion, have the release come from someone on staff other than you, but have them offer, “If you have questions our would like to interview Widgt’s CEO, Blah Blah, you can reach him at blah@widgt.com or by phone at 512-555-1212.”

For some reason I think this comes across better– I’ve seen reporters criticize CEO’s who do their own outreach (”he must not have very much to do if he has time to email reporters”), but they also like to get direct access to the CEO  (”I hate it when a PR thinks they can be the gate keeper to the executive suite.”).

If you want to be a real bulldog, you can have your staff follow-up with a phone call.

Of course, there are other ways to promote this– post the news on your blog, pitch the story to local bloggers you find on Technorati, and don’t forget to pitch TV stations (local morning news shows are always trying to fill content) and radio.  If you think your winners would agree, you should offer to make them available for tv and radio interviews.  And since you have video, consider cutting a short video of the winners’ content and offering it to the tv station.

I’m just back from SMX Advanced in Seattle, which was a great conference all about search marketing.  My personal interest was the organic search tract, which covers many methods we used to build ApartmentRatings.com.  And within organic search, the main attraction was link-building especially from a PR and social media perspective. 

I picked up a number of great ideas, and here’s an easy and quick one any entrepreneur can do right now: use Google date search to find your competitors’ newest links (especially on blogs and forums), then jump in and comment.  I call this jujitsu because you use your competitor’s successful marketing efforts against them. 

The key to this strategy is finding blog and forum discussion opportunities quickly and getting involved while the topics are hot.  When you comment, always include your signature with a link back to yourself.

Here’s how to do it: 

1. Go to Google, click Advanced Search, then in the field called “this exact word or phrase” enter a competitor’s domain name with quotes (e.g. “lawyers.com”)
2. In the field, “Search within a site or domain:” enter “lawyers.com”.
3. Click on the line marked “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more” and choose “past 24 hours.” 
4. Now click the “Advanced Search” button to search. 
5. As a final step: in the search box, change the search from

   “lawyers.com” site:lawyers.com to
   “lawyers.com” -site:lawyers.com

   That tells Google to exclude any pages from your competitor’s own site and only shows other sites that link to your competitor.   You might also search for pages with include the word “Comment,” which is a good marker for pages that invite user comments, like this:

   “lawyers.com” -site:lawyers.com comments

Now you’re set to find some opportunities to participate in timely, relevant discussions.  This technique may also yield some reporters and webmasters who you can contact to pitch your site.