Google News Not Always So Great at Favoring Original Sources

September 1, 2011

News publishers are all too familiar with the fact that Google News doesn’t always do such a great job of favoring original sources in its story clusters. It is not usual to see a syndicated, aggregated or simply re-covered version of an article gain prominent visibility over the original. Today I noticed an example that [...]

Google Expanded Sitelinks: Optimize Opening Text in META Description Tag

August 22, 2011

Google’s expanded sitelinks give sites greater exposure for branded searches and the ability to dominate the page one results above the fold. User reactions have been mixed so far (some find them overwhelming or borderline obnoxious) but Google is touting the user benefits and the expanded sitelinks appear to be here to stay. That means [...]

Official Publisher Profiles on Digg One Year Later: Followers up 720% But Have They Died on the Vine?

August 10, 2011
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It has been a year since I took at look at the followers and activity of News Sites on the New Digg so I thought I would see how those official profiles are faring today. When I did my original post Digg v4 was just about to come out of alpha so there has been [...]

Email Press Release Optimization Circa 1999

July 27, 2011
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While going through some old documents I came across an article I’d written on email press release best practices back in 1999. It’s a fun look back at the early days of online media relations so I thought I’d share it. I started doing online public relations activities in 1995 and from 1996-2000 I managed [...]

How Much is a PR Professional Worth to a Startup?

July 12, 2011

While watching the film The Social Network over the weekend one scene in particular caught my attention. Mark Zuckerberg and key members of the early Facebook team are meeting to discuss roles and ownership stakes in the company. To quote the Mark Zuckerberg character in the film (emphasis is mine): “Now here’s the arrangement. Eduardo [...]

Will Media Outlets Keep Using Google+ Personal Accounts? Will Google Let Them?

July 8, 2011
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Earlier this week Search Engine Land reported that Christian Oestlien, the Ads Lead for Google+, had posted a message asking businesses to hold off on using personal accounts to create business pages and that non-user profiles would be shut down. Quite a few media outlets have already created personal Google+ accounts and many of them [...]

Is LinkedIn the New Old Boys Network?

June 16, 2011

According to the new Pew Internet study Social Networking Sites and our Lives there are nearly twice as many male LinkedIn users as female. What gives? So what accounts for this disparity? More males in the workforce? Do men prefer LinkedIn’s brand of simple, stripped down, business-oriented networking?

Better than Great: A Cure for Buzzwords and Marketing Speak

June 1, 2011

Twice in the past year I’ve covered the most overused PR buzzwords and marketing speak and press release buzzword abuse. It is fun to point out the biggest offenders but even well-intentioned marketing communicators can find it difficult to avoid them. Ready to stop being a “leading provider” of “unique,” “innovative” and “award winning” overused [...]

The Most Popular Summer Blockbuster Movies in Social Media

May 24, 2011

Alterian recently released some data on the most popular summer blockbusters in social media, focusing specifically on movies with May and June release dates. According to their data Fast Five and Thor are far and away the most popular summer movies with each getting 38%+ of social media activity among the selected group of films:

2011 NBA Playoffs: Head-to-Head Twitter Matchups by Klout Score

May 3, 2011

This year’s NBA playoffs have been great so far, a nice surprise considering it is still early in the second round. Since I like looking at the social media presence of NBA teams I thought I’d run the 2011 playoff teams through the beta version of the new Klout to see how the fare against [...]

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