I'm so sick of hearing from PR "professionals" who don't have a clue about how to pitch bloggers. It's obvious they don't even read my blog. This is spam, pure and simple. It's just the next evolution of spam - the progeny of the "reciprocal link request." I used to get those every day before I started blocking unknown senders (i.e. those not in my extensive "white list") using SpamArrest challenge-response. Frustratingly, SpamArrest doesn't keep the PR flaks away, because they respond to the SpamArrest challenge-response test, thus proving they are warm bodies.

Blogger-spamming PR flaks need to understand that bloggers will not respond positively to getting spammed with press releases. Indeed, bloggers love to out them on their blogs. (Any PR is good PR? I don't think so!) So, in that same vein, for your reading pleasure, I include a real example that just arrived in my inbox today (congratulations, Stella Parkes, if that's your real name).

The moral of the story, for those not in the PR industry: Don't ever hire a PR firm that does "blogger relations" like this. Or if you already have a firm doing this on your behalf, fire them.

Dear Stephan
Ive been reading your site and as you write about email marketing I wanted to get in touch to see whether you are interested in receiving relevant news from Epsilon International, the UK arm of the US-based email marketing business?

We aim to send only newsworthy stories for consideration and hope that getting a heads up on research findings or changes to our business will be interesting. If at any time you want us to stop then send me an email and I will remove you from our press list.

Below is a news release about a new senior hire  Jon Maddison  who has joined Epsilon as its first client services director. If this is not relevant then please let me know. In the near future we have some research findings, which may be of interest.

Thanks for your time, I look forward to hearing from you.

Stella Parkes

For Epsilon International

EPSILON INTERNATIONAL STRENGTHENS SERVICE OFFERING WITH APPOINTMENT OF FIRST CLIENT SERVICES DIRECTOR
Jon Maddison hired from Loyalty Management Group to boost senior team
www. epsilon. com/international

Epsilon International, the global arm of the worlds largest email marketing services business, has hired Jon Maddison as its first UK client services director.

[...rest of verbose and pointless press release omitted...]

Stella Parkes
Account manager
Renegade Media Ltd

PR for media and creative businesses

Office: +44 (0)1452 760 147
Mobile: +44 (0)7740 432 112
Email: stella@renegademedia.net

Social networking is all about being social and networking - duh The question is: How do you do this; what does that mean? It means being active in the community; it’s saying thanks to people who vote your stories up; it’s responding to comments on your blog; it’s posting comments on other folks' blogs. It’s starting topics of conversation and being a part of other conversations.

Be careful though, it is very easy to destroy your online reputation by being a jerk, so watch what you say. Don’t just go and type in your gut reaction to things like you would if you were having a conversation with someone. The same care and attention in crafting responses is required in social networks as in email, since the emotional cues that are present in in-person and over-the-phone interactions are missing in online communications. You have all the time in the world to make your communications and your online persona funny, witty, insightful, thoughtful, ingenious. So take that time. Ultimately, however, your true character is going to shine through - but this is a good thing!

Being honest and open with people is what will net you real friends – friends that if you happen to be in the same city will buy you a drink, show you around, or even put a good word in for you if you’re looking for a job. It’s these kind of real social media friends that will bend over backwards to help you out if they can. If you’re a freelancer or a business owner, they might even recommend you to people they know.

Just by being yourself in social networks you’ll find that you are making friends with people of similar interests and humor types – people with similar personalities that actually like YOU and not just your online presence.

Be careful when converting your company name / brand name into an (available) domain name; it can have embarrassing repercussions.

I was reminded of this fact recently when seeing an email in my inbox that was sent to multiple recipients, including myself. One of the recipients was someone at arsecommerce.com. This domain name may appear rather ordinary to us Americans. But to those who speak "the Queen's English" - including those in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand - I bet they get a chuckle when they see it. I can imagine them thinking to themselves "Is this the company that put the "arse" in commerce?". The company is ARS Ecommerce, not Arse Commerce.

Company names that work well in one context may not work so well in another. I remember a classic example of this from a hilarious piece in Business 2.0 magazine (circa 2001) called "Boo! And the 100 Other Dumbest Moments in e-Business History". Here's the money quote:

In October 1998, an e-commerce software vendor launches with the name Accompany, which, when said aloud, sounds exactly like "a company." As in "Hi, I'm calling from Accompany." "Which company?" "Accompany." And so forth. It changes its name to MobShop in March 2000.

In my post on the News.com blog titled "Eleven steps to buying a domain name that doesn't suck, I give another classic example of a domain name faux pas: therapistfinder.com. No, it's a site for finding therapists, not rapists.

You also have to consider whether your choice of domain name will get you inadvertently blocked by email firewalls or the search engines' adult filters.

Take for example this parts store - partsexpress.com - hyphenating the two words would have been a good idea. Ditto for whorepresents.com, an agency that represents celebrities.

Here are a few other examples of domain names gone horribly wrong:

• cumstore.co.uk for Cumbria Storage Systems, Ltd.
• choosespain.com to travel in Spain, pain-free!
• mammotherection.com deals with modern architecture and engineering
• cummingfirst.com is for a church in Cumming, Georgia

While these are pretty funny (and/or disturbing, depending upon your point-of-view), these are reputation management nightmares. Sadly, they were all preventable -- usually with merely a well-placed hyphen or change in keywords. NYCanal.com could have saved themselves a lot of embarrassment by choosing ny-canal.com or newyorkcanal.com instead.

Big name companies often miss out on one of the basic concepts of SEO: Canonicalization, which means "identifying and consolidating to one, definitive source." How are they missing out? Grab a handful of your favorite companies and see whether or not they have a http://www.yourdomain.com and a http://yourdomain.com that leads to the same page. You'd be surprised how many "culprits" there are out there that don't have a 301 permanent redirect in place to preserve their home page's Page Rank. By having two sets of pages out there, it creates duplicate content because the search engines see pages based on their URLs. So instead of splitting your Page Rank between two, identical URLs, take control over your traffic and make sure you have a 301 permanent redirect in place.

For more on this topic, read my full post on my CNet: Searchlight blog.

You may or may not have heard of a blog carnival. Blogging colleague Toby Bloomberg first introduced me to the concept and I must say, as a link building afficionado, my eyes lit up at the potential these traveling columns have for building links.

A blog carnival is, in effect, a column on a particular topic that is passed on from blog to blog, with each blogger adding their own thoughts or findings to that topic.

If you have expertise, for example, in nonprofit marketing, you can join the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. There you will find other members of the nonprofit blog carnival adding posts on this specialty topic.

Think of the potential. By participating as a host (dare I say, carny?), all the other host members of the blog carnival will link to you.

Each issue/edition will link to a handful of blogs and sites as well, so if you have something useful and intelligent to say on the topic, you should submit your link for consideration by the host(s). And even if you don't actively participate, it's good to get on the radar of those contributing to it. You never know, they may see one of your articles or blog posts and discuss it within the carnival. Just by reaching out you may see your site mentioned as a useful resource. Now that's potential.

Now here's another great little service I've recently discovered.

Say you've just released a news story, blog post, product page or any other web page, hopefully people all over the Internet are talking about it. And you'd like to keep track of all those conversations, right?

TalkDigger will help you find, follow and display conversations evolving around a subject (URL). It works like this: If you want to know who is talking about you, copy the URL, paste it in the TalkDigger search box at TalkDigger.com and hit "Dig it!"

TalkDigger then returns results from various search engines, all of which contain a link to the URL.

Having access to these conversations is a truly powerful tool for webmasters and bloggers, and online marketers can discover what people think of your new product — its strengths and weaknesses. Pretty neat, eh?

Hat tip to Jeremiah Owyang for this one.

Following on from my last post on Larry Chase's predictions for how online marketing in 2006 will evolve...

I can't stress enough how important it is to experiment with the new technologies that Larry discussed (RSS, podcasting, video downloads, mapping applications, etc.) so you're not left in the dust. Sure, RSS or podcasts or video downloads won't take over the world in 2006, but you can be sure you'll be on the back foot if you do nothing and let your competitors establish a foothold with a popular podcast show or video blog.

What I'm talking about here is first mover advantage. Once your competitor becomes the next RocketBoom.com (a popular video blog which auctioned off their first video ad on eBay for $40,000!) or the next FrenchPodclass (a podcast of French language lessons offered by 26-year-old Sebastian Babolat, who recorded them in his living room and within several months had 10,000+ subscribers), it'll be hard to catch up and overtake them.

Our client Steve Spangler is podcasting audio commentary, audio interviews, and video clips demonstrating some very cool science experiments to teachers and parents (his target audience). I reckon that his competitors won't be upstaging him anytime soon, given the loyal following and buzz he's already built up. And most importantly, now he's got the momentum to keep evolving his podcasting/vodcasting at a faster and faster clip.

What are you doing to differentiate your brand and position yourself to capitalize on the whole "Web 2.0" thing going forward?

There's an art to making an effective link request. For starters, you should not propose a reciprocal link, for 2 reasons: 1) the reciprocal nature of the link will basically nullify the SEO benefit you would have gotten, and 2) all the link request spams flooding webmasters' inboxes are of a reciprocal nature and you need to differentiate yourself as much as possible from that rubbish. Say these sorts of things and rest assured that your link request will go straight into the recipient's Trash:

• "Hi, Let’s swap links!"
• "I’ve already linked to you."
• "Great site!"
• "You already link to our competitor XYZ.com and we offer a better/complementary product."
• "Please use the following text in your link…"

When requesting links, think and act like a PR professional or a biz dev director, not an SEO. Or even think and act like an end-user of their site. "Hi, I found a broken link on _____. Have you thought about adding features like _____ to your ______ on your site? BTW, you might want to add xyz.com and abc.com as links." Just don't be disingenuous; provide real value with your suggestions. Even suggest links to competitors or sites that you have no vested interest in.

We all get link request spams, even Google engineers! (such as this one posted by Matt Cutts). Here's one I got recently:

Subject: Quality link request

Hello,

I found your website www.stephanspencer.com on Google.

We have a quality website at www.ace-mobility.com that will be well ranked on Google.

We are happy to upload a link onto this website in any way you request in exchange for a return link. I'm sure you appreciate that this would be of great benefit to us both.

To go ahead with this exchange please upload our link information below to your links page.

Please reply to all@acemobilitychoice.co.uk to say where you have uploaded it.

If you would like your return link presenting in a particular way please include this information in your email.

I will then arrange for your link to be uploaded and email you again to let you know.

Thank you.

Regards
Jessica


Please note, the link needs to be set out as below in order for it to be returned.
[rest of email ommitted]

All I've got to say to that is, "Yeah, right!"

Eric Ward shared some secrets on how he crafts link requests that work in Thursday's link building webinar for MarketingProfs which Eric and I co-presented. MarketingProfs will post the archive of the webinar in their Premium Library soon. And for those of you who aren't MarketingProfs premium subscribers (you should join, btw, it's well worth it!), I'll see if I can get permission from MarketingProfs to post an archive of the webinar here on my blog.

It's been a rough ride for Kryptonite Locks. Last September a blogstorm erupted — due to their unresponsiveness after the discovery that an ordinary Bic pen could pick their bike locks — costing them an estimated $10 million. It all happened so quickly, as you can see below:

(Source: Fortune, 2005)

But 10 months later, online Kryptonite still publicly suffers from the aftermath. As you can see, it's not their home page that ranks #1 or #2 for "kryptonite" in Google, but their product recall pages that bloggers had Googlebombed to those top positions. Worse yet, the #5 position is occupied by a blogger (Engadget.com) who rails on Kryptonite, complete with video.

In a sense, Google (as well as the other engines) "ear marks" victims of blogstorms. I learned last week at Williamsburg while on vacation with my family what "ear marking" originally referred to: someone put in the stocks would have their earlobes nailed to the stocks. Then when it came remove them, their ears would be torn, as a form of permanent public humiliation. So when you saw someone with torn ear lobes, you'd know immediately that the person had been in the stocks at one point in time. The 21st century equivalent: the top Google results for your company name endure long after you've been blogstormed.

As a follow-on to yesterday's post about getting your blog noticed by influentials, i.e. A-List bloggers, I thought I would describe a scenario just recently presented to me.

I have been asked by analyst Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester Research if I would be willing to blog about their upcoming boot camp on integrated marketing on May 5. It's a full-day intensive workshop being held at their offices in Cambridge. I said "Sure, I'd be happy to mention it, but I don't think it will get picked up by other bloggers and thus it won't spread through the blogosphere." So the effectiveness of such a promotion strategy is limited.

A-List bloggers, like everyone else, are forever tuned in to the station "WII-FM" — What's In It For Me. As such, Forrester's message would be much more contagious, if there was a "free prize inside," so to speak, for the bloggers who read my boot camp "plug." In other words, the way to spread the word about the Forrester boot camp is for Forrester to make an irresistible, exclusive offer to bloggers who blog about the boot camp.

For example, what if Forrester gave away some exclusive piece of research that normally only their clients have access to? It doesn't have to be an entire report, just something exclusive and something bloggable. Like a "scoop" on an upcoming report. Or a synop0sis of key points or perhaps a mini report. Now what if the bloggers who blog about this integrated marketing boot camp get access to this exclusive information as part of the deal? In fact, what if Forrester Research turn this into an ongoing program, kind of like how Microsoft is wooing influential bloggers with their "Search Champs" program (where they hand-pick influencers and fly them to Redmond to wine-and-dine them and to discuss how Microsoft might improve their MSN search engine).

Hmm... "Forester Research Champs." Sure, they'd be buying off bloggers. But everybody would win, including blog readers. Bloggers get access to exclusive research early and often — as long as they agree to blog about Forrester. It is an interesting proposition. Forrester, what do you think?