This week, we're asking for your picks for Best Articles or Resources for Blog PR. We're looking for article summaries or web site reviews, about 500 words maximum, that tell us exactly what was so helpful about the article or resource. Resources must be available for FREE online and should focus on strategic public relations blogging.

Students from my Internet PR class will be adding reviews of articles they find. They've also been reviewing articles and resources that people on IAOCblog.com point them to. So if you have a site or article you would like reviewed, post it here and see if one of my students takes the bait.

STEVE O'KEEFE
Vice President, IAOC

Joe Taylor, publisher of the industrial websites waterandwastewater.com and powderandbulk.com, has brought online video sharing to the industrial sector. With its easy upload tool and social tracking tools (such as most viewed, viewer voting and tagging), Taylor's industrial video communities (see here and here) bring a new impetus for equipment marketers to create an entirely different breed of video.

I did a few B2B corporate and marketing videos BTI (before the Internet), and I have to say I'd do them differently today. I'd make them shorter. I'd lose the music soundtrack, and maybe the voiceover narration, too. I'd spend less of my video budget on a single video's production values and more on increasing the number of videos.

Just Show the Machines at Work

I like the simplicity of this machine demo where all kinds of foreign objects, from a rubber glove to a tennis shoe, are dropped into a shredder used to keep sewer lines clear of debris. I also like the ability video gives you to capture action. This demolition of grain silos is from Poland.

Humor also works, though the humor in this conveyor video is more for insiders. For those who missed the joke: the guy with the shovel wouldn't need to be there if the conveyor belt were just a foot longer. If you're really bold, you might even figure a way to make this "happy wastewater guy" into a viral marketing campaign.

This Bulk Solids Pump (BSP) video is a good example of what happens to a traditional marketing video when it's moved to an online video sharing site. Seeing the BSP's unique technology in action works fine, but the soundtrack is a bit out of synch. You can see same video here (bigger Quick Time file, a little better sound and picture). If I were developing this video today with Joe Taylor's new sites in mind, I'd keep it shorter and simpler and just let the machine do the talking.

How Taylor Created His Video Sharing Sites

To create his industrial video sites, Joe Taylor says he started with the free open source Mplayer (also see the Wikipedia article) and the closely related MEncoder that enables visitors to upload their own videos and convert them on the fly to a small Flash file. Taylor did his own customizing and says he spent about $2,000 on outside programming help.

Getting Around the Corporate Barriers

Forget about trying to go to YouTube from inside most corporate networks. Like many organizations, my company's IT department has setup barriers to block employee access to potential bandwidth hogs, such as music downloads and streaming video sites. Taylor's sites haven't been immune to these barriers. Sometimes marketing people can persuade IT to loosen the rules for business-oriented sites (my request to allow Taylor's sites was promptly acted on by our IT manager).

But rather than leave it to chance, Taylor has experimented with different naming conventions that might keep the barriers from ever being raised. He found that a URL like http://video.powderandbulk.com was a certain invitation for blockades to rise, where www.powderandbulk.com/videos didn't set off nearly as many alarms. With the growing migration of business into the social networks with their music and video and 3-D reality, this issue is going to become an increasing headache for IT managers.

PRWeek is running a free Online Career Fair. According to the announcement you can:

• Meet with recruiters in online booths
• Search for positions in the PR industry
• Interact live with company HR representatives
• Attend live webcast presentations

All from the convenience of your desktop!

Register for this FREE event today

My brother, Kelly O'Keefe, recently took charge of the Executive Education program at the world renown VCU AdCenter at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. He asked me to post this notice about a week-long program they're having, March 12-16, on Brand Management:

The VCU AdCenter is Hosting an Executive Education Program for Brand Managers and Marketing Leaders.

It's an intensive, 5-day session, where participants will gain insights into emerging best-practices. They’ll learn practical techniques for understanding the changing marketing landscape, monitoring consumer trends and attitudes, developing creative strategies that work, and proving it by quantifying return on investment.

Guest instructors include industry leaders like John Jay, Partner/ECD, Wieden + Kennedy; George Neill, Corporate VP of Global Marketing, Motorola; Scott Slagle, Senior Brand Manager Chrysler Brand, DaimlerChrysler Corporation; Ted Ward, VP Marketing, GEICO;  Elizabeth Talerman, VP Marketing, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia; and Bill McDonald, EVP, Brand Strategy, Capital One. 

Space is limited to 30 participants, so be sure to reserve space early. Check out the website for more details.

this is a copy of a post I made on my own blog and I thought it was relevant for our audience.

There's been so much good discussion about the structure (or in this case re-structuring) of the press release. Todd Defren and his team at Shift Communications are carrying the torch on this quest...makes me think of Monty Python whenever I say that.

The Quest for the Holy Grail! King Arthur: "We have ridden the length and breadth of the land in search of knights who will join me in my court at Camelot. I must speak with your lord and master." Soldier: "What? On a horse?" King Arthur: "Yes." Soldier: "You're using coconuts..." King Arthur: "What?" Soldier: "You've got two empty halves of coconut and you're banging them together!"

This is not to suggest that Todd and his team are a bit nuts...far from it...merely that they are on a noble quest. Today they launched a template for a more social online newsroom, or in our parlance, MediaRoom. I applaud them for their efforts to keep this evolutionary thinking moving forward. Change takes time, particularly in industries that are highly regulated. In the last six years, my company has launched over 400 online newsrooms of some shape or size, many of those through our strategic partner, PR Newswire. Certainly back then and to a large degree still, education was the key to adoption. PR Communications professionals had to KNOW ABOUT the tools before they could use them.

New technology has to do a couple of things very clearly in order to see mass adoption. Tony Perkins, founder of the now defunct Red Herring Magazine, and editor of the new Always On Network, has some interesting insight in his blog post about avoiding another tech bubble. One of the key components of any new technology is that it takes something that people are already doing and saves them time and money.

That has always been the key value proposition of online mediarooms to the busy PR professional. They MUST post news releases to their websites for compliance and other reasons. They MUST (if they're public) use the wire services to distribute said news. And historically that meant dealing with a busy webmaster or using a clunky html WYSIWYG tool to do it. Content management platforms have improved, PR pros have gotten more savvy, IT teams have become less gatekeepers and have allowed business units within their organization to use 3rd party vended solutions, price points have come down...and voila we have adoption of online mediarooms. Riding this wave and working personally with several hundred companies to implement these solutions has given me and my team a unique perspective...probably very similar to the experience base of the CCBN (now Thomson) team that has implemented thousands of IR websites since Reg FD became a reality.

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been lobbying the SEC to make a blog post compliant as "disclosure." Well guess what? Today TypePad, which powers a very large percentage of PR and corporate blogs, was completely down for an hour. Oops. The "new way" would have been a disaster.

Are online newsrooms useful for smaller or privately-held companies or non-profits or policy groups? Sure. Different value prop...they're looking for publicity, promotion, sales, consensus-building, etc. But my experience base lies with the publicly traded corporation and in this environment, the concept of enabling every Tom Dick and Harry to mash up and spread your company's news simply scares the bejesus out of them. Not interested. I'm convinced that at some point that will change and we will want to "turn on" the social elements of our MediaRooms much like Shift has suggested in their template. The technology is there...it's the strategy that has not yet caught up with it.

As I mentioned before, new technology always begs those discussions until it reaches a tipping point. Usage and comfort always has to catch up with the tool. Remember how yucky it felt to drive your first car that had anti-lock brakes? I really missed the old controlled skid!

Education is the key. The news release is certainly not dead...nor is the traditional way of doing news distribution for thousands of companies and the bulk of communications professionals. Change is good and most certainly inevitable...like Agent Smith says in the first Matrix: "You hear that Mr. Anderson?... That is the sound of inevitability... It is the sound of your death... Goodbye, Mr. Anderson..." Keanu: "My name...is NEO!"

In our continuing series on Top Internet PR Resources, this next week we are looking for your recommendations for Top Online Article Syndication Resources. Once again, we're looking for FREE tools or articles people can use to help them with Online Article Syndication.

Online article syndication is a very powerful tool for raising awareness, improving inbound links, improving search engine rank, and establishing yourself as a leader in your filed. Some "signature articles" have appeared on hundreds of web sites. I'll go so far as to say that one good signature piece -- say, on "permissions marketing" or "long tail" or "the millionaire next door" -- can propel a person to the top of their field and generate hundreds or thousands of responses every year.

So this week we are looking for your suggestions. Please provide reviews of 500 words or less. Or point us to a link and my Tulane students will be reviewing some of the resources you point us to.

Thanks for Your Help,
STEVE O'KEEFE
Vice President, IAOC

Call for Search Engine Optimization Resources

This week, we are looking for your recommendations on the top Search Engine Optimization articles or resources. Please place your suggestions in this thread and students from my Tulane University class in Internet Public Relations will post reviews here. Or post your own review.

Morty Schiller and I have been swapping SEO suggestions. Hopefully, he'll share some of his top picks. Also, my IT department -- Jesse Vohs a.k.a. The MacMaster -- has been doing SEO work for my company and found some good resources for analyzing your web site's SEO-friendliness. If he doesn't post, I'll extract his tips from previous e-mails and post them here.

Here are a couple of my top picks:

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Search Engine Watch

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/

An amazing resource for information about web site registration strategies and search engine optimization. A good list of links to do-it-yourself registration pages. Students will find many articles here worthy of review.

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Words In A Row

http://www.wordsinarow.com/wheretogo.html

An excellent site for do-it-yourself registration, with a comprehensive list of top directories and search engines, links to their submit pages, and tips on using each one.

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STEVE O'KEEFE

Author, Complete Guide to Internet Publicity

Professor of Internet Public Relations, Tulane University

Vice President, IAOC