Great Online PR Quote

Reading Brian Solis new ebook "A Guide to Blogger Relations" and it includes this great quote from City Mama....

"We all know PR people don't read our blogs. I mean, if one more PR person starts and email with, 'Hey! How was Hawaii!' because a quick glance through last month's posts mentions my trip, I'm gonna scream…Tell me you looked up my stats on Alexa. Tell me you picked me because you *think* I may be influential. Tell me that you know mombloggers get pitched to all the time but that you'd *pretty please* like me to listen to you. Just don't bullshit me by telling me 'you read my blog.' I know you don't.”
- Stefania Pomponi Butler

I think quote does a great job demonstrating that while traditional PR pitching skills are definitely a part of online PR, the rules of the game are different.

SEM for the Small Business

I've become a contributor for COSE's MindSpring website in the Technology/SEO category. The first post is a starter of SEO resources for the Small Business. It would be great to get your suggestions about small-business specific SEO resources to add to the list.

What's a Media Hatch Look Like?

Ever wonder what it looks like at Optiem's Media Hatch? Well wonder no more, here is a snapshot of where we work. Check out our Optiem Flickr gallery to get a feel for our entire space. Its a pretty cool place to work.

Keyword Ranking Reports of the Future

The first of the month always has our team busy getting together client's monthly reports. These include looking at a variety of KPI's but one of the items that always generates the most discussion is the keyword ranking report. Each client is uniquely fascinated by how they stack-up on Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.com for their most important keywords.

While this is a good indication of how a site is performing, translating this ranking into actual customers is what good SEOs do. But how do you get a client, particulary non-web savvy clients, to take the time to understand web analytics is where the good data lies? Web analytics packages have come a long way in terms of user friendliness, but they are still daunting to navigate for the novice. And a keyword ranking report is not, its nice and easy to understand and provides at-a-glance performance metrics.

But what about in the future, where search is truly local? We may not be able to generate keyword ranking reports for clients based in other cities, or for clients looking to monitor a keyword in cities across the country.

One answer to this questions is timing and training. With time web analtyics will become more and more mainstream. And with training good agencies can teach clients the importance of measuring keywords by the amount of traffic and conversions they drive, not where they rank on search engines.

But wouldn't it be nice if there was a tool that could replicate search engine results uniquely by city or state across the country, or communities around the world?