PR 101

A friend who owns a marketing agency in Milwaukee told me of a recent application for an internship she received. The college student appeared to have the necessary qualifications – that is until my friend Googled this would-be intern.

One of the things came up on the search was the young man’s Twitter feed. My friend told me to describe this feed as scatological would be understating things. This feed made my friend immediately decide this student was not nearly mature enough to handle a work environment. She decided anyone that would tweet in great deal about relationships clearly needed to grow up before attempting a leap into the real world.

You might read about the Buckingham Palace guard who posted some very inappropriate things about his royal bosses on Facebook. The United Kingdom’s Press Association reported that Scots Guardsman Cameron Reilly, 18, who usually stands guard outside the royal palace, called Prince William’s bride-to-be a “posh b****” and other nasty names on Facebook.

ABC news reported that Reilly reportedly wrote, “hur and william drove past me on friday n all a got was a sh*tty wave while she looked the opposite way from me, stupid stuck up cow am a not good enough for them! posh b**** am totally with u on this 1 who reely gives a f*** about hur”.

Reilly also posted anti-Semitic and racist comments on his Facebook page, the Press Association reported. The Ministry of Defense is reportedly investigating the claims and has removed Reilly from his wedding day duties. I don’t know what happens in the British Army when one screws up like that, but I am guessing young Mr. Reilly will soon be guarding the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. The Scots say that’s where the Lord tests his storms before unleashing them on the rest of the Earth. Not always a pleasant place to be.

At any rate, these are two examples of what I hammer constantly to clients and groups when I speak. The key thing to remember is that nothing is ever private on the net. Number two, trust no one among your followers.

Once you have more than say 100 followers on Twitter, Facebook or any other site your are not going to know all of them personally. They might like you, they might not. Post something that is critical or offensive and one of those “friends” might decide to share it with the world.

Forrester Research estimates that one post on a social media site reaches approximately 150 people. If 10 of those people repeat the post, there is a potential of reaching 1,500 people. And if they repeat it and so on, your seemingly private comment has gone viral. It could also be an embarrassing picture or video. Those tend to spread even faster.

As I always clients, don’t do anything stupid because it will hang around forever. Remember the words of Ben Franklin” three can keep a secret – if two are dead.”

This blog generates a lot of comments. Many of them end up in my spam filter. Not unusual I am told. The ratio seems to be one legitimate comment for every 20 or so spam comments.

For the longest time I couldn’t figure out what I was getting so much spam. It didn’t appear to be hackers or anyone trying to do something malicious. I used to just hit the spam delete button without bothering to ever look at anything that in the filter.

Curious a couple of weeks ago about where all this detritus was coming from, I started looking at the senders’ email addresses. The light bulb went on. The spam generators were attempting to use my blog for “Black Hat” search engine optimization. They were attempting to raise their sites Google rankings by placing links on my blog site.

It works this way. Search engines, in particular Google require ways to confirm page relevancy. One method is to examine for one-way links coming directly from relevant websites. The more links into the website, the higher the search ranking.

Since most people searching for something rarely go beyond the first page of Google’s results, companies work very hard to increase the links to their pages. How they do that is called search engine optimization or SEO. I use “White Hat” SEO tactics for this blog.

There are a number of ways to do that, including using key words that will show up in search engines, trading links with other bloggers, and posting links to my blog in public forums. All of that is accepted practice perfectly legitimate.

Then there are the Black Hat tactics. As I like do, let’s use an example. In this case, let’s discuss that well-known department chain J.C. Penney.  During the 2010 holiday shopping period, the department store started showing up on the first page of Google for almost every product it sold. Highly unlikely that would happen on its own.

In February, the New York Times reported that it had “asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

“Despite the cowboy outlaw connotations, black-hat services are not illegal, but trafficking in them risks the wrath of Google. The company draws a pretty thick line between techniques it considers deceptive and “white hat” approaches, which are offered by hundreds of consulting firms and are legitimate ways to increase a site’s visibility. Penney’s results were derived from methods on the wrong side of that line, says Mr. Pierce. He described the optimization as the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has ever seen.

“Actually, it’s the most ambitious attempt I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You’d think they would have people around them that would know better.”

What someone did – Penney’s denies it had anything to do with the effort – was place links on thousands of websites all over the world that led directly to JCPenney.com The more links, the higher the Google search ranking. When the Times notified Google, punishment was swift, the newspaper reported.

Google pushed J.C. Penney search results to its back pages. (The Bob Dylan reference is intentional.) Suddenly it was very hard to find anything the company sold.

J.C. Penney paid the price for someone’s overzealous marketing effort. To me, Black Hat SEO is like an athlete who uses performance drugs. Would that person have won without the chemical boost?

The sad thing to me, beyond the unethical practice, is how Black Hat SEO calls all search results into question. I am willing to be bet that 99.9 percent of people on the Web don’t cheat. But all it takes is few people to try and game the system to make everyone suspicious. That benefits no one.

On May 28th, Google unveiled what it is billing as “the email of the future.”

Named Google Wave, the experimental project is the result of a multi-year initiative to reinvent digital communication by blending e-mail, instant messaging, and content sharing into something resembling a cross between Twitter, Facebook, and a standard email platform, according to Online Media Daily.

Google Wave, which is expected to be released later this year, will “combine conversation-type communication and collaboration-type communication,” Lars Rasmussen, a software engineering manager at Google and the project’s co-founder said, Online Media Daily also reported.

What does this mean to those of us who use social media for marketing and public relations? It means it will be almost impossible to run an effective social media campaign without using Google applications. Merging Google Wave with Google Friend Connect means the “search engine” will become the colossus that will stand astride the web.

The core of social media is building communities. Think of Google as the place that provides all of the tools one needs to build those communities. I know of only one other place that provides as comprehensive a toolbox as Google does. It’s called Apple. Apple develops hardware and software for that hardware. Google is concerned with Internet applications. The two companies offerings dovetail quite nicely,

And Google and Apple are apparently working very closely together. One of Google’s new applications is called IGoogle. Coincidence, I think not. IGoogle aggregates such things as Google Latitude (which tells your contacts where you are), local weather forecasts, Gmail, sports scores, local events and a host of other information.

I first learned about Google approximately 10 years ago. A colleague at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel told me about this new search engine that was better than Yahoo. She said it was faster, simpler and wasn’t cluttered with ads. I tried it and I liked it.  At the time, I was one of the only people I knew who was using it. When I told people what search engine I was using, they laughed at the name. Now, Google dominates the Web.

Google is now so ubiquitous that the world “Google” has become a synonym for search. Consider these statistics for 2008:

Search Engine                         Share of Searches

Google                                            59.3 percent

Yahoo                                             16.9 percent

MSN                                                13.3 percent

AOL                                                 4.1 percent
Source: http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/135

As I have already said, Google is now far more than just a search engine. It is has made itself an essential part of working on the web.

Let’s look at some of its other applications:

• Google Friend Connect. Look at the right hand side of this blog. You will see a widget marked Google Friend Connect. Social media used to a fragmented experience. Some people were on Facebook, some were on Twitter, others used MySpace. What Google Friend Connect does is allow the linking of social media sites. As social media expert Simon U. Ford explains, Google Friend Connect is the pipeline running the under the web.
• Google Mail, or Gmail, provides email, instant messaging, and voice and video communication without launching a separate application. It is kind of a one-stop-shop for instant communication.
• Google Docs, which is essentially an on-line office application. Google Docs supports .doc, .xls, .csv, .ppt, .txt, .html, .pdf and other formats. What it means is anyone care share and edit documents, spreadsheets, web pages, etc. in real time. There is no need to email anything back and forth.
• Google sites allow the construction of rich websites. It can be used for something as complex as a company intranet or as simple as a family web page.

There are many other applications Google provides. As I already said, what Google has done is make it easier than ever to set up a social media campaign.

Let’s say you have launched a new product. Your customers like it. You create a Google site for those customers to go to discuss the product. You hook in Google Friend Connect to that site. Using Google’s blog app, you post a blog on that site where you discuss the product and give customers an opportunity to comment.

Some of the customers can record a video on YouTube about how much they like the product. Say link to that video on Facebook. Using Google Friend Connect, they become a fan of your site. Using the same app, they can link that Facebook video into the website in a seamless way.

And from the website, again using Google Friend Connect, the video can be linked to Digg, Plaxo, Technorati and a plethora of other sites. All of sudden, the potential exists for your video to be seen, and your blog to be read, by millions of people. And not to sound too much like a salesman, but Google made it all possible.

Will something else come along and knock Google off its pedestal? Who knows? All I know right now is that if you are going to run an effective social media campaign, you are going to need Google.

I post this blog every Monday. If you have questions you would like me to answer, please email me. I am always looking for topics and input. My email address is in the next paragraph.

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In addition, please join my community. In the upper right hand corner, there is a widget marked Google Friend Connect. Please join. This is an example of cutting edge social media.

My background: I worked as a reporter for 25 years in central Illinois, upstate New York, suburban Detroit and Milwaukee. I now help clients with marketing communications through my company – JJC Communications LLC. If you want to know more about my company, and myself, click the link. It’s a cliché, but it’s true for me: no job is too big, no job is too small. I have worked with companies on the Fortune 500 list and I have worked with companies that have one employee. The service I provide is the same for all.

Email me at jjcole54@gmail.com