This week the New York Times broke the story about how JCPenney nabbed the #1 spot in Google for a slew of search terms.  For months – right through the holiday season – they were top of the rankings for phrases like “skinny jeans”, “home decor” and “comforter sets”, to name just a few. Google looked into the results and, suddenly no more JCPenney.  They were penalized for buying links on spammy, irrelevant sites, which is a violation of  Google’s terms and conditions.

What does Google like?  Good quality  content. And no, that does not mean buying reams of articles from content farms.

The Official Google blog says “As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.”

So what does Google like? Really good quality linkbait.  Creative content that adds value to the conversations online. Here is what Matt Cutts of Google has to say  about this.

Listen to your audience/community/tribe and find out what kind of content they’re interested in, what they find entertaining or valuable.   Figure out what you can provide that will grab their attention and get them to link to your content.

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This week Joe Kutchera, author of Latino Link, is doing a Blog Tour.

Here are three tips and cases studies that show how companies can listen, learn and respond and how effective engagement can lead to ROI.

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The SNCR Symposium is one of my favorite events of the year. Many of the best minds in PR, Marketing and Social Media present their research findings for the year, so I get a two-day immersion in the state of new communications. And I get to chat with them and ask them questions.

Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Senior Fellow and Research Chair of the Society for New Communications Research and Chancellor Professor of Marketing at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth presented the annual update of the study “The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging and Twitter Usage by America’s Largest Companies.” Quite a mouthful, but very interesting data.

The study shows that Fortune 500 are definitely on board with social media and that Twitter is the current darling of the big companies. 60% of the F500 have an active Twitter account – described in the study as an account that has a post within the last 30 days. ( Not quite what I would call an active Twitter account, being that it is a real-time microblogging service.) That’s up from 35% in 2009.

9 of the top 10 corporations (Wal-Mart, Exxon, Chevron, General Electric, Bank of America, ConocoPhillips, AT&T, Ford and HP) consistently post on their Twitter accounts.

One other big move is that the bulk of the active companies are not in the top 100.  In 2009 40% of the companies with an active account were in the F100.  2010 saw a wider spread of adoption: only 25% are in the F100 and the majority of active tweeters are now in the middle of the pack.

The industries most strongly represented among Fortune 500 Twitter accounts were

• specialty retail (23 companies)
• food, drug and CPG (22)
• insurance (20)

These are also the three top industries using Facebook.

The most interesting fact that I heard last week is that the engagement gap is still alive and well in corporate social media.  Only 35% of these F500 Twitter accounts are using the @replies, RTs and engaging in converation with their followers.

The CMO council defined the engagement gap as “The difference between the influence of the Internet in consumer decision making and the amount of spending and effort on the part of corporations and organizations in trying to interact with and shape the thinking behind those decisions.”

So it would seem to me that companies have accepted that social media is here to stay.  They know that their customers expect them to be on Facebook and Twitter.  However, there is still a ways to go to really understand what this social media thing is all about.  Only half of those F500 get the conversation and social idea. The rest are quite happily treating it as just another broadcast marketing channel.

It’s not too surprising then that social media training seems to be a hot item in many of these F500 companies for 2011.

These findings  clearly demonstrate the growing importance of social media in the business world. These large and leading companies drive the American economy and to a large extent the world economy. Their willingness to interact more transparently via these new technologies with their stakeholders is clear. It will be interesting to watch as they expand their adoption of social media tools and connect with their constituents in dramatically new ways, concludes the report.

During Social Media Week in LA USC held an interesting one day seminar focused mainly on geo location services.

Professor Jonathan Taplin of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California is a  co-founder of the Annenberg Research Network for International Communication and he consults for various business and government organizations on the role of digital media in the economic infrastructure.  He touched on some points that  are  particularly relevant to PR – being authentic and building community.

When I asked him how we should go about finding the right influencers so that we can build our community for a brand he explained that it involves a lot of data gathering and analysis.  He says anyone can learn to use these tools, but it is not immediately obvious who your influencers are- you have to do the in depth collection and analysis of data.

I’ve been working with a couple of monitoring tools, as well as with some developers who are researching new ideas in language and monitoring of conversations, so I know that his statement is correct.

I’d recommend that you get some social media training – learn to do it with free tools like Social Mention, RSS feeds and a NetVibes dashboard so you really understand the process

Then upgrade to a tool like Sysomos,  Radian 6 or Ecairn Conversation.

It’s vital to have this kind of information so that you can

• Discover who your core community is
• Develop content based on the current interests of your core community
• Find the right influencers for that community
• Seed the content into the community at the right place so it gets shared by influential credible people

If this approach interests you, and you will be at the PRSA National conference in DC in October, come to our  session on Branded Content Sunday October 17.

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I had the pleasure of chatting with Maggie Fox at the Media Relations Summit in New York City last week. She spoke on the session about the future of social media and in this interview Maggie explains how branded content and the intersection paid and earned media is a growing trend she is seeing.

Great minds think alike, Maggie! Branded content is one of the trends in my Future of PR report

Using paid media to extend the reach of your news content is often a controversial subject in PR. Making the most of the online and social media opportunities to leverage great content produced by customers or bloggers makes good PR sense.

Suppose a blogger or video blogger produces content around a remarkable brand or product experience and their blog only reaches ten thousand people.  You could use paid social media and online news services  to deliver it to other people who might be interested, but won’t ever see that particular blog post. This kind of content has a high trust-factor and sites like digg and foursquare are offering paid content marketing opportunities now.  You can also use services like Outbrain and Newsforce to place the content on major news sites.  And that audience is growing by leaps and bounds. Newspaper websites had their highest ever number of visitors in Q1 of this year.

Its definitely time to add some new ideas and tools to our traditional PR and media relations skill set.

Update:  You might also find this post about the long tail of the media from Geoff Livingston relevant to this idea.

He says:

In Chapter Four of Now Is Gone, we talk about this “ping pong match” between traditional and new media outlets. From the draft material in June of 2007:

One great way to promote your new media initiative remains traditional media, who often use well-respected blogs as sources or even the subject of stories… [Social media attention] drives information into the spotlight forcing traditional media to pay attention – or look like they’ve missed the news, and most importantly the conversation. Blogs [can be] a more effective way of reaching and inspiring traditional media to react than most PR professionals and wire services combined.   Ping pong matches demonstrate that weighting one tool by its actual total community and eyeball impact fails. As Seth Godin said in Meatball Sundae, “It doesn’t matter if the socially generated earned media only gets one percent of the hoped for attention if it’s the right one percent.”

However, it doesn’t hurt to make it available to the other 99 percent either.

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On Wednesday morning a group of people interested enough in social media to brave the LA traffic gathered at the W in Westwood for the Visible Technologies Social Media Readiness breaskfast. The first speaker was Esteban Kolsky of ThinkJar. Kolsky was a Gartner analyst and now does work on social CRM and strategy.

He spoke about the depth of unfiltered intelligence available in social conversations and the value this data has for an organization. Monitoring and analyzing social converations is faster, more accurate and costs about one-tenth of traditional market research.

According to the Trust Barometer what people trust most is no longer ‘someone like me’  it’s now  ‘a company like me.’

People trust, form relationships with, and buy from companies that share their values.  They expect, and in fact demand, that these companies become social internally and externally. They want to be involved,  They want to have a voice in how the products are designed and how the company operates.

To be a social businessyou have to:

Listen – but listening alone is not enough. Most companies are not sure what to do with the data and are not organized to use the information

Learn – Analyze the content you monitor and learn from the information and start to do something about it. There is a wealth of information in these conversations.  Mine the data and find those gems of intellegence.

Participate – Don’t let this be a one-way flow.  It’s about the conversation.  That means you have to participate and engage with your customers, detractors and evangelists. Use tools.  Form social media teams. Set social media policies and guidelines.

Collaborate – Provide your employees with the tools to colloborate,  Be open.  Take down that firewall between the smart market and your smart employees, so eloquently described in the Cluetrain Manifesto.   Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in. 
Grow and improve  - use the information you learn from your interactions with people  inside and outside the company to change, adopt better practices and make better products.  Use social media like you use email – it should be that integrated into your organization, not a ‘campaign’ or ‘experiment’ in PR or marketing.

Become a client-driven, innovative organization.

What does it take to do this?

• Buy in from the top
• A commitment to changing the way you operate
• Social media training. 

The training needs to go across the entire organization, from C-suite to finance (they approve the budgets) legal and  compliance, sales and CRM.  It’s not just for the marketing and PR department.

Ravit Lichtenberg of Ustrategy spoke in the keynote at OMS10 about the vital need for a social media strategy rather than “shooting arrows at a moving target.’

Take a step back and figure out  the best way to reach your customers, provide valuable content and stay close to them, says Ravit.

Five Social Media Tips:

1.  Have a vision-driven strategy, but a campaign driven implementation.  Have a strategy based on your vision but choose two to three tactic to focus on for your implementation

2. Own your own content as an organization.Aggregate all your content on your website.  Make is easy for people to find all your content in one place.  (A social media newsoom is a great tool for this.)

3. Put a well-defined structure and process in place.  Define the roles and assign accountablity.  Be fast and agile because the speed of customer engagement online demands immediate response.

4.  Be aware of the role of women in social media.  75% of purchasing power is in the hands of women and traditionally women are good at relationships. Think about marketing to women.

5. Resources – find the right balance between external resources and employees to help you craft the strategy and implement it going forward.

Ravit and I are both presenting sessions at the PRSA Western District Conference and we’ll be on a panel together as well! Join us for a few days in the desert at a lovely spa resort.

The Online Marketing Summit in San Diego was held at the beautiful Paradise Point Resort this year.  I caught up with Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR after one of the keynote sessions and talked to him about search, video and public relations.

According to comScore the second most popular site where searches are conducted is YouTube, Music is the number one genre of videos searched, but how-to videos are not far behind.

Gregs advice for PR people:

The opportunities are increasing online.  PR people have to learn new skills.  You can create videos and upload them to YouTube as part of your pitch to traditional media.  Learn to tell your stories in video, upload them to YouTube, optimize them for search so they get found and work with analytics so you can track and measure your results.