Do We Still Need Newspapers? What About Local Radio?

I was skimming through my overview of discussions in the Linked In groups to which I “belong” when I came across one that immediately got my attention.

Charisse Louis, who owns a graphic design shop and is a blogger, asked the question, “Do you still read the newspaper?," bewailed that the over 55 crowd seems to be the only group that still reads the paper, and wondered what would happen when they (I assume, newspapers) were gone? She has written a blog installment on the same question. (Here's a link: http://www.charene.net/blog )

It triggered memories of bad times here on the Gulf Coast. In the wake of several hurricanes, the most devastating of which was Katrina, I saw good reason NOT to allow newspapers or local radio stations to vanish!

I know that the under 50 crowd thinks they can get their news from national broadcasts or on the Internet, but my question to them is, “what happens when there is no power, the phone lines and cell towers are damaged, you can’t get on the Internet (for lack of power or your wireless connection on your laptop isn’t getting a signal), and you can’t watch TV because it’s all digital now?”

In a media class I was teaching at Spring Hill College, many of the students believed that local radio and newspaper were “dead” until I described how it felt when a hurricane made landfall and the aftermath of the storm. Some of them had been in Mobile after Katrina, so they understood what I was talking about.

During the storm, the only connection you have to the outside world is the voice on the local radio station, since the only means of receiving news is your battery powered radio. Your battery powered televisions are no good now that we’ve gone to digital signal only. You huddle around the radio in the dark listening to that voice tell you where the storm is and what’s happening. Sometimes the voice may go off the air because the “roof of the studio is coming down.” (This actually happened during hurricane Frederic in the 70s.) So you switch to another station. I applaud these brave “voices in the dark” for staying and reporting to all the fearful folks huddled around their battery powered radios.

And when the hurricane has passed through and you emerge to take stock of the damage, you have another dilemma. Power is out, cell phones and phones may not work. Once again you feel cut off. But either that day or the next, the local paper is being sold on the street corners or delivered to your house. In the stifling heat, you read all about the devastation visited on your city and/or others down the coast; where to get help, supplies and services; catch up on the regional, national and international news; and you are eternally grateful that the paper published the issue in some other city and had it trucked in for the residents, who otherwise would be isolated.

After one of the hurricanes flooded Mobile some years back and the wind knocked out power, the Mobile Press Register still produced a daily paper. They had it printed in either Pensacola or Birmingham and trucked in. We got our in-depth news, which is still another reason for newspapers to be treasured.

Broadcast news cannot give us the in-depth coverage of a newspaper. I take the digital form of the Wall Street Journal, and treasure my time going through the articles. I read the printed format of the Mobile Press Register (as lean as it is these days). If the power goes out, I’ll lose my Wall Street Journal feed for lack of power to my computer, just as I’ll lose television coverage, but the Mobile Press Register will still be there, as will local radio stations.

I happen to like to work the crossword puzzles in the paper. I’ve tried doing crossword puzzles online, but at 9 p.m. my eyes hurt and I don’t want to be in front of a computer screen any longer!

I’m afraid of what will become of in-depth news when print is gone. I’m afraid that there will be lots of coastal residents in the dark with no friendly voices telling them what is happening if the local radio stations go automated and all we have is “national robo announcers” or satellite. I think there is good reason to have many viable mediums from which we get our news. I don’t think that digital television, satellite radio and the Internet are the end-all be-all of the media world.

Ms. Louis emailed me and said she had never considered a natural disaster when she had come up with her blog post about newspapers. And I didn’t see any other people citing similar examples in their discussions.

Is there anybody else out there that is afraid of losing our local media (especially print)? Is there anybody else out there who wonders what will happen in the wake of a natural (or unnatural) disaster? I’m afraid that we are being short sighted in our worship of the “new” technologies we have developed. How about you?

Search Engine Woes Part II

SEO, SEO…Don’t get me banned from Google, Mr. SEO!

On my last post, we looked at a couple of tricks that some underhanded SEO practitioners might use. And I promised you that in a future post, we would cover things that might get you banned on search engines. Well here we go...

Straight from the webcrawler's mouth, here are the ten "dirty SEO tricks" that will cause Google to ban your site:
1. Cloaking (This doesn't relate to a Romulan "bird of prey.")
2. Duplicate Content (Pretty much what it says...)
3. Have a Robot Write Your Web Site (Mr. Data isn't involved here, either.)
4. Add Keywords that Don't Relate to Your Content (What it says...)
5. Link to Bad Neighborhoods (They have those on the web? Believe it!)
6. Hide Text (Also called keyword stuffing or fontmatching.)
7. Title Stacking (Google calls this the "cousin" of keyword stuffing.)
8. Distribute Viruses, Trojans or Other Badware (Nasty, Nasty!)
9. Doorway Pages (Another sneaky redirect)
10. Automated Inquiries (Another Robot No No!)

And rather than "duplicate content" which might violate copyright (which to me is one of the BIG No Nos), I'm going to link you to the About.com page that explains the ten nasty tricks listed above. http://google.about.com/od/searchengineoptimization/tp/badseo.htm?p=1

Search Engine Woes Part I

SEO, SEO… What the Heck is SEO?

According to Wikipedia:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

So how do I get “SEOd”?

We are constantly being emailed about optimizing our site (which we have already done, and we do for all our clients). I had one “gentleman” tell me we had to hire his firm because no one could find our site on the search engines. I asked him how he found us. Obviously, he had been on our site, since he knew we existed, had my company email address and the company phone number. He couldn’t have found us in the Yellow Pages, since we’re not there.

Watch out for these companies that contact you by email and tell you that they can produce great results for you. These spam emails are about as useful as the emails that you get on “male enhancement” pills.

Your webmaster or mistress should understand keyword optimization and build it into your site in the design and development phase. If you have hired someone to build your site, ask them if they understand SEO before the process begins. And listen carefully. If they promise you the moon and stars, be skeptical.

If you already have a site, check with your provider and ask them if they have optimized your site. Ask them how they did it. If you don’t hear anything about keywords and site structure, then you may want to investigate companies that do search engine optimizing. But be careful. There are plenty of SEOs out there that do underhanded and unethical stuff that may get your site removed from the search engine indices (as stated above).

If you think you need SEO, check with people you trust to find out who they recommend. Talk to your ISP. Talk to Internet design firms. And be wary of the “SEO” song and dance. Don’t let anyone promise to put you at the top of the Google search. Nobody can promise that you’ll end up as number one on all the search engines.

Questions to ask:

* What experience do you have in my local area? Nationally? Internationally?
* What are your most important SEO techniques?
* How long have you been doing SEO? How long has your company been in business?
* Are you putting me in paid advertising or actually optimizing my site?
* How do we communicate? Will you provide me with detailed information about how you intend to optimize my site and the reasoning behind your plan? Will you provide me with a written plan and list of keywords?

If you don't have an Internet site design and maintenance firm, check us out. http://www.imagerymarketing.com

Next time – Avoiding practices that could get you banned from the search engine indices.

Recovering From Information Burnout

I just spent about a month not updating this blog. Why? I think I’ve been suffering from information burnout!

Between RSS feeds, e-publications, social media, other blogs to follow, business and personal email (at several addresses), and updating client sites, I finally ended up with totally singed synapses. So what did I do? I backed away from every form of communication I could and only looked at the news info I had to have to keep our clients happy and unscathed by the information age.

Having bronchitis for about four weeks didn’t help, since my voice kept cracking when I answered business calls, but it probably aided my attempt to hide from the information bombardment.

Do any of you find yourselves experiencing information burnout? I’d like to know. I don’t see myself becoming a tweeter for this very reason. Perhaps this isn’t a great admission on my part, but…

Hey! We all need a vacation at times!

You may need a Virtual Assistant!

Virtual Assistants (typically abbreviated to VAs) are entrepreneurs who provide professional administrative, technical, or creative (social) assistance to clients from a home office. They usually work for other small businesses and consultancy groups. It is estimated that there are as few as 5,000-8,000 or as many as 35,000 Virtual Assistants worldwide; the profession is growing in centralized economies with "fly-in, fly-out" (FIFO) staffing practices.

Common modes of communication and data delivery include the Internet, e-mail and phonecall conferences, online work spaces, and fax machine. Professionals in this business work on a contractual basis and a long-lasting cooperation is standard. Typically 5 years of administrative experience in an office is expected at such positions as executive assistant, office manager/supervisor, secretary, legal assistant, paralegal, legal secretary, real estate assistant, etc.

What is a Virtual Assistant?
A VA is an independent contractor who works remotely in his/her home-based business, usually from his/her home office, performing secretarial, administrative, creative and many many other tasks. With the use of e-mail, Internet, fax, phone and mail, a VA is more than able to offer valuable support to large and small businesses who can get on with growing their own business, while outsourcing administrative tasks.

Clearing up some misconceptions about Virtual Assistants
A VA does not have a work at home 'job', but a work at home business, nor is a VA an employee or an employed telecommuter. As stated above, a VA is not an employee, but a contracted service provider.

Resource: www.virtual-assistant-advice.com/

Let Imagery Marketing & Research Consultants provide VA services for you! Call us or visit www.imagerymarketing.com

What is PR and why do we need accredited PR Professionals (instead of spin doctors and flacks)?

Several years ago, one of my classes at Spring Hill College created a campaign for Public Relations which was intended for use by the Public Relations Council of Alabama. In the advertising and promotional materials prepared for PRCA to use with Alabama businesses and organizations, the class used an excellent line to explain why businesses should hire accredited public relations practitioners. I think their sentence says it all:

"We could spend an entire day explaining what a trained public relations professional can do for your company, but we basically help your organization build and protect the relationships that count."

PR must be a conversation with those "publics" with whom we must maintain good relations. Any means to carry on that conversation should be utilized by a smart practitioner. So in a way PR is connected at the hip to marketing communications, advertising, and others, but must also maintain a distance in order to be the conscience of the corporation.

And in these days of “AIG Bonuses”, all types of corporate greed and layoffs like we haven’t seen since the eighties, our corporations need a conscience!

Check out our interview on “Virtual Agencies”:
http://www.americanentrepreneurship.com/2009/02/28/expert-q-a-%e2%80%93-virtual-marketing-agency-benefits-for-small-businesses/

Public Relations versus Advertising

Our guest "Phlogger" this week is Mary White, MA, SPHR.

Many people have the misconception that publicity and advertising are the same things. While both publicity and advertising can play important roles in an organization’s overall marketing plan, they are very different. The three primary differences between publicity and advertising are (2) control, (2) cost, and (3) credibility.

Control: Advertising is a controlled form of communication, whereas public relations is uncontrolled. When you run an advertisement in a print publication, you purchase a specific amount of space on a page to run in a particular issue of the publication. You may even be able to specify that your ad be placed on the top left corner of the sports page. You control the content of the ad as well.

With publicity, you don’t dictate when, where, or if your promotional messages ever see the light of day. You can send a news release to a print publication, and the editor or journalist who receives it might see value in it and print it in the next issue. He or she might really find the information appealing and interview you for a cover story. However, your news release might just as easily end up in the garbage can, depending on its relevance, timing, or a number of other factors.

Cost: The control that you get with advertising doesn’t come without a price. The reason that you can specify when and where your advertisement will run is that you pay for the space, airtime, or bandwidth that it occupies. You are able to control the content because you also pay to have the advertisement itself created. Some advertisements can be produced inexpensively, and others are very costly.

When you are trying to generate publicity for your business through public relations efforts, the only cost is the manpower that it takes to create the documents that you send out to the news media and the costs of delivering or shipping. It is much less expensive to send a photograph and a news release to a magazine editor than it is to create a 4-color, camera-ready magazine ad.

Credibility: With advertising, you are able to make sure that the exact message that you want appears in the media exactly as you have specified. When consumers see an advertisement, most of them are aware that it is a paid promotion. Some consumers tend to be a little bit suspicious of advertising messages for this reason.

However, when your local newspaper runs a feature article about your business as a result of a news release that you sent to the editor, consumers generally don’t stop and think that the story started with a promotional message from the company. A story in the newspaper is generally considered to be much more credible than an advertisement in the newspaper. The reason for this is the third party endorsement effect associated with having someone outside your company saying good things about it.

The best marketing plans include a mixture of advertising and publicity. It’s important that you understand the differences between these two forms of communication so that you can make sound decisions about the ideal mix for your organization.

About the Author: Mary G. White, M.A., SPHR is the Training Coordinator for Mobile Technical Institute & MTI Business Solutions (http://www.mobiletechwebsite.com), where she specializes in human resources, management, and marketing training. She teaches open enrollment classes for MTI, provides on-site corporate training, and frequently speaks at conferences and association meetings. She is also the author of 101 Successful PR Campaign Tips in the LifeTips book series. MTI provides a variety of consulting services, including IT Training, certification testing, HR consulting, and custom database development. For free career and business development tips, see http://www.DailyCareerConnection.com and http://www.DailyBizSolutions.com.

Check out our "Blog of the Month": http://www.hyku.com/blog/