@dvocable

We love  putting a ‘Twitter Trending Topic List’ as a measure of success in an online promotional activity. How does one do it? Simply throw a contest and add some attractive prizes. Soon enough if you get lucky, your contest #hashtag would surely get into the local city or country trend list.

Why do trends matter? Because as soon as you hit the trending topic list, your #hashtag gets exposed to a lot of people who are keeping watch on the trending topic list and visibility increases manifold.

Now here is the problem as I see it. The Twitter trending topic is defined by Twitter as …’topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help people discover the hottest emerging topics of discussion on Twitter.’ I often check the trending topic list to see popular conversations happening in the twitter-sphere.

So when someone throws a contest, it might not be necessarily something that becomes popular naturally, but made popular by offering a bait to Twitter users. A popular topic often can be superseded by a commercially led topic. Given the increasing number of brands throwing contests and promotions on Twitter, very soon the trending topic might be full of branded keywords.

Isn’t that actually a danger of the trending topic becoming redundant?

A sponsored hashtag or sponsored tweet is okay as people know they are sponsored. Just that the problem is people today don’t know many trending topics are sort of sponsored.

Of course Twitter contest rules today doesn’t forbid having contests, and so throwing a Twitter contest is the easiest thing to do. Facebook used to be easy like Twitter once upon a time and brands used to throw out questions out in dozens and ask  people to like or comment with their answers. Then Facebook realizes that all these affect the way how it ranks pages and came out with strict guidelines.

Watch out Twitter might just follow suit with more stricter rules soon.

Often we have to go for live blogging/tweeting at events and functions and manage the client Twitter accounts and we need to show our clients a sample of what we plan to do in a simple sheet that we usually called the Tweet Sheet. I have seen various styles of this one and I thought I should create one that might just answer most client questions.

Check it out. Thoughts welcome.

Tweet Sheet Template

• #PRdebate: Can PR step up to the digital challenge? – If by ‘the PR industry’ you mean traditional agencies or ‘the dinosaurs that run PR who don’t get the significance of digital’, as James Warren put it, then i agree PR has already lost. But if we’re talking about the growing band of smart new agencies and the intelligent approach of the larger agencies of which a few were represented last night, then no. These sorts of comms professionals know they still have a lot to learn, but they are building digital skill sets by hiring in experienced individuals or looking beyond the boundaries of what would traditionally be PR. Yes, the social media specific agencies and digital agencies have a lead in understanding the environment, but they also need to skill up in terms of comms strategy and delivery.
• The Great Online PR Debate (#PRdebate): PR Agencies are Losing the Right to Learn – The skills required in the Online world are very different to those practised in Media Relations. What clients need in the Online domain is a set of direct service offerings. They need direct management of reputations amongst communities and forums. They care for direct, bottom line events like sales and bookings conversions, and other direct, tangible outcomes like traffic acquisition. This involves a specific set of direct Online skills: Online people talking directly to lots of other Online people (customers, partners, influencers, stakeholders, etc), not people talking through people (the media). These aren’t Media Relations activities and I don’t think that a traditional Media Relations agency can carry them with any level of assurance. More to the point, most traditional PR firms aren’t comfortable with this kind of work.
• Ignore Twitter? Major brands learn they’d better respond — and quick – Los Angeles Times – “Our social media marketing approach is that we want to be everywhere our consumers are,” said Michael Donnelly, Coke’s director of global interactive marketing. “There’s significant risk in being perceived the wrong way.”
• Difference between PR and publicity – Regis McKenna was great at PR. Yes, he got Steve Jobs and the Mac on the cover of more than 30 magazines in the year it launched. That was just publicity. The real insight was crafting the story of the Mac (and yes, the story of Steve Jobs).
• How to Demo Twitter – One of the great challenges for anyone who loves Twitter is to show other people why they should love it too. You can start off by showing how businesses use Twitter. For example, AmazonDeals increases Amazon’s revenue, and ComcastCares provides support to Comcast customers. Zappos promotes the caring brand image of the company because its CEO, Tony Hsieh, is doing the tweeting.
• How to create a hosted Wordpress blog – a step by step guide from booking the domain to getting your blog seen – Everything you need to know to create a blog, seo it, and promote it well. This has a step-by-step guide and dozens of resource links.

Creating a blog is simple. Visit Blogger, Wordpress.com, or the short and sweet Tumblr, follow the easy instructions, and you are ready to publish your first post.

However, when it comes to creating a blog that you want to host on your own space, or promoting your blogs during the initial few months, most people tend to get confused. Worry not. It happens to most of us.

At least that’s what I mentioned to a good colleague of mine, who wanted to start blogging, when I wrote her a detailed mail recently. Soon there were other colleagues who were asking me the same thing, and I forwarded that mail to them. Then I though why not just post the mail online and maybe it might help someone else as well. So here it is – though a bit modified.

Before you go ahead, remember there are many blog CMS, web hosting companies, blog designs, and a number of blog promotion advice you can get easily searching on the web. What I am writing is based on what I have used and learnt. Nothing more.

Booking a domain, webspace, and creating your blog

1. Check for a free domain name (like Bella.com) – Type the domain name you want in the search box in this site – Domainsbot and wait. It will tell you which domains are free and which are not. You have to use other domain checking tools in case you want check for the country specific domains like the .in and .co.in variety. Or you can go for unconventional domain names.

2. Once you found your desired and free domain name, you need to register it and buy some space on the web for your domain. There are many domain registrars available. I used 1and1 for this site and others because I find it better and cheaper. On 1and1, go to the Linux hosting from the left hand side and choose the Beginner package. (Or choose any other package or web host if you prefer.)

3. Once you have done the payment and you are ready to roll, and the 1and1 site or your web host admin dashboard is showing your domain name and how to edit details and stuff, set up your MySQL database, this is how you can do it in 1and1. Copy the MySQL set up details on a notepad and keep it safe.

4. After this, you need to copy your ftp username and password from your webhost and also copy it in a notepad and keep it safe. On 1and1, this is how you can get your ftp details.

3. Download the Wordpress CMS on your system (remember this is from Wordpress.org, not Wordpress.com) (dare I say Wordpress is the most advanced of the lot, has one of the largest communities and is the most popular blogging software today.)

4. Extract the Wordpress files from the zipped folder and follow the instructions. For those who used 1and1 as their web host, here is the FAQ. Don’t get scared if it gets too technical. Read it slowly and you will come out fine. Remember the only thing that needs to be done is to open the file called ‘wp-config-sample.php’ using a notepad and fill in your database details that you have saved earlier. Then, save and rename the file as ‘wp-config.php’. You are done editing it. Simple.

5. Download a ftp client like Filezilla and install it on your system. Once done, open it and fill in your your host (like bella.com), username and password (the ftp details you copied earlier) in the QuickConnect bar on top and click the QuickConnect button.  Filezilla will then connect to your webspace. The left hand window of the client shows the files on your system and once connected, the right hand window will show the files on your webspace.  Navigate to your Wordpress folder in your system in the left-hand window (lower one), select all the files in the Wordpress folder, right-click, and use the upload link. That’s all. It will take a while to upload all the files to your webspace depending on your connection speed. You might as well have a cup of tea in the meantime.

6. Once all the files are uploaded, type ‘http://example.com/wp-admin/install.php’ in your browser address bar and follow the installation instructions that follow. (Remember to replace example.com with your domain name) The installation should go smooth and you can now log in to your dashboard.

There is also a video tutorial on installing Wordpress on 1and1 written way back in 2007 at Solostream. Also, before going further, you might want to read up the Wordpress Lessons.

Designing your blog

1. Now that your blog is up, you might need to design it better and choose a different look than the default theme. For this, you need to either look for some good free themes or buy one.

You can start looking at the links below. Choose one according to what you are going to post in your blog. For example, if you are going to post pictures most of the time, you might want a theme with a wide post area. If you are going to write business stuff, you might do better choosing a theme with less colors and jazz.

- Mashable: Top 12 Stunning Wordpress Themes
- Mashable: Unusual Wordpress Themes
- Mashable: Wordpress 2 Column Themes
- Mashable: Wordpress 1 Column Themes
- Mashable: Wordpress 3 Column Themes
- Mashable: 4 Column Wordpress Themes
- Performancing Wordpress Themes
- Smashing Magazine: 100 Excellent Free and High Quality Wordpress Themes
- Smashing Magazine: 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You Probably Haven’t Seen
- The Official Wordpress Themes Directory

2. The next important thing is adding some useful plugins (third party tools that give you extra features). You can go to the Wordpress plugins directory or even check out my collection of Wordpress plugins you can’t just miss. Here is a huge list of 300 Wordpress tools you can check out as well.

3. Of course, you can already start posting.

Promoting your blog

1. Add a way for your readers to subscribe to your blog. But you might want to add a email subscription box as well.
a. Feedblitz (for email updates)
b. Feedburner (for RSS)

2. A little bit of search engine optimization so that you blog starts appearing in search engines and eventually rank well is necessary. There is no shortcut here nor it is easy but not impossible to do it alone.

Some ebooks on SEO I have read are SEO Made Easy and Google SEO Starter Guide.

In short, there are two type of optimization you can do:

a. Onsite optimization: Make sure you have the meta tags in your site html proper, put good alt tags for images, include relevant keywords in your post without overdoing it. Try the website grader to check how your site scores. Check if the theme you are using is designed properly. Is it W3C compliant? Even if it is not, can you fix some major errors? Here is a basic starter to learn html.

b. Offsite optimization: Google will rank your blog primarily on how many and what type of sites are linking to it. Try to get as many as quality sites and blog as you can to link to your blog. Some people buy links, some request and beg, some exchange links, you decide what you need to do. How you can start is by submitting your sites to directories, bookmarking on (do follow) bookmarking sites, commenting on do follow blogs, and most importantly connecting with other bloggers and writing good content. You will see the phrase ‘content is king’ many times over as you start researching more online.

Submit your site to search engine and directories. Refer the main ones below to start with:

a. Google
b. Yahoo
c. Live

You can use Submit Express’s Free Submission as well to submit it other smaller search engines.

Also, use these tools to analyze your site better:
a. Google Sitemaps: It helps Google index your site better, tells you which page is being indexed by Google, and where are the problem areas.
b. Google Analytics: It tells you details about the site traffic.
c. Yahoo Site Explorer: Webmasters traffic analytics tool by Yahoo.

Then there are site directories:
a. DMOZ
b. Yahoo Site Directory

What about blog directories:

a. Technorati
b. Blogcatalog
c. Mybloglog

Here is a giant list of blog directories.

3. Network with other bloggers: The blogosphere is a huge network and it’s fun to be connected and it’s beneficial as well. The usual (and correct) advice is read other blogs, comment on their posts, reply to comments on your blog, and send emails once in a while to established bloggers in your niche sharing an interesting post you have written. In short, let other people know you and that your blog exists. Everything doesn’t happen automatically on the blogosphere, even though we would love to think of it like that. The underground blogosphere, which is described as a complex network of bloggers communicating and networking among one another through emails, phones, IMs, etc. to promote and help one another out, is much prevalent.

Some of the best blogging tips are at Problogger, Copyblogger, and Daily Blog Tips. There are more good ones. Check out this directory of bloggers writing on blogging here. There are other directories at Alltop categorized by subject. Choose your niche.

4. Create social networking profiles and promote your blog there. Yes, the social networking sites, where you already so familiar/ or tired of.

Facebook: The biggest social networking site can give you ways to publish your blog’s RSS feed on your profile page, exposing your posts to your friends. You can join groups where you can occasionally share your best posts.

Flickr: Do you plan to use pictures on your posts? You can try creating a Flickr account and uploading your picture there and embedding it to your blog posts. It will save you web space and create an opportunity to network with people there.

YouTube: Similarly, you can post your videos on YouTube and embed them on your blog. It can give good exposure to your blog through your videos and friends there.

Twitter: Nowadays, a lot of traffic to my blogs come from Twitter. Twitter is today the cool thing everyone is talking about and the sooner you try it out, the better. You can feed you blog RSS to Twitter using Twitterfeed. There are a number of Twitter Wordpress plugins to do the job as well. My Twitter profiles are here (@palinn and @indiaprblog) and hey I post interesting links often.

Linkedin: You can showcase your blog posts, and share it to groups. I put my other blog, India PR Blog, as a company I am engaged with. So I come out like Founder and Writer, India PR Blog as one of the current job description.

Remember all these sites have their own communities and different ways of engaging within those communities. Learn and adhere to those. If you are not spamming your blog url and are nice to most people, it should be fine.

5. Other methods: You can put your blog url on your email signatures, talk about it to friends, clients, colleagues, pitch to the traditional media, etc. Run a contest on your blog. The possibilities are endless.

Happy blogging.

This post is intended for those who are new to blogging. Experienced bloggers are also requested to leave their advice and tips in the comments.

Image credit: How to Make a Badass WordPress Logo

• The Domino’s Effect – Domino’s brand cultivated over 49 years…damaged in 30 minutes or less. The latest viral video on the Web today isn’t related to an upcoming summer blockbuster, nor the next Chocolate Rain sensation or even the next Obama Girl. Today’s social video frenzy is a real time case study of what happens when the employees of a franchise use online video to inadvertently cause a global domino effect that financially and emotionally impacts other franchises, employees, customers as well as bruising the corporate brand overall.
• Savvy & Energetic: Keys to Real PR – If you think you’ll annoy the media then STOP. Reporters need PR people. We give them stories. Even though members of the media may be busy, prove to people that you’re the real thing, and this genuine, concerted approach will open ears. You will establish yourself not only as a source of useful information, but also as a person in a helpful relationship. Often, the most important part of the PR cycle involves what happens after the pitch! It’s all in the follow-up. Say that last sentence a few times. Please.
• Hanging Tough – In the late nineteen-twenties, two companies—Kellogg and Post—dominated the market for packaged cereal. It was still a relatively new market: ready-to-eat cereal had been around for decades, but Americans didn’t see it as a real alternative to oatmeal or cream of wheat until the twenties. So, when the Depression hit, no one knew what would happen to consumer demand. Post did the predictable thing: it reined in expenses and cut back on advertising. But Kellogg doubled its ad budget, moved aggressively into radio advertising, and heavily pushed its new cereal, Rice Krispies.
• The Rise of Asian Brands | Reputare – Between 2001 and 2005, the number of Asian brands in the BusinessWeek top 100 has doubled to eight. This is no small achievement – especially if you consider the fact that this period has also seen intense and merciless global competition in which powerful incumbent brands from developed economies could delve into their deep pockets to win market share in the new emerging markets. What’s happening? What’s changing?
• A letter to young job seekers – Be prepared with an elevator pitch. Most interviews will start with “Tell me about yourself.” Prepare a one-minute spiel that highlights your strengths and personality, then practice it before your interview. You don’t want to recite mechanically, but you also want to sound ready and polished.
• PDF: Social Media Tools Popular Among Marketers & more – Michael Stelzner interviewed some 900+ Internet marketers to determine how they are using social media to promote their businesses, what social media tools are more popular among marketers, how much time are they spending on social media sites and so on.
• 5 Essential Traits for Community Managers – As corp comm managers today need to play role of community managers for their companies and engage with communities online, they might as well gear up and know what it takes to be a good community manager.
• The 6 stages of Twitter media coverage hell – The media does this with every truly major Internet phenomenon that comes along. It happened with the Internet itself, then e-mail, then the Web, then the tech bubble, then social networking and now Twitter. Here are the 6 stages of media coverage hell that the press and the TV networks are putting us all through.

• 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page – For many companies a FacebookFacebook reviewsFacebook reviews fan page is an integral part of their social media campaign. But, what elements help fan pages build up large followings and what can brands do to emulate the success of others? I’ve put together a list of specific elements that I believe have helped create fan pages with large, engaged, followings.
• How a Jewellery Store Can Use Social Media to Promote Their Brand | WATBlog.com – Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India – Have an online jewellery design contest. If your target is youth, the college crowd then have them design the kind of design they love to see. Have a community on Facebook where the participants could interact and showcase designs. Give the winners some coverage and of course have prize. You have just used social media not just for branding but also for market research and feedback as well, not to mention a collection of designs.
• How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard » aimClear Search Marketing Blog – This post is a guerrilla tutorial for building a totally free reputation monitoring dashboard, suitable for personal/corporate use or reselling to an agency client. You’ll be able to easily build a tool where nobody can even whisper your business keywords, in a positive or negative light, without your awareness.
• Nielsen: Twitter’s growing really, really, really, really fast | The Social – CNET News – A small new survey from Nielsen about the five fastest growing “member community destinations” in the U.S. reveals what we all kind of knew already: Twitter is at the top. From February 2008 to February 2009, it clocked in at a whopping 1,382 percent growth rate. That’s to be expected, considering the amount of press the still-without-a-business-model microblogging service has gotten in recent months.
• Getting Optimized Press Releases Approved – Optimizing press releases can be an important part of any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program. It’s usually pretty easy to convince clients of the need to optimize news content since these kinds of releases can reach journalists and bloggers as well as consumers.

I have seen web design companies and online marketing agencies coming out with their online properties geared towards mass usage. So why shouldn’t a PR agency? So now Waggener Edstrom has come out with twendz, an online tool that you can use to find out the tone of the tweets around yourself, your brands, or a topic.

I ran my username on twendz and it brought up the latest RTs and replies to me on Twitter and summarized that 11% of my conversations are likely negative, while 59% are positive and 30% are neutral.

How did twendz come up with this? According to its site, ‘twendz uses a keyword-based approach to score tweets. Meaningful words in each tweet are compared against a ‘dictionary’ of thousands of words that are associated with positive or negative sentiment; each word receives a score that, when combined with the other scored words, allows twendz to make an educated guess at the overall tone of a tweet. After twendz scores a handful of tweets matching certain criteria, it extracts key terms, assigns a tone rating to each of those, and assembles them in a word cloud.’

Sounds good. My only concern is if twendz can figure out the context in which a particular word has been used. For example, ‘spam = negative’ might be questionable when I received a reply about somebody else like ‘Mr. Toby spams’. I mean I’m not the one talked about negatively here.

This aside, the tool looks promising (it’s still in beta) and something one can used to quickly see how people are talking about a brand or topic on Twitter. Check up your client on it.

All those Twitter aficionados there: tired of checking all the Twitter ‘manage it better’ tools mushrooming like crazy everyday? Try something different. Though not so useful, this certainly is a feel good tool.

I’m talking about the Twitter Mosaic that you can use to create a mosaic just like the one I have created below using my Twitter friends avatars. A whole bunch of nice folks there. Thanks for the conversations.

You can use the tool to have your mosaic (friends or followers) printed on a mug, tshirt, bag, or mousepad.

By the way, I haven’t counted the number of people on the mosaic below. Seems some have been missed out. Not my fault. Still, we can connect on Twitter, can’t we?

This is my other post on Twitter: Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools!

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of witnessing a PR crisis spelling out in the western blogosphere. It all started with Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker posting a status on Twitter about a new PR blacklist wiki she has created. She was apparently tired of PR folks sending her irrelevant emails and decided to filter out all emails coming from specific domains of PR agencies.

One of our PR 2.0 guys, Brian Solis replied to her saying ’some of us are trying to help’. Brian posted another tweet soon after – Making Mistakes and Amends in Blogger and Media Relations. Meanwhile Steve Rubel joined in by twitting – @ginatrapani Appreciate your concerns about PR spam but is it really that black and white? Finally Gina tweeted again – PR folks, thanks for your thoughtful replies. Here’s why I filter entire domains. She pointed to this post, which I am sure you will love visiting and reading about the journalist complaining about receiving irrelevant emails from PR people.

All this drama was happening in my Twitterfox right inside by browser. Quite entertaining. While all this time we profess to be PR 2.0 experts, we ended up on the PR blacklist.

So guys, lets try not repeat this in India. Rajesh recently wrote about some PR agency sending some kind of email that he had to sigh. Press releases are not wanted so much anymore by the media today, and especially not by the bloggers. And the copy and paste pitch email mass mailing has to stop. I remember in my early days, I used to send press releases to editors and follow up as well. Lucky me. Phew! The editors were kind enough to day ‘thanks, I will see to it’. I also remember a colleague who had the email addresses of about 500 journalists and he used to mail every press conference invite to all of them.

About journalists, I know one, for whom, in her junior years, I had asked questions to my own client on her behalf because she couldn’t ask any in an interview meeting. Now she is in a hot financial daily and doesn’t seem to recognise me. I also know a journalist who was working in a financial daily with a big shot ‘I hate PR’ attitude, but after she shifted to a daily tabloid recently, she is today the one sending interview requests to PR agencies. Those who used to hate PR yesterday are in corporate communications departments today.

So people, no use trying to wash the dirty laundry in public. Lets just try to make it work together.

Oh about the rest of the weekend, my wife had pretty pink butterfly tattoo done from a parlour at Priya complex in south Delhi. The experience was great (will post a video soon on my personal blog) but funny as well. Funny because the tattoo maker was trying very hard to be cool. Tattoos are cool. So tattoo makers have to be super cool you see.

Now let me shut up.

One last thing, just in case, I tweet at http://twitter.com/palinn