Carson and Company

If your pr marketing strategies do not include using Google News, then your pr client will not get that needed exposure they deserve. What, you are not sure how to make Google News work for your pr client? I will give you some advice on making your pr marketing strategy work best when you use this tool.

If you are somewhat familiar with SEO, then you may be aware of the Search Engine Strategies that was held in San Jose sometime back. The main thrust of the meeting/event was directed toward Google. One writer said that if the publishers would listen better, they might just realize how Google and Google News can help them. But that is another topic.

One of the neat things is the “real time search suggestions” with Google Suggest. For those writing in foreign languages, like French, Italian German or Spanish, Google News has added this feature as well. The best way to explain how this feature works was said by a Google spokesperson statement: “The feature can make your experience searching Google News better by helping you formulate queries, saving you keystrokes, correcting spelling mistakes and exposing you to queries you might not have thought of,” says Google. “The goal of all that? To get you to the articles you’re looking for as quickly as possible.”

Get your pr marketing strategy going in the right direction. Start using this tool. Just like a reporter, you then can get real time stories to be better targeted when you have the right tools, the Google Suggest tool that is. Get more tips on SEO’s with Web Pro News.

If your pr marketing strategies need help, or if you are a pr client that would like to explore this option to get more awareness, give Carson Marketing, Inc a call. Ask for George Carson. He knows SEO’s and can get your publicity marketing campaign ahead of the competition.

Contact George at: 949-477-9400.

In this tough economy it is necessary to keep your potential customers at your site and convert them to buyers. This pr marketing strategy is a must for you to have a successful eCommerce web site. So how do you do this? It all begins with Optimization. Yes, that word keeps popping up, but this time, I will provide you some pr marketing strategy tips to spot if your site is well optimized or if it is time to re-design the site and optimize it.

To understand the right way, you need to know the “failure” signs of a poor web site. For example here is a short list of what a poor failing web site contains:

1- Poor Copy. Too often the copy talks about too many things, and is not focused on how your site, or the products will benefit your customers.

2- Difficult to navigate. If you have visited a site and thought how poorly it was to find things, or navigate, then use this to really see if your site falls in this category.

3- Difficult to find items. Many web sites try to pack as much products into their site, only to get the visitor lost and confused as what to buy. Keep your products limited to a few, or to a specific category.

4- Broken links to web pages. This happens too often. It will also cause you to get poor ranking on the search engines. Check all your links, make sure they work, and if you have links to other sites, make sure they work as well.

5- Poor design. This should be at the top. If your site is too busy, or lacks interest, then you need to re-design the site to be more pleasing for visitors.

6- Contact Information. Again, this important area is one of the main causes of people moving on from your site. If visitors have questions, or want to contact you, give them an easy email, phone number, or form for them to get in touch. People want to know you are real, so don’t provide a “yahoo” email account, or a PO Box for an address.

These are just a few of the pr marketing strategies that you can do to improve the conversion rate of visitors to your web site. If you want a FREE analysis of your web site, give Carson Marketing a call. We will give you FREE tips on how to improve your site. Or you can keep going on as usual and watch your competitors take all the business from you.

Ok, you want to know how do you get free publicity, right? It isn’t easy. You just completed your pr marketing strategies for next year and included publicity as part of the plan. Now you are looking at getting free publicity as part of the marketing strategy. Well, there are no special formulas, trick words, or how you “optimize” your press release that will garner you all that free publicity. When you think about this topic, what is free? Are you willing to not pay someone to write a press release, or pay a pr distribution company, like business wire, to submit your releases? What about the do-it-yourself approach? Sure, if you don’t value your time or pay yourself anything, then I guess you got the release for free. That still leaves the media. If you do not have the contacts, your release, or article may never get published.

When people say they got “FREE publicity”, ask them if they paid for any of the services I just mentioned. In reality, free refers to the media. Unless you pay for an advertorial, or a press release to be published, then it is free. Unlike an ad, which you pay for that space (this even includes traditional publications, online media, social networks, etc) publicity is something that editors will allow to be printed in their media without cost. You need to realize that the editor, or publisher has the right to refuse, or publish any releases or articles. Whether it is about a new product, or service, it is up to that publication if they want to run it.

So how do you really get Free PR? Hire a professional company that knows how to write press releases/articles and has the media contacts, Then you may get the FREE PR everyone is bragging about. If your company wants free publicity and can’t do it in-house, give Carson Marketing, Inc a call.

Every web marketing person uses the grand daddy, Google, as their guide to making web site pages rank high. So what is all this noise about PageRank, and why is Google the pacesetter? Because in just a few years, Google has set the path and standards for page ranking. To better understand how page ranking helps a web site, you need to know what PageRank is. Make sure that your pr marketing strategies include a PageRank campaign.

This is a description that I found which Akinola Akintomide wrote. He explains it as this:

“PageRank is a patented algorithm written by Larry Page (Page-Rank). It is a trademark registered to Google. It is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. According to Google “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.” In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links, a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Sounds techy, and it is. Google changes this process every three months. That’s why it is necessary to have an on-going web marketing program, otherwise your web site will loose its position in the rankings. If you are interested in knowing about the algorithms, read this description in Wikipedia’s page on it.

The new pr marketing strategies for web marketing now include a variety of methods. Just last year you could do these to get high Page ranking on Google:

Updating pages frequently

Registering on DOMZ and Yahoo listings

Adding linked sites that you purchase with these endings: .edu, and .gov

It now requires, in addition to the above, to find pages that are reputable and relevant that is linked to your site. In addition you need to make sure the “links” are truly relevant. For example if your company is a cosmetic, or snack food company, just mentioning a manufacturer, or a recipe and linking to those sites will rank you lower. Why? Because your site, or the text only mentioned the link as a reference, it did not have a lot of dialogue on the subject. That shows you how sophisticated their whole process of optimization, and web marketing has become. It is a full time effort to keep your site looking good in the eyes of Google. All the other SEO’s follow this same path.

Need help in getting to the TOP? Give George Carson a call at Carson Marketing, Inc. 949-477-9400. He will provide a one-hour consultation free and explain to you in easy to understand terms how web marketing will benefit your web site.

Publicity clients rely on their pr agency to provide various services such as press releases, promotional events and articles. As these are necessary, it is the innovative pr marketing strategy that we use to get pr clients noticed. There are many other marketing strategies that can be developed in a campaign to be successful. That’s what makes Carson PR and Carson Marketing, Inc. unique.

It is the ability to be proactive. The foresight to see market conditions and respond accordingly. It is the knowledge of knowing how to reach an audience. That’s what makes us different.

Am I bragging? Maybe. Why am I telling you this? Because I am frustrated in having new pr clients come to us after being hammered or taken by traditional pr agencies for thousands of dollars, then we only have very limited budgets to make things happen. And we do! Our direct pr marketing approach isn’t unique, but it takes on-going efforts (rather than pumping out press releases, or articles and sitting back waiting for them to be published like traditional pr agencies) to get pr clients noticed.

It is the combination of web marketing, social networking, blogging, as well as online publicity programs that creates a successful campaign to get pr clients more than noticed, but gets results.

When a pr client really needs a successful campaign, that’s when we are called. Why are we the last resort? Because we don’t take clients for granted, but work harder than most of our competitors to “make things happen“. If you are ready for success, give George Carson a call at: 949-477-9400. It could be the best call you make before you spend your budget foolishly!

A few months ago I had the pleasure of presenting to the faculty and administrators of the California Community Colleges a lesson on “Power Listening“. It was geared to students to better understand how to “listen”, not just hear, what is being said. This was a critical lesson when entering the business industry.

Today I saw a great article in Marketing Pros, that addressed this same issue about listening. It was from Todd Defren who has a blog called PR Squared. Todd puts the listening concept more in tune with the business world of marketing. Publicity professionals may hear, or listen to what is happening in a PR Clients market. But do they have the power, or knowledge to implement a program that responds to what they hear.

For example:

Defren says there are two ways you can “listen” to your customers:

• Many savvy brands use active listening to monitor social media and respond when appropriate. Defren on active listening: “Quick! Somebody said something about us! Say something back!”
• The next step is actionable listening. “The difference here,” he notes, “is that the folks doing the listening/responding are empowered to effect change within their organization, on customers’ behalf.

Much of what Todd is speaking about is social media. Knowing when and how to respond is critical. Having the power to do the response to what is said is necessary. By not acting quickly to social media comments about your pr clients product/service is a missed opportunity to gain a stronger brand and image. This is another example of showing a need to include social media and social networking in a pr marketing strategy for pr clients. If you are a PR Client, it is time to get your publicity campaign in gear with today’s pr marketing tools. Listen to what is being said about your industry, and products. Make sure you have a publicity professional or pr agency that can meet your needs.

A good pr marketing strategy is to keep current and use new technology when it is hot. Just like online social networking. But are you using it? If so, are your pr marketing strategies in place? Do you use banner ads, or is it a place you visit once in a while?

If your pr marketing campaign consists of only placing banner ads on these social networks, then it’s time to re-think your pr marketing strategy. I have written several articles about using this hot media, to help pr clients. For example, banner ads on social networks only benefit the media, such asMySpace, or Linked-In, or even Facebook. Unless you have a very generic product or service, your wasting money. The first rule in marketing is to understand and know your audience.

A recent article in iMedia Connection by Michael Estrin speaks about this. I share a lot of his views about using social media web sites. This can be a productive media source when understood and planned correctly. One example in Mr. Estrin’s article is how Visa worked with Facebook, not using banners, but for downloading an application. The deal was worth $2 million to Facebook. This is one way to gain maximum exposure and get your customer to react to your product/service.

In last week’s newspaper, an article about Linked-In told how the company grew rapidly with advertisers (banners, etc). This is great for the company and it’s founder, Reid Hoffman, who is making money, but are the advertisers? Again, this is fine for the few major companies. It is best to target your audience, and get them involved. That’s the way to establish a strong branding image for pr clients. All professional publicity companies know the power of marketing and connecting to your audience. But are these professional publicity people really using the media or are the media buyers at the ad agencies just rushing in on this trend? I feel most ad agencies and many publicity professionals do not understand the social network market.

If you are a pr client or publicity professional, don’t just launch into this media, be sure that you, guide clients by learning how to utilize social network to the max.

Web sites are more than places to buy electronic products, or collect information about a company. All industries, including the medical field, understand how important it is to have a visible image on the Internet as part of their pr marketing strategies.

Recently our company, Carson Marketing, Inc., was contracted to design a web site for a board certified internist. The web site was created for Dr. Hedyeh Golshan. Unlike the typical site that is sometimes difficult to find what you are looking for, this site is geared to be extremely user friendly. The clean graphics, and bright, yet subtle colors, creates a strong image for the doctor. We used her photo on the main page so that patients can feel they have a personal relationship with the name. This was all part of the pr marketing strategy we used in developing the web site.

The site is simple, with few pages, but enough information to help those seeking a medical doctor, like Dr. Golshan, to feel comfortable enough to further contact the doctor to arrange for an appointment. When discussing the site development with our pr client, we made sure to communicate in the site what was necessary for potential patient’s to know. This included listing a chart that shows the provider ID# for the different insurance plans. As simple as this sounds, it has helped those seeking a doctor by eliminating unnecessary phone calls to Dr. Golshan’s office asking for the doctor’s ID#’s.

So how does this all fit into a publicity campaign? As I have been saying for years, “Publicity is Everywhere”. That includes a pr clients web site. The Internet may be your only visible contact with potential, and existing customers, clients, or in this case, a patient. Having a clean and uplifting web site can enhance a company’s image and establish a branding identity. If your company needs to freshen up an existing web site, or need a new web site, call George Carson at 949-477-9400. Our creative and web marketing programs are designed to get you noticed!

Are professional publicity firms and their staff really using social networks for their pr clients? Or are the pr clients telling their publicity professionals and pr agencies to look into getting more involved with social networking. If you are a publicity professional, you will say yes. Ask a pr client, and you might get a complex answer, or just plain “no”.

If you have a pr marketing strategy plan, or a publicity plan, then include marketing to the social networks. It is more than a group of kids connecting. There are a bunch of different networks on the Internet today. If you recall from my article titled “Social Media keeps growing…” you will learn about the different types of networks. Including those that reach seniors.

Today I read an article, front page of the business section, in the LA Times. It was all about MySpace and how it is now keeping up with Facebook. At one point Facebook took the lead with the social networks. Now, the owners of MySpace, News Corp, has hired hundreds of programmers who speak to this audience to create a slew of new features to compete with Facebook. Good article. In more than just how the two are competing. It is telling publicity professionals that social networking is a mainstay and you need to make your pr marketing strategies part of the overall campaign for pr clients.

It doesn’t matter if you are a local publicity company in Orange County, or a national publicity agency, you need social media networking. I spoke about other types of business networking such as linkedIn. These are geared to business professionals, but soon you will start seeing “business networks” similar to MySpace where companies of all sizes will share their thoughts, strategies, and business philosophy. So get going and get into social media networks. Not sure how to do that? Then give George Carson a call at 949-477-9400. He can get you noticed!

More and more major corporations are hiring staff bloggers, now being titled Chief Bloggers. This is proof that blogging is making a serious impact on corporations as well as small to mid-size companies.

No longer considered a trend but now part of the business daily activity, business blogging is a mainstay for pr clients as well as any company that has a pr marketing strategy. Publicity professionals have seen the positive results that blogging has and are finally asking pr clients to add daily business blogging to their pr marketing campaign. Several high profile corporations see the need to blog. A few of these corporations are Coca-Cola, Kodak, and Marriott to mention a few. According to a recent article in Advertising Age, over 11% of the Fortune 500 companies have corporate blogs. Smart publicity professionals know how critical a publicity campaign with blogging can have on a company’s branded image. It is now more important than before to get the word out and the best way to do this is having your own business blog site.

More aggressive business blogs are from Kodak. An article in Blog Herald, dated April 3, 2008, describes that Kodak has two business blog sites and hired chief bloggers to maintain them. Blogging should be part of your pr client’s business tools. No longer can it be taken as a part-time or as a pass-time project. Just ask CEO-President Jonathan Schwartz on Sun Microsystems. He has helped direct the company and improved the image with his business blogging. This doesn’t mean that the CEO, or owner needs to do the blogging. But many of the top executives direct their chief bloggers on the topics or give approval before a blog is posted. This may seem staged in some ways, but as I said before, it is a pr marketing strategy that is making a strong impact on business. Make sure your pr client, or company is using their blog site to keep that branded name in front of customers.