Discovering a New Tool to Gather and Organize Data Online

This week in my public relations and new media class at Loyola University Chicago, we learned about Yahoo Pipes (Pipes), which, according to its website, is “a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web”.

This free tool can be used to “combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it, geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map, power widgets [and/or] badges on your web site or grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats”.

As a student, I can use Pipes to research, organize and analyze information for papers and projects. Instead of spending countless hours searching online for information I need, Pipes finds the information for me and organizes it as well. Depending on the parameters I establish when creating my pipe, Pipes can gather content, filter out the items I do not want and sort the items by date. Pretty impressive and efficient. Right? I thought so.

For pr practitioners, Pipes is a great way to keep an eye on your competition and as well as your own efforts. You can track the effectiveness of a new campaign or monitor the success of an existing one. You can see your presence on a local, regional, national or international level or prepare for a new initiative.

If you’re not ready to “get your hands dirty” creating a pipe, as my professor Dr. David Kamerer would say, or are having difficulty creating a pipe, you can always search or browse pipes that other people have created and use and/or edit these pipes depending on your needs. You can also participate in discussion boards or view documents online that offer helpful suggestions in getting the most out of this great tool.

For more information about Yahoo Pipes, I suggest watching the tutorial below or visiting Yahoo Pipes online.

Until next time,

dp

Stayed tuned for more reports on my student adventures in public relations and new media.

Learn How to Build a Pipe in Just a Few Minutes @ Yahoo! Video

Search and Ye Shall Find or Will Ye?

Less than fifteen years ago, someone looking for a plumber might have turned to the yellow pages, the local newspaper or even a next-door neighbor for a telephone number or recommendation. Today, that someone is more likely to go online and use a search engine, like Google or Yahoo, to find that same plumber. In a world full of endless choices, how do you standout? Three words…search engine visibility.

According to Steve Rubel, senior vice president and director of insights for Edelman Digital and co-author of Search Engine Visibility: An Edelman Digital Position Paper, businesses today employ four tactics to maximize their search engine visibility. These tactics are paid search, optimized search, reputational search and social search.

Paid search, or search engine marketing (SEM), according to Rubel, is an advertising paradigm in which marketers purchase small text ads that are triggered when certain keywords are searched. For example, links for Toyota appear in the sponsored links sections at the top and right of the search engine results page (SERP) when searching for the keywords "hybrid cars" at Google.com. Because Toyota purchased keywords, such as hybrid cards, its links will appear in the sponsored links sections of the SERPs as illustrated in the image below.

The second tactic is optimized search (SEO), which, according to Rubel, is a technical process in which webmasters adjust their sites in an effort to rank well organically on high-value keywords. This tactic, if done successfully, incorporates elements both on and off the page, including fresh quality content (text), networked relationships (links), keywords and descriptions.

For example, look at the image above, but more specifically, at the first organic result listed in the SERP below the sponsored links for http://www.hybridcars.com/. Notice the description for this site? It wasn’t chosen by accident. In fact, this description was cleverly placed off the page by the webmaster. If you visit this site and view the source code, you’ll see code for the description. Notice that it’s the same as the one listed in the SERP? Search engines like Google look for these descriptions and use them to rank the results.

Another tool that improves a site’s rank is keywords. If you visit hybridcars.com, you’ll notice several keywords, like “hybrid cars”, both on and off the page. Search engines love text and what better way to feed a hungry search engine than with keywords on your site.

Speaking of text, did you notice that hybridcars.com is mostly text, and more specifically, constantly updated text? Quality content that changes frequently and includes keywords draws attention from search engines and greatly improves the rank of your site in SERPs.

Last, but not least, search engines love links. No man is an island, offline or online, and search engines like Google recognize that. As such, these search engines will improve a site’s rank with each new reciprocal link it acquires. The more traffic these links provide, the higher the site’s rank will be as evident by hybridcars.com’s rank in the image above.

So having learned about SEM and SEO, it’s now time to touch briefly on reputational search and social search. As mentioned previously, reputational search is the third tactic for search engine visibility. According to Rubel, reputational search is the blending of basic SEO tactics with classic PR approaches. The objective is not only to generate media and/or social media coverage, but also to do so in a way that can influence search results. By incorporating fresh quality content (text), networked relationships (links), keywords and descriptions into traditional PR tactics, such as press releases, corporate newsrooms, media relations and blogger engagement, PR practitioners can join in the fun and increase a company’s search engine visibility.

The fourth and final search engine visibility tactic is social search. According to Rubel, those who establish meaningful presence in social networks will not only generate conversation and build relationships but also establish "link equity" that makes them more visible on search engines. As a PR practitioner, you can establish that meaningful presence and increase your company’s search engine visibility.

For more information about search engine visibility, check out Search Engine Visibility: An Edelman Digital Position Paper or subscribe to one or more of Steve Rubel’s blogs, like Micro Persuasion, The Steve Rubel Lifestream or Steve Rubel's Friend Feed.

Until next time,

dp

Stayed tuned for more reports on my student adventures in public relations and new media.

What’s your social technographic profile?

This week in my public relations and new media class, we addressed the topic of social technographics. “What’s that?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell you. According to Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, authors of Groundswell, social technographics “classifies people according to how they use social technologies.”

Still confused? Let me see if I can make it simpler. From what I gathered, social technographics is a means of categorizing people into one or more of six groups based on their usage, or non-usage, of social technologies, such as blogs and social networking sites. These groups, according to Li and Bernoff, are creator, critic, collector, joiner, spectator and inactive, and the combination of one’s participation in each of these groups is one’s social technographic profile. Seems like a lot of scientific, number crunching, mumbo jumbo, doesn’t it? I know it does, but it’s actually quite fascinating.

For example, did you know that young men are more likely to be creators, collectors, joiners and spectators than young women are? Did you know that older boomers (people aged 52 to 62) are more likely to be creators, critics, collectors, and joiners than seniors (people aged 63 and over)? Did you know that democrats are more likely to be creators, critics, collectors, and joiners than republicans or independents? I sure didn’t.

According to Li and Bernoff, creators do exactly that. They create social content, such as writings blogs or uploading video, music or text. Critics are, well, critics. They respond to content that others created. They may post reviews, comment on blogs, participate in forums or edit wiki articles. Collectors are a little less self-explanatory. They organize content for themselves or others by using RSS feeds, tags or voting sites like Digg.com. Joiners join. They connect in social networks like MySpace and Facebook. Spectators are all eyes and ears. They read, watch and listen to a variety of social content but never actually create any themselves. Finally, inactives are just that…inactive. They do not create or consume any social content whatsoever.

So what’s your social technographic profile? Based on Li and Bernoff’s six group definitions, I’d say that I’m definitely a joiner, possibly a low-level creator, critic and spectator but not quite a collector or an inactive. How embarrassing. You’d think someone who grew up in the technological age would have a greater presence online. Wouldn’t you? Well, by the end of this class, I’m going to increase my presence and improve my social technographic profile.

Want to know more? Then check out Bernoff’s presentation on social technographics and rate yourself. I’m sure you’ll be surprised at where you land.

Until next time,

dp

Stayed tuned for more reports on my student adventures in public relations and new media.

Do you know where Americans are going online?

I certainly thought I did until I recently visited http://www.alexa.com/ and checked out the top sites visited by country.

I assumed with fantasy football season approaching and Americans’ incessant curiosity of all things celebrity that yahoo.com and tmz.com would be first and second on the list respectively, but to my amazement, they were not. Out of the top 100 sites visited by Americans, Yahoo ranked second, but TMZ wasn’t even listed. So back to the drawing board I go.

I then put on my public relations (pr) hat and took another stab at some of America’s most visited sites. Since all good pr practitioners need to know what’s going on in the world and in their industry, I figured that Americans might be visiting CNN and The Wall Street Journal. They had to be in the top 100…not so much. Again, one ranked seventeenth and one didn’t even rank at all. Can you guess which one made the top 100? That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. It was CNN at seventeen. Who knew? Obviously not me.

For my last trick, I thought I might try taking off my pr hat and putting on my new media hat. I have a good feeling about this one [wink, wink]. I just have to get it right this time. So knowing how much Americans love their online social networking, I’ll pick Facebook and Twitter.

Can she do it, ladies and gentlemen? Can she pick two sites of the top 100 sites visited by Americans according to alexa.com? The answer is… [dramatic pause]…wait for it… [another dramatic pause even longer than the last one]…wait for it… [one last dramatic pause just for effect]…yes, she can!

Facebook is number three and Twitter is number fourteen. I knew I had it in me. Thanks for avoiding any interpersonal, face-to-face communication, America. I couldn’t have done it without you.

All the best,

dp

Stayed tuned for more reports on my student adventures in public relations and new media.