In a recent blog post I wrote about my secrets to successful phone pitching, I spent some time emphasizing the importance of in-person communication whenever possible. Coming off the heels of a few recent media trips, I thought I’d share a few of the tactics I’ve learned from my time spent face-to-face with media.

There are three typical situations in which you’ll be pitching media face-to-face:

1. You’re pitching in person by chance because you happen to be sharing a cocktail with a media friend at an industry event.
2. You’re speed pitching because you’ve been lucky enough to attend an event hosted just for the purpose of pitching and the media is ready to hear it all in 5 minutes (like that hosted by the San Diego Press Club on January 25th).
3. You’re pitching in person because you’ve set up an appointment to do so. You have something to offer the media and the media is interested enough to give you some of their time.

No matter what the circumstance, start by caring about your product or service. If you’re planning to pitch face-to-face about a product you don’t quite understand, don’t truly like or don’t believe is a perfect fit for that publication, it’s not going to work. Done and done.

Situation #1:

This one requires extreme tact. Focus on the fit for the publication instead of the product or service. Start by talking about the outlet, the part of it you see your product in, and how it fits. For example, if I want to pitch a board game to help families unplug and share some laughter together, the best bet is to talk about the trend of families wanting to unplug, wanting to spend more quality time together. Sell the person on the story, before the product. Keep in mind that the media person likely knows what you’re trying to accomplish, so be tactful, but be real.

Situation #2

In this case, get to the point because you only have five minutes. Start with your product so it’s clear who you’re trying to promote. You’ll find that in many cases, the media will help you get to the best story angle that fits your product if they really understand it. Throw out all the ideas you’ve been mulling over with your team to find out what resonates best with them and then build from there.

Situation #3

You’re stoked. Situation #3 is the best. Take the opportunity to find out what the person really cares about. Sometimes the most successful placements come from personal interest rather than a great pitch. That said, don’t be afraid to leverage a person’s interests to help get your product to the right person if it’s not them. Talk through all the details of your clients as well as the angles you’ve been pitching so that the two of you can come up with an exclusive angle that’s going to work perfectly for this outlet. Make sure they know what you can offer them and bring everything you can: photos, press materials, product samples, let them know who they can interview, what imagery you have, etc. Seal the deal while you can.

From there your follow up should be a hand written thank you note as well as a call or email to finalize any last minute needs for the piece. Hopefully by now you feel like you know them on a personal level and can have some very genuine and productive conversations moving forward.

Lastly, use this time to learn about the person and the outlet and how to best pitch them in the future. Ask if they appreciate phone calls, what they like to see in a subject line, whether or not they open emails with attachments and how far out they plan each issue. This information becomes invaluable.

Remember in all situations to follow up. Sometimes the media needs time to digest it, mull it over, check that there are no conflicting advertisers or run it by their editors. Take the ideas you discussed and condense them into nice succinct ideas and email them or call to follow up.

In-person communication with the media speeds up the process immensely, for everyone involved. At BG, we strongly recommend making the effort to get to know the editors we work with in other cities, whether it’s flying out to New York or driving up to LA and jam-packing the day with meetings to discuss our clients. Just a few weeks ago, we had the pleasure of meeting with 11 top media in Orange County and LA. We secured more than 10 placements for our clients (including multiple placements in a couple of publications) that may have taken us weeks to secure had we not met face-to-face.

If you’re planning a trip like this, try bundling clients together to make it more appealing for the media to give their time. An added benefit to this is that when you meet with someone planning to talk about a new restaurant opening, you may find that in addition, they’re particularly interested in another client of yours and have a way of including that in their publication or a different publication that you might have had no foresight to pitch.

So take every chance you get to meet face-to-face, even if just for a few minutes. Dropping off a sample? Do it in person. Got a great placement that made your client hoot and holler? Offer to take the media out for a drink to thank them for their coverage. Got a pitch that’s taking too long to type? Pick up the phone and if the conversation is going well, ask to get together and catch up. You won’t regret it.

You have a great product, you’ve done your research and you’ve hired the best PR agency out there. The ball is in the agency’s court, but it seems to be taking forever to get that first placement. What’s the hold up?

There’s a lot that goes into this “ramp-up” period and it can seem long and discouraging, if this initial planning stage isn’t explained and expected beforehand. I hope to alleviate this misconception and shed some light on everything that goes into these beginning days and why it’s crucial to the overall success of any PR campaign or project. Hopefully, these tips will help speed things along for you in the long run.

Setting goals and strategy:

Your PR company needs to know what your goal is. Is it traffic? Sales? Awareness? Social media interactions? Are you just dying to be on Oprah or do you want to saturate one local market? Are you interested in being featured in the food section or the living section or the business section? Are blog placements more important than traditional media placements? Arm your agency with the answers to questions like these before they even have to ask and they’ll be able to put together a strategy you love on the first try.

On the flip side, if you’re at an agency and not getting the answers you need – then get the conversation going and ask those necessary questions straight out of the gate.

Getting to know the product and becoming passionate:

It seems simple but it can take time. A PR person needs to be as well versed as the client and there’s a good chance the client has spent years getting to know the product. In PR, we don’t just need the pitch, but we need to be able to carry on a conversation about your product and that doesn’t always come easily. Be sure to arm your PR agency with all the tools, information and experiences they could possibly need to be well versed – and passionate – about your product.

Successful PR pros will continue the learning process even after this initial start-up period. Keeping up with industry news and constantly monitoring what’s going on in the client’s world.

Sifting, researching, brainstorming and compiling:

Once you’ve sent all the info you can, realize that it’s going to take some time for the team to sift through it to find what’s most relevant to the media. If they’re really good, they’re going to do some brainstorming and maybe even some research to determine the pitch that’s going to best resonate with the media you want to target. They’re also going to do a lot of research to determine relevant trends, round up and stats that may add to their pitch to ensure that your product has a place in the media’s story. Fill them in on the industry details that they may not be well-versed on. Tell them what trends you’re seeing in the industry, stats that support your position and where you think your product stands out.

Drafting press materials:

The media moves fast. If we pitch a daily publication or TV station and they like the pitch, they expect that we can turn around all the information for tomorrow’s news. That said, all press materials should be ready to go and approved before any pitching begins. Press releases, fact sheets, bios and images, all need to be at the ready. Speed along the process by responding quickly to your agency with information and approvals.

Finding just the right media:

Keeping up with media changes is getting out of control these days. There are more blogs and websites being created every day. Freelancers are working for different publications all the time. Layoffs, buyouts and folding magazines complicate the process and no matter how well-established your agency is, their media lists will need to be refined before every use. On top of that, research should be done to find people at each publication that write about just what you’re aiming for. This may require trips to the magazine store, sifting through articles, blogs and TV segments to determine the home-run contacts that are going to love the pitch idea. Show your agency any media placements you’ve already secured or any example articles that would be ideal. Let them know if you have any already-established media connections and how they may leverage those relationships into quality PR placements.

Writing just the right pitches:

Once the media lists are in place, it’s time to write the pitches. Maybe we discovered that this product has an angle for family writers, food writers and feature writers – that’s three pitches to craft and a pitch is not to be taken lightly. This pitch is like a handshake, it must impress upon first impression. The subject line is a science, the first sentence must be strategic, just the right information must be included and each pitch must be catered to each individual outlet. If your product is especially complicated because maybe it’s hard to explain why it’s different, it’s name doesn’t quite explain what it is or it’s something that must be experienced to be understood, then it’s up to your agency to determine how to get heard through all the noise in somewhere between 2 and 15 seconds (the time the media will likely give you for that first impression).  This may require your agency to come up with a great visual, an event, a video or just a creative way of talking about your product. Let your agency know what you’re willing and not willing to do. If you can allocate funds to creating something to mail or deliver, if you have great video capabilities or if you’re willing to send products to media, make sure your agency takes that into consideration at the beginning.

Agency folks looking for ways to get creative with the pitch, start with a team brainstorm and don’t be afraid to step outside of those traditional media relation boundaries of an email pitch and phone call.

Been there, done that:

If you’re thinking, “we went through this when they gave me the proposal,” you’re right. We did. We probably asked you some of the same questions and gave you a great idea of what our pitches would be and who we would pitch but when it comes time to get things rolling, there’s much more detail involved. The pitch idea is one thing, the actual pitch that grabs the writer’s attention is far more developed. The media list likely included the outlets, not the contacts and their email addresses and phone numbers. The more information your agency digs up, the more successful they will be in placing your product.

So in sum, to achieve the best results for your product, plan ahead, allotting about a month for your agency to “ramp up” and prepare for great things to come. On the agency side, being clear about these ramp-up projects beforehand is key. Letting the client know realistically what your time frame is moving forward, is never a bad thing. After all it’s better to be thorough and successful, than quick and mediocre. If all goes as planned then, the PR placements should come rolling in.

There are times when a pitch is so straight forward that a succinct email to the right person warrants an immediate response. An interview is set, images are sent and a placement is made. Done.

But more often than not, it’s not that easy.

Usually, a pitch that’s going to warrant a great in-depth story is going to require a great, in-depth pitch and email just isn’t always the way to go. So when email isn’t cutting it, here are a few tips I’ve learned to help garner results by phone.

First ask yourself this: Is a phone conversation even going to do it? If not, then ask the media person to drinks, coffee, lunch, or a deskside appointment. Face-to-face time is wildly more valuable and wildly more productive. Just recently, Katie Levien and I set up a meeting with the new editor of San Diego’s Downtown News. The result was an ongoing series dedicated solely to our client, Seaport Village, highlighting a different tenant each month. Had we requested that by email, she may have thought us absurd but our face-to-face conversation led us to this great result.

If a phone call will do, make your call wisely. Is your list of media to call seven pages long? Treat those seven pages one call at a time.  Research the pub and the person to make sure you have a fit and that you know just the way to propose it to the person on the other end.

Then when you do pick up the phone keep the following tips in mind:

• Remain calm and cool. The media person on the other end is likely going to sound like they’re rushing you because naturally, he or she is busy. Respect that, but do not let it get in your way. Remind yourself of this before you pick up the phone so that their quick response is not a surprise that throws you off.

• Talk slowly. Respecting their time can be done with a succinct pitch and a concrete question or request from them. It doesn’t mean that you have to talk abnormally fast.

• Entice him or her to respond. I find it best to start with: “My name is Lizzie Younkin and I work with Seaport Village. Are you familiar with the destination?”

You may get some great info from them to help direct the rest of your conversation, or you may learn that they just did a story on it (shame on you for not knowing) and you can end your conversation before wasting their time. Here are a few other tips and tricks that may help you get the job done:

• Pause. Let them respond and think and talk it through with you. Allow it to be a conversation instead of a pitch.

• Try calling on Fridays. If they’re in the office, people seem to be quite happy then!

• Keep in mind deadlines for different outlets. If you know that one publication always goes to print on Thursday, try calling on Friday or Monday. If you know another is on deadline the last week of the month, respect that week and make your call another time.

• Research new contacts. If you’re not finding the right contact, kindly ask editorial assistants and receptionists to get you to the right place.

• Here are a few key questions to ask in order to get the conversation going in the right direction:

Is this __ and do you cover __?

I know, it sounds so obvious but how annoying would it be to give your whole pitch to the wrong person? Also, if you say what they actually do cover, then they’ll know right away that you have something that likely fits their beat and will be more likely to hear you all the way through. If they don’t cover the beat you’re pitching, ask what they  cover and ask if they know who covers the beat you’re looking for. Consider every interaction an opportunity.

As mentioned earlier, ask if he or she is familiar with your product or brand, or propose your roundup/trend/pitch and ask straight up if they’d ever cover anything like that. Sometimes this isn’t so easy, but if you’re pitching a product for a holiday roundup, the quickest way to the point usually starts with “Hi, this is Lizzie Younkin calling from USAopoly, I’m wondering if you’re compiling any holiday gift guides this year?” This allows you to work your product into something they’re already doing, rather than giving your pitch, and leaving it to them to figure out where to fit it.

In sum, my rule of thumb is to always imagine that you’re sitting across the table from the person, enjoying a coffee. Your phone call should feel like a respectable and succinct conversation. If it’s not working out, but you know you have a great pitch, literally meet for coffee to build your relationship and find ways to work together that are mutually beneficial. While not everyone wants to pick up a phone call when they know it’s a pitch, everyone is willing to pick up a call from a friend.

I think it’s safe to say our PR team has officially recovered from Opening Day at Del Mar. In my haze of recovery I was asked, “what do you do there?” Good question.

It starts in the winter, pitching magazines and travel writers to write about the track in time for the public to plan on attending. We invite editors and writers who have never been to Del Mar to experience the track in the upcoming season so that they can write about it next year.

It heats up in June, with local and regional media calling, emailing and randomly showing up to ensure they’ll have their credentials and their coveted wrist bands to the Turf Club. We start credentialing, we supply email after email of information like concert dates, past celebrities who have attended, ticket prices, images, etc.  Then we do it a million more times so that we can ensure anyone who wants to know about the track’s Opening Day and anyone who doesn’t want to know about it, will know about it.

Then come the TV stations. San Diego has six major news stations that broadcast live from the track on Opening Day. They each want the best shot of the track, they each want an interview with a jockey, they each have tech needs, parking issues, need credentials, the list goes on.  Starting in late June, our team meets with each station throughout the month to discuss their morning interview schedule, their tech needs and what special, behind the scenes arrangements we can make for them.

Every on-site or in-studio mention of Del Mar that you saw on TV came through this agency.

The two days prior to Opening Day are long ones. You’d be surprised how many people get in touch at the last minute for their credentials. In addition, we have a lot to coordinate. We schedule upwards of 50 interviews in the four hours of news that day. So we make calls to the hat designer, the jockey’s agents, the Del Mar executives, the stylist, the track bugler, the guy who runs the jockey room, the handicapper and the list goes on. We prep the media with information about the track and their interviewees to ensure that the details are all accurate and we arrange all the necessary access they’ll need – unlock the door to the turf club, drop a cable behind the building, put their logo on the Jumbotron, etc.  We meet them at the track to film their b-roll or their pre-Opening Day interviews. For most of the interviews you see on TV, we are behind the cameraman, sipping an oversized coffee, watching like a hawk to make sure they say everything correctly and don’t spook the horses and wondering how the hell we managed to get up that early.

Then Opening Day arrives. It’s like Christmas. We tear out of our warm beds at 4 a.m. We’re at the track just before the morning shows start because its our role to make sure everyone shows up for their interview. And when they don’t, we send Carrie Jones racing around the barns to grab the closest horseman she can find and swoop them up to the camera for a far-too-last-minute interview.

At 9 a.m., the shows are more or less done and we breathe a sigh of relief. We eat a bagel. We charge our cell phones. Then we start again. We wrangle a few last minute interviews and we begin meeting our media guests who are arriving to enjoy a day at the track. We give the royal treatment to some media by taking them into the Paddock and down to the Winners’ Circle to watch a race. We deal with far too many people who claim they should have a credential, claim they should be in the Turf Club and we do our very best to make sure they all have a great time.

Then, when we’ve given all the Turf Club wrist bands we can give, we’ve made all the last minute credentials we can make, we’ve sent all our TV cameras free to film the crowds and we’ve wooed all the media we can woo, we relax. It’s lunchtime and the day is still young.

Bailey Gardiner's Del Mar Racetrack PR team, after the morning madness

The team leaves when you leave, we’ve just been there a bit longer. We of course, could not do it without the horses, jockeys and our on point set of Del Mar Thoroughclub Executives, but we do our best to make sure you knew it was happening and that it happened well.

At 8 p.m. on Opening Day, our team called the TV news desks and alerted the radio stations that Del Mar had its highest attendance in history, 46,588 party-goers. That makes it the eighth-straight year of record-setting Opening Day attendance. On-track handle was up nearly 10%.

The following morning, we send pictures of celebrities to the gossip mags for mentions of celeb sightings including Ali Fedotowsky and Roberto Martinez, Mark Sanchez and Dylan McDermott.

And let’s not forget that throughout the entire time, we managed Del Mar’s Twitter and Facebook activity, responding to the more than 23,000 fans and nearly 6,000 followers who had a lot to say on Opening Day.

This year’s Del Mar team coordinated 57 interviews that all took place on Opening Day morning.  The team coordinated upwards of 14 interviews prior to Opening Day and credentialed approximately 200 media. Don’t worry though, we’ve recovered. Bring on the cougars, the ex-lovers and the wiener dogs. We still have five jam-packed weeks to go!

We just can't get enough.

As a public relations professional, you can spend hours, days, weeks or even months crafting the perfect messaging for your client. You can be so sure that when your company’s message hits the press, it will be received with acceptance and praise. However, a company’s public messaging is only as good as its spokesperson and without the right delivery, a message can be completely misconstrued.

There are the obvious qualities that make a good spokesperson, such as:

• An eloquent speaker
• Someone who can think on their feet
• Commanding the room through projection of voice and confidence
• Being armed with the right information and talking points
• Someone who has been armed with a few practical tips for being a spokesperson

But today I’d like to share a few SECRET qualities that stand out amongst all successful spokespersons:

• They don’t say “the right thing.”

They say the honest thing. A great spokesperson admits when they are wrong, they give honest answers, they do not hide or twist the truth. They set realistic expectations, own up to wrong-doings and they can be trusted to say, and do, the right thing.

• They look good.

Sounds superficial, I know. I don’t mean that a quality spokesperson is attractive or looks especially youthful. I mean that he or she is well kept, presentable, groomed and properly dressed for the part. People are REALLY quick to judge, especially when you’re likely saying only a sentence or two, which may or may not be taken out of your original context. The least a spokesperson can do is ensure that he/she looks presentable. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can sure as hell judge a company by its spokesperson.

• They really, honestly care.

A spokesperson who truly believes in their company, their cause or their message, will be able to answer nearly anything thrown at them. They will be armed with the right knowledge because they are truly invested. They will stand up for the cause because they care on a personal level. They will be honest and they will be genuine and the public will see this. They are “believable.” If a spokesperson does not believe the messages he or she has been asked to relay, then there is a good chance that either you have the wrong messaging, or you have the wrong spokesperson.

• They’ve been trained.

While they look like naturals, the best spokespeople have been through “public speaking boot camp.” Even the most eloquent of speakers and most senior of employees can benefit because with training comes practice, and with practice comes confidence which is key when speaking on behalf of a company or organization. The value of media training cannot be realized until its been tried and we recommend it for any and all spokespersons facing the media. To get you started, here are a few interview tips to consider if you already have the right person. And if you respond better to “don’ts” than to “dos” here’s a thorough list of the top 10 don’ts for a great spokesperson. Keep in mind that there are professionals who can help you train, blog posts like these are just a start.

I hope that this post gets you critically thinking about your company or organization’s spokesperson and makes you re-evaluate whether or not your message is coming across clearly. Keep in mind that your media messaging doesn’t stop with the message, it stops with the messenger.

At this year’s Online Marketing Summit, the talk was all about content and linking. Gone are the days of tricky Meta data or a high number of inbound links, no matter the relevancy. The search engines are getting smarter, so are we, and SEO is getting more and more organic. That means that in order to rank well, our websites must be technically flawless, with a host of quality inbound links.

Currently, the four most important elements of SEO are as follows:

Freshness (how often new content is posted or the website is changed)

Links (quality not quantity)

Server response time (meaning how quickly the server hosting your site can respond to the request for the site)

Keyword in the URL

In this post, I’ll focus on the importance of links and content, by highlighting some of the results of a study put together by Covario and discussed at the Online Marketing Summit. Their whitepaper can be found here, in which they evaluated 100 top sites for their compliance with a series of SEO best practices in the categories of technical construction, content usage and link strategy.

The first item of note is that very few leading websites had any issues with the basic crawl-ability of the sites. This means that web marketers and IT departments are putting a lot of emphasis on SEO, a new development, and an important one. All the more reason to be sure that YOUR site is ranking well.

What some of the major companies struggle with is content. Many sites do not use keywords frequently enough or they do not include them in the URL, their header tags or the “alt” attribute tags. I like to think this is because we are not blind-sided to the user experience. While it is known that Flash websites are not a good SEO decision, I see many new websites built in Flash. It’s hard to let go of the user experience, and in some cases, it’s not worth it either.

Lastly, high quality links – meaning those from authoritative websites – carry MUCH more weight than a high number of links. We are seeing top ranking websites with a high number of quality links, meaning that people are catching on, AND it’s getting easier. I like to think that with so much activity on social media and so much content on the Internet, it’s getting easier and easier to share links.

So how do you make sure that your site complies with the four most important elements of search? Focus on content.

• Quality content will earn you quality links (or at least make the gathering of links a bit easier).
• If you can put strategy behind your content and optimize it with strong keywords, people searching for your content will find it.
• If you create content regularly, your page will be fresh, making it stronger in the “eyes” of search engines.

As far as your website’s server response time, you can nerd-out and use some online tools to figure it out, but I suggest leaving it to the programming experts.  Make sure it takes no longer than 1.5 seconds.

Having your keyword in the URL is self-explanatory but I’ll drive home the point that in order to do this, you need to take SEO into consideration at the very beginning stages of your website. Make sure you don’t exclude an SEO strategy from your overall picture.

Working at a public relations agency, we often wear a variety of hats. In my case, I’m a Thoroughbred fan, draped in diamonds with a fetish for street performers, a passion for peace, and a whole lot of REALTORS® at my fingertips.  As you can imagine, I wouldn’t know nearly enough about this variety of clients if I hadn’t done my research.

Here’s a secret.  PR can be done with very little knowledge of the client, but PR is best done with a LOT of knowledge, and in many cases, experience.  Case in point:

The National Conflict Resolution Center (NCRC) hosts the inspiring Peacemaker Awards every year. One of this year’s honorees is The New Roots Community Farm, a plot of community gardens in San Diego where refugees are starting their new lives and getting back to their roots by farming and providing fresh fruits and vegetables to their families. It seemed like an easy enough pitch, until we did some preliminary research to find that, lo and behold, the story had been done. In fact, Michelle Obama had visited the location last year, which means that we needed a better story. General information from the client wasn’t going to cut it.

So last week, Katie Levien and I headed out to the farm. We met with Bilali, a Somali Bantu refugee who has played a major part in developing and running the community garden. He took us on a tour of the garden and introduced us to others in his community. Within minutes of being on-site, we had the information we needed to make our pitch.

It is imperative that for any PR project, the proper research is done.  Here’s a checklist to ensure you’ve done all you can:

•  Look for prior media coverage. This will ensure that you don’t try to retell a story and will provide you with some great contacts who may be interested in writing a follow-up story to their first.

• See what’s being said on social media. This can be a great real-time window into what others know and think about your client and a great way to make sure that your pitch will go over well.

• Spend time with your client. Set their expectations that you want more than a one-hour meeting. You want a few hours to mine them for any and all information.

• Spend time without your client. Ask them to put you in touch with people from other areas of their company: sales, customer relations and even those on the floor (front desk personnel, those at the cash register, tour guides, etc.).

• Get on site! If your client is a hotel, be a guest. Spend the night, try the food, ask for suggestions of surrounding things to do. Had I not received the information I needed within the first few minutes of my visit to the New Roots Community Farm, I may have spent a day farming and selling at the farmers market with this client.

With the proper information, you’ll discover the deep-rooted story behind your client that is going to set your pitch apart from all the others and empower you to speak to it as if you only have one client. It’s a trick of the agency trade and it’s an imperative part of any public relations practitioner’s job.

Something big happened in the worlds of social media and search this month.  After much speculation about search engines factoring social media influence into website rankings, Danny Sullivan took it upon himself to interview Bing and Google to find out that indeed, social media IS affecting search rankings.  BIG STUFF!

What I mean is, if someone as influential as @bgindra shares a link to this blog post, it is that much more likely to show up in search results than it would if I just “SEO’d” the heck out of it…hint hint. So suddenly, in the world of search, people matter!

In case you think this is old news, we’re not talking about social search ranking, such as Google Social Search or Realtime Search. We’re talking about ordinary web search. Aside from their super secret algorithms, we already know that Google takes into consideration the PageRank of a webpage as well as the links pointing to that page and the HTML title tag.  But now, rather than just looking at the web page’s authority, these search engines are starting to look at human authority too and so far, Twitter is the biggest indicator.

Both Google and Bing have announced that authoritative people on Twitter lend their authority to pages they tweet. In the case of Bing, the search engine takes into consideration how often a link has been tweeted, as well as how influential the users are that share it. Google answered that it only uses the data in limited situations (as vague as their algorithm) but they ARE using it.

As for Facebook, Bing pays attention to links shared that people share on their profile if they are marked as “everyone” and links shared from company pages.  Google doesn’t factor in personal wall data at all and treats links shared on company pages the same way they treat tweeted links. It’s a bit harder for the search engines to determine the authority of a person on Facebook than it is on Twitter because of the lack of public information so really they’re just looking for trends to surface that will help them rank a webpage.

So how does this affect your marketing plan? Here are my three takeaways that you should keep in mind as social media and search blend and you plan for 2011:

1.    Get on board

Your business,  product or you need to have a presence on social media NOW.  If you’ve been avoiding it because you don’t care to fill that piece of your marketing plan just yet, now is the time (how many times have you heard that!?).  Everything is integrating together and will continue to be. If you build your presence now, you just may build the relationship with influencers that you’ll need when social media and search truly mesh. It is possible that one day we will see that you can’t have a good ranking without social media influence.

Furthermore, no matter what you think of company pages, they are currently the most available for search engines. So if you’re thinking of starting one, now is a good time. If you already have one, get in the practice of thinking about search when you’re busy being social. Use keywords that support your search goals when linking to your website or blog posts and start networking with other company pages to help share your content (more on that in number three).

2.   Make influence a priority

Influencers are more important than ever. You can find them by  looking at their Klout score or simply check out the size of their network and interactions. When you find people that are impressive, engage.  Target the influencers that truly fit your niche and share your interests.  Take the time to figure out what they love and then create a strategy around talking with them. If you build trust and respect with influential people, there’s a good chance they’ll share your links.

Also remember that being an influencer is just as important as having relationships with influencers. Luckily, there are steps you can take to make yourself more influential. For some insight on this, check out @CallanPaola’s blog post on how to raise your Klout score. As social media and search continue to merge, who you are and who you know is affecting far more than just your ego.

3.    Be social:

Being social is a BIG deal. I’m not talking about just being on social networks but interacting with people and sharing content. There’s a lot of talk about link baiting, but if you look at it as simply being social, you’ll have much more success. If I share your link, you are more likely to return the favor. If I put my content all over the web, people are more likely to find it (a little bit of strategy here helps of course). If I include your opinions in my blog post, you’ll may want to boast about it as I alluded to in number one. If I partner with other company pages on Facebook, we open doors for each other to share information with like-minded audiences.

Getting the hang of being social, being influential, and working with influencers is a big deal already. Now that it’s affecting search, it’s taken over even a bigger piece of your marketing pie.  Carpe diem!

A big thanks to Danny Sullivan for his informative interview with Google and Bing. If you’re interested in seeing their responses to all his questions, you can check it out here:

http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389

We often refer to them as “mom bloggers” but they aren’t all moms.  In San Diego, we have moms, dads, twenty-somethings considering becoming moms, fashion bloggers, wedding bloggers and everything San Diego bloggers, but they all have one thing in common – influence. San Diego’s blogger community is well known for its size and influence among their vast online and offline networks. Knowing that they are so often approached for blogger events, giveaways or promotions and that they readily inform and share opinions, it’s often an intimidating process for marketers to get a brand in front of them.

Bailey Gardiner recently coordinated a blogger event with San Diego’s Tiffany & Co., “A Breakfast at Tiffany.“ Hoping you and yours will have the chance to enjoy this great group of women and the influence that they bring, here are a few of the pointers we gathered from the event:

• Think beyond the blog.
Twitter, Facebook and location-based social networks often see more activity from bloggers than their own blog. Prior to the Breakfast at Tiffany, BG provided each guest with a hashtag #BreakfastAtTiffany. This allowed the women to tag their tweets and it allowed us to measure results via TweetReach.

In addition, remember that you’re not the only one that respects bloggers. There is a good chance that some of them are regular guests on local news programs or they freelance for a print publication or another online site.  Be sure to arm them with all the information they would need and be readily available for them in the future. One of our fashion bloggers spotted a product at the event and included it in a piece she wrote for 944 San Diego the following month.

•  Give them more than everyone else.
Marketing to bloggers is just like marketing to any other media.  It behooves publicists to give bloggers an experience beyond what the public can have.  For our breakfast, we had a selection of the freshly released Tiffany Leather Collection sent from New York as a special media preview just for the bloggers. We pulled displays of the latest jewelry above the cases where they were tangible. We let the women try on three-carat diamond rings and Tiffany blue handbags. We let them photograph each other and post immediately to Twitter and Facebook and then we gifted them each with a Tiffany Blue Box gift of their own upon leaving.

• Get the staff involved.
Prior to the event, BG briefed the Tiffany & Co. staff for the morning about the bloggers, providing information about each of them and their blogs. We provided the employees with common terminology that they may not know of such as, “tweet,” “hashtag,” and “Foursquare check-in.”  In addition, we strongly emphasized the purpose of the event being not to sell, but to simply provide a fun and informative experience.

• Be personable.
At BG we are lucky to have established relationships over time with many of these bloggers, but in addition we spent a lot of time researching.  We made sure that we knew their faces and the style of their blogs so that we could make each blogger feel welcome and appreciated in the Tiffany & Co. store.

If all goes as planned, you should see results like this:

After the November blogger event at Tiffany & Co., Bailey Gardiner located 11 blog posts from those in attendance.  In addition, Tiffany & Co. had the honor of being the featured brand for the launch of San Diego’s only collaborative blogger site, MOMfia.com.

The chatter online began nearly 24 hours prior to the event, with bloggers tweeting about their plans and excitement for the next day.  The activity continued throughout the event and into the following days.  Using measurements from TweetReach based on those tweets that included the #BreakfastAtTiffany hashtag, 49,979 people were reached via 204 tweets from only 24 incredibly networked women. Thirty-seven pictures from the event were shared via Twitpic and the hashtag received 300,319 impressions on Twitter in only two days.

Most importantly, 24 active San Diego bloggers were re-introduced to the Tiffany & Co. brand and its latest collections just in time for the holiday shopping season.

In addition to my marketing perspective, check out this post from Beth Avant, a marketer and mom blogger herself, for tips on marketing to the mom blogger specifically.

More than 20 percent of searches on Google are from people looking for information on a businesses location.

If your business is one that relies on local clientele, then this is not to be overlooked.
For a long time now, Google has given business owners the option of listing their business’ information so that when someone searched for a business, a list of local results would show up and yours would have the possibility of being included.  These showed up next to a map that marked each of their locations.

Lately, Google has made some updates to this tool known as Place Pages that inspired me to share a bit about them and how businesses can use Place Pages to boost their SEO.

If you haven’t already explored a Google Place page, go ahead and do a search for a local business, let’s say “San Diego Italian restaurant.”  The listings with the red pushpin next to them are Google’s local results.  To the right of these listings, you’ll see a star rating system followed by a link called “Place page.”  Pick one and click on it.

You’ll see that the business owner has the opportunity to provide information about their business in a website-like format including the following:
• Address
• Website
• Description
• Categories your business falls under
• Store hours
• Payment information
• Photos
• Videos
• And any other additional details such as parking, dog-friendly, etc.

Notice too that when you get your search results page, some listings also have a cluster of external links leading to review sites.

This means that as a business owner, you have some work ahead of you. Reviews are automatically pulled into your page from other sites including Yelp!, CitySearch and Insiderpages.com for example. Unfortunately, you don’t have control over which reviews show.  So as if I haven’t given you enough homework already, be sure to treat review sites as part of your Google Place page management. It’s your job as a business owner to encourage good reviews from satisfied customers and to manage negative reviews as well.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by the additional work Google just gave you, keep in mind that they are making these changes to better the experience for the user. , The new Place pages makes it so that people searching for the most basic information about a company, can find it all in a one-stop click. It’s pulling together the best results for what that person is looking for and letting them see all the most relevant information, without ever having to leave the search results page and without ever going to your business’ website. And herein lies the problem for business owners, because between Place pages and the many aggregator and review sites, your website is getting lost.

Therefore, my biggest takeaway is that you must treat your Google Place page as another website.  It needs your attention to be monitored and optimized.

If your place doesn’t have a Google Place page, you’ve already fallen behind. There’s only a slim chance you’re website will show up above these pages and, quite frankly, making your own Place page is the easiest SEO you can do for yourself.

Here’s how you get started

Claim your business:
Go to- http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter

Once there, simply enter your phone number and carry on from there.  Keep in mind as you fill in the information that your goal is to succinctly describe your business using researched keywords where they fit naturally. If it looks spammy to you, Google won’t like it and nor will searchers. You also must earn the trust of the searcher – sell them with your great images, useful videos or honest description. Don’t try too hard, just be thorough. You can read more about the factors that affect your Place page ranking in David Mihm’s Location Search Ranking Factors Survey.

Lastly, remember that your Place page is something that must be managed, not simply completed. Just as I say with all SEO, you’re never done.  It is important to monitor you Place page analytics (Google provides these to you, similar to how they do with your website’s analytics) and make changes accordingly so that the Place page can best benefit your business.