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10 Rules for Using Twitter for PR
Rules for Using Twitter
As every entrepreneur knows, speed is your friend. There are few online services better at that than Twitter (when it’s up anyway). Since it’s such an incredible platform for finding and disseminating news, I highly recommend you take a look at using Twitter as a PR vehicle. I’ve compiled a few rules to consider before you start.
- If you have a personal Twitter account, start a new one for professional contacts. This is marketing 101, but it’s a question of audience. Don’t confuse your professional contacts who are following Mike-the-CEO with your friends and family who are following Mike-The-Guy-Who-Won-Last-Weekends-Drinking-Contest. That doesn’t mean your professional tweets have to be stiff and corporate, but there’s a line (think Linkedin versus Facebook).
- Your tweets should be from you personally, so choose a Twitter id that reflects your name, not your company. Think about it: would you rather follow “AppleCorporation” or “SteveTheAppleGuy.” People want their news from the CEO.
- Get as many friends on Twitter as you can… put your Twitter id in your email signature, on your blog, your Linkedin profile. Let Twitter troll your email accounts to find your existing friends who are on Twitter. Follow them, and hopefully they’ll follow you.
- Follow everyone who you like, respect, and matters. As Scoble points, out, “the more people [you] follow, the smarter [you] get.”
- Follow journalists who cover your space (this may work better (or not) in tech). You can find out what’s top of mind for them and add value when appropriate, or maybe react quickly with a relevant pitch, or both.
- If you blog, announce your blog posts on Twitter.
- Announce minor new features, upgrades, service downtime, hardware upgrades, and other helpful news about your company on Twitter. Twitter is great for announcing the “small wins” that aren’t worthy of press releases, but are interesting and cool.
- Twitter about things that matter to your company: new laws that suck, cool blog posts that support your vision of the future, blog posts that get it wrong. Take a stand and give your tweets a point of view.
- Remember, your tweets are more or less public, and cannot be undone, so exercise some basic caution about what you want “on the record.” If you wouldn’t want it printed in tomorrow’s WSJ…
- Billy Goat Tavern is a bar in Chicago known as a hang out for the city’s top journalists. A barfly there could easily stay on top of the news by sitting around all day and chatting up the regulars. But Twitter may not be that watering hole for your industry. If Twitter isn’t a place your industry tends to hang out, decide if that’s just because you’re ahead of the curve or because your industry may never adopt Twitter. Effective entrepreneurship is all about the right action at the right time.
Windows 7 usage growing quickly
Microsoft appears to be getting relatively strong early adoption of Windows 7 in the 10 days since its official launch.
According to Net Applications, more than 3 percent of PCs accessing the Web in the past two days have been doing so using the new operating system. Usage of the operating system has been growing strong in recent days, though Windows 7 already accounted for 2 percent of global Web traffic in the days ahead of its formal launch.
“The early adoption of Windows 7 looks very strong, and I don’t believe Vista enjoyed the same early success,” said Vince Vizzaccaro, an executive vice president at Net Applications. “Plus, we’ve seen surges the past two weekend days, and Windows has historically seen much higher usage market share on weekdays than on weekends.”
However, weekends tend to see stronger usage by consumers. And consumers are more likely to move quickly to a new version of Windows than businesses, which tend to do extensive testing before adopting a new operating system.
The news is not all positive for Microsoft, though. As a whole, the Mac OS continues to gain on Windows. As of October, Windows had 92.5 percent of the worldwide operating system market, but Mac OS reached 5.27 percent, up from 5.12 percent in September. (Past numbers from Net Applications showed the Mac OS with significantly higher market share, though the market research firm says it has changed its methodology to better reflect the relative traffic of the countries from which it is getting data.)
Apple’s recent anti-Windows 7 advertising has touted that if users are going to upgrade their Windows XP machines and have to transfer their data anyway, they might as well move to a Mac. Vizzaccaro said the early numbers suggest that the Mac might indeed be benefiting from such a trend but said it is too early to know for sure.
“We’ll know much more in the months ahead,” he said.
Google 101- The Basics of Google
Google Basics
When you sit down at your computer and do a Google search, you’re almost instantly presented with a list of results from all over the web. How does Google find web pages matching your query, and determine the order of search results?
In the simplest terms, you could think of searching the web as looking in a very large book with an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned (“served”) to you.
The three key processes in delivering search results to you are:
| Crawling: Does Google know about your site? Can we find it? | Learn more… |
| Indexing: Can Google index your site? | Learn more… |
| Serving: Does the site have good and useful content that is relevant to the user’s search? | Learn more… |
| Crawling |
Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.
We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or “crawl”) billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.
Google’s crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.
Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service.
| Indexing |
Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.
| Serving results |
When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.
In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Our Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site’s ranking.
Google’s Related Searches, Spelling Suggestions, and Google Suggest features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and popular queries. Like our google.com search results, the keywords used by these features are automatically generated by our web crawlers and search algorithms. We display these suggestions only when we think they might save the user time. If a site ranks well for a keyword, it’s because we’ve algorithmically determined that its content is more relevant to the user’s query.
Recommended WordPress Plugins
Howdy! Here’s a list of top recommended SEO plugins for WordPress.
SEO
Meta Robots WordPress plugin – Adds meta tags automatically to posts
Aizatto’s Related Posts – Adds related post information to posts and feeds
Cross-Linker – Set up commonly used words to link to posts or redirects (also useful for affiliate links)
Sitemap Generator – Automatically builds and HTML style sitemap
Google (XML) Sitemaps – Automatically build and ping multiple sitemap services with an XML file
HeadSpace 2 – A monster plugin that lets you rewrite titles, meta data, and host of other features watch the video on the page for the full list of features
SEO Title Tag – Don’t need all the power of Headspace try SEO title tag
SEO Slugs – keeps slugs from becoming too long
Utilities
Secure Form Mailer – makes building and integrating multiple and custom forms easy
FeedBurner FeedSmith – Makes integrating with feedburner easy
Feed Footer – Adds advertising, copyright or other custom messages into feeds
Flickr Photo Album – Integrate your flickr photo’s, albums, sets, and groups into your website
flickrRSS for WordPress – add photos from any flickr RSS feed into your website
Future Posts Calendar Plugin – A calendar that shows which days you have posts scheduled to publish, very helpful for multiple authors and scheduled posts.
Full Text Feed – Lets you use the “more” tag and still publish full feeds
GoCodes Redirection Plugin – Add tiny URL style functionality into your blog
Got Banners – Makes adding advertising banners quick and easy without having to monkey with the template
Highlight Author Comments – Makes giving authors comments a different style much easier
Objection Redirection! – Makes setting 301’s (especially lots of them) easy as pie
WordPress Organizer – Makes adding and managing uploads and images easier
Who Sees Ads – Makes ads or other elements conditionally displayed
Absolute Comments – Makes replying to comments and managing them much easier
Photo Dropper – Makes adding Creative Commons licensed photos from flickr quick and easy
Search Pages – Lets the search box search both posts and pages
Permalink Redirect – Keep urls with parameters from being indexed
WordPress Mobile Edition – Display a simple stripped down version of your site to mobile users
WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin – Save yourself thousands of hours of time upgrading wordpress
WordPress Database Backup – Automate backups of your blog
Social
Increase Sociability WordPress Plugin – Display custom messages for people who came from social sites like Digg and stumbleupon
Share This – add buttons for social networks under the share this icon
Subscribe to Comments – let people subscribe and be notified when new and follow up comments are made
What Would Seth Godin Do – Display a message to a new visitor on your blog
Twitter Tools – Integrate twitter functionality into your blog
Maintenance
Close Old Posts – Closes old posts keeps them from becoming spam targets and maintenance issues
Search and Replace – Lets you easily search and replace information in your database
Simple Tags – Manage and get tag suggestions for all posts
Reports and Analytics
Blog Metrics – Gives you comments and stats on monthly and author levels
Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports – get feedburner and google analytics in your wordpress admin section
Search Meter – Find out what people are searching for on your site
Essential WordPress Plugins 2006
These plugins go on 99% of the wordpress installs I do. I’ll only leave one off if there’s a very specific reason for it not to be there.
Akismet – This one actually comes with wordpress you only need to get a liscence to activate it. Unless you have need for spam in your blog this is one the most effective tools for stopping it. Very little actually gets through and very little gets flagged as a false positive.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Let’s be honest once you’ve got a site over 50 pages maintaining a sitemap by hand is tedious and inefficient. This plugin has quite a few options and takes care of all the grunt work for you.
Organizer – This plugin allows you to create and upload files from the web browser without having to fire up your FTP program. It’s especially helpful on blogs with multiple users who aren’t tech savvy. The only downside is if they don’t know the “rules” things can get messy and disorgainzed very quickly.
Feedburner Replacement Plugin – Let’s you keep your feedburner feed on your domain.
Objection Redirection – This plugin by Dax is one of the most powerful and useful plugins I use. It let’s you redirect old and broken url’s to clean and fresh url’s without you having to touch an htaccess file.
Google Sitemaps The Google Sitemaps Webmaster Central program by Google is absolutely one of the most helpful things Google has ever put out. If you are fixing your own site or someone else’s there’s no better way to figure out what a search engine thinks about your site. This plugin updates and rebuilds the XML file everytime you make a new post and ping’s google to tell them about it. It’s especially helpful if you publish on a predetermined schedule. Warning make sure you have the file permissions set correctly or this won’t work properly.
WordPress Database Backup – If there is one wordpress plugin you absolutely need this is it. It gives you the ability to backup the core database tables and any other tables you specify. The backups happen on demand or on a nightly schedule. While it might be against TOS what I do is set up a dedicated gmail account for each wordpress blog. I then set this plugin to backup the tables every night and email the file to a gmail account. Viola a free daily incremental offsite backup.
Permalink Redirect – In the event some wise guy tries to mess up your blog this keeps things neat and tidy.
Highly Reccomended Plugins
These plugins go on most of my installs but not all of them
Search Pages – This plugin ties the built in search function in wordpress to the pages. The default installation only searches blog posts. This is an absolute neccesity if you are using wordpress as a CMS and not a blogging tool.
Search Meter – Looking at search logs to find out who’s searching for what can be a valuable tool for figuring out what’s right and what’s wrong on your site.
Static Homepage – If you want to use wordpres as a CMS instead of a blog this plugin makes the homepage magic happen.
Cool Stuff
Not necessary but sometimes pretty helpful
Adhesive – Allows you to stick a posting to the top overriding the standard chronological order of things.
Adsense Deluxe – A powerful way to control adsense from a master level on your blog.
Adsense Injection – Another Dax special that randomly inserts Adsense somewhere in each posting. Not advisable for the control freaks, definitely advisable for sites with lots of returning readers who don’t normally click on Adsense.
Bunny’s Technorati Tags – A simple and easy interface for tagging in each blog post.
Bread Crumb Trail Generator – A little tricky to configure but very useful once you do. Especially nice when used on a static website.
Feed Copyrighter – Let’s you add copyright info to your feed. Makes it easy to track and follow scrapers.
Moderate Trackbacks – Not used as much as it once was Akismet catches most of the spam, but I keep it around as a backup.
Postie – A very powerful tool if you do remote posting via email. Takes a little tinkering to get it set up right but once you do it’s hands off. Combine with cronless postie for regular automated checking.
Related Posts – Automagically creates a list of related posts.
Recent Posts and Recent Comments – Shockingly these two plugins give you a list of recent posts and recent comments, go figure.
Flickr Photosets – If you are doing anything with flickr this plugin kicks ass letting you tie it into your wordpress bog. Especially nice if you’ve upgraded to flickr pro and have multiple albums, see an example.
Top 10 Posts – gives you the top 10 posts by views, very hackable see my top 100 posts for an example.
WP Cron – Makes all sorts of wordpress housekeeping features happen automagically. Just be sure to activate the main plugin first before any of the others or things may not work properly.
WP – Admin Bar – Puts a really nice navigation bar up for users who are logged in.
WP Contact Form – A very simple no frills contact form.
Use with Extreme Caution
These are specialty plugins that you really should know what the heck you are doing before you touch them as they could seriously mess things up if you aren’t careful.
Bad Behavior – Does a really good job at keeping out robot scrappers. Also does an excellent job at blocking people who have their user agent set as bot. Also does an amazing job of blocking bots that you may want to let in. Not very configurable.
Custom Query String – Let’s you set the number of posts to appear in a category or monthly archive page. Can result in some really huge files.
Subdomains by Category – Very cool but also dangerous if you don’t know what the heck you are doing.
SocialVibe