I will be speaking at SES London and New York on a session called Search, PR and the Social Butterfly with a good friend of mine Mel Carson, Microsoft Advertising Community Manager at Microsoft Advertising.

“RT this. Take social media to the boardroom! Social media continues to spread its wings with the advent of Google Social Search, Bing, Twitter Search and Yahoo’s Twitter-like moves. With the demise of traditional media outlets and the rise of search and social, PR firms have also gotten a big lift and muscled in on the territory once ruled by advertising agencies. Time to eighty-six the anachronistic press kits and media lists and hand over the keyword rich online status updates and Twitter feeds. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear firsthand from online PR/social media pros that bridge the best of both worlds while influencing SEO via Profiles, Fans, Tweets, Friends and Follows.”

The Web is talking and you should listen, there are peple talking about your company, you and/or your services. An Icelandic company Clara is now one of many that is providing the listening service for company’s perfect solution for those that want to hear what is being said online about their services or stakeholders such as staff or even the competition. Clara’s proprietary web crawlers search the web looking for customer insights in news, blogs, comments and forums. The tool automatically sums up the discussion and shows you the results in a clear interactive web-based dashboard. CLARA delivers up-to-date results in close to real time.  What it makes it even more special is that is the only tool that is Icelandic friendly.

The Internet has returned public relations to the public! That is you can now take material you want to announce and use the internet to send it out so it accessible to the public, press releases have stopped being limited to the media and a narrow group of stakeholders. Through the likes of eNewsWire you can now reach potentially millions of possible evangelist that are likely to pick up your story and advocate it and when I say millions I mean millions, Face book users in the US are well over 60.000.000 and in the UK they are nearly 18.000.000 and that is just one of the options you have to distribute content through, then there are the hundreds of sites that accept press releases for a free distribution over the Internet and some even direct to the inbox of the media.

With around 100.000 searches per month for the phrase “action vacation(s)” on Google world wide a well written press release on a country like Iceland (my home country) as a “solution” for that search is likely to pop up in Google Universal Search results, Google’s blog results and Google News results and if you optimize an image to accompany the release you might also come up under Google Image search, then there is Bing, Yahoo and all of the other search engines. And of you do your job well, the media will pick it up and write about the dream action vacation.You could argue that the Internet has distorted the gap between PR and marketing.

Modern public relations are no longer about generating “clips” or getting “ink” or “airtime” and it’s definitely not about one way communications. It’s about understanding that you can reach your audience directly using the internet and in many cases it will be a low cost, high impact distribution.

As the web allows direct access to information, a once direct to media PR strategy is often not necessary and/or you can reach the media in the same way as you can your audience, through the Internet. According to a recent survey done in 2007 well over 70% of journalist admit to reading online press releases and use as a base to their material and 98% say they use the Internet daily.
Study done by Nordic eMarketing on the behaviour of journalists seem to support this, but not only do journalists use the internet, their response time to material send out and picked up by Google News, Yahoo News or similar News aggregators is very low. We have seen online PR material or news go out and external media come in within minutes and then seen similar topics show up shortly after on the visiting media web-site.

The bottom line is that as the Internet develops and as gap between marketing and PR becomes more and more blurry, organizations not embracing these changes will be left behind.

I have been speculating about whether Airbus has a public relations problem, after two major accidents involving airplanes from Airbus there is no reaction from the company on the Internet, so they seem to be taking the typical large organization “look but don’t touch” approach.

It unbelievable how the Internet does not seem to play a role in their Public Relations strategy as I mentioned in my previous blog post called When should you use PPC as a part of a PR strategy?.

How do they deal with this? “Actor Ashton Kutcher cautioned his fans on Wednesday that a pilot recommended to him not to fly on Airbus until the manufacturer’s composite tail is declared safe.” - I am afraid that this will not blow over and they need to get their act together if the Internet is not to harm them more.

Airbus use the Internet, use PPC, use online PR, use Twitter and Facebook! Don’t fall into the “Look – Don’t touch” thinking as other major organization seem to have the habid of doing.

Nordic eMarketing does this, works on creating online crisis management solutions for companies and governments to deal with crisis through the Internet using effective online assets.

I have in cooperation with the IceNews Network and eNewsWire UK working on mapping the behaviour of Journalists, editors, Columnists use the Internet to research for articles and or react to breaking news using such services such as Google Alerts. What surprised me was the sometimes lighting fast reaction time. That is from the time news or a PR item was sent out until we saw someone from the major news outlets or stakeholder related come in and review the article. We are talking some couple of hours from when the article was send out until it was mentioned or quoted somewhere else online.
Major news outlets such as the BBC, New York Times and News Week where sometimes in within minutes from when Google showed the news in their Google News search. We have seen timelines such as news being posted at 10:00, picked up by Google News at 10:03 and a major news agency and/or stakeholder is in 10 – 20 min later. Truly lightning fast?

I am hoping to have more data gathered and reportable within the next two months, did some preliminary finding introductions at the SES in NY, but SMX in London should provide me a platform to give more in-depth data and understanding of the true impact of online PR and news distribution. If you want more information pls. send me an email to kmh /at/ nem.is.

Despite trends in former recessions of decreased marketing, there are signs that many companies might keep their marketing efforts unchanged or even increased this time around.

For the airline industry which is traditionally very recession sensitive, this might be particularly true. The flight industry magazine, Airline Business, in its latest issue publishes the results of a survey conducted among 22 top level airline executives. The surveyed focuses on the airlines marketing directions and size of their marketing budgets for 2009. Interestingly, as much as 60 percent of the participating airlines claim that it is important to invest more in marketing during a recession, to stimulate demand.

Compared to last year, only 15 percent of the contributing airlines plan to decrease their marketing budget. 45 percent plan to keep the size of their marketing budgets unchanged while 30 percent of the airlines plan to spend more and 10 percent plans to spend “significantly” more. Birkir Holm Gudnason of Icelandair says in the article that his company intends to spend 10 to 20 percent more on marketing this year, compared to last, adding that Icelandair conducted a similar marketing effort as a direct response to the markets reaction of the 9/11 incidents.

In terms of marketing strategy, 81 percent of the responding airlines viewed the Internet as being very important to their marketing strategies. 57 percent responded that they would spend more money on Internet marketing this year compared to last and a further 29 percent said that they would spend “significantly” more. 75 percent of the airlines recognized optimization of their websites as a “very” important cornerstone of Internet marketing while the remaining 25 percent graded it as “important”. Search engine optimization and focus on achieving high organic search results was graded “important” or “very” important by 75 percent of the airlines.

Among the vast majority of respondents that valued Internet marketing, many mentioned social networking forums such as Facebook as interesting opportunities to look into. Some of the responding airlines are further ahead than others in exploring Internet marketing strategies. One of the Internet marketing front runners among airlines is Icelandair. Its CEO Birkir Holm Gudnason interestingly enough says that they have tried social network marketing in recent years but are going back to focus on visibility through search engine optimization as it has generated the best ROI for them so far.

Although we at Nordic eMarketing are very pleased that more and more companies are realizing the impact and strength of search engine optimization in the long term perspective we are devoted to all types of Internet marketing methods, not the least social networking. We are even happier that we keep hearing about companies and industries which will keep the size of their marketing efforts unchanged and maintain or even strengthen their brand communication during the coming years of recession. We are convinced that the players who spend their money wisely and a large part of it on Internet marketing will come out as the strongest on the other side of the recession.

I am starting to see more and more companies out there specializing in online reputation management and ePR. We have been doing this since 2005 inspired by such good people as Greg Jarboe www.seo-pr.com. what we have seen more and more are consultants and programs that tell you that there is a problem but can do little to implement the help needed to deal with the problem or help boost the positive impact out there.

Key questions as what to do if you company is under a brand attack online? How doe deal with that? How do you implement your online crisis management plan or for that matter create it? The list of questions goes on and on. Through Nordic eMarketing services eNews PR we have been working with companies on a multilingual scale creating in cooperation with traditional PR companies and Communication departments strategies dealing with scenarios that have had unforeseen effects on companies and peoples reputation among other.

Next week I am speaking at an event on reputation management, the date is October 21st  and the events location is the Dorchester Hotel, London. The event is held and managed by Augure - Corporate Communications Solution, you do not have to pay anything to enter, but there is limited seat availability so better book now than later.

“Reputation has become a board level priority affecting an organisation’s ability to raise capital, attract and retain staff, sell products and services and ultimately compete in today’s marketplace.”

Really good speakers are doing this event and it looks like a great event for those that are looking to learn about the latest in reputation management.

I was reading a magazine the other day and I found and article in it that I found quite remarkable. So this is the scenario when Virgin MegaStore became Zavvi in the UK, they opened a website as can be expected under their brand name zavvi.co.uk and it was business as usual. But it was not, because around the same time a UK based company opened another website called zavvidirect.co.uk looking strikingly similar to the original site, this did then easily fool unsuspected online shoppers and when they advertised a limited special offer on a gaming computer people when out and ordered, filled in their credit card information, clicked on enter and waited excited for the delivery that never arrived. Just to cut a longer story short, this was corrected and Zavvi has now, through copyright laws, closed this site.

For more information on the WebUser article buy issue 192, 2008 and you should find it there on page eleven to the right above the “Gordon Ramsay Cooks up Game” article and beside the “Internet cafes under attack”.

So how can you try to prevent this?

1. Don’t shop online, just kidding… I have shopped online for over 10 years and never had problems
2. Shop with established online shops such as Amazon
3. If you don’t want to do that, Google the name of the shop you want to buy through
a. If there only or mostly negative activity, don’t shop
b. If there no activity, then that should also ring bells, I would then wait a little to see how things evolve
4. When looking at the forums or blogs and you see one or two negative posts and you really want to shop with them, send the company an email and ask them to explain why these customers are negative
5. Only shop with companies that use PayPal or other recognized payment systems
6. Don’t use debit cards use Credit Cards, they work in a different way and are to my knowledge more secure

Good luck shopping!

Is there anything you can do to survive online crises with your brand?

The short answer is; yes use the Internet!

The longer answer is having a plan and understanding that all brands even the biggest are vulnerable, brands like Dell and Wal-Mart know that well.

The first thing you need to do is to show humility, the Internet has a mind on its own and the only thing you can do is to have a plan and deal with it the best you can by being prepared.

A part of the plan should always be listening, have your eyes and ears open to the buzz out there. The Internet is the main venue for dejected customers and in most cases the brand owner does not have a clue on what is happening. Forums and blogs are being opened everyday and some with the sole purpose of writing “bad things” about product in behalf of unhappy customers.

So what happens when you find something that is not to your liking, true or untrue?

Deal with it; take it on without a delay. One of the best ways to solve most of brand attacks is to respond promptly and head on, go to the source. Remember that the very same costumer that wrote the complaint is waiting for your reaction and I have had cases where by talking directly to the blog/forum owner he removed the post and it was out of Google two weeks later, problem gone. In this case it was a typical story that could have spiraled and gone out of control.

But is it this simple? No not quite! But the only thing I have to say that is “be ready”, have an online crisis management plan in place. A plan that answers at least the following questions:

1. What do you do when some talks about your brand in a negative manner?
2. How do you push down negative pages out of the search engines
3. When you have dealt with the situation, will you communication channels open?
4. Monitor the activates on your own site, who is returning you traffic and why, are you using web analytics?

The adult industry versus Radisson SAS Iceland
One of my favorite cases where a decision on one site of the globe can affect something on the other side is the “Radisson SAS Iceland versus the European Adult conference Case”, long title on short story that goes like this. Two years back, the European Association of the Adult Industry in Europe (not fully sure of the name) was going to have their annual conference in Iceland, the topic? I am guessing, the Adult Industry in Europe. So few weeks before the event was going to take place, there rose an political issue on this in Iceland, we did not want to get a bunch of naked people to our small country and under pressure the Radisson SAS hotel management in Iceland cancelled and guess what it hit the media and for some two or three weeks if you Googeled Radisson SAS or phrases like adult entertainment or adult conference Radisson SAS and the Adult conference story came up.

This story as such was not such a problem, but the problem as I saw it was twofold:

1. They where opening a new hotel in Bahrain or Dubai at the same time, so when the travel reporter that wanted to write about the new hotel he found little but some adult conference problems in Iceland through Google News and knowing reporters this could pose a huge proplem. Even know Radisson will be connected with the adult industry through this post and will come up under some adult related search phrases at Google Blog and you might be here and reading this article because you got a Google Blog og Web Alert.

2. The there is the linking, if I remember correctly only handful of the sites picked this story up (15 – 20) and some other sites had their RSS-feeds but all in all around 30 sites had some information on this topic, but most based it on two or three original articles. So here is what I feared, imagine this story being picked up massively, by thousands of sites and all of the having a link to Radisson SAS front page with the phrase “adult conference” – Everybody that has even the most basic understanding of link-building will tell you that such scenario would be bad.

So start creating your online credibility, when you need it might be too late.

Also if you are looking for a professional web analytics solution, try Yahoo! Indextools, it’s a great tool and it’s free!