Thinking about it more, I jokingly refer to it as HRO, or Human Reader Optimization. It’s the next step beyond SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Sure it’s great that you’ve used SEO tactics to get somebody to your site, but is that landing page something they actually want to read. It might contain the keywords, but is it relevant and perhaps most of all interesting?
Google helped make this a bit more obvious (hopefully). Think back to Alta Vista, when ‘relevant’ meant a page that contained the most instances of a keyword, with Google relevant is partially calculated by what others (via links) think is relevant.
A while back I talked about the SEO strategy surrounding blogs and made some jokes/jabs about it. With blogs, the SEO strategy should start with, “Write good relevant content that people find interesting.”
Newsroom vendors hype the SEO benefits of keyword-optimized press releases. Great, are they HRO? As a general web user, is a press release really what you want to read?

Granted, Wal-Mart has made a few social media mistakes and has been raked over the coals for it, but how about Target?

Recently Kaye Sweetser posted about a situation with Target’s Rounders program and one of her students. You can read the entire post to get all the details.

In short, Target instructed their Rounders to keep their relationship with Target a secret. When one of her students questioned this on Target’s Facebook wall the thread was removed.

Was there a mass outcry over this? Not really. A front page article on the New York Times? Nope. Why? A double standard? What do you think?

If not, ask around.

What does the word conversation mean to you and to your company?

We say the word conversation quite a bit in the social media world. But like some words, when you say it over and over, it sometimes loses all meaning…..sort of like social media. When I started my breakout session at the PRSA International Conference last week I joked with the audience was probably sick and tired of the term ’social media’. They had to be, they had been in sessions for three days hearing it over and over again.

Back to the word conversation though. I think when I say it and hopefully when some of the organizations I work with say it, they mean they want a two way dialogue. Both sides learn something from each other. There is a give and take.

Unfortunately conversation is also becoming a strategy, a marketing plan.

Politicians also use the word conversation. They say, “We need to sit down and have a conversation about that issue.” I don’t know about you, but when I hear that from a politician I usually think, “I am going to speak with you to give you the appearance that I actually care what you have to say, but in reality I am just going to use this opportunity to force my ideas upon you.” Not my idea of conversation.

Are politicians and corporations giving conversation a bad name?

One of the people who left a comment on my post was Etan Horowitz, the tech reporter for the Orlando Sentinel.
He said:

A quick search of my inbox reveals nearly 100 e-mails with the words “Web 2.0″ in them. Most of them are pitches from tech companies.

I ran into Etan at an event this past Monday and asked him about the comment. He said it’s almost a joke, everybody is throwing the 2.0 label on their pitches. The end result is that it becomes a meaningless term and actually devalues your message.

Yes we all know that Google loves blogs, but if your only reason for blogging is SEO, then you’re going to fail. Back in early 2006 I posted about a newspaper that wanted to start community blogging. I told them if the reasons were revenue or page views that things would fail. The primary purpose has to be conversation and community. If you do those two things right (and have your blog properly configured) then SEO and all the other benefits should follow.

During the panel today the analogy I used was this:

If your fiance asks you why you love him/her and want to spend the rest of your life with them you shouldn’t say:

A. I’m looking for increased ROI thru shared living expenses.

B. You have a great network of (hot) friends, and partnering with you allows me to position myself favorably with them.

It should first and foremost be about love and compassion (with your fiance).

Earlier this year I asked, are you willing to take from your pr/marketing budget to fix a problem in another department? A great case in point was the recent Spirit Airlines dust-up. For a quick refresher:

- Alex has customer service issue with Spirit Airlines

- Alex blogs about it

- Other people comment, sharing their customer service horror stories

- Google ranks post #3 for “Spirit Airlines” search

- Even more people comment, sharing more horror stories

- Aviation Week blogs about it

- Traditional media picks up the story

- Rinse & repeat

If you read through the blogs posts, Alex’s issue revolves around the customer support line. From his experience it just doesn’t work. Many of the people who commented on his post shared the same view.

When I was interviewed by the media for the story about Spirit Airlines I was asked, “What would be your counsel? How can they make peace with the bloggers?” My response:

Well there is what I would tell them they should do, and then there is what they will do, which are two entirely different things.

What they should do…..It seems that the majority of their issues are related to their customer support line, they should fix that problem first. Fix the customer support lines and then go back to the bloggers and say, ‘We’re sorry for the issues you encountered. It seems that we had some problems with our customer support lines and we heard that from you and the other commenters. We’ve fixed those issues by increasing our staff at our major call centers. We’d love to have you fly with us again and if you ever need to call our customer service line again the level of service will be much better.’

Of course they won’t do that. Each time something like this comes up again their communications depart will apologize. But we all know that it’s a hollow apology since they really don’t plan on fixing the problem.

I know budgets are really tight at a low-cost airlines, but at what point does the time and effort spent dealing with PR issues related to this (not to mention the lost sales) outweigh the cost to fix it?

I often hear old-school PR practitioners complaining that all this ‘blog stuff’ is negative. It depends on where you’re sitting of course. Social media is great for shining a light on the broken parts of your business. You can take the exposure of faults as a negative, or as an opportunity to fix things and make your products/services better. Which will you do?