SEO and PR

I really would appreciate your feedback on this question. Maybe I am not rubbing elbows with enough, or the right kind of, people.

But what I am finding, by and large, is that people who understand SEO do not understand PR and what it does. The ones with the best grasp of Web 2.0 stuff don't understand how the edited media work.

Is that a gross oversimplification? The reason I ask is that I would like to give a speech to PR professionals about SEO. I want to tell them that if they can learn about SEO they will have a huge advantage over the current SEO experts.

But I don't want to tell them that if it is inaccurate. Of course, there is always a person here or there who masters both. But in your experience, in general, do you find it to be true?

Sen. Winfrey?

Just when I think US politics can't get any more ridiculous, yesterday Rod Blagojevich wanted to nominate Oprah Winfrey to serve in the Senate next to Kirsten Gillibrand.

Nominating Oprah is a fine idea. She's been so much in the public eye that if she had any dirty secrets beyond her disordered eating we would all know about them. I don't know her grasp of politics, but I know she speaks more articulately than Sarah Palin and Caroline Kennedy.

I object, though, to the idea of Blagojevich nominating anyone, even if Aung San Suu Kyi were a citizen. Once he made it clear that he thought he should profit from the nomination, that power should have been wrested from his greedy hands. And somebody should have fed him a bar of soap.

Kirsten Gillibrand

I am so proud of Kirsten Gillibrand. New York Gov. David Paterson has picked her to fill Hillary Clinton's seat in the Senate.

Kirsten and I attended Emma Willard School together. She impressed me when she spoke there about women and power last year--and now she will have a lot more power.

Kirsten, good luck.

InDesign Lust

I haven't always been just the content lady. At other jobs I was the only marketing person in the company. When we needed ads, I taught myself Illustrator and Quark.

So when I read Art Direction + Editorial Design by Yolanda Zappaterra I found myself itching to have a little more control again over the way my words looked on the page or screen. Read the book for yourself and see if it doesn't cause you to say, "Wow, I wish I could do something like that."

I could, I said to myself, if only I had a graphic design program. And if the graphic design program also included Dreamweaver, I could apply ideas to my websites as well...

Then I remembered that I have two graphic design projects coming up that might justify purchasing software: people close to me will celebrate milestone birthdays this year, and their families are reuniting to celebrate with them. I could buy InDesign, I said to myself, and produce keepsake books for the occasion.

Then I looked at the price of InDesign. Yikes! I decided that my websites looked good enough with their template design, and I could put the birthday books together with a flatbed scanner and a Sharpie marker.

Adobe does offer the 30-day free trial. If I end up going for it, you will hear about it here.

Wall between Editorial and Advertising

Last night at dinner I ran into a reporter for our local weekly paper. I'm sorry to hear that they had two rounds of cutbacks last week.

PC Magazine published its last print edition this month.

Times are tough for direct print media. It's harder than ever for me to convince people to pay for advertising. Print advertising is probably ineffective.

• If I want to buy something, I look online, not in print.
• The media that I respect do not allow advertising dollars to affect their editorial decisions, of course.

This means that if I do convince the people with the checkbooks to pay for print ads, the ads will probably not reach the buyers. Even if I spend, editors may still allow unfavorable coverage of my product.

That said, I bear in mind two things

• Print media are businesses, too. Subscription revenue does not pay their bills; without advertising, they sink.
• The editorial process gives direct print coverage and its online versions much more credibility than unedited usergroups and blogs like this one.

I believe in print media, and I believe in spending on advertising to support them. It's hard for advertisers to point to direct benefits, but if we allow our print media to sink, we have lost something important.

Keep It Simple, Sweetie

I haven't had any recent requests to dumb down my content, thank heaven. But what if I decided to write all marketing content at a 10th grade level? As it happens, Word has a language and grammar checker (Flesch Kincaid), which evaluates the grade level of the highlighted content or the document. Theoretically, I could tweak all my work until it was appropriate for 10th graders.

When I looked into the Flesch Kincaid algorithm I was disappointed. As far as I can see, all it evaluates is the length of the sentences, the lengths of the individual words, and the number of sentences per paragraph.

1) The orangutan was encountered by the multitudinous elephantine community. (Woo—Flesch Kincaid grade 19.3)

2) The large elephant herd met the orangutan. (Flesch Kincaid grade 7.3)

I would smack down any English student or content writer who submitted sentence #1 to me, even though its Flesch Kincaid score was more than twice that of sentence #2. Clearly, a higher Flesch Kincaid score does not indicate higher quality.

I would pay good money for a Strunk & White scoring algorithm, though.

Try the Flesch Kincaid scoring system for yourself in Word. Highlight any section of your document. Click , Go through the spelling and grammar check. At the end of the check you get a “readability statistics” box.

In case you’re wondering, this posting scores 8.0.

Just Wondering about the SuperBowl

The guys I work with talk about football all the time. I understand that I am not the only person with no interest whatsoever in watching football but who still watches the SuperBowl for the ads, especially if the snacks are good enough.

Besides, I didn't want to schedule a social occasion that might conflict with the big night. So back in December when I was filling out the 2009 calendar, I asked the football fan in the house when it was. "I don't know," he said.

So I asked the guys at work. None of them knew.

In case you're wondering now, I looked it up online at Superbowl.com. It appears to be February 1.

But what is it about the football fans? How come none of them knew when their big game was, the night of the biggest annual simultaneous toilet-flush and post-game domestic violence? Do they wait for their favorite tournament to sneak up and bite them on the butt?

Just wondering.

Pickypedia II

So much for last year's resolutions. I swore I would not do this again, yet here I am editing Wikipedia. Or not, because, as you can see, I am procrastinating by blogging.

When I put up the article about my church last May, people immediately slapped banners on it. The one that annoyed me the most was the one at the very top of the article that said, "This article does not cite any references or sources." I had kind of thought that the two articles from the New York Times were unimpeachable references.

More warnings at the bottom tell me that "This article about a building or structure in New Jersey is a stub," and "This article about a church or Christian place of worship in the United States is a stub." And if I visit the discussion page there are more banners from the WikiProject Christianity and the WikiProject Anglicanism.

I stopped editing Wikipedia after that experience. After taking a long time to learn to add the citations, the "lack of reference" banner disgusted me.

Now, though, I am dismayed to learn that I have forgotten everything I learned about citing sources on Wikipedia. This is unfortunate, because the company where I work is having trouble with its Wikipedia article. We had a problem with our supply chain the week before Christmas. A Wikipedia editor added a mostly-truthful section about the problem on our article. So my job is either to remove the section or dress up the article so the edit is less conspicuous, all the while maintaining Wikipedia's vaunted neutrality.

We tried the "remove the section" approach, but this did not sit well with the Wikipedia community, which added it back. Fair enough, and we try to abide by the rules.

I discussed the question with my Wikipedia sponsor (How do I ask this editor why he or she did not add sections to our competitors' articles when similar problems have occurred?). In response, my sponsor slapped a "conflict of interest" banner at the top of our article.

The banners are raising my hackles. Especially, though, the charge of conflict of interest. Our product is rather dry. It's not like a church or civic organization, where people's deep emotional connections encourage them to ride the Wikipedia learning curve for several hours so they can write about it. Plus, the product is technical. Even if someone earnestly desired to write about it, he or she would face another steep learning curve in order to be able to describe it.

In short, the only people who are going to write about my product are the people who work for the company. (Or the people who work for the competition--infer what you will about the motives of the anonymous editor who gives only his/her IP address. Or someone with too much time on his or her hands, such as Dr. William Chester Minor.) Yet, this is an important product, one that every Internet user relies on to keep data transmission secure. Playing by the rules, in this case, is really difficult.

Okay, I feel better now. Thanks for letting me share. And best wishes for a healthy and peaceful new year.