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.