Fake Plastic Noodles

Last week I sat down via Skype with David Strom and Paul Gillin for their Mediablather podcast (formerly Tech PR Warstories). We had a nice little chat, albeit a bit echo-y, about blog outreach and the best way to approach it.

I’ve never been on a podcast before and with the exception of last week, had never been a “guest” on anything, so I’m truly honored that they would even ask me to come on the show. To be in the company of some of their former guests is insane to me.

Take a listen. I thought I would be cringing at the sound of my own voice, but it really isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Must have been all that practice at the WAHS (the one and only station for alteration) in high school.

Thanks again, guys!

If you have a moment today, please click on over to From Dates to Diapers for a peak at my first ever guest post. Christine, one of my favorite Mommy bloggers, asked me a couple days ago to write a little bit on how PR selects certain blogs for engagement; Never one to miss an opportunity to talk openly about blog outreach, I was happy to do so.

It has just been insane around here lately, although I have to admit it hasn’t just been with work. I’ve mostly been spending my free time avoiding blogging. Instead, I’ve been basking in the sunshine on restaurant patios and attending a ridiculous amount of amazing shows in the Detroit area.

It’s been great to veg out for a little while. I’m wrapping up this work week in anticipation of next, when I’m off to Florida for a Radiohead show and to sit out on the beach with an umbrella-adorned drink. I will not be bringing my computer with me

Vacations can be trying, though, if not simply because of the work that seems to accumulate while you’re gone. Well, I’ll probably kick myself for saying this later, but ::knock on wood:: I don’t think that this time around will be too bad. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot going on in the social media scene and my day-to-day work (for once) has not been overwhelming.

And even though there will only be light posting on here the next few days, you will be able to find me elsewhere (albeit not by e-mail, Facebook, work phone or this blog). Tomorrow I’m being interviewed by David Strom for the MediaBlather podcast and I will also be doing a guest post on one of my favorite Mommy blogs.

And no, I’m not a Mommy. Just thought I should put that out there.

Within about ten minutes, unbeknownst to either of us because wonky Lotus Notes delays e-mails anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours, my colleague Todd and I sent around to the office two very similar comparison/measurement tools we found online (I was first, Todd, remember that): Twist and and the Facebook Lexicon.

It seems like with every social media conference or gathering, the topic of discussion is how to measure the impact of social media. Nobody can seem to agree how to do this (or even if we should), but I think Twist and the Lexicon give us a little bit of a starting point to work off of.

With both tools, you can search for one or more keywords to spot buzz trends in the application. Going a step further, Twist incorporates a Tweet Scan-like function that produces a real-time feed of all Tweets using that keyword.

The only thing that doesn’t seem to be effective is searching for low-volume terms. For example, if you search for “mseasons” on Twist, you can see a minuscule number, but no real graphic evidence. Apparently I’m not kind of a big deal. You need to be very broad with your terms to have any visual value. One of the examples they give on the homepage is the comparison of “hillary, obama,” which as you can imagine has been talked about a lot (note the spike during the Pennsylvania primaries).

I’ve not had a whole lot of time to play around with them and have yet to incorporate them in a practical sense, but I dig the concept. Being able to compare trends over the long term could be an incredibly valuable correlation tool between word-of-mouth and conversion - especially if they could be broadened.

Wondering if anybody might know of some good resources for bloggy SEO. I’m trying to expand my horizons and up that score. I’m not beginner, but by no means advances. Just looking for something straightforward, and not crazy in-depth.

I’ve done a fair amount of searching online, but everything seems to be rather disjointed. I’m hoping for personal experience here. Let me know what’s worked for you.

In fact, here’s a follow-up question: Do you even worry about SEO? I have a feeling most Type A (*ahem* me) personalities do.

UPDATE: I’m going to qualify this for people who don’t have control over the design of their blog. I am using a WordPress template and don’t have access to the CSS that makes it up, so changing of taglines and tags is pretty much out. Limiting, I know. But while we’re at it, I’m thinking of redesigning, so any suggestions there would be helpful too. Thanks!

Two years ago today, I left for the required after-college backpacking trip to Europe. If I think about it, no single experience in my life thus far has changed me as much as seven weeks in Europe all by my lonesome.

It seems rather far away now even though I remember just about every moment. I kept a written journal and travel blog and took over 1,000 pictures to help log the journey.

It was a trip that most Americans are not lucky enough to take and besides being asked the oh-so-annoying “Is it true that only 2 percent of Americans have passports?” question a million times, it was fantastic. (Incidentally, the answer is no - I think it hovers around 20-25 percent.)

Anyway, as a trip down memory lane, I’ve decided to post just a couple pictures from the best two months of my life.

As I said, there are about 900 more, so if you fancy a look, head over to my Europe collection on Flickr.

Every once in a while somebody passes along a web site to me that makes me stare at the computer screen in utter disbelief.  LifeGem is one of those sites.

Taking immortalizing a loved one to a ridiculously uncomfortable level, LifeGem turns the actual carbon remains of your dead so-and-so into diamond jewelry.  I shit you not.

Each LifeGem^®, created from the carbon in a lock of hair, symbolizes your precious and personal bond with another.  With this closeness offered only by a LifeGem^®, you will have your loved one with you and in your life at all times.

Can I get a WTF?

I understand the need to feel like a lost loved one is with you always, but turning him or her into a snazzy pair of cuff links isn’t exactly the way I would picture doing it. Ick.

I’ve never really paid attention to Zappos before, but they sure as hell are making it difficult for me to ignore them now. First, BL Ochman wrote a post on how amazing their customer service and now there’s an amazingly successful Twitter campaign going on as I type.

A couple hours ago the resident Zappos Twitterer announced that the company would be giving away a free pair of shoes to a random follower tonight. Presumably seeing the response, he/she announced that up to 10 friends of the follower would be receiving shoes too. That’s all it took. Within minutes, my feed started looking like this

Everyone follow @zappos - Giving away a free pair of shoes to followers and will give 10 of your friends shoes too if they are following

the free shoe thing is exploding! http://twitter.zappos.com/

@zappos keeps impressing me. Follow their tweets and perhaps win some shoes! (totally worth it btw…even w/o the free shoes)

It worked too - I’m happily following Zappos, waiting for them to tell me when I can expect these:

*This is so my last Twitter post for a while. Much to my chagrin, it seems like it’s the only thing in the news nowadays.

So, the hullabaloo that was last week’s BlogHer Business is over, and while I did not attend, a couple of my fantastic colleagues did, including Charlie Kondek, MS&L’s Director of New Media Relations. Since he sits just about an arm’s length from me, I tapped him to answer a few of my burning BlogHer questions

I considered adding in a little introductory bio for him, but I think this exchange from just a couple minutes ago will suffice:

Charlie
Jabber
2:34
Thank you for the opportunity! I hope they are good answers. Need any help on my bio? Or will it be, simply, “Charlie Kondek is a guy I work with and he is so dreamy. I asked him about BlogHer and this is what he said. Sigh!”

Melanie
Jabber
2:35

::copy and paste::

Charlie
Jabber
2:35
Haha!

And without further ado…

1. How have you seen the Mommy Blogosphere change over the last four years?
   There’s more of them, they are a community, and they are consolidating into loosely organized sub-groups. BlogHer presented some research that confirms that there are more women bloggers, blogging more frequently. What I’ve noticed is that many of the moms are blogging in more than one There’s more of them, they are a community, and they are consolidating into loosely organized place or banding together to create multiple-contributor blogs. It seems to me also that these writers would like to expand into writing about new categories. They already write about working and family, politics, regional concerns. They want to write about tech, gadgets, sex, science, literature, current events - I can’t even keep track.
2. How do you deal with negative feedback from bloggers on PR people?
   As you know, our firm has hardly ever been on the receiving end of bad feedback from a blogger, and we’ve never been isolated by other marketing blogs or blogs like Chris Anderson’s for being an intrusive, blundering firm that has spammed them. I’m proud that our firm never comes up in blog posts in which people are lashing out at PR firms. That said, I pay very close attention to this criticism and try to learn from it. I try to be cognizant and respectful of the fact that other companies are making negative waves in the blog waters and that we might be the next firm to swim into those currents. So rather than react with a “how dare they?!” I try to inculcate an attitude of: “The natives are restless. Must respect the natives.”
3. When introducing yourself to a new blogger, how do you separate yourself from the pack?
   I don’t think I consciously try to separate myself from the PR pack, unless the complete transparency that we always display and our successful record of working with bloggers is something that separates us. Often, I meet new bloggers through other bloggers, so that’s helpful to building a new relationship. But with a cold pitch or a completely new person, I’m as upfront as possible about who I am, what I want, and how much I respect the blogger’s potential participation in our programs.
4. We’ve talked a lot about Moms, but was there anyone else there? Topics of note?
   There were a lot of women at BlogHer that are not moms or at least not easily identifiable as moms. Some of the participants were also noting that they want to be idenfitied as more than a mom, or not a mom, a person of color, a professional who has chosen not to have a family at this time, a grandmother, a none-of-the-above. At this recent conference I was meeting a lot of people in my same business, PR people and marketers, so we were pooling thoughts on how we work. I absolutely adored Heather Gorringe’s presentation on Wiggly Wigglers. As I mentioned in my Blogworks post, she boils everything down to “having a chat” the way one would in the English village she hails from.
5. Did you come back with any super original ideas for campaigns?
   There were great presentations but I wasn’t seeing anything particularly new, not new to me or my firm, which was rather validating. I had to leave the conference early on Friday to catch a flight so I missed out on some of the presentations I wanted to see, like CityMama’s presentation, and the latter half of the Q&A for “improve this pitch.” There was some very interesting talk on mobile and generational marketing. Someone asked a panel of very respected experts who was marketing well to women and the answer was Dove and…. Bon Jovi! I forget who it was but she said she went to see Bon Jovi in concert and it was a bunch of women her age in the audience.
6. Any predictions for the next big thing with female bloggers, not just Moms? Broad question, I know.
   Well, as I said I think moms and women bloggers want to write about a lot more than just work, family, and cetera. They want to write about a lot of topics and many of them already are, and at a variety of web-based publications. Tech and gadgetry was particularly called out at BlogHer Business as a topic women want to be more involved in. We can, I think, expect more web-based magazines and multiple-contributor blogs, moms and women bloggers resembling freelance writers whose work extends into a number of different places. They are becoming more savvy about what they want from marketers, PR firms, brands, and I think have a better sense of how they want to negotiate for placements. Sadly, I think many companies don’t know what they want from the bloggers. But this is exciting. It’s new media journalism; these people are at once the consumer, the gatekeeper, the publisher, the writer, the artist, the ad buyer and the marketer. They are their own brand.

Thanks Charlie! If anyone has any questions for him, give me a shout or find him on Twitter.