This Blog is Moving and Will Now Be Known as 'the inbound-i blog'. Click the link and come subscribe for uninterrupted service. I'll miss you if you don't!

Dear Subscribers,

Today is moving day. I’m launching a new blog called ‘the inbound-i blog’. It’s a continuation and evolution of New PR Words and Music, which will remain here so that you can come back and access the 110 posts created here. When you click on the link to the new blog and read the first post, you’ll understand why I’m making the change.

While you’re there, please subscribe by email or RSS feed so that you receive the latest information, ideas and intelligence about inbound marketing without interruption.

The new blog is a result of the evolution of online marketing and my own business focus. In explaining why the new blog, there’s also some good information for you about the importance of tailoring your online marketing to maximize the use of inbound marketing analytics.

Come with me to the new blog for future posts and come back here as often as you like to re-read and to re-listen to your musical favorites.

I will, too.

The moving image is from the Flickr photostream of aldenjewell under Creative Commons license.

A search for Kim Kardashian Divorce PR Strategy got my post to Google Page 1 Positions 2 and 3

My last post has made it to Google Page 1 for searches related to the Kim Kardashian divorce – the intended point of an experiment I conducted with it. See above and below for the proof.

The post contended that including hot and trending topics in your blog posts can boost your traffic by getting your post to come up in more searches. As an experiment I created an Inbound Marketing metaphor to the Kim Kardashian Kris Humphries Divorce.

The post also referenced Siri, which had brought another of my posts to Google Page 1 for sumerous searches and led to the topic of the last post and the Kardashian experiment. Here are more results.

A search on Kim Kardashian Siri brought my post to Google Page 1 Position 2

The searches are actual searches that got people to my blog. Note that the first Page 1 positions were out of 165,000,000 results and the second was out of 7,030,000 results. Case made. Hot topics can get you visibility you’d never get otherwise!

What trending topics and current events will you tie your next post to?

Don't be like Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries. Choose Web Technology that will last more than 72 days.

Can Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries push this blog post to Page One of Google? Let’s find out.

This post is actually a follow-on to one I wrote at the end of October about the keywords people search on that bring our posts up on Page One of search engine results pages (SERPs). One of the examples was a post I wrote about Apple’s new SiRi app for the iPhone 4s and IBMs artificial intelligence counterpart Watson.

Comparing the two turned out to be a very hot search topic and sent scads of traffic to my blog that might not have found it otherwise. Some of those seekers subscribed and are now part of my blog community. Since the flow of hits from Siri Watson searches hasn’t yet ebbed, I suppose that this post will come up, too.

This has led me to think about how useful posting about news events and hot topics can be to building blog traffic. A precept of inbound Marketing is that people are already online searching for the information we provide and all we have to is to help them to find us.

Think ‘news you can use’. What’s going on today that you can write about – that either falls into your area of expertise, or that you can use as a metaphor for something that does?

As an experiment, I’m going to use the next couple of paragraphs to compare the Kim Kardashian Kris Humphries divorce to what can happen if you happen to choose the wrong website designer and technology platform in a web 2.0 world.

Like Kardashian and Humphries you may be dazzled by a package that promises a fairy tale online future – a beautiful website with great design, lots of pictures, built with dazzling Flash technology that animates the whole shebang. While the price tag might not be $15 million, it’s still a pretty penny, but, you feel, worth every shekel.

Fast forward to 72 days after the launch. You wonder why you’re not getting any leads from the new site. The title tag announces your company name, after all. Great if anyone is searching for you specifically. Lousy if they’re searching generically for what you do.

You complain to a friend who explains that Flash is basically invisible to search engines and not supported by the Apple OS. And by the way, why don’t you have key words and search terms in your title tag before your company name – SEO best practices?

You also soon learn that if your site had a connected blog, you could drive lots of traffic to it. If it had a conversion form and you had the ability to add a piece of content on a hot topic for visitors to download in exchange for providing their email addresses, you could start to build a nice list of leads who you could then nurture with more useful information and who would likely become customers.

But you can’t do that because you built a beautiful online brochure not made for an interactive internet environment. Just like Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries, you accept the fact that you and your new site have irreconcilable differences and you kiss it all goodbye – including the cost of development.

Maybe you should have looked a little bit closer before taking the plunge. The dream dashed, like Kim, you’d might as well head off to Australia to pitch your business there and start anew.

OK. I’m going to tag this post with all of the hot topic names and let’s see if Kim and Kris followers bring us up to the top of the Google world! I’ll let you know – or try googling some of the keywords in the tags and see if you find New PR Words and Music. Let me know, ok??

A print ad for the Colgate Dinah Shore Winner's Circle Golf Tournament - With Arnie Palmer. I was there when it was shot.

Today is four years since my dear mentor and stepfather John R. Walsh died. Two years ago I wrote a post about him that will give you some of his and our background.

What I’d like to share with you in this post is some of his brilliant thinking and the lessons we can take  in a Web 2.0 world from his ability to strategize before the Internet/World Wide Web.

Next time you watch women’s golf and tennis think of John Walsh. Back in the 1970′s women’s sports had almost no corporate sponsorship. With no big money prizes and TV contracts there was very little interest. It occurred to John that this represented an opportunity for consumer products companies whose primary purchasing public was almost wholly women.

He pitched the idea to Colgate-Palmolive CEO-at-the-time David Foster, who passed away recently. Foster, who happened to really like women and golf, thought it was a great idea and the Colgate Dinah Shore Winner’s Circle Golf Classic was born. Foster even bought it a home – the Mission Hills golf Course in Palm Springs. Its success also helped to increase sponsorship of women’s tennis.

Walsh and Foster boosted the careers of LPGA Hall of Famers JoAnne Carner, Nancy Lopez and Amy Alcott among many others. The two pretty much put the sport on the map. The fabulous PR strategy still puts Colgate-Palmolive in a positive spotlight today.

John’s big strategic idea: Great opportunities are out there. Look for an audience that can get behind something that already exists and is just waiting for support from a logical booster. He did the same thing with Cutty Sark Scots Whisky and Men’s Fashion.

In the days of Web 2.0 and online search, it’s actually much easier to come up with winning matches.

If you click the link at the top of this post it should bring up your audio player and a music file of John singing and playing one of his own compositions, “I’m In Love With San Francisco.” As I explained in my 2009 post, John played a mean piano – in the key of C only – and composed some wonderful songs. A man of words, he was his own lyricist.

Unfortunately, John’s songs remain unknown. I’m happy to give one of them some airtime here.  The song was recorded to digital from an old cassette tape using an iPhone 4s so the quality isn’t great, but it’ll give you a peak at one other part of his creative heart and mind.

Here’s to one of the greatest winners I’ve ever known. Love you and miss you, John.

In these times of blogging and content marketing we can all be looking to beef up our writing skills. In the past I’ve mentioned that I subscribe to a free vocabulary builder newsletter, A Word A Day (AWAD). I recommend that you all go get a subscription at www.wordsmith.org.

One of my favorite features of AWAD is A Thought for Today, a daily quote on communications, life, human nature and other important topics. Today’s quote really grabbed me:

“The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way.” -Richard Harding Davis, journalist and author (1864-1916)

Finding an interesting way to discuss a topic that’s been fairly well hashed out will certainly make your writing – and you — stand out.

On the other hand when you’re trying to discuss a new idea, it helps people to understand it if you couch it in terms of an idea that’s already in their knowledge base.

We in Inbound Marketing have that challenge – as you can tell from the recent contest here to succinctly define IM. Lately I’ve found myself describing it as the opposite of traditional Outbound Marketing – print and broadcast ads, direct mail, telemarketing that get blocked my modern technology like TiVo/DVR, voicemail, Do Not Call lists, etc.

Or I’ll say that Inbound Marketing is an online ‘pull’ strategy as opposed to an offline ‘push strategy’.

How are you saying old and new things in your writing?

The image is from the flickr stream of sure2talk under creative commons license.

A Search for Siri vs Watson & Jeopardy Brought My Post to Google Page One

What really brings us up on page one of Google search results? I just took a look at my blog analytics. As I frequently am, I was surprised at what people typed into the Google search field that brought my blog up on page one – out of hundreds of thousands to millions of results. For almost none of these specific search terms did I set out to optimize my posts. But, nonetheless, they came up.

The lesson is that no matter how hard we work on our SEO, the people searching will determine by their searches if they land on our pages. The further reality is that we may or may not ultimately be relevant to what they’re looking for – but we never know.

It’s just a good thing to temper our SEO efforts with an understanding that there are infinite queries that can bring us to someone’s attention. This to me is what’s so exciting about marketing online!!! It’s the ultimate in interactivity with our audiences, and the possibilities are endless.

Here are the searches that brought me up on page one today–  plus the url’s for the actual posts that came up with the search results. How relevant do you think my posts might have been to the queries?

• siri Watson    http://bit.ly/rMKrdw (same for all of the Watson siri queries)
• siri vs Watson
• watson vs siri jeopardy
• watson siri
• siri versus Watson
• how are apple’s siri and ibm’s watson the same and different?
• siri vs. Watson
• how to identify key messages          http://bit.ly/slp4f7
• respect and listening lessons         http://bit.ly/swDGrt
• jazz manager ken Blanchard            http://bit.ly/vXTYyP
• emily post etiquette social networking tips        http://bit.ly/srjnwa

Will what you post online make you proud to be googled?

If we’re marketing online, then I think the goal should be simple. We should strive to always be proud to be googled. After awhile of building an online presence, we have bios and profiles posted all over the web.

Not only that, somewhere our tweets live on – even if Google isn’t indexing them anymore. Wherever we’ve commented on blogs, it’s there to be served up in response to simple queries that include our names, our urls, our companies and any other identifiers or keywords that pull up something we’ve posted or contributed to online.

The fun of marketing online – and what keeps me writing blog posts at the end of the work-a-day – is that you never know where what you put into the cyber world will end up. It’s exciting!

The whole history of my career in PR and online marketing is on the Web. Press releases for clients. Milestones in my agency. Columns I write. Blog posts. Comments here and there. Guest posts. Media coverage.

It doesn’t matter one iota what I say about myself. Everything I’ve done is there to be found, there to be seen by anyone who types my name or company name into a search field. It provides credibility. She says she writes columns? Oh yes. There’s her column.

Whenever I post something online, I say to myself, “If I tell someone to google me and this comes up in the SERPs, how will I feel about it? What will it say about me to someone who doesn’t know me and is thinking of hiring me?”

My clients and I are building our businesses on the web. None of us is perfect and we may all exercise an occasional lack of judgment about something we post. It can happen.

But why not build our online personae in a way that is both authentic and that we can be proud of…that we can say, “Here’s my bio, but if you want the bigger picture, google me!”

By the way…follow the link if you’re interested in how Inbound Marketing can generate online leads.

The image is by y0mbo under Creative Commons license.

Digital Power Couple IBM's Watson and Apple's Siri are Marching Down the Aisle to the Semantic Web

The first few posts I read about the new Apple iPhone 4s pre- and immediately-post-launch were pretty tepid and ho-hum post-Steve Jobs dismissals. This is why I rarely pay attention when the tech avant garde makes its first pronouncements about a new product release. Turns out that hiding in the new iPhone is some game-changing technology.

Over the next couple of days the word/name Siri started to creep into my conscious as something that might just be interesting about the new version after all. Finally, David Pogue wrote in the New York Times about four new things the iPhone 4s does, the last of which made the hairs on the back of my neck tingle with excitement.

He wrote about ‘Thing 4’ that it is: “Speech recognition. Crazy good, transformative, category-redefining speech recognition.” He was referring to Siri — a software functionality from a little company that Apple acquired in 2010.

Apparently Siri builds on another voice recognition software, Dragon, that’s been available on iPhones since 2009. Dictate using Dragon and your voice converts to text, subject to the occasional glitch.

What got my attention – and what made Pogue go wild about Siri — is that ‘she’ is billed as a virtual assistant that understands fairly complex commands and questions. But what’s fabulous is that ‘she’ answers questions and provides information in a contextual way.

You can read Pogue’s column, but here are some examples that he gave:

“You can say, “Wake me up at 7:35,” or “Change my 7:35 alarm to 8.” You can say, “What’s Gary’s work number?” Or, “How do I get to the airport?” Or, “Any good Thai restaurants around here?” Or, “Make a note to rent ‘Ishtar’ this weekend.” Or, “How many days until Valentine’s Day?” Or, “Play some Beatles.” Or, “When was Abraham Lincoln born?””

“In each case, Siri thinks for a few seconds, displays a beautifully formatted response and speaks in a calm female voice,” Pogue added.

The idea of the Semantic Web – sometimes called Web 3.0 – fascinates me as it will provide the next advances in communications between humans and computers. If you’d like to know more, check out my post from back in the late winter when I blogged about IBM’s new computer Watson ‘who’ blew away top contestants on a much-publicized match on the TV show Jeopardy.

Watson and Siri promise to be part of a new DNA line of computer technology. What do you imagine or hope we’ll be able to do in computing or online when their offspring come of age and we can converse with our computers and mobile devices?

By the way…follow the link if you’re interested in how Inbound Marketing can generate online leads.

The image is from Neal under Creative Commons license.

Question: What's the Definition of Inbound Marketing? Thanks for sharing your answer!

Can you succinctly describe Inbound Marketing? Do you have an idea but are not quite certain? Would you like to know more about what it is? Do you have absolutely no idea, but would be willing to take a stab at explaining it anyway?

Then this is the post for you! You just have to be prepared to share your take on Inbound Marketing in the comments. There’s a prize involved. Read on.

Why am I looking for a definition? I talk to companies about Inbound Marketing every day and each time I try to find the tidiest way to help people get it. I’m a pretty darned good communicator – been doing it professionally and successfully for decades. I’ve explained lots of complex concepts and technologies.

But Inbound Marketing seems tougher for some reason. Maybe it’s because people think they know what it is, and are resistant to accepting that there’s more to it. Eventually people understand, but given today’s short attention spans, we need a short explanation. Time is of the essence!

I’ve checked out Inbound Marketing groups on LinkedIn, the websites of fellow Inbound Marketing agencies, HubSpot’s website and Wikipedia, which was able to shed light on an earlier sense of Inbound/Outbound Marketing that I encountered once trying to explain it to a software company product development executive.

So far I’ve found nothing that encompasses all the parts and benefits of today’s Inbound Marketing in a way that’s quickly understandable. I’ve blogged about how people don’t get it. I’ve wracked my own brain for a tight definition and come up with something that I’m trying out in my networking groups and to audiences I’m speaking to in the near future. But I have a feeling I can do better.

So I decided to reach out to the online community of all stripes to see if we can crowd source something that works. There’s a prize for the best definition: A copy of Inbound Marketing  by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, co-founders of HubSpot. Brian coined the phrase Inbound Marketing.

Let’s have at it. I’m passionate about Inbound Marketing, know it works and want more companies to get it and buy in, so that they can start reaping the benefits. Plus we can have some fun!

Let’s get all the help we can. Please share everywhere!!

The image is from the photostream of tj scenes on Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.

In Tribute to Steve Jobs

Today a musical post to accompany the words. Steve Jobs was a huge Beatles fan – and so one of the most beautiful love songs ever written, “Here, There and Everywhere” from the iconic 1966 album, “Revolver”.

A sad loss like we experienced with the death of Steve Jobs this week, makes me think more about life – and love. Here is what the brilliant love of my life Jeff Levine has come to believe over his life of helping people to understand theirs: “We’re here to love, and to love is to give.”

If we reflect on Steve Jobs’ life from this perspective and what he’s given to the world, we can rightfully say that he was one of the most loving people to have ever walked the planet.

The beautiful tribute image is from Flickr photo stream of Daniel2005 under Creative Commons license.