Social Media Training In Demand on West Coast Too

SEO PR draws PR folk in San Francisco

The Bulldog Reporter PR U event in San Francisco drew attendees from Seattle to San Diego.

Nicki Dugan, editor of Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog, shared insights into why they launched a corporate blog in addition to what they call their Mount Rushmore bloggers (Jeremy Zawodny et all)

Mark Jen shared his two weeks of fame) or infamy) as a blogger at Google.  His blog attracted a storm of attention precisely because Google was so close-mouthed and no one at Google was blogging.  A cautionary tale for anyone working in Corporate America – find out what your company’s policy on blogging is before you rush in where angels fear to tread.

I spoke on Blogs: the good, the bad and the ugly.  who is getting it right (Sun Microsystems, Channel 9 at Microsoft, Stonyfield Farms and GM’s Fast Lane) who got it wrong (Edelman and Wal-Mart, Panasonic and Dell) and why.

But the area that needs the most explanation is social media. PR people get blogging now, but they don’t understand the elements of content sharing and social bookmarking.

We spoke about tagging, what it is, how to do it and why it’s important.  What a social bookmark is and how it can influence others. And at the end the question remains “OK, we get it, but how do we do it?”

PRESSfeed was built specifically to make content sharing and syndication easy for PR and marketing folk who are not techies.

After we exhibited at Search Rngine Strategies in August, I realized from the questions we were asked again and again that there is a need for education in this field. I wrote a 6-part series on RSS content syndication as a PR and marketing strategy. My next project will be a 6-part series on Social Media and its use in PR.

Watch this space.