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Roger Warner, Managing Director, C&M
July 2009
We’re having an increasing numbero conversations with clients who arelooking to us or that all-importantpixie dust that will drive new levels oawareness and trafc.No surprise there, right? That’s our job!But rather than sit on these experiences,we thought we’d do the decent thingand share our insights with you…
 
Party Harder:
C&M’s Five Basic Social Theories of Online PR // 
C&M
//July 2009
2
 
An EArly DigrEssion:ThE ‘PArTy hArD’PrinCiPlE of onlinE Pr
 A.B.C.
Nine times out o ten we strike ona set o common, undamentally‘social’ ideas that we know will make100% o dierence – andyet, or one reason or another,they tend to grate with traditionalmarketing theory. As such, this paper is our attempt toconvince you that great Online PR iseasy. All it takes is some basic rewiring.
The idea is simple:
in order to engagewith your audiences online, you needto shape your words, messages andtactics around their agendas,not yours. In other words, yourOnline PR eorts need to be a wholelot more social than they have beenup until now.
 Aida Eldermariamwrote a great pieceor the Guardianin December 2008on this very topic.Entitled‘The MostPopular Story in theWorld,’it looked at how news media are adapting their tactics to engagebetter with a ragmented online readership.She shares the same problem as our clients: how to ensure a messagehits home in the manic environment o the web…?Eldermariam draws a super analogy with the social mechanics o anetworking party. Imagine it’s in ull-swing and you have an importantmessage to pass on to your ellow guests. You have limited time andresources, and no stooges to spread the word on your behal…
how Do you Do iT? Do you…
Stand on a chair in the middle of the room and shout yourmessage repeatedly?‘Speed date’ by shaking the hand of everyone at twominute intervals, cranking out the message whirlwind-style as you go?
…or
Mix, mingle and meet folks, and – when you find thenice guys – pass on your message in the context of aconversation (and in the process encourage them to gospread the word on your behalf)?
 
Party Harder:
C&M’s Five Basic Social Theories of Online PR // 
C&M
//July 2009
3
Unless you carry the charisma o Jack Nicholson, then optionsa) and b) are out. Actually, they’re counter-intuitive – they’llprobably alienate you. (Who are you? Why should I care?Jesus – go away!! Somebody call the authorities!!!)The point is, o course, that when you’re operating in a looselystructured environment like the web / a party – an arena where nobody‘owns’ the terms o engagement – the best way to communicate is bybeing more social. Yet we seem to miss this point on a consistent basis. As Eldermariam describes, the crux o our problem is that when it comesto the web (or newspapers, or any orm o mass communication) there’s
 
“a great tension between what people want and what we think they needto know.”We’re so obsessed with the importance o our message – and soignorant o our audience’s wants and needs – that we seem content tobleat without direction into outer space. In practice, we run elaborateash banner campaigns (hey, give me that big chair to stand on –I’m gonna try to shout the
LOUDEST!
 ), and we build reams ounky little microsites (hey, screw this, nobody’s listening…let’s have our
OWN
party!). A much better approach is to listen frst, and then do the talking. Weshould try to understand what our audience cares or
beore
we openour mouths. Eective web marketing does this in spades, just like thegood guys at the party. They get their message across (and get all thetrafc) not because they shout the loudest, but because they’re the mostengaged and the most engaging…
In other words, it’s all about being more social 
With this in mind, here’s our fve Basic Social Theories o Online PR…(We recommend you print them out on nice glossy paper, stick them onyour wall and then bake them into everything you do online…)Launching a new piece o content or a new site without frstunderstanding the language o your marketplace is Online PR suicide.SEO 101 teaches us that in order to make our content ‘fndable’ by usersand ‘indexable’ by search engines, we need to work within the linguisticramework o our searching public.It’s easy to understand the psychology o search via tools likeGoogle SuggestandWordtracker– both will give you an instant read on the keywords your audience is using. Your job is to take this vocabularyand weave it into the abric o your content: in site names, urls, pagetitles, meta descriptions, headers, links, and so orth.For example, i you provide a slicker-than-average ‘personalised toneservice’ or mobile phones, you may want to position yoursel assomething bigger and groovier than a plain old grubby ringtone…but your customers won’t be making that distinction. They don’teven know you exist. You might preer to call your stu a BingTone or aHumTone, but they’ll be searching or a plain old ringtone. And i ringtoneisn’t at the heart o your content strategy, then rest assured you’ll be othe Google map and missing a stack o motivated trafc.Getting these principles right is what’s known in the trade as ContentOptimization – and you can learn how to do it here. It’s inherently social:it’s all about talking like a customer, and it’s the most cost-eective wayo generating the right kind o web trafc. 
C&M’s BAsiC soCiAlThEoriEs of onlinE Pr
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