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How to track the blogosphere?
How will the PR industry react on those new challenges?

The classical gatekeeper role model must die!

Public Relations is still centered around the old gatekeeper role model because classic media works as a so called ‘relevance filter’ and like every filter can be manipulated in many ways. Offer free travel, transportation, invitations, etc. and you will most likely get friendly news coverage.

The blogosphere works totally different because of the viral character of hyperlinking information.

Let’s see why the gatekeeping theory is old media news only…

Definition: Gatekeeper role model

In human communication, in particular, in journalism, gatekeeping is the process through which ideas and information are filtered for publication. The internal decision making process of relaying or withholding information from the media to the masses. The theory was first instituted by social psychologist Kurt Lewin in 1947 and is still one of the most important theories studied by students of mass communication and journalism. Gatekeeping occurs at all levels of the media structure – from a reporter deciding which sources are chosen to include in a story to editors deciding which stories are printed, or even covered.

Source: Wikipedia Gatekeeping (communication)

Gatekeeping is dead in the blogosphere

Pito Salas from the BlogBridge team posted a Blog article and points out what are the three most relevant questions in the PR industry regarding the blogosphere.

It’s been quite interesting to hear how the ‘blogosphere’ is posing new challenges to Public Relations and Corporate Communications executives. Many of the tried and true ways of delivering a valuable service to clients don’t seem to be working anymore. In fact there are those out there that say that ‘traditional PR is dying”.

He is saying that there are three main fears inside the PR industry:

1. What are the top blogs that are most relevant for client X?
2. Finding the coverage that matters and ignoring the noise.
3. What about metrics? What is the influence of this blogger, or the circulation of that one?

Read the full article. The trembling uncertainty within the PR industry is postulated here: Tracking the blogosphere (I shamelessly stole his great sub-title for my article title – Kudos)

Dear Public Relation folks

1. Blogs and/or the Internet have no gatekeeper function!
2. A blog with 10 readers can go viral with bad news in minutes and receive 1,000s of hits just because somebody complained about a product and the story hits a viral nerve.
3. Is reputation management still a PR task?

A really good PR representative must know when to start/stop to react in public or how to find a behind the scenes solution.

Setting up a working blog monitoring environment is time consuming and an art if you include a reputation management workflow.

Don’t ask for ‘the relevance of a blog’! Monitor the search sources instead.

From my comment

• Willing to become part of the discussion? Head over or post your own article 🙂
• What are your experiences with the PR industry?
• Did some companies try to ‘influence’ you?

Offering a blog monitoring service is a nice business model now!

My friend Randa Clay has a laser-sharp eye for graphic design. And she’s the one who gave the Performancing Awards their “gloss” and professionalism. When someone comes to me and says “Hey Ryan, I need a good graphic designer for project X” my reply is almost always -> go with Randa Clay.

She does beautiful design and her turnaround time is second to none.

Thanks Randa, you really made these awards shine.

Performancing is a top-tier community network that focuses on blogging, productivity, SEO, marketing, advertising, monetization and Internet applications . In addition, we provide free resources such as our pMetrics blog statistics package and our WordPress Themes site.

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To inquire about advertising, please send an email to [email protected] or use our contact form.

Please see our current advertising rates listed below.

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To inquire about advertising, please send an email to [email protected] or use our contact form.

Don’t force your content into the mold of a social media user base in exchange for a quick fix.

Lots of blogs are going in the wrong direction by building gimmicky linkbait designed to push the buttons of Digg users. Gimmicky linkbait is a waste of time and resources in exchange for a quick fix – the rush of traffic over the course of 2 days. Instead, you should be building strong, solid resources that will stand the test of time and establish your site as an authority.

The fact of the matter is that Digg is no longer the guaranteed linkbuilder it used to be. Sure, you’ll get lots of links from Digg accounts and lots of links from Digg syndicators and lots of links from duplicate content. But that’s not really the best kind of linkage. What you really want is for other sites in your niche to notice you and to view you as a credible source of information.

Digg should be secondary in your linkbuilding plan. It’s not that Digg is bad, but you shouldn’t shape your content around the Digg user base while alienating or ignoring your own user base. Instead, put a lot of time into building the best, most interesting resources in your own niche. And only as an afterthought consider whether it might do well on Digg. Even if it isn’t the kind of content that would do well on Digg, it will probably do well on Stumble…maybe Reddit…and maybe Mixx (a new favorite of mine).

So the basic principle is this: think long term with your linkbuilding plans. Build content and resources that will be soaked up by other fanatics in your niche.

Let social media follow your content, and not the other way around.

If you quantify over the entire Internet, Google does a very good job. So let’s give them their props before we look at how they can improve. Despite their great successes, there are some places where Google could really improve. Here’s a list of seven things I’d like to see them work on.

1. Less False Positives

This is really my biggest gripe with Google right now. Way too many false positives in their filtering algorithms. Quality sites that did no harm are getting caught in the wide net.

2. Faster Re-Checks of Penalized Domains

To solve the first problem, Google might consider building a better algorithm for doing penalty reconsiderations. Especially for sites that have lots of quality indicators and might have gotten just one or a few things wrong.

3. Higher-Resolution Communication via Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools made some great progress in 2007. Still, I’ve worked with at least 4 sites that were receiving an obvious SERP Penalty, yet according to Webmaster Tools everything was just fine. Since there are so many false positives, it would be really nice if the more serious filters (such as blanket SERP downgrading) were mentioned in Webmaster Tools so that legit webmasters could work for a faster resolution.

Penalties that I know are being assessed but not reported:

• keyword spamming
• a pattern of titles that are too long
• a pattern of urls that are too long
• a pattern of unnatural linkage
• unnatural ratio of social media to content situated links
• wordpress dup content (the disappearing act)

Even if you had to cluster these issues together to avoid giving the spammers too much information, it would be good to identify “classes” of issues so that webmasters would know what the general area of the problem is:

• unnatural semantics
• unnatural link portfolio
• internal duplicate content
• external duplicate content

4. Give the little guy a shot

One of the really cool things about Reddit, which they do better than Digg, is that they have a nice randomized story display pattern that takes into account total votes, etc.

One thing I’ve noticed over the last year is that Google has made the rich richer and the poor poorer. By this I just mean that it’s much harder for a little site to get its quality articles on the front page SERPS. It would be cool if Google reserved the bottom five results on the front page for some SERP randomization in a similar spirit as Reddit. Give the little guy a chance to get noticed.

5. Better job at following redirects from syndication to their sources

Of all the algorithm penalties I’ve seen, the most serious right now is the mis-identification of source because a powerful syndicator uses javascript or other non-linking forms of redirects. Not sure what I’m talking about? Take this current example:

There’s this sophisticated syndicator splog called Speeple. They syndicate all the content from my site CelebrityCowboy. They also syndicate all the content from lots of other sites. Take a look at Speeple and the first thing you notice is that they look authoritative (both in design and PageRank). But they don’t produce any original content. That’s fine.

The problem is that Google is identifying the Speeple content as the *original source* in many cases. Why? Well, I’ve noted 2 possible reasons. First, Speeple has managed to obtain a strong perceived authority (at least partially via a fancy 301 from an old domain -> xmlmania.com). Second, Speeple uses internal redirects rather than standard, PR passing links.

Whatever the case, it’s really upsetting that Speeple is getting rewarded for the content that I and others produce. As evidence, here is a google search on a title that originally appeared at Celebrity Cowboy:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Britney+Spears+is+Under+Sedation

6. Less “I’m your homie” Fixes

One thing is clear. If you’re Matt Cutts homie, and you get nailed by a false positive, you’re about 1000x more likely to get a quick resolution. Evidence of this was clearly seen after the PageRank crackdown where certain unnamed people managed to resolve their PageRank penalties almost immediately.

Further evidence of this state of affairs can be seen when Matt shows up in the comments of a legit complaint post. Kudos to Matt for trying help out, but isn’t this an uber-primitive method for correcting false-positives? Especially for a billion dollar company?

This environment creates a feeling of hopelessness and fear in the webmaster community. Without a straightforward lifeline to Matt Cutts, what’s the average webmaster to do? Well, you might say its best to just keep building a great site. But how long do you wait? One week? One Month? Six months? All the while the people who know the right people are safe?

7. Don’t be evil

Don’t succumb to the evil that seems to be inherent in scale.

I’m always reminded of the US principles surrounding criminal justice – “Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted.” I hope that’s how Google does things, too, but I suspect that’s not the case.
–Rand Fishkin

Bonus Request: A better way to monetize video.

It’s that time of year when the Internet goes into a virtual slumber. But we here at Performancing wanted to keep things a little spicy (just like that spiced butter rum you’re drinking). So we’re offering you a trivia question to keep your mind active (and free from complete holiday comatose):

Besides getting an explicit notice in Webmaster Tools, or an email from Matt Cutts, what is the clearest sign that your blog is not in the good graces of Google?

I have one specific answer in mind. It’s really obvious and gets at the core of what Google is all about.

Here’s a clue: what’s the most important stat chart that an SEO can look at?

First person to get my answer gets a free submission in the EatonWeb blog directory. I’ve told the answer to Ahmed Bilal, so the answer is locked in.

Any guesses? Post your answers in the comment section. First person to answer correctly wins.

Web entrepreneurs, especially those who work outside the confines of the traditional workspace, often have trouble managing their time.

This article proves 10 time-tested methods to get more work done than before AND free up the time we tend to ‘borrow’ from outside our work schedule.

These suggestions are work well for bloggers, entrepreneurs and especially anyone whose work routine needs to be flexible because of their family / social circumstances. The key is to integrate these habits into your daily routine, otherwise it’s not going to bring you any results.

General Tips

These are general habits that set the foundation for increasing productivity and using your time effectively.

1. Time & Task Chunking

There are two things you must start doing right now:

• Think of the time available to you in ‘chunks’ or ‘blocks’.
• Group related tasks together, and assign them time chunks.

Working on related tasks in the same time chunk makes it possible for you to get through those tasks faster than you would otherwise as your mind becomes attuned to doing a specific type of task. You might have heard the tip on writing your blog posts for the week / day in one go – this works because once your writing juices get flowing, it’s easier for you to write that second and third article for the day / week,

Why time chunks? I’ve discussed in detail later, but in essence the idea is to a) break down your work day into manageable time periods (input, output or just processing) and b) help you concentrate better on your work.

2. Smarter Email Management

Ideally you should be checking email just once a day – however in practice this is a difficult habit to adopt from the start, so I recommend restricting yourself to 2 checks – once in the morning to deal with the urgent stuff and once in the evening to answer emails, etc.

Daniel has more on effective email management. A great tip from the article is to NOT read your emails unless you’re ready to deal with them (reply, take an action based on it, etc). Usually what happens is that we tend to read an email once and then don’t take action on it for a few hours (or days). That leaves an open loop in our work cycle – either you’ll keep being reminded of unfinished business by looking at that unattended email or you’ll have it floating around in your head.

Only read an email if you’re ready to take immediate action on it. This is why I suggest splitting your email checking time into two steps – urgent and regular processing. Scan email headlines to pick out urgent matters and discipline yourself to leave the rest for later, when you can go through each email and deal with it there and then.

A last word on email – learn to write emails that deal with such simple follow-up questions as ‘what if this happens?’ or ‘how do I do that?’. Close possible loops by discussing alternative scenarios and solutions, as well as providing references in advance in case someone needs to know how to do a particular task.

3. Say No To Feed Abuse

Earlier this year I wrote an article on Search Engine Journal on why you should dump 90% of the feeds you read. At that time, I was spending 2-4 hours every day just browsing through feeds, and at the end of it I’d have so much in my head that I would find it difficult to sift through the unimportant stuff and focus my thoughts on the important, bloggable material.

Since then, I’ve dumped my feed reader altogether. I now rely on 2 types of news sources – editorially-aggregated news (a good example of this is the Search Engine Land’s SearchCap) and my network of contacts who end up emailing / IMing me the the hottest news. I wouldn’t make a living as a news blogger this way but in terms of ‘winning back’ time that can be invested elsewhere, this approach is an absolute must.

You don’t have to dump your feed reader, but cut down to reading aggregated roundups of your niche (and if there isn’t anyone doing that currently, that’s a perfect opening for you in that niche).

4. Downtime = Networking

Schedule some downtime for your self during the day – afternoon is a good slot, so is late night after you’re done with everything else (including planning for the next day). By downtime I’m not talking about taking a break, I’m talking about indulging yourself in IMing and random web browsing – putting aside time for IMing is one way to get the most out of the exercise, especially because the short time forces you to do the important things first (including networking, of course).

Some people will disagree with this approach, and I admit that I’m quite often online all day, if only because these days me and Ryan are coordinating a few Perf projects. In such cases I’m only available to chat for one or two people and with everyone else, I’ll have to wait till the important stuff gets done first. It’s hard but it’s the only way to eliminate the distractions that get in our way and stop us from getting work done.

5. ‘Heavy Lifting’

Set aside time daily for some heavy lifting – i.e. intensive work. You don’t have to do this at the same time every day (although in terms of building your rhythm and improving productivity that surely helps) but you should allocate the same amount of hours to it every day.

The ideal solution for me is to have two ‘heavy lifting’ chunks – one in early / late morning and the other either late afternoon or early evening (never at night). This allows me to start the day off by getting a good chunk of my work complete, and before the day is over I’ve done everything for that day, giving me time to enjoy the rest of the day and obviously plan for the next day ahead of time as well.

6. Input / Output / Processing

I’ve started thinking of a typical work cycle as 3 distinct phases.

1. Input: Any task that involves the intake of information. Browsing, feed-reading, etc are input-oriented activities.
2. Output: Any task that involves you producing something – blogging, programming, designing, etc.
3. Processing: When you’re dealing with ideas, knocking off action items, planning for the next day or evaluating progress.

In practice, you want to limit your inputs to the ‘absolutely necessary’ and maximise your output. Most of the time we spend our day the other way around – reading a lot and doing / writing very little. In terms of achieving your goals, that’s a brain-dead approach – why would take up any habit where you’re deliberately limiting the amount of work you can get done?

Sometimes people don’t segregate processing from their input / output states. I disagree – it’s vital that you set aside time for processing your inputs as well as for planning what needs to be done in the future. The processing phase is key to giving your perspective on what you’ve done, what you want to do next and how to get that done.

Like the concepts earlier, thinking of your work cycle in terms of these 3 phases will help you focus on why you’re doing certain tasks and therefore help you get the most out of your time.

When Working / Heavy Lifting

The 6 tips mentioned above concern basic habits. From #1 and #5, you’ll remember the concepts of time chunking and heavy lifting. The rest of this article concerns tips on how to make the most out of your working time, especially the time when you need to be 110% productive.

7. Stay Offline

Turn off your browser, your IMs, etc. If you’re blogging and need access to feeds, open all the required web pages in your browser and then disconnect.

There are two major problems when you’re online and blogging / writing / programming / strategising at the same time: one, you have the option of distracting yourself, and two, you’re leaving yourself open to the possibility of being distracted by someone / something else (a news item popping up in your feed reader, an email).

I can hear you saying – ‘what if its important?’ Sure, it probably is, but you’re smart enough to know that the work you’re supposed to be doing is certainly important, while something that you might miss in those 3-4 hours is most likely not important. You’re most likely not missing much by going offline, but you’re definitely losing a lot by dividing your attention.

Of course, there are obvious exceptions. However for 95% of us, those exceptions are just theoretical (we’re not as special, essential or important as we like to think).

8. Turn Off Your Phone

I don’t know about you, but phone interruptions are the worst when I’m blogging. Whether it’s a message or a call, even the one minute it takes to shift focus from one thing to the other and then bringing it back can have you lose your momentum, pushing you back by 5-10 minutes or more.

Turn your phone off, or at least on silent and train yourself to ignore the phone. When blogging, check your phone between blog posts if you absolutely must, not during.

What if it’s an emergency? Like I said earlier, our imagination paints the world far worse than it really is. In case of an emergency and especially if there is a real need for you, the person looking for you will find a way to contact you. In any case, keeping two numbers (one for social and professional contacts, one for close friends and family) allows you to turn one off and then you can decide to ignore the second one. This only works if implement it properly and make it clear that the second number is only for emergency use. Drastic, yes, but since you’re only going to be doing this for a few hours each day, it’s worth it.

At the end of the day, us ADD-affected entrepreneurs need every little bit of help they can get.

9. Be Alone While Working

Admittedly this is more of a personal issue – I feel that I cannot work at my best, with full concentration, if someone else is around in the room. From getting distracted by what they’re doing to feeling the urge to strike up pointless conversation, I tend to get very little done when there are people around.

To get the most work done, find a quite spot where you can be alone. If that’s not possible, try ensuring that your immediate physical area is clear and free of distractions.

If all else fails, chain yourself to the desk and lock yourself in the room until you get work done.

10. Deadlines

When faced with a project, nothing ruins it more than having a deadline far into the future. Break your projects down into smaller, bite-sized tasks and set impossibly short deadlines for getting them done. You’ll find that not only do you psychologically motivate yourself into getting things done quicker, you’re probably doing less work than you would if you approached it as a large chunk and set aside weeks or months to get it done.

Process each project, break it down, and get it done as quickly as possible.

(Bonus) 11. One Thing At A Time

This part is especially for those people who claim to be multi-taskers. I’m sorry, but there’s no such thing as multi-tasking.

• If you plan your work in advance, you’ll never be rushed enough that you need to do 2 things at the same time.
• And if you concentrate on one thing and get it done before moving to the second, you’ll get both of them done faster than if you tried to ‘multi-task’.

If you’ve lived all your life multi-tasking, it’s possible that you’ve achieved some success because of that approach. Unfortunately, multi-tasking is an emergency, short-term response to a failure of planning and a product of panic. It slows you down, and as a long-term strategy it’s just stopping you from planning your tasks properly.

Multi-tasking forces you to be inefficient and unproductive. Don’t fall into / stay in this trap.

Summing It Up

I hope you found the above tips useful. Following any one of these tips will immediately boost your productivity, but when you start applying several of them together is when you will see the real benefits – these tips were far better in tandem than they do on their own.

Comments are welcome.

Also read: 10 Tips for Razor Sharp Concentration.