Brussels, Belgium. June 29 2010 – The Worldcom Public Relations Group, the world’s leading partnership of independently owned communications counseling firms, today announced results of a survey of its partner offices around the world that projects a rise in social media and research and a decline in media relations and advertising services over the next three years. More than 70 of Worldcom’s 104 offices responded to the survey.

“The results of this survey clearly demonstrate that public relations has moved multi-channel,” said Stefan Pollack, chair of the Worldcom Americas Region and president of The Pollack PR Marketing Group, a Los Angeles-based firm. “From a trend perspective, clients are looking for firms that can deliver immediate impact with sustainable value. These results provide insight to our partner firms about how to gear their client programming and to determine how best to continue to grow services and in what areas.”

According to the survey, the services respondents expect the decrease to include: media relations (19 percent), advertising (17 percent), and direct mail and marketing (11 percent). In general, the majority of firms are optimistic about business increasing in the next three to five years.

Moreover, an increase in multichannel services is a critical indicator for firms to move beyond media relations as a major source of revenue. For example, more than half of the respondents expected social media, interactive/web development and search engine optimization services to increase – 93 percent, 73 percent and 61 percent, respectively. Yet obstacles still remain for firms to determine how to increase revenue from these services; particularly search engine optimization – for example, no agency reported more than 10 percent of revenue from SEO.

In addition, one-third of the Worldcom Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region and Asia Pacific region firms expect the percentage of work from their home countries to decrease. This represents an opportunity for global firms to acquire clients from beyond their home countries. Additional key findings included investor relations and influencer/stakeholder relations as other significant areas of revenue, and 37 percent of firms in the Americas targeting specific cultural demographics. The most commonly cited was Latino/Hispanic, with 10 percent.

Methodology
The online survey was sent to 104 Worldcom firms regarding services provided by their firms. Seventy-four firms responded, a response rate of 71 percent. Padilla Speer Beardsley’s research practice facilitated the survey.

About the Worldcom Public Relations Group
Worldcom Public Relations Group is the world’s leading partnership of independently owned public relations counseling firms, with 104 offices in 91 cities worldwide. Established in 1988, it was formed so that the strongest, most capable independent public relations firms could serve national, international and multi-national clients while retaining the flexibility and client-service focus inherent in independent firms. Through The Worldcom Group, clients have on-demand access to in-depth communications expertise from professionals who understand the language, culture and customs of the geographic arenas in which they operate. Visit www.worldcomgroup.com for more information.

Worldcom EMEA currently comprises 34 agencies with strong expertise in consumer, healthcare, travel & tourism, technology, energy & environment, financial services, investor relations, public affairs and crisis & issues management. Clients include Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Panasonic, Sony Ericson, LG Electronics, the EU Anti-Tobacco Campaign, Verbatim and Palm. Visit www.worldcomprgroupemea.com for more information.

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example:  Ask, Excite, Yahoo, Bing and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

For additional information, please visit our partner agency at www.ideafolder.com, thank you.

They use viral marketing by e-mail as a marketing tool… what did you think I meant? Viral marketing can work well for B2B providers, as long as the following is true:

The product or service has to add value for the sender, as well as, the receiver.

1. The offer has to be deliverable. You don’t want to offer a product that you can’t deliver if demand grows rapidly.

2. The offer has to be easily transferable to others. E-mail and Web pages provide the best medium to facilitate this.

3. The vest viral marketing campaigns use existing networks to move the message along.

The basis of viral marketing has been around for a long time. The idea is that you incite your customers or referral sources to pass on something about your business to their network of colleagues and friends. Those that pass on your information get something in return. The something might be a gift or service related to your business.

Using e-mail makes it incredibly easy to pass information on to a friend or colleague, especially if it involves something fun or free. With millions using the Internet worldwide, the potential for exponential growth is tremendous. The great things about viral marketing are that it is free and works virtually by itself. Once you make an offer and provide the facility for referrals, viral marketing spreads like… well… a virus…but the good kind.

To implement viral marketing at your business; first, start with your customer base. Incite existing customers to refer new ones. Second, go to your referral sources. Service providers, your outside network and colleagues can be encouraged to provide referrals that lead to business.

If you need help in creating a viral marketing campaign, feel free to contact us at hector@carrenogroup.com.

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. When a topic is typed for search, nearly instantly, the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed about and present you with ones that match your topic. The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Remember that a prospective customer will probably only look at the first 2-3 listings in the search results. So it does matter where your website appears in the search engine ranking.

Further, they all use one of the top 6-7 search engines and these search engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else. So finally it all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

It is the Keywords that play an important role than any expensive online or offline advertising of your website.

It is found by surveys that a when customers want to find a website for information or to buy a product or service, they find their site in one of the following ways:

• The first option is they find their site through a search engine.
• Secondly they find their site by clicking on a link from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.
• Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article.

Thus it’s obvious the the most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90% of online users. In other words, only 10% of the people looking for a website will use methods other than search engines.

All search engines employ a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules in a ranking algorithm is to check the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Don’t forget that algorithms also give weightage to link population (number of web pages linking to your site). When performed by a qualified, experienced search engine optimization consultant, your site for high search engine rankings really does work, unless you have a lot of money and can afford to pay the expert. With better knowledge of search engines and how they work, you can also do it on your own.

President Obama’s healthcare reform speech was a huge hit, according to Nielsen TV Audience Measurement. In his second address to a joint session of Congress, across ten broadcast and cable networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, BET, CNBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, Univision and Telemundo) last Wednesday night speech aired to over 31 million viewers, adding up to a combined household rating of 20.4 and a share of 35. The TV show “Friends” airing on NBC from 1994 to 2004, had a 9.2 rating at its height and last seasons “American Idol” finale, FOX Network reality show had 28.8 million viewers.

With all the drama that took place at town hall meetings across America this past August you would not have believed that so many people would tune in to watch the President. So the question I have to ask is, why would so many viewers spend time watching a politician, who according to recent polling data, the majority of Americans do not trust, talk about an issue they don’t agree with him on?

Could it be that Americans across all political parties, ethnic and age groups are truly interested in healthcare reform? Maybe the President is right, healthcare reform is tied to our economy’s recovery and Americans understand the connection. Didn’t the polls and the “talking heads” predict early on last year that Mayor Rudy (Winning Florida will win me the election) Giuliani was going to be the GOP nominee for president?

Could it be that they are wrong … again!

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/erickson/2009/04/did_i_really_need_to_hear_that.html

Great article on when to keep your mouth shut, so let’s take this article one step further and add the social media perspective.   In a recent round table discussion of my peers, the conversation was not who you were connecting with on FB or Twitter, however who people were hiding or disconnecting because of boring banter.  If we follow Dr. Albert Morabian’s graph, on the impact of a message;  7% are words, 38% are voice tones and 55 % are facial expressions and body language then those words need to be pretty concise when using social media.   The consensus at the end of the discussion was that people need to learn to EDIT themselves before they ruin their credibility.  Some people share too much information and forget that this is a vast audience that may impact them professionally and personally.  This all goes back to branding yourself, if your posting random thoughts just because you can… then be prepared to enjoy the positive feedback as well as the negative that are now associated with your name.    Facebook  and Twitter are suppose to be fun, however never loose sight of when sharing too much inforamtion  may cause disconnects or hides that may come your way.

Lately you may have seen news story about the fast growth of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc… these are a few of the new Social Media networks that are changing who we all interact on the internet.

Many can tackle social media marketing, but few approach it like onlineLINK Marketing, a new business unit of carreñogroup.

onlineLINK Marketing can help you climb the social media mountain by first developing a SMO (Social Media Optimization) strategy. Next, we work with you to identify desired outcomes traffic/page views, sales, reputation, social responsibility, influence, credibility, and brand awareness.

Once we understand the desired objective, we choose tactics wisely, while cognizant of what actions will influence the desired outcome with the most impact.

Social Media Marketing is characterized by communities that allow users to do many or all of the following:

· Create profiles/accounts

· Grow a network of colleagues/friends

· Collaborate with other community members

· Submit content

· Vote on content

· Tag content

· Comment on content

With the overabundance of social media options, onlineLINK Marketing ensures that you embark upon the right channels with the right content!

Stop the Madness People!  If you have heard my presentations, TIME is a precious commodity not just in business, but in life.  When I facilitated the Franklin Covey Time Management course, the top three detractors were email, voicemail and managing the daily interruptions.  Today lets add LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter,YouTube along with blue-tooth technology to keep you connected.

Second point in my presentation is understand your Behaviors and recognize your Patterns above all else in a decision making process.  When deciding to add technology to help you become more efficient, there is no need to incorporate every available gadget and software into your life at the same time.  Assess what tools you really need and be conscious of your daily work patterns and behaviors.  It’s about you and your needs versus what everyone in the world is using, without this approach technology will only become one more thing for you to manage.  

Case in point in a recent face to face meeting with a client (which she arranged) who was constantly checking her Blackberry every time it vibrated, it occurred to me is this self proclaimed efficiency or just plain rudeness on her part?  The reason my client called for a consultation was to discuss her inability to close the deal with clients.  After much discussion and constant interruptions, I pointed out the only deals getting attention were on her blackberry and we may have accomplished more had we just texted each other.  My client did not realize she had picked up her Blackberry 16 times in 30 minutes until I showed her the tally I was using to keep count.  She said she did not realize how much she was using her phone and was worried she might miss a call from a potential client.   Like her client, my time is also valuable and my face time deserves some respect, courtesy goes a long way, and undivided time and attention to a client goes even further.

Based on discussions and observations her behaviors reflected a lack of focus and social etiquette as well as an immediate need to respond to technology creating patterns that were jeopardizing building relationship with potential clients.  She had made technology the priority instead of the tool to prioritize what is important to her business and her life.   Technology is always changing, your behaviors can be modified, however time does not stand still for anyone and that potential client may not either.

Harvard Business Publishing

I am just beginning to take Twitter seriously a few weeks ago, I find it very user friendly and I think it adds more overall value for branding and communicating than other social media website. However, here’s an interesting article by Gyutae Park (Winning the Web) on using Twitter – http://www.winningtheweb.com/twitter-seo-optimize-search.php

This past week I was reading Network Week and saw a story on using Skype on cell phones. This is a great story and I think we should all read it.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/033009-mobile-skype-the-end-of.html?page=1

When VOIP comes to our cell phones it will be one more opportunity to communicate in a cost effective manner.

If you are not using Skype yet at home or at the office you need to start now!  Free Calls To Skype Users, Free Video Calls, Download For Free.

www.Skype.com