I wouldn’t want to be the owner of Yellow Pages (yes, I know there are millions of ‘owners’ through the company’s shares). What a tight spot to be in. I’ve been singing this tune for the past few years now. I remember several years in a row when my Yellow Pages rep sat down with me at Cambrian Credit Union to discuss the annual ad buy. Each time, as she valiantly tried to upsell me, I had to persuade myself that we should be in the old book at all.

I kept Cambrian in the book during my tenure, because a large enough portion of its clients were of a generation to use it regularly. For the rest of us, I’m not so sure. The Google deathstar has Yellow Pages in its sights. We just don’t search for information the way we used to when the phone book was the only game in town. 

Today, my clients and I will talk about search engine optimization strategies for a week before anyone even mentions the phone book. And while Yellow Pages also has a searchable website, it’s costly to advertise on it and its share of the web audience is puny compared to Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Optimizing your search engine results isn’t easy. You need to deliver relevant, fresh content constantly in order to rank anywhere near the top in organic searches. Paid search is easier to control, but then you can also blow your budget quickly if you’re shooting to be near the top.

But then, you don’t need to be at the top… sometimes the best place to be is third or fourth in the paid search list. Just take a look at this article from imedia’s Chris Lien: How to win the search position game. I think the author’s formula for determining how much a click is worth is out of whack (it’s no good to break even on conversions when profitability is the key to your enterprise), but he’s got some good thoughts on the subject of optimizing keyword search results.

Adam Dooley

Oh please let the woeful Spirited Energy campaign die. A story in the Winnipeg Free Press today illustrated just how badly the province fumbled its last attempt to ‘rebrand’ itself. The article revealed a Grade 4 class had come up with their own rebranding effort.

They hung their branding efforts on Flatlanders: Our sky goes on forever. Okay, it’s not brilliant, but let’s give the kids credit. They put their heads together and came up with a brandname and a tagline that actually mean something, that every Manitoban will instantly understand, and (best of all) it provides a unique identity.

Someone remind me, what did the province pay for the meaningless pith: Spirited Energy? And yet the article mentions that there’s a rumour the province is trying to revive it. Ugh. Why? It’s a sunk cost, let’s not throw more good money after bad.

A few things I learned at the CPRS 2008 conference in Halifax:

1. Far too few people in our industry have embraced social media yet.

2. A lot of what’s happening in the social media space is great, some of it is still pure, unadulterated BS (ie. social media hasn’t changed us all that much… the technology has simply moved age-old human relationships into a different sphere).

3. Issues management remains one of the most important and rarified skills in public relations.

4. The competition among wire services is a great thing! They’re all becoming better.

5. Building credibility is the cornerstone to good communications… and you can’t do that by spinning.

 And…

6. Halifax has some great bands and is perhaps a bit too sociable.

See you all in Vancouver next year.

Halifax - There were two reactions to Andrea Mandel-Campbell’s presentation this morning: depression and elation. I’d say most of the room thought her remarks were overly gloomy on the general laziness of Canadian business and its reputation for underachieving on the global stage. A few of us, however, thought they were refreshing.

Canada has plenty of natural advantages - clean air, plentiful resources, a highly educated populace, a close proximity to the U.S. - yet we trail other jurisdictions when it comes to competing internationally and building great businesses.

I plan to pick up her book: Why Mexicans don’t drink Molson. One question I have for her though: if she’s advocating for Canadians to do a better job of promoting themselves, why couldn’t I buy her book here at the conference?

So far, the CPRS national conference here in Halifax has been very thought-provoking. The organizers have done a good job.

Halifax — This is the third national CPRS conference I’ve attended and it’s clear that social media and user-generated content is taking over. Two years ago in Niagara Falls there was one short breakout session on blogging. Last year in Edmonton there was a keynote and a breakout. This year, the first morning of Day 1 has been taken over by it.

We had Max Valiquette, President of Youthography as keynote for breakfast. Joseph Thornley, of Thornley Fallis, joined Carman Pirie, of Colour, to discuss Best Practice in Social Media (hint: there aren’t any yet… thanks for being honest). And Leonard Brody, CEO of NowPublic, was keynote over lunch.  

An observation: all of the presenters have been clear that the technology is changing as fast as people’s online habits. It’s great to hear solid presentations validate many of my own thoughts on where public relations is going as a business. Traditional media organizations are really becoming less and less important to governments, companies and non-profits who are seeking to communicate to their ‘publics.’ Newsrooms will likely survive the current revolution on the basis of providing insight and analysis, but their monopoly on that is broken (making them one of many players) and breaking news is now the domain of everyone with a camera phone.

Personally, I like the anarchy of the technology is creating.

I do not know who is responsible for the current “creative accountants” campaign. I can only guess that the Certified Management Accountants read it, liked it and approved it. It’s awful. If you haven’t seen it, take a gander at the website. The campaign touts CMAs as creative. In doing so, it says that society should no longer think of creative accountancy as a refuge of scoundrels, frauds, liars and cheats (my words, not their’s). Why would they equate themselves to such negative connotations? Have they learned nothing from Enron, Worldcom, Nortel, et al?

If I were a CMA, I’d be mad as hell. I’d also be looking for a public relations consultant to help them (I happen to know of an excellent one in Winnipeg).

You don’t control your brand anymore… at least not in the traditional sense. You might think you control it, but you don’t. Your brand lives with your customers and your potential customers. They shape it through their perceptions of you, your company and your products and services. The way they shape it is how things have changed. Social media - from the Facebooks to chatrooms (yes, they still exist) to Digg and Twitter - give consumers the power to influence brands in a major way.

Check out this article on the topic: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/19513.asp.

The days of command and control communications are ending, which means that corporations and organizations need to do a much better job of getting their employees and customers on side with their brands and corporate visions through positive and proactive communications tactics. If they don’t, they’ll probably find their brands are defined from outside their walls.