Like today’s web, the Web PR+ conference was not a one way street of shameless plugs and speakers trying to force their products/services down your throat. A Collaborative experience of note, the speakers were not only educating the masses but learning from us too. The awesome Sally ‘get’s it’ Falkow has written these 5 lessons learnt from speaking at Web PR+ just for you, the readers of this blog… enjoy
- While the audiences were quite small in comparison to other venues around
the world, my last two seminars have shown me that there is a growing
interest in this subject in South Africa. In June 2006 I had 45 in Cape
Town and this year we had 70. I’d like to see more PR people there though.
Perhaps at the next one? - Some agencies and corporates already get it. There are more and more who
see the need to learn about it. The audience in both venues was open to
learning how they can prepare for the future when broadband becomes more
affordable and widespread in SA. - Connectivity really is an issue. One company told me that they chose
their current office location because the building has its own generator. As
they are an IT and Internet services firm they can’t afford to be without
electricity and connection. - South Africa knows very little about Web PR. They know about
e-marketing and online ads, but they really don’t get the importance of
online PR. No one is optimizing news releases for search. This is a missed
opportunity to reach journalists and consumers who search the news.
Companies still tell me ‘we come up number one for our company name’ and
they think that’s good enough. They have not seen the PR value of high
rankings on a Google search results page when people search generic keywords
and news content. - I found hardly any use of RSS feeds on news content on corporate sites.
Your news sites have feeds – but business has not yet seen that opportunity.
There is a rash of new technology that uses feeds – like building a custom
feed in Yahoo Pipes and pulling of content into a Google home page. This
means that companies must look at making their content available in feeds,
or they will not even be considered when a consumer or prospective buyer is
setting up a personalized feed of information in their industry.
Instead of asking 5 questions like we did with Rob Stokes, Your Web AddiCT asked Sally Falkow one question that required 5 answers.
