Impressions

Pitching with PR emails

Posted by David Compton on February 27th, 2009

One of the topics that came up during the PRSA Idaho meeting in February on Effective Pitching Practices was emails. Jill Kuraitis at NewWest.net gave some good points in a half page distributed at the meeting:
1) Know and read the publication
2) Keep format simple and casual; avoid attachments
3) Tell me why it’s a NewWest story

Just finished reading the Groundswell blog of Josh Bernoff ,
Three quarters of the PR email I receive is irrelevant, he gives some great points like only an analyst could. By analyzing his January emails (114) from PR folks, he notes that 75% are completely irrelevant to subjects or companies he covers. More than half were on an industry (TV) he used to cover two years ago. He notes that he prefers the personal note with the text news release. He says the newsletter formats make it easier for him to delete the email and unsubscribe. He also says that most of the PR emails do not come with unsubscribe links that are required by the SPAM email rules.

Personally, I think Josh is right. The personal note highlighting real news that is in his area of expertise or interest with the text of the release is the best approach. My own approach is to use the personal note and include a link to more detailed information on a Web page. This gives the added benefit of tracking the information and know how interested the journalist may be.

Changing my spots – iMac and Leopard OS X 1.5

Posted by David Compton on July 11th, 2008

I was not going to do IT. I was not going to brag about my new iMac. That is until Wednesday this week when Microsoft put me and thousands of other users of XP that have ZoneAlarm Security Suite out of action with their weekly update. Read all about it in Information Week. I lost a whole day trying to reestablish my Internet connection when I started work on Wednesday afternoon. After 4 hours, I discovered that the problem was with ZoneAlarm, the log showed it was not allowing any connections to the Internet, even though everything looked fine. I went to bed Wednesday night disgusted that I could not make my HP Media Center connect to anything. I got my email via my PPC 6700.

iMac with Leopard OS X 10.5

iMac to the rescue!! I decided to check ZoneAlarm on Google.. Lo and behold I found out that Microsofts update had put thousands out of commission. There is great comfort in knowing thousands of others are tearing out their hair trying to figure out what can possibly be wrong this week with my PC. The problems have become so frequent, that I decided to change my backup server to an iMac.

Those commercials on Mac versus PC and the Leopard operating system are true. I took the iMac out of the box. Followed a couple of simple steps and had my email configured and my iMac connected wirelessly to my office network. I was dumbfounded. I did not have to go searching though reference books to figure it all out. It found the wireless hub and asked me for the password. Now that is slick. I have told myself not to get into a lot a Microsnot bashing. But suffice it to say, I am glad to have a Mac back in the office. I think I will sleep better as soon as I have all the software installed. I plan to use it as backup with the Apache server and will be installing XP Professional for the IIS server to do all my testing.

Of course, if I have any more problems with my PC, I might just change my spots to Mac OS X Leopard altogether.

To blog or not to blog

Posted by David Compton on July 3rd, 2008

Seems the biggest problem with my job lately is blogging. Looking at Powering Publicity it has been months since I added a post. I did better last year when I was in the throws of prostate cancer and wondering if a blog really mattered.

I did better when I was distributing a newsletter by email each month. I had my editorial plan of what the main feature was going to be. I made sure to review the research sites for interesting ideas. I used a content formula that forced me to read a book each month. Overall, it was challenging but doable.

Today, I think I am focused on other interests at work. Also, I am just frustrated with all the SPAM comments that come in. Thank goodness for WordPress and the Mass Edit function so that I can just check and delete them all. I also learned how to get the spammers IP address and make it so he can’t get back to the blog.

So consider this my apology for not posting for so long. I promise to do better. Unfortunately, I will be traveling a great deal this summer and fall with two international trips and several regional visits.

One note, don’t listen to the SEO firms that say they can get you to the top of the listing. You can do it yourself by picking the right content, correct titles and headlines and using the Google Webmaster site with your own XML sitemap. I will talk about how it is done in a column soon.

Getting top billing in Google

Posted by David Compton on January 30th, 2008

Seems like I no sooner finish a Web site and the client wants to know why they are not top-billed in Google. Google has a very complicated algorithm for determining positioning in its indexes, but there are some known reasons. Here are my reasons:

1) The terms you want to be top in Google are nowhere on the site. The Google spider is pretty smart when it comes to what is on the Web site, but it is lousy at reading intentions. If the page title and headline do not say “Web development”, the index is unlikely to present your link under that category. Also, like any search engine, if the term is only used once in the text; it does not generate prominence in the index.

2) The term is not one of your keywords. Additional weight is given to using keywords in the head that match the page contents.

3) Your site has no logical sitemap, index linking or Google XML Sitemap that the service can use to get your content indexed. Some sites (not the ones I build) seem to smash the visiting Google spider on the homepage. The linking is only in a complicated javascript or CSS formulation that points to destinations unknown. Somewhere on the page there needs to be linking to the subpages. The more those links match the term desired to be indexed the better. By this time the reader should be saying that the spiders seem to be pretty dumb – i.e. we not only need to link to the page with the term, but name the page and headline the page with the same term. I will pause a moment for your A-ha moment. YES

4) Is your new site the lonliest site on the Web? Google gives prominence to sites that are well linked with other sites that also have the term. Today, few companies that are launching a new site invest the time and effort to see what the competing content is. A linking campaign is one in which you request links to your site from other indexes or sites that cover the term you think is important for your site. Rather than spending time and effort on expensive search engine optimizations (SEO), you will find it is very effective to get links from major sites that dominate your term or topic.

5) Since most competing sites are not going to give you links that boost your rankings, you need to conduct a launch campaign to registered your site in most search databases, and get links from news and general information sites.

After death – Paradise

Posted by David Compton on December 10th, 2007

From death with prostate cancer in July – see last month’s post- to today, I must be in paradise. Paradise comes in the form of two weeks on the beach in Riviera Maya {near Cancun} Mexico. It is a celebration of a cure from cancer and 35 years of marriage. I have been here for 10 days at the El Dorado Royale Hotel and Spa near Playa del Carmen in the Yucatan area of Mexico - its new web site . We bought into the resort through timeshare two years ago and it as close to paradise as you can get. They call it “laid back” luxury, but I call it paradise. The Infiniti Casitas at Casitas Royale are luxurious with plasma screen TV, romantic outdoor shower, jacuzzi and its own swimming pool connected to the swimup bar. The all-inclusive price includes gourmet food and drinks from seven restaurants and numerous bars. The best bar of all is the Martini Bar with its Rob Roy, it is the nectar of the gods. In the Infiniti Casitas, they even have a chef prepare little treats out by the pool at lunch. The temperature is a coooooool 80 degrees here while back home in Idaho it is 33 and snowing today (Dec 10)

Last night as part of the member benefits of the Exotic Travel Club, we has a dinner of lobster and steak. A mariachi band led us to the outside restaurant for the feast. After all the hardship of battling cancer this last summer, this event was such a good feeling.

Paradise is a guy named Edgar that seeks you out every day whether you are reading in one of the Palapas on the beach or lounging by the pool to bring you your favorite ice cream as an afternoon snack. It is going to be hard to beat this kind of treat as a Christmas present.

I am here with my wife Rebecca celebrating our 35th wedding anniversary and my recovery from cancer. Got to go. The sun is shinning and time to go rest on the beach after the big breakfast of Eggs Benedict.

El Dorado Royale - More info
Be sure to tell them David C sent you. Also if you are interested in a reduced rate for attending their timeshare presentation, let me know at david@comptoncoms.com or leave a comment.

Back to Work!

Posted by David Compton on November 16th, 2007

If you have wondered why my blog stopped abruptly in July, I have a simple reason… I died.

Perhaps a little too melodramatic, but in July I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. It took me weeks to get over the stunned feeling. I then got tons of information from the doctors, books and the Internet. I was in information overload, but I had an important decision to make – surgery or radiation. There is no chemotherapy for prostate cancer.

I wanted to know everything about this disease and how to beat it. You should know that cancer is the second leading cause of death for men following heart disease and prostate cancer is the second leading cause of death from cancer for men. The wiki on prostate cancer gives more facts and figures. Prostate cancer Wiki

The options and choices require some real decisions. For men with demanding jobs, surgery will all but require a hiatus or job change. I fortunately had a great group of clients that understood and gave me time to recover. And it took longer that I thought it would for energy levels to return to normal after surgery.

As shocking as having the doctor say “It’s cancer”, is the elation when he says you’re PSA is zero, no more cancer. After three months, all my systems involved in the surgery have pretty much returned to normal and I feel good.

Yesterday I stopped by my family doctor’s office for my flu shot and I gave him a special thanks for detecting this disease early and getting me help.

So now it is back to work.

More product praise – PPC6700

Posted by David Compton on July 20th, 2007

Normally, I am a pretty critical guy who can always find fault with just about any product or service. I just bought the PPC-6700 Smartphone…AKA GeniusPhone from Quest. I had been looking at phones for months. My veteran Sprint phone had given great service for 3 years, but it was time to go. The smartphones were appealing…I even thought about an iPhone. However, I hate to buy on hype and the PPC-6700 had been around awhile.
Details and specs are at http://www.utstar.com/pcd/view_phone_details.aspx?mcode=PPC6700&sAct=0

It is a smarter than smart phone. For me it is a portable office. It has my email, phone, contacts, reminders, photos, videos, music, and Web browser. Everything except Dreamweaver and my web mastering tools are available on this “brick”. Even has a keyboard, but I find using the onscreen keyboard is faster. It is touch screen like the iphone.

Perhaps the best feature is the integration with my office phone. When I leave the office, I turn on the “one number” feature from Qwest with a couple of keystrokes. Instead of my office phone ringing and then going to voicemail. The call rings first on my smartphone, then the office and finally to voicemail. I find this feature to be real genius for a guy working from a home office. I don’t feel tied to the home office because I am expecting a call.

Setting up email and loading all my Outlook contacts was so simple, I don’t even remember doing it. I have more than 450 contacts with email, phone, etc. It is a snap to get in touch with people anywhere, anytime.

Yes, but there is more. I an enamored with the iPod and this PPC can handle MP3s and videos downloaded using Microsoft Video Player. You download directly to the miniSD storage card that resides in the top of the device. I bougth the storage card at Walmart for under $20. I plan to buy a 2 gig miniSD card this month. I have 5 albums and 4 client TV commercials on the card currently and still have room for more.

It synches up easily for data from my main office computer. Just put it in the cradle, select the programs you want to synch contacts, appointments, etc. and you are up to date. I do not need to synch email since it gets email from the office servers via an EV-DO (highspeed data) link. This is an extra service from Qwest in addition to the wireless phone service.

Since Qwest in my area uses the Sprint network, I have the same quality of wireless I had before.

Other features include a 1.3 megapixel camera that displays on the 320/240 pixel screen. The camera has a variety of modes that include panorama (overlap three shots), sports (10 shots in rapid sucession, and video mode. You can take a picture and push it immediately to email.

So what is the downside. The operating system is Windows Mobile 5. It hangs periodically so get used to pushing the soft reset button.

Adobe CS3 – awesome

Posted by David Compton on June 18th, 2007

OK, I am normally not into hyperbole about new software. Last time I installed a piece of Adobe software (Adobe Elements for Photoshop and Premiere 5.0), I ended up logging onto their Web site and sending not so nice emails to any address I could find. But Adobe CS3 Web Premium edition is different.

I was prepared for the installation to be a major headache. However, the 4.1 GB of programs installed smoothly, it even updated by Adobe Acrobat 7.0 to the new 8.0. Now I was truly amazed. As I lo0ked at the new Photoshop, it activated all the software in one shot. In an hour and thirty minutes it was all done and no crashes, no searching the Internet for fixes to installation problems. I was in shock and truly awed. This is the way to get a long awaited software marriage (Dreamweaver and Photoshop) off to a great start. Adobe is not paying me to say this, but with CS3 I think they have a real winner.

I am so full of praise because I have been so down on Adobe as I watched Acrobat become less useful and more problematic with each version and Photoshop (my first love) become so expensive and cumbersome in CS. But today in CS3, Photoshop is zooming. Try the zoomify application on a map with the new Photoshop to see what I mean – awesome.

Here is the Adobe CS3 Web site Adobe CS3

It comes with a disk of training videos and be sure to order the books. Stacked up they represent about two feet of “I never-knew-that reading”.

From day one

Posted by David Compton on May 29th, 2007

Yesterday was supposed to be the day I would start up my blog. The plan was to launch the blog Jan 1, 2007, but that date passed without getting the Compton Communications Web site redone. I wanted the newsroom to have a link to the blog. Finally, this week the new newsroom should be up.

I used XOOPS as an online newsroom application, but I found to be too labor intensive to keep going.

I am now using Coranto again for the news and WordPress for the blog. Coranto is open-source software and has a Web-backend system build specifically to handle news.

So why have I been out of the net (literally) for a year. First we had the launch of the new MPRI website, a defense contractor that I supported at the Pentagon. The launch was followed rapidly by integrating another company into the MPRI Web site and then followed a third company in the fall. The last half of the year was a big blur.

The first half of 2007 was not much different. I am working on trying to be able to do a Web project and still keep my other activities going. But it is tough.

Somewhere in the last year I also managed to get in two seminars on New Media. It convinced me that blogging was better than trying to build newsletters, especially online. Newsletters gather news for dissemination at a specific time whereas blogging is a more immediate and tailored method of disseminating news.

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