Facebook … is growing … by 600,000 or more users … per … day.

(crickets chirping)

There’s no way to really comprehend that type of growth.  Think about it … that’s like everyone in a small to medium-sized city signing up each day!  In all, Facebook has 140 million users.

If we didn’t have it before, this is proof positive that social media and social networking has reached the mainstream.  Facebook started out as being for college students only.  You had to have a college email address just to sign up.  Once they lifted that restriction, “old” people like me started to flock to the site as a way to keep in touch with friends, share pictures, and play games.  It truly is like a class reunion every day over there.

So, what does this mean for PR people and businesses hoping to promote themselves in this social media landscape?  Obviously, it means you need to have a presence (either a page or a group) on Facebook, and that advertising there is becoming more and more attractive.  Facebook has been known for some time as a very inexpensive site to place ad, and right now it’s probably the best social media site on which to advertisde.  Of its primary competitors for eyeballs, MySpace is so 2007 and Twitter doesn’t have advertising … yet.

Another way to take advantage of Facebook’s growing mass of people is by building applications for the site.  These are simple programs that provide fun or information for users.  They add them to their account, and when they do it’s broadcast out to all of their “friends” … essentially advertising the existance of the application.

PR professionals need to understand how to use these new tools.  It’s no secret that using the media to “get the word out” isn’t the only, or even the best, way to help our clients anymore.

Coming up in the next couple of weeks they have several opportunities for webinars for both new users and advanced users. If you’ve been thinking of using online distribution, they have a course for new users. If you use online distribution frequently, they have a webinar for advanced users could teach you something new.

Check out the schedule here.

EndGame Public Relations: Increased from PR3 to PR5
Media Relations and SEO PR Blog: Increased from PR0 to PR5
Startup BizCast Podcast: Increased from PR0 to PR5
GeekLogos Graphics: Increased from PR3 to PR4

So, all in all … I’m obviously pretty happy. I still wonder what the heck took so long with the update. Maybe Google will let us know once it’s done. If your site hasn’t updated yet, it may still happen. The updates usually take a couple of weeks before they’re complete.

Here’s the video!

]]> http://www.endgamepr.com/blog/2007/09/15/an-explanation-of-prweb-on-video/feed/ 1 http://www.endgamepr.com/blog/2007/09/07/wheres-our-google-pagerank-update/ http://www.endgamepr.com/blog/2007/09/07/wheres-our-google-pagerank-update/#comments Fri, 07 Sep 2007 04:08:34 +0000 Steve Mullen http://www.endgamepr.com/blog/2007/09/07/wheres-our-google-pagerank-update/ I wrote in this space back on July 25 that a Google Pagerank update was underway.  Guess what?  It’s not finished.  Updates usually take a week or three.  There’s a lot of buzz on the “internets” about what’s going on … everything from the update still being underway, to Google actually deciding to do away with Pagerank (or at least the displaying of Pagerank).

I don’t see Google actually eliminating PR altogether.  It’s supposedly the backbone of the search engine.  If they did away with it, they’d have to rebuild the entire house of cards.  However, eliminating the *display* of PR is a possibility.  As we know, Google is on a crusade against link spam, and much of link spam is based on getting links on the sites with the highest PR.

The most likely explanation for the delay is that Google is reconfiguring their search matrix somehow, but I have no evidence of that.  With Google, you don’t learn anything about what they’re doing until it’s already done … and even then, they don’t tell you much.

And so, this blog’s PR remains at zero.

The last pagerank update gave Media Relations and SEO PR a PR3. However, right after the update I changed the directory where this blog sits from www.endgamepr.com/wordpress to www.endgamepr.com/blog, which wiped out my visible pagerank. My guess is that my little blog will end up with a PR3 or PR4. We’ll see when it’s over!

PRO access to the number of people who have viewed or clicked individual content items in your feed and “Reach,” which estimates the daily number of subscribers who interacted with your feed content.

The My Brand service is something definitely worth looking into both for SEO and branding reasons. It allows your feed to appear as though it’s actually coming from your website. Instead of having a URL something like http://feeds.feedburner.com/mycoolsitefeed, the address can be http://www.mycoolsite.com/feed.

Full disclosure: I’m a former and still unhappy RegisterFly customer who switched to become a very happy GoDaddy customer.

An excerpt from the Associated Press story published this evening about the deal:

“For the past few months, they were pretty much in the dark and there was a lot of frustration there,” GoDaddy Chief Executive Bob Parsons said in an interview. “All that is a thing of the past.”

Parsons refused to disclose terms of the transfer deal, saying they are confidential. But he said GoDaddy isn’t buying RegisterFly, so any lawsuits and other previous disputes remain with RegisterFly.

The deal calls for RegisterFly to give GoDaddy its customer databases. Transfers of names will be automatic, and GoDaddy will notify existing RegisterFly customers about the switch and set up a Web page and telephone hotline. GoDaddy expects to start running those names within a week.

You can read the entire story in a variety of places, including Businessweek.

One theory is that Google changed its algorithm to more easily transfer the main page PR to interior pages. This stands to reason, since the Media Relations & SEO PR Blog is technically an interior page of EndGame PR site, and now has the same pagerank as the front page.

Editor’s Note: Nevermind. I changed my blog’s URL and lost my pagerank. It will be transferred from the old URL eventually, but for now I’m not even at PR0 … I’m unranked! :(

You can read the release on the EndGame Public Relations News page, or by looking at a copy of the release on PRWeb.

EndGame PR has a long history with the Baldwins. NetBaldwin was one of our first clients and we’ve done work for a number of Jim and Laurie’s clients. Currently EndGame PR is not only their public relations agency, we’re also partnering with them on an SEO project for another of our clients, Fight SMA. We are performing the non-profit organization’s SEO PR services, while NetSearch Direct is providing assistance with SEO and SEM. Congratulations to the Baldwins on this new venture!

“They were meant to be seen by one person and one person only,” Coluccio said at her Holmdel home. “The really bad ones aren’t her. I’ve studied them. It’s not her nose. She’s never had (acrylic nail) tips in her life. She’s the least slutty person I know.”

So, the denials begin. Antonella herself can’t comment because FOX doesn’t allow interviews with contestants until they’re voted off the show. Maybe she posted them herself … maybe she didn’t. The conspiracy-theorist in me says Ms. Coluccio could be in on the whole thing. This is starting to sound like O.J. Simpson and Al Cowling to me. Regardless, my original stance remains: If she did post them herself, I’m impressed with the results.

By now you may have heard about the racy pictures of American Idol contestant Antonella Barba that are flying around the Internet, particularly if you’re a fan of social media or at the very least a fan of the reality show. If you haven’t seen them, I’m not going to leave you completely on your own to find them. Nor am I posting them here, however. If you look around, it should be relatively easy for you to find what you’re looking for.

If you haven’t heard what’s going on – here’s the story: Antonella Barba is one of the top 22 contestants on the reality show. She is, in my opinion, a mediocre singer but a very attractive woman. She was nearly voted out last week when suddenly some pictures, a bunch of her in various states of undress and another that might or might not be of her performing a very personal act, appear in blogs across the world. Because of this, she is now even more famous than she would have been if she had merely been a contestant on the show. In fact, her name is, at the time this blog was written, the top search on social media search engine Technorati.

At this point, you’re likely asking, “So what?” Well, here’s my point — either Ms. Barba is a victim of friends and/or ex-boyfriends who really don’t like her much, or she is a social media genius.

Think about it for a moment. A lot of reality show contestants have gone on to pose in girly magazines after their shows are over. At least one other has become a talk show host, if you can believe it. If Ms. Barba is indeed the source of the pictures that are floating around, and I believe she is, I’m impressed.

One of the keys to using social media to promote anything from yourself to dog food is creating something that turns viral. Marketers and public relations folks search far and wide to find something that will spread across the Internet on its own. Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes their efforts fall flat. What this reality show contestant is doing is manipulating her show while it is underway, by using the power of social media. She reason it might work is that the winners and losers on the show are chosen by telephone voting by the audience. She won’t win the show with singing talent, but she could pull a huge voting block into her corner — teenage boys. They’ll dial until their fingers bleed, hoping more pics will surface next week.

Is releasing racy photos of yourself and then denying you did it a new tactic? No. it’s probably been done before by people from Paris Hilton to Britney Spears. There are an awful lot of so-called unauthorized sex tapes out there. However, this is a different because those people were already famous. Before these pictures, Ms. Barba was on the cusp of celebrity. Now, she’s extremely well known, at least in the growing blogger community. It remains to be seen how far these “unauthorized” pictures take her.

I think it’s a shame that they’re doing this, but my reasons are mostly selfish I suppose. I found PRWeb shortly after I founded EndGame PR, so I guess I came in on the end of the free release distribution run. They’ve been doing it since 1997. I have enjoyed having the free option, for SEO purposes. You would get some good links for a low-priority release just by posting it on PRWeb. My clients loved it, and I used it myself for posting releases about my firm.

PRWeb is still going to offer its $80 distribution option, which is considerably cheaper than PR Newswire. But, if I’m going to pay, I’ll probably stick with the more effective option … which is PR Newswire. In my experience, not only is the distribution to reporters better and more respected from PR Newswire, you seem to get better results from an SEO standpoint as well, even though PRWeb touts itself as being more concerned about SEO than anyone else. In my semi-limited knowledge of SEO (I have an SEO firm as a client, so I do know a bit) one of the main goals is to get links back to your site. When you pay for distribution on PRWeb, you get a mess of links .. but they all go back to the release posted on PRWeb. When you pay for distribution on PR Newswire, more sites post your entire release, and some include whatever links you might have in the release. Those are gold, Jerry! Gold! I did at one point email PRWeb to ask about this difference in results, and the response I got was that I must be doing something wrong. Unfortunately, they declined to tell me WHAT I was doing wrong.

What I’m saying, essentially, is that PRWeb is/was an outstanding free service, but after testing the paid side for a while, I’ll probably pay the extra to post on PR Newswire. There are other free release distribution services, but I haven’t found one that’s as respected and effective as PRWeb. I’ll keep looking. Feel free to comment if you know of a good one!