Web 2.0

Sometimes I feel like I’m actually catching up with the technologies at our disposal in marketing and public relations. This AM was one of these times ‘cause Judi Swartz of Business Wire threw an outstanding seminar to talk about “SEO and Web 2.0” and demonstrate the company’s new EON product.

I’m trying avoiding puffery here. Maybe I just don’t get out enough. But I did learn more in an hour and a half than I have from a whole bunch of surfing and reading. It gave me an opportunity to connect some of pieces that I hadn’t been able to put together before, from pinging and trackback to RSS feeds and social media.

It took two people to make these connections for me and it was worth every minute. Too bad you missed it.

Monika Maeckle, Business Wire’s Southeast Regional VP and David A McInnis, founder and CEO of PRWeb (left, obviously: does that look like a “Monika” to you? ) did an outstanding job of covering needs and solutions in layman’s terms.

The challenges are: How can you (agency or client) increase the certainty that your “news” will hang out longer on the Internet? Reach more people virally? Improve your company’s visibility in the new world of Web 2.0?

BTW, Web 2.0 refers to a second generation of services on the Web that lets people collaborate and share information (to quote one of the seminar’s handouts). That’s what I do with this blog; that’s what we do with press releases…especially the ones with real news in them.

One current answer is EON, this “enhanced online news” service that Business Wire is offering in partnership with McInnis’s PRWeb, a leader in direct-to-consumer PR distribution. EON is a collection of tools you can use to optimize the language of press releases for higher search engine efficiencies; make the PR releases more…interactive; and measure results. It’s pretty slick.

More important, it really helps to know that there are resources “out there” that have been thinking and perfecting a lot of these mechanisms. Then getting the right people in a room to listen to. (A boatload of thanks to Business Wire for this alone.) I don’t have to do it myself – not that I could. It’s kind of like a college education. If you’re a genius, you’ll memorize everything. If you’re somewhat shy of that level, you’ll at least know where to go to get the information and the help you need.

When it comes to Web 2.0, McInnis probably recalls the words of Max Bruinsma from around the turn of the century (and doesn’t that sound weird?): The content and effectiveness of communication have become strongly context-dependent, not least because the audience…has…matured. In contrast to the impression created by many communication products – from advertising to news bulletins – the recipient is usually not stupid.

The customers and prospects that want to read our sales and marketing messages are probably looking for them right now. The stuff in today’s seminar demonstrated one way to make it a lot easier for them to find our “news.”