This morning reading Ben Hunt’s excellent post and video on the importance of description tags in getting better click thru rates, I realized I’d already incorporated the point of his post into what I do myself. To me, it was common sense. But my background includes using copy to attract attention. I loved how Ben professionally covered the subject when it comes to attracting more visitors to your site. See his post here.

This post excerpts  paragraphs in random order from an interview with NY Times best-selling author Doug Casey on March 2, 2011 in his free e-newsletter. My first PR firm worked with Doug’s publisher on his last book and I’ve remained an avid reader of his since. Doug is founder of Casey Research, is a financial newsletter writer, speaker, and world traveler and investor. His world-view of the economy, finance and politics derives from personal experience with nearly every region on the globe. Click HERE to subscribe.

The Future of Corporate Media

“Big broadcast TV is disappearing too, for the same reasons we’ve been discussing. When some kid with a webcam in Egypt, Libya, or even Belarus, can produce a live documentary that’s more riveting and costs nothing compared to professional TV news coverage, you know that the business model of major news networks is on its way out. Anyway, kids today don’t watch TV, where you just absorb what you’re fed. They watch a million channels on YouTube, and get what they individually want and need on millions of websites. Broadcast, network, TV – with its arrogant executives, and feather-bedding union workers – is on its way out.”

Small Business vs. Politically-Connected Corporate Giants

“In a true free-market society you could only get big by making a product the consumers love. In a fascist society you get big through political favors.”

“The world is changing. Trying to use the coercive power of the state to maintain the status quo is a doomed effort. It’s like trying to carry water in your hands for an entire marathon.”

“Small, swift, new competitors are going to devour the big old dinosaurs, like a school of piranhas – and any new business that gets too big and bureaucratic, as well. The whole world is in the early stages of downsizing.”

After the Greater Depression – aka After The World Economy Resets

“The good news is that the post-industrial world will be one of true marvels. Bringing production down to the individual level, at very low cost, will create the most prosperous society the world has ever seen. The same forces are advancing medicine, and that will make our descendants the healthiest and most long-lived people the world has ever seen. And the individual nature of value creation should make it the freest culture the world has ever seen. That’s why I’m an optimist; I’m looking forward to a true renaissance, a golden age.”

‘You can’t regiment and standardize creativity. And there is no such thing as “job security,” which was always a stupid and parasitic notion. Your job is secure as long as you’re productive and creative – and your company is profitable.”

Want more? Click HERE to subscribe to Doug’s free e-newsletter. (For more information on the Greater Depression, read the best-selling book “Aftershock,” or an interview with Doug Casey from June 2010.)

Lady Gaga Truthfulness Refreshing

Aaaaaah. The refreshingly sweet sound of candor. In today’s transparent, upload-to-You-Tube-in-Minutes World, candor will be your Best PR.

Take Lady Gaga’s admission to using marijuana when she writes. She could have avoided Anderson Cooper’s question about drugs in her recent 60 Minutes interview. She could have lied. She didn’t. She admitted what she did, while at the same time acknowledging that her only other response to the question would have been to lie: something she won’t do.

Applied on a business level, whether a mission statement, press releases, problem with clients or staff state clearly what you stand for: be authentic.

Manipulation is deeply rooted in Public Relations

Many PRs from the past were masters at deception.

Edward Bernays is considered the father of modern public relations and coined the term in the United States to replace “propaganda,” as that word had gained disrepute.

Bernays’ niece Anna described his philosophy as a sort of “enlightened despotism.”

Bernays wrote of his view in his 1947 essay The Engineering of Consent which he describes the art of manipulating the American people. The central idea is that the public should not be aware of the manipulation taking place. He felt this manipulation was necessary in society, which he regarded as irrational and operating on herd instinct.

Fast forward almost one hundred years and you have what you see today in modern public relations, advertising and marketing: an ongoing battle for your mind using spin.

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To create press releases that generate traffic to your site, there’s got to be news.

To write an article that attracts visitors to your site, it’s got to teach them something.

To effectively use Twitter to get people to your site, it has to compel an idea in a limited number of characters and the link you send them to has to maintain that interest and not betray the interest by bait and switch.

That’s a PR function. It’s why one friend of mine was disappointed with the company he hired to generate online press releases and articles. They’re very good tekkies. But they’re not PRs. They didn’t “get” him and so what they wrote wasn’t authentic. It was churned out copy that made him appear trite.

Like any display of originality, authentic content is hard to outsource.

The online world takes it a step further: it’s personal. To keep up pages on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, continue blogging, keep up on Twitter and nurse Squidoo pages, you have to invest the time. Most of these require personal communication that’s hard to outsource – unless your PR knows you so well that he/she can speak for you.

So … what do you do? If you’re doing it yourself, pick one or two that you can actually keep up with and make those great. Skip the rest. If you’re not going to nurture them completely, don’t bother getting involved. Seth Godin recommends this in his post The Sad Truth About Marketing Shortcuts.

Think of it like doing publicity offline. If you just wrote a non fiction book and have a limited budget, do talk radio interviews by phone or concentrate on getting magazine articles, if your subject is appropriate.

When you go online, time is your commodity, unless you’re paying an online PR to represent you. Don’t waste it doing things halfway. Slow and steady wins the race applies here.

But when a PR is just plain careless or lazy, they’re inept.

A blogger in a niche industry asked my opinion of a situation.

He had requested an interview with a high profile person in the niche industry that he blogs about. The “celeb” had referred his request to her publicist. The publicist told him her client was too busy to interview with him and blew him off.

He wrote something about the celeb anyway … a little humorous banter about a tournament she was playing in.

He learned indirectly that the publicist is quite angry with him, although she has not contacted him.

In this internet age in particular, a PR representing any type of celebrity must be pro-active in managing what’s said. After all, that’s what you’re hired for. If you’re not managing the media contacts on behalf of your client and you don’t like what’s said about your client, then you better raise the bar on your performance.

As far as I’m concerned, this publicist displayed poor manners. If someone is influential enough for the publicist to be concerned with what they write, then nurture the relationship on behalf of your client. If you mistakenly mishandle a media person or blogger in your industry, then amend the blunder with good old fashioned honest communication.

The same holds true, in my estimation, of John McCain’s PR person who cancelled his interview in October with David Letterman. That was a flap of major proportion. Anyone who watches Letterman (as a PR in this position should), would have known the liability of canceling a scheduled interview with him in favor of another. Big mistake. It wasn’t McCain’s place to fix that PR kerfluffle with Letterman … it was the PRs job. And they messed it up pretty badly.

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” That means what you have to do to make sure your website is found by the people who are searching for your service or product using a search engine. To “optimize” your site means to make it findable by search engines. Since Google is the most used search engine, they’ve set the standard of optimization.

And that is a short answer to a very involved industry.

Ten years ago all you had to do to get found was mainly have lots of your “keywords” all over you site. This practice was called “keyword density” and it placed more importance on writing web copy for the robots to find your site than copy intended to connect with your visitors.

Today all you hear about is “linking.” In the offline PR world, that’s getting people and media to talk about you. In the online PR world, it’s getting other sites to link to yours using words and phrases that reinforce to Google that your site is actually what you say it is.

Like all tricksters looking for a quick way around something, the quest to get lots of incoming links led to “link exchanging” and link spamming by using software to distribute the same article on multiple article directories so there would be lots of incoming links to your site.

As will happen with any trick that doesn’t serve the market, Google catches on. They caught onto this. Now you really need to have income links that are of high quality. That means authentic articles on sites relevant to yours that are themselves legitimate.

So, Google forces quality. Quality content, quality articles, quality information.

If you approach a website editor to post an a quality article and the site is a suitable fit, the editor will post it and give you links. If you find twenty websites that are naturally relevant to yours to accept authentic articles, what are the chances that those webmasters will all select the exact key phrases to link back to your site? That’s right – slim. Google knows that too, according to James Martell.

I haven’t bought any of James Martell’s courses, but he was part of a small group of speakers and panel members at an internet marketing weekend intensive hosted by Ken McCarthy. James has been earning income online since 1999 and is a publisher who thrives on building websites with quality content.

He stressed that, to succeed in the long run, you needed something authentic and valuable to say and let others know about you so they can talk about you too.

I call those the New Rules of SEO. That’s what a good PR does for a client with offline press. Sounds to me like PR has come of age online.

Marketing gurus tout “build a list by being an expert.”

That’s fine, IF you happen to have some very valuable expertise.

If someone doesn’t really have anything valuable in an industry to contribute, why should I listen to that person? Won’t that person have to be dishonest to some degree to their customers about their expertise?

I commonly see limited experience being packaged and sold in courses, tapes and coaching.

I’ll give you an example. There’s a speaker on PR who appears at some of the marketing events I attend. He’s an incredible speaker and salesman. He sells a course on “do-it-yourself PR.”

What qualifies him to sell a course on the subject? Many years ago he had a huge success getting media coverage for himself.

Having gotten media coverage for over five hundred different types of subjects, experts and corporations, I’m impressed with how he has packaged his expertise and credentials. Truly impressed.

But I know enough to know that getting PR for yourself … even national attention … doesn’t qualify you to write the definitive manual on it that “anyone can use …” yadayadayayda.

Lesson? Examine the actual track record of whoever is selling you something.