The Blog Studio

When talking with geeks, or anyone who works in tech, they are often mystified by public relations. People are filled with misconceptions. They think of a world of shady spinmeisters huddled up in a back room somewhere constructing audacious lies to save the necks of evil CEO’s. Alternately, they imagine a world of women with too much makeup running interference because Lindsay Lohan got drunk and wrapped her Range Rover around a tree or Tom Cruise said a little too much about Scientology. It’s a shame, because the real world of PR isn’t anything like this. The average business owner, techy, developer or designer actually stands to gain a lot by interacting with the world of PR and the press. Seeing your latest project written, blogged and reported about is essential in the 21st Century. If you’re building something great, they won’t come. You need to lead them there.

Over the course of a few blog posts, we’re going to give you the PR basics you need to get your name up in lights (or in pixels as the case may be). Think of this as “PR 101” for non-PR people. Armed with the right information, supplied by your friends at The Blog Studio, a bit of research, some clever emails and the right attitude, there is no reason the press shouldn’t be writing about what you’re doing.

Make it easy for anyone that wants to write about you. The simpler it is for a writer to get the basic background info they need, the more likely they are to include you in the piece they are working on. Plus, the less time you need to spend telling them the basics, the more time you’ll have to discuss the interesting things you’re creating, and make the pitch for your work. The simplest way to do this is to create a press page. Surprisingly, most businesses don’t have a press page. The ones that are out there are often poor, uninteresting, dull and seem like afterthoughts. Having a killer press page will separate you from the competition and make sure you get written about, not your competition.

What makes the perfect press page? To begin with, the tone, attitude and vocabulary of your writing need to be appealing. Do you believe in the work you’re doing and what you’re creating? Make sure that comes across in your copy. Write as if you’re the best thing going, but don’t cross the line into being pompous. That never plays well in the press. Be cheerful, be optimistic and most of all be honest. If you write any half truths, little white lies or blatant falsehoods, they will come back to bite you in the digital ass. In the ultra-connected 21st Century, it only takes a minute with a search engine to suss out your dishonesty. Keep the tone of your copy light, hopeful and honest, and you’ll do great. Keep in mind as your write, that you’re telling a story, hopefully an engaging one. You aren’t filling out a mortgage application.

The physical design of your press page should match the aesthetics and design sensibility of your company, and the rest of your website. There are certain elements that should be included in every press page, which are essential to creating a media friendly image for your company. You should put your own personal spin on these features, but including them will definitely help your case.

A History
Include a short, 3-5 paragraph, history of your company in narrative form. Pretend that you’re telling a story, and the audience knows nothing about what you do. Highlight the people, places, milestones and major successes that you’ve accomplished so far. Describe your company culture, what makes your group unique and the reasons why your business is run the way it is. A company history will give a journalist writing about your company the long view of how your company sees its’ place in the world.

Employee Bios
Create very short biographies of key personnel, and there role in the companies mission. You aren’t writing a resume. A few succinct sentences of what each person does to keep things rolling is plenty. Company bios tend to get boring fast, so just include the major milestone accomplishments for each person. It’s a good idea to include a photo for each person as well. Stay away from those generic corporate mugshots. Is there anything that sucks the life out of a good story any more quickly then a boring photo of a scarecrow in a suit?

A Note To the Press
Compose a short note addressing any journalist who may be thinking about including you in a piece. In your own words, let them know you love the press, enjoy being included in the media circus and would be happy to provide them with quotes, photos, documentation, a preview of your product or anything else that will make the writers job easier. Extending a clear invitation to media types goes a long way, and lets people know that you’re game to play the game. If you have a communications officer or PR person on staff, this note should be written, composed and signed by them. Think of this as extending an olive branch to the media; “We’re friendly, we don’t bite, feel free to get in touch”.

A Document Library
Create a section within your press page to display any company documents that you would feel comfortable sharing with a writer, and that a writer may find useful while researching your company. This is the spot to upload any brochures, white papers, videos, ads and slide decks you’ve created. The more background info you can provide, the more interested parties can learn about what you do. Having a gallery, with photos, logos and graphics in the highest resolution you can provide is extremely helpful. In many cases, the availability of good multimedia assets can be the tipping point that gets you included in a piece over your competitors. If you have a solid social media presence on visual networks like YouTube or Flickr, include links to your pages here. Some companies choose to password protect their document libraries, and hand out the passwords like they’re the key to a national secret. Why? If you’re nervous about people seeing certain documents, don’t post them! Otherwise, make it simple for anyone to view and use what you’ve created.

Previous Press Hits
It’s a simple truth, but press begets more press. If you’ve been featured in the media before, include scans, PDF’s and links to these articles here. Reporters often feel more comfortable writing about companies that have a proven track record in the media. This will also give researching journalists a chance to see what has been said about your work, and a chance to discover fresh angles. A press gallery is also a low key way to do a little bragging to potential clients and your competitors. If your being written about, why not share it with as many people as you can?

Contact Information
Nothing will frustrate a writer more than wanting to grab you for a quote, an interview request or a fact checking session, and not being able to get in touch with you. On your contact page, there is no such thing as overkill. Start with the names of the people in your organization who are the points of contact for the media. Provide as many different ways to get in touch with you as possible - every member of the media has their own preferred method of contact. At the minimum, an email address, phone number and mailing address should be here. However, this is 2011, so you should also include your social media links, Twitter handle, Skype name and any other way it’s possible to get a hold of you.

Creating an online presence for the press is just the first step to making PR work for you. Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll explain how to start making in roads into the media world.

For a while, banner ads that read “Find Out Who Is Searching For You On Facebook!” were popping up all over the place. Many people clicked on them, only to be disappointed. It isn’t possible to find that information out. Until now. A guy named Jeremy, on his blog TheKeesh.com has discovered a way to get into the guts of the Facebook search mechanism and shed some light on the mechanics of what is going on.

While doing some work with Facebook, Jeremy wondered if it was possible to type faster than the Facebook auto-complete feature. He discovered that it wasn’t and in the process discovered a file called first_degree.php, with some very interesting JSON info (basically JSON is a data exchange format that is readable in plaintext). This file contains a list of the Facebook people you search for, and view the most often. It’s the naughty inside your brain when you’re surfing Facebook converted into a Text file. I imagine some people won’t be surprised, but will be embarrassed when the list is populated with high school flames, attractive people from their office and lots of exes. Next to each name entry is a positive or negative number, which they use as a sort of popularity rankings system.
TheKeesh.com has made it dead simple to find and view this information. They’ve created a bookmarklet, available on their site, which you drag into your browsers tool bar. Next, disable the ‘Safe Browsing’/HTTPS security setting in Facebook. Click the bookmarklet, shield your eyes and the list will pop-up. It is truly that easy.

Anyone who works with Facebook in a marketing or data capacity has definitely wondered how the algorithm they use works to rank your friends when you search. This isn’t the whole solution to the puzzle, but it’s definitely an integral part, and an interesting one at that. My guess is that Facebook won’t be happy when they discover that this information, and an accompanying easy to use bookmarklet, are out in the wild. If you’re interested in experimenting with this data, get cracking, because a fix and take down notice can’t be far behind. It’s my hope that some smart people with much more knowledge about code and search algorithms jumps on this information and makes the picture even clearer. I also have to give huge props to Jeremy for discovering this info, building the bookmarklet to make it accessible to everyone and sharing it with the world. Very well done.

Flickr is one of the most useful, but underrated social media platforms on the web. It doesn’t have the headline grabbing power of multi billion dollar valuations like Twitter, and isn’t the newest kid on the block like Google +. Year after year, Flickr does it’s job - sharing photos - extremely well, so it rarely pops up in the press, or in conversations about the social web. It’s a shame. More web dwellers should realize it’s possible to put the low-key profile of this brilliant service to work for your and your business. With a small amount of careful, consistent work, Flickr can improve the SEO of your websites, expand your online profile and reputation, promote your projects and maybe even bring a few bucks in on the side through photo sales.

When we speak with our clients, we find that most of them are just vaguely aware of Flickr, or occasionally use it as a place to dump photos. Since Flickr is a dark horse, we’ll start with the very basics here, to get you started using Flickr and seeing results.  To get going we’ll delve into 3 ways you can use Flickr to improve the online influence of your business, your brand and yourself. This is just the start, as there are so many ways to make the most out of Flickr, so you can expect us to dig deeper into this topic with additional blog posts.

Uploading with Apps
Getting your photos online is the lynchpin of any Flickr based campaign. The key to using Flickr well, is having loads of photos in your Flickr stream. The more photos you provide, the better chance there is that someone will find them. After a quick inspection, you’ll notice that they don’t make it easy for you to get your images online. This is the case in the main Flickr web interface. However, by using one of the brilliant Flickr uploading tools, you can submit huge numbers of photos with a minimum of effort. More importantly, you can provide the correct metadata, like keywords and descriptions, that are essential for Flickr success. The key is to use the uploading apps to make certain that all the photos you upload have titles that contain a descriptive keyword, tags that describe the photos and what they might be used for, the right type of licensing and their location on a map. Using an uploading app lets you add all this data quickly, in one shot. Having correct, thorough information attached to your photos is the most important thing to make Flickr work for you.

Flickr for SEO
Flickr is a solid tool for improving SEO, while generating traffic and links. Image searches are popular in all search engines. People need photos to illustrate blog posts, news articles, for graphics in documents and an infinite number of other uses. Filling this niche, by providing people with these photos is an excellent strategy for gaining traction on the web. When creating the descriptions for your pictures, take the time to be extra thorough. Describe what’s in the photo. Also describe where the photo was taken, provide the date, add the dominant colors and list any words, like ad copy, that appear. Put yourself in the shoes of a person looking for an image to use on a project. What keywords would you search for?  These descriptive words will bring traffic right to you. In order to capitalize on this traffic, make sure you add your name and website to the description in every photo. The people who find your images will see your website listed there and pay a visit. It’s a way to get your url in front of thousands of new visitors.

Use the Analytics Tool
Flickr has outstanding analytic tools built right into the main interface. For some reason, Flickr makes this information difficult to find.
Clicking the squiggly line (highlighted by the red arrow in this illustration) will take you to the “hidden” analytics page. You can also view this by going to You > Your Stats.

You’ll be shown overall statistics such as how many people have clicked on your photos, when they were viewed and which individual photos are most popular. The most useful section of the Flickr analytic report is the “Referrers” section. Here you can see how people found your images, right down to the individual web pages and search terms they’ve used. Examining the search terms will give you more ideas on how to better tag your photos so more people will find them, by adding these search terms to the tags when you add new images. Since you can see the places where your work is appearing on the web, you can drop by those pages and leave a comment. Let the people who’ve used your work know that you’re flattered they picked your photo, and leave your URL to help get the word out. It’s a method of expanding your circle of online contacts without being a spammer.

Flickr is a very solid, underrated social media service. The fact that it’s somewhat under utilized is a boom for anyone who chooses to take advantage of it, because the competition for eyeballs here is less fierce. This is our first installment of ways that you can use Flickr, so stay tuned here for more ideas coming up soon. In the meantime, send us a link to your Flickr streams so we can see what you have going on. 

We love a good infographic. Truthfully though, who doesn’t? Over the last two years, I’ve begun to notice that infographics are one of the most popular items that you see blogged, tweeted, re-tweeted and passed around online. Infographics look pretty. They take what are often complicated data-sets or bits of information, and make them simple to understand. You can digest an infographic quickly. The people who create infographics are able to make a point fast, and the evidence, in the form of data is included right in the argument itself. They are compact, to the point, attractive, data rich and clever. Looking over the analytics for a wide variety of our clients, the numbers show that infographics grab the clicks on blogs, Twitter and Facebook across all kinds of audiences. Infographics are the perfect format for sharing information in the social media world.

A few days ago, we were discussing creating an infographic here at The Blog Studio. It isn’t easy, was the conclusion we came to pretty fast. You need data. You need to make a point with that data. You need design skills. You need to create a way to display that data so it makes your point. Then you need to make it look pretty. It’s a tall order, and there are a lot of very disparate skills involved. The person who crunches the numbers may not have the design chops to make the end product. The designer may need a hand figuring out how to make the graphics tell their story.

We did some poking around, and discovered the Google Public Data Explorer. Leave it to Google Labs to take a complicated process, and simplify it enough so that anyone has a shot of creating an informative, attractive infographic. That’s what Public Data Explorer is all about.

To get started creating your infographic masterpiece, begin by exploring the data sets that Google provides as part of the web app. Stat geeks are going to lose it when they see what’s available here. There is deep financial data: GDP, personal income, unemployment and retail sales are all available. Population data is covered by country, both currently and historically. A vast amount of health data, like info on prevalent STD’s, flu outbreaks and cancer cases is presented by location. The environment, education, greenhouse gasses and whole lot more data is available for your number crunching pleasure. Since Data Explorer is relatively new, I imagine more datasets will become available as time goes on. It’s also possible to add your own datasets in a variety of formats to work with.

Once you’ve decided on the data you’d like to work with, you’re presented with many ways to parse and compare this data. It’s possible to break things down by location, time frame, density, performance and many more useful ways. Decide what data comparisons make your point, and then quickly see them graphed and displayed. You have the option to display the data in several graphic formats, including overlaying it on Google Maps. The colors, size and many of the graphic elements are completely configurable to make a wholly unique infographic. There are tons of filters and customization options available, depending on the data you’re working with. I can safely say you won’t feel limited in any way as you are creating your infographic masterpiece.

The final results are outstanding. While the infographics lack the last bit of sparkle you’ll find in an infographic done up from scratch by a talented designer, they still look great.  You would be happy to pass along something you created with the Public Data Explorer to your Twitter friends, or use it in a professional presentation. A tiny bit of additional polish from an Illustrator wizard could easily make one of these infographics as visually appealing as any I’ve come across.

To the best of my knowledge, Google Public Data Explorer is a first. It’s the only serviceable, self-contained, infographic creation tool I’ve come across. I’ve tried some other apps that claim to do the same thing, but the results have been very sub-par. Not here. I already have plans to create some infographics with this tool for blog posts and presentations I’m working on now. It’s that good.

If you’re a stats nerd, a designer, a speaker or someone with clever ideas that could use the graphics treatment, you will find the Google Public Data Explorer supremely useful. It took me two hours of playing with the app to become a full fledged convert. If you’ve been wanting to make some infographics, but needed help in some area of creation this is the app for you. This FAQ from Google will get you up and running fast.

You can definitely expect to see lots of infographics by The Blog Studio popping up soon.

We’re just settling in to 2011 here at The Blog Studio, and we’ve been thinking about the New Year for quite some time. We know it’s going to be a big one for us. There is a lot of great stuff shaping up. We’re really excited to get cracking on some huge new projects, where we’ll have the chance to create some truly innovative work.

Starting a New Year is a good time to look forward, but it’s also a great time to look back. What did we learn? What can we change? What can we do better in the future? Personal resolutions are one thing, but we find work, especially tech resolutions much more interesting (We bet you do as well. No one wants to hear about how much less we’re going to drink, eat and smoke in 2011).

We threw this questions out to each other: What changes in your work patterns are you going to bring to bare in 2011?

Lucia - President

In 2011, my goal is to have all documents using consistent and clear naming conventions. Our business is growing and we are adding amazing individuals to The Blog Studio team. My goal is to ensure any new members of our team can easily find any files needed and instantly know what version of the file they have based on the naming structure that file was saved with.

We deal with many files: revisions of logos, designs files, web code, among others. I’ve worked with many companies and find their naming conventions to be unnecessarily long and confusing. The key to useful naming conventions is keeping them simple and clear, even to those outside the organization.

Jess - Design

For my New Year’s Resolution my goal is to: Maintain and organize my reference files a.k.a My Goodies Bag. My Goodies Bag consist of fonts, vectors, images or textures files I use on projects. 

Having a well kept Goodies Folder makes your design life so much easier. Start by dividing and concurring your files into smartly named folders, you can base the names on file type, style, topic or even use. In my Goodies Bag, my most organized folder is my ‘Vectors’. Within that folder I’ve divided my files based on ‘Style’, ‘Patterns’, ‘People’, ‘Borders’, ‘Icons’ and so on. 

Might take some time in sorting out your files and diligence for the upkeep but in the long run you’ll be much happier.

Mike Caputo - Development

I should be doing the backup thing for my personal computer- after I lost my 500gb HD last month… Dropbox works great.

Mark - Managing Director

In 2011 I Will Stop Organizing.

Systems are sexy. If you’re a geek you love systems: systems for organizing your music, backing up your data, navigating the transit system, and making french toast. If you’re a geek you have more systems than you realize and probably spend more time maintaining them than you realize.

I recently did a time audit and was horrified to find I spend a full 30% of my waking hours organizing information.

Systems are great because they let our brains focus on the tasks at hand (I don’t have to worry about where my wallet is because if it’s not in my breast pocket it’s on my dresser) but they’re supposed to help us, not be the reason for our existence.

So in 2011, my resolution is to stop mucking around with systems and reaping their rewards instead. Of course my history of system mucking has created the systems that work for me so I’d like to share what I’ve learned in hopes of sparing you some time.

Web clips are the organizers greatest challenge. The randomness of topics is outstanding (eg. cute kittens to optimizing server farms) and it comes in all formats (text, photos, videos, and links).

There is one golden rule: every piece must have only one home. In other words, if someone asks you to find a note you’d know exactly where it is. The natural corollary from this rule is simpler systems are better (more on this later).

Of all the notebook software I’ve tried, I like Evernote, it’s excellent for several reasons.

Everything goes in: text, images, links, audio clips, PDFs
It goes in anywhere: phone, email, Twitter, Read It Later, a browser plugin
And is everywhere: Windows, Mac, a browser, iPhone, Android, BB, even Palm

Evernote uses tags like Gmail for organizing - very flexible but if you have too many you’ve just created a complicated system inside a simple one, not good. Use ‘Movies’ instead of ‘ActionMovies’ and fight the urge to sub-categorize. Keep it simple and you will use it more.

It helps to think of tags in two groups: (1) the type of content, and (2) the topic. For example, my types include Tips, Tools, Thoughts, and News. My topics include Movies, Motorcycles, Tech, Design, Gaming, and UX/UI. Each note has one type but can have multiple topics. When I add a note I ask myself ‘What type of information is this?’ and ‘What is it about?’

Finally, I have a list of tags with the ‘my’ prefix: myPeopletoMeet, myStories, myGoals, myExperienceIt, and myProjects. That yawning kitten video is funny but not something that’ll change my life. But The Death Race, now that sounds like something to do. TAG: myExperienceIt. I check that tag for planning holidays.

There’s a strange satisfaction to nerding out in systems but they’re ultimately tools and not tasks. So in 2011 I’m going to start using them properly and doing something with that extra 1/3 of my life.

Happy New Year. May you have good health, good friends, and good fortunes.

Mike D - Strategy & Outreach

I will be anal about backing up my files in 2011.

It seems most people become backup fiends after suffering from a major data loss catastrophe. Luckily, I haven’t had that happen in quite some time (the last time I lost a ton of data it was on a 486DX, so that should put this in the correct time frame).

How am I going to accomplish this? I’ve spent quite a bit of time researching on the web, and picking the brains of my friends who do things like run server farms or spend most of their days on #Rails. So I’ve got a plan.

I created a folder that contains all my truly irreplaceable documents. Work documents, blog posts, contracts, proposals, strategy sets, writing, and photos. I have this folder synced to Dropbox, the wonderful cloud storage service app. Whenever a change is made to one of these documents in this folder, it gets updated and pushed to the cloud for safekeeping. I also created an Automator script, which will backup this same folder each day at midnight, by saving it to a USB stick drive, which lives permanently in my USB hub.

Next, I setup Time Machine, the OSX backup program, to do a complete system backup of all my files each day at 3am to an external hard drive. With the Time Machine backup, I’m able to do a full system restore if a real disaster unfolds, or I spill a bottle of wine onto my Macbook.

With this system I have all my one of a kind work stored in 4 places: on the hard drive of my Macbook, on an external hard drive, in the cloud and on removable media, with the stick drive. Unless the entire Eastern Seaboard gets hit with a comet, a la “Thundar The Barbarian” my data is as safe as possible.

Thundar the Barbarian

Feel free to check in with us, and put the screws on a few weeks from now to see how we’re doing. You can always leave us comment and let us know what we can do to make our resolutions stick. Don’t be afraid to call us out, it keeps us all honest.