Your ‘about’ page is important
Posted Saturday, June 30, 2007 at 2:02pm in Blogging | 10 Comments
Here’s a bit of a sweeping statement. Although overlooked by many, your blog’s ‘about’ page is one of the single most important aspects of your blog. Why? Well, because it allows you to tell anyone and everyone exactly who you are, what you do, where you work, where you live, what your interests are, the blog’s topic and a whole host of other aspects that define you as person that a visitor to your blog could potentially connect with. There have been countless times I’ve landed on a blog and tried to find out more about the person behind it with very little success. More often than not, I haven’t subscribed.
Sure, once you’ve developed relationships through social media then your about page doesn’t really matter to your online mates and contacts. They know you and may have met you in the real world. Probably read your blog too. However, your about page could be the deciding factor for people you don’t know yet to connect with you or not.
Let me give you this example. Here’s the content overview screengrab taken from the Google Analytics report of this very humble blog. Note: This was taken over the last three weeks period.
Yep, I know, the traffic’s nothing to write home about. Take a look at the about page though. It’s the second most visited page over the last three weeks. Pretty important don’t you think? It’s not just a once off either. This is the same content overview but with the date ranges applied for the last nine months.
Again, if we go back to the three week period and drill down into the data for the about page it gives some interesting facts.
Looking at the screengrab, my Google Analytics account tells me that I’ve had 401 unique visitors to the about page in the last three week period. Unique visitors meaning people who have never been on this blog before, meaning 401 different people I could potentially connect with. That’s quite a lot. Also, the average time on this particular page is over one hundred seconds on average, so they’ve obviously had to read what I’ve got to say.
Okay, when I get to the Bounce Rate I’m a little confused. Maybe Kev Price or the lads from Distilled can help? From my understanding, the Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who leave your blog/site completely after viewing that particular page. So once they land on it, they bounce right back of it (I think).
At first, I thought a 50% rate was pretty decent. Not so. A quote by Google Analytics evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, says that I should be worried. Crikey! I guess I need to improve on my own about page.
So, what should you include in your about page? Entirely up to you I guess. Antony Mayfield has a list of short one liners. So does Simon Collister. Ged Caroll, however, goes more indepth and covers a lot of his personal background whereas Matt Brett describes it through a narrative. Hugh MacLeod takes it further with words and pictures.
So whatever you decide to do with your about page, make it visible for visitors and, above all else, don’t neglect it.
Loving links
Posted Friday, June 29, 2007 at 10:07pm in Blogging, Media, PR General | 4 Comments
A title for a post headline I blatantly stole from Jonny Rosemont. 
Seminar: How to make PR work online
Will Critchlow informs me that his company, Distilled, is holding a seminar on online PR on Wednesday 11 July, 5pm at their offices. Will says on the Distilled blog: “It’s targeted mainly at agencies and people working in PR, though it’ll hopefully also be interesting to people doing their own PR as well. We are not intending to talk about how to do PR or the fundamentals of good PR campaigns (the people this is aimed at know far more about that kind of thing than we do) but rather the plan is to share some of our knowledge about translating PR into online benefit (and particularly into benefit with the search engines).”
If you’re in the area it’s definitely one worth checking out. I’m learning bits of SEO as I go but could always do with knowing more.
New blog: The Answer Experts
Here’s a good idea for a media related blog. Andrew Harvey informs me of the Answer Experts, a blog that gives its ‘verdict on the media performances of top businesses and organisations’ and in his own words it “takes a critical, and sometimes wry, look at how those in the public eye respond to the media or use the media to broadcast their views.”
Andrew and his partner Graham Leach own a media training company, HarveyLeach. As a sidenote, I, along with many others, grew up with Andrew reading the news on both the BBC and ITV. And here’s a video I found on YouTube of Andrew reading the headlines back in 1986.
Cool beans.
Regionals go all web two dot ooh
journalism.co.uk reports that owner of the Daily Mirror and a number of other titles, Trinity Mirror, is revamping its regional newspaper websites - starting with the Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Echo. The Liverpool Daily Post seems to be embracing the whole citizen journalism concept really well by allowing the public to send in their own stories, upload pictures and videos.
The same article reports that Trinity Mirror will also be updating the websites of the Journal and the Evening Chronicle, in Newcastle, and the Middlesbrough-based Evening Gazette. Titles in South and North Wales, Yorkshire and Scotland will similarly follow suit.
technorati tags: distilled, answer+experts, trinity+mirror
webitpr launches version of the Social Media News Release
Posted Monday, June 25, 2007 at 2:34pm in Blogging, Media, PR General | 9 Comments
We’ve been working hard over here at webitpr towers. So much so that we’re the first UK (possibly European) company and first wire service to launch a version of the Social Media News Release. And what a good version it is too if I don’t mind saying so myself. First off, kudos to the original SMNR template developed by Todd Defren at SHIFT Communications which he/they kindly released out into the ether (better known as the blogosphere) just over a year ago with no copyright notice at all. Todd’s just referenced us in his most recent blog post.
Each SMNR we distribute will credit the SHIFT template btw.
We’ve tried to adhere to all of it’s original specifications and during this current beta phase we’ve received feedback from the man himself along with Brian Solis who knows more than most on social media and the concept of the SMNR. Take a look at this post by Brian.
We also received some great feedback from the guys from Converseon, Constantin Basturea and Paull Young, which, again, we have implemented into our version.
This particular SMNR is purely to demonstrate all of the features we’ve incorporated. Guess who the topic of the story involves? That’s right. Me. So for the time being forget about the content (and try to ignore my ugly mug) and concentrate on the features - there’s everything in there that’s specified in the original template and more. We have:
* Core facts
* Quotes
* Contact details
* Images
* Audio
* Video (with the option to use social networking video a la YouTube)
* RSS feeds
* Comments (which can be turned on or off)
* Social bookmarking
* Blog reactions (from Technorati)
* Related links
* Related coverage
Finally, we’ve integrated the facility to domain map each release so it can tie up with the client’s website and branding . If you take a look at my example you’ll see that it’s tied to the news.prblogger.com sub domain of my own url which means the client website (or in this case, my blog) will get all the Google juice. Have a look here to see it in the Google search results. We also have the option to set up data analytics software (e.g. Google Analytics) to track stats on each release.
I’m really proud of what we’ve done here and how we went about doing it. This is, in my humble but slightly biased opinion, the best version of the SMNR so far. Our belief is that it’s something that will continue evolving over time so we’re always looking for feedback and constructive criticism.
As a sidenote, I’m also proud that a smallish UK company beat all the HUGE wire services to it.
1 - nil to us.
Love it!
technorati tags: social+media+news+release, smnr, webitpr, todd+defren, shift+comms, brian+solis, stephen+davies
TechCrunch is bigger than the Sun Online
Posted at 11:27am in Blogging, Media | 4 Comments
Wow! Just done an Alexa traffic graph comparing the Sun and Guardian websites alongside Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch and, in terms of traffic, Arrington’s blog is bigger than the Sun Online and on par with the Guardian. Last June I made a post about how Steve Rubel (a sole PR pro) had a bigger readership than PR Week UK (a trade publication). Here’s a team of three (I think) compared alongside two national titles consisting of streams of professional journalists.
As Piaras noted in the Rubel/PR Week UK post I’m not comparing like for like and I partly agree - in both instances - but I still think the comparison in relative terms is worth noting. Both nationals still have the dead tree versions of course.
Funny times we’re living in.
Scanning
Posted Sunday, June 24, 2007 at 10:12pm in Media | 6 Comments
Great post by David Brain on the number of inputs he receives in a given day. The amount of messages that we receive through both regular media and social media in a 24 hour period is massively high. To a point where you simply can’t take all of them in. And remember, this is excluding advertisements.
I left a comment on David’s post but somehow it got lost (Geordie spam filter apparently) but I pretty much agreed with what he had to say. I often feel ‘consumed’ because I’m so involved in social media - often to the point where it, for want of a better phrase, does my head in. There’s simply too much to absorb. I’ve tried to implement time-saving methods to keep on top of what’s going on, but these are generally met with limited success.
So here’s my list of daily inputs
Email - 50
This number is for work and personal emails. David’s is much higher at 200. But then again, I don’t belong to a 2500+ strong network and I’m not in charge of 550 individuals in 11 countries. 
Newspapers - 2 (800 stories and nibs)
Note to self: Must start reading more newspapers at home - The Tube and newspapers go together so well. Sidenote: My paper of choice yesterday was the newly introduced Durham Times. Way hey! Who said newspapers where dead when Durham can launch its very own?!
Facebook - 80
I’m using Facebook increasingly for both personal and professional reasons of late and can only see it increasing. In fact, whenever I’m online I just leave a Facebook open in a browser tab and keep checking every 10 mins and there’s always new content in the News Feed on the homepage. It’s very addictive if you haven’t noticed?
Blogs - 680 (170 feeds)
I’ve guestimated that if I have 170 feeds then each will provide on average four posts per day. I’m subscribed to the likes of the Media Guardian etc that publish multiple times per day which kind of balances out the ones that don’t post so regularly.
TV - 24
The only TV I watch these days is the news - either Sky or BBC - my old flatmate will testify to that. I guess, by David’s methodology, I receive around 24 inputs.
Radio - 0
Haven’t listened to radio in a while. Last FM is taking up all my listening time unfortunately.
And that’s it. In total I receive:
1634 inputs on average on any given day.
11438 inputs on average in a week.
594776 inputs on average in a year.
technorati tags: attention, consumed, inputs, david+brain, stephen+davies