Review: Online PR Seminar 13th Sept

I popped along to the Online PR seminar at the Cube on Portland Street, Manchester the other night. It was held in conjunction with Manchester Digital (trade association for digital companies)and The North West CIPR and was a good introduction into e-PR for those in the traditional PR industry.

It did have its annoying features. As it was for PR with years of experience in traditional press advertising it (without biging myself up) didn't expand my mind. But for others I could see they found it useful.

One of the speakers was Jane Smith of Smith and Smith PR. Her presentation was all about how and why to use blogging as a PR tool for PR agency clients. I couldn't fault her on 99% of her speech. But there was thing that annoyed me (I only wish I had time to raise it in the Q&A at the end) - and that was one aspect of her list of "Abuses of Blogging". I'll list them here and you can guess which it was:

1) Astroturfing - Lobbyists faking grass-roots support;
2) Ghosting - pretending to be others;
3) Libel
4) Deepling
5) Disclosure

Yes, you guessed it - its deeplinking. I've already blogged about deeplinking and how people think they can prevent people linking into particular pages in their site.

Jane said that you shouldn't deep link if people don't want you to. She said that you should always look to see if a site has a deeplinking policy before you link in. Two points, if I did that then I'd spend more time looking for site policies rather than getting on with writing content. Another point, there is no legal precedent to stop me from doing so.

My solution. If you do need to link to a particular resource and the site says don't you should respect the request to a degree. They may do it because they want to control internal page rank or prevent "Googlebombing". I'd recommend that you just do rel="no follow" to lessen the impact.

I'd also add another rule: Keep your blog branding consistent. There are a number of other blogs called "PR in a Jar". I got confused when searching on my N95 for her blog on my way home on the train. If I was Jane, I'd come up with a distinctive name for her blog and brand it. I'd also not host it at the free Typepad domain. I'd make it as part of their corporate site on the same domain - it's all about branding and consistency.

Oh, another rule. If you've got a blog, try and add a contact option so that people can ask questions or comment in a way that they wouldn't want to do publically by replying to a post.

BTW: Jane is a nice person though!