Social Media & SEO

Has your organization ever held meetings about improving web traffic, but let the implementation of SEO strategies fall by the wayside? If so, you’re not alone. Here are four recommendations for communicators seeking to drive better SEO practices across their organizations.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has released a policy paper proposing 20 different paths toward social media regulation. In the paper, Warner divides his proposals into three categories: combating disinformation, protecting user privacy and promoting competition in the tech space. Here’s what the paper’s key points mean for communicators.

Facebook didn’t lose a cow today, it lost nearly all of McDonald’s. The question for communicators, though, is whether or not this is the right time to abandon the platform as a marketing and communications vehicle. It is if you believe Facebook is irreparably damaged and millions of users will depart abruptly. Of course, Facebook could shed several million users gradually and remain the dominant social network.

PayPal’s director of global corporate communications Amanda Miller cautions the next generation of PR professionals to realize that visuals, owned media and social are just a piece in an ecosystem that should include earned media, too.

While a successful donation campaign or high number of form fills is cause for celebration, it’s often what isn’t working that gets overlooked, whether you’re updating an existing site or launching a new one. A bad website might be compared to the Winchester Mystery House, famous for its eccentric and haphazard construction, including stairways and doors leading nowhere.

Confidentiality is paramount to professional communicators, and while embargoes are hard to enforce, Google’s new “Confidential mode” positions Gmail as a top tier security safeguard. The problem with these new security features, says leading digital digital privacy nonprofit The Electronic Frontier Foundation, is that they offer users brittle security measures that can easily be breached.

Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft announced a new program called the Data Transfer Project (DTP), an initiative to “create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that all individuals across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want.”

Though many don’t realize it, SEO is influenced by every department that touches digital content in a given organization. While you don’t have to be a technical genius to understand how that impacts your marketing and communications efforts, it’s important to be aware that even if you hand off SEO to your resident SEO expert or to an agency, your actions with your brand’s digital content are already affecting your search rankings.

James Nickerson will kick off the Facebook for Communicators Boot Camp at PR News’ Social Media Summit on Aug. 9 with a timely invocation on where the platform is going, including why regulation might not be a bad thing for Facebook and the ramifications of GDPR for users. Tying these future-focused topics together is Nickerson’s belief that marketers are in a unique position to heal the growing disconnect between brands’ trust in the platform and the distrust felt by end users.

At its Social Media Summit in San Francisco on Aug. 10, PR News will honor Madison Dowswell of PepsiCo, Ashley Frohnert of PETA and Jessica McGlory of Jellyfish as its 2018 Social Media Luminaries. The Social Media Luminaries awards program celebrates of-the-moment social media marketing pioneers.