The lines between PR and SEO are becoming ever more blurred. Back in February, Matt on his InfluenceFinder blog asked “Is PR the next SEO or SEO the next PR?” Yesterday I came across a new eConsultancy Q&A with John Straw – thanks to the power of Twitter – that again looks at the merging of these disciplines.

To a certain extent I agree with the views in these posts. SEO is definitely a natural extension of the digital PR skill set. That said, there is more a PR consultant offers than just relationships. When it comes to how PR can influence natural search rankings, these relationships are important and at the heart of a PRO’s ability to do his/her job. But, more important in delivering greater click throughs from natural search, is a PR professional’s ability to deliver the right message, in the right format, at the right time to the right influencer. A process and skill set that I am sure a SEO marketer can identify with.

Having the right relationships certainly makes this process easier as it provides the insight into which influencer is best placed to deliver your chosen message to the audience you wish to reach. But without the right pitch you will just be spamming that poor blogger or journalist, damaging any existing relationship you may have had.

We are in the midst of the 2010 Tour de France and the race has come down to just two riders. Andy Schleck is just eight seconds behind “Berty the Accountant” (Alberto Contador) as Ned Boulting and Matt Rendal call him on their Real Peloton podcasts. It has been an amazing spectacle, cobbles, crashes, tears on the podium, mountains, more crashes, British riders in the mix and millions of Twitter posts.

This year more than ever before we are able to share in all the ups and downs of teams, riders and all other interested parties in diverse ways. Where marketing budgets for teams (marketing tools themselves) are tiny – let’s take the first year British team, Team Sky, as an example – social media has become a cornerstone of its communications plan.

Prior to this year, and it can be seen in Formula One as well, Facebook fan pages and especially Twitter profiles were the preserve of a limited number of tech savvy competitors looking to build their own brand. 2010 however, has seen a holistic approach to social networking as a seriously cost effective channel to fans.

Looking more closely at Team Sky you find the website is supported by a Facebook page, a Twitter profile and a blog (only in name as nowhere to add comment) on the website. Add to this the set of individual rider’s Twitter profiles and the whole story of the team’s race can be gleaned in just a few minutes.

If success is measured in numbers, and it most often is, then Team RadioShack - undoubtedly due to the presence of Lance Armstrong – has the social media yellow jersey. Team Sky do well with over 42,000 fans, while the current yellow jersey wearer’s team has just 2,133 fans. That said the current race leader himself has almost 70,000 followers on Twitter, damn good when he is only following 16.

We are seeing a real revolution in sports marketing. Fans have always been fans, but with social media the ability to get to share in the success and disappointment of your heroes, almost as it happens and directly from them, creates a much stronger bond for that fan with that sports person as a brand.

Having said that, you can get too much of a good thing. At the moment I have to avoid using Twitter for large portions of the afternoon and evening so I don’t see who wins the stage before catching the highlights on TV that evening. But, once the stage is over, I am straight onto TweetDeck to get the inside track on what the riders are saying.  Word of mouth marketing has never had such a perfect case study.

I recently attended a WOM UK briefing run by Reed Smith on the subject of ‘the benefits and legal risks of Word of Mouth Marketing in Social Media.’ One of the subjects touched upon was moderation; when inviting comment from the public, how much responsibility does the publisher have for the content that’s uploaded to their website?

This is an issue that’s undoubtedly on the radar of the HM Treasury this week as they opened ‘The Spending Challenge’ to the public for the first time. For those of you unfamiliar with the idea, ‘The Spending Challenge’ is essentially a forum that allows the public to suggest ideas for where spending cuts could be made to tackle the budget deficit. Recent criticism stems from the fact that the site’s moderators have been allowing offensive comments to remain visible to anyone who visits the site. A quick search through recent comments on ‘The Spending Challenge’ website reveals a multitude of comments tagged by users under terms including ‘hate crime,’ ‘hate,’ ‘facist’ and  ‘racial hatred.’ There’s a witty summary of the latest posts here entitled ‘Race hate meets comedy gold.’

What’s actually a potentially brilliant tactic by the government to engage the public in the debt crisis recovery is now in danger of becoming drastically tarnished by negative media coverage and sarcastic Tweets.

Crowdsourcing is one of the latest buzz words in social media at the moment with many brands seeing the benefits of both customer engagement and business/product development. However, ‘The Spending Challenge’ shows that inviting opinions on any subject which has the potential for defamatory material and comment needs a carefully considered moderation plan. Is a ‘Notify and Take Down’ system always the right method in these situations?

It will be interesting to watch the steps taken by the government to control the current media backlash on ‘The Spending Challenge.’ Clearly, a more rigorous moderation process is needed to ensure the public’s suggestions are constructive and serve the website’s purpose. For those of us in the PR & Marketing industry, it’s a stark reminder of how unwieldy a tool the web really is. Whilst crowdsourcing might sound like a great campaign tactic, it’s vital to remember that we can’t control what people say on websites and social media platforms. The potential for damaging coverage and comments is ever present and it’s the average savvy webuser who is the most stringent moderator of them all.

Taking a look at the evolution of social media as a communications tool over the past year, it is clear that one thing in particular has changed, businesses now take it seriously and include in their communications strategy.

Brands now automatically lose their shine with customers if they do not allow for direct communication between customer and company. This shift in expectation has lead to the growth in the number of managing directors asking where the company’s Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and YouTube channels are and why can’t we have thousands of fans tomorrow?

With a view to providing a glimpse under the hood at some of these changes over the last twelve months, we have put together our Social Media Lens. The document launches today at Marketing Week Live! For your own copy just click here, all we ask are a few details about you.

We have been very lucky to have some of the UK’s leading practitioners in the social media space support us with the production of Social Media Lens; presenting real world examples instead of last year’s theories. The collection of articles provides a unique view on what has changed, what works, what doesn’t and a variety of tips and tricks for getting social media activity up and running.

Articles in the ebook cover a whole raft of different insights, advice, trends, what is new and coming up in social media as well as some secrets from marketing professionals from major brands including: Sony, Paddy Power, Oracle, Santander and more.

Once you have had a chance to take a read do come back and let us know what you think.

These two disciplines may seem like unlikely bedfellows, but bear with me, the analogy works out in the end.

I was recently reading a book called Pixarpedia, a behind-the-scenes look at Disney Pixar’s film studio. Almost as soon as I’d opened the first page, the foreword from their CEO, Andrew Stanton, struck a chord:

“When it comes to making our own movies we’re obsessed with figuring out the details that will make our stories real. The first step of that process is ‘city planning’ – figuring out how the world works and what the rules are. From there we work out the particulars of personality and setting.”

‘City planning’, as Stanton puts it, should be fundamental to any PR campaign- and never more so than with social media. Brands that ignore the rules and skip straight to the execution will inevitably end up getting burnt. I won’t go into the well documented social media failures of the past few months, but it is clear that they didn’t take enough time to understand the online landscape before jumping in feet first.

But brands shouldn’t be afraid of social media rules. It’s not a secret doctrine you can’t read about online; just one that requires attention, adaptation and intelligence. Taking time to city plan may seem like a daunting task, but once you’ve figured out the rules, campaigns can go to infinity and beyond…

You might have heard a lot of chatter about real-time search recently, with Facebook buying Friendfeed (a microblogging service with some strong real-time search technology) and Google unveiling Caffeine, a more real-time focused version of its own search technology. Although real-time search is currently more hype than reality, it seems likely we’ll see the technology being used a lot more over the next 12-18 months, so online PR and marketing people should be paying attention.

What is real-time search?

In conventional web search, results are influenced by the authority of a page – well established websites with a high number of links from other trusted sites tend to rank highly. Real-time search is much more focused on what’s hot right now – what are people currently talking about on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

If you searched on the word “Pie” using a conventional search engine, you would expect to see some websites of big pie manufacturers, pie recipes from big cookery sites, the Wikipedia page about pies, and so on.

Real-time search, would be more likely to show you a current news story about the Prime Minister being hit in the face with a custard pie, a popular viral video of puppy stealing a pie, or some reviews of a new American Pie movie -anything related to pies that is currently generating a lot of buzz.

This is all very exciting, so it’s led a few people to declare that old-search is dead and real-time search is the future. This is nonsense. While real-time search is certainly going to get bigger, conventional search isn’t going away – if anything, the two will simply merge to provide blended results of high authority content alongside real-time results.

What does this mean for brands?

We know what we want from conventional search – our clients should be at the top of the page for relevant keywords, and the rest of the page should be filled with authoritative third party recommendations. This is what SEO and online PR is all about.

But what’s the goal with real-time search? If you want to consistently appear at the top of real-time search results, your brand is going to have to consistently be interesting enough to get people talking. This, I would suggest, requires a kick-ass online PR strategy.

What should you do about it?

Brands need to get a lot better at monitoring what’s happening online, to stay informed about what the rising trends are in their key markets and what subjects are generating online buzz. Forget monthly or even weekly reports – too slow, you lose.

Second, reaction times need to improve. If it takes you a week to get anything approved, you’re wasting your time. As real-time search becomes more important, comms teams will need the flexibility to respond to issues quickly, while the public is still interested. When one of those funny complaint letters about your company goes viral, nobody will care that you responded brilliantly if it doesn’t happen until a week or two later.

Take a look at your crisis comms plan and consider updating it for the real-time comms environment.

It’s not just about responding quickly to the bad stuff. Keeping on top of trending topics will help you to spot opportunities for positive conversations that your brand can be a part of, although this doesn’t mean you have to pounce on every new meme and beat it to death with corporate messaging.

The essence of all this is reaction time. If your brand wants to be involved in fast moving online conversations, you will have to find ways of keeping up or risk being left behind.

There’s been a huge amount of discussion about how Twitter can be used most effectively for online PR and marketing, and there’s no shortage of interest in the subject since the mainstream media became obsessed with the platform. The only problem is that most of the current analysis is either lofty strategic level stuff, or is based on the assumption that you already know a lot about Twitter, neither of which are much use to the majority of people who just want to know where to start.

This prompted us to produce a practical guide to help PR and marketing professionals get some real value from Twitter, without assuming that they already have a deep understanding of the service.  You can get hold of a free copy of the Twitter for PR and Marketing Professionals guide on our website – we put a lot of work into it, so I hope you find it useful.

If you haven’t got time to read the whole thing, the following diagram outlines the basic steps you should follow to incorporate Twitter into your comms activities. It’s a very brief overview, and the full guide goes into a lot more detail about how you can accomplish each of these steps:

Simply put, you first need to monitor Twitter to find out what people are saying about the issues that matter to your organisation, then learn how to participate in the Twitter ecosystem appropriately in order to gain acceptance, and then you will be in a strong position to instigate the kind of conversations that are important to you.

Whilst reading the econsultancy.com online PR benchmarking report, it struck me that PRs and brand marketers were still talking a different language.

Clients wanting increased brand mentions online are met with agencies delivering blogger relations. Those asking for brand reach are offered optimised press releases.  A client wants outcomes: and the agency offers tactics. Well, nothing new there then!

The trouble is that this issue is completely exacerbated by the proliferation of social media jargon. Love or hate these new terms, agencies and clients alike are letting them fly from their collective lips: especially around the pitching table.

At the recent Utalk Marketing conference, presentations from different marketing agencies revealed the scale of the confusion within the industry. There is no common understanding between the different marketing professions. Just look at the PR and SEO industries where there is no agreement on the definition for online PR. No wonder clients get confused.

We might be using the words like ’social media’, ‘influentials’ or ‘conversations’, but we don’t always mean the same thing: several social media terms could now be classified as homonyms there are so many different meanings!

And the cloud of confusion is getting thicker. Every time a new tool, technology or platform rises in popularity it is accompanied by a raft of new buzzwords.

It occurred to me that no one had yet determined how much the social media jargon was impacting client marketers. What is the effect of having to learn a new lexicon of marketing and technology terms? How is social media literacy affecting the understanding of what a client wants? And most importantly, how is the confusion influencing budgets.

So we are doing some research with brands in the UK, to be published as a report (and shared socially of course).

I would like to include some comments and anecdotes from readers and fellow bloggers in the report (accredited of course). So if you have an opinion, or story to tell on the issues of social media jargon, please do share in comments or trackback posts (now I am using jargon!).

Do certain terms need clearer definitions, or should we be going back to basics and using the language of communications? Are there words that you think are commonly misunderstood or often misused?

Our intention is to put the best into the report with a link to your blog or website – and give you the first view of the report before we officially publish.