This is an old chestnut that comes up with enjoyable regularity.

We are talking about the PR imposter…

How long before we all realize that:

Concentrate on communication rather than subterfuge and you’ll do much better.

Danny Goodall sent me a recent example. He’s a fan of English soccer team Southampton. There growing pressure on the club’s chairman and he’s recently hired a “PR Firm”. Rather than engage in dialogue they ‘cleverly’ posed as a ‘fan’ and went posting supportive messages on Southampton’s message boards.

Only problem was, the messages were tracked back to the PR firm’s web address. Doh!

Good job. Where did they learn about communication? Good ROI on those billable hours though.

News that a conference organizer in Ireland was hit with a ‘cease and desist’ by CMP Media over the usage of the term Web 2.0 in the title of an event they are running in Cork [Disclaimer: Microsoft are the event sponsor] is a good illustration of the danger of monikers. What have CMP done to deserve the legal right to the term “Web 2.0″ as it applies to conferences? Nothing. But then the term Web 2.0 is loaded. Part of me thinks it’s a clever collective term for some really exciting online developments, while the cynical part of me sees “Web 2.0″ as simply a marketing play to focus excitement around those same Internet technologies for a run at “Internet Boom 2.0″.

Something that concerns me far more however is the term “PR 2.0″. Now this is a far more heinous development. PR 2.0 is a bad thing. Why?

Well first an foremost let’s define PR 2.0. I assume that the term is meant to be used as a collective term for the impact that many of the Web 2.0 technologies and channels will/are having on communications.

The danger of a term like PR 2.0 is manyfold.

First it equates PR with the technology. This is, in my opinion, incorrect. This isn’t about technology, this is about how people are/will use the technology. It’s about how these technologies change how people communicate. But it is NOT about technology per se.

Secondly the moniker 2.0 implies that something is coming that replaces what went before (and by extension implies that what went before was not effective). This again is incorrect. What we’re seeing is evolution not revolution. Tried and tested techniques such as face-to-face meetings, conference calls, e-mail, post and even the much maligned press release aren’t going away. Traditional media relations, internal communications, investor relations etc. these continue to grow today. What we’re seeing is the gradual addition of some new tools and techniques to our existing toolset… not a replacement. Show me the practitioner only using new tools and I’ll show you an unhappy client…

This was brought home to me from a load of PR conferences that I’ve recently being attending and speaking at. There’s a lot of interest in these new technologies, there’s a lot of interest in how our audience is changing. However, there is also reality. The fact is that outside Silicon Valley and the technology business our traditional tools remain king. In my opinion now is the time for practitioners to learn about the new tools, to understand how they might effect their audience, to trial, measure and review the tools. But we are years away from these tools being given equal billing alongside the tried and tested PR tools. That’s the reality.

PR 2.0 represents a worrying growth in the echo chamber effect of the PR blog community. There’s too much inward facing debate and not enough pragmatism.

PR consists of a wide diversity of audiences, tools, grographies, cultures and languages. If we’re serious about providing guidance on how new tools fit with our existing services then we need to be realistic.

So let’s stop looking to throw the baby out. Instead let’s focus our energy on how people are changing how they find, use and share information. Let’s focus on how we make the most of these new tools alongside the daily grind.

PR 2.0? I wonder how long before I get the cease and desist… bring it on.

There’s a lot of speculation about the information that Google has about domain names. What does Google know about your domain name and what do they not know?

Many webmasters are still obsessed with the green PageRank bar in Google’s toolbar. Matt Cutts is a Google engineer who knows exactly how the Google ranking algorithm works. He confirmed that PageRank is not the only important factor for Google.

Traders and money managers often dream about one day running their own hedge fund, managing large sums of money, and competing head to head with the world’s top traders. For many, though, this dream remains unfulfilled, because they do not know where to begin and do not want to squander their resources “reinventing the wheel.”

In this extensive article from www.capitalmanagementlaw.com, Hannah Terhune, offers an in depth overview of the hedge fund industry and how to get into it.

You might also be interested in:

• Due Diligence, Disclosure and Fund Managers.

The effect of co-citation is often overlooked by search engine optimizers. The other web sites to which your link partners link can influence your search engine rankings. Read on to learn more about this important topic.

The May Report of AlphaProfit Sector Investors’ Newsletter is now available. Commodities are on a roll. The U. S. dollar continues to weaken and
interest rates continue to rise. The May Report discusses our outlook for sectors and industry groups likely to outperform the averages in the period ahead.

The new Google Trends product is getting lots of talk, but it took Google themselves to put it to the important use of proving that:

• More people want sex than jesus
• More people want jesus than Mel Gibson
• Paris Hilton was bigger than jesus, briefly
• The Beatles are not bigger than jesus, at least in 2006 (if only they had data from 1963…)

Search Engine RoundTable gives a good overview of how this tool can be used by online marketers.

Bonus: Don’t miss the related research from Andrew Sullivan

Yahoo has file a new patent with the name “Link based spam detection”. It’s another attempt from Yahoo to improve the relevancy of their search results by detecting links from link farms and other shady link sources. Read on to find out how this affects your web site.

Google has extended the penalty notification experiment that was started last year. Google’s Webspam team now works with the Google Sitemaps team to alert some (but not all) site owners of penalties for their site.