Articles by BillFrench

As a PR professional or journalist, online research can be tedious. Imagine you wanted to learn about a company such as Blogsite (disclaimer - it’s one of MyST Technology Partners’ companies). You could go to the web site (which is really a blogsite) and try to find your way around. Or, you could go to a different type of interface - a topic cloud.

The topic cloud makes it a bit easier to drill into subjects based on keywords. And since it provides a search capablility, you can mix and match terms to get closer to content that you’re really looking for but didn’t know it existed without the tag cloud view. There are many interesting aspects of a topic cloud - here’s a paper that provides a little background.

Imagine (as a PR executive) you must review your company’s weblogs for interesting story ideas or police the blogs for things that people should’t be discussing. Topic and tag clouds would be ideal for these tasks.

Other great examples of tag clouds (not topic clouds) include Technorati and TagCloud but each have different ideas about the value and implementation. For example, TagCloud extrapolates keywords from RSS feeds, whereas MyST Topic Cloud uses real (human-generated) keywords based on each blog post; both implementations are useful.

Topic Cloud also decomposes longer key-phrases into discrete key terms. The key-phrase “Marcom Blog” would exist in the cloud as “Marcom”, and “Blog”, and each of these terms would be related and cross-referenced to the unambiguous term “Marcom Blog”. Of greatest interest - this approach begins to embrace keywords as topics, much like a topic map (see XTM), the closest specification we have to describing knowledge. As such, topic clouds are uniquely different from tag clouds.

In any case, consider tag clouds and topic clouds unique concepts that may (or may not) be important for public relations. Think about how these types of tools can be used in PR and let me know your thoughts - maybe I can help you apply this model to some use cases I haven’t considered.

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While we have started to grasp a basic understanding of the dynamics of long-tail search (and Internet topology in general), we continue to pretend that search behavior is predictable. The long-tail of search represents a unique opportunity to tap into niche markets for PR purposes, but it is far from a predictable science.

PR Guy (Todd Defren) draws an excellent conclusion about niche audiences - following a very good overview of the origins of long-tail understanding.

But this is the lesson of the Long Tail: they are ALL important! Every single itty-bitty one of ‘em. You can influence a hundred “Influencers� who can in turn influence millions of consumers.

A deeper appreciation for the long-tail can be found at The Long Tail (an FAQ on the subject); the introduction (Long Tail 101) is comprehensive and eye-opening. Another perspective worthy of refelction is Steven Johnson’s The Urban Long Tail which helps us understand some of the conditions that may cause discrete markets-of-dozens to flourish.

Armed with an understanding of long-tail benefits and the potential to reach audiences that matter, we can see that the types of queries that are likely to produce results are mostly unique. Joe Krause makes this very clear with real data –

“The most interesting statistic however, was that while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these top-10 searches represented only 3% of our total volume. 97% of our traffic came from the “long tailâ€? – queries asked a little over once a day.” — Joe Krause (co-founder of Excite)

Having recognized that the nature of search (and access to niche audiences) has shifted, why do PR agencies continue to optimize for predictable terms and phrases (i.e., the short-tail)?

Challenge: If you were a PR executive at 3M Corporation and someone said - “We have to tap the long tail of niche markets that use products like Post-it Software Notes(tm)“, how would you approach that problem?

Note: Post-It Software Notes(tm) are [themselves] a PR diamond-in-the-rough. More on this in a future challenge.

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