ReviewMe is a service for sponsoring product and service reviews by bloggers. You pick your property (someone’s blog) from the many, many blogs in the system. Each blog has a fee (less than most insertion fees out there in PR/advertising world) based on popularity and traffic measures. The blogger decides whether or not to highlight your product/service, and if she does you get a highlight and pay the fee. No additional haggling required. Of course you don’t get to dictate the content, but people are predictable, and it is pretty easy to avoid prople who are hypercritical if you know your product or service stinks.

ReviewMe just updated their evaluations of blogs and now charges $250 for a sponsored highlight on this johnon.com blog. Initially, I was offered half of a $60 fee for johnon.com. With this update, I think ReviewMe is now a viable service. Since they keep 50% of the fee, sponsored reviews here at johnon.com will now result in a $125 payment to me, and $125 to ReviewMe. As a pasive form of promotion, we can both prosper with that.

I am often hired to write press releases and promotional copy. And I am just one of *many* marketing bloggers registered with ReviewMe. So think this through… if you hire me to write your press release, and then pay the wire service to distribute it, you’re close to $1000 typically and even then the PR wire service is usually placing some restrictions on how many links you can have, what anchor text you can use, and how it gets archived. With clever utilization of ReviewMe, you can get that professional marketer to write about your product or service, insert it into syndication for you (this blog pings over a hundred syndication alert systems), and archive it several times. What a bargain, no?

Take my advice. After you get a marketing blogger to highlight your product or service offering via ReviewMe, issue a brief press release about how Blogger so-and-so highlighted your product (whether they loved it or just liked it). You don’t need to pay a consultant to write than one, and the third-party linking will give Google goose bumps. It’s a career move for you junior marketing and PR folks out there. It’ll impress the hell out of your old fogey corporate upline.

So good luck to those of you who utilize ReviewMe to get popular Internet marketing blogs to highlight your offerings and activities, and who then reference those in your About blogs and the free press release services. Let me know how much you get for your $250. I’d love to hear the success stories.

Disclaimer: this was NOT a sponsored review of ReviewMe.

Michael Gray on Long Island notes that a Google search for “spinach” produces not one crafted public relations effort, despite almost a week of breaking news about e-coli contaminations of spinach, advisories to destroy purchased bagged spinach, and concern about the image of organic foods and farmers following this public health threat. A “spinach” query produces ads for buying spinach, ads for news on the spinach problem which don’t actually go to news about the spinach problem, and an ad from Dole for “the latest on packaged spinach” which, sadly, also doesn’t go directly to the proper landing page but the home page, where a box that promises information on “Dole bagged spinach” competes with a Flash animation (with music) or the goodness of vegetables and fruits, and a talking , animated Curious George. Michael does a good job of explaining his findings on ThreadWatch, the search marketing blog.

I would add that there is not one competitor ad either. I would like to see “Afraid of Spinach? Try Kale” from the Kale Marketers Cooperative, or perhaps “Thought Organic was Clean? Think Again.” from the GMO industry. Why not? With all those searches for “spinach” following the news, why not utilize the opportunity for public education?

As of today, the one organic farm most damaged by the early press coverage, states on it’s web site that not only has nothing from their farm been identified as contaminated, but that every instance of contamination checked by the FDA so far has been non-organic spinach:

At this point in the investigation, all of the manufacturing codes taken from spinach packaging retained by patients are from packages of conventional (non-organic) spinach.

Wow. You’d think they’d spend a few bucks on ads like “Contaminated spinach not organic” or something.

Maybe the California Raisin people could buy ads for “Raisin’s have more iron than Spinach“, because some portion of spinach lovers erroneously attribute iron to spinach (it has some, but not really all that much). Or how about “Dirty Spinach? It’s probably from Mexico” from the Minute Men Civil Defense Corps. They would all work.

A PR guy says “this is not SEO. Really. It’s not SEO. Nope.” What does that tell you?

I have been interested in the cross roads of PR (public relations) and SEO for some time, but I have not seen a decent move from the PR guys lately so I wondered if they were capable. I mean, the Ad guys failed at “getting” the web. Oh sure SEO-PR got it long ago (and even got the domain name), but they are really PR guys. Whenever I heard Greg Jarboe speak he was like SEO is really PR…SEO is PR..if you are an SEO, you need to understand PR because SEO is PR. Personally, I’m more thinking that PR today has to include a lot of SEO.

So now I see promotional campaigns from Connors Communications (a PR firm) about a new service called HITTail. Since my audience is mostly SEO folk, I can simply say that Connors has decided to take one piece of SEO and hit the less sophisticated clients over the head with it, over and over and over again until sign up. That piece of SEO is referrer mining.

The more interesting facet of this is how a PR firm is staking a claim in the SEO world. As I have mentioned before, the PR folks seem to have a problem with commitment. On the web site, Connors first goes to great lengths to try and distance itself from SEO. I quote from the web site (and I am not quoting everything.. just enough to make my point):

“HitTailing is Not SEO”
“HitTailing is like search engine optimization without the trouble.”
“HitTailing is NOT Tweaked Out Super-SEO”
“HitTailing Co-Exists Happily with Professional SEO”
“HitTailing is no threat to that special brand of hyper-competitive, popular keyword SEO that thrives on tweaking densities and HTML tags.”

Umm, clue to the HitTail guys: SEO is not really concerned much with densities this millennium.

A little further down the page, they say:

“We are definitely positioning it as SEO for the masses of mainstream marketing departments who have yet to venture into the natural search arena.”

which leaves me more than a bit conflicted. But then, I was not part of the “beta”, which apparently went out to “professional SEO firms”. I suspect that the Professional SEOs that worked with HittTail were more of the boiler room type than the independent metrics-driven consultant type. I guess because of the way Connors dances around the edges of the clear overlap of HitTail and SEO:

“Yet, we are completely disclosing that HitTailing doesn’t solve the greater SEO problems that may plague your site. It only defers the discussion while you get some of the benefit in the short term through blogging, which you should be doing anyway. In short, we are attempting to precondition the marketing departments of the world to be receptive to the greater SEO “fix”, because they will be in a better position to see the value.”

So I guess the message is HitTail is *not* a threat to the SEO industry, but actual helps it by priming the pump! I see. Now for PR guys this “SEO Page” on the HitTail web site is really getting conversational the further down the page I read…more like a blog than a web page. And it ends with further evidence that these PR guys may not be too comfortable stepping into the wild and wacky world of SEO:

“Our original intent was to disclose everything we know about SEO, and have dubbed the “Connors Magic Bullet,” so that the mechanical best practices aspect of the discussion becomes assumed and fades into the background. But we have since thought better of this, because this is the role of the Professional SEO Industry. These factors are in constant, slow “continental drift” and it is not a wise use of our resources to keep the documentation up to date. We’d rather improve the HitTailing process, and let the SEO profession and search-savvy blog software deal with SEO drift.”

Wow. It almost sounds as if they are intimidated. Ooh… did the Black Hats threaten to bomb the HitTrack client sites out of the SERPs? Oh I’m just kidding. They would never do that! But I do suspect they were intimidated by the speed with which the real SEO world adapts. I do suspect that they got solid, factual, and specific advice from those large SEO firms, only to discover that there was sounder, more factual, and conflicting advice from other SEO firms a day later. I know, it makes my head spin sometimes, too.

After watching the demo and reading the web pages I see HitTrack as a user-friendly introduction to referrer mining, with instructions on how to use that with your blogging efforts to get more traffic volume right now. It’s a decent message, and it will increase traffic, but I think it is in over it’s head here. Just as do-it-yourself SEO almost always leads to trouble, this, too can lead a marketer down the wrong path in search of traffic. More traffic does not mean better results.

The key to good SEO is the quality and reliability of the traffic, coupled with organic search penetration and related momentum that can come from carefully-managed organic SEO efforts (including referrer mining). Unless HitTrack can add some serious intelligence to it’s algorithms for highlighting the keywords culled from referrer logs, following their advice may hinder the SEO momentum, and may broaden the traffic such that ROI suffers. I’m not sure the PR guys understand the importance of characterizing traffic. It’s one of the harder concepts to clear with most SEO clients. I guess people are just comfortable with percentages, and playing the odds. Too bad real SEO is not usually about playing the odds (in my opinion, it hasn’t been since the AltaVista days).

HitTail bills itself as “A Practical Alternative to Paying for Search Hits“. It claims to be able to help reduce the costs of buying traffic through PPC, and emphasizes the value of “natural” search engine referral traffic. HitTrack sells itself on the popularity of SEO. Plain and Simple, HitTrack is a PR firm’s initial shot at SEO, covered with layer after layer of disclaimer that appears to me to be classic “PR” intended to defer critique from real SEOs and avoid comparisons to SEO, while capitalizing on the negative image SEO has in certain circles (like skittish corporate marketing departments that hire PR firms). Guys, this is an SEO page. Really. And it needs to be corrected.

I can’t help but want to critique Connor’s “Magic Bullet” SEO when given the chance. Like when they say:

We’ve never measured a keyword density in developing the app, yet regularly score top-10 positions on important keywords that convert. But HitTailing is no threat to that special brand of hyper-competitive, popular keyword SEO that thrives on tweaking densities and HTML tags. HitTailing works best where tweaks matter least.

But I won’t. Instead, I welcome the PR guys to SEO. Watch out for the shovels, and bring your hip boots. It’s gonna get pretty deep in here.

Note: I started this with a link to Mike Levin’s Bio on Connors. He’s an SEO, hired on in 2004 to bring SEO to Connor’s PR business. His bio includes:

Mike Levin has been involved with Search Engine Optimization since the late 90s. Inspired by the notion that Search Engine Optimization and Public Relations are founded on the same underlying principles, Mike joined Connors Communications, a New York based PR firm, in 2004. Since that time he has continuously promoted the merger of traditional public relations with organic SEO, bringing ideas, original tools and industry experience to Connors’ SEO team. By combining his grasp of SEO tactics and his unique blend of information design with Connors Communications’ 20 years of PR experience, Mike has helped build Connors into a leader in joining the two distinct, but inter-related fields.