• Your press releases should contain a “keyword trifecta”: Your keyword search term should be in your headline and your first paragraph, and the keyword in your first paragraph should link to your web site. HT: Sarah Skerik, PR Newswire
• Be generous with your links — people often don’t want to include outside links because users may leave their site when they click on the link. But being generous makes you part of the conversation and is a win-win for everyone. HT: Debbie Weil
• Cowboy up! “Own your space and your authority” — meaning, be the communications expert and stand firm on what’s right and wrong in communications. HT: Skerik

And here’s the real bonus — a twit stream of tips and observations from the session — free!

I kept waiting to see if the Obama team was just waiting for the right time to roll out its effort, but now that the news is that the White House is “firing back” at critics, it’s obvious that they went to Plan B because they didn’t have a Plan A.

Where, for example, is the Mile High Stadium version of a health care reform rally?

Where are the heart-rending stories from ordinary citizens who will be helped by the plan?

Where is the demonization of the huge interests who are opposed to reform?

Where is the one-pager that describes to the average citizen what the benefits of the plan are?

Why is it that even I, an informed and highly educated citizen, can’t tell you a thing about what’s in it for me and my family?

This last point is the reason why these wingnut shouters at Congressional town hall meetings are having so much success — because the absence of a common understand of “what’s in it for me” has created a vacuum and an opportunity to create a fear of “what I have to lose.”

It’s too late now to fundamentally change the game. The best the Obama people and supporters of reform can hope for is that the screamers will hit the limit of their effectiveness and that the Democratic majorities in Congress will deliver an acceptable reform bill.

A heck of a lot of people didn’t do any of those things, because they weren’t alive yet. Just like I have no clue about living through WW II or the Eisenhower years. Wasn’t born yet.

To get a kick in the head about how people entering adulthood see the world, check out the Beloit College Mindset list. It’s a compilation by some brainiacs at Beloit College about the sensibilities of the incoming freshman class. The list for the Class of 2012 is their most current (last year’s class). When they release this year’s list, I’ll post an update.

Here are some of their observations about people in the U.S. who are now 19 years old and if they are in college, starting their sophomore years:

• GPS satellite navigation systems have always been available.
• Gas stations have never fixed flats, but most serve cappuccino.
• Electronic filing of tax returns has always been an option.
• Girls in head scarves have always been part of the school fashion scene.
• WWW has never stood for World Wide Wrestling.
• Films have never been X rated, only NC-17.
• The Warsaw Pact is as hazy for them as the League of Nations was for their parents.
• Students have always been “Rocking the Vote.”
• Clarence Thomas has always sat on the Supreme Court.

Their lists go back to the class of 2002 — people who would be in their late 20s now.

Why should you care? Because people you may be pitching or working with may very well be in this cohort, and if you want to work with them successfully, it helps to have a cultural frame of reference.

But there’s a serious grain of reality in these man-on-the-street insights. Eight months ago, Obama’s PR machine had created a feel-good climate in which you would not have heard a Vegas taxi driver disparaging the President-elect. Now, everyone’s a critic. Why? Because, in my opinion, the Obama people haven’t done as good a PR job as they could and should selling this health care plan to the American people.

This should be a no-brainer — the facts are on their side. But Obama seems unable to close the deal. In this case, he seems incapable of clearly articulating in plain, clear and compelling language how this plan will reform the health care system so more Americans get better and cheaper care.

I’m not clear on the politics of the situation — maybe he knows that the Democratic majorities will give him a good enough bill to sign and so he doesn’t need public opinion to be on his side. But I can’t see where appearing weak and defensive on this critical issue could serve either his current cause or future causes.

Maybe the guy is human after all.

Here’s an early warning sign that the Twitter rage may be short-lived: a 15-year old Morgan Stanley summer intern wrote an eye-opening research report for the firm about what he and his peers are looking for in information-entertainment.

“Teenagers don’t Twitter,” said the intern, Matthew Robson.

Other insights from a young man who already probably has a job for life:

• Teens don’t listen the radio
• Teens do listen to music online but are “very reluctant” to pay for it
• Newspapers and other print media are “irrelevant”
• Teens go to movies not for the content but for the companionship of friends

In the mainstream, there’s probably no more “prominent” spokesman for white supremacy than Pat Buchanan. I put prominent in quotes because the man is self-appointed, having never won election to anything.

In a recent appearance on the Rachel Maddow show, where he is a regular contributor, Buchanan once again spouted his white supremacy, non-white inferiority line of “reasoning” during a discussion of Sonya Sotomayor, and as usual, played fast and loose with the facts. While Maddow let him get away with it during the original segment, she took him to task in a follow-up segment, and in the process, gave the most eloquent and forceful endorsement of anti-racism I’ve ever heard on national TV.

This is a big subject, but let me summarize, because this is important to me:

• White supremacy means a world dominated by people who pass as white, and seeing the world through the lens of white peoples’ experiences and standards
• There’s a world of non-white people out there, and they have been systematically discriminated against by white people (don’t believe me — read some of these links)
• People like Pat Buchanan are completely bought into defending white supremacy and white privilege
• There is very little in the mainstream media as yet about combating racism and white supremacy, but I’m happy to say that in my personal/religious life, I’m deep at work on it.

I can’t do Maddow’s takedown justice by quoting her. You just have to watch it for yourself.

BTW, the relevance to PR: This country will be majority non-white in my children’s lifetime. If your comms aren’t changing to reflect this reality, you’re falling behind.

I’ve railed recently about the lack of professional standards in our industry and how they hold us back. Another practice element sorely in need of improvement is measurement.

Other departments (operations, finance, sales) are obsessed with numbers and measurement, and guess what? The cream of the crop from those departments rises to the top and gets to the C-suite. Our department, all worried about “relationships” and “awareness” but short on the metrics to prove our worth, is forever stuck in middle management. When was the last time a CEO came out of the communications function?

One of the ways an industry improves in a particular area is to set up a competition and give out awards for industry leaders. And that’s the driving force of this blog post — to let you know that the deadline for applying for the Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award from the Institute for PR is coming up soon: August 15. Winners will be feted at the Institute for Public Relations Summit on Measurement in October in Portsmouth, NH.

This award — named for Jack Felton, founder of the IPR Commission for PR Measurement & Evaluation — recognizes excellence in public relations research, measurement and evaluation. The award’s primary objective is to identify superb examples of research used to support public relations practice, and to publish them as case studies on the Institute for Public Relations website. You can see the 2008 winners here, and all the winning submissions can be found at that site on other pages.

How important is measurement? Let measurement diva and IPR Commission member Angie Jeffrey convince you:

“All of us on the IPR Commission are passionate about the Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award because it is truly designed to reward practitioners who prove themselves genuine leaders in our field by utilizing research and measurement to get the best possible results for their organizations or clients.

In today’s economy particularly, no one can afford programming that doesn’t hit the right target audience with the right messages to gain the right business outcomes. The only way to really do that is to utilize research both formatively in campaign creation, in measurement throughout the campaign execution, and in analysis at the end to pull ROI.

I wouldn’t be caught dead in PR today without making sure my programs were fully accountable to my CEO!”

But that’s nothing compared to the awesome job these guys have done with their VC firm web site, Foundry Group. I’m also a big U2 fan so I recognized the poses immediately. And doesn’t Brad Feld (3rd from left) look a little like Bono?

Main image on Foundry Group's home page

Miller

Young Times tech reporter Claire Cain Miller discovered the latest it-girl in Sili Valley PR, Brooke Hammerling, who, the story asserts, is at the forefront of a new trend because she is as keen on pitching influential bloggers and other industry leaders as she is on pitching the professional journalists in the mainstream media.

Holy Reporter’s Notebook, Batman — stop the digital presses!

Hammerling

Among Miller’s other “findings” in this 3,000-word stemwinder:

• That Ms. Hammerling is, among other things, obsequious to a fault, folding her strategic tent at the merest assertion of a different idea from her A-list client
• “In the new world of social media, P.R. people must know hundreds of writers, bloggers and Twitter users instead of having six top reporters on speed dial.”
• “Despite all these new channels, it’s still essential to know which mainstream publications to approach. If a start-up is seeking venture funding or new engineers … PR still looks to The San Jose Mercury News, VentureWire or TechCrunch to get the word out.”
• “She drops names like a boat anchor, so shamelessly, but at the same time, it’s, ‘Larry, Larry,’ and I think she’s lying and then I get on the phone and it’s Larry Ellison. She got him on the cellphone; I didn’t,” says a journalist who did not want to be identified.

OK — enough having fun at Miller and Hammerling’s expense. What are my takeaways?

• Yes, social media and the Internet have transformed PR and are making mainstream media relations less important and multi-channel PR more important.
• It’s still about a) who you know, b) who trusts you and c) whether you have a good story.
• Reaching out to other influencers in addition to journalists has been a PR tactic since, as a friend used to say, God got her ears pierced. I recall writing PR plans in the 90s chock full of such tactics, only it didn’t involve using Twitter and Facebook, it involved snail mail and in-person events. Tools change, strategies are more permanent.

Now, though, the web makes the term virtually meaningless. So many different people and audiences other than the media can access our press releases in real time that calling it a press release is almost a blunder. [If someone's got a better phrase, let me know]

So if reaching many different audiences is now both a given and an objective of our releases, what do we need to know to make the most of the opportunity?

This, in a nutshell, is what we will be talking about on Wednesday at 1 PM ET on the PR University audio conference, “New Ways PR Can Use SEO and Smarter Writing Techniques to Reach Wider Audiences.”

I’ll be moderating and will be joined on the call by:

• Paul Furiga, ABC, President, WordWrite Communications
• Laura Sturaitis, Senior Vice President, Media Services & Product Strategy, Business Wire
• Paul Dyer, eMedia Director, WeissComm Partners, Invigorate Communications
• Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR

We’ll be covering these and other topics:

• SEO Fundamentals: How to conduct preliminary keyword research—plus online tools and new techniques for finding your company or brand’s keyword sweet spot
• Word counts, hyperlinks, headline writing rules and other SEO guidelines for optimizing press release copy without alienating readers
• Using video, audio, photos and multimedia to boost your online footprint
• SMR Update: What a social media news release (SMR) is and how it differs from a traditional press release
• Overcoming the challenges of creating and distributing effective social media news releases
• Online Distribution: How to seed your releases, announcements and ideas in blogs, forums and even Facebook, LinkedIn and beyond
• Measuring your success: new tools for measuring the effectiveness of your press releases

Hope you can join us!