It’s no secret that information is exploding, but just how much may shock you.

Americans consume 100,500 words a day, according to a study by the University of California at San Diego – and that doesn’t include any information at work.

What’s worse, as more content is digested digitally, we now scan and skim. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen found that on the average web page users read at most 28% of the words.

While both of these studies focus only on the US, the “Attention Crash” is a global problem – and it’s not going to get any better. This means that the single biggest challenge PR professionals will face in the next 10 years (and perhaps beyond) is in how to secure enough “surface area” to create behavior change.

The good news is that we’re not alone. The media too is struggling to capture fleeting attention spans. Consider this: the average Internet user spends six hours a month on Facebook, according to Nielsen (no relation to Jakob). Most news sites are lucky if they get 20 minutes of a user’s time per month.

However, the media, more so than the PR industry, is successfully coping with these changes by increasingly turning to traffic-generating search engine optimization tactics. Page-view journalism, like it or hate it, is the new reality. And we can learn from the media.

Writers and editors at Hearst Media, for example, use a tool that suggests relevant Google-friendly keywords. The Huffington Post runs two different headlines on a story as it’s published to determine which is stronger – and then it abandons the weaker one. Bloggers change their headlines weeks later to cater to Google. And a rising assortment of content mills (AOL’s Seed.com, Demand Media and Yahoo’s Associated Content) assign thousands of stories to amateur scribes. Payment rates are based on keyword volumes/search demand – i.e. their traffic potential. (The image below shows how AOL uses Seed.com to recruit writers for its network.)

With this in mind, here are three simple tips to help you implement a more traffic-friendly PR campaign.

Use search data to inform message development/story ideas

Google knows more about me than my own mother. The same is true for you. If you’re thinking about breaking up with your significant other, Google knows. Looking for a new car? Google knows. You get the idea. Put your sailboat into these winds and your programs will go further.
 
Start with Google Insights. On this site you can see how the world thinks and searches. This information can be used to help shape messaging strategies and program that increase the likelihood that any earned media will find its way into high-value search results. View Google as media.

Write web-friendly copy

Brevity rules online. Web users are very mission-oriented. This means that any messages that are meant to be consumed/reverberated by others via screens need to be very clear and literal. This is especially key for content that you hope to see spread on Twitter. Write headlines like tweets. For more, see this forthcoming book from Yahoo.

Create and generate socially connected content

Content is king today. If a company isn’t creating or effecting content on a regular basis, they will be invisible. However, in a world where everyone can create, it’s becoming critical that all of the content we generate be socially connected.
 
Three great resources here are rich media sites like Flickr, YouTube and SlideShare. Consider prioritizing these sites over traditional press rooms and/or turn to emerging services like Presslift that already have strong SEO.

Originally posted on Forbes.

As I write this column it’s the morning after the long Memorial Day weekend and the web is brimming with activity. Google searches are spiking for Ted Koppel, who’s 40-year-old son was tragically found dead. Twitter, meanwhile, is abuzz over WGM – short for the primetime Korean reality show “We Got Married”. This is perhaps a direct reflection of the service’s growing global appeal. Finally, over on Facebook word is spreading of a scam featuring what’s deemed as a “hilarious video”. A CNN news story on the hoax currently has over 10,000 shares.

All of these are disconnected events; a Polaroid snapshot of our psychology at a single moment in time. Some of these memes are ephemeral. Others may be lasting. However, our success as marketers increasingly hinges on having a deep, real-time understanding of our networked environment and how these themes can impact our programs. Enter situational awareness – an essential skill every CMO-level executive and their staff must build and evolve.

Situational awareness, according to Wikipedia, is “the practice of being aware of what is happening around you to understand how information, events, and your own actions will impact your goals and objectives, both now and in the near future”. It’s common throughout the intelligence community. The White House Situation Room, for example, operates a 24/7 Fusion Center that pulls together 3,000 sources of information into three daily briefings for the President. For more, see this fascinating short video.

What’s important to note is that situational awareness is not a substitute for client/brand monitoring, reporting or measurement. Rather, it’s a complementary set of processes that help you form gut insights that make marketing, public relations and/or digital engagement more efficient and effective.

Most CMOs will not need the intricate web of systems that the White House employs. Yet every marketer should be required to make situational awareness part of his/her daily workflow. It all needs to happen in a focused way, at every level and in both client and agency organizations. The good news is that situational awareness can be quite simple. The bad news is that very few people have created the daily systems or habits required to succeed. Here are three simple tools to add to your workday to get started.

Google Trends

Many marketers look first to Twitter and Facebook for consumer insights. However, they often overlook Google. This is a mistake. Far many more people search than those who engage on social networks. Therefore, Google knows more about you than your own mother. And, much the same, day in and day out it can tell us a ton about what we’re thinking as a society. The Google Trends home page is about as good a barometer as any for what the US and the world is thinking about right now. I try to check into this page several times a day. In many ways, it’s like a 24/7 supermarket checkout line.

Seesmic Web

One of my colleagues described Twitter as the new daily newspaper. A blogger who I met recently at a client event described it as “Google with a brain”. While Twitter’s audience pales in comparison to Google or Facebook, there’s no doubt it’s a critical treasure trove of information for what’s top of mind among opinion elites like the media, celebrities and influencers.

One of my favorite situational awareness tools is Seesmic Web, which only requires a browser to run and can sync with mobile device clients that the company has created for every platform. I keep the site open in a tab in my browser with various lists of people who serve as my window into the online world. Over time, this helps me build a deeper understanding of what makes this entire network and its micro communities tick.

ItsTrending

While it doesn’t have the same ecosystem of tools that Twitter supports, as Facebook slowly opens up its data it’s ushering in all kinds of new tools. Some of these are invaluable for helping us shape aggregated insights into the mindset of those who have elected to live more public lives on Facebook.

ItsTrending is one such tool. The free site data mines Facebook for the most popular links, images, news stories and videos on an array of topics. Several visits a day are all you need to develop a deeper sense for how Facebook themes and memes can impact your programs.

These are just three – there are hundreds of others, many of them are free. What’s key, however, is to find the right tools and package them into your workflow so that you have a gut feel for the various online environments you are engaging in daily and how the macro themes can play a role in success or failure.

Image credit: Laurence Tucker

Another month, another visit to Silicon Valley – my home away from home – and, with it, another visit to the Googleplex in search of insights. This time I chatted with Karen Wickre, who oversees Google’s growing armada of blogs and Twitter embassies.

Google, perhaps more than any other company, has a culture of openness. Often a company’s culture shapes its communications strategy. And that’s certainly the case with Google. So social media comes naturally.

Karen first launched Google’s corporate blog back in 2004. Today the company has digital embassies for virtually every product. This armada spans dozens of blogs, Twitter profiles, YouTube and more recently Facebook.

Back when the Official Google Blog launched, posts were conservative. Wickre, a former tech journalist, told me over breakfast that early items were almost whimsical, focusing on the food at Google (which I can assure you, rocks).

While the blog still features some trivial fare, no one could call it – or any of Google’s other digital assets – a light weight. In fact, the opposite is true. Google uses its armada to take on hard issues like China, public policy and privacy. And it largely eschews press releases, unless they are financial or material to shareholders.

While Wickre doesn’t oversee all these embassies, she serves as a beacon for the teams that manage them – subject matter experts like product managers, engineers and marketers. Like a good coach, she provides templates and best practices and answers questions as they come up. Wickre, in the meantime, is turning her attention to how the company can strategically use its own Buzz product.

Wickre is one of an emerging breed of professionals that companies hire to manage/lead companies down the social media path. Not nearly enough credit goes to people like her. These individuals are often the ones who have to effect change – with the help of partners like us.

Google, perhaps more than any other company, is a model of social media success. One reason is that they tap into the three key trends that I wrote about earlier. They are real-time, visible and data driven. However, what they do best is embrace using multiple messages, formats and stories.

I subscribe to a fire hose feed for all the Google blogs as well as their Twitter and Facebook embassies. On any given day you will find a wealth of news, tips and stories that are tailored to specific interests. Only care about Gmail? There’s an embassy for that. How about policy? That too.

However, Google’s social media success goes beyond just having lots of teams engaged. Each venue slants the content to the reader/viewer’s needs and utilizes different formats – short form, long form, video, images and more. The end result is that Google creates massive surface area that make them hard to miss in an age where information choices are ubiquitous.

The takeaway here for companies is that, when possible, they should consider creating several blogs and – more likely – digital embassies inside existing communities. One Twitter presence might not be enough. The same goes with Facebook. (Note that this is just one approach and not the only one. Some advocate centralizing content into a single place. There are pros/cons to each.)

Businesses today need to consider having multiple streams that are mapped to high priority interests. This creates surface area and lots of entry points for stakeholders to get engaged. What’s more, the content should be “hand crafted“- eg tailored to each community. And these spaces should be managed by identifiable employees who are subject matter experts.

This is how I am tailoring my own content. I use Twitter for sharing/conversing around links and news. My new Facebook community is for discussions and sharing insights and observations. While my Posterous blog site is for essays, videos and the occasional digital doodles.

Now scaling might intimidate some. According to a recent Smartbrief survey, time is the chief obstacle to engaging in social communities. However, if a business makes social media a team sport, as Google does, anyone can succeed.

The Pew Internet for the American Life Project is out today with an important study about US news consumers that, in my view, is one of their best yet. While the data only covers the US, it could point to some global macro trends. You can download it here.

Key highlights…

So what does this all mean? The implications for PR are significant.

To me at least, it shows that we are well into an age of Media Agnosticism, something I wrote about here.  It also reaffirms the Trust Barometer findings, which shows that informed publics need to hear things three to five times and from diverse sources before it is believed.

Here are three considerations for companies:

First, the study underscores that a single media placement – no matter how powerful – is no longer enough to reach the masses when attention spans are so marginalized. Businesses increasingly need to be ubiquitous in all key relevant venues – online and off. The more we can spread the ball around, the better.

Second, companies clearly have an opportunity to tap into the power of social networks to amplify the stories that they do tell. This requires a mix of art (relationships, content, etc.) and science (data). Facebook is now a leading driver to news sites according to Hitwise.

Finally, if consumers are media agnostic, as the study shows, then the door is open for businesses to become media companies themselves by creating or curating their own content. This isn’t easy, but the opportunity is there. And we have vast resources and expertise to do so.

Many marketers chase technologies and new channels – e.g. “bright shiny objects.” It’s the trends, however, that are more important and often overlooked. Here are the three key trends that companies should begin to pivot into now.

This is the year that businesses will recognize they must:

“Real-time is the New Prime-time”

In December, when Queen Rania of Jordan spoke at the Le Web conference in Paris, she said “real-time is the new prime-time.” Her highness doesn’t just say it; she lives it. The Queen of Jordan has an active presence on a variety of social networks where she engages and inspires people around the world, all with the intent of driving awareness and engagement for her charitable interests. She engages in real-time in order to ensure she gets heard.

If an institution, such as Jordan, can be engaged in real-time then why not every business or NGO?

Consumers have finally migrated from thinking about the web as pages that we browse to an Internet of infinite “streams” where information cascades in real-time, often from friends. Twitter and Facebook feeds are two such streams. However, it goes deeper. News sites like the target="_blank">New York Times are embracing this model too by organizing content by date and time, rather than by priority.

The challenge here for companies is attention – it’s a finite resource. Information will scale, humans can’t. As a result, businesses will need to focus less on securing surface area and more on time and attention. One solution is to become a real-time business. However, this requires scale. One way to achieve scale is by synchronizing employee engagement and digital engagement strategies.

Digital Visibility

The average American visits 87 domains and 2,600 Web pages, according to Nielsen. Outside the U.S., these numbers tend to be smaller. What’s more, fresh data indicates that just a few sites dominate the mix. A target="_blank">comScore study released this week found that Facebook alone accounts for seven percent of all time spent online.

The upshot of all of this is we are entering a new era of target="_blank">media agnosticism. Faced with infinite choices, we’re drilling down deeper into fewer sites and accessing much of the rest via Google.

Google is the number one site in almost every country; this means that news drives search and search drives news. But search results are now more real-time and socially driven. The visibility rewards go to businesses that create quality content that’s socially connected – and do so again and again.

The Data Decade

Finally, Internet users tend to be very mission-oriented. In other words we need to know what we want and then go seek it out.

However, things are changing. We’ve entered so much information into little white boxes – ones owned by Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google and others – that the machines can surface what we want before we even ask. In other words, the we can actually know what we don’t know. (What’ya know?)

Welcome to the Data decade. In the next ten years products, news and information will find us through algorithms and the lens of our friends. Companies that take a data-driven approach to comms programs will be in a better position to succeed. In the months ahead I will show you how anyone can easily data mine from their desk to easily understand, anticipate and address such unmet needs.