Last Tuesday, I led a Ragan Communications webinar on the state of the communications profession and where the business is headed. There wasn’t enough time to answer everyone’s question in the time allotted, so I invited questions by email and promised to post them, along with my answers, here so they’d be available to everyone who attended. Here’s what I got and how I answered (and I’d love comments that offer your own thoughts or opinions on these questions):

You suggested having SEO as a core competency.  Which books or blogs would you suggest for a more in-depth look at this subject?

A lot of blogs address search and SEO. The ones I read include…

SearchEngineLand
SearchEngineWatch
Lee Odden’s TopRank blog
Matt Cutts
Best SEO blog

I’ve only read one SEO book—SEO for Dummies (by Peter Kent),
believe it or not, but these come highly recommended:

Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day
The Art of SEO
SEO Warrior
The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization: Your Visual Blueprint for Effective Internet Marketing

I’m curious why when you talked about the future roles of PR professionals you never talked about the fact we’ve really evolved into strategic advisors? We’ve worked so hard to have seats at the head of the table, instead of being an afterthought, that I was hoping to hear a greater emphasis on communicators as strategic advisors.

I certainly don’t disagree with you, but I think we achieved that status about 10 years ago, so I didn’t see any point in raising it.

Given that all of the technologies we’ve discussed are based on “pulling” content we value as individual or community, how will a technology such as realtime rss feeds be able to maintain our interests and relevance?

There are a couple things to keep in mind. First, the real-time dimension of the web will augment, not replace, the static web. What will change is the speed with which you are notified of alterations and additions to pages, along with the delivery of news.

Right now I subscribe to a few hundred RSS feeds. Once an hour, my reader polls these feeds to see if something has changed and I see a scrolling window of updates. With the real-time web, those blogs and news sites that have new content will push them out to me almost the instant they occur, so I’ll have access to the news when it’s fresh, not potentially 59 minutes old.

Remember, the only content that will be pushed to me is the SAME content I would have received through the time-delayed pull. I’ll just be getting it faster, so the relevance isn’t affected…only the speed with which I get the stuff that’s relevant to me.

Here are some good resources to help further understand the real-time web:

ReadWrite Web’s “Introduction to the Real-Time Web”
“4 Emerging Trends of the Real-Time Web” from Mashable
ReadWrite Web’s “Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action”

One more great example, this from Dave Winer, the programmer behind RealTime RSS ():

What is the Real-Time Web?
Four words: It Happens Without Waiting.
Narrative: Today I wrote a piece about the Berkeley Public Library on InBerkeley.Com. I wanted to find a pointer to the library website, so I switched over to Google. Looked up Berkeley Public Library. My piece, published less than a minute earlier. was the first item. Real-time web. (True story.)

I represent a school district with a superintendent who is a lightning rod for criticism because of bold choices and decisions she is making.  I know I need to “brand” her and we are using our destination website to try to market her in a positive way.  She answers scores of critical emails a day.  What would be a way for her to communicate with our mass without having to address each email?  Our technology is very traditional.  Where should we begin to move technological as a district to get our messages out?

With email, generally speaking, there is an expectation that when I send you one, you’ll reply. There is no such expectation in social media, particularly in blogs and Twitter. With a blog, the superintendent could articulate a position, allowing interested parties to comment. They would not expect each comment to receive a reply, but she could selectively add her own thoughts to the comment thread or (as GM Vice Chair Bob Lutz does on his blog) respond to a number of comments with a follow-up post.

Some people will comment on Twitter rather than the blog itself, so it would be important to monitor those responses (not a difficult task) and incorporate them into a response strategy. She can also use Twitter to notify her audience of a new post.

This approach is one that would require the superintendent to write her own posts (or for her to disclose that her staff is working with her on the blog), but it would engender a conversation rather than a one-way push of information. Obviously, listening becomes an important part of the process.

She wouldn’t be the first school superintendent to blog. Here are just a few examples:

http://www.bryanisd.org/default.asp?pageID=199
http://blogs.tampabay.com/classroom/
http://npssuperintendent.blogspot.com/
http://superintendentsblog.blogspot.com/
http://barrysblog.jordandistrict.org/
http://www.cchs.k12.pa.us/district/blog/