The Internet has revolutionized the way we consume content and key messages. That shouldn’t be a surprise – even my mom gets it despite the fact that she can’t tell the difference between a private message and a status update on her Facebook account.

But many executives and internal copy producers still haven’t wrapped their keyboards around the idea that the Internet has also changed the way we create brand content. Styles of writing that have delivered big wins in the print arena don’t automatically translate into online success and in fact, may be completely inappropriate for web audiences.

Whether you’re writing a contributed article for an online journal or posting to the company blog, there are at least five key differences that need to be incorporated into the content you create for online audiences.

1. Length. Forget what your English teacher said about a three-sentence minimum for paragraphs. Web audiences prefer short, pithy blocks of text and tend to stay longer on web pages that feature concise, one or two sentence paragraphs.
2. Links. Links are the citation method of the Information Age. But links are also a way to increase the value of your writing by providing opportunities for readers to access additional information on specific topics or engage more deeply with your brand’s other online assets
3. Tone. Regardless of whether you’re writing for web or print, the tone of your writing needs to be matched to your audience and the purpose of the piece. For example, an online white paper will likely require a much different tone than an internal company newsletter. But in general, print writing tends to be more rigid than web writing since online readers prefer informal writing styles laced with elements of the writer’s personality.
4. Composition. Studies have shown that nearly four out of five web readers don’t read web content word-for-word. Instead, they scan the page, culling information from headlines, section breaks and bullet points. As an online content creator, it’s important to use that information to your advantage, composing pieces that feature bulleted lists, sub-headings and other web-specific composition strategies.
5. SEO. Online writers frequently target SEO at the expense of meaningful, high quality content. Although it’s important to include search engines in your online audience, the Golden Rule of content creation is that search engines and other audiences reward great writing – and that means your online efforts should focus on strong writing first and SEO second.

In the last two years Walker Sands has more than doubled, causing us to completely rethink employee professional development.

Account Executive Julie Walsh launched the program in October with a personality assessment. Since then the company has met every month to tackle a new challenge. So far our sessions have covered:

- Understanding One Another: MBTI – Communication is critical, so we started with a Myers Briggs assessment to determine the different personality types at the agency. Today the matrix of everyone’s communication style hangs on many people’s bulletin boards. Take the test yourself at http://bit.ly/RYWA9.

- Setting S.M.A.R.T. Goals – Important for both our clients and our personal lives, Julie took us through a session to define Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely goals.

- The Attributes & Enemies of Good Writing – Ken Gaebler, CEO, led an interactive session that covered a number of key writing strategies as well as basic topics like the pyramid approach.

During meetings, participants also discuss the Walker Sands’ Challenge. This program challenges Walker Sands’ employees to come up with a solution to a problem they see within our firm. It could be as simple as a new conference room decoration or as complex as restructuring our SEO services.

So far, response has been phenomenal, with great idea sharing occurring during each session. Upcoming sessions include Managing High Touch Clients, How to Present like Steve Jobs, and The New Business Process. If you are interested in learning more, Julie is sporadically blogging about the topics on this blog so come back to check out her posts.

Got another idea for sessions that a firm like ours should cover? Leave them in the comments.

Tomorrow several websites including Reddit, Wikipedia, WordPress and TwitPic will participate in a 24-hour blackout to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act. A small community of around 30 websites will temporarily shut down to demonstrate how radically different the Internet could look without their presence. Though rumors circulated that Twitter would also participate in the protest, earlier this week officials stated that the site will remain up and running.

For those who may be unfamiliar the story behind tomorrow’s blackout, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a proposed bill that would drastically change the way people use the Internet. In a nutshell, SOPA seeks to remove copyright-infringing material from the Internet; this could include restricting links to offending sites in search engines, and the removal of certain sites altogether. Its main objective is to protect intellectual property, but many fear that SOPA is blurring the line between upholding copyrights and censoring free speech.

Yesterday Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo reported that Twitter, an outspoken opponent of SOPA, will not be joining the online blackout along with the aforementioned sites. He tweeted: “Not shutting down a service doesn’t equal not taking the proper stance on an issue. We’ve been very clear about our stance.”

Be that as it may, Twitter’s participation in the blackout would certainly carry much more weight than several of the contributing smaller sites. In recent history, Twitter has played an integral role in freedom of speech and enacting or disabling policies worldwide; events ranging from the retraction of Bank of America’s $5 user fee to the Arab Spring have been attributed, at least in part, to protests over Twitter.

The social media giant’s participation in the anti-SOPA blackout is almost necessary to the cause of the protest. More than any other participating site, Twitter has the potential to set off a chain of events that could stop SOPA from being enacted, chiefly because Twitter has proven its ability to wield influence among its millions of users worldwide. Disabling the site for 24 hours would educate people trying to access it about their cause. It might be inconvenient for a day, but in the long run it would mean spreading knowledge of a potentially damaging piece of legislation to hundreds of millions of Twitter users. And as they say, knowledge is power.

With a bill such as SOPA threatening to change the way we use the Internet so significantly, we need the social media giant to flex its muscles, show its strength, and oust the threat of SOPA for good. What do you think? Be sure to leave your opinion in the comments below.

Social media use among Fortune 500 companies has plateaued, according to recent data. This hardly means these organizations have adopted social media en masse (62 percent have an active corporate Twitter account, while only 58 percent maintain a Facebook page), and it presents an opportunity for those without a social presence or those who remain inactive in those channels.

This prompts an important question for the laggards: Who should be in charge of running these things, anyway?

If the headline is any indication, the answer is the PR team. Here’s why:

The PR agency or team is best equipped to respond to inbound media requests. 

When a reporter reaches out to the brand via social media, your organization must be prepared to respond promptly. If the reporter doesn’t get a quick response, he or she will move on to find another source.

The PR team already handles inbound media requests, so they are prepared to coordinate interviews and provide the journalist with any background information for the story. The PR team also has a better grasp on which journalists have already been in communication with the organization or have written previous stories, and social media provide additional channels through which the PR practitioner and journalist can communicate.

PR understands the organizational messaging.

Whether it’s the typical “say this, not that” that stems from the corporate legal department or subtle messaging tied to the product or service, the PR team is already adept at communicating in the organization’s style.

Social media accounts are often run in a particular voice (Think of Twitter accounts or Facebook brand pages that refer to the organization in the collective “we.”), and the PR department is best equipped to incorporate the unique tone of social media into the organization’s many other communications channels.

The PR team is trained in reputation management.

It’s no secret that customers use Twitter as a sounding board for issues they encounter in dealing with your brand. The PR team knows that an organization’s many audiences – consumers, partners, investors, stockholders, media – should be treated differently, but all with an eye on the big picture.

This said, the PR department should have close ties to other departments with a horse in the race (read: everyone). If complaints come flooding in about a landing page on the site crashing, don’t you think the Web team would like to know? Similarly, the PR team should alert customer service or sales if people mention difficulty redeeming coupons or processing a transaction.

PR strategy, in part, dictates social media strategy.

You have a comprehensive public relations plan for your organization (if you don’t, you should probably get on that). Use it. A social media strategy that’s in lockstep with a PR strategy amplifies results on both fronts.

What did I miss? Do you disagree? Sound off in the comments below.

A version of this post originally appeared on PR Daily, where the author is a contributor.

Welcome back to part 2 of our look at how we report for our SEO Clients. In this part we take a look at the current report and why we do things differently now. Thanks for sticking with us.

2011 was the year of standardization. The first thing we did  was make all of our spreadsheets and report documents follow the same narrative. Instead of each report being a little different, each excel document having things in a different order. This way, each new piece of data builds on the last one, creating a story that makes sense and explains where things stand. This is an important, and often overlooked, aspect of reporting.

And we added color. Instead of black and white, we bordered things in Walker Sands orange in order to brighten things up. We added charts to almost all of our data sets so that it was easier to tell the story of the website.

The orange just brightens your day, doesn’t it?

After looking at the branding of individual keywords in 2010, I wanted to look at overall branding trends for all the keywords that drive traffic to a site. Now instead of wondering where that spike in search traffic came from, we might learn that those new pages that went up drove up non-branded traffic or that the positive mention of the client on ABC news drove waves of branded search.

I did the same thing with landing pages. We always talked about total landing pages as a way to see whether the content creation strategy was working, but this was just wasn’t enough information to see what was actually changing. It was like looking at the your bank account balance and trying to decide what you were spending too much money on. By categorizing and tracking the landing pages, we now know what types of pages are making a difference.

It kind of reminds me of the Chicago Skyline

The last big change for 2011 was mobile. While it isn’t an SEO metric by itself, we think it’s very important for our partners to be aware of how mobile traffic is changing the web. Not only has it impacted search and the push for results to be more local, but it changes the way visitors use a website. If your mobile traffic is only 5%, this isn’t a concern, but for many of our clients their mobile traffic is at 10%, 14%, even 19% of their traffic(check out our quarterly mobile traffic report to learn more). And if 1 in 5 people visiting your site is having a radically different experience from everyone else, that’s something you want to look in to.

2011 was definitely the year of mobile

2011 was the year that the story of the SEO program got easier to tell and the sorts of questions we hear in our monthly meetings reflect the growing understanding our clients have of SEO. By providing more in-depth information, we equip our partners with the tools they need to make informed decision about how to move ahead and that helps drive success.

We aren’t alchemists any more, we’re partners who’s solutions can be backed by charts that make sense and data that’s easy to read and I hope that we continue to improve that in 2012. If you’re interested in learning more about the Walker Sands SEO process and how we can help your business grow, talk to us today.