Power Searching for PR Professionals

So we have our Lexis/Nexis, we have our Google, does PR searching
get any better?

For the intrepid infonaut (aka Newsmaster Flash), you
bet it does – and will get even more powerful, for those who want to take the
time to push the envelope and stay on the cutting edge.

Let’s face it; although Google has done a great job with
search, the iconic blank screen with a simple stark search box has dumbed down
the art of finding things on the Web.

Ever more powerful algorithms improve relevancy of results,
relieving people of the burden of actually understanding how search works (and
lessening the need to master advanced search).

In short, better search capabilities bring better search to
more people, making it seemingly unnecessary to be search experts.

Yet for the PR professional – and other knowledge workers –
this can be a dangerous thing. The
specific ways in which you enter your search (and where you go to search) can
mean big differences in the results you get.

We need to understand what search covers and what it doesn’t
(not all print hits wind up online, of course, general Web searching is not necessarily the same as blog searching, and there is no single place to
go to that I am aware of – for free, on the Web, or even from paid content
libraries – that includes everything), and how to structure search differently
for different engines to get what we want, and how to master advanced
techniques such as using search operators, wildcards, etc., and how to search
metadata.

As more and more content migrates to the Web, and
increasingly originates on the Web, and as tools get better, I truly believe we
are headed for a golden age in PR in which we can better plan strategies,
monitor buzz almost as quickly as it develops and gauge the results of our
efforts.

Advanced unstructured data searching, reporting, analysis
and content mining tools will increasingly help us make sense of the sea of
facts and opinion, take the pulse of the state of thought in certain areas,
make sense of what is being written about; track the conversations that count,
how often themes and concepts are explored, and determine the penetration and
prevalence of key messages for our clients, employers and competitors.

Armed with these capabilities, we can start answering the
following questions:

• What issues are emerging and rising in importance?
• Where are
  our clients/employers mentioned, in what context (positive, negative, neutral) and for
  which audiences?
• Which influencers are
  rising and which ones are yesterday’s news?
• Are the desired messages getting
  through?
• And are we getting our fair
  share of attention and coverage?

Of course these types of questions can all be answered
today, but with lots of heavy lifting, and/or in conjunction with specialized
services.

As Jon Udell mentions in his article Divergent
citation-indexing paths, “In the academic world, where citations are
taken very seriously, digital object
identifiers play a much more important role than they do on the web. We web
folk could learn a thing or two from our academic cousins.”

So, there are some advanced search technologies being deployed
in the world of scholarly searching, and this may give us a sign of what is to
come in general Web searching. E.g.
there are free tools on the Web for science searching, like Scirus (full
disclosure, a client). Scirus features a
hand crafted index designed to screen out sites that have no relevance to
science, and utilizes a massive scientific vocabulary to check search terms
against. Scirus thus improves relevancy for
science specific searching. 

There are also subscription products, like Scopus from
Elsevier, which helps librarians and researchers navigate a sea of peer
reviewed scholarly content, giving users ways to mine citation records and thus
derive useful information about the evolution of research topics and influence
of scientists and researchers.

I will come back to issues of emerging search technologies like content mining, in the meanwhile I list
below some links I have found to be helpful.

The somewhat long title of this Online Magazine article says it all:

Blog searching for competitive intelligence, brand image,
and reputation management: do you know what is being said about you in the
blogosphere? Should you care? Aren’t blogs just for kids, political campaigns,
and geeks, of no value in business? If you think this, you’re likely missing
out on an increasingly powerful information source.

This post from Burnham’s Beat describes the persistent
search trend (basically, the art of setting search alerts).

Persistent
Search: Search’s Next Big Battleground

ResearchBuzz is a great site (with an accompanying email
newsletter) that covers cutting edge search topics.

Of course, SearchEngine Watch is the recognized authority on search related topics.

This blog post from Digital Inspiration covers the subject general Web vs. blog
searching.

Anyone worth their salt in PR these days and/or who
agrees new media and the blogosphere are forces to reckon with should master Technorati’s
various search tools.