This week the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) International conference is being held in Philadelphia which is the largest organization for PR professionals.

TopRank Online Marketing CEO, Lee Odden participated on a panel called “Social Media, What Every PR Practitioner Needs to Know” moderated by Peter Himler and with Rob Key, Lee and Nicco Mele on the panel.

Peter Himler started out the session by having the panel introduce their company’s services and specialties. The panel then offered their thoughts on how PR practitioners can and should leverage social media. Rob Key’s work ranges from search marketing to PR to virtual worlds. His company, Converseon, recently won an OMMA Award for “Second Chance Trees“, a virtual world project directed towards promoting reforestation both virtually and in the real world.

As the webmaster for the online campaign website for Howard Dean, Nicco Mele discussed his company’s expertise at building communities online.

TopRank Online Marketing CEO, Lee Odden gave insight into how search marketing affect PR and social media. Important concepts discussed and previously published at Online Marketing Blog include: Push and Pull PR, holistic content optimization, top down keyword messaging with all digital communications, digital asset optimization and the effects both on influencing search results in a Universal Search environment as well as creating direct interaction opportunities with distinct search channels.

It’s easy to start a blog. Just ask authors of the 90 million blogs Technorati is tracking. However, it’s not so easy to be successful. For that, just ask the top 200 bloggers out of those 90+ million blogs. But what is success? Especially for a business blog?

As the primary author of one of those top 200 blogs (Online Marketing Blog) that has also been highly recognized by publications such as Advertising Age (AdAge Power150 #3) and well respected PR industry blogs such as in Edelman’s Social Media Index #13, I’ve found some of the measurable outcomes from business blogging include:

• Use of brand names in text, in links
• Number of comments
• Number of subscribers via RSS and RSS to email
• Media attention
• Speaking requests
• Customer loyalty
• Inbound links to the blog
• Search engine ranking for the corporate site
• Corporate website traffic
• Leads/sales initiated
• Volume of blog traffic
• Technorati and other credible rankings
• Search engine ranking for the blog
• Increased company visibility within the industry
• Increased media coverage
• Improved customer loyalty
• Increased sales leads/revenue/new customers