OpenCa.mp DFW is a conference focused on WordPress, Drupal, Joomla! and .NET development. There are a few sessions touching on blogs and social media and surprisingly, one on public relations. Paula Berg was with Southwest Airlines for 10 years building their social media effort to 8 people and becoming a very legitimate and significant source of revenue for the airline.

Her presentation at OpenCa.mp started with an admission of being somewhat hungover, we are at a tech conference after all, and a rate of speech that was more like East Coast than South West. She was engaging and entertaining.

A lot of companies are doing “Third world social media”. They’re doing things tactically and not integrating into their overall business.

1. About jaw dropping reports:  Sure, servies like Radian6 can create nice looking reports, but what does it mean?

It’s not all about the numbers. What is the data trying to tell us? What are we tring to prove or accomplish. What should we be doing differently. Who cares about this insight?

2. Launch an all out PR assault – tell everyone about your social media program

3. Make executives love it. Dazzle them. Scare them. Do what you have to do.

“People who write web copy often write for a particular audience: customers, or analysts, or journalists. But there’s an extra audience you should always consider: search engines.”

Lee Odden is a man with a message: write to your audience. Of course, PR pros knew that already. If we’re pitching to a tech publication, we talk tech; if we’re pitching to a newspaper, we’re topical. However, we’re still ignoring the audience of the search engine – and it’s one of the most influential publics we have. Search engines don’t buy our products and they don’t write the news – but they influence everyone who does. No one knows this better than Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing. His business is built on optimizing brands’ online performance, and he believes that ‘Optimized PR’ – the practice of integrating the opportunities offered by search engine optimization and social media into your PR – is the future.