Another 2011 trend predicted by ClickThrough has PR implications:

Many companies have excellent existing content in PDFs, brochures, PowerPoints and offline video that can be converted to digital assets, put online and filtered into the social web.

One way to do this is to publish your content on social platforms like Scribd, Slideshare, Docstoc and Issuu – they all have over a million unique visitors each month.

Google Trends shows how searches for Scribd took off in 2009 and stayed high through 2010. Slideshare is the next best bet in terms of web search and news search.

Edit video material and put short, interesting material on YouTube, now the 2nd biggest search engine. Don’t forget the option of making a short video of a slide deck with audio and uploading that to YouTube too.

These platforms shoulder the bandwidth and provide easy publishing tools, with features like descriptions and tagging, so your content gets indexed by the search engines and can easily be found on line.

Why is this so important?

Scribd is integrating with other social sites like Facebook and providing Twitter-like features of following and news feeds. They encourage sharing of the content to the person’s other social streams, which then get seen by their friends. This raises your search visibility and your online footprint.

PR Tip:

Start the New Year with a content inventory.

Find those gems that can be re-purposed and put online.

Use social platforms that encourage sharing and socialization.

Use a tracking service to measure the increase in visibility and engagement.