Online Marketing Blog

Most companies understand the benefits of a well-executed online PR strategy: improved brand visibility and industry reputation, increased traffic to the company website and even sales. It’s no wonder that companies trip over themselves to come up with a regular stream of PR related content.

Unfortunately, lower barriers to entry for publishing and distributing information have resulted in a plethora of non-news littering the web.

Is there any harm in “putting it all out there,” as in writing and distributing a press release for every event, newsworthy or not? I’d argue that yes, there is potential harm. As an industry journalist, I’ve personally become annoyed with companies or PR people sending me twice-weekly emails about everything under the sun. Whether someone has moved up internally or a company is seeking another round of funding, isn’t exactly compelling news.

The transition from old to new technology creates both challenges and opportunities for communications professions.  The field of public relations is directly tied to the publishing industry which of course, is directly connected to business and consumer information discovery and consumption.  The migration from offline to online has left these industries in a state of flux and traditional PR becoming increasingly digital is no exception.

There are tactical challenges as well as strategic. For example, the shift towards digital communications means a new set of tools must be learned in order to accomplish today’s PR goals.  Now more than ever, public relations professionals need to familiarize themselves with a new arsenal of tools to adjust and thrive in a digital world.

Today I did a webinar with PRWeb on how to improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization) results by using online public relations tactics. With 15 minutes to present, there wasn’t a lot of tactical detail. At TopRank we’ve done a pretty good job at identifying trends in a way small and large business marketers can understand. Concepts like “push and pull PR”, “digital asset optimization” and “press release optimization” have helped many marketers realize the benefits of SEO from different perspectives. The embedded slides below touch on several of these concepts:

Of course, feedback and questions are always welcome. The webinar had about 350 participants online and there were well over 70 questions posed.

Many companies narrowly define PR activities online solely as blogger relations when in reality, online public relations is so much more. To me, internet based public and media relations encompasses gaining editorial exposure on the web with sites like blogs of course, but it also leverages web based technologies, networks and platforms for developing and maintaining more efficient communication with the media. And by “media” I mean traditional media with an online presence as well as other influencers – be they bloggers, power social news users or social networkers.

Communication efforts might happen online, but the media exposure outcomes may be in print or the web. The question arises, if the connections are made and maintained online using online PR and social media tools, but the exposure is offline, is it still online PR? I say yes.