The media landscape is changing and PR needs to catch up fast.
There will be lots more announcements like this one in the months to come as clients begin to challenge their agency with questions like ‘’do you think we should have a blog?” and “what are we doing on second life?”. But if we are to avoid chasing fads we need to understand in precise detail what the media is changing into and how we can make clients useful to it.
There’s not a single newspaper group that hasn’t made significant job cuts this year as advertisers follow consumers online. News International are currently looking for 20 redundancies at the Sunday Times while TimesOnline continues to expand but PR’s response to this needs to be far more than just adding websites to our press release distribution lists.
We are not saying that traditional media will disappear, there will always be a role for trusted brands with stringent editorial checks and balances and newspapers have a role well into the future just because of their sheer portability. We should also remember that established media brands have a huge store of content and web 2.0 offers potential for them to have a deeper and richer offering.
But we are certainly moving away from a process of targeting a small number of elite press and broadcast journalists who have a finite amount of space and send out one-way messages. The new media is made up networks of inter-related online publishers that we need to know and understand if we are to ensure the right messages reach our audiences. We need to master the intelligent distribution of content, management of conversations and monitoring hundreds of media.
We are dealing with a media that is content hungry. It needs regularly refreshed content to attract eyeballs through Google, to keep people on their site for longer and to encourage users to pass on to their friends and for other sites and blogs to link to them. This equation of amount of relevant content on your site that other people have an incentive to link to and is regularly refreshed = higher Google ranking = more of the right people on a site is crucial to this new world order.
The bulk of people will arrive on a website, be it transactional, networking or a news site, via a search engine – usually Google. Search engines rank sites and therefore a brand’s chances of appearing high up a search page on link analysis and content analysis. Link analysis involves the search spiders calculating how many other sites are linking to it and also rating the quality of those links i.e. are those links from a trusted site or one that has lots of other sites linking to it (see I told you that equation would come in handy!). Content analysis involves the spiders looking at the site and looking for regularly updated content that mentions prominently the key words being searched for. Search engines make daily visits to sites that have frequently refreshed content and some such as the BBC get hourly visits. Less popular sites may get visited once a week.
So the new media badly needs (the right) content. However they typically don’t have the resources to produce it in-house. This gives us an opportunity to either offer guides, news articles, video or interactive tools that we supply in return for data capture, branding and/or live links back to our site which generate traffic and boost our own search ranking. We offer clients’ expertise through live webchats or leaving a post on a blog that has a discussion that’s relevant to their area of expertise or solving a query via a forum.
This new approach also means a PR programme that produces content with the right key words, that point to the correct pages on your site (not necessarily the home page) and are distributed in the correct format to sites within social networks that are read by your target audience.
I recently had a client who gave me the PR objective, yes PR objective of getting the brand to the top of Google on given search terms, which renders that exclusive with the Sunday Times almost pointless! This is a trend that will spread. PR practitioners need to get closer to the content and having a content production unit in-house that hosts webchats, tracks forums and blogs and produces video and audio is a must.
If PR people don’t do this then it will be colonised by SEO people yet it is we that have built our careers on understanding what media wants, building relationships and how we can secure space within that media on the basis of our client’s expertise, research, useful products and services i.e. content. Just goes to show some good ideas never go out of fashion!
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