PR is adapting to digital too slowly - search expert says

I was chatting to bigmouthmedia’s Andrew Girdwood in the lunch break of a Fresh Business Thinking event last Friday and he repeated the concerns I touched upon in a whitepaper published a year ago about the tentative future of PR agencies.

Andrew still believes PR agencies are reacting too slowly to digital media and many will ultimately become obsolete. He also believes PR agencies need to work harder to communicate with and collaborate with search marketing agencies, and it’s in their own interests to do so.

To illustrate the point, Andrew gave the example that effective PR campaigns can trigger a massive increase in searches on the client brand name. And if the client invests heavily in paid search there can be a resultant spike in paid search clicks, but with most traffic being driven by curiosity the conversion rate drops. Suddenly, the client’s investment in paid search looks very poor, and points the finger unfairly at the search agency.

This is just one example of why PR professionals should communicate with and collaborate with search marketing. The situation above would be completely avoided with a bit of advance notice from PR agency to the search agency.

But the real reason search and PR should buddy-up is that when they do results can be amplified. The message can be spread further and wider and online traffic directed to the right place.

You could say that it’s the job of the client to ensure good intra agency communication. But I don’t believe that. I think it’s in the interests of all agencies with mutual clients to forge links and share information – it works for everyone. And only by engaging in digital media, and working with search agencies is just one part of that, will PR secure its future as a critical marketing discipline.

Comments

[Pixielated]

This is actually something that we have found also. As part of a search engine marketing agency communication between all of the client's agencies is so important for their continued success. Actually blogged about it the other day!

http://froggblog.leapfrogg.co.uk/2008/05/integration-differentiation.html

[Michael Kenward]

It is amazing how few PR folks have latched on to something as basic as RSS feeds.

Visit the PR pages of some of the world's biggest companies and reel back in amazement that they miss this basic trick. Boeing is a recent example that I have tried.

Then there are the people who have the wrong idea of how to use technology. Those "Flash" presentations for example that take you through a report, but offer no way of saving a copy locally as a PDF file. Once again, Boeing comes to mind.

PR people need to ask themselves how journalists work. How they like to file away web pages, for example.

Of course, the biggest crime is to post a "contact us" button or email address and then to ignore anything that turns up. This time I have Rolls-Royce in mind as an example.

Maybe the aerospace sector is just bad at technology. Worrying.

[Daryl Willcox]

Thanks for your comment Michael. You've given some good examples there.
As a private pilot the aerospace industry is close to my heart. It's a global industry but a very small one, and I suspect many aerospace PR professionals just focus on the contacts in their black book. That was fine before, but digital media means there are many more people talking online about aerospace now. Aerospace communications people, like those in any other industry, need to understand that.
I would love to give Boeing and Rolls-Royce a right to reply on this blog. But there is a lesson there - unless you track social media, you can't influence it. Let's see if they drop by.