PR and search - so close, yet so far?

There was an enthusiastic exchange at yesterday's gathering of PR, search and social media professionals at the CIPR, one of the Social Summer series of discussions set up by grass-roots CIPR members.

I won't attempt a full summary - Speed Communications' Stephen Waddington has already done that, but I will share some of the stuff I put forward at the event.

Prior to the gathering we investigated what proportion of press releases on our Response Source/SourceWire Press Release Wire come from search marketing agencies rather than PR. Looking at all releases through our system in June this year, this figure turns out to be 20 per cent. That's a significant minority, and roughly double what it was in 2007 when I wrote my whitepaper warning that search would encroach on PR activity.

When you take this figure in the context of the press release embedded links statistics I shared a few weeks ago, which found that 67 per cent of releases on our wire include embedded links, then you can extrapolate that 47 per cent of releases originating from a PR source include embedded links. This is assuming that all releases from an SEO source include links, which is reasonable.

Of course, as Will McInnes from social media marketing agency Nixon McInnes quite rightly pointed out, understanding search is a lot more than just including links in press releases, but it is an interesting barometer of SEO knowledge within the PR industry. If less than half of the PR world understands something as basic as including links in press releases than that does seem dissapointing.

One issue that cropped up during the discussion is internal client strutures and how this could be a factor in the lack of integration of PR and search. In many companies, PR is handled by a PR or communications manager and search is handled by a marketing function. The former looks after brand repuation and the other is responsible for driving sales leads. Many agree that when PR and search work together the results are very powerful, but does this need change in internal client structures for this collaboration to happen effectively?

I think it was we are social's managing director Robin Grant made the point that small to medium businesses (SMEs) are perhaps more likely to get understand the benefits of PR and search working in tandem, as the client structure in these businesses is often a single person - the marketing manager. So perhaps it will be SME sector where the innovation comes from.

Comments

[Josie Herbert]

Daryl, you make some excellent points here. From my own conversations with smaller businesses it certainly would appear that the smaller the business the better their handle on social media, search and PR (in that order). A recent pitch to a small information security company (with big name clients) revealed that even though they claimed they'd "done no PR" they were using a search agency extremely successfully as well as forging very close links with their core press contacts. Their investment in search preceded their formal search for PR. I'll be following this blog thread closely. Thanks for sharing your observations.

[Andrew Bruce Smith]

I believe Kelvin from Site Visibility mentioned the distinction between technical SEO and link building SEO (crudely, the difference between on page vs off page SEO). And this maps on to the client structure issue. A client that has focussed on technical SEO has probably got non-PR/marketing people responsible for SEO. And if historically they've started with technical SEO, the same people are probably responsible for off page SEO if they move that way. In my experience, the responsibility for SEO can sit in a surprising array of different places within an organisation - which is part of the challenge. Also, big FMCG firms (with naturally Internet related sales models eg travel, insurance, etc) have been the ones that have embraced search most vigorously (and have more likelihood of having either dedicated in-house search specialists, or at least having it sit in marketing - though not PR).

SMEs definitely have a great opportunity to take a more integrated approach.