Search is a hot topic at the moment. With innovations in mobile and local search and the impact of real time mentions and social media, the competition for the much sought over front page position is hotting up. For some, the temptation may be to take advantage of one (some) of the many free press release distributors in the hope of creating  a few of those juicy Google links –

Here’s why we don’t think they should jump in, without looking deeper…

Death by association:

Your content might be good, but there’s no saying what it might be next to.  Scanning the headlines on a couple of the leading free press release sites shows that “Innovative Bilingual Program Builds Bright Future for YCIS Beijing Students” is next to “New Website Scores You On How “Do-able” You Are” and “Sceneric relaunches Frasers Autographs on hybris”  precedes  “Inspired or expired meat! Can cancer make you feel horny?” With little say in what your content will sit alongside – both in terms of other stories and links –  the reputational risk is definitely worth considering.

But press release pages are for journalists and not consumers, right?

Well, yes. It could be argued that journalists are accustomed to sifting through press releases to identify the relevant stories; however, what you’re paying for in traditional press release distribution sites – direction, focus, proactive targeting – is lost when you take out the price. As Daryl Willcox from DWP Publishing said in an Econsultancy interview last year: “You get what you pay for with free press release distribution services. Enough said.”

So, free press release sites aren’t great at taking a story to the right person, but what about generating online links?

An SEO strategy?

As one of the determinants of page ranking, the promise of online links might be enough, on its own, to tempt businesses towards free press releases. There are few flaws in this thinking. For a start, not all the free press release sites that we reviewed permitted live links, and the majority did not permit anchor text. And then, the risk to reputation that we were talking about earlier? With some recent noise around the quality of Google’s search and the consequent demotion of low quality, spammy sites, a link is not always an asset.

This extract from the Google blog illustrates the point:

“As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.”

Recommendations

Google’s emphasis on relevance is the key, we think, to both effective online content strategies and getting a news story out. The internet may have opened up the media, but some of the old rules still apply:

• Targeted approach: Invest time in identifying, targeting and developing relationships with appropriate online influencers. Individually pitching your news angle to the top people you’ve identified within your market is more likely to result in coverage and any links will be more valuable due to the relevant content they’re associated with.

• Content strategies: Having high quality content online is more likely to generate natural linkage and encourage share-ability.  Ensure that content is well optimised for search so that news is discoverable and will appear in any relevant online searches.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

You might be aware that Twitter recently updated its terms and conditions, so we thought it was worth highlighting what these changes might mean for brands that use the micro-blogging site.

Advertising

Although no specific announcement has been made regarding advertising, the new terms make it clear that Twitter is seriously considering using adverts to generate revenue. Clearly, this will have an effect on organisations which use Twitter as a PR and marketing channel – the main implication being that they could end up with adverts on their pages that they have absolutely no control over.

We suspect what will happen is that Twitter will roll out advertising at the same time as paid-for ad-free accounts to kill two birds with one stone, since no business would want to allow third party adverts on its page, least of all if it had no say over what those adverts will be.

Content Ownership

Twitter makes it clear that publishers still own the copyright of their tweets, but by publishing them on Twitter they allow the company rights to distribute that content through its websites and API. There’s very little to worry about here, Twitter isn’t about to start doing nasty things with people’s content, since that would immediately scare away all of the business users which are most likely to contribute to its future revenues.

One potential issue in this area is that the content is published to the API which third party developers can then use for any number of things. At the moment there’s nothing bad happening in that space, but it’s worth keeping an open mind about what unscrupulous people might use the content for in future – although it’s safe to assume that Twitter will quickly block access to anybody who’s using the API for illegal/spammy behaviour.

UPDATE: Netimperative reports that Twitter has ruled out introducing advertising this year.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

You may have read that Facebook recently added a new feature which allows you to ‘tag’ other users in updates, which works in the same way as Twitter’s @ reply feature. We think this will have a significant impact on brands which are active on Facebook.

How does the new feature work?

When writing a wall post, users can now easily link directly to the profile of other another Facebook user, fanpage, or group. This can (and will) be used by consumers to specifically direct comments at brands on Facebook.

What does this mean for PR?

If you have a fanpage or group on Facebook, users can now address comments directly to you from their wall. The comments they address at you will be displayed on your wall as well as their own.

This means that Facebook now allows users to engage in public and highly visible conversations with brands, in exactly the same way as Twitter. As with all conversations that take place in a public arena, there are opportunities and risks: negative comments will be seen by large numbers of people, and brands which either fail to respond, or provide an inadequate response, are likely to suffer.

Conversely, actively engaging with consumers who direct comments at your brand can have real benefits. A recent survey by Trendstream found that 30% of people say their opinion of a brand improves as a result of it listening to people’s comments on social networks.

What action should be taken?

Assuming you are already regularly checking your Facebook page, you probably don’t need to carry out any additional monitoring and we expect that in the short term most brands won’t notice much difference.

However, as Facebook users become more familiar with this new feature we expect that it will be used in a similar fashion to the equivalent Twitter feature, and brands will begin to notice an increasing volume of comments directed at them. As this becomes the case, you may need to allocate resources to responding to these comments – ignoring them is not an option!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

One of the most interesting changes taking place as the PR industry evolves into an online discipline is the increased emphasis on measurement. In the old days of offline PR, little attention was paid to systematically analysing the relative success of campaigns, because measuring PR is hard to do. Measures that attempted to pin a quantifiable return on investment to PR activity, such as Advertising Value Equivalent were woolly at best.

But that’s all changing and it seems that PR isn’t getting a free ride any more. All of a sudden, acronyms like ROI and KPI are being applied to an industry that has long been used to justifying its budget with a ring-binder full of shiny, laminated press-clippings. There is now a far greater expectation that PR should provide hard evidence of its impact on the bottom line.

There are two things PR agencies can do about this:

• Keep banging on about how the qualitative nature of PR makes it impossible to measure in the same way as other disciplines

• Figure out how we can use all of these new metrics which are available in the online world to put together some kind of robust and repeatable framework for measuring the value of PR activity with some degree of consistency

You might like to take a guess at which of those approaches is likely to win the most new business.

Of course, there’s already a lot of healthy debate and discussion about PR measurement in the blogosphere, and it’s no surprise that a lot of the big names in PR have their own ideas about the most effective approach.

On the one hand, it’s good that there’s so much interest in solving the problem, but on the other hand, it looks unlikely that an industry-wide consensus will be reached any time soon. Obviously, everybody wants to implement a measurement standard that best represents their own strengths, and it doesn’t help that any discussion on the subject invariably gets sidetracked into an esoteric debate about the nature of influence.

Obviously there’s still a long way to go before this is anywhere close to being solved, but at least there now seems to be broad acceptance that rigorous measurement will be key to the PR industry’s future.

However the measurement debate unfolds, I think it’s absolutely key to ensure that the metrics used are properly aligned with the client’s business goals.  All too often, arbitrary KPIs are chosen simply to provide a tick-box for PR staff to show that they’ve done some work, with little consideration into how exactly they help the business achieve its ultimate aims. And that’s a far worse situation to be in than the old days where we relied solely on qualitative reporting, which at least had some kind of value.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites