Hi. I am James Crawford, a PR man. Media relations is my specialism, but public relations is changing and the internet is at the heart of it.
I'm a Manchester dweller and lover of the media. I have too much music, support Manchester United and adore all things French.
I currently work for a Citypress, Manchester's biggest and best PR consultancy, but all the thoughts on here are my own and nothing to do with my employers.
The link between SEO and PR is nothing new but recently everyone’s been talking it. More and more public relations and optimisation consultancies are starting to truly understand the interrelation between the two disciplines, although there are lots of consultancies who talk the talk but can’t walk the walk.
In both the SEO and PR industries there is widespread debate about consolidation between the two specialisms, and I expect over the next few years that the big PR groups will be acquiring SEO companies (in fact a few mergers, buyouts and even senior appointments of SEOs are already taking place).
Despite this trend, too many SEO and PR companies just don’t understand the other’s profession.
Some SEOs think that PR is submitting content to newswires, while there are far too many PR people that don’t even know what optimisation is or why an in-bound link has value, let alone more advanced SEO concepts.
Those of us in PR know that, while submitting content to newswires and article sites has SEO benefits, very few techniques can create high quality links like PR. And when I say PR I mean, good old fashioned media relations, never mind the ‘social’ side.
For example, can an SEO company get you a link on the BBC website? Only good old media relations can do that.
Likewise, though, can the average PR, fiddle under the hood of a website to optimise your site for search purposes, The answer is of course ‘no’.
The two disciplines need each other.
As illustration of the similarity between SEO and PR, during a recent PR campaign I analysed how many links were created and now pointing to a client’s site.
Over a third of all the links created were from press coverage or blogger engagement. And we hadn’t even been trying to build links; this was merely a by product of our work.
There are other metrics too, like site traffic and bounce rates, but it is the basics (link building) that many don’t understand.
In summary, SEO and PR are incredibly complementary for these eight reasons:
1 – 65 per cent of Google rankings are made up of off-page factors, such as in bound links
2 – PR campaigns naturally create inbound links, almost as a by product
3 – It is very easy to measure inbound links and prove that they were generated by PR
4 – Good public relations consultancies secure their clients links on high quality sites, such as the BBC, or other national newspapers. The sort of links SEO companies can only dream of
5 – SEO professionals can provide insight for PR campaigns, such as helping define key messaging or campaign targeting. PRs should work with SEO professionals where possible
6 – PR professionals can help with on-site SEO, by developing fresh content, rich in keywords (e.g. a blog, social content)
7 – PR activity can also help dictate the nature of the anchor text (which is another SEO factor)
8 – PR can also improve your social graph. (yet another contributing factor to SEO)
For PR people interested in thought leadership, Q&A tools like Yahoo Answers have failed to deliver. In fact, sites like these have been the subject of much derision. Since 2008 a service called Quora has been emerging, and it is now about to break into the mainstream.
The increasing amount of unique users (see fig 1.) is not the main reason for jumping to this conclusion; nor is the user experience that sees a community which is ready to provide insight on serious industry topics, or light hearted fun stuff too.
Fig1.
stats
It is also not the way Quora combines the best of a wiki, Reddit and the ability to share your questions with a wider community on Twitter or Facebook.
The reason behind why Quora is so useful is that it is a genuine source of insight and a huge thought leadership opportunity for anyone willing to make best use of it.
I found it useful, if a little difficult to grasp at first, and I did make a few mistakes (putting comments where answers should be etc). However, I think in part it is this complexity which has kept Quora high brow compared to Yahoo Answers.
For the uninitiated, here are a few notes on Quora. Rather than writing my own thoughts, I felt it made more sense to construct this post from questions asked by me and others.
Why are the responses on Quora better than Yahoo Answers?
Speaking from my design instincts alone: Yahoo! Answers was designed for a very broad audience, and as with any service designed for a broad audience, you have to design for lower common denominators. That is, people who rely on dead simplicity and the ability to ask and answer questions easily. Over simplification and making something too easy can be a reason why the overall quality of information on a service is poorer – it’s simply too much perceived effort to create high quality information. Quora, with its more sophisticated features, seems to have been designed for a much narrower audience that cares highly about the quality of information that flows through the community
What is the need for Quora when Yahoo! Answers has such widespread adoption?
First, it’s all about the users and their interests. Yahoo’s user base is significantly different from Quora’s. They talk about different things. They answer in different ways. Early adopters set the tone and expectations of a community, and while Quora may/should/will eventually move beyond the silicon valley crowd, the culture is being shaped now by us social software loving alpha geeks.
Second, it’s hard for sites to evolve models once they have established communities. Yahoo Answers was cutting edge in 2006, but it doesn’t have wiki edits and its reputation system could use an update. Not all user bases can withstand significant changes, and you run the risk of driving them away.
How can I follow topics on Quora?
Almost anywhere you see a topic, it will either have a green “Follow” button next to it. If you click that button, you’ll start following the topic.
If the topic doesn’t have a follow button next to it, you can usually click on the topic name which will take you to the topic page where this is a big green “Follow” button in the top right.
Following a topic means you’ll see questions about that topic in your feed and it will be listed on your profile
I suspect they’ll have nearly complete indexation within 3-7 days. However, depending on whether the pages they encounter produce duplicate content or faceted navigations that show a lot of the same links/questions/answers, they may start dropping a lot of that over time. Hopefully, Quora’s been thoughtful about how they built their information architecture to help solve this potential
How long will it take Google to index Quora? (answered by Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz)
I suspect they’ll have nearly complete indexation within 3-7 days. However, depending on whether the pages they encounter produce duplicate content or faceted navigations that show a lot of the same links/questions/answers, they may start dropping a lot of that over time. Hopefully, Quora’s been thoughtful about how they built their information architecture to help solve this potential issue.
Is Steve Jobs trying to protect Apple’s public relations image by deflecting negative PR attention towards himself?
As public relations crises go, Apple’s iPhone 4 launch is up there in second place behind BP’s oil leak.
The product launch has been besieged by negative press and PR coverage regarding the product’s aerial and connection.
Recently, many bloggers have focused on an email from Steve Jobs, in which he emailed a customer and allegedly said that the phone worked perfectly well and claimed customers are holding the handsets incorrectly.
Steve Jobs has a track record of replying to people personally by email, as illustrated by this Steve Jobs’ blog. As you can see, often his emails are short and terse.
Now, the latest public relations issue is revolving around whether these emails were real or fake.
This made me ask myself the question: is this email exchange an intentional PR tactic-come-stunt by Apple? It sounds like a crazy PR strategy to cook up a stink for your brand in this way. Or does it?
Are people now talking about the incredible failings of Apple’s New Product Development team, or is the focus on the crazy public relations style of Steve Jobs? Or, put more accurately, is Steve Jobs deflecting some of the negative attention away from the brand?
Engadget, Erictric, Gawker, 9 to 5 Mac, Mobility Site, Electronista, Gizmodo, everythingiCafe and Techcrunch have all published the email story. What is more, Steve Jobs’ email is the number two story on Techmeme and a top ten story on aggregator Popurls.com.
There are other famous examples of this tactic working to great effect. Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager, is also expert at this type of crisis management.
When his team is in trouble, he will pick a crazy fight with a referee, another club manager etc, just to take the heat off the team. Just read a few of these perfectly executed PR and press sound bites if you don’t believe me.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this was what Tony Hayward at BP was trying to do in the US (but badly). Most CEOs have shares in the business, and the last thing they want to see is their investment being hit.
If push comes to shove, a CEO can get another job fairly easily. Of greater importance to them is the value of the business and the return to their shareholders.
It is very easy to measure PR sentiment and other public relations objectives, like public opinion and a move like this can be carefully stage managed.
A large corporate like Apple can control their PR communications in many ways and a brave CEO won’t mind taking a bullet for the corporation, as long as it’s not a terminal blow.
My guess is that the PR Week article didn’t reflect the depth at which each of these points were discussed. Instead it inspired me to write this post on measurement.
So, just how can you measure PR?
Prior planning
What seems to be missing from most PR blog posts on this subject is that measurement should begin before a proposal has even been written.
Public relations experts use planning tools, similar to those used in advertising, to find out about:
- Markets, products, services, demographics, media and attitudes, e.g. TGI data or Caci for example
- online media profiling, e.g. using www.google.com/adplanner or Metrica’s http://www.metrica.net/ tools, which I have used.
Note, I promised to blog about Metrica because I used their great planning tool but fatherhood distracted me, sorry lads.
By undertaking planning, PR consultants can target campaigns, but also help to inform objective setting. More on this later.
Set public relations objectives
The first important step is to set SMART PR objectives
- e.g. achieve a three per cent sales increase on an e-commerce site by targeting the travel media.
Without SMART KPIs you can’t measure. Don’t be scared to set PR objectives which link directly to business outcomes, rather than media coverage objectives. However don’t neglect media objectives too.
What to measure?
Impact
It doesn’t matter if an article had all your key messages in and was 32 pages long if it had no impact with your target audience. To measure impact you can:
- Use sales or footfall data. Have you seen a return on investment? What was it?
- Monitor behavioural change. Read this post on behavioural economics
- Undertake opinion tracking studies of customers.
- What do they think?
- Has it changed?
- Research the views analysts and industry experts
- Survey your staff.
Competitors
Don’t just monitor yourself. Monitor your competitors PR activity.
- As a percentage has their share of voice decreased?
- What is the impact of their campaign on yours? What do your customers think of them?
- Demonstrate client and competitor social search visibility.
SEO
PR has a huge impact on SEO so measure it. Too many PR agencies fail when it comes to measuring online coverage. IT IS SIMPLE TO DO.
- Use Yahoo Site Explorer to measure backlinks.
- Map out when press coverage was achieved and overlay it to Google Analytics data on site visitors.
- Is there a correlation?
- Referral sites, where did visitors come from?
- Compare news content ranking with competitors.
- Run a keyword ranking report and compare to a competitors.
- Set keyword ranking goals and overlay any changes with PR coverage.
Interaction
Has your campaign created interaction with a community or group, both on or off line? Radian6 is good for online but expensive. In the real world, maybe monitoring the impact on third parties is a job for a community relations officer?
Coverage measurement
Don’t forget that nothing makes the client happier than clippings. Although the real power of public relations is shown with its impact on the business, a managing director loves to see physical results.
- How many clippings, articles, bookmarks, retweets, reblogs, readers or viewers have you achieved?
- Group the media based on importance. Is this a tier one, two or three title (one being most important)?
- Regionality: are you reaching all the right places both globally and locally.
- Photography: it’s a metric for print media, but a picture can really improve page impact, and readability.
- Advertising equivalent value (AVE): Firstly contrary to the CIPR, AVE is OK and is not “dead”, it is just not that important in the grand scheme of things.
- Key messages: create key messages and measure their number, prominence and effect on the overall tone of the article. This can be done:
o quantitatively (e.g. how many times these appeared in the article.)
o qualitatively (e.g. was the theme of the article consistently on or off message?)
o by analysing use of spokespeople: where they quoted?
o Favourability.
- Journalists/ analyst/ blogger tracking: what are they saying and why and has it changed over time?
- Social-economic penetration: has the coverage reached your target audience?
- Reach frequency and opportunities to see.
There are lots more different ways to measure, but I am stopping now. I could go on and on and on. If you want to know more about PR measurement, drop me a line or visit AMEC.
Public relations is all about targeting. Sometimes PR professionals chose online media for their campaigns, other times broadcast is a better channel to get a communications message across.
In a recent PR post about online media and the world cup, it was suggested that FIFA has missed a trick with social media for this year’s World Cup.
My take in this public relations conundrum is that while FIFA has ‘dropped the ball’ with online media, it might have decided to:
1. ignore social media on inclusivity grounds
2. avoid the complex task of running a pan-global social media campaign
Firstly let’s look at point 1. Why would FIFA ignore social platforms on inclusivity grounds? Social media is the most inclusive form of media ever created, right?
My answer is simple. While I can afford a smart phone, a laptop, broadband and other modern luxuries, fans in North Korea or even in parts of host nation South Africa probably can’t.
Would moving parts of the World Cup experience into social media be excluding large numbers of people, perhaps the majority of football fans, from enjoying the tournament on an equal level to the rest of us?
I think it is very easy to argue “yes”. Just look at this map as an example, and look how many missing countries there are with no social platforjms at all.
Fig. 1.1. Click on the image to make it large enough to read on screen
Some might say that a true pan-global campaign should be tailored per country, allowing for use of social sites in some countries and not so in others, but I am not sure that this would be the right thing to do in this instance.
Football is a unifying force, so why exclude people from the experience? We are already seeing poor South Africans being priced out of tickets to matches, and this exclusion doesn’t need to be made any more prominent.
TV is still the number one medium globally, so let’s not forget that. I have been to rural villages in Asia and Africa and found families with TVs. It might be that during the tournament an entire village is crowded around one TV, but at least most villages can access a TV. Therefore a broadcast campaign should be the favoured platform.
Now let’s consider point 2, i.e. that a pan-Global campaign is just too difficult for FIFA. It is a slightly depressing consideration, but probably quite likely.
This presentation below starts to illustrate how difficult FIFA’s task would be. The presentation looks at which online media is popular in different countries, but even this very comprehensive study has lots of gaps, where there is no data, or possibly internet usage, i.e. Africa, parts of South America etc. Again, making a social media campaign is difficult to say the least.
Even in the ‘developed’ world some social platforms are more important than others. In Holland, for example, Facebook is not the number one platform and Twitter is even less popular. The Differences between platforms in other countries is a huge barrier and a complex problem.
Difficulty is no excuse of course for not giving social media a go. To the contrary, but while there are still organisations in the UK, US and elsewhere who are still baulking at trying social media because of a lack of understanding, one can imagine that perhaps FIFA found the task just too challenging.
I am sure I am not the first Public Relations person to trot out the old cliché that talent borrows and genius steals. With this in mind I thought I would share a few PR blogs from which I have learn so much over the past few years.
Firstly let’s get the big two out of the way:
• Steve Rubel is a PR giant and runs one of the most authoritative public relations blogs on the planet http://www.steverubel.com. This PR blog gives clear and concise advice on all things online, without the usual jargon and “social media guru” nonsense
• Bridging the gap nicely from the US to the UK PR industry is American expat Fernando Rizo with his blog. Too many PR people fall into the Chris Morris / Nathan Barley school of idiot, but I have met Fernando and not only is he a well rounded human being, he also knows his stuff. His blog is free of the usual pretention which litters public relations
• Litman Live is an exceptional PR blog authored by public relations’ man Mike Litman . His blog is a lifestream of all the great stuff he finds on the web, along with his own posts
• Adam Vincenzini ‘s PR blog is superb, although I prefer his Posterous blog, which is rougher around the edges but full of rebloggable insight
• Mark Borkowski is famous as a stuntster and maverick. His public relations blog is at its best when discussing the murky world of celebrity PR
• Citypress is Manchester’s best PR agency and although I am culpable for not writing a post for it since April – gulp – it is worth keeping an eye on it for occasional works of genius
• We shouldn’t forget the young either and Ben Cotton’s PR blog is a great example to ‘new breed’ practitioners of public relations who are trying to enter the world of PR. His blog screams employability as does Kat4pr which is the blog of Katerina Hejralova.
Who would have thought that sharing on Facebook increases when titles have numbers in them? The rest of this post from Brian Solis is interesting too. Have a read.
I hate the term ‘social media’ and I think we should kill it off once and for all.
It is meaningless, confusing and doesn’t convey the real concept.
Here are a few thoughts on the matter:
1. What we are really talking about is how we share information, not social media, whatever that meant.
2. Most of the ‘old’ media has incorporated elements of ‘sharing’ via the Internet, so splitting the media by old and social is inaccurate.
3. In fact, media has always been ‘social’. Talking, gossiping, letter writing and even watching TV can be a social experience where we share.
4. No media exists in isolation, each channel – TV, newspapers, Reddit or whatever – influences the other
5. Why lump blogs, forums, wikis, bookmarking, microblogging, geolocation and innovations like Stickybits together? They are all so different and some have more in common with ‘old’ media than we think.
6. If we kill social media we can get rid of annoying social media gurus.
As you can see, a compelling argument. I know I have used the term social media in the past too, but as of late it has started to annoy me.
I work in public relations and until recently used a Blackberry, however for the PR professional, there is no better device than the iPhone for bringing together Web 2.0 technology. Here is my list of killer apps. I’m hoping by writing this that others will recommend apps that I’ve missed. Please suggest others by way of comments.
WordPress – I’m writing this post via the WordPress app from my bed while my three week old baby sleeps on top of me. You can write, tag, upload photos and approve comments. It’s pretty damn fine actually.
Google Analytics – this is on here by default as I actually hate Google Analytics, but I can’t find a better tool for measuring traffic while out and about.
Delicious, Instapaper and Evernote – Delicious for archiving and retriving useful stuff and Instapaper for filing stuff to read later. Evernote allows you to archive anything and tag it so it can be found later. Useful!
Sky+ – for recording Man Utd. Obviously. Or perhaps client coverage.
Guardian, Telegraph, Sky News, The MEN, Thomson Reuters, Digg, Reddit – for keeping up to date.
Foursquare – I disagreed on Twitter with Robert Scoble on the potential for Foursquare. I just don’t see it as a B2B tool. However it is not to say that I don’t find it useful, especially the tips section which helps me gain insights about local restaurants etc.
Dropbox – storage in the cloud. You can keep anything here. This app is so useful that I might pay and upgrade so I have 100gb storage.
Stickybits – one day someone will use this app for the purposes of brandalism and you PR people will be glad that you know about it. At the moment though Stickybits is a not much more than untapped potential and a social media curiousity. Fun though!
Polarize and Quadcam – so you are blogging on the go and want a photo for your post. An iPhone photo can be pretty poor quality but you can spruce them up no end with these little beauties.
Ustream – I have 3gs envy. With
The 3gs device and Ustream you can broadcast directly from your iPhone.
Tweetie 2 – again, pretty much the definitive Twitter app. There are lots of blogs on this app, so I’ll move on.
Facebook, Google, Flickr, Youtube etc – again standard but essential stuff.
PUBLIC RELATIONS AND SOCIAL MEDIA – There is a new social media tool called Stickybits, which I think could be big and has implications for both B2C and B2B PR and marketing – along with anyone who likes messing around with the interweb.
The premise is that you can attach videos, music, text, PDFs, Zips or anything to a given barcode. The idea sounds a bit bizarre at first until you consider when, how and by whom it can be used. Stickybits is currently receiving lots of hype on the blogs and also in the mainstream media with the LA Times among others writing about the service.
B2B PR and Marketing
Imagine you are an office products manufacturer and you want people to be able to access your product manual, a message from your Managing Director, good reviews about your product, feedback from other consumers or, well, pretty much anything. All this content can be attached to a barcode. No longer does a consumer need to turn to the internet and make a search about your brand. Instead this can all be shared via your barcode.
B2C PR and Marketing
Again, much like B2B, user generated content can be attached to your brand. This could be brand ambassadors or fans of your product waxing lyrical. Or, more likely, this could be activists making complaints about your products and services, or campaigning against you. Imagine if a complaint was the first thing that a customer finds when researching your brand? Not ideal!
Importantly, the first person who scans your product has veto over what else can be uploaded against your product. Imagine if this person is someone with a vendetta against your products. Simply put, someone else would have control of your brand’s presence.
Here is an example that I created for a Beer called Red Angus, so you can see the kind of content that can be attached to a bar code. (Excuse the use of my son in the video, any excuse to show off Armand. The content is somewhat daft too, but a guy has to have fun when blogging hey?)
As well as attaching content to existing code, you can print your own barcodes and stick them on anything. Here is an example barcode which can then be printed off and attached to anything. Their bar codes look like this:
There are some interesting examples of what to do with Stickybits here on their wiki.
Of course, it is still early days for Stickybits, but it is backed by people with proven track records in social media. There is also a limit to the popularity of Stickybits because use of it is largely limited to iPhone and Android phones. The app is currently available on iPhone and Android here.
Hi. I am James Crawford, a PR man. Media relations is my specialism, but public relations is changing and the internet is at the heart of it.
I'm a Manchester dweller and lover of the media. I have too much music, support Manchester United and adore all things French.
I currently work for a Citypress, Manchester's biggest and best PR consultancy, but all the thoughts on here are my own and nothing to do with my employers.
Be the First to Comment 
