Revolver

The media relations landscape has changed as traditional publications have downsized, re-focused online or been eliminated altogether.

As we all know, fundamentally, Public Relations serves two groups:  The companies that pay for representation and the journalists, analysts, reporters and increasingly, bloggers, that rely on PR professionals as a source of news content.

With this in mind, and considering advertising budgets have shifted online combined with changes in consumer information discovery, consumption and sharing habits via the social web present both challenges and opportunities for PR agencies to deliver more value to their clients.

In a 2008 Journalists Use of Search Survey by TopRank, 91% of respondents reported using standard search engines to perform activities such as research companies, past media coverage and subject matter experts.  In the same study, 64% reported using social networks, 55% use blogs and 50% use Wikis as social media tools.

The increased use of search and social media both by the media and by end consumers will no doubt motivate PR professionals to better understand the digital PR strategies and mechanics of successful SEO and social web participation.  Keyword research, content optimization and promotion along with link building make up the core of search engine optimization for news content.  Press releases, archived webinars, white papers, video, podcasts, blogs and past media coverage are all opportunities for news SEO.

Making it easy for journalists or end consumers to find and interact with news content can provide a substantial boost to PR results in a time where the value of PR budgets are in question. Digital public relations savvy agencies are making both traditional media relations, digital media relations and optimized news content work together.  Not to mention working to partner with journalists to provide content via push delivery, but can also optimize (SEO) news content to make it easy for story researchers to find companies the public relations firms represent.

The trend in hard times is for companies to cut all marketing costs that are not tied to direct sales.  Yet, some companies as we can vouch for are shifting budgets to smart, creative digitally enabled public relations efforts.  When no one else is marketing, there’s even more opportunity to stand out to prospective buyers.  So don’t shy away from digital pr, it’s the thing of the future don’t you know?