A strong SEO PR campaign focuses on choosing the right keywords to create a balance between words that most accurately describe the company and those that are “search engine friendly,” that is, they have low competition in search queries. By optimizing and distributing press releases online and using RSS feeds and other forms of social media, the press release has the ability to grow behind just print media and have a longer life online. The release will often be picked up and archived by a multitude of sites that pull relevant news feeds, which means that the press release’s message gets instant online visibility, and if the content is something people want to read it will naturally spread through social bookmarking sites such as Digg or social networking sites like Twitter.

SEO efforts can be further strengthened by having the keywords included in the release’s copy link back to your website. Besides increased visibility, this can be very powerful as the sites that are likely to pick up your online release are usually relevant to the content being distributed, which helps increase your rankings. Remember to use relevant keywords as anchor text for your links, too, and avoid anchor text like “click here”. But don’t go overboard:  putting too many links in a press release, article or blog entry can actually negatively impact your rankings, so just choose the most relevant key words to highlight. Lastly, when you create a press release, make sure it’s newsworthy and relevant to your target audience to maximize exposure..

Besides optimizing your written online content, other PR strategies to help build SEO include:

• Posting commentary on relevant industry blogs, forums or open source “wikis” with links back to your website can help boost visibility online.  Commentary should add value to readers, so it helps to keep blatantly self promotional language to a minimum.

• Social networking sites like Facebook and Linkedin are a no-brainer for companies looking to building web awareness. These sites have very high SEO visibility, are inexpensive and offer a relatively easy and instantaneous way to communicate company news, distribute video, post photos or start a discussion with target audiences. They are also much less expensive and time consuming than updating your own web site

• Registering your company in online directories (such as Philly Ad Club) is another cost effective way to increase rankings. Potential clients may be searching these organizations for new potential partners, and if you’re not listed, you won’t be on their short list of targets.

Like traditional PR, Clients are still extremely focused on immediate, demonstrable ROI rather than longer-term metrics such as branding, site stickiness, or correlating search behavior to other marketing/pr programs. Forms of measurable results therefore can be found in increased traffic to your web site, an increase in your keyword footprint, search engine rankings, online press release pickup and traffic generated from the release.

SEO PR is evolving every day with the addition of new social networks, web sites and online tracking devices. While there is no one-size-fits-all formula for SEO PR, there is almost always a unique mix that is right for your company. Smart use of PR and SEO provides a cost-effective way to harness the power of the web to help meet your marketing and business goals.

This may seem like a great idea in theory, but is it a reasonable request of your PR firm? Of course it is.  Public relations has the ability to generate revenue, enhance efficiency, identify and avoid potential crises, increase the likelihood to purchase your brand, reinforce organizational values, establish credibility, increase customer loyalty, influence customer and employee behavior and so much more.  The key to measuring these results? Establishing clear, measurable goals, creating an open dialogue between client and agency, and yes, some of the budget allotted specifically to the task of measurement.

Share Information
Inherently measurement is a comparative tool.  To determine whether a campaign is successful or not, the results need a benchmark from which to compare the results.  Depending on the goals established, the benchmark can be company performance over time, traffic to the company website, number of mentions in the press vs. the competition, etc.  Most companies have done some sort of analysis (as basic as it may have been) on their employees, customers, competition, sales, or any other aspect of the company.  This information can be invaluable for a new PR campaign and can serve as a benchmark to measure business outcomes against.  Providing this information to your PR firm is also a quick way to save some upfront costs.

Think Beyond the Marketing Department
The objectives of a public relations campaign should tie into the overall business objectives of the company.  More often than not a client will share with us their marketing objectives, but give no detail on the overall objectives and goals of the company.  For a campaign to be successful and provide results that influence business outcomes, every business objective needs to be taken into consideration, even if it’s not immediately apparent that it relates to marketing.  Don’t be afraid to tell your PR firm the full story.  The more information we have the better we will be able create a campaign that marries your communications and business objectives.   

Hard Number Cost, Well, Hard Numbers
There are many ways to analyze the results of a public relations campaign, ranging from free web tools like Google Analytics to more expensive software applications that can track and analyze media relations results.   According to USC Annenberg, a general rule of thumb is that the cost of measurement should average 3-7 percent of the total public relations budget.    The more detailed the analysis, the more time and resources necessary to be dedicated to the project. 

Determining the results of a PR campaign is no longer a guessing game. With a dedicated PR team, a well thought-out strategy and plenty of planning, PR programs can drive business performance, which should make everyone happy.

How then do you attempt a viral campaign with chance of success?  Is there a formula to follow?  Dan Goodswen proves that there is definitely precedent to follow.  For the film industry specifically, there are aspects of certain campaigns that seem successful.  For films, it seems that if the viewer is questioning if something is true or not “the buzz” increases.  Call us conspiracy theorists, but examples like Blair Witch Project, Fight Club, and the Dark Knight fit the mold. Toeing the line with the ‘is it real?’ question creates hype.  Thinking outside the box is not necessarily better.  The Da Vinci Code tried games and puzzles on the internet, a campaign deemed too ambitious to be successful.

Now, viral videos are less underground.  We wake up to infectious and creative videos featured on the Today Show, videos are forwarded to our inboxes, and websites like Digg and Stumbleupon tell us what people everywhere are looking at.  What is so great, is that if your campaign is good, there are people tweeting until they are blue in the face fingers, and people will hear about it.

It is easy to connect youtube videos with viral campaigns but what else is out there?  Hershey’s used sponsored house parties, luring nearly 150,000 guests.  HBO series True Blood created fake beverage ads and a vampire-human dating site, causing viewership to grow 66% over the course of the first season. (Source:  http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/135/spread-the-word.html)

These numbers are impressive, no doubt.  Back to deciphering a formula, the answer for one constant success story is still at large.  The only consistency appears to be that any successful viral marketing campaign needs to ‘go big or go home’ in this pass/fail grading system.

With the advent of social media, public relations agencies now have competition from places where there was never competition before, such as interactive agencies and engaged individuals. With predictions that social media will replace television and the main news sources altogether, where do public relations firms fit into that equation? In his recent article on AdWeek.com, Joseph Jaffe asked “how ‘relations’ between corporations and journalists equate with real people hanging out with other real people.” In other words, if corporations and journalists are now speaking directly to each other, how is there still a need for public relations?

While I disagree with Jaffe and believe that the public relations industry is not going to vanish, public relations practitioners will need to adapt to survive, and those who don’t will not be in existence for much longer. In a world where journalists are speaking directly with corporations, public relations practitioners now more than ever need to show their value. Part of that value is measuring relationships. Public relations measurement is a way for practitioners to put hard numbers and solid data in front of C-suite decision makers. The value that measurement provides clients is invaluable for public relations firms’ survival.

The authors of the USC Annenberg Gap IV study found that the public relations profession is not doing enough to demonstrate its value relative to other disciplines such as advertising and marketing. It is imperative for public relations practitioners to demonstrate quantitative means that go beyond simple numerical counts of media clips before even considering getting a larger share of the total communications expenditure.

In order to make this happen, public relations practitioners first need to get educated about measurement. In their analysis of the increasing impacts of social and other new media on public relations practice, Wright and Hinson found that while more than 90% of the study’s respondents encourage the use of research to measure various aspects of how blogs and social media are influencing their organization, only about one-third say their companies are conducting this measurement. The same study found that more than 90% of respondents very strongly agree that measurement and evaluation about blogs and social media should focus not only on outputs but also on content analysis and outcomes; however, in reality, most measurement is directed only at outputs. What’s interesting about the results of this study is that while public relations practitioners are aware that measurement is important, very few are actually conducting meaningful measurement, and are still just counting outputs.

Public relations practitioners need to think beyond outputs as evaluation and realize that for public relations to remain an item on the marketing budget there needs to be a direct link between programs and achieving the objectives of the corporation. Building measurement into proposals for services should be the norm and building evaluation into budgets should be essential.

This is a change that those in the public relations industry should embrace. Social media are actually putting the “public” back into public relations, and who better to measure relationships with the public than the practitioners who have been influencing them for years?

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