Comments on: Why PR is losing the social media battle: Day Two

By: DarikaAhrens

DarikaAhrens — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:31:43 +0000

That raises a great point – everything in moderation! Yes it's awful when clients make requests like that as well. We might need a whole new series #fixclientexpectations

By: Claire Thompson

Claire Thompson — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:20:55 +0000

Another great piece.
I agree with the sentiment but die inside a little when clients give me a list of media properties and blogs they want to be on, a list of keywords terms, and a list of links they want the site to include forgetting that what comes out at the other end has to be readable and entertaining/informative for the site's readers.
Sadly. many have been sold the unrealistic expectation that the BBC will suddenly change its house style to accommodate the five key words and link that they want in the first para of the article.
Which, of course, we can try to influence by providing the right information, but cannot pretend to control.

By: DarikaAhrens

DarikaAhrens — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 01:39:06 +0000

I think you're bang on that this is a major way digital agencies are beating out PR agencies.

By: Paul Sutton

Paul Sutton — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:23:09 +0000

Another excellent piece, Darika. The way the web operates and the world of PR are converging at frightening speed, and SEO is the lynchpin that is holding and pulling them together. SEO is not an easy area to get to grips with, however, and that's where 'digital agencies' have a big lead on PRs.

Everything I learned about SEO I learned from running my own ecommerce website. I learned about keyword densities, HTML tags, metatags, backlinks, ALT tags and a whole lot more on-the-job and out of necessity. An effective backlink, for example, has a great number of variables including the page from where the link comes, the text in the link itself, the coding of the link and the page to which it links. SEO is a very complex area.

Once you understand how website infrastructures and search engine algorithms work, however, you come to think of online content creation in a new way. It's a very different mindset to conventional content creation. My fear is that PRs are not challenged with this in their day-to-day roles, and so have no need to learn these skills. They don't see the relevance because they never encounter it. An MD of a very successful PR agency recently spoke to me about ‘CEO’ in a conversation about search engine optimisation – with that sort of lead, what hope do account execs have?! (I was too stunned and embarrassed for them to correct them!)

Digital agencies can sell their social media offering very convincingly around SEO, and quite rightly. PRs can't. Your point about RSS aggregators perfectly highlights the issue in question. Many PRs I know don’t even use RSS feeds, let alone know there is such as a thing as Google Reader. That’s why PR is falling behind and it frustrates and scares me in equal measure!