Traditional PR vs an Online PR Agency: You’ve Been Stumble(d)upon!
I’ve been reading a bunch of things from PR blogs lately that are starting to question how and where Online PR, SEO and traditional PR will all fit together.
This one, from PRBlogger.com, suggests that “PR doesn’t face losing the online PR battle against marketers …but what it does face is losing the battle among marketers of what the definition of real online PR actually is.“
Now, whilst this kind of navel gazing is fairly typical of the PR community (OK, hands up – I’m one of them!), it does raise a fundamental question about what’s going on in online marketing right now.
The PRBlogger piece goes on to partition and evaluate various disciplines, which in my opinion can be dangerous. Dividing and sub-dividing marketing monikers is not what our clients need right now. They need an Online PR agency that can just jump right on in and start getting results, across the board – using offline and webby skills.
To my mind, the smartest clients and agencies now recognise that SEO (and every other online marketing exercise) is built around some core ‘PR-like’ skills and disciplines – like gaining trust and improving reputations. For this eureka moment we have to thank the advent of social media, and the impact that it’s had on both SEO and PR practitioners – because the overlap in skill sets has caused different people to Stumbleupon one another (sorry – excuse the in-pun, couldn’t resist!)
This is because the driving principles in great online PR and marketing are: creating great content, seeding it in the right networks, and winning friends and influencing people…. and that a byproduct of this activity – thanks to Google’s algorithm – is backlinks, better PageRank, and traffic – which of course is incredibly measurable and compelling to fee-paying clients.
In other words, great Online PR = great SEO and vice-versa.
So rather than think about how different disciplines might be allocated different roles, I prefer to think of how SEO (and Online PR, and Social Media Marketing, etc) is disappearing as a distinct discipline, and how everything we do online is now simply ‘PR.’
I have no doubt that this will pass because more and more marketing plans will be devised web-first. And this ought to make some PR and SEO agencies a little hot under the collar if they fail to quickly acquire some smarts from one another’s camp…..
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Franklin Bishop
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