RHetoric

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz has written a revealing column on the machinations he and his fellow reporters must go through to cause their articles to show up in Google search results.  We go through a similar process when we write press releases, and it can challenge a copywriter’s sensibilities.

Unfortunately for the Post, it also challenges journalistic sensibilities.  As Kurtz points out, Google trending is telling him his stories will be better read if he makes reference to Sarah Palin, Tiger Woods’s ex-wife, and Lady Gaga, all in the same story.  Not exactly Kurtz’s beat!

How does this apply to public relations firms serving businesses?

Used to be, the people we wanted to reach were unwittingly exposed to a wide variety of subjects.  The daily newspaper, trade journal, or evening news supplied a global sampling of the state of affairs, sparking new ideas and new interests. A mile wide and an inch deep.

Today, these same people hand-pick blogs and Twitter feeds and e-newsletters that cover not just their industries but sometimes their distinct job functions in their industries.  Their information consumption is highly specialized - a mile deep and an inch wide. So how do new ideas, one or two standard deviations from a reader’s core interest, break through?

The answer is relevance, and Google serves a useful public service here.  Its algorithms, hated by many, actually create a road map for businesses to make their ideas and innovations relevant to target audiences who have chosen to specialize.

If we want hospital IT managers to pay attention to our client’s HIE (health information exchange) solution, and we know that hospital IT managers are busy doing searches on terms like “meaningful use rules,” then we had better be using those terms in our press releases, and posting them on wire services that are crawled by search engines!

It’s one thing for a press release to be read by a journalist - but if it can be read by a prospective customer, even better.

Now, one can get a lot more sophisticated than keyword selection. The point, however, is that Google is not causing people to specialize, it is that they are choosing to.  So marketing and PR professionals must tweak their content to be relevant to the specialized interest, and the keyword is one way to do it.

There are other ways too, some of them gimmicks designed to game the algorithms.  We’ve seen content farms where kids are paid by the word to scrape copyrighted news articles, pepper them with references to the corporations that are paying them, and repost them - all to fool search engines into ranking those corporations higher.  We’ve seen cases where well meaning bloggers are duped into hosting linkbacks to other sites, to juice the other sites’ search engine results.

Ever do a search and end up on a page where the content seems relevant but just doesn’t seem to make sense?  Someone is getting paid to waste your time on purpose, to register another tick in their statistics.

For those of us in business-focused PR and marketing, we don’t have to resort to dropping Lady Gaga into our press release headlines to garner readership.  It would boost the numbers, but not of the right kind.  Rather, we have to be mindful of the fact that our target readership has chosen to specialize, and so as writers we must tap the language of their specialty to relate.  That is where Google’s algorithms can help us make the link.

Now I am going to go monitor my web stats to watch my online popularity explode as a result of this keyword mention of Lady Gaga.

BP’s PR problem isn’t a PR problem… it’s an unstoppable gushing well problem. However that hasn’t stopped some crisis PR “experts” from rushing to the media to offer their opinions on what BP should be doing differently to enhance its image. Hey, it’s good exposure for the PR experts, I’ll give them that.

But frankly the image problem is the effect; while the cause is the non-stop, gusher under the Gulf. Until that hole is plugged, no amount of PR advice can really plug BP’s PR nightmare.

PR professionals commenting on this crisis should first acknowledge this is the underlying cause of BP’s PR problem, then dispense advice in this context.  If they did, they would be doing a much needed service for the entire PR industry, which sometimes gets a bad rap for vacuous spin.

So now for the two-bit PR advice to BP.  First, plug the well - obviously.  But in the meantime, have a script.  Sending the CEO or chairman in front of the cameras in the middle of a crisis without a carefully prepared and vetted script is madness.  Had the CEO said, “I want my life back” in a media training session first, the comment would have never made it to prime time.  Likewise, BP’s chairman should have memorized a carefully crafted script before walking out of a White House meeting and talking to the press corps - a script that would not have referred to Gulf residents as “small.”

It’s a good lesson for anyone in corporate America.  When a crisis hits, it is absolutely critical to prepare before stepping in front of the camera.  A single unintentional comment can throw off all good intentions.  And all good intentions are meaningless if the underlying problem - in this case the blown well - are unresolved.

The latest trend in stock-picking? Watching the TV series "Undercover Boss." According to research by the Wall Street Journal, the share prices of all but one of the companies featured on the show have outperformed the rise in the S&P 500.

"Senior management has been coming under fire throughout this downturn, so to show management in a more favorable light, to show they have an interest to see what's going on in the front lines of their business and show they're not bigger than the rest of us, there's got to be a popular sentiment around that," said one of the analysts sought for comment on the findings.

Many companies, public and private, struggle with outsider perceptions - often misperceptions - of management's approach and strategy. Sometimes a little media limelight can go a long way to turning that around.

Teasers began running on CBS last week for the next episode, featuring 1-800-FLOWERS. Check out the chart.