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.

I've had this book on my shelf for several years:  The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR.  I dusted it off today after reading a New York Times story indicating the book's prophecy is closer than ever to being realized.

When the book was written, in 2002, the term 'social media' was not part of marketers' or PR pros' lexicons.  However the authors' premise was that in the 21st century, successful brands are born with publicity and the credibility generated by PR.  Advertising's credibility is increasingly marginalized because it is a bought-and-paid-for message.  The authors claim advertising's true value is brand maintenance, not brand definition.

So no wonder then that new research finds that advertising continues to contract, while PR and 'word-of-mouth marketing' is expanding.   See the full article here.

This is not to say that spending on more credible forms of communication will overtake ad spending - not even close.  But projections that place the media industry as the third-fastest-growing economic sector in coming years (after mining and construction) are due primarily to the growth in PR and word-of-mouth marketing.

This is all good news for brands with great stories to share, and good news for those of us in the business of telling great stories.

Michael Phelps’ fingertip finish for his seventh gold medal is worth celebrating, unless you are the ad man for Speedo.

He (or she) is likely crying in his Tsingtao because the Speedo logo, stitched into the special racing suits worn by the American team, has been covered over with black tape by some swimmers. And Michael Phelps is wearing a Speedo suit with only Nike logos.

From the ad man’s perspective, all of this boils down to a lost 30 seconds of exposure in men’s and women’s races so far, calculated by one industry analyst at a loss of $750,000 of value ($25,000 per second). 30 seconds folks!!!

This is where the ROI calculations of traditional advertising conflict with reality. Is it really fair to say that 1,300 Speedo racer suits (at $550 a pop) will go unsold as a result of the logo not popping up on camera for 30 seconds?

Which raises a larger question altogether - how many Cokes will go unopened, Visa charges uncharged, and McDonald’s McNuggets unfried as a result of blokes like me fast forwarding through all the commercials in between Olympic events?

It appears as though Madison Avenue’s relationship with the 2008 Olympics is not much different than that of the 1968 Olympics (also sponsored by Coke and McDonald’s, and where U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz began his gold rush). Maybe by the time the Winter Games roll around, we’ll see advertising strategies catch up with reality.

In the meantime, Speedo’s top executives are probably celebrating… they did not spend boatloads on an Olympic sponsorship, yet all of this free PR is doing wonders for awareness of their high tech racing suits.