A Digital Media Diamond in the Spam

Mike Kilroy posted on December 17th, 2008

Sometimes digital media insights can be found in the least likely of places.

I scanned an e-mail advertisement from Bulldog Reporter today that actually brought some clarity for me to this new digital media age we find ourselves in.

The e-mail was targeted to PR professionals. One of the first lines that caught my eye was:

“Search” has become one of the most powerful marketing techniques ever.

I would revise that slightly to say that “search” is the most powerful marketing tool today. 

With newspapers folding and many other print publications scrambling to stay alive, I think this becomes more evident everyday. We are experiencing a true democratization of publishing, which is leading to the democratization of marketing – everyone online can be your cheerleader or your detractor, and either way, they are major influencers on your brand.

“Public relations is search.”

Simple and direct – and difficult for me to argue with. Just consider the meaning of the words “public relations,” and it’s easy to see that PR should be responsible for relating to your organization’s publics online. That’s where your PR team should be focusing its energies in this new era.

But what does an organization get out of a digital media PR program?

Aye, there’s the rub.

According to the e-mail ad copy, a digital media program:

  • significantly increases your coverage in traditional media
  • distributes your releases directly to customers and bloggers
  • dramatically boosts traffic to your corporate Web site, online newsroom and product landing pages
  • attracts more visitors to your corporate blogs, videos and social media postings
  • helps you manage and better control corporate crisis
  • directly sells your products and services

What organization wouldn’t want these benefits? 

You can quibble and say the last bullet should be first, but anyone in business long enough knows there’s a sales process for every product or service. You first have to win the customer’s attention, educate the customer on how your product benefits his/her life, and engender trust and credibility before a sale is made. (Check out the Maples white paper on mapping a digital media program to the buying process.) The argument can be made persuasively that digital media tools allow you to accomplish all the above, all online and all at a very low cost.

 The final point that I liked from the unsolicited e-mail ad was (my bolded text):

You are only going to be successful at search marketing if you know exactly what you are doing.   

What this says to me is that digital media tools are cheap and plentiful, but you need an experienced team of digital media evangelists, communications strategists, as well as design and technology specialists to execute an online public relations program that gets results and avoids misfires. 

 So, to summarize: Search is king. PR is search. Get someone who knows how to do it effectively.

 All in all, a valuable read amid the spam.  Let me know what you think.

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