Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

Semil Shah recently shared a post on TechCrunch on the value of PR. Most of our readers here don’t need to be persuaded on this, so the post isn’t likely new territory for you. However one bit from the post deserves a response (emphasis mine):

Yestarday with the launch of Google+ to a larger group of beta users, PR News reached out for me for comment. I responded to a few items for a quick article on their site, but actually gave even more detail than they were able to publish.

I experiment with many different ideas to create interesting content, drive traffic, earn links, rally communities and inspire people to action. It’s a lot of fun, and at the same time a fantastic way to learn. There is no limit to using open networks other than your creativity. And, quite possibly the best way to learn and find what works for you personally is by experimenting.

Many of you reading this already know who Matt Cutts is. For those who don’t, he is Google’s head of webspam. Simplified and in plain English, what that means is he helps make sure those Google results you receive for your queries are of high quality and spam-free.

But this post isn’t about webspam or SEO. What’s even more interesting to me as a communications professional is that in many ways, Matt represents the future of PR as a transparent, seamless process internally for sophisticated, industry-leading companies.

There’s a lot of great thinking from Steve Rubel, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis and others about the future of PR.

I frequently get pitched to cover businesses or other websites at this blog. Most of it isn’t a fit or just pure spam. As a marketing/PR professional by trade, I’m patient and take the time to help those who send me irrelevant pitches by pointing them to some tips for pitching bloggers.

There has been some good thinking on PR and its interaction with the blogosphere lately. Specifically a post from Louis Gray: Bloggers and PR Are Not Enemies, But Quality Efforts Are Needed.

Lets start by pulling out something Louis wrote:

Not every public relations firm is an expert in dealing with bloggers. Some are waking up to the blogging phenomenon and, guessing at the influencers, are simply adding blogger e-mail addresses to their distribution lists, without taking the time needed to see what it is each blogger covers, learning their focus areas, or personalizing an angle. Others are aggressively hustling the top two to five names and ignoring the second layer – which creates stress for those pursued, and resentment for those who are ignored.

I would like like to think every PR firm gets it by now, it’s not a big mystery what the blogosphere is. Louis is right though unfortunately, especially when we see things such as the bad pitch blog. Then again, there have been bad pitches since traditional media was the only game in town. Bad PR is bad PR, and simply carries over into the blogosphere.