The differences between online PR and traditional PR
By Paul Green
At a number of recent events I’ve spoken at, quite a few business owners have asked about how online PR differs from traditional PR.
So I thought it would help to put together a Q&A about online PR and how you can use it to help your business.
What’s the difference between online PR and traditional PR?
Online PR is the process of generating content about your business that people find when they search online. This can include online news stories, blog entries, and comments on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
Traditional PR is about achieving the same thing – except in offline media such as newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. Increasingly the line between the two is being removed. For example if you manage to get a story about your business in the Daily Mail, you will normally find that the paper puts the story on its website too. One press release sent to a journalist who works on the paper gets you online and offline coverage. Excellent!
What’s the difference between online PR and SEO?
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – is about making sure it is your business’s website that appears in Google searches when people type in certain search terms. And online PR has an important part to play in that. There are natural ways to do this, such as generating stories that appear in Google News (and so will also appear in main Google search results), as well as artificial ways such as writing and publishing your own articles that link to your website. SEO experts tell me that link building in this way is an important part of search engine optimisation… if a time consuming one.
Is online PR the same as reputation management?
Not really. Reputation management is what big businesses do to ensure that customers and potential customers think about them in a certain way. More and more, businesses are monitoring what’s being said about them online because that’s where real people are having their say (and the weight of a 1,000 real people online is the same as one journalist writing in a national paper). I experienced this myself recently. I updated my Twitter feed admitting I had been blaming BT for a business broadband fault that was actually down to a fault in our office. The next day the BT Business team sent me a message saying they were happy we were back online. Incredible! Even though I know it was probably a PR person paid to search for mentions of BT, I was still impressed.
How can I use online PR to help my business?
Online PR is important, as a good mention for your business online can keep coming up in Google searches for years. But seeing as the websites with the most traffic tend to be run by the mainstream media, I recommend focusing your PR efforts on offline media. Continue to think great story first and then distribute press releases widely.
What tools do you recommend using?
Response Source is a UK press release distribution service that sends your story to real UK journalists – and puts them online too. I’ve seen many of our press releases submitted through the service feature in Google News.
Some of our clients also swear by websites like PR Web. Personally, I find them a bit expensive, although they are international tools. Steer clear of free press release sites. They might have a place in SEO, but real journalists in the UK don’t look at them (most don’t even know they exist).
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