Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Here’s another story about how PR and marketing should be best friends: more brands are spending money to bring attention to unpaid media mentions.

Edelman’s Steve Rubel tells Digiday that more and more marketers are working to “making sure the press coverage you’ve already earned works harder” by pairing with networks like Twitter or “you might also like” content recommendation services like Outbrain to push more traffic toward those media mentions earned by sheer luck, quality products or…hard-working, press-savvy PR teams. (You knew we’d get there.)

The advantage to this approach, of course, is that earned media will always be more valuable than paid. But the ROI is a more difficult to measure for retailers, who have trouble drawing a line between clicks on third-party posts and subsequent sales....

Think about it this way: It used to be you’d have a crisis communication plan written and it would stay in a drawer until your PR team pulled it out the following year, dusted it off, and gave it a good rewrite.

I’m sure you see or hear this a lot: Traditional PR is dead! Media relations is dead! Websites are dead! Marketing is dead! Advertising is dead! Newspapers are dead!

Granted, sometimes those things are written to motivate people to click on a link, but all of the customary ways of communication are far from dead. Instead, we find it’s necessary to integrate the things that are “dead” with digital public relations....