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Google is constantly changing its algorithms. We all know about Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird, but what people often forget is that each one is periodically updated, often without any confirmation or announcement by Google.
The latest known Panda update is Google Panda 4.1, according to the Moz Google algorithm change history log, which has had a profound effect on PR agencies.
The Panda algorithm, in particular, has made huge waves across the PR industry. According to the article ‘Did Google Panda 4.0 Go after Press Release Sites?,’ industry expert Barry Schwartz launched a study which revealed prominent PR agencies like PR Newswire, BusinessWire, and PRWeb lost up to 85% of their visibility within a matter of days.
Studies like this demonstrate that PR agencies are intertwined with the SEO industry, and must adapt or perish in a changing environment....
There’s been a lot of talk about how traditional public relations can help boost your SEO.SEO and PR go hand in hand. I’m really lucky to work with several PR professionals in my current position, and they all agree that SEO best practice is essential if your story is going to connect with its audience.
While still distinct disciplines, SEO and PR are now joined at the hip, and professionals on both sides can no longer remain ignorant of each other’s worlds. An SEO who is armed with top tier PR training can have intelligent conversations with clients in regards to branding and PR goals, and an expert public relations professional can optimize press releases, understand on-page elements and use tools beyond social media to make sure that their client’s needs are best served.
So, here are some tools that I use in my own efforts as in performing my outreach role:...
I tried to explain public relations to my grandmother once ...
This was many years ago, back when PR pros cut press coverage from publications we could actually hold in our hands, and few marketers talked about SEO in everyday conversation.
“So, it’s advertising,” she’d say, and I’d try again to explain that, no, it’s not.
“Advertising is about paying for attention; PR is about earning it.”
I don’t think she ever got it, and she’s not alone. Most people still think PR is some kind of black magic flacks work on the press -- you sprinkle a little witch’s potion, and TA-DA! You’re in The Wall Street Journal. But PR is a more strategic, sustained practice than that, and it’s a field content marketers need to understand as owned, earned and even paid media continue to intersect.
Below are seven PR lessons for content marketers (and for my relatives who still don’t understand what I do).....
Given the job PR has done to support the growth of the tech industry, it's time to celebrate the top tech PR executives globally. And there are 100 of them.
We have therefore decided to celebrate the top tech PR executives that have played their part in supporting some of the now household names in the tech industry and developed the sector as a whole.
To do so, we have again put the decision in the hands of the Hot Topics community and asked them to nominate the 100 top tech PR executives globally.....
Who fancies a game of Buzzword Bingo? Here are five words to get you started that I’ve noticed being used with increasing regularity inside communications agencies and at industry conferences…
The Role and Responsibilities of a Chief Communications Officer … and How It’s Rapidly Changing Thanks to Tech...
Essentially I wouldn’t have been able to achieve much success (and sales) at all if I hadn’t followed Marc Andreessen’s 50/50 Rule, which is essentially the understanding that one should spend 50% of your time building product and the other 50% of your time gaining/building traction (i.e. marketing and message expansion).
It’s a tough blend and balance, there’s no two ways about it and for many developers and engineers the thought of spending half of their time marketing is upsetting, to say the least....
DS Simon published the results, titled “The D S Simon Media Influencers Report,” which revealed that 90 percent of digital journalists say a PR pro has lied to them. Sixty-eight percent say that PR pros lie to them “sometimes,” and 20 percent say they’ve been lied to “often.
Good news, though—only three percent of digital journalists think that PR pros “always” lie to them. Bloggers, however, have a bit more cynical view, with seven percent saying that PR pros always lie to them...
Let me open the door to a new world for you?
One Where Good Guys Win
One where the more truthful and honest you are, the more you enjoy your work, the more money you make.
One that few people know about.
Walk through the door and when you’ve stopped blinking, I’ll show you the light.
And if, when you get to the bottom of this post, you agree with me and the 36 experts’ experiences, share the secret with your friends.
In the meantime, while you get the Sun out of your eyes, indulge me for one minute as I share a wee story…
It was unbelievable news. And reporters shouldn’t have believed it.It turns out that the Institute of Diet and Health is just a Web site with no institute attached.
Johannes Bohannon, health researcher and lead author of the study, is really John Bohannon, a science journalist. And the study, while based on real results of an actual clinical trial, wasn’t aimed at testing the health benefits of chocolate. It was aimed at testing health reporters, to see if they could distinguish a bad science story from a good one.In many cases, they couldn’t....
The global PR industry grew by 7% in 2014, with currency volatility helping to soften another positive year for PR firms around the world, according to the 2015 World PR Report.
The 2015 World PR Report, produced by the Holmes Report and ICCO, again provides the clearest picture available of the global PR industry, based on submissions from more than 400 PR firms across the world.
The research reveals that, for the first time, the Top 250 PR firms in the world cracked the $10m barrier in terms of fee income last year, reporting $10.4bn compared to $9.7bn in 2013....
Global expansion. Blurred lines between PR and marketing. An explosion of creative services.
Chief executives from 12 of the largest agencies in the world discuss their firm’s performance over the past year and share their pitch for the future of the business....
Gawker recently turned food marketers' heads with a 2,500-word takedown of blogger, dietary guru and anti-GMO activist Vani Hari, aka "Food Babe." Author Yvette d'Entremont, who started a rival blog under the "Science Babe" moniker, asserted that Hari peddles easily disproved pseudoscience designed to frighten people into emptying their pantries of "toxins" and send angry emails to major food conglomerates.
Vani, a New York Times bestselling writer and TV talk show guest, responded with a can't-we-just-be-friends lament before casting d'Entremont as a "biased," pro-pesticide advocate promoting that most unpopular of agricultural villains—Monsanto. She even created a disclaimer for readers who visit her site from links in the Gawker post: "Coming from Gawker? Warning: I believe you should have both sides of the story before you make an informed opinion. Read the other side of the story here."
A larger trend is lurking beneath this spat over digital influence: America is facing a growing crisis of credibility in food labeling. And as consumers struggle to decide whom to trust—passionate bloggers or major food brands—agencies can get caught in the crossfire....
The 'Reputation Complex' is a moving combination of various reputational factors, components and drivers that are linked in a close and complicated way. This combination brings with it, for all organizations, equal risks and opportunities – the first to be managed and the second to be exploited in the right manner.
MSLGROUP's SVP and Chief Strategy Officer, Pascal Beculer shares his thoughts on the fast transformation of Reputation Management, everywhere in the world, and what it means for our clients and for us....
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When my boss sent an email saying we should buy former TechCrunch reporter Jason Kincaid’s book, The Burned-Out Blogger’s Guide to PR, she included a link to a review of the book and noted that it explained a lot of our challenges. I admit I was hooked by the first paragraph of the article:“Then-TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid was attending a press event in San Francisco, frantically trying to finish his story before the embargo lifted. When someone from the company came over to ask how things were going, he blurted out: ‘I hate you.’
”As a former reporter myself (though more on the lighthearted side), I knew I would likely relate to some of his peeves. However, spending some time on the “dark side” has been a bit of a humbling experience. Kincaid reminds us a few times that reporters are people, but I’d like to remind everyone that PR reps are people, too.
Regardless, in between the slightly bitter generalizations and laugh-out-loud moments in this book, there’s a lot of great information and important reminders for startups as well as every PR professional. Here are a few of my favorites:...
At Onalytica we have been looking closely at the transformation of PR as we know it. Our vision is to evolve media relations into influencer relations professionals by managing relationships with hundreds of key influencers rather than just journalists.
Think about the numerous analysts, politicians, bloggers, thought leaders, industry professionals, stakeholders and influential consumers that all have big audiences that you want to reach. Influencer relations is a truly essential part of modern PR (we also offer a B2B influencer relations platform for PR practitioners)
One of the most time consuming parts of influencer relations (or influencer marketing) is identifying the right thought leaders. What if you just wrote a new blog and you have no idea what influencers would be interested in your content?
We’re here to help! We built a new tool to do this. Before it took up to an hour to find 10-20 relevant influencers, now you can do it in less than a minute…
...On the other hand, this seems like a strange time to be accepting a supporting role for PR. The things that PR has always been about—transparency, authenticity, credibility, engagement, conversation—are at the heart of successful marketing today, and that ought to create an opportunity for campaigns that are driven by a PR idea to win big at Cannes.
We certainly should not be looking at narrowing the definition of public relations to ensure that the winners all feel like “real” PR campaigns....
PR leaders have to wade through lots of noise.
Some reporters, for instance, are difficult to reach due to the hundreds of pitches that they’re receiving per day via e-mail and Help a Reporter Out (HARO). What PR leaders need are techniques to stand out and outsmart the accidental mess created by the industry.
This process involves learning and experimentation with new communication, content marketing, and information management tools—more importantly, it involves a paradigm shift in how the PR industry builds connections with the media world.
The time to explore and try new techniques has never been better. Here are 7 resources to help you make the most out of your next brain break....
We often hear Sanjay Dholakia’s quote, “Marketing has changed more in five years than the past five hundred.” What we don’t hear as much, however, is how public relations needs to transform itself to adapt to a changing world.
Here are three trends that are forcing PR agencies and professionals to step up their game, and what your organization can do to wield them to your advantage....
Hello again, readers.
Since we didn’t quite have time to peruse our favorite pitch responses last Friday, here’s a new edition of our weekly media relations series, put together with the help of our friends at Muck Rack.
First, Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times may be the most powerful tech journalist in all of media right now, and he has a point to make...
London's Waterloo Station has an attention-grabbing piece of cargo passing through: a crate made to hold "predatory livestock" for Jurassic World's fictional InGen Technologies.
With the summer blockbuster's opening weekend just a week away, Universal Pictures is clearly stepping up its marketing effort with cobranded partnerships like the (actually decent-sounding) Dairy Queen Jurassic Smash Blizzard and a big out-of-home push.
The Waterloo stunt quickly proved its worth in social media, vaulting to Reddit's front page today....
If you dig deep enough, you’ll find some interesting clues from the past that mirror what an effective public relations strategy should look like today. Want proof? Below are five essentials to successful public relations efforts that began in ancient times:
PR professionals often search for a magic solution to the value dilemma, but the answer is a lot simpler than they think.
At her “Money Well Spent: Tips for Showcasing PR’s Value” webinar, Shonali Burke explored how to design and develop a PR campaign center piece, avoid the seven sins of bad measurement and refocus your efforts when something doesn’t go according to plan....
Plus, if you haven’t got the time to read articles or watch videos during your busy day, podcasts are extremely accessible – listen during your commute, or even on the treadmill. And get this: according to Edison Research, people who listen to audio listen to podcasts almost as much as they listen to the radio.
But why is podcasting important to PR and marketing professionals? Besides the wealth of knowledge it can provide us on a daily basis, its a piece of content marketing we can use to reach our audiences: 67 percent of podcast listeners don’t mind sponsorship messages and occasionally find them useful, compare to 6 percent of TV or radio listeners.
So, if you’re looking to get a daily dose of valuable info from the experts or get inspiration for starting a podcast of your own, here’s our top 50, ranked in order of Twitter followers...
Google likes to keep us PR pros on our toes.
Last year the big update to search results came through the “nuclear bomb” that was Panda 4.0. The age of the keyword was essentially over, and proper storytelling blogs and press releases were in. Many claimed that SEO was on its way out completely.
Recently, Google made even more changes. Though the advent of Panda 4.0 made press releases seem borderline useless, the search engine has now revalued them. There’s one big alteration, though, that changes the way savvy PR pros should use press releases....
PRWeek's Global Agency Report launches on April 27: Here is a sneak preview of the trends agency bosses identified as defining 2014 and shaping the year ahead....
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Learn how PR and SEO go hand in hand for results.