Online PR Company Approach

So what do you mean when you say online PR?

Had the pleasure of meeting one of new clients last night at the 2012 Vision Award in Charlotte put on by the Center City Partners, and the title above is a question I got.

What exactly is online public relations and what do you do for me?

If you know me you know I absolutely love SEO, Marketing, selling online and watching SERPS and the trends online. I am very analytical and would really do this for free or on my day off.

I answered this with a lot of overlap from Defensive SEO and strong dash of social media.

“Public relations” is defined as the professional maintenance of a favorable public image by an organization or a famous person. PR is the state of the relationship between the public and a company or other organization or a famous person.

Online we must often be reactive in a practice sort of way. We do not always get to “wag the dog” when dealing with the world of searchable content. Very often a customer will search for what they want when they want to. In other forms of PR and marketing people like me take pride in telling people what they want and doing it in a way where they don’t know why they wanted it.

Does anyone really remember what was so great about Cabbage Patch kids or Teddy Ruxpin?

Now we can track customers and searchers to within a micrometer of what they are thinking and this is almost as good as telling them what they want. With Google analytics and other social media tracking tools like Pagelever allow us to know what works and doesn’t work in real time.

Still in this situation we don’t know when the trend will change until it does. The solution to this is often preparing ahead of time with defensive SEO, a tsunami of online press and covering every page a person may find in conjunction with a clients name.

We want to do all of the basic things like create a great Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, Linkedin presence of course. We want to make all of those pages tempting to join with motivational calls to action for any visitor. Our thinking here is that when we do all this work to get a searcher to your page we don’t want them leaving empty handed.

I want your social media presence to be like the candy in the checkout aisle. Who can say no to “free newsletter, EBooks and updates only takes one click on my LIKE BUTTON?”

Not really PR, but the residual PR you get from having an active relationship with thousands of fans and followers is he most effective part. When someone sees you r message on your wall it means only so much, but when they se your message on their best friends wall who is your follower….means much more.

Searchers are not on Facebook searching though; they are on Google, Bing or Yahoo. And when they enter you name what do they see? The searchers can often end a search for your service on just the snippets Google provides. If I search for CGR Creative where I work as Online Marketing Director I see nothing but the great things we do for our community. I see Press releases covering our activity in the community and I see rave reviews from valued clients past.

In a past article I point out how over 80% of searchers do not go past page one in their searches, but that doesn’t apply to reputation defense when I do it.

If I am searching for a web design firm in Charlotte I likely won’t go past page one if I am a casual searcher. But now I have picked CGR for example and am considering the phone call tomorrow to them. My next step is to search them specifically and in this scenario most searchers will go 2,3 or 4 pages deep. Searchers curious about your business reputation are not looking for top 10 or the Google chosen “best”, they are looking for the bad news. Searchers looking for bad news tend to go much deeper into the results.

When’s the last time you search some old friend or enemy just for fun? How many pages deep did you go? Enough said.

Now go search CGR Creative Charlotte and go back to page 4, this is what I can do for clients.

We make sure you have a good reputation online which gets you a much higher conversion rate on raw leads who are kicking tires online. You have spent so much time building your name up with positive public relations; one single bad piece of news that is accessible to the world on Google 24/7 will lose all that faith in your next perspective client.

We build content and press for you through 40+ Press websites, cover all review websites including industry specific ones and local search results, respond to anything negative and work to minimize or remove it. We will make sure you perspective clients hear nothing but positive things and build faith in your business that they will turn around and pass on to their friend with confidence. Word of mouth and what people see what their own eyes is very effective in selling your brand long term.

Todd Kron
Online Marketing Director
CGR Creative Design - Charlotte, NC

71% of Online Americans Visit Video-Sharing Sites by Greg Jarboe, July 27, 2011

Kathleen Moore of the Pew Internet Project has just written a report that says 71 percent of online Americans now use video-sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, up from 33 percent 4.5 years ago. The use of video-sharing sites on any given day has also jumped, from 8 percent of online Americans in December 2006 to 28 percent in May 2011.

Pew also found that Internet users in rural areas are now just as likely as users in urban and suburban areas to have used these sites, and online African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely than Internet-using whites to visit video-sharing sites. In addition, 81 percent of parents in the survey reported visiting video‐sharing sites, compared with 61 percent of the non-parents.

According to Moore, “The rise of broadband and better mobile networks and devices has meant that video has become an increasingly popular part of users’ online experiences.” She added, “People use these sites for every imaginable reason – to laugh and learn, to watch the best and worst of popular culture and to check out news. And video-sharing sites are very social spaces as people vote on, comment on, and share these videos with others.”

In her report, Moore also said, “The rise in use of video‐sharing sites is at least partly being driven by the growth in content on sites like YouTube and by user contributions, which then possibly encourage site visits by contributors’ friends and others who pass around links about popular amateur videos.”

According to the latest statistics from YouTube, 48 hours of content are uploaded every minute to the site, and the range of contributions is striking. YouTube lists 28 different categories for channels of video.

YouTube viewership has grown from 8 million views a day by the end of 2005, to over 3 billion views a day in 2011, according to the company’s data. And the company receives over 200 million views a day via mobile connections.

And, as I mentioned on July 17, comScore and YouTube are partnering to launch YouTube Partner Reporting this summer. This new enhanced online video measurement feature will break out individual audiences and demographic data for partners and their channels for the first time.

Finally, if you’re going to SES San Francisco 2011 next month, check out these sessions, which will cover YouTube or video marketing:

•Social Media Solutions on a Budget
•Next Gen YouTube Marketing
•SEW Labs - The Use of Video in Social Media
•The Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing