I’d like to expand on an excellent post from the Online Marketing Blog that discusses the idea of using social media to multiply your PR efforts–both for communicating to the consumer as well as the press.
There’s an increase in the use of social media both by end consumers and the media for tracking information that interests them. This includes: blog and news search engines, social news, social bookmarks, podcasts and video.
I really like his push/pull PR model:
Push basically means the tactics used to distribute a company’s news including using press releases sent out via wire services, email or fax. It also includes pitching the media on story ideas and contributed articles.
Pull activities are based on the demand consumers have for online news as well as the search activities of people in the media looking for subject matter experts, researching past news coverage and looking for story ideas. Pull PR makes it easy for the media and your intended audience to find and pull themselves to your news.
Push PR is mostly comprised of the traditional methods (e.g. new releases, pitches to journalists and bloggers, etc.) Now you can amplify the usual strategies using pull techniques such as:
- Exposure in news search (Google News Alerts now includes blog posts)
- Organic search engine ranking/exposure
- Social news and bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, etc.
- Blog search engines
- Organic blog buzz
- etc.
Most of these things I talk about in my book, Promoting Your Podcast. Now I have a new way to frame my book in conversation: “Not only does it teach you how to promote your podcast, it’s a great primer for social media and pull PR.”
Picture this…
Your company is announcing a new product release. In addition to the usual press release to the major outlets (on and offline), you post an episode to your podcast feed with interviews of the key players behind the product. The consumers and the media get to hear the voices of the real people associated with the development and release of the product. This information supplements the salient (but less human) points featured in the press release. The podcast gives these things more life.
You accompany the podast release with a keyword rich show notes post on your blog. The blog gets indexed my Google for inclusion in regular and blog search as well as Google Alerts. You bookmark the post in del.icio.us and other interested consumers follow suit. A radio and/or TV outlet hears the podcast and decides they would like to interview the product developer on their show. An avid and excited consumer submits this “bonus” podcast information to social news site, Digg.
You get near-immediate feedback directly on the blog giving you a pulse of how your product release is being received. Other bloggers pick up on the buzz and join the conversation on each of their sites. The number of inbound links to your site continues to grow bolstering your search engine relevancy.
Your PR message can grow exponentially, driven by the online social media engine. Granted, the degree of success you’ll have goes back to PR 101…is your story interesting and newsworthy. I can see a time ahead where this kind of double punch PR won’t just be a way to gain an edge. Soon it will be mandatory or your message will drown in the noise.
Pull PR: just one more point on the list of reasons why your business should start a podcasting initiative.
November 22nd, 2006 at 9:12 am
Am glad you liked the post Jason and I appreciate that you’re drawing more attention to this side of marketing/PR.