Making Pink Elephants Fly On Web Waves

An effective online public relations campaign will lead to stunning results. Even the smallest company can look big online.

Summary

What makes pink elephants fly?
Do pink elephants speak?
Can they be found on the Web naturally?
Are they isolated entities?
Will we face another death of the mammoths?

What makes pink elephants fly?

You’d say pink elephants are fantasy creatures and I am not going to argue that. I’m just going to share with you a little secret: pink elephants are nothing less than ordinary elephants in new clothes, flying a private jet, with the speed of thought.

Does this come as a surprise? Don’t you know that online anything is possible?

To make the impossible possible the normal elephants need some help. And the best help comes from the online public relations agencies that adapted their ways to the new media realities.

The trends are clear: offline companies pump thousands of dollars into creating solid online presences. They hire the most skilled web designers to put up outstanding websites; they invest in online marketing campaigns, including search engine optimization, pay per click and other forms of advertising.

There’s huge potential of profits online and the savvy entrepreneurs don’t want to be left out.

However, there are some entrepreneurs who still hold on to their old-fashioned ways of doing business, and that’s one of the reasons that lead to bankruptcy and the death of a company.

As soon as these businessmen will understand that online search is the first stop for most of the people who look for a new product or service, we will assist at a boom of the online PR profession, pretty much as it happened with SEO a few years ago.

Right now search marketing still has its advantages over PR. The most important is that SEM can demonstrate ROI easily, through traffic analysis and click conversions. PR is still struggling to define tools and means that to standardize calculating ROI.

As PR doesn’t focus on sales, but on generating positive feedback and reviews about a company, it’s hard to understand the role of this profession online.

If we look at the search engine marketing firms that offer PR services (like writing and distributing press releases) it’s not hard to understand where PR fits. As we’ll see below, online PR doesn’t reduce itself at press releases.

Broadly misunderstood, this new profession cumulates all the traditional public relations tools and the new online tools to reach the same objectives: to enhance the prestige of a company.

The advantage of online PR over its offline relative is coverage. The Web provides for broader coverage. An online press release for example can reach Global targets. The distribution is not limited to the local media. If the release is newsworthy the news could even make it to the pages of traditional printed publications from different countries.

Additionally, offline, public relations experts are responsible for creating the standards of the company identity. They work together with branding experts to define the brand and corporate values and communicate these to the public. The role of the online public relations consultant is very similar, but the online public relations expert faces some difficulties: acerb competition, thorny brand placement (many online firms compete for the same or similar keywords), tricky placement tools and even the risk of falling into anonymity (because of ineffective search engine optimization for example).

An effective online public relations campaign will lead to stunning results. Even the smallest company can look big online. As Seth Godin says, “small is the new big.”

Do pink elephants speak?

As I said, online anything is possible. The public relations expert gives to a company a face and a voice. You don’t need to literally “hear” the voice to know that a company speaks.

When a company states its corporate values and beliefs online, you know it has a voice. But if you want to hear something, you know that there are communication tools available: toll free phone numbers, VOIP, Skype and online conferences, podcasting and video sharing, voice messaging and so on. So the answer is “yes, the pink elephants speak.” They communicate, they are ready to answer your questions, they are real and they are there. They might speak up for themselves or delegate a public relations expert or a speaker. There’s all part of the process of online communications.

Communicating with clients and business partners is part of the public relations. Some companies use public relations tools without acknowledging that they do.

Effective communication needs skills that are not easily mastered by everyone. The public relations experts are trained to use such tools effectively and they could train anyone… for the right price.

Can we find pink elephants on the Web naturally?

Google them.

Let’s say we want to find a chocolate manufacturer or distributor. One Google search and we find Hersheys among the top 10 results. Hersheys is a pink elephant. We found it naturally (within the organic search results of Google). Without its good placement on the SERPs it won’t be easy for us to find it online. What determines such a good search engines placement? SEO.

SEO is the discipline that has the most affinity with online public relations. As a matter of fact, each online PR expert should familiarize himself/ herself with the basic SEO strategies and understand search engine optimization.

A PR expert doesn’t need to be an SEO, but he/ she should work closely with SEOs for the benefit of the clients.

There are three basic fields which should employ both PR and SEO: press release and article writing, keywords selection and website copywriting.

The truth is that public relations experts know better than SEOs which keywords should be targeted for a specific market. PRs have to know the company and its products and services, they have to understand which message has more weight than another and they have to find the best ways to communicate that message.

Without proper search engine optimization, the most important channel of communication is closed. The search engines deliver circa 40% of the traffic to a site, in some situations even more. And among all the search engines, Google is the strongest.

SEO should be used to maximize the effects of online public relations and should not be treated as an inferior discipline. Despite all the controversy, each website developer involves SEO tools when creating a site: meta tags, internal linking, inbound links, and even website copywriting are all SEO tools. Without them there is no chance for a site to rank naturally in the search engines, and there is no chance for us to find it by performing a simple keyword search.

Are pink elephants isolated entities?

Some are, while others prefer getting involved in the online community through social channels.

The future belongs to those who understand the importance of the social media. The social media is nothing new: online forums and discussion groups do have their age already. There are some new social media channels that multiply the possibilities of sending a message to a broader audience, but these don’t make the social media a new territory.

Blogs are a manifestation of the social media and so are the social networks and social bookmarking sites. A general definition of social media could be “user generated content.” We often notice that users trust more the personal opinions of other users than articles in a magazine.

To get your message to the social media is not so easy. Firstly, the social media users don’t like direct approaches. They prefer to discover the news on their own, browsing sites of interest. Secondly there’s difficult to offer something that motivates the social media author choose to write about a certain topic. These are some picky authors, especially those who are seen as “gurus,” experts or authorities.

The online public relations expert needs to understand these authors and needs to know how to approach and motivate them. Here we learn again that without a skilled communicator a company could remain an isolated entity.

Will we face another death of the mammoths?

Traditional media will not die.

People tend to consider printed coverage more valuable than online coverage. Although we already see a decline of the printed media, especially for newspapers and magazines, there are no reasons to predict the end of the mammoths. Radio and TV will continue to exist too, although there are reasons to believe that they will migrate online – for economical reasons.