Here is my advice to PR: Stop wasting your time fretting about the downfall of the mainstream media. Partner with an SEO firm, demand quality content from a former reporter, and engage in the great key-word land grab that is happening right underneath your noses.
Key word communications is about pushing out quality content tied to key words that showcase your core competency, surface in a myriad of online searches and deliver new business again and again. While the traditional media, especially the trades, will simply be one spoke on the communications wheel, public relations and SEO need each other in the worst way…….
I recently had a client hire me a month after he inked a deal with an SEO firm. It wasn’t long before I ran across rogue articles using Google supposedly written by my client. They were poorly penned, embarrassingly off-topic and the firm’s name was spelled wrong. The client had never approved copy, nor been privy to any part of the process. I was outraged.
There is a wellspring of quality writing talent waiting to be tapped for the future of key word communications. Let the crashing of the Rocky Mountain News signify a rising up of a new model that frees us all!
Social networking has freed communications professionals–publicists, reporters, marketers, advertising executives–from their corporate cages. In fact, they have no choice but to circumvent the mainstream media and make a beeline to their target audiences using key word communications.
Instead of relishing the fresh air and wide open spaces, many communicators I speak with feel like a prisoner who has served his or her sentence, but can’t hack it on the outside. They have forgotten that, regardless of the medium, they are storytellers, change agents, muses and consensus builders.
On the flipside of the revolution, are the pioneers, the established professionals who refuse to stop learning and growing, the college kids who never stop aspiring and people in between who have the spirit to charge forward with wild abandoned into the future of key word communications.
I never thought the day would come when I would be mentoring my mentor who taught me everything I know about public relations, but it’s just another example of how the world has turned upside down. I’m helping her to navigate the microblogging mayhem and miracle that is Twitter.
Cheers to the open-minded mentors like my mentor who are letting their mentees give back to them after giving them so much.
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