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• • Category:
  • Digital PR
• • Title:
  • PR and Search - Part One
• • Description:
  • Antony Mayfield, head of content and media at Spannerworks, explains how digital media excited him so much he ditched a successful PR career to join a search marketing agency.
• • Keywords:
  • digital media, online PR, search marketing, public relations
• • Length:
  • 00:04:41
• • Transcript:
  • I was a director in Bell Pottinger Group, which is a large public relations group - I worked specifically at Harvard Public Relations.
    
    I spent a lot of time thinking about and looking at social media and kind of evangelising that within the Chime Group as well, about the changes that began to become apparent that were coming for media and therefore marketing and communications, because of what's going on online.
    
    I think that yes, everything I that learned in PR is applicable in this new place, in digital and online communications. Most of all understanding that attention, whether it's press coverage, or people linking to you from a blog, or you being discussed in a Facebook group, is earned, it's not bought
    
    So why join a search agency?
    
    I had this vision, this idea, of what brand communications people were going to be doing in the future - in the very near future. And when I talked to Spannerworks about it - I had a mutual friend who is on the board at Spannerworks - it was very very close to what their vision of the future was for search, coming in the opposite direction. They were a technical agency, and they realised that the future lay in brand management, and in proper reputation management. A lot of people just think of search engines, and search engine optimisation, as just technical tricks, as boosting your rankings, and really that's only a very small part of what it’s about and what it's about to become. Because what search engines really are is reputation management systems, as someone said in Wired recently, a very good way of putting it - they're looking at reputations within networks online, so the kind of \"search engine view of the world\", suddenly made sense to me.
    
    Search vs. PR?
    
    There are people who desperately get it on both sides, and desperately want to understand the other side of the equation, and piece it together, and there are people who don't. People who are search clients, in the first instance, have more of a sense of urgency to do it, because they already understand some of the principles that PR people are having to understand online, and that's about competing, in real time, in real markets, for attention.
    
    If you look at Google, it's a technological marvel, if you look at search engines, they're amazing pieces of technology, but all they're trying to do is understand human reputation within networks. So if you look beyond that technical stuff, if you get your technical stuff right and you're just ticking the boxes, and making sure you've designed the information architecture and all of that in the right way then what you really get to and where you really start competing, once everyone's sorted their acts out and built their sites properly, is being the best website, and attracting attention from people by being responsive and by being more useful than other websites around.
    
    So why not just throw money at it?
    
    Buying attention isn't the best way to go. Even if you're spending money on adverts and the rest of it, there's so much content out there, there are so many choices for people in online media,that just buying your way in front of people will not work. They'll block the ads, they'll avoid you like the plague, they'll switch sites, they'll go somewhere else - they'll ignore your branded experience and go somewhere that serves the purpose that they're looking for.
    
    So PR has always been about earning attention. It's always been about being useful, and earning that press coverage if you're talking about media relations. It's about being useful so that you're trusted by journalists or trusted by politicians, or whoever the PR target is, so that you can then have a dialogue with them and give them content that's useful to them that also furthers your agenda and gets your messages out there. And PR people instinctively understand networks and plugging in to them, and giving stuff and not expecting necessarily to get coverage every time for it. Those kind of principles are much more suited to this world. They're much more used to operating on lower budgets and just pulling together good ideas and getting them out there and getting good content together. It used to be in the form of press releases - still is, obviously - used to be in the form of press photographs, but they can easily turn those skills to creating useful content that people want direct.
    
    © Daryl Willcox Publishing
• • Views:
  • 6067

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