Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

I was having a discussion with one of my oldest and closest friends the other day about his career. He wants to go farther in the world of public relations but doesn’t quite know what he needs to get there. So, as an enterprising go-getter, he started making connections and asking other PR pros what he needs to know in this day and age to get ahead of the competition.

What one professional told him made me laugh and then made me think.

“To get ahead, you need to know two things: Google Analytics and SEO.

”This kind of stopped me in my tracks. Yes, analytics and SEO are extremely important in the digital world. They go hand in hand – one promotes your website while the other tracks how you’re doing.

For instance, you can be at the top of the rankings for a key term, but if your bounce rate for that page is insanely high, you might need to change some things. SEO only gets you the attention you need; analytics will tell you exactly how long and what happens after the user sees your page.

But what shocked me is that it wasn’t a marketing executive that was telling my friend how essential these tools are, but a public relations professional with many, many years in the business.

So has public relations and marketing suddenly become the same thing?...

Global expansion. Blurred lines between PR and marketing. An explosion of creative services.

Chief executives from 12 of the largest agencies in the world discuss their firm’s performance over the past year and share their pitch for the future of the business....

Is hiring a public relations firm even worth it in a world that changes so quickly? Has the whole game of a public relations firm become obsolete because of 800 TV channels, thousands of satellite radio channels, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Meerkat, Periscope, blogging, Blabbing and all of the other social media platforms? Can a firm even grab the attention of television, radio or newspaper producers long enough to pay attention to their pitch?

I’m writing this after giving three different firms a year each to produce results. They promised results, I expected results — neither result was delivered. And each relationship started the same way; we met at my home or out for lunch to get to know one another. I told them my story, they asked who I wanted to reach — they got excited, I signed a contract and then I pumped them with massive amounts of relevant content that they could pitch to producers....