Successful Online PR

Successful Online Public Relations With Greg Jarboe by Rachelle Money, 8 April 2009

How do you generate great online PR? How can keyword research benefit an online PR campaign and what are the things people should avoid? These are just some of the questions we put to Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder of SEO-PR, a search engine optimization and online public relations firm. Greg has written numerous articles for Search Engine Watch and has contributed to Wordtracker's newsletter too, so who better to tell us how online PR really works?

Key points

• Schmoozing hasn't gone out of fashion just because PR moved online. Build your relationships with a wider audience including bloggers, journalists (on and offline) as well as editors.
• Learn the language. Don't assume a blogger isn't a journalist and make sure the terms you use are familiar to them and easy to understand.
• Think about how you produce a visual image to accompany your press release, such as a JPEG image or a video.

We jumped straight in and asked Greg, "if someone has a product or service they want to launch, how do they go about starting some online PR around that?" He kindly gave us his step-by-step guide on how the experts do it.

"We do our keyword research first. By knowing what the relevant search terms are for the product, company, or announcement we can find out what articles have been published around these search terms. We then do some searches in Google News and find out who has written about those topics in the last 30 days.

"All of a sudden you will see who your targets are. You should read those articles because if you can say, "hey I see you wrote this article a couple of weeks ago", it gives you a good starting point with that journalist, and you also get an idea of what their viewpoint is on issues. When I reach out I have some background information because of that research.

"I'd also say that people shouldn't be put off by the location of that publication. Just because a newsletter is published in Australia doesn't mean you can't contact that journalist. Content is distributed globally so it's more important to think about whether they are written in English or not. There are lots of English language publications and websites in India, for example, that are not on your competitors' list of contacts - and provides you with an opportunity.

"Then you should come up with a shortlist of appropriate journalists and contact 20. If two of them get back to you, you have had a good day.

"One of the things we keep discovering again and again is that when you have a conversation about the story, more often than not the blogger or journalist will ask, "do you have a jpeg or video?" If we can tell a journalist that we have a graphic element to a story it seems like it's more likely to be published."

Rachelle Money: What if my product or service doesn't fit into the news story mould?

Greg Jarboe: We've found the more successful campaigns that we've been involved with recently have been in sharing tips.

We got an article from the editor of Parents Magazine about the top seven dos and don'ts of taking a photograph of your child for a competition. That information was gobbled up by bloggers because it was like sharing the secrets of success - Parents Magazine was holding a contest in November 2008 where the winning photograph of a child aged six months to six years would be featured on the cover of the magazine. We know that they had 4,000 entries before they brought us in and six weeks later they ended up with 88,000.

Rachelle: How important is keyword research to online PR?

Greg: Keyword research shapes our strategy. It's really hard to have an effective strategy if you haven't done your keyword research first. You can get caught up in the “here's what I want to say” regardless of whether they want to hear it. Keyword research tells you what people are interested in and the language they're using. Sometimes that actually causes conflict.

Rachelle: Keyword conflict?

Greg: We did some work with Consumer Report Magazine and they have a test track where they test out cars and then review them. They came to us with this review to turn into a press release and the cars they had reviewed were called Sports Coupés. I did some keyword research and found that no one was really searching for Sports Coupés and so they had just reviewed a car that no one was interested in. So I had to go back to them and ask them why they called it this and they said: "We've called it Sports Coupés since the 1930s." We changed the review from Sports Coupés to Sports Cars because then people will find the review when they search for the term.

Rachelle: Did you experience any resistance from your client when advised to change the keywords?

Greg: There was a little resistance because journalists are a bit resistant when it comes to PRs - even when those PRs are working for them. I was able to explain, because I am also a former editor and have worked for media companies, that the search terms were not some attempt to influence the interviewer. I don't care how they reviewed the cars, or what they said about them; what I was saying was that this is what your reader is interested in, and if you aren't interested in what your reader wants, then you should get out of journalism and start writing poetry. I won that one.

Rachelle: Have you ever lost an argument over keywords?

Greg: On another occasion with Consumer Report Magazine they wanted to have a holiday gift buying guide at Christmas. We did some keyword research and found that around December people were searching for things like Christmas gifts, Christmas presents, Hanukkah gifts and that kind of thing, but the magazine felt this wasn't politically correct and kept it as a holiday gift buying guide. They decided they wanted to be PC rather than to be found.

Rachelle: What's the most common mistake in online PR?

Greg: One is that everyone you talk to is a professional journalist. Some of them are, but some of them don't have the journalistic training to know what it means to publish under embargo or to have someone pitch an idea – there is a whole set of language associated with journalists that maybe a blogger won't know. A hard lesson is that you have to to learn the language.

Also, you can't assume that a blogger isn't a journalist. In the US about 35% of journalists have blogs and there's a lot of cross-over. So know who you are talking to and which language they speak.

Rachelle: What's the difference between offline and online PR?

Greg: One of the big differences is that offline PR is focused on print media that has the broadest reach, for example the national newspapers or the big magazines. It turns out that some of those national print publications do have a robust online presence, but not all of them do. In contrast there are some blogs and online-only publications that actually drive more traffic to a site than major newspapers' websites do.

Rachelle: Is offline PR less important nowadays?

Greg: A trend that's become clear here in the US and which is now visible in the UK is that newspapers are in big trouble. The Boston Globe is a major newspaper and ten years ago had 590 reporters working there; today it's more like 330. If you are focused only on what is happening offline and on the print media then you are only half as effective as you could be. If you follow that trend out you'd better shift your resources online or at some point update your CV and find yourself another occupation.

Rachelle: What makes good online PR?

Greg: In some respects the strategies still work from ten or 20 years ago – you just have to apply them online rather than offline. Strategies such as the traditional approach of building a strong relationship with a reporter; that's fundamental to public relations. You still need to do that, but you have to do it with a larger group of people; bloggers and online media outlets for instance.

Rachelle: Is it appropriate for an online PR person to approach a blogger or journalist on a social media site?

Greg: More often than not it isn't appropriate. Social media sites are personal and if I were invited to a party and I came around with samples of my product and started trying to sell things I wouldn't be too popular. We have therefore found that these sites are good places to get to know someone - but they're bad places to pitch stories.

When you enter a social media site I think you have to leave your agenda behind and meet people. I'd say that at another time and place you can go back with your PR hat on and say: "Hey, the other night you said this trend was an important one - well I have a story that you might be interested in as a result." You might want to socialize there but that doesn't mean you should do your business there.