Public relations: Google owns you

The day of the newspaper is almost over. So says David Meerman Scott in the New Rules of Marketing and PR. He implores PR professionals to stop spending time writing “press releases” where we hammer out a lifeless sheet that’s been vetted through a million committees, legal departments and the like – and then cross our fingers, post it to a PR wire and hope some journalist likes it enough to contact us. It’s such a convoluted process and with the democratization of information via the Internet, it’s brutally ineffective.

The truth is – traditional PR isn’t working anymore. That’s because traditional media isn’t working anymore. The latest statistics show that newspaper readership continues to decline, and the same for television. Less and less people are reading or watching traditional news. That means less and less people are going to read our stories through these channels.

The Internet is growing significantly as the news medium of choice. And it’s not just traditional sites like CNN, its user-generated sites like Digg, stumbleupon, del.ici.ous where the readers decide what’s most relevant to them. The Internet is democratizing Journalism and that means it’s also democratizing public relations.

Our landscape is changing significantly – half of what I learned in PR school no longer applies. In ten years, I’m sure most of it won’t apply at all. With that said, the guiding principles of public relations, communicating, will always be relevant. The rise of the Internet isn’t the end of PR – it’s just means re-evaluating how the cycle works.

Instead of creating “push” pieces, we need to start creating “pull” pieces. Instead of talking at our audiences with press releases, glossy newsletters, over-produced annual reports, we need to start having genuine conversations. In marketing, guru Seth Godin coined the term “permission marketing” for this approach. For us, it’s should be called “permission communication.”

We need to start creating “news releases” that any person can find on the Internet easily, read and understand. That means optimizing our releases for searching on the Internet, which means eliminating the jargon, eliminating the PR-speak, and writing plainly and simply.

It’s quite simple: Google owns you. That’s how the majority of people will look for your company, your products and your news. The “pull” approach means that you stop writing at your audience and instead let them come to you. Let them find you easily with Google, and when they do, make it easy for them to do what they want on your site, so that it’s rewarding and meaningful for them.

Once you show that you’re genuine about delivering the best and most useful content and information to the people that want to read about you. They will trust you and they will keep coming back.