Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Public Relations (PR) professionals are logically linked by technology and human behavior, yet few companies are combining their knowledge of each to generate big results in today’s rapidly evolving communications landscape. A few smart PR agencies are exploring adding SEM capabilities to their teams.

At minimum, PR agencies should be training their employees to understand the basics of SEM. (I’ve done that with local agencies, and it’s been great fun. According to the participants, results have been strong so far.)  Here’s some background for the PR agency management team to consider…

The People Effect

It’s no new news that “new media” influencers are proliferating online – there are expert bloggers in every niche market and Technorati tracks more then 112.8 million blogs today. That’s up from 90 million in July, 2007 and 78 million in April of 2007.

In addition to sharing stories and opinions, people are sharing all sorts of media - known as user generated content (UGC) - in social networks like Facebook and LinkedIN; and in content portals like Flickr (photo sharing) YouTube (video sharing) and iTunes (audio sharing).

And every single piece of media that is uploaded online is categorized, or “tagged” by the author. Technorati currently tracks more than 250 million tags (July, 2007). There are plenty of tag sharing sites today, like stumbleupon, delicious and ma.gnolia. I’ve blogged about smart uses for tagging sites before.

Steven Johnson, author of Emergence, envisioned the results of this phenomenon in 2002:

“Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts…And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher-level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up.”

The Technology Effect

Enabling this huge public publishing push has been the availability of cheap, easy to use publishing technology. Blog software is free and extremely easy to use. Computers have built- in video cameras, and phones have built-in cameras and video. Anyone can be an online, multimedia publisher today.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is the ultimate consumption technology. RSS allows publishers to feed their content simply and easily from their web sites to their readers. When readers subscribe to their RSS feeds, they’re automatically delivered to email inboxes, to phones and PDAs - anytime information is updated. Information comes to you as it happens… I’ve blogged a ton about RSS here, so go explore.

Basically, you can subscribe to favorite sites or  you can set up persistent searches for categories (tags or phrases) you’re interested in, and anytime someone tags their content with your search phrase, you’ll have it delivered right to you immediately. RSS is built into blog software, to social networking applications and into web sites. All you have to do is turn it on, and you’ll notice RSS icons are cropping up everywhere online.

The Read/Write Web

Largely as a result of these forces, the profession of journalism has gone well beyond credentialed reporters and into the hands of bloggers.  New York University’s Jay Rosen on his PressThink blog wrote of the current state of journalism:

“1. The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market economy.

2. Journalism had become the domain of professionals, and amateurs were sometimes welcomed into it—as with the op-ed page. Whereas the weblog is the domain of amateurs and professionals are the ones being welcomed to it.

3. In journalism since the mid-nineteenth century, barriers to entry have been high. With the weblog, barriers to entry are low: a computer, a Net connection, and a software program like Blogger or Movable Type gets you there. Most of the capital costs required for the weblog to “work” have been sunk into the Internet itself, the largest machine in the world (with the possible exception of the international phone system.)”

And with smart RSS platforms, people can now instantly read feeds from within their email, react to them by adding their comments or thoughts, and publish their reactions along with the original feed and their own relevant tags to their own blog, their company’s intranet site or Wiki.

In addition, my Search Engine Marketing-based Public Relations (SEMPR) approach is based on the following tenets:

1) People are increasingly going online first when looking for information about a product or service to purchase. (Source: WOMMA)

2) The Internet is the only medium in which trust is raising vs. television, newspapers, and other media outlets (Source: Forrester Research)

3) People trust word-of-mouth recommendations by 2:1 over other sources in their purchase decisions. (Source: McKinsey)

4) Journalists and analysts are not the key influencers even for Business to Business (B2B) purchases that they used to be; while new media influencers are growing in strength. (See sources below)

5) User generated content (UGC) have been effectively tagged by people with authority – their creators, viewers, detractors and admirers.

There are very compelling statistics that support these tenets and our different, SEMPR approach to building sustainable conversations:

- 76% of Americans don’t believe advertising – Yankelovich, 2005

- 92% of Americans rate WOM of friends, family, and others as the best source of ideas and information (up from 67% in 1997) – GfK NOP/Roper 2005

- WOM ranked as #1 driver of directly influencing technology or services purchase decisions – CNET Business Network

- 85% of U.S. marketing executives plan to incorporate WOM, customer evangelism and blogs into their marketing mix – CMO Magazine Survey 2007

- 74% of people hearing a personal, negative recommendation were influenced to buy another brand – Millward Brown, 2005

SEMPR, then, is about leveraging the activities of people searching, categorizing, tagging, sharing and talking with each other online. Who better to manage those activities (from a business perspective) than those responsible for positioning an organization, their products, their effects on markets, etc.

Why not SEMPR?