Search Engine Strategies: Public Relations Via Search Engines: RedBoots Consulting
Next up was Nan Dawkins, partner at RedBoots Consulting. She spoke about RSS and its growing popularity. Reporters are increasingly using RSS, and this means PR flacks don’t need to worry about finding journalists and getting their email addresses and getting past spam filters; the press comes to them.
There’s a big difference between companies that blog and not. When a company has lots of negative press, that ranks usually very high, with consumer review sites and message board posts showing lots of negative press. Wal-Mart, which has no blog and no voice in the blogosphere, has terrible search results, while Saab, which does blog and does have executives commenting on blogs, has much better press and search results, even after bad news stories.
Companies should have feeds of their press releases. Hopefully, a big company will have feeds for different topics, allowing interested reporters to read what they want. Cisco is great about this. They send out over 50 different feeds. It’s also important that corporate feeds have a landing page that explains what it is and how to use it.
Meaty content is very important. The more content, the more interested journalists will be.
Didn’t mean to suggest that one to one outreach to reporters is obsolete — there is still a place for that. But, RSS does provide benefits over email as a communications tool.
Comment by Nan Dawkins | March 8, 2005
Yeah, didn’t mean to suggest that, just that RSS makes PR easier, eliminating a lot of extra work. That work is still necessary, but you can rely on reporters getting at least some of the releases on their own.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | March 8, 2005