When it comes to online PR, the canny marketing person will know that this is one of the best ways to get market visibility and makes you realise that PR, which was rooted in a different age completely, has found a new lease of life.
That’s not to say that traditional PR has run its course, or that the days of the hand delivered press release and a hoped for few inches in a national newspaper have gone forever. It’s just that online PR brings the marketing discipline into a new era.
Online press releases do carry weight and if picked up by more than the distribution services (many which are highly credible and well ranked sites themselves), can have a viral effect on the internet, bringing great kudos and attention to the originator of the news.
The trick of course is to tailor the online PR bump particularly for the internet and not as you would do for the magazine say Whippet Monthly.
Which is why most journalists in the UK have been retrained to understand the meaning of terms such as search engine optimisation and keywords.
There is a downside of course, in that much of the discipline of preparing a press release has gone out of the window, meaning that many examples released into the ether have bigger imaginations than Disney. It used to be that a traditional press release had to be accurate, truthful, informative and well written. Nowadays it’s a seemingly ugly free for all which destroys credibility.
So yes, online PR is great, but just check the source!