The PR industry is in a state of flux with increasing emphasis on the digital and social side of communications.   In the context of digital PR, social media and search engine optimization can work together to compound results.  As PR efforts continue to emphasize content publishing, digital and social communications, the opportunity to keyword optimize content for search is low hanging fruit.

Forward thinking companies would do well to assess the SEO and social media readiness of their marketing and PR resources.  Is the current digital PR effort leveraging improved visibility through search engines? Do current PR and Marketing staff or vendors possess the digital PR tools they need to offer competitive consulting in a “PR 2.0” world? Consider the following questions to assess the SEO and social media readiness of your digital PR assets:

1. Is social media participation conducted without attention to SEO?
   According to the iPressroom Digital Readiness Report, social media adoption outranks organic SEO. Yet more than 82% of Internet users surveyed in “When Did We Start Trusting Strangers” (published by Tom Smith, one of the researchers of the Digital Readiness Report) stated search engines are the tools most frequently used to source information about products, brands and services. That disconnect reinforces the need for search engine optimization as a key digital marketing and PR tactic.

Say what you will, blogs are increasingly in competition for time and attention against mainstream media news sources. As the importance of blogs grows, many PR organizations struggle to identify best practices for engaging them.

Blogger relations is not a matter of media relations with a new type of media list. Bloggers are typically not reporters and don’t follow the same rules and practices within traditional journalism. Yet a single blogger can attract an audience on par with that of a small news organization.

As a blogger with over 15,000 subscribers, I’ve been on the sending and receiving end of blog pitches. Here are a few hard won insights for media relations professionals trying to make sense of the blogger audience.

• Be relevant. It seems so simple and obvious, yet it is the biggest mistake made when pitching bloggers. Look at the categories of the blog, tags and previous blog posts. Is your pitch REALLY relevant?

• Personalize. Getting an email pitch with no personal reference at all, or just a press release and no message is a sure trip to the trash folder. Take the time to research the blog, make comments and get involved. Be honest about who you are in the comments and provide thoughtful insight that is of value and relevant to the blog post.

“Do it Wrong Quickly: What Corporations Need from PR in Today’s Transforming Marketplace”Mike Moran begins the afternoon keynote with what is perhaps the most salient point of the whole conference. We don’t need to be the expert in new media or blogs. We need to be the expert in how to solve our client’s problems. Otherwise, we might as well give up. We’ll never be the blog expert because the blog experts exist, and they’re not getting any dumber.

Moran’s tone is optimistic, and not at all condescending, which is a refreshing change from many speakers on this topic, who seem to want to tsk-tsk us for not having discovered social networking years ago. Oh, and they are eager to inform you that whichever social media platform you have succeeded in engaging was obsolete in 1999. Moran eschews alarmism to good effect.

PR types tend to view new media as a sort of death knell for Public Relations. Moran sees them as an opportunity. The new model allows Public Relations to deliver hard results where we know we are making an impact on behalf of our clients. We can target more closely, measure results more accurately, and respond more quickly to customer feedback.

Mainstream media is losing it’s luster and PR firms are scrambling, fumbling in some cases, to reach out to the influential blogerati in the hopes to capture shifts in audience information consumption. OMB recently published a blogger relations guide as well as a long list of what not to do when pitching blogs. Here’s an exceprt:

• Don’t pitch irrelevant stories
• Don’t send emails to anonymous recipients. Use a name.
• Don’t send blanket solicitations to bloggers in the same general industry.
• Don’t embargo an announcement for more than a few days.
• Don’t demand to be covered as if you’re gods gift to the blogosphere.
• Don’t insult the blogger, even as a joke, especially if you don’t know them.
• Don’t lie or make promises you can’t keep.
• Don’t send story ideas that are about as exciting as mall music.
• Don’t send a regular pitch with a press release to a blogger.
• Don’t use traditional media relations tactics with bloggers, but rather, make an effort to connect with them individually.
• Don’t play bloggers like a numbers game.
• Don’t be rude and not thank the blogger for covering your news.