PR is just off-line SEO.
What?
I spent yesterday at the excellent Search and Social School 2012 at Manchester Metropolitan University, organised with skill and elan by David Edmundson-Bird and Ben Keegan. If you don’t follow David on Twitter @groovegenerator you are missing out on a unique voice on digital marketing (and the inadequacies of the trains between Manchester and Preston), whilst Ben @bobotheeklown tweets a life of quiet desperation. He supports Arsenal you see.
Both are great assets to the Manchester digital community.
The presentations from leading players in the digital marketing field were detailed and very practically oriented and as a value for money for exercise the event was perfect. Great content, delivered for precisely £0.
One thing that inadvertently linked the presentations together was a sense that the purpose of social is to ‘game’ Google. This is not an original thought but one that began to get uncomfortable when one of the presenters described social and PR and reputation management as ‘off-line SEO’.
I’m completely happy with the SEO folks playing a never ending game of cat and mouse with Google but reputation and PR are different and it’s an illusion to think that you can ‘game’ your own reputation and talks to a very old-fashioned mindset in which the more data you have on your customers the better tools you have to outwit them.
Well, I guess you can fool a customer once.
One of the presentations revealed more of this attitude to customers when portraying behavioural targeting as this brilliant way to present your message to customers who have gone some way down the route of buying before leaving a site.
In that sentence you can replace the phrase ‘present your message’ with the word ‘get right up the nose of’, like a shopkeeper chasing you down the street after you’ve picked a shirt off the rack, thought twice, and left the shop.
Appropriate down the market perhaps, but not in the marketing department
Who thinks of customers and potential customers as the mistaken, who need to be herded back into the store? Whatever happened to the idea of marketing as working out what customers want to buy and then presenting it to them?
One of the presenters, Simon Wharton, of leading SEO and digital marketing boffins Push On Ltd had a go at PR for being behind the curve on both social and SEO and there’s a lot of truth in that criticism, but there’s a wider question than simply who has the better technical skills.
If you regard social and SEO as ‘tools to fool’, either Google or a customer (and there were some eye-opening comments about manipulating user reviews for SEO too) then you have also to be able say that you have first tried to be worth searching for in the first place.
I have mentioned before Andy Sernowiz’s great phrase: “Advertising is the Cost of Being Boring.”
In other words, your first responsibility as a marketer is to find what it is about your product or brand that is intrinsically interesting and be able to tell a compelling brand story that people think is worth sharing, rather than rely on interrupting your market in ever more elaborate and even undercover ways.
The result is word of mouth and everyone knows where that ranks in the marketing hierarchy.
I’m comfortable with SEO and digital agencies having control of the specialist skills required and PR people must improve their understanding in this area (one of the reasons I devoted a day to the event) but you can have as much data and as much technique as you like, but it’s the story that customers buy into.
What do you think?