Tips for Online PR

I did an interview recently and thought some of the Q/A would be useful: What's the difference between online PR and offline PR? Basically, online PR invlolves activities geared towards influencing media, communities and audiences that exist solely on the Internet using online channles. That includes search engines, blogs, news search, forums, discussion threads, social networks and other online communication tools. Brand reputation monitoring and management is also a focus area for online PR. Offline PR deals with the same things except with print, radio TV, conferences/events and other "real life" venues. One difference between online and offline PR is in pitching. For example, before pitching a print journalist, the publication's editorial calendar is researched to see if there are any planned story opportunities. The subsequent pitch is specific to the upcoming story. Popular blogs can be as influential as many print publications, but pitching a blogger requires a careful approach. There is no editorial calendar for blogs so it is important to read previous posts and become very familiar with the subject matter covered. When pitching a blogger it is better not to include the press release in the pitch, since most bloggers don't write stories based on press releases, they point links to a release and write their own commentary. When you pitch a blogger poorly, they may furl.net and PRWeb has a great mix of tools for distributing press releases as well as hosting high resolution images, permanent redirects for URLs and a podcast feature for certain levels of press releases. PRWeb also offers a trackback url on press releases so blogs are encouraged to link to them. Doing so creates an automatic link back to the blog. Other wire services we use include: Business Wire and micropersuasion.com, thenewpr.com. There are many more, but I like to keep it simple. The most important online PR resource you can have is a talented PR pro that can research story opportunities and persuasively pitch both online journalists and bloggers accordingly. Sending out press releases alone is like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks. Software tools can help make things easier, such as Google Alerts for brand monitoring, but it is human interpretation that provides the most value. What skills, knowledge and contacts are important for online PR practitioners? Like SEO, online PR requires a mix (although in a different order of priority) of social, creative, persuasive and technical skills. Developing relationships with online publication editors and bloggers is also particularly useful. When is it a good time to outsource public relations and when should you keep it in-house? When companies have an internal public relations staff, they often only need consulting from a online PR specialist on best practices or with a particular situation. For companies that do not perform their own PR, then an online or offline Basically, reputation management (online) is the business of monitoring what the marketplace is saying about your brand. It also means responding to situations before they run out of control. Venues include blogs, discussion threads, forums and social networking sites. A simplistic forumla is to allocate a proportion of resources to reputation management in relation to how important your brand is to your overall business. Monitoring how consumers talk about your brand can provide early warning signs for product or service issues as well as promotion opportunities that can be leveraged. Companies can start by subscribing to RSS feeds of search results on their company name from blog and news search engines, set up a Google Alerts account or use the BlogPulse Lowdown on Press Release Optimization for more information on how to leverage press releases for SEO and online promotion. Lee Odden is President and Founder of Online Marketing Blog offering daily news, interviews and best practices.