As we all know, digital marketing ceased to exist last year. In January 2013, Forrester announced it was to be the year that ‘digital marketing’ became just ‘marketing’.
I’d like to posit that something similar happened to PR. In fact I think it happened earlier, though we have yet to have had the debate.
There’s no doubt that the internet has changed marketing’s function and activities, but its impact on PR has simply been to expand the discipline’s footprint.
In a world where everyone is a communicator, PR’s influence is all-pervasive. It’s for this reason that I find the term ‘online PR’ to be so reductive.
More than links
As PR people have rushed to get their heads around SEO, and SEO people started undertaking activity that might traditionally be called PR, we’ve seen the term ‘online PR’ increasingly bandied about.
What it tends to mean in this context is content generation and influencer relations, with one goal in mind: building links. And link building, as a goal in itself, is dead, or at least dying.
And deservedly so. Call me old fashioned, but I like my search results to be a representation of the best content for what I’m looking for, not what an SEO (or PR) professional has managed to get the most links to point at.
Google happens to agree with this, so link building, and by extension what tends to get called‘online PR’, is diminishing in effectiveness.
The focus now needs to be more firmly on just creating good content, with the emphasis on forming relationships with those that might link to it taking a back seat.
By Ian McKee (For Econsultancy.com)
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