The New PR

  • How can “bad actors” ruin your company’s SEO?

    How can “bad actors” ruin your company’s SEO?

    Three ways you can defend your company’s SEO from hackers, scammers, con artists, and the competitors who hire them.

  • How we learned to love reanchoring our content’s key performance indicators

    How we learned to love reanchoring our content’s key performance indicators

    Ever since we expanded our team and hired an analytics specialist, we’ve been watching changes in how our clients’ audiences enjoy the content we produce. Ten years ago, I would have told you about major spikes in page view, the overall number of unique visitors, and whether our link-building campaigns had any effect on Google’s…

  • Burgers and fries: how your customer experience and communications should work side-by-side.

    Burgers and fries: how your customer experience and communications should work side-by-side.

    “I never, ever want to get a phone call from a customer about an undercooked hamburger.” That quote’s from a former boss of mine, during a meeting about licensing one of our organization’s valuable brand names to a food service company. He recognized that we wouldn’t have a lot of visibility into all the things…

  • Capturing attention and building media relationships in “The New PR” environment

    Capturing attention and building media relationships in “The New PR” environment

    A client’s investor called me to check in on the status of a communications campaign. Having made it through both “Web 1.0” and “Web 2.0,” he shared a perspective I hear often from media and technology leaders these days. Despite a seeming explosion of places where companies can get coverage—blogs and podcasts, along with newspapers…

  • Story Placement and “The New PR”

    Story Placement and “The New PR”

    When I talk to business owners and company leaders about why they think their messages aren’t getting traction with public relations or earned media, I’ll cite changes in the way newscasts actually present information. Instead of just telling you the news, an anchor’s got to deliver an enticing customer experience — they’ve got to convince…

  • Focus on your business instead of on your business blog.

    At two of my early journalism gigs, I encountered assignment desk editors who would crumble press releases and three-point them into the nearest trash bin if they didn’t follow accepted submission protocol. Leave out the “–30–” or the triple-hash at the end of the page? Binned. Miss the “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” at the head? Chucked.…