Online PR activities
Activities which can be considered to be online PR include:(a) Communicating with media (journalists) online
(b) Link building
(c) Blogs, podcasting and RSS
(d) Managing how your brand is presented on third-party sites
(e) Creating a buzz – online viral marketing.(a) Communicating with media (journalists) online
Communicating with media (journalists) online uses the Internet as a new conduit to dis-
seminate press releases through e-mail and on-site. Options to consider for a company
include: setting up a press-release area on the web site; creating e-mail alerts about news
that journalists and other third parties can sign up to; submitting your news stories or
releases to online news feeds. Examples include: PR Newswire: (www.prnewswire.com),
Internetwire (www.internetwire.com/iwire/home), PressBox (www.pressbox.co.uk); PRWeb
(www.prweb.com), Business Wire (www.businesswire.com). Press releases can be written
for search engine optimisation (SEO).(b) Link building
Link buildingis a key activity for search engine optimisation. It can be considered to be
an element of online PR since it is about getting your brand visible on third-party sites.
Link building needs to be a structured effort to achieve as many links into a web site
as possible from referring web sites (these commonly include reciprocal links). We have
also seen that your position in the search engine results pages will be higher if you have
quality links into relevant content on your site (not necessarily the home page).
McGaffin (2004) provides a great introduction to implementing a structured link-
building programme. The main principle of link building is as follows. McGaffin says:
‘Create great content, link to great content and great content will link to you.’ He
describes how you should review existing links, link to competitors, set targets and then
proactively enquire to suitable site owners for links.CHAPTER 8· INTERACTIVE MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS
Link building
A structured activity to
include good quality
hyperlinks to your site
from relevant sites with
a good page rank.
Reciprocal links
Links which are agreed
between yourself and
another organisation.
Note on link building
You can use the syntax link:sitein Google to see the number of quality links into a page on
your site as judged by Google, e.g. http://www.davechaffey.com.
Note this also includes internal links. To exclude internal links and include pages with lower
page rank or that do not have a true hyperlink, but contain the URL, search on Google for this:
http://www.url.com – site:www.url.com.
For example,
http://www.davechaffey.com – site:www.davechaffey.com