Online PR

This includes planting posts, mentions and comments in blogs, forums and social shopping sites. Injecting your brand in the social space can be effective, but remember that the game has changed. It’s still about publicists making contact with the media, issuing press releases and holding event-driven launches – but the definition of media has been greatly expanded. Publicists now work on developing relationships with influential bloggers and citizen journalists, too.

The upside of this is that connections are much easier to come by and develop. Now, you may have to connect with three citizen journalists, one niche publication, and any number of followers you’ll need to cajole into spreading the word. But, since your message is much more targeted and already filtered by experts and actual users, when it spreads, it spreads because it should and not because you lunched with the right connection.

There are two important rules that will keep you from embarrassment here. First, remember that this is a social medium. So your people – not your company – should be doing the seeding. Second, remember not to butt in where you’re not wanted. Have you ever been deep in conversation with a close friend about an arcane, inside event and someone who only heard the last sentence jumps in on the totally wrong track? That person’s credibility is shot, and, worse, they don’t know it. Apply this concept to social networking. There are conversations that started hours, days, weeks, even years ago and if people are kind enough to let you in, you better understand the context. The good news is, new conversations are starting everyday and you can be an authentic part of them.

Another piece of good advice is this: make good associations. Just like when you were a kid, if you hung out with a certain crowd, teachers, parents and your peers would perceive you to be of like caliber. In the new landscape, business connections are similarly transparent. It’s critical for businesses to make the right connections.

This may be no surprise, but the companies best suited to help you with online outreach and influencer outreach are actually traditional PR firms. It’s in their DNA. Unlike traditional full-service agencies, which are facing a challenge in shifting to the web, PR firms seem to have made the leap fairly gracefully. That may be because their business was always about relationship-building. That lends itself really well to navigating the social networks and making contact with influencers such as bloggers.

Online PR really has two aspects: social interaction and news releases. News releases provide you with great natural search exposure regardless of the wire source you use. Particularly good pickup for your release in reputable news outlets gives you even more bang because backlinks on higher-reputation sites can boost your overall search rankings. That can increase traffic for you and also get you into some of the social or news marketing sites like Digg. The potential residual exposure you can get from improved SEO ranking as a result of backlinks is great – and it only increases the return on your original investment.

I would suggest putting some of the pieces of the ecosystem in place before you go out and try to stimulate activity. You need to have the hooks to ensure that activity is going to be continuous and ongoing. You also need to have a website that’s able to provide some level of engagement, able to share some utilities or tools with users, and able to stimulate a conversation – whether it’s among users or with the company – via commenting or feedback mechanisms.

The key is to have something there to keep users coming back. To use a retail analogy, you don’t want to send people into a store that’s empty. No matter how big the sign is outside, if the store has nothing to sell, there’s no reason to be there and absolutely no reason to come back. Just as importantly, you need to be able to close the loop with email and other contact strategies. Make sure that as many of those components as possible are in place before you do too much outreach.