Leveraging the Web for PR Practitioners
Notes from a March 11th Presentation
To the Independent Practitioners Group

A Few Questions We'll Explore:

• What are your sustainable competitive advantages (in other words, how can you better distinguish yourself from the run of plain-vanilla PR providers)?
• How can you leverage the web to strengthen and broadcast those advantages?
• How can you slowly increase the pipeline of candidates ready to engage with you, and eventually (perhaps) do business with you?
• How can you intelligently integrate your relationships (a big company would call it CRM, or Customer Relationship Management) into your marketing efforts?
• How can you continue to add to the universe of possible clients (the saddest story I’ve heard in months was about a guy in advertising who complained all his clients got bought by other companies. How long did he go without adding to his client base—20 years?).
• How can you find the time to deliver more value to clients while searching for business less?
• How can you broaden and deepen your intelligence network to find more business? Or better yet, how can it better find you?

A Couple of Phrases We’ll Illuminate:

Inbound Marketing
Relationship Marketing

A Mantra We’ll Dissect:

People Tend to Buy from those they Know, Like & Trust

Seth Godin on PR:

"Most PR firms do publicity, not PR. Publicity is the act of getting ink. Publicity is getting unpaid media to pay attention, write you up, point to you, run a picture, make a commotion. Sometimes publicity is helpful, and good publicity is always good for your ego. But it's not PR. PR is the strategic crafting of your story. It's the focused examination of your interactions and tactics and products and pricing that, when combined, determine what and how people talk about you."

A Few Sites Worth Studying Regularly

www.iwantmedia.com
Maintained by an NYU new media professor, it’s one of the best at keeping track of developments at the intersection of the business sides of PR and journalism.
www.micropersuasion.com
One of the earlier & better guides to how the web is changing PR. Its author now works in new media for PR giant Edelman in NY.
www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45
The infamous Romenesko, read several times a day by nearly every journalist in America.
www.marketingprofs.com/
One of the better how-to sites about good online marketing.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com
Godin is simply the best, freshest thinker about the philosophies behind marketing in the 21st century. The original guru of “permission marketing.”
www.copyblogger.com
The best site on the web about the ins & outs (and value) of online copywriting.
www.clickz.com
Not what it used to be, but still worthwhile sometimes.
www.chrisbrogan.com
A newer-age Seth Godin (Seth was actually his mentor). Pretty sharp.
http://searchenginewatch.com
Never hurts to understand a little about how search engines work.

Some Good Local Resources/Ideas/Smart People to Watch

http://askinsivia.com
A great online tool for answering web questions and making new connections, by the Cleveland web development shop Insivia. A great example of an inbound expert tool.
http://toughsledding.wordpress.com
Bill Sledzik, a PR prof at Kent State, offers fresh thinking about PR on his blog.
http://technomarketer.typepad.com
Matt Dickman, formerly w/Digiknow, is now the resident social network guru with the Cleveland office of Fleishman-Hillard, and is increasingly becoming a nationally recognized thinker on the topic.
http://www.pr2020.com/blog
A blog by Paul Roetzer, who runs perhaps Northeast Ohio’s only true inbound marketing/PR operation.