Last week my blog was about my view of technology and small business over the course of the past 29 years.  This week I want to talk about the internet based world of technology today and what it means to my business and to our clients’ businesses. 

Public relations used to be the practice of approaching the traditional media (print, broadcast, magazines) to garner third party endorsements for our clients.  These third party articles or endorsements were valued by our client’s customers and client’s sales rose as a result. Today, many traditional media are shutting down or moving to the internet due to the lack of traditional advertising revenue.   

The internet is an open medium.  Press releases historically were not.  Today, public relations messages placed on the web have the ability to drive client’s sales as well as attract traditional and new media articles.  This is an amazing leap forward in the value of public relations. 

Driving client’s sales on the web means pushing the client name up to the number one or two slot on search engines.  At LANE PR we are now as focused on a client’s search results as we are on the quantity of clips that we garner for them. 

We drive search rankings by optimizing all of the usual public relations tools - press releases, white papers, media kits, with key words and hyperlinks.  Additionally, we are now responsible for our client’s news rooms and monitoring their search rankings and Google Analytics.  Bringing these tools under our responsibility allows us to monitor the results of our public relations efforts.   Social media campaigns provide another very rich opportunity for driving additional rankings and sales for clients.  Public relations can now accomplish organically what pay-for-click attempts to do.  

We have added all of these tools to our public relations tool kit at no extra charge to our clients.     I have always maintained that public relations existed only to drive sales or company value for our clients.  With new media, our public relations strategies can now be directly linked to the client’s sales as well as their news clips. 

As a trained marketing professional, I started LANE PR in 1990 as a public relations agency.  Although I am a strong believer in integrated marketing strategies, I felt that public relations was the most cost effective tool to increase sales and grow value for our clients.  With the advent of new media, public relations has exponentially increased its ability to drive sales and to be the most cost effective marketing tool available.   

Wendy Lane