You Ask, I Answer: Difference Between Digital PR and Traditional PR?

In today's episode, Elizabeth asks, what's the difference between digital PR and traditional PR? Um so this is in reference to something that uh search engine companies are promoting. Uh the idea of digital PR uh being focused on SEO outcomes, uh getting inbound links to your website, uh getting clicks on those links, etc. Uh, from high-ranking domains. Guys, that's just SEO.

Right? I it's fine if you want to rebrand it as digital PR, but it's still just SEO. Uh, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a vital important part of uh the SEO work that you do.

But PR outcomes, there's there's two PR outcomes, right? Fundamentally, there's attention and trust. Great public relations efforts. Um, deliver attention. You can call you know, measure that with any way you want, and trust uh the belief in uh brand, a company, etc.

Um, and that it's trustworthy and worth doing business with. Those are the two fundamental outcomes. Whether you call it digital or traditional or online or offline or whatever, it doesn't matter. The outcomes are the same. If the outcomes are not the same, then you're not doing public relations.

Um, are there uh secondary effects, uh other outcomes that come along with that? Yes, and that's where things like uh SEO metrics come into play. Back in the days when I worked at a PR agency, one of the benefits we promoted of good public relations was many of the SEO outcomes, like inbound links, um referral traffic from other websites and things like that. But those are not the program outcomes that you're being aiming for. Those are beneficial side effects, really.

If you are pitching people for links as opposed to pitching people for coverage, you're not really doing PR. You are doing SEO. And that's, again, there's nothing wrong with that. But don't confuse the two. And the reason you shouldn't confuse the two is that SEO has a narrower scope of outcomes, and those outcomes may not deliver the kind of results that you get from a great public relations campaign.

Getting a great link in a story uh is less impactful to the end user than getting a great story about your company, whether or not it has a link. And one of the things that you measure, if you're doing public relations measurement correctly, one of the things you're measuring is branded search. How many people are searching for your company by name, right? How many people are searching for trust insights or Christopher Penn within the realm of analytics and data? Because there's a uh long-deceased movie actor by the same name.

Um searching for that, right? And if I'm doing good public relations, awareness and attention and trust, then those things should increase. And by the way, those things may or may not involve inbound links. Right? If you are aware of me by name, if you're aware of my company by name, you may not need uh a link to be able to Google for me.

You may just know I'm top of mind. Oh, I need to I need somebody to help me with Google Analytics 4. Well, go and type in uh Christopher Penn, Google Analytics and see what comes up. Right? That's what great public relations does, is it creates that awareness and it creates that trust.

So be very careful when someone is conflating SEO outcomes with public relations outcomes. They are different, they are equally valuable in their own ways, and you can use some metrics from either branch to help measure the other. Like for um for digital PR or SEO, right? You can look for things like unlinked mentions, right? That's okay.

One of the things that uh when we look at how Google's algorithms work, uh, they do things like entity recognition and entity detection within uh text to see like what are the words and phrases that are in a block of text that are mentioned near each other that inform the search engine about what constitutes a topic, right? It doesn't necessarily need links to do that. Bill Slosky over at SEO by the C has dived deep into a lot of Google's patents on how they do entity recognition and then build a network graph of those entities to determine relevance to determine related terms. So good doing great public relations can benefit you even if there's no link for SEO purposes because it helps associate the topic uh with your brand. If you are constantly being mentioned in the New York Times, whether or not you get a link, uh, because the New York Times is such a credible site, it helps build Google's knowledge graph of everything relevant to that idea.

And as we talked about, you know, traditional public relations can use SEO metrics as part of the set of outcomes. Realistically, when you're measuring public relations, you're looking at you know four or five buckets of metrics. You're looking at referral traffic for sure. Uh, you're looking at branded uh search. Uh, you are looking at some of the other SEO metrics as well.

You are looking at um uh attention and trust, right? So things like NPS scores can be uh potentially impacted by that. Um you are looking at uh even efficiency of of campaigns, right? If you put two ads in front of a consumer, and one ad is by a brand they recognize and one by is a brand they don't recognize, which is the consumer more likely to click on, right? From just simple probability, uh they're more likely to click on the ad from the company whose brand they recognize and like.

One of the one of the worst things I've I've seen I've seen when I worked in public relations was uh you know, people making the claim you can't measure PR. Well, that's not true. Uh I I've said that in perhaps stronger terms uh back in those days, but it's not true. Um the challenge becomes establishing which measurements uh that you have access to, which data you have access to has an actual relevant out um relevance or correlation to the outcome that you care about as a company. So what's the difference between these two things?

There is no difference. You know, if you're doing public relations, right, you're generating awareness, you're generating trust. When are you measuring those things by certain outcomes? Yes, including SEO based metrics are in mostly the awareness bucket, but things like branded organic search are in the trust bucket. Um do your measurements well.

Use the data you have available to you. There's so much, so much you can do to measure public relations effectively. You've just got to have the systems in place, have the processes in place, and have the knowledge to know how those things relate to the outcomes that your business cares about. So interesting question. Um say a whole lot more about people mixing up uh disciplines or moving metrics from one to the other, but I think that we'll leave it there for now.

If you've got follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.