Today’s public relations campaigns are drastically different from those of even ten years go. Using the Internet, companies can target specific market segments and talk directly to their potential customers through Web sites, blogs, online videos, social networks, news aggregators, forums, and search engines. This has led to a more personalized brand of PR that can grab greater attention for less money.
Once upon a time, public relations required hiring expensive agencies. These firms had built close relationships with traditional media outlets such as newspapers and controlled the information that the public received. When a client needed press attention, the agency would shower its media contacts with various perks, and in return these gatekeepers would provide news exposure.
The rise of the Internet changed everything and signaled the decline of traditional media. Nowhere was this more apparent than with newspapers. As the Web grew, an increasing amount news and information appeared online, much of it entirely free of charge. “New media” sources such as Web sites, blogs, and forums attracted millions of viewers, all hungry for the next article, post, or upload. Soon search engines and aggregators began collecting news into portal locations, making it easy to find specific topics and other information. Most recently, with the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, media sharing sites as well as social networks have facilitated the quick exchange of ideas, pictures, and movies.
As a result, traditional media outlets have lost their ability to hold shut the gates, making it easier to reach people than ever before. Companies can submit news directly to Internet news portals such as PRweb and Digg. Sites like YouTube and Flickr have simple tools to post PR videos and pictures. Still other sites such as Facebook and MySpace let people distribute messages and media virally over social networks. And, of course, Google with its ubiquitous search engine and news feed enables anyone to locate the latest articles and information.
So it’s a cinch to grab lots of attention for mere pennies, right? Not quite yet. While the advertising middlemen are disappearing from the PR equation, it still takes skill to have your news ride the Internet wave. In fact, each type of Web channel, whether a blog, search engine, or social network, requires specifically tailored submissions to maximize distribution. Over my next few articles, I’ll be exploring the most popular venues for Internet PR and how each of them can provide personalized, targeted exposure for your company.
“Global Business Services unveiled its new report, “The End of Advertising as We Know It,” forecasting greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than occurred in the previous 50.To examine the factors influencing advertising and explore future scenarios, IBM surveyed more than 2,400 consumers and 80 advertising executives globally. The IBM report shows increasingly empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies are redefining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked.
Traditional advertising players risk major revenue declines as budgets shift rapidly to new, interactive formats, which are expected to grow at nearly five times that of traditional advertising. To survive in this new reality, broadcasters must change their mass audience mind-set to cater to niche consumer segments, and distributors need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices. Advertising agencies must experiment creatively, become brokers of consumer insights, and guide allocation of advertising dollars amid exploding choices. All players must adapt to a world where advertising inventory is increasingly bought and sold in open exchanges vs. traditional channels.
Advertising Experts’ Expectations in Line with Global Consumer Trends
IBM’s research found that advertising experts recognize the changing nature of consumers and also anticipate dramatic changes on the horizon. More than half of ad professionals polled by IBM expect that in the next five years open advertising exchanges (currently led by companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL) will take 30 percent of current revenues now commanded by traditional broadcasters and media. Nearly half of the advertising survey respondents anticipate a significant (greater than 10%) revenue shift away from the 30-second spot within the next five years, and almost 10 percent of respondents thought there would be a dramatic (greater than 25 percent) shift. Two-thirds of advertising experts surveyed by IBM expect 20 percent of advertising revenue to move from impression-based to impact-based formats within three years.
Saul Berman, IBM Media & Entertainment Strategy and Change practice leader, said, “Advertising remains integral to pop culture and continues to fund a significant portion of entertainment around the world. But it needs to morph into new formats and offer more intrinsic value to consumers, who will have more choices. The wealth of new advertising outlets means consumer analytics will have a more prominent role than ever regardless of where you reside in the value chain. Young people in particular have grown accustomed to not paying for content. Despite greater consumer control over content and advertising, we envision a world where consumers will continue to prefer to view advertising rather than pay for content directly.”"
Click here to read the complete research report
Helm, Clay. “IBM Predicts the End of Advertising as We Know It.” IBM. 11 Nov. 2007 <http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22570.wss>.
As a web development company who experienced the boom of the late nineties, where moderate sized web applications easily cost a quarter million to build, its amazes us that the cost of today’s web applications has become so inexpensive. We even surprise ourselves with how much functionality we are able to produce for our clients for their invested dollar with the speed our developers, new tools and reusable code.
Here are some recent figures to support this claim:
DropSend: Build $48,012 / Monthly $3,625
Freshbooks Build $290,000 / Monthly $46,000
Maya’s Mom: Build $70,000 / Monthly $30,000
Mobissimo: Build $60,000 / Monthly $150,000
Wesabe: Build $200,000 / Monthly: $3,000
Source: SXSW: The Figures Behind The Top Web Apps
With costs to develop Web 2.0 applications at affordable cost levels for any new idea and startup it leaves one wondering why not start a site. With MySpace worth an estimated $20 Billion and Facebook gaining quickly at an estimated worth of $10. The risk v. reward tradeoff seems to be stacked for the entrepreneur. If you have a great idea, don’t delay, get a quote from WebpageFX today 
I had read in an article back a few months back about an interesting website promotion. Essentially the customer would give something away or offer a certain coupon/service that would only be available via their company website, thus pushing traffic to the site through the website promotion effort. As the webmaster of a local fire department, I figured that I might give this website promotion idea a try.
-The Plan
With the holiday activities of Halloween quickly approaching, I figured that an online photo gallery of kids out for trick or treat with our firehouse dalmation “Sparky” would be a pretty easy way to get some attention.
-Location, Location, Location
Luckily I was able to secure the town square for my photo shoot!
-Activity
Kids would already be out trick or treating, what else do they need? How about a larger than life dalmation and a firetruck? Sounds fun to me&helli;
-Reminder
The kids want the candy, how will they remember to go to the website? My solution was a business card size reminder of our web address and some dear little paw prints from “Sparky”.
-Plan of attack
This was the part that was most important. I have them on my website and they know what they are looking for, how can I get them interested in what I want to target with my web promotion? It was simple, I built the photo gallery pages, and simply added some general information on the different sections of the website that I wanted to promote.
-Results that count
In the end, I saw a major spike in my site visits over a period of a few days after the event. I also had some up front results by having some of the promotional material available while doing the photo shoot on location. Overall, this web promotion works great and was very successful.
Click here to find out about other website promotion ideas
After a long awaited 180 days another Google PageRank update is now underway. For those of us in the Internet Marketing world Google PageRank can be a badge of honor if your websites have a high PageRank and for Internet marketers who own properly websites with advertisers a 1/10 increase or decrease in PageRank can mean the difference in thousands of dollars in advertising revenue a month.
This update was a disappointing one for the team at WebpageFX. Our website dropped from a PR6 to a PR5 which makes no difference in the number of visitors who come to our website, but we enjoyed having a PR6 for many years. The downward shift of Google PageRank is part of every update as it becomes increasing harder to have a PR6+ website PageRank.
Here are some other websites how experience a large decrease in PageRank:
For those of you who fall outside of the Internet Marketing community here is a quick definition of Google PageRank:
PageRank is Google’s ranking software that calculates the relevance of a webpage to the search keywords entered. The software analyses both the number of incoming links and the ‘quality’ of the referring webpage to generate a relative measurement between 0 (low-relevance) and 10 (high-relevance). (The ‘quality’ of the referring webpage is an abstract measure of how authoritative it is on the subject matter.)
Definition from: motive.co.nz
Spending on internet advertising by business-to-business advertisers jumped 17% last year to $1.4 billion dollars.
Highlights:
- B2B advertising spending grew to $14.39 billion last year, up 1.4%
- The largest B2B advertisers are AT&T, Verizon, Sprint/Nextel, IBM and HP make up the top 5
- The #1 internet advertiser was Monster Worldwide, who spent $101.6 million
Data from BtoB Magazine