DWPub Sporadic

My whitepaper examining the impact of search marketing on the PR industry has been published today.
Entitled Public Relations Versus Search Marketing - Clash or Collaboration?, the whitepaper is a response to the fast growing phenomenon of search marketing agencies offering PR services.
It illustrates how search marketing agencies are threatening to grab the online PR agenda if PR professionals do not educate themselves en masse about new media issues and start offering online PR advice and services. The whitepaper describes how PR professionals can benefit from the close relationship between PR and search engine optimisation.
Take a look at the press release and download the whitepaper from www.dwpub.com/whitepapers/

Pictures can now be included in press releases submitted to the Response Source/SourceWire Press Release Wire.
Including an image with each press release is a great way to boost your press release distribution - increasing chances of media coverage and attracting more visitors to your release online.
Each image appears alongside its press release on Response Source and/or SourceWire and expands to full size when clicked on. Releases with images are highlighted with an image icon on the home page and press release index pages of each site as well as being flagged in the plain text email version sent to subscribing journalists.
Uploading pictures with press releases is easy with the press release submission form.
For more information call 0845 370 7777 or email sales@dwpub.com.

Business and technology journalists’ website SourceWire is to be the official press office sponsor of the Internet World show in early May.
Press releases associated with the event, which will run between 1-3 May at Earls Court 2 in London, are being featured on a dedicated page on the SourceWire site. To make sure your releases are included simply post them to the SourceWire Press Release Wire and be sure to include the phrase ‘Internet World’ in the body text.
Members of the DWPub team will be based at the press office during the show and will be available to provide advice on our publications database, journalist enquiries system and press release wire.

I wandered along to the latest E-consultancy.com roundtable on online PR yesterday and witnessed a real consensus that the disciplines of PR and search marketing have a lot to gain from each other.

E-consultancy.com's primary audience is e-commerce and internet marketing people, so it was really encouraging to see that about a third of the 22 attendees were 'traditional' PR professionals.

Kate Williams from online PR agency headstream showed how it was possible to adapt PR skills to the online world with great tenacity. And Andrew Girdwood from bigmouthmedia showed how search engine optimisation (SEO) companies are becoming very savvy when it comes to PR. But we need to see more members of the 'traditional' PR community learning about online techniques.

Prior to the event E-consultancy CEO Ashley Friedlein illustrated the issue well when he said: "Our online PR training courses are currently our most popular courses. Not surprisingly we get loads of SEO types on these courses. My impression is that search people are much more eager to learn about PR than the other way round – PR people beware."

You can now quickly generate target press lists and contact journalists directly using our improved Press Lists Express service on FeaturesExec.
The new Press Lists Express, which will go live next week, is based on enhancements suggested by users since the original service launched in mid-2005 when we also launched FeaturesExec for all sectors.
You’ll find the new version faster and easier to use. You are now able to incorporate freelance journalists (if you also subscribe to our Freelance Journalist Directory) and your own private contacts in addition to staffers. And once you have created your press list you can email multiple journalist contacts at the same time.
For more details about the new Press Lists Express and the Freelance Journalist Directory call 0845 370 7777 or email sales@dwpub.com.
The link between Press Lists Express and the Freelance Journalist Directory can help to boost your media coverage over time - see my earlier story on working with freelance journalists.

Make the most of this year’s CeBIT technology show with the dedicated SourceWire Press Release Wire section.
Press releases submitted to the Response Source/SourceWire Press Release Wire which include a reference to ‘CeBIT’ will be featured on a special section on the SourceWire site in the lead-up to the event and for a period afterwards, enabling journalists to quickly find releases relevant to the show. The section also features releases related to the 3GSM World Congress.
If you’re going to be at CeBIT this year, two members of our team will be around in case you need a break from talking to clients and journalists! UK account manager Tanya and German market specialist Katja will be at the show for the first two days. They can be contacted on +44 7769 712381 while they are there.

It's now easier to assess the merits of each individual Response Source journalist enquiry thanks to changes to the format of the emails. We’re now sending more journalist enquiries (see our journalist enquiries usage graph) to a greater number of recipients than ever before, so it has become critical for recipients to be able to scan each one they receive quickly. We’ve cut out some unnecessary text and brought the critical elements of each enquiry further up the email. We hope you like it. If you have any feedback on Response Source please let us know - email admin@dwpub.com or call 0845 370 7777. If you’re not yet a subscriber to the Response Source Journalist Enquiries System then call 0845 370 7777 or email sales@dwpub.com for more information.

For people who don't like to believe anything until they've seen the stats, there have been a few reports out recently supporting the widely-held perception that online news consumption is now significant.

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise has revealed some early nuggets from the forcoming Hitwise UK Online News and Media report. It shows that 'news and media' experienced 28 per cent year-on-year growth in market share of UK internet visits in January (also see the Journalism.co.uk report on this).

Meanwhile, a KPMG report found that 26 per cent of UK 18- to 24-year-olds  get their news online rather than from TV, newspapers or radio. Though the headline saying 'traditional media resilient' is an interesting spin - it's really only showing resilience in the higher age groups.

All this rather supports my argument that PR professionals must start engaging much more in online PR.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) has issued it's Social Media Guidelines document.

This is a very welcome development from the CIPR which up to now has been a little slow on the uptake with such issues. However, having had a quick scan at the document I feel it fails to communicate the major challenge that social media represents to the PR industry.

The documents focuses mainly on ethical issues, it's main theme being a list of 'do nots'. Yes - the ethical side of social media and PR is all very worthy, but there isn't much point talking about ethics when in five years time the PR industry may have all but lost its voice.

The critical issue is that the PR industry needs to educate itself en masse about how to use social media for the benefit of its clients and start putting online PR techniques into practice. The CIPR should take a lead in this process. If this is not done the PR industry risks losing the communications agenda to other disciplines such as search marketing, direct marketing and advertising.

I attended the latest in the Leeds Metropolitan University PR open lecture series last night (see also Richard Bailey's blog), and very good it was too despite the last-minute change - scheduled speaker D-J Collins from Google couldn't make it.

My four-hour drive up to Leeds from Brighton was not wasted as a director from local agency Ptarmigan PR stepped in to do an enlightening presentation on guerrilla PR.

He provided some entertaining case studies, but I noted that they were all for consumer clients and seemed reliant on a stunt with some sort of physical presence - be it sand castles in the shape of a Mini car, logos projected onto public buildings or massive graffiti murals. This is all very well when your target audience is a local consumer, but what if your client is B2B with national customers? Guerrilla PR appears much more challenging in a B2B context as it seems to inevitably revolve around a local event.

I got a few ideas from the presentation though, I'll be trying them out on you!