Viewpoint: Purchasing Search Ads Can Help Influence Consumer Conversation

A key distinction between PR and advertising has always been that public relations is earned media rather than paid. But now, just as search engines have revolutionized the way consumers access information, search marketing is evolving public relations.

At Ketchum, some of our newest PR offerings involve buying ad space online -- literally paying for the ability to reach the public with our clients' stories.

If you think that's odd for a PR agency, consider this: Google -- with upward of 5 billion views a month in the U.S. alone -- is essentially the largest publication on the planet. Tie your brand to the right search terms and you can instantly advertise your online offerings to anyone searching for topics that contain those words. But don't count on any real consumer engagement. That's where PR comes in.

(more at AdAge)

About a month ago, Gareth Kay, a man much pithier and more eloquent than I, wrote a fantastic op-ed piece that perfectly sums up our approach to counseling brands on how to engage audiences on the interwebs.

He asks a crucial question: “rather than focusing on social media, shouldn’t we be focusing on social ideas?” That’s the question we had on our minds when we first started ISG a few years ago, and unfortunately, it represents a perspective that’s still exceedingly rare in the worlds of PR and advertising.

Misled by their agencies and the media, when most brands look at the internet, they see a toolkit..  Having identified their target demographic, they map out their messages and then select a delivery mechanism for those messages, picking and choosing from the online toolkit Silicon Valley has created for us over the years in the form of the various available social media channels. But focusing on the tools first means that most brands are missing the digital forest for its trees.

Here's the problem with using the social media toolkit as a foundation for planning communications campaigns...Web users aren’t flocking to different social media channels because they love the channels themselves—they’re using them because of the conversations and stories they enable. When seeking to engage web users through social media, however, in shockingly few cases do brands actually pause somewhere during this process to figure out what, exactly, that compelling conversation or story will be (hint: it’s not that you have a new product, or that your product is special in some way).