Wednesday’s post featured half of the list capturing my top storytelling techniques posts from the first half of 2014, including the American Chemistry Association breaking down the composition of Sriracha.
Today brings the second half.
We’ve been quietly executing campaigns that blend the principles of PR with owned media to improve a client’s organic search. I decided to use my talk at the CIPRA conference in Beijing as the forum to publicly share what we view as the game changer in the communications industry. As search engines increasingly emphasize content — not technical acuity — in organic search, PR sits in the perfect position to take this one on. Unlike search consultancies that must resort to buying links — a definite “no no” in the eyes of Google — natural link-building is part of PR’s DNA.
Explaining the commoditization of the news release as a form of supply-demand economics misses the root cause. When distribution of the news release reached only the domain of the media, journalists enjoyed a free lunch. With little effort, they could write stories based on a news release, and those stories appeared fresh to their readers because they couldn’t find them elsewhere. This advantage disappeared around 1996 when news release distribution services started flinging out news releases to the masses via the Internet. This post includes an infographic that puts it in perspective.
The intelligence community devotes massive amounts of time in trying to decode information from the bad guys as well as advancing their own encryption technology. The communications business — and specifically the client/agency relationship — has its own code. Taking our own advice that levity has a place in business communications, we created an infographic that cracks the client/agency code.
Embed this Infographic on Your Site:
<div align="center"><a href="http://www.ishmaelscorner.com/2014/02/23/the-client-pr-agency-relationship/”title=”decrypting eight code phrases in the client/pr agency relationship"><img src="https://www.ishmaelscorner.com/wp-admin/Infographic For Decrypting the Client/PR Agency Code?utm_source=infographic&utm_medium=main&utm_campaign=infographic" alt=" Hoffman infographic- decrypting the client/pr agency code" style="border:none;" /></a><br /> <small>The Hoffman Agency is a public relations firm that emphasizes storytelling in <a href="http://www.hoffman.com">business communication</a></small>.</div>
This is a starting point.
When I started this blog in 2008, I hoped it would serve as a resource for the communications profession in understanding the concept of storytelling. That’s still one of my objectives; hence, this post reverse-engineers why a national newspaper like The New York Times would write a feature on the City of Chattanooga (above the fold in the print version).
The Internet has commoditized the news release. The three largest news release distribution services sent out roughly 642,000 news releases last year. I’ll bet that less than 5 percent of these missives generated legitimate media coverage. Again, we brought a touch of levity with an infographic that helps one answer the question: Will anyone care about this news release?
<div align="center"><a href="http://www.ishmaelscorner.com/2014/04/17/finally-a-test…a-news-release/" title="Hoffman Agency Infographic- a Test To Guide the Actions and Storytelling Behind a News Release"><img src="http://hawebpage.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/04_22_press_release_final_ORIGINAL.jpg" alt="Hoffman Agency Infographic- a Test To Guide the Actions and Storytelling Behind a News Release" width="467" height="1024" style="border:none;" /></a><br /><small>The Hoffman Agency is a public relations firm that emphasizes storytelling in <a href="http://www.hoffman.com">business communication</a></small>.</div>
With Google taking away the benefit of link building through syndicated news releases last year, you can no longer rationalize news release distribution as an SEO tactic.
If you think I left out a deserving post, that’s a debate I’d like to have.
Thanks for reading.
Side note: I also use the blog as a lab to dig into storytelling techniques. No question, the majority of experiments have focused on visual storytelling as our entire Agency looks to accelerate our learning curve in this area.