Background on Public Relations

Along with branding, public relations is one of the few things that save you and I from commoditization. Every business (and business model) has flaws, hidden costs, value propositions, and has stories to express the delivery of value. PR aims to minimize the downsides of the flaws while making the upside look much larger than it is. Alternatively, public relations can also be used to diminish the upside of competitors while making their flaws look much larger than they are.

The Idea of a Fair Market

Is buying links fair? Is buying and holding domains fair? Is linking to a friend's site or your own new site fair? Is buying out competing sites fair? Is syndicating your spin through your own media outlets fair? Business does not care about the concept fair. It only cares about results.

The word fair is typically used to manipulate people. Markets are not fair. Humas have a bias toward that which they have an affinity to, and business is self-serving and inherently dirty.

PR aims to exploit the media and our inherent biases to create an affinity for a brand or product while viewing other brands or products lowly. Low kicks are allowed, though not recommended unless you thought through the potential consequences ahead of time.

Who Uses PR?

• Governments use public relations to create and maintain support for wars. In The Fog of War, Robert S McNamara discussed how he manipulated public perception to keep the war in Vietnam going. Today, due to poor public relations, leading to a recruiting shortage, the US government is pushing recruiting illegal immigrants to fight as conscripts in Iraq.

• Like governments, most successful businesses use PR.
• Search engines are so powerful largely because they are so good at public relations. Every week you see Google partnering with someone, fighting for a cause, or talking down competing companies like Microsoft.
• Much of the media you consume was created because a PR firm pitched a story. All media is biased. Look at how people who watch Fox News thought Saddam was involved with 9/11.
• The Wikipedia's PR article and Paul Graham's essay The Submarine offer good introduction articles into how prevalent public relations is in the mainstream media.
• Thank You for Smoking is a DVD about how the tobacco market spins their product.

Why PR is so good for business

• People and search engines have to trust something. Good public relations campaigns target the trusted parts of the web, by targeting either general authorities or related topical experts.

• PR is hard to duplicate. Each story has a main storyteller. Another people retelling your story wont make the right people want to talk about them. Other SEO techniques, such as link buying, are much easier to duplicate and much easier to penalize.
• Some of the best PR stories get to be told over and again by the main storyteller, surfacing that person as a topical expert whenever their field comes in focus of the media. Awareness builds relationships, which allows you to spread other stories.
• Being trusted by one expert makes it easier to be trusted by others. The exposure builds an affinity to your brand and builds credibility.
• Some things are popular only because they are popular. Good public relations stories can go viral and produce Justin TImberlake-like results. Using large seed sets makes it easier to ensure success, even if the story is not as viral as you would like.
• Media exposure gives a sense of credibility. My landlord called me to tell me he read about me in the Wall Street Journal. It is much easier for him to view me as a topical expert after reading that article.

We Love You

Good public relations campaigns spread so well because they make the target want to share the story, by making them feel important, sharing their bias, and/or giving them some incentive to spread the story.

• Salary.com created a story about how much work at home mothers should be paid, high-balling the numbers. Every year they re-release the same story and the media eats it up as though it is new.

• All of the blog value calculators high-ball the value of the blogs to get people to want to talk about how great their blog is.
• Even if you hate the concept of SEO it is hard to hate a version of it that is useful, free, and co-branded with Firefox.

Even if you fail to spread to spread these types of stories right away, you can still passively target the right audience using AdWords for less than 10 cents a click.

We Hate You

Many smaller companies make a name for themselves by stating how impure competing businesses are. Creating a common enemy makes it easy for people to identify with you.

The key is not to rant, rave or bash the enemy, but to provide an underlying theme that shows you’re all in it together against the enemy. When framed that way, you’re not a salesperson; rather, you’re a comrade who can lend a hand. Establishing a thematic enemy allows you to focus on providing solutions without coming across like you’re hard selling, and is a perfect technique for white papers, tutorials and blogging in general.

• In some cases small market players can garner support when businesses attacks them. Once lawsuits are filed you never know how much support the competitor will get. When I was sued by Traffic Power my fight was for freedom of speech online and saving blog comments. It was an easy story to want to share, so people did. Within days of my blog post about it, the story was featured in the Wall Street Journal.

• When we submitted a story about the fall in the value of the US Dollar to Netscape the story was titled How Bush Devalued the Dollar. They like political stuff on Netscape, so the story quickly shot to #1 on their homepage, stuck there all day, and sent over 15,000 visitors to our site.

Please Hate Us

Some public relations ideas play both sides of the coin - creating controversies then fixing problems they created. For example, PayPerPost went lowbrow with their marketing, offering unmarked editorial blog posts as a service, then came up with their Disclosure Policy site to correct the problem they created. They got press on the way down and the way up. They probably would have never received VC funding if they were not so lowbrow with their marketing.

Jason Calacanis

Love him or hate him, he is great at public relations. Most Weblogs Inc. content is at best average, yet he got a nice payout for it, and he used the PR machine again to launch Mahalo.

• Weblogs Inc. worked because it got so much link equity from the media, which wanted to tell a story on blogging.

• Jason maintained that all you needed to be successful was great content, but they had first mover advantage, paid low rates, and scraped by on profitability by selling spammy links.
• Jason got a lot of press for Mahalo by claiming the death of SEO. Mahalo is a human compiled scraper & the URLs are seo friendly.
• A week into creating Mahalo they already scraped trendy keywords off the Google hot terms list and now anyone can get paid a near livable wage building the manual scraper

Reputation Management

SEO can also be used to aid your public relations for your core branded terms. Reputation management works by helping favorable documents rank better, which suppresses the rankings of negative documents.

Can PR be Dirty?

Just like SEO, public relations can be used to push things that are good or things that are bad. Seth recently published my favorite marketing rant post ever. Here is a quote:

I believe that every criminal, no matter how heinous the crime, deserves an attorney. I don't believe that every product and every organization and every politician deserves world-class marketing or PR.

If you get asked to market something, you’re responsible. You’re responsible for the impacts, the costs, the side effects and the damage. You killed that kid. You poisoned that river. You led to that fight. If you can’t put your name on it, I hope you’ll walk away. If only 10% of us did that, imagine the changes. Imagine how proud you’d be of your work.

PR Watch highlights some of the misuse of and abuses by the public relations industry. They also publish videos to YouTube. I marketed some really dirty stuff when I was new to the web. As I learn more about the power of marketing, I am less willing to market things that only sound good when ignoring the hidden costs.

I tend to hate link aggregator posts, but I have read a lot of good stuff recently, and do not want to write 30 posts today or regurgitate other's info verbatim, so here is a link list of useful stuff I recently came across.

Affiliate Stuff

• Affiliate Survival Guide - by SugarRae

• how to make a thin affiliate site thick and why you should be scared of universal search by Andy Hagans
• My friend Anita Chaperon launched her Reviewlicious review site and reviewed my ebook.
• A Large Internet Audience Is The Quickest Way To A Billion Bucks and I Stopped Trying To Rank for Anything When I Realized I Could Build Traffic For Everything by Scoreboard Media

Search, SEO, & Personalization

• Wordpress extension to help build links from Google image search and Yahoo! renting subdomains to affiliate sites by Patrick Altoft

• extension to de-personalize Google

by Joost de Valk

Business, Media, & Publishing

• the truth about venture capital parts 1, 2, and 3 by Marc Andreessen

• why ebooks are bound to fail
• Blueprint for a Brilliant Blog Launch
• top ranked Google news sources, Media Predict, and keyword based conversion tracking with Google Analytics (via Peter)

Arbitrage & PPC

• 5% refund on your PPC spend and Wordze vs Hitwise by John K

• AdWords IP Exclusion feature (mentioned on WMW)

Ad Relevancy & Quality Scores

Google has again and again touted the value of their targeted marketing, but most of the fortune 500 ad dollars are not spent on targeted marketing. A couple weeks ago in a WebmasterWorld thread many advertisers complained about getting killed by another quality score update.

What quality score actually means probably comes down to one of two things

• your site is a thin affiliate site or something else they once needed to fill a market niche but now is viewed as noise

• you have not created enough organic value and/or have not yet spent enough money building your brand

Google Hates Most Affiliate Websites

Some key quotes from the WMW thread...these two show the trend against affiliate sites in general

Too many outgoing affiliate links and you are toasted

So on my basic two types of sites, when I send the visitor to another domain to buy, I'm getting severly penalized ( a new affiliate "penalty"), but if I have a another party's lead form on my domain, I didn't get hit.

and this one shows that the change is not a short term one

A Google Adwords customer service rep said that they do not systematically target affiliates as a whole, nor sites with affiliate links. But, she said they are taking more steps with each landing page tweak to weed out sites that do not add a certain level of "value" to their visitors (as other posters to this thread have mentioned). She wouldn't tell me if this "value" is human-determined or algo-determined, again saying that she didn't know.

If your site is not the type of site they would white-list in the organic results eventually they are going to look to dispose of your position in the ads as well. As soon as enough brand advertisers find your space you are no longer needed. Thanks for sharing the keyword data needed to tell the brands what to bid on, and best of luck getting traffic from somewhere else.

If you want to see where paid search quality filtering is headed, look at how the organic algorithms have changed. Nothing better to glimpse the future of PPC than to read the documents about how they expect humans to rate organic search results.

Expanding the Role of Brand Related Advertisements

In that same WMW thread Skibum posed the following question

Why attack long time advertisers regardless of their business model who are providing consumers with what they are looking for while using broad match to show more ads triggered by keywords they were not intended to run on?

I recently saw a Dollar rent a car ad at the #1 ad position for Forex, which is not a cheap keyword.

As the day passed Google's CTR numbers showed they expanded that ad out too far and they made that ad less broad. They can automate spreading out brand ads too far, and then pull them back if the relevancy scores are too poor.

When it comes down to it, it is all about money. As Google commoditizes everything that is not a brand they need to collect more money from brands. The reason Google is pushing video hard is because they want to lead that ad market. It is no suprise to see Google leading in innovation in the video ad field. There is no better way to create inventory than to get it from your already established near infinite traffic stream.

The Cadillac Escalade video ads are taking the place of the textual Ford Explorer ads. Google has no brand allegence. Whoever is willing to overpay for exposure right now can buy all they want from Google.

Even when Google can show relevant ads, they still prefer to show brand ads if they think they will pay more. Consider a Michigan counties page where Google shows the following ad links.

Those are relevant. But what ads does Google also target to that page?

A lot of car donation charities are non-profit shells wrapped around dirty high margin auction houses (just look at the $20/clicks ad pricing).

A pharmaceutical ad from a company with a patent an a marketing budget larger than their research budget.

"The most startling fact about 2002 is that the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion)." - Marcia Angell

Given that ad targeting, it doesn't seem that Google is so pure, does it? One of the guys at WMW said the following

You guys are AdWords arbitrageurs. Although I'm sorry that your little gravy grain went off the rails, as a Google user, I can say good riddance to your garbage Web sites. Google, and users, want actual retailers to come up top in search results for sellers of a product, not parasite Web sites linking to actual retailers.

In a few years that same guy will probably be whining about how Google destroyed his business, but just like the other websites that died, Google doesn't care about him. What they want is decent relevancy WITH as much profit as legally possible. The more they cut out middle men the bigger they can make their chunk, even if doing so hurts relevancy and result diversity.

How do they get any more efficient than automating ad targeting while turning the text link into an unmarked ad unit? And they have patents for ad targeting based on how big of a risk taker you are:

"Examples of information that could be useful, particularly in massive multiplayer online RPGs, may be the specific dialogue entered by the users while chatting or interacting with other players/characters within the game. For example, the dialogue could indicate that the player is aggressive, profane, polite, literate, illiterate, influenced by current culture or subculture, etc. Also decisions made by the players may provide more information such as whether the player is a risk taker, risk averse, aggressive, passive, intelligent, follower, leader, etc. This information may be used and analyzed in order to help select and deliver more relevant ads to users."

How can anyone else compete in the ad market?

Eli goes through the thought process of how to create automated search spam generator software. His recent launch of SQUIRT (a much expanded version of his free quick indexing tool) seems to have went quite well. Great marketing on the launch.

He also posted about recycling content, which is a bit aggressive for high brand sites, but probably quite common on thinner spammier sites.

Update: The below coupon code no longer works, but we have found a couple new 2011 Business.com coupons. :)

In a recent interview Jessica Bowman offered the following Business.com coupon code: AVIVA, which is good for 20% off Business.com directory listings. Inclusion typically costs $299 a year, so with the coupon you would pay $239 for your submission.

Another nugget from the interview:

We currently have five editors and one editorial manager out of a total staff of nearly 100 employees, and all Business.com listings, whether pay-per-click Featured Listings or internet directory Standard Listings, are reviewed by a member of our Editorial Team.

Not bad margins on that business model if all the listings are wrapped in Google PPC ads and it only takes 6 editors to review it.