Online Publicity Campaigning

When most big companies want to publicise new web services, they hire a PR company to spread the message in offline media (press and broadcast). The result is often ineffectual and always bad value for money.

Offline Publicity Is Gone Tomorrow — Web Publicity Lasts For Years

Billboards, TV ads, newspaper adverts are not only expensive. Their effect usually lasts for seconds ... if you are lucky! By contrast, a web page, advert or web news story can hang around for years and can always be found by search engine queries for the terms it uses. GBdirect, for example, still gets a great deal of our website traffic from people who find their search terms in press releases we issued years ago. In some cases, time has rendered the content of some of those releases faintly embarrassing today, but they remain available and they continue to bring us paying customers.

Even The Most Trivial Archived Notice Produces Value For Years

Many PR companies consider it a coup when they get unpaid for advertising out of a fabricated news story in the offline media. For a fraction of the cost, the tiniest company can put out a press release which will be archived in dozens of different places around the web — and every one of those copies will point back to the company site for years.

Archived PR Provides Links And Search Engine Ranking

Not only can every archived press notice match an individual’s query and direct them to your site, the links they follow will also help increase your kudos in search engine ranking mechanisms.

In short by providing permanent paths to your door, you also increase the visibility of that door.

Online Publicity Demonstrates Your Web Expertise

Sophisticated long-term web users find most expensive web sites laughable. Their ridiculous design usually demonstrates that the company which is trying to get you to disclose your credit card number online hasn’t the faintest idea about web technology, still less security.

Over time, a very significant proportion of web users have become sophisticated and experienced. The proportion will only increase. As it does, fewer and fewer users are happy to waste their time and resources on resource-hogging animations and imagery which merely demonstrates the site builder’s inability to acknowledge and work within the technical contraints of networking technology. Neither increased network speed nor computing power is going to change this significantly.

By the same token, sophisticated web users will be impressed by companies that do demonstrate their grasp of web technology by exploiting its wrinkles in their publicity campaigns.

Online PR Is Very Low Cost

In a few minutes we can write and distribute an emailed press release to hundreds or thousands of news organisations and journalists. The process scales at almost no extra cost, and the effect can be far greater than years of assiduous work in building up conventional PR contacts.

Online Publicity Is Viral

If you actually have something useful or interesting to say, even the slightest utterance from a company will be reproduced and spread around the internet by online interest groups and communities. Every reproduction further increases your site’s direct visibility and its search engine kudos.