Brandweek has an excellent article today on the changing job description of a CMO.
Lynne Seid, a partner for the global marketing practices at Heidrick & Struggles, the recruiting firm and Tom Kline, chief scientist for the marketing firm Digital Scientists, interviewed 111 top CMOs in December about digital marketing. They say that the realization that data like searches, trackbacks and tweets add up to valuable marketing data is just hitting a lot of companies right now.
That is true for PR too. As the online world changes the media landscape and what influences people, we find that we need new skills. One of those skills is understanding search engine optimization and search trends, so our nrws content gets seen in the right places.
Google has a wealth of data and they make it freely available. All you have to do is learn how to use their tools. Why ‘fly blind’ when tapping into online data can give you insights into what people are interested in right now.
Google Trends can tell you what search terms are popular, which are rising and which are falling out of favor. Here is a Google Trends graph for the phrase skin care.
As you can see, the general web search figures are on a slow decline. But skin care has become a rising news search term. Google Insights for Search tells us that the top related search is skin care products and the top rising search term right now is exposed skin care – up 300%! The top rising search term a month ago was organic skin care.
How can you use this data? Write your news content around these rising search terms. It makes sense that as summer approaches people become concerned about exposure and skin care. However, without Google’s insights, I would not have picked exposed skin care as a phrase. A news release about skin care products for exposed skin should do very well right now.
Not sure how to do all this? The PRESSfeed News Optimization Toolbar ( a free download) has detailed instructions on how to optimize news for search and it has links to all the tools, like Google Trends and Google Insights for Search, that you’ll need to develop this modern PR skill.
