It’s the new buzz, but is brand journalism really something new?
Spearheaded by McDonald’s statement that they will no longer pursue one consistent brand message, but will tweak the message for different media, there’s been a buzz around the term ‘brand journalism.’
Marketing Guru Seth Godin says it’s a move in the right direction. Laura Ries, author of the Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, says it’s lunacy.
But is this actually something new? One of the basics I learned in PR 30 years ago was to have one overall consistent message, and then interpret that message so it communicated easily to each identified audience.
Hubbard’s definition of PR says you have to ‘interpret top management policy to the various publics of the company.’
So if McDonalds has "I’m lovin’ it’ and they tweak the message for different communities and use different images and situations to show ‘how’ each audience is ‘lovin it’ – that just seems like standard good PR to me.
What took them so long?
And as for web content strategy – every website has a variety of audiences. That’s why we do keyword research. That’s why we do several PPC campaigns with different wording and different landing pages.
A website is the perfect place to interpet messages. You have as many pages as you want. You can tweak each one to a different keyword and a different audience.
That’s what a website content strategy is all about.
