We had several meetings last week with marketing and PR staffs of Copper Mountain and Keystone resorts. Ostensibly, these meetings were to allow the resort folks to ask questions of the bloggers and gain insights into how the blogoshpere can assist them in dialog with their customers, but as expected we learned a lot from the resort people as well.
One of the illustrations we commonly employ to punctuate the benefits of blogging is that of Google mentions. Marketing people tend to acknowledge that mentions on Google is a non-trivial indicator of a campaign’s visibility. We asked the PR team from Copper Mountain resort to describe a high-priority campaign that they had worked on recently (and we looked for a unique search phrase associated with it.)
They said that they had done a big push with their campaign to promote the “Main Vein Superpipe”, which was the only superpipe in the United States. It opened in December 2005 and is so unique that Olympic competitors flew out to train on it. They did a traditional PR campaign which did not include any blogging component.
While at Copper Mountain, we found 57 mentions on Google for “main vein superpipe.” We then compared that to our “bloggy mountain high” gathering being hosted at that very moment (which had no traditional PR effort associated with it). Result? 11,000 mentions.
Before the comments start coming in, let me qualify this. I am not saying Google mentions are the defining metric of a campaign’s success. Nor I am not saying that Google accurately counts mentions on Web pages. I am simply saying that if you are after Google mentions, it appears that posting about an event, and cultivating other bloggers to do the same will garner many more mentions than sending our press releases alone.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Kip Meacham 02.21.06 at 10:47 am
Timely post, Steve.
In my post from last night I commented on the need for PR and blogging to figure out how to ‘get along’ as it were. Public Relations and blogging are an interesting combination that I’ve written about before… They’re going to be living together, so they need to learn to get along.
My post is a quick pick list of blogs that I use to stay in touch with the combination of the two.
The numbers for the two initiatives you cite are certainly telling—if only from an eyeballs on the info perspective.
I believe that savvy PR folk will eventually figure this out—but the dynamic of PR’s desire to control the message and blogging’s organic nature is going to make this a very interesting symbiosis.
DJ 02.21.06 at 2:09 pm
We are on the same boat (Jet), recently when we made our pitch on this new Jet Fractional Program it was a group of unhappy customers of Eclipse
the Microsoft backed Very Light Jet guy’s in New Mexico who came on board after the second year in a row of not getting certification. Then today we see the power of Blogging again as Eclipse was given much to the chagrin of the industry at large the Collier Aviation Award for benefical and proven service. And the FAA still will not approve their plane! I love it the best combo of PR and Blogging yet.
alex 02.22.06 at 2:09 am
Interesting figures and indeed the issue is not how Google counts hits. The difference is striking and only confirms my conclusions from examining current means to convey a marketing message to a target audience. The goal of my research was to optimize the communication mix for a start-up in such a way as to gain maximal exposure on a limited budget. Clearly blogs, podcasts, tagging and social networking on the Internet are central to the strategy the company is now implementing and we do have significant results. That however does not mean that traditional channels can be disregarded; we have had some prime-time TV coverage in France and the impact has been higher by an order of magnitude (more traffic on the site, more downloads…) but wears off very quickly. It is almost as though blogging and web 2.0 marketing tools allow us to build momentum in a slower but more solid way. Then I guess that the name of the game is to build such critical mass that the buzz becomes unstoppable because of inertia.
Anyway, great post. Thanks.
Mark Alan Effinger 02.22.06 at 1:56 pm
This is a great area of discussion, and harks to an even bigger question: In a wired world, can offline/traditional PR create enough buzz?
As a PR professional, I’ve found that, like Steve, online activities that are Google-friendly provide much stronger results than non-line activities.
So, since 1998, we’ve put more and more emphasis in online PR using what has become a favorite press release distribution engine: PRWeb.com. Through effective use of this Web2.0 platform, we get both the announcement/update sort of content of traditional online PR with the social commentary and syndication aspects of blogs (and yes, we use blogs extensively as well).
We find online PR provides a proactive, real-time injection of SE friendly content that provides predictability for us. Then, as blogs and web sites syndicate our PR content, we get that massive Google pickup rate that carries the message much further than a single on or offline PR effort might otherwise produce.
I recently composed a series of short case studies on the matter here, and will continue to look for creative ways to expand this effort.
Also: PRWeb just added Trackbacks to press releases distributed on their system (NOTE: Blogs hav ALWAYS syndicated this PR content using PRWeb’s integrated RSS toolset). So now PR, previously a one-way communication system has now become more of a social media element, providing a way for syndicators to add their comments immediately below the press release. Something worth watching (see it here at PRWeb Adds Trackbacks).
Again, excellent post. It’s time traditional PR sees and uses the online tools of THEIR trade to get the most bang for their client’s hard-spent buck.
Best,
ME
RichContent
Eric Schwartzman 02.24.06 at 9:59 pm
Blogs make it easy for people to grasp and appreciate using the web as a dynamic communications channel. They are an add water and stir content management engine. They’re easy-to-use and inexpensive. And they have made it easy to understand how the one-to-many nature of the web can be used to communicate, becasue they have put that ability to use it as such within reach of anyone motivated enough to try. I beleive blogs have been widely adopted and hailed as the marketing dept.’s magic bullet for this reason.
But I also believe they are only the first step in what will be a rapid shift from a world that favors mainstream media and offline marketing communications tactics, to a world where new media and online communications are the primary channel.
More sophisticated online publishing and interactive marketing applications that offer integrted blog management as one of many new media tools will ultimately take over, and the blog will remain the web tool of choice for indivudals. Once the business case for online marketing becomes undeniable, corporation will pay big money for web marketing tools and services that go beyond the blog in options and functionality.
These organizations — while they may still have people at them who blog — will be able to better leverage the web for dynamic communications with a more powerful web publishing engine that offers all the bells and whistles of interactive makreting communications without having to piece meal that functionality together from a bunch of disparate, unsupported freeware web apps that are neither mission critical enough or scalable enough to perform under pressure.
-b- 02.26.06 at 9:30 am
Eric,
Regarding online communications as the primary communications channel, see this related article from the NYTimes profiling Madison Avenue’s 30-Second Spot Remover and how “technology is going to wreak havoc on the agency business” and “creative problem-solving sponsored by corporations to get the story out”
Mary 04.03.06 at 1:49 am
I think the online, traditional PR does not exist anymore. For one, PR is now using blogs as its tool to continue to influence people. Well, it may also be said that there are, however, several agencies online that we tagged as “traditional PR”, yet, as we could also see, PR is now evolving together with the Internet. And so, I think that PR is still here to stay as long as it would adapt to certain changes.