Promotions & Activations Opinion South Africa

What does Google Authorship mean for SA PR industry, clients?

This piece was inspired by an original blog posted by Heather Whaling (@prtini). It got me thinking about the South African PR industry and the way we interact with our clients and, more importantly, how we measure our effectiveness and add value to our clients and meet the PR and reputational management strategies ad goals.

It also got me thinking about PR consultancy sites and how they position their clients' content on their own sites. Now here, I believe that, while the big local PR agencies/consultancies/shops have their client content on their sites, the smaller less savvy agencies have missed a neat trick. How many have posted their clients' content to their own websites? And how many have tagged the content so that it appears in search engine rankings?

Move swiftly up the rankings

Well, with the Google Authorship news, there is an opportunity to get your clients content to move swiftly up the rankings.

Slightly off topic, but this had me thinking about measurement and providing a value to the coverage received. Do local PR agencies include traffic stats on client copy on their website stats when providing report backs to their clients? Which raises the issue of whether the agency website is fully optimised. But I digress.

Let's turn back to the authorship issue and to one specific area where the SA PR industry is perhaps missing another trick. YouTube.

Most of us consider the TV interview as an 'easy hit' as the perceived value of a radio or TV interview is disproportionately huge. But why leave it to the behest of the radio and TV stations?

Another pitching tool

Why not produce compelling audio and TV content and post it to YouTube? If it's properly optimised and the links sent to producers, it becomes another pitching tool and, added to which, should generate its own number of views... The client wins, the trafficcan be measured and a value can be included in that next monthly coverage report.

And, if the newly released tools from Google are properly implemented, the sky is the limit, literally.

About Angelo Coppola: @angelo2711

Angelo Coppola runs his own PR shop (Channel Managed PR), when not looking for something worthwhile to champion. He specialises in tactical content, media liaison & strategic and tactical PR. He's an ex-financial journalist. Email him at az.oc.rpmlennahc@olegna, follow him on Twitter at @angelo2711 and read his musings at www.posterous.com/angelo2711.
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