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Measuring_&_Evaluating_a_public_relations_presence_online
| Measuring & Evaluating a public relations presence online
You've done everything right. You helped increased sales, people
recognize your business name and you are considered an expert on
what you are selling by millions of people around the globe.
Then, your boss asks you to prove the worth of your online PR
efforts to the company.
Measuring and evaluating a public relations presence online
takes planning. It is important to understand before you being
your online PR efforts what you should be measuring. Listed
below are a few tips about measuring and evaluating your online
public relations presence.
What effect of your online PR efforts should you be measuring?
There are really only a handful of effects that you could
measure resulting from online PR efforts that will matter when
you are trying to prove worth of the time you spend - three of
the most important are media penetration, traffic or links and
believe it or not - sales and revenue. With offline public
relations efforts, measuring response on occasion nears
impossibility. With online PR efforts, thanks to technology,
online PR managers have tools at their command that help measure
efforts effectively.
Measuring ONLINE PR Penetration: Many PR managers want to employ
clipping services to measure the effect that articles or press
releases have on their prospective audiences. While having a
list of media outlets that have published your news or features
is helpful in identifying who to keep targeting, in the offline
world it is difficult to measure what effect those mentions have
on the bottom line. When measuring online PR penetration, it
becomes much simpler in that savvy online PR managers are able
to tell exactly where visitors are coming from. If you know when
you submit articles or press releases to the media or when you
start your online PR campaign, all you need to measure online PR
is access to your server logs. If you do not, ask your company's
webmaster to send you a list of the "HTTP REFERRERS" that your
site has received over a specified period of time. By looking at
the HTTP referrer list, you will see not only who has sent you
traffic, but how much traffic was sent.
An alternate way to measure the effect of your online PR
campaign or PR efforts is to create a mini-site. Mini-sites give
PR managers the ability to control everything from the image you
want to convey to the content that you are sharing with the
public. Mini-sites can be used for Web logs, article archives,
web press centers or Internet press rooms. Thanks to the low
cost of domains and hosting, you could conceivably set up a
separate domain from your company for less than it costs to send
out one press release to the media using popular distribution
services. By knowing what it costs to generate one new client
for your company, you will be better able to report the
contribution online PR efforts make to the bottom line of your
business venture.
Another way, that can arguably be perceived as under the
dominion of online public relations is bid for placement or pay
per click advertising. While a company's main site might be used
as an "all-purpose" solution, PPC advertising enables promoters
to promote a concept or an idea over a general business
category. For example, if you sell pillows, you might want to
create a page on a mini-site that deals specifically with fabric
used within your pillows. Take this page and promote it on PPC
search engine using a low bid making sure to define with titles
and descriptions exactly what the surfer might be looking for.
About the author:
Peter Prestipino is the founder and principal of SCG - Swirling
Circle Online PR Group providing Internet solutions to small and
medium sized businesses through online PR efforts such as
mini-website development, link building, press releases and
product reviews. For more information, visit
http://www.SwirlingCircle.com.
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