'News is dead. Long live SEO.' Discuss.
What's more important for good communication? A good story or good SEO? I raise this apparently 'chicken and egg' question because I've noticed that new media communicators seem to be good at placing their stories into a lot of places.
However, they are perhaps not as good at identifying and expressing a good story in the first place, and I'm wondering whether it matters any more.
Back in the day, I was taught through a mixture of practical advice, experience and gut feeling what was meant by a good story. After a while you learn to recognise one without too much analysis, and from that point on, your stuff is interesting enough to get into the newspaper or magazine you work for, and the total product is interesting enough for people to buy it.
PR professionals, many of them former reporters, have until recently used those same news values to write their clients' information in a way that will appeal to journalists and get printed in their publications, thus securing wide publicity for the clients and their messages.
Spool forward to today, and the 'dead tree media' (printed publications) are a shadow of their former selves and shrinking inexorably. At the same time we've seen the emergence of all kinds of clever things you can do with links, tags, connections and posting on to multiple sites and blogs, which will ensure that your story goes everywhere.
But it's no longer related to whether it's a good story. And there are all sorts of online quasi-publications - 'Information' and 'What's On' sites for specific towns and cities, for example - which will accept anything you send them, as long as it's about their town, without exercising any kind of selection or editorial judgment.
That would appear to mean that SEO rules and old-fashioned news is dead. And there will be PR and new media communicators out there who will tell you that. But just think for a moment what's happened to TV. Loads of channels, poorer quality on the original terrestrial ones - and nothing worth watching on any of them!
These vacuous no-content TV channels will eventually wither and die. After the novelty has worn off, people will not want to consume stuff just because it is there. I believe the same fate lies in store for no-content sites and distribution channels. Getting your pointless or boring message on to a million websites does not mean that anyone will absorb it or take any notice of it.
If you want to turn your messages reliably into news that people will read, believe, understand, find interesting, comment upon, take action upon - and whether your chosen vehicle is a blog, a website, a Twitter stream, a LinkedIn or FaceBook post, a podcast, vodcast or even a printed article - the best method is the same as it was a hundred years ago. Hire an experienced, trained, creative and talented journalist!
http://blog.prnewswire.com/2010/10/15/awesome-content-applying-some-blogworld...
Another angle to this discussion is the role of editor, to help winnow the chaff and find the relevance. Who are my editors today? Google, and a bunch of smart people on Twitter.
The links are just a signal the search engines use to determine the reputation of the content. But it's not the only signal, and the engines are (thankfully for all of us) getting better and better at determining the real reputation of a piece of content, and filtering out the noise.
Pebble is absolutely correct, and indeed 'using clever gizmos and techniques to achieve zillions of web references' is a brief advantage at best, like trying to fill a sieve with water. A few good honest references from good, honest sources will rank much better in the medium and longer term.
Dez.
I'm with you on this. The compelling content is everything. You can place it in as many outlets as you like, but it's worthless unless people read it. I've blogged on this myself. http://www.net-mentor.com/blog/article-701-2010-10/good-journalism-still-applies
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