SCHWARTZ CROSSROADS

Games People Play: Website Traffic, PR and the News Media

Tom Foremski, one of the more thoughtful observers of interactions between PR people and journalists, has a couple of fascinating recent posts on "the killer pitch." In the first, he says that because some reporters' compensation is based on page views, the killer pitch would be the PR person's claim that they can drive traffic to the journalist's website. He goes on to say that PR people don't really know how to do this.

"Well, that's not entirely correct," I thought--PR people understand that clicks matter and we aren't completely unable to influence them now and then. Certainly, we've had people comment, and sound pretty happy, I might add, when they've enjoyed a boost in traffic after a company links to a favorable article. So as I read the first post, I thought, "okay, I may personally not have enormous ability to pump up a story that makes my client look good, but I know how to advise the client on promoting it, which can have the same result."

Then, in a follow-on post, Mr. Foremski puts a finer point on the question and wonders whether agencies can "reliably drive traffic to specific stories." This idea is more focused and far more interesting. 

If journalists are evaluated based on page views and, at the same time, PR people create a repeatable approach to promoting the stories their clients like, and do so in a way that affects the reporter/blogger's bottom line, the media's role as a critical observer of an issue or industry can't help but be negatively impacted. (You really want to read the original posts and comments.)

It's a big topic to consider. When I initially read this, I thought that the question of "the killer pitch" was a timely twist on questionable but sadly common tactics like trying to buy positive editoral coverage by advertising or sponsoring publications' conferences, currying favor by giving select reporters exclusives on news items that you know more than just one would find appealing and--the PR equivalent of holding your breath until you turn blue in the face--not communicating with reporters who don't see eye to eye with your client.

However, the issue that Mr. Foremski describes is new. The question is what happens when the reporter covers his or her industry carefully and thoroughly, with an eye to clicks but not primarily motivated by them, but companies become adept at elevating the prominence of coverage they find most flattering. Obviously, companies will effectively hide from search engines coverage that's negtive or even just balanced.

It seems to me that it would take more than a few submissions to Digg and some tweets to do the trick, but when I check out one client's Twitter following of a couple thousand and then consider that some of those people are active re-tweeters of links to our news coverage, I wonder whether the scenario that Mr. Foremski is talking about might really come to pass. In particular, I can envision it in segments of the tech industry that have relatively few reporters left.

Really, it's the flip side of what some companies already do when they try to bury a particularly bad article by stepping up the pace of their own news releases for a few months, thus loading down search engines with fresher content.

At any rate, Mr. Foremski's posts are the most interesting I've read so far this week.

Posted by Laura Kempke on January 14, 2010 at 6:20 PM