Last night I made a trip over to Russell Square to attend the latest in the excellent Social Summer series of events at the CIPR.
Curated by web marketer extrodinaire Philip Sheldrake and hosted by analytics expert Andrew Smith, last night’s session posed the question: What has Google ever done for PR? Based on last night’s talk, the short answer is ‘quite a lot, actually’.
As little as two years ago PR agencies were still having a bit of a stab in the dark with regards to targeting the right people for campaigns, but now, thanks to people handing over petabytes of data to Google by purely being on the internet, free tools have emerged which have handed over control to the communications people.
Of course, it was possible to get audience data before Google’s offerings hit the market, but paying hefty sums for search and monitoring was something none-too-appealing to PR directors with dwindling budgets.
Andrew Smith talked through the benefits of four of the search giant’s main monitoring products and compared them to paid-for tools such as Experian’s Hitwise and Compete.com.
As AdPlanner, AdWords, Google Analytics and the ingenious Browser Size Labs were being dissected it became increasingly clear that the gap is closing between these free, easy-to-use tools and other products that offer slightly more refined results but can set an agency back hundreds of thousands of pounds.
So how accurate do PR agencies need to be? By the look of amazement on most of the executives faces in the room last night, Google’s products offered more than enough to get started with.
Weirdly though, praise for the big G soon turned to concern as someone asked: ‘With all this data being pumped into Google on a daily basis, are they going to use this for evil in the future?’
As the room pondered this most intricate of questions, curator Sheldrake, pin-sharp as always, replied: ‘I don’t think so. Google is doing an hour-by-hour census on humanity and they’re giving it away for free’.
Well, when you put it that way…
Thanks for coming along last night – glad you found it useful.
I guess one of the points I was trying to get across last night was the issue now isn’t really about the data or the tools – I’d argue for the vast majority of PR firms and in-house teams, Google’s free tools provide not only an excellent starting point – but are probably up to the job over the long term. The real challenge is in developing the skills and expertise to really get the most out of these tools – and in turn using them to create a quite different approach to PR planning, and campaign development. As I mentioned last night, I feel PR has too often been viewed as buying “cheap reach”. I think many people have to wean themselves off the obsession with big numbers (OTS = 1 million) and get comfortable with smaller, but more highly engaged audiences (we know for a fact that 500 people have actually bought/changed their opinion as a result of our mini-campaign).
The more PR people roll their sleeves up and get stuck into Google tools, the better
If *only* they were giving it away for free!
I’ve spent much time on the phone to Google execs asking whether they’d consider (for a fee) giving us access to some of the numbers behind Insights/Trends, and whether they’d consider adding a higher degree of granularity (I can get approx searches per month from the Keyword tool, or a relative figure by week from Insights.)
This is great when it comes to planning search campaigns, and next to useless when it comes to tracking search as part of the comms mix. Who the hell uses months as a bucket these days?