It used to be that companies published their own newsletters for clients and enlisted the services of specialist PR and marketing agencies to deal with the press and advertising, often at great expense while running their internet marketing as an additional branding and marketing channel. While the internet revolution has seen online press distribution channels spring up forcing a move towards digital marketing, the cost of enlisting these services is still high with an often low focus on search engine optimisation .

Social media however can be used to perform the same marketing and public relation functions while also working towards greater search engine placements at a fraction of the cost. In other words, social media outlets can be used as the mouthpiece of online brand awareness, securing virtual column inches and specific link backs for your brand. With this in mind, we can define online PR using social media as follows: Maximising favourable mentions of your company, brands, products or web sites on a range of third party web sites such as media sites, social networks and blogs, which are likely to be visited by your target audience, online PR can offer a low-cost route to increased brand awareness. It can also help attract visitors and increases back links to a site, which is useful for SEO .

Online press releases can be delivered directly to the inbox of each major national, regional and local website, newspaper and magazine as well as specialist publications, relevant foreign press, online portals and social media sites. By ensuring that all recipients are relevant not only to your products and service but also to your target demographic, it is possible to glean large numbers of good quality links.

This low-cost route has tremendous value for search engine marketers and if implemented properly can develop into a dynamic community focused around your brand. Well-written content and meaningful contributions, bookmarks to articles of note and the production of article and editorial is an underused link building tool but is the best way to secure online traffic and attract high visibility link placement from good Google page ranked sources.

The best example of how to harness this power and enjoy both an SEO and economic return is Dell. In a much publicised post, one technology blogger aired his frustration about what he called Dell’s appalling customer service. In a series of posts known as Dell Hell, his blog received widespread coverage, gleaning links and inciting comment. The story spread rapidly across the internet in a wave of online protest, giving the original blogger hundreds of links as sites, magazines and news channels referred their readers back to the original post.

After being contacted by the blogger directly, Dell rushed to stem the tide of consumer discontent by joining its clients alone. It created an online community with forums and company blogs to reach out to those criticising the corporation. Like the original blogstorm which began with one posting, Dell’s response has not only led to a an avalanche of on and offline comment but hundreds of links back to individual postings from the chief Dell blogger.

As this example shows, done properly, digital ink can perform even better than off line public relations and be used not only to increase brand awareness and brand profile but also as a vehicle for increasing search engine rankings. Researching, creating and distributing fresh, informative and interesting articles about your brand and areas of expertise, article marketing and online PR are a direct route to improved search visibility and brand awareness.

It’s worth noting that this approach works well for new sites or those who do not currently have a presence for specific keywords- what we often find is that when you type in a keyword search results reference blogs, press releases and wikis as well as web sites. The reason for this?

Social media marketing has a direct effect on search engine rankings and engines are using social voting systems and book marking trends to determine quality sites (source: SearchEngineJournal.com).

Patents lodged by search engines including Yahoo and Google seem to confirm this as they reference book marking methods. Unlike expensive paid advertising campaigns, social media activity reaches out to potential users on their own level. The number of views a press release logs, the number of digs a bookmark receives, the level of activity on blogs are all indicators of relevance and quality – making them a likely inclusion for search results.

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