NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> An experienced response on the futility of an...
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> An experienced response on the futility of an...
Cliff Kurtzman (cliff.kurtzman_at_tenagra.com)
Fri, 31 Jan 1997 23:34:46 -0600
Eric Ward wrote a long essay, and I certainly agree with his general thesis
that traditional media clipping services are often not complete solutions
for tracking online pr campaigns. They don't track most of the Internet
trade pubs, nor any of the online activity.
But then Eric gives his paper on why "Trying to keep up with coverage of
Web related news and events will drive you to an early grave..." Here I
have to significantly differ with Eric on some aspects of what he has
written. Eric wrote:
>
> Moving deeper into the online realm, it gets even harder.
>Each special pick Web site would have to be checked on a
>daily basis. Do-able, but not exactly cost-efficient. As
>for Web-zines, like Netsurfer Digest or WEBster or the
>hundreds of other, you'd have to know the pub date for each
>one (some are weekly, some bi-weekly or monthly) and be able
>to visit each and every one of them just hoping to spot a
>mention somewhere.
>
> Then their's the online news' sites, like C-Net news or
>COWLES, or Net NewsCam or Newslinx. These can frequently
>change daily, and even several times daily. Tracking these
>would mean someone must sit watching that site all day, and
>waiting to see if your story shows up. And these are just
>the well known ones. Factor in the news' sites for your
>particular industry (if they exist) and your by now you're
>brain-dead.
If one of these sources covers one of my (or my client's) sites and
includes a link to the site in their coverage, then I'll know about it the
minute the first person clicks on the link they have put up. And I never
have to go to the source's site and check for it. Boom -- as Eric actually
alludes to at the end of his article, I'll immediately get an entry in my
access log with referral information indicating the page the person clicked
from. For some of our sites, the referral information is immediately
ported into a database, and I can pull up a web page with a view at any
time showing me links to that site, with the most recently added ones on
top (or sorted by a number of other parameters, such as most frequently
clicked referral pages).
To me, trying to run an online PR campaign without this capability is like
trying to drive a car with a blindfold on. You don't know what is working
and what isn't, and you don't know what links are really paying off and
what ones are not worth the effort.
>From time to time, a new client will come to us wanting us to do PR for
their site but it will turn out that they are not set up on a server that
provides them with adequate reporting capability to get closed loop
results. This is very frustrating, and we will usually encourge the client
to try to seek new hosting, whether it is with us or with someone else that
provides a more robust capability than what they were set up with
previously.
If a source covers one of my web sites but does not link to it, then it is
more difficult to find out about the reference. We put guestbooks on most
of our sites that ask the person filling out the guestbook to tell us how
they found out about the site, and this is a very useful mechanism for
finding out about such references. One of our sites is covered somewhere
new almost daily in print, tv, radio, and online, and I'd guess that we
find out about better than 80-90% of the references to the site, without
using any clipping service at all.
Reporting to clients the coverage results of their online and offline pr
campaigns is something that I think can indeed be done and be done well.
There is a cost to do it, to be sure, but for many organizations that
expense will be worthwhile.
--Cliff
Cliff Kurtzman
The Tenagra Corporation
Visit our new site at: http://www.tenagra.com/
281/480-6300
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