Partner Article

Pay-per-click: Just pa-pering over the cracks

Pay-per-click might shift some product but it won’t turn your business into a great company.

When we’re contacted by new clients, we often find they’ve different reasons for wanting PR. A percentage simply want to sell their product or service, and PR can do that very well.

But a larger number want PR for some other reason: to enhance their reputation, to combat untruths peddled online, to present them as thought leaders in their sector. These are the far-sighted people, because what turns a good company into a great company is not being able to sell a few widgets: it’s building an amazing reputation.

That’s why throwing your budget at internet advertising – pay-per-click being currently the most popular – is a short-term fix. If you need sales now, then do it; but, long-term, it’s not so much pay-per-click as pa-pering over the cracks.

Public Relations, on the other hand, is an industry that’s changed and adapted to the online world amazingly effectively. There’s no doubt that the internet presents challenges, not least the need to confront a damaging story with lightning speed rather than dealing with what, in retrospect, feel like the pedestrian media deadlines of yesteryear.

What the internet has really taught PR professionals is that it’s no longer possible to create a PR gloss over something underneath that’s fundamentally different. That was just about possible a couple of decades ago - but now that every person on the planet is a potential journalist with their own publishing media, it no longer applies.

Good PR now reflects the good things within a business and if faults are highlighted, it reflects those back and drives organisational change.

As a result, Public Relations has evolved to become the defining strand that runs both vertically and horizontally through an organisation, ensuring that there is no disconnect between a brand and its reality.

Look at the world of commerce today. Look at the really great companies. Do they invest in internet advertising? Possibly. Do they invest in PR? Definitely.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lexicon PR Ltd .