How do you define success with your federal government PR program? Are you still trying to count clips? Do you need to secure a set number of interviews to make your boss happy? Unless you have been living under a rock you know that the world of public relations has changed, the number of publications that will cover you has shrunk significantly, and unless you have a real game changing technology it is very difficult to get ink. But don’t despair…content is still king, and if you have a good strategy to deliver it via multiple channels to reach your customers wherever they may be, you can have a great PR program.

Last month Mark Amtower wrote a great column in Washington Technology (http://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2011/02/24/amtower-column-march.aspx) that very much aligns with what we at Bluetext have been telling clients. That is why our tagline is “Any Challenge…Every Channel” and why we have built our company with experts that understand the power of different mediums for different messages. So the next time your technology lead clamors that they should be more coverage of your company in GCN or The Washington Post, grab your Flipcam and ask them to start talking – if the story is good there are ample avenues to deliver it.

Google announced some significant changes to the way it ranks page results this past weekend to better weed out low quality sites that are used to prop up companies seeking to game the system. This move, chronicled best in The Wall Street Journal, follows the high-profile cases of J.C. Penney and Overstock.com, who both got caught using spam-filled link farms to capture the results of hundreds of searches. The ongoing cat and mouse game will continue as long as there are cats and mice, of course.

But here’s what I found most interesting in The Wall Street Journal’s article Saturday reporting on Google’s changes: widely-followed scholar and academic VivekWadhwa pronouncement that he had written off Google because of its allowing spammers to take control of search. When someone like Wadhwa dismisses the value of a Google search, that’s a problem for Google. Wadhwa does say that Google’s improvements made him “optimistic that they may well get this under control.” But more alarming, he told the Journal that, “It’s not rocket science; they know who the bad guys are, they compensate the companies” by letting them post Google ads and share revenue.

I wanted to know more about what’s behind Wadhwa’s dark view of internet search, so I went to his blog site to find out. Let me quote from a recent posting:

“But what has really changed in search [over the past 15 years]? We still go to the same text boxes, enter expressions that we hope the computer will understand, get back lists of web pages that reference those words, and click on links to find the information we are looking for. The only real difference is that now the top links take you to spam sites—which want you to click on other links that make them money and that make Google money. Creating low-quality, low-cost information pages has become such big business that the leading content farm, Demand Media, just went public and is valued at $1.9 billion. According to Blekko’s spam clock, over 1 million spam pages are created every hour. So the web is becoming one giant heap of trash.”

For organizations truly hoping to provide quality content across the internet in a legitimate desire to attract viewers, this isn’t good news.  First, it makes every result that much more competitive with the spammers.  Second, it undermines confidence from key audiences that search results will provide quality results.  And third (and this isn’t really bad, just another challenge), it means that companies trying to target their audiences will have to broaden their outreach– through social networking sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, through traditional media and paid advertising, and through new avenues that emerge every day.  Google will remain important, but if it doesn’t get the spam results under control, it may be soon relegated to oblivion.

Not a week goes by where I don’t see an email about a special offer for some last minute advertising space left in an upcoming publication. While the offers can be enticing and very reasonable financially, my advice to clients before they pull the trigger is to remember the way you need to analyze every activity like this – make sure it is strategic and not episodic. Is this a publication that you have been advertising with recently so the audience is conditioned to seeing your name regularly? Is the message and creative you may develop for this one-off the same as readers may see across other mediums? The point is, when you are executing a strategic communications campaign, every tactic must tie together and continue to tell the same story. You don’t want to surprise audiences, and trying to get lucky by placing one add that will likely get no traction falls into this category. Sure, it may be buying season in the Federal Government, or the entire issue is dedicated to the key market area you want to penetrate.

Despite how enticing this opportunity may be, I would only consider this offer if it is part of a strategic, ongoing plan and it aligns with all the other messages that are getting delivered to the market. If you are going to execute an advertising campaign, then do it right by starting with the goals you are trying to achieve and matching up your buy accordingly. Otherwise, I can think of a lot more strategic ways of spending that money on that “last minute” advertising space.

It may be a surprising question.  Google, after all, is a search engine, Facebook a social network that by all appearances is the hot property over the past 12 months.  The number of users is growing exponentially, and investors believe it is worth billions of dollars. But there is real evidence that Facebook is inadvertently losing its primary attribute– intimate social interaction– that truly differentiates it from the all-data driven promise of Google.  It may seem counter-intuitive and will, take a little explaining, but it all became clear when reading Time Magazine’s Person of the Year cover story in December on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s erratic founder.

The gist of the difference between the world’s largest search engine and the world’s dominant social networking site goes something like this:  When you look for information on Google, such as restaurant critiques, movie reviews, suggestions for vacation resorts, or anything else you can think of, you are getting the wisdom of strangers.  When you seek that same information on Facebook, you are getting the recommendations from friends.  The latter would seem to be more valuable for most people because it is from individuals with whom they have those types of relationships, and not from faceless (and often nameless) Internet personalities.

That’s just one example of the utility of Facebook.  It is also much more of a place to have a dialogue with people with whom you have a relationship with– to see what they are up to, what they are reading, or how their families are doing, or just to look at their photographs.  In other words, where Google is about broadcasting information, Facebook is about engaging in conversation with friends.

But look what’s happening on Facebook when it comes to having “friends.”  The definition has changed– dramatically.  In the off-line world, friends are people with whom you share experiences, spend quality social time, and interact with on a personal level.  In the Facebook world, the meaning of the term “friend” goes far beyond that– it is anyone who hits the “accept” button.

My daugthers each have well over 800 friends on Facebook.  In their off-line life, the number is a fraction of that.  I have one colleague who has more than 3000 friends on Facebook.  When he asks for movie recommendations, even from his Facebook friends, the response is no different in my mind than from a Google search– it is merely the opinion of strangers who happen to be friends by this new definition.

From a practical stand-point, there is no way he can follow the news feeds of those 3000 friends, not can he engage in any meaningful conversation.  When he posts a status update, links to an article or video, talks about his weekend, he isn’t engaging in dialogue on a personal level with anyone.  He is simply broadcasting his posts, hoping that, as with Google, people will see it.  When online friends don’t really have the same attributes as off-line friends, the social networking component disappears.

What does this mean for communications professionals?  For one, Facebook can be a great place to broadcast information far and wide. But it’s going to become a more difficult place to actually engage key audiences– be they consumers, customers, employees, policy makers, or just friends.