It certainly feels as if a traditional approach to media relations is on a downward slide to oblivion. With so many ways to connect directly with prospects, customers, and influencers, many companies are questioning the investment in old-school earned media. Even social media-based PR has become pervasive enough to feel ‘traditional’ to some degree. And with sponsored content, native advertising and pay-for-play by-lines gaining in popularity, it’s understandable that many marketers are becoming more deliberate in figuring out how to best structure a long-term public relations campaign. But as we like to tell our clients, while digital strategies are an essential part of the marketing mix, traditional media outreach is still important. Here are five common myths about public relations in the year 2014 that are worth examining:

1)      Traditional PR is becoming irrelevant. This is a very tempting myth to buy into because fewer publications are thriving; and because fewer reporters are employed by those publications, it calls into question readership and impact. We continue to see layoffs across the media landscape, and some trade pubs have closed their doors. Print readership is way down, but many of these publications have maintained or upped their commitment to digital content. All of this is not necessarily an indictment of earned media as much as it is the “printed form” of earned media, which we still feel provides tangible validation of a company’s products or services, and enables thought leaders to shape conversations. An independent analysis from a credible publication will always be taken more seriously than your own marketing. In addition, the search engines continue to value original “good” content from news outlets over sponsored articles.

2)     Sponsored content is just as good as earned media. It is true that target audiences are looking for good content, regardless of where it is published and by whom. Still, editors are struggling to incorporate sponsored content into their online publications. They know it’s a nice revenue stream, but they are still hesitant to do anything that might confuse their readers by making native advertising look too much like their own writing. As a result, it often is marked with their own version of a scarlet A—clearly denoting it as a paid placement.

3)     Get a good article placed, and everyone will see it. It wasn’t that long ago that a print publication would get passed around an office so that actual readership might be many times the circulation. Those days are long gone, and many trade pubs have shifted to online only. That means that the likelihood that an individual print article will be seen and viewed by the right audience is falling. Instead, today’s media currency is sharing through social channels as well as direct outreach. We tell our clients to aggressively market their earned media placements as much as possible, and every good PR program needs to have a solid social media strategy. That increases the chance that prospects see the article as you can’t just assume that the target audiences you want to see the content will stumble across it organically. In addition, the search engines and social media algorithms put a premium on those that get shared the most, guaranteeing that the article will come up high in search results and in social feeds.

4)     You can’t connect media coverage with leads and sales. Marketing and sales teams struggle to show a direct connection between media coverage and new sales leads. At Bluetext, we think that you can make that connection and show the value of media outreach, and that any smart PR program will have those types of metrics integrated into their campaigns based on tying media coverage to business objectives. There are effective methods to drive readers to landing pages and microsites, where re-targeting and other lead generation connections can be made and measured. The key is being smart about the tools you use and the results you are looking for.

5)     Traditional PR is slowly but surely going the way of the dinosaurs. This myth is probably closest to some version of reality, depending on how one defines ‘traditional.’  As I said earlier, print as a PR medium is declining, but there are still news sources for which media coverage can have impact. At the end of the day, good content is good content, no matter where it is published. Getting that good content to the right audiences means using all of the platforms—traditional and digital. No one can afford to put all of their eggs in one basket anymore. Campaigns must be integrated and coordinated for maximum impact.

With so much value and change coming out of organic Search Engine Optimization it is easy to make a mistake. We’ve made a presentation of the top 10 mistakes you should try to avoid when working on your SEO campaigns.

From the second we wake up until the moment we fall asleep – our time and attention is dispersed across multiple screens, devices and media channels – this mass audience attention deficit disorder is further exacerbated by the fact that our primary screen of interest seems to change by the minute.

Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet and American Life Project summed up this phenomenon best, calling it “a constant state of partial attention”.  So for marketers – this begs the question: How are you going to get my attention – and more importantly – get me to take action?

Roy H. Williams, author and lifelong student of humanity, wrote in his “Wizard of Ads” Trilogy that marketers typically assume that their audience is seeing and hearing their ads – yet rarely is this the truth. In reality the sheer volume of advertising that gushes toward the mind is like a fire hose aimed at a teacup – there simply too much coming at us to contain. Most of the information aimed at our brains is deflected, spilled or lost. And at the end of the day, precious little is actually retained.

As technology continues to drive how we communicate – it is also forcing marketers to innovate and embrace the powerful role that technology can play in driving demand above the funnel through brand engagement – or get crushed by their peers who have already adapted their strategies to stay one step ahead of an audience dispersed across an increasingly digital media landscape.

Roy Williams quipped that your audience will only ultimately recall an experience it was actively engaged in. So for your marketing to be truly effective, the audience must be a participant in it. The one tool Roy didn’t have access to when he wrote those words was digital marketing – for now anyway, and with the right agency partner – the easy button for today’s marketer to catch and actively engage his or her audience as they move ever so swiftly through their multi-screen lives.

We love pushing the envelope with our clients who understand the only way to stay visible – and relevant – is to continue to engage their audience in bold and innovative ways that gets them to stop and pay attention to their message. I have embedded a few examples of that which I am hopeful will get you to do the same.

By now, you may be one of the more than 13 million YouTube visitors who have viewed the clever, genuine yet very purposeful Xmas Jammies video, or saw it on any number of major broadcast outlets that picked it up. For marketing, creative, and PR professionals, viral videos can be maddeningly elusive. There are some characteristics universal to viral videos, but just as many that fall In the excerpt above, he discusses the technical problems with the federal health anthem insurance marketplace website and what his administration is doing to help consumers get enrolled in an anthem insurance plan. outside the blueprint as well.

In my latest article for PR Week “The Hub,” I take a look at some reasons why Xmas Jammies took off, and what digital marketers can learn from its success.

from Jason Siegel

On November 7th, the IRS Design Office hosted the second Design in Government (DIG) meeting in the main IRS Auditorium, the only meeting gathering of federal graphic designers government-wide. The goal of the DIG meeting was to strengthen the federal graphic design community and to help build relationships across federal agencies to encourage networking and discuss innovation, design management and design complex issues in a collaborative way, during these difficult budget times.  Partner Jason Siegel presented the following presentation with supporting videos.

Everywhere you turn, people are talking about responsive design. It is a critical website solution for providing your customers and prospects a seamless experience across all devices and making it easy for you to manage one web infrastructure.

With a responsive website, businesses can be in front of consumers at every step of their online journey. A user viewing a website on the go via a mobile device can have the same powerful experience as when sitting in their office.

Responsive websites provide continuity between different viewing contexts, remaining completely agnostic to the type of device used and the size of the screen it has.

Unfortunately, a mobile version of your website isn’t good enough anymore. Responsive websites simplify internet marketing and SEO. Instead of having to develop and manage content for multiple websites, businesses with responsive sites can take a unified approach to content management because they have only the one responsive site to manage. The same applies to analytics and strategy development and deployment. A responsive website means there is only one set of analytics to examine and a single strategy to develop and deploy.

Responsive websites are easier for consumers to find than traditional or mobile sites because they come up higher in search engines’ rankings. Google recommends responsive web design because having a single URL for desktop and mobile sites makes it easier for Google to discover content and for Google’s algorithms, which are constantly changing, to assign indexing properties to content.

Responsive Design in the Future

Responsive design is still in its infancy, and the future looks extremely bright. All of our websites are responsive today, and our developers are exploring emerging areas of responsive design by testing a multitude of integrations that are now available.

As the internet transforms further into a platform of services and user interfaces that tie those services together, leveraging responsive design principals will allow companies to integrate a plethora of back-end services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services, and then present the integrated data to users in an integrated manner. Expensive back-end solutions are no longer a requirement to integrate legacy systems with business partners.

One thing is certain, you don’t want to fall behind and watch your competitors launch responsive websites while yours is still stuck in 2012. The time to get responsive with your web design is now.

APRIL 22 – WASHINGTON – Bluetext, one of the fastest growing digital marketing, branding and communications agencies in the country, and GreenTrees, the largest carbon reforestation company in North America, today launched a comprehensive corporate sustainability platform designed to enable enterprises to demonstrate and quantify environmental, financial and social benefit. Companies such as Duke Energy and Norfolk Southern Railways are experiencing the benefits of the GreenTrees program.

The GreenTrees program offers companies a way to invest in proven reforestation efforts that provide carbon offsets, water credits, biodiversity and other environmental benefits. Bluetext provides a turnkey communications platform that lets customers, partners, and investors know about a company’s participation and investment in GreenTrees reforestation.

“Large corporations often have difficulty demonstrating their commitment as environmental stewards and to sustainability,” said Chandler Van Voorhis, Managing Partner of C2I, the driving force behind the GreenTrees program. “The GreenTrees reforestation program offers a short path to environmental leadership and CSR goals. Partnering with an innovative company like Bluetext will help companies communicate effectively about the benefits of their participation in this program.”

GreenTrees grows world-class, healthy forests to heal a vital part of our country. The outcome produced is an ACRE (Advanced Carbon Restored Ecosystem). The monetization of this restoration is a conduit to connect private capital to private landowners for the public good.

This joint program includes both the development of the GreenTrees proven CSR program wrapped around an integrated CSR campaign development and implementation strategy.

“When the opportunity to launch something unique with GreenTrees arose, it perfectly aligned with our core principles of being a good company that helps our clients become good corporate citizens,” said Jason Siegel, partner at Bluetext. “Our team has worked on many exciting corporate social responsibility programs for global enterprises and we are confident that as more companies learn about the benefits of GreenTrees and our platform for getting their message out they will recognize the value of this innovative program.”

About Bluetext
Bluetext delivers comprehensive digital marketing, branding, and strategic communications services to our clients, who range from global leaders in their industries to emerging companies at the forefront of innovation and technology. Organizations turn to Bluetext because of our reputation for developing robust and highly scalable digital platforms designed to optimize brand performance in an increasingly digital environment. Our team has delivered some of the most creative and effective campaigns for organizations looking to increase their presence and brand in this market. We have successfully positioned lesser-known organizations as thought leaders, and taken better-known organizations to a new level, differentiating and delivering a brand promise that resonates with the market. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Our goal is to get a seat at the table with you, understand your goals, audit what you have done and what resonates with your audience, and deliver an integrated strategy that will give you a long-term platform for success. To learn more visit www.bluetext.com

About GreenTrees
GreenTrees delivers the Currency of Conservation. GreenTrees starts from a tree planting approach, grows the forest to produce carbon, and then lets the carbon become the base for a series of forest assets – biodiversity, air, and water – we call it ACRE (Advanced Carbon Restored Ecosystem).   Forests are nature’s cathedrals, and we cement a legacy and turn out sustainability credits for investors seeking the best in credentials for their work. To date, GreenTrees has over 2 million tons of carbon credits under contract for Fortune 500 companies, making GreenTrees the leading reforestation carbon company in North America. To learn more visit www.green-trees or http://vimeopro.com/greentrees/planting