The potential power of PR

A very interesting day last week at the Omniture Summit, where much of the focus was on measuring the impact of social and rich media. There is much talk in the PR world about the impact of all things online – how to target social networks, whether we should pitch using Twitter, the value of the social media release, use of vidcasts etc – but the really interesting thing to me is that finally, PR online has become measurable in a meaningful way.

The digital world is utterly transparent – you can track way beyond site hits these days. Imagine seeing not only which search term (key message), campaign or article drives a visitor to your site, but also what that visitor did once they arrived; where they engaged and where they didn’t; what they bought and what they ignored. By creating a dialogue with that visitor, you can track exactly what messages and themes resonate with target audience, and which networks / blogs / tweets have had the most impact. It’s incredibly powerful. Once we’re doing it properly across the industry, I’ll challenge any sales team to call PR ‘just an overhead’.