Thanks for pointing out the things that I didn’t even touch on: education, jobs, telehealth, etc. Interestingly, my mother just lost her battle with breast cancer, which she’s been fighting for more than 8 years. I do think that having broadband could have been more helpful to her in accessing information as well has management for her disease. These are big issues we have to deal with as a nation.

Tawnya

I do agree that marketers/PR people should be thinking about all the tools in their bag when planning a campaign–not just focusing on one area.

I would frame things a little differently. The more well thought out your outreach strategy is, the more effectively you can leverage whatever tools you use to communicate. For some strategies this can mean social media alone, but my experience has been that this is the rare exception. They’re all just tools, we should use them where appropriate. The hard thing is keeping up with emerging media (Pownce?) and understanding them well enough that they can be harnessed effectively.

Also, minor point, we’re in British Columbia not Alberta.

Our blogs launch on day one with a ranking of 3-5 million. Then they quickly become reach the 1 millionth mark and good things start to happen on Google. When you rank below 100K on Technorati, you can’t be beat.

Because we rank so high, the traffic and the buyers come flooding in. Type in this phrase in to Google — PR recession — and you’ll see what I mean. When people find us through all the noise, they don’t comment much, you’re right. They don’t really want their struggle with the bottom line to be a public thing. Instead, they just call and we start in to working together.

I’d still like to give you some easy pointers that can give your blog a lift on search engine rankings.

Thanks, too for your comments. I appreciate your candor. Considering that we’ve only recently launched PluggedIN, and haven’t had the benefit of two years of SEO as you’ve had with Phenix Rising (launched in 2005), I’ve no doubt that your ranking is higher that ours. But I also have to point out that many of your blog postings have zero comments, so you may be getting a higher ranking, but does that necessarily mean people are interacting/reading yours as well?

Nonetheless, perhaps you misunderstood my post in that I’m not disagreeing with you on the importance of social media. I do firmly disagree with you though in your assumption that social media alone is enough.

As for big retainer checks, I’m not sure what you qualify as “big,” but when one considers that the average monthly PR retainer for small to medium sized client is less than one full page ad in a daily newspaper, then most see the value. And, when you can bring your client a significant number of press mentions (50+ per year) then that value is increased. (Not to mention what it can do for your social media campaign.)

As you well know, many in this industry are still “figuring” this thing out. What social media looks like today, will certainly not be what it looks like tomorrow. And those of us who are making emphatic predictions now, only remind me of those who made those same emphatic predictions about the impact of email campaigns back in 2000, saying that they were going to wipe out all other forms of marketing. I don’t know about you, but I’m still getting a whole lot of direct mail in my mailbox. Thanks.