Business Week arrived in my mailbox today and as I perused the table of contents I was drawn to an article entitled “Buying Clicks To A Tragedy.” At first I thought it appalling but as I read it, I started to think about the practical application to our industry.
The fact is that there is an “ever-growing chunk of total revenues coming from the Web.” Because of that, news outlets now “scramble their online marketing staffers as quickly as they do reporters when a big story hits.”
And what does that tell us? It tells us that once again, traditional mass media advertising is being replaced by the web. The newspapers of the world have been forced to quickly adapt and embrace the web because their more traditional print medium is no longer as effective as it once was. Don’t get me wrong. There are millions of people that read newspapers. They are not going away – at least not yet. However, the web is becoming increasingly important.
And now the application to the PI industry. This story immediately made me think of the biggest PI firms in the country. When a relevant story hits, or a drug is recalled or a local catastrophe occurs, our ranks are so trained to call their advertising agency and scramble to run a series of TV spots. That is if their advertising agency doesn’t call them first. But how much of our time and resources are allocated to the web.
The Business Week article stated “At the risk of sounding crass, these do become marketing events for these news sites.” When the Virginia Tech tragedy occurred the business operations of the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and Time magazine bought ads on either Google or Yahoo so that anytime someone searched the phrase “Virginia shooting,” their links would pop up prominently on the right-hand side of the page. That strategy is called pay per click advertising, and I’ve found it to be very effective when properly researched and placed.
So let me ask you this. How are you embracing and utilizing Web 2.0? However that might be, I suggest that you step it up a few notches. If you want to talk about it, give me a call at 610-692-2950.
