Social Search – Digital PR Opportunity

• Tweet
• Sharebar

• Tweet

…free Digital PR idea to steal…

Can you think of some things that you really love, and love to explore? Maybe it’s wine, or equipment for your recording studio, or let’s say… hiking. From who do you take advice? Who’s word would you trust to speak the truth about a new product? Is it your friends, or maybe an expert in the field?

• Do you use Google to learn more before buying? I think you do
• Do you trust experts and niche authorities over your beer buddies? I think you do
• Do you follow experts or your heroes in social media? I bet there is a good chance you do

Apparently 78 % of Swedes start their product research on Google, 12 % goes straight to the product site. And according to the Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2011, trust in the opinions of academics and experts is rising.

Double trust – Social search makes for great PR

In a practical sense, this means it is not only important to have your site as the top hit on Google. It should also be recommended by prominent people in your field. If you in some way can have influential people recommending the site, say via Twitter, that recommendation will show up in Google-searches for your product. Staring to see the benefits of social search?

Who people follow and the reason for following them becomes even more important. This is not new, the few influentials was always the way to mass market, it’s just so extremely obvious now.

How to do it?

Well a pre-hype PR campaign seems like a good way to start. Think of an influencer program tightly connected to recommendations via social media. The goal shouldn’t be how many, but who recommended your site. Go for the influential few.

List all influential people your audience might listen to, go for the ones with many followers, who gets retweeted a lot. Think of a way to get them engaged with your site. What would get them to throw away a tweet about it?

So that when the day of your big product launch approaches, the cool cats in your industry already mentioned your site and the recommendations are there for their followers to see, and for their followers too. Think of the credibility possible here.

When your big bang goes off, people research your product using Google and they will find their heroes recommending it, how cool is that?