I was reading my Daily Dog this morning and caught an interesting byline, “Search Engine Technology Has Changed PR Forever—So Why Is It Taking So Long for PR People to Adapt?” It starts out by saying, “Google’s search engine technology has so radically changed the practice of public relations that it may be time to change PR’s name entirely,” and goes on to paint a somewhat drab picture around PR’s role.

The author, Greg Miller, concludes the piece by saying PR programs should combine traditional and new media strategies. He also makes the point that every PR person should do an online audit of the company. I wholeheartedly agree with both these points. But, there are several key points Greg makes that I completely disagree with, but the two biggest ones are:
1. “Your audiences get information about your company as quickly as you do” If this is the case, then your company needs to rethink its internal communications strategy (or get one), and you certainly need to get yourself inserted into more conversations. If a company views PR as strategic, then this statement should always be false.

2. “The media is now using Google as a primary news source—and often the only one—in its coverage about you and your company.” Wow, if this is what you think of the media, it’s time for a new career. Google is a conduit to information — if anything, search engines are merely pointing media to more information than they’ve ever had. PR’s job is to make sure the search results are positive, on message and help build a better story for the company.

I agree that search engines have changed the PR landscape, but I think for the better. Now, anyone — anywhere — can access information on the web via a search engine. That means that a once low-level piece of coverage suddenly has much broader exposure. With search engines, it also means that 20 of those smaller pieces of coverage can now have the distribution (and redistribution) of the “holy grail” hits. When used to your advantage, search engines can act as a conduit, aggregating all our work for a cumulative, massively impactful, single result.

I own the PR and communications for a business information search engine, ZoomInfo. We’re an Internet property, so I want to make sure we’re easily found. I also want to make sure that if someone looks for us on Google (or any of the search engines), all our great coverage and blog mentions and customer case studies appear for that “wow, I need to check them out” affect.

Personally, I’ve always considered the Google results page to be a real-time snapshot of my PR portfolio. PR people only need to fear search engine results when there aren’t any.