Escherman’s Andrew Smith answered the question what has Google done for PR with a whistle stop demo of the free tools that PRs should be using to plan and measure digital campaigns. His reckons that Google’s tools are a “gift” to the PR profession that enable us to demonstrate our value unlike ever before.

markettiers4dc’s Russell Goldsmith spoke about how broadcast is changing and the opportunity for brands to create their own content and engage with audiences directly and via syndication. He also showed us some neat technology from LinkTo.tv that enables a call to action to be rendered within video content.

What have we learnt so far? Spend time looking at the digital data that is available when you’re planning campaigns and think about the opportunity for your brand to become a media owner.

“In the past, the notion of measuring engagement with editorial content was largely theoretical.  Circulation and readership figures were treated as proxies for engagement,” say Smith.

But for online PR, Google tools provide hard numbers. Parker and Smith define reach as the number of views that a page receives and engagement as the amount of time that a person spends on a page.

They find that visitors spend a widely varying amount of time on different news sites and predict how many words they are likely to have read per page.

“[…] as a general rule, specialist titles seem to have lower numbers of visitors and page views, but tend to have far higher engagement with content,” says Smith.

There is one exception. News sites such as Reuters that act as a syndication service have a high level of reach and engagement.

The lessons for online PR are clear.

• Don’t chase sites with large circulation numbers as engagement is likely to be low
• Plan your campaigns and target content at sites where your audience is engaged
• The higher up a story you get your content the more likely it is to be read