Craig McGinty alerted me to an interesting and furious debate that has been going on in Twitter about the role of SEO and PR in relation to each other.

It can be hard to follow a conversation that has already happened, but it raised a point that has stirred emotions: as PR and social media / SEO converge where does the power lie?

There seems to be all shades of opinion including between Stuart Bruce and Jed Hallam of Wolfstar (read their entries).

Stuart is of the opinion that PR offers higher level services than an SEO agency can appreciate or deliver.  Jed argues “PR needs to get smart, before digital/SEO/advertising/marketing/online agencies begin to learn traditional PR skills (or hire in smarter).”

I think both sides have merit.  If you are dealing at a strategic or specialist level then an SEO agency will have barriers to entry.  But this is true for a generalist PR.  After all how many PR professionals could quickly switch to effective financial PR or lobbying without considerable skills and experience?

I have tended to take Jed’s point of view as many PR professional are handling accounts that are day-to-day are about bread and butter awareness generation.  Surely the barrier to entry is lower, we are vunerable as PRs.

Yet I sway back to Staurt.  I have worked with advertising and marketing agencies that could have “easily” moved into PR and did not, and haven’t a real understanding of it.  In fact they need to buy in those skills in a freelance capacity or with permanent staff.

So will SEO agencies swamp PR?

I am not so sure.

I think some might become media communications agencies covering both broad disciplines.  (A sort of PR full service agency).  There will be PR and SEO agencies that dip into each others disciplines and take business.  There will be specialist agencies that partner.

One thing is clear PRs need to appreciate and learn about online media if their publics have moved online.

Tags: PR, SEO

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Online PR, PR, Social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.