PR CEO Tony Wright on crisis management and SEO

December 1, 2014: Tony Wright is CEO of WrightIMC, a Texas-based agency. He’s an experienced PR veteran who led the crisis response team for American Airlines in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and is a digital native who’s been both witness to and participant in the digital revolution that’s shaken up journalism and PR in the past decade.

Didit: With events such as the current Ebola worries, the Ferguson demonstrations, the recent Edward Snowden revelations of government spying, air bag recalls, and hacking attacks now becoming commonplace, a state of continual crisis seems to be “the new normal” in our world. How can PR / SEO / social media crisis management teams best prepare for such unexpected events?

Tony Wright: The biggest thing is to have good monitoring. Back in 2001, we didn’t have monitoring –  not even Google Alerts. If you aren’t monitoring your brand, at the very least, you aren’t doing your job – especially if you are responsible for the crisis management. Also, while crisis plans don’t seem to be in vogue right now with most social media folks, they can be extremely beneficial if used correctly. Just knowing who’s going to respond to what in a crisis before it happens is vital. You’ll never be able to anticipate every type of crisis – but you can create a framework for how to respond to a crisis.  Also, if your brand is worried about its own reputation, creating positive items about your company and placing them on various websites can help protect you during a crisis. If a crisis hits a blank slate – especially in regards to your Web presence – the crisis wins.

Didit: Everyone agrees that content is critical, but good content is very hard to scale. What is your take on the limits of content scaling? Is inbound the answer?

Tony Wright:  I can attest to the fact that content is difficult to scale unless you are willing to pay quite a bit of money. If you can use platforms like LinkedIn to send others to your own “content hub” that you control, you win. It’s easier said than done, but using inbound marketing techniques is definitely the way to go. But there are also some outbound techniques you can use to draw attention to your content, specifically retargeting and display advertising.

Didit: Continuing our inbound tack, what do you think of the whole inbound gospel? Is it just more marketing Kool-Aid or should we begin to exchange our metaphorical shotguns and scalable mass tools (broadcast media, banners, etc) for “sniper rifle marketing” (direct opt-in e-mail, content marketing, etc?) How much is hype and how much is truth?

Tony Wright: I hate the word “inbound.” Mass communication isn’t going away. If you have the money, the value in buying a SuperBowl ad can be realized – but you’ll be more effective if you integrate your inbound marketing with your mass marketing. Inbound can work by itself – but I can tell you that the clients that I have that employ radio and television advertising alongside a robust Web Marketing (inbound) campaign are successful much faster and usually to a much greater degree.

Didit: It seems from your blog that you keep up with the various Google updates. I’m getting the feeling that Google is pushing us SEOs away from being technical optimizers and into the role of becoming content curators for our users. Your take?

Tony Wright: Google has no love for SEOs. Good SEOs help Google; bad SEOs hurt Google. I think Google recognizes this, but the good SEOs don’t provide enough benefit to Google to outweigh the harm bad SEOs do to the SERPs. So therefore, Google has very little incentive to help SEOs. There is no money in it for them.  So, to your assertion that Google would love us to all to abandon technical SEO, I say that would be true. But, as my friend Greg Boser said, SEOs are “the cockroaches of the internet.” Technical SEO isn’t going anywhere, even if Google wants it to.

Didit: Let’s talk about day-to-day operations for PR, SEO, and social teams. Their responsibilities overlap a lot. How should budgets be allocated? Should all teams follow a coordinated set of best practices?

Tony Wright: Companies that operate in silos are going to have to change. The line in the sand that has always existed between advertising, public relations and marketing is eroding, if not completely gone. SEO and PR actually work very well together. When advertising gets in the mix, it can be even better. This doesn’t mean there won’t be specialists; different people have different strengths. But the turf wars over “who does what” and fighting over budgets is counterproductive. And it needs to stop. It won’t for many companies for many years – but smart companies will realize the synergies and leap ahead in their marketing much faster.

Didit: Please describe five of these best practices (or of your favorite discipline if you feel that they are indeed separate).

Tony Wright: I really only have one best practice: “Always Be Testing.”

Didit: Tell us how *you* measure ROI from social, since everyone seems to have a different answer.

Tony Wright: That’s a tough question. How I want to measure it isn’t how my clients want to measure it. Your social media strategy, in most cases, will lose if you look for dollar-for-dollar attribution.  Social media is a marathon, not a sprint. And the measurement of success is so different for each company. For instance, if I sell heavy machinery and each sale is worth millions of dollars, and I am just looking at my Facebook likes, I’m not going to be very happy. But if I’m creating  engaging content that appeals to the decision makers who buy my products, I’m going to sell some machinery. But the attribution is going to be messy. There’s no way that Facebook alone made the customer buy. Selling is a complex process and we’re still holding social media to a last click analysis. And it’s not fair. But I don’t have a great answer, yet.