Sam's thoughts
Never say never – when does an Online PR campaign end?
So, when does an Online PR campaign end? Is it when the promotion timeframe ends? Is it when you just stop checking for links?
But what if there is a natural spread of links, benefitting the campaign, that you are unaware of? It’s a tricky question to answer.With a lot of campaigns it is quite easy to say “this campaign is over”. From a campaign management point of view the time may have been allocated, the budget spent and, to put it bluntly, you don’t haven’t enough hours in the day or target publications and sites to continue to push it.
However, does a campaign end when people stop promoting it, or does it in fact end when people stop talking about it? I’d lean towards the latter for a number of reasons; firstly, especially in the online community, people will access news, information and entertainment at their leisure.
The Sneezing Baby Panda video didn’t just stop existing when the first person to put it online stopped talking about it. It will continue to thrill people for years to come – perhaps a weak example in that this was not a campaign, but it does prove the point that people will access things as and when they are ready.
A campaign I recently worked on included developing a theory test, including 12 questions to test a fans’ knowledge of a game. It did quite well in terms of links, not brilliantly, but certainly at a level that meant we had achieved value for money for the client. That campaign ended two months ago and had seen 13,000 people attempt the test. We archived the test and, other than my own curiosity in terms of pick up, it stopped receiving new links and any meaningful number of attempts, however, in the past two days, it has received a further 9,000 attempts and a large number of high authority links. No extra promotion has been done, no extra funds were put behind this project – these are natural links that have come about as a good idea has been found by a key influencer, who has shared it.
SO, back to my original question, when does an Online PR campaign end? I’d argue from a business stand point it ends when the promotion and budget ends, however, from an overall SEO campaign point of view, if a large number of natural links occur, these should be recorded and recognised as the fruits of previous work.
Even though the campaign budget may have been spent, people will stumble across the piece at their own leisure and in their own time – so the campaign never really ends, does it?
